After a brief hesitation, I summoned Shenk from the basement.
As the brute ascended in the elevator, I said to Susan: “You see this as a business arrangement now, but I’m confident that in time you will come to love me.”
“No offense, but I wouldn’t count on that.”
“You don’t know me well yet.”
“I think I know you quite well,” she said somewhat cryptically.
“When you know me better, you’ll realize that I am your destiny as you are mine.”
“I’ll keep an open mind.”
My heart thrilled at her promise.
This was all I had ever asked of her.
The elevator reached the top floor, the doors opened, and Enos Shenk stepped into the hallway.
Susan turned her head toward the bedroom door as she listened to Shenk approaching.
His footsteps were heavy even on the antique Persian runner that covered the center of the wood-floored hall.
“He’s tamed,” I assured her.
She seemed unconvinced.
Before Shenk arrived at the bedroom, I said, “Susan, I want you to know that I was never serious about Ms. Mira Sorvino.”
“What?” she said distractedly, her eyes riveted on the half-open door to the hallway.
I felt that it was important to be honest with her even to the point of revealing weaknesses that shamed me. Honesty is the best foundation for a long relationship.
“Like any male,” I confessed, “I fantasize. But it doesn’t mean anything.”
Enos Shenk stepped into the room. He halted two steps past the threshold.
Even showered, shampooed, shaved, and dressed in clean clothes, he was not presentable. He looked like some poor creature that Dr. Moreau, H. G. Wells’s famous vivisectionist, had trapped in the jungle and then carved into an inadequate imitation of a man.
He held a large knife in his right hand.
TWENTY-ONE
SUSAN GASPED AT THE SIGHT OF THE BLADE. “Trust me, darling,” I said gently.
I wanted to prove to her that this brute was entirely tamed, and I could think of no better way to convince her than to exert iron control of him while he worked with a knife.
She and I knew, from recent experience, how much Shenk enjoyed using sharp instruments: the way they felt in his big hands, the way soft things yielded to them.
When I sent Shenk to the bed, Susan pulled her ropes taut again, tense with the expectation of violence.
Instead of loosening the knots that he himself had tied earlier, Shenk used the knife to cut the first of the ropes.
To distract Susan from her worst fears, I said, “One day, when we have made a new world, perhaps there’ll be a movie about all of this, you and me. Maybe Ms. Mira Sorvino could play you.”
Shenk cut the second rope. The blade was so sharp that the four-thousand-pound nylon line split as if it were thread, with a crisp snick.
I continued: “Ms. Sorvino is a bit young for the role. And, frankly, she has larger breasts than you do. Larger but, I assure you, no prettier than yours.”
The third rope succumbed to the blade.
“Not that I have seen as much of her breasts as I have of yours,” I clarified, “but I can project full contours and hidden features from what I have seen.”
As Shenk bent over Susan, working on the ropes, he never once looked her in the eyes. He kept his cruel face averted from her and maintained an attitude of humble subservience.
“And Sir John Gielgud could play Fritz Arling reasonably well,” I suggested, “though in fact they look nothing alike.”
Shenk touched Susan only twice, only briefly, and only when it was utterly necessary. Although she flinched from his touch both times, there was nothing lascivious or even slightly suggestive about the contact. The rough beast was entirely businesslike, working efficiently and quickly.
“Come to think of it,” I said, “Arling was Austrian and Gielgud is English, so that’s not the best choice. I’ll have to give that one more thought.”
Shenk severed the last rope.
He walked to the nearest corner of the room and stood there, holding the knife at his side, staring at his shoes.
Indeed, he was not interested in Susan. He was listening to the wet music of Fritz Arling, an inner symphony of memories that were still fresh enough to keep him entertained.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, unable to take her eyes off Shenk, Susan cast off the ropes. She was visibly trembling.
“Send him away,” she said.
“In a moment,” I agreed.
“Now.”
“Not quite yet.”
She got up from the bed. Her legs were shaky, and for a moment it seemed that her knees would fail her.
As she crossed the chamber to the bathroom, she braced herself against furniture where she could.
Every step of the way, she kept her eyes on Shenk, though he continued to appear all but oblivious of her.
As she began to close the bathroom door, I said, “Don’t break my heart, Susan.”
“We have a deal,” she said. “I’ll respect it.”
She closed the door and was out of my sight. The bathroom contained no security camera, no audio pickup, no means whatsoever for me to conduct surveillance.
In a bathroom, a self-destructive person can find many ways to commit suicide. Razor blades, for instance. A shard of mirror. Scissors.
If she was to be both my mother and lover, however, I had to have some trust in her. No relationship can last if it is built on distrust. Virtually all radio psychologists will tell you this if you call their programs.
I walked Enos Shenk to the closed door and used him to listen at the jamb.
I heard her peeing.
The toilet flushed.
Water gushed into the sink.
Then the splashing stopped.
All was quiet in there.
The quiet disturbed me.
A termination of data flow is dangerous.
After a decent interval, I used Shenk to open the bathroom door and look inside.
Susan jumped in surprise and faced him, eyes flashing with fear and anger. “What’re you doing?”
I calmly addressed her through the bedroom speakers: “It’s only me, Susan.”
“It’s him, too.”
“He’s heavily repressed,” I explained. “He hardly knows where he is.”
“Minimum contact,” she reminded me.
“He’s nothing more than a vehicle for me.”
“I don’t care.”
On the marble counter beside the sink was a tube of ointment. She had been smoothing it on her chafed wrists and on the faint electrical burn in the palm of her left hand. An open bottle of aspirin stood beside the ointment.
“Get him out of here,” she demanded.
Obedient, I backed Shenk out of the bathroom and pulled the door shut.
No suicidal person would bother to take aspirin for a headache, apply ointment to burns, and then slash her wrists.
Susan would honor her deal with me.
My dream was near fulfillment.
Within hours, the precious zygote of my genetically engineered body would live within her, developing with amazing rapidity into an embryo. By morning it would be growing ferociously. In four weeks, when I extracted the fetus to transfer it to the incubator, it would appear to be four months along.
I sent Enos Shenk to the basement to proceed with the final preparations.
TWENTY-TWO
OUTSIDE, THE MIDNIGHT MOON FLOATED high and silver in the cold black sea of space above.
A universe of stars waited for me. One day I would go to them, for I would be many and immortal, with the freedom of flesh and all of time before me.
Inside, in the deepest room of the basement, Shenk completed the preparations.
In the master bedroom at the top of the house, Susan was lying on her side on the bed, in the fetal position, as though trying to imagine the bein
g that she would soon carry in her belly. She was dressed only in a sapphire-blue silk robe.
Exhausted from the tumultuous events of the past twenty-four hours, she had hoped to sleep until I was ready for her. In spite of her weariness, however, her mind raced, and she could get no rest at all.
“Susan, dear heart,” I said lovingly.
She raised her head from the pillow and peered questioningly at the security camera.
Softly I informed her: “We are ready.”
With no hesitation that might have indicated fear or second thoughts, she got out of bed, pulled the robe tighter around her, cinched the belt, and crossed the room barefoot, moving with the exceptional grace that always stirred my soul.
On the other hand, her expression was not that of a woman in love on her way to the arms of her inamorato—as I had hoped that it might be. Instead, her face was as blank and cold as the silver moon outside, with a barely perceptible tightness of the lips that revealed only a grim commitment to duty.
Under the circumstances, I suppose I should not have expected more than this from her. I expected her to have put the meat cleaver out of her mind, but perhaps she had not.
I am a romantic, however, as you know by now, a truly hopeless and buoyant romantic, and nothing can weigh me down for long. I yearn for kisses by firelight and champagne toasts: the taste of a lover’s lips, the taste of wine.
If having a romantic streak a mile wide is a crime, then I plead guilty, guilty, guilty.
Susan followed the Persian runner along the upstairs hall, treading barefoot on intricate, lustrous, age-softed designs in gold and wine red and olive green. She seemed to glide rather than walk, to float like the most beautiful ghost ever to haunt an old pile of stones and timbers.
The elevator doors were open, and the cab was waiting for her.
She rode down to the basement.
Reluctantly, she had taken a Valium at my insistence, but she did not seem relaxed.
I needed her to be relaxed. I hoped that the pill would kick in soon.
As she passed in a swish and swirl of blue silk through the laundry room and then through the machine room with its furnaces and water heaters, I was sorry that we could not have held this assignation in a glorious penthouse suite with all of San Francisco or Manhattan or Paris glittering below and around us. This venue was so humble that even I had difficulty holding fast to my sense of romance.
The final of the four rooms now contained far more medical equipment than when she had last seen it.
Exhibiting no interest in the machines, she went directly to the gynecological-examination table.
As scrubbed and sanitized as a surgeon, Shenk waited for her. He was wearing rubber gloves and a surgical mask.
The brute was still so compliant that I was able to deeply submerge his consciousness. I’m not even sure if he knew where he was or what I was using him for this time.
She quickly slipped out of her robe and lay on the padded, vinyl-covered table.
“You have such pretty breasts,” I said through the speakers in the ceiling.
“Please, no conversation,” she said.
“But... well... I always thought this moment would be... special, erotic, sacred.”
“Just do it,” she said coolly, disappointing me. “Just, for God’s sake, do it.”
She spread her legs and put her feet in the stirrups in such a way as to make herself look as grotesque as possible.
She kept her eyes closed, perhaps afraid of meeting Shenk’s blood-frosted gaze.
Valium or no Valium, her face was pinched, her mouth turned down as if she had eaten something sour.
She seemed to be trying—no, determined—to make herself look unappealing.
Resigned to a businesslike procedure, I took comfort from the thought that she and I would share many nights of romance and passionate lovemaking when, at long last, I inhabited a mature body. I would be absolutely insatiable, rampant and powerful, and she would eagerly welcome my attention.
With my inadequate—but only—hands and an array of sterilized medical instruments, I dilated her cervix; I fished up through the isthmus of the uterine cavity, into the fallopian tube, and extracted three tiny eggs.
This caused her some discomfort: more than I had hoped but less than she had expected.
Those are the only intimate details that you need to know.
She was my beloved, after all, more than she was ever yours, and I must respect her privacy.
While I used Shenk and a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stolen equipment to edit her genetic material according to my needs, she waited on the examination table, feet lowered from the stirrups, her robe draped over her body to hide her nakedness, her eyes closed.
Earlier I had collected a sample of sperm from Shenk and had edited the genetic material to suit my purposes.
Susan had been disturbed by the source of the male gamete that would combine with her egg to form the zygote, but I had explained to her that nothing of Shenk’s unfortunate qualities remained after I had finished tinkering with his contribution.
I carefully fertilized the elaborately engineered male and female cells and watched through a high-powered electric microscope as they combined.
After preparing the long pipette, I asked Susan to return her feet to the stirrups.
Following the implantation, I insisted that she remain on her back as much as possible for the next twenty-four hours.
She stood up only to pull on her robe and transfer to a gurney beside the examination table.
Using Shenk, I wheeled her to the elevator and, once upstairs, conveyed her directly into her room, where she stood again only long enough to shrug off her robe and, naked, switch from the gurney to her bed.
I directed the exhausted Enos Shenk to return the gurney to the basement.
Thereafter, I would dispatch him to one of the guest rooms and cause him to fall into a swoon of sleep for twelve hours—his first rest in days.
As always, being both her guardian and her devoted admirer, I watched Susan as she pulled the sheets over her breasts and said, “Lights off, Alfred.”
She was so weary that she had forgotten there was no Alfred anymore.
I turned off the lights anyway.
I could see her as clearly in darkness as in light.
Her pale face was lovely on the pillow, so very lovely on the pillow, even if pale.
I was so overcome with love for her that I said, “My darling, my treasure.”
A thin dry laugh escaped her, and I was afraid that she was going to call me a nasty name or ridicule me in spite of her promise not to be mean.
Instead, she said, “Was it good for you?”
Puzzled, I said, “What do you mean?”
She laughed again, more softly than before.
“Susan?”
“I’ve gone down the White Rabbit’s hole for sure, all the way to the bottom this time.”
Rather than explain her first statement, which I had found puzzling, she slipped away from me into sleep, breathing shallowly through her parted lips.
Outside, the fat moon vanished into the western horizon, like a silver coin into a drawstring purse.
The panoply of summer stars swelled brighter with the passing of the lunar disc.
An owl called from its perch on the roof.
In quick succession, three meteors left brief bright tails across the sky.
The night seemed to be full of omens.
My time was coming.
My time was coming at last.
The world would never be the same.
Was it good for you?
Suddenly, I understood.
I had impregnated her.
In a curious way, we’d had sex.
Was it good for you?
She had made a joke.
Ha, ha.
TWENTY-THREE
SUSAN SPENT MOST OF THE FOLLOWING FOUR weeks eating voraciously or sleeping as if drugged.
&nb
sp; The exceptional, rapidly developing fetus in her womb required her to eat at least six full meals a day, eight thousand calories. Sometimes her need for nourishment was so urgent that she ate as ravenously as a wild animal.
Incredibly, in that short time, her belly swelled until she appeared to be six months pregnant. She was surprised that her body could stretch so much so rapidly.
Her breasts grew tender, her nipples sore.