Prodigal Son

like the squares in a crossword puzzle. This geometry gives him comfort.
        He visualizes in his mind one letter of his name with every step that he takes, spelling himself along the tile floor, block by block, toward freedom.
        This is the dormitory floor, where the most recently awakened members of the New Race are housed until they are polished and ready to infiltrate the city.
        Half the doors stand open. Beyond some of them, naked bodies are locked in every imaginable sexual posture.
        Especially in their early weeks, the tank-born are filled with anguish that arises from their knowledge of what they are. They also suffer intense anxiety because they come to full consciousness with the immediate understanding that, as Victor's chattel, they do not control the primary issues of their lives and possess no free will; therefore, in their beginning is their end, and their lives are mapped without hope of mystery.
        They are sterile but vigorous. In them, sex has been divorced entirely from the purpose of procreation and functions solely as a vent for stress.
        They copulate in groups, tangled and writhing, and it seems to Randal Six, whose autism makes him different from them, that these thrusts provide them no pleasure, only release from tension.
        The sounds issuing from these orgiastic groups have no quality of joy, no suggestion of tenderness. These are bestial noises, low and rough, insistent almost to the point of violence, eager to the point of desperation.
        The slap of flesh on flesh, the wordless grunts, the guttural cries that seem charged with rage-all this frightens Randal Six as he passes these rooms. He feels the urge to run but dares not step on the lines between the vinyl blocks; he must place each foot entirely in a square, which requires a deliberative pace.
        The hallway increasingly seems like a tunnel, the chambers on both sides like catacombs in which the restless dead embrace in cold desire.
        Heart knocking as if to test the soundness of his ribs, Randal spells his name often enough to reach an intersection of corridors. Using the final letter, he spells a crossing word- left- which allows him to turn in that direction.
        From the letter t, he sidesteps four blocks, spelling right backward as he goes. With the letter r as his new beginning, he is able to spell his name and, thereby, proceed forward along this new hall, toward the choice of elevators or a stairwell.

CHAPTER 53
        
        ERIKA TOOK DINNER alone in the master bedroom, at a nineteenth-century French marquetry table featuring a motif of autumn bounty-apples, oranges, plums, grapes, all spilling from a horn of plenty-rendered with exquisitely inlaid woods of numerous varieties.
        Like all those of the New Race, her metabolism was as fine-tuned and as powerful as a Ferrari engine. This required a formidable appetite.
        Two six-ounce steaks-filet mignon, prepared medium-rare- were accompanied by a rasher of crisp bacon, buttered carrots with thyme, and snow peas with sliced jicama. A separate chafing dish contained braised potatoes in blue cheese sauce. For dessert waited an entire peach cobbler with a side dish of vanilla ice cream coddled in a bowl of crushed ice.
        While she ate, she stared at the scalpel that had been left on her bath mat earlier in the day. It lay across her bread plate as if it were a butter knife.
        She didn't know how the scalpel related to the furtive ratlike noises that she had been hearing, but she was certain that the two were connected.
         There is no world but this one. All flesh is grass, and withers, and the fields of the mind, too, are burned black by death and do not grow green again. That conviction is essential to the creed of materialism; and Erika is a soldier in the determined army that will inevitably conquer the Earth and impose that philosophy pole to pole.
        Yet, though her creator forbade belief in the supernatural and though her laboratory origins suggested that intelligent life can be manufactured without divine inspiration, Erika could not shake a sense of the uncanny in these recent events. The scalpel seemed to sparkle not solely with the sheen of surgical steel but also with… magic.
        As if by her thoughts she had opened a door between this world and another, a force inexplicable switched on the plasma TV. Erika looked up with a start as the screen