Deficiency by Andrew Neiderman Page B

alive. Animals that worked for other animals had shorter life spans.
    This realization came to him one day when he stopped in a meadow and watched bees working around a hive. The individual sacrificed itself for the good of the whole. But what was its reward? It didn't live to see or to enjoy the fruits of its labor.
    Enjoyment and fulfillment were the only reasons for life, and who could deny that both of these were enhanced when the individual cared only for himself? There was more of everything for him. He lived to please himself. The weaker and the infirm called that greed or lust, but they were hoping to feed off the success of the stronger, weren't they? In that sense they, too, were selfish.
    He loved himself even more for being able to justify that love, and anyone who had seen him on mornings like this one, the morning after a feed, would step back in admiration, in awe, shaking his head, wondering who he was and how they could be like him. He had jogged through the park, past the inferiors like a beautiful fish swimming through a sea of covetousness. They had just wanted to touch him, to be beside him, to learn from him or take from him.
    But he was too fast, too graceful, and too clever to permit any of them to do so. As soon as one drew too near, he had driven his feet harder into the soil and had lifted his body away. In moments he had been gone and he had known they had been left shaking their heads and wondering if they had imagined it or they really had seen him.
    They would know. Oh, they would know, but only one at a time, and after that knowledge, they would be drained and discarded, left behind like some emptied cartons. He was convinced they existed only for his pleasure and nourishment anyway. He saw them the same way a bird sees worms. And just like a bird, he suffered no guilt when he fed. Indeed, he felt it was coming to him. Why else was it there? Why else was he here?
    Questions like these rarely bothered him anyway, and whenever they did, he brushed them aside as he would brush aside some annoying insect. It was just as pointless to stop and wonder why there were mosquitos. Don't wonder about them, destroy them and go on and on and on, he thought…
    Just like he was doing now.
    Just like he would always do.
    Filled with the wonder of himself, he had glided ahead toward the rising sun and into its gradually expanding pool of warmth. Even that existed solely for him.
     
     
    Late in the afternoon he had read the newspaper while he had sat in a booth in a small Italian restaurant and sipped some white wine. Every time he read a newspaper or turned on the news, it was as if he had been on a journey in space and had just returned to earth. He devoured the headlines and stories like one who had been kept hostage by terrorists for years. He knew that he needed the knowledge and the information in order to conduct himself well in the present. People wouldn't understand if he didn't know what month, day, or year it was, or if he didn't know who was president or what major events like earthquakes or revolutions had just occurred.
    Most of the knowledge he had, he had inherited anyway, if
inherited
was the right word for it.
Inherited
implied so many things. It was all just there, at his beck and call. What difference did it make that he couldn't remember how it had gotten there?
    When he came to the news story about the young woman who had been found dying in a motel room and read the details, he consumed them with a detachment that would cause anyone who saw him reading to think this was the first he had heard about it.
    He sipped some more of his wine and then looked up to smile as the young, buxom waitress with light brown hair brought him his order of lasagna, the special of the day. She had guaranteed him it would be good.
    "The pastas homemade here," she pointed out.
    He was charming; it came natural to him to be so.
    "It's rare that you get a meal that tastes homemade when you are traveling," he