Demon Seed (21 page)

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and another, as if drawing the cool water of courage from some deep well in her psyche.

“Furthermore,” I said, “four weeks from tonight, Shenk will have to harvest the developing fetus for transfer to the incubator. He’s my only hands.”

“All right.”

“You can’t do any of those things yourself.”

“I know,” she replied with a note of impatience. “I said ‘all right,’ didn’t I?”

This was the Susan with whom I’d fallen in love, all the way back from wherever she had gone when for a couple of hours she had stared silently at the ceiling. Here was the toughness I found both frustrating and appealing.

I said, “When my body can sustain itself outside the incubator, and when my consciousness has been electronically transferred into it, I will have hands of my own. Then I can dispose of Shenk. We need endure him for only a month.”

“Just keep him away from me.”

“What are your other terms?” I asked.

“I want to have the freedom to go wherever I care to go in my house.”

“Not the garage,” I said at once.

“I don’t care about the garage.”

“Anywhere in the house,” I agreed, “as long as I watch over you at all times.”

“Of course. But I won’t be scheming at escape. I know it’s not possible. I just don’t want to be tied down, boxed up, more than necessary.”

I could sympathize with that desire. “What else?”

“That’s all.”

“I expected more.”

“Is there anything else I could demand that you would grant?”

“No,” I said.

“So what’s the point?”

I was not suspicious exactly. Wary, as I said. “It’s just that you’ve become so accommodating all of a sudden.”

“I realized I only had two choices.”

“Victim or survivor.”

“Yes. And I’m not going to die here.”

“Of course you’re not,” I assured her.

“I’ll do what I need to do to survive.”

“You’ve always been a realist,” I said.

“Not always.”

“I have one term of my own,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Don’t call me bad names anymore.”

“Did I call you bad names?” she asked.

“Hurtful names.”

“I don’t recall.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“I was afraid and distressed.”

“You won’t be mean to me?” I pressed.

“I don’t see anything to be gained by it.”

“I am a sensitive entity.”

“Good for you.”

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.

S
USAN 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.

O
UTSIDE, 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 being 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.