Free The Bradbury Report by Steven Polansky

is doing what it set out to do, there will be close to two hundred and fifty million clones in there, living their lives. We can only speculate. How do they live? Day to day, hour to hour. What do they do? How are they treated? What do they eat? How do they think, and what do they think about? How are the infants produced? If they are borne, who bears them? Who delivers them? Are they suckled? How are they reared? Who rears them? Who, that is, are their parents? Are they parented? Do they get an education of any sort? Are they taught to speak? Are they permitted to speak? Have they developed a language of their own? How are they governed? Are they named? Are the males and females segregated? Do they feel desire? Do they feel love? What if these living repositories of human parts themselves require medical care? Do they know they are clones? Do they experience what we would call a sense of self, whatever we might mean by that? What happens when a clone gets old? What happens when a clone dies? Of natural causes, I mean, before he or she is harvested. What happens when they’ve been harvested? Suppose a hand is taken? Or a leg? Or an eye? Or a liver? Their heart. What is done with what remains? Do they protest? Can they conceive of protest? Do they rebel? Are they punished? What form does their punishment take? How are they dressed? Do they know kindness? Do they know God? If so, what
God? Are clones human beings? If they are not, in what way not? What are the differences between them and us? Where, in the business of cloning—it is a business, if the government is involved—is the profit? How is the money made?”
    I don’t remember all the questions Anna posed in that conversation. Nor can I be sure which of the questions I’ve tallied here were hers, and which are questions I’ve come up with, after the event. We know some of the answers now. Anna does, and her group, and I, per-force, do, too. Until we (I chafe at the pronoun) make public this information—this report is intended as the first step in a broad-based, multiform campaign of disclosure—and more so afterwards (when we are exposed and no longer of use), we are, Anna and I, in significant danger.
    â€œSo far as we know,” Anna said, “no one has been inside.” She was no longer beside me on the couch. As she began to unroll her sample questions, she stood up, just so she might pace slowly the width of the living room, back and forth between the wing chair and the double windows. Instinctively, I spread out, legs and arms, occupying as much of the couch as I could to discourage her sitting back down. With the enumeration of each successive question, she became more and more absorbed in her task, paid less attention to me. “And not once in twenty-five years has there been a creditable report of a clone come outside the Clearances. We have waited and watched for it. Religiously. As if we were a lunatic cult.”
    â€œAnd you’re not,” I am sorry to say I said.
    Either she didn’t hear this, or she ignored it. She stopped pacing. She sat down heavily in the wing chair, as though she had worn herself out.
    What she said next, she said quietly, without affect. “We have a clone.”
    For several seconds, I said nothing, I was irrational enough to think the clone Anna said they had might be Sara’s, that this would explain Anna’s coming to me. I confess this possibility, however macabre it might have proved if realized (Sara would be no older than twenty-one; I would be an enfeebled old man, not just unrecognizable
but unknown. I would mean nothing to her. For me, after the first delusory moments, it would be killing.), filled me with expectancy and something like physical desire. I knew it was not possible; Sara died before the replication program was initiated. “Where did you get it?” I said.
    â€œHim,” Anna said. “I’m not sure. He came to us. Wandered off.