Fantastic Metropolis

“Whatever you say.”

“You can’t have kids, you told me, right? You don’t produce sperm. Is this some kind of perverse reaction to that? Are these your children, created in hatred of a body that can’t make the real thing?”

“Sure,” Drew had replied, “why not?”

“Is it because you hated your father, and he hated you?”

“Yes, that’s it exactly.” Drew wagged his head then. “You read too much into my stuff,” he told Sol. “These aren’t me. They aren’t meant to represent my emotional or psychological state. They’re all an Everyman; they aren’t a personal expression. Hey, I just like the way I make them look. It’s a matter of aesthetics, that’s all.”

He dried his hand, smiling at his reflected face in the liquid of the tank. Speaking of aesthetics: this one was going to be a big hit, that was for certain. She looked so pretty, he doubted that they would treat this one as a pinata. If it were me, he thought, I’d fix her up a room and keep her around as a pet for lonely nights.

He still felt a crawling arousal. He would have to go relieve it himself. Drew and his last girlfriend had broken up three years ago. She had appreciated his art less even than Sol. Lack of understanding was something he had learned to deal with.

But lack of companionship was harder.

 

THE RAINS HAD stopped today, and the streets were dry. Of course, the corpse in the gutter was still there, and its decomposition had been effectively sealed up and suffocated. But in his zeal to affix the thing to the pavement, he had gone too far with the sealant, and it had turned a discolored yellow in drying, it was so thick, like a layer of dirty wax painted over his creation. But there was something far worse than that. Some kid, some punk, had spray-painted a witty remark on the body. An obscenity. It was a desecration of his art. Here he himself hadn’t autographed it, and some worthless insect had sprayed a joke on the thing as if to sign his own name to it. Furious, Drew glanced around as if he expected to find the kid lurking in an alley, snickering. He saw no one. Could he remove the paint with a solvent? He must try. If that didn’t work he’d spray the whole cadaver another color to mask the vandalism. Or maybe he’d have to chisel up the thing and dispose of it, rather than leave it here like this—its lonely beauty, its statement, muddied.

Its lonely statement. Yes, all right, Drew thought. He did seek emotional expression through his work. But it was a universal palette of emotion he worked from, not a personal one. He painted in broad, archetypal strokes of color and meaning. Every clone of himself was merely another Everyman—body debased, mind burnt away and spirit enucleated.

 

DREW SIGHED, PUSHED himself back from the monitors before him. Against one section of his work area’s wall was his computer center, its screens glowing like aquariums of exotic knowledge, bundled cables trailing across the floor or up the wall. Drew had excelled in college. He could have been a doctor, according to every family member, friend and girlfriend he had ever been criticized by. But medicine was for mechanics. He was an artist. The same knowledge could be turned on its ear. The same ear could be turned inside-out to make a new flower of flesh; ugly or lovely, it would be a miracle of one man’s imagination, not a miracle of Nature’s mindless engineering.

She was ready to be born from her artificial womb.

He rose from his chair, took one more sip of coffee, and went to her.

First, he drained the violet liquid into a recycling system, where it would be purified for the next creation. When the tank was sufficiently dry, he raised the platform on which his clone lay. Her face was serene, her arms at her sides and her feet pale as those of a corpse on a morgue slab. But Drew inserted a tube into her mouth, down her throat, as if to undo her embalming. There were discs adhered to her chest, and he tapped the keys of a device on a rolling tray beside the tank. A jolt went through the woman’s wet, glistening flesh, and her back arched violently. Again. Again. She was like a fish drowning in air. Like a sleeper gripped by a terrible dream.

But at last, a beeping came from the portable unit on the tray, and Drew smiled. It was the sound of her heart stumbling to life.

A few minutes later, her eyes opened. She looked up into Drew’s face with a dull, fish-like expression. But her eyes followed him as he moved across the room to pour himself a fresh coffee. He noted this with satisfaction. He had wanted to keep her an animal. But not the usual starfish. For this creature, a product of his highest artistic refinement, a little more seemed called for than the usual shuffling zombie.

When she began to sit up, he set down his mug and rushed to her, took her arm to help her. He swung her legs over the side of the platform, eased her to her feet with one of her arms slung over his shoulders. She was heavy, awkward, but he walked her to a stained love seat. Along the way, she turned her face to gape at him. He grinned back at her. “Hello, my beauty,” he whispered. He was as proud as a father, or a groom carrying his wife across the threshold.

 

AS HE WENT through his bureau to find her some clothes she could wear, just some sweat pants and a t-shirt maybe, he watched her crawl on hands and knees across the room. She stopped at the foot of the sofa, and gazed up mutely at the flayed, crucified creature on the wall. As if it sensed her, the blind thing moaned.