Accidental Creatures (29 page)

She nodded her head slowly. This new calm of hers was more frightening than her rage and tears. He didn’t know what to expect next. “And put all those people out of work,” she said at length.

“It’s lousy work, Helix. It kills them. You know that now, I’m sure you do. But you — you and your sisters and your mother — you can swim in the vats all day and all night, and it won’t harm you. And besides that, it was a fascinating problem. You had to be intelligent, you see, at least I felt you did. That was my solution to the complexities of vatdiving. Another researcher might have taken a different approach, but I made the multiprocessor brains, and that’s where I started with you.”

“I suppose you think I should be grateful to you for creating me, for making me... intelligent.”

He shook his head and looked down. “No, not really, no.”

Helix walked slowly about the living room, her gaze wandering, seeing nothing, crunching slivers of glass beneath her shoes. “My sisters and my mother, you said.”

“Yes.”

“My mother — she’s...”

“The first of your kind. Her name is Lilith,” he said gently.

She stared at him again, froze him with the cold blue fire of her eyes. “My mother was a vat diver. I was an orphan. You adopted me.” she whispered, advancing on him slowly. He wanted to back up, and probably would have, but the wall was in his way. She took his face in her four hands, gently cradling his jaw and skull in her fingers, and gazed into his eyes with a look so wounded that his heart went cold.

“Why did you lie?”

He swallowed with difficulty. He was crying now too, it seemed. He closed his eyes, unable to bear her gaze any longer. “My work is my life, Helix,” he whispered, “and you are my life’s work. I didn’t want to see the pinnacle achievement of my career wiped out or relegated to the status of slave labor. That you are finely suited to work in the vats cannot be denied, but there’s more. Your social structure, other things. You are a brand new, intelligent life form. I wanted to see what you could do outside of the laboratory. I wanted you to get loose, undetected, to pose as a sport, to get good and far away from GeneSys. That was my hope for you, in particular. Until you came along there seemed to be no future for your kind, but when I found you-”

“Found me?” Surprised, she took away her hands.

“Yes, you’d been driven from the — the nest quite shortly after you were born. I don’t think you can remember.”

Her eyes went cold again, this time not with anger but with hatred. “Oh, I don’t think you want to know what I remember,” she said, her voice shaking. She turned from him, her four fists clenched, her arms stiff. “I remember torture, you bastard! I remember being a pathetic little specimen, picked on and beat up for what I was. Now I find out I’m really some kind of laboratory experiment gone awry, and none of that really happened. None of that shit I based who I was upon ever happened. I don’t exist. I’m somebody else. Why didn’t you just tell me all of this? No, you had to make me hate myself, instead!

How could you,” she turned towards him again, “how could you do that? You made me think you were the only one in the whole wide world who cared about me, and all along, you were the one who had hurt me.”

Hector sank to the floor and bowed his head over his knees. She was absolutely right. That was what he had done. That his intentions had been otherwise, that he had reasons for making up her past made no difference. In trying to save her he had betrayed her. He had burdened her with the memories of a childhood that was not her own.

“You’re right,” he said, finally, out of the depths of his inner darkness. “You’re absolutely right.” He looked at her, but made no other move. Just forced himself to look at her without flinching. She stared back at him hollowly. She was more lost than he was, which felt impossible, but there it was.

“Why didn’t you want me to know what I am?” she asked. “Is it so horrible?”

“No! Oh, no, Helix. That’s not it at all. I thought I was protecting you. The project wasn't going well. I knew it was only a matter of time before the project was canceled. In the eyes of someone like Graham, it was a useless waste of funds. He wouldn't even stop to consider that it was a new species of intelligent beings which he was eradicating with the flick of his pen.“ Hector trembled, with anger, he realized. ”I didn't care that the project failed its objective. As far as I was concerned, it was a complete success. I didn't want the beings I'd helped bring into the world to disappear without a trace, and with you, I knew I had a chance at seeing them survive.

“I knew someday you'd have to leave here, and I didn't want you to go back to the nest of your birth. They drove you out, and I didn't think they'd let you in again. And if you tried to find out more about the project, you'd be discovered. So I made you think you were human, and I taught you to fear people and hide what you are so you could remain undetected for as long as possible." Helix shook her head in confusion. She turned to the couch as if she would sit down. Broken glass lay scattered on the upholstery. She picked up one of the larger shards to toss it onto the pile debris that had been his table. It sliced her hand and she dropped it. “Because of you my first memories were of hostility. Why did I have to start out like that? Not knowing who I am, forced to find out by myself in a world that didn’t welcome me.”

Anger flashed through him again, surprising and sudden. He stared up at her. “Don’t we all start out like that? Where do you think I got the material for your memories? Do you think I could have made them that vivid for you if I hadn’t experienced them myself?”

She stared at him, nonplussed, blood dripping unheeded from her lower left fingertips. “You were never in an orphanage.”

“No,” he said, standing. “But I did go to school, and I was different, and kids are like that.”

She sighed and shook her head, “But you could have told me the truth, and together, we could have reached the same conclusions.”

“Maybe, maybe not. I couldn’t take the chance.”

“No, you just had to decide for me,” she retorted hotly. “You had to manipulate me, make all my choices for me. If you'd treated me like a human being, instead of just making me think I was one, maybe I wouldn't hate you now.”

He laughed bitterly and began making his way around the wreckage to the dining alcove. "It's really not important how you feel about me, Helix. What's important is that you survive. Hate me if it helps you, but don’t punish yourself.” He pulled a chair out from the dining table and looked back at her. “I made the mistake, not you. Take what help I can give you now, I beg of you.”

She looked at him with more sadness than anger. “What help can you possibly give me?”

He nodded at her bleeding hand. “For starters, I can bandage that.”

Amazingly enough, she sat at the dining table and allowed him to wrap her hand with cello tape. She knew almost everything now. To fill the silence between them, Hector told her the only thing left that might be of value to her. “I had a lot of trouble with the project,” he said, gripping her hand more firmly when he said ‘project’ lest she try to pull it away. “I was working off a multiprocessor brain. Trying to design a body with a sensory system and motor control reflex that it could use. Overlaps in the gene splicing caused your double set of arms and your enlarged eyeteeth, but the real problem was the sensory input. All multiprocessor brains have to do is think. The creature I was trying to create had to use all the physical faculties. I was beginning to think I’d taken the wrong tack, starting with the brains.”

He looked at her, staring hard into her eyes as if by the force of his gaze he could make her understand.

“And then one night Lilith came to me in a dream. I saw her, saw for the first time what she would look like, and she looked into my eyes. She looked into my eyes, Helix, and I knew how to do it.”

She winced and he realized he was squeezing her hand. He loosened his hold, and went on. “The next day in the lab I stopped trying to build sensory systems onto the multi brain, and instead I just grew the cerebral cortex larger, and let the sensory nerves map onto it on their own. The senses of the body created their own intelligence. Within weeks she was born.”

“Born?”

He shrugged, “Call it what you will. She came into the world through me, and through her, I learned how to bring her here.”

Reluctantly he finished bandaging her hand. He wished time would stop. He wished he could keep her here with him, but he’d already done that, and he’d already lost her some time ago. “And now you know everything I know.” he said, releasing her hand. “And you should leave. You’re in danger here. Take the airplane ticket, Helix. Get away from here.”

“I can’t do that. I need a vat, Hector.”

He sat back. Of course she did.

“Maybe I can remedy that,” said a voice from the living room. Hector turned to see Graham stepping out of the hallway, a young man with dark hair and sideburns close behind him. “Good of you to leave the door open, Martin,” said Graham as he raised his arm and squeezed the trigger of a tranq gun. The dart struck Helix in the shoulder and she crumpled to the floor. Hector was up and out of his chair.

“Get out of here Graham! Aren’t you in enough trouble already? Do you want to add assault and breaking and entering to the charges against you?”

Graham smiled at him. “So you want to play lawyer, huh? You should have stuck with that assault story you peddled to Anna. You don’t have the goods to pin attempted murder on me. I don’t know how you pulled the security clearance to bring me in on nothing but your say so, but it isn’t going to happen again. My lawyer can beat up your lawyer any day of the week.

“Besides,” Graham glanced to where Helix lay unconscious on the floor. “Murder and assault are offenses against human beings, and that’s not what we’re dealing with here, is it?

“I’m not through with you by a far sight, Martin. But first there’s a little loose end to tie up.” He nodded, and the young man stooped to haul Helix up off the floor.

In desperation Hector ran at the man and pushed him, causing him to drop Helix. He stood over her recumbent body, knees flexed, his arms tensed to do he didn’t know what. “Leave her alone!”

The man laughed and pushed Hector back into the dining table.

“As of right now, this isn’t your project anymore, Martin,” said Graham. “I’m taking you off it.” He held the tranq gun up again, pointing it at Hector this time.

“This isn’t about any project anymore, you ought to know that,” said Hector. “Just what do you think you’re going to do with her, anyway?”

“I’m going to take her back to the hive, where she belongs.”

“You can’t! They’ll kill her!”

“Or each other, preferably. There can only be one queen, right? With Helix and Lilith out of the way, the others will be much easier to deal with, I’m sure.”

Graham’s cohort bent to pick up Helix again, and as Hector rushed him he heard the click of the tranq gun, and felt the sting of a dart in his chest. His next step seemed to take hours as darkness closed in, taking Helix and Graham and the other man away with the fading light. oOo

Chango paced back and forth from Vonda’s home lab in a back bedroom of the house to the living room where Pele, April, Coral and Hyper sat waiting for her diagnosis. Vonda had banned her from the lab for asking too many questions. All she could do was stand at the doorway watching Vonda work, and then walk back into the living room, to bask in the collective anxiety of her peers, which drove her down the hall again, to watch Vonda peer into slides and hold vials of different colored liquids up to the light.

“Hey, come on,” Hyper approached her on what must have been her twelfth or thirteenth circuit, laying a hand on her arm to stop her restless movement. “Come on in the kitchen, Pele’s making sandwiches.”

They were putting away the bread and stacking plates in the sink when Vonda came in. She sat down at the table and April handed her a fresh cup of coffee. Chango stood rooted to the floor, waiting while Vonda spooned sugar into her cup, stirred it, and drank. Finally she looked up, staring at Chango and nodded. “There was blast in those tanks.”

April pounded her fists on the table. “That fucking son of a bitch! I’ll kill him.”

“We don’t know where he is,” Pele observed.

Hyper switched off the game show he’d been watching on holo and keyed up his com page. “I’m going to call Hector. This may help him against Graham.” He typed at his wrist keypad, waited, shook his head and typed some more. “No answer, I wonder if something’s happened to him. He was trying to build a criminal case against Graham. This evidence could help him.”

“What are we going to do?” asked Pele.

“We’re going to find Benny, and beat the living crap out of him!” said April.

“I don’t know what’s happened to Hector Martin, but he needs these tanks. He can get them tested in the GeneSys labs. It’ll carry more weight if two independent tests show there was blast inside them.”

Chango picked up the tanks. “You guys find Benny. I’ll go to GeneSys. If something’s happened to Hector, then Helix is probably in trouble too. I have to try to help them, if I can.”

Of all the old buildings Chango had been in, the Fisher was by far the most beautiful, and instead of being a ruin, its frescoes and pillars and inlaid floors were all lovingly preserved. She was glad she had reason to come back here, she thought as she crossed the mezzanine to the elevators. Before, they’d brought her in to lock-up through the garage, and when she was released, she’d been in too big a hurry to take it all in.

Above her, the second and third floor balconies were lined with brass grillwork. There were inscriptions in gold lettering over the archways, and the whole place was lit by great oblong chandeliers of overlapping frosted panels, like pine cones made of glass.

It was like a cathedral. A cathedral to industry, she thought, noting the inset semi-circles high up on the walls, just before the curve of the arched ceiling. They showed stylized pictures of animals, buildings, beehives, and bore labels such as “commerce” and “agriculture.” Here was one of the greatest architectural treasures of Detroit, happily preserved by the gods to whom it was dedicated. At this hour the ground floor was deserted, the shops shuttered. Her footsteps echoed as she walked the length of the gallery. The sound made her feel very small and exposed. She quickened her pace. Even the details have details, she thought, looking at the elevator doors - brass panels etched with lotuses and goldfish surrounded by an interlocking geometric border. How wonderful, she thought as she pressed the elevator button, for something so carefully made to still exist. A brass chart on the wall above traced the positions of the elevators with lighted numbers. Most of them were up above the tenth floor, but there was one two floors below, and rising.