This Day All Gods Die Read Free Page B

too."
    Involuntarily Hashi drummed his fingers on his desk. He needed to answer Warden's summons. "Lane, please make your point. I am not in good odor with our esteemed director.
    This delay,while we talk will doubtless vex him."
    "I'm trying, damn it," she snapped. "Nobody but you ever gets to think around here."
    He swallowed a burst of ire. He had called her before she was ready to report. Her findings were partial or unclear. Naturally she wished to express them cautiously. He would gain nothing by reproaching her.
    "If there were more resemblances," she explained stiffly,
    "I would probably assume this particular coenzyme is there because of the shields. But it wouldn't work well for that. The differences are too significant."
    Again she paused. In another moment or two, Hashi thought, he would have no choice but to shout at her.
    More slowly than ever, she went on, "If I were asked to come up with a use for the holoenzyme this coenzyme creates, I might say it would make a good chemical trigger. Release it into the bloodstream, and one or two heartbeats later you get a big bang. Like an orgasm so intense it kills you."
    Without transition his irritation vanished. Lane Harbinger, he hummed to himself, you are a marvel. Is it any wonder that I endure your eccentricities?
    Almost singing his excitement and pleasure, he said,
    "Check his teeth, Lane."
    Where could a coenzyme be concealed so that a man in a state of drug-induced hypnosis would be able to ingest it on some preconditioned signal? Where else but in his mouth?
    And absorption into the bloodstream would be slower. Ten or fifteen seconds at least. Safer for the man who gave the signal.
    "What's left of them," she returned. "I'm already working on it."
    In a glow of perverse gallantry, he answered, "Then please do not allow me to interrupt you. Perhaps when your efforts are complete you will let me persuade you to marry me."
    So that he wouldn't hear her laughing in scorn, he silenced his intercom.
    No doubt she could never prove the conclusions he drew.
    When her research was complete she would probably be able to demonstrate that this particular holoenzyme would serve well as a chemical trigger. Sadly, logic would preclude her from concluding that this holoenzyme did serve in that fashion.
    Nevertheless what she had learned was enough for his immediate purposes.
    Gathering his rumpled labcoat around him, Hashi Lebwohl left his office and walked as quickly as his untied shoes allowed to his meeting with Warden Dios.

CIRO
Vector had told him he was
    cured. Mikka told him over
    and over again, holding him in her arms and rocking him as if he were a baby.
    Ciro knew better. The walls of his doom had closed around him like the claustrophobia of Mikka's embrace. His bunk was a coffin. Of course he knew better.
    Sorus Chatelaine had injected a mutagen into his veins: he understood that in the genetic programming of his DNA; understood it more profoundly than anything anyone could have said to him. No mere words could outweigh his cellular comprehension of the way he'd been betrayed.
    Somehow Morn had lured or tricked him into revealing what had happened. Now everyone knew. By the hour his doom became more certain, not less.
    Of course she'd asked Vector for help. Why not? Why should she grant Ciro the simple decency of facing his shame and horror alone? No one had ever taken him that seriously.
    And when the dilemma had been explained to him, Vector had proposed giving Ciro some of Nick's antimutagen. Vector had said, The drug is essentially a genetically engineered mi-crobe that acts as a binder. It attaches itself to the nucleotides of the mutagen, renders them inert. Then they're both flushed out of the body as waste. As he spoke, the man who'd once been Ciro's mentor and friend had sounded confident and calm, inhumanly sure of himself.
    But his reassurances meant nothing. Ciro couldn't hear them through Sorus Chatelaine's threats.
    Her words were infinitely