When the lift stopped and the doors opened, a second
Marine greeted me, requested that I hold my fingertips to
an identiplate to verify his visual check. I complied, was
approved, and followed him to another elevator in the
long bank. Again: up.
Too many floors to count later, we stepped into a
cream-walled corridor, paced almost to the end of it, and
went through a chocolate door that slid aside at the
officer’s vocal command. Inside, there was a room of
alabaster walls with hex signs painted every five feet in
brilliant reds and oranges. There was a small and ugly
child sitting in a black leather chair, and four men stand-
ing behind him, staring at me as if I were expected to say
something of monumental importance.
I didn’t say anything at all.
The child looked up, his eyes and lips all but hidden by
the wrinkles of a century of life, by gray and gravelike
flesh. I tried to readjust my judgment, tried to visualize
him as a grandfather. But it was not so. He was a child.
There was the glint of babyhood close behind that ruined
countenance. His voice crackled like papyrus unrolled for
the first time in millennia, and he gripped the chair as the
words came, and he squinted his already squinted eyes,
and he said, “You’re the one.” It was an accusation.
“You’re the one they sent for.”
For the first time in many years, I was afraid. I was not
certain what terrified me, but it was a deep and relentless
uneasiness, far more threatening than The Fear which rose
in me most nights when I considered my origins and the
pocket of the plastic womb from which I came.
“You,” the child said again.
“Who is he?” I asked the assembled military men.
No one spoke immediately. As if they wanted to be sure
the freak in the chair was finished.
He wasn’t.
“I don’t like you,” he said. “You’re going to be sorry
you came here. I’m going to see to that.”
II
“That’s the situation,” Harry said, leaning back in his
chair for the first time since he had taken me aside to
explain the job. He was still nervous. His clear blue eyes
were having trouble staying with mine, and he sought
specks on the walls and scars on the furniture to draw his
attention.
The child-ancient’s eyes, on the other hand, never left
me. They squinted like burning coals sparking beneath
rotted vegetation. I could feel the hatred smoldering
there, hatred not just for me (though there was surely
that), but for everyone, everything. There was no particle
of his world which did not draw the freak’s contempt and
loathing. He, more so than I, was an outcast of the
wombs. Once again, the doctors who made their living
here and the congressmen who had supported the project
since its inception could gloat: “Artificial Creation is a
Benefit to the Nation.” It had produced me. More than
eighteen years later, it had come up with this warped
super-genius who was no more than three years old but
who appeared to be a relic. Two successes in a quarter of
a century of operation.
For the government, that’s a winner.
“I don’t know if I can do it,” I said at last.
“Why not?” asked the uniformed hulk the others called
General Morsfagen. He was a chiseled granite man with
exaggerated shoulders and a chest too large for anything
but tailored shirts. Wasp-waisted, with the small feet of a
boxer. Hands to bend iron bars in circus acts.
“I don’t know what to expect. He has a different sort of
mind. Sure, I’ve esped army staff, the people who work
here at AC, FBI agents, the whole mess. And I’ve uner-
ringly turned over the traitors and potential security risks.
But this just doesn’t scan like that.”
“You don’t have to do any sorting,” Morsfagen
snapped, his thin lips making like a turtle bill. “I thought
this had been made clear. He can formulate theories in
areas as useful as physics and chemistry to others as
useless as theology. But each time we drag the damn thing