low-grade plasmid to help her hack a gambling machine in Fort Frolic, and his fellow artist, Sander Cohen, who owned the casino, had caught her. It was getting hard to find voluntary patients. He did think he might get Diane McClintock to come in again. He longed to alter her in another manner entirely, according to his artistic whim—to give her a truly transcendent face. He might get hold of a telekinesis plasmid and use it to form her face from within, shape it telekinetically, into something lovely.
They were all so ugly, honestly, so plain. They didn’t try hard enough to make themselves fitting vessels for Aphrodite. “But they’re filthy, filthy at the core,” he muttered. No knife was sharp enough to cut that filth out. He tried and tried and tried, but they were always so fat or short or… plain. Steinman made a
He hit Record again on the tape recorder and cleared his throat to set down another immortal memo. “With genetic modifications, beauty is no longer a goal, or even a virtue. It is a moral obligation. Still, ADAM presents new problems for the professional,” he said, for the audio diary. “As your tools improve, so do your standards. There was a time I was happy enough to take off a wart or two, or turn a real circus freak into something you can show in the daylight…” So saying, he started carving deeply into the face of the woman on the gurney, glad he’d taken the trouble to brace her head in place because she was shaking so much with agony as he sliced away her cheeks.
He went on, “…But that was then, when we took what we got—but with ADAM, the flesh becomes clay. What excuse do we have not to sculpt and sculpt and sculpt until the job is done?” He hit Pause on the tape recorder, its buttons becoming slippery with the blood on his hands, and considered his work. It was hard to tell through all the blood and torn tissue. “My dear, I believe I’m going to give you some ADAM that will regrow your face into another shape entirely. Then I’ll carve the new tissue some more. Then I’ll regrow some
Another muffled shriek from the woman. He sighed, shaking his head. They just would not understand. He hit Record again and accompanied his next wet, spurting spate of carving with a kind of artistic manifesto: “When Picasso became bored of painting people, he started representing them as cubes and other abstract forms. The world called him a genius! I’ve spent my entire surgical career creating the same tired shapes, over and over again: the upturned nose, the cleft chin, the ample bosom. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could do with a knife what that old Spaniard did with a brush?”
Steinman hit pause again, used his left hand to wipe some blood from the recorder buttons. He returned to his patient only to find she’d died on him. “Oh dammit, not another one…”
Blood loss and shock, he supposed, as usual. It was really quite unfair.
They always left him too soon. It made him angry to think of their selfishness.
He slashed at her in his fury, knocking the tape recorder on the floor, cutting her throat into ribbons, long pretty ribbons… which he then tied into bows.
When he calmed down enough to be precise, he exposed her breasts and cut them into shapes like the sea anemones that waved in the gentle currents so restfully, so gracefully, outside the window of his office…
“Bill?”
Bill McDonagh nearly leapt from his barstool when Redgrave spoke at his elbow.
“Blimey, don’t sneak up on a man like that!”
Redgrave smiled sadly. “Sorry. Something you ought to know, though. Your woman who cleans the rooms—she found something.”
Bill sighed. He tossed down his brandy, nodded to his bartender. “Just close down when you feel like it, mate.” He got off the barstool. “All right, let’s have it, Redgrave…”
“You’ve been letting out some of your rooms, ain’t you? Number seven—that was the Lutzes’?”
“Sure. I don’t charge them for it. Christ, their little girl went missing on my watch.” He couldn’t resist a cold look at Redgrave. “On your watch too.”
Redgrave grimaced. “We only looked away a couple of seconds. We were watching for splicers—”
“I know—forget it. What about Sam Lutz?”
“Come on.”
Feeling leaden, Bill went with Redgrave to the tavern’s back rooms. Number 7’s combination door was open. He stepped in and immediately saw the two of them stretched out on the mattress, on their backs, side by side: two corpses holding hands, barely recognizable as Mariska and Samuel Lutz. There were a couple of empty pill bottles lying on the floor nearby.
The sunken eyes of the cadavers were closed, eyelids like wrinkled parchment, their faces yellow and emaciated. The shriveling of death had given their lips the same pinched expression of disapproval, as if they were silently judging all the living. They wore their best clothes, he noticed.
“Suicide. And there’s this…” He pointed—beside the bodies was one of the ubiquitous tape recorders.
Bill pressed Play on the tape recorder. Mariska Lutz’s voice came distant and tinny from the little recorder, as if speaking across the gulf of death:
Bill stopped the recording.
Redgrave cleared his throat. “Well. I expect… they knew they couldn’t get her back. She was already… gone. You know, changed so much. So they…”
He gestured limply at the pill bottles.
Bill nodded. “Yeah. Just… just leave ’em here. I’ll seal it up. This’ll be their crypt, for now.”
Redgrave stared at him as if he might object—then he shrugged. “Whatever you say.” He looked back at the bodies. “We only looked away for a moment or two.”
He shook his head and walked out, leaving Bill alone with the dead.
Walking up to Atlas’s office, Diane was still sweaty, shaky from the raid.
She’d had some training from Atlas’s guerillas, and she was almost used to slipping through the wire, waiting as the other team created the decoy, dashing past Ryan’s men. More than once she’d followed the other
