"Lilith" by Emilie Aurora Finn

04/12

Lilith was created to be as perfect as humanly possible. What amazes me is that she is even more perfect than I imagined she would be. Besides an intellect that is quickly surpassing that of children twice her age, she possesses great beauty, grace, and a proficiency for music and abstract art that quite astonishes the experts I’ve brought in to study her. Of course we could not plan that she would have such a pleasant speaking voice or that she would have hair that was effortlessly beautiful. These are things that happened as a direct result of the genetics that were involved in her creation. And while, at the time I was working on her creation, I had no particular aspirations to make her anything more than a great mind, I am pleased at how lovely she is.

It was at the insistence of those who funded my little experiment that I agreed to make her the epitome of beauty. Lilith’s features are parallel, her eyes just slightly angled to give her an older appearance. Her mouth is generous and her teeth will never need any orthodontics. She has hair that is naturally honey-hued and despite the fact that she does not spend any time outdoors she maintains a slight tan. All of this was not my priority, but I take great pride in the fact that I was able to ensure that through the years she will remain beautiful.

            I have run tests lately to simulate her growth and I find that she is going to be slightly taller than other children her age as well as slightly more mature. While I cannot determine the cause of this without further tests I am not worried about it. In the long run Lilith is much healthier than any normal human being. Her physical education tutor, Mr. Shields, also keeps her active. Her regime includes running each morning, aerobics every afternoon (with some stretching), and yoga every other evening. Mr. Shields recommends that when she reaches ten years she begin self-defensive training. I will look into this further.

            The recent worry over her appetite and the amount of hair that was coming out when she washed or brushed it was easily identified as a vitamin deficiency. It is a slight problem that many people face though Lilith it seems is especially affected. Though most people lacking vitamins can easily fix the problem with a simple change of diet, Lilith will require a slightly more rigorous treatment. Her body wastes essential vitamins so quickly that she must take supplements with every meal. She is young enough that this can easily be made into a habit and should not cause her any problems later in life.

            Tara Michaels, my public relations officer, has asked me to agree to an interview with a major television network. She insists that the procedures would be standard and that any footage of Lilith would be taken with sensitivity to her special circumstances. I have been conflicted over the idea of letting the public see Lilith as she is now. It occurs to me that most parents would not allow their children on national television at the tender age of six. And though such an idea is both scandalous and utter nonsense, I cannot help asking, What am I, if not Lilith’s father? After all, Lilith is a living creature and she is my creation. No one else has any claim on her, or any responsibility for her well being, so to all intents and purposes I am her guardian. Though in truth I am more her owner. This is not a popular or sensitive notion however and I must suppress it. I will speak with Tara more about a television interview, and make it clear that any such event must be tightly controlled so as not to confuse or alarm Lilith. It must not interfere with her growth or development in any way or my experiment will be ruined.

Elaine wants me to attend the Christmas recital at Our Lady. The girls are in it, and they want me to see. I am not sure how this fits in with Lilith’s schedule, but I must try to arrange it. I will talk to Margot. Elaine seems distant lately, and remotely hostile. She is still jealous of Lilith. I have agreed to marriage counseling, but only if we can manage early morning sessions. Lilith will be studying then and won’t need me. Elaine will get back to me on that. Somehow I feel very disconnected from her. My every day is spent cultivating life, and when I get home I see three strangers taking life for granted. It is a discouraging thing to me, though I don’t know how to tell them so.

--E.D.

*      *      *

The bright gold light on the tile floor was rectangular in shape. At first glance, she thought its angles were right angles, but as she slowed and dragged back on Keith’s arm to look more carefully she saw at once that they were slightly slanted, so that the angles on the floor were not quite parallel to the angles of the door through which the sun shone. Fascinated by the just barely perceptible asymmetry, she tugged harder on Keith’s arm, bringing him to a stop. Firmly she freed her hand from his and retraced her steps to stand in front of the door. Keith followed her, and leaned over her shoulder, obviously trying to figure out what she saw on the spotless white floor at her feet.

His shadow impinged on the perfect asymmetry of her sunlight.

“Move back.”

The little girl’s voice was sweet and perfectly modulated, and though there was no trace of impatience or demand in her tone, the quiet authority with which she spoke made her words a command. Keith obeyed her first and thought about it after he had already moved two paces back. “Why, Lilith?” he asked then.

“The light. It’s beautiful. You were in the way.” Lilith answered out of politeness, something the Doctor told her was very important, even though she knew Keith wouldn’t understand what she meant.

Sure enough, Keith shook his head and laughed. “Whatever you say, kiddo,” he said in the tone that indicated she might as well drop the subject for all the good explaining in more detail would do. Lilith curved her lips in the smile expression the Doctor told her the grown-ups who attended her liked her to see, and returned her attention to the light. To her amazement, the angles had changed.

“It’s moved!” she said, glancing up sharply to recapture Keith’s wandering attention. He had had a dreamy smile on his face before she spoke, and a small corner of her mind that seemed to concern itself with nonessential trivia wondered what he had been thinking.

He looked down at the floor and laughed again. “Of course it has,” he said. “The sun’s moving.”

Lilith allowed her eyes to follow Keith’s hand as he pointed out the door. The brightness of the sun dazzled her as she looked at it, causing her eyes to water and sparks to dance in front of her vision. Blinded, she turned away, belatedly remembering the Doctor’s explanation of the dangers of looking directly at the sun. She usually remembered his instructions, but this one had slipped her mind because she had never before had an opportunity to see the sun in real life. She had only seen pictures in books, and it hadn’t been blinding then.

“Are you okay?”

Keith was crouching at her side now, a hand resting on her shoulder, and his voice was concerned. Lilith nodded quickly to relieve his anxiety, blinking her still-watering eyes. “Yes,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. Doctor Diener told me not to do that.”

He chuckled. “Did Doctor Diener also tell you that the earth orbits around the sun?” he asked her, “and at the same time spins around on it’s own axis, and that that’s what makes the seasons and day and night?”

Lilith simply nodded. She decided that it would not be polite to point out that his way of expressing an incredibly complex scientific phenomenon was impossibly simplistic. In fact, the idea of a planet ‘spinning around on its axis’ tickled her sense of proportion, and she was surprised to find her lips curving upward entirely of their own accord. Keith could make them do that sometimes.

“Well, that’s what’s making your light move,” he continued. “When the sun moves, it changes the angle it comes through the door in, and that makes the sunlight on the floor look different.”

Lilith’s brow furrowed for a moment. Then quite suddenly she laughed out loud. It was a clear, bell-like sound that surprised her as much as it surprised her attendant. “If I keep watching, the angles will keep contracting, making the reflection on the floor more and more unlike the door through which the sunlight shines,” she said.

It was a statement, but he nodded in answer to the unspoken question in her eyes. “That’s right.”

Without another word, Lilith sank gracefully to the floor, crossed her legs under her, and stared almost unblinkingly at the light before her. Keith sighed resignedly and backed up a few more paces to lean against the wall. A few minutes later he slid down the wall to sit on the floor as well. Knowing the capacity for concentration usually exhibited by this uncanny child—if you could accurately call a girl created in a test tube a child—the two of them could be here until the sun went down. If he’d known Lilith’s afternoon recreation was going to consist of sitting by the door for several hours, he would have brought a book.

*         *          *

Dr. Emil Diener stormed down the hall of the Diener Institute for Genetic Research. Technicians and assistants scrambled into doorways and down halls, anxious to avoid their erratic employer’s wrath. Keith Davison, a hapless junior assistant and the object of that wrath, waited at the end of the hall by the red exit sign. Diener stopped barely two feet from the cringing man, and his voice cracked like a whip as he uttered a single word:

“Well?”

“I-I d-don’t know, sir,” Keith stuttered miserably. “Sh-she was right here by the door when I…” his voice trailed off as he glanced at the patch of golden sunlight, which had narrowed as the sun sank toward the horizon and now stretched across the hall in a long, thin line. “I told her to stay where she was while I just ran to the men’s room,” he continued, unable to meet the doctor’s slate grey eyes again, “and I was gone all of thirty seconds, I swear! And when I got back she was gone. I thought maybe she’d gone back to see you, so I went to ask Mrs. Smith, and—We’ve looked everywhere, sir!”

“Get out of my sight!” the doctor hissed.

The young assistant nodded nervously and turned away. As he was about to round the corner to hurry down the nearest hall, Diener’s voice arrested him.

“Davidson!”

He turned back, pale and trembling. “Yes, sir?”

“If anything has happened to Lilith—if she has been harmed in any way whatsoever—you’ll be next. Mark my words!”

Keith trembled more violently at the coldness in Dr. Diener’s eyes, then turned and almost fled down the hall. It never occurred to the young man to doubt that the doctor would make good his threat to the very letter.

*        *         *

Lilith was created to be as perfect as humanly possible. What amazes me is that she is even more perfect than I imagined she would be…

Emil Diener sat in his office, staring blindly at the journal entry still on the screen of the open laptop on his desk. Lilith, his life’s work, his creation, his only reason for being, was gone. He had watched her grow from a small sample of some woman’s DNA into a living, breathing human being. He had been with her every step of the way, as even a mother could not, calculating gene sequences, making sure there were no deformities, no mental deficiencies, not allowing even the slightest hint of imperfection. And when she had taken her first breath, and opened her eyes to look at him for the first time, he had been so awed by his accomplishment that he had wept.

She wasn’t really gone, of course, he told himself firmly. She was in some corner of the Institute that those incompetent fools he’d hired to take care of her had neglected to look in. Really, they were all such idiots that he might as well carry out the search himself!

Galvanized by this thought, Emil rose from his chair, reflexively straightening his tie and brushing a few invisible specs of dust from his pristine lab coat. That was just what he would do, then. After all, if anyone could find Lilith, it would be her creator!

Footsteps and voices sounded in the secretary’s cubicle outside his office, and he halted halfway between his desk and the door, listening. What was that other sound? The one that sounded like an injured kitten? Emil paled as the realization hit him. Lilith! Then he felt the blood rush back into his face, and fury boiled up inside him. Lilith hadn’t cried since she was two years old! Whoever had dared to make his child cry would rue the day he was—

Emil burst from his office and stopped short at the sight that met his eyes. A strange, dark-haired young man in sunglasses and a battered hat that had reporter written in every crease of it, even if the pad and pencil in his hands hadn’t given him away, stood talking calmly to the secretary, Mrs. Smith. Clinging to the stranger’s threadbare coat and sobbing quietly and uncontrollably, was Lilith. Her short-sleeved white blouse and light blue skirt were dirty, and one knee was scraped and bleeding.

The young man turned when he heard the door open, and raised one hand to the brim of his hat in greeting. “Dr. Emil Diener?” he queried. Lilith stopped crying and looked up, wide-eyed.

“Yes,” Emil said curtly. “What is the meaning of this?”

“I was hoping you could tell me!” the reporter laughed, gesturing to Lilith with his pad. “I found this little one a block over on Blank Street, in the middle of a gang of kids who were bullying her. I believe she’s yours?”

“Yes,” Emil replied again, grudgingly, most of his attention on his injured creation. “This is Lilith. I—we are much obliged to you for returning her to the Institute.”

“Yes, but can I just ask you how she got—”

Emil interrupted the man decisively. “Mrs. Smith, please see that Mr.—” he looked at the man pointedly.

“Uh, Gladstone,” the man said quickly. “Brad Gladstone of the Register Guard. Now, Dr. Diener, if you could just tell me—”

“Please see that Mr. Gladstone is compensated adequately for his trouble,” Emil’s words rode over the young man’s, “and then show him out. If you will excuse us, I must tend to that wound before it leaves scar tissue. Come Lilith.”

Lilith ran to the doctor’s outstretched hand and took it quickly in both of hers. Diener all but dragged her thorough his office doorway, and shut the door with a decided bang, leaving Mr. Gladstone in the lobby with his mouth open.

Lilith began to cry again. Emil put his hands around her slender waist (he had made it so on purpose, he noted with satisfaction. He absolutely detested pear-shaped women) and sat her carefully on the edge of his desk. He pulled on his latex gloves and bent to examine the scraped knee carefully, shuddering as he imagined his perfectly controlled experiment contaminated by whatever dirt and corruption was on the rough pavement outside.

“Stop crying, Lilith, and tell me what happened,” he said quietly as he poured disinfectant onto a cotton cloth and gently dabbed her knee with it. Lilith flinched a little at the sting, but obediently swallowed her tears to answer him.

“It was m-my fault, Doctor,” her dulcet voice said, with only a hint of a quaver. “Keith told me not to go anywhere. But there was sunlight outside, and I was tired of looking at it reflected through the glass. I wanted to really feel it, not just through a window. S-so I went out. I-I’m sorry.”

Emil smiled thinly. “Keith Davidson is a fool who should have watched you more carefully, Lilith,” he replied evenly. “He should know that all children are curious and want to explore. You should have been obedient, but I don’t fault you. What happened then?”

“There is a park across the street. With swings and slides like those I’ve seen in my picture books. And there were—” she looked up at the doctor, eyes wide with childish amazement— “there were other children there, too. Only these children were male, like you and Keith. I thought maybe we would play together, like children do in stories. But when I spoke to them, they laughed at me, and called me a freak, and one of them pushed me.” She hung her head as tears spilled from her eyes again. “I-I guess they didn’t like me, Doctor.”

Dr. Diener wrapped the bandage a little more tightly around Lilith’s knee than he normally would have, as he quickly repressed a sudden urge to charge over to the park and start wringing the necks of the cruel little brats on the playground. Then he took his child’s chin between thumb and forefinger and raised her tearful eyes to meet his ice-blue ones. “Don’t cry, Lilith,” he said gently. “It wastes fluids that your body needs for other things, remember?”

Lilith gulped and nodded.

“As for those boys on the playground, it doesn’t matter in the slightest what they thought of you. I want you to put the entire incident out of your mind. Now wipe your eyes and blow your nose.”

Lilith nodded again, and obediently pulled a tissue from the box he held before her. When she had dried her eyes, her expression was clear again, and her perfect face showed no sign of tears.

Emil turned to put away his supplies. “It should have occurred to me that you would want to see the world outside,” he said absently, more to himself than to the girl behind him. “You are an uncommonly intelligent and perceptive child. Lilith,” he turned back again suddenly, a warmer smile on his face than most of his acquaintances had ever seen, “would you like to take a little trip with me sometime soon? Would you like to see and learn more about the world outside?”

Far back in the depths of Lilith’s blue eyes a spark of something like excitement flared up, though her face remained solemn and calm, and Doctor Diener did not seem to notice the brief hint of emotion. “Yes, Doctor,” she said, her quiet voice more carefully modulated than was usual, even for her.

“That’s settled, then,” the doctor said briskly, turning back to his laptop. “I’ll start making arrangements this very afternoon. While you take your nap.”

The little girl took this as the order it was and jumped down from the doctor’s desk as he picked up the phone and spoke decisively into the receiver. “Margot, please take Lilith to the observation room for her nap.”

As Lilith put her hand on the door knob, Diener spoke to her once more, in the same decisive tone. “Meanwhile, there will be no more ventures outside. Do you understand, Lilith?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

*       *        *

Emil sat quietly in his accustomed chair in the observation lounge, carefully watching the sleeping child on the bed before him. The afternoon had served as a much-needed wake-up call for him. Obviously he needed to take a much more active role in supervising Lilith’s activities during the day. She had a dangerous streak of curiosity—as did any healthy human child, he acknowledged ruefully—and would clearly require round the clock supervision from now on. It didn’t appear that any permanently harmful damage had been done by her chance encounter with the boys on the playground, but he could not risk any more such occurrences. It would only take one physically or psychologically scarring incident to ruin his entire experiment. He shuddered at the memory of the raggedly torn skin of her knee and the dirt slowly mixing with her perfectly engineered hemoglobin.

Then, though his eyes never strayed from Lilith’s sleeping face, Emil’s fingers suddenly began moving rapidly over the keyboard of his laptop. It was possible, he thought, with just one more round of modifications to her DNA sequencing, that he could make her skin less susceptible to bruising or breaking. It was possible…

Ideas sped through his brain, and his fingers translated them almost as quickly into calculations and formulas. After a few minutes his fingers slowed, then stopped, but his eyes never lost their intensity as he stared fixedly at the small form before him. Carefully, he saved his work, closed his laptop, and set it on the floor. Then he stepped over to the bed to place a long-fingered hand on the child’s forehead.

Now no one will be able to hurt you ever again, little one, he thought. What was that line from Revelations? He murmured it softly to himself. “And God will wipe every tear from their eyes…” Emil’s face took on a serene cast, his lips curved into a triumphant smile. No more weeping for this perfect little girl he had made.

His brow furrowed only slightly as footsteps behind him interrupted his reverie. He turned his head just enough to see the intruder, Keith Davidson, the junior assistant who had lost his precious child that morning.

“Sir,” the man stuttered anxiously, “they told me you found her. I’m so glad, Dr. Diener. I was so worried…”

“You,” the doctor said, a puzzled look on his otherwise serene face. “What are you doing here? You’re fired.”