Blood Music Read Online Free PDF

later.”
    Vergil picked up the box. The cold feeling in his forearm had passed now. Rothwild escorted him down the stairs and across the sidewalk to the gate. Walter accepted the badge, his face rigid, and Rothwild followed Vergil to the parking lot.
    “Remember your contract,” Rothwild said. “Just remember what you can and cannot say.”
    “I am allowed to say one thing, I believe,” Vergil said, struggling to keep his words dear through his anger.
    “What’s that?” Rothwild asked.
    “Fuck you. All of you.”
    Vergil drove by the Genetron sign and thought of all that had happened within those austere walls. He looked at the black cube beyond, barely visible through a copse of eucalyptus trees.
    More than likely, the experiment was over. For a moment he felt ill with tension and disgust. And then he thought of the billions of lymphocytes he had just destroyed. His nausea increased and he had to swallow hard to keep the taste of acid out of his throat.
    “Fuck you,” he murmured, “because everything I touch is fucked.”
    CHAPTER FOUR
    Humans were a randy bunch, Vergil decided as he perched on a stool and watched the cattle call. Mellow space music powered the slow, graceful gyrations on the dance floor and flashing amber lights emphasized the pulse of packed bodies, male and female. Over the bar, an amazing array of polished brass tubing hummed and spluttered delivering drinks—mostly vintage wines by the glass—and forty-seven different kinds of coffees. Coffee sales were up; the evening had blurred into early morning and soon Weary’s would be turning off and shutting down.
    The last-ditch efforts of the cattle call were becoming more obvious. Moves were being made with more desperation, less finesse; beside Vergil, a short fellow in a rumpled blue suit was plighting his one-night troth to a willowy black-haired girl with Asiatic features. Vergil felt aloof from it all. He hadn’t made a move all evening, and he had been in Weary’s since seven. No one had made a move on him, either.
    He was not prize material. He shambled a bit when he walked—not that he had left the stool for any purpose but to go to the crowded restroom. He had spent so much time in labs the past few years that his skin was the unpopular shade of Snow White. He didn’t look enthusiastic, and he wasn’t willing to expend any amount of bullshit to attract attention.
    Mercifully, the air conditioning in Weary’s was good enough that his hay fever had subsided.
    Mostly, he had spent the evening observing the incredible variety—and underlying sameness—of the tactics the male animal used on the female. He felt out of it, suspended in an objective and slightly lonely sphere he wasn’t inclined to reach beyond. So why, he asked himself, had he come to Weary’s in the first place? Why did he ever go there? He had never picked up a woman at Weary’s—or any other singles bar—in his life.
    “Hello.”
    Vergil jumped and turned, eyes wide.
    “Excuse me. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
    He shook his head. She was perhaps twenty-eight, golden-blonde, slender to the edge of skinny, with a pretty but not gorgeous face. Her eyes, large and clear and brown, were her best feature—except possibly for her legs, he amended, looking down on instinct.
    “You don’t come in here often,” she said. She glanced back over her shoulder. “Or do you? I mean, I don’t either. Maybe I wouldn’t know.”
    He shook his head. “Not often. No need. My success rate hasn’t been spectacular.”
    She turned back with a smile. “I know more about you than you think,” she said. “I don’t even need to read your palm. You’re smart, first off.”
    “Yeah?” he said, feeling awkward.
    “You’re good with your hands.” She touched his thumb where it rested on his knee. “You have very pretty hands. You could do a lot with hands like that. But they’re not greasy, so you’re not a mechanic. And you try to dress well, but…” She