The incessant rain at the windows. The expectation that this room might at any moment tweak and fold into a bleak new century. His heartbeat slow, heavy. A stillness without hope. Only anguished anticipation.
Anna picked up one of the photographs.
David spoke to her better nature. “The technology of your time is so advanced, it’s like magic to me.”
She looked up from the image of David to the reality of him.
He took a deep breath and hesitated and finally said, “Emily had been knifed twice. Maybe she’d lost a lot of blood. Maybe there’d been organ damage. But with your technology, surely she could have been saved.”
Holding the photograph to her breast, she said, “You listen to me now, David. You listen close. This is how it is, and it can’t be any other way. She’s dead, dead, dead, and it can’t be any other way. Our protocols allow us to kill only those responsible for the horrors that we believe have shaped the world of our time. We are not permitted to kill—or even to save from death—anyone else. Because there’s no way to know how interference of that kind might reverberate through time and possibly shape an even worse future than the one we have.”
In her insistence, he heard deception. He persisted. “Patrick Corley was a sweet, sentimental man. In those days he was alive and working with you, Pat himself, not a clone of him. He was a gentle guy, incapable of killing. Incapable of letting someone die who could be saved, someone innocent like Emily. You needed his continued cooperation, his assistance in concealing what his house had become. In part, by cloning Nanette from a lock of her hair, you bought his cooperation, didn’t you? In part. Before you were Emily for me, were you Nanette for him, using her clone as your avatar?”
“I’m only Emily now,” Anna declared. “She’s my only avatar. Only for you. The others use the Nanette clone, but I never will again.”
“A year after giving him his lost wife, Nanette, what did you do that night when he insisted you couldn’t let Emily die? What did you do? What did you do that night?”
“You won’t listen,” she said. “You’re deaf to reason.”
David pressed her harder. “There’s no stone with the word beauty. That was a lie. Wasn’t it? There’s no stone because there’s no grave.”
“Don’t do this, David,” she warned.
“What else is there left for me to do?”
“Accept. Just accept the way it is, the way it will be.”
“I can’t accept the unacceptable, the unthinkable.”
“You won’t give up, will you?”
“No.”
“You will not have me.”
“No. Never again.”
“You know too much now. You realize that you know too damn much?”
“Too much,” he agreed, “but not quite enough.”
“Do you understand the price of such knowledge?”
“Will you prevent me from leaving, keep me here forever? Kill me? Isn’t killing me against your protocols?”
She’d been so deeply wounded by rejection that she was capable of regarding him with coldest contempt. “There are rare exceptions to the protocols.”
“Now I know the price. You’ve made it clear. So be it. I want the truth. All of it.”
She raised her voice, slashed at him with her words. “You’re sick, David. You’re obsessed with your guilt, with earning absolution. Get over it. She’s dead! She’s gone to the worms. You aren’t Christ Almighty. You can’t resurrect her.”
“You can.”
Anna’s face—Emily’s face—was clenched with anger and self-pity. “She’s dead. The gorgeous bitch is dead. There’s me. Take me, you selfish bastard. I’m gorgeous now. I love you.”
“You love me? Really? Or do you just love being loved? Do you love seeing beauty in the mirror? Is what you love just that fine reflection? True beauty is more than that.”
Defiantly, she said, “I can have you whether you want me or not.” She indicated the ampule of blood hanging above her bed. “I have insurance against rejection. I can clone you. I can have another you.”
“And call that true love? Two soulless avatars, each operated by a puppeteer? Can that really be love? Or would it be only a squalid passion?”
“I can have another you,” she insisted. “If you won’t be what I need, I can make what I need.”
“Then make him, use him. And tell me what you did that night ten years ago, when Pat Corley insisted you couldn’t let Emily die?”