Prodigal Son

sex would lead to a relationship.

Indeed, personal relationships between members of the New Race were discouraged. Jonathan sometimes suspected that as a species they were hardwired to be incapable of relationships in any of the ways that the Old Race experienced and defined them.

Couples committed to each other are impediments to the infinite series of conquests that is to be the uniform purpose of every member of the New Race. So are friendships. So are families.

For the world to be as one, every thinking creature must share the same drive, the same goal. They must live by a system of values so simplified as to allow no room for the concept of morality and the differences of opinion that it fosters.

Because friendships and families are distractions from the great unified purpose of the species, the ideal citizen, Father says, must be a loner in his personal life. As a loner, he is able to commit his passion fully to the triumph and the glory of the New Race.

Touching Jenna as he wished, unable to stir within himself the need that passed for desire, Jonathan suspected that his kind were also hardwired to be incapable of-or at least disinterested in-sex with members of the Old Race.

With their basic education via direct-to-brain data downloading comes a programmed contempt for the Old Race. Contempt, of course, can lead to a sense of righteous domination that includes sexual exploitation. This does not happen with the New Race, perhaps because their programmed contempt for nature's form of humanity includes a subtle element of disgust.

Among those created in the tanks, only Father's wife was allowed desire for one of the Old Race. But in a sense, he was not of the Old Race anymore, but was the god of the New.

Caressing Jenna, whose body was lovely and whose exterior form could pass for that of any woman of the New Race, Jonathan not only remained detumescent but also became vaguely repulsed by her.

How strange that this lesser creature, who was the dirty link between lower animals and the superior New Race, nevertheless might have within her the thing that Jonathan himself seemed to be missing, the organ or the gland or the neural matrix that enabled her to be happy nearly all the time.

The time had come to cut.

When she groaned and her eyelids fluttered, he applied a few more drops of chloroform to her upper lip, and she subsided.

He rolled a wheeled IV rack beside the table. From it hung a bag of glucose-saline solution.

He tied a rubber-tube tourniquet around Jenna's right arm and found a suitable blood vessel. He inserted an intravenous cannula by which the glucose-saline would be infused into her bloodstream, and removed the tourniquet.

The drip line between the solution bag and the cannula featured a drug port. He inserted a large, full syringe of a potent sedative, which he would be able to administer in multiple, measured doses, as required.

To keep Jenna perfectly still during dissection, he must put her in deep sedation. When he wanted her awake to answer questions that he might have about what he found inside her, he could deny her the sedative.

Because she might cry out even during sedation and alarm the residents in the apartment below, Jonathan now wadded a rag and stuffed it in her mouth. He sealed her lips with duct tape.

When he pressed the tape in place, Jenna's eyes fluttered, opened. For a moment she was confused, disoriented-and then not.

As her eyes widened with terror, Jonathan said, 'I know that your kind can't turn off physical pain at will, as we can. So I'll wake you as seldom as possible to get your explanation of what I find inside you.'

CHAPTER 65

With a suction-adhered emergency beacon on the roof above the driver's door, Carson cruised fast on surface streets.

Struggling to absorb everything she had told him, Michael said, 'The guy you saw in Allwine's apartment, he owns a movie theater?'

'The Luxe.'

'The nutcase who says he's made from parts of criminals and brought alive by lightning-he owns a movie theater? I would have thought a hot-dog stand. A tire-repair shop.'

'Maybe he's not a nutcase.'

'A hamburger joint.'

'Maybe he's what he says he is.'

?A beauty salon.'

'You should've seen what he did with those quarters.'

'I can tie a knot in a cherry stem using my tongue,' Michael said, 'but that doesn't make me supernatural.'

'I didn't say he was supernatural. He says part of what the lightning brought him that night, in addition to life, was? an understanding of the quantum structure of the universe.'

'What the hell does that mean?'

'I don't know,' she admitted. 'But somehow it explains how he makes the coins vanish.'

?Any half-good magician can make a coin vanish, and they're not all wizards of quantum physics.'

'This was more than cheap magic. Anyway, Deucalion said some of their kind are sure to have a strong death wish.'

'Carson-what kind?'

Instead of answering his question, aware that she must lead him a careful step at a time toward her ultimate revelation, Carson said, ?Allwine and his friend were in the library, poring through aberrant psychology texts, trying to understand their anguish.'

'Don't drive so fast.'

Accelerating, Carson said, 'So the books weren't pulled off the shelves in a struggle. There wasn't a struggle. That's why the scene was so neat in spite of the apparent violence.'

'Apparent? Allwine's heart was cut out.'

'Hearts. Plural. But he probably asked his friend to kill him.'

''Hey, pal, do me a favor and cut my heart out?' He couldn't just slit his own wrists, take poison, bore himself to death with multiple viewings of The English Patient?'

'No. Deucalion said their kind are built to be incapable of suicide.'

With a sigh of frustration, Michael said, 'Their kind. Here we go again.'

'The proscription against suicide-it's there in the original diary. I saw it. After the coins, after I started to accept? then Deucalion showed me.'

'Diary? Whose diary?'

She hesitated.

'Carson?'

'This is going to be a real test.'

'What test?'

'A test of you, me, our partnership here.'

'Don't drive so fast,' he cautioned.

This time, she didn't react to his admonition by accelerating. She didn't slow down, either, but she didn't pump up more speed. A little concession to help win him over.

'This is weird stuff,' she warned.

'What-I don't have a capacity for weird? I have a fabulous capacity for weird. Whose diary?'

She took a deep breath. 'Victor's diary. Victor Frankenstein.' When he stared at her in flabbergasted silence, she said, 'Maybe this sounds crazy-'