Taylor Five (15 page)

“No,” said Tay blankly. “We took food and water. There was no time, and Clint was hurt. We didn’t think about anything else. May I go now, Doctor? Or do I have to stay for the whole hour?”

Dr. Soo-yin didn’t look offended. “Of course you can go. The session is for you, not for me. Maybe we will talk for longer next time. But I’d like to explain to you a little more about the medication I could prescribe—”

Something broke down in Tay. “I don’t want you to give me your drugs.” She could not stop herself, she was on her feet, she was shouting. “I don’t want to lose my painful memories.
The pain is all I have left
. Don’t you understand? The pain is all I have left!”

“That’s all right, Tay,” said the counselor gently. “That’s all right.”

Tay hated the pretty little lady at that moment. But what she hated most was the feeling that Dr. Soo-yin was
glad
that she had made Tay break down: as if that was just what she had wanted.

Tay went shopping with Rei Van der Hoort. She didn’t see much of her aunt because Aunt Helen didn’t like to leave her hotel, not even to visit air-conditioned shopping malls. That was okay: they’d be seeing enough of each other soon. She went swimming, in her new swimsuit, in the Van der Hoorts’ pool and lay beside the gleaming water, listening to the Van der Hoort kids at play; and to the insect sounds in the garden, the “nasty bugs” Aunt Helen had hated, that meant home to Tay. . . . She kept half hearing Donny’s voice, yelling as he bombed off the diving board: but she tried to tune it out.

And still there was no news.

She had lied to Rei, and to the counselor. She knew what they were asking about. It was the packet Clint had insisted they take with them when they left the burned-out wreck of the refuge and drove into the wake of the fire. Maybe, she thought, that packet had held notes about Uncle, explaining why he was a person, not an animal. But Tay was convinced that Clint’s notes were at the bottom of the Waruk River, and she didn’t want to talk about it. She did not believe the terrible things she’d nearly believed, the night before she left the Marine and Shore. She knew Lifeforce would never be involved in cruel experiments on the orangutans. She must have been dreaming; all those things she’d thought Uncle could do and feel must have been hallucinations. Realizing this was like losing her last friend in the world, but it didn’t hurt. The only thing that still hurt, in her deadened mind, was the certainty that Pam had lied to her. She didn’t know why she still felt that way, if Uncle really was just an ordinary ape,
but she did
: and the pain was unbearable. She had to shut it out, she had to get away from everything to do with her gene mother: even if it meant spending her life in gray England.

Uncle would be all right. The people at the San Diego ape center would be kind to him.

Her second meeting with the counselor was a few days of shopping and resting after the first, and she went back purely because she didn’t want any fuss. If they wanted her to see a counselor, she would see a counselor. It would be all over soon, anyway. The tickets were booked, and she and Aunt Helen were going to England.

The only thing that scared her was the drug that would destroy her painful memories. She had images of Dr. Soo-yin suddenly producing a hypodermic and sticking it in her arm. But really she knew that wouldn’t happen, and of course it didn’t. Dr. Soo-yin didn’t mention the drug. She didn’t say anything about the way Tay had shouted at her at the end of the last session. She just started asking the same sort of gentle questions as before.

“Dr. Soo-yin, what if I wanted to see a counselor who didn’t work for Lifeforce?”

“We could arrange that,” said the doctor with unfailing calm. “I think you
should
go on seeing someone like me, a professional stranger to whom you can say anything, when you are in England. But Tay. . . . there is a difficulty. It would not be fair to ask someone to try to help you, and keep something important from them—”

“You mean the doctor would have to know I’m a Lifeforce Teenager.”

“Well, yes—”

Tay felt sick. So there was another lie. Aunt Helen had said no one would know, but of course that couldn’t happen. Being a clone, being one of the Lifeforce Teenagers, was going to follow her all her life. But why couldn’t people understand that the
last
thing she wanted was to talk about it. Talking wasn’t going to make Tay not a clone, or bring Mum and Dad and Donny back. She nodded, and sat with her head down, waiting to endure the next questions, whatever they might be—

It was several minutes before she realized that Dr. Soo-yin wasn’t sitting opposite her on the couch anymore. She looked up and saw that the counselor had quietly moved away, her high heels making no sound on the thick Chinese rug. She was sitting at her desk at the other end of the room, doing something on her computer.

It looked as if she’d given up on the session.

Suddenly Dr. Soo-yin gave a little chuckle. It was such a strange sound in this situation that Tay was curious in spite of herself. She got up and went slowly to the desk.

“Ah,” said Dr. Soo-yin. “Would you like to see?”

Tay shrugged and went round the desk so that she could see the screen over the doctor’s shoulder. There were no printed words, just a kaleidoscope of bright colors that dipped and darted around on a clear blue background.

“What is that meant to be?”

“It’s my hobby, Tay. You can call it computer art if you like. I just think I’m making patterns. This one I call Hummingbird. I thought you might be interested to see some of my work because I know you’re good at art.”

“No,” said Tay. “It was Donny who was good. I’m just neat.” She looked up and realized that the “paintings” on the walls were actually prints of computer pictures like this one. “Are those your pictures on the walls?”

“Yes. Only amateur, but I enjoy making them.” Dr. Soo-yin looked very human, suddenly. Just like Donny, when he knew he’d done something good and went all shy about it. Tears pricked Tay’s eyes; she swallowed hard.

“They’re very nice,” she croaked.

“Now, this is a new trick I’ve learned. Let me see if I can make it work—”

The “hummingbird” vanished. Two thin beams of light shot out from the tiny Webcam eyes on the top rim of the screen, and a new image, a spinning green sphere, seemed to jump out of a dark background. It seemed to hang in the air where the beams of light meshed. The green ball separated into segments like an orange, and then each segment burst into shining drops that danced around each other, like chips of emerald.

“Hey, that’s wonderful!” cried Tay.

“It would be better with three-D glasses,” said Dr. Soo-yin modestly.

“What’s it meant to be?”

“Only a pattern. I call it Emerald Storm.”

The green star flowers were swimming in the night. Tay’s heart gave a painful leap. Where had she heard that? Where had she seen the green stars? Oh yes. . . . on the beach by that stream, when Donny had first been ill. She had woken in the night to find her little brother sitting up beside her, gazing at the fireflies. Donny had woken because he had a fever, but he had turned to her, with such a beautiful light in his eyes, and he had said,
How unbelievably great to see that
—

My little brother Donny. He was so brave. He was such a brilliant kid.

“I’ve seen something just like that,” she whispered aloud. “When we were on the run, and my brother Donny was very ill. We saw a swarm of fireflies one night.”

Dr. Soo-yin turned round, leaving the program to run. She pulled up another chair and Tay sat down, hardly realizing what she was doing.

“What was he like, your little brother?”

“He . . . he had black hair and blue eyes, like Mum. He was nearly as tall as me. He wasn’t terrifically good at things like English and maths and science, but he was
truly
good at art. And he was just, brilliant fun. He was just, my best friend.” She looked at the neatly folded pink cotton handkerchief that had suddenly appeared in her hand.

“What’s this for?”

“Because you’re crying.”

“Oh.” She wiped her eyes. “You see, the forest was such a wonderful place to live. Sometimes people visit the rain forest and they say it’s boring. You
do
see animals. You see the gibbons, and you see birds, and masses of butterflies, and monkeys sometimes. There were otters in the creek near our clearing until it dried up, and there was a mouse deer, but it was very shy. But it’s not like a wildlife safari. Usually it’s just the trees. Trees, and creepers, and big plants growing under them, and it’s very silent. But it’s not boring: it’s subtle. It grows on you. You never want to be anywhere else.”

She wiped her eyes again, but the tears kept flowing. “I loved the silence. I used to walk out, off the path where the ground was clear, and sit down and just
be
. Oh, and there were the apes. You think you know the apes, when you’ve watched them for years. I thought I knew. But I didn’t, until I was alone with Uncle.”

“He was your faithful friend, I know.”

Tay shook her head. “No. He was not my friend, and he was more than my friend. He was himself. It was what Mum and Dad used to say. A privilege. A privilege to be near them, because
they are like us
. They don’t talk, but you can feel there’s a person, a different kind of person, with a mind but not like yours. It’s like nothing else in the world. I can’t explain.”

“I think you explain very well.”

Tay nodded and scrubbed her eyes. She swallowed hard. “I think,” she said, “I think I want to go now, Doctor. I’ll c-call a car from the lobby desk. Thank you for showing me your art. You sh-shouldn’t call it just my hobby like that. It’s really great.”

“Thank you.”

“H-here’s your handkerchief.”

It was a sodden gray lump. Dr. Soo-yin smiled. “Ah, you may keep it, Tay.”

She leaned down, slipped a disk into her computer’s drive, tapped a few keys and took it out again. Then she tucked it into a square white envelope and held it out.

“Here you are.”

“What’s this?”

“It’s a copy of Emerald Storm. I would be honored if you would accept it, brave Tay.” Tay took the envelope, feeling confused. Dr. Soo-yin smiled. “Oh, and there’s something else I meant to give you. Here, it’s a master key card for Conservation Projects. In case you wanted to visit there and not have to bother asking, before you go to England.”

As she headed for the door, Dr. Soo-yin came with her and said hesitantly, “I have been proud to meet you, Tay. You are a very special person, you know.”

“I know,” said Tay, her heart closing up again. “I’m a clone girl.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Out in the quiet corridor, Tay put the disk away in her backpack and pressed her hands to her tearstained cheeks. She didn’t want anyone to see her crying, she just wanted to get away and hide. But she was going back to England. This might be the last time she would ever be inside the Lifeforce Asia tower.

Her feet took her to the lifts, and then her finger pressed the familiar number. Floor forty-one, Conservation Projects. When she stepped out on that floor, everything was so familiar it was like walking into a sad dream. Left from the lifts and then right by the big weeping fig in its planter . . . and here was the corner room that had been Mum and Dad’s office since Tay was seven. There was a joke about orangutans, a tatty newspaper cutting, still taped up on the door. How many hours had Donny and Tay spent hanging around here: squabbling because they were bored, running races up and down the corridors? How many times had the four of them gathered for a rushed meal before the flight home to Kandah, among heaps of books and files, eating Hokkien food out of cardboard take-away boxes—