City of Night

hold fast to even the meager knowledge and modest standards of deportment that had been downloaded into their brains while they had been in their tanks.
    After the interments, the crew would feast, drink very much, and have sex. They would eat hungrily at the start, and soon they would be tearing at their food, gorging with abandon. The liquor would flow directly from bottle to mouth, mixed with nothing, undiluted, to maximize and accelerate its effect. The sex would be eager and selfish, then insistent and angry, then savage, no desire unindulged, no sensation unexperienced.
    They would find relief from loneliness, meaninglessness. But the relief came only during the feeding, during the drinking and the sex. After, the anguish would return like a hammer, driving the nail deeper, deeper, deeper. Which they always forgot. Because they needed to forget.
    At this moment, Gunny Alecto and other crewmen were at the walk-in cooler, loading the five human bodies and three dead gone-wrongs onto a pair of small, open-bed, four-wheel-drive trucks that would convey them to the site of the ceremony. The Old Race cadavers would be on one truck, the gone-wrongs on another.
    The Old Race dead would be transported with less respect than gone-wrongs received, in fact with no respect at all. Their bodies would be subjected to grotesque indignities.
    In the class structure of the New Race, the Epsilons had no one to whom they could feel superior—except those of the Old Race. And in these interment ceremonies, they expressed a hatred of such purity and such long-simmering reduction that no one in the history of the earth had ever despised more intensely, loathed more ferociously, or abominated their enemy with greater fury.
    Some fun tonight.
     
     
     

Chapter 45
     
    At the Hands of Mercy, none of the three isolation rooms had been designed to contain a deadly disease, for Victor did not have an interest in the engineering of microorganisms. There was no danger whatsoever that he would accidentally create a deadly new virus or bacterium.
    Consequently, the twenty-by-fifteen-foot chamber that he chose for Werner was not surrounded by a positive-pressure envelope to prevent the escape of airborne microbes and spoors. Neither did it have its own self-contained ventilation system.
    The isolation room had been meant solely to contain any New Race variant—he experimented with some exotic ones—that Victor suspected might prove difficult to manage and any that unexpectedly exhibited antisocial behavior of a lethal nature.
    Therefore, the walls, ceiling, and floor of the chamber were of poured-in-place, steel-reinforced concrete to a thickness of eighteen inches. The interior surfaces had been paneled with three overlapping layers of quarter-inch steel plate.
    If necessary, a killing electrical charge could be introduced into those steel plates with the flip of the switch in the adjoining monitor room.
    Sole access to the isolation chamber was through a transition module between it and the monitor room.
    The staff sometimes referred to it as the air lock, although this inaccurate term annoyed Victor. No atmosphere changes occurred during the use of the transition module, and there was not even a simple recycling of air.
    The module featured two round steel doors that had been made for bank vaults. By design, it was mechanically impossible to have both doors open at the same time; therefore, when the inner door opened, a prisoner of the isolation chamber might get into the vestibule, but it could not break through into the monitor room.
    On a gurney, his flesh undergoing cellular breakdown if not even molecular reorganization, Werner had been rushed through the halls of Mercy, into the monitor room, through the module, into the isolation chamber, with Victor urging the attendants to “hurry, faster, damn you, run! ”
    The staff might have thought that blind panic had seized their maker, but Victor couldn’t concern himself with what they thought. Werner had been secured in that fortresslike cell, which was all that mattered.
    When the hand had formed out of the amorphous flesh of Werner’s torso, it had taken hold of Victor’s hand tenderly, beseechingly. But the initial docility dared not be taken as a reliable prediction of a benign transformation.
    Nothing remotely like this had ever happened before. Such a sudden collapse of cellular integrity accompanied by self-driven biological reformation should not be possible.
    Common