City of Night

occasion, however, she insisted on going shopping first. When Cindi insisted on something, Benny always let her have what she wanted because she was such a whiner when she didn’t get her way that even Benny, with his high tolerance for tedium, lamented that his maker had programmed him to be incapable of suicide.
    At the mall, to Benny’s dismay, Cindi led him directly to Tots and Tykes, a store selling clothing for infants and young children.
    He hoped this wouldn’t lead to kidnapping again.
    “We shouldn’t be seen here,” he warned her.
    “We won’t be. None of our kind works here, and none of our kind would have reason to shop here.”
    “We don’t have a reason, either.”
    Without answering him, she went into Tots and Tykes.
    As Cindi searched through the tiny dresses and other garments on the racks and tables, Benny followed her, trying to gauge whether she was likely to go nuts, as before.
    Admiring a little yellow dress with a frilly collar, she said, “Isn’t this adorable?”
    “Adorable,” Benny agreed. “But it would look better in pink.”
    “They don’t seem to have it in pink.”
    “Too bad. Pink. In pink it would be terrific.”
    Members of the New Race were encouraged to have sex with one another, in every variation, as often and as violently as they liked. It was their one pressure-release valve.
    They were, however, incapable of reproduction. The citizens of this brave new world would all be made in tanks, grown to adulthood and educated by direct-to-brain data downloading in four months.
    Currently they were created a hundred at a time. Soon, tank farms would start turning them out by the thousands.
    Their maker reserved all biological creation unto himself. He did not believe in families. Family relationships distracted people from the greater work of society as a whole, from achieving total triumph over nature and establishing utopia.
    “What will the world be like without children?” Cindi wondered.
    “More productive,” Benny said.
    “Drab,” she said.
    “More efficient.”
    “Empty.”
    Women of the New Race were designed and manufactured without a maternal instinct. They were supposed to have no desire to give birth. Something was wrong with Cindi. She envied the women of the Old Race for their free will, but she resented them most intensely for their ability to bring children into the world.
    Another customer, an expectant mother, entered their aisle.
    At first Cindi’s face brightened at the sight of the woman’s distended belly, but then darkened into a snarl of vicious jealousy.
    Taking her arm, steering her toward another part of the store, Benny said, “Control yourself. People will notice. You look like you want to kill her.”
    “I do.”
    “Remember what you are.”
    “Barren,” she said bitterly.
    “Not that. An assassin. You can’t do your work if your face advertises your profession.”
    “All right. Let go of my arm.”
    “Calm down. Cool off.”
    “I’m smiling.”
    “It’s a stiff smile.”
    She turned on her full dazzling wattage.
    “That’s better,” he said.
    Picking up a little pink sweater featuring colorful appliqued butterflies, displaying it for Benny, Cindi said, “Oh, isn’t this darling?”
    “Darling,” he agreed. “But it would look better in blue.”
    “I don’t see it in blue.”
    “We really should be getting to work.”
    “I want to look around here a little longer.”
    “We’ve got a job to do,” he reminded her.
    “And we have twenty-four hours to do it.”
    “I want to decapitate one of them.”
    “Of course you do. You always do. And we will. But first I want to find a really sweet little lacy suit or something.”
    Cindi was defective. She desperately wanted a baby. She was disturbed.
    Had Benny been certain that Victor would terminate Cindi and produce Cindi Two, he’d have reported her deviancy months previously. He worried, however, that Victor thought of them as a unit and would terminate Benny, as well.
    He didn’t want to be switched off and buried in a landfill while Benny Two had all the fun.
    If he had been like others of his kind, seething with rage and forbidden to express it in any satisfying fashion, Benny Lovewell would have been happy to be terminated. Termination would have been his only hope of peace.
    But he was allowed to kill. He could torture, mutilate, and dismember. Unlike others of the New Race, Benny had something to live for.
    “This is so cute,” said Cindi,