Robert Silverberg - In the Clone Zone

The airport was very new. It had a bright, shiny, majorworld-capital feel, and for a moment Mondschein thought the plane had landed in Rio or Buenos Aires by mistake. But then he noticed the subtle signs of deception, the tackiness around the edges, the spongy junk behind the gleaming facades, and knew that he must indeed be in Tierra Alvarado.

“Senor Mondschein?” a deep male voice said, while he was still marching down the corridors that led to the immigration lounge. He turned and saw a short, wide-shouldered man in a beribboned green-and-red comic-opera uniform which he remembered after a moment was that of the Guardia de la Patria, the Maximum Leader’s elite security corps. “I am Colonel Aristegui,” he said. “You may come with me, please. It was a good journey? You are not overly fatigued?”

Aristegui didn’t bother with passport formalities. He led Mondschein through a steel doorway marked SEGURIDAD, INGRESO PROHIBIDO which admitted them to a series of bewildering passageways and catwalks and spiral staircases. There was no veneer back here: everything was severely functional, gunmetal-gray walls, exposed rivets and struts, harsh unshielded light-fixtures that looked a century old. Here it comes, Mondschein thought: this man will take me to some deserted corner of the airstrip and touch his laser pistol to my temple and they will bury me in an unmarked grave, and that will be that, five minutes back in the country and I am out of the way forever.

The final visa approval had come through only the day before, the fifth of June, and just hours later Mondschein had boarded the Aero Alvarado flight that would take him in a single soaring supersonic arc nonstop from Zurich to his long-lost homeland on the west coast of South America. Mondschein hadn’t set foot there in twenty-five years, not since the Maximum Leader had expelled him for life as a sort of upside-down reward for his extraordinary technological achievements: for it was Mondschein, at the turn of the century, who had turned his impoverished little country into the unchallenged world leader in the field of human cloning.

In those days it had been called the Republic of the Central Andes. The Maximum Leader had put it together out of parts of the shattered nations which in an earlier time, when things were very different in the world, had been known as Peru, Chile, and Bolivia. During his years of exile in Europe Mondschein had always preferred to speak of himself as a Peruvian, whenever he spoke of himself at all. But now the name of the country was Tierra Alvarado and its airline was Aero Alvarado and its capital was Ciudad Alvarado, Alvarado this and Alvarado that wherever you looked. That was all right, a fine old South American tradition. You expected a Maximum Leader to clap his own name on everything, to hang his portrait everywhere, to glorify himself in every imaginable way.

Alvarado had carried things a little further than most, though, by having two dozen living replicas of himself created, the better to serve his people. That had been Mondschein’s final task as a citizen of the Republic, the supreme accomplishment of his art: to produce two dozen AAA Class clones of the Maximum Leader, which could function as doubles for Alvarado at the dreary meetings of the Popular Assembly, stand in for him at the interminable National Day of Liberation parades, and keep would-be assassins in a constant state of befuddlement. They were masterpieces, those two dozen Alvarados—all but indistinguishable from the original, the only AAA Class clones ever made. With their aid the Maximum Leader was able to maintain unblinking vigilance over the citizens of Tierra Alvarado—twenty-four hours a day.

But Mondschein didn’t care how many Alvarados he might be coming home to. Twenty, fifty, a hundred, what did that matter? Singular or plural, Alvarado still held the entire country in his pocket, as he had for the past generation and a half. That was the essential situation. Everything else was beside the point, a mere detail. To Mondschein the clones made no real difference at all.

In fact there was very little that did make a difference to Mondschein these days. He was getting old and slept badly most of the time and his days were an agony of acute homesickness. He wanted to speak his native language again, Spanish as it had been spoken in Peru and not the furry Spanish of Spain, and he wanted to breathe the sharp air of the high mountains and eat papas a la huancaina and anticuchos and a proper ceviche and maybe see the ancient walls of Cuzco once more and the clear dark water of Lake Titicaca. It didn’t seem likely to him that Alvarado had granted him a pardon after all this time simply for the sake of luring him back to face a firing squad. The safe conduct, which Mondschein hadn’t in any way solicited but had been overjoyed to receive, was probably sincere: a sign that the old tyrant had mellowed at last. And if not, well, at least he would die on his native soil, which somehow seemed better than dying in Bern, Toulon, Madrid, Stockholm, Prague, wherever, any of the innumerable cities in which he had lived during his long years of exile.

They emerged from the building into a bleak, deserted rear yard where empty baggage carts were strewn around like the fossil carcasses of ancient beasts, a perfect place for a quiet execution. The dry cool wind of early winter was sweeping a dark line of dust across the bare pavement. But to Mondschein’s astonishment an immense sleek black limousine materialized from somewhere almost at once and two more Guardia men hopped out, saluting madly. Aristegui beckoned him into the rear of the vast car. “Your villa has been prepared for you, Dr. Mondschein. You are the guest of the nation, you understand. When you are refreshed the Minister of Scientific Development requests your attendance at the Palace of Government, perhaps this afternoon.” He flicked a finger and a mahogany panel swung open, revealing a well-stocked bar. “You will have a cognac? It is the rare old. Or champagne, perhaps? A whiskey? Everything imported, the best quality.”

“I don’t drink,” said Mondschein.

“Ah,” said Aristegui uncertainly, as though that were a fact that should have been on his prep-sheet and unaccountably hadn’t been. Or perhaps he had simply been looking forward to nipping into the rare old himself, which now would be inappropriate. “Well, then. You are comfortable? Not too warm, not too cool?” Mondschein nodded and peered out the window. They were on an imposing-looking highway now, with a city of pastel-hued high-rise buildings visible off to the side. He didn’t recognize a thing. Alvarado had built this city from scratch in the empty highland plains midway between the coast and the lake and it had been only a few years old when Mondschein had last seen it, a place of raw gouged hillsides and open culverts and half-paved avenues with stacks of girders and sewer pipes and cable reels piled up everywhere. From a distance, at least, it looked quite splendid now. But as they left the beautifully landscaped road that had carried them from the airport to the city and turned off into the urban residential district he saw that the splendor was, unsurprisingly, a fraud of the usual Alvarado kind: the avenues had been paved, all right, but they were reverting to nature again, cracking and upheaving as the swelling roots of the bombacho trees and the candelero palms that had been planted down the central dividers ripped them apart. The grand houses of pink and green and azure stucco were weather-stained and crumbling, and Mondschein observed ugly random outcroppings of tin-roofed squatter-shacks sprouting like mushrooms in the open fields behind them, where elegant gardens briefly had been. And this was the place he had longed so desperately to behold one last time before he died. He thought of his comfortable little apartment in Bern and felt a pang.