Dead and Alive

is
orgasm
.
    Its entire body spasms. In orgasm, it is as fully in touch with its body as it will ever be—but, strangely, at the same time seems to escape its body and for a minute or two is not itself, is not anything, is only pleasure.
    After the phone call, the PUZZLE sits in silence again.
    Chameleon was a long time in the cold. A long time in the imprisoning polymeric-fabric sack.
    Now it is warm.
    Under the pleasing scent, the infuriating scent.
    Chameleon wants an orgasm. Chameleon wants an orgasm. Chameleon wants an orgasm.

CHAPTER 63
    UNDER THE DUMP , Carson and Michael and Deucalion followed the landfill workers and the resurrected Alphas along a passageway that branched off the main course. It would lead them out of the landfill and under the tank farm next door.
    Ahead of them, torchlight ignited faux fire across the glazed curves of the tunnel. Because they were at the end of the procession, an inky gloom pooled behind them.
    The Resurrector was far in front. Perhaps it had already entered the main building at the tank farm.
    Carson had no concern about the darkness at her back. Here, in the warren of their monstrously strange accomplice, they were safer than they had been in a long time.
    “What it does telepathically,” Deucalion said, “is project its inner nature in order to screen from us itsphysical appearance, because it would be impossible for most people who see it to believe it’s benign.”
    Like Carson, Deucalion and Michael had been suspicious of the telepathically projected image and had been strong-willed enough to peer through the Resurrector’s radiant veil to the truth of its form. Deucalion had seen it twice, once for perhaps half a minute.
    Michael achieved only the brief glimpse that Carson had seen. In spite of his tendency toward cynicism, he was convinced that the creature could be trusted, that it was allied with them. “If not, it could have killed us all back there, as big and powerful as it is.”
    “None of the landfill workers saw through its disguise or even suspects there is one,” Deucalion said. “I doubt that the Alphas, Erika Four and the others, have any suspicion, either. They and the Resurrector are of the same flesh that Victor engineered for the New Race, and perhaps that renders them more susceptible than we are to its masquerade.”
    “I was plenty susceptible,” Michael said. “I felt as if I was in an anteroom of Heaven, getting a pep talk from an archangel while waiting for judgment.”
    “Why make a thing that looks … like that?” Carson wondered.
    Deucalion shook his head. “That it should look like that was not Victor’s plan. Physiologically, it’s a gone-wrong. In its mind, in its intentions, it’s a gone-
right.”
    The tunnel ceased to pass through compacted trash. Abruptly, its walls were formed of earth, coatedwith the glossy material that had sealed over the trash in the main passageway and in the first part of this one.
    The Resurrector was a digger of considerable industry.
    “Will he really come here?” Carson wondered.
    “He will,” Deucalion assured her.
    “But Erika Four says she’s called him twice. He knows she’s up here somewhere, reanimated. He knows something unprecedented must be happening.”
    As Deucalion looked down at her, the light of the centuries-old storm throbbed through his eyes. “He’ll come nevertheless. He’s got too much invested in the tank farm, a new crop birthing in less than twenty-four hours. Mercy gone, this is his best bet. He’s arrogant and insanely certain of himself. Never forget the pride that drives him. Perhaps in all of history, there has been only one other whose pride was greater than Victor’s.”
    Maybe the caffeine tide pulsing through Carson was brewing up new symptoms or maybe sleep deprivation torqued her mind in spite of the NoDoz-cola cocktails. Whatever the cause, a fresh anxiety began to pluck at her. She was not a seer, not a Gypsy with one eye in the future, but a prickly intuition warned her that even if Victor died in the next few hours, the world he wanted to make was a world of which others dreamed, as well, a world in which human exceptionalism was denied, in which the masses were regimented drones who served an untouchable elite, in which flesh was cheap. Even if Victor received justiceand a grave in garbage, Carson and Michael were going to be making a life together in a world ever more hostile to freedom, to human dignity, to love.
    As they reached