Often, when she finished a book, she came to herself with a sense of loss at what she’d surrendered in reading that last page. Closing the book was a finality that stripped her of identity, severed her life, left her squatting in the shallows of her mind, surrounded by polliwogs and ooze, with all the depths drained away. How often in her life had she longed for the story to become real! And yet now, here she was, far, far out in space, getting closer and closer to a dramatic doing, a wonderful adventure, a terrible excitement beyond all her expectations, and all she could do was worry that when the time came she’d be so self-conscious or frightened that she couldn’t engage the event!
Her basic worry, excavated from the depths of her being through many fretful midnight sessions, was this clone business. Could a clone accomplish something it wasn’t designed for? Dancer clones were supposed to be dancers. Musician clones were supposed to be musicians, entertainers entertainers, supervisors, scientists, genius generalists, all to be what they were! Just as many were cloned as were needed, with none left over—except for the occasional nus.
Nuses were mistakes. They were errors of system or development, and in moments of despair, Ellin comforted herself that she was definitely not a nus. She was exactly as per order, good legs, dancer’s build, and with a mind that was … oh, filth, filth, filth, step one foot outside the stage and it was an absolute blank! Hadn’t her clone parent had a brain? Hadn’t the brain been passed on? If Ellin wasn’t a nus, why did she feel like one? She clenched her pillow and groaned.
A moment later there was a rap at the door before it opened a crack to reveal a sleepy-eyed Gandro Bao peering in at her. “I am hearing moans? Are you being sick?”
Had she moaned? Perhaps it had sounded like that. “Maybe I let out a sigh or something,” she confessed. “I was thinking about something.”
“About all the volcanoes on Newholme blowing up?” he asked, insinuating himself into the tiny stateroom and perching on the foot of the bunk. “About the strange indigenous peoples existing there?” Some of this information had reached COW through official channels. Other facts, if indeed they were facts, had been picked up from the gossip of BIT or freighter crews who had landed briefly on Newholme to deliver or pick up materiel.
“Those are the only two things I could get out of all those filthy reports,” she snapped. “Did you find anything else?”
“No. Indigenous race is being there, even though indigenes were not being there before settlement. Volcanoes are threatening to blow up world, even though they were never doing so before settlement. This is making me think settlement is, perhaps, unsettling.”
He mugged a comic face, making her laugh, then cry, petulantly: “Why did it take them a thousand pages to say that?”
“Aha,” he said with a serious face. “You were moaning over number of pages. That is being very understandable. Number of pages is often causing moaning, groaning, temper tantrums.”
She flushed, embarrassed, confessing, “Nothing so relevant, Gandro Bao. I was thinking it would be easier if this was a book.”
“Why is it being easier in book?”
“If the book came to a troublesome part, I’d just lay it down for a while. Or I’d jump ahead a page or two, to see if it came out all right. That way my stomach wouldn’t hurt, and I wouldn’t get pains in my head. And in a book, you get told who you are. You get the right words and the right clothes and the dialogue, everything, props and all. You don’t have to work it out for yourself.”
“This is being true in dance, too, but dance is not excluding extemporaneous art. So, be extemporizing.”
“It’s easier if you have a personality, that’s all,” she said in a defeated tone. “You know. Roots.”
“You are fine nordic dancer. There are being many roots to go with nordic dancer.”
“I know that.” She sat up, annoyed. “I looked it up. There’s a lot of warlike hordes moving around, and lots of stomping and kicking dances and several complicated religions, and a lot of violent wars. I don’t feel connected to any of it. It’s not like a family.”