“We are at that crossroads, yes. But there is a way. We bring stability, not greed. Tell us what you have done that blocks our controls.”
Norton nodded. The conversation was following the proper form now.
“I’d like to know what my mistakes were,” Rob said.
The caretaker moved closer. Her eyes inspected him with a surprising heat and her voice rose almost an octave.
“When you seek to live forever, you cut yourself away from the Little Mothers and their ministrations. That can make it difficult for others to control you, yes. But not impossible. It just takes more, much more, over time, as a wife or lover might deliver, or all at once, a mix of product and maker, the pure form, then you can be run for several hours, even days, sometimes weeks.”
“Why do I have wrinkles on the backs of my hands?” Rob asked.
I watched Norton—Melon—carefully. Stupid men always leave themselves open, but I was not at all sure Melon was stupid. He just knew what to pay attention to and what to ignore. And he seemed less ill at ease than Stuart.
He knew the place. It was Melon’s assignment.
“You have cut off signaling paths used by both the body and the Little Mothers.”
That phrase kept popping up and it was bugging the hell out of me. “What are these Little Mothers?” I asked.
“She means bacteria,” Rob said, his eyes on the caretaker, as if they were playing a game of chess and he wanted to psych her out. Another bad move. Don’t stare at the beast.
“The body feels lonely without guidance,” the caretaker said. “It turns in on itself. You lose your connections to other humans. What you hate and fear becomes magnified.”
She looked at Melon again. I could not read her expression, and clearly Melon did not want to try. Who was in charge here? Who was running whom?
“Dr. Golokhov—treated you first?” Rob asked.
“Skip it,” Melon said.
“I was the first. I volunteered,” she said. She wanted to talk. Rob was providing a sympathetic ear. A fellow traveler. I was back in Kafkaville with a vengeance.
“And it didn’t work?”
“I am still here. I will be here a hundred years from now, barring accidents . . . or losing control.”
“But you said you went insane.”
“You pass through the most horrible gates to escape death.” The caretaker sighed like a little girl. “I remember the days we worked together, how he tended to me during my transition, and learned from my example to change his treatments, to avoid the most obvious side effects. He was wrong to leave me here. I could have helped him listen to the Little Mothers. That’s the important thing, isn’t it?”
“Listen to them—where?”
“Downstairs. In the tanks. Everything else we did was wrong. He drove me to this. Maxim was wrong.”
Melon’s eyebrow twitched. “Time’s a-wasting,” he said.
“Tell me about my errors,” Rob insisted, his face as intensely focused as a cat’s over a bowl of cream. “He must have done more work, more research. How can we avoid making his early mistakes?”
The caretaker looked up at Melon.
“Fuck this,” Melon said. He pushed his gun against Rob’s neck. “How do you block the tagging?”
Rob blinked. We were on a knife edge and he was discovering courage.
“How?” Melon insisted.
The caretaker held up her hand. However small, this gesture made Melon back down—but only for a moment. “Will you work with us?” she asked. “It is obvious we have so much information to share.”
Rob looked pained and shook his head adamantly. “Never,” he said.
“Give them what they want!” I shouted.
“They don’t need me,” Rob said. “This is a charade.”
“We had to try,” the caretaker said. “We are not monsters, you know.” She faced the wall of pictures, head tilted to the right, then the left. She seemed to have tuned us all out.
“Tell them,” I said to Rob. “Give them something!”
Melon waved his little gun. “Let’s do it,” he said. The caretaker swung around on her tiny feet and glided out of the small office.
We got up from our chairs and returned to the main corridor, where Stuart was waiting.
“Ready?” he asked me.
We all came to a wide doorway and stopped. Beyond lay a room that might have been an abandoned Turkish bath, slick gray surfaces rising into long benches against the walls. Seven blue-gray tile basins, as big as double-wide bathtubs, held the center in two rows of three, and one in the middle, forming an H. Dark, pudding-thick liquid spiraled in the tubs, stirred by hidden paddles. Long hoses connected to aerators hung off the far sides of each tub. I could hear small bubbling sounds. The room was mostly in shadow.
“Take off your clothes,” the caretaker said.
