Prodigal Son

anyway, listening for furtive sounds, looking behind furniture.
        In the night, gripped by a surprising fear of the unknown, she had retreated. Fear, an important survival mechanism, had not been entirely denied to the New Race.
        Superstition, on the other hand, was uncontestable proof of a weak mind. Victor had no tolerance for superstition. Those with weak minds would be recalled, terminated, replaced.
        The most innocent-seeming superstition-such as a belief that ill fortune attended every Friday the thirteenth-could open a door in the mind to consideration of larger supernatural issues. The most essential purpose of Victor's revolution was to complete the work of modernity and create a race of absolute materialists.
        Erika searched the suite to quell the quasi-superstitious dread that had seized her the previous night and that still lingered. When she found nothing untoward, her confidence returned.
        She enjoyed a long hot shower.
        Members of the New Race, even Alphas like her, were encouraged to develop a keen appreciation for simple physical pleasures that could serve as an inoculation against emotions. Emotions themselves could be a form of pleasure, but also an anti-revolutionary force.
        Sex was among the approved pleasures, pure animal sex divorced from affection, from love. Sex between members of the New Race was also divorced from reproduction; they were engineered to be sterile.
        Each new man and woman owed his or her existence to the direct action of Victor. The family was an anti-revolutionary institution. Family fostered emotion.
        Victor trusted no one but Victor to create life only for purely intellectual, solely rational reasons. Life from the lab will one day entirely replace life from the loins.
        Shower completed, Erika opened the door of the stall, fished a towel from the nearby rack, stepped onto the bath mat-and discovered that she'd had a visitor. The splash of water and the clouds of steam had masked the movements of the intruder.
        On the mat lay a scalpel. Stainless steel. Sparkling.
        The scalpel must be one of Victor's. He owned collections of surgical instruments acquired at various times during his two-century crusade.
        Victor, however, had not put this blade on her bath mat. Nor had any member of the household staff. Someone else had been here. Something else.
        Steam swirled around her. Yet she shivered.

CHAPTER 46
        
        FOLLOWING THEIR STOP at the morgue, Michael made a play for the car keys, but Carson as usual took the wheel.
        "You drive too slow," she told him.
        "You drive too asleep."
        "I'm fine. I'm cool."
        "You're both," he agreed, "but you're not fully awake."
        "Unconscious, I wouldn't drive as slow as you."
        "Yeah, see, I don't want to test that claim."
        "You sound like your father's a safety engineer or something."
        "You know he's a safety engineer," Michael said.
        "What's a safety engineer do, anyway?"
        "He engineers safety."
        "Life is inherently unsafe."
        "That's why we need safety engineers."
        "You sound like probably your mother was obsessed with safe toys when you were growing up."
        “As you know perfectly well, she's a product-safety analyst."
        "God, you must have had a boring childhood. No wonder you wanted to be a cop, get shot at, shoot back."
        Michael sighed. "None of this has anything to do with whether you're fit to drive or not."
        "I am not only fit to drive," Carson said, "I am God's gift to Louisiana highways."
        "I hate it when you get like this."
        "I am what I am."
        "What you are, Popeye, is stubborn."
        "Look who's talking-a guy who will never accept that a woman can drive better than he can."
        "This isn't a gender thing, and you know it."
        "I'm female. You're male. It's a gender thing."
        "It's a nut thing," he said. "You're nuts, I'm not, so I ought to drive. Carson, really, you need sleep."
        "I can sleep when I'm dead."
        The day's agenda consisted of several interviews with friends of Elizabeth Lavenza, the floater without hands who had been found in the lagoon. After the second of these, in the bookstore where Lavenza had worked as a clerk, Carson had to admit that sleep deprivation interfered with her ability as an