Lentz, in an instant, anticipated everything either of us might say to each other on the morality of machine vivisection. The whole topic was a wash, as insoluble as intelligence itself. He waved his hand, dismissing me as a madman. No part of her lived. To take her apart might, finally, extend some indirect service to the living. Anything else was softheaded nostalgia.
I had no leg to stand on. Lentz owned Helen, her shaped evolution, the lay of her synapses. He owned all the reasoning about her as well. I had some connection to her, by virtue of our long association. But that connection was, at most, emotional. And if Helen lived far enough to be able to feel, it just went to prove that emotions were no more than the sum of their weight vectors. And cuttable, in the name of knowing.
My strongest argument belonged more to him than it did to me. We know the world by awling it into our shape-changing cells. Knowing those cells required just as merciless tooling. To counter any part of Lentz's plan would be to contradict myself. To lose. I had just one bargain to make. And I damned myself with it willingly.
"At least give us until after the test."
"That's fine. I'm pretty much backlogged until then anyway."
I hadn't suspected how easily I could sell my weighted soul.
"Diana was right," I spit, venomous. "You are a monster."
He stared at me again. You're going to fault me for the deal you proposed? He stood up to leave, grasping his tray. "Oh, don't go getting your ass all out of joint, Marcel. I said we won't cut anything until after you run your little competition."
I tracked Diana down to her dry lab. She sat in front of a monitor, watching a subtractive visualization of the activity of cerebral columns. A color contour recording: the flashing maps of thought in real time.
"Lentz wants to brain-damage Helen. Selectively kill off neurodes. See what makes her tick."
"Of course he does," Diana said. She neither missed a beat nor took her eyes from her screen. "It wasn't that long ago that he stopped frying ants with the magnifying glass."
"Diana. Please. This is really happening."
She stopped, then. She looked up. She would have taken my hand, had she not been a single parent in a secret affair, and I a single, middle-aged man.
"I can't help you, Ricky." Her eyes glistened, slick with her impotence. "I fractionate monkey hippocampi."
Confusion wanned me like an opiate. I rolled with it, to the point of panic. "Monkeys can't talk."
"No. But if they could, you know what they would ask the lab tech."
She implored me, with a look of bewilderment. Don't press this. Helen hurt her. I destroyed her. But nothing approached the pain of her own living compromise.
I gave Helen a stack of independent readings. I did not trust my voice in conversation with her. And she needed no more lessons in cheerful deceit.
In all our dealings, Harold Plover had never been the spokesman for anything but decency. I decided to go enlist his humanity. I'd never seen him away from the Center. But I had his address, and showed up at his place late that Saturday afternoon, unannounced.
Harold met me jovially at the door. He was seconded by an even more jovial Doberman. The dog was at least half again bigger than A. The dog leaped up and knocked me over, while Harold fought to restrain it. I righted myself and the game started all over again.
"Ivan," Harold shouted at the creature, further exciting it. "Ivan! Knock it off. Time out. Haven't we talked about socially unacceptable behavior?"
"Try 'Down, boy.' Quick."
"Oh, don't be afraid of this pooch. He won the 'Most Likely to Lick a Serial Killer's Face' award from doggie obedience school."
"Doesn't this brand have one of the highest recidivism rates?"
"Breed, Maestro. Dog breeds. Dog food brands. Words are his life," he explained to Ivan.
At last Harold succeeded in hauling the disconsolate dog off me. Without asking why I'd dropped by, he hauled me into the inner sanctum. The place crawled with daughters. Daughters had been left about carelessly, everywhere. Harold introduced me to his wife, Tess. I expected something small, fast, and acid. I got an isle of amiable adulthood amid the teenage torrent.
One who must have been Mina flirted out a greeting. "Look who's here. If it isn't Orph himself."
"Orff?"
"Yeah. Orphic Rewards."
"She's gone anagram-mad," Harold whined. "It's driving us all up the bloody wall."
Another daughter came downstairs, modeling her prom dress. This might have been Trish. I wasn't betting.
Harold exploded. "Absolutely not. You're not wearing that thing in public! You look like a French whore in heat."
"Oh, Daddy!"
"Listen to the expert in French whores." Tess tousled Harold's hair. "I figured you had to be spending yourself somewhere."
"Do you believe this woman? You'd never guess to hear her, would you, that she spent six years in a convent?"
"We'll talk about it," Tess consoled the devastated kid.
"We won't talk about it," Harold shouted.
"Talking never hurts," Tess said.
The Doberman came and pinned me to the sofa. A préadolescent in blue jeans, probably the caboose, said, "Watch this." She produced a dog biscuit. "Ivan. Ivan! Listen to me. Can you — can you sneeze?"
Ivan rolled over.
"I didn't say roll over. I said sneeze."
Ivan barked.
"Not speak. Sneeze. Sneeze, you animal!"
Ivan sat up and begged, played dead, and offered to shake hands. In the end, Harold's youngest threw the dog the sop in disgust.
Harold reveled in the show. "He's learned that you just have to be persistent with humans. They get the idea eventually, if you keep at them."
Before I knew it, dinner enveloped us. No one sat at the table. Only about half of us bothered with plates and silverware. But definitely dinner. The tributary of bodies in and out, being fed.
"That's not fifteen minutes," Tess said to the one in the revealing prom dress. "Remember? Fifteen minutes with your family, every day. You promised."
"My family. So that's what you call this."
But if one or another of her sisters had struck up a tune, this one would have joined in on some loving and cacophonous counterpoint. This was the land A. came from, huge, jumbled, and warm. I wanted to excuse myself, to run off to A.'s apartment on G. Street and tell her that it wasn't too late to make a dissonant choir of her own. I wanted her so badly, I almost forgot why I'd come to this place.
Harold, happily harassing his girls, recalled me. "Lentz wants to do exploratory surgery on Helen," I said.
"Have another piece of broc," he urged me. "Lots of essential minerals."
The word "mineral" struck me as incomprehensible. Foreign. Where had it come from? How could I have used it so cavalierly before now? "He wants to clip out whole subsystems. See what effect that has on her language skills."
Harold wolfed at the pita pocket he'd constructed. "What's the problem? That's good science. Well. Approximately reasonable science, let's say."
Mina, drifting past the buffet, called out, "Oh no! Not Helen."
Trish, in her prom dress, for it was Trish, added her hurt. "Daddy! You can't do this."
"Do what? I'm not doing anything."
Both sisters looked out through puffed portals, bruising silently, over nothing. An idea.
"Diana disagrees," I stretched. "About its being good science. I think she'd help me, except she feels incriminated herself."
A skip in the flow, too brief to measure, said I'd overstepped. Broken the unspoken. I should have known. Nobody had to tell me. I just slipped.
"Honey," her mother told Trish, "take off the dress before you slop all over it."