Shaitan had gone mad in a most interesting way, had vanished while supposedly on vacation, but in fact had been living in the secret byways of the lower floors for almost thirty years, subsisting on immense stores of dehydrated, vacuum-packed foods intended to sustain thousands of government officials who would have been brought here in anticipation of imminent conflict, to ride out World War III and the radioactive aftermath.
In certain ubersecret bunkers at the bottom of this supersecret installation, Ehlis Shaitan invented a colorful personal history that was mythological in nature. In scores of thick handwritten volumes, in elaborate bunker-wall paintings and carvings done with hand tools, he celebrated his supposedly supernatural powers and crowned himself the immortal ruler of this underworld. And acting as a prophet, he predicted his own ascension to the surface in a time of cataclysm, when he would take what riches he wanted, rape whomever he desired, kill more prolifically than any score of homicidal rulers had ever murdered their fellow men, and allow those to live who worshipped him and became his pliant and obedient servants.
In his mid-seventies, Shaitan grew weary of waiting to ascend to rule a devastated Earth, and when Victor and his original team of scientists moved into the upper levels of the facility, the bearded old man monitored them secretly. Eventually he enticed two first-generation Communitarians into his lower world of obscene, violent, grotesque murals, into rooms in which the floors were as vividly decorated as the walls and ceilings, and he made an effort to enlist them in his cult.
When Victor and his team found the two missing Communitarians, both had to be destroyed, so strange had they become. The weakness in their program was identified: certain lines of code that did not sufficiently embed and enforce the absolute need for
Victor had personally killed the lunatic old man and ordered his bunkers sealed. There was no room for an Ehlis Shaitan in the world to come, no need for his like or his opposite.
Now Victor walks the lower floors, alone with his thoughts, his multiple cascades of scintillant theories and ideas, pleased by the prospect of witnessing the extermination of every thinking creature on the planet, down to the last finch and wren, to every smallest lizard. When his are the only eyes left to see the world, when his is the only mind left to appreciate it, how brilliant it will be to end his own existence as unhesitatingly as he had terminated Ehlis Shaitan.
He would prefer to walk in this deep retreat for hours yet, for days. But although the solitude is invigorating, his time here is necessarily limited by the absence of Communitarians to see to his needs.
He takes an elevator up to one of the floors of the Hive. In the corridor, as he approaches the first plasma screen, it sounds the three-note alert to request his attention. Scrolling up the screen comes the report that the employees at KBOW have not been entirely replaced with Communitarians as per the plan. They have become aware of the replicants among them, and they are broadcasting a warning to Rainbow Falls and, perhaps more worrisome, to communities beyond in that portion of Montana that the station serves.
This is not a gnat in the path of the Communitarian war machine, as was the failure to properly track two of the Builders. This is admittedly a larger issue, a housefly rather than a gnat, but it is not a serious setback, because there can be no serious setback in the progress of the Community. Their triumph is inevitable; and to think otherwise would credit humanity with at least some significance, when it has none, not a minim.
Victor says exactly what he said before, although he knows that his order has already been effectuated because of the well-programmed responses of the brutal Communitarian war machine. “Consult the master strategy-and-tactics program, apply the appropriate remedy, and press forward without delay.”
With no destination in mind at the moment, still walking just to walk and think, he turns right at the next corridor, where the small three-legged table waits for him. On the table stands a cold bottle of water. Beside the water is a yellow saucer. In the saucer lies a shiny red capsule and a white tablet. He swallows the capsule first and then the tablet.
When next he approaches a plasma screen, it sounds the three notes. The scroll informs him that, in addition to the problem at KBOW, pockets of organized resistance have formed in Rainbow Falls.
This is expected. Resistance is futile. Even now, Builders by the score are emerging from their cocoons, and the next, more violent, phase of the conflict is beginning. Soon they will emerge by the hundreds. They are indestructible, unstoppable, and their rapidly increasing numbers will soon ensure victory in Rainbow Falls, after which they will spread out anonymously through the country and then the world, a plague of death growing geometrically in virulence day by day.
Chapter 49
At the end of Erika’s driveway, Deucalion turned right, not onto the county road but instead directly into the driveway at the Samples house, under the spreading limbs of the towering evergreens. Through the broken-out passenger window, he heard the nearest sentry call quietly to a second who was farther removed, and the second to a third, passing the news like members of a fire line passing a pail of water. The name with which they announced his return wasn’t his own—“Christopher …” “Christopher …” “Christopher …”—and he wondered why they had adopted a code name for him.
As Deucalion stepped down from the truck, Michael appeared in response to the sentries’ announcement. “The Riders don’t waste time. The effort to make a garrison of the neighborhood is moving fast. And expanding from one square block to two as they get people to join them. Those cell-phone videos make an impression on the skeptical. And now your work at KBOW. Some local talk-show guy is getting out the word with such passion he mostly sounds convincing. And even when he sounds like a raving nut, he sounds like a nut who’s telling the truth.”
“More children?” Deucalion asked.
“Carson’s assembling the next group in the living room.”
“How many?”
“I think fifteen. They’re coming over fences from neighboring houses, yard to yard to yard.”
Opening the cargo doors, Deucalion said, “Jocko found a few things worth knowing. The most helpful might be the name of the organization Victor is using for cover. Progress for Perfect Peace.”
“Interesting sense of irony. When all of us are dead, the peace will be perfect, I guess.”
“It’s not irony,” Deucalion said. “It’s confidence.”
“I hate that guy.”
“Progress for Perfect Peace. Spread the name around. Maybe someone has heard it before. Maybe someone knows about a location other than the warehouse where they were liquidating those brain-damaged people.”
Carson appeared on the front porch of the house. She led a group of well-bundled youngsters down the steps and across the yard to the truck.
The children must have been briefed about Deucalion, because they showed no fear of him. Their thin, pluming breath seemed to be a testament to their fragility, to how easily they could be snuffed out, but the plumes didn’t betray any terror of him. As they boarded the truck, some looked at him shyly, and other sweet, cold-pinked faces regarded him with an awe that seemed to have in it an element of delight.
He was not accustomed to delighting children. He liked it.
After Deucalion assured the kids that they would not have to endure the dark in the back of the truck for more than a few minutes, he closed the doors and said to Carson, “Why do the sentries call me Christopher?”
“Among other things, he’s the patron saint of travelers, especially of children. They say he was a Canaanite of gigantic stature. Seems to me, Christopher fits you better than your current handle.”
In a time when he was bitter about having been brought to life, when he was full of rage and had not yet realized what his mission must be, he named himself Deucalion as an expression of his self-loathing. Mary Shelley titled her book
Now he knew that the lightning of his birth pulsed in his eyes as he said to Carson, “I haven’t earned a better name than the one I have now.”
