City of Night

sense suggested that such a radical metamorphosis, which must obviously include drastic changes in cerebral tissues, would entail the loss of a significant percentage of the direct-to-brain data and programming that Werner had received in the tank, including perhaps the proscription against killing his maker.
    Prudence and responsible haste—not panic —had been required. As a man of unequaled scientific vision, Victor had at once foreseen the worst-case scenario and had acted with admirable calm yet with alacrity to respond to the danger and to contain the threat.
    He made a mental note to circulate a stern memo to that effect throughout Mercy before the end of the day.
    He would dictate it to Annunciata.
    No, he would compose it and distribute it himself, and to hell with Annunciata.
    In the monitor room, where Victor gathered with Ripley and four additional staff members, a bank of six rectangular high-definition screens, each displaying the closed-circuit feed from one of six cameras in the isolation chamber, revealed that Werner still remained in a disturbingly plastic condition. At the moment, he had four legs, no arms, and an ill-defined, continuously shifting body out of which thrust a vaguely Wernerlike head.
    Highly agitated, the Werner thing jittered around the isolation chamber, mewling like a wounded animal and sometimes saying, “Father? Father? Father? ”
    This father business irritated Victor almost beyond the limits of his endurance. He didn’t shout Shut up, shut up, shut up at the screens only because he wished to avoid the necessity of adding a second paragraph to that memo.
    He did not want them to think of him as their father. They were not his family; they were his inventions, his fabrications, and most surely his properly. He was their maker, their owner, their master, and even their leader, if they wished to think of him that way, but not their paterfamilias.
    The family was a primitive and destructive institution because it put itself above the good of society as a whole. The parent-child relationship was counterrevolutionary and must be eradicated. For his creations, their entire race would be their family, each of them the brother or the sister of all the others, so that no particular relationship would be different from all the others or more special than all the others.
    One race, one family, one great humming hive working in unison, without the distractions of individuality and family, could achieve anything to which it set its mind and its bottomless bustling energy, unhampered by childish emotions, freed from all superstition, could conquer any challenge that the universe might hold for it. A dynamic, unstoppable species of heretofore unimagined determination, gathering ever greater momentum, would rush on, rush on, to glory after glory, in his name.
    Watching the four-legged, mewling, jittering Werner thing as it began to sprout something like but not like arms from its back, Ripley raised his ridiculous eyebrows and said, “Like Harker.”
    Victor at once rebuked him. “This is nothing like Harker. Harker was a singularity. Harker spawned a parasitical second self. Nothing like that is happening to Werner.”
    Riveted by the shocking images on the screen, Ripley said, “But, Mr. Helios, sir, he appears to be—”
    “Werner is not spawning a parasitical second self,” Victor said tightly. “Werner is experiencing catastrophic cellular metamorphosis. It’s not the same. It is not the same at all. Werner is a different singularity.”
     
     
     

Chapter 46
     
    Cindi and Benny Lovewell, one a believer in the science of voodoo and one not, reestablished contact with Detectives O’Connor and Maddison through the signal emitted by the transponder under the hood of their police-department sedan. They caught up with their targets—but remained out of visual contact—in the Garden District.
    For long minutes, the cops cruised the same few blocks, around and around, and then changed directions, cruising the identical territory in the opposite direction, making one circuit and then another.
    “Like a blind rat in a maze,” Cindi said solemnly, identifying as before with O’Connor’s childlessness.
    “No,” Benny disagreed. “This is different.”
    “You wouldn’t understand.”
    “I have the same capacity for understanding that you do.”
    “Not about this, you don’t. You aren’t female.”
    “Well, if it’s necessary to have ever had a womb in order to be