Dead and Alive

that will be relayed by satellite to everyone made of New Race flesh, to every meat machine that walks. And you will fall down dead.”
    They appeared convinced. Yet not one spoke.
    Victor smiled, anticipating triumph in spite of their silence. “Did you think a god would die alone?”
    “Not a god as cruel as you,” Deucalion said.
    When several in the crowd cried out that he should be cast into the pit, Victor promised them a new beginning, reparations, freedom. But they would not listen, the fools, the ignorant swine.
    Suddenly, from behind the mountain of garbage beside the grave, a creature of great radiant beauty appeared. Oh, graceful it was, its form exquisite, its nature mysterious yet beguiling in every aspect, and he could see that the crowd, too, was in awe of it.
    But when he appealed to it, asking it to persuade the crowd to have mercy, the Being changed. Over him now loomed a beast that even he, Victor Frankenstein, in his ferocious quest for absolute control of human biology, could never have imagined. This thing was so hideous, so monstrous, so suggestive of chaos and violence in every smallest detail that Victor could neither repress a scream nor prevent it from escalating wildly.
    The beast approached. Victor retreated to thebrink. Only when he fell into the foulness at the bottom of the grave did he realize with what putrid materials his last bed had been so richly prepared.
    Above, the hateful presence began to push the heaped garbage back into the pit from which it had been extracted. Every foulness imaginable rained down on Victor, drove him to his knees in the even greater foulness under him. And as an avalanche of suffocating filth poured onto him, something spoke within his mind. Its message was not in words or images, appeared instead as a sudden dark knowledge that was at once translatable:
Welcome to Hell
.

    ERIKA FOUR WATCHED as the radiant and enchanting Resurrector moved back from the great landslide of garbage that it had instigated, and Deucalion threw the switch that delivered a death jolt to Victor at the bottom of his final resting place.
    She looked around at all the New Race and said, “Peace at last,” and they replied as one, “Peace.”
    Half a minute later, the Resurrector and everyone in the gallery fell dead as stones, except Deucalion, Carson, Michael, and Duke, who were not creatures of the New Race flesh.

    IN THE SUV in front of the tank farm, Erika Five had a sudden premonition of death, and reached out to Jocko.
    From his tortured expression, she knew that thesame premonition had stricken him, and he grasped hold of her.
    In the instant that they clasped hands, the storm that had thus far been without pyrotechnics abruptly exploded with lightning. The sky flared violently, and the focus of Nature’s sudden fury seemed to be the GL550. Barrages of thunderbolts slammed into the pavement around the vehicle, so numerous and so perfectly encircling that from every window nothing could be seen of the night or the land or the tank farm, only a screen of light so bright that Jocko and Erika bowed their heads. And though neither of them spoke, they both heard the same three words and somehow knew that the other had heard them as well:
Be not afraid
.

    DEUCALION TURNED to Carson and Michael. “You pledged to fight at my side, and fight you did. The world has gained a little time. We destroyed the man … but his ideas did not die with him. There are those who would deny free will to others … and there are too many willing to surrender their free will, in every sense of its meaning.”
    “Busting bad guys is easy,” Carson said, “compared to fighting bad ideas. Fighting ideas … that’s a life’s work.”
    Deucalion nodded. “So let’s live long lives.”
    Making the
Star Trek
greeting sign, Michael said, “And prosper.”
    Picking up Duke as if he were a lap dog, the giantcradled the shepherd in his right arm and with his left hand rubbed its tummy. “I’ll walk with you to the surface, bring Arnie from Tibet, then it’s good-bye. I need to find a new retreat, where I can say my thanks, and think about these two hundred years and what they’ve meant.”
    “And maybe we could see the coin trick once more,” Michael said.
    Deucalion regarded them both in silence for a moment. “I could show you how it’s done. Such knowledge would be safe in your hands.”
    Carson knew that he meant not just the coin trick, but all that he knew—and could do.