Clone parts solved that—as far as your immune system is concerned, a clone finger is your own finger. So now I knew that nobody was kidnapping indigent teenagers and stealing their retinas or kidneys.
Since I hadn’t actually expected to find evidence of that, I was surprised by how relieved I felt. So now I had to find out what was really going on in here, and why it was so secret. I was pretty sure I’d figured out why O’Mara and Starlight had been pushing me toward uncovering the information on my own: so that I wouldn’t be bound by the hospital’s privacy strictures regarding patients. I wasn’t supposed to know what was going on here. Therefore nobody had bothered to put a block in my fox about it.
I downloaded a few more sets of records, and then when I was well away from the desk (glossy Ceeharen syster still engaged and on-task behind it) I pretended I had found the room I was looking for, and stepped inside. The occupant was a human female, 135 ans of age, Beyte Denarian by name.
It was almost the last room in the corridor, and when I walked in I was surprised by how quiet and empty it seemed. Hospital rooms are usually full of stuff: wires, equipment, monitors, tubes to put fluids into the human body and tubes to take them away again.
This seemed like a bedroom, and a pleasant bedroom at that.
I crossed to the bed and looked down.
A woman lay there, head shaved, blonde hair beginning to regrow, skin translucent as the skin of low-melanin humans who have never stepped out under a living sun becomes. Eyes closed, hands folded neatly on her breast atop covers that had never been wrinkled or disarrayed by human sleep. I felt as if I were looking at a corpse arrayed for the funeral.
I could see the blue veins under the skin of her throat, her cheeks, her temples. The backs of her hands.
She could not have been more than seventeen or eighteen ans of age.
She could not be Beyte Denarian. And yet—I checked the chart again—she was.
I touched her shaved scalp gently, the soft hairs fuzzing against my palm. There was a scar there, a tiny scar, tidy and neat. She was about old enough to have had a fox implanted, if it was done early. Usually, my species waits until our children are aged around twenty-five ans. Their neural development is more or less complete at that point, and they have learned social skills and how to experience and control their emotions without intervention. They have learned who they are.
So this woman was young, biologically speaking. But she was not unreasonably young.
She did not wake up when I touched her, but there were no signs that she was sedated, or that she was being supported through a period of unconsciousness due to illness or injury. She was lying there, inert. Breathing regularly.
I lifted an eyelid and flashed a light against her pupil. It contracted normally. Her pulse was even and tidy.
I set her hand down where I had found it and slowly left the room. The syster had not looked up from their work. You don’t find many people that devoted on a sleep shift, but maybe they were studying for advancement. Or maybe they were playing solitaire.
There was a little more corridor beyond this room, and at the end of it, another door.
I squared my shoulders. I was ready to jimmy this lock, too.
I wondered what I would find there.
At first, I thought the space beyond—too large to call it a room: a hold, maybe, labyrinthine—was full of cryo tanks. Much more modern ones than those that had lined the vast hold on Big Rock Candy Mountain, naturally—but it still left me with a shiver of recognition.
Then I looked at them again, and realized they were not cryo tanks, but the exact opposite. The cryo tanks were there, but they were in ranks behind the objects I’d first noticed, and there were a lot more of them.
The ones in the front… were artificial wombs and incubator tanks full of suspensory medium. Incubator tanks of various shapes and sizes. Incubator tanks optimized for a dozen, two dozen different species of systers.
And they, and the cryo units behind them also, were full of clones.
It was not the first clone farm in my experience. This was a hugely resource-intensive operation, but there was no good reason for it not to be here. The whole private unit was a resource-intensive operation, after all. But something about this place and the young/old woman I’d seen outside bothered me.
I picked my away along the rows of tanks. Call me ethnocentric, but I concentrated on the human ones. A few dozen, ranging in age from fetal to the prime of youth. Suspended in their nutrient liquid, doing nothing at all. Medical clones don’t have fully developed brains; enough to keep the autonomous functions functioning and the normal growth growing. Brains don’t develop in a vacuum; they need stimulation and experience to learn how to do even such basic things as balance, pick up a fruit. Interpret language. See.
I supposed there was a possibility that Mx. Denarian out there had had her brain transplanted into a clone body. It would be an egregious waste of resources; sure, you could use a stem-cell suspension to graft the old brain onto the new neural tissue, but old brains are old. We don’t die, these diar, because our bodies wear out; we die because our brains stop functioning effectively and we run out of the ability to prop them
