Mens sat back from his desk, his eyes wide, his mouth curving into the most genuine smile Pietro had seen from him. "That is really an outstanding idea, Pietro. I confess I have no idea whether it can be done, but we've recently done a number of things I'd thought couldn't be done. If you're successful..." Mens frowned. "Wait. How can we know whether we have been successful? If a crew member is along as a pure passenger in a clone's body, and is unable to affect the behavior of the clone, what's our evidence she's really there? If it's really been done as you're describing it, by that very fact we wouldn't be able to see any proof of it in the clone's behavior."

"No proof in the behavior, correct, but I believe the EMIs, the emotion monitor implants, will show it." Pietro was remotely aware that he had now reached the level of comfort with Mens that he could actually lecture him. "In a normal dolly, say, I don't know that this has been looked at before, but I believe an EMI would register exuberant joy when its owner makes use of it. But if the dolly were carrying, say, Captain Grishova's mind, there would be conflicting emotions, with Grishova's mind being appalled at what her body is doing. Similarly, when a normal dolly is left on its own, unable to meet its need to gratify its owner, it would be emotionally crushed, while one carrying a crew member's mind would have that emotion mixed with relief. We would be able to measure these things."

Mens pounded his desk, startling Pietro. "Yes! Pietro, I want you to start working on this at once! Work with the others on existing projects if you wish, but give this top priority! Is there anything you need?"

Pietro thought. "Not right away, I think. For a time it will all be so theoretical I just need to think, maybe consult your records..."

"That will all be open to you."

"Thank you, Sir. Oh! Actually, I did have one unrelated question that has been bugging me for days."

Mens nodded, and waited.

"You said that, in preparing Major Duchain, or that is, her mind within the clone, for the first experiment, Dionysus was helpful in putting her in a receptive frame of mind, and that in particular, he found a way to make her believe the original Aurora crew was dead without saying so, so that, for the time being, she wouldn't concern herself with her sister's whereabouts. If they are dead, nothing should have prevented him from coming out and saying it. I have never read anything about the fate of Aurora's crew..."

"We keep that to ourselves. Our preference is that we don't empower the crew by saying we killed them, which may suggest we feared them, or that we kept them alive long after we had any need for them, which may suggest we were afraid of the consequences of killing them. The fate of the actual crew is..." he made a flippant hand gesture, "...beneath consideration, an unimportant detail."

"But if I'm understanding what you said about Dionysus and his interaction with Major Duchain, then the crew is alive. Yes?"

Mens nodded. "It's time you learned that. Yes. They're alive. As is Major Duchain."

Pietro had never been quite sure he would hear it confirmed. He put all of his surprise and wonderment into the question: "Where??"

Mens smiled. "You may be able to figure it out. It was not entirely accurate to say we had no further use for their bodies. In a practical sense, they can continue to contribute for many years to come."

Pietro gave him a puzzled look, then suddenly gasped in amazement. "Oh!!"

Megan wriggled. She could never break herself of the habit of wriggling. Somehow it always seemed as though her muscles were going to seize up in a body-wide cramp, but they never did.

She wished she could sigh. It wouldn't accomplish anything, but somehow it would help.

She couldn't move her head, within the unshakeable grip of the metal collar around her neck from which so many inputs into her body emerged, but she could move her eyes enough to look downward to see her hugely expanded tummy, her breasts resting on its upper part on either side. It always looked the same, since it had grown to its current full size, surrounding the babies slowly growing inside her. The babies never let her forget they were there. She could feel them moving inside her, sometimes kicking. Looking around the tank at the six copies of herself, all beach-ball shaped baby factories like herself, Megan could see their tummies dimpling from the shifting around within. Sometimes, if she looked downward at the right place at the right time, she could see her own tummy ripple as one or more tiny feet kicked inside.

Gravity, she assumed, encouraged the heaviest babies, the ones that had been in her longest -- the ones closest to birth -- gradually to settle towards the bottom, at last to escape her when ready, to be immediately replaced, she was sure now, with another fertilized egg by the mechanical probe working up through the tube in her rectum. There was no pain involved in the implantation, only the unhappy realization that she was being made to grow yet another clone of herself, another twin sister to be enslaved by a pack of evil men, to be another farm animal or sex toy.

Or maybe occasionally a boy. She wasn't sure where the boys, like Jason or Bret, came from. She supposed that was her job as well.

She remembered how terrified she had been, at the very beginning, after being captured with Sissy, when she had awakened in the breeding tank and understood where she was. It had been her greatest fear, since seeing the tanks, that she would end up in one. And she remembered panicking because she couldn't breathe. It was some time before she realized breathing wasn't needed.

She knew far more than that about the state of her body now. It was the only thing in her environment she could examine in detail.

Megan knew she couldn't survive outside the tank. She wasn't breathing, and she was aware of the absence of a heart beating in her chest, a feeling she had ignored all her life until it was gone. She knew, by the throbbing feel around the collar, that it was pumping clean, aerated, nutrient filled blood through her veins, taking the place of the heart, lungs, and probably stomach, and she had no doubt, since it would make perfect sense, that these organs had been removed, to make more room for babies.

She also knew that, like all of the breeders she had seen in the past and present, she had no arms or legs either. She wasn't fooled by the fact that it felt as though her limbs were there. They didn't respond to any attempt to move them, not as if they were held in place but as though they were asleep. Looking at the limbless clones in the tank with her, she knew exactly what she herself looked like.

At first she had been angry, infuriated, over the hideous wrong done to her by men so evil they had been banished from Earth. But anger, and terror, and panic, can only last so long in a situation that never changes. Now Megan simply concentrated on ways to pass the time. The vast amount of time, and the difficulty of filling it all, challenged her ingenuity.

At the beginning, she had found herself in a tank with six breeding clones -- she hoped they were clones -- with the bodies of six of the seven Aurora crew members... all but Janica, she saw, and hated the men afresh for that cruelty, though she realized she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to see Janny this way. All of their tummies, like her own, had been flat, but had begun slowly, slowly, as the weeks and months passed, growing. Megan had been terrified when she first saw a baby spill out from underneath one of the clones -- Polina Grishova, as it happened -- knowing that it meant she herself would give birth to the first of her babies within days. When it came, it was painful, but after a time it was over, it was done -- but she could still feel babies moving inside her. That was when her belief that there must be more than one baby inside her, and that more were being implanted regularly, was verified beyond doubt.

Megan kept track of passing time by counting babies, though she didn't know the amount of time between deliveries. She was methodical about it, as she was in all things: starting with the clone immediately to her left -- Heather Lopez -- she fixed that clone in her mind as her "anchor point," mentally moving the anchor one step clockwise each time she had a baby, to help her keep count. Megan herself was the anchor point after her seventh baby, the fourteenth, the twenty-first, and so on. In between, she developed various mental games: remembering plots of ficslabs she had read, or of videos she had seen, trying to recall classmates from each year in school, their personalities, whether she had liked or disliked them, conversations she had had with them.

She had also trained herself to make her mind go blank for days at a time. Or it might have been hours. She hoped it was days.

It seemed odd that she couldn't recall any breaks for sleep. She knew she must still be sleeping sometimes. Somehow she kept missing it.

After her sixty-eighth baby, there was an unexpected discontinuity. Without being aware of having lost consciousness, though she must have -- probably a drug had been fed in through her collar -- suddenly the tank, instead of being populated by clones of various crew members, was filled instead with six exact copies of herself. Seven Megan Duchains in the tank altogether. All of the new ones began with flat tummies, which had slowly, so slowly grown to be as rounded as Megan's own, and then they began having babies, at the same rate as herself. Megan was stunned by the only explanation that made sense: that she had been in the tank long enough for her earliest babies to have grown to maturity, and that six had been chosen to assist her in her mission to contribute Megan Duchain after Megan Duchain to a world that would strip them all of their birthright as humans.

From now on, she thought bitterly, with a rare return of emotion, I'll just be one of the identical machines cranking out Megan babies. The familiar blank looks, that she had seen on the faces of all clones except Sissy, reinforced the idea of them being machines, and that she herself was nothing but another.

She had felt sure, by this time, that years had gone by, but she hadn't thought it could be that many years. It scared her that she could possibly have been in the tank that long, but in a sense it also cheered her. She'd made significant progress through her lifespan. There were, she knew, still a couple of centuries to go, but she was closer to the end than she had thought. She yearned to reach the end.

And it gave her a way to measure the passage of time in years. Presumably eighteen years must have passed so far, so she must be having three to four babies each year. She could keep track that way from now on.

Life went on.

She started over on her count, from the time when the other Megans had appeared. Ten babies... twenty... She was up to twenty-six. About eight more years have gone by, she thought, according to my theory on the frequency of births. If I live two hundred years in here, she told herself, I'll give birth... what is it... about seven or eight hundred times.

Automatically she tried to sigh again. Another habit she couldn't break.

She felt a familiar pain shooting through her, an electrifying stomach ache. Shit, she thought, shit, shit, it's time again. She felt the movement, felt it reach the point where she could start to push. Wriggling like a hooked fish, exactly the way she remembered seeing a clone in the tank give birth so, so long ago in another lifetime, she felt it slowly squeeze out of her.

Twenty-seven.

"So the Aurora crew have been making babies in the breeding tanks all these years?"

Mens smiled. He nodded. "We've now got eight tanks. In each, the original physical body of one of the Aurora crew, or in one case Megan Duchain, is busy making our clones for us. Along with six copies of each. Now, I should point out, if you are wondering how we produced so many Megan Duchain clones as quickly as we have, that half of the breeders, once we obtained Major Duchain's genetic code, were impregnated with clones of Major Duchain instead of themselves. Now that we have a reasonable supply, and there are now seven Megan Duchain breeders, we've gone back to having each breeder reproduce copies of itself."

Pietro sat back, pinching his lower lip absently, a habit that was part of his thinking process. "I suppose they still have the escape of dreams."

Mens shook his head. "We thought of that ahead of time. Among the electrodes implanted in their brains and serviced through the helmet, one of them detects the characteristic activity of dreams, and with a small trickle of electricity it sidetracks the content of the dreams on the way to storage in permanent memory. Most of us have no recollection of most of our dreams; the breeders can't remember any of them. They also, as a consequence, have no memory of falling asleep to begin with."

Pietro shook his head in admiration. "Ingenious."

Mens looked off into the distance wistfully. "It's a pity that the crew's life as breeders can only last so long. A lifetime, centuries long though it is, must always come to an end."

Pietro nodded, then blinked and sat upright suddenly. His heartbeat quickened. Mens's comment had set off a spark in his mind that grew into a flame quickly. He was accustomed to that. He was used to being the smartest boy, now man, in the room, and had felt desperate for Mens to have that perception of him. His idea of the Aurora crew being carried as passengers in the minds of every clone had helped in that direction, he was sure, but both he and Mens were fully aware that making the idea a reality might be impossible. He needed an impressive idea that would work in the real world. Mens's last statement, and the wish expressed in it, had opened the door. He said to Mens, with a small smile, "Not really."

Mens looked amused. "No, Pietro, really, that's one of the unbreakable rules of life. It has an ending."

Pietro shook his head vigorously. "No, Sir. What if, after a century or so, you made another download of the breeders' minds, and then upload that into a new set of clones? The new ones would have an entire life ahead of them, in the tanks, but they would feel as though they had already been in the tank a hundred years. And then keep doing that."

Mens sat straight upright, his jaw hanging loose. "Such a simple idea... Why did we never think of that? They would have memories, eventually, of thousands of years in the tanks. A life that really never needs to end!"

"Exactly, Sir." Pietro beamed at him.

Mens looked at Pietro steadily for a minute without speaking. Pietro waited.

At last Mens said, "Pietro... I have one bottle of a very fine cognac from Earth. May I interest you in sharing it with me?"

Pietro's eyes glowed. "Absolutely, Sir."