Kiln People

It wasn’t hard to spot the lady in charge — dark brown and real — sitting on a stool next to a table piled high with papers and supplies. She wrapped the arm of a greenie whose whole left side looked badly burned. Overhead, another of the rosette symbols gradually turned, like a circular mandala or a flower whose petals all flared to wide tips.

“Open your mouth and inhale this,” the volunteer told her patient, pushing a pop-breather at the poor roxie’s face. Snapped, it billowed a compact cloud of heavy fumes the green sucked gratefully.

“It’ll numb your pain centers. You must be careful then. Any bump or minor injury might—”

I interrupted.

“Excuse me. I’ve never been here before, but—”

She jerked her thumb to the left. “Please get in line and take your turn.”

I saw a rather long queue of injured dittos, patiently waiting. Whatever mishap brought each one to this place, their owners clearly wouldn’t inload such memories. Nor were these golems quite ready for recycling. Not with ancient instincts still screaming at them to fight on. The Standing Wave’s oldest imperative is endure. So they came here. Like me.

But I couldn’t afford to be patient. Turning around, I insisted.

“Please, ma’am. If you’d just look at this.”

She raised her eyes, tired and perhaps cranky after long hours in this makeshift clinic. The volunteer nurse started to utter a curt dismissal, only it died on her lips. She blinked, then shot to her feet.

“Somebody help me here, stat! We’ve got an eater!”

What followed was weird, in a crazed-panicky-resigned kind of way. Like a scene from some old wartime hospital drama, updated with the hasty banter of a pit crew at an auto race. I lay prone on a filthy tabletop, listening through a haze while others dug into my back with makeshift, unsanitized tools.

“It’s a clayvore! Damn, look at the bastard move.”

“Watch out, it’s big one. Grab those needle-nose pliers.”

“Try to catch it whole. Eaters are illegal in this state. We may get a month’s rent from the bastard who used this!”

“Just grab the little devil before it gobbles something vital. Hey, it’s trying for the central ganglia—”

“Shit. Oh wait, I think … Got it!”

“Oh man, look at the nasty mother. What if they ever gave these things a taste for real flesh?”

“How do you know they haven’t, in some secret lab?”

“Don’t be paranoid. The Henchman Law ensures—”

“Shut up and put that awful thing in a jar, will you? Now someone get me a cup of plaster. The ganglia’s intact. I think we can get by with a patch.”

“I don’t know. The wound’s pretty deep and this green’s young. Maybe we should give the motivators a quick test.”

I listened from quite some distance away. The pop-breather stopped pain, all right — a merciful aspect of ditto design, required by law. It also explains why there are few free clinics. This was the first time I ever used one … to the best of my knowledge, that is. What a futile idea, after all — spending effort to save creatures who will vanish in a few hours anyway. Like ditto emancipation, most folks don’t see the point.

Yet there I was, fighting to survive, and grateful for the help.

As I said before, a ditto’s personality is almost always based on its archetype. Almost always. Maybe I came here for help today because I’m a frankie. Because I no longer share Albert’s wry stoicism. At least not completely.

Anyway, the operation was far shorter than any visit to a realperson hospital. No worry about recovery or infections or malpractice suits. I had to admire the volunteer staff, making do with makeshift equipment and stale, off-market parts.

Ten minutes later I was sitting among other brightly hued patients and derelicts in the old church’s wooden pews, sipping Moxie Nectar while antidotes countered the pain drug. Underneath a hand-carved sign that read Helping the Kneady a crippled purple stood at the old preacher’s rostrum, reciting to us from a sheet of paper that she held in her good hand.

“It is not for Man to set boundaries, or to define the limits of soul.

“Once, human beings were as children, needing simple tales and naive visions of pure truth. But in recent generations the Great Creator has been letting us pick up His tools and unroll blueprints, like apprentices preparing to work on our own. For some reason, He’s permitted us to learn the fundamental rules of nature and start tinkering with His craft. That’s a fact as potent as any revelation.

“Oh, it is a heady thing, this apprenticeship and the powers that go with it. Perhaps, in the long run, it will turn out to be a good thing.

“But that doesn’t make us all-knowing. Not yet.

“Most religions hold that some immortal essence stays inside a real human being — the original body — when copies are made. The golem-duplicate is just a machine, like some kind of robot. Its thoughts are projections — daydreams — sent in a temporary shell to perform errands. To help make your ambitions come true.

“For a rox, afterlife comes only by reuniting with its rig … just as the rig achieves it someday by reuniting with God. That’s how older religions dismiss the ambiguity, the moral quandary, the troublesome morality of making new intelligent beings from clay.

“But doesn’t some bit of immortal tincture transfer, each time we copy? Don’t we still feel passion and pain, while wearing these brief forms? Does heaven have a place for us, as well?

“If it doesn’t, well, maybe it ought to.”

The sermon droned on while I regathered my thoughts. Again, I saw the rosette pattern overhead — this time in a stained glass window that looked half-finished. Several crippled dittos worked in a corner, fashioning another flared bit for the flower. Only this petal looked more like a fish of some kind.

I always figured the people who ran this place — the Ephemerals Temple — were related to the self-righteous kooks who picket Universal Kilns, like that greenie at the beach. So-called mancies who want citizenship for dittos. Or maybe the religious aspect meant they were kin to those other demonstrators … conservatives who see roxing as an affront to God.

But neither seems to be true. They aren’t asking for equal rights, only compassion. And to save a little soul-stuff, here and there.

All right, so maybe they’re sincere kooks. I’ll ask Nell to send the Ephemerals a donation. If realAlbert doesn’t veto it.

Still, I got out of there as soon as I could stand, seeking a quiet place to make this recording. Maybe Al and Clara will listen to it together and ponder a few new notions.

That’s enough immortality for me. For a frankenstein mutant.

Meanwhile, it’s time to get busy. I may not be a faithful duplicate of my original, but we still share some interests. Things I’d like to know before vanishing away.