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CHAPTER SEVEN


Florence was a shock, Gwen decided. Mainly because so much was the same. The Eurasian War of her 1940s had killed a tenth of humankind and left most of northern Europe beaten flat, to be rebuilt in the conquerors fashion. Italy had been overrun swiftly and with minimal combat, though. Her grandparents had settled in the country near here in 1946; her human mother was born there in 1954. Gwen had been cloned and implanted in a clinic in Florence, in the 1970s.

“Not far from right . . . here,” she mused, shouldering through the crowds.

Still the same low sienna-colored skyline of tile roofs. The white-ribbed red dome of the Cathedral, with Giotto’s bell tower; still a church, here. The Palazzo Vecchio, not a Security Directorate regional headquarters, here. The same narrow streets. And yet everything so different from the city of her youth. Hotter, crowded. Far too many of the absurd stinking ground vehicles; they were monstrosities even in the Americas, insane in this medieval street pattern. Noisy, gabbling, stinking feral humans everywhere, invading her sphere of social space, refusing to give way, some of them even daring to touch her. At first it was all she could to not to lash out, forcing her mind to clamp down on her glands. The air was better than New York’s, but that was all you could say for it.

“I don’t like what they’ve done with my home,” she whispered subvocally

That was illogical; the Domination’s District of Tuscany had never existed here. The Ingolfsson plantation was a village called Radda, and had never known her family’s footsteps. In fact, the Ingolfsson who’d founded the line had probably died in Iceland in 1784, rather than arriving in the proto-Domination as a refugee settler.

This mockery of her birthplace still put a subliminal growl in her throat. It might have been better to meet the scientist in Berlin.

No point in delaying. The Locanda Scoti was a moderately good pensioni not far from the Duomo, marked only by a plaque marked P. Scoti, right across from the Strozzi Palace. Inside was dark and quiet, the furnishings mostly eighteenth century. The staff looked at her with suspicion—she was in hiker’s gear, and holding a knapsack—but she ignored them and took the stairs with a quick springy stride.

“Herr Doktor Mueller?” she said, knocking at the door.

There was a single human male inside: middle-aged and not too healthy, she could tell that from the scent and the sounds of breathing and heartbeat. Also the smell of alcohol, some potato distillate.

“Frau Ingolfsson?”

“Ja.”

She’d picked up modern German in preparation. It was easier than adjusting to this history’s version of Italian, fewer childhood memories to overwrite.

The door opened a crack. She pushed it wider, gently but irresistibly, and walked in. The man closed it hastily; within was dark, far too dark to be comfortable for human-norm vision. Papers were scattered over a table, and the bottle of . . . schnapps, the label said. She picked it up and drank down six or seven solid swallows. Not bad, if you wanted colorless, tasteless alcohol distilled from root vegetables. Gwen twitched the curtains open. Friedrich Mueller threw a hand up. She waited until the human had stopped blinking and squinting, then squeezed her hand. The thick glass broke with a spatter of liquid and fragments. Then she held the hand before his face.

The German watched silently, blinking, as the cuts closed and blood clotted with inhuman speed. Then she gripped his wrist, put her other hand on his shoulder and lifted, lifted until he was clear of the floor, waited for an instant and then set him down again. After a moment he slumped into a chair and stared at her, cleaning his glasses on his tie and staring at her. She could hear his heart leap, then steady a little erratically.

“I hope you’re satisfied,” she said. “I could tie that poker in knots, if you wish.”

“No,” he said slowly. His hand reached for the spot the bottle had occupied, then sank down. “I . . . I was fully convinced by the, the documents and so forth. Impossible to doubt such sums of money as well, and the papers were convincing . . . but this, this is a bit of a shock to me still, you will understand.”

Odd creatures, humans, she thought once again. To believe, and yet not believe.

“I understand completely,” she said soothingly, sitting down across the table from him.

“Another world,” he whispered, taking up some of the papers. Among them was X-ray film.

Dr. Friedrich Mueller looked at the transparency. His hands shook and his face shone with lust; not for the woman across the table from him, but for what the film represented.

“These bones . . . they look as if they have flanges on them,” he said.

“That’s effectively what they are,” Gwen said.

“Muscle attachments, I suppose,” Mueller mumbled to himself. “Very broad area of attachment . . . but wouldn’t the leverage be too much structurally?”

“The bone density is higher, as well as being stronger per unit of weight,” Gwen said. “That’s one reason I’m heavier. Also the muscle tissue itself is different, more fibers; the hemoglobin has a higher oxygen-transport capacity.”

“It would have to, even with the added capacity from the larger heart and lungs.” He nodded, and shuffled through the stack. “This organ, below the lungs, what is it?”

“Auxiliary heart, on standby unless the main is damaged. It keeps the circulation going on a minimal level until the primary organ regenerates.”

“Full regeneration?” The German scientist’s eyebrows rose. “Of an entire organ?”

“Limbs, organs, nerve and bone,” Gwen said cheerfully. “Let’s get something better than that swill you were drinking.”

She picked up the phone. “A bottle of white and a selection of antipasti, please. That’ll be cash.” They fell silent until the maid had brought it.

“Regenerate unless I’m killed instantly,” Gwen went on. “Blowing off enough of my body-mass would do that, or destroying enough of the brain, or cutting my throat back to the neckbone, something of that order.”

He nodded again, reverently, and returned to his study of the transparencies. “Some of this hardly looks like biological systems at all,” he said. “This webbing under the subcutaneous layer . . .”

“That’s armor,” Gwen said. “It’s grown there as single-molecule chains of organo-metallic compounds by a . . . call it a synthetic virus. Damned uncomfortable, while it’s being done. There are a number of, hmmm, we call them biomods, done that way.”

The German looked up. “Logical,” he said. “I should think a good deal of your technology works so, at a molecular-mechanical level.”

“Or atomic. Down there, there isn’t all that much distinction between a machine and an organism,” she said. “It’s all chemistry if you get small enough. Or even physics.”

He laid his hands on the table and looked at them. “I have spent my entire life in futility, it would seem,” he sighed.

“Scarcely,” Gwen said with a chuckle, picking an olive out of a bowl. She savored the rich salt-oil taste, crunching the pit for the extra trace of bitterness. Then she went on: “You could scarcely know someone with my database was going to show up. For that matter, your species is more scientifically creative than mine.”

Mueller looked up sharply. “How so?”

“We modified ourselves neurologically before we fully understood the brain-mind interface,” she said. “For that matter, we don’t fully understand it yet. Drakensis seem to have less capacity for . . . intuitive leaps than you do, although we’ve got more g-factor intelligence. Perhaps we oversimplified while trying to eliminate some redundancies.”

Mueller frowned. “I am surprised. I would have expected the neural functions to be a thoroughly solved problem—have you not true artificial intelligences?”

“Only by virtually copying brains; and then what you get is a brain in a box, and it’s easier to breed them—we can use direct data-transfer with our own minds anyway if we need to link to machinery. In any case, it turns out to be impossible to be significantly more intelligent than the upper curve of the human range.”

Mueller rubbed his fingers together. “You cannot increase the computational functions?”

“Yes, but that’s irrelevant. You people here are still thinking of brains as organic computers made of neurons, and that’s far too coarse a level of metaphor. For one thing, neurons turn out to be only signaling devices. The real information processing in the brain takes place in smaller structures you’re just beginning to discover, and at a quantum level. It’s non-algorithmic as well. In your terms, the brain isn’t a Turing machine.”

She extended a hand. “Do we have an agreement, then, Doctor Mueller?”

He took it in his. He was an ugly specimen, flabby and pale and sour-smelling, but the look of worship on his face made it almost agreeable.

“How could I not, and pass up a chance at such information?” he said. “The only thing which puzzles me is why you need the services of . . . of a witch-doctor like me.”

“What you know isn’t wrong, just incomplete,” Gwen explained. She crunched a few more olives. “And you will be invaluable integrating my knowledge inconspicuously with the current technostructure here.”

“For a while,” the German said, his lips tightening.

“The current order hasn’t, ah, fully utilized your talents, I know,” Gwen said.

Red spots appeared on Mueller’s cheeks. “I have been hounded—persecuted—myself and my family . . .” He controlled his breathing.

He’d also been quite important in the scientific bureaucracy before the fall of the East German state. Afterward, trial and unemployment, and an abrupt drop in status and income.

“You’ll have nothing to complain of in my service,” Gwen said.

“Yes, I would not expect the vulgarity, the penny-pinching of capitalists from a world so advanced.”

“Well, we’re certainly not capitalistic,” Gwen said with a slight smile. “We’re not exactly true communism either, you understand.”

Mueller shrugged and cleaned his glasses again. “That particular faith I have lost some years ago,” he said. “A stable order that appreciates my capacities and rewards me fairly, that is all I ask.”

“You can expect that,” Gwen said sincerely. “You can relocate immediately?”

“As soon as I arrange certain matters with my family,” he replied.

Gwen nodded. “There’s a house ready and waiting,” she said.

“I can hardly wait to begin work,” Mueller said, looking down at the sheets of transparent plastic. “The possibilities!”

Gwen looked out over the world.

“Exactly.”


# # #


Alice Wayne sat in the waiting room and tried not to shift nervously. After a moment she stood and looked at herself again in the mirror. Nice sensible business suit, blond hair caught back with a clasp. Very light makeup. Emphasize the fresh-faced look, which her Anglo-Irish genes did anyway; you had to play the hand you were dealt. She looked a little younger than twenty-five, which was unfortunate but what could you do? It was the curse of a snub nose and freckles. Practice a level-eyed look, friendly but businesslike.

She looked around the room; expensive offices, in the best part of Nassau. Leather furniture, and a window overlooking Delancy Street; not quite the center of town, but close. A faint ozone tang of computers, although the only one in sight had been on the receptionist’s desk. The waiting room had a long table and prints on the wall, a few discreet magazines in a hardwood rack.

Was it worth the bother of answering the ad? she thought. Then: I’m not going back to Sydney with my tail between my legs. Not yet.

“Miss Wayne?” the receptionist asked. She had a Latin American accent. Alice jumped slightly. “This way. They’ll see you now.”

Alice picked up her attaché case and followed her into another room. This one had windows giving onto a balcony, and a working desk in one corner with terminal and all the trimmings. A woman and a man were waiting for her behind a table, with a seat for her on the other side.

The quasi-famous Gwendolyn Ingolfsson. She looked younger than Alice expected, no more than thirty, although she had the sort of sculpted face that is called ageless and does look much the same between the twenties and late middle age. Natural redhead, naturally slim, filthy rich, Alice thought. The sort you hope is a bitch so you won’t feel guilty hating her. Something a little disturbing about the face, foxlike or catlike.

Gwen smiled slightly, an odd closed curve of the lips. Alice had the sudden feeling that the green eyes were looking right through her, and felt herself flush. Another drawback to having ancestors from a small foggy island where pink skins were an advantage.

Tom Cairstens. Lawyer, with California written all over him. Casual suit, outdoors tan, not quite as smooth-looking as you’d expect, an undertone of seriousness. Quite ducky, actually. Not bad at all.

“Thank you, Dolores. Would you like coffee or tea, Ms. Wayne?” the American asked.

“No thank you.” Damn. She could tell when a man was impressed with her looks, and he wasn’t. Pity if he’s queer. Why were so many of the best-looking men gay?

“Well.” He opened a folder; Alice recognized her resume, and swallowed dryly. “First—”

The inquisition was relentless. Cairstens did the talking; the owner of IngolfTech sat silent, sipping fruit juice through a straw. When the lawyer was finished, Alice could feel herself sweating. She looked up, startled to see how far the shadows had moved.

Cairstens looked at his employer. “Seems suitable,” he said. “Of course, so do many of the others.”

“I’ll take it from here, Tom,” she said softly. Her voice was a husky purr, not quite like anything Alice had heard before, accented in a way she couldn’t place.

“Now, Ms. Wayne,” she said, when the man had left. “Let me summarize. You’ve got a two-year course in business accounting and administration from a not-very-distinguished institution in Australia. Moderate competence with financial software. Undergraduate degree in life sciences. You moved to Houston, and met—became intimate with—one Carlos Menem. He ran a, shall we say, irregular but profitable air-freight business in which you acted as his assistant and accountant. He had a disagreement with some gentlemen from Cali, Colombia. They repossessed the assets after Mr. Menem’s . . . departure. Your green card for the U.S. is no longer valid, your work permit for the Bahamas is running out, and you have no money. Am I correct? Please be frank.”

Alice nodded, gripping the arms of her chair and struggling to keep the fear from her face. Is this it? No, the Cali boys weren’t so indirect. If they wanted her dead, they’d have given her what Carlos got, three bullets in the back of the head. She’d found him slumped over his desk . . .

“Yes,” she said.

“Good. Now, IngolfTech has incorporated here in the Bahamas because the taxes are low and the government . . . not inquisitive about cash flows. You understand?”

“Perfectly, ma’am.”

And they want someone who won’t talk. It wasn’t the sort of job qualification she’d dreamed about back when she was a student, but if it worked, she wouldn’t object. Also someone without local family or ties. Bloody hell. She might never get an honest job again. On the other hand, honest jobs didn’t pay very well.

“I need several executive assistants—not glorified secretaries, real assistants. The workload will be brutal and the holidays nonexistent.”

Alice nodded, putting an eager smile on her face. That was about par for the course, in a startup firm. Laziness had never been one of her faults.

“We’d take care of the work permit and start you at fifty thousand a year, American—after taxes, deposited where you please. Plus a stock option that ought to be worth considerably more, in time. Full medical coverage, housing and car provided.”

Alice choked and coughed to cover it. Fifty thousand! After taxes! Stock option!

“Who do I have to kill?” she blurted. Then, horrified: “I mean—” For that sort of money, I would kill somebody! I think.

For the first time, Gwen smiled. She rested her elbows on the table and her chin on linked fingers. “I like your attitude,” she said cheerfully. “Now—”


# # #


Gwen raised the ankles higher, holding the legs slightly apart so they wouldn’t be bruised in the struggle. The dark water frothed, clear enough to her but ink-black to a human beneath the moonless sky. Chest-deep in the sea there was no way for the one held this way to bend enough to get their mouth out of the water. The flailing weight rocked her a little, and she dug her toes into the coarse gritty sand; she was more than strong enough to hold, but she weighed less than two hundred pounds, only a little more than her victim. The struggles slowed, ceased. She held on for a minute longer to be sure, then let the legs fall. The body began to sink, lungs filled with water; she pushed it outward, with the ebbing tide, swimming powerfully. After ten minutes she released it, turned back and stroked easily for the shore.

Tom was waiting on the beach, holding out a towel. She took it and began to dry herself off, looking up at the lights of the house a few kilometers down the coast.

“I wish we didn’t have to do that,” he said somberly.

Gwen pulled on her tunic—it was a dress, actually, but much like the tunics that were day-wear back home. “I do too; Pat was useful. But she just couldn’t take the truth; a mistake on my part.”

And a good thing she’d had all outgoing traffic monitored. Three long-distance calls to newspapers; none of them past the hints and innuendo stage, thankfully. My employer is an alien monster from another dimension wasn’t the sort of thing you could say directly to any paper anyone would listen to. They’d assume she was some sort of flake and forget the whole matter.

Tom nodded. “Oh, it was necessary; one life is nothing beside the cause . . . but . . .” He shrugged. “I still regret it.”

They turned up the sand, above the line of tidewrack, under the clacking fronds of the coconut palms. Gwen put her arm around the man’s waist to guide him through the night. The heat of his body cast a ghost-pale shadow across the flat silvery reflection of the beach; she could see the warmth of lesser lives scuttling in the undergrowth, and hear the muted clicking of beach crabs. In the house, one of the guards worked the action of his weapon, a faint chick-chack across the thousands of meters. The wind was from there; she could smell the individual scents of a dozen humans, the three Doberman guard dogs, wet cement from the construction, cooking, smoke, cooling metal in the vehicles.

She looked up at the multicolored tapestry of ten thousand stars. Thermals were clearer at night, the rising heat of the day fading up into the cool of the upper sky. Someday. That was another thing she missed: seeing the stars from beyond atmosphere.

“No sense in repining.”

“And no problems from the police,” he added. “Not when Captain Lowe’s second cousin is in charge.” After a moment: “Do you think Lowe will stay bought?”

“He’ll have to. It works both ways: ‘They’re crooks, and here’s the payoff they gave me, to prove it’ isn’t a very practical threat. And we have enough on him, now, to take him down three times over if he tried anything. Not that he will. The parable of the goose that laid the golden eggs is well within his capacities.”

“Anyway, there won’t be any marks on the body even if the sharks don’t get it,” Tom said. “We’ll report her missing tomorrow.” He sighed. “Who’ll replace Pat?”

“Alice Wayne, I think.”

She could sense his frown. He didn’t like the Australian much.

“She’s unprincipled.”

“True, but she’s also very greedy. And tough, although not too tough to intimidate. It’s a useful mixture; we have to work with what’s available. I’ve had her under observation for nearly a year now, after all.”

Another sigh. “True, as you put it.”

Gwen tightened her grip. “I’ll tell her while you’re away in California,” she said. “By the time you’re back, I’ll be able to judge how well she’s adjusting.” She smiled in the darkness. “Come on up to my suite, and we’ll say goodbye properly.”

The smile grew broader as she heard his heart leap.


# # #


“Fascinating,” Mueller said, staring at the screen.

It was showing output from the scanning/tunneling electron microscope.

“Fascinating how selective the replacement is. As if the carrier knew which section of the DNA strand to travel to.”

“Well, it’s more a matter of mechanical fit,” Gwen said. “Lucky we had the basic transposer model in my bloodstream; that cut five or six years off the development schedule. I wasn’t sure they were still active.”

Mueller looked up at her, raising his brows.

“From my last retrofit,” she said. “Those can take a decade or more; thank the gods I’ve only had to go through it three times. You have no idea how uncomfortable a whole-organism makeover can be. The algae should be ready, then?”

“It should be,” Mueller said cautiously. “I’d like to run a series of tests to make doubly sure. I realize this isn’t really experimental, of course.”

“It is when done on this equipment,” she said. “By all means, with fail-safes and controls. Keep me posted.”


# # #


“It’ll cost at least twelve million,” Alice said.

Gwen walked past her and stepped out to the veranda. The room was large and pale-colored, full of shadow and light through the tall shuttered french doors, spilling across tile and blond wood and the rattan furniture. Through one that was half-open she could see the terrace and part of the pool, and the slope of lawn down to the palm-fringed beach. The twin-engine seaplane bobbed at the dock there, near the boat; beyond a curve of sail showed against the clear green waters off Andros Island. The staff were still unloading the baggage compartment of the floatplane.

Alice glanced quickly down again, fighting to control her breathing. You’re not in any danger, she told herself. Pat had been stupid, like Carlos—and both of them had gotten the same reward for it. Nobody could kill you deader than dead—a superhuman time-traveler or the boys from Cali, it was all the same.

Once you knew, it explained a lot of things about Gwen. I’m surprised how fast it went down, she thought. Evidently her gut had believed before her head was informed. It was only a week, and she could sleep without pills again.

“Property in that part of Manhattan s still extremely expensive, ma’am,” she went on. “Despite the crash.”

“We need that warehouse,” Gwen said. “Send the retainer.” Without turning, she went on: “What’s bothering you, Alice?”

One of the house staff wheeled in a covered lunch tray and then set it out: conch soup and grilled marlin steak and salads. Gwen thanked her in fluent Haitian Creole patois; all the house domestics were from Haiti. The maid smiled whitely and bobbed her head before taking the trolley out.

The staff were all devoted to Gwendolyn, Alice knew. Why not? She got them work permits here in the Bahamas, which was like a ticket to heaven compared to their impoverished, violence-plagued homeland; she helped with their families, paid top wages and was unfailingly polite, in a rather distant, lordly way.

They don’t know what she is. God, she scares me.

“That’s a logical response,” Gwen said calmly. “I’m a predator, after all, and you’re the species I was designed to hunt.”

Alice started violently and felt real fear clutch at her stomach. Can she

“No.” Gwen smiled, turning from the window. “I can’t read your mind. But I can hear anything you subvocalize, and I can smell your emotions, and I can read your body language like a book. Do come have some of this, it’s very good. Anyway, there’s no need to be too frightened. You’re mine, now, so I’m obliged to protect you.”

Alice sat down across the table. Gwen went on: “Just remember that you’re transparent as glass. You can’t deceive me any more than you could outwrestle me. Try to lie and you’ll make me angry, and believe me, you don’t want that.”

I wish she hadn’t told me.

“It was you or Sally or Edgar, and I do need an executive assistant who knows. Sally’s not flexible enough, and Edgar doesn’t smell quite right.”

She hadn’t felt hungry, but the smell of the food made her pick up the fork. As she leaned forward to spear a chunk of the marlin, she smelled something else. Gwen was as fastidious as a cat about cleanliness, but close to there was something different about the faint smell of her sweat, something you only noticed because of the contrast to what you expected. A very slight muskiness. It was oddly soothing, and she felt her heartbeat slow.

The marlin was delicious. If you were a member of the Household you lived like royalty, nothing but the best.

God. And the money’s so good. Double pay with her promotion to the inner circle.

Tom Cairstens came in, grinning. He tossed a folder down beside the plates on the table. Gwen laid aside her fork and picked it up, giving it her quick three-second-per-page scan.

“Home is the hunter, home from the hills,” the lawyer said. “Hills of Hollywood, at least. That’s their offer, basically—but I think they’ll go to twenty million and fifteen percent, net, if we wait a little or drop a hint about MGA. Their people have finished examining the holographic projector and they’re drooling. It’s our biggest deal so far.”

“Excellent, Tom,” Gwen said. “Remember, though, this is our first non-industrial product, our first direct-to-consumer. We don’t want too much publicity, and it’s worth money to avoid it; IngolfTech isn’t going to be the subject of articles in Fortune if I can help it. Also, don’t pressure them to front-end it. The cash is a bagatelle; the real money from this will be in the licensing, and we’re not in a hurry.”

He nodded and inclined his head slightly to Alice.

“Yes, she’s been briefed. No problems.”

“Welcome to the Household,” he said to her. “Marvelous, isn’t it?”

Alice made herself smile back. Oh, God. “I’m . . . still taking it in, sir.”

“Tom.”

“Tom. It’s, ah, it’s a wonderful opportunity, Tom.”

The lawyer walked over to Gwen’s workstation and stared at the image on the screen. Or half-stared, at least. The other half of his attention was on Gwen. Alice shuddered slightly; she didn’t know why, but when Gwendolyn Ingolfsson was in the room it was impossible not to focus on her, even if you didn’t know the truth. Thomas Cairstens was normally a worldly man, used to moving in the monied glamour of the West Coast elite, not easily impressed. The look of sandbagged awe on his face made Alice shiver again.

“What is that?” he asked, pointing at the screen.

“A fusion reactor,” Gwen replied. “Early model. I’m working on adapting it, but it’s slow going. This”—she pointed her fork at the workstation; it was linked to the new massively-parallel mainframe—“is about as much use as an abacus. Construction? It’s going to be like trying to build a megawatt laser in a blacksmith’s forge.”

“Everything here must seem very backward,” he said humbly.

Gwen shrugged. “The electronics are surprisingly capable, for 1997. Very different, though. We used more analog technology, and we never had all this open architecture—Security would have had kittens at the thought. It was all ROM, read-only memory, for the compinsets, the programs. Still is, come to that.”

“Will we need it?” he asked, nodding to the reactor design.

“Oh, certainly. The power requirements can’t be met from any sort of capacitor, and those would be too conspicuous in New York anyway.”

“A private power station won’t?”

“It’s not very large—about the size of a two-story house, according to my best estimate. I’ll discuss the Paramount proposals with you further at dinner.”

He nodded; that was dismissal. Then he turned back for a moment: “Ma’am . . . what’s Los Angeles like in your world?”

“Los Angeles?” she said. “There’s no city there. Mostly prairie with live oaks, along the coast. Some desert inland, mountain forests, chaparral. Good grizzly country. The settlements are small, some orchards and fields in the more favored spots. I’ve got a property there, near La Jolla. Wonderful spot for swimming and sailing, and I raise horses.”

He shook his head in wonder. “I can’t wait until we get the Project rolling. We’ve dreamed of Utopia all these years, and we’re finally going to get it. Paradise . . .”

Alice moistened her mouth, watching him leave. “He’s crazy, isn’t he?” she said.

Gwen shook her head. “Just very focused. It’s true we’ll clean this planet up; we don’t shit in our bedrooms, and we put the industry out in space where it belongs. Tom loves redwoods and whales and snail darters . . . Hence, paradise.”

She turned, and Alice felt the full impact of the green-eyed stare. In private, with the inner circle, she didn’t bother to tone it down.

“It’s going to be hell, isn’t it?” Alice said quietly, hearing her own Australian accent grow stronger.

Images ran through her mind: Nagasaki, the newsreels of Buchenwald, history classes. “Like us and the abos, only worse.”

“Concentration camps, you mean? Plagues?” She shook her head indulgently. “No, you can’t hurt us, so we won’t use extreme measures. We’ll conquer you, then domesticate you.”

It’ll be a long time and the Project may not work. And maybe it won’t be so bad.

“You said that the molehole might not work,” Alice said. “What then?”

“Then I’ll take the planet myself,” Gwen said coolly, looking out the window and resting her chin on a palm. “That’d be more difficult, but an interesting challenge, in a way.”

And there’s only one of her here, Alice thought. And . . . it’s too late for second thoughts, anyway. Even if they all come through, they couldn’t be worse than Hitler or Stalin or that awful thing in Cambodia.

“We’ll only kill the ones who resist,” Gwen confirmed. “I expect to be put in charge here, and the sky will be the limit for my administrative Household. It really will be a Utopia, of sorts, for the rest. No more wars or terrorism, no more sickness or poverty or famine, no more environmental problems. A highly evolved parasite sees that the host body stays fit; and we’re nothing if not highly evolved.”

“People will still fight,” Alice said. “Some will.”

Gwen nodded. “That’s humans for you. Of course, they’ll only be humans in the first generation or so, and we drakensis are immortal. We’re good at waiting.”

Alice paused with the fork halfway to her mouth. Gwen poured more of the chilled white wine from the carafe.

“Not human?” Alice said. The fear welled up a little, then sank.

“No, Homo sapiens sapiens is far too risky to have around in large numbers. We’ll use a tailored paravirus to alter your heredity to Homo servus. Don’t worry, it’s not a big change, much closer to human than I am. Some neurological alterations, the endocrine system, hormones, the vomeronasal organ. Clean up all the hereditary defects at the same time, cancer, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, and so forth. Servus are still people, they’ve got personalities and thoughts, they just aren’t aggressive or rebellious—or not much. It’s not like the old days before the change to the New Race, whips and torture and that sort of thing. Not necessary. Why, these days a lot of the servus aren’t even personally owned, they can even have property, to a certain extent.”

She smiled nostalgically. “Very sweet people, actually, and I miss them.”

Alice relaxed again. Odd. I never get as worried when she’s around, even though she scares the shit out of me. If Gwendolyn was typical, they didn’t seem cruel, at least. Beautiful, terrifying, awesome, but not sadistic.

“You can tell if I’m lying,” Alice said. “What am I supposed to do?”

Gwen moved; so swiftly that Alice had no time to jerk away. Suddenly her face was inches from the Australian’s.

“Trust me,” she said. Alice swallowed and nodded, shuddering slightly as the others eyes gripped hers and held them.

After a moment Gwen returned to her seat: “What’s on the agenda?”

“Primary Belway Securities. They’re the logical choice for a public offering—did I say something?”

Gwen was grinning to herself. “No, no,” she said. “I’ve had a . . . previous contact with the firm. Go ahead.”

“We should sound them out, and set up a preliminary meeting in a few months. Shall I go ahead with it? And where would you like it set up, in New York or Nassau or . . . ?”

“I think we’ll have them over here,” Gwen said. “A more controlled environment; it’ll put us at an advantage—and with investment bankers, you need it. We’ll get the hierarchies squared away before we transfer the proceedings to New York.” She wrinkled her nose. “Race Spirit, but that place stinks. How you humans manage to breathe in a fog of burnt hydrocarbons and sewage is beyond me.”

The servant came and removed the tray, leaving a plate of pastries and a coffee service. Alice looked on in frank envy as Gwen ate; she knew it took six or seven thousand calories a day to maintain the Draka’s supercharged metabolism, but it was still aggravating.

Gwen saw her glance. “There’s a pill we had, back in our late 1990s,” she said. “Metaboline. It adjusted the basal metabolism to allow humans any level of calorie intake. I’ll have some run up.”

Alice was smiling as she left.


# # #


“She seems to be working out well,” Tom said. He picked a wedge of tomato out of the salad and ate it.

Gwen nodded. “You caught all that?”

“The monitor system is working fine.” He glanced out the door after the Australian. “Have you, ah . . . ?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Not yet, I don’t want to stress her too heavily. In a day or two.”

He shook his head, grinning in admiration. “How do you do it? I’d have sworn she was straight, and I’m not—or not very.”

Gwen was paging through the report again. She spoke without looking up:

“Ah, well, both behaviors are latent in any individual human; there’s a whole complex of genes that determine which is dominant and to what degree, and they interact with environmental factors at triggering stages in the development process. It’s a spectrum, not a binary opposition, even in humans; both are always active in a drakensis. Anyway, my pheromones are panspecific—they fill all the receptors in your vomeronasal organ. Think of it as fooling your hypothalamus and limbic system. It doesn’t work on all humans, but it will on most. On Alice, certainly; I can scent it, although she doesn’t know it yet.”

“I won’t quarrel with the results,” he said. “It seems to take more than one of us to keep up with you.”

Her glance lingered on him, and she saw him flush and a light sweat break out across his brow.

“True,” she said. “That’s a byproduct of the aggression reflex, hormonal. I don’t produce much estrogen unless I decide to ovulate; there’s another set of hormones—they’re somewhat similar in structure to the androgens in your human system—that controls secondary sexual functions in drakensis, with only minor differences between the genders . . . It’s complex.”

He swallowed and shifted. Gwen listened to his heartbeat increase and inhaled to take his scent.

“The bankers are coming?” he said, changing the subject.

“Yes, in a few months. It’s the only way to raise the operating capital we’ll need. There shouldn’t be any basic difficulties; from their point of view we’re a very good prospect for a public stock offering, so we should be ready to get down to serious negotiations by the winter. I want everything very tight by then, Tom. No mistakes, nothing to disturb them. We’ll be moving the main locus of our operations to New York, and there’ll be far less margin for errors and coverups.”

She rose and began to undress. “As for right now . . . take your clothes off, Tom.”

He smiled and obeyed. “Your wish is my command.”

Gwen nodded. “And kneel to me,” she said, putting her palms behind her on the table and leaning her weight on them.

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Framed