Clones

by Gardner Dozois

  David slept where they had left him, and in the morning he continued south, leaving the cart behind, taking only enough food for the next few days. He stopped once to look at a maple seedling sheltered among the pines. He touched the soft green leaves very gently. On the sixth day he reached the Wiston farm; alive in his memory was the day he had waited there for Celia. The white oak tree that was his friend was the same, perhaps larger, he couldn't tell. He could not see the sky through its branches covered with new, vivid green leaves. He made a leanto and slept under the tree that night, and the next morning he told it good-bye solemnly and began to climb the slopes overlooking the farm. The house was still there, but the barn was gone, and the other outbuildings. Swept away by the flood they had made so long ago.

  He reached the antique forest late in the afternoon. He watched a flying insect beat its wings almost lazily and remembered his grandfather telling him that even the insects here were primitive—slower than their more advanced cousins, less adaptable to hot weather, dry spells.

  It was misty and very cool under the trees. The insect had settled on a leaf spread out horizontally to catch what sun it could. In the golden sunlight the insect was also golden. For a brief moment David thought he heard a bird's trill—a thrush. It was gone too fast to be certain, and he shook his head. Wishful thinking, no more than wishful thinking.

  In the antique forest, a cove forest, the trees waited, keeping their genes intact, ready to move down the slopes when the conditions were right for them again. David stretched out on the ground under the great trees and slept, and in the cool, misty milieu of his dream saurians walked and a bird sang.

  Table of Contents

  PREFACE

  NINE LIVES

  MARY

  THE EXTRA

  OUT OF COPYRIGHT

  THE PHANTOM OF KANSAS

  BLOOD SISTERS

  PAST MAGIC

  CLONE SISTER

  WHERE LATE THE SWEET BIRDS SANG