Dead and Alive

the trees as if to throttle the life from them. The world was wild and violent and strange.
    The troll walked on his hands, down the center line of the highway.
    When she could no longer hear the S600 above the wind roar, Erika glanced back, watching the distant taillights until they were out of sight.
    The troll capered in a serpentine pattern, lane to lane, pausing now and then to spring off the pavement and kick his heels together.
    Wind danced with the night, anointed the earth with rain, inspired the trees to celebrate. The world was free and exuberant and wondrous.
    Erika rose onto the points of her toes, spread her arms wide, took a deep breath of the wind, and stood for a moment in expectation of the twirl.

CHAPTER 67
    AS THE LANDFILL was encircled by a formidable fence, so was the tank farm. Instead of three staggered rows of loblolly pines, there were clusters of live oaks festooned with moss.
    The sign at the entry gate identified the resident corporation as GEGENANGRIFF , German for
counterattack
, Victor’s little joke, as his life was dedicated to an assault against the world.
    The main building covered over two acres: a two-story brick structure with clean modern lines. Because every policeman, public official, and bureaucrat in the parish was a replicant, he’d had no trouble with building-code requirements, building inspections, or government approvals.
    He opened the rolling iron gate with his remote control and parked in the underground garage.
    The experience at the rest area had blown away thelast clinging doubts that made him wary of returning to the farm. He’d been spared from a murderous creation of his own, Chameleon, by the mutant being that had evolved out of Jonathan Harker, who himself was one of the New Race. To Victor, this strongly suggested—nay, confirmed beyond question—that the entire New Race enterprise was so brilliantly conceived and so powerfully executed that within it had evolved a system of synchronicity that would ensure that errors in the project, if any, would self-correct.
    Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychologist, had theorized that synchronicity, a word he invented for remarkable coincidences that have profound effects, is an acausal connecting principle that can in strange ways impose order on our lives. Victor enjoyed Jung’s work, though he would have liked to rewrite all the man’s essays and books, to bring to them a far greater depth of insight than poor Carl possessed. Synchronicity was not integral to the universe, as Carl believed, but sprang up only during those certain periods in certain cultures when human endeavor was as close to fully rational as it would ever get. The more rational the culture, the more likely that synchronicity would arise as a means of correcting what few errors the culture committed.
    Victor’s implementation of the New Race and of his vision for a unified world was so rational, was worked out in such exquisitely logical detail, that a system of synchronicity evolved within it while he wasn’t looking. Something had gone wrong with the creation tanks at the Hands of Mercy without any indication toVictor, and before more imperfect New Race models could be produced, Deucalion appeared after two centuries to burn down the facility—an incredible coincidence indeed! Deucalion assumed that he was destroying Victor, when instead he was preventing more flawed models of the New Race from being produced, forcing Victor to use only the vastly improved creation tanks at the farm. Synchronicity had corrected the error. And no doubt synchronicity would deal with Deucalion, as well, and clean up other minor annoyances—Detectives O’Connor and Maddison, among others—that might otherwise inhibit Victor in his ever more rapid march toward absolute dominance of all things.
    With Victor’s unstoppable drive for power, with his singular intellect, with his cold materialism and his ruthless practicality, and now with synchronicity on his side, he had become untouchable, immortal.
    He was immortal.
    He took the elevator from the parking garage to the tank fields on the main floor. When the doors opened and he stepped through, he found the entire staff, sixty-two of the New Race, waiting for him, as throughout the ages commoners have gathered along streets to bask in the glory of passing royalty or to honor great political leaders whose courage and commitment those drudges of the proletariat could never hope to match.
    Having stood in the