He need not have worried with Lilith, she was her own being right from the start. For weeks he ate and slept in the lab, observing her, talking to her. Within weeks she mastered language, and started asking him for a nest.

Hector pulled some strings and transferred the experiment to the test facility in the basement. It had once been the proving grounds for the first living polymers. Now it was home to a new prototype, one of his own making.

Months passed, and Lilith swam around in her vat eating agules, and nothing else happened. He had designed the tetras to be parthenogenic, but she had yet to reproduce. Hector started limiting the number of people in the vat room, but that only seemed to make her more restless. Then one night, when he was working there alone, she came to him. He was shocked to see her out of the vat, and even more shocked to realize, as she raised one hand to cup the side of his face, that she was dry. She detested being dry, but he had told her how dangerous growth medium was to humans, and she must have realized it was necessary — she spread her hands across his chest — for this. To his eternal shame, he made love to her that night. He tried to reason with himself that it was necessary. Ring tail lizards, he kept telling himself, were parthenogenic but only reproduced if another ringtail lizard went through the motions of mating with it. They were all females, but one would act the male, mounting the other and stimulating her to ovulate. Male or female, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the act of love. He had not passed his genetic material on to Lilith’s offspring, yet he had caused them to be born, just the same.

And he was glad, because he was a scientist and his creation flourished, and because he was a scientist and Lilith was his creation, he was ashamed.

She laid a clutch of twelve eggs which nestled at the bottom of the vat for six months before they hatched. But these tetras were smaller than Lilith, and tests showed that they were sterile. Lilith began to turn away from Hector and his assistants, devoting herself to her daughters; grooming them, cuddling them, and ordering them around. She laid a single egg, without his or any other human’s assistance.

That egg sat at the bottom of the vat like a time bomb, a bomb that went off, six months later, when Hector went down to the vat room late one night, and found a lone tetra curled up against the outer door

— naked, like they all were.

Her lower arms were wrapped around her knees, her upper arms sheltering her bent head. She looked exactly like Lilith, but when he touched her she gazed up at him with the eyes of an infant, unguarded and unwise.

She'd had a harsh introduction to the world, that was sure. She was covered with bruises and bites. A gash on her left thigh and another just below her right collarbone looked serious. He hesitated before the crouching thing. She was too big for him to carry, but he didn't know if she could walk yet. The others had all started out swimming.

It was chilly in the hallway, and she shivered, looking up at him with wide eyes that looked dark and wet in the cold shine of the halogen lighting. Hector Martin took off his raincoat and drew it over her shoulders. With a tentative hand on an arm, he guided her to a standing position. She leaned on him and nestled her head against his shoulder. He got his arm around her waist. She responded by clinging to him with three arms. When Hector took a step, she followed suit. Good, she could walk.

"This way," he said pointlessly, steering her towards the elevator. If she was anything like her mother and sisters, it would be weeks before she learned human speech.

Fortunately they didn’t have to wait long for the elevator to arrive. On the ride up to his apartment she slumped against him, fairly pinning him to the wall of the elevator. When the doors opened, she didn’t budge. She liked the elevator. She did not want to leave the elevator. And she was at least as strong as he was, though less coordinated just now.

By the time he managed to propel them both towards the door, it had shut again. He reached over and hit the open door button and when he looked back he found that his raincoat had slipped from her shoulders, and in the struggle to put it back on her he missed the door opening and had to hit the button again. Finally, in desperation he just got out, and she followed him. Thank God it was so late, he thought as he walked down the hall supporting a four-armed woman half-clad in his raincoat, guiding her groggy way to his apartment. He got her inside and deposited her on the couch in his living room.

It wasn't until that moment that he realized what he'd done. He'd made a decision without ever thinking about it. He could have put her back in the vat room, but her wounds had been inflicted by the other tetras, and something told him that if he put her back in there they’d kill her. Still he could have taken her to the lab. That was the right place for her, surely. But he hadn't even considered it. Without thinking, he'd brought her here. Maybe it was just as well. If she was discovered, it could lead to the destruction of her and all her kind.

The fledgling tetra squirmed on his couch and whimpered. Blood from her cuts was soaking into the cream colored cellweave upholstery. The stains faded even as he watched, absorbed and metabolized by the living fabric.

Hector bit his lip, hesitating to leave her alone for even an instant, but there was no help for it. He rushed to the bathroom, got adhesive bandages, cellular tape, peroxide and a clean cloth, and came back. It took about five seconds. She was still there. He sat her up and cleaned out her cuts, sealing the two big ones closed with cellular tape. He didn't know how to give stitches, and taking her to someone who did was out of the question.

After having her wounds tended, the tetra wanted to cling to him some more. Hector sat on his couch, an infant with the body of a twenty-five year old woman clinging to him with four very strong arms. "I guess she thinks I'm her mother," he thought, and laughed, long into the night, at the absurdity his life had become.

He woke late the next morning, still on the couch, still with the tetra wrapped around him. Well, everyone knew he'd been working late last night, but he still needed to make an appearance some time today. He couldn't afford to attract any attention, not now. With effort he pried himself free from his sleeping child, and went into the bathroom for a shower. After he'd dressed again, he ran the tub, and went into the kitchen, rummaging around in the cupboards until he found an old box of kosher salt. All the other tetras had spent their first days floating in growth medium. He dumped half the box of salt into the tub. This was nothing like growth medium, of course, but it was the closest he could get, right now. He didn't like the idea of leaving her alone here for several hours, but he had to do it. Maybe being in a tub of warm, salty water would make her feel at home, and keep her quiet. She settled into the water with a blissful smile that bared her fangs, and looked at him with eyes of bright, sky blue. Dark brown hair sprang in clumps from her skull, but just the same, he thought she was beautiful.

She sighed, and her throat convulsed as she uttered an inarticulate, guttural noise. "Hgcklx," she said. It was the first sound she'd made that was identifiable as a syllable.

"Helix," Hector Martin said back to her. "Your name will be Helix." oOo

Lilith dreamed she floated in the warm, void waters of the womb. Her womb, the womb of her mother. A pattern emerging from the whorl of nonbeing, coalescing in the darkness. Until the dream. The dream she dreamt of the dreamer's face. He opened his eyes, and he saw her, and through his eyes, and his dreaming vision, she was born.