Killing Time (23 page)

“That’s it.”

“But doesn’t taking it just once a year make it more likely you’ll forget?”

“I receive an automatic notice. Everyone who signs up for the yearly control gets notified a month before the end of the dosage, then again two weeks later, then again the day before. It’s up to you whether or not you follow up, and if someone decides to stop taking birth control, they’re supposed to notify the system so it doesn’t waste time with useless notifications.”

“Is it just for women, or for men, too?”

“Women. The male system is different. The longest effective birth-control dosage perfected for men, so far, lasts about a month.” And far fewer men than women signed up for birth control; but no matter how the social scientists argued, the fact still remained that men didn’t get pregnant, so birth control was far more important to women. It didn’t seem fair, but there it was.

She could practically feel the questions bubbling in him, but she placed her fingers over his mouth before he could start. “I’m so sleepy,” she whispered. “We’ll talk tomorrow. I just want to clean up and go to sleep.”

“We can do that,” he said, finally letting her ease to the side. “It’s a waste of time, but so what; I have plenty of hot water.”

25

Knox woke her twice more during the night to make love. After the third time, as she began to surface from the sheer physical pleasure, her conscience awoke with a vengeance.

It wasn’t fair of her to take advantage of his ignorance. There were certain things about her that he should know, that anyone who became close to her, whether in friendship or romance, should know. If he was then going to choose not to pursue any closer relationship, then it was better that she tell him now, at the beginning, when there wasn’t as much emotional investment. She had learned the hard way not to wait.

After they had cleaned up yet again they returned to bed. He settled back on his pillow and pulled her close against his side, her head on his shoulder and his left arm around her. She listened to the strong, steady beat of his heart and sent up a silent prayer that this wouldn’t be the last time she was close enough to him to hear his heartbeat.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” she said before she lost her resolve.

“That’s never good,” he commented after a moment’s pause.

“What isn’t?”

“Starting a conversation with those words. What follows is never anything I want to hear. Is this going to be any different?”

“Probably not,” she whispered, dread making her throat tight.

“If you’re married, Nikita, I swear to God—” he began with an undertone of fury.

“No, no! I didn’t lie, I’ve never been married.”

“Then what is it? You’ll never convince me you’re gay.”

The old-fashioned term gave her a brief moment of amusement, but it was very brief. “Nor that. I’m a Copy,” she said steadily, determined to get it said before he sidetracked her.

“A . . . what?”

“A Copy,” she said. She had learned over the years how to keep her voice very neutral when she disclosed her origins. “I wasn’t born, I was . . . grown. Like a vegetable.”

“Shit. No kidding? All in a row, like carrots? What stuck up, your head or your feet?”

The image was so ridiculous she sat up in bed, abruptly angry. “I’m serious! This isn’t a laughing matter.”

“I’m not laughing,” he pointed out, pulling her down to him again. “I asked a question.”

“You can’t—” She stopped, because he obviously
could
think that. His mind must have some real twists and turns in it, to come up with a carrot analogy.

“You said ’vegetable.’ What was I supposed to imagine? Pea pods? Tomato bushes?”

“Would you just shut up? I’m not a damned pea pod! Or a tomato.”

He pinched her bottom. “How about a peach? You’re nice and juicy.”

Exasperated beyond bearing, she snapped, “I was grown to provide replacement organs for my . . . sister. But she wasn’t really my sister, because I’m her. I’m her copy. I’m identical to her, except I’m alive and she isn’t.”

There was a long, loaded silence, and she felt as if she were suffocating there in the darkness. She reached to turn on the bedside lamp so she could see his face, and also so she wouldn’t feel as if the walls were closing in on her. He stopped her, his hand gentle on her arm.

“Leave the light off,” he said gently. “Lie back down and tell me about it. In your time, people are cloned and the clones are killed for their internal organs? No offense, darlin’, but that’s damned barbaric.”

“No, that isn’t what happens.” She could hear the upset in her voice, and tried to regain her neutral tone.

“Then what? How were you grown to provide organs? I don’t think you’re like a salamander, able to grow back parts.”

“Would you please stop comparing me to vegetables and lizards? Please!”

“A peach is a fruit.”

Goaded beyond control, she grasped a handful of hair on his chest and gave it a hard pull.

“Ouch!” he yelped. “Hey! Leave the body hair alone!”

“The next time, I go for your crotch,” she warned. “Are you going to listen, or are you going to make smart remarks?”

“After a threat like that, I’ll listen to anything.”

To her surprise, she realized she was smiling, and she was glad he couldn’t see her in the dark. Her feeling of dread had lifted a bit; maybe this wouldn’t be so terrible, maybe he wouldn’t be as horrified as people in her time were. When he pulled her down onto the bed and wrapped her in his arms again, she let him.

“Cloning is illegal,” she said. “The results in cloning experiments never turned out quite right; the clones seemed to be genetically weakened. They became easily diseased, they died young for the most part, and if they did mature and propagate, their children were almost all born with severe birth defects. So cloning was outlawed, but billions upon billions were spent developing the technology to essentially grow replacement organs from a subject’s own cells. The biggest problem was to grow the organs fast enough, because the donor might be in extremely poor health and not have the months needed for an organ to mature. So this huge experimental program was under way trying to speed-grow organs—”

“Hold on,” he interrupted. “Any organ grown from someone sick would have the same genetic weakness that was attacking the person to begin with, wouldn’t it?”

“If the problem was genetic, yes. But what if you were prone to heart disease, and when you were in your fifties you developed advanced cardiac impairment? A new heart could give you another fifty years, or longer, because you have to allow for new advances in medicine. Wouldn’t you take the heart, knowing it was prone to developing the same disease in another half-century?”

“Hell, yeah. You can’t beat those odds.”

“The majority of people in the world feel the same way. The speed-grow program was at its peak about thirty-five years ago, when my parents had their first child, a little girl named Annora Tzuria. She was beautiful, healthy, but when she was two, she contracted a virus that so heavily damaged her heart and kidneys she needed transplants within a year to live. My parents immediately enrolled her in the speed-grow program, healthy cells were taken from her to grow the organs, and they waited.”

“And instead, they got you,” he interjected.

“Essentially, yes, but don’t get ahead of me. There were different factions in the development program who competed for funding—”

“Some things never change.”

“Definitely not that. The researchers in one faction believed they had perfected the cloning process and had eliminated the factor that made each copy in succession weaker than the one before. They were supposed to be growing organs. Instead, for about two years, they grew people. There were slightly more than four thousand of us when they were discovered and the program halted.”

“It’s hard to hide four thousand people.”

“Four thousand
babies.
We grew normally; we didn’t spring to earth fully formed. We were marked with serial numbers, which consisted of the number creation we were, added to our birthday, so my serial number is 233704272177. It’s permanently etched in the skin behind my left ear. If the skin is tampered with, if I try to remove the number by surgical or any other means, a signal is transmitted to a security agency that oversees the copies and I’m to be immediately apprehended.”

“But you’re an FBI agent, not a criminal,” he said, sounding angry on her behalf.

“I’m also a Copy. Copies’ legal status is somewhat up in the air. Until it’s decided, law prohibits discrimination against us. Federal agencies in particular have to be evenhanded in the application of their hiring policies, but I was accepted to the Academy on the basis of my grades. But that was later. Let me get back to the beginning.”

“Okay, you were a fully formed, squalling baby.”

“And it was discovered what they were doing. The experiment center was raided; all the experiments were taken into federal custody until it could be determined who was guilty of what and who were the original donors for these four thousand or so babies. Serial numbers were matched with records, and people were contacted.”

His arms tightened around her. “That would be a hell of a shock. You think you’re saving your life, or your child’s life, and instead there’s a whole new human being. What did they do? Your parents, specifically, but everyone else, too?”

“Some were too horrified to cope, and the babies were adopted out or remained in federal custody as wards of the nation. Some took their babies home with them. That’s what my parents did. Whether or not my mother gave birth to me, I was genetically theirs, and identical to Annora when she was that young. But the fact that the Copies were complete humans meant that the people who were supposed to be saved, died, because by the time the experiment was discovered, there wasn’t enough time to grow the replacement organs that were supposed to have been grown in the first place.”

“God.” That was all he said, but a wealth of understanding was in his tone, in that one word.

“They gave me the same middle name, Tzuria, in Annora’s honor. She died three months after my parents brought me home. I don’t remember her, and for a long time when I saw holograms of her, I thought they were of me.”

“I can’t imagine how your parents must have felt,” he said thoughtfully. “They’d buried their child, and yet . . . there you were, that same child, only healthy.”

“My mother said I saved her sanity, that she could look at me and see this baby who needed her and depended on her. I looked like Annora, but at the same time, I was a different person. Annora spent most of her life in very ill health, while I was healthy and energetic. But Mother was always protective, and because the legal issues are still very much a hot button and because of the moral problems people have with the Copies . . . I’ve always been very careful in what I say and do. She told me from the time I was old enough to understand that I couldn’t afford to get in any sort of trouble.”

“That’s quite a load to put on a little kid.” He kissed her forehead. “No wonder you seem so—”

“Robotic?” she finished drily.

“I was going to say ‘even-tempered.’ ” He chuckled. “I learned my lesson. The R-word will never pass these lips again.”

“Robotic is exactly the way I am, and it went through me like a knife when you said that, because I realized how I had always held myself back. I never let myself get really angry, I never yelled, I never danced. I held everything in, because anything deemed too violent, or too enthusiastic, or too
anything,
could be used to have us legally declared a danger to ourselves and others.”

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am I said that.” He kissed her again, this time tilting her chin up so he could reach her lips. “When I saw how much I’d hurt you, I wanted to kick myself.”

“And you were afraid you’d ruined your chances for sex,” she added.

“That, too.”

She yawned, suddenly exhausted. She still couldn’t quite believe how matter-of-factly he had accepted her particular situation, when people in her time were aghast at the results of that experiment. “Some of the Copies haven’t done well,” she admitted. “Personality disorders seem to be more the norm than the exception. Violent crime rates are high among Copies, too. It’s still being argued in the courts whether or not we should all be institutionalized for our own good.”

“I don’t guess it occurred to anyone that making a kid a ward of the nation, depriving it of a real family, always pointing fingers and looking for abnormalities, could cause personality disorders and a tendency toward violence, huh? Look at you. You were raised in a family with people who love you. The biggest problem is their childhood environment, not anything intrinsic in being a Copy.”

“The prejudice against cloning is so ingrained, and with good reason, that most people react first with their emotions when they learn I’m a Copy. I’ve always told people I was becoming close to, so they could make the choice whether or not to remain my friend. Most chose not to.”

“Their loss,” he said briefly. “I’d hazard a guess and say that’s the real reason why you aren’t married, not just because of the pressures of your job.”

“There’s the birth control issue, too,” she said, and despite her best efforts she could hear the echo of pain in her voice. She took a deep breath and regained control of herself. “Copies aren’t allowed to have children. By law, I have to be on a birth control regimen. If I don’t report in to have my birth control renewed, I will be captured and sterilized.”

Held as closely to him as she was, she could feel the tension that invaded his muscles, feel the heat of anger wash over his skin. “Excuse the hell out of me for saying so, but sounds to me as if civilization has reversed instead of going forward. Never mind your technology, your society sucks.”

“And yet, if you had lived in a time that saw the horrible birth defects caused by cloning, you would probably be more understanding.”

“Probably not. I’m a Kentuckian; I’d more likely be in some underground militia, trying to overthrow the tyrants. To hill people, the Civil War was yesterday, and the Revolution the day before. The word ‘taxes’ still gets us riled.”

“Then you wouldn’t want to live in my time,” she admitted.

“Probably not, but I sure would like to visit. What’s it like?” He turned on his side to face her, and as she had with his anger, she could now feel the force of his curiosity. “What’s the world’s population? Is our form of government still the same? How many states are there? And what about cars?”

She laughed softly and looped one arm around his neck. “Stop worrying about the cars. They’re called personal vehicles now, and they’re powered by a variety of means: magnetic propulsion, hydrogen, electricity. There are free lanes and regulated lanes. If you choose the regulated lanes, the speed and traffic flow is controlled, so you never go very fast, but you don’t get in traffic snarls, either. You program your route into the PV’s computer, then sit and read or otherwise amuse yourself while the vehicle takes you to your destination.”

“Have sex?” he suggested, laughing.

She had to laugh, too. “Yes, people being people, sometimes sex is had. If you see a PV with the privacy screens in place, you can be fairly certain what’s going on inside. Occasionally a couple will be arrested for
not
having the privacy screen in place.”