Immunity Index by Sue Burke (ebooks children's books free txt) 📕

the word dupe and at laughter more mocking than joyous. He seemed to expect her to say something. “That’ll be nice,” she said without enthusiasm.

“Dupes like him.” He pointed to Nimkii, still grinning. That grin added to Irene’s deepening certainty that Alan and his family had no love for Nimkii. And to her certainty that she had come to a very wrong place.

“I’ll take any visitors we can get,” Alan added defensively, perhaps because she hadn’t laughed. “The tourism board doesn’t do crap for us anyway. We thought this was going to be a great idea, our own little zoo with a big star animal to show off. It’s just not working out.”

Maybe no one wants to visit a sad, stinky animal. Irene began to load some apples into a box for him, rejects from a nearby orchard that were small, misshapen, or blotched—and fragrant in the heat. Her mouth watered.

“I was thinking,” Alan said, “about getting some passenger pigeons. Maybe that would bring more people. They could visit central Wisconsin the way it used to be.”

They’d never guess by the way it is now. Visitors saw endless industrial farms covering sweltering land that only a half century earlier had held cool, beautiful forests. Worse, the farm corporations were pushing for travel restrictions like the ones in Iowa, which would mean no visitors at all.

“You know,” Alan said, “I thought I’d feel connected to him. I’m a little Ojibwe. My ancestors knew mammoths firsthand. That’s why we called him Nimkii.”

The name meant Thunderbird in Ojibwe. A Missouri exotic-animal breeding farm had raised him with an elephant surrogate mother and had called him Big Babar. Irene knew a little about the breeding operation and liked none of it, including the thoughtless names. Nimkii had suffered a cheerless childhood in a pen even smaller than the one where he lived now.

“There’s always so much to do,” Alan said. “And the cost just for alfalfa keeps rising. He eats too much.” He waited for her to answer.

Fruit was expensive, even bad fruit. “Yeah,” she said, faking a little enthusiasm. “We’d better get ready for visitors.”

Alan shrugged and returned to the farmhouse. She picked out a good apple and slipped it into her pocket before she fitted the box into the chains. A twittering flock of sparrows was scavenging inside the pen for bugs in the mammoth scat. Nimkii rumbled, glaring at them, as if they were stealing his dinner.

In July, when she’d arrived as an unpaid intern, Irene’s heart had broken the moment she’d seen the woolly mammoth. Or rather, it had broken when she saw his pen. Six acres had looked bigger in the photos. They showed him standing in a lush tallgrass prairie under wide oak trees, wildflowers brushing his belly.

But in real life, the pen resembled an inadequate prison exercise yard. The grass and flowers had been eaten or trampled to bare sandy soil, and the savanna oaks ripped apart. Six acres, just over four football fields, was nowhere near enough for a creature who in the wild might range more than thirty miles in a single day.

Irene had not expected love at first sight, and now she dreamed of somehow petting him as he towered over her. But if he behaved like a wild fourteen-year-old adult male elephant, and it seemed he did, no one could come close. He would assert dominance, and with a casual swipe he could kill.

She hadn’t expected love, but she had arrived with a secret kinship with Nimkii. Like him, she’d been genetically engineered. No one seemed to remember that artificially engineered, cloned humans used to be sort of legal.

On graduation day, when she received her bachelor’s degree in environmental ecology, graffiti had been scribbled on her dorm room door. Dupe. Duplicate, clone. Then she got threatening messages, one showing her at a restaurant with friends the evening before. It was time to get out of town fast and cover her electronic tracks. A mammoth farm in Wausau might be far enough from Madison, only one hundred fifty miles due north, since she’d told no one besides her mother where she was going—and Mamá hadn’t wanted her to go but had no better ideas, either. Now she was cut off from almost everything that mattered.

Second-class now, too, if anyone finds out. Well, things might change soon, from what her mother had told her. Irene found it hard to hope for changes that big.

She hadn’t faced much competition for the internship. Nimkii was legal, but was his existence ethical? With only twelve other mammoths alive in North America, he might be alone his whole life, condemned to solitary confinement. Male elephants seemed like loners but actually led social lives at least as complex as a human’s. Humans in solitary confinement went mad.

He lived in a little pen at a failing farm where the house had fading siding, the barn had a leaking roof, the shed sat on a cracked foundation, and the driveway needed a fresh layer of gravel.

On some days, no visitors came to help pay for his fodder. So when the little bus arrived carrying three residents from the sheltered home, Alan and his gruff wife, Ruby, came out to meet them. Irene busied herself on the far side of the pen, watching surreptitiously. One of the residents wore leg braces, but the other two seemed normal—like Irene. She knew for a fact she was normal. Some clones had been badly designed, physically or mentally, and needed special care. Others could live just fine on their own like anyone else, but they were often pressured into surrendering to protective custody.

Irene didn’t want to think about it. She took the tractor to cut some alfalfa for Nimkii, hoping to distract herself, but she thought of nothing else the whole time. That could be me.

When she came back, the visitors were gone, and Alan and Ruby were in high spirits.

“Hey, Irene, they were nice!” Alan said.

“No one snapped,” Ruby said. They both laughed. Dupes were