Charles Sheffield - Starfire

“She won’t care where I am,” she said. “Big Maury Wellstone comes around Sunday nights, and she always needs her sleep before him.”

“Is it Sunday?” I said. “I didn’t realize. When I’m working hard I lose track of the days.”

I was well aware that it was Sunday; in fact, I was counting on it.

The bright weather of the September morning had turned nasty. The early breeze had strengthened and scudding low clouds threatened rain. No Scantling performs any kind of work on the Sabbath, so the streets were almost empty as I and Paula-she with a short coat of mine over her blouse and skirt and a scarf wrapped around her head-made our way to the Institute for Probatory Therapies. When we passed Paula’s apartment building she gave it hardly a glance.

The side door of the institute was locked, but I had a key. We entered the long ground-floor corridor. We then had to walk the full length of it, because the elevators and stairs were both at the other end. This was a critical moment. Occasionally others would work on Sundays, but even then it was a day for catching up on experiments and data analysis. People stuck closely to their own labs and had no interest in socializing or wandering the corridors. Paula and I met not a soul in the corridor, or on the way to my lab on the sixth floor.

She was delighted with the cages of cloned mice and rats and gerbils and rabbits, as any fourteen-year-old might be. Less usual was her fascination with the microtome lasers and scanning probe microscope; and downright unusual to the point of implausibility were her sharp questions about the similarities and differences between human and animal subjects. I wondered, briefly, if I might be wrong. Was she young enough to change, to become what her intelligence permitted? But then she said, with no change of tone, “I could get good street money for those gerbils. Do you know what people use them for?”

I did not know. She told me. I realized that redemption in this life was impossible for Paula Searle.

It had to be quick and painless. I went to the locked cupboard and took out the vapor spray. It was calibrated to deliver dosage based on body mass. I was about to make an estimate when it occurred to me that in this case I didn’t need to.

“Paula, how much do you weigh?”

“Weigh?” She was leaning over the scanning probe microscope, which showed an image of a cell mitochondrion and the two conformational states of its inner membrane. “Oh, I dunno. Maybe a hundred and ten?”

Fifty kilos, which was just what I would have guessed. It was time for action, not thought. I set the delivery level, stepped up quickly behind Paula, and in the same moment applied the vapor nozzle to the back of her graceful young neck.

The combination of neurotoxin and DMSO skin dif-fuser acts in milliseconds. When Paula swayed and I caught her, she was already dead.

I lowered her to the floor and crouched beside her. Death added a new calm beauty to her face. I fought back the urge to take a picture of her as a permanent record. I reminded myself that I would have much more than that. I would have Paula herself, a better Paula than she had ever been in this life; and I would have her forever.

I have no idea how long I looked at her before I was able to force myself to stand up and take the next step.

The odd thing is that there were no decisions to be made. It was as though, unconsciously, I had established a research facility ideally suited to my present needs. I took the DNA sample at once and placed it into a sequencer and segmenter. While sequencing proceeded I lifted Paula’s body, complete with clothing, and carried it to the organic disposal unit.

Full dissociation at the cell level would take at least twenty-four hours. The DNA sequencing and segmenting would be completed long before that. I wondered where I would store Paula’s genome, but again it seemed as though the necessary arrangements had been made ahead of time. I had been experimenting with the storage and later reconstitution of DNA segments in the chromosomal introns of an old box tortoise that I had inherited from a previous research worker. Although the tortoise’s age seemed indeterminate, its gender was not, and the name Matilda, painted in pink block letters on his back, was highly inappropriate.

I had cleaned his shell and renamed him Methuselah. Now Methuselah’s introns would safely contain Paula until the time, perhaps years ahead, when I had a facility big enough to clone a human. Then I would bring her once more into the world, and to the perfection that was hers by rights.

When all was done that had to be done I went to my desk and sat down. I wanted to work, but I could not. I was quite calm and at the same time enormously excited. Sex had never produced sensations remotely like this. In my giddy joy I knew, even then, that what had happened with Paula would happen again. This time it had been a chance combination of circumstances. Next time, and on all later occasions, everything would be planned to the smallest detail. It had to be that way, because I would not stop and I did not intend to be caught. Ever.

Ah, the hubris of youth. I was caught, of course I was. Just as, forty years on, the murderer on Sky City would be caught. There would be a fatal moment of carelessness or indecision, or a too-long pause for savoring or pleasure. At the moment of dispatch, as I well knew, time stretches. Interval becomes meaningless. How long had I sat, suspended outside of time, and stared at Paula’s calm and lifeless face?

A hand shook my arm. I opened my eyes. It was evening, and a shaft of late sunlight struck through the low western window of the castle and lit the face in front of me.

It was Paula’s face, Paula changed to an eleven-year-old. She was bending over me, panting, dark hair wild and liquid eyes aglow.

“We’re back!” she cried. “I won, I got here first!”

I blinked, and the present came crashing in on me. Here they were, filling the rooms, all my darlings. There was chatter, there was laughter that rang from the stone walls and the high rafters and ceiling, there was the brimming energy of eighteen stampeding girls between the ages of seven and eleven.

Behind them came a woman in her forties. She was breathing heavily and shaking her head.

“Honestly, Mr. Baxter, I don’t know how you do it. They wear me out, and that’s a fact.”

I glanced down at my lap, making sure that the gruesome records from Sky City were safely closed.

“They’ll do the same for me, Mrs. O’Keefe, before this night is over. They still have to have their lessons, and after a couple of days in Londonderry it’s always the devil to get them settled in again.”

“Well, they’re all fed, sir, so you need have no worries on that score. And they all bought outfits for autumn. Not that that was easy, if you’d seen some of the things they wanted to be buying and wearing before I put my foot down.”

“I’m sure that I’ll approve of whatever you chose.”

“I hope so.” She glanced through to the dining room, where the girls now had the long table covered with clothes. Almost without thinking, I ran the count. It was not that I didn’t trust Mrs. O’Keefe completely, but …

Paula, Amity, Katherine, Rose, Gloria, and Bridget, all age eleven. Darlene, Charity, Beth, Dawn, Trixie, and Willa, age nine. Crystal, Maxine, Dolores, Lucy-Mary, Alyson, and Victoria, age seven. Originally I had wanted them all the same age, but limitations on cloning equipment made it impossible. There had also been a temptation to give each of them a new name drawn from classical sources. Finally I decided that would not work-for me, rather than for them. I could think of their names only as they had been when first we met.