His mind moved from the suburbs of sanity to the borderline.
Victor Immaculate possesses all the memories of the original Victor. He knows, therefore, the meaning of the words that have been spoken behind him: I am satisfied.
More than two hundred years earlier, shortly after Deucalion murdered Victor’s bride, Elizabeth, on the shores of Lake Como, the great scientist and maker of men had returned to Geneva. There, as he knelt in a cemetery at night, vowing vengeance, his creation spoke to him tauntingly from the darkness: I am satisfied, miserable wretch! You have determined to live, and I am satisfied.
Deucalion had meant that now his maker’s anguish would be as intense as his own, and both of them would suffer the rest of their lives, Victor for what he had lost by his pride and his imprudent researches and Deucalion for being forever an outsider, alone of his kind.
Victor Immaculate turns and sees the giant that had come to life centuries before he himself had risen to replace the original Victor in New Orleans. No slightest fear afflicts him. Rather, his singular intellect is engaged, his curiosity as keen as a scalpel.
Deucalion says, “So long ago, you told your story to Robert Walton, that man aboard the icebound ship in the Arctic. His letters and journals were what Mary Shelley employed to tell her tale. Walton said you died on the ship, and he fabricated a loathsome story about my visiting your deathbed and expressing remorse to him. How much did you pay Walton to say that you perished on that vessel?”
“Not me,” Victor Immaculate replies. “Your maker paid him, and handsomely. You forget that I’m not the one who made you. I’m only his clone.”
“You are him as ever he was,” the giant insists. “He is in you, all his knowledge and all his sins. You are him in concentration. By using the gullible Walton, you presented yourself to the world as a flawed but compassionate, loving, noble figure, much put upon and so determined to put right the wrong you did. Every time I’ve read your words, the pages stink with your false humility, expressed at such length its insincerity is evident in its redundancy.”
As the creature approaches, he seems larger step by step. But Victor Immaculate does not retreat. He does not know how. Besides, he is invulnerable to this one.
Deucalion says, “The pages reek with your bottomless self-pity so poorly disguised as regret, with the phoniness of your verbose self-condemnation, with the insidious quality of your contrition, which is that of a materialist who cares not for God and is therefore not true contrition at all, but only despair at the consequences of your actions. For centuries, I have been the monster, and you the well-meaning idealist who claims he would have undone what he did if only given the chance. But your kind never undoes. You do the same wrong over and over, with ever greater fervency, causing ever more misery, because you are incapable of admitting error.”
“I’ve made no error,” Victor Immaculate confidently assures him, “and neither did your maker.”
Looming, the giant says, “You are my maker.”
“That’s an error of yours, which you seem unable to admit. I’m not Victor but Victor Immaculate.”
Deucalion places his hands upon Victor’s shoulders, gripping with such power that it is impossible to shrug loose or pull away.
“I was once a monster, as you made me,” the giant says. “Full of rage and hot to murder. But on the lightning, I was given free will … and have remade myself through the centuries. I am not a monster anymore. But you are the monster you have always been.”
“Release me,” Victor demands.
The giant says nothing, but a strange light pulses through his menacing eyes.
“Look at your face in a mirror,” Victor suggests. “Would you like the normal half to be as disfigured as the other? Or should I instead make your skull implode and finish you forever?”
“You don’t have that power over me, as he did.”
“Oh,” Victor disagrees, “I am quite sure that I do.”
The funnel cloud of nanoanimals sucked the Rider off the floor, dissolving him as he rose, and incorporated him into the swarm that blackened the air near the ceiling, spiraling ominously above more of the living room than not, enlarged now by the mass of the ingested victim.
Yet Carson and the others remained paralyzed, still fearing that if they moved, they would make targets of themselves.
The swarm churned as before, darker and seemingly as saturated as thunderheads pregnant with rain. Then the cloud began to eject things, as if spitting them out: a human foot with a mouth across its bridge, teeth gnashing; what seemed to be a pair of kidneys saddlebagged across a beating heart; a grotesquely large nose with wiggling fingers protruding from its nostrils.… A hand fell to the carpet, and on the back of it, set high like those of a crab, were eyes that appeared all too human.
The hand scuttled across the floor, toothless yet unsettling nonetheless, and Carson cried out—“Michael!”—but he had the same idea that motivated her cry. He was already hustling the three children into the adjacent dining room.
If they could get into the kitchen, there was a door between it and the dining room, another between it and the downstairs hall. They might be able to keep the swarm out, and hope to make a stand there.
They were halfway across the dining room when aproned women began to crowd through the door from the kitchen. Another Builder had gotten into the back of the house.
After the failed assault on KBOW, Sammy Chakrabarty was not in a mood to celebrate. He knew worse would be coming. He relentlessly circled the roof, maintaining surveillance on every side of the radio station.
He was most worried about the back of the building, where the broadcast tower soared into the falling snow. Fifty yards beyond lay a small woods, past which was a meadow and then a motel. He could see neither the lights of the motel nor the meadow beyond the copse of pines, but he thought it might be easy to approach KBOW on foot, through the cover of those trees.
As he stood peering through the open girders toward the woods, a truck roared into the parking lot. He hurried across the roof to his original position, dropped to his knees behind the parapet, and through the crenel saw men — or things like men — pouring out of the cargo box of another blue-and-white truck. Some of them had weapons, and they began to spray the building with bullets.
Sammy opened fire on them with the Bushmaster.
Chief Rafael Jarmillo and Deputy Nelson Sternlagen, equal in position as all Communitarians were equal — therefore neither of them quite leading, neither of them quite following — brought two Builders through the pines behind KBOW. Jarmillo had Warren Snyder’s spare keys, but he would relinquish them without hesitation to Sternlagen if for some reason it became more efficient for the deputy to be the one to unlock the back door.
They paused at the edge of the woods, waited until they heard gunfire, then hurried through the snow toward the broadcast tower.
The two Builders in front of the Hummer began to move toward it, as did the two behind. They approached not snarling and at a run but smiling and with an eerie leisureliness that suggested they were certain of triumph.
Sully York had never been the kind to defend his position if he had any chance of attacking from it. No one was deader than those who didn’t risk all when all was at risk.
As if he’d written deeply into the minds of enough Western-novel heroes to know the intimate workings of Sully’s thought processes, Bryce Walker said, “Go for it.”
Even though these were killing machines of some kind, not people, as they appeared to be, Sully chose to run down the man in the tuxedo rather than the woman in the black cocktail dress, because chivalry was not easily set aside when it was the habit of a lifetime.
Confident of the Hummer’s exceptional traction and bad-weather handling, Sully tramped the accelerator, and the big SUV shot forward without a spinning of tires. The tuxedoed sonofabitch didn’t try to dodge out of the way, like most chickenhearted pretty boys would have. The Hummer hit him hard, jolting everyone
in it, and then something happened that seemed to prove that he must be the stage magician he appeared to be.
The Builder wasn’t knocked down, stood his ground, and the SUV parted around him, dissolved around him. The engine gave out, maybe ceased to exist, the headlights died, and the vehicle shuddered to a halt. The Builder stood now directly in front of the windshield, in an apparent Hummer vise of steel and truck parts, smiling in a snarky sort of way, as if to say the impact had been a damn treat, thank you very much. It placed its hand flat on the windshield, and Sully York thought for the first time in his life of adventures that the end had come: The glass would craze, the Builder would burst inside, they would all be liquidated and cocooned.
Instead the handsome magician frowned, opened his mouth, seemed to gag, and from him spewed a tangle of fan belts. On the windshield, his hand transformed into a conglomeration of spark plugs and wires. His tuxedo shimmered away, and he lost all human appearance a moment later. He morphed into what appeared to be a hard gray mass, roughly manlike in shape, although from it protruded all manner of engine parts, as if this were a sculpture of a man made from automotive odds and ends.
Sully knew intuitively that the Builder had ceased to function, as any machine might freeze up if its cogwheels were immobilized by metal filings that clogged their teeth. They were saved.
On the other hand, the Hummer was useless now, and three more Builders were circling them.
The nude woman who stepped out of Corrina Ringwald’s dark living room, into the foyer, wasn’t a blonde, like the one in the blue robe, but she was a brunette of even greater beauty, more unreal than any airbrushed photograph of any plasticized and Botoxed Hollywood star. After she had come into the light and given Rusty a moment to admire her physical perfection, her nose collapsed into her skull, her face puckered around that hole and then raveled inward, and her head sank out of sight into the stump of her neck.
Behind Rusty, as he tried to hold fast to his sanity, the door chimes sounded again.
The brunette’s face formed in the abdomen of her headless body, her breasts now like horns on her brow. Her eyes were green and fierce, and her voice was both seductive and triumphant when she said, “I am your Builder.”
In Deucalion’s grip, certain of his power over the giant, Victor nevertheless decides to change his tack:
“Why be a defender of their kind? They’re less than you. They’re of the same species as one another, all of the human community, and yet they hate one another, conspire against one another, war against one another.”
“And some are willing to die for one another,” Deucalion says.
“Yes, for something called duty and something called love — which are concepts, not realities. You can’t deny they live for lust, for greed, to envy and to justify violence with their envy, to seek power over one another and to apply it ruthlessly.”
“Most of them are not that way,” the giant says. “But among them are enough like you, Victor, to lead them astray again and again, to be their conniving politicians and their self-sickened intellectuals, their self-satisfied elites who seduce them away from their better natures. There is a serpent in the world, and having signed a pledge with it, you spent your life — your lives — spreading its venom.”
Victor knows he has the right side of this debate, and he does not hesitate to press forward, face-to-face: “They think themselves exceptional, a part of them eternal, but consider the world they have made, a sewer of vice and self-interest, of worm-riddled bread and grotesque circuses that become more macabre year by year. They make a claim to lives of meaning, yet they pursue nothing but meaningless thrills.”
“Because it is your kind among them who bake the worms into the bread and write the scripts for the circuses. You repeat the same tired argument.”
“But if for no other reason,” Victor Immaculate says, “surely one as ancient and wise and intelligent as you must hate them for their riotous individuality, every personality different from the other, the whole vast, tumultuous sea of them, not a fraction as organized as the lowly crawling ants, seething with eccentricities, with an infinite variety of passions and prejudices, likes and dislikes, schemes—”
“Hopes and dreams,” says Deucalion.
“—quirks and useless idiosyncrasies—”
“Charms and talents,” Deucalion says, “gifts and graces.”
Waiting for his mental power to soar to unprecedented heights when the latest round of supplements kicks in, Victor Immaculate does not attempt to break free of the giant, but raises one hand to the undamaged half of the brute’s tattooed face, touching it tenderly, much as a loving father might touch it, and Deucalion doesn’t shrink from the contact.
“Surely you see,” Victor says, “that they will never be as one, work as one, unite without qualification in a quest for greatness. They will never sacrifice their individuality for the betterment of the race, will never bend their billions of minds and hearts to the same goal and thereby conquer nature and the universe forever.”
“God spare them that,” Deucalion replies.
And then a surprising and unpleasant thing begins to happen.
Deucalion didn’t know how the execution would transpire, only that this Victor, this self-proclaimed Immaculate, would perish and all of his foul work with him.
The end arrived when he began to be aware of the pulses of light passing through his eyes. Previously, he had seen the phenomenon only in mirrors or in pools of still water. Now, cold white waves of light passed across Victor’s upturned face. In the clone’s frightened eyes, incandescence throbbed, too, although it wasn’t an inner luminosity but a reflection of his executioner’s eyeshine.
In his mind’s ear, Deucalion heard the storm — and more — on the night that he had been born from the dead: the escalating crashes of thunder that shook the heavens as if to bring them down like vaults of quake-shocked stone, the burr and buzz of arcane machines echoing off the walls of the old windmill, his anguished cries as he resisted his creation, his maker’s shrieks of triumph, a mad cacophony. And in memory, he saw once more the first thing that he had seen when opening his eyes on that distant night: the colossal bolts of chain lightning turning the night to blazing day beyond the mill windows and crackling down the cables by which Victor induced it into his demonic machinery, not the usual lightning of an ordinary storm, but lightning of unprecedented explosiveness, light alive.
Now he felt that same raw power surging through him, along his arms and into his hands, into the body of this Victor Immaculate. The madman’s clothes smoked and burst into flames, but the flames didn’t burn Deucalion’s hands. Victor’s skin blackened and peeled, his eye sockets splashed full of fire, flames licked from his mouth, and in mere seconds, he collapsed out of Deucalion’s grip, reduced to ashes and fragments of charred bones.
More than two centuries of scheming toward utopia were at an end. The only thing of significance that Victor achieved was a death toll in the many thousands, and even that appeared insignificant when compared to the work of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others, who murdered in the tens of millions. Under all his names, Leben and Helios and Frankenstein, Victor was a small man of small ideas, large only on the silver screen in the theater of his demented mind.
On a nearby gurney, the naked body of a replicant struggled to rise as Victor burned, but shuddered and fell back, dead. Until now, Deucalion had not realized that this particular Communitarian was a duplicate of the President of the United States.
As the three Builders approached the disabled Hummer, Sully York said, “Damn if I’ll let it end like this. Bryce, let’s me and you give these sonsofbitches such a case of indigestion that Grace and Travis will have time to run.”
He threw open the driver’s door and, issuing a muttered war cry, clambered out into the falling snow with his gun and with a lifetime of experience surviving hopeless situations. He heard Bryce getting out of the passenger door, and he thought, By God, it’s always good to give
the blighters what-for with a good man at your back.
He was almost disappointed when, before the battle could begin, the Builders collapsed simultaneously into apparently inert piles of what appeared to be, but certainly wasn’t, gravel.
With the rattle of gunfire at the farther end of the building, Chief Jarmillo and Deputy Nelson Sternlagen reached the back door of KBOW, the two Builders immediately behind them. Jarmillo handed the key to Sternlagen — he wasn’t quite sure why — and Sternlagen handed it back to him, and they both stood for a moment, staring at the key in the chief’s hand. They never did get it in the lock.
The face in the abdomen of the headless woman declared, “I am your Builder.” The mouth stretched wide, and from it came a jet of silvery gray sludge — that halted inches from Rusty’s face, quivered in the air, and fell to the floor, as did the headless woman. This once phantasmagoric and threatening figure was now an apparently harmless pile of … something.
Heart racing nonetheless, Rusty noticed that the fragments of the glass-faced man had continued fracturing until they now formed little mounds of what might have been sand but probably wasn’t. And the door chimes were not ringing.
He switched on the porch lamp and hesitantly put his face to the window. The porch seemed to be deserted.
When he opened the door, the handsome man with the I-can-sell-you-anything smile was gone. Nothing remained but another strange pile of … something.
Rusty stood in the cold, on the porch, listening to the night. He heard no gunshots. No screams. No cadres of models were marching in the street. The handsome pair of German shepherds appeared, no longer fleeing in terror, wandering aimlessly, smelling this and that. One of them abruptly dropped and rolled onto its back in the freshly fallen snow, kicking its legs joyfully in the air.
As suddenly as the nightmare had begun, it was over.
Returning to the house, Rusty called, “Corrina, Corrina,” all the way up the stairs. By the time he reached the master bedroom, he was singing her name.
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