From that room came another plaintive cry, thrashing noises, the shattering of glass.
When Deucalion moved past some of the people standing in the hall, not one seemed to register his presence, so intent were they on the crisis in the laboratory. They stood in various postures of expectation. Some trembled or even shook violently with fear, some muttered angrily, and some appeared to be in the grip of a strange transcendental awe.
Through the open doors of the laboratory, into the corridor came Hell on six legs.
CHAPTER 32
For the moment, cold does not matter.
The transparent polymeric fabric of the imprisoning sack and the glass door of the freezer are for the first time not a torment to Chameleon.
The recently arrived, unusual, very busy, blue, not-a-person something goes back and forth, back and forth through the lab with great energy.
This visitor seems intent on creating a new order. It is an agent of change.
Cabinets topple. Chairs fly. Lab equipment is knocked helter-skelter.
In its pendulous sack of ice-flecked fluid, Chameleon can’t hear voices. However, the vibrations of this vigorous reordering are transmitted through walls and floor to the freezer and thus to its occupant.
The lights dim, swell brighter, dim, fade further, but then brighten once more.
The freezer motor stutters and dies. The backup motor does not come online.
Chameleon is alert for the distinct pattern of second-motor vibrations. Nothing. Nothing.
This interesting and energetic visitor draws some people to it, lifts them up, as if in celebration, as if to exalt them, but then casts them down.
They remain where they have fallen, motionless.
Other workers seem to approach the busy visitor of their own volition. They appear almost to embrace it.
These also are lifted up, and then they are cast down. They lie as motionless as the others who were cast down before them.
Perhaps they have prostrated themselves at the feet of the busy visitor.
Or they may be asleep. Or dead.
Interesting.
When all the once-busy workers are motionless, the visitor tears the faucets out of a lab sink and casts them down, making the water gush forth.
The water falls upon the workers, the water falls, yet they do not rise.
And no second-motor vibrations are as yet transmitted to the fluid in the imprisoning sack.
A stillness has come over the sack. The saline solution is without tremors and without hum.
Busy, busy, the visitor uproots the lab sink from its mountings, tosses it aside.
The stainless-steel sink strikes the freezer door, and the glass pane dissolves.
This seems to be an event of great import. What has been is no more. Change has come.
Chameleon has a clearer view than ever before as the visitor departs the laboratory.
What does it all mean?
Chameleon broods on recent events.
CHAPTER 33
The six-legged pandemonium that entered the corridor from the demolished laboratory loomed as large as three men.
In some of the entity’s features, Deucalion could discern the presence of human DNA. The face appeared much like that of a man, though twice as wide and half again as long as the average face. But the head did not rest upon a neck, instead melding directly with the body, much as a frog’s head and body were joined.
Throughout the organism, nonhuman genetic material manifested in a multitude of startling ways, as if numerous species were vying for control of the body. Feline, canine, insectile, reptilian, avian, and crustacean influences were apparent in limbs, in misplaced and excess orifices, in tails and stingers, in half-formed faces liable to appear anywhere in the tissue mass.
Nothing about this bizarre organism appeared to be in stasis, but all in continuous change, as if its flesh were clay submitting to the imagination and the facile hands of an invisible — and insane — sculptor. This was the Prince of Chaos, enemy of equilibrium, brother of anarchy, literally seething with disorder, defined by the lack of definition, characterized by distortion and disfigurement, warp and gnarl and misproportion.
Deucalion knew at once what stood before him. Earlier, searching Victor’s files on the computer downstairs, he had found his maker’s daily diary of important developments. Among the few days he scanned were the two most recent, wherein the sudden metamorphosis of Werner was not merely described but also illustrated with video clips.
Across the surface of the beast, mouths formed and faded, formed again, most of them human in configuration. Some only gnashed their teeth. Some worked their lips and tongues but could not find their voices. Others issued cries like those that brought Deucalion from Victor’s main lab two floors below, wordless expressions of sorrow and despair, voices of the lost and hopeless.
These speakers sounded childlike, though everyone in the Hands of Mercy — therefore in this aggregate creature — was an adult. Having escaped their enslavement by surrendering to biological chaos, having dropped their programs in the process of abandoning their physical integrity, they seemed to have regressed psychologically to early childhood, a childhood they had never known, and they were now more helpless than ever.
Among the aggregated individuals, only Werner, whose distorted countenance remained the primary face of this beast, possessed an adult voice. Upon exiting the laboratory, he rolled his protuberant eyes, surveying those who waited in the corridor, and after giving them a moment to consider — perhaps to envy and admire — him, he said, “Be
A man with a rapturous expression approached the Werner thing, raising his arms as if to embrace freedom, and his liberator at once snatched him up. Insectile puncture-and-pry limbs of wicked design opened the convert’s head as if it were a clamshell, and the brain was transferred into the aggregate creature through a thick-lipped moist cleft that opened in the beast’s chest to accept the offering.
A second man stepped forward. Although he was one of those shaking with terror, he was ready to commit to a bizarre and possibly tormented life in the aggregated organism rather than endure more life as Victor allowed him to live it.
Deucalion had seen enough, too much. He had been compelled to climb the steps in answer to the eerie cries because he had climbed them for two centuries in dreams. But in his climb, he had indeed brought the past and the present together. The first of Victor’s works was here with the last of his works, and the collapse of his demonic empire was under way.
Certain about what he must do next, Deucalion turned from the beast and its offer of freedom. He took one step in the corridor and the next one in the main lab, two floors below.
The end of this empire might not be the end of the threat to civilization that it posed.
To ensure eternal power over his creations, Victor designed the New Race to be infertile. He created females with vaginas but without wombs. When they were the sole version of humanity on Earth, the world would be perpetually without children. Never again would society be organized around the family and its traditions, an Old Race institution that Victor abhorred.
But when their biological structure collapsed, when they remade themselves into something like the
