Zelazny, Roger - Novel 05 Read Free

the
emerging sun cast my long shadow down past her.
                   She turned then, and shaded her eyes. I
dismounted, twisted the reins about a nearby shrub's handiest branch and headed
down.
                   "Hello," I said, as I approached
                   It was ten or fifteen seconds before I reached
her, and it took her that long to decide to nod and smile slightly.
                   "Hello," she said.
                   "My name's Angelo. I was riding by and
saw you, saw this place—thought it might be pleasant to stop and smoke a
cigarette, to watch you draw. If that's all right?"
                   She nodded, bit into the lower half of a new
smile, accepted a cigarette,
                   "I'm Julia," she said. "I work
here."
                   "Artist in residence?"
                   "Bio-tech. This is just a hobby,"
she said, tapping the pad and letting her hand remain to cover her work.
                   "Oh? What are you bioteching?"
                   She nodded toward the woolly crowd.
                   "Her," she said.
                   "Which one is she?"
                   "All of them."
                   "I'm afraid I don't follow …”
                   "They are clones," she said,
"each one grown from the tissue of a single donor."
                   "Neat trick, that," I said. 'Tell me
about clones," and I seated myself on the grass and watched it being
eaten.
                   She seemed to welcome the opportunity to close
the pad without letting me see her work. She launched into the story of her
flock, and it required only a few questions here and there for me to learn
somewhat of herself also.
                   She was originally from Catania , but she had been to school in France and was presently in the employ of an
institute in Switzerland which was doing research in animal
husbandry and was employing cloning techniques to field-test promising
specimens in various environments simultaneously. She was twenty-six and had
just ended a marriage on a very sour note and gotten herself transferred to the
field with a test flock. She had been back in Sicily for a little over two months. She told me a
lot about clones, really warming to the subject in the face of my obvious
ignorance, describing in overabundant detail the processes whereby her sheep
had been grown from cellular specimens of a hybrid in Switzerland to replicate her in all details. She even
told me of the peculiar and still not understood resonance effect, which
involved the fact that all of them would exhibit temporary symptoms of the same
illness should one of them be stricken—in eluding the original in Switzerland
and others in other parts of the world. No, to the best of her knowledge,
cloning had not yet been attempted at the level of human beings—myriad legal,
scientific and religious objections existed—although there were rumors
concerning experimentation on one of the outpost worlds. While she apparently
knew her business quite well, it struck me after a time that her words were put
forth more with a pleasure at having someone to talk to than from any desire
too inform. And we had this, too, in common.
                   But I did not tell her my own story that day.
I listened, we sat a time in silence, watching the sheep, watching the
lengthening shadows, talked again, in a desultory fashion, of small, neutral
matters. As we talked, a mutual assumption gradually became manifest in our
speech, that this was but a part of a continuing conversation, that I would be
back, the next day or the day after, that we would be seeing one another again,
and again. Nor was this assumption incorrect
                   Before very long, she became interested in
horseback riding. Soon we were riding together every day, mornings or