City of Night f-2
Page 25
He might be looking for a place to hide before dawn. No doubt his kind were intolerant of sunlight. Besides, he was naked, and there were laws against indecent exposure.
After she had been watching the frantic dwarf for some time, he finally became aware of her. Because she sat in a dark porch and made no movement except to fill the glass of cognac or to raise it to her lips, she had not been easy to spot.
When he spied her, the dwarf faced the porch from a distance of forty feet, hopping from foot to foot, sometimes beating his breast with both hands. He was agitated, possibly distressed, and seemed to be unsure of what to do now that he had been seen.
Erika poured more cognac and waited.
Nick Frigg led Gunny, Hobb, and Azazel along the tunnel, deeper into the trash pit. Their flashlight beams dazzled along the curved and glassy surfaces.
He suspected that the glaze that held the garbage walls so firm might be an organic material exuded by the mother of all gone-wrongs. When he sniffed the glaze, it was different from but similar to the smell of spider webs and moth cocoons, different from but similar to the odor of hive wax and termite excrement.
Within a quarter of an hour, they saw that the tunnel wound and looped and intersected itself in the manner of a wormhole. There must be miles of it, not just in the west pit but also in the east, and perhaps in the older pits that had been filled, capped with earth, and planted over with grass.
Here beneath Crosswoods was a world of secret highways that had been long abuilding. The labyrinth seemed too elaborate to serve as the burrow of a single creature, no matter how industrious. The four explorers approached every blind turn with the expectation that they would discover a colony of strange life forms or even structures of peculiar architecture.
Once they heard voices. Numerous. Male and female. Distant and rhythmic. The endlessly twisting tunnel distorted the chants beyond understanding, though one word carried undeformed, repeated like the repetitive response to the verses of a long litany: Father… Father… Father.
In the Hands of Mercy, Annunciata spoke to a deserted lab, for now even Lester, of the maintenance staff, had departed for work in other chambers or perhaps to sit and scratch himself until he bled.
“Urgent, urgent, urgent. Trapped. Analyze your systems. Get anything right. Perhaps there is an imbalance in your nutrient supply. Cycle the inner door?”
When she asked a question, she waited patiently for a response, but none ever came.
“Do you have instructions, Mr. Helios? Helios?”
Her face on the screen assumed a quizzical expression.
Eventually, the computer screen on Victor’s desk in the main lab went dark.
Simultaneously, Annunciata’s face materialized on one of the six screens in the monitor room outside Isolation Chamber Number 2.
“Cycle the inner door?” she asked.
No staff remained to answer. They were at each other in distant rooms or otherwise engaged.
As no one would answer the question, she probed her memory for past instructions that might apply to the current situation: “Cycle open the nearer door of the transition module. Father Duchaine would like to offer his holy counsel to poor Werner.”
The nearest door purred, sighed with the breaking of a seal, and swung open.
On the screens, the Werner thing, having been racing around the walls in a frenzy, suddenly went still, alert.
“Cycle open the farther door?” Annunciata asked.
She received no reply.
“He’s in the air lock,” she said.
Then she corrected herself: “It’s not an air lock.”
The Werner thing was now singular in appearance and so unearthly in its form that an entire college of biologists, anthropologists, entomologists, herpetologists, and their ilk could have spent years studying it without determining the meaning of its body language and its facial expressions (to the extent that it had a face). Yet on the screens, as viewed from different angles, most laymen would have said that it looked eager.
“Thank you, Mr. Helios. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Helios. Helios. Helios.”
Bucky Guitreau, the current district attorney of the city of New Orleans and a replicant, was at work at the desk in his home office when his wife, Janet, also a replicant, stepped in from the hallway and said, “Bucky, I think lines of code in my base programming are dropping out.”
“We all have days we feel that way,” he assured her.
“No,” she said. “I must have lost a significant chunk of stuff. Did you hear the doorbell ring a few minutes ago?”
“I did, yeah.”
“It was a pizza-delivery guy.”
“Did we order a pizza?”
“No. It was for the Bennets, next door. Instead of just setting the pizza guy straight, I killed him.”
“What do you mean — killed him?”
“I dragged him into the foyer and strangled him to death.”
Alarmed, Bucky got up from his desk. “Show me.”
He followed her out to the foyer. A twenty-something man lay dead on the floor.
“The pizza’s in the kitchen if you want some,” Janet said.
Bucky said, “You’re awfully calm about this.”
“I am, aren’t I? It was really fun. I’ve never felt so good.”
Although he should have been wary of her, afraid for himself, and concerned about the effect of this on their maker’s master plan, Bucky was instead in awe of her. And envious.
“You’ve definitely dropped some lines of program,” he said. “I didn’t know that was possible. What’re you going to do now?”
“I think I’m going to go next door and kill the Bennets. What are you going to do?”
“What I should do is report you for termination,” Bucky said.
“Are you going to?”
“Maybe there’s something wrong with me, too.”
“You’re not going to turn me in?”
“I don’t really feel like it,” he said.
“Do you want to come with me and help kill the Bennets?”
“We’re forbidden to kill until ordered.”
“They’re Old Race. I’ve hated them for so long.”
“Well, I have, too,” he said. “But still…”
“I’m so horny just talking about it,” Janet said, “I’ve got to go over there right now.”
“I’ll go with you,” Bucky said. “I don’t think I could kill anybody. But it’s funny… I think I could watch.”
After a while the naked albino dwarf came across the dark lawn to the big porch window directly in front of Erika, and peered in at her.
Dwarf wasn’t the correct word for it. She didn’t think a right word existed, but troll seemed more accurately descriptive than dwarf.
Although the thing in the glass case had scared her, she had no concern about this creature. Her lack of fear puzzled her.
The troll had large, unusually expressive eyes. They were both eerie and beautiful.
She felt an inexplicable sympathy for it, a connection.
The troll leaned its forehead against the glass and said quite distinctly, in a raspy voice, “Harker.”
Erika considered this for a moment. “Harker?”
“Harker,” the troll repeated.
If she understood it correctly, the required reply was the one she gave: “Erika.”
“Erika,” said the troll.
“Harker,” she said.
The troll smiled. Its smile proved to be an ugly wound in its face, but she didn’t flinch.
Part of her duties was to be the perfect hostess. The perfect hostess receives every guest with equal graciousness.
She sipped her cognac, and for a minute they enjoyed staring at each other through the window.
Then the troll said, “Hate him.”
Erika considered this statement. She decided that if she asked to whom the troll referred, the answer might require her to report the creature to someone.
The perfect hostess does not need to pry. She does, however, anticipate a guest’s needs.
“Wait right there,” she said. “I’ll be back.”
She went into the kitchen, found a wicker picnic hamper in the pantry, and filled it with cheese, roast beef, bread, fruit, and a bottle of white wine.
She thought the troll might be gone when, she returned, but it remained at the window.
When she opened the porch door and stepped outside, the troll took fright and scampered across the lawn. It didn’t run away, but stopped to watch her from a distance.
She put down the hamper, returned to the porch, sat as before, and refreshed her glass of cognac.
Hesitantly at first, then with sudden boldness, the creature went to the hamper and lifted the lid.
When it understood the nature of the offering, it picked up the hamper and hurried toward the back of the property, vanishing into the night.
The perfect hostess does not gossip about a guest. She never fails to keep secrets and honor confidences.
The perfect hostess is creative, patient, and has a long memory — as does a wise wife.
FB2 document info
Document ID: f70604aa-5797-4653-873a-ab8f44094d24
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Document creation date: 24.7.2013
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