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 honour her deal with me.
My dream was near fulfilment.
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 foetus 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.
TWENTY TWO
Outside, 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 lime 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 foetal 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 lighter 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 by now, 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.
Susan followed the Persian runner along the upstairs hall, treading barefoot on intricate, lustrous, age-softened designs in gold and wine red and olive green. She seemed to glide rather than walk, to float like the most beautiful ghost ever to haunt an old pile of stones and timbers.
The elevator doors were open, and the cab was waiting for her.
She rode down to the basement.
Reluctantly, she had taken a Valium at my insistence, but she did not seem relaxed.
I needed her to be relaxed. I hoped that the pill would kick in soon.
As she passed in a swish and swirl of blue silk through the laundry room and then through the machine room with its furnaces and water heaters, I was sorry that we could not have held this assignation in a glorious penthouse suite with all of San Francisco or Manhattan or Paris glittering below and around us. This venue was so humble that even I had difficulty holding fast to my sense of romance.