Drakon (18 page)

Alice started violently and felt real fear clutch at her stomach.
Can she
—

"No." Gwen smiled, turning from the window. "I can't read your mind. But I can hear anything you subvocalize, and I can smell your emotions, and I can read your body language like a book. Do come have some of this, it's very good. Anyway, there's no need to be
too
frightened. You're mine, now, so I'm obliged to protect you."

Alice sat down across the table. Gwen went on: "Just remember that you're transparent as glass.

You can't deceive me any more than you could outwrestle me. Try to lie and you'll make me angry, and believe me, you don't want that."

I wish she hadn't told me.

"It was you or Sally or Edgar, and I do need an executive assistant who knows. Sally's not flexible enough, and Edgar doesn't smell quite right."

She hadn't felt hungry, but the smell of the food made her pick up the fork. As she leaned forward to spear a chunk of the marlin, she smelled something else. Gwen was as fastidious as a cat about cleanliness, but close to there was something different about the faint smell of her sweat, something you only noticed because of the contrast to what you expected. A very slight muskiness. It was oddly soothing, and she felt her heartbeat slow.

The marlin was delicious. If you were a member of the Household you lived like royalty, nothing but the best.

God. And the money's so good.
Double pay with her promotion to the inner circle.

Tom Cairstens came in, grinning. He tossed a folder down beside the plates on the table. Gwen laid aside her fork and picked it up, giving it her quick three-second-per-page scan.

"Home is the hunter, home from the hills," the lawyer said. "Hills of Hollywood, at least. That's their offer, basically—but I think they'll go to twenty million and fifteen percent, net, if we wait a little or drop a hint about MGA. Their people have finished examining the holographic projector and they're drooling. It's our biggest deal so far."

"Excellent, Tom," Gwen said. "Remember, though, this is our first non-industrial product, our first direct-to-consumer. We don't want too much publicity, and it's worth money to avoid it; IngolfTech isn't going to be the subject of articles in
Fortune
if I can help it. Also, don't pressure them to front-end it. The cash is a bagatelle; the real money from this will be in the licensing, and we're not in a hurry."

He nodded and inclined his head slightly to Alice.

"Yes, she's been briefed. No problems."

"Welcome to the Household," he said to her. "Marvelous, isn't it?"

Alice made herself smile back.
Oh, God.
"I'm . . . still taking it in, sir."

"Tom."

"Tom. It's, ah, it's a wonderful opportunity, Tom."

The lawyer walked over to Gwen's workstation and stared at the image on the screen. Or half-stared, at least. The other half of his attention was on Gwen. Alice shuddered slightly; she didn't know
why,
but when Gwendolyn Ingolfsson was in the room it was impossible
not
to focus on her, even if you didn't know the truth. Thomas Cairstens was normally a worldly man, used to moving in the monied glamour of the West Coast elite, not easily impressed. The look of sandbagged awe on his face made Alice shiver again.

"What is that?" he asked, pointing at the screen.

"A fusion reactor," Gwen replied. "Early model. I'm working on adapting it, but it's slow going.

This"—she pointed her fork at the workstation; it was linked to the new massively-parallel mainframe—"is about as much use as an abacus. Construction? It's going to be like trying to build a megawatt laser in a blacksmith's forge."

"Everything here must seem very backward," he said humbly.

Gwen shrugged. "The electronics are surprisingly capable, for 1997. Very different, though. We used more analog technology, and we never had all this open architecture—Security would have had kittens at the thought. It was all ROM, read-only memory, for the compinsets, the programs. Still is, come to that."

"Will we need it?" he asked, nodding to the reactor design.

"Oh, certainly. The power requirements can't be met from any sort of capacitor, and those would be too conspicuous in New York anyway."

"A private power station won't?"

"It's not very large—about the size of a two-story house, according to my best estimate. I'll discuss the Paramount proposals with you further at dinner."

He nodded; that was dismissal. Then he turned back for a moment: "Ma'am . . . what's Los Angeles like in your world?"

"Los Angeles?" she said. "There's no city there. Mostly prairie with live oaks, along the coast.

Some desert inland, mountain forests, chaparral. Good grizzly country. The settlements are small, some orchards and fields in the more favored spots. I've got a property there, near La Jolla. Wonderful spot for swimming and sailing, and I raise horses."

He shook his head in wonder. "I can't wait until we get the Project rolling. We've dreamed of utopia all these years, and we're finally going to
get
it. Paradise . . ."

Alice moistened her mouth, watching him leave. "He's crazy, isn't he?" she said.

Gwen shook her head. "Just very focused. It's true we'll clean this planet up; we don't shit in our bedrooms, and we put the industry out in space where it belongs. Tom loves redwoods and whales and snail darters . . . Hence, paradise."

She turned, and Alice felt the full impact of the green-eyed stare. In private, with the inner circle, she didn't bother to tone it down.

"It's going to be hell, isn't it?" Alice said quietly, hearing her own Australian accent grow stronger.

Images ran through her mind: Nagasaki, the newsreels of Buchenwald, history classes. "Like us and the abos, only worse."

"Concentration camps, you mean? Plagues?" She shook her head indulgently. "No, you can't hurt us, so we won't use extreme measures. We'll conquer you, then domesticate you."

It'll be a long time and the Project may not work. And maybe it won't be so bad.

"You said that the molehole might not work," Alice said. "What then?"

"Then I'll take the planet myself," Gwen said coolly, looking out the window and resting her chin on a palm. "That'd be more difficult, but an interesting challenge, in a way."

And there's only one of her here,
Alice thought.
And . . . it's too late for second thoughts,
anyway. Even if they all come through, they couldn't be worse than Hitler or Stalin or that awful
thing in Cambodia.

"We'll only kill the ones who resist," Gwen confirmed. "I expect to be put in charge here, and the sky will be the limit for my administrative Household. It really will be a Utopia, of sorts, for the rest. No more wars or terrorism, no more sickness or poverty or famine, no more environmental problems. A highly evolved parasite sees that the host body stays fit; and we're nothing if not highly evolved."

"People will still fight," Alice said. "Some will."

Gwen nodded. "That's humans for you. Of course, they'll only
be
humans in the first generation or so, and we
drakensis
are immortal. We're good at waiting."

Alice paused with the fork halfway to her mouth. Gwen poured more of the chilled white wine from the carafe.

"Not human?" Alice said. The fear welled up a little, then sank.

"No,
Homo sapiens sapiens
is far too risky to have around in large numbers. We'll use a tailored paravirus to alter your heredity to
Homo servus.
Don't worry, it's not a big change, much closer to human than I am. Some neurological alterations, the endocrine system, hormones, the vomeronasal organ. Clean up all the hereditary defects at the same time, cancer, obesity, Alzheimer's disease, and so forth.
Servus
are still people, they've got personalities and thoughts, they just aren't aggressive or rebellious—or not much. It's not like the old days before the change to the New Race, whips and torture and that sort of thing. Not necessary. Why, these days a lot of the
servus
aren't even personally owned, they can even have property, to a certain extent."

She smiled nostalgically. "Very sweet people, actually, and I miss them."

Alice relaxed again.
Odd. I never get as worried when she's around, even though she scares
the shit out of me.
If Gwendolyn was typical, they didn't seem cruel, at least. Beautiful, terrifying, awesome, but not sadistic.

"You can tell if
I'm
lying," Alice said. "What am I supposed to do?"

Gwen moved; so swiftly that Alice had no time to jerk away. Suddenly her face was inches from the Australian's.

"Trust me," she said. Alice swallowed and nodded, shuddering slightly as the others eyes gripped hers and held them.

After a moment Gwen returned to her seat: "What's on the agenda?"

"Primary Belway Securities. They're the logical choice for a public offering—did I say something?"

Gwen was grinning to herself. "No, no," she said. "I've had a . . . previous contact with the firm. Go ahead."

"We should sound them out, and set up a preliminary meeting in a few months. Shall I go ahead with it? And where would you like it set up, in New York or Nassau or . . . ?"

"I think we'll have them over here," Gwen said. "A more controlled environment; it'll put us at an advantage—and with investment bankers, you need it. We'll get the hierarchies squared away before we transfer the proceedings to New York." She wrinkled her nose. "Race Spirit, but that place stinks. How you humans manage to breathe in a fog of burnt hydrocarbons and sewage is beyond me."

The servant came and removed the tray, leaving a plate of pastries and a coffee service. Alice looked on in frank envy as Gwen ate; she knew it took six or seven thousand calories a day to maintain the Draka's supercharged metabolism, but it was still aggravating.

Gwen saw her glance. "There's a pill we had, back in our late 1990s," she said. "Metaboline. It adjusted the basal metabolism to allow humans any level of calorie intake. I'll have some run up."

Alice was smiling as she left.

***

Gwen nodded. "You caught all that?"

"The monitor system is working fine." He glanced out the door after the Australian. "Have you, ah .

. . ?" He raised an eyebrow.

"Not yet, I don't want to stress her too heavily. In a day or two."

He shook his head, grinning in admiration. "How do you do it? I'd have sworn she was straight, and I'm not—or not very."

Gwen was paging through the report again. She spoke without looking up:

"Ah, well, both behaviors are latent in any individual human; there's a whole complex of genes that determine which is dominant and to what degree, and they interact with environmental factors at triggering stages in the development process. It's a spectrum, not a binary opposition, even in humans; both are always active in a
drakensis.
Anyway, my pheromones are panspecific—they fill all the receptors in your vomeronasal organ. Think of it as fooling your hypothalamus and limbic system. It doesn't work on all humans, but it will on most. On Alice, certainly; I can scent it, although she doesn't know it yet."

"I won't quarrel with the results," he said. "It seems to take more than one of us to keep up with you."

Her glance lingered on him, and she saw him flush and a light sweat break out across his brow.

"True," she said. "That's a byproduct of the aggression reflex, hormonal. I don't produce much estrogen unless I decide to ovulate; there's another set of hormones—they're somewhat similar in structure to the androgens in your human system—that controls secondary sexual functions in
drakensis,
with only minor differences between the genders . . . . It's complex."

He swallowed and shifted. Gwen listened to his heartbeat increase and inhaled to take his scent.

"The bankers are coming?" he said, changing the subject.

"Yes, in a few months. It's the only way to raise the operating capital we'll need. There shouldn't be any basic difficulties; from their point of view we're a very good prospect for a public stock offering, so we should be ready to get down to serious negotiations by the winter. I want everything very tight by then, Tom. No mistakes, nothing to disturb them. We'll be moving the main locus of our operations to New York, and there'll be far less margin for errors and coverups."

She rose and began to undress. "As for right now . . . take your clothes off, Tom." He smiled and obeyed.

"Your wish is my command." Gwen nodded.

"And kneel to me," she said, putting her palms behind her on the table and leaning her weight on them.

Jennifer Feinberg opened the door of her apartment and put an automatic foot out to block the cat.

"You wouldn't like it out there," she said, swinging it closed and snicking home the multiple locks. "I wish
I
could stay home."

She dumped her attache case on the table, walked into the kitchen to put the water on for tea, and hit the play button on the answering machine.

"Jennifer, this is your mother—"

"Oh, puh-
leez,
" she groaned, fast-forwarding.

"Miss Feinberg, I have to speak with you. Could you—"

She hit the
stop
button with a small scream of fear, closing her eyes as the machine rattled on the sofa-side table.
Control your breathing,
she told herself. Her hands were still shaking as she punched the number the policeman had given her into the phone.

"Carmaggio," a voice said.

"This is Feinberg," she managed to say, looking around her apartment.

The heavy December rain was streaking down the windows, and she hadn't had time to turn on the lights. She was sweating under her outdoor coat. The studio smelled of sachet and tea and, very faintly, of cat. It was
home,
but right then it felt very lonely.

"Yes, Ms. Feinberg?" Trained patience on the other end of the line.