City of Night

Sometimes these encounters began in a jazz club or a tavern. To the target, it seemed that new friends had been found — until later in the evening, when a parting handshake or a good-bye kiss on the cheek evolved, with amazing rapidity, into a violent garroting.

Other victims, on seeing the Lovewells for the first time, had no fair chance to get to know them, had hardly a moment to return their dazzling smiles, before being disemboweled.

On this sweltering summer day, prior to being summoned to the Hands of Mercy, the Lovewells had been bored. Benny could deal well with boredom, but tedium sometimes drove Cindi to reckless action.

After their meeting with Victor, in which they had been ordered to kill Detectives O’Connor and Maddison within twenty-four hours, Benny wanted to begin at once planning the hit. He hoped that the business could be arranged in such a way as to give them an opportunity to dismember alive at least one of the two cops.

Forbidden to kill as they wished, other members of the New Race lived with an envy of the free will with which those of the Old Race led their lives. This envy, more bitter by the day, expressed itself in despair and in a bottled rage that was denied relief.

As skilled assassins, Cindi and Benny were permitted relief, and lots of it. He usually could count on Cindi to match the eagerness with which he himself set out on every job.

On this occasion, however, she insisted on going shopping first. When Cindi insisted on something, Benny always let her have what she wanted because she was such a whiner when she didn’t get her way that even Benny, with his high tolerance for tedium, lamented that his maker had programmed him to be incapable of suicide.

At the mall, to Benny’s dismay, Cindi led him directly to Tots and Tykes, a store selling clothing for infants and young children.

He hoped this wouldn’t lead to kidnapping again.

“We shouldn’t be seen here,” he warned her.

“We won’t be. None of our kind works here, and none of our kind would have reason to shop here.”

“We don’t have a reason, either.”

Without answering him, she went into Tots and Tykes.

As Cindi searched through the tiny dresses and other garments on the racks and tables, Benny followed her, trying to gauge whether she was likely to go nuts, as before.

Admiring a little yellow dress with a frilly collar, she said, “Isn’t this adorable?”

“Adorable,” Benny agreed. “But it would look better in pink.”

“They don’t seem to have it in pink.”

“Too bad. Pink. In pink it would be terrific.”

Members of the New Race were encouraged to have sex with one another, in every variation, as often and as violently as they liked. It was their one pressure-release valve.

They were, however, incapable of reproduction. The citizens of this brave new world would all be made in tanks, grown to adulthood and educated by direct-to-brain data downloading in four months.

Currently they were created a hundred at a time. Soon, tank farms would start turning them out by the thousands.

Their maker reserved all biological creation unto himself. He did not believe in families. Family relationships distracted people from the greater work of society as a whole, from achieving total triumph over nature and establishing utopia.

“What will the world be like without children?” Cindi wondered.

“More productive,” Benny said.

“Drab,” she said.

“More efficient.”

“Empty.”

Women of the New Race were designed and manufactured without a maternal instinct. They were supposed to have no desire to give birth. Something was wrong with Cindi. She envied the women of the Old Race for their free will, but she resented them most intensely for their ability to bring children into the world.

Another customer, an expectant mother, entered their aisle.

At first Cindi’s face brightened at the sight of the woman’s distended belly, but then darkened into a snarl of vicious jealousy.

Taking her arm, steering her toward another part of the store, Benny said, “Control yourself. People will notice. You look like you want to kill her.”

“I do.”

“Remember what you are.”

“Barren,” she said bitterly.

“Not that. An assassin. You can’t do your work if your face advertises your profession.”

“All right. Let go of my arm.”

“Calm down. Cool off.”

“I’m smiling.”

“It’s a stiff smile.”

She turned on her full dazzling wattage.

“That’s better,” he said.

Picking up a little pink sweater featuring colorful appliqued butterflies, displaying it for Benny, Cindi said, “Oh, isn’t this darling?”

“Darling,” he agreed. “But it would look better in blue.”

“I don’t see it in blue.”

“We really should be getting to work.”

“I want to look around here a little longer.”

“We’ve got a job to do,” he reminded her.

“And we have twenty-four hours to do it.”

“I want to decapitate one of them.”

“Of course you do. You always do. And we will. But first I want to find a really sweet little lacy suit or something.”

Cindi was defective. She desperately wanted a baby. She was disturbed.

Had Benny been certain that Victor would terminate Cindi and produce Cindi Two, he’d have reported her deviancy months previously. He worried, however, that Victor thought of them as a unit and would terminate Benny, as well.

He didn’t want to be switched off and buried in a landfill while Benny Two had all the fun.

If he had been like others of his kind, seething with rage and forbidden to express it in any satisfying fashion, Benny Lovewell would have been happy to be terminated. Termination would have been his only hope of peace.

But he was allowed to kill. He could torture, mutilate, and dismember. Unlike others of the New Race, Benny had something to live for.

“This is so cute,” said Cindi, fingering a sailor suit sized for a two-year-old.

Benny sighed. “Do you want to buy it?”

“Yes.”

At home they had a secret collection of garments for babies and toddlers. If any of the New Race ever discovered Cindi’s hoard of children’s clothes, she would have a lot of explaining to do.

“Okay,” he said. “Buy it quick, before someone sees us, and let’s get out of here.”

“After we finish with O’Connor and Maddison,” she said, “can we go home and try?”

By try, she meant “try to have a baby.”

They had been created sterile. Cindi had a vagina but no uterus. That reproductive space had been devoted to other organs unique to the New Race.

Sex between them could no more produce a baby than it could produce a grand piano.

Nevertheless, to appease her, to mollify her mood, Benny said, “Sure. We can try.”

“We’ll kill O’Connor and Maddison,” she said, “and cut them up as much as you want, do all those funny things you like to do, and then we’ll make a baby.”

She was insane, but he had to accept her as she was. If he could have killed her, he would have done it, but