“Annunciata!”

Of the emotions he was allowed, Ripley proved best at envy and hate. Like many others, from the brainiest Alphas to the shallowest Epsilons, he lived for the day when the killing of the Old Race would begin in earnest. His most satisfying dreams were of violent rape, mutilation, and mass slaughter.

But he was no stranger to fear, which came over him sometimes without apparent cause, long hours of unfocused anxiety. He had been afraid when he witnessed Werner’s catastrophic cellular metamorphosis—not afraid for Werner, who was nothing to him, not afraid of being attacked by the thing Werner was becoming, but afraid that his maker, the Beekeeper, might not be as omniscient and omnipotent as Ripley had once thought.

The implications of that possibility were terrifying.

With twenty-four simultaneous clunks, the lock bolts retracted entirely into the vault door. On the control console, the yellow switch turned green.

The formidable barrier swung open on its single, thick barrel hinge.

Having burst out of and torn off its garments long ago, the Werner thing stepped na*ed from the transition module, into the monitoring hub. It was not as handsome as Adam in Eden.

Apparently, it continuously changed, never achieving a stable new form, for it was in significant ways different from the beast that had regarded the overhead camera in the transition module only moments earlier. Standing on his hind legs, the new Werner might have been a man crossed with a jungle cat and also with a praying mantis, a hybrid so strange that it seemed utterly alien to this planet. The eyes were both human now—but they were much enlarged, protuberant, lid-less, and staring with a feverish intensity that seemed to reveal a mind in the triplex grip of fury, terror, and desperation.

Out of the wickedly serrated insectile mouth came a subhuman voice full of gargle and hiss, yet intelligible: “Something has happened to me.”

Ripley could think of nothing either informative or reassuring to say to Werner.

Perhaps the bulging, feverish eyes revealed only rage, and not also terror and desperation, for Werner said, “I am free, free, free. I am FREE!”

Ironically, considering that he was an Alpha with a high IQ, Ripley only now realized that the Werner thing stood between him and the only exit from the monitoring hub.

CHAPTER 8

BUCKY AND JANET GUITREAU STOOD side by side on the dark back lawn of the Bennet house, drinking their neighbors’ best Cabernet. Bucky held a bottle in each hand, and so did Janet. He alternated between a swig from the left bottle and a swig from the right.

Gradually the warm, heavy rain rinsed Janet clean of Yancy and Helene.

“You were so right,” Bucky said. “They really are pussies. Did it feel as good as doing the pizza guy?”

“Oh, it felt better. It felt like a hundred times better.”

“You were really amazing.”

“I thought you might join in,” Janet said.

“I’d rather have one of my own to do.”

“Are you ready to do one of your own?”

“I might be almost ready. Things are happening to me.”

“Things are still happening to me, too,” Janet said.

“Truly? Wow. I would’ve thought you’re already … liberated.”

“You remember I watched that TV guy twice?”

“Dr. Phil?”

“Yeah. That show made no sense to me.”

“You said it was gibberish.”

“But now I understand. I’m starting to find myself.”

“Find yourself—in what sense?” Bucky asked.

Janet tossed an empty wine bottle onto the lawn.

She said, “My purpose, my meaning, my place in the world.”

“That sounds good.”

“It is good. I’m quickly discovering my PCVs.”

“What’re they?”

“My personal core values. You can’t be of use to yourself or to the community until you live faithfully by your PCVs.”

Bucky pitched an empty wine bottle across the yard. He had drunk more than a bottle and a half of wine in ten minutes, but because of his superb metabolism, he would be lucky to get a mild buzz from it.

“One of the things happening to me,” he said, “is I’m losing the education in law I got from direct-to-brain data downloading.”

“You’re the district attorney,” she said.

“I know. But now I’m not sure what habeas corpus means.”

“It means ‘have the body.’ It’s a writ requiring a person to be brought to a court or a judge before his liberty can be restrained. It’s a protection against illegal imprisonment.”

“Seems stupid.”

“It is stupid,” Janet agreed.

“If you just kill him, you don’t have to bother with the judge, the court, or the prison.”

“Exactly.” Janet finished the last of her wine and discarded the second bottle. She began to undress.

“What’re you doing?” Bucky asked.

“I need to be na*ed when I kill the next ones. It feels right.”

“Does it feel right just for the next house or is it maybe one of your personal core values?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it is a PCV. I’ll have to wait and see.”

Toward the back of the yard, a shadow moved through shadows. A pair of eyes gleamed, then faded into rain and gloom.

“What’s the matter?” Janet asked.

“I think someone’s back there in the yard, watching.”

“I don’t care. Let him watch. Modesty isn’t one of my PCVs.”

“You look good naked,” Bucky said.

“I feel good. It feels so natural.”

“That’s odd. Because we aren’t natural. We’re man-made.”

“For the first time, I don’t feel artificial,” Janet said.

“How does it feel not to feel artificial?”

“It feels good. You should get naked, too.”

“I’m not there yet,” Bucky demurred. “I still know what nolo contendere means, and amicus curiae. But, you know, as long as I keep my clothes on, I think I’m ready to kill one of them.”

CHAPTER 9

EARLIER IN THE NIGHT, arriving home to his elegant Garden District mansion, in a foul mood, Victor had savagely beaten Erika. He seemed to have had a bad day in the laboratory.

He found her eating a late dinner in the formal living room, which offended his sense of propriety. No one programmed with a deep understanding of tradition and etiquette—as Erika had been—should think that taking dinner in the living room, alone or not, would be acceptable.

“What next?” he said. “Will you toilet here?”

One of the New Race, Erika could turn off pain at will. Slapping her, punching her, biting her, Victor insisted that she endure the agony, and she obeyed.

“Perhaps you’ll learn from suffering,” he said.

Minutes after Victor went upstairs to bed, Erika’s many cuts closed. Within half an hour, the swelling around her eyes diminished. Like all of her kind, she had been engineered to heal rapidly and to live a thousand years.

Unlike the rest of her kind, Erika was permitted to experience humility, shame, and hope. Victor found tenderness and vulnerability appealing in a wife.

The day had begun with a beating, too, during morning sex. He left her racked with pain and sobbing in the bed.

Two hours later, her bruised face was as smooth and as fair as ever, though she was troubled by her failure to please him. By all biological evidence, he had been excited and fulfilled, but that must not have been the case. The beating seemed to indicate that he found her inadequate.

She was Erika Five. Four previous females, identical to her in appearance, had been cultured in the creation tanks to serve as their maker’s wife. For various reasons, they had not been satisfactory.

Erika Five remained determined not to fail her husband.

Her first day as Mrs. Helios had been characterized by numerous surprises, mystery, violence, pain, the death of a household servant, and a na*ed albino dwarf. Surely the second day, soon to begin, would be less eventful.

Recovering from the second beating, sitting in the dark on the glassed-in back porch, she drank cognac faster than her superbly engineered metabolism could burn off the alcohol. Thus far, however, in spite of the consumption of two and a half bottles, she had not been able to achieve inebriation; but she felt relaxed.

Earlier, before the rain began to fall, the albino dwarf had appeared on the rear lawn, revealed by landscape lighting, scampering from the shadows under an ancient magnolia tree to the gazebo, to the arbor draped in trumpet vines, to the reflecting pond.

Because Victor purchased and combined three grand properties, his estate was the largest in the fabled Garden District. The expansive grounds gave an inquisitive albino dwarf numerous corners to explore.

Eventually, this strange visitor had noticed her behind the big windows on the dark porch. He had come close to the glass, they had exchanged only a few words, and Erika had felt an inexplicable sympathy for him.

Although the dwarf was not a guest of whom Victor was likely to approve, Erika nevertheless had a duty to treat visitors with grace. She was Mrs. Helios, after all, the wife of one of the most prominent men in New Orleans.

After telling the dwarf to wait, she went to the kitchen and filled a wicker picnic hamper with cheese, roast beef, bread, fruit, and a chilled bottle of Far Niente Chardonnay.

When she had stepped outside with the hamper, the frightened creature hurried to a safe distance. She placed the offering on the lawn and returned to the porch, to her cognac.

Eventually, the dwarf came back for the hamper, and then hurried away into the night with it.

Needing little sleep, Erika remained on the porch, wondering at these events. When the rain came, her contemplative mood deepened.

Now, less than half an hour after the rainfall began, the dwarf returned through the down-pour. He carried the half-finished bottle of Chardonnay.

From the small red-and-white-checkered tablecloth that had lined the picnic hamper, he had fashioned a sarong that fell from his waist to his ankles, suggesting that he had not been running na*ed through the night by choice. He stood at the glass door, gazing at her.

Although in fact he was not a dwarf but something strange, and though she previously decided that troll described him better than any other word, Erika wasn’t afraid of him. She gestured to him to join her on the dark porch, and he opened the door.

CHAPTER 10

WHEN ANNUNCIATA’S FACE FADED entirely from the computer screen in the networking room, Deucalion quickly plucked the oxygen-infusion lines from the four additional glass cylinders, putting a merciful end to the imprisonment and the existence of the other disembodied Alpha brains, whatever their function.

Lester, the Epsilon-class maintenance man who had accompanied him down from the main lab, watched with obvious longing.

Members of the New Race were created with a proscription against suicide. They were incapable of killing themselves or one another, just as they were incapable of striking out against their maker.

Lester met Deucalion’s stare and said, “You aren’t forbidden?”

“Only to strike at my maker.”

“But … you’re one like us.”

“No. I’m long before all of you. I’m his first.”

Lester considered this, then raised his eyes to the blank screen where Annunciata had once appeared. Like a cow chewing its cud, his Epsilon-class brain processed what he had been told.

“Dead and alive,” he said.

“I will destroy him,” Deucalion promised.

“What will the world be like … without Father?” Lester wondered.

“For you, I don’t know. For me … it will be a world made not bright but brighter, not clean but cleaner.”

Lester raised his hands and stared at them. “Sometimes, when I don’t have no work to do, I scratch myself till I bleed, then I watch myself heal, then I scratch till I bleed some more.”

“Why?”

Shrugging, Lester said, “What else is there to do? My job is me. That’s the program. Seeing blood makes me think about the revolution, the day we get to kill them all, and then I feel better.” He frowned. “Can’t be a world without Father.”

“Before he was born,” Deucalion said, “there was a world. It will go on without him.”

Lester thought about that, but then shook his head. “A world without Father scares me. Don’t want to see it.”

“Well, then you won’t.”

“Problem is … like all of us, I’m made strong.”

“I’m stronger,” Deucalion assured him.

“Problem is, I’m quick, too.”

“I’m quicker.”

Deucalion took a step back from Lester and, with a quantum trick, wound up not farther from him but closer to him, no longer in front of him, but behind him.

From Lester’s perspective, Deucalion had vanished. Startled, the janitor stepped forward.

Behind Lester, Deucalion stepped forward, too, snaked his right arm around the other’s neck, his left arm around the head. As the janitor, with his strong hands, tried to claw loose of the death grip, Deucalion wrenched with such force that the Epsilon’s spine shattered. Instant brain death precluded any healing, rapid or otherwise.

Gently, Deucalion lowered Lester to the floor. He knelt beside the cadaver. Neither of the janitor’s two hearts continued beating. His eyes did not track his executioner’s hand, and his eyelids did not resist the fingers that tenderly closed them.

“Not dead and alive,” Deucalion said. “Only dead and safe now … beyond despair and beyond your maker’s fury.”

Rising from his knees in the basement networking room, Deucalion reached his full height in the main laboratory, at Victor’s U-shaped workstation, where his search had been interrupted by Lester and then by Annunciata.

Earlier in the night, from Pastor Kenny Laffite—a creation of Victor’s, whose program had been breaking down—Deucalion had learned that at least two thousand of the New Race were passing as ordinary people in the city. Pastor Kenny, who was now at peace like Lester, also said the creation tanks in the Hands of Mercy could produce a new crop of his kind every four months, over three hundred annually.

More important was Kenny’s revelation that a New Race farm, somewhere outside the city, might go into operation within the next week. Two thousand creation tanks, under a single roof, would produce six thousand in the first year. Yet another such farm was rumored to be under construction.