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“It is?”
“Oh sure.” She brightens, her eyes gleaming with excitement, and clasps her hands together. “Snakes have been known to clone in a primarily female environment. Sharks do, too. Armadillos give birth to four identical children every time they propagate. Those are, for all intents and purposes, clones.”
Snakes? Sharks? Armadillos? “Ugh. Those are not great examples.”
“Tapeworms—”
“Devi,” I interrupt. “This isn’t helping me. All the things you’re pointing out are gross.”
Her nose wrinkles. “Sorry. I’m just trying to point out that it’s a common occurrence in nature. We’re just freaked out over it because of science fiction propaganda about clone harvesting and organ farms and all that silliness.” She rolls her eyes. “As if anyone would grow an entire clone when all they have to do is grow the damn organ in the same jar.”
“Still not helping,” I say tightly. I didn’t want to think of myself as a snake or a tapeworm—I really, really don’t want to think of myself as a cluster of cells in a petri dish.
“Right. Sorry. Just ignore all of what I just said. But it really is common. There’s no need to panic.”
Easy for her to say. She’s not the clone. “But I have memories.”
“Yes, and that’s the really interesting part.” Devi taps on her lower lip. “I’d love to know how they managed that but my guess is that you’re most likely given a bit of a nudge in the hippocampal formation so your outer age matches your inner workings. As a product, you’d be near useless if you had the body of a thirty year old and the brain of an infant who doesn’t know the basics. Parsing out or copying memories from the host seems like a logical move.”
“I don’t care how logical it is. It’s really messing with me.” I press my fingers to my temples. “I have a head full of memories and they’re not even mine. I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.”
She adjusts her legs, shifting her position on the floor next to me. “You’re focusing on the wrong thing. Do you have memories of television?”
Devi’s mind sure jumps around a lot. “I mean…yes.”
“Any particular shows?”
I shrug. “Does it matter?”
“Not really.” She taps the side of her brow. “They’re not your stories but they’re all stored up in here, right? Think of those memories as television. A soap opera. The stories exist, and you have them memorized, but they’re not really yours.” Devi spreads her hands. “And they won’t do you any good here anyhow, right? We’re all more or less starting fresh, unless your mind is full of spear-fishing and animal trapping already, in which case you’re the luckiest one here.”
I manage a reluctant smile at that. “Not a bit of spear-fishing, I’m afraid. Just a lot of library stuff.”
Devi carefully takes the skin from where it’s spread out in front of me and begins to roll it up again. “And I have a head full of laboratory and microscope procedures. I have every single word of my master’s thesis ingrained into my memory, and it was about Mesozoic hairy snails. Do you think that does me a bit of good?” She shakes her head as she rolls, smiling. “We’ve all had to start over from scratch. We’ve all had to learn how to hunt and fish and make things from animal skins. We’ve all had to learn how to cook over a fire. Harlow had to learn how to eat meat again. And the men that came from the island had to learn how to hunt in the snows. And your troglobite friends from the caves will have to learn how to live above ground.”
“Troglo-what?”
“Oh!” She pauses. “N’dek kept calling them the ancestors and I pointed out that they’re not really his ancestors? They’re too young. They’re people, but a subterranean people. The scientific term for animals that have adapted to cave dwelling is troglofauna or troglobites.”
“Sounds like something out of Tolkien,” I admit.
She laughs. “Oh, it really does.” She pauses. “Now that I’ve given you my snakes and tapeworms cloning pep talk, do you feel any better?”
It’s strange, but in a way, I do. She’s taken all the emotion out of it for me and laid it out in a logical fashion. I’m not the only clone here, and I need to stop acting like it’s destroying my life. When you look at it from Devi’s perspective, it all makes sense. “I just…sometimes I feel like I’m cheating R’jaal. Like I’m not supposed to be here.”
Devi purses her lips. She ties the large skin carefully and sets it aside, and then gazes at me. “You’ve had the science pep talk. Now you get the mom talk.”
“The mom talk?”
She nods. “The way I look at it, everything in space and time happens for a reason. There are billions of planets and billions of years of time. Millions of creatures have gone extinct before the first mammal ever existed. Out of all the creatures on Earth, out of all the people on Earth, your ancestors were born. I won’t even get started on the billions of sperm that had to lose in order for the one that fertilized the egg that Librarian Rosalind was created from, and then you were picked from billions of humans on Earth and cloned specifically from. You landed here, at this tiny spot in the vast universe at this specific time. You immediately resonated to R’jaal, who has been lonely and longing for a mate. That’s a lot of very, very specific things to happen all at once—a convergence of happenstance—to create you and him and bring you both together at the right time. You think that’s not by a greater design? Maybe this is exactly where you’re supposed to be.”
