Aurelia heaved a sigh of relief as she kicked off her shoes. Eight hours on her feet treating some of the trickiest trauma cases in Lunar City Hospital left her exhausted. The price you paid for being head of trauma was you got the hard cases. She sat back on her couch, then groaned as the intercom beeped.
She hadn't realized the time, and her transport pod had already arrived to pick her up. She'd meant to spend a few minutes with Elza, the hospital head. She was recovering from stimulant addiction, but she didn't have time now. Suppressing another sigh, Aurelia bent and tugged her shoes back onto her swollen feet.
Yes, she was tired, but the thought of seeing Jonathon Hansen made her smile, and her heart skipped at the memory of the night they had spent together. Now, she was about to see his home for the first time because Nicholas, her clone friend, was under house arrest there—which, when she thought about it, was something very hard to explain. She took a moment to stretch her aching muscles and to run her fingers through her long black hair, then made for the door. Transport pods were not particularly patient, and she didn't want to miss this one.
The ride through Lunar was, as always, brightly lit and full of energy and neon colors. It was so different from the life Aurelia had known on Earth that it sometimes took her breath away. The transport pod zoomed through the sky lanes, dropping levels every now and again to gain a clear path. Aurelia had no idea where Jonathon lived, but the pod had been programmed with directions, so she sat back to enjoy the journey.
The streets grew wider and the buildings taller as the pod moved into the center of the city. After a ten-minute ride from the hospital, the pod finally slowed, and Aurelia prepared to get out. She was confused when her security belt refused to open, even though the pod had eased to a halt. Usually, it released automatically. She rattled the belt buckle, but it was stuck. So focused was she on the belt that she didn't notice a sec Worker beside her until he knocked on the glass. Her window slid down, and the Worker spoke.
"Number."
One word, one number, but it summed up everything that Aurelia was. She dutifully gave her personal number to the Worker, who checked it on a rolled-up screen from his top pocket. The Worker nodded, pressed an icon, and the transport pod slowly began to move again. Wait. What? She'd presumed that she'd reached her destination, but apparently not. She hadn't even considered the possibility of security, but she didn't often remember that Jonathon Hansen not only came from one of the ruling class elite families in Lunar, but was also widely considered to be the ideal candidate for the next empire president.
The pod hovered through wide lanes, and everywhere Aurelia looked was green. She knew what things were called. The stuff on the ground was grass. The tall things were trees. She'd simply never seen them before in real life. Earth no longer had gardens such as these; the soil was far too contaminated with nuclear wastes, and the air too polluted. Even on Lunar, she'd never seen anything like this.
She waited impatiently for the pod to stop. When it finally did in front of a large portico, she fiddled with her security belt and jumped out, running away from the door as she did so.
"Hey! Where are you going?"
Jonathon's voice rang with amusement as he watched Aurelia run to the lawn. Hearing him, she turned, suddenly remembering where she was. He walked to her, taking her in his arms and kissing her soundly.
"That's better," he said, still holding her. "Now, where were you speeding to?"
Aurelia felt herself blush; her heart was already racing from the kiss. "Um, it's just that, well . . ." Now she felt foolish. She looked down at her feet. "Er, I wanted to walk on the grass," she admitted shyly.
Jonathon laughed. "Come on, then," he said and took her hand.
It was incredible. The ground under her feet felt both soft and hard at the same time, like walking on a very deep carpet. The smell. It was . . . Aurelia thought hard about how she would describe this to her parents. It's fresh but not citrus fresh, lighter than that. Crap. She had no idea how she could make anyone on Earth capture the smell of grass.
"So?"
Crap again. She'd been so busy thinking about grass that she hadn't heard a word Jonathon had said to her.
"Um, I'm sorry, I really wasn't listening," she said, blushing once again.
Again he laughed "I think we'd better get you off the grass, or else you won't be able to hold a decent conversation."
He took her back to the path, and they walked towards the large door.
"I was saying how all's well so far," Jonathon said. "Nicholas is safe. Only the two sec Workers who are guarding him, a couple of hospitality Workers, and I know he's here."
"Hospitality Workers?" Aurelia asked, confused.
Jonathon looked at her strangely, then shook his head. "Sometimes I forget you're not from around here," he said. "Yes, hospitality Workers. You don't think I look after this whole place by myself, do you?" He gestured towards the building in front of him and the gardens around him.
Aurelia stopped in her tracks. This whole place. It implied it all was Jonathon's. Such a thing was unthinkable. One person in a building this huge, using this much land? Why, on Earth, space was so limited that thousands of families lived on one small city block. No, it can't be true.
"Oh, don't look so shocked!" Jonathon scolded, taking her hand again and resuming walking. "It's not all mine."
"Whose is it, then?" Aurelia asked.
He shrugged. "It belongs to my family. All the ruling class families have houses like these. It's one of the advantages to having a city designed specifically for your needs. Each of the elite families had a large section of land put aside for their own use when Lunar was being built."
"So other people live here, right?"
"Sure. My parents, for a start, though they tend to keep mostly to themselves. The ground level and the basement below it are separate from the rest of the house."
Aurelia snorted. "So you still live with your parents."
He grunted in response. "I guess I do, but I rarely see them."
They reached the large entry, and it opened. Inside was a long white hallway with various doors leading off it. Jonathon ushered her through one of these openings, and she found a living room with couches that begged her aching bones to sit on them.
"Drink?" he asked.
She nodded and looked around. Like nearly every building Aurelia had ever been in, this one was circular, a large tower sweeping up in a spiral. The room was a familiar curved shape. What was inside was distinctly unfamiliar, though. The couches and tables weren't the standard issue furniture that came with most living pods. These were deep, soft, and obviously expensive. Sitting, she sank into the cushions and the couch cradled her. I could sleep here, she thought.
Jonathon handed her a glass of water. "Or do you want something stronger?" he asked.
"No, I'm fine. Thanks."
Like most Earth people, Aurelia didn't really drink. Real alcohol was in short supply and expensive, and synth drinks tasted like rocket fuel.
Jonathon came to sit next to her. He put a hand on her knee, and she felt the warmth of his skin. "Had any thoughts?" she asked him, mostly to distract herself from the presence of his hand.
"About Nicholas? No." He sighed. "For the time being, he's safe here, but at some point he's going to have to leave."
"Won't the sec Workers or someone want to take him to trial?" Aurelia asked curiously. Nicholas had been arrested after Jonathon had filed a report on him.
Jonathon shook his head. "It doesn't really work the normal way for clones," he explained. "I filed the report and asked for custody of him, and it's sort of assumed I will deal with matters."
"That you will kill him," Aurelia said bluntly. The life of a clone was cheap, she'd already discovered, and the normal rules of justice, such as they were, didn't apply.
"Yes." Jonathon hesitated. He was still obviously uncomfortable with Aurelia's liberal opinions regarding the military class. "Which basically means I either need to come up with a body, or I have to get him the hell out of here and hope everyone forgets he was here, which is probably impossible."
Aurelia laid her head on Jonathon's shoulder. She really was tired. "We'll think of something."
"I'm working on it. Speaking of which." He stirred to look at his time reader. "I should be going soon; I'm due at a dinner."
Aurelia hadn't had any real contact with Jonathon's political career, and she naturally assumed that she wouldn't be going to any fancy dinners with him. After all, she was a med Worker, not ruling class in the slightest.
"Fancy coming?" he surprised her by asking.
"Me?"
"Who else? We're going to have to go public at some point."
Aurelia considered this. Going public sounded, well, serious. She wasn't at all sure she wanted to do so. She was certain she loved Jonathon, but the whole ruling class elite dating thing was going to take some getting used to. "Not tonight," she said, hoping he wouldn't get offended.
He smiled down at her. "Yeah, I know. Kinda scary, huh?"
She grinned. "Kinda."
"Besides, you've yet to see Nicholas, which is why you came here in the first place."
He stood, and Aurelia found she needed his hand to pull her up out of the deep couch cushions. "I came to see you, as you well know," she said, dropping a kiss on his cheek once she was standing. "But yes, I would like to see Nicholas."
"No probs. I'll take you down there. Then, I'll need to go. Stay as long as you want, okay? I arranged security clearance for all of the doors as well as the main gate, so you'll be fine."
She followed him back down the long white hallway, glad that he'd told her to stay as long as she wanted. She knew he wasn't fond of Nicholas, and that he knew Nicholas had feelings for her, and she liked how Jonathon trusted her implicitly. They went through a door at the end of the corridor and down a flight of stairs before seeing a sec Worker. Jonathon nodded at him, and he opened the door he was standing in front of.
Nicholas stood as soon as they entered.
"Aurelia!" He hugged her.
Jonathon cleared his throat. "I've got to get going; hopefully, I'll be back with some news for you later." Ending his mysterious message, he was gone.
"Are you okay?" Aurelia asked, releasing herself from Nicholas's hug and sitting on a small desk chair.
The room was windowless but large and nicely furnished. There were a bed, desk, couch, several small tables and chairs, and a vid screen on one wall.
"I guess I'm okay," said Nicholas, sitting back on the couch he'd vacated when Jonathon and Aurelia arrived. "I mean, it's hardly a battleground down here, but it's comfortable enough."
"Yeah, not too exciting," Aurelia agreed. "Rest assured, we're working on getting you out of here."
Nicholas shook his head. "I really don't see how it's possible. I can't go back to the arena; they'd inject me on sight at this point. I'm hardly inconspicuous with these." He moved his sleeves to show his clone ID number burned into his wrists. Aurelia knew the same number was marked all over his body. "Where could I possibly go?"
"We'll think of something," Aurelia said, though she wasn't sure what could be done.
Nicholas had been ordered to assassinate Jonathon but instead had saved him in hopes the future president would support equal rights for clones. For disobeying a direct order, he should have been killed. Jonathon had saved him by having him arrested, despite not agreeing with Nicholas's politics. Now, here they were, at somewhat of an impasse.
"Hope it's soon," said Nicholas with a wry grin. "I'm pretty sure I could go insane down here."
Aurelia laughed. "No, not you. You're far too smart for that. Anyway, weren't you genetically engineered not to be able to go insane?"
"I've been genetically engineered for a lot of things," Nicholas said. "However, sometimes nature finds a way."
"Well, I'm here for your entertainment now, so what would you like to do?"
"Go out for a walk, drink coffee in a café, meet friends, people watch," he said petulantly.
Great. Two days of being down here, and already he's antsy. Aurelia could understand he didn't want to be locked up, but she'd have thought he would have appreciated it was for his own safety. She said nothing.
"I'm sorry," he sighed. "I know, I'm being childish. You've made the effort to come and visit. Hey, we could have some coffee, you know."
She was about to reprimand him for even thinking about leaving the house, but she saw he was pressing an icon on his roll-up screen. "What are you doing?"
He put the screen away again. "A hospitality Worker will bring us coffee," he said. "Jonathon's idea. He hooked me up with one of the house Workers so I can get anything I need. It was pretty thoughtful, I guess."
Nicholas was not Jonathon's biggest fan. Aurelia wasn't sure how long the current detente was going to last, but she did know that both men were very committed to their causes. As well as being a consummate politician, Jonathon was a leader in the resistance movement and had vowed to make the empire a place of equality, rather than letting Lunar treat Earth dwellers as slaves. Nicholas wanted more than anything for clones to have the rights humans did: the ability to pair, to breed, to choose. Whether or not those interests could intersect was another question, though.
With a cup of coffee finally in her hand, Aurelia sat next to Nicholas on the couch. "I want to know more about clones," she said. After all, she'd agreed to help Nicholas persuade Jonathon to support his cause. She might as well know what she was talking about.
"Like what?" he asked, taking a sip of his drink.
"Like, where do you grow up?" It was the first question she could think of, and she knew that once Nicholas started talking, she was likely to learn far more than merely the answer to her question.
He put his coffee down on the table. It was still too hot to drink properly, and he closed his eyes in thought. "Okay," he said after a moment. "Clones are made, rather than birthed."
"Wait, what?" A sentence into the explanation, and she was already confused.
Nicholas laughed. "Gods, I'm going to have to start at the very beginning, aren't I? Alright, so the genetic material is taken from the donor. That material is then grown in a lab, sort of like a plant, I guess. The clone is grown inside a false womb that is broken when the child is old enough to breathe alone. With me so far?"
Aurelia nodded.
"The child is then taken to a nursery. I don't really remember the primary growth part; we leave very early and never go back. Presumably, we're fed, clothed, and generally taken care of. Once we're three years old, we're taken into a training school."
"Three?" Aurelia was surprised. Even Worker children didn't enter schooling until five, and real profession-based training didn't start until seven.
"Three," Nicholas confirmed. "I was trained here in Lunar as most of us at the arena are. There are a couple of smaller training outposts on Earth, though those are only precautions, giving us a stock of new clones should anything happen to the arena up here."
"So the arena, the place you took me, is home to children?" She was aghast at this, thinking of small children playing where soldiers learned to fight.
"No, Aurelia," Nicholas said seriously. "Not children. Soldiers. As soon as you enter training, you are military class. End of story. You are expected to obey without question and to do exactly as you are told."
"A three-year-old is expected to do exactly as instructed?"
"If he doesn't, he is injected," he said. "It generally only takes one or two injections for the rest of the class to understand there is no other way but to do as you are told."
Aurelia thought back to her own childhood, which had been a happy one with parents that she loved. "No mother, no father," she whispered, almost to herself.
"No. Not for clones. For us there is training. Exercise, drills, study time, meals, sleep. That's it. Once you are of age, you are allowed more freedom, if that's the appropriate word. You're allowed to leave the arena if you're not drilling or studying. But that's about it."
"How old is of age?"
"Twelve."
"Which means what?"
"Which means once you are twelve, you are a full soldier and can be sent wherever you are needed, though such deployment rarely happens so young. We're not at war, so nowadays we receive more specialized training and generally don't get posted anywhere until we're eighteen or so," Nicholas explained.
"Then what?"
"You work, continue doing as you are told until you can't anymore. Once you're too old to drill effectively, you will be injected. The only exceptions are made for those with particularly strong skills. They will teach the younger clones until someone comes along who's even more skilled and can take their place."
Aurelia put her empty coffee cup down. "And that's it," she said.
"Exactly."