"Look," I said slowly, hoping she'd be able to catch onto what I was going to tell her. "Don't know how to tell you this, but there are a few things you should know. Such as, there's no way you can get to the outworlds. Only Realpeople can go. You need a greencard, and clones don't get greencards. You're Unpeople. You're property. You belong to someone — either to a person or a corporation. Clones can't even have credit accounts, so it stands to reason that they can't just wander off to the stars when they please."

Watched her open her beltpurse as I tried to figure out how I was going to explain the workings of CenDat to her in terms she would understand.

"You see, when you were born…or hatched, or whatever-"

"Deincubated," she said, still working at the beltpurse.

"Whatever. They took a little piece of tissue and recorded your gene structure into the Central Data banks. Your genotype will remain on record there until you die. Just like mine. Just like everybody's."

She nodded. "I know. And they can't clone another of me until I'm dead — the One Person/One Genotype law."

"So you know about that." Puzzled me. "Then what made you think you could get off-planet?"

She looked around like I might be hiding someone behind the

desk or somewhere else in this shoebox-size cubicle.

"Is what we say here secret? Really secret?"

"The word is 'confidential.' And yes, everything's secret. What've you got in your hand there?"

She pulled something out of her beltpurse and laid it on my desk.

"This."