“Why such rage? I don’t mean any harm to anyone.”
“In your arrogance, in your obsession to have what you want at any cost, you better know the price might be the world itself.”
“I don’t make any future but my own—–and not much of that.”
Her hatred was palpable. “Seemingly insignificant things can have terrible consequences. The horrors coming in the next hundred years are beyond your comprehension, pretty boy.”
The stained-glass chandelier and other lights pulsed, and with each dimming, wings of shadow furled and unfurled through the house.
She said, “The catastrophes that people of your time fear—none come to pass. You fear the wrong things. You’re all stupid, blind. You’re so ignorant, you mistake the real threats as steps to Utopia. But if the future can’t be changed, there will be hell on Earth.”
He had no time for Nanette’s rage and contempt.
The woman whom he had come to set free must be on the second floor. As the lights pulsed and the low throbbing passed through the house again, David climbed the stairs, no less in the grip of dread than in the thrall of hope. He followed the upper hall to her room.
| 90 |
The collection of photographs. The ampule of blood hanging by a gold chain.
All in white, she was more radiant than the dress she wore. She stood at the foot of the bed, young and beautiful and so alive, her face as solemn as that of a mystic contemplating eternal mysteries.
He stopped six feet short of her, afraid that what he had come here to learn would not be what he wanted to hear.
The lightning and thunder seemed to have relented, but hard-driven sheets of rain drummed the windows as though some tempest of absolution meant to wash from the world its long, sordid history of wickedness.
When he spoke the names, his voice was reverent but also riven with uncertainty. “Maddison? Emily?”
“Neither,” she said. “You should have waited for me, David. You shouldn’t have investigated me, shouldn’t have come here. I asked you to have patience, but it’s too late for that now. Put the tote down and sit with me. Understand . . . once you know, there is no going back to your old life. You’ll have to pledge to me.”
Although she remained radiant, she lacked the warmth that had previously marked her treatment of him, that had been a fundamental aspect of Emily’s personality.
. . . there was this shiny metal cap, like the size of a quarter, in her skull.
What he said now was the truth but also an effort to placate her, to draw her out. “I don’t have a life worth going back to. Not now that I’ve been filled with so many . . . expectations.”
She sat on the edge of the bed and extended one hand to him. “Put the tote down and sit here.”
If the tote contained only money, there would be no reason to refuse to put it aside. He placed it on an armchair, sat next to her, and took her offered hand.
She smiled at him, but this was not the lover’s smile with which she favored him in recent days. He couldn’t read her mood as clearly as he’d read it before, but that smile seemed reptilian.
“What did you mean ‘neither’？” he asked. “How can you be neither Maddison nor Emily?”
“My future, a century from now, is a place of technological wonders—but also horrors without equal in history. Your generation and others, enchanted by change, welcomed their enslavement without realizing the hell they’d bring on themselves by their trust in unconsidered ‘progress.’ When change occurs at warp speed, some technological dreams become nightmares.”
A sinking, sickening feeling overcame him as his hope shrank. “But if you’re not Emily or Maddison, who are you?”
“My name is Anna. My body is in the basement, in a control pod that transmits my consciousness into this clone of Emily.”
“Clone.” The word felt like a stone in his mouth.
“The clone is my avatar. I operate it, I see through its eyes, I feel through its senses. With a DNA sample, we can grow a clone to maturation in four to six weeks. Three of us are on this mission. Pat Corley worked with us until he died, and now one of us operates a clone of him. Nanette was cloned from a lock of her hair that Pat, a sentimental man, clipped while she lay dying.”
The Emily that Richard Mathers had found sitting in an armchair as if spellbound, this Emily, had been a clone whose operator had been at the time withdrawn, occupied elsewhere.
He thought of the love they had made during the two nights she had been with him, and ripples of nausea washed through him. He had not lost himself in the woman he loved, but in some crafted thing, some mindless biomachine controlled by someone whom Nanette had called a monster.