Prodigal Son

the chair. She sat with her head bowed for a moment. Then she raised it and straightened her back.
        His people were amazing. Tough. Resilient. In their way, proud.
        Leaving her in the chair, he went to the library bar and poured cognac from a decanter into a snifter.
        He wanted to be calmer when he killed her. In his current state of agitation, he would not be able fully to enjoy the moment.
        At a window, with his back to her, he sipped the cognac and watched the contusive sky as its bruises grew darker, darker. Rain would come with nightfall, if not before.
        They said that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. They were lying.
        First, there was no God. Only brutal nature.
        Second, Victor knew from hard experience that the creation of a new world was a frustrating, often a tedious, and a time-consuming endeavor.
        Eventually, calm and prepared, he returned to Erika. She sat in the chair as he had left her.
        Taking off his sport jacket and draping it over the back of an armchair, he said, "This can be a perfect city. One day… a perfect world. Ordinary flawed humanity-they resist perfection. One day they will be… replaced. All of them."
        She sat in silence, head raised, but not looking at him, gazing instead at the books on the shelves.
        He removed his necktie.
        "A world stripped clean of fumbling humanity, Erika. I wish you could be here with us to see it."
        When creating a wife for himself, he modified-in just a few ways-the standard physiology that he gave to other members of the New Race.
        For one thing, strangling one of them would have been extremely difficult. Even if the subject had been obedient and docile, the task might have taken a long time, might even have proved too difficult.
        Every Erika, on the other hand, had a neck structure-windpipe, carotid arteries-that made her as vulnerable to a garrote as was any member of the Old Race. He could have terminated her in other ways, but he wished the moment to be intimate; strangulation satisfied that desire.
        Standing behind her chair, he bent to kiss her neck.
        "This is very difficult for me, Erika."
        When she did not reply, he stood straight and gripped the necktie in both hands. Silk. Quite elegant. And strong.
        "I'm a creator and a destroyer, but I prefer to create."
        He looped the tie around her neck.
        "My greatest weakness is my compassion," he said, "and I must purge myself of it if I'm to make a better world based on rationality and reason."
        Savoring the moment, Victor was surprised to hear her say, "I forgive you for this."
        Her unprecedented audacity so stunned him that his breath caught in his throat.
        When he spoke, the words came in a rush: " Forgive me? I am not of a station to need forgiveness, and you are not of a position to have the power to grant it. Does the man who eats the steak need the forgiveness of the steer from which it was carved? You foolish bitch. And less than a bitch because no whelp would ever have come from your loins if you had lived a thousand years."
        Quietly, calmly, almost tenderly, she said, "But I will never forgive you for having made me."
        Her audacity had grown to effrontery, to impudence so shocking that it robbed him of all the pleasure that he expected from this strangulation.
        To Victor, creation and destruction were equally satisfying expressions of power. Power alone motivated him: the power to defy nature and to bend it to his will, the power to control others, the power to shape the destiny of both the Old Race and the New, the power to overcome his own weaker impulses.
        He strangled her now, cut off the blood supply to her brain, crushed her windpipe, strangled her, strangled her, but with such fury, in such a blind rage, that by the time he finished, he was not a man of power but merely a grunting beast fully in the thrall of nature, out of control, lost to reason and rationality.
        In her dying, Erika had not only denied him but defeated him, humiliated him, as he had not been in more than two centuries.
        Choking with wrath, he pulled books off the shelves, threw them to the floor, scores of books, hundreds, tore them and ground them under his heels. Tore them and ground them. Threw them and tore them.
        Later, he went to the master suite.