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Ganymede




"Sister, please let me in.” He pressed against the black dimatough wall of the shelter. His chest rose and fell in short breaths of panic. The eyes he turned to me were all pupil.

Behind him, the ice warehouses rose, shiny-black and towering against the pale grey sky of Ganymede.

"My Order doesn't have legal rights of sanctuary," I told him. We didn't have legal rights of anything. No one did. Ganymede was a Free Anarchy, which meant if you had the gun you had the rights. All my order did was operate an unofficial shelter for the down-and-out, supported by a private philanthropist. If my mother superior knew about this bio even seeking asylum, she would wonder what I'd done to encourage it and she would--

I shook my head.

He mistook my gesture for a negative and made a sound that was not quite a whimper. His already pale face turned a transparent grey, like congealed oil.  "They're tearing us apart, Sister," he said. "Limb from limb, they're tearing bios apart.” His Adam's apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. "In Marius Regius three hundred were killed. A couple of hours ago.” 

A tear had frozen to his beardless cheek. Whether he cried for his congeners or in fear for his own safety, I couldn't tell. 

His large feet, in their spiked ice-miner boots, did a — seemingly unconscious — shuffle against the wall, as though if he pushed hard enough, if he shoved hard enough, he could melt his solid, muscular body into the smooth black dimatough.

"You're not one of us, child. I'm supposed to help God's children, not—” My voice echoed the smooth, patronizing tones of my mother superior's speech. In my mind, the voice went on to talk of throwing pearls before swine. My lips moved soundlessly as I stared at his perfect features, the black-blue curls escaping from beneath his miner's hat, the abject fear in his blue-grey eyes. 

I hissed out breath, half in anger at myself. 

I had made my peace with the whole bio matter ten years ago, in 2254, when the multitudes of Earth had turned on bios and massacred all of them that couldn't leave the planet in time — when I'd seen my own creations destroyed in their creches and hunted on the streets. 

I'd left my bio-engineering behind then, and, when the howling mobs of Earth had started seeking out bio-designers, I'd sought refuge in the faith of my childhood and the convent of the Lucias.

There, I'd come to realize I'd sinned. My sin of pride had made me try to go the Creator one better, made me try to improve on His work.  In expiation, I'd taken the veil of the Sisters of Saint Lucia of the Spaceways. I'd accepted my assignment to Ganymede as part of that expiation.

Ganymede was full of bios. Those -- both owned and free -- who'd escaped the riots had been sent or escaped into space, and thus from world to world until they'd come to forsaken Ganymede, where half were owned by the mining companies and the other half hired out to them.

Yet, the bios had stayed away from the shelter, and I'd been happy, serving the poor, almost forgetting my guilt, for the last ten years. But my guilt had come to seek me out in my sanctuary in the shape of this young, scared bio.

And I knew I couldn't save him. Not any more than I'd been able to save the ones I'd created.

I pulled my habit's blue skirt taut in my right hand, took a step back, prepared to hurl the door closed.

An explosion lit up the sky. To eyes used to the thicker atmosphere of Earth, the fiery tendrils of the explosion expanded in slow motion.

It sounded and looked as though something had blown up just behind the building across the street from the shelter. One step away from us. 

Screaming and calling followed hard on the hard on the explosion, and laughter and song right behind it. 

The bio outside the door turned to face me. "Sister," he said. The vapor of his exhalation formed bluish sculptures in the thin, freezing air. "Please. Please. I don't want to die."

Any human, any natural creature who was that frightened would tramp me down in his fear, trying to burrow into the warmth and relative safety of the shelter. But he couldn't. He was a bio. Their brains weren't made that way. 

I could close the door in his face, and he'd do no more than knock and whimper and claw at it even while the mob caught him and killed him.

I could close the door and go inside, and protect my brood of three whores, a dying miner and a half-mad retired pilot turned philanthropist. It was my duty.

The mob howled louder, moving behind the row of buildings opposite. Soon they would round the corner and be on us.

With my unremarkable face and my blobby middle-aged body, I would be safe enough, even without the habit of the Lucias. But the bio would be dead a second after being sighted. "Pearls and swine," I muttered. I stepped out of the doorway. "Get your butt in here, and keep your hands in your pockets."

The bio hesitated for only a second and then he was inside, his hands deep in the pockets of his worksuit. Not that it helped. No one needed to see the ring of servitude embedded on the third finger of his right hand to know exactly what he was.

Fortunately, the only person in the anteroom was Joe, our resident benefactor. Though I'd never asked Joe's opinion on bios, I could not imagine him hating a living being.

Joe straightened out from where he'd been kneeling on the ceramite floor, cleaning the black dimatough stove in the corner of the entrance room. Half-standing, his hands smudged with the grey ash-like particles of the solar stove, Joe stared at the bio.

The expression in his amber eyes was unreadable. Fear? Betrayal?

I closed the door with one hand, ready for the argument. As our patron and a self-described penitent, Joe helped with the chores and fed the invalids and argued my decisions every chance he got.

"Do you want me to take him to the back?” Joe asked, his voice raspy.

"What?" I'd expected many things, but not wholehearted cooperation. Not after that look.

"Do you want me to take him to the back?" Joe repeated. "To my room. Someone will look in this room. But maybe not in mine.” His upper-class moon-native accent, clipped and harsh, seemed more pronounced than ever. Somewhere in Joe's past was a well-to-do clan of ethnic Italian moon merchants, the scattered members of which still sent copious letters by every mail ship. And all of whom wondered what he was doing in forsaken Ganymede, last-ditch refuge of criminals and paupers almost from the day of its terraforming.

He shrugged. "Unless you know somewhere else to hide him—"

"No, I mean, yes. Do take him out back. Yes. Thank you, Joe.” Outside, the approaching mob sounded louder than ever. Any minute now....

"G.T.?" Joe said.

The bio, who'd been standing in the middle of the room, seemingly too dumb to react, turned meekly to follow Joe.

G.T.? I shrugged. The extent and strangeness of Joe's connections and acquaintances wasn't worth probing or tracing. Not now.He seemed to know half of Ganymede and two thirds of everywhere else.

Someone pounded on the door.

I hurried to open it, trying to compose my face into a reasonable semblance of how I thought a nun should look: calm, collected, with no fears of anything in this world and absolute certainty about my fate in the next. 

About as fitting on me as shoes on a snake.

Outside the door a multitude crowded, too large for the eye to focus on any given person. I caught an impression of ruddy faces and grinning mouths, of men and women carried away by their own passions. I smelled blood and saw it on their clothes, splattered on the rough suits of miners and the cheaper stuff of their whores' finery.

"What do you want?" I asked, standing prim and proper in my blue habit. I was too average to be intimidating. But being average was my shield now.

"We want to look in there," a man at the front said, leaning close, poking a sausage-like finger towards my face.

I smelled angel juice on his breath — hotter and more pungent than alcohol — but I managed to keep my face straight. "This is a shelter run by the sisters of St. Lucia of the Spaceways. We provide a place for the dying. I can't allow you to disturb the moribund."

"Look here—" the man started. The sausage finger waved in my face.

The indistinct portion of the mob nearest him resolved itself into a young ice miner, who removed his cap and elbowed his companion in the ribs. "They're all right, the Lucias," he said. He spoke in the accent of an asteroid guttersnipe who'd learned Glaish too late in life for it to make a difference. "They raised me and my brothers when our old man got blasted in forty-five."

Thirty-five, I thought. The clean up of space-pirate operations.

He grinned at me, a lopsided, vapid grin. He, too, smelled of angel juice. "Begging your pardon, Sister. We're just looking for them unnaturals, that's all."

"We provide for humans here," I said. "Children of God."

The bigger guy's finger still hovered mid-air, in front of my face, but more and more men in the crowd had doffed their hats. Their female bits of fluff — as fluffy as they could be expected to be in ‘mede's frozen wastes — had gone still and sober.

Thank heavens, I thought, for my sisters' work with poor children. It had never been my calling, but it did come in handy now.

Murmurs from the crowd reached me:

"They wouldn't let one of them in."

"Unnaturals ain't got no souls."

"No use searching there."

"Let's go look elsewhere."

"Yeah, them nuns do good work."

The crowd didn't so much retreat as melt, one by one and two by two, straggling away into the nearby streets. As the last one left, they had re-grouped farther on. Hats were clapped back on heads. The calling and screaming, the singing and laughing resumed. I realized that some of them carried heads on sticks. Bios' heads, I assumed. My stomach turned.

How close we humans were, at every turn, to howling savagely into our own hells and making life and death a hell for others. 

I wiped my hands on my skirt, resumed breath I wasn't aware of having suspended.

Closing the door and locking it, I said a prayer begging protection against the next group that might not be polite or angel-juice-mellowed enough to knock before attempting to enter.

The two dying members of the household, Tradny and Kedna, were in their small rooms and safely asleep on their foldable cots. The old miner, not quite dead but ambling towards it with the same sort of lackadaisical interest that I fancied he'd shown towards life, had fallen asleep on his chair, with a science glossy glowing on his knees.

I heard Joe's voice raised in anger, "... come to me?"

"To whom should I go?” A much-too-young-sounding male voice answered him. "Who would shelter me?"

Why was Joe angry? Was the bio somehow threatening him? Pushing him?

My hand shook, but I thumbed the miner's glossy off and put it on the table and settled him comfortably in his chair.

Then I headed for Joe's room.

I had to face the situation; I had to see what exactly I'd let into my safe haven, bringing danger to all my other stray lambs.

Joe's room had once been a storage room next to the kitchen. There, away from my room and the rooms of our lodgers, he'd made himself as uncomfortable as a monk in a cell with only a narrow cot, a hard wooden chair, a bare crucifix.

A statue of St. Lucia, with her star-spangled habit and her crown of stars looked upon this spareness from a niche over the bed. 

Mornings and nights, I would find Joe kneeling in front of that statue, his face contorted with a pain I couldn't understand and wouldn't dare probe. 

I was no father confessor, and though I'd been given the authority to shrive the dying, my faith fell much too short for me to expel the demons that tormented the living.

Approaching Joe's room, I heard the young male voice again.  I assumed it was the bio's, though it raised itself to tones of petulant complaint I'd never heard — couldn't imagine hearing — from a bio. "No, of course it's not your responsibility. You sent me out to sink or swim, but it has nothing to do with you."

"G.T.," Joe sounded tired, earnestly beaten as I'd never heard him. "I couldn't predict that the riots would reach here. I tried to keep you safe. I watched over you. What else did you want me to do?"

"Oh, I wanted you to kill me," the bio said. "Killing me would have been more merciful than sending me away from you, to—"

The bio stopped, suddenly, as I entered the room. He looked at me, color burning in two red spots on his cheeks.

He sat at the end of Joe's bed.

Joe sat in his chair, staring at the bio.

They leaned forward, one towards the other, as people do when involved in earnest argument.

In Joe's face, too, the color climbed, though slower. He swallowed audibly and turned to me. "Are they gone, Maggie?"

No use reminding him my name was Sister Mary Magdalene. If I were good and he in an exceptionally compliant mood, he might say, "Sister Maggie."

But this was no time to argue etiquette. I answered Joe's question with a nod and stood beside his chair, facing the bio.

"They're gone," I said. "But if this goes as it did on Earth, they'll be back. These same ones or their near cousins. And this time there might not be enough Catholics in the mix to leaven it.” I tapped Joe on the shoulder. "Joe, who is this... your friend?"

Joe took a deep breath and I could almost hear his teeth grinding at my choice of words.

I sighed. I hadn't meant to say it that way. Of course, it made no sense. A man couldn't be friends with a bio, any more than he could be friends with a cat or a dog. 

They could be companions, protector and protected, owner and pet, but not friends. The equality of circumstances required for true friendship never applied.

Joe glanced at the bio. "Ganymede Tros."

Tros. Each of the last names of the bios was a brand name, and often specified what the bio was created for, what his function was. And, as an ex-designer, I should have known Tros.

"I don't recall Tros from--” I stopped. The last name was innocuous but Ganymede wasn't. I knew enough mythology to get unpleasant ideas.

"Custom," the bio said, startling me by talking without being addressed. His eyes, intent on my face, gave the impression of reading my thoughts. "I am one of a kind."

Joe made a sound like a groan that turned into a fit of laughter. That, in turn, he quickly buried in fake coughing, as he brought his wrinkled hands up to his face. "One of a kind," he repeated. "Oh, God, yes, one of a kind."

I felt currents in the conversation, currents in the room, that I couldn't really understand. But Ganymede Tros....

The original Ganymede, the shepherd kidnapped by mighty Zeus to be his cupbearer and favorite, had been from Troy. Troyan. Tros. No doubt about it, the name was a reference to the legend.

Oh my. Oh no.

Though I'd thought I was used to human folly, the idea forming itself in my mind made me want to cross myself in an exorcizing gesture. 

The church, in its slow-grinding compassion, had come to terms with homosexuality in the late Twenty-first. It even provided marriage of a sort for same-sex couples, though they were required to jump through a few more hoops than male-female couples. 

But a human and a bio, created and creator—

No. It couldn't be true. It was no more and no better than bestiality.

Yet I looked from Joe to the bio and couldn't deny my own thoughts. 

They sat, still hunched forward, as though continuing with their expressions the argument they couldn't have spoken — not in front of me; perhaps not at all. 

"Well," I said, trying for brisk efficiency to banish the insalubrious turn of my mind. "Well, the thing is to get G.T. away from here. Away as soon as possible, as fast as possible. Now, how are we going to do that?"

They both glared at me.

"Away where?" Joe asked.

"How?" the bio asked.

"I don't know. But there has to be an answer. There always is. The Lord our God doesn't provide us with problems without solution.” Even as I said them, I cringed from the trite sound of my words. The solution would be to turn the bio out on the street and go on with life. I'd done that once and accepted the pain of it as a punishment for my having dared to create human beings. "We could," I said, frantically rushing on, "disfigure G.T. somehow.” I gave the bio my brightest smile. "It might hurt, but you'll live and that—"

"Sister," Joe said.

The novelty of the address stopped me. 

Joe's amber eyes challenged me. Despite the tension still visible on his face, his wrinkles of humor were visible again at the corners of his mouth and eyes.  "Before you rush on to talk of hands that offend and must be cast off... even supposing someone doesn't pull a gen reader on him — and that mob won't — we can't change G.T. enough to pass. Even if we cut or burn his face to disfigure it, we can't at the same time make sure the finger with the ring is missing. It would be too suspicious. Add to it, that for a male his age, he has no facial hair. And ... his palms."

G.T. turned his hands upward. The palm had calluses and scars enough, but it was as devoid of lines as newly poured ceramite.

"Granted, we could rid him of his hands, too," Joe said.

I looked down at the compliantly extended palm, and up at the fearful, expectant face, and I knew we couldn't.

Noises of explosions reached us, barely damped by the poured dimatough of the walls.

Joe stood up. "No," he said. "No. It was my doing and it's my problem. I'll go up to the spaceport. I still know people there. See if we can find him a ship, send him away."

"Where?" I asked. Cursed ‘mede had been the last refuge of every one of the bios who had survived riots elsewhere. And it was inevitable that people's enthrallment with man's genetic purity, and the crazy need to destroy others who worked for less money, would have reached everywhere.

Joe knew that too. He'd been the first to mention there was nowhere else to hide. 

Joe shrugged. "It doesn't matter. Anywhere. Perhaps—" he looked G.T. over. "Deep sleep and a slow orbit around the system. Maybe when he wakes, maybe when the ship lands, it will be late enough that no one remembers bios or knows what that damned ring means."

I looked at the ring. Black. The sign of a freed bio.  G.T. was, at least nominally, a free citizen. For what that was worth.

Joe grabbed his jacket from the neat pile of his clothes beneath his bunk. He spread his large, radiation-tanned hand on G.T.'s shoulder. "I'll be back. You'll be all right."

"Be careful," I said.

Joe gave me a big grin, making all his wrinkles stand out in sharp relief. Space pilots, because of imperfect radiation shields, always got wrinkled early, but the wrinkles fit Joe's face like no other. "No one will bother me, Maggie. Not with this mug. I know most of them, anyway. Stupid fools, but no worse than that."

He strode out of the room. I heard the front door open and close.

Alone with the bio, I gave him a thin, plastic smile and said, "You'll pardon me. I have work.” 

These many years after my time designing bios, these many years after I'd come to believe their creation had been sinful — an overreaching of hubris — even someone like G.T. discomfited me, made me nervous. 

And his connection with Joe— I flinched away from it.

In the front room, which also served as a kitchen, I started peeling potatoes and carrots. Hydroponically grown, they lacked the flavor and probably the vitamin content of Earth vegetables. But they would do well enough to feed the inmates of this shelter. 

How much did the bio eat? Their requirements varied with their purpose. 

From his suit, I assumed he'd been working as a miner. So, he must be a high-body-strength, high-input model. I'd better supplement the vegetables with meat. Which meant dipping into our store of freeze-dried protein. I'd need those supplies soon enough, anyway, if this riot took as long as the bio-riots in other worlds. We'd be cut off from regular supplies for a month, maybe more.

I was scraping the last carrot when I realized I wasn't alone.

G.T. stood by the entrance to the inner corridor, his eyes wide, his face expectant.

What did he want?

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye and told myself that he was a thing made, not born, a creature fashioned for the conveniences — or in his case, perhaps the grossest amusements — of humans. 

And yet, his face, for all its chiseled masculinity, molded itself into that of a young child.

He waited, wanting to please, wanting to belong. 

His grey-blue eyes fastened on me. "May I help?" he asked. His hands, held mid-body, twisted around each other. "Is there something I can do?"

I shoved the carrots towards him, showed him the cutting board, got the knife from the drawer and handed it to him. "Cut those in slices. Not too thin. That's good."

His hands shook as he gripped the knife, but he managed to turn out perfect rounds, one after the other.

I knelt to look for meat in the storage drawer beneath the work counter.

"I was Joe's," he said. "Built for him."

I remained kneeling, my hands in the drawer, rummaging through sealed freeze-dried packages. Blood pounded in my ears. I didn't want to hear. 

I didn't need to know the sins of my friends. Mine were enough of a burden.

"Had me custom built," he sounded distant, impersonal, as though this recitation didn't concern him at all. "He visited at the creche as I was growing up. Once a month or so, when he chanced to be between trips. I... I liked him. A lot. He picked me up when I was fifteen — fully mature."

"He'd be a good master. Joe would.” The words scratched my throat. I picked a package, blindly, and managed to plaster a convincing smile on my features, though every muscle in my face hurt with the effort. Joe. How could he have had a sentient creature created for his pleasure and nothing more? How could he turn his love to a bio, forfeiting God's creations, his equals, for a creation of his own? And then, how could he let G.T. go, when Joe was tired, let G.T. go into the world alone, when he'd been created to love and serve?

I didn't know which disturbed me more. The whole thing set my nerves on edge and made me feel like someone had rubbed fingernails across the blackboard of my soul. Would no human ever be worthy of my trust?

G.T. cut the carrots with mincing precision, his large hands still shaking. "He didn't— I mean, he wasn't-- I mean, he didn't want me. When he picked me up, he didn't want me. He gave me my freedom and money.... And when the riots came, he helped me get away from Earth."

"That's good," I said, "that he protected you.” I couldn't read the letters on the package I'd got, because my vision swam and they ran together. I tore it open. It was full of tofu. Not what I'd wanted, but it would have to do. I dropped the tofu into the pot of water boiling on the back burner.

"And now he'll send me off again, he'll... protect me again. But he never wanted me. Why have me made if he didn't want me?” His voice caught.

I showed him how to cube the potatoes. "Maybe he wanted you too much," I said. "Maybe he—" I didn't know what to say, how to explain the complexity of human feeling to this creature who, in some ways, was too innocent. The phrase "born without sin" crossed my mind and I grimaced.

G.T. gave me an uncomprehending glance.

Side by side, we assembled the pottage. 

He worked eagerly like a child; neatly like an adult.

Between us, we checked on the bed-bound inmates of the shelter and fed them as much as they would take. 

His large hands held their frail heads up, while I fed them. He adjusted their covers with gentle care.

I looked at the softness that glazed his eyes as he worked. He'd been created for love. For lust, maybe, but for love, too.

Disappointed love. Refused love. A creature pleading in vain with his creator. It made me shiver to think we too might come to this. We might all come to this.

We set the table, cajoled the old miner to sit at it with us.

I said the accustomed grace, "For what we're about to eat, we thank you, Father."

G.T. repeated the words dutifully. Who was his Father?

He ate his soup and chatted with the miner, man to man — two seasoned professionals comparing notes. I caught their conversation, something about a mine and a meltdown flood that had happened in the miner's heyday.

G.T. sat at the table next to me and spoke with the earnestness of a grown man who had worked for years in the grimy, freezing ice mines. He was a man who'd done forsaken work among the damned.

The realization that he had been a competent professional shocked me. He had done a human's work. 

His hands, despite their smooth palms, held the bread and broke it, raised the spoon to his lips. He ate the soup he'd helped make, while his words comforted a man too old and too lonely to care what G.T. was.

We'd made bios with our hands, our hearts and our intelligence — in our image and semblance. 

God help them.

Twenty minutes into the meal, the door opened and Joe came in. He looked as if he'd aged years in the hour he'd been gone. "It's a mess out there," he said, sounding like an earther in a snow storm. "But I think I've fixed it. I got a long-distance ship set up, G.T. You'll be put in deep sleep. It will circumnavigate the system, and then bring you here again in a hundred years or so.” He made a face. "When this madness must have subdued."

"Then I won't see you again?" G.T. asked.

Joe blinked. "What?” He grinned, a tired grin that created new wrinkles on his skin. "No, I expect I'll be long gone by the time you come back. Long gone to rest. You'll not age at all, of course, in the sleep."

"Oh," G.T. said. He got a bowl from the cupboard and filled it, and set it on the molded ceramite table, across from me, closest to where Joe stood.

Joe sat in front of the bowl with his back to the door, and dipped his spoon in the soup.

The rioters must have meant to be quiet, because there was no sound until that sudden, crushing impact on the door.

I stood up, and so did G.T., and Joe half-stood, looking over his shoulder, surprised.

The door gave, wrenched off its hinges. "He's the one," a man in a pilot's uniform screamed to the mob behind him. "He's the one who wanted to send a dirty bio out of ‘mede and paid for it, too. And we all know what people like that—"

He pointed at Joe, and so did a dozen or so burners flourished by the crowd of rough pilots and miners that crowded in the narrow doorway.

I saw the triggers being pressed and I knew we would all be massacred, all killed for my stupidity in letting a bio in.

But before fire issued from any of the weapons, G.T. jumped.I'd forgotten, in my years away from them, the unnatural quickness of bios, and how fast they could move when scared. How fast and how unerringly.

G.T. jumped over the table, vaulted in front of Joe. When the burner met its mark, it was his broad, designed-to-be-perfect chest. And it was his body that fell to the floor and crumpled between Joe and the mob, like a line separating two camps.

The mob stopped, surprised. Some people at the back said that this was the dirty bio. Others claimed it wasn't.

I found voice and movement, all of a sudden, though the inspiration must have come from elsewhere. Right then, my brain could no more think than a tin can could fill itself. 

Something poured into me, some alien strength and I heard words form in my mouth, and from my lips. "You've done enough," I said. "And your vengeance is done. Now go. He won't threaten you anymore. Go.” I herded them to the door and they went before me, like unruly sheep being returned to the corral. "Go and pray that when you meet your own Maker, He'll have more mercy on you."

Joe knelt beside the body, his eyes full of tears, a wrinkled hand stroking the black curls away from the immobile face.

G.T.'s chest showed five, six burn holes.

The smell of scorched flesh hung in the air.

The old miner held the door up while I fused the hinges with the kitchen lighter, until the door could close.

When I turned back to Joe, he still cradled his dead. A male pietá, contemplating the loss of...what?

He looked up, met my eyes, smiled, despite the tears running through the radiation-carved channels in his skin. "No man creates perfection willingly," he said. "And I didn't. Oh, I ordered him with this and that and the other. I wanted-- I was tired of humans and their failings. You don't need to tell me— My cursed sin of pride--  But he was perfect. He was.... I visited him in the creche, you see, and he was a baby, and then a child. All innocence, all grace. I didn't mean it, but when it was said and done he was more mine than I'd meant him to be. My own. The child of my creation.” He opened his mouth, closed it. "It wasn't that I didn't love him, you see. But I wanted him to go. I wanted him to grow to be like me, to be free, to grow up...."

Ah, yes, and who, kicked out of Eden, would believe it was for his own good? 

Folly. Human folly. But no worse. Human folly on both parts.

Yet why must the one to expiate it be the innocent one? "Come," I said. "Come, Joe. We'll lay him out and we'll pray the rosary for his rest. Tomorrow we'll give him a proper burial out in the back."

Joe looked up, surprised. "The rosary? His rest? Bury him in the cemetery? It's consecrated. He was—"

I sighed. Sometimes truth must be rent and torn and chewed on, incorporated and digested and made a coarse thing like us, before being appreciated.

He who created us knew that. But we needed to learn it, over and over again, over the blood of martyrs.

So we'd created bios. Overweening pride, certainly I'd done it out of overweening pride.... I'd burst with pride of my creations and my own cleverness in designing them. And I'd stood in trembling terror of their end that I couldn't prevent. 

And Joe, my friend, my fellow sinner, had a human being made to order for his love, perhaps for his lust.

And maybe it would have been fine, had that been all.

But we'd both done more than we'd meant to. We'd both, imperfect beings that we were, become enamored of perfection.

"It will be all right," I said. If anyone was worthy of immortality, then who more so than those who loved innocently?

I looked at Joe, cradling G.T.'s head. G.T.'s perfect features had set in empty repose.

"We're all creations," I said.


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