"Oh, we're very careful about that." She climbs at an angle beside him, not using her hands. "It would be a dreadful loss if we couldn't understand the books. All the children are taught from the same original tapes, you see. Oh, there's faddy words we use for a
while, but our communicators have to learn the old texts by heart, that keeps us together."
Judy Paris grunts from the pedicycle. "You, my dear children, will never know the oppression we suffered," she declaims mockingly.
"Judys talk too much," says Connie.
"We do, for a fact." They both laugh.
"So you still read our so-called great books, our fiction and poetry?" asks Lorimer. "Who do you read, H. G. Wells? Shakespeare? Dickens, ah, Balzac, Kipling, Brian?" He gropes; Brian had been a bestseller Ginny liked. When had he last looked at Shakespeare or the others?
"Oh, the historicals," Judy says "It's interesting, I guess. Grim. They're not very realistic. I'm sure it was to you," she adds generously.
And they turn to discussing whether the laying hens are getting too much light, leaving Lorimer to wonder how what he supposes are the eternal verities of human nature can have faded from a world's reality. Love, conflict, heroism, tragedy-all "unrealistic"? Well, flight crews are never great readers; still, women read more… Something has changed, he can sense it. Something basic enough to affect human nature. A physical development perhaps; a mutation? What is really under those floating clothes?
It is the Judys who give him part of it.
He is exercising alone with both of them, listening to them gossip about some legendary figure named Dagmar.
"The Dagmar who invented the chess opening?" he asks.
"Yes. She does anything, when she's good she's great."
"Was she bad sometimes?"
A Judy laughs. "The Dagmar problem, you can say. She has this tendency to organize everything. It's fine when it works but every so often it runs wild; she thinks she's queen or what. Then they have to get out butterfly nets." All in present tense-but Lady Blue has told him the Dagmar gambit is over a century old.
Longevity, he thinks; by god, that's what they're hiding. Say they've achieved a doubled or tripled life span, that would certainly change human psychology, affect their outlook on everything. Delayed maturity, perhaps? We were working on endocrine cell juvenescence when I left. How old are these girls, for instance?
He is framing a question when Judy Dakar says, "I was in the creche when she went pluggo. But she's good, I loved her later on."
Lorimer thinks she has said "crash" and then realizes she means a communal nursery. "Is that the same Dagmar?" he asks. "She must be very old."
"Oh no, her sister."
"A sister a hundred years apart?"
"I mean, her daughter. Her, her grand-daughter." She starts pedaling fast.
"Judys," says her twin, behind them.
Sister again. Everybody he learns of seems to have an extraordinary number of sisters, Lorimer reflects. He hears Judy Paris saying to her twin, "I think I remember Dagmar at the creche. She started uniforms for everybody. Colors and numbers."
"You couldn't have, you weren't born," Judy Dakar retorts.
There is a silence in the drum.
Lorimer turns on the rungs to look at them. Two flushed cheerful faces stare back warily, make identical head-dipping gestures to swing the black hair out of their eyes. Identical… But isn't the Dakar girl on the cycle a shade more mature, her face more weathered?
"I thought you were supposed to be twins."
"Ah, Judys talk a lot," they say together-and grin guiltily.
"You aren't sisters," he tells them. "You're what we called clones."
Another silence.
"Well, yes," says Judy Dakar. "We call it sisters.
Oh, mother! We weren't supposed to tell you, Myda said you would be frightfully upset. It was illegal in your day, true?"
"Yes. We considered it immoral and unethical, experimenting with human life. But it doesn't upset me, personally."
"Oh, that's beautiful, that's great," they say together,, "We think of you as different," Judy Paris blurts,;; "you're more hu- more like us. Please, you don't: have to tell the others, do you? Oh, please don't."
"It was an accident there were two of us here," says. Judy Dakar. "Myda warned us. Can't you wait a little while?" Two identical pairs of dark eyes beg him.
"Very well," he says slowly. "I won't tell my friends= for the time being. But if I keep your secret you have' to answer some questions. For instance, how many, of your people are created artificially this way?"
He begins to realize he is somewhat upset. Dave is right, damn it, they are hiding things. Is this brave new world populated by subhuman slaves, run by master brains? Decorticate zombies, workers without stomachs or sex, human cortexes wired into machines. Monstrous experiments rush through his mind. He has been… naive again. These normal-looking women could be fronting for.a hideous world.
"How many?"
"There's only about eleven thousand of us," Judy, Dakar says. The two Judys look at each other, trans-, parently confirming something. They're unschooled in deception, Lorimer thinks; is that good? And is diverted by Judy Paris exclaiming, "What we can't figure out is, why did you think it was wrong?"
Lorimer tries to tell them, to convey the horror of manipulating human identity, creating abnormal life. The threat to individuality, the fearful power it would put in a dictator's hand.
"Dictator?" one of them echoes blankly. He looks at their faces and can only say, "Doing things to people without their consent. I think it's sad."
"But that's just what we think about you," the younger Judy bursts out. "How do you know who you are? Or who anybody is? All alone, no sisters to share with! You don't know what you can do, or what would be interesting to try. All you poor singletons, you why, you just have to blunder along and die, all for nothing!"
Her voice trembles. Amazed, Lorimer sees both of them are misty eyed.
"We better get this m-moving," the other Judy says.
They swing back into the rhythm and in bits and pieces Lorimer finds out how it is. Not bottled embryos, they tell him indignantly. Human mothers like everybody else, young mothers, the best kind. A somatic cell nucleus is inserted in an enucleated ovum and reimplanted in the womb. They have each borne two "sister" babies in their late teens and nursed them a while before moving on. The creches always have plenty of mothers.
His longevity notion is laughed at; nothing but some rules of healthy living have as yet been achieved. "We should make ninety in good shape," they assure him. "A hundred and eight, that was Judy Eagle, she's our record. But she was pretty blah at the end."
The clone-strains themselves are old, they date from the epidemic. They were part of the first effort to save the race when the babies stopped and they've continued ever since.
"It's so perfect," they tell him. "We each have a book, it's really a library. All the recorded messages. The Book of Judy Shapiro, that's us. Dakar and Paris are our personal names, we're doing cities now." They laugh, trying not to talk at once about how each Judy adds her individual memoir, her adventures and problems and discoveries in the genotype they all share.
"If you make a mistake it's useful for the others. Of course you try not to-or at least make a new one."
"Some of the old ones aren't so realistic," her other self puts in. "Things were so different, I guess. We make excerpts of the parts we like best. And practical things, like Judys should watch out for skin cancer."
"But we have to read the whole thing every ten years," says the Judy called Dakar. "It's inspiring. As you get older you understand some of the ones you didn't before."
Bemused, Lorimer tries to think how it would be, hearing the voices of three hundred years of Orren Lorimers. Lorimers who were mathematicians or plumbers or artists or bums or criminals, maybe. The continuing exploration and completion of self. And a dozen living doubles; aged Lorimers, infant Lorimers. And other Lorimers' women and children… would he enjoy it or resent it? He doesn't know.