"Well. Butterknife. Completely the stupidest thing I've ever done," she said, almost amused at the idea now, over a year later, and she had always anyway had that desperate, hysterical tinge of darkness to her sense of humor. "Much stupider than going out to the cabin should've been. I honestly think it only worked at all because the sucker was so surprised anyone would even try something so impossible."

Sunshine listened to his little discussion of curriculum. The described courses were comprehensible, or would be if they'd applied to adults instead of children - really, how could you teach a child younger than ten anything like that? But a clone army?

It really was like the science fiction stories she'd read when she was younger, Sunshine thought. She'd had two little brothers always demanding stories from her; she loved fairy tales best, but there was something approachable in the yellowing paperbacks with their covers of rockets and robots and improbably attired blondes on distant moons; they were both closer and farther away from being real than Beauty and the Beast. Even if she had often had to change the stories in her own versions so the heroines weren't quite so hopeless.

Was that really what his life had been like? Her world had nothing like the technology to make clones, it was all a thousand times more of a fantasy than the silly pre-War gothic novels she'd moved on to as she got older. She knew what a clone was, but it would have been easier to understand if he'd said he'd been raised by demons. She could have asked what kind.

"How was that? I mean," hearing the stupidity of that question, "was it lonely? or hard? or good to know what you were supposed to be doing with yourself? Obviously it's been useful."