by Dean Koontz
William's fate clearly did not alarm Ripley as did Harker's. He had seen this sort of thing before.
Victor brought to life a perfect being with a perfect mind, but contact with the Old Race, immersion in their sick society, sometimes corrupted the tank born.
This would continue to be an occasional problem until the Old Race was eradicated and with it the social order and pre-Darwinian morality that it had created. Thereafter, following the Last War, without the paradigm of the Old Race to confuse and seduce them, Victor's people would always and forever exist in perfect mental health, every last one of them.
When they were finished with William, Ripley said, “Mr. Helios, sir, I'm sorry, but I can't stop wondering, can't stop thinking — is it possible that what happened to Harker could happen to me?”
“No. I told you, he was a singularity.”
“But, sir, I beg your pardon if this sounds impertinent... however, if you didn't expect it to happen the first time, how can you be sure it won't happen again?”
Stripping off his latex surgical gloves, Victor said, “Damn it, Ripley, stop that with your eyebrows.”
“My eyebrows, sir?”
“You know what I mean. Clean up here.”
“Sir, is it possible that Harker's consciousness, the essence of his mind, somehow transferred to his second self?”
Taking off the surgical gown that he wore over his clothes, moving toward the door of the dissection room, Victor said, “No. It was a parasitical mutation, most likely with nothing but a crude animal awareness.”
“But, sir, if the trollish thing isn't a thing, after all, sir, if it's actually Harker himself, and now he's living in the storm drains, then he's free.”
The word free halted Victor. He turned to stare at Ripley.
When Ripley realized his error, fear brought his eyebrows down from their absurdly lofty heights and beetled them on the cliff of his brow. “I don't mean to suggest that what happened to Harker could be in any way desirable.”
“Don't you, Ripley?”
“No, sir. I don't. It's a horror, what happened to him.”
Victor stared at him. Ripley dared not say another word.
After a long mutual silence, Victor said, “In addition to your eyebrows, Ripley, you're far too excitable. Annoyingly so.”
Chapter 28
MOVING HESITANTLY through the kitchen in a state of awe, Randal Six imagines that this must be what a devout monk feels when in a temple, at a consecrated altar.
For the first time in his life, Randal is in a home. Mercy had been where he was billeted, but it had never been a home. It had been only a place. He'd had no emotion vested in it.
To the Old Race, home is the center of existence. Home is the first refuge from — and last defense against — the disappointments and the terrors of life.
The heart of the home is the kitchen. He knows this to be true because he has read it in a magazine about home decor and in another magazine about cooking light.
In addition, Martha Stewart has said this is true, and Martha Stewart is, by acclamation of the Old Race, the ultimate authority on such matters.
During social evenings, close friends and neighbors frequently gravitate to the kitchen. Some of a family's happiest memories are of moments together in the kitchen. According to Old Race philosophers, nothin' says lovin' like somethin' from the oven, and the oven is in the kitchen.
The blinds are half drawn. The late-afternoon sunshine that reaches the windows has first been filtered by oak trees. Yet Randal can see well enough to explore the room.
Quietly he opens cabinets, discovering dishes, cups, saucers, drinking glasses. In drawers he finds folded dish towels, flatware, knives, and a bewildering collection of utensils and culinary gadgets.
Usually, too many new sights, too many unfamiliar objects, will throw Randal into a panic attack. He is often forced to withdraw to a corner and turn his back to the world in order to survive the shock of too much sensory input.
For some reason, the staggering richness of new experience in this kitchen does not affect him in that way. Instead of panic, he experiences... enchantment.
Perhaps this is because he is in a home at last. A person's home is inviolate. A sanctuary. An extension of one's personality, Martha says. Home is the safest of all places.
He is in the heart of this home, in the safest room of the safest place, where many happy memories will be made, where sharing and giving and laughing occur on a daily basis.
Randal Six has never laughed. He smiled once. When he first made his way to the O'Connor house, when he got out of the storm and into the crawl space, in the dark among the spiders, knowing that he would eventually reach Arnie, he had smiled.
When he opens the pantry door, he is stunned at the variety and quantity of canned and packaged food on the shelves. Never has he dared imagine such abundance.
At the Hands of Mercy, his meals and snacks were brought to his billet. The menu had been planned by others. He was given no choice of food — except for the color of it, on which he was insistent.
Here, the options before him are dazzling. In canned soups alone, he sees six varieties.
When he turns from the pantry and opens the upper door of the refrigerator, his legs shake and his knees go weak. Among other things, the freezer contains three quarts of ice cream.
Randal Six loves ice cream. He never gets enough ice cream.
His initial excitement abruptly turns to crushing disappointment when he sees that none of the choices before him is vanilla. There is chocolate almond. There is chocolate mint. There is strawberry-banana swirl.
For the most part, Randal has only eaten white and green foods. Mostly white. This restriction of colors in his food is a defense against chaos, an expression of his autism. Milk, chicken breast, turkey, potatoes, popcorn (without butter because butter makes it too yellow), peeled apples, peeled pears... He tolerates green vegetables like lettuce and celery and green beans, and also green fruit, like grapes.
The nutritional deficiencies of a strict white-and-green diet are addressed with white capsules of vitamins and minerals.
He has never eaten any flavor of ice cream other than vanilla. He has always known that other flavors exist, but he has found them too repulsive for consideration.
The O'Connors, however, have no vanilla.
For a moment he feels defeated, and drifts toward despair.
He is hungry, starving, and as never before he is in a mood to experiment. To his surprise, he removes the container of chocolate mint from the freezer.
Never before has he eaten anything brown. He chooses chocolate mint instead of chocolate almond because he assumes there will be bits of green in it, which will perhaps make it tolerable.
He withdraws a spoon from the flatware drawer and carries the quart of ice cream to the kitchen table. He sits, quivering with fearful anticipation.
Brown food. He may not survive.
When he pries the lid off the container, Randal discovers that the mint appears in thin ribbons of bright green, woven through the cold brown mass. This familiar color heartens him. The quart is full, and he digs out a spoonful of the treat.
Raising the spoon, he comes up short of the courage needed to put it in his mouth. He must make four halting attempts before he succeeds on the fifth.
Oh.
Not disgusting, after all. Delicious.
Galvanizingly delicious: He thrusts the second spoonful into his mouth without hesitation. And a third.
As he eats, he settles into a peace, a contentment, that he has never known previously. He is not yet happy, as he understands the concept of happiness, but he is closer to that desired condition than he has ever been in his four months out of the tank.
Having come here in search of the secret of happiness, he has found something else first: home.
He feels that he belongs here in a way that he never belonged in the Hands of Mercy. He feels so safe here that he can eat brown food.
Maybe later even the pink-and-yellow strawberry-banana swirl. Anything, no matter how daring, seems to be possible within these sheltering walls.
By the time he has devoured half of the quart of chocolate mint, he knows that he will never leave. This is his home.
Throughout history, men of the Old Race have died — and killed — to protect their homes. Randal Six knows a little history, the usual two gigabytes downloaded in the tank.
To be torn from this peace and thrown into the bright and noisy world would be akin to death. Therefore, any attempt to force him from his home should be regarded as a murderous assault, justifying a swift and lethal response.
This is his home. With all his strength, he will defend his right to it.
He hears descending footsteps on the stairs.
Chapter 29
GUNNY ALECTO, a garbage-galleon driver, came into the shack that served as the manager's office, sat on the edge of Nick Frigg's desk, and said, “Rain rail rape raid rag rascal rack.”
Nick didn't reply. She was just having trouble getting started; and if he tried to guess the word for which she was searching, he would only further confuse her.
“Rabid race rabble rap rat. Rat!” She had found the wanted noun. “Have you noticed about the rats?”
“What about them?”
“What about who?”
“The rats, Gunny.”
“Did you notice, too?”
“Notice what?”
“The rats are gone,” she said.
“Gone where?”
“If I knew, I wouldn't be asking you.”
“Asking me what?”
“Where are the rats?”
“We've always got rats,” Nick said.
She shook her head. “Not here. Not now. No more.”
Gunny looked like a movie star, except dirty. Nick didn't know why Victor had made her gorgeous and then assigned her to the dump. Maybe the contrast between her looks and her work amused him. Maybe he had modeled her after one of the Old Race who had rejected him or had otherwise earned his resentment.
“Why don't you go out there and look for elephants,” Gunny suggested.
“What're you talking about — elephants?”
“You're as likely to find them as rats. Plowin' the trash, I usually chase up packs of them all the time, but I haven't seen one in three days.”
“Maybe they're just making their burrows deeper in the pit as we fill it fuller.”
“So we got five?” Gunny asked.
“Five rats?”
“I heard five Old Race dead came in today.”
“Yeah. Plus three dead gone-wrongs,” Nick said.
“Some fun tonight,” she said. “Man, it's hot today.”
“Louisiana summer, what do you expect.”
“I'm not complaining,” she said. “I like the sun. I wish there was sun at night.”
“It wouldn't be night if there was sun.”
“That's the problem,” Gunny agreed.
Communicating with Gunny Alecto could be a challenge. She had looks, and she was as good a garbage-galleon driver as anyone, but her thought processes, as revealed by her conversation, didn't always track in a linear fashion.
Everyone in the New Race had a rank. At the top were the Alphas, the ruling elite. They were followed by Betas and Gammas.
As manager of the dump, Nick was a Gamma. Everyone on his crew was an Epsilon.
Epsilons had been designed and programmed for brute labor. They were a step or two above the meat machines without self-awareness that one day would replace many factory robots.
No class envy was permitted among those of the New Race. Each had been programmed to be content with the rank to which he had been born and to have no yearning for advancement.
It remained permissible, of course, to disdain and feel superior to those who ranked below you. Contempt for one's inferiors provided a healthy substitute for dangerous ambition.
Epsilons like Gunny Alecto didn't receive the wealth of direct-to-brain data downloading given to a Gamma like Nick, just as he received less than any Beta, and far less than any Alpha.
In addition to being less well-educated than the other ranks, Epsilons sometimes seemed to have cognitive problems that indicated their brains were not as carefully crafted as the brains of the upper classes.
“Goat goof gopher goon golf goose gone. Gone! Gone-wrongs. We got three, you said. What're they like?”
“I haven't seen them yet,” Nick said.
“They'll be stupid-looking.”
“I'm sure they will.”
“Stupid-looking gone-wrongs. Some fun tonight.”
“I'm looking forward to it,” Nick said, which was true.
“Where do you think they went?”
“The deliverymen put them in the cooler.”
“The rats?” she asked, puzzled.
“I thought you meant the gone-wrongs.”
“I meant the rats. I miss the little fellers. You don't think we've got cats, do you?”
“I haven't seen any cats.”
“That would explain no rats,” she said. “But if you haven't seen any, that's good enough for me.”
If Gunny had been required to live among members of the Old Race, she might not have passed for one of them — or might have been designated mentally disabled.
As a member of the Crosswoods crew, however, she had no life outside the dump. She lived within its gates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with a bunk in one of the trailers that served as dormitories.
In spite of her problems, she was an excellent dozer pilot, and Nick was glad to have her.
Getting up from the edge of Nick's desk, Gunny said, “Well, back to the pit — and then some fun tonight, huh?”
“Some fun tonight,” he agreed.
Chapter 30
AFTER HER CONVERSATION with Christine in the kitchen, Erika Helios toured those rooms of the mansion that she had not previously seen.
The lavish home theater was Russian Belle Epoque after the palaces of St. Petersburg. Victor had specified this opulent style in honor of his late friend, Joseph Stalin, communist dictator and visionary.
Joe Stalin had come forth with vast resources to fund New Race research after the sad collapse of the Third Reich, which had been a terrible setback for Victor. So confident had Joe been in Victor's ability eventually to fabricate an entirely controllable and obedient variety of enhanced humans that he had ordered the deaths of forty million of his citizens by various means even before the technology of the cloning tanks had been perfected.
Desirous of living forever, Joe had submitted to some of the same techniques with which Victor had sustained his own life for — at that time — nearly two centuries. Unfortunately, Stalin must have been suffering from an undiagnosed brain tumor or something because during the period that he underwent those life-extension procedures, he had grown increasingly detached from reality, and paranoid.
Eventually hair had grown on the palms of Stalin's hands — which had never happened to Victor. Furthermore, Stalin had been seized by unpredictable fits of mindless violence, sometimes directed at people around him, sometimes at pieces of furniture, once at his favorite pair of boots.
The dictator's closest associates poisoned him and concocted a cover story to conceal the fact that they had perpetrated a coup. Injustice was once more visited on Victor, and his research funds were cut off by the bean counters who followed poor Joe.
In the tank, Erika received all of her husband's rich history; however, she was forbidden to speak of it to anyone but Victor himself. She had been granted this knowledge only so that she would understand his epic struggles, his triumphs, and the glory of his existence.
After the theater, she explored the music room, the reception lounge, the formal living room, the informal living room, the jewel box of a breakfast room, the trophy room, the billiards room, the indoor pool with surrounding mosaic-tile deck, and came at last to the library.
The sight of all those books made her uneasy, for she knew that books were corrupting, perhaps evil. They had been the death of Erika Four, who had absorbed dangerous knowledge from them.
Nevertheless, Erika had to familiarize herself with the library because there would be social evenings when Victor would invite his important Old Race guests — mostly powerful politicians and business leaders — to repair to the library for cognac and other after-dinner drinks. As hostess, she would need to feel comfortable here in spite of the dreadful books.
As she walked through the library, she dared to touch a book now and then to accustom herself to the sinister feel of them. She even took one off a shelf and examined it, her two hearts racing.
In the event that a guest some evening said, Erika, darling, would you hand me that book with the lovely binding. I'd like to have a look at it, she must be prepared to present the volume as casually as a snake-handler of long experience would pick up any serpent.
Christine had suggested that Erika browse the several shelves of psychology texts and bone up on sexual sadism. She couldn't, however, bring herself to actually open a book.
As she moved across the big room, sliding her hand along the underside of a shelf, enjoying the satiny feel of the exquisitely finished wood, she discovered a hidden switch. She had flicked it before she quite realized what she had done.
A section of shelves proved to be a hidden door, which swung open on pivot hinges. Beyond lay a secret passageway.
In the tank, she had not been informed of the existence of this concealed door or of what lay beyond it. But she'd not been forbidden to explore, either.
Chapter 31
AFTER SWITCHING ON the kitchen lights, prior to preparing dinner, Vicky Chou washed her hands at the sink, and discovered that the soiled towel needed to be replaced. She blotted her hands on it anyway before fetching a clean towel from a drawer.