The Reflections of Ghosts
Drew glanced again at the clone. Yes, it was true, he could make another one. And he could make that one more intelligent, not less intelligent. Intelligent enough not just to snuggle, an adoring dog, but to love him as a true woman.
But then wouldn’t she also leave him, as other women had? Criticize his art first, and then leave him?
Whether he made another clone for himself or not, he had yet to decide, but he must give this one up. And maybe it was for the best. She made him too confused. She made him feel more alive than he cared to. It was all right for his clones to starve, freeze, die in the street. But for him to feel the ache of his own solitude…that was more of a burden than he cared to carry. Better to keep his suffering in those extensions of himself, safely distanced.
As he shut off the vidphone, Drew saw that the woman had twisted around from the VT and been watching him finish with Sol. “Hi, there,” he said, smiling uneasily like a guilty teen caught making plans by an eavesdropping mother. The woman only stared back at him, her dark eyes narrowed slightly and blinking. She looked like a person trying to remember a dream.
A HEAVY THUMP awakened him.
Over the top of the partition, the monitors and tanks of his work area cast a blue and violet glow on the ceiling. But that was the only light. The artist felt as though he floated in a dark void, a black womb, listening to the burbling of his coffee and his chemicals. A computer chirped like some night insect. Rain pattered on his balcony outside.
That was all normal enough, but something was amiss.
A sound of movement, from the living room section. As of something—crawling. Dragging itself across the cold bare floor in the deep gloom.
Drew realized then what was amiss; the woman was gone. No warm body against his, as there had been these past nights, her skin sticky from the sweat of her exertions. The previous night she had kissed him on the mouth before he could begin to make his advances. Had she become programmed? Or had her adoration evolved from the dog-like? She had begun to moan when they were entwined, these past couple of nights, and responded more enthusiastically to their love-making; writhing, clutching him, even riding atop him last night.
With only two days remaining before he had to give her up, Drew had again begun to doubt that he could part with her. Even if he had the ability to create a dozen more like her. They would be a dozen women like her. But they would not be her.
He sat up in bed, stared into the darkness. He wanted to call her name but hadn’t given her one. She seemed to be crawling toward the bed. Yes, he decided, she was. Had she fallen in the dark, hurt herself? Without waiting any further, he reached out blindly for his bedside lamp…
But as he did so, he felt her fall against the mattress. He reached instead to her, took hold of her arms, pulled her up. “Are you all right?” he asked, not expecting an answer.
She gave a deep groan.
Her arms seemed thinner, like those of a starving child, atrophied. And her breath was sickly. And her chest, as she fell upon him. It was hard and bony…
Drew cried out, tried to push the thing off him, but its wide flaps of skin covered him like a blanket, lent weight to the pathetic creature as it lay atop him. Its face pressed into his neck in a terrible mockery of the woman, but Drew knew that it wasn’t her. Instead, it was the crucified thing, somehow. Somehow it had fallen, its spikes torn free.
He pushed it off the bed with one panicked surge, terrified suddenly that it would suffocate him with its manta-like body. It thudded to the floor, and he thrust his arm out for the lamp.
It came on and he leapt from the bed, backed across the room. He saw the abomination trying to push itself up. The eyeless head lifted as if to sniff him out, its twisted mouth working, drooling. It trailed the cords of its life support.
He looked around to the wall where it had been suspended, and saw the woman there, standing before him.
She was naked. As lovely as ever, her thick hair half obscuring her face like a primal thing, a savage innocent. His beast. His pet.
But under one arm, she held his decapitated head.
And across the sofa cushions lay every one of his embryos, his future clones. All were dead already but for one, wriggling its tiny limbs like flippers.
Under her arm, Robespierre had rolled its eyes up, lips quivering as it died, disconnected from its tank.
