Karl sees only two.
From her knees, Romy cranes her neck to see him, "No!"
Two men look up, faces blank with surprise. The closest, a lanky Indian with long black hair, looking like a shaman in blue business suit says, "Karl, a pleasure to see you again. "
Time frozen, Karl stares into dark eyes, doesn't like what he sees. How can he know his name? Why is he familiar? He's never seen him before, yet somehow, somewhere he must know this chocolate skinned pencil neck. How?
The shaman smiles, and things move fast. Without a word, without even a flicker of his lips, the big guy holding Romy comes at him. Eyes on the Indian, Karl raises the heavy revolver. Sighting on white skin just under the chin, where no vest will stop it, he squeezes the trigger. A small dark mole appears as the slug tears through trachea, cervical vertebra, soft mush of spinal cord, snapping his head forward. Knees buckling, he collapses on the couch like a man in need of rest. Arms at sides, eyes wide, mouth gaping with surprise, he gasps for a breath he'll never draw.
Karl turns back in time to see something move at the extreme periphery of vision. Much too late he realizes where the third man has beenthe bathroom. With no time to turn, he tries ducking and fails, taking the stun gun's charge on the back of his neck.
When he can see again, move again, the room is empty except for his friend on the couch. Skin buzzing, hands prickling needles and pins, he snatches the Smith off the carpet and staggers out the door to follow. Ears ringing, he jogs to the elevator, uses the security override to bring it back up. Waiting, he leans against the wall, presses a hand over his heart to steady it. Won't slow, won't settle down. Every once in a while it misses a beat, then hurries to add an extra one to catch up. Like a kid trying to march... What a stupid way to die.
Light-headed, weak, he waits. Behind him, the lift door slides open and he almost laughs at the timing.
"Security override on floor forty, awaiting instruction," the lift recites in a lilting feminine voice.
The spell hits him and he loses his grip on the .44, letting it fall to the carpet, watching it stupidly through blurring eyes. Jesus, he can't even hold onto his gun.
"Awaiting instruction," it says, nagging.
"Wait a minute, will you, dammit?" Reaching, careful not to lose his balance, he scoops up his gun.
"Lacking authorized instruction, returning lift to service."
Blocking the door with an arm, he falls into an elevator bearing one confused old man with the kinkiest head of white hair he's ever seen.
With curious, watery eyes, he watches Karl. "I told it I wanted to go down," he says, "but it came up again. Odd. Don't you think that's odd?"
Karl nods, saving breath. The car falls, lightening them on their feet. Nothing to say to the old reprobate, probably visiting the third floor with its fifteen-year-old sisters, Karl watches the screen overhead, trying to get his vision to focus. He won't do anybody any good if he can't see.
"Nineteen..."
"What is that gun for? You a bandit?"
Smiling, Karl slides down onto his haunches in the corner of the car, hoping it'll help his vision come back. "Trying to catch one."
"Fourteen..."
Still Karl can't make out the numbers glowing overhead. The old man comes up close, takes Karl's wrist, bare fingers icy on his skin before he can pull away, and as Karl winces before the onslaught, the flood comes upon him: Regret strong as wine gone to vinegar, and a simple desire to help. That's all, nothing else, no hate, no hidden dark desires, not even the lewdness he expected. Only the knowledge and skill of a doctor.
Karl turns to look into the face of the man at his side, marveling at the simplicity he finds there. "What are you doing?"
"Ten..."
"Oh, my dear young man, you should be resting, not running about with guns and such. With an arrhythmia like yours, too much of the wrong kind of exercise could bring on an episode of fibrillation." He reads Karl's face. "You know that, then?"
How Karl wishes he could see. "I know it."
"Then why haven't you had it corrected? We have therapy for that, you know."
Karl looks at him, then back at the floor, He wants to tell him that he doesn't want any lousy gene therapy, doesn't want anybody mucking with what God gave him. Heart killed his father at fifty. Karl reckons it's as good a way as any to check out. When his heart picks up its syncopated rhythm, it doesn't scare him. In a way it's reassuring, the hand of God there beneath his ribs, letting him know he hasn't been forgotten. A reminder that any moment he might learn all there is to know.
Hunger, regardless of what they say, is not the best sauce. It's the nearness of death that hones the edge of the appetites. No, he won't have it fixed. Die he must. While he lives he'll live.
Too tired to bother telling the old man any of this, he only grunts, the big Smith unbelievably heavy in his hand.
"Ah," the old man says, smiling wanly, patting him as the missionary pats the pagan. "A religious man, eh?"
Karl wants to ask him what he's doing on the plat, why he's here with the engineered whores, the sexual freaks, the chimera, the rest. Instead he struggles to focus on the angrily flashing holo before his eyes: two blue X's flanking a red circlehis red circle. They were moving fast. A thrill of fear courses through him.They get her on a taxi and she's gone.
"Romy, they've got her," Karl says to nobody in particular, not noticing the old man stiffen. "I don't care what she is, nobody deserves that kind of pain, that kind of death."
"Romy, you said?"
"Long ORomy. Pet name for Rosemary," he says, panting, "Germanic, I looked it up." He says it again, listening to the sound of it, liking it, "Romy."
"In trouble, you say?"
Karl isn't listening. "God, oh God, oh God, I'll be too late, too late."
"Too late? Too late for what?" Vici shakes him. "Are you listening to me? Too late for what?"
If he can just get out of this lift and out into the fresh air, Karl is sure he can make it. "Open, God damn it, open!"
"Where, where's Romy?"
Karl watches the brushed stainless door, not hearing. "I didn't know, didn't understand. They're human as we are. It's not their fault what they are, what they look like, any more than its anybody's."
Ignoring the gun, Vici takes him by the lapels of his jacket, slamming him against the wall, "What are you talking about? If Romy's in trouble, tell me where she is!"
"Quay," says the lift in the voice of a temptress. The door opens and Karl jerks free of the old man's grasp, "Look out, old man, I've got to go."
Teetering like a drunk, feeling ridiculous, he shoves off the wall and out the door. Sight shrunken to the view from a half-clenched fist, ears ringing with low blood pressure, he stumbles out into the lobby.
Like any first product, Romy's generation has bugs. There are problems with uniformity, docility, even obedience. Some learn too quickly, others not swiftly enough. Still others can't, or won't, internalize the routine of life in the Sisterhood. Some make problems for nurses and teachers. Romy is one.
Precocious, sharp-witted, often she appalls the matrons with a razor tongue. Quick to detect weakness, mercilessly she taunts. Soon after she turns ten, three of her pack of incorrigibles disappear from the dormitory. Never slow to detect a sea change, Romy at once learns to use her smile.
Through whispered rumor after lights out, she learns someone has heard screams from the infirmary and later seen stasis chambers wheeled from the medical wing trailing clouds of vapor along the floor behind them. Stenciled on the side: ORGANS/EXPEDITE. Romy doesn't know whether to believe or not, but gone her sisters areso much is incontrovertible.
Five years later, a fifteen-year-old Romy lies awake, eyes on the swelling number of empty beds. One, stripped of sheets, now, over one row and down two files is where Chantal had slept for as long as Romy can remember. Chantal, who always asked so many troublesome questions. Chantal, who the other girls seemed to follow instinctively since they could walk. Chantal, the natural leader. Two nights ago they came for her.
Ears alert, Romy hears she is not the only Sister who does not sleep this night. Some weep. Not Romy. She has no time for tears. Too busy is she planning, digesting what she has learned. Now she knows what happens to leaders. Two days later, when they come for Lissette, she learns something else. Lissettealways last done, always last out of the shower. Lissette the slug. Lissette the snail. From Lissette she learns it is fatal to be slow.
Barely a month later, they come again. Boots sounding alloy floor like a drum head, they come among Sisters lying naked under covers clutched to chins. Many tremble. Romy does not.
Eyes on high ceiling, curiously calm, she stares at nothing. She has nothing to fear tonight. She knows they come for her. Clearly they have been able to read her mind. They know she repeats the words morning and night feeling nothing. They have found her out. They know she hates Genie, hates it for bringing her into the world, for giving her life, for taking it away day by day. They know, they must.
Nearer come their boots as Romy listens, breath abated. Along her row of beds, two files away they come, how many she's not sure, three maybe, four. Eyes squeezed shut, she can already feel their hands on her. In the seconds that remain, she wonders if what she's heard about them is true. Romy wonders what it would be like to be caught up in those hard arms.
Without slowing, they pass. Suddenly frightened, she sits up. No, they will take no one else by mistake. They have come for her, and it's her they will have.
"Stop," she says, voice loud in the quiet dorm. Hulking shapes through the murk double back, boots setting her bed arattle. Looking up she sees them, blackness in the murk, surrounding her cot. "It's me you want."
Light-gathering headsets glowing violet, they hover over her like undercut buttes, like bulldogs, all their weight in arms and shoulders. Though it's too dark to see their faces, she knows they can see her, and self-consciously she covers herself.
The leader, the biggest among themshe can tell even in the dimtilts his head to see the holo projected from his headset.
Why does he hesitate?
An immense hand takes up her wrist in a grip infinitely gentle, and in the gentleness she senses this hand could crush her wrist as easily as she crushes a drink box. She strains her eyes to see his face and fails. Which is this? Has she seen him work out among the sweating men below where Sisters take their walks?
With a ruby wand he reads her chip. She is readywhy doesn't he take her? She can imagine the feel of the knife as it bites into her side.
"S... sleep, little s... sister," the faceless one says, voice low as booming surf, "We've c... come for another."
Hands moving with great gentleness, he lays her back onto her pillow, drawing the blanket over her. The others milling silent as so many ghosts, he reaches out to touch her forehead with one finger. Slowly, barely teasing the down on her face, he traces downward to the tip of her nose. Backing away, together, dark hulks marked by pinpoints of violet light, they move away.
It is Rada they take. Rada who could never be anything but the best. In the dark between them she follows quietly, calmly.
But why Rada? Why should the best, the brightest, the most adept be punished?
If she learns from Chantal, from Lissette, from Rada she learns more. From this night she is careful never to let anyone know how much or how well she can do. From this night Romy is in the center of every group, near the mode of every test, every measurement. Like a small bird among thousands of its like, she strives for the safety of the middle.
Nothing she says has not been said before. Nothing she does attracts notice. In a world she views as if from a great height, she has one goalsurvival. Determined to live, why she can't say, she will do what she must.
No longer able to refuse, Romy learns to give and take pleasure as her sisters commonly do. Pleasant enough, she doesn't mind it, but for her it is less excitement than a temporary reprieve from loneliness.
Always she does as expected, but often, though she never dares speak of it, she thinks about the other thing, the thing men do with women. The odd, frightening thing she has learned of by threading her way past barriers on the net set up to keep it from them. This thing, above all, puzzles her.
This linking of bodies, this attraction of positive for negative. Described in such anatomical detail in the literature, yet not really described at all. She deduces from the sighing and moaning that the activity is proposed as pleasurable. The act seems to her nothing so much as ugly, as animal.
Such a grotesque ritual this intrusion of the one into the other, what could possibly induce a male to do it? And, yet more puzzling, in a day when such trespass is unnecessary for reproduction, why should the female suffer it? Nothing, Romy is sure, could compel her to endure such base intrusion.
Once, feeling especially alone, she asks Lena if she ever thinks about men.
"Of course not," Lena's head tilts. "Why? Do you?"
Suddenly it's as if she's being tested, as if the other girls stare, straining to hear her answer. A voice inside her screams.
Romy shrugs carelessly, laughs, "No."
Lena, seeming to relax, moves easily down to rest her cheek on Romy's thigh, making her forget the fear, forget everything else but the now.
Later Romy lies mimicking sleep, pinching herself hard on the tender white place on the back of her arm, punishing herself for being so stupid, for trusting, for hoping to find another who felt the same.
Never again will she reveal herself.
Never.
Karl's not going to make it.
He rounds the corner at a dead run, boots pounding alloy grid of the quay. Dodging netpunks huddled along the wall, he pushes himself. Past tourists straggling back from the casinos he runs, at last picking her up more than a hundred meters ahead. Romythis freak, this lovely recom mishmash he's got to keep alive if he wants to go home.
It's going to be close. The shaman guides her, arms bound, mane clamped in a big hand, moving fast to the waiting water-taxis. From there an easy eighteen minutes to L.A., where, undisturbed, he can wring her of all the pleasure she can give.
Uh, uh, not this time.
Dizzy, heart protesting, Karl lopes, head throbbing like a melon bruised from a drop on cement. Feet skimming grillwork, he runs, ignoring his thudding heart. Too winded to yell, too stubborn to slow, feet clanking shifting plates, doggedly Karl closes.
Netpunks stare through him. Tourists shrink, clinging to the rail.
The Indian turns to nail him with cobra eyes, and though he's never seen him before tonight, Karl knows them well.
"Let her go," Karl says, voice breathy, raw, gulping air heavy with the stench of kelp.
Romy strains to see him, eyes pleading, "No, please, no more killing."
Too late he notices it's not him she's talking to.
He sees it come, shrugs, takes it glancing off his shoulder rather than on the back of the skull.The netpunkshow could he have forgotten them? One stupid move and, that quick, it's over.
He falls hard, tasting blood, gun skittering across the grid. Maybe a sap, maybe a ball bearing in a sock, either way he's just as dead. Face down on the grill, hands and feet numb, just not there, he explores the torn flesh of his inner lip with his tongue, teeth grating cold alloy.
Looming meters below: the sea. Knowing what's coming, not able to get his hands to work, Karl waits for it. Below, the sea sloshes in and out among pilings, rising and falling in bioluminescent ebb and flow. If only he could turn to sand and sift through the grate.
With boots they probe neck, crotch, kidneys. He curls up, arms and hands wrapping up his head, nose to the grate, protecting his face. Not much else matters at the moment. Fear doesn't matter, a plan doesn't. He doesn't need a plan to end up at the bottom of the shelf. And that's where he's going.
Karl sneaks a look at the one holding Romy. Just in time he covers up, the kick glancing off his jaw, slamming his teeth together.
That's the one he wants, the one he's going to hurt. He doesn't know how, but he will. With every kick he's more certain.
Face to salty grate, a thought makes him smile. Karl's wondered what it would be like to die. He's seen people die. Always thought it looked easy. Now, here over the water, it seems he was right. It doesn't hurt, not much. It's like it isn't even him down here on the grid, like it's somebody else. Maybe this is what UR's like, he thinks, sort of real, sort of not. Good enough to fool you, but only if you want to be, only if you play along.
The tall one leaves Romy to come stand with the other two while they catch their breath, and what's weird, they say nothing. Not a word. This reminds him of the other thing, the odd thing, the thing that scares him more than the idea that he's about to die.
When they touch him he doesn't feel a thing, not a thing. In forty years, that's never happened. Never. A first. Bully for him. What it means he has no inkling. Then he thinks of something. Maybe when they hit him they knocked it out of him, the talent he's spent his whole life running from. Now that would be rich. Cured just to die. For all he can tell it may be true.
Squinting, he sees Romy still right where they left her, waiting like a horse at the rail. He wants to scream at her to run, to go over the side into the sea, to go anywhere. If he could find the breath, he would. For a genius, pretty stupid.
He tries to move and pain bites him, gnawing his ribs. He realizes now he's dead, and wonders if this is how the others wentif this is how Sara wentkicked to death in the dark. One of them pins his arms with sandpaper hands, jerking him to his feet. A slap jogs the pickup behind his ear, cueing his headset and it blares full volume.
"Tonight on Uninet..." says a suit sitting suspended in space just above the rail. Riding his head, an ice-blue pompadour that could pass for an iceberg if he were submerged to his hairline. Wincing at the blare of his voice, Karl wishes he were.
"...Rumors of the occult."
An item his topic search has netted for him. How nice to be kept current as he's being kicked to death.
"It seems every time we turn around we hear of another case of supposed demonic possession, or another mysterious disappearance. These are the subjects of Morgana's commentary this evening. Morgana..."
Angel face on the body of a succubus, Morgana sits, shimmering dress of Chinese silk slit up to forever, lean legs crossed, smiling as if she's done it all, seen it all, and found it all damnably tiring.
Karl likes her right off. So unequivocally corrupt, he finds her refreshing after the pretension, the affectation he's seen the last week of his life.
"Demonic possession? Really?" she says, voice sticky as the dregs of love, "I mean, who's kidding whom? People claiming loved ones change before their eyes, become vicious strangers, as they watch. We're expected to believe this? Are we living in the age of reason or are we not?
"Some even blame implants and biocoms for it. Now there's a non sequitur for you. Ever since the leap forward into satcoms a generation ago, religious extremists have been looking for a way to derail the advancements made in the last fifty years, and send us back to the dark ages when entertainment, communication and commerce were isolated from one another, when TVs, phones, computers, FAXs, stereos, radios, VCR's and cameras each did its own little job and that's all. Hard to believe, I know, but it's truethey want to go back.To the days before Uninet, before UR, before mankind was linked into a global village."
Now why would that be? Karl would laugh if he could spare the breathhe can't.
"It's been half a century, and this is the best they can come up withdigital demons? Oh, puh-lease! It's a joke. Look, you can believe there are dark forces afoot on the net if you want to, but don't expect to see me in line to have my implant ripped out of my skull, all right?"
She leans closer, exposing endless cleavage, "You weirdoes scuttling around in the dark, living in fear, crying Henny Penny, I've got a little message for you. Like it or not, you're living in the 21st century. You come up with Beelzebub and I'll be the first to invite him on for an interview, but until you do, just snap out of it, why don't you?"
Karl promises to do just that.
Blinking his eyes to clear them, he can see Romy at her place by the rail. In the moonlight her face looks troubledhe wonders why. Can it be she isn't enjoying the show?
The big Indian rabbit punches him in the short ribs with what feel like depleted uranium knucks. When he can breathe again, Karl discovers a couple ribs have gone south. Doesn't make sense just a few broken bones can hurt that bad. He gives not breathing a try.
Karl takes a knee in the crotch that lifts him off his feet. All three laugh as if on cue. The same laughone he's heard before. Karl finds out that he can hurt more than he already does as waves of nausea and cramps wash over him. The one with pig-iron hands drops him and he hits the deck hard as a sack of rolled corn. Curling up, he fights dry heaves, cold sweats, four-minute flu.
His old friend, the grid. He notices an oddly beautiful pattern to the holes punched in it, something he's never seen before. Funny what you notice when you're about to die. It's cold. It's hard. It tastes of salt and smells of urine. Not bad really. It doesn't kick and it doesn't punch. Kind of like home. If he could burrow his way into it he would.
In the dim light given off by a Coke machine rolling down the passage, he makes out a boot close to his face.
The box sings as it comes, a waist-high minstrel. "Good evening, Visitors, good evening, Sister. The lights along this section seem to have failed. Please watch your step. Would anyone care for a Coke?"
It runs up against his foot with a balloon tire. "Excuse me, sir, are you in need of assistance?"
"As a matter of fact"
He takes a boot hard in the mouth and it goes dead. He tastes blood, feels with his tongue, finds a mouth full of teeth that can't feel back. At least they're still there.
"Help has been summoned," the vendor says merrily.
Thanks heaps and gobs.
An errant kick bounces off the box, and it backs away, siren howling, strobe flashing a painful barrage of blinding light. "Security has been summoned. It is a class two felony to assault a rolling vendor. Security has been summoned." It retreats back down the passage as the two follow after, kicking, laughing. Teeth grating against cold alloy, Karl smilesat least it got away.
Glancing up, he sees the shaman's ankle near his face. With the other two chasing the box, it'll have to be now. Reaching back, Karl frees Tate's clip knife from the waistband of his trousers, thumbs it open. Wrapping the ankle up in his left arm, he bears down viciously over the Achilles tendon until the serrated blade grates bone.
Hamstrung, he screams, goes down, and what's stranger yetfeels.
Fear, rage, confusion all come through from the man scrambling on the grid next to him. Karl reaches out, drags himself up his coat to look in his face. Pressing a hand to the skin of his throat, he gets him loud and hard. This is a man, all right, a scared one.
The shaman sits rocking, whining to himself, suddenly turned kitten. "Oh, God, man, I'm sorry I did that, I'm sorry I hit you, I... I didn't mean it," he says, wincing from the pain, hands raised to ward off Karl's anger. "My ankle's broken, I think. Did I fall?"
Karl can only stare. This is the same man who had Romy's hair clamped in his fist, who was about to kill her. Karl knows he's telling the truth, knows he's not a man who could ever do what he has done, what he was about to do. In the rocking of the grids beneath them Karl can feel itthe other two are coming back.
A boot comes from the right, then the left. Karl loses the knife somehow, and burying his head in his arms, watches as it tumbles down, dark water glowing where it hits. Good knife, he hates to lose it. No fear, he can get it later. He'll be going down after it.
A quick glance tells him Romy's where they left her, watching.
What in her eyes, pity, maybe?
If he didn't hurt so much, he'd laugh. Pity from her he doesn't need. Pity from a doll, from a genetic freak with angel face and a magnum intellect. The dear Sister feels sorry for the man being kicked to death under her nose. He doesn't want it, doesn't need it, can die just fine without it.
The turban squawks and rolls out of the way as the other two step on him in their eagerness to get at Karl. They ignore him where he lies mewling against the rail. If Karl lives, he'll have to give this some thought.
He doubts he'll get the chance.
He has to get up while he still can, but not now. Now he's too dizzy to move. He shuts his eyes.
Tired, so tired.
A little nap's all he needs, just a wink or two. It's comfortable on the grating. The water rises and falls around the pilings, up down, up down. How he hates this sea.
He's sick again, but has nothing left to lose. He is convinced puking with broken ribs is one of the deeper levels of hell, reserved for lawyers and churning brokers. The pain hits him and his stomach spasms again.
This he just wants over.
Why don't they just roll him off the deck and let him sleep?
• • •
For Romy, Sundays were fun days.
Sisters are allowed to visit the public entertainments offered in the great amphitheater. Whether a play, a musical, full contact jai alai or rugby, for girls barely sixteen it is always exciting. Romy enjoys drama as much as any of the other girls, but even more she loves the games. Sports allow her to watch the Brothers' bodies as they play. So hard, so big, so male, they both frighten and attract her. A guilty pleasure, it's one she dares confide to no one.
This Sunday the game is unarmed combat, first man to his knees the loser. The contenders make an even match. Both highly skilled and fit. In thong briefs, their bodies glisten as they parry, feint, dodge, lunge in synchronized ballet pugilistic. All practiced perfection, the contests end bloodlessly: a deft throw, a lightning pin. The crowd about her enjoys their Sunday, screaming themselves hoarse, tossing hair ribbons down onto the stage to the victor. Romy feels stupid but in the interest of invisibility does the same.
Now comes the big eventwhat Romy can't guess. Into the arena a large man is led trailing a plastic cable from one massive leg. First generation Brother, same generation as Romy herselfanother of the unpredictable ones. Top-heavy as a bull, built to fight, to kill, she guesses his center of gravity at somewhere about nipple level.
She has seen his like, but never his match for size and power. Watching slab pectorals ripple over his chest as he walks, loose-limbed as a cat, she catches herself trembling. This one frightens her.
His cable two smaller Brothers loop to an eye in the center of the floor. One of the attendants offers him a flexible wand of soft tubing. Useless for defense, that she can see. It's the Aztec ritual.
She's read of it.
An enemy warrior of distinguishing bravery is not sacrificed with the other prisoners, but given a chance to live.
Heavy face impassive, the Brother ignores the offered wand. Thrust into his hand, he lets it fall. Watching, Romy is transported back half a millenium through her studies of central American civilization.
About the waist the warrior is tethered to a millstone, given a sword with feathered edge.
From her perch high in the stadium, Romy frowns as the crowd about her jeers the passive giant below. What can be coming? Surely nothing like the ritual it reminds her of.
If he can kill five of the best warriors armed with razor edged weapons, he goes free. This is his chance.
Onto the stage struts an emcee dressed in a sequined suit that glimmers under the spot. A banty cock of a man with a large voice and an irritating laugh, she's seen him before.
"Here he is!" He circles the giant as if he fears he may break free. "Here stands a monster, a genetically bred killer! Bad to the bone, craving flesh, lusting for blood!"
It's all Romy can do not to laugh, though looking about her, the others seem taken in. To her it's obvious the Brother has no interest in doing anything at all at the moment.What can they have planned for him? What could he have done to deserve it?
"Look at him! Butchery and dismemberment on his mind. Don't be fooled by his act, this one's capable of limitless mayhem."
The emcee approaches the audience, "Is there anyone here man enough to bring this killing machine to his knees? Is there? Your weaponthe hot stick." He brandishes it over his head. Romy has seen them before, a meter long, slender length of spring plastic molded with metal filament to conduct a 20,000 volt charge from the handle.
The strutting master of ceremonies offers it in two hands to an audience enraptured. "Excaliber! Who will be our Arthur?"
Applause flares as a rawboned tourist stalks down onto the stage in neon jacket and clashing shorts, legs flashing white. Romy watches, disgusted, as he parades around the stage, wielding the prod as if it were a broadsword. Curious, her eye returns to the Brother standing as if admiring the fine cloudless sky above him, arms loose.
What might his thoughts be?
Rod high, the man in shorts circles as the Brother twice his mass stands inert. Striking out furiously with the rod, he lays it hard on the Brother's back and chest.
Romy watches, jumping with each impact.
The tourist dodges, thrusting the long foil in to spark against bare skin. The Brother takes strike after strike, muscles in arms and chest spasming as the prod discharges. Each strike leaves a small dark crescent of burnt skin. Still, he stands unresponsive.
At last, snarling with contempt, the man in shorts hurls down the prod. At this, the crowd roars its approval. Making a show of rolling sleeves up over flaccid arms, he moves in barehanded, hammering, hammering. With each slap of fist against flesh Romy flinches. Eyes upward still, the Brother neither blocks nor parries, only takes it, making no effort to cover up. All of this Romy sees, nails cutting palms, hating those around her for finding this entertainment.
"Fight!" They scream it in a voice five thousand strong. "Fight!"
The Brother lifts massive arms skyward and, following his gaze, Romy notices a flight of sea birds, pelicans she thinks, soaring overhead in a lazy delta. What can it mean? It's as if he would join them, would fly away. There in the overheated stadium she is chilled. Never has she hoped to find another who longs to leave as does she.
Arms beefy, heavy with flab, the tourist steps in to whip his fist across the bridge of the Brother's nose in a backward knuckle snap. This he follows with an elbow to throat and solar plexus, then a fist snap to groin.
Hearing the sickening contact, Romy covers her eyes only to peek through parted fingers. The Brother staggers, drops to one knee.
Go down, go down! Biting her fist, Romy wills him to fall. Unsteadily, he rises, locks his knees, muscles of his thigh spasming like she's seen horses in vids flinch to dislodge flies. Her stomach roils as the stench of burning flesh and hair reaches her. The Brother's wounds, though not fatal, must be more painful than she can imagine, yet still he stays on his feetwhy?
Sick with loathing, she looks from matrons to lab-coated observers mumbling observations to the air. No one seems the least inclined to stop it. The sisters about her enjoy themselves, as do younger Brothers gathered round the raised platform. Screaming themselves hoarse, they call to the tourist to drop him, to bring him down.
How could she ever have enjoyed these games, ever have found these howling wolves attractive?
A curious feeling rises from the pit of her stomach, a feeling she has never before experienced. Having no name for it, she only know she no longer cares whether she lives or dies, so long as the torture of the Brother ceases. Knowing full well she must do nothing, knowing she must sit quietly and observe, showing neither too much pleasure nor too little, Romy rises.
Levering herself easily over the rail, she drops lightly to the cushioned floor a dozen feet below.
Stop. She must stop. This is insane. An internal voice hammers at her, a voice that has kept her alive. Does she want to die? Is that what she wants?
Ignoring it, she moves through the stands, gravity drawing her down the sloping ramp to the stage. What will happen to her she knows intimately. She will be noticed, singled out. She will lose her precious invisibility and, with it, her insides. Yet down she strides.
Passing between screaming boys, packed tightly shoulder to bare shoulder, she crams herself between them, climbs the raised platform. Brother barely an arm's length from her, she can see his wide lip beaded with perspiration. Thighs triple the girth of her waist, shoulders far too wide to encircle with her arms, the Brother waits, eyes on the sky. The tourist retreats, unhappy to no longer be the focal point of the crowd.
Facing him, Romy realizes all at once what she has done. Looking up, she sees matrons motion, calling her back. Never are sisters allowed to mingle with Bothers. She has undone all she ever promised herself, thrown her life away. Slowly, so slowly, as the crowd roars its delight at this outré, this never before seen diversion, the Brother's powder blue eyes fall to her face. In them there is curiosityand compassion she has never seen.
"Give them what they want, go down. Don't you know you're being a fool?"
Nose running blood, lip split, burns and welts spread over a table chest, his eyes smile with irony, "As m...much a fool as y...you?"
Behind her she hears the other, and suddenly afraid, she whips around, staying between the two as he moves. The amphitheater explodes with applause, with screams, with the roar of approval, and two women in sequined nothings come to lead the disappointed tourist away to his prize. Not understanding, Romy turns to find him on a knee behind her. In his eyes she sees he's laughing. She doesn't have to ask why.
She knows.
Not for the pain, for herbecause she asked.
She opens her mouth to say something and sees his face harden. The crowd's voices rise in a crescendo as he reaches for her. Taking her by the front of her tunic, he jerks her off her feet. Romy thinks that, having been so stupid, it serves her right to die.
Before she can react she hits a shoulder hard as alloy, losing the breath in her lungs. Nimbly, he catches her in an arm, and she sees the tourist come at them with the rod. Carrying her as if she were a part of his hip, he leaps like a huge cat, chopping the wand from his hand, wrapping the other's arm in his own. With an easy wrench, he snaps it back at the elbow. Then, planting a foot in the center of the startled man's chest, he sends him catapulting over the rail. Now, amphitheater eerily silent, he sets her gently on her feet, releasing herbut not with his eyes.
Face heavy, coarse, shaved head seemingly rooted to the base of his shoulders, he is uncomely a man as she has seen. But his eyes.... In them is kindness she has never known. Even as the matrons come for her, he holds her eyes with his. Nothing does he say, but reaches out with a finger thick as a root. Eyes smiling through deep sadness, through hopelessness, he brushes her skin lightly from the center of her forehead right down to the tip of her nose. When he speaks, his voice is a whisper, "S... sleep, little s... s..." He breathes. "Little sister."
Truth dawning, as matrons lead her away, she strains to keep him in sight as long as she can.
It's him.
The one with the stevedore grip jerks Karl back on his feet, drawing his head back hard by the hair.
Karl fights to keep his chin down so he can't snap his neck, but he's tired. Hands in his hair, knee in his back, they win. A blade snaps open with a frosty snick. He knows what's coming. Again he notices he's getting nothing through their hands. Even autistics have a whirlpool of emotion swirling inside themnot these two. He'd like to know why, knows he never will.
"Any last words, Karl? A lecture perhaps, concerning morality, concerning the value of life?" He prods Karl under the chin with a needle point blade. "Come on, what do you say? Let's hear an epistle on the sanctity of the law, shall we? You're an expert on that, aren't you?"
Karl blinks, trying to clear his eyes of sweat, of blood. He can't see too well, but from what he can, he's sure he's never seen this guy before. It doesn't add up. Not only does this psycho know him, he doesn't seem to like him very much.
"You know me," Karl manages to say.
That laugh again. Where has he heard it?
"Oh, yes, I know you."
He can see he wants a reaction out of him, wants him to ask how he knows his name. He won't do it, won't give him the joy. It can't matter, now, anyway. "So do it, hotshot."
He takes Karl's chin in his hand, draws back the blade. The skin on Karl's throat crawls as he waits for it.
"Can you feel it, Karl? The steel biting you, the ice as hot muscle gapes open to air? Use your imagination."
Who are you, Karl wants to ask, how do you know me? But breathing's too hard and there's no time anyway. He takes one last breath, wincing at the ache in his side. One should be enough to last him the time he has. Dying should be painless. He'll tell them in a minute, anybody wants to know.
Very near, a plate shifts.
The knife freezes mid-swing.
They aren't alone.
Quietly Romy follows.
To the labs.
To the place where Sisters go and do not return.
Hands trembling, a tech in white leads her into an office with carpeting the color of coral. There she is left alone with a man who sits watching her over tented hands.
He nods her to a chair, eyes never leaving her face. She complies, wondering why she is not simply led to one of the tables in the operating theater and strapped down.
Why is there only this one old man with eyes that seem to see through her? Where are the others, the teks that will open her?
Somehow, no longer frightened, she waits to see if he will speak. When he does not, she turns her attention to the room. All very ordinary but for along the long windows overlooking the sea. There, in a long row, are the strangest things she has ever seen.
Trees impossibly small, terribly old and wizened, they lean as if tired. Her fate forgotten, she smiles, straining to see from her chair, not daring to get up as she had been told to sit.
"You like them?"
She nods, trying a smile only to have it shatter. She must be careful, must not say the wrong thing, must not anger this important man with heavily-veined hands. As if it matters now.
"Go ahead, have a look."
Hesitant, she cocks her head, not sure she understands, unwilling to misstep.
"Go on."
She rises, and warily as a cat on glass, goes to them.
From his desk he watches her as she examines each tree, running a finger lightly over furrowed bark, delicate leaves, hanging pea-size apples. Thrilled, she looks back timidly, curiosity overcoming fear. "What are they?"
Behind his hands he smiles, "Bonsai, potted trees, some four times your age."
"They're...." She turns back, searching for the word, not finding it. "They're like old men, aren't they?"
Again, she thinks she may have seen his face change.
"Yes, very much like them."
Returning to sit primly on the edge of her chair, head erect, she takes a deep breath. She is ready. "Am I to die now?"
"No," he says, wrinkles forming around tired eyes. "What on earth gave you that idea? I want to talk to you, that's why you're here, to talk. I don't want you to be afraid, don't be. Nothing will happen to you, I promise you that."
She listens, not believing a word, "I'm not afraid."
"What gave you that idea?"
"Chantal, Lissette, the others, the ones who were taken away, they were killed."
"No, no, no, they were sent away. This isn't the only group of Sisters, you know. There are a thousand of you spread all over the world. We often shuffle them, to see the effects on interaction."
"Oh," she says, chagrined by her simplicity. "I didn't think of that."
"What I'd like to know, Romy, is why you did what you did today."
Hands clasped tightly on her lap, she looks down at them wondering what to say, how much to tell. Does she dare tell him the truth? Is it all a trick?
"I tried not to, tried to sit and watch, even closed my eyes. I couldn't stand it."
In an immense chair he leans back, hands clasped together over his chest, "What couldn't you stand?"
"The way they hurt him, the way he did nothing but stand and let himself be burned. I had to stop it."
"Even though you thought you would be killed if you did?"
Afraid she has said too much, she adds nothing.
The man thinks for a moment, then seems to decide. "If I were to allow you to see this..." he consults a tablet on the desk, "...Willy, would you care to?"
She nods, not believing. She had been sure he would be taken away too.
"You know he's dangerous."
Blankly, she looks at him. What can he mean? "Dangerous?"
"He may not look it, but he's one they made for killing, that and hard work. He's got it in him but he's a strange one, doesn't follow the map, believes it's wrong, he says. Let's see, I was just reading about him. He was one of the best in his generation, a real talent for it, but not too long ago he changed."
Desperately, she wonders if he expects her to reply. "How strange," is all she can think to say.
He smiles, "You are a surprising creature, Romy. Not at all what we expected either, are you?"
How much does he know? How much has he guessed, about Sisters, about maleshas he guessed that? "I serve the sisterhood well, I hope."
That he waves away, "You can forget about that claptrap with me. And don't be afraid. I'll see that nothing happens to you. I promised you that, didn't I?"
Not reassured, wanting only to get away, not daring hope, she squirms on her perch.
Vici rises, very tall, very thin. Now, for the first time, she feels fear as he comes around his desk to lean back against it, long legs stretched out in front of him, "We still don't know what makes us the way we are. We have so much to learn. Will you help me learn why you and Willy are different?"
Eyeing the door, she nods, still not believing she's allowed to leave. "Can I go now?"
He smiles. "Of course."
She's up and moving for the door in an instant. When he speaks she is only halfway there. "Romy?"
Knowing it's all been a lie, that she will be taken and strapped to the tables, she whirls, betrayed. "What?"
"Would you..." he motions at the bonsai, "...like to learn to make, to tend trees like these yourself? I could show you."
Eyes narrowing, she senses a trap. "You would?"
"Yes, you and Willy too, if you can satisfy me he can be trusted. I have a potting shed and beds on the roof," he points. "In the morning say, day after tomorrow?"
Torn to her core, she opens her mouth to speak, the desire to flee balancing her yearning for the wonders lining the glass.
"They could be yours," he says, offering a hand. "Here, come, choose one for yourself, a gift for your helping me understand you. Come and pick."
She shrinks. This is too much. She cannot, will not pick one. How can she? She owns nothing of her own. "But..." she says, struggling with herself, with her fear, "I have nowhere to keep it."
"You may keep it on the roof with mine."
Her resistance fails. "You're sure?"
"I am."
Swallowing, she decides instantly, laying a finger on an old yew, more than half dead, branches straining against imaginary wind. "This one."
This seems to please him. "Good choice, the most valuable of the lot, nearly a century old. Oh, yes, Romy, you are very different. I have much to learn from you." He leads her to the door, "I'll call for you, and you'll come, won't you?"
Confused, she examines his face. "You're... asking me?"
He opens the door, stands back out of her way, "I'm asking you, yes. Will you?"
Never as long as Romy can remember has she been asked to do anything.
Ordered, yes.
Never asked.
A new feelingone she likes.
Moving quickly, still suspecting a trick, she bolts, casting her answer behind her as she slips away, "I'll come."
Under Karl's feet the grid shifts as behind him, cat quiet, someone moves.
Vertebral cartilage rends with a snicking crackle as the netpunk pinning his arms dies. Karl can imagine the icy tingling, imagine the confusion as he falls, not understanding why, only knowing he can no longer breathe, no longer feel, no longer speak. He slams to the deck and free, Karl wavers.
The blade man's hand is snatched and his arm broken over a knee by a hulk in glowing green jumpsuit. Without a breath of hesitation, he lifts him, flings him over the rail.
Knees buckling, Karl falls face first on the grill. The decking by his face gives as if a great animal stands over him. Much too tired to move, to care, he awaits what comes. What stands over him plucks the dead man off the grid. A distant splash. Circles of phosphorescence spread as he hits water, tossed like a doll over the rail. Steeling himself, Karl takes the breath he didn't think he was going to need, and at once regrets it.
The man Karl hamstrung scrambles for the ladder, a whimpering seal calf fleeing the club. Knowing it's over, too frightened to look back, he claws his way along the grid. Karl sees a hand clamp down on his leg, and he's gone, cartwheeling over the rail. His Dopplering scream ends with a splash. This one Karl wishes well. Once the madness left him he didn't seem so bad. He may liveif he swims.
He's next. He just hopes he misses his buddy when he hits the water.
From the corner of his eye, Karl sees Romy, cloak clasped about her, looking much better than she has any right to. Grid cold against his face, he watches, strangely unconcerned as two very large boots come back for him. From his angle of vision he can see the quay give under the man's mass. A hand in his hair lifts his head off the deck. A second takes his chin. Back flexed painfully, he can do nothing but wait for the wrench he knows is coming.
"Willy, no!" Romy says as she might correct a beloved dog for digging among the iris. "Bring him, and be careful. He was trying to help me."
Karl knows the voice, wants it to come again, needs it to. The old man from the elevator turns him gently. Karl wonders why he's here.
"You all right, my boy?"
Is he all right? He's hunkydory.
Karl's heart jumps the track. Thumping a click a minute, four times a second. Hits him hard as a freight. He can't answer, can't speak, can't move.
"Wait," Vici says, "something's wrong." He lays a cold hand against his neck, "He's fibrillating, we've got to get him to the clinic." He looks at Romy. "Unless..."
Vision narrowing, Karl lies on his back in what seems a well, way to the world of the living irising closed above him. Then she is there, face close over him, eyes swallowing him. In an instant he guesses what she's up to.
God, don't let her touch him. The last thing he wants is this freak touching him.
He tries to speak, to scream but can only watch as she reaches down, her cloak soft as cloud whispering across his open hands on the cold deck. Romy unzips his jacket, yanks wide his shirt, sending weak thrills of feeling through his skinpeace, calm, caring. Then, eyes on his, she presses hands flat against his chest, and in a rush quick as a fall into water he knows all there is to know.
The yearning, the need to live, the despair of knowing she won't, of being less than human, less than woman. And something elserecognition, completion of a puzzle, the missing piece falling to place unquestionably, the lone vacancy in a jigsaw making a whole. What it means he doesn't know, but through her hands and in her eyes it's plain.
She's puzzled, frightened, filled with desire, with longing.
Why? For whom?
Romy seems to shake herself and over his heart there grows a tingling, a vibration, a probing of current. It hurts.
"Ah," he says, mouth wide, "ah!" He jumps, the heels of his shoes clanging the grill, falling back from a contraction. Too quick for fear, he's better. Heart calming, settling into a normal rhythm, it's over.
Tentatively, as if ashamed, she jerks her hands away, leaving Karl wanting them back. "You're better, now," she says, backing away.
"Well done, now security's on the way," the old man says, taking her arm, pulling her off him. "We've got to go. Willy, haul him up to my floor."
Romy hesitates, "Wouldn't my room be better?"
Karl feels their boots through the deck.
"There then, but let's move, shall we? Willy's just tossed three men over the rail."
At her nod, Willy hoists him over a shoulder and red hot hayhooks sear their way into his chest as broken ribs grate.
On Vici's say-so, a sixteen-year-old Romy is allowed into Willy's cell.
A white room, perhaps three meters by five, absolutely bare, lit starkly from above by a single skylight. In a far corner, water drizzles from a hole in the ceiling into a larger one in the floor. Simplicity.
Willy hunkers, back to the wall, elbows on knees. Feet bare, fingers linked, eyes closed, head back, he rocks to an inward rhythm.
As the door slides shut behind her, she begins to wonder if she is wrong about him. Can he be as dangerous as they say? What then?
She turns back, peering out through the glass to the empty hall beyond. They have left her alone with him. If he should crush her it will serve her right. With a sigh she turns to find him watching.
Back to the door she squats.
"They didn't se... se..." he says, voice a husky whisper.
Easily, she guesses what he wants to say. "Send me away, no."
A minute passes, maybe more, Romy can't tell. Through the wall, she hears a mumbling, a scream, banging, then quiet.
"W... w...." He struggles for some seconds, then stops, breathes, tries again, "Why are you here?"
"That's a stupid question. To see you."
"So...." Lazily, he shrugs broad shoulders, "You ha...have."
Romy swallows as the slap sinks in. She doesn't understand him. After the other day, now he acts this way. Can it be he doesn't want to see her? "Shall I leave?"
He glances up, then back down at his ankles, shakes his head no.
Small victory, but it doesn't answer the ice in his manner. What can she have done to deserve it? "I'm here to ask you something."
"Wha..."
"Dr. Vici says that if you can satisfy him you won't hurt anyone, you can go free."
"W...where sh.... Where should I go?"
This isn't what she meant to say at all. "You shouldn't go anywhere. What I meant was that you could come to work with me on Dr. Vici's floor in the tower."
A broad brow gathers itself into furrows. "Why?"
"To help him learn about us, about all of us, about why we're different."
He opens one pig eye, shuts it again, "I would s... s... see you?
"Every day."
"You w..."
Knowing what he's about to say, Romy waits.
"You w..."
"I want it."
"You know n... n... nothing about m..."
"About you?" Oh, yes she does. She has seen his eyes, has seen him suffer without hurting back. She knows all she needs to. "Yes I do."
"Do you?" He smiles, offering a hand. "D..." He struggles to force out the word, whole body working. "Do you know what it's like to t...to t..."
Her stomach wrenches to hear him fight so. "Take your time, I'm not in a hurry."
"To take a man's life with the flick of a h... of a h..."
"A hand?"
He nods. "Do you know what it's like to j..." He stops, breathes slowly, "To jerk a man's t... A man's trachea from his th..."
She swallows. "Throat?"
"Do you know what it is to ac...to ac..." Frustrated, he slams a palm to the floor. "To ac..." He bellows his frustration, then forces himself to slow, to breathe, "To acquire a taste for it?"
His eyes focus on her. Romy has the impression of looking into the eyes of a predator temporarily sated with blood.
"I d..."
So excruciating is it to listen to him struggle, she finishes for him. "You do."
He nods.
Romy swallows, wondering how long it would take to get anyone to open the door. Way too long. "But, you're kind. I saw that, I saw you at the amphitheater, I know that much about you."
He broods. "Am I?"
Confidence slipping, she feels blood rush to her neck, and knows she must be coloring, pale skin betraying her. "Yes, I know you are."
"Wh...what if you're wrong?" He slips to his feet easily, as if for him gravity were held in abeyance. Three leopard-like paces and his face is centimeters from hers.
Nothing hesitant about the way he moves. Nothing at all.
Romy, trembling, not willing to be intimidated, keeps her eyes on his, "Maybe you should tell me, what? And while you're at it, maybe you could tell me why you're trying so hard to scare me."
He hesitates, stunned, returns to his spot against the wall, slides back down into a crouch. "Am I?"
Encouraged by his reaction, she pushes on, "You know you are. Why?"
"And am I s... s...?"
"Succeeding?" She smiles, looks him in the eye. "You are."
His mouth twitches at the corner, "You're h...honest."
"I see no reason not to be, do you? What is it you're so afraid of?" She rises, hunkers down in front of him, searches his face. "What?"
Eyes closed, he opens his mouth, bull neck straining. "I d..." He strains to say it, vein standing out at his temple.
"You don't what?"
"I don't want to h... to h..."
She understands, but she doesn't believe. "Hurt me? You don't want to hurt me?"
As if ashamed, Willy nods.
Reaching out hesitantly, Romy runs a hand over the bumps on his skull, "What makes you think you would do that?"
Mouth wide, he strains to speak, face pained. "It's all I know. H...how can I resist doing what I was m... m..."
"Made to do? But you already have, I saw you."
"And did you s..." He sucks a lungful of air. "Did you s...?"
"I saw." Romy heard they'd had to airlift the tourist to L.A. with a fractured arm, pelvis, cervical vertebra. They said he would be paralyzed. The thought had both revolted and thrilled her. "You did what you had to, that's all." Romy, conscious of being so close within reach of those deadly arms, deadly hands, reaches out to lift his gross face, hand rasping on his beard. "Look at me, now. Look at me."
He opens his eyes and as quickly, shuts them.
"I said look at me."
As if he fears her more than he had the tourist with the rod, he squints.
Hands on his face, she tells the wonderfully ugly man before her something she has never told anyone. "I'm not afraid of you, Willy, I trust you. Do you hear me? I trust you. I know you won't hurt me. You understand?"
The words strike him as blows. His mouth falls open. His chin trembles. "Y..."
Romy nods, smiling, as her vision blurs, "Yeah, that's right. I see the good inside you. I see it, I do."
He flinches as if she had struck him, turns away.
"Will you come? Will you come be my friend?"
Body taut, face contorted into grotesque mask, jaw clenched, he hides his face in the crook of a massive arm in a violent attempt at control.
Puzzled by his reaction, Romy doubts he has understood. When between his boots droplets spot concrete, she sees she's wrong. "Oh, Willy..." With a hand she reaches out to stroke his head, presses her brow to his. "Will you?"
So slowly she nearly misses it, he turns one hand palm up.
Seeing she has her answer, Romy's heart leaps in her chest. Into this claw, this killing tool, she lays her hand. Now she watches muscles in his forearm work as fingers the girth of her wrist close over her hand with a grip that wouldn't harm a sunning swallowtail.
Her throat constricts. "Oh, Willy."
No longer is she alone.
Karl wakes.
Forcing open gritty eyes, he sees what looks like what might be morning. Carefully, he turns a head that feels as if it may come off.
Not his cubicle. Ten times the size of it. Never seen it before. Every horizontal surface occupied by Bonsai. He can feel he's not alone. Straining his neck, he sees Romy. In a chair by the door she nests, legs folded under her, book cradled in the crook of an arm. Waiting for something. Maybe for him to die.
Revulsion washes over him. Damn her for looking like she does. Damn her for seeing through the problem so easily when he couldn't.
He watches her read, unaware he's awake. He remembers reading her when she slowed his heart on the quay. She read pure, pristine, guileless as a child. Like no woman he's ever touched. Dizzy, head aching, he gives up, presses hands to his eyes. None of it makes any sense.
Looking up, she notices him, closes her book. "So you're back." Slowly, as if she's a little afraid, she comes to stand at the foot of the bed. He can't imagine what she can have to fear from him, but that's the impression she gives. "It took long enough, it's nearly ten. How do you feel?"
Not liking the feeling of her standing over him, he tries again to rise, "If I didn't have to breathe, I'd be fine."
"Don't try to get up. Vincent says you won't be well enough for that for another day at least."
Propping himself on his elbows, he works on focusing his eyes. When he does, he wishes he hadn't. She looks better than he remembers. "Vincent...who's he pitch for?"
Puzzled, she frowns. "Pitch?"
A literal mind. "Who is he?"
"Vincent Vici. You must have heard of him," she says, looking at him as if he'd never heard of milk. "He's the one who went to get Willy, who made sure you were taken care of."
Her voice is like... what? He can't decide. Husky, dark as dusk, it's a voice he wouldn't mind hearing more of. "Willy? what is this, War and Peace?"
"I'm sorry. You don't know Willy, do you? He's waiting outside. I'll introduce you."
"Wait a minute." In Karl's mind something clicks. "The Dr. Vici that was the old man on the lift?"
She nods, "Is there another?"
"No, I mean I don't know.... Look, we've got to talk."
She turns, "Sorry, I don't have time. I just wanted to stay long enough to say thank you for what you did yesterday for Kara and Lia."
Sitting up, he raises open hands, "For who?"
"The two Sisters you forced the tech to help."
Anger rises in him. "And what about what I did for you?"
She shrugs, saying nothing.
"Wait, wait," he says, confused. "If I hadn't done what I did you'd be in pieces now." He holds up two fingers, "Twice now you'd be in pieces. I just about am myself."
She props a hand on her hip, "Maybe next time when someone asks you to mind your own business you will."
Karl can't believe what he's hearing. If he could move he'd think about slapping her. "You're welcome."
She tilts her head, "Oh, I'm supposed to thank you for saving the day, huh? Okay," she says as she moves toward the door, "thanks."
"Wait a minute, come back here."
She frowns in puzzlement,"Why, you don't even know who I am."
"Yeah, Romy, I do."
At the door she stops, turning slowly. "If you're another of my mother's men here to convince me to come away, to testify for her, you won't last any longer than they did."
Karl gets his feet on the floor, pain in his ribs like a dive in an ice water lake. "I'm nobody's man."
"Then what are you?"
He reaches for his clothes. "Somebody who'd rather be somewhere else."
Frowning, she crosses arms across her chest. "Then why stay?"
So far he's doing much better than he'd dare hope. She's still here and they're making noises at each other. "I want to go home, I've got to get you off the plat."
The hint of a smile plays over her eyes as they run over the bandages spanning his chest, behind his ear. "So you're here to protect me?"
"Yeah," he says, knowing how ridiculous it must sound. He's got to get the hell out of this bed. "That's right."
"And who's going to protect you?"
He's got no comeback for that one. He never could argue worth a damn.
Again, she turns for the door, "I've already got all the protection I need."
Gingerly, he slips into his shirt, unsure about how he'll work the pants. "Do you? What about last night?"
From the way her eyes flare he can see he's hit a tender spot.
"Little boys playing with your guns.... You disgust me, you know that? Nobody asked you to interfere, to rush in shooting, killing."
He's not sure he follows."Would you have preferred I hadn't shown up?"
For a minute she says nothing, then she laughs, face serious. "Who sent you?"
"Auri sent me. She's worried about you."
"Forty years too late, let her worry." Eyes the color of deep, clear water narrow suspiciously, "Why me?"
Karl's fed up with her, and he's having a hell of a time doing up his shirt one-handed. "Ask her yourself."
She lays a hand on the door. "I've got to go."
He slips on his trousers. "I'm coming with you."
She laughs as if she finds him amusing in a tired sort of way, as if she's seen too many of his type and no longer takes them seriously. Coming back, she smiles doubtfully, "What you're going to do is get back in bed." She reaches out to press him back, robe opening to expose her neck, and he traps her wrist in his hand.
"Don't," he says. He doesn't read her, now. Somehow he's able to hold back the flow when it's he who does the touching. If he wants he can. Like any callus, this skill of his built up over time with a thousand small hurts. "Don't touch me."
As if she's touched hot iron, she slips from his grasp leaving him not quite sure how she did it. Face shut tight as a door, she steps back, "I understand. You'd be surprised how many people feel that way, but I don't blame them. In their place I'm sure I'd feel the same." She says it as if she's discussing how most people prefer their coffee. She slips into her jacket.
Okay, so he's a jerk. He doesn't want to hurther or anybody. "It's not you." He runs hands over tender ribs, probing painful spots, gauging their depth. "I don't like to be touched, by anybody. It's just the way I am. Been that way a long time. Nothing personal."
"Of course not," she says, face bitter.
She has a way of keeping him off balance. "Look, I mean what I say."
Her face changes as she seems to realize he's telling the truth, "Never? By anyone?"
The question catches him unprepared. He answers with the truth. "Anyone." He wonders why he's telling her things he doesn't tell anyone. Wonders if it's because, not being real, she won't care, won't understand, most of all won't pity.
When she speaks, her eyes seem to see through him, through the wall and out across the sea. "That must be very lonely."
He sees he's wrong about hermaybe about everything.
"I'm late, I've got to go."
Back turned, he struggles with his fly, "Where? You can't go out there. They're not kidding around. Is that what you think, they're kidding? I need to get you back to L.A. where they can protect you until you testify."
"And what makes you think I want to?"
Her answer blindsides him, leaving him sputtering. He'd never considered she might not go along with Auri's plan, might have ideas of her own. Do near-humans have ideas? Zipped, he turns. "You're saying you don't?"
She ignores the question. "I can't leave now."
She's at the door. Desperately, he stalls, moving as he talks, "Why not, why can't you?"
"I have things to do."
He leads her to the bed, sits her down. "Wait here a minute, I'm coming with you."
"No, you're not."
"I thought Sisters were supposed to be great company. All you do is argue."
She looks like she'd like nothing better than to kill him herself. "At half million an hour we are. I wasn't aware you'd paid." She rises. "Anyway, I'm done with that." She moves for the door.
He looks for his gun, doesn't find it. "I need my gun and I'm ready."
She laughs, shaking her head in amusement, "For what, to protect me? You can barely dress yourself."
Moving fast, ribs aching with every step, he cuts her off, "You can wait a minute."
"I said I was in a hurry."
"So wait anyway."
Romy smiles, pokes him lightly in the ribs with a finger. He winces at the unpleasant surprise.
"Lucky for you I don't push people around the way you do, isn't it." She jabs him again, harder this time, pain jolting him. It's a moment before he can breathe.
"Oh..." She coos. "Does that hurt the big tough guy?"
She reaches out and he slaps her hand away, backing, "Knock it off."
Working her way easily around his guard, she prod, taunting, "Why don't you hit me, why don't you shoot me like you shot that man yesterday, huh? Bang, bang goes the big tough guy's big tough gun, isn't that right?"
She reaches out again and he catches her wrist, feeling bones flex under his grip, seeing the pain in her eyes. "Stop it."
Mouth turned up in a bitter smile, face close to his, she whispers. "Oh, yes, that's the way we like it, isn't it? We like hurting don't we? especially women, though I'll bet you're a real tiger with children and dogs, too."
Startled by the voltage, the ugliness of her disdain, he lets her go. Let her think what she will, he won't deny it. Let her hate him, in the end it makes no difference. "I can't let you go alone."
Hand on hips, patience spent, she sighs, "Look, whatever your name is"
"Karl."
"Yeah, okay, fine, I've been up twenty-four hours watching you sleep. And let me tell you, I've had more fun. I'm tired, too tired to play any more." Over his shoulder, she calls out for Willy.
Behind Karl, the door swings wide, and he turns to see. Loose jointed, moving silently as a big cat in high grass, a big man slips through. Irresistible as dew, he moves across the rug to flank Karl. Long arms hanging, he radiates power as a glow tube sheds light.
Karl guesses his mass at maybe one and a quarter kilo, but he's light on his feet, as if his short, thick legs are spring steel. Head capping massive trapezius, his chin leads in a bull neck to a wide chest. Mouth open, guileless, ears like two delicate pink camellias against the stark white flesh of the side of his head. Eyes, small and delicately lashed as a pig's, watch Karl.
Romy reaches out to lay an arm on Willy's shoulder. "Willy would kill you if I asked him to, wouldn't you, Willy?"
The eyes move to her face then back to Karl, not to his eyes, to him, his body, all of him, sizing him, weighing him, gauging pressure points, weaknesses, the best fulcrum from which to break an arm, an ankle, a neck. Karl knows the look. He'd bet his life he would. Hell, yes. In the shake of a lamb's tail.
Willy stands poised on his toes, left leg jumping with nervous energy, on edge, wound tight, ready to spring.
Karl swallows, watching his eyes, feeling naked. He's too close to reach for the .44, even if he had it. He doesn't. Nothing else within reach, nothing, not even a chair, and what good would it do if there were? Willy could take him easilyone kick in the short-ribs, one jab would turn him to jelly.
"But, you see," she says, voice cold, condescending, "I'm not like you. You want to know the truth, I wish you'd never found me last night. If you hadn't, it would all be over now. No one had to die."
Karl doesn't move, knowing that right now, within reach of those hands he's as close to death as he's been in his life. "No one but you."
Romy sighs, exasperated, "You keep saying that like it matters."
Through new eyes, he looks at her, "It doesn't?"
On the way out she turns. "Don't hurt him, just keep him from following me." She looks Karl in the face, "He's a very sick man, Willy. He needs his rest."
Willy nods, slate grey eyes on Karl.
Romy shuts the door behind her.
And now it's just the two of them.
Under Willy's wary eyes, Karl paces.
He's got to get out of here. "Don't like me much, do you, Willy."
Nothing.
What's to lose? He may as well try, see what happens.
Karl heads for the door. Shoulders loose as a wrestler about to make a take-down, Willy blocks his way. Karl goes back to his pacing.
He imagines what it would feel like to be grasped in those arms, cracked ribs grating. He's got to try.
"Okay, Willy, you heard what she said. She doesn't think it matters if she dies. I got to ask you something. Are you more afraid of doing what she's told you not to, or of letting her die?"
Still he says nothing, but his eyes show he's listening. Karl hopes that's a good thing, hopes it sincerely. "I thought so. Okay, then you and I need to talk." Karl realizes how little he knows about this guy. Not knowing how or where to start, he sits. "I've never known anyone like you, or her either and I never thought I would."
Willy nods.
Voilàcommunication. Karl knows what comes next, though he isn't too hot on it. "You think you could get me one of those pain pills she left for me?"
Willy returns with a little blue pill in his hand. Watching his face, Karl dreads touching him. He doesn't want to see life through porcine eyes. What a curse it is, this gift. What a repulsive talentright now one he needs. Reaching out, Karl picks the tablet off his palm and spirals down the maw of a whirlpool.
A chamber with darkened periphery. At the center an alter lit by a shaft of sunlight angling in from a slit in the ceiling to illuminate a sleeping Romy. Face serene, preternaturally lovely, a robe of unbelievably sumptuous indigo velvet drawn primly to her chin, white hands folded like birds over her breast, she sleeps. About her the stone floor lies littered with corpses. At her side stands Willy. Karl makes out someone hiding in shadow beyond reach of the light and recognizes himself.
So, for Little John, here, Romy's the sun and moon. It doesn't surprise him, he's seen it before. Throne rooms, he calls them, places in people's minds where everything they value, everyone they love or hate has its place. This is Willy's. No one else, no other masters, only she, the rest of the world against them, Karl lurking in the gloom. He thinks he understands. Willy hasn't made up his mind yet whether to add him to the bone pile, that's all.
Jerking his hand away, Karl breaks the spell. "Thanks." He downs the pill, rising to search the room for his gun. "As I was saying, you and I are going to be friends."
Broad brow furrowed, Willy watches him from a big easy chair by the door. "W...why's that?"
Karl hesitates at the words, the first he's heard him speak. It's a good question. Considering the way Willy thinks of him, one not easy to answer. He checks the last drawer, still nothing, then ducks into the bathroom and finds it in a wicker hamper. Gun and shoulder rig tightly wrapped with his headset in the bottom under some damp towels. Thank God she didn't get rid of it.
"Why?" Karl says from the bath, "I'll tell you why." Somebody didn't want him to find ithe can guess who. Karl slips into the rig, heavy revolver slapping hard against a broken rib, feels better at once with the weight back under his arm. Checking the cylinder, he finds he's still down one. "Because we want the same thing, that's why."
Pulling one round off a strip under his left arm, he fills it, snaps it shut. Coming out of the john, he finds Willy where he left him. "We both want to keep her alive, don't we?"
Willy nods, a movement so slight he might have missed it. So far he's got him. Now to see if he can keep him.
"Okay, we're together on that, then. You know about the murdered Sisters, right? You know how they died? They were raped, strangled with their own hair, very slowly. It took a long time. Long enough for the blood vessels in their eyes to swell and rupture. Can you imagine what that must be like, dying like that?"
Karl can see he's got him. "Imagine coming up through water, lungs bursting for air, and just as your mouth hits the surface, being jerked back down under. Over and over until finally you stop fighting. They were conscious, they knew what was happening to them, and they knew they were going to die. You want Romy to die that way?" He watches Willy's face. "Do you?"
He doesn't answer. He doesn't have to. Karl can tell by looking he's getting it. "Okay...." He leads him. "Last night they nearly had her. Now, with you and I both here, who's going to make sure they don't do better tonight, huh, who?"
Still Willy is silent. Karl wonders what he thinks, or if he does. Patience evaporating, he gets up to search for his shoes. "Come on Willy, make a decision. I have. I'm laying all my cards on the table. If I ever find my shoes and jacket, I'm going out that door. And though I'd love to wrestle you for it, I don't have time. I don't know how much of this you can follow, but if anything happens to her, I lose everything I've got.
"Now that may happen, but not because I'm sitting here on my ass. Now I know in a fair fight you could tear me in two, but I can't afford to play fair right now." Karl peeks under the bed, "Aha!" He reaches under to pull out his shoes, sits on the edge of the mattress to slip them on. "I know you could tell she doesn't much like me, and, well, I'll tell, you, Willy, I don't much like her either. But I think she needs us right now, don't you?"
Does he see a change somewhere down deep under that slab face? He hopes he's not kidding himself.
"Now," he says, taking out the revolver, "you know about guns, don't you, Willy?"
"I know."
"Good, because no matter how good you are with those hands of yours, this is better. This is a .44 magnumnot the biggest handgun by any means, not the most capacity, not the most accurate. Just an old six shooter, but big enough." He opens the cylinder, pulls out a round, holds it up for Willy to see. "See this? Ice cream cone upside down, right? It's not lead, it's bronze. The shape, well, worst of both worlds, I guess you could say. Penetration on everything but the new vests, and hydrostatic shock like a hollow point."
Willy watches, face blank.
"You following this, Willy? I'm telling you this for a reason. I don't want to kill you. I've never killed a man that didn't deserve to die, and I'll tell you something, I don't think you do." Karl reloads the round, closes the cylinder, lays the revolver on the bed, taps the air with a finger, "You know, Willy, what I'd like to happen, and I know you don't always get that, but what I'd like, is for us to work together. Would you help me?"
Is there enough space between them to allow Karl to shoot before he's on him? A lousy thought, but he hesitates and he's dead.
Slowly, Willy rises, and Karl's hand moves to rest on the gun by his thigh. He doesn't want to kill him, but he will. So help him, he will.
Willy goes to the closet, drags out Karl's jacket, offers it. "We should h...hurry."
Willy leads him out of Sisters Tower and down to the quay, moving in an easy lope as Karl struggles to keep up.
The overlay on Karl's headset shows her in the corporate tower looming above and ahead. "Hold it a minute," Karl says to his back, "Where is she?"
Willy stops, raises an arm to Genesistems Tower. "Vici's."
Musing at Willy's talent for economy of speech, he taps the broad back in front of him. It's like touching a sun-warmed bole. Willy turns, squinting at him with eyes that remind Karl of nothing so much as those of his long-tushed boar back home. "I need to go to my cubicle first to get some things." He gives him the number and Willy leads them along another passage over the sea, then out into the thick of the crowd.
A high, bright fog washes over the platform. Breakfast's cookingcultured eggs and sausage, heavy stench of grease blown down from the kitchens by vents under the grid in hopes of luring the herd. Karl's hungry. Mouth wet, he wonders when he'll get back across to the Derby, hopes it'll be soon.
Girls young and old at the same time line the quay. An almond eyed girl standing two meters in stiletto heels reaches out, catches his sleeve, "How about it?"
Karl pulls away, catching a glimpse of self-loathing so strong it backhands him. He stops, and, thinking she's got a hot one, she cranks up the voltage in her smile. From inside where light and music blast, a stairway leads up to rooms leased by the minute.
"Why?"
"Fifty bucks."
He strains to be heard over the blare.
She's not listening. "Fifty."
"No." He says it again, louder, "Why, I asked. Why?"
She frowns, puzzled, "Why, what, stud?" she says, voice gritty as river sand.
Does she yell herself that way? Does she go out on the quay at three a.m. and scream and scream?
"Why hate your life so much and not change it?"
Face crumbling, she backs away, elbows her way through the crush to squat, back against the wall, face gone blank.
Willy takes his arm, leads him back into the moving press, "Too l...late." He points at an emaciated woman, arms impossibly thin, face hollowed, eyes wounds, "Her in a y...year, come on."
Karl watches her as Willy leads him away. Smiling, mumbling, raising an arm in benediction to empty air, perhaps a princess holding UR court, she fades into the crush.
Old couples here for the shows, the slots. Kids looking for pockets to pick of tokens, selling vials too hot to clear the drug scan. Men here for the girls, the boys. Karl can't take much more of this. He hates crowds, hates their smells, their noise. Most of all hates being jostled and treated to another squalid mind. A boy with a tattooed face kicks out, grazing Karl's shin with a boot. Anger flaring inside him like black powder, Karl turns.
As if on signal, five boys whirl at once, knives cutting air. Nine years old, ten maybe, no more, heads bobbing in time to music only they can hear, eyes seeing him, but more too. They move like one organism, waving their knives in one fluid arc, giving him the come on.
Willy drags him on.
Karl, disgusted as much as he is resentful, lets himself be draggedas if he could resist anyway.
Down to the dark hallway leading to his cubicle. Karl rounds a turn and sees the door ajar. Willy he sets against the wall, by signs motioning him to stay, to watch the hall. Magnum inconsequential in his hand, Karl nudges the door with his toe, and out tears Bink. When he can breathe again, Karl lets him jump up in his arms to nuzzle his ear. From Bink Karl learns there's nothing to be afraid of in the roomnot any more.
Poor Bink, doesn't like it here any more than he does. Too many feet, no moles to dig for, no peafowl to chase, no turf to tear with his nails after a particularly satisfying bowel movement. Karl can't agree moreit stinks.
Halfway open, the door sticks. Karl stalls, trying to think of a smart thing to do. The room may bristle with booby traps, but he needs what's in there. It's all he has. They may or may not have found it. Either way he has to know, has to see.
Karl lets Bink down and before he can catch him he's back inside. Shouldering the door open as far as it will go, he ducks his head around and jerks it back fast, scraping his ear painfully. A Sister lies on his bed facedown unmoving as Bink sniffs her toes. Shoving his way inside, he kicks a fallen cushion out of the way of the door, leaving it open behind him. The room reeks of cheap cologne, not his.
Checks the bathno surprises. Checks the ceilinglooks good, untouched, the hair he slipped between the tile and the frame still there. Up on a chair, he slides down the bag. They may be smart, but they aren't perfect. That's good, because he sure as hell isn't. Now to get away. Far away.
He turns to go out, but instead, stops, sighs, drops the bag, turns to look at her. Though she looks asleep, he doesn't have to touch her to tell she's not dreaming. Flawless legs apart, palms up, hair twisted about her throat, she waits for him. Again he sighs, drops to aching knees. This part he despises. Somehow, prying open the thoughts of the dead seems indecent as grave robbing, but they need to be heard. He's sure about that.
If she has somthing to say, how can he not listen? In a way it's a duty. That's how he thinks of it.
On his knees, dreading what's coming, Karl raises a hand over a bare curve of spine, over skin so white it might be calcite. He closes his eyes, trembling hand poised a centimeter over her. For the hundredth time he envies the normal, curses the gift.
Giftthat's rich.
Well he knows the feel of the deadcolder than it seems skin can be. He covers her with a sheet he finds on the floor and somehow that makes it easier to be so close.
He cocks an ear toward the door as down the hall voices grow louder. Tourists bleary with drug or drink, they pass. Lowering his hand, he hesitates just brushing the fine hair on her back, sending a tingle up his neck. God, she's charged. He can tell. Oh, yeah, there's something waiting for him on the other end, something intense, something he can use, maybe? A name, a face? He wishes he could know.
He swallows, throat dry, snatches his hand away, rubs it against the leg of his pants to dry his palm, makes a fist, looks over his shoulder at the door.
Come on, come on, come on... They'll be here to collect her any minutethey might be zipping up the lift right now. They find him here, he'll have to fight his way out, and that he doesn't want.
He presses his hand flat onto her icy skin and a wall of hate like a wave rolls over him, crashing in his ears. He can't breathe, can't swallow. Slowly, so slowly she's deprived of air, of life, the pain of his sex inside her burning. Karl sags under the force of it.
Bastards, you bastards, I did everything you asked, why, why? You lied to me!
Karl can feel a hand between his teeth, feel his teeth meet through the web between thumb and finger, feel her delight having done it.
Oh, Romy, Romy, I'm sorry, I betrayed you, forgive Sasha...
That's all. Shorter than some, but more intense. It usually is when they have something left to finish, but damn, nothing to nail it. Then he remembers. So, Sasha bit him.That might help. But there it is againor isn't. He got nothing at all secondhand from the creep on her. Weird, damned weird.
He peels his hand away. It comes sticking slightly as if honey had been drizzled over her back. It's always like that when it's intensestatic maybe. He doesn't knowone of many little mysteries. He accepts it. Some day the bright boys at The Skeptical Inquirer can explain it to him.
Sitting back on his heels, hands shaking, drained, he presses his eyes with the heels of his hands. After knowing suffocation so intimately he draws breath deeply, fully, as if he's just surfaced from a dive. He hates this part. Hates hearing the anguish of the dead. Hates the helplessness he feels.
Footsteps, voices approach from the hall. Suddenly Willy's at the door. In time they make it to the safety of the stairwell. Dizzy, onto a cold steel tread he sags, breathing deep of the dead air.
When he can stand, they climb the stairs to the quay.
Now he's in deep. No accident they did her in his cubicle.
Somebody's on to himwho?
First step out on to the quay he's screwed.
Two security officers call his name. No stooges in monkey suits these. Walthers slung, grips within easy reach, they corner them in a cul-de-sac. He thinks about settling things right now, reckons his chances slim and none, decides he'll wait.
Swindlehurst is waiting in his office. They'll be happy to take him.
Sure they will.
Karl flashes his security ID, hoping for a break. He can find his own way. Reluctantly, they agree. Karl takes Willy by an arm and gets him moving while they query the air for further instructions. He doesn't have to go, but then why not? Might learn something.
Willy takes him in through the side entrance as workers, most of whom might be Willy's twinand probably areclear away the mess from the bombing. Some scoop broken glass. Others torch away twisted alloy, sparks spurting through a tangle of hanging fiber optics. Outside, tourists gawk, corralled by a barricade of charged tape.
Around two bends in the walkway, down a side way Willy leads. Here the crowd thins to nothing. At a service entry Willy stops, runs a hand past the black plate on the door frame. It parts. Down a long hall and up ten flights Willy lopes. Karl drags after, duffel weighing heavy in his hand. He wonders if Willy picked the route for spite. From below and behind, he watches his thighs piston effortlessly and hates him either way.
Upstairs, Willy waits outside with the secretary. Doesn't look happy as she holds open the door to Swindlehurst's office. Not used to being around Willy's type, Karl guesses. As he passes he drops the duffel in Willy's lap.
Inside, it's frosty. Swindlehurst quivers, steel rope wound to test, "Security will be arriving any moment now to take you into custody. Medical's expecting you."
This isn't what Karl expected. "What for?"
Swindlehurst leers, shock of yellowish hair falling over one eye. "You cost us three bills in tainted organs the other morning. If it were up to me you'd be dead already." He sneers, "Nothing to say? Funny, neither did the others."
"You knew about them?"
"I look that dumb? Auri's lucky to be alive. She won't be for long."
Panic pricks Karl's neck. If he's telling him this, he won't be either. Sure he's going to die, sure it'll be soon, he's not at all hot on the idea of doing it alone. Karl rises, draws, points the revolver.
Swindlehurst laughs. A filthy sound, it makes Karl want a shower. "It's not me you have to kill, Karl, it's Genesistems."
The .44 Karl keeps aimed at his heart. There's got to be a way out of this. Should he run? Wait for them here? He debates using him as a shield. "You put Sasha in my cubicle?"
Swindlehurst watches him from under drooping eyelids, "I wouldn't worry too much about that, just our legal department working their angle. You won't live to see arrest let alone trial. Twenty-four hours from now, you'll be spread from Tijuana to Tibet. At least you'll repay a fraction of what you cost me. You know that noble stunt you pulled the other day could cost me my bonus, don't you? We can't have that."
Karl wants to run, to get out before he has to pass carbines to do it. He thumbs back the hammer.
"Oh, come on, you're not going to shoot me. You do you'd be a murderer. And you're not, are you." Swindlehurst points at vacant air, "Oh, look at the time, you're wasting what little you have."
Disgusted and more than a little sick, Karl lets down the hammer, puts the gun away, heads for the door, feeling death close around him. At the door he pauses. That smell.
He remembers Sasha reeking of cheap after shave, looks back to see Swindlehurst's left hand hidden in his pocket. "How's the hand?"
Smile genuine as pyrite, Swindlehurst raises his right, turns it in the air, "Fine, why?"
Three strides and Karl has his wrist clamped in his hand. An angry red crescent stretches between thumb and finger. Karl opens his mind and in rushes fear, desperation, confusion. Though he did it, like the other one, Swindlehurst believes he's innocent. Is the urge to kill being passed around like a cold virus? "You did it."
A change comes over Swindlehurst's face. And something Karl's never felt before. His wrist turns to wooddoor slamming on all thought, all feeling. Swindlehurst's eyes change, too. He yanks his hand away, "Get out."
Karl backs for the door. He won't let him live long, now he knows. He'll be lucky to make the quay. It could be anybody, anywhere. He's armed and he's no copthey can gun him down and claim whatever they want. The gun alone makes him guilty. He never should have let himself be pinned down here this long.
He feels again the revulsion in Sasha's mind. He sees Sara smiling, hair tucked behind an ear. He'll never get another chance at this guy. Even if he lives, he'll never be this close again to the one who had her murdered. Can he walk away? Can he do that?
Swindlehurst's voice follows him, "You dumb-cluck, who do you think you're dealing with, some low-life child molester?" At the shock on Karl's face he laughs, "And as for Romy, take her, she's yours."
Karl freezes, for an awful second doubting his sanity. Darkness crowds him as he remembers the words of a man he killed five years before. He makes himself look into his eyes. Darrell looks back. Through a tight, dry throat, Karl says, "Who are you?"
Swindlehurst smiles, and though the face is different, thinner, cleaner, younger, it's the same smilethe smile from the carport. "You don't know me, Karl?"
It's him. It can't be, but it is. He's positive it is. He's looking into the eyes of a dead man. Nerves humming with fear, he wants nothing so much as to be out the door and awayfrom this platform, from L.A., from the thing in front of him. But he's got to know. "What are you?"
"Now, Karl, you wouldn't want me to tell you that, it'd ruin all the fun we're going to have."
The heavy revolver in his hand wavers. He wants to kill this thing, whatever it is, wants to grind it under his heel. But it's true, he's not a murderer. Can you murder the dead? He doesn't know, that or anything. Behind him the door opens.
Willy takes the room in. "T... time to go."
Karl doesn't waste the effort to fight, lets him drag him out. The secretary sits, long legs tightly together, skirt tented over thighs as he goes. How could he have ever found her anything but repulsive?
Swindlehurst follows, "Go on, run, Karl, run, and see how much good it does you!"
Gun still in his fist, he swipes the bag from Willy's grasp, tails him out.
"Tell you what..." Swindlehurst calls after them. "I'll have them take you alive and I'll open you myself. I'd like that."
Karl follows Willy down, dragging at least three floors behind. Willy's boots are a distant clatter on steel treads somewhere below.
Stopping to gather his breath, he sets the bag on a tread, fishes out the 12, clips it under his arm, zips the duffle and starts down.
Thinking with the clarity of a man about to die, he makes a decision. He goes to the shelf he'll make damned sure he has company.
Karl hits the grid, slams out into the glare.
Plenty of it.
Outside, Karl squints in bleached sunlight, wavers, stunned, as his eyes adapt.
Hunkered on thighs, Willy waits, back against the wall as tourists flow past, faces intent on their pleasures. Eyes slits, Bink stands on hind legs overcome with ecstasy, as Willy scratches his jowls. Binkthe mutt who won't let strangers get within a stones throw of him, a pushover for a recom.
Karl looks down at them, big man hunkered on thighs over a dog no bigger than an L.A. rat. "You two get along pretty good."
Willy gives his big head a nod, not looking up, "To Romy, now?"
"Yeah, take me to Romy."
Vici's suite takes up the 60th floor of the tallest tower on the plat. In the lift up, Karl muses. How will he get her to listen? The first time he didn't do so hot. So, let's hear it for second tries.
The lift slows, sending Karl's stomach into his throat. The door slides away and Karl steps out as an alarm screams and five bodyguards raise stubby HKs, bolts clacking home.
"Don't move," the leader says. Then over a shoulder, "Dr. Vici, can you spare a moment?"
The doctor strides into the anteroom to meet them, "Ah, Willy, you've brought our friend, Mr. Latte. You can't keep a good man down, I see," he says to Karl, laughing at his wit. "Please, don't mind the unfriendly reception. Come in."
The muzzles stay where they are. Very jumpy, Karl thinks, maybe very eager to make some noise, prove how alert they are.
"The small one has a weapon."
Not fond of the moniker, Karl raises open hands, trying a friendly smile, not doing too well. "Let's all stay cool, okay?" He's seen the tests done on goats back in the '90's, and has no desire to replicate them. Five streams of 5mm at a thousand rounds per minute from two meters and he'll need a lot of bandaids.
Tension thick as Brie, Karl says, "You let them use those things you'll never get the stain out of the rug."
"Oh?" Vici says to Karl, "We must be careful about that, then." He points to his jacket with a long finger. "Bad boy, eh, what have you got?"
"Not much," Karl says "Want to see?"
"If you wouldn't mind."
"Not a bit." Karl opens his jacket, revealing the short shotgun hanging under his right arm, and the revolver under his left. The hired guns tighten their grips on their carbines.
"Oh, my." Vici finds it funny. "We've got a walking armory here." He runs a finger along the Remington's receiver, pokes it into the stubby barrel. "A shorty, my God, I haven't seen one of these in forty years, and nothing that looked like this puppy." The doctor's eyes move over him. "Why the artillery?"
Not sure what to say, he tries the truth. "I want to live."
Vici sneaks a shrewd smile, "Didn't do much for you night before last, did it?"
Karl shrugs. True enough. "No guarantees in life."
Vici frowns."Why carry antiques, then? Surely there have been some advancements in small arms in the last hundred years."
Karl looks at the five men covering him. There's more to life than results. "Not that I can see."
Vici nods to the leader, "Okay, Eric, I think we can let him keep his toys."
Eric isn't happy. "Dr. Vici"
Vici raises a hand. "It'll be fine, Eric. I trust Mr. Latte." He turns to Karl, fixing him with a gimlet eye. "Am I wrong to do that?"
In the old man's eyes Karl thinks he sees sadness, infinite disappointment, also great intelligence. "No, you're not."
Eric's not convinced, but he backs off as Vici leads him inside. Karl follows, letting a breath go. It's good to have those snouts off him.
"Come in and talk with me, come," Vici says, leading the way into his office, desk and walls chockablock with bound books. From the wall, the immense shaggy head of a buffalo looks down.
"Who's your friend?"
Vici looks up, "Who, Chief Joseph? The last of the North American herd, gone now. He's here to remind me things change."
Karl looks over the stacks of books, "Impressive library."
"I love the damned things. More buffalo is all they are, soon extinct themselves. Can't stand the new ones."
The desk is loaded with teetering stacks of the wafer-flat tablets, screens dark. "You've got enough of them."
"Oh, I read the damned things." He tosses one over the desk, where it responds to the jar, screen glowing, "But only because I have to." From the sagging shelf Vici plucks a paperback, "There's just something about a bookthe heft, the cover art, the grainy, brittle pulp yellowed with time, even the smell."
Karl smiles, hearing his thoughts echoed so precisely. Last of the glut from closing libraries just about gone, books are scarce. Their passing Karl will regret.
"All the new stuff's on tablet, now. Nobody prints anymore. Big publishers gobbled up by media conglomerates and liquidated the year the push for implants began. A few stubborn small houses kept on for another twenty years, but there was no fighting it. Each run a few less copies. Nothing sees print anymore."
Karl feels the old familiar disgust percolate through him, along with a camaraderie with the old man across the desk. "Who wants to bother reading when you can catch the latest UR? Why read the news when you can have it read to you by cleavage with caps?"
"It's easy to see the advantage from the government's point of view," Vici says. "The more people who can't read, the more who depend on its version of the news. Nonreaders can't challenge what they hear on the net."
Bink in his lap, Willy reaches for a tablet, scrolls through.
To Vici, Karl says, "What's he reading?"
"Something on viruses, I think."
"I didn't know he could," Karl says, feeling stupid.
"Read? Why shouldn't he read? He's first generation, same as Romy." He sits, propping slippered feet on the desk.
"But," Karl says, stumbling, "I thought they were made to fight."
"Bodyguards, soldiers, yes, but mostly they are workers. The ones they make nowfifth generationcan't do half of what he can. When I ran things, we didn't suppress intelligence, free will. Even so, among the first generation Willy stands out."
Willy reads, ignoring them, Bink curled up in the crook of one heavy arm.
"Doesn't say much," Karl says.
Vici smiles fondly at Willy. "Most people would benefit by emulating him, don't you think?"
"What is he?"
"Willy? A recombinant, of course, like Romy and the others."
"He doesn't look much like Auri."
"No, no," Vici smiles, purses his lips. "Willy's mother was never born."
"Wait a minute,"Karl says, raising a hand to stop him, glancing at Willy to see if he's listening, relieved to see he's not. "You lost me alreadynever born? What's that supposed to mean?"
"What it says, she was aborted as a fetus."
Sorry he asked, Karl's neck prickles, "Then how..."
Vici smiles condescendingly, "Look, just how much do you know?"
Karl doesn't like being ignorant, but knows enough to admit it when he is. "Not enough to bother you if it got in your eye."
Vici smirks. "A history lesson then. Half a century ago, scientists looked around, saw what they could do and were scared sphincterially constricted. Those with the wisdom to see beyond the next grant raised hell, wrote letters, signed petitions, wrote articles alerting the public to the dangers of man playing with the tinkertoys of life. Most of us, the ones doing the work, saw them as carbuncles on science's ass.
"As Palomar committees met to draft rules for the creation of new life, experimenters with conflicted interests assured scientifically illiterate reporters all was well, that there was no danger, and they bought it, printed it."
Lost, Karl opens his hands, "Why?"
A bit sadly, Vici smiles, "Because when a Nobel laureate like Crick tells a reporter who's failed Chem 1A how the cow ate the cabbage, he either plays parrot or he hits the pavement, that's why. After the seminars, the conferences, the bull sessions, all well-covered by an ignorant media, the National Institute of Health responded to public concern by drafting a set of guidelines.
"What they came down to was this: No new forms of life will be released into the environment without adequate testing."
"And what if they are?"
Vici shakes his head, "Nothing. That's it, just a set of rules no one was expected to follow."
"In other words," Karl says, "it was toothless."
"In other words, the old law applied; If it could be done, it would be done. If there was profit, if there were patents, if there were papers, books, articles in it, then screw the NIH and its impotent protocols, and get on with it. And that's precisely what we did.
"Ah..." He breathes deeply, reminiscing, "it was a hell of a ride. Roe v. Wade provided more fetuses than we could ever use. We salvaged trillions of viable ova. The Human Genome Project cracked the code at the millennium, and with the first patents for living organisms granted nearly three decades earlier, patents for near-humans were only the next logical step. Genesistems was the first to apply.
"At first we had to put up with a lot of bitching from the ACLU, but a seven figure contribution oiled the waters well enough. Soon they were back to insuring everyone's free net access to sadomasochistic torture UR. When the patents for Sisters came through we knew we'd made it. That year Genie was the biggest stock miracle since Microsoft."
"Look, you're going to have to help me out here," Karl says, "I know I'm dense, but I still don't get it about Willie."
Vici rolls his eyes, making a not-so-subtle effort at not losing his patience, "A fetus has all the ova the woman will ever ovulateon average nearly half a million. That's where Willy's ovum came fromaborted fetal tissue. Get it, now?"
Stunned, Karl looks again at the big man seated in the corner. What must that be like? To live your life knowing your grandmother killed your mother before she was born? Watching him, Karl feels something he never thought he wouldempathy for a recom. "Father?"
"Out of nitrogen." Vici shrugs, "Who knows, might have been anybody who donated sperm in the last fifty years. Doesn't narrow it down much, does it? Altered quite a bit anyway. Be right back," he says, going out.
Karl chooses a tablet and the screen glows green with the title: Unscrambling the Code: Bane or Blessing? Frowning, he scrolls down to the introduction. He never liked tablets, but he can use them.
One of the two men to describe the structure of DNA most of a century ago, Francis Crick was neither a biologist, nor a geneticist.
What he is at thirty-one is a loud-mouthed physicist with a mediocre degree, unpublished and unknown. Fresh from the admiralty where he spent the war safe from everything but buzz bombs and Yanks (only three things wrong with Yanks: they're overpaid, oversexed, and over here) designing mines to sink German shipping,
Nothing much in front of him, and damned little behind, he blusters his way into the PhD program at Cambridge in '51, where he meets the other half of the critical mass that will change the world forever.
At Cavendish he runs into Watsona gawky American biologist in his early twenties with an out-of-control mop of red hair disguising a balding pate. When he meets Crick he knows he's found the place he was meant to be.
DNA, they both know, is the prize, the jewel, the key to all that comes after, and from their first meeting they talk. And talk. So much do they talk they are given their own room so they won't bother other experimenters with their chatter. They argue. They build models out of bits of wire, clamps, and tubing. They talk some more.
In '53 Pauling describes the Helical structure of proteins. It's only a matter of time before he cracks the puzzle of DNA. What chance do these two nobodies have against a mind like that?
Rosie from King's gives them X-ray photos of DNA looking like spinning paint wheels at the fair, proving the backbone lies outside the spiral. The outside, not the inside as Watson had hopedon the outside they might fit together any of a hundred ways, and how the hell to know if your diagram is the right one?
While the machine shop dawdles with the tin cut-outs of pyrimidines and purines, Watson feels Pauling's breath hot on his neck. Linus knows more about hydrogen-bonding than anyone else in the world, and neither Watson nor Crick knows bugger-all about chemistry.
Will he beat them to it?
How can he not?
Staying late to test his theory of like-with-like bases, Watson comes up with what he thinks is the pattern, writes a letter saying he has it. An hour after he posts it Donahue tells him he has the wrong forms of thymine and guaninethe enol, not the keto form.
One misplaced hydrogen atom, bonded to oxygen instead of nitrogen makes all the differencethrows the angle of the bond off by a few degrees. He's been trying to solve a jigsaw with all the wrong pieces!
Back to work with scissors and poster board he goes and stumbles onto it. Cytosine paired with guanine, adenine with thymine: now it's obvious why Rosie's chrystalographs showed identical purine and pyrimidine residues. God, it's so simpleone always mates with the other.
The beauty of it staggeringthey form their own template for replication, bonds allowing the pairs to follow in any order. Zipper twisted into a spiral, during replication unzips, teeth a series of blocks and holesround and square. Linus speculated so much twenty years earlier. Each half of the helix must act as a template for its own reproduction, and by each tooth of the zipper, each nucleotide mating only with one possible partneradenine with thymine, cytosine with guanine. A four letter code.
They fiddle with the model, run to the metal shop to get the soldering done and come up with the spiral staircase of sugar and phosphate: the double helix. Though they rack their skulls to see possible errors, they find none. It fits. From America Linus comes.
The world's pre-eminent chemist travels to stand before the model built by two unknowns half his age, comes to see the solution to the problem he's nearly solved and missed, the problem they'd solved by reading and rereading his book on carbon bonding. And with Watson and Crick cringing before the expected devastating assessment of their error, he speaks. "Yes, yes, you have it."
For fear others in France, the US or UK might beat them to it, the article they draft for Nature is unusually brief. Saturday, typists off, Crick's wife, Odile, typed it, sketches them a helix instead of her usual nudes, and off it flies by overnight post.
Characteristically, Crick wants to extrapolate biological implications, but Watson, afraid to say too much lest they be proven wrong, insists they play it safe. Crick, afraid to say too little and be thought too dumb to know what their own work means, slips one sentence in at the end. One carefully wrought line that changes the world and man's place in it forever:
"It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."
One sentence, but enough. Enough to open the door, to point the way. Enough to suggest cracking the code.
If they weren't laughed at, neither were they applauded. Chargaff at Columbia jeers, labeling them scientific clowns. Others say nothing, unimpressed by the two brash unknowns and their theory of hydrogen bonds. Five months later, no longer hesitant, they publish a paper that sews it up. Pauling at Cal Tech, Rosie at King's, Wilkins, Franklin, they beat them all, bringing us one step nearer to creating, to shaping life.
So soon after the Manhattan Project blossomed over Japan with petals of fire, how is it they never stopped to ask themselves what it was they had done?
Scrolling back to the title page, Karl notices the author and is more than surprised.
Vici returns, heavy glasses of ice in his hands. One he sets before Willy.
"You wrote this," Karl says.
He glances at it, hands Karl a glass, "Surprised?"
Noticing the blue ice, Karl lifts it to the light, curious.
"Glacial ice, flown in from Patagonia, takes longer to melt, frozen for millennia." Over it Vici pours something clear. "One of my little luxuries. One has money, one must spend it, mustn't one?"
Karl tastes it gingerly, is relived to find it water. Unimpressed, still he's glad to have good water after the chlorinated sewage he's been drinking for a week.
Vici watches him, "You need something stronger, I can get someone to bring you something. What do you prefer?"
"I'm fine." Karl studies the ice in his glass, not sure how to start. He hasn't met many people of Vici's caliber, finds himself intimidated by the power of the intellect shining behind those tired eyes. "You asked if I were surprised... I guess I am. Not that you wrote it, but by what it said. From what I've read about you, I wouldn't have guessed you felt that way."
Vici raises bushy eyebrows, dropping the corners of his mouth, "I haven't always. You'll find the copyright date fairly recent." He takes up the tablet. "I'll read you my favorite bit. Ah, now, let me find it...here it is." He looks up, "More history, I'm afraid, will it bore you?"
Karl is curious, now. "It may. I'll take the chance."
"All right, then." Vici reads. "At eighty, still at work shaping mankind in his image, Crick looks up, blue eyes sharp under a white bush of brows, to postulate the existence of an area of the brain as the seat of free will. Sure there is no God, he works eagerly to free man from the faith that there is more to us than what can be coded in the helix.
"For an adoring public he pinpoints the anterior cingulate sulcus as the seat of what unenlightened men have for ages believed was a soul." Again he turns milky eyes on Karl. "Follow that?"
Baffled, Karl laughs. "Sure thing."
"Thought not. A sulcus is... you've seen brains..."
"Sure."
"A sulcus is one of the furrows, one of the wrinkles. Cingulate means encircling ridge."
"Got it."
"Good." He continues. "Prometheus Crick will lead them to the tunnel mouth where blares the flame of reason. Laboring tirelessly as Auden's Honeyman, Crick bequeaths us the knowledge to grant government its fondest fantasycontrol over the common mind. No longer are stripped electric wires, truncheons, dental drills the shapers of dissident thought. To posterity Crick delivers subtlety of means."
"You believe that."
"I do now."
Karl debates whether to ask the question that's been bothering him. Watching Vici sprawled, leg over the arm of his chair, he decides. "I know you started Genie forty years ago, what I've always wanted to ask is, why? Why make Willy, Romy, the rest of them?"
"Why?" He chuckles as if it's a stupid question, eyes the eyes of an executioner. "Because we could." Vici smooths wiry hair, hair that springs back erect with the passage of his hand. "The field was wide open in the late nineties, NIH regs a joke. We'd had germ cells in nitrogen for half a centuryno records, parents dead. Who owned them? Nobody. They were property, experimental material, tissue. The moment we won the patents on near-humans we were made men."
Karl's over his head and knows it.
Vici smiles, shaking his head at Karl's stupidity. "The one thing we could not do, the one thing science can never do, is stop. When, in '98, the Japanese came up with a viable method of exogenesis..." He hesitates, remembers who he's talking to, "I'm sorry, gestation outside the womb, we had humans out of the loop. From then on it was smooth running." He smiles, reminiscing, "An exciting time."
Karl listens, watching Vici closely. He wants to remember him, wants never to forget what hubris brought to its ultimate conclusion looks like. "If you had it to do again, would you?"
Vici leans back, waves a hand expansively, "We wanted to create the perfect man, the perfect woman. We wanted to learn what it is to be human, who and what we are."
"Please," Karl says, tossing the tablet onto the desk where it caroms off a stack of books, "spare me the flim flam nobility, the shtick about the tireless search for truth. You wanted to make a buck and you did, and to hell with the consequences, especially for Romy, for Willy."
Vici gives him a smug smile, "You have any idea of my net worth?"
With an effort, Karl keeps the repugnance he feels off his face. He's sure he'll tell him.
"One hundred trillion dollars."
Karl remains unimpressed. Once the numbers get that high, what do they mean, really? "You haven't answered me."
Vici glares, "About what?"
Karl knows he hasn't forgotten, but asks anyway."Would you do it again?"
All levity gone out of his face, Vici looks hard at him. "I was young, enthusiastic. This wasn't the way I wanted it to be. Not this way. Do you realize, that if you hadn't gone after her last night, if you hadn't run into me, like you did, Romy would be gone? Do you?"
He says it as if the thought terrifies him. This surprises Karl. Why should he care so much for one of a thousand?
"The murders keep on and no one does anything. Why is that, do you suppose? I'll tell you why. Because every time one of them dies, Genie makes 1.5 billion."
He picks up a tablet, shakes it under Karl's nose. "And what does security say about them?" Viciously, he hurls it into a corner where it bounces off the wall undamaged. "They say the crimes aren't related. Like hell they're not!"
With an effort, Vici calms himself. "Would I do it againno." He rises, leads the way outside onto the roof. Karl adjusts the shotgun, uncomfortable against his ribs, following him out.
Vici points, "Slightly illegal, isn't it?"
"Very."
Vici nods, "Ah, yes, now we must hire our guns if we would be safe. By the way, I should apologize for Eric. I wouldn't have them here at all, but for Romy. I have nothing to fear from Genesistems. My block of stock is held in trust for The Army of God." Seeing Karl's confusion, he explains. "A group believing Genesistems is the work of the devil. They'd love to be able to get into the stockholders' meetings and vote a block of shares the size of mine. They used to believe I was the Antichrist, though I'm sure they're over that now. I die, they get my shares and the votes that go with them. Ironic don't you think, my sworn enemies my life assurance policy?"
Willy follows them out into the wind.
Vici breathes deeply. "There, that's better. No, Swindlehurst and the rest aren't too fond of me, but even I'm preferable to them." Vici looks at him. "You like wind?"
Karl scents the chemical tang on the air and again feels a pang for the cape. "Where I come from there's a lot of it. Thanks for wrapping my ribs last night."
"Me, oh, no, Romy did that. Trained her myself. Body like yours, you'll be mended in a few weeks." He paces the railing, waves of windblown mist breaking over them. "What I would like you to tell me is who you are."
Taken by surprise, Karl says nothing.
"Come on," Vici says, prompting. "I've seen the load of crap that comes on your chip." He smiles, a white-headed troll. "Don't believe a word of it." His eyes lock on Karl's, and the smile is gone. "Who the hell are you and why'd you take the chance you did last night?"
Karl considers, sees no reason not to level. "Used to work for an agency under DOJ auspices."
"Ah, G-man."
"No more."
"Freelance, then?"
Karl shakes his head, no. "Farmer, I raise apples, lambs, pigs, in a place you never heard of."
"Retired?"
"Quit."
"Lambs...." Vici frowns, "What's a farmer doing on this stilted Hades?"
"Auri sent me."
When he hears this, Vici begins to smile, then he laughs long and hard, finally looking thoughtfully up at Karl. "Auri, I might have guessed." His eyes narrow as he seems to think of something. "And did you have anything to do with her surviving that ugliness last week?"
"Not much."
"No, I'll bet not," he laughs down deep in his throat. "Ah, what a woman she was," he says, raising his eyes to a bank of dark cloud moving inland over their heads. "Did she tell you that she and I..."
Karl shakes his head no.
"Not that she would remember me. I was hardly anyone for a woman like her to remember. But she was incredible. Romy's got her mother's looks. And her brains." He watches Karl, speculatively. "She must have something pretty strong on you to bring you out here away from your little lambs, eh?"
Karl doesn't answer.
"Enough to get you to go after those men with your heart ready to burst through your rib cage. Must be something you value pretty highly." He shrugs, not seeming to care that Karl doesn't respond. "It's all right if you prefer not to say. She has dirt on everyone, gets anything she wants in Washington with a crook of her finger. My guess is she learned a few things from that fiasco at La Crillónhas a few vids of her own, now."
Impatient, Karl interrupts, "Romy, is she here?"
"Romy?" A sly smile snakes its way across Vici's face. "Find her interesting, do you?"
"Very," Karl says, irritated. "Can I see her?"
"She's spent the last twenty-four hours sitting up with you. She's showering." Vici smiles, motions, "Of course if you can't wait she's back there, feel free."
Something about the way he says it turns Karl's stomach. "I can wait."
Vici reaches out, not quite touching his chest, "How is your heart, by the way?"
"Better..." He hesitates, not sure he wants to go on.
Vici watches him, barely concealing a smirk. "What?"
"She put her hands on me." Not easy to talk about, but it's driving him nuts and he's got to know. "On my heart..."
"And you stopped fibrillating." Vici says, prompting.
"How'd she do it?"
Vici leans over the rail, face haggard. He nods, breathes deeply, slowly. "Forty years ago I was young, I had a name to make. It was my idea to buy ova from Auri and the others. Oh, we had all we wanted or could ever use already, but I thought the publicity would be good. I was right.
"They turned out more beautiful than any of their mothers. But beauty wouldn't be enough. If we wanted the patent, and we had to have it, we had to think of some way to change their genotype, their genetic blueprint, without giving them three toes, or say, programming in susceptibility to cancer."
Karl can see he's having trouble going on.
"So, we added things." He looks hard at Karl, leaning close. "Don't misunderstand me, I've done many things in my life I'm ashamed of, foolish things, but my daughters I don't regret. How could I regret them? I can't, I don't."
Karl looks more closely, wondering if he heard him right."Your daughters?"
Vici looks over to see Willy across the roof. They are alone. "No one knows that but you, Auri, Romy. Call it the egotism of an awkward young man, if you will, but yes, I'm their father."
"All of them, but..." He must have misunderstood. "Aren't there over a thousand?"
"There were."
"And, now?"
"Fifty-two."
"Jesus," Karl says, breathing it, seeing the resemblance of them both in Romy.
"Things have gotten very ugly. Auri, she's doing what she thinks she should, though I've tried to dissuade her. The suit, it was too much, too quickly. I would have found a way. I pleaded for just a few more years, but no, she had to push it, her and her murder of lawyers.
"Auri's got too much money to play with, is the problem, too much time on her hands. And with public sentiment the way it is, even Genie couldn't fight it. I told her what might happen, but she forced the issue, panicked them."
"Them," Karl says, struggling to follow, "who, Swindlehurst?"
"God, no, he's nothing, I'm talking about the board, the major stockholders, the dozen or so men and women who really run Genie."
"You know who they are?"
Vici shakes his head, "Who can tell the shills from the players, I can't. She forced them into a corner. Maybe she thought they would just take the loss of 1.5 trill in profits from organ and tissue sales, I don't know. If she did, she was wrong."
Getting more and more confused, Karl interrupts, "But the last I heard they were breeding pigs with human genes for that, raising clones for transplantation tissue."
Vici silences him with an arrogant wave of a bony hand, "No, no, the pig thing went the way of baboons, rejection rate way too high. They couldn't get it down. I for one was glad when they shut them down. They had the poor dumb things in metal cages stacked five high in warehouses, cages so small the poor bastards couldn't even turn around. I think stress was a factor, but it doesn't matter, they're long since bacon.
"The clone thing, the worry we'd breed brainless children as a pool of compatible donorsjust a pipe dream, a sci-fi conceit from the last century. All the hubbub about cloning mammals, condemnations by the pope, hand wringing by ethicists," he blows air, "A joke, as if they could stop anything with regs. UK banned cloning of mammals in '97. Did it stop? No. What stopped it was economicsthere were more profitable ways to do it, that's all."
"Then Sisters were created primarily as organ donors?" Karl says, trying to draw him back on track.
Again Vici looks at him, disdainful of his ignorance. "Haven't you been listening? I told you, we made themI made them to do what random mating has never donecreate the perfect woman. But we did more, much more. We gave them the scent of orchids, the talents of electric fish, the ability to regenerate lost appendages the way lizards regrow tails. We slipped a little something in the intronsyou know, the 95 percent of the genotype we used to think was junk. Of course we know more, now, but then.... We thought introns were deadwood, leftover code from a million years of evolution, genetic buggy whips.
"We elbowed our way into them using enzymes and bacteriophage, substituting snippets of what we wanted. Just dumb luck we did no harm. That was how we beat the resistance of the patent office. It was our coup. It got us out of the garage. It made us rich."
Too much, too fast. "So what," Karl says, appalled, not wanting to believe, "Romy's part eel, part lizard?"
"Nonono.... What, you sleep through genetics? Not part anything, she's human, but...she does have the ability to generate a field of 600 volts at one ampere for, say, a thirtieth of a second or so. A Microscopic differentiation in a percentage of the muscles in her thighs, that's what she used on you."
"How did she know...." Karl's not sure how to put this.
"To use it?" Vici smiles. "She's not stupid. She's read most of my medical books. Romy's retention is magnificent. And you were hardly a difficult diagnosis. Demonstrated any more symptoms and you'd have been in arrest."
Karl struggles to understand, "Genie's already killed most of them for their organs, that's what you're saying, isn't it?"
"China's been dealing in organs for forty years. At first only political prisoners, about five thousand a year at the end of the century. Back then kidneys went for 100,000. Now they're a thousand times that. A heart? five times that, livers the same. Demand's up, the market responds. But what's sweet, as patented non-humans, their organs fly right by the law banning the interstate transport of human organs for sale." Vici stabs the air with a finger, "That's what brought Mainland China in."
"Why? They have more people than they could ever use."
Smiling smugly, Vici says, "AIDS, drug addiction, Herpes, the hepatitis alphabetthe world's elite want more for their money. They want organs untainted by disease or drugs and they're willing to pay for them. Sisters were the answer."
"In two days they'll be free. Until then, I've got all that are left staying here with me. All that Romy and I can convince to come, anyway." Vici turns his face out to sea, expression bitter, "Not all would listen."
This Karl can't believe. "They prefer to die?"
Sighing as if he's talking to a moron, Vici explains."They have lived thirty years believing Genie would take care of them. When the Chinese took us over, they got the best psychologists they could find to do the conditioning. They weeded out any that caused trouble, questioned too much. I raised hell, though by then I'd lost control. I was told they were being sent to the mainland for behavioral studies. Like a fool, I believedmaybe because I wanted to. In fact they were taken for organs, sold to rich Americans under Most Favored Nation trading status."
Karl finds himself appalled by the picture of a young Romy led away to be murdered.
"I didn't know it for years. When I found out, I signed over my interests to the Army of God, then began to throw my weight around a bit. When, as a teenager, Romy got into trouble, I took her under my wing, kept her out of their hands. All of which brings me back to my question. Why are you here?"
Again Karl goes with the truth. "To get her out alive."
Vici seems to find this funny. "She won't go, you know, not without the others." He shakes his head, emphatic, "No, never without them. You've got to try and understand. They're her family, her friends, her lovers. They're all she has, and they're not leaving yet."
Karl sighs, fighting back a rising sense of desperation. "Then when?"
"Two days, when they turn thirty, that's what we're waiting for. To take them away before that would make me guilty of grand theft."
"And until then?"
Vici doesn't seem to understand. "Until then we wait."
"And you don't think that seventy-five billion dollars waiting around here are going to tempt anybody to do anything ill-considered, maybe get rough?"
Vici flashes an arrogant smile. Karl can easily picture him as the man who created a thousand daughters with the eggs of the lovliest women alive. "They wouldn't dare, I told you"
"Yeah, you told me." Karl says, unconvinced.
"Those men you saw by the lift, there are four more like them, people out of San Diego, Auri sent them, the best."
Somewhere deep in the well of Karl's mind a pebble drops.
"Oh, yes," Vici says, "we're safe here as anywhere in the world." Exactly Karl's point. He remembers the men he stepped over in Auri's lobby, remembers how close he'd come. "Thank the Lord for that."
For a moment Vici's eyes fill with doubt. "You think I should worry?"
Karl thinks it over, shakes his head, "I wouldn't," he says, but he is. Very worried.
Just then, Romy ambles out on the roof with a Sister Karl doesn't recognize. They hold hands, not like lovers, like sisters. She sees Karl, whirls, "Willy, I told you not to let him follow me!"
Bink slides between the big man's boots, alarmed by the tone of her voice. Willy hangs his head, looking like Bink when Karl catches him sucking eggs.
Romy turns on Karl. "What did you do," she says, voice rising, "beat him up?" She lifts Willy's chin with a small hand to look into pig eyes. "Did he hurt you, Willy?"
Amazed, Karl watches. Can she be serious? Who does she think he is, Superman?
"No," Willy says, voice low, ashamed.
"Then, why is he here?"
Karl's had enough. "Oh, quit it, for Christ's sake, will you? He came because I beat him into submission, okay? Now lay off, you're scaring the dog."
She ran her hand over the stubbled dome of Willy's head, looking hard at Karl. "It's okay, Willy, I'm sorry I yelled. It's all right, I'm not mad.
Willy looks up, face a mask of guilt. "He said you were in d..."
"In danger, of course he did." Her eyes flash at Karl as she comforts him. She turns on Vici, "And why did you let him in?"
Vici seems puzzled, even entertained by the question. "I saw no reason not to. After last night I think we can trust him, don't you? It seems to me you might even be just a wee bit grateful to him for saving your life, first in the lobby, then again out on the quay. Am I being unreasonable?"
Her mouth curves up into a cruel imitation of a smile, "Oh, yes, that was impressive, wasn't it, a rare demonstration of prowess." She sneers. "If you hadn't brought Willy, how much would he have helped?"
Vici looks embarrassed. "I don't think that's fair, do you, Romy?"
She leaves the flame-haired Sister who Karl notices is really quite lovely in a fine-boned, Irish way. Romy moves close, "And you know who asked him to come out here, did he tell you? Auri, that's who."
"He's okay," Vici says.
She nearly spits. "Why? because you can tell by the look of his face? What is it, a man thing? Something about the way he pushes people around, the way he kills?" She reaches out, unzips his jacket, throws it open, "Or maybe his big gun, huh, that it? Oh, that's great, let's all get down and kiss his feet, why don't we?"
Bink rushes forward, bounding into Karl's arms, trembling.
She holds out an arm, laughs, "And what is it with this dog? He's a traveling circus!"
Willy surprises Karl by interposing his bulk between them, raising a huge hand to comfort the dog in his arms. "No, Romy," Willy says, in gentle reproach. "Don't scare B..."
Bink surprises Karl by kicking his way into the big man's arms and under his hot green jacket, leaving only a freckled snout exposed as Willy hunches round shoulders protectively.
Stomach churning, Karl's having trouble keeping his face impassive. He doesn't know why he should care what she says, but he does. He's very close to walking out the door, telling Auri she can stuff the whole thing.
"Romy," Vici says, reproving, "this isn't like you. Mr. Latte is a guest in my home." Vici takes her elbow, ushering her and the redhead inside. "Ah, Lena, I'm glad Romy could convince you to join us. Come in where it's warm and we'll talk." Over a shoulder he says to Karl, "I'm sorry about the scene, Karl, it won't happen again. You will join us for dinner?" Not waiting for a response, Vici disappears inside.
Willy paces the railing at the edge of the roof, cooing softly to Bink. Curious, Karl reaches out to clamp a hand on Willy's shoulder and finds it hard as a boar pig's. "What do you weigh, Willy?"
"One-fifty three."
That would make him almost twice Karl's mass. He swallows, thankful he didn't have to try to stop him from two meters with only a .44 magnum.
Willy's face is troubled as he looks up, "She wasn't f...fair."
Karl tries not to smile. What do you say when a man who came a breath from snapping your neck shows concern for your feelings?
"I can take it. Now, listen, I've got to go out for a while. Watch her for me?"
He nods, head, shoulders, chest, all as one. "Go. Bink and Romy...." He gives a thumbs up. "Okay with m...me." Face serious as a car wreck, Willy waves him over, pulling open his jacket with a finger thick as Braunschweiger. "He's s...sleeping already, s...see?"
Karl peeks into the dark cavern formed under his arm, and sees it's true. He thinks of something, calls him back as he turns to resume his pacing. "You know how to use a gun?"
"No," he says, frowning in disapproval, rubbery mouth pursed, "no guns."
Watching him return to his pacing, cradling Bink in arms that the night before had swung men through the air like bullroarers, Karl sees he has underestimated the complexity of the man. As he goes inside on his way out, he wonders how much more of Willy he has yet to plumb.
The hired guns at the elevator stare vacantly as he passes. Curious, he backtracks to pass a hand in front of Eric's face, snapping his fingers twice before he comes alive enough to grunt, "Yeah, yeah, I see you," and is gone again.
Disgusted, Karl heads downstairs. This is security?
It's good Vici's given Genie a reason not to hit him. With these guys on the job it had better be a good one.
A hundred billion dollar one.