“I’m not there yet,” Bucky demurred. “I still know what
CHAPTER 9
Earlier in the night, arriving home to his elegant Garden District mansion, in a foul mood, Victor had savagely beaten Erika. He seemed to have had a bad day in the laboratory.
He found her eating a late dinner in the formal living room, which offended his sense of propriety. No one programmed with a deep understanding of tradition and etiquette — as Erika had been — should think that taking dinner in the living room, alone or not, would be acceptable.
“What next?” he said. “Will you
One of the New Race, Erika could turn off pain at will. Slapping her, punching her, biting her, Victor insisted that she endure the agony, and she obeyed.
“Perhaps you’ll learn from suffering,” he said.
Minutes after Victor went upstairs to bed, Erika’s many cuts closed. Within half an hour, the swelling around her eyes diminished. Like all of her kind, she had been engineered to heal rapidly and to live a thousand years.
The day had begun with a beating, too, during morning sex. He left her racked with pain and sobbing in the bed.
Two hours later, her bruised face was as smooth and as fair as ever, though she was troubled by her failure to please him. By all biological evidence, he had been excited and fulfilled, but that must not have been the case. The beating seemed to indicate that he found her inadequate.
She was Erika Five. Four previous females, identical to her in appearance, had been cultured in the creation tanks to serve as their maker’s wife. For various reasons, they had not been satisfactory.
Erika Five remained determined not to fail her husband.
Her first day as Mrs. Helios had been characterized by numerous surprises, mystery, violence, pain, the death of a household servant, and a naked albino dwarf. Surely the second day, soon to begin, would be less eventful.
Recovering from the second beating, sitting in the dark on the glassed-in back porch, she drank cognac faster than her superbly engineered metabolism could burn off the alcohol. Thus far, however, in spite of the consumption of two and a half bottles, she had not been able to achieve inebriation; but she felt relaxed.
Earlier, before the rain began to fall, the albino dwarf had appeared on the rear lawn, revealed by landscape lighting, scampering from the shadows under an ancient magnolia tree to the gazebo, to the arbor draped in trumpet vines, to the reflecting pond.
Because Victor purchased and combined three grand properties, his estate was the largest in the fabled Garden District. The expansive grounds gave an inquisitive albino dwarf numerous corners to explore.
Eventually, this strange visitor had noticed her behind the big windows on the dark porch. He had come close to the glass, they had exchanged only a few words, and Erika had felt an inexplicable sympathy for him.
Although the dwarf was not a guest of whom Victor was likely to approve, Erika nevertheless had a duty to treat visitors with grace. She was Mrs. Helios, after all, the wife of one of the most prominent men in New Orleans.
After telling the dwarf to wait, she went to the kitchen and filled a wicker picnic hamper with cheese, roast beef, bread, fruit, and a chilled bottle of Far Niente Chardonnay.
When she had stepped outside with the hamper, the frightened creature hurried to a safe distance. She placed the offering on the lawn and returned to the porch, to her cognac.
Eventually, the dwarf came back for the hamper, and then hurried away into the night with it.
Needing little sleep, Erika remained on the porch, wondering at these events. When the rain came, her contemplative mood deepened.
Now, less than half an hour after the rainfall began, the dwarf returned through the down-pour. He carried the half-finished bottle of Chardonnay.
From the small red-and-white-checkered tablecloth that had lined the picnic hamper, he had fashioned a sarong that fell from his waist to his ankles, suggesting that he had not been running naked through the night by choice. He stood at the glass door, gazing at her.
Although in fact he was not a dwarf but something strange, and though she previously decided that
CHAPTER 10
When Annunciata’s face faded entirely from the computer screen in the networking room, Deucalion quickly plucked the oxygen-infusion lines from the four additional glass cylinders, putting a merciful end to the imprisonment and the existence of the other disembodied Alpha brains, whatever their function.
Lester, the Epsilon-class maintenance man who had accompanied him down from the main lab, watched with obvious longing.
Members of the New Race were created with a proscription against suicide. They were incapable of killing themselves or one another, just as they were incapable of striking out against their maker.
Lester met Deucalion’s stare and said, “You aren’t forbidden?”
“Only to strike at my maker.”
“But … you’re one like us.”
“No. I’m long before all of you. I’m his first.”
Lester considered this, then raised his eyes to the blank screen where Annunciata had once appeared. Like a cow chewing its cud, his Epsilon-class brain processed what he had been told.
“Dead and alive,” he said.
“I will destroy him,” Deucalion promised.
“What will the world be like … without Father?” Lester wondered.
“For you, I don’t know. For me … it will be a world made not bright but brighter, not clean but cleaner.”
Lester raised his hands and stared at them. “Sometimes, when I don’t have no work to do, I scratch myself till I bleed, then I watch myself heal, then I scratch till I bleed some more.”
“Why?”
Shrugging, Lester said, “What else is there to do? My job is me. That’s the program. Seeing blood makes me think about the revolution, the day we get to kill them all, and then I feel better.” He frowned. “Can’t be a world without Father.”
“Before he was born,” Deucalion said, “there was a world. It will go on without him.”
Lester thought about that, but then shook his head. “A world without Father scares me. Don’t want to see it.”
“Well, then you won’t.”
“Problem is … like all of us, I’m made strong.”
“I’m stronger,” Deucalion assured him.
“Problem is, I’m quick, too.”
“I’m quicker.”
Deucalion took a step back from Lester and, with a quantum trick, wound up not farther from him but closer to him, no longer in front of him, but behind him.
From Lester’s perspective, Deucalion had vanished. Startled, the janitor stepped forward.
