Cloned Lives Pamela Sargent

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standing by his bed, clad in white coats. He tried to focus on them. One moved closer to him; a
brown-haired woman, slender high-checked face, large green eyes.He lay under the craft, pressed
against the dead ground, hopelessly waiting . He watched the woman and suddenly felt spasms of
bewilderment and fear.
Her lips moved. "Paul?" The word had some kind of significance and he knew he must concentrate on it.
Paul . A name. Perhaps his name.Paul. Yes, he had been called that. He closed his eyes again and
waited.
"It's Kira, Paul. I'm here. Rest if you need to, I'll be here."
Kira. Who was Kira? He concentrated, trying to summon up an image. Achild sat on his lap as he
spoke of a farm in Minnesota and the white-haired woman who baked apple pies . Kira. She was a
child, then. But this woman was also Kira.
He was suddenly tired, The room around him seemed to recede. He drifted into a gray world spotted
with scarlet stabs of pain. Dimly, he perceived a dark and empty terror circling him, waiting to seize him
when he emerged once again into consciousness.
"He's awake again," Juan Colòn said. "He's very weak, but I think he'll be all right. He seems to have a
strong will to live, even in this state."
"I know," Kira said wearily. She rubbed at a dark spot on the clear table top in front of her. "I went in
before. I don't know if he was fully conscious the first time. I waited. When he became conscious again, I
talked to him, but I don't know how much he understood." She stared at some of the print-outs on the
table, then looked up at Juan. "I don't know what we've done," she said to the young surgeon. "After all
the plans, all the work, I don't know what we've done."
"We all feel that way," Juan replied. He closed the door to the conference room and sat down beside
her. "May I speak frankly to you? At first, I was concerned only with the surgery, with the injections,
replacing his damaged kidney with our cloned one, all of that. But then, when the medical computer
revealed activity in the brain…I became terrified. I began to pray. Can you believe that? I prayed that I
had not committed a sin. Yet this is little different from operating on critically ill patients frozen for an hour
or a day, and I have brought them back from that state before." The young man pressed his hands
together as if praying now. "I found myself wondering where this man's soul had been for twenty years, if
he were now a soulless being. I had to tell myself that this was idiocy, an hour or a year makes no
difference to God."
"My problem isn't theological," Kira said. She looked at Juan's dark, expressive eyes and slender hands.
It was not hard for her to imagine him as a priest; in a former time, he probably would have been one.
"He's my father. I saw him look at me and he didn't know me, Juan, I know he didn't. I tried to explain
who I was, and told him he'd been sick for a long time or words to that effect, but he didn't know me or
didn't understand. I don't even know if he realized who he is, or where he is, or…"
"You can't expect that he would know, Kira. You know what would probably happen to a brain
cryonically suspended for all that time. Memories are gone, whole tracks are erased by random noise or
whatever, and even if his mind is still fairly well integrated, it will take time for it to heal. Some memories
may return when he's had a chance to read, talk to people, undergone some therapy. He's had broken
limbs repaired, a damaged kidney replaced, injections of serum from your cloned cells, all of that. It
would take time for a normal patient to recover from that, and this isn't a normal situation. I think you
may be too close to all of this."
"I was too close from the start," she said. Juan gestured as if to take her hand, then seemed to
reconsider.
"I'll leave you alone, if you want," he said finally. "Do you want me to get you some coffee or anything
else?"
"No, thanks. I guess I do want to do some thinking for a while."
Juan got up and left the room, closing the door behind him.
Paul isn't dead now, she heard her mind say. The thought was shocking, almost as startling as the news [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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