“Corpulent likelihood,” murmured Ellin.
“I am testing if we are really important,” he said, crinkling his eyes at her. “Your question about my sister, yes, she is looking much like me, Asian type, and we are having similar facial structures. What is your family?”
“No family I know of. Except clones. I was born on preassigned ethnic quota, so my parent could have been anyone … “
“I am looking at you,” he corrected her. “I am thinking not just anyone, no.”
She flushed. “I never asked if I had non-clone siblings, full or half. Somehow it didn’t seem to matter.”
“Where was your rearing?” he asked.
“First in an infant fosterage, but I don’t remember much about it, to tell you the truth, except for Mama One. They cloned six of me, and History House approved us for fosterage—not together, of course—then it picked me up on a quota-clone contract when I was six … “
“After you were infant?”
“I lived at the History House boarding school, with dancing lessons every day, in a nurturance group—foster brothers and sisters—with our Mama and Papa Two, until I was twelve. Then I went into the ballet school, four of us with a foster aunt, for six years of additional education in dance and drama and twentieth-century studies. Then the corps de ballet. And they’ve moved me around. This last History House was my fifth.”
He grinned ruefully. “It is not sounding like much fun. How is it feeling to have foster parents? And foster aunts?”
She frowned, chewing on a mouthful of cookie, surprised to find her eyes filling. She shook her head impatiently, refusing the tears. “Well, actually, I loved Mama One very much. I guess you could say I never really got over the separation. I still hear from her, every now and then. Mama Two was different, but as she told me herself, her job was different. And when it came time for Foster Aunt, her job was to get the four of us through the second-decade miseries. Do boys have miseries?”
He laughed, his eyes half shut, his body shaking. “Oh, Ellin Voy, I am remembering all such things. Yes. Miserable boys, I am remembering.”
“How’d you get into a History House?” she asked. “Tapped, or on purpose?”
“I was being tapped,” he admitted. “I was attending school in town where family is living. There, in the school, I am being always … what is called a laughjerker … ?”
“A clown?”
“You are knowing the exact word. Clown, yes. Everything is being a joke for the face and for the voice and for the legs, always being funny, always making the laughter, always falling down so much they are calling me Bao Bao Down. So many times I was having the settle-down speech, the school was getting tired of saying it. So, instead, they were giving me the test battery, and as soon as I was reaching twelve years, my family was being told I am born actor, born comic, born Kabuki dancer for women’s parts—all Kabuki is dancing by men, you know … “
“I didn’t know. Why?”
“Oh, long ago sex-workers were dancing Kabuki to be fetching customers, so Emperor was issuing decree that only men could be dancing. My life is being like your life. I am having foster uncle and three brothers also with miseries, and I am learning in the theater school, in the dance school. I am playing parts of women characters in Kabuki; princess so-so in Japanese drama; jokey fisherman wife in China Sea; fall-down silly daughter of man who is keeping cormorants.” He shrugged. “That one is fun, much miming of being in rocking boat, making whole audience seasick. Now I am dancing most of time, and for rotation I am doing weird empress or being strange holy woman.” He folded his arms, half closed his eyes and gazed directly ahead with a lofty, detached expression of infinite disdain. “Very wise. I am memorizing whole book of Confucian analects.”
“Tell me an analect,” she begged.
“Major principles suffer no transgression. Minor principles allow for compromise.”
“What does it mean?”
“It must be meaning my dancing is a minor principle,” he said, laughing. “For my career is being compromised.”