The carriage driver snared the bridle. The mule became calm and allowed itself to be walked back to the curb. The snarled traffic began to move.
Carson said, “He knows we’re on to him. Even if we leave the city, he won’t stop until he finds us, Michael. We’d always be on the run.”
“Sounds romantic,” he said wistfully.
“Don’t go there,” she warned him. “Aubrey’s rose garden wasn’t the place for it, and this is worse.”
“Will there ever be a place for it?”
She drove in silence for a minute, turned right at the next corner, and then said, “Maybe. But only if we can bring down Helios before his people rip our guts out and pitch us in the Mississippi.”
“You really know how to encourage a guy.”
“Now shut up about it. Just shut up. If we go all gooey over each other, we’ll lose focus. If we lose focus, we’re dead.”
“Too bad the rest of the world never gets to see this tender side of you.”
“I’m serious, Michael. I don’t want to talk about me and you. I don’t even want to joke about it. We’ve got a war to win.”
“All right. Okay. I hear you. I’ll stifle myself.” He sighed. “Champ Champion has three testicles, and pretty soon I’m not going to have any, they’ll just wither away.”
“Michael,” she said warningly.
He sighed again and said no more.
A couple of blocks later, she glanced sideways at him. He looked adorable. He knew it, too.
Stifling herself, she said, “We’ve got to find someplace private to have a look at the new guns, load them and the spare magazines.”
“City Park,” he suggested. “Take that service road to where we found the dead accountant two years ago.”
“The naked guy who was strangled with the Mardi Gras beads.”
“No, no. He was an architect. I’m talking about the guy in the cowboy outfit.”
“Oh, yeah, the black leather cowboy suit.”
“It was midnight blue,” Michael corrected.
“If you say so. You’re more fashion conscious than I am. The body was pretty close to the service road.”
“I don’t mean where we found the body,” Michael said. “I mean where we found his head.”
“You walk through a little stand of Southern pines.”
“And then some live oaks.”
“And then there’s open grass. I remember. That’s a nice place.”
“It’s very nice,” Michael agreed, “and it’s not close to any of the jogging paths. We’ll have privacy.”
“The killer certainly had privacy.”
“He certainly did,” Michael said.
“How long did it take us to get him — four weeks?”
“A little over five.”
“That was a hell of a trick shot you got him with,” Carson said.
“Ricocheted right off the blade of his ax.”
“I didn’t much appreciate being in the splatter zone.”
“Was the dry cleaner able to get out the brain stains?”
“When I told him what it was, he didn’t even want to try. And that was a new jacket.”
“Not my fault. That kind of ricochet is God’s work.”
Carson relaxed. This was better. None of that distracting, nervous-making romance talk.
Chapter 27
In the stainless-steel and white-ceramic-tile dissection room, when Victor examined the carcass of Detective Jonathan Harker, he found that approximately fifty pounds of the body’s substance was missing.
A raggedly torn umbilical cord trailed from the void in the torso. Considered with the exploded abdomen and shattered rib cage, this suggested that some unintended life form — call it a parasite — had formed within Harker, had achieved a state in which it could live independently of its host, and had broken free, destroying Harker in the process.
This was a disturbing development.
Ripley, who operated the handheld video recorder with which a visual record of all autopsies were made, was clearly rattled by the implications of this discovery.
“Mr. Helios, sir, he gave birth.”
“I wouldn’t call it giving birth,” Victor said with undisguised annoyance.
“We’re not capable of reproduction,” Ripley said. His voice and manner suggested that, to him, the thought of another life coming forth from Harker was the equivalent of blasphemy.
“It’s not reproduction,” Victor said. “It’s a malignancy.”
“But sir… a self-sustaining, mobile malignancy?”
“I mean to say a
In the tank, Ripley had received a deep education in Old Race and New Race physiology. He should have been able to understand these biological nuances.
“A parasitical second self developed spontaneously from Harker’s flesh,” Victor said, “and when it could live independently of him, it… separated.”
Ripley stopped filming and stood slack jawed with amazement, pale with trepidation. He had bushy eyebrows that gave him a look of comic astonishment.
Victor could not remember why he had decided to design Ripley with those shaggy eyebrows. They were absurd.
“Mr. Helios, sir, I beg your indulgence, but are you saying that this is what you intended, for a second self to mutate out of Harker? Sir, to what purpose?”
“No, Ripley, of course it’s not what I intended. There’s a useful saying of the Old Race—‘Shit happens.’”
“But sir, forgive me, you are the designer of our flesh, the maker, the master. How can there be anything about our flesh that you do not understand… or foresee?”
Worse than the comic expression that the eyebrows gave Ripley was the fact that they facilitated an exaggerated look of reproach.
Victor did not like to be reproached. “Science proceeds in great leaps, but also sometimes takes a couple of small steps backward.”
“Backward?” Having been properly indoctrinated while in the tank, Ripley sometimes had difficulty squaring his expectations with real life. “Science in general, sir, yes, it sometimes missteps. But not you. Not you, and not the New Race.”
“The important thing to keep in mind is that the leaps forward are much greater than the steps backward, and more numerous.”
“But this is a very big step backward. Sir. I mean, isn’t it? Our flesh… out of control?”
“Your flesh isn’t out of control, Ripley. Where did you get this melodramatic streak? You’re embarrassing yourself.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I’m sure I don’t understand. I’m sure when I’ve had time to consider, I’ll share your equanimity on the matter.”
“Harker isn’t a sign of things to come. He’s an anomaly. He’s a singularity. There will be no more mutations like him.”
Perhaps the parasite had not merely fed on Harker’s innards but had incorporated his two hearts into itself, as well as his lungs and various other internal organs, at first sharing them and then taking them for its own. These things were missing from the cadaver.
According to Jack Rogers — the real medical examiner, now dead and replaced by a replicant — Detectives
