and his humility, and his brave little soul.
“The pull of the program is strong,” she said. “The command to obey. Like a riptide.”
“If you go in, Jocko goes in.”
“No.”
Jocko shrugged. “You can’t choose for Jocko.”
“Please, Jocko. Don’t put this on me.”
“May I say?” When she nodded, he said, “Jocko could know what it’s like to have a mother. And you could know what it’s like to be one. It would be a little family, but still a family.”
CHAPTER 71
In the Subterranean Gallery, Victor stood at the center of the crowd, determined that this ignorant rabble would never hear him ask for mercy or concede the truth of their accusations.
He realized that the employees of the landfill were here. And several Alphas he had terminated, somehow revived.
Erika Four came to him out of the mob, stood face-to-face and met his eyes, and was not cowed. She raised a fist as if to hit him, but lowered it without striking. “I am not as low as you,” she said, and turned away.
And here was Carson O’Connor, Maddison standing behind her with a hand on her shoulder, a German shepherd at her side. She said, “Don’t bother lying to me. I know my father saw something that got him on your case. You ordered your zombies to kill him and my mother.”
“I killed them both myself,” Victor said. “And he begged like a little boy for his life.”
She smiled and shook her head. “He begged for my mother’s life, I’m sure. He would humble himself for her. But he never begged for his own. Rot in hell.”
The book taunted James as much as did the crystal ball. He paced the Helios-mansion library with growing frustration.
“I know the path to happiness,” said the book.
“I swear, you say that one more time, I’ll tear you to pieces.”
“I will tell you the path to happiness.”
“So tell me.”
“You better have a drink first,” said the book.
In a corner of the library was a wet bar. James put the book down long enough to pour a double shot of whiskey and toss it back.
When he picked up the volume once more, it said, “Maybe you would be better off just going back to the dormitory.”
“Tell me the path to happiness,” James insisted.
“Go back, sit at the kitchen table, and stab your hand with the meat fork, watch it heal.”
“Tell me the path to happiness.”
“You seemed to be enjoying the meat fork.”
Through his exchanges with the magic book since he downed the whiskey, James had been looking in the backbar mirror, not at the volume in his hands.
By his reflection, he discovered that both voices were his and that the book, as perhaps the crystal ball before it, did not talk at all.
“Tell me the path to happiness,” James insisted.
And in the mirror he saw himself say, “For you, the only path to happiness is death.”
The montage of decoupaged garbage flowed over the walls and the floor of the huge subterranean gallery. The place was more mysterious than any Victor had known before.
In the center of the room, a grave had been prepared: ten feet long, six feet wide, twenty feet deep. Beside this excavation stood the immense pile of garbage that came from it, a festering heap of rotten materials of sundry kinds.
After they chained his hands behind his back, as they escorted him to the grave, he spoke the death phrase, but none of them fell dead. Somehow they had been freed.
Nick Frigg, boss of the dump, buckled a metal collar around Victor’s neck, and Victor did not beg.
A lowly Epsilon attached a cable to the collar.
Victor supposed that the cable ran all the way to the surface, drawing juice from the dump’s main power.
“I will not beg,” he told them. “You owe your existence to me. And when I die, so will every creature I have made.”
The crowd stared at him in silence. They neither called him a liar nor asked him to explain.
“I am not bluffing,” he warned them. “My altered body has its cables winding through it, as you know. I receive an electric charge regularly, store it in power cells within my torso, convert it to another life-sustaining energy as I need it. Many of you know this to be true.”
He saw that they did know.
“When I die, those cells will be tapped to send a signal that will be relayed by satellite to everyone made of New Race flesh, to every meat machine that walks. And you will fall down dead.”
They appeared convinced. Yet not one spoke.
Victor smiled, anticipating triumph in spite of their silence. “Did you think a god would die alone?”
“Not a god as cruel as you,” Deucalion said.
When several in the crowd cried out that he should be cast into the pit, Victor promised them a new beginning, reparations, freedom. But they would not listen, the fools, the ignorant swine.
Suddenly, from behind the mountain of garbage beside the grave, a creature of great radiant beauty appeared. Oh, graceful it was, its form exquisite, its nature mysterious yet beguiling in every aspect, and he could see that the crowd, too, was in awe of it.
But when he appealed to it, asking it to persuade the crowd to have mercy, the Being changed. Over him now loomed a beast that even he, Victor Frankenstein, in his ferocious quest for absolute control of human biology, could never have imagined. This thing was so hideous, so monstrous, so suggestive of chaos and violence in every smallest detail that Victor could neither repress a scream nor prevent it from escalating wildly.
The beast approached. Victor retreated to the brink. Only when he fell into the foulness at the bottom of the grave did he realize with what putrid materials his last bed had been so richly prepared.
Above, the hateful presence began to push the heaped garbage back into the pit from which it had been extracted. Every foulness imaginable rained down on Victor, drove him to his knees in the even greater foulness under him. And as an avalanche of suffocating filth poured onto him, something spoke within his mind. Its message was not in words or images, appeared instead as a sudden dark knowledge that was at once translatable:
Erika Four watched as the radiant and enchanting Resurrector moved back from the great landslide of garbage that it had instigated, and Deucalion threw the switch that delivered a death jolt to Victor at the bottom of his final resting place.
She looked around at all the New Race and said, “Peace at last,” and they replied as one, “Peace.”
Half a minute later, the Resurrector and everyone in the gallery fell dead as stones, except Deucalion, Carson, Michael, and Duke, who were not creatures of the New Race flesh.
In the SUV in front of the tank farm, Erika Five had a sudden premonition of death, and reached out to Jocko.
From his tortured expression, she knew that the same premonition had stricken him, and he grasped hold of her.
