The flawless and radiant face brightened with a smile. “Oh, good. Good, good. I hope you will come back. I could cook a perfect dinner for you. I know a thousand and one recipes. I would like nothing more than to make you happy.”
If far down inside this girl there had seemed to be some small imprisoned consciousness issuing a scream that couldn’t be heard here far above the bottom of the abyss, Jane would have taken her out of Aspasia. But to whom, what, where? To have her identified by fingerprints or otherwise, to return her to some family that she no longer knew and who would not know this new girl woven from the fragile threads remaining of who she had been? No counseling would restore her. If a surgeon trephined her skull and found a nanotech web woven across her brain, he would not know how to remove it, and she most likely would not live through its removal.
“I would like nothing more than to make you happy,” LuLing repeated. She sat on the sofa once more. Smiling, she used one hand to smooth the fabric where her visitor had been sitting. She smoothed and smoothed the fabric.
Jane wondered…When the girl was not cleaning her suite, which wouldn’t take much time, and when she was not making her meals, and when she was not exercising, and when she was not being owned by some visitor, how often did she sit staring into space, alone and silent and still, as if she were a doll abandoned by a child who had moved on from childish things and no longer loved her?
The doorknob felt like ice in Jane’s hand. Responding to her touch, the door eased open of its own accord, and she stepped into the hallway, and the door closed behind her.
The hall seemed colder than it had been earlier, and she was shaking, and her legs felt unsteady. She leaned against the wall and took slow, deep breaths. The pistol was terribly heavy in her hand.
12
* * *
THE ENUNCIATOR REPORTS no new transgression on the part of the member with Girl Number Six.
Borisovich and Volodin wait for developments, for the moment having lost interest in card games.
When there are no immediate developments, Volodin says, “It has gotten dark. We can go ahead with the disposal now.”
“We might as well,” Borisovich agrees. He rises from the table and picks up his pistol and holsters it in his shoulder rig.
Volodin does the same.
Neither man is wearing a jacket, their weapons revealed. They do not expect to encounter a member where they are going.
They leave Borisovich’s suite together.
13
* * *
JANE CONSIDERED CHOOSING another portrait, opening another door, talking to another girl. But she would learn nothing more than the bleak truth that she already knew. The conversation would be as disturbing and depressing as that between her and LuLing.
Sex was a truth of Aspasia, but it was not the truth. The larger truth was raw power, domination, humiliation, and cruelty. These sexual encounters involved no love, no slightest affection, and certainly no procreation. The girls were uncommonly beautiful, as was the house, so that these visitors who had descended into depravity could pretend to themselves and to one another that there was beauty as well in their pitiless barbarity, that their absolute power made them beautiful, too, rather than base and demonic.
Only once before in her life had Jane been this afraid and felt this powerless—and that had been a long time ago.
If talking to other girls reduced to LuLing’s condition would lead her nowhere, something useful might be learned on the ground floor. The back stairs were nearby. They were enclosed on both sides, unlike the grand main stairs, the ultimate vertical shooting gallery, but she went to them and descended as fast as she dared.
Stairs were one of the challenges she had been taught to meet at the Academy, in Hogan’s Alley, a little town of brick and wood buildings, with its courthouse and bank and drugstore and movie theater and Pastime Bar and motel and used-car lot and more, the most well-conceived and authentically constructed reality-training center in the world. No one really lived in Hogan’s Alley. All its criminals were actors provided by an agency.
As she descended the back stairs, Jane felt almost as if her training in the faux town of Hogan’s Alley had been expressly to prepare her for Aspasia, which was in its way also a stage setting, where the girls and the security men resided but where no one really lived.
During her sixteen weeks at Quantico, she’d now and then passed through Hogan’s Alley when no scenario was being played out, when no one else walked the streets. Although she was not given to easy superstition, the place had sometimes seemed to be haunted and had sometimes given her the feeling that she was at the end of the world when all human habitations were abandoned and hers was the last heart beating on the planet.
By the time she reached the bottom of the back stairs, she had been overtaken by that end-of-the-world feeling once more, and this time for a better reason. In Aspasia, the darkest desire of humankind—to hold absolute power, to control, to command obedience, to eliminate all voices of disagreement and dissent—had found its full expression. The technology that made LuLing happy to be used, happy to sit and wait to be hurt and humiliated, was the technology of hive masters who would order the world into their idea of utopia, and in so ordering would destroy it.
The west wing on the ground floor remained deserted, the long hallway dwindling toward the front stairs and the foyer, telescoping out before her, as if it would grow longer with every step she took.
She opened one of a pair of doors on the left, found the light switch, and saw a gym with weight-training machines, treadmills, Exercycles….
She thought that the first door on the right might lead to the kitchen, but instead she found a strange windowless room where the overhead fluorescent lights had been left on. White ceramic-tile floor. White walls. In the center of the space stood a table with a pedestal base tiled to match the floor and a stainless-steel top. It seemed like a chamber in a starship in some science-fiction film.
Lying on the table was a naked girl.
14
* * *
FROM A DISTANCE, the girl on the table appeared to be sleeping, but that illusion passed when Jane stepped farther into the room. The corpse’s hyacinth-blue eyes were open wide as though she had been shocked by the last thing that she’d seen. Ligature marks around her graceful throat were proof of a violent strangulation, though the necktie or scarf or length of rope with which the deed had been done was nowhere in evidence. Blood on her chin had issued from her tongue, which she had bitten in her death throes and which remained trapped between her teeth.
In life, this blonde had been as beautiful as LuLing, her face perfection, her body sculpted by Eros himself. As with LuLing, as far as looks went, Jane would not have been in the same league with this girl.
And yet she thought, This could be me, this is me. This is me tomorrow or next week or a month from now, because there’s no way to beat people with this power.
Another room connected to this one. The door between the two stood half open.
If she had been a person who ran from trouble instead of into it, she might have fled. But to flee would be to dishonor herself and to further fail her mother, whom she had failed nineteen years earlier. This was a world that didn’t reward flight. Whenever you fled from anything, you inevitably fled into its equivalent.
She went to the half-open door. Pushed it wider. Crossed the threshold.
Before her stood a super-efficient gas furnace that had no role in heating the grand house. The manufacturer had labeled it POWER-PAK III CREMATION SYSTEM. It was usually found only in mortuaries.