He shrugged. “Whenever. If ever. Jocko — he doesn’t deserve it anyway.”
“Yes, you’ve said. But I promise I will have a funny hat for you within a day or two.”
Regardless of what difficulty Erika might have finding a very funny hat, she was rewarded in advance for her trouble when she saw his delight, his tears of gratitude.
“You are such a kind lady. Jocko would kiss your hand, except he doesn’t want to disgust you.”
“You’re my friend,” she said, and extended her right hand.
The loose flaps around his mouth and the brief touch of his sticky teeth were even more repellent than she expected, but Erika smiled and said, “You’re welcome, dear friend. Now there’s something I hope you can do for me.”
“Jocko will read a book to you,” Jocko said, “two books at once, and one upside down!”
“Later, you can read to me. First, I need your opinion about something.”
The troll grabbed his feet with his hands and rocked back and forth on the floor. “Jocko doesn’t know about a whole lot besides storm drains, rats, and bugs, but he can try.”
“You’re Jonathan Harker, or were Harker, whatever. So you know the New Race has little emotional life. When they do have emotional reactions, they’re limited to envy, anger, and hatred, only emotions that turn back on themselves and can’t lead to hope, because he says hope leads to a desire for freedom, to disobedience and rebellion.”
“Jocko is different now. Jocko feels big good things with great exuberance.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed that. Anyway, I don’t have the knowledge or the breadth of vision to understand fully why a genius like Victor would create his New Race this way. Only I, his wife, am different. He allows me humility and shame … which in a strange way lead to hope, and hope to tenderness.”
Feet in his hands, rocking, his head turned toward her, the troll said, “You are the first ever, Old Race or New, to be kind to Jocko,” and again tears spilled down his cheeks.
“I hope for many things,” Erika said. “I hope to become a better wife day by day. I hope to see approval in Victor’s eyes. If in time I become a very good wife and no longer deserve beatings, if in time he comes to cherish me, I will ask him to allow others of the New Race to have hope as I do. I will ask Victor to give my people gentler lives than they have now.”
The troll stopped rocking. “Don’t ask Victor anytime soon.”
“No. First I’ve got to be a better wife. I must learn to serve him to perfection. But I’ve been thinking maybe I could be Queen Esther to his King Ahasuerus.”
“Remember,” he said, “Jocko is ignorant. An ignorant screwup.”
“They’re figures in the Bible, which I’ve never read. Esther was the daughter of Mordecai. She persuaded King Ahasuerus, her husband, to spare her people, the Jews, from annihilation at the hands of Haman, a prince of the king’s realm.”
“Don’t ask Victor anytime soon,” the troll repeated. “That is Jocko’s opinion. That is Jocko’s very strongly held opinion.”
In her mind’s eye, Erika saw Christine lying on the floor of the master-suite vestibule, shot four times through her two hearts.
“That isn’t what I want your opinion about,” she said, getting to her feet. “Come with me to the library. There’s something strange I need to show you.”
The troll hesitated. “I who am came out of he who was only a few days ago, but I who am Jocko have had enough strange for as long as I live.”
She held out a hand to him. “You are my only friend in the world. I have no one else to whom I can turn.”
Jocko sprang off the floor and stood en pointe, as if about to pirouette, but still hesitated. “Jocko must be discreet. Jocko is
“Victor has gone to the Hands of Mercy. The staff is at the back of the estate, in their dormitory. We have the house to ourselves.”
After a moment, he came down from his toes, slipped his hand in hers. “It’s gonna be a very, very funny hat, isn’t it?”
“Very, very funny,” she promised.
“With some little bells on it?”
“If I find a funny hat without bells, I’ll sew as many on it as you want.”
CHAPTER 43
Corridor after corridor, laboratory after laboratory, room after room, in stairways and lavatories and storage closets, a perfect hush has fallen over this place.
With all of its windows bricked up, the building admits no sound from the world outside.
Here and there, brainless bodies lie in groups. They are all EXEMPTS.
No one moves who can be seen.
Chameleon follows the tantalizing spoor of the TARGET until those pheromones come to an end at the workstation in the main lab, with no sign of the person who cast them off.
Dim memories of this enormous room stir in Chameleon’s mind. It seems to have no recollections prior to these.
Memories do not interest Chameleon. It lives for the future, for the infuriating smell of TARGETS.
Frenzies of violence thrill the pleasure center in its forebrain as intense sex might thrill it if it were capable of sexual activity. Slaughter and only slaughter stimulates its orgasm. Chameleon dreams of war, because for it, war is continuous ecstasy.
Suddenly, on the desktop computer and on an eight-by-six-foot screen embedded in a wall, images appear.
The screens show a broad avenue, tens of thousands of people, dressed alike and ordered into precise ranks, marching in cadence to loud music.
In every fifth row of the stiff-legged marchers, every person carries a flag. The flag is red with a white circle. In the circle is a man’s face.
The face is familiar to Chameleon. It has seen this man a long time ago, has seen him often and in this very lab.
The camera pulls back to reveal colossal structures flanking the twelve-lane avenue. They are all of bold design unlike any of the scores of typical-building layouts programmed into Chameleon to assist it in navigating an average office high-rise or church, or shopping mall.
On some of these immense edifices are portraits. The face of the man on the flags is rendered in paint or in mosaic tile, or is etched in stone.
None of these images is smaller than ten stories high. Some are thirty stories.
The music swells, swells, then recedes to a background level. Words are being spoken now, but Chameleon is not interested in what is being said.
The marching hordes on the screens are not real people, merely images. They cannot be killed.
Crawling among the many machines, Chameleon seeks what lives only to be killed.
For a while it smells nothing but the lingering pheromones of the TARGET that was recently here but has gone. Then a new scent.
Chameleon turns its head left, right. Its two ripping claws scissor with anticipation, and its crushing claw opens wide to grip. Its stinger extrudes from under its carapace.
The scent is that of a TARGET. In the hallway but approaching.
CHAPTER 44
