Dead and Alive

You can’t be of use to yourself or to the community until you live faithfully by your PCVs.”
    Bucky pitched an empty wine bottle across the yard. He had drunk more than a bottle and a half of wine in ten minutes, but because of his superb metabolism, he would be lucky to get a mild buzz from it.
    “One of the things happening to me,” he said, “is I’m losing the education in law I got from direct-to-brain data downloading.”
    “You’re the district attorney,” she said.
    “I know. But now I’m not sure what
habeas corpus
means.”
    “It means ‘have the body.’ It’s a writ requiring aperson to be brought to a court or a judge before his liberty can be restrained. It’s a protection against illegal imprisonment.”
    “Seems stupid.”
    “It is stupid,” Janet agreed.
    “If you just kill him, you don’t have to bother with the judge, the court, or the prison.”
    “Exactly.” Janet finished the last of her wine and discarded the second bottle. She began to undress.
    “What’re you doing?” Bucky asked.
    “I need to be naked when I kill the next ones. It feels right.”
    “Does it feel right just for the next house or is it maybe one of your personal core values?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe it is a PCV. I’ll have to wait and see.”
    Toward the back of the yard, a shadow moved through shadows. A pair of eyes gleamed, then faded into rain and gloom.
    “What’s the matter?” Janet asked.
    “I think someone’s back there in the yard, watching.”
    “I don’t care. Let him watch. Modesty isn’t one of my PCVs.”
    “You look good naked,” Bucky said.
    “I feel good. It feels so natural.”
    “That’s odd. Because we aren’t natural. We’re man-made.”
    “For the first time, I don’t feel artificial,” Janet said.
    “How does it feel not to feel artificial?”
    “It feels good. You should get naked, too.”
    “I’m not there yet,” Bucky demurred. “I still know what
nolo contendere
means, and
amicus curiae
. But, you know, as long as I keep my clothes on, I think I’m ready to kill one of them.”

CHAPTER 9
    EARLIER IN THE NIGHT , arriving home to his elegant Garden District mansion, in a foul mood, Victor had savagely beaten Erika. He seemed to have had a bad day in the laboratory.
    He found her eating a late dinner in the formal living room, which offended his sense of propriety. No one programmed with a deep understanding of tradition and etiquette—as Erika had been—should think that taking dinner in the living room, alone or not, would be acceptable.
    “What next?” he said. “Will you
toilet
here?”
    One of the New Race, Erika could turn off pain at will. Slapping her, punching her, biting her, Victor insisted that she endure the agony, and she obeyed.
    “Perhaps you’ll learn from suffering,” he said.
    Minutes after Victor went upstairs to bed, Erika’s many cuts closed. Within half an hour, the swellingaround her eyes diminished. Like all of her kind, she had been engineered to heal rapidly and to live a thousand years.
    Unlike
the rest of her kind, Erika was permitted to experience humility, shame, and hope. Victor found tenderness and vulnerability appealing in a wife.
    The day had begun with a beating, too, during morning sex. He left her racked with pain and sobbing in the bed.
    Two hours later, her bruised face was as smooth and as fair as ever, though she was troubled by her failure to please him. By all biological evidence, he had been excited and fulfilled, but that must not have been the case. The beating seemed to indicate that he found her inadequate.
    She was Erika Five. Four previous females, identical to her in appearance, had been cultured in the creation tanks to serve as their maker’s wife. For various reasons, they had not been satisfactory.
    Erika Five remained determined not to fail her husband.
    Her first day as Mrs. Helios had been characterized by numerous surprises, mystery, violence, pain, the death of a household servant, and a naked albino dwarf. Surely the second day, soon to begin, would be less eventful.
    Recovering from the second beating, sitting in the dark on the glassed-in back porch, she drank cognac faster than her superbly engineered metabolism could burn off the alcohol. Thus far, however, in spite of theconsumption of two and a half bottles, she had not been able to achieve inebriation; but she felt relaxed.
    Earlier, before the rain began to fall, the albino dwarf had appeared on the rear lawn,