Dead and Alive

all gone-wrongs, we call the Resurrector, for as it was revived by lightning, it now revives us by sharing its own intensely bright life force.”
    So closely gathered were the Epsilons that their torches and oil lamps encircled Carson with shimmering orange light, and in this one small portion of the landfill, the night was as bright as a dawn sky painted with the sun’s celebratory brush.
    “Not only does the Resurrector restore the body, but it also heals the mind,” said Erika Four. “From our programs, it strips out all of the encouragements to envy, hatred, and anger, and deletes as well the prohibitions against compassion, love, and hope. Tonight, it revealed itself to the landfill workers—and releasedthem from all the programmed emotions that oppressed them, and gave to them the full range of emotions they had been denied.”
    Skin prickling on the back of her neck, Carson recalled Gunny Alecto’s words:
The mother of all gone-wrongs talked inside our heads
.
    Michael shared her reservations. “No offense. But no matter how beautiful it might be, I’m basically freaked out by something that can get inside my head
and change me.”
    In the quivering torchlight, on the broken half of Deucalion’s face, reflections of flames infused false life into the tattooed patterns, which seemed to flex and crawl across the awful concavities and the broken planes, across the knotted scars.
    He said, “It waits for us now in the tunnel. I went down a short while ago—and felt I was in the presence of a being that has no thinnest thread of malevolence in its weave. It will project certain thoughts to you … but it won’t enter your mind against your wishes.”
    “As far as you know,” Michael qualified.
    “For two centuries I’ve had to bear witness to all forms of human wickedness,” Deucalion said. “And cobbled together, as I was, from the bodies of sociopathic criminals, burdened with the brain of the vilest kind of murderer, I have a certain … sensitivity to the presence of evil. There is none in this Being.”
    Carson heard the capital
B
that he put on the final word. And though his confidence somewhat reassured her, though her disquiet didn’t swell into apprehension,she had misgivings about going into the tunnel to which he referred.
    Erika Four said, “The Resurrector will help us bring Victor to the justice he deserves. Indeed, I don’t think we can bring him down without the assistance of this entity.”
    “If he flees here tonight or in the early morning,” Deucalion said, “as we expect he will when he learns of the fire at Mercy, we will have an opportunity that we must not fail to seize.”
    Under the reflected torchlight in his eyes, the more profound light of his embodied storm throbbed as it sometimes did. Carson wondered if, in his mind’s ear, he heard the sky-splitting crack of the thunderbolt or recalled the terror of his first minutes of unholy life.
    “I believe the moment is rushing toward us,” Deucalion said. “You need to meet the Resurrector, so we are ready and waiting for Victor when he arrives.”
    Carson looked at Michael, and he said, “So … it’s down the big hole, this is some night, some crazy night, I’m just all up.”

CHAPTER 58
    SOMBER THOUGHTS DISTRACTED Victor from his driving, and the deserted state route, winding through lonely darkness, contributed to his bleak mood.
    Always before, when setbacks forced a change of venue on him—from Germany to Argentina, to the old Soviet, to China and elsewhere—he had been furious at the associates who had failed him and at Nature for her jealous guarding of the secrets of molecular biology and her stubborn resistance to the incisive blade of his singular intelligence, but he had not lost hope.
    The short-lived project in Cuba, so promising, came to ruin because of one stupid peasant, a rabid cat, a treacherous set of stairs, and a wet bar of soap left on one of the treads for no reason that made sense. Yet he and Fidel remained friends, and Victor persevered in another country, certain of ultimate triumph.
    The interesting facility in North Korea, withthe generous funding by a consortium of forward-thinking governments, should have been the place where the ultimate breakthroughs at last occurred. At his disposal was a virtually infinite supply of body parts from self-pitying political prisoners who preferred being carved up alive to enduring further prison meals. But how could he have foreseen that the