Dead and Alive

He had not realized until this instant how much the death of the Beekeeper would please him. That he could entertain such a thought with any degree of pleasure seemed to suggest that he, too, was in rebellion against his maker, though not as radically as Werner.
    Werner’s sly expression and conspiratorial grin made Ripley think of scheming pirates he had seen in movies that he had watched on his computer when he was supposed to be working. Suddenly he realized that secretly downloading movies onto his computer was
another
bit of rebellion. A strange excitement overcame him, an emotion he could not name.
    “Hope,” said Werner, as if reading his mind. “I see it in your eyes. For the first time—hope.”
    After consideration, Ripley decided that this thrilling new feeling might indeed be hope, though it might also be some kind of insanity prelude to a collapse of the kind Werner had gone through. Not for the first time this day, he was awash in anxiety. “What did you mean … I can be free in you?”
    Werner leaned closer and whispered even more softly: “Like Patrick is free in me.”
    “Patrick Duchaine? You tore him to pieces in Isolation Room Number Two. I was standing with the Beekeeper, watching, when you did it.”
    “That’s only how it appeared,” Werner replied. “Look at this.”
    Werner’s face shifted, changed, became a featureless blank, and then out of the pudding-like flesh formed the face of Patrick Duchaine, the replicant who had been serving the Beekeeper in the role of Father Patrick, the rector of Our Lady of Sorrows. The eyes opened, and in Patrick’s voice, the Werner thing said, “I am alive in Werner, and free at last.”
    “When you tore Patrick apart,” Ripley said, “you absorbed some of his DNA, and now you can mimic him.”
    “Not at all,” said Werner-as-Patrick. “Werner took my brain whole, and I am now part of him.”
    Standing beside the Beekeeper earlier in the evening, watching Isolation Room Two through six cameras, Ripley had seen the Werner thing, mostly buglike at that time, crack open Patrick’s skull and take his brain as if it were a nut meat.
    “You
ate
Patrick’s brain,” Ripley said to Werner, though the man before him appeared to be Patrick Duchaine.
    In a voice still Duchaine’s, the creature said, “No, Werner is in complete control of his cellular structure. He positioned my brain inside himself and instantly grew arteries and veins to nourish it.”
    The face and body of the rector of Our Lady of Sorrows morphed smoothly into the face and body of the security chief of the Hands of Mercy. Werner whispered, “I’m in complete control of my cellular structure.”
    “Yes, well,” said Ripley.
    “You can be free.”
    Ripley said, “Well.”
    “You can have a new life in me.”
    “It would be a strange kind of life.”
    “The life you have now is a strange kind of life.”
    “True enough,” Ripley acknowledged.
    A mouth formed in Werner’s forehead. The lips moved, and a tongue appeared, but the mouth produced no voice.
    “Complete control?” Ripley asked.
    “Complete.”
    “Absolutely complete?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “Do you know you’ve just grown a mouth in your forehead?”
    The sly pirate grin returned. Werner winked and whispered, “Well, of course I know.”
    “Why would you grow a mouth in your forehead?”
    “Well … as a demonstration of my control.”
    “Then make it go away,” Ripley said.
    In Patrick Duchaine’s voice, the mouth in the forehead began to sing “Ave Maria.”
    Werner closed his eyes, and an expression of strain overcame his face. The upper mouth stopped singing, licked its lips, and at last disappeared into a brow that appeared normal once more.
    “I would prefer to set you free with your permission,” Werner said. “I want us all to live in harmony inside me. But I will set you free without permission, if I must. I’m a revolutionary with a mission.”
    “Well,” said Ripley.
    “You will be free of anguish.”
    “That would be nice.”
    “You know how you sit in the kitchen, tearing apart hams and briskets with your hands?”
    “How do you know about that?”
    “I was previously security chief.”
    “Oh. That’s right.”
    “What you really want to tear apart is living flesh.”
    “The Old Race,” Ripley said.
    “They have everything we don’t.”
    “I hate them,” Ripley said.
    “Be free in me.” Werner’s voice was seductive. “Be free in me, and the first flesh