Prodigal Son

There is only compassion for you here."
        The electronically disguised voice denied him again. "The most recent one I killed… was one of yours."
        Victor's alarm grew. One of his creations killing another by its own decision. Never had this happened before. A programmed injunction against suicide was knit tightly into their psyches, as was a stern commandment that permitted murder for just two reasons: in self-defense or when instructed by their maker to kill.
        "The victim," Victor said. "His name?"
        "Allwine. They found his corpse inside the city library this morning."
        Victor caught his breath as he considered the implications.
        The caller said, "There was nothing to learn from Allwine. He was like me inside. I've got to find it elsewhere, in others."
        "Find what?" Victor asked.
        "What I need," said the caller, and then hung up. Victor keyed in *69-and discovered that the caller's phone was blocked for automatic call-back. Furious, he slammed down the handset. He sensed a setback.

CHAPTER 32
        
        FOR A WHILE AFTER Victor left for the Hands of Mercy, Erika remained in bed, curled in the fetal position that she'd never known in the creation tank. She waited to see if her depression would pass or thicken into the darker morass of discouragement.
        The flux of her emotional states sometimes seemed to have little relation to the experiences from which they proceeded. After sex with Victor, depression always followed without fail, and understandably; but when it should have ripened into something like despondency, it sometimes did not. And though her future seemed so bleak that her despondency should have been unshakable, she often shook it off.
        Remembering verses by Emily Dickinson could lift her out of gloom: "Hope" is the thing with feathers- / That perches in the soul- / And sings the tune without the words- /And never stops at all.
        The art on Victor's walls was abstract: oddly juxtaposed blocks of color that loomed oppressively, spatterings of color or smears of gray on black that to Erika seemed like chaos or nullity In his library, however, were large books of art, and sometimes her mood could be improved simply by immersing herself in a single painting by Albert Bierstadt or Childe Hassam.
        She has been taught that she is of the New Race, posthuman, improved, superior. She is all but impervious to disease. She heals rapidly, almost miraculously.
        Yet when she needs solace, she finds it in the art and music and poetry of the mere humanity that she and her kind are intended to replace.
        When she has been confused, has felt lost, she's found clarity and direction in the writings of imperfect humanity. And the writers are those of whom Victor would especially disapprove.
        This puzzles Erika: that a primitive and failed species, infirm humanity, should by its works lift her heart when none of her own kind is able to lift it for her.
        She would like to discuss this with others of the New Race, but she is concerned that one of them will think her puzzlement makes her a heretic. All are obedient to Victor by design, but some view him with such reverential fear that they will interpret her questions as doubts, her doubts as betrayals, and will then in turn betray her to her maker.
        And so she keeps her questions to herself, for she knows that in a holding tank waits Erika Five.
        Abed, with the smell of Victor lingering in the sheets, Erika finds this to be one of the times when poetry will prevent depression from ripening toward despair. If I shouldn't be alive / When the Robins come / Give the one in Red Cravat / A Memorial crumb.
        She smiled at Dickinson's gentle humor. That smile might have led to others if not for a scrabbling noise under the bed.
        Throwing back the sheets, she sat up, breath held, listening.
        As though aware of her reaction, the scrabbler went still-or if not still, at least silent, creeping now without a sound.
        Having neither heard nor seen any indication of a rat when she and Victor had returned to the bedroom following the departure of their guests, Erika had assumed that she'd been mistaken in thinking one had been here. Or perhaps it had found its way into a wall or a drain and from there to another place in the great house.
        Either the vermin was back or it had been here all along, quiet witness to