The Bradbury Report by Steven Polansky

Author:Steven Polansky
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Published: 2010-08-02T04:00:00+00:00

Sunday night, our last in Montreal, after an early dinner, during which neither of us spoke about the next day, we returned to the hotel and packed our bags. It was the right time, Anna said, for her to brief me on what it was like for a clone inside the Clearances. What it would have been like for my clone. I told her I was sleepy. She said I wasn’t sleepy, that I’d slept most of the day. With that, the idyll, such as it was, ended, and class began.

“From the start of the government’s program,” Anna said, “as I believe I’ve told you, we have tried to think, as near as we could come to it, the way the government thinks. All the evidence points to thinking that is pragmatic, self-interested, and venal, but who can be sure how the government thinks? All I can tell you is what seems to us the most probable of what has been guessed, deduced, imagined. We believe we have come close to the truth.”

Although I had slept most of the day, I was tired. My feet hurt. My scalp itched. I was worried about my heart. I wanted to be in bed, in the dark, alone in the room. I wanted to think about things—however beside the point—without Anna’s voice in my head. Why did I need to know this? I would meet the clone. I would see what I would see. I would do what I could for him. I would stand beside Anna. If I still saw the reason for it, I would write the report.

“Everything within the Clearances,” she told me, “the most densely populated area on earth, is designed and engineered to keep the clones physically healthy and emotionally placid, to keep them manageable and docile, without the instinct or means for procreation, or self-preservation, or aggression. Every day the clones get long bouts of regimented exercise, though there is no game-playing, no sports, no activity that might encourage a spirit of collaboration or teamwork, nothing to inspire a collective sense. They get an optimally balanced, low-calorie, inexpensively delivered diet. They eat vegetables and fruits grown on the Clearances by the clones themselves. They eat very little meat, and no red meat. The poultry and pork they eat is from pigs and fowl raised inside the Clearances. The fish, too, is farmed there. No sweets. No coffee or tea; nothing that might jazz them up. Plenty of water. Wholegrain breads. A glass of purple grape juice with supper. They eat the way we might eat if our one concern was maximum health and longevity. So that, on average, the health of the clones is far better than that of their originals. It is certain,” Anna said, “that the government cares far more about the health of the clones than it does about the health of its citizens, in whom it has little investment.

“As long as they live, adult male clones are administered daily a massive and uniform

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.