Starfire a-2

by Charles Sheffield

  She was delighted with the cages of cloned mice and rats and gerbils and rabbits, as any fourteen-year-old might be. Less usual was her fascination with the microtome lasers and scanning probe microscope; and downright unusual to the point of implausibility were her sharp questions about the similarities and differences between human and animal subjects. I wondered, briefly, if I might be wrong. Was she young enough to change, to become what her intelligence permitted? But then she said, with no change of tone, “I could get good street money for those gerbils. Do you know what people use them for?”

  I did not know. She told me. I realized that redemption in this life was impossible for Paula Searle.

  It had to be quick and painless. I went to the locked cupboard and took out the vapor spray. It was calibrated to deliver dosage based on body mass. I was about to make an estimate when it occurred to me that in this case I didn’t need to.

  “Paula, how much do you weigh?”

  “Weigh?” She was leaning over the scanning probe microscope, which showed an image of a cell mitochondrion and the two conformational states of its inner membrane. “Oh, I dunno. Maybe a hundred and ten?”

  Fifty kilos, which was just what I would have guessed. It was time for action, not thought. I set the delivery level, stepped up quickly behind Paula, and in the same moment applied the vapor nozzle to the back of her graceful young neck.

  The combination of neurotoxin and DMSO skin dif-fuser acts in milliseconds. When Paula swayed and I caught her, she was already dead.

  I lowered her to the floor and crouched beside her. Death added a new calm beauty to her face. I fought back the urge to take a picture of her as a permanent record. I reminded myself that I would have much more than that. I would have Paula herself, a better Paula than she had ever been in this life; and I would have her forever.

  I have no idea how long I looked at her before I was able to force myself to stand up and take the next step.

  The odd thing is that there were no decisions to be made. It was as though, unconsciously, I had established a research facility ideally suited to my present needs. I took the DNA sample at once and placed it into a sequencer and segmenter. While sequencing proceeded I lifted Paula’s body, complete with clothing, and carried it to the organic disposal unit.

  Full dissociation at the cell level would take at least twenty-four hours. The DNA sequencing and segmenting would be completed long before that. I wondered where I would store Paula’s genome, but again it seemed as though the necessary arrangements had been made ahead of time. I had been experimenting with the storage and later reconstitution of DNA segments in the chromosomal introns of an old box tortoise that I had inherited from a previous research worker. Although the tortoise’s age seemed indeterminate, its gender was not, and the name Matilda, painted in pink block letters on his back, was highly inappropriate.

  I had cleaned his shell and renamed him Methuselah. Now Methuselah’s introns would safely contain Paula until the time, perhaps years ahead, when I had a facility big enough to clone a human. Then I would bring her once more into the world, and to the perfection that was hers by rights.

  When all was done that had to be done I went to my desk and sat down. I wanted to work, but I could not. I was quite calm and at the same time enormously excited. Sex had never produced sensations remotely like this. In my giddy joy I knew, even then, that what had happened with Paula would happen again. This time it had been a chance combination of circumstances. Next time, and on all later occasions, everything would be planned to the smallest detail. It had to be that way, because I would not stop and I did not intend to be caught. Ever.

  Ah, the hubris of youth. I was caught, of course I was. Just as, forty years on, the murderer on Sky City would be caught. There would be a fatal moment of carelessness or indecision, or a too-long pause for savoring or pleasure. At the moment of dispatch, as I well knew, time stretches. Interval becomes meaningless. How long had I sat, suspended outside of time, and stared at Paula’s calm and lifeless face?

  A hand shook my arm. I opened my eyes. It was evening, and a shaft of late sunlight struck through the low western window of the castle and lit the face in front of me.

  It was Paula’s face, Paula changed to an eleven-year-old. She was bending over me, panting, dark hair wild and liquid eyes aglow.

  “We’re back!” she cried. “I won, I got here first!”

  I blinked, and the present came crashing in on me. Here they were, filling the rooms, all my darlings. There was chatter, there was laughter that rang from the stone walls and the high rafters and ceiling, there was the brimming energy of eighteen stampeding girls between the ages of seven and eleven.

  Behind them came a woman in her forties. She was breathing heavily and shaking her head.

  “Honestly, Mr. Baxter, I don’t know how you do it. They wear me out, and that’s a fact.”

  I glanced down at my lap, making sure that the gruesome records from Sky City were safely closed.

  “They’ll do the same for me, Mrs. O’Keefe, before this night is over. They still have to have their lessons, and after a couple of days in Londonderry it’s always the devil to get them settled in again.”

  “Well, they’re all fed, sir, so you need have no worries on that score. And they all bought outfits for autumn. Not that that was easy, if you’d seen some of the things they wanted to be buying and wearing before I put my foot down.”

  “I’m sure that I’ll approve of whatever you chose.”

  “I hope so.” She glanced through to the dining room, where the girls now had the long table covered with clothes. Almost without thinking, I ran the count. It was not that I didn’t trust Mrs. O’Keefe completely, but …

  Paula, Amity, Katherine, Rose, Gloria, and Bridget, all age eleven. Darlene, Charity, Beth, Dawn, Trixie, and Willa, age nine. Crystal, Maxine, Dolores, Lucy-Mary, Alyson, and Victoria, age seven. Originally I had wanted them all the same age, but limitations on cloning equipment made it impossible. There had also been a temptation to give each of them a new name drawn from classical sources. Finally I decided that would not work-for me, rather than for them. I could think of their names only as they had been when first we met.

  “So I’ll be on my way,” Mrs. O’Keefe was saying. “And I’ll see you in two weeks. Oh, but I was asked to give a message to you. It was sent in to the Dunglow center and I said I was on the way here and could save them a delivery.”

  Her tone was a little chiding. It said, Come on, Mr. Baxter, why don’t you put a communication center here in the castle and get in line with the rest of the world? It wouldn’t be as much trouble as you seem to think.

  She had no idea that in the basement I had access to all the global nets and services. Passive receive-only, of course, because I would do nothing to draw outside attention.

  I held out my hand for the message, but she shook her head. “It’s too simple to be worth writing. Just a man who says he’s figured out how to do it without you going anywhere. He didn’t leave a name.”

  Any more than I would. I wondered about Seth’s penchant for secrecy. Was it natural, or did he have good reason? It would be nice to know, and maybe have another lever to use on him.

  Mrs. O’Keefe was leaving. On the way out she stared again into the long dining hall, where my darlings were now squabbling as they compared their purchases from Londonderry.

  “Look at them,” she said as she headed for the front door. “Like a bunch of magpies they are, chattering and chuntering away. You never complain, but running an orphanage like this has to be harder than anyone knows. I’ll say it again, Mr. Baxter. You’re a saint.”

  A saint. Indeed.

  Given the suspect hagiography of Ireland, which includes such stalwarts as Saint Terence the Wastrel and Saint Brendan the Fornicator, her statement was not as improbable as it sounded.

  Before I went through to coerce the girls to evening studies, I sat for a moment reviewing my efforts of the day. What had I learned,
in my attempt to summon up remembrance of things past?

  One thing, but an important one. The Sky City murderer and I had no commonality of motive or feeling. The deaths of my darlings had been clean and painless, leaving them as beautiful in death as in life. The notion of stabbing, bludgeoning, and sexual mutilation sickened me.

  But that left a mystery. If serial killings represent consequence rather than cause, what driving need was compelling the murderer on Sky City?

  It was not, I felt sure, passion as I knew it. Was it, indeed, passion of any kind? And yet there had been mutilation-evidence, surely, of a killing frenzy.

  I thought once more of the dates of death, from number one, Myra Skelton, to number twelve, Kate Ulrey.

  Almost three weeks had passed since Kate had died, her brains bashed out on a well-traveled and well-lit corridor close to the central axis of Sky City. Another murder was overdue. Would it happen?

  If it did not, that would be a clue. A clue as to what, I could not say. But murder, especially murder of this type, keeps its own schedule and imposes on the killer its own imperatives.

  8

  Celine had been half right. Nick Lopez’s staff on the World Protection Federation did not know where he was, but they could certainly exchange messages. Celine’s request for an “urgent and highly sensitive” meeting had been forwarded to Nick as soon as it came in. Normally he would have answered at once, but for the moment something more urgent was on his mind.

  What was happening to the aircraft?

  He was on his way from Washington to a private meeting with Gordy Rolfe, and all their previous sessions had taken place either at the World Protection Federation offices in New Rio or at The Flaunt, the corporate headquarters of the Argos Group. The steel-and-glass splinter of The Flaunt towered four thousand feet above the Palladian architecture of Houston, and Gordy’s summit suite overlooked the rebuilt city. Nick had assumed that they would use the same rendezvous site today. That would give him a comfortable and productive flight of at least an hour and a half, during which he could attend to other business. But his craft was beginning its descent less than twenty minutes after takeoff.

  He glanced at the telltales and saw that all mechanical and electronic conditions were normal. The weather was clear and fine. Still the vehicle went on descending. He checked the Automatic Vehicle Control. The AVC’s destination coordinates had been provided from Gordy Rolfe’s office, and Nick had never thought to question them. But instead of the glitter of The Flaunt ahead there was only a peaceful landscape of rural Virginia.

  The craft went into a gentle bank, and as it leveled off Nick caught sight of a runway. The black strip was short, and it was narrow, but from the way that the vehicle was behaving, a full electronic landing system was in operation.

  Nick could see no sign of any other aircraft. He waited through the gentle touchdown and taxi to the end of the runway. Then he slid open the hatch and allowed the glide stair to carry him from plane to ground.

  He found himself standing in a shallow valley, with low grassy hills to the east and more substantial wooded mountains to the west. A solitary building hugged the ground two hundred yards past the end of the runway. Beside it rose strange shapes, red and green and yellow, oddly angular and complex in the late afternoon light. He began to walk toward them.

  At the moment when he recognized both the building and its neighboring structures — it was an old school-house, its playground still filled with brightly painted seesaws and monkey bars — a figure emerged from the schoolhouse door.

  Gordy Rolfe was easy to identify. He was diminutive, with a head too big for the slender body. A great sculptured upsweep of snow-white hair exaggerated the disproportion. It was styled for effect, as were the big steel-rimmed glasses. A black jumpsuit, Rolfe’s standard attire, emphasized rather than disguised the crooked back and uneven shoulders.

  Rolfe did not walk toward Nick. He waited, leaning against the schoolhouse wall. When the two were within earshot, he said, “Don’t judge this place by appearances, Senator. I learned to read and write in there.”

  “I guessed as much.” Lopez peered in through one of the windows. “Been a while since the school was used, though.”

  “You knew where we were going to meet?”

  “Not until we landed. I thought I was headed for Houston. But I’ve seen pictures of this place before. I was Senate Majority Leader in Washington when the headquarters of the Legion of Argos was raided and the Eye of God was taken prisoner. The old headquarters is directly beneath us, isn’t it? We had pictures of the whole attack plastered all over the place.”

  “So did we.” Rolfe grimaced, increasing his likeness to a sinister elf. “Of course, the Legion members had a rather different view of events.”

  Nick Lopez nodded. He was round-faced and brown-complexioned, and the hair above his broad brow was set in a high, old-fashioned pompadour. Despite Rolfe’s extravagant coiffure, Lopez towered a foot and a half above the other man. “Did you know her well?”

  “Pearl Lazenby — the Eye of God?” The gray eyes behind their big lenses glittered, and Gordy laughed harshly. “Fucking right I knew her. From the time I was six until I was seventeen she was more important than my own parents. Of course, for a lot of that time she was serving a sentence in judicial sleep. But there was morning-noon-and-night talk of her, and I was raised with her rules.”

  Raised by the members of the Legion of Argos, Nick thought, with their rigid attitudes. Lots of prayer, lots of dogma, lots of discipline and harsh punishment. But no medical treatment to make Gordy Rolfe of normal height, even though that had been a standard procedure long before the supernova. No simple corrective changes to his vision, to make those anachronistic eyeglasses unnecessary. No protocol to adjust the spinal curvature that threw the right shoulder a little lower than the left. It was no wonder that the head of the Argos Group now had his own rigidity and strangeness.

  Nick said only, “I’m surprised that you can stand to come back here, with all those memories.”

  “Stand to come here?” Gordy Rolfe twisted his head to look sideways up at Nick, even though Lopez had stooped slightly to see in through the classroom window. “Senator, you’re so-o wrong.” He moved into the schoolroom, gesturing to Lopez to follow. “When the Eye of God was recaptured and taken away to be put back into judicial sleep, my mother and father and the other Legion members wailed and moaned and acted like it was the end of the world. Me, I did the same — in public. But in private I danced. Pearl Lazenby scared me shitless. When I heard that she had died after three more months in judicial sleep it was the happiest day of my life.”

  “Were you still here then, with the Legion?”

  “Yeah. But it was already starting to fall apart. See, the Eye had prophesied that she’d wake up at a time of great disaster and lead the Legion members to take over the whole world. The supernova happened, and they hauled her out of judicial sleep. The prophecy was validated. Everyone said, this is it. They were primed and ready to go. Pearl assured them that the great victory of the Legion of Argos was only days away. Then the boys from Washington came in here and grabbed her, and suddenly the holy cleansing was over before it started.”

  “Not just the boys. Did you know that Tanaka led them here?”

  Gordy Rolfe stood in front of a bank of three old elevators, ready to enter the middle one. He swung around sharply at Lopez’s question. “President Tanaka? I thought she was off on the Mars expedition when the gamma pulse hit. That’s what her bio said when she ran for President.”

  “She was. She got back just in time to help Special Forces capture Pearl Lazenby.”

  “Then I owe her one. Hell, if I’d known that, I might have voted for her. Anyway, when Pearl was taken away, nobody in the Legion could believe it. Her prophesy had been wrong, see, and when she prophesied as the Eye of God she was supposed to be infallible. Some of the old-timers tried to weasel round that, but the newer members weren’t buying. People sta
rted leaving.”

  “Not you, though.” Lopez followed Rolfe into the elevator.

  “No.” Gordy Rolfe pressed the bottom button, which bore an icon like a flaming torch, and they began to descend. “Once she was out of the way, why leave? There were opportunities for a genius at headquarters.”

  “A genius like you?”

  “Who else? I knew I had talent. And I didn’t know a damn thing about the world outside. I stayed behind, looked at what the Legion was ready to walk away from, and started work. That was the beginning of the Argos Group. Houston is the official headquarters, but I prefer this. I come here more and more often.”

  The elevator was descending, slowly and noisily. Nick wondered what would happen if it broke and they became stuck a thousand feet underground. He decided that anyone able to design and build robots as complex and capable as the rolfes would certainly have allowed for elevator maintenance. Gordy was just doing what Nick had so often done, choosing a meeting place where he had the psychological advantage. Probably there were other surprises ahead.

  But not, perhaps, at once. The elevator creaked to a stop and the door opened on a long chamber painted in gunmetal gray. Every few feet along the walls, Nick saw a lurid and unvarying design: the scarlet talons of a bird enclosing a green globe.

  He stopped by one of the painted symbols. “The original symbol of the Eye of God.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t change the paintings down here; they’re all over most of the walls. Don’t you think it makes a nice official emblem for the Argos Group?”

  Rolfe’s voice burned with a nervous energy that Nick Lopez encountered only in his meetings with Gordy. Even with the aid of telomod therapy, how long could a man operate at that level of intensity? Rolfe was forty-three years old and he looked over sixty.

  Nick made his own reply deliberately casual. “It all seems pretty run-down. I assume we’ll have a shielded environment where we can talk?”