IMPOSSIBLE CHILD

1561 4D

He entered his great chamber, on a level near the top of the City. The room glowed with pipelight from the surface. In the middle of the room, a sprawling sofa circled a broad, low table. The chamber’s walls, still one of the deepest mysteries of the City, displayed a continuous animated artwork that ran all the way around the room, punctuated by two doors and a few framed objects. The artwork was a living vista of an endless twilit desert, changing, as if geologic time passed in moments, to shallow seas, then to hills and mountains and back to desert again in hours. Never did the details of the scene repeat themselves.

It was time for companionship. Arlen made one call, and Indrio appeared at the great steel-sculpted doors. A fine chain of platinum hung around her dark-golden waist, with a pendant that hung over both upper and lower navels; an even-finer chain of silver lay across her chest, dangling hair-thin strands of micro-links that spread like water to reveal her brown-copper nipples. With bare scalp, small ears tight to her head, large dark eyes, narrow face, a full mouth and lips, she stood naked, the swelling beauty of her breasts, hips and buttocks gleaming in the soft light. Only andros, vat-born and raised, were as beautiful as this.

She extended long arms to Arlen. “Come here,” she said, her voice very low. “Let me warm you.”

“Indrio.” The day’s burdens had exhausted him. This woman was the one great and secret joy he allowed himself, the one door in his fortress through which he granted entrance to that thief he named love.

His power in the City forbade easy intimacy with others; too easily a spy or an assassin was inserted into the service of the mighty, maybe as a biopuppet of a former loyal soul: the same in body and thought and gesture until some malignant mnemon triggered and the servant became a killer. But Indrio was not like others.

No, Indrio was his own discovery, the impossible child of a human and andro union. No andro carried viable eggs or sperm; his own andro-farm geneticists told him that the genes were simply not present. Yet here she stood, daughter of human mother and an unfortunate andro father; he had found her abandoned as an infant in the sludge of Babiar Zone, at the base of the City, during his prowlings there, and he had raised her up to be nursed and taught and loved in his own holdings high in the City‘s levels.

Now she was his lover, and her andro beauty shone through the warmth of her humanity. The angels of the archives could not match her; she was sweet, patient with him, attentive, giving.

He touched the release of his singlesuit, and it fell away. Even aged four hundred years, his dark body still carried the powerful muscles of a youth, and little fat. Indrio‘s eyes widened to see him: he was ready for her.

Her father had been gene-traced, found and vaporized, of course; no andro with potent sperm could be allowed to propagate. It might have been wise to sample his genes and determine the cause of the aberration, but the man was escaping, and fought to the death, further evidence that something was terribly wrong with him. If the City and Regional governments never found out, so much the better.

Tenderly Arlen touched Indrio‘s cheek. “I missed you today. If only there were more time for us.”

She held his face in her long fingers. “Let’s make good use of our time.” Her feathered nails making his skin tingle, she slid her hands down his neck, brushed his nipples with an electric thrill, and circled his waist both ways until her arms wrapped him tightly. The heat of her body pulsed against him; her tiny chains seemed to vibrate.

“My queen,” he said, when his breath returned. He kissed her toes, and began to work his way up her ankle, and she laughed, and they began again.