A greencard.

Speechless for a moment. Clones get redcards. Never get greencards. Never. It was impossible — but there it was on my desk.

"A fake. Got to be."

She shook her head. "No. It's real."

"You've tried it out?"

"I don't have to. I know it's real."

Picked it up. Sure looked real. This was getting stickier and stickier by the minute.

"You could wind up at the South Pole shoveling chlorcow manure for having this, you know."

She nodded. "I know. But it won't matter when we get Out Where All The Good Folks Go."

Always hated that expression. Everybody seemed to refer to the outworlds that way. Everybody but me. Didn't like what it implied about us who stayed behind on Earth, although I couldn't deny that it might be true.

But I stuck to the subject at hand: "You need more than a card, you know. Unless someone's changed your status in CenDat from clone to Realpeople, this is nothing but green plastic. When they stick it and a skin scraping into their little machine at the shuttleport it'll read out that there's no such Realpeople as you and you'll be arrested there and then for exporting stolen property — yourself."

She gave me a half-vacant smile. "I know. But that will never happen."

"How can you be so…?"

She shrugged and smiled. "Kyle fixed it. He took a skin sample and came back a few days later with the card. He loves me."

Looked at the greencard again. Seemed as real as my own. Couldn't figure it. A man who would go to this extreme for a clone must really…love her.

Nah.

But my face remained a picture of professional blandness.

"How long has this Kyle Bodine been missing?"

"Five days. We were supposed to meet at L–I Port by the shuttle dock Friday night. I haven't heard from him since Friday morning."

"Where do you think he is?"