Starfire (12 page)

We began to walk side by side, I deliberately shortening my step to fit hers. There seemed little chance that she would comprehend any element of my work, but we had six long blocks to walk. I told her of my own background in biology. I started to explain the nature and causes of apoptosis, the preprogrammed death that comes to most (but not all) cells of an organism. I spoke more for my benefit than hers—my mental review of the previous night's work had been interrupted by our chance meeting—and I made no attempt to talk down to her or to simplify the intrinsically complex biochemistry.

She said nothing, and after a couple of minutes brought a couple of marbles from her pocket and began to chink them together. I assumed that she had stopped listening, until suddenly she said, "It all happens from inside, don't it, like the cell's wearing out? I mean, it's not like a virus or something gets in and kills it."

Paula Searle, in thirty seconds, made real and tangible a truth that I had previously known only intellectually: Just as mental slowness occurs no less frequently in those of royal descent (more frequently, some would say, with an argument based on sound genetic principles), so intelligence and talent and quickness of wit may surface in the deepest despairing depths of society.

Paula was
bright.

We walked, we talked, we came to my building and went up. I cooked while Paula explored the small apartment and made derogatory comments concerning my inadequate wardrobe and rickety table and total lack of entertainment facilities. She had removed the dark blouse and dowdy wraparound skirt that mimicked Scantling attire, and was now revealed in brief shorts and a T-shirt of pale yellow. With her coltish limbs and liquid dark eyes, she danced and skipped between the two rooms of my apartment and brightened any spot upon which she lighted.

At one point she sang a Scantling hymn, "The Narrow Gate of Heaven." She had a small, true voice, and I listened with pleasure until I realized that the song was a parody, the same tune but with words of sexual innuendo and details of illegal surgery to make you shudder.

"Don't sing that," I said.

She paused in her wandering and stared at me in surprise. "Sorry. I know somebody had it done to her, just like in the song. But if it makes you too hot, I'll stop."

"Please." But I wondered, could she be right? I was in truth oddly excited, although not in any way that I could relate to my previous sexual experiences.

Even with distractions, I am a good cook. When we ate—her reaction to my food and my cooking were positive—I asked more about her background. How old was she, how long had they been living where they were now, where had she been before that, did she have other relatives in Atlanta, where was her father?

I was making conversation, easily and naturally. Just as when we had finished eating, she, easily and naturally, went through to sprawl across my bed while I cleaned up.

It took me no more than five minutes. When I came through to ask if she now was ready to go back home, she was sound asleep.

It seemed wrong to wake her. I moved a soft chair in from the other room and sat down. She had in her answers to my questions revealed an appallingly adult knowledge of the world. Her mother had moved from Norfolk four months ago. They had become afraid when Paula's "father" was killed in an argument over stolen goods from a warehouse raid. Paula and her mother were not registered, so she had not been able to go to school for over a year. When she was older—not much older, though she was not sure how much—she would help earn her keep. Not with men like her mother brought home, Mother promised her that, but with ones young and nice. But—her red-rose mouth stretched wide in a grimace—you'd be a fool to believe that, wouldn't you?

I looked down at her. In sleep, all her cynicism vanished and only innocence remained. Here was a beautiful and intelligent child, on the brink of becoming a woman. The world ought to be opening out before her in all its glory and diversity, but that would never happen. Not to little Paula. The narrow gate of heaven had for her already closed. She was the loveliest thing I had ever seen, with grace and brains and talent far beyond the women with whom I had made love, but already she was tainted and blighted.
"That which is marred at birth, time will not mend."

I did not intend to sleep, nor did I make plans before I slept. Nor, while I slept, did I dream. And yet, when I awoke soon after noon, the idea—the resolve, the compulsion-—was already formed in my mind, to the smallest detail of planning and execution. (Yes, yes, I know; let us not trivialize a life with a sniggering and obvious play on words.)

She would be missed, maybe in hours but possibly not for days. Her mother, as an unregistered resident of Atlanta wary of authority, might never report the disappearance; and if she did, what would any rational investigator conclude? Surely that Paula had chosen the unknown future of a runaway's life over the sordid certainties of the present.

I waited two hours more, until Paula stirred and sat up and smiled at me. "Oliver Guest," she said. "
Doctor
Oliver Guest. Do you really work with all those animals and things like you said, or were you making it up?"

"I really do. And I must go back to work this afternoon. And you ought to go home to your mother."

I am sure that I said those words. They sound as though I was faint-hearted, or suffering second thoughts. The reality was more complex. I wanted to believe, at some level, that Paula was my accomplice in what I planned to do, that it was her desire as well as mine. It would be, after all, to her ultimate benefit.

"She won't care where I am," she said. "Big Maury Wellstone comes around Sunday nights, and she always needs her sleep before him."

"Is it Sunday?" I said. "I didn't realize. When I'm working hard I lose track of the days."

I was well aware that it was Sunday; in fact, I was counting on it.

The bright weather of the September morning had turned nasty. The early breeze had strengthened and scudding low clouds threatened rain. No Scantling performs any kind of work on the Sabbath, so the streets were almost empty as I and Paula—she with a short coat of mine over her blouse and skirt and a scarf wrapped around her head—made our way to the Institute for Probatory Therapies. When we passed Paula's apartment building she gave it hardly a glance.

The side door of the institute was locked, but I had a key. We entered the long ground-floor corridor. We then had to walk the full length of it, because the elevators and stairs were both at the other end. This was a critical moment. Occasionally others would work on Sundays, but even then it was a day for catching up on experiments and data analysis. People stuck closely to their own labs and had no interest in socializing or wandering the corridors. Paula and I met not a soul in the corridor, or on the way to my lab on the sixth floor.

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 diffuser 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.