“No.” There was an amused smile on her face, but she wasn’t laughing. “Tarragon does work for the government, but not in an executive capacity. He’s kind of a field supervisor, a troubleshooter for a very important ongoing project.”
Eric frowned. “Then what’s his connection with you? Are you involved in this project somehow?"
Her left hand reached up to gently caress his face. “Poor sweet, mysterious Eric, I do love you so. You don’t understand. I told you at the start that you wouldn’t understand." Her hand pulled away reluctantly.
“Eric, I am the project. And I can’t love you because I was designed not to.”
His thoughts tumbled wildly over one another, preconceptions shattering like thin glass. “You’re not making any sense, Lisa. Okay, so you’re involved with some kind of government project. I can accept that. You say that you’re a designer?”
“Eric, please, listen to me. Don’t make this any harder for me than it is. I am the project. I’m not a designer. I am … was … designed. I’m a lure, Eric.”
“A lure?” He gaped at her, wisdom at a dead-end.
“You know what a lure is. A little wiggly thing that fits on the end of a fishing line. I’ve been constructed with great care. I’m told only the best bioengineers in the world assisted with my design. It was a difficult thing to accomplish. Standards of beauty differ from one part of the world to the other, and I had to appeal to men from every continent.”
“I don’t doubt that you would,” he whispered.
“Listen to me! Eric, I’m an artison, an artificial person. I’m like Topsy, Eric.” She laughed nervously. “I was just growed.”
Quietly he sat next to her, feeling her warmth, knowing her goodness, sensing her love and not wanting to believe her. But she spoke with too much assurance.
He had to take her at her word. There was no conceivable reason why she would manufacture such an incredible lie, not now, not safely clear of Tarragon’s clutches. He could look inside her and not be able to discover the truth. Only a molecular biologist could do that.
Inside as well as on the outside, Lisa Tambor was perfectly human. Too perfectly. There was nothing to distinguish her from a normally conceived human being other than certain special talents or abilities her designers might have built into her. Talents like the ability to lure, for example.
A brief glance into a passing car on a street in Phoenix had disrupted his entire life and driven him several times to the verge of death. Yes, he could well believe she was a lure.
Her fingers twisted against each other on her lap. “There are certain people that WOSA, the World Space Authority, needs. Not just scientists. I’m told, but particular mental types required to provide proper population balance on Garden and Eden, the GATE colonies. I’ve been told that I was designed expressly to appeal to these mental types. They have an irresistible desire to fall helplessly in love with me.” Her smile was twisted.
“It’s a kind of test, falling in love with me. How did you think people for Eden and Garden were selected, Eric?”
“The lotteries,” he mumbled weakly. “Everybody has a chance to be …”
Her faugh was kind even as it was tinged with sadness. “Lotteries! Do you really think WOSA would choose the people intended to insure mankind’s survival by populating the only two extra-solar colonies by mere chance? Oh, a few are chosen that way through the lotteries to keep people like statisticians from getting too curious about the procedures, but when WOSA locates a certain type they want to recruit, they put him in close proximity to me. I have several male counterparts, by the way, and there are other female lures at work. If the subject responds correctly to my presence, they are recruited.”
“How could anyone not respond to you?” Eric told her.
“You’re prejudiced. It’s a carefully chosen combination of visual excitants, pheromones, and other characteristics beyond my comprehension. I can’t explain it all. I’m not a scientist. I don’t know how I produce the effects in men that I do, only that it happens." She went silent then and they listened together, each lost in private thoughts. Eric was thankful for the occasional off-key notes the choir produced. They were necessary reminders of reality.
Finally he looked back at her. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters so long as you love me.”
“I do love you,” she told him, fighting back fresh tears. “That’s not built into my makeup, but I do. I don’t understand it, but I do. And you can’t love me!”
He took both her hands in his. “Stop telling me what I can and cannot do, what’s possible and what’s not.…
“But don’t you see, Eric? That’s why Tarragon and the bureau are so upset. You’re not supposed to love me. You’re a stranger off the streets, an accident, an anomaly. You don’t fit the mental profile.”
“Tarragon’s told you all this, hasn’t he?” She nodded. “I don’t doubt that I’m a surprise to them, but how do they know I don’t fit their damn profile? They haven’t tested me.”
“But they have, Eric. Tarragon told me. When this began, when you started pursuing me, they went into the employee data bank at your company. They studied all your employment and subsequent updating tests. None of it fits, Eric. Nothing matches properly. If there were even a few parameters you tested within, Tarragon would have treated you differently. Of course, you wouldn’t have been allowed to stay with me, but you might have been recruited.”
“Then their parameters are wrong,” Eric told her, “because it’s an unarguable fact that I am in love with you. Obviously, they’ve slipped up. Maybe their parameters aren’t exact.”
“And what if they aren’t? What if they have made a mistake and they decided to recruit you, to send you?”
“Tarragon wants to send me someplace, all right, but it isn’t Garden or Eden.” The paradise worlds, he thought idly. No taxes, no crushing burden of day-to-day jobs. It was something everyone dreamed of, everyone aspired to.
Well, he didn’t. Not anymore.
“It wouldn’t make any difference, Lisa. You should know that. Because they wouldn’t let me take you with me.”
“No, they wouldn’t let us go together, Eric. My work is here. The work I was designed for.”
He shook her forcefully. “Stop that! I can’t think of you that way, as a bunch of figures and calculations on some engineer’s designing screen. You’re not a machine.”
“I am a machine, Eric. An organic machine. We all are. My specifications are just a little more rigorous, a little more precise than yours. I was built up molecule by molecule, Eric, strand by strand, just like the bench we’re sitting on, like the dome arching over the choir. A Christopher Wren of biology drew me up on a terminal, Eric, and organic chemists watched my growth.
“I’m not bitter about it. I’m resigned to it. I don’t feel any less human than anyone else in this chamber, or for that matter, any more human. I don’t feel bitter about all the nice men who fell in love with me, were told the truth, and went out to the colonies. Once things were explained to them, they fell out of love with me very quickly.” Her expression was suddenly desperate.
He hastened to reassure her. “I’m not falling out of love with you, Lisa. Not even a little. I don’t give a damn what you are—robot, android, or artison. What you are is what you are, Lisa, and what you are is the woman I love.” She didn’t try to stop the tears this time, sobbed against him. “I’m not bitter about it,” she insisted. “You’ve got to believe that I’m not bitter about it None of us has any real control over our own destiny. We each do the best we can with what life deals us. I do my job, the job I was designed to do.”
“You were designed to love me,” he told her gently.
“Eric, they’ll find us and take you away from me.” A few people turned to stare, looked away when they met Eric’s eyes. “They’ll take you away and ship you off to Eden or Garden, or worse.”
“They’ll do nothing of the kind to me. I told you nothing was going to separate us again."
She pulled back, stared hard at him. “Haven’t you been listening to me? Haven’t you heard anything that I’ve said?”
