Engineman - Eric Brown [207]
I hesitated. "I'm working on her case."
He threw his head back and laughed.
My fist tightened on the pistol. "I don't see what's so funny."
He indicated another door along the hall. "Follow me."
He opened the door and entered the room. He turned to face me, his laughter mocking my shock.
Behind him, spread across the floor and the far wall, were the remains of what once might have been a human being. It was as if the wall and the floor had suddenly snapped shut to create a grotesque Rorschach blot of flesh and blood. The only part of the body that had survived the mutilation was the head. It sat beside Lassolini's right foot, staring at me.
It was the head of the same woman...
Lassolini left the room and strode to the next door. He paused on the threshold. "My dear..." I stumbled after him, amenable with shock.
Another atrocity. This time the woman had been lasered into bloody chunks and arranged on plinths around the room after the fashion of Dali.
"You're mad!" I cried.
"That did occur to me, my dear. Though what you see here is not the cause or symptom of it, but an attempt to cure myself. A catharsis, if you like."
"But... but which one is Stephanie Etteridge?"
"None of them is Stephanie," he said. "She is alive and well and living in Paris. And yet... all of them were Stephanie."
I took control of my shock, levelled the pistol and said with determination: "Look, Lassolini, I want answers. And if I don't get them..."
He bowed. "Very well, my dear. This way - and I assure you, no more horrors."
He strode down a long corridor. I had to run to keep up. We came to a pair of swing doors with circular portholes, and Lassolini pushed through. Another surprise: after the luxury of the ballroom, the stark and antiseptic utility of what looked like a hospital ward. Then I remembered that this place was once the city morgue.
We stopped at a line of horizontal silver tanks, and with an outstretched hand Lassolini invited me to inspect their contents.
I peered through the first frosted faceplate and made out the young, beautiful face of Stephanie Etteridge. In a daze I moved on to the next one, and the next: Etteridge, again, and again. Each tank contained a flawless replica of the actress.
I stared at him, and he smiled.
"Clones..." I murmured, and I experienced a curious vacuum within my chest.
"Perspicacious of you, my dear."
"But I thought the science was still in its experimental stages. I thought the Kilimanjiro Corporation had the rights..."
Lassolini laughed. "The science is still in its experimental stages," he said. "And I am the Kilimanjiro Corporation."
I gestured in the direction of the ritually slaughtered Etteridge clones. "But you still murdered human beings," I said. "Even clones are-"
Lassolini was shaking his head. "By no stretch of the imagination can they be considered human - as of yet. They are grown from DNA samples taken from the original Stephanie Etteridge, and their minds remain blank until the encoded identity of the subject is downloaded into them."
"So those...?"
"Merely so much dead meat. But it pleased me to sacrifice Stephanie, if only in effigy. These bodies were the ones I kept in supply for the time when she aged and required her youth again."
I looked into his youthful face. "So both you, and the Stephanie Etteridge I met, are clones?" I was beginning to understand.
He regarded me, as if calculating how much to divulge.
"We were married for five happy years," he said. "When her career came to an end, and she began to show signs of age, I promised her a new lease of life. Virtual immortality. Perhaps only this kept her with me, until my scientists perfected the technique of cloning, and the more difficult procedure of recording and downloading individual identity from one brain to another.
"She was nearly seventy when we downloaded her into the body of her twenty year old clone. Then... and then she left me, and nothing I could do or say would make her return. I had such plans! We could