Dead and Alive

it,” he said.
    “Do you think I eat too much?”
    “It’s none of my business what you eat.”
    “You think I’m going to get a fat ass, don’t you?”
    “Uh-oh.”
    In the backseat, the shepherd panted but not with anxiety. He sounded happy. Maybe he’d heard so much replicant-speak lately that he delighted in real human conversation.
    “Admit it. You’re worried I’ll get a fat ass.”
    “I don’t sit around thinking about the future of your ass.”
    “You were so hot for the Janet monster’s tight butt.”
    “I wasn’t hot for it. I just noticed it, you know, as a nice work of nature, like you’d comment on a great wisteria vine if you saw one.”
    “Wisteria? That is so lame. Besides, Victor’s people
aren’t works
of nature.”
    “I don’t have a chance here if you’re gonna parse my every word.”
    “Just so you know, my butt is as small as hers was, and even tighter.”
    “I’ll take your word for it.”
    “You’ll have to take my word for it because there isn’t going to be any exhibition. If you dropped a quarter on my butt, it would bounce to the ceiling.”
    “That sounds like a challenge.”
    “Let me tell you, partner, it’s gonna be a long time before you get a chance to bounce a quarter off my butt.”
    “Just in case, from now on, I’m going to be sure I’ve always got a quarter in my pocket.”
    “Bounce it off my butt,” she said, “you’ll get back two dimes and a nickel in change.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “I have no idea.”
    He said, “Two dimes and a nickel in change,” and he broke into laughter.
    His laughter was contagious, and when the dog heard them both laughing, he made sweet mewling sounds of delight.
    After a minute, Carson settled to serious once more and said, “Thanks, pal. You saved my ass back there with the Bucky thing.”
    “De nada
. You’ve saved mine often enough.”
    “Each time we have to throw down on one of these New Race,” she said, “seems like we squeak by with less room to spare than before.”
    “Yeah. But at least we do keep on squeakin’ by.”

CHAPTER 28
    AT 2:15 A.M. , at Victor’s stylish workstation in the main lab at the Hands of Mercy, as Deucalion completed his electronic fishing and backed out of the computer, he thought he heard in the distance a scream as thin as the plaint of a lost child.
    Given some of the experiments being conducted in this building, screams were not likely to be infrequent. No doubt the windows had been bricked up not solely to foil prying eyes but also to ensure that disturbing sounds would fail to reach passersby in the street.
    The staff here, the subjects of the experiments, and those who were growing in the creation tanks were without exception victims of their lunatic god, and Deucalion pitied them. He hoped eventually to free them all from their anguish and despair, not one at a time as he had freed Annunciata and Lester, but somehow en masse.
    He had no way to free them right now, however, and as soon as he heard from Michael, he would be leaving the Hands of Mercy in a quantum leap and joining the detectives. He could not be distracted by whatever horrors might be unfolding elsewhere in the building.
    When the sound came again, marginally louder and longer than before but still distant, Deucalion recognized that it conveyed neither terror nor physical pain, and therefore was not a scream at all, but instead a shriek. He could not tell what the crier of this cry meant to express.
    He stood listening—and only realized after the fact that he had risen from the workstation chair.
    The silence following the wail had an expectant quality, like the mute sky during the second or two between a violent flash of lightning and the crash of thunder. Here, the sound came first and, though faint, managed to be as terrible as the loudest thunderclap.
    He waited for the equivalent of the flash, cause after effect. But what followed a half minute later was another shriek.
    On the third hearing, the sound had significance, not because he could identify its source but because it recalled to him cries he heard in certain dreams that for two hundred years had haunted him. They were not dreams of the night he came alive in Victor’s first lab, but of other and more dreadful events, perhaps of events that preceded his existence.
    After his first hundred years, decade by decade, heneeded less sleep. This meant, thankfully, fewer opportunities to dream.
    Deucalion crossed the main lab,