through the neighborly gate, into the backyard at the Bennet house, alongside the house toward the street, the dog in the lead, and Bucky heard himself saying,
CHAPTER 19
The master suite of the Helios mansion included two bathrooms, one for Victor and one for Erika. She was not permitted to cross the threshold of his bath.
Every man needed a sacrosanct retreat, a private space where he could relax and relish both the accomplishments of the day and his intentions for the morrow. If he was a revolutionary with the power of science at his command, and if he had the courage and the will to change the world, he needed and deserved a sanctum sanctorum of grand design and dimensions.
Victor’s bathroom measured over sixteen hundred square feet. It included a steam room, a sauna, a spacious shower, a whirlpool spa, two under-the-counter refrigerators, an icemaker, a fully stocked bar, a microwave concealed behind a tambour door, three plasma-screen TVs with Blu-Ray DVD capacity, and an anigre-wood cabinet containing a collection of exquisitely braided leather whips.
The gold-leafed ceiling featured custom crystal chandeliers in the Deco style, and the walls were clad with marble. Inlaid in the center of the polished-marble floor were semiprecious stones forming the double helix of the DNA molecule. The faucets and other fixtures were gold-plated, including even the flush lever on the toilet, and there were acres of beveled-edge mirrors. The room glittered.
Nothing in this luxurious space brought Victor as much pleasure as his reflection. Because mirrors were arranged to reflect other mirrors, he could see multiple images of himself wherever he went.
His favorite place for self-examination was an octagonal meditation chamber with a mirrored door. Therein, nude, he could admire every aspect of his body at the same time, and also see infinite images of each angle marching away to infinity, a world of Victors and nothing less.
He believed himself to be no more vain than the average man. His pride in his physical perfection had less to do with the beauty of his body — though it was uniquely beautiful — than with the evidence of his resolution and his indomitability that was revealed in the means by which he maintained that body for two hundred and forty years.
Spiraling through his muscular torso — here inlaid in the flesh and half exposed, here entirely embedded — entwining his ribs, coiling around his rod-straight spine, a flexible metal cord and associated implants efficiently converted electrical current into a different and arcane energy, into a stimulating charge that ensured a youthful rate of cell division and prevented time from taking any toll of him.
His uncounted scars and singular excrescences were a testament to his fortitude, for he had gained immortality at the cost of much pain. He had suffered to fulfill his vision and remake the world, and by suffering for the world, he could lay claim to a kind of divinity.
From the mirrored meditation chamber, he repaired to the spa, in which the air jets roiled the steaming water. A bottle of Dom Perignon waited in a silver bucket of ice. The cork had been replaced with a solid-silver stopper. Settled in the hot water, he sipped the crisp, ice-cold champagne from a Lalique flute.
As it unfolded, the day just past seemed to be a chain of crises and frustrations. The discoveries during the Harker autopsy. Werner’s meltdown. The first of Victor’s triumphs, now calling itself Deucalion, not dead after all but alive in New Orleans. The brief encounter with Deucalion in Duchaine’s house, the tattooed one’s mystifying escape. Erika having dinner in the living room—
The Harker and Werner situations might seem like calamities to unimaginative types like Ripley, but they were opportunities. From every setback came knowledge and stunning new advancements. Thomas Edison developed hundreds of prototypes of lightbulbs that failed, until at last he discovered the right material for the filament.
Deucalion was a mere amusement. He could not harm his maker. Besides, the tattooed wretch killed Victor’s first wife, Elizabeth, two centuries earlier, on the day of their wedding. The freak’s return would give Victor a chance to take long-overdue vengeance.
Victor had not loved Elizabeth. Love and God were myths he rejected with equal contempt.
But Elizabeth had
As for Erika Five’s breach of etiquette: She would have to be disciplined. In addition to being a brilliant scientist, Victor was to an equal degree a brilliant disciplinarian.
All in all, everything was moving along nicely.
The New Race that he had worked so hard to create with Hitler’s generous financing, the later effort financed by Stalin, a subsequent project in China, those and others had been necessary steps toward the glorious work at the Hands of Mercy. This time, thanks to the billions earned from his legitimate enterprise, Bio-vision, he was able to fund 51 percent of the current project and prevent meddling by minority partners, which included a consortium of South American dictators, the ruler of an oil-rich kingdom eager to replace his restive population with obedient new subjects, and an Internet superbillionaire idiot who believed Victor was creating a race that did not exhale CO2, as did humans, and would thereby save the planet.
Soon the tank farms would begin producing thousands of the New Race, and the Old would be on the doorstep of oblivion.
For every minor setback, there were a hundred major successes. The momentum — and the world — was Victor’s.
Soon he would be able to live again under his true name, his proud and storied name, and every person in the world would speak it reverently, as believers speak the name of their god with awe:
When eventually he got out of the spa, he might return to the mirrored meditation room for just a few more minutes.
CHAPTER 20
Carson and Michael sat in the Honda, near Audubon Park, engine running, headlights on, air conditioner blowing. They were eating the crispy-fried-redfish poor boy and side dishes, their chins greasy, fingers slippery with tartar sauce and cole-slaw dressing, so content with the Acadiana food that the incessant drumming of the rain on the roof began to seem soothing, when Michael said, “Here’s something.”
Carson looked up from her sandwich and saw him squinting through the sheet of water that shimmered down the windshield and blurred the view. She switched on the wipers.
Sprinting toward them along the middle of the street — deserted at this hour, in this weather — was a German shepherd, and in pursuit of the dog were a man and a woman, both nude.
The shepherd raced past the Honda faster than Carson had ever seen a dog run. Even barefoot, the man and woman were faster than Olympians, as if they were in training to compete in NASCAR without a vehicle. The man’s genitals flapped, the woman’s breasts bounced exuberantly, and their facial expressions were equally ecstatic, as if the dog had promised to lead them to Jesus.
The dog didn’t bark, but as the two-legged runners passed the Honda, Carson heard them shouting. With the windows closed and rain pummeling the roof, she couldn’t discern what the woman was saying, but the man excitedly shouted something about pizza.