Arrival: Chapter 39

  It had been a few days since negotiations on the ship had concluded, and most of the people who intended to live down on the planet had already been ferried down in the shuttles.  Ever since the end of the conflict though, Halley had been distant in a way which made those who still cared about him worry.  Søren in particular, as his closest friend, could tell that there was something which was still bothering him beyond the self-evident.  He’d asked him a few times what it was but Halley only ever waved him off without explanation.  Knowing his friend as well as he did, Søren understood that he would talk only when he was ready, and that pressing him about it would only serve to push him further away.

  Halley had angered and frustrated Sadhika, but she was intrigued by him nonetheless.   Although she could never condone what he’d done, she did on some level understand his motivations and the deeper dilemma of his existence.  While their respective situations were in some ways entirely different, in other respects she figured that they were actually rather similar.  Both of them had to reconcile being reincarnations of a sort; both of them were in their own way different kinds of copies of an original.   He was of the same stuff but an altogether different person, whereas she was of different stuff but essentially the same person.  His ingredients were the same but his manifestation was different, while her ingredients were different but her manifestation essentially the same, at least by comparison.

  She found him sitting on the cliff which Sadhika and the other sims had come across when they’d made their way to the ocean.  It was mid-morning and he sat with his legs hanging over the edge of the cliff, staring out into the deep infinitudes of the ocean and the distant horizon.  As she approached, Halley picked up a small stone and rolled it around in his hand thoughtfully for a few moments before lobbing it out in front of him and watching it fall all the way down to the water below.

  She didn’t ask if she could join him, instead she just sat down beside him without saying a word.  Instead of hanging her legs over the edge as he had, she instead sat cross-legged and wrapped her arms around her legs.  The two sat in silence for quite some time, long enough for Sadhika to watch several clouds roll in overhead and create an overcast effect, not across the entire sky but quite significantly in the area above where they were.  The clouds looked heavy, and she found herself wondering if it might rain.

  Sadhika was waiting patiently for Halley to feel the need to break the silence.  She was hoping that if she sat there long enough he would open up to her about what, beyond the obvious given the past few weeks, was still bothering him so much.

  “I’ve never seen clouds before…” he finally said.  “I mean, I guess I must have seen them when I was preoccupied with my mission, but I never took the time to really notice or appreciate them.  I’d only ever seen pictures on the ship before we landed.”

  “Pictures can never really tell the whole story can they?  Not even your PANEs on full immersion can, there’s something about really being here isn’t there…”

  “Yeah…” he said with a sigh as he studied the sky.  “It’s beautiful.”  The simulated woman sitting beside him nodded her agreement.

  “Sadhika I’ve been meaning to, um…” Halley started without looking at her and instead still holding his gaze out towards the horizon, “I wanted to thank you for talking me down that day…” he finally said.  

  “You’re welcome,” she softly replied.

  Halley sighed heavily, as though a tremendous weight on him made the act of sighing particularly laborious.  “I think I wanted to die…”  Another heavy sigh.  “I think in that moment… I think that was the whole point for me.  I guess I wanted to do the whole… blaze of glory thing.  I wanted my star to burn brighter and hotter than anybody else’s.  As a clone I had something to prove… but when I realized I wasn’t going to get my way I guess in response I just resolved to burn even brighter and hotter.  But the hotter and brighter a star burns though, the sooner it burns out… a part of me knew that maxing out the intensity meant that I had to die for it.   I think that was the whole point at the time…  I knew it would be so much easier than… god, than going through all this.”  Halley started to tear up at this point.  “It would have been so much easier than facing the world I helped to create and… and the people that I hurt.  It’s killing me to face what I did and all the people who were lost as a result… people like Ishtar.”

  “I know.”   These were the things which she could have imagined would be bothering him.  She figured that maybe he had to work through these things out loud before he could get to what was bothering him beyond this.

  “And you were trying to warn me all along weren’t you?” Halley said through tearful eyes as he finally looked directly at her.  “Beyond trying to save everyone else… you were also trying to spare me all this weren’t you?”

  “Yeah…” Sadhika agreed with a heavy sigh.

  “Well,” Halley said with a morbid chuckle as he wiped tears away from his eyes, “I certainly appreciate the effort.”

  “You know, there’s no way I could have reached you if there wasn’t some part of you that wanted to be reached, if on some level… you didn’t want to be stopped.”

  “I suppose so…”

  “So are you going to tell me what’s really bothering you beyond all that?” Sadhika finally felt she had to ask directly.  “Søren and I are worried about you,” she gently added.

  Halley hesitated for what seemed like a long time, but then finally answered: “I don’t want to be the last.”

  “The last?” Sadhika asked, not quite understanding at first.

  “The last clone.”

  “Oh I see.”   She now understood completely, but she didn’t know what to make of him saying it.  She found herself immediately and deeply troubled by the prospect of Halley taking it upon himself to create yet another clone; it was a prospect she’d never considered before.

  “I’m not saying that the experiment should go on forever, but… I don’t want to be the last one.  I don’t want me and everything I’ve done to be the… you know, the definitive version.  I don’t want my actions to be what we are all ultimately and collectively remembered as being.”

  Sadhika felt that she had to handle the situation very delicately.  She was absolutely opposed to the idea of course, but she was wise enough to know that her outright forbidding him at this point might only serve to totally commit him to the idea.  “Why do you feel that way?” she hesitantly asked.

  It was at this point that Halley bolted up to his feet, and in the process almost launched himself off of the cliff in the process.  He turned away and walked into the tall grass which lay between the cliff edge and the jungle which separated them from the primary colony site.  As Sadhika stood to follow him, he stopped and stood still with his back to her.  “Because I’m a failure.” he quietly answered.  “Not just because of the mess I caused here, but… but because I proved to be just as flawed as any of the others.  After my… after my father I can only be thought of a step backwards, as a… as a regression.  I am error.”

  “You’re looking at it all wrong Halley,” Sadhika said as she approached him from behind, and then came around to stand in front of him.  “I think your error… was only the original error in the first place of thinking that anybody can clone their way to self-actualization.  It just… it just doesn’t work that way.

  “For one thing, it was a fundamental error from the outset, to believe that there is some ultimate standard by which you can measure yourself as a human being, some definitive standard which you can progress towards and judge yourself by how closely you mirror it.  In the end there is no ‘correct’ way of being human Halley, any more than there is an incorrect way.  There are only… different ways of being human.   The only meaningful metric of one’s way of being is whether or not it is counterproductive to one’s own goals and values.

  “You and the other clones have successfully and definitively demonstrated that from any given genome vastly different kinds of people can arise given different lived experiences.  As we’ve discussed though, there are also deep fundamental traits which seem to be constant throughout and which seem to fundamentally anchor all of that vast variability.  I think as a result that is enough to call the experiments a success on their face and… and to let it be at that.  Any scientific justifications which may have existed for the experiments have been satisfied and now no longer exist.   The idea that’s been developed throughout though, of continual improvement towards some ethereal ideal incarnation which you have to keep replicating until you achieve… I think that is not only an unjustifiable idea, I think it’s a dangerous one.  

  “It’s too much pressure to lay at the feet of any new being… and you know that as well as anyone, don’t you?  What makes it so insidious is that it’s an impossible ideal because there can never be any agreement on what the idealized human being would be.  It is different for every whole being, every being who is both their genetics and the life they’ve lived.  There can be no ideal expression of a genome because the life it is subjected to is as integral to its ideal expression as the genome is.   Ask a million different people, hell ask a million different clones of Markus Bowland what the correct way of being human is and you’ll get as many different answers.  That’s the problem.”

  “The point is not to strive to live any particular life…” Halley said as he came to understand, “the point is to enjoy and live well the life you get isn’t it… to learn acceptance of who we are and to make the most of the life we’re given.”

  “Precisely,” Sadhika agreed, “not in a fatalistic acceptance of some kind of destiny, but in a deterministic appreciation of how our futures are shaped by the decisions we make in the present and the lessons which we draw from the mistakes we’ve made in the past.  The key is to never stop learning and recalibrating our understanding of who we are, what we really want out of our lives, and how best to pursue what really matters to us so we don’t waste a single moment of our ever so brief moment on the stage.  That’s the process which led me and the others to throw ourselves into the mission which got us all here in the first place.  It’s what you did on some level when you chose to recalibrate what you really wanted in that moment on the bridge… when you chose to live.”

  “Tycho didn’t choose to live,” Halley observed, “he wasn’t able to… but I could.   We were all different, not different degrees of separation from the ideal, just… just different.”

  “Exactly.   Each one of you had to figure it all out from scratch for yourself just like every other human being.  To learn about oneself and about the universe we’re born into… is the birthright of every human child.  It’s the only kind of betterment and self-actualization any human being has any genuine access to, the individual kind.  The whole point of a human life is for it to be lived Halley, to be discover day by day.  You can’t cheat your way to self-discovery through cloning.  It’s cheating the game of life, and if you’re cheating… you’re not really playing the game are you?”  

  Halley nodded that he understood, but he didn’t say anything.  The clouds were rolling in more thickly now; it was definitely threatening to rain.

  Sadhika thoughtfully added:  “If you’re always preoccupied with who you’ve been, and who you might become in the future, you’ll miss the most important part of your life – who you Halley Bowland are right now, singularly here with me as an individual being, in this moment of time.  There is only now.  There is only your own life, as you live it, right now.  It is one’s existence… and it’s easy to miss if you exist somewhere else.”

   “You know… I was going to ask you to be my mother, I mean… mother to the new clone.  I always believed that my father was the most developed of us and that it was because he was raised by your granddaughter Dhika.  I remember my grandmother, and I remember her being a lot like you.  I have to think that she was what made all the difference for Herschel.   

  “But now… now I think that maybe you’re right.  Maybe it really is finally time to put it all to rest.  You know, Ishtar always agreed in principle to us raising a new clone together.  I believed that in the right environment, in our own community and with loving parents, that together we could produce a truly idealized clone… but you know, we also planned on having our own naturally conceived children as well as the mission outlined.”

  “You could still have a child with her you know… certainly her genome is on file; it wouldn’t be very difficult at all.”

  Halley nodded.   “Have you sims agreed to who is going to lead the different colony sites?” he asked.

  “Not yet, no.” she answered.

  “I want you, Sadhika.  I want you to be the one to lead us.  I trust you.   I… I respect you.  I’d accept any of the others as I agreed of course, but… you’re the one I’d choose.”

  Truth be told, Sadhika hadn’t given much thought to who would live where when it was all said and done.  But it was also true that she didn’t have any immediate aversion to it being her to live with and lead Halley’s camp.  After all she’d be able to communicate with anyone wherever she wanted, and it was a pretty short trip between the two colony sites so on some level it really didn’t matter in which site she lived.

  Plus, she had a certain sympathy for Halley which she couldn’t entirely explain.   Perhaps it was her empathy over their shared burden of both being new incarnations of former beings, and the constant pressure to live up to a predecessor which went along with it.

  “If I agree to lead you,” she offered as gently as she could, “would you agree to commit to ending the cloning program?”

  Halley spent several moments in silence, presumably considering the proposition.   Instead of answering her question directly, he answered with another question.  “If I instead have a novel child using Ishtar’s genome… would you agree to be its mother?”

  He asked it so casually, as though he were asking her to stir the pot while he used the bathroom so the sauce didn’t burn.  She was taken aback, but she didn’t find herself settling on declining right away.  She was actually rather surprised by the degree to which her heart called out to ascent.   There was a part of her which had always been sad to not have had children back on Earth when she was human.   She never regretted her path and she’d made her life choices with her eyes wide open, but it also made her appreciate the offer which had now been so casually made; she in fact found it quite flattering.  She was also acutely aware that as a simulant her procreational options were limited to say the least.  

  After a bit of awkward silence, Halley started: “I’m not suggesting we be lovers or a couple or anything-“

  “I know,” she acknowledged with a muted nervous laugh. In truth she was surprised to discover she wasn’t sure that in the very long term she’d always be opposed to such a thing anyways.  In her head she was already speculating about the possibility of their next child being a blending between both of their respective progenitors.

  “I mean, I haven’t even begun to process losing Ishtar,” Halley nervously clarified, “and-“

  “I know, Halley,” she said as she put her hand on his shoulder.  “I know.  I’m just… I’m just thinking.”

  “I wouldn’t want to do it alone and, and you remind me so much of my grandmother…”

  “I know,” she offered as reassuringly as she could.  “So is that your settlement offer then?  No more clones if I be the leader of your town and the mother of your child?   Is that everything?” she asked in jest, trying to lighten the mood.

  “If you want to call it that…” he replied, still a little too serious for her comfort.   “I’d call it offering you to be more generally enshrinement as our matriarch.”

  “Right…”

  “We’ve got a lot of work to do…” Halley observed, “raising families, taming a wild planet… hell, building a whole civilization.”

  “I look forward to it,” Sadhika said with an eager smile.

  “Me too…” Halley agreed with a gentle chuckle.  “I didn’t before though.  It used to feel like a burden, but now… now it’s exciting.  Now I look forward to the challenge.”

  It was at that moment, that if finally started to rain.  It started with a moderate shower, but quickly escalated to quite a significant downpour.  Neither of them felt the need to run for cover or lament their lack of anything to cover themselves up with.  Halley looked up into the sky, and put his arms out with his palms up to feel the drops falling down on him.  He started to laugh in delight and Sadhika could understand why.  He’d never seen the rain before.