“Do you guys clone? You gotta know how. Your technology’s advanced enough,” Mark suddenly asked.

“We can, but we don’t.”

“Why not?”

“When a culture is more concerned with fitting old minds in young bodies, and loses interest in young minds in young bodies, that culture is dying.” She flashed Mark a quick smile. “We grow children the old-fashioned way. Also, you clone enough, and genetic read errors creep in.”

“A copy of a copy of a copy.”

“That’s right.” Tis finished sealing the soft tissue with a sterile fixative that left only a pale pink line.

Tach touched a panel, and the screen flashed once and vanished. Grunting a bit with effort, she lifted her little patient off the table and set him on his feet. The cradle mother was waiting outside the cubicle.

“As good as new,” Tach said as she handed over the boy.

“I was afraid you’d say that,” sighed the other woman.

The child was staring down at his arm with excitement and wonder. “Look, it isn’t pink no more. My line is white. Maybe Momma won’t ever know.”

“There’s a wonderful human phrase that applies in this situation. Say ‘fat chance,’” Tis said.

Mark and Tis went strolling. Rarrana was huge, and Mark sensed he’d only seen a fraction of it.

“Zabb’s put a big negatory on giving me a lab,” Mark said.

“He’s hoping you’ll run out of drugs. Then you and I will both be without friends, and he can kill me with impunity.”

“I’m tellin’ you, man, Zabb doesn’t want you dead.”

“Mark, you are gullible, naive, and sweet. You think everybody has a touch of goodness in them.”

“I know Blaise doesn’t,” Mark defended. “And I know Zabb doesn’t want you dead.”

They had reached an intersection of several corridors. One wall looked out of place, breaking the symmetry of the architecture. Tis suddenly stopped and stared at that wall for a long, long time. Mark reached hesitantly out and touched her hair.

“Doc?”

“This is where my mother died.”

The ace’s head swung back and forth like a puzzled crane’s. “I thought she, like, fell down stairs or something?”

“There used to be a stairway here. Father had it destroyed… the entire wing walled off. Her suite was down there.”

So much of Takisian life, particularly a Takisian woman’s life, seemed centered indoors. It heightened Mark’s sense of claustrophobia. And this place was really giving the ace the creeps.

“Hey,” he blurted. “Let’s go outside while there’s still some light left.”

Tis shook herself free of her reverie. “While there’s still some autumn left. It will be winter soon.”

They went to the private garden off Tisianne’s suite, an odd diamond-shaped plot of ground that seemed to have been created more by architectural oversight than any plan. High walls in four different styles and three different colors peeped coyly through the leaves and trumpet-shaped flowers of a climbing vine. It was like a fat woman hiding her physical shortcomings behind gauzy veils and hoping the covering would distract the eye.

As usual there was a fountain making water music, but a sharp wind was warping the shape. Dark clouds were scudding across the sun like a nightmare’s mane dulling the crystal fire of the crushed-quartz path that wove through the parterre flower gardens and trees. Since their last walk it had been raked back into its curving pattern, and now here they went raping the perfect symmetry with crude footprints. It made Mark a little crazy. Every day he wrecked some person’s life work, and yet he never saw the phantom raker.

They came to roost on a bench beneath what Mark had dubbed the grape arbor for lack of a better phrase. It was an arbor, there was fruit growing on it, and the smell was very alluring, but a sampling produced effects like a shot of bad Mexican water. Mark knew, he had succumbed to temptation.

Tis sighed heavily, leaned back on one hand, and rested the other high on the bulge point of her belly. Sunflower, Mark’s wife lo these many years ago, had assumed just such a position when she’d been pregnant with Sprout. Maybe all pregnant women did. A universal in any culture. In any species. On any planet.

“I haven’t asked before, but, like, are you handling this?”

“No, I never thought it would get this far. I was sure Kelly would have to handle, well… the messy bits.”

“It’s about a month away, right?”

“Yes.”

“You want to talk about, like, uh, how you’re feeling?”

Tis laughed, a hollow sound devoid of humor. “I’d almost rather talk about my father, and that walloping load of guilt.” Mark opened his mouth, but she forestalled him with an upraised hand. “Just kidding. Fear is easier to face than guilt. And that’s what I’m feeling. I’m absolutely, totally terrified. I don’t want to have this baby. Somebody else has got to have this baby for me.” She levered herself to her feet and paced nervously up and down in front of him. “I have been shot, beaten, poisoned, slashed, and raped. Pain is an old companion to me. But this pain terrifies me. I’ve seen women in hard labor…” Her voice trailed off, and she stared out at the eastern sky where the first evening stars were just beginning to show. “Maybe Jay will come ambling back with Blaise and my body in tow.” She turned back to Mark. “I have that fantasy a lot. Stupid, isn’t it?”

Very slowly, for the words cost him, Mark said, “I used to go to sleep at night and think that if I just hoped long enough or prayed hard enough, when I woke up in the morning, Sprout would be all right. She wouldn’t be retarded. We all have crazy fantasies.”

Even an imagination as fertile and creative as Jay’s couldn’t turn Ilkala into New York City. No self-respecting New Yorker would build office buildings in pale lavender, lime green, dusty rose… the list of offensive pastel colors went on and on. And while the Takisians built tall, they built tall wrong. The multistory buildings couldn’t really be called skyscrapers, they were too spindly for that. Meadows, in another of his endless, fucking lectures, had explained that too. Something about how Takis had a relative mass about one-third? Two-fifths? – some damn number or other – of Earth norm, so the gravity was less, and buildings could look anemic.

And everybody could be a flit, thought Jay sourly as he surveyed his fellow passengers on the tram. It seemed a prosaic description for an impeccably clean means of conveyance which had no apparent means of propulsion. It hummed lightly up the deep valley to within a mile of the House Ilkazam, depositing servants, and the occasional slumming psi lord, and went humming back to the city. If the New York subway system was a tenth this nice – He cut off the thought ruthlessly. He didn’t want to like anything about Takis in his present mood. The seats. Yeah, the seats were way too small. Not comfortable at all.

Mollified by finding fault, he returned to a sour contemplation of his physical surroundings. He had no idea where to exit the tram. The rush of events hadn’t left him with much time to peruse the guidebooks. What were the sights and attractions of Ilkala? Did Takisians write guidebooks? Did Takisians take vacations? He tried to picture the Takisian equivalent of a Hawaiian shirt and failed utterly. Some things man was not meant to see.

At least there was a bizarre familiarity to the entire commuting ritual. In place of briefcases the business people possessed wafer-thin laptop computers that were attached by fine filament wires to a throat patch. Jay presumed they were all dictating information to the critters rather than typing. Seemed sort of cumbersome. Other people read (the books were shimmering projections at eye level, which adjusted for a shift in your posture) or listened to music on tiny radios disguised as ear clips. The competing musical styles formed whispers in the air. Apparently Takis had avoided the boom-box phenomenon.