Resurrection, Inc.

16

Danal kept running by instinct. Enforcer hovercars soared overhead, skimming the tops of the buildings, converging near Resurrection, Inc. If he concentrated, Danal could still hear the sounds of the angry mob even above the background noises of the city.

Danal wondered when the Enforcers would send out special tracker teams to locate him. Or would they even bother? Would they assume he was dead? Had they even discovered that Danal had been the cause of the uprising?

The Servant stumbled into a residential area of towering condominium buildings. The streets—all of which had been named after extinct wildflowers—looped about in a conscious attempt to break the illusion of a geometrically ordered city.

Danal wished he could see through the buildings, look straight down the convoluted streets. Julia remained out there somewhere. He had seen her—a Servant like himself. But was she Julia? Or was the true Julia gone, leaving only a walking body behind? He could remember the last time he had seen her—the real Julia. The memory had returned now, if he could find it, if he was able to dig through the pain….

She had been sitting across from him in the formal dining room of the Van Ryman mansion, resting both elbows on the tablecloth. They were laughing. It had started out as an argument, but they had consciously steered the conversation to more lighthearted things.

They talked and drank cheap pink champagne—Julia liked cheap pink champagne. Their two new Servants, a male and a female, stood attentively outside the door of the formal dining room. Danal—the real Vincent Van Ryman—had purchased the Servants to allow him more time alone with Julia, now that he had given up all his neo-Satanist activities. Danal/Van Ryman hadn’t noticed that the Servants’ eyes looked too attentive, that their thoughts seemed too alert.

Julia giggled, but then stopped laughing abruptly. Van Ryman looked up and saw that the room had gone blurry, and the champagne suddenly had an awful aftertaste of chemicals. The world went out of focus, and then faded to black….

He had awakened in the artificially dank stone Sabbat chamber underneath the mansion. Manacled to the walls—it all seemed weirdly Gothic and melodramatic. Francois Nathans was there, and Julia was not.

“Julia? What happened to Julia?”

Nathans made a wry scowl. “Oh how noble of you to think of the poor lady first, Vincent. She’s already dead—dumped on the street and deleted from The Net. But you’re a much bigger PR item. Our first ‘Traitor to the Faith.’ I couldn’t have dreamed up a better unifying force if I’d tried. We’ll have a special Sabbat in your honor, Vincent, and no one will know the difference… because you aren’t you anymore.” Nathans laughed. “Oh boy, we’re going to milk this for all it’s worth!”

Vincent Van Ryman pulled against his chains, and felt cold as he slowly reached forward to touch his face—

Then Danal slammed the door on the clamoring memories, holding them at bay for later, making them wait. Until it was safe.

The Servant found himself careening down one of the winding streets where the backs of the condominium buildings butted up against each other. He could see the worn fences of the lucky first-level dwellers who had their own yardlets fenced into little honeycombs. The denizens of the upper stories had to remain content with small terraces above, looking down at the ground.

Unseen behind one open patio window came the shouts of two men and one woman arguing in a language Danal could not identify. On another patio an older couple lay on stained chaise lounges, stretched out, motionless next to each other.

Danal felt exhausted, with the world pounding around him, too much happening all at once. His head buzzed with the reality that had just struck him, from the events that in such a short time had changed him from a normal, obedient Servant to a renegade.

He leaned against the fence, sheltered by a large garbage receptacle and the shadow of the twin condominium buildings. Resting for a moment…

Danal took a deep breath and let the nightmares come to him. He was afraid at first, but he opened the door quickly and snapped it shut again, allowing only the first memory—the last memory—to come out.

“Rah hyuun!”

“Rah hyuun!”

The ritual chanting filled the air with a drone like a locomotive, augmented by the chain of speakers around the grotto ceiling.

Vincent Van Ryman was drugged, and he stumbled. The inside of his head felt fuzzy and his vision had narrowed to the width of a pencil shaft. Around him he saw robes—white, red, black—signifying the ranks of Acolyte, Acolyte Supervisor, and Coven Manager, with various markings to indicate the sublevels of authority and mastery of neo-Satanism.

The grotto was lit by candles and red strobelights that provided a hypnotic atmosphere for the ritual, enhanced by odorless hallucinogenic drugs wafting through the enclosed air.

Danal/Van Ryman knew he was doomed, about to be sacrificed. He was not bound or restrained in any way, but he had no will to make his arms or legs move. It took all his concentration merely to remain standing or to stumble forward when someone directed him.

Nathans wasn’t there; Nathans never took part in the actual rituals. He kept his hands clean. He remained out of sight. But with Vincent Van Ryman—the former High Priest of the neo-Satanists—turned against him, Francois Nathans had yanked invisible strings, setting wheels in motion, proving to be a formidable enemy.

The ritual moved forward, but Vincent’s brain had slipped a gear, plodding ahead at a greatly reduced pace. He had conducted the chant himself a dozen times before, but now he could not remember the words, the details of the High Sabbat. Except he knew that at the culmination of the High Sabbat, someone always died.

And as he recalled this, he felt hands grasping the numb skin of his arms, roughly yet gently. Red-robed men urged him toward the poured-stone altar into which had been molded various signs and symbols. In a corner of his mind he remembered designing many of those symbols himself.

Van Ryman could not resist. His arms slowly moved up to fend them off, but he felt a stinging in his neck. One of the Coven Managers herding him toward the altar withdrew his finger; he saw a glint from the silver thimble needle that had been dipped in curare. Vincent knew it would take only a moment, and he felt the vestiges of his muscle control dissolving into mist.

He lay back, barely able to feel the roughness of the altar against his naked back. He stared up at the ceiling, originally hewn from the end of a deep subway tunnel but now embellished with papier mache stalactites.

“Rah hyuun!”

“Rah hyuun!”

Vertigo engulfed him as the chanting reached its climax. He could not move or even turn his head now. It was a major effort simply to blink his eyes.

Then the chanting stopped abruptly. The tape-recorded choir cut off, and the neo-Satanist attendees stopped their own voices a moment afterward. The hushed silence pounded at him.

Into his field of view he saw, like a mirror moving up in front of him, his own face, his stolen face, fixed with a fanatical, confident expression, looking triumphant. The real Van Ryman could see a line of faint red pinpricks along the imposter’s jaw. Then he caught the glint of orange candlelight on the edge of the wide, rune-marked sacrificial dagger, the arthame.

The imposter spoke the last words, the benediction of the High Sabbat, as he brought the arthame down. “Ashes to ashes, blood to blood; fly to Hell for all our good!”

Van Ryman was not able to blink; the curare denied him even an instinctive flinch. Blackness and pain exploded outward from the center of his chest as the blade drove in….

Now, Danal came up out of the memory gasping, sucking cold air into his lungs like a drowning man clawing his way to the surface. Servants did not sweat—their body temperature was too closely regulated to make perspiration necessary—but he felt drenched with an emotional backwash.

The memory of the High Sabbat scorched the backs of his eyes, yet the pain grew more endurable. The mental ache did not fade, but he learned how to tolerate it, how to face his own past. He stepped into the middle of the winding street, leaving behind the fixation with his memories. Danal had more practical considerations for the moment.

What was he going to do now?

He couldn’t go back. He couldn’t ask for help. The imposter remained living inside Danal’s own home, playing the part of Vincent Van Ryman. Danal had no place there. The imposter had planned something, led Danal through the motions of a careful script, and he had unwittingly performed like a pre-programmed machine.

But Francois Nathans was dead at the Servant’s hands. Some of the self-directed horror faded as Danal remembered what Nathans had done to him in life, but Nathans had never been stupid. The killing had been too carefully set up, as if Nathans had specifically planned to trigger Danal’s murderous rage. As if he had a death wish, or something else in mind. Had he been trying to commit suicide? Not Nathans. Was there something more, something that Danal still could not see even with the restoration of his memories?

The Servant finally began to heed the pain in his shoulder. He cocked his head and looked down at the torn gray material of his jumpsuit, at the cut-meat remains of his shoulder where the shrapnel had struck him. Clear, saplike synBlood oozed from the wound.

Doctor. Medical attention. He would have to be repaired. Servants had difficulty healing themselves. The synthetic blood did carry micro-platelets to dissolve and coagulate, sealing leaks upon exposure to air, much like some antifreeze solutions sealed mechanical leaks. But the wound sealants in synBlood were not very efficient, good mostly for minor injuries. After all, if a Servant was too badly damaged, an owner could just get a new one.

The slow healing might be Danal’s greatest danger, letting him bleed to death before he could adequately seal off the injury. Even in that case, the synHeart would dutifully keep beating, and the microprocessor would continue to drive his brain while the bloodless body burned itself out.

Danal searched his mind, accessing all the general information stored in the microprocessor until he found the implanted map of the Metroplex. Inside his head Danal located the nearest medical center.

The red swath of Nathans’s blood stood out like a banner on his jumpsuit. Danal would have to explain the blood and his own injury. He wasn’t certain if the center would treat him at all. He set off, trudging down the street, mentally slowing his synHeart to retard the bleeding. He would worry about explanations later.

17

By the time Danal arrived at the medical center, he had reached the middle stages of dizzy euphoria, feeling light as air and drained of blood. The world moved slower around him.

The transplastic doors glided open in front of him, smooth and silent on their chrome tracks. He plodded into the room, peripheral vision suddenly gone fuzzy. Black spots danced in front of his eyes, like holes in the universe that winked in and out of existence.

Several Servants worked behind the expansive front counter, keying information, moving boxes, delivering papers and supplies. Other patients waited in separate privacy cubicles surrounded by bright plastic plant-things, but the reception area itself seemed relatively empty. The casualties from the street riot had apparently not yet overflowed the medical centers closer to Resurrection, Inc.

Danal shuffled up to the counter, trying to speak, but his throat was too dry. A female Servant stood with her back to him, paying no attention to his arrival. One of the fluorescent light panels overhead flickered spasmodically, as if struggling to throw out just a few more photons before the repair-rats replaced it.

An overweight nurse/tech strolled out from another corridor to meet the wounded Servant. Her hair had been dyed black and looked like plastic; her face was weighted down with so much makeup that Danal doubted he could see a square centimeter of her real skin. Thin surgical gloves covered her hands.

The nurse/tech looked at him with a puzzled, astonished expression. Dried blood from Francois Nathans stained the front of Danal’s jumpsuit, and the Servant’s own colorless synBlood darkened the fabric around his ragged wound. She spoke with a thin voice he would not have expected from her matronly body. “What do you want here, Servant? Has there been an accident?”

Danal placed a blank mask on his face and answered her calmly. “I was told to come here to be healed.” He used the last of his mental strength to wrench himself back to awareness of his surroundings.

Still not sure what to do, the nurse/tech refused to move. Then she clutched at her usual routine and stepped back behind the counter to reach a Net terminal. After hitting a few burst keys, she called up an input screen and looked at him with detached professionalism.

“Okay, how were you injured?”

Danal responded automatically with the self-programmed answer he had pounded into the front of his brain. “A riot in the streets. A stray projectile struck me. The Enforcer told me to come here.” His Servant programming rebelled, trying to deny the lie and state the bald facts, but Danal managed to control the other self.

“What’s your ID number? And who is your Master?” she asked in a flat voice, routine questions to her.

Danal balked and covered his momentary hesitation with a sigh of pain. Vincent Van Ryman was not his Master. Vincent Van Ryman was not even real, not anymore. An imposter now had the name and the physical appearance, but the real Van Ryman was dead, living again only as a simulacrum of disguised flesh, resurrected memories. Danal couldn’t give out his ID number. That would be like a beacon for anyone trying to track him down, a signal for the Enforcers and the Guardian Angels to locate him, to terminate him once and for all.

But the black dizziness swam in front of his eyes, like shark fins cutting the water of his consciousness. His synHeart labored, ready to burn out, his blood vessels running dry. Danal couldn’t worry about the future if he didn’t survive the present.

“Vincent Van Ryman. My Master is Vincent Van Ryman,” he said weakly. He stated his ID number a few digits at a time until the nurse/tech had all the information. Danal’s joints began to go haywire. For some reason his knees wobbled in and out, and he slumped against the countertop. He was oddly reminded of the moment of his rebirth, as he had emerged dripping from the vat and unable to control his own reflexes, and Rodney Quick standing there taunting him.

But Rodney Quick is dead. I killed him.

An accident.

Danal became partially aware again as the nurse/tech bellowed for one of the human orderlies. He felt a man’s ungentle grip on his waist and his uninjured arm. Their words drifted around his ears, and he was only vaguely able to comprehend them.

“Help me get him to one of the sterile rooms. Then go to the trauma chamber and find some of the extra bottles of synBlood.” (Nurse/tech.)

“Can’t he go to a repair center or something? I thought we didn’t fix Servants here.” (Orderly.)

“Consider it good practice, then.” (Nurse/tech: with cold sarcasm.)

But when Danal tried to move his legs, tried to help carry his own weight, the blackness in the air reached out to swallow him up. He reeled, and lost control of the door in his mind.

Unchecked, all the dead memories swooped after him as he fled undefended down into unconsciousness….

“I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is,” Francois Nathans had said.

It was just the start of a conversation, an exchange of ideas. But it altered the lives of Vincent Van Ryman, his father Stromgaard Van Ryman, and Nathans himself.

Young Vincent was eighteen years old at the time. He went to answer the door signal, but he knew it was Nathans even before he opened the door. Outside, the muscular and ever-watchful Servant bodyguards kept their strategic positions around the Van Ryman mansion. The bodyguards would have excluded most people—except Nathans.

With the growing blue-collar opposition to Servants and Resurrection, Inc., several terrorist attacks had been directed at the mansion itself. Perhaps the single private dwelling stated too blatantly how much wealth and success Stromgaard Van Ryman had achieved by putting blues out of work. Nathans, on the other hand, kept several dwellings, none of them elaborate and all of them very secret.

Vincent’s mother had been killed five years before, assassinated while she walked with her son on the streets. She’d fallen next to him, still trying to walk but with a half dozen projectile holes in her body. The thirteen-year-old boy realized how lucky he was to survive, and wondered if he’d be a target as well. He experienced anger and shock, but it was hard to feel deep sorrow for her. His mother had always treated Vincent as a burden, much as Stromgaard now did.

Vincent let Francois Nathans into the well-lit front hallway of the mansion, smiling as the tall man clapped him on the shoulder. “Hello, Vincent.”

Though it was dusk, they had several hours yet before Nathans would worry about the Enforcers’ curfew. Silhouetted in the dampening stillness of sunset, the Servant bodyguards stood motionless and threatening around the house.

Nathans had chosen to wear a silvery hairpiece this time; the older man wore silvery hairpieces only when he had something important on his mind.

“Where’s your father?” Nathans asked him, as if he didn’t know.

“In the study, playing Net games.” Vincent tried to keep his unconscious sneer in check. He hated how Stromgaard wasted his time, and wasted the capabilities of The Net, by using the entertainment directories and nothing else.

Vincent had watched his father slowly drift deeper into the background of running Resurrection, Inc. As the work grew more complex, it required a special kind of mind to manage it all, more than just a competent resource organizer (which, Vincent believed, was all his father could really be).

Nathans had shouldered more of the burden. While Stromgaard sulked and grumbled to himself about how Nathans was taking over what was rightfully his, the elder Van Ryman basically ignored his son.

Vincent had grown used to it over the years and trained himself to find his own means of entertainment. He had grown quite proficient in searching the databases and in doing programming. He became more and more impressed with The Net itself, finding little he could not do once he set his mind to it. He created several false identities on the electronic-mail network—not a difficult task, since some members of special-interest groups operated under pseudonyms, keeping their private lives anonymous. Vincent then carried on five different fictitious lives, all of which allowed him to look at society from different angles.

Nathans shrugged off his jacket and threw it over one arm as he strode down the hall to Stromgaard’s study. In the background, Vincent could hear some of the electronic sound effects as Stromgaard played his idiotic games. He heard a rapid succession of bleeps, then a whoosh, and then a quiet curse from his father.

Nathans waited outside the study door with a half smile on his face. He flashed Vincent a conspiratorial grimace, then entered the room.

Stromgaard did not condescend to acknowledge the other man’s presence. The elder Van Ryman always seemed to be searching for a way to annoy Nathans, but Nathans blithely ignored it, which perturbed Stromgaard even more. Sometimes his father’s childish attitude embarrassed even Vincent.

Vincent made ready to go back upstairs, where he spent most of his time. He never took part in their discussions, but this time Vincent paused on a whim and moved closer to the study as he heard Nathans’s opening gambit.

“I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is.”

Stromgaard greeted the proposal with silence, but Vincent could sense that Nathans had captured his father’s attention. The elder Van Ryman waited for him to continue.

“As the saying goes, the first priest was the first charlatan who met the first fool. We could cash in on that.”

“Why?” Stromgaard asked. “You don’t have enough money? You don’t have enough to do lording over Resurrection, Inc. all by yourself?”

Nathans smiled, sidestepping the implied accusation. “It’s not actually the money, Stromgaard. I was thinking more along the lines of something for you to do. You’re… phasing out of your duties at the corporation. You obviously need something else to occupy your time.” He pointed to the Net screen on which Stromgaard’s game score still flashed. “Annihilating alien invaders? You’re more talented than that.”

“I’m not interested in religion,” the elder Van Ryman said. “And I’m not feeling much like a messiah lately.”

“No,” Nathans countered, pacing the room, thinking out loud. “Messiahs are… boring. They’ve been done so many times, you know. I had something more in mind like… well, something new.”

Stromgaard let out an incredulous laugh. “Something new? In a religion? Have fun trying to come up with an idea.”

Nathans sat down in the overstuffed chair and poured himself a glass of the Glenlivet Stromgaard always drank. Vincent occasionally sipped a small snifter of the scotch himself, mainly when trying to be part of someone else’s conversation, but he personally disliked its pungent taste and the way it lingered for hours in the back of his mouth.

“Well,” Nathans continued, “that’s what I was hoping to discuss with you tonight. A brainstorming session, like the ones we used to have when you weren’t moping around all the time.”

“I’m fresh out of ideas. Come back some other day.” Stromgaard punched a few keys on the Net keyboard, initiating another game.

Vincent stepped into the study, and spoke up before the two older men could see him. “You could run a computer model on The Net. Have the system design the most viable new religion, given an up-to-date analysis of current events and social trends.”

His father turned away from the screen and scowled at him. “Vincent, go to your room.”

“No,” Nathans interrupted. “I’m in the mood for ideas.”

Giddy at what he was doing, Vincent continued. “I was listening, sorry. But The Net could analyze all the world’s religions, correlate the main theses that seem to have the most impact, the greatest chance of hooking new followers, and then we can put it into the context of modern-day society—create something new, but with all the good parts of the old.”

Nathans grinned at him with bright eyes. Vincent felt a warm flush, but kept his pride in check. Stromgaard turned away from the Net screen and let the video spaceships play by themselves for a moment before they all annihilated each other.

“You can’t do that,” his father said. “It’s much too complicated. We’d need an army of superhackers and programmers.”

“Give me ten minutes,” Vincent said and took his place at the keyboard. He canceled the game and stepped his way down through the menus. He paused and couldn’t resist turning to his father. “The Net is good for more than just games. You’d see that if you spent more time exploring it.”

He set a few datastrings in motion, building a broader relational file. “I’m going to run a lot of the tenets through a logic routine, and have it discard anything that really makes no sense at all.”

“Ah no, Vincent, you’re missing the point,” Nathans said. “I don’t want it to be believable, not believable in the least. There’s a larger plan at work here. I want to make our religion ridiculous, because I don’t want to mislead any intelligent people, the ones with even a modicum of potential in their cranial chambers. I want to lay a selective trap, something that only the terminally stupid will fall into. Intelligence is the only thing we’ve got that sets us apart from other animals, you know.”

Vincent blinked and nodded, but Nathans seemed to have launched into a well-rehearsed speech. “The popular religions are at the root of the problem, teaching people not to think for themselves on pain of losing their Eternal Salvation. ‘The world holds two classes of men—intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.’ A tenth-century Syrian poet wrote that.”

“Nobody will believe you,” Stromgaard said in a confident voice.

“Mankind’s track record says otherwise. Think of all the people who, despite utter and overwhelming proof to the contrary, still believe in magic apples and talking snakes to explain the creation of the world?”

“Oh, don’t even start, Francois,” Stromgaard sighed. “You’re going to give me a headache. And we’re not interested.”

“Let me make my case! I’ve done my homework because I intend to do something about this. If you’re going to help me, you have to understand my rationale.”

“Who says we’re going to help you?”

“Doesn’t it bother you that, just because the Bible happens to say the Sun goes around the Earth, the religious fanatics feel it’s their right to go out and burn astronomers at the stake for proving otherwise? It’s been done. Would you swallow a story about a fish swallowing a man, then spitting him out safe and sound three days later, never mind that the hydrochloric acid in gastric juices would eat through a tabletop in a few seconds?”

Vincent paused at the keyboard to listen, but then continued with his work, eager to show off his skill with The Net.

“It goes on and on, but let’s not just pick on Judeo-Christians,” Nathans continued. “What about Islam? One God omniscient and omnipresent, yet He seems to have a fine-tuning problem—He can’t hear your prayers unless your head points toward a particular latitude and longitude? How could anybody believe such things?”

“Like believing a man could rise from the dead?” Stromgaard retorted to the head of Resurrection, Inc., with a glint of triumph in his eye.

“Not without due process! Besides, it takes us a little longer than three days. Religion is like a wet blanket to the thinking man. In Seventeenth-Century Russia, the Eastern Orthodox Church went to war with itself over whether the faithful should make the sign of the cross using two fingers symbolizing God and Man, or three fingers for the Holy Trinity—thousands and thousands of people died in the struggle! It’s pathetically funny in a way.”

Stromgaard sighed. “That was centuries ago, Francois. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“But it hasn’t changed! The Vatican just released an announcement that people no longer need to be actually present at the Pope’s Christmas Mass to receive his blessing, because ‘improvements in technology now allow us to transmit God’s forgiveness electronically.’ And the Moslems are all excited because they’ve developed a new selective disintegrator ‘for Allah’ that’ll let them remove the fingers and hands of thieves according to Islamic law, keeping the pain but doing away with all the mess.”

Nathans shook his head wearily, as if in despair. “Progress doesn’t enlighten people—it just makes them stupid in new ways.”

Stromgaard snorted, narrowing his eyes. “You’re going off on another one of your crusades, Francois. Years and years ago you were trying to solve the world’s crime problem, and what ever became of that? Now it’s religion. Next, you’ll be working on the world food shortage. You storm ahead and argue a lot and leave us all in the dust. Why not just give it a rest?”

Nathans looked at him with a sour expression. “You must have a problem with grandiose ideas, Stromgaard. I’m giving you something to think about. Mull it over. Expand your mind. It looks like you’re getting out of practice.” He glanced around the study. “Do you have something to eat?”

“No,” Stromgaard answered flatly.

Vincent turned while The Net continued to labor. “But if you want people to expand their minds, Mr. Nathans, what’s wrong with having them ponder metaphysical things, like religion?”

“Ah, Vincent, thinking about such questions is fine, but when philosophy becomes a religion, then people stop considering the ideas and pay more attention to following ritual. Once you’re convinced that you have The Word Of God, you stop bothering to think about the details. How could a Supreme Being ever be wrong? Then your brain begins to atrophy.”

Nathans ran a fingertip along his lip, thinking. “Maybe the Eastern religions… they’re not quite so preoccupied with their own importance. Hmmmm. No, take a look at Taoism—they happily worship gods of robbery and drunkenness, and take their pick from eighty-one different heavens, while the Buddhists, being much more conservative, limit themselves to a mere thirty-one heavens. No wonder they believe in reincarnation—a poor wandering spirit can’t figure out where else to go!

“Consider some, like Orthodox Judaism, that have stagnated in their rituals and symbols. They may as well just videotape their services and play them back year after year, generation after generation. Nothing ever changes. It’s always just the same mechanical gestures, the same memorized phrases. Nothing has been brought into the context of the modern world—do they think we’re all still shepherds in the Middle East? Are we still supposed to placate the old things that used to go bump in the night?” Nathans sat down, exasperated.

“‘Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis,’ Sigmund Freud said. And he was right.”

“Got it!” Vincent interrupted, turning away from the Net terminal. Nathans looked up at him, and Stromgaard regarded his son skeptically. Vincent continued, “It’s a little bit unexpected, though. It looks something like Satanism, in an updated form.”

He pointed to the screen and listed out the results of the relational search. “You want something that the people will find exciting, something that seems slightly forbidden, which I take to mean something dark. You’ll want it to be titillating, so throw in a little racy symbolism, some suggestive rituals, maybe even sex during the high ceremonies. And you want your deity to be bigger than life, very powerful but within reach—not some ethereal, all-pervading god spirit that never interferes in the affairs of mortals. We want an Old Testament-ish dictatorial entity that rewards the faithful but does all sorts of unpleasant things to unbelievers. Try the popular conception of Satan—it all fits.”

“Satanism…” Nathans pursed his lips, considering. “But placed in a modern context, a new Satanism. Neo-Satanism! I like the sound of that.”

Stromgaard looked as if he had been left out of the decision entirely, and was about to speak up when Vincent’s enthusiasm stopped him. “Let’s do it!”

18

Later. Much later.

As if from a great distance, Vincent looked down at the victim on the altar. The young woman—formerly a student, then turned activist, and then, for some unknown reason, suddenly a fanatic neo-Satanist—lay back in anticipation, naked except for the flimsy white robe, most assuredly not a virgin. She thrust her small, not quite rounded breasts up toward him as he stood in his black High Priest robes.

They hadn’t needed any drugs with her, no tranquilizing or disorienting substances to keep her quiet through the ceremony. She lay back, grinning a self-satisfied smile, without the slightest doubt on her face, absolutely confident in her beliefs.

Vincent could hardly keep the scorn from his face. Nathans was right—how could these people be so gullible?

The candles flickered; the incense made the underground room seem too stuffy, too perfumed. Sounds echoed in the large vault, making it seem like a vast, unpleasant womb. Not quite familiar with the High Sabbat ritual, some of the white-robed Acolytes continued the meaningless chant, following along in their printed program leaflets. Vincent ignored them.

Behind the altar, the “sacred relics” of neo-Satanism sat on display in separate transparent showcases. A black (plastic) claw torn from Satan’s finger when He turned his back on Heaven in disgust, deciding instead to come and look after mortals. Another relic: a blackened hoofprint burned into the linoleum when Satan had appeared in Wittenburg to make his famous bargain with Dr. Faustus in the sixteenth century (it didn’t seem to bother any of the converts that linoleum hadn’t been created until more than three centuries later). And a small vial of semen from when Satan had impregnated a twentieth-century woman named Rosemary.

Vincent dragged his gaze over the chanting crowd and prepared to strike. He raised the blade of the arthame over the naked woman’s chest. She cocked her head back, anticipating, distantly awed by what she expected to see.

“If you believe all that,” he couldn’t resist mumbling under his breath, not sure if she could hear him or if she was even listening, “then you’re brain dead already.”

He brought the blade down. It was always the same, and by now he had lost his revulsion, his guilt, and felt no sympathy at all for the victims, for people who would allow themselves to be so easily manipulated.

Vincent had considered it an elaborate joke at first, a game, a trick to play on the masses—but they were supposed to catch on, and everyone would laugh sheepishly and admit they’d been fooled. Yet to his horror, the people turned the tables on him—they had embraced neo-Satanism with all the fervor that The Net had predicted. It amazed him at first, and then appalled him.

Back at the beginning. Nathans tilted the chair, locking his fingers together behind his neck. He smiled to himself, and spoke aloud to Vincent, who was busily concocting “holy writings,” scribbling complex and nonsensical poetry on some artificially aged parchment.

“‘Man is insane. He wouldn’t know how to create a bacterium, and creates gods by the dozen.’ The French philosopher Montaigne wrote that.”

Vincent looked up from his writing. “You sure read a lot, Mr. Nathans.”

“No. I just memorize a good many quotes. That way it seems like I read a lot, when I don’t really have the time.”

Vincent rolled up the parchment, careful not to smear the ink. They planned on claiming that this particular scripture came from ancient Arabia, and he wondered how anyone would explain the existence of felt-tip pens in that far-flung land. Sadly, he doubted anyone would question it at all.

“I’ve been using The Net to do a lot of my researching for me,” Vincent said distractedly. “It’s funny some of the things that turned up. Did you know that Satan means ‘adversary’ in Hebrew? Yet Lucifer means ‘light bearer.’ That’s an odd contradiction, don’t you think?”

“Fit those details in. The more mysterious names and ancient-sounding words, the better.”

“I’ve even come up with a rationale for worshiping Satan,” he offered. “For instance, why waste your time worshiping a good god? If he’s truly good, then he’ll never do anything bad to you. You’re better off trying to keep the evil one happy, appease him with a few rituals and sacrifices, so he won’t harm you. You’re covered on both bases.”

“No, no, no!” Nathans stood up and went over to close the French windows against the gray fog outside. On his way back to the chair, he switched on the fireplace. “You don’t argue using concepts. You have to claim dogma and leave no room for rational thought. If someone challenges you with irrefutable logical arguments, you need only say ‘the Lord works in mysterious ways,’ or ‘all things are clear to those who have Faith.’”

They heard Stromgaard moving down the hall, going up the stairs, and then returning again to exit the front door without speaking to them. The elder Van Ryman had kept himself busy with the business details of forming the new religion, and left the philosophical discussions to Vincent and Nathans, who enjoyed them more.

Earlier, as they had all sat in front of the mirrored hearth, Nathans stressed the importance of ritual, how the proper gestures and repetitions were pivotal to a successful religion. The ritual had to be simple enough to be remembered easily, yet complex enough that one had to learn it, rather than mindlessly follow along. And it also had to have an air of mystique, a dark power behind it to lure the converts.

The elder Van Ryman had been in charge of contacting a professional choreographer, who helped them to design the elaborate rituals. The choreographer, a bitter woman who could no longer dance because a nerve disease had taken from her the precise use of her arms and legs, immediately took up the challenge and derived remarkable rituals based on, but not obviously evolved from, common religious ceremonies. The Black Mass, or the Sabbat, became a parody, an inverse of the Catholic Mass, with the worshipers reverently making the sign of the broken cross.

Although Nathans had specifically intended neo-Satanism to be Stromgaard’s bailiwick, the elder Van Ryman again proved his inadequacy. Vincent and Nathans had forged far ahead philosophically, but kept Stromgaard busy and distracted with a great deal of the nuts-and-bolts work. Confidentially Nathans had told Vincent how he hoped they could occupy Stromgaard long enough to get the religion formulated. After the major groundwork was properly completed, neo-Satanism could function by itself, even with someone like Stromgaard at the helm.

One thing Stromgaard had indeed helped them with was designing a hierarchical structure in the new priesthood. Stromgaard had devised the management levels of Acolytes, Acolyte Supervisors, and Coven Managers, with the various numerical ranks in between. A hierarchy kept the converts feeling like they had their own place, he said, giving them something to work toward, some ladder to climb up.

“I think we should also engage a professional graphic designer to come up with a logo for neo-Satanism,” Vincent suggested.

Nathans’s eyes lit up. “Yes! Symbols—we’re going to need plenty of those. Crosses, stars, rosaries, mandalas, communion wafers—it’s all just to keep you thinking about the abstractions and not the contradictions.”

Vincent brought out a stack of printouts, handing them to Nathans and then offhandedly spreading the sheets so Stromgaard could look on as well.

“I’ve come up with a list of special demons according to mythology.” He pointed to the list. “Abaddon. Asmodeus. Eurynome, the eater of carrion, Satan’s own prince of death. Oh, and I also found that in order to summon a demon, your circle is supposed to be drawn exactly nine feet in diameter—that’s a little over 2.7 meters.”

He pointed to the second sheet of hardcopy. “I’ve also found several people to put in our Hall of Fame, if you want to call it that. Theophilus, a sixth-century cleric who sold his soul to the devil in order to obtain Church office.” He scratched his head. “There’s something inherently paradoxical about that. Anyway, Roger Bacon is another. And Sjømunder the Wise of Iceland, who was without a shadow because Satan had extracted it as payment for services rendered. Friar Bungay, who was slain along with the sorcerer Vandermast when they dueled each other, using demons as their weapons. And of course Dr. Faustus of Wittenburg. Charles Dexter Ward. The Arab, Abdul Alhazred. I’m open to suggestions for any others.

“And finally,” he said, gathering up the papers and looking smug, “a nice finishing touch would be for us to come up with a few holy relics of our own, some tangible objects, solid things to point to as proof in case any of our new converts are a little bit skeptical.”

“Proof?” Nathans cocked an eyebrow. “We can just say the angel Moroni popped down and conveniently did away with all the evidence. It’s been done before.”

Vincent frowned, but then decided that the other man’s sarcasm had not been directed at him. Nathans waved for him to continue. “I was thinking that we might want to try and find an untranslated original copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, the ‘Hammer of Witches.’ It was a book actually used to justify the burning of witches in the Middle Ages. It’s sort of exactly the opposite of what we’re looking for, but the name sounds so sinister, no one would doubt its authenticity.”

Nathans looked at Vincent, then shifted his gaze to the elder Van Ryman. “Good idea. Stromgaard, you could probably track down that book better than either of us, am I right?”

Then came the advertising blitz, subtly secretive, but staged by some of the best publicists Stromgaard could hire. Through it all, Vincent remained isolated in the mansion, looking at the neo-Satanist scheme from a detached and amused stance. But he felt a growing amazement as the inverted star-in-pentagram logo began to appear in prominent places, placed there by zealous new converts. One evening he saw a dancer on a Net entertainment channel wearing a pentagram pendant in her ear.

To keep up the charade, the appearance of the Van Ryman mansion changed, undergoing a metamorphosis to make it look more like the abode of a High Priest. What had once been a white-painted, black-roofed facsimile of an old Midwestern farmhouse changed into a dark and sinister-looking haunted house. Vincent watched from behind his upstairs window as a crane uprooted the picket fence surrounding the house to replace it with a barricade of black iron spikes. The rooster weathervane on the rooftop became a cavorting demon pointing in random directions. Pipes connected dry-ice pumps to the sprinkler network under the lawn, releasing eerie mist each dusk. Under the eaves of the roof and around the gables now stood a line of hideous gargoyles, one to represent each of the special demons in the neo-Satanist writings.

And Nathans had been right. With remarkably little effort the religion of neo-Satanism was becoming a business success rapidly approaching the success of Resurrection, Inc.

“Vincent, there’s something you have to help me with,” Stromgaard said. His voice was dull and somber. Nathans sat unobtrusively at the far end of the long dining-room table, watching but saying nothing.

Vincent had seen his father rarely during the past few weeks. Now, though, Vincent noted that Stromgaard had grown precariously thin, haggard and gaunt. His eyes were stained with bloodshot lines, and the shadowed hollows around them looked dark enough to be makeup.

Stromgaard removed a packet and spread the contents on the wood surface of the long table, moving the decanter of Glenlivet and setting it distractedly on the floor. Vincent bent forward to see various NMR images and two x-ray plates showing the intimate inner detail of some human being—he presumed it to be his father. Trails of dark smudges showed up in an alarming number of places where they shouldn’t have been.

“It’s all over inside of me. My entire lymph system. There’s no place it hasn’t touched,” he said slowly, as if each word were a stone he choked out of his throat. “Right now I can feel it, like a parasite, hiding inside me and trying to peek out.” Stromgaard started to tremble and then, very uncharacteristically, he put his face in his hands. Vincent stood frozen, not knowing what to do. His father had never asked for any kind of comfort before.

For the past year and a half, neo-Satanism had been running smoothly, with Stromgaard Van Ryman as its High Priest. Vincent assisted in the ceremonies, as did a few highly placed converts, but the others were fanatics who actually believed in the religion. Nathans helped neo-Satanism as well, but for the most part remained invisible in the background—he had once compared himself to the Wizard of Oz, running the show from behind his curtain. Stromgaard was the figurehead, the visible power, the focal point in the public eye.

Nathans stood up and patted Stromgaard on the shoulder, then he turned to Vincent. “He’s probably got a month left, maybe two.”

Vincent stared in silence, absorbing the information. He waited, and finally Nathans spoke again. “He needs you to take his place as the High Priest of the neo-Satanists. You’re the heir apparent.”

The younger Van Ryman snapped out of his trance and looked at Nathans. “Me? Isn’t it enough now? Haven’t we brainwashed enough people?”

“No,” Nathans answered firmly. “These are people who have to find themselves a religion—it’s like theological masturbation. If they don’t join neo-Satanism, then they’ll become Fundamentalist Christians, or Scientologists, or something else. At least we’re honest with ourselves about our motivations.”

“And I’m supposed to take his place, carry on those sacrifices, attend the rituals, and pretend I believe in all that stuff?”

“It’s for a good cause.” Nathans shrugged. “The betterment of humanity—we’re keeping the marching morons occupied while the rest of us continue what mankind was destined to do.”

“You sound very high and mighty, Mr. Nathans,” Vincent responded.

“I have every right to. Nobody else is thinking about our future.” He rubbed his hands together, as if dismissing the subject.

“Now then, we have to discuss the transition. I’m afraid poor Stromgaard is not going to be able to perform his duties much longer. Already he is keeping himself pumped up on enough drugs that he’s not always as clearheaded as he used to be. We want the transition from father to son to be spectacular and dramatic, and I’m afraid you’re not going to like it much, Vincent. But it has to be done.”

Stromgaard Van Ryman lay on the altar, still garbed in his red-trimmed High Priest’s robe, while Vincent stood beside him, wearing his own black-and-red robe. Vincent shifted the razor-sharp arthame from hand to hand, fidgeting.

The ceremony progressed as it always had, and Vincent found himself mechanically offering the expected gestures. But his mind was elsewhere.

“I won’t feel a thing, Vincent. I will be drugged and floating high in the sky long before you even begin the Sabbat,” Stromgaard had said. “The pain is already so bad I can hardly stand it. It’s eating me away and I can feel every bite it takes.” He clutched Vincent with a desperate clawlike hand.

“Don’t force me to shrivel away until there’s nothing left,” he pleaded, “It’ll only get worse. Much worse.

“I’ll keep myself drugged to euphoria until you finish the High Sabbat. Give me at least that much dignity. Let my own choice enter into it. Besides, it’s the best thing for neo-Satanism.” Stromgaard said the last comment as if he meant it fervently.

The younger Van Ryman looked down between the folds of the old High Priest robe and saw the gaunt, skeletal remains of his father. The ribs protruded; the skin had a grayish cast. And Vincent even noticed a wide birthmark on the right side of Stromgaard’s chest that he had never seen before.

Stromgaard Van Ryman’s eyes were strange and glassy, unfocused and staring deep into infinity. His chin was covered with stubble, and the knuckles on his hands stood out like knobs on an old tree.

I won’t feel a thing. This is what I want.

The crescendo of the ritual rose, then fell, then rose again to an even higher peak before it stopped abruptly. Vincent turned to look at the faces of the gathered neo-Satanists, searching. They stared back at him, some curious, some expectant, some wearing no expression at all, just a blank, confident acceptance.

He turned back to his father and shifted the arthame to his left hand so that he could deliver a hard and swift final blow.

“Ashes to ashes, blood to blood; fly to Hell for all our good!” he intoned, and then, mostly to himself, “Goodbye, Father.”

19

Deep in the lower managerial levels of Resurrection, Inc., Francois Nathans stared at the bloody corpse of the man who looked exactly like him. The dead man lay face down on the carpet, still dressed in the white symbol-embroidered neo-Satanist robe. Nathans knelt and rolled the man over, looking down into his face.

Though he had anticipated Danal’s reaction, and planed for it, the sight of his murdered lookalike still gave him an eerie sensation, as if he were looking at a snapshot of his own death. Nathans had watched the whole thing from a hidden monitor, astonished by Danal’s explosive speed and violence, but he didn’t feel a great deal of pity for the dead duplicate—the other man had been fully aware of the risks, and he’d agreed to accept them.

“A man has amnesia. We’re trying to awaken his memories, trigger them to return,” Nathans had explained it to the volunteer. “We don’t know how he’ll react, and there could be some risk. There’ll probably be some risk. The man is a Servant.”

After seeing the large sum waiting to be transferred into his Net account, the volunteer had motioned for them to begin the surface-cloning that would give him the face of Francois Nathans.

Now Nathans looked down at the murdered man again, saw the line of faint red pinpricks where the clone-infection had spread, and saw where Danal’s blinding speed had neatly split the double’s throat like a spoiled fruit.

A warm thrill trickled down his spine. Something had snapped, some part of Danal had come back, some part of the original Vincent Van Ryman had broken through the wall of death and reawakened his old anger.

Pondering, he moved slowly over to Rodney Quick’s body on the sofa. That was something Nathans had not counted on. A shame, too—and a waste. He had been touched by the regret and dismay on Danal’s face as he placed the dead technician on the couch. But things were moving too fast right now. Nathans could mentally collate the events later.

He picked up the young tech’s body and stumbled with it outside his office, back to the elevator. He positioned Rodney’s body against the wall, to look as if he had been attacked and then discarded. Then Nathans went back to seal the door of his own office. He had other things to take care of before he could sound the alarm down in the lower levels.

The door to the secret alcove opened and an Enforcer came in, moving rapidly from the passage to the street above. The Enforcer was outfitted in glossy dark-blue armor with crimson ringlets on each arm-piece. He quickly came up to Nathans, moving with a fluid assurance in his dark armor.

“The riot out there is getting worse, sir. We’ve got Special Forces coming in now. Should be under control fairly soon.”

“What are you doing here in that Elite Guard uniform?” Nathans demanded. “This is Resurrection, Inc, remember? I’m supposed to hate the Enforcers. Get changed immediately!”

The blue-clad Enforcer nodded stiffly. Nathans then indicated the dead lookalike on the floor. “I want you to get rid of this. And completely destroy the body—make sure no one sees you.”

The Enforcer mumbled his reply and wasted no time getting to work.

Nathans placed his hands behind his back and went over to the thick underwater window, staring out at the murky shapes behind the glass. He flicked a switch and sent spotlights into the water. Sharply defined yellowish beams plunged into the murk where they occasionally struck the shapes of large grayish fish.

Danal had responded! Now they were past the first major hurdle. The experiment might work after all.

Nathans jumped out of his reverie and went to the direct network-link terminal. Making sure the Elite Guard was not in view, he punched a few buttons and came face-to-face with an image of the captain of Resurrection’s specially assigned team of regular Enforcers.

“We’re busy right now, Mr. Nathans,” the captain said impatiently. “We’ll give you a report as soon as we can compile one.” The other Enforcer reached forward to blank the screen.

“The Servant must not be harmed,” Nathans interrupted. “All other priorities are secondary. You have to get him out of there, rescue him from the mob.”

“I understand that, Mr. Nathans. It’s too bad he got away in the first place, isn’t it?” the white-armored Enforcer said. “We’ve informed all our men except one Enforcer. We’re not able to contact him. His suit radio must be out of service.”

“Who? Which one?”

“Jones—the man who first went after your rebel Servant at the scene. His weapons fire could have sparked the disturbance outside. Your receptionist believes the Servant was struck in the shoulder by one of his shots. Jones was in the lobby at the time and acted exactly according to protocol. Commendable, under any other circumstances.”

“I’m not interested in any other circumstances! I want you to make damn sure my Servant is not harmed. You don’t understand how valuable he is.”

“That may not be possible by now, sir.” The guard captain had a maddening hint of disrespect and scorn in his voice. “As I said, we’ve lost contact with Enforcer Jones, and the disturbance is getting pretty bad. A mob would probably focus around a Servant, especially one running from an Enforcer. He may not have had a chance.”

Yes, Nathans thought, but you don’t know how fast that Servant can move! With his knuckles Nathans rapped the key that blanked the screen. He clenched his teeth and stared through the murky window again.

Damn! Now that he really needed the skills of a good Interface to organize all the different things taking place at the same time, Supervisor had blanked out, failed him right when he needed her.

Interfaces could become lost in The Net, leaving their bodies behind and unable to find the way back to their own minds. It happened sometimes. And no one could determine whether these Net burnouts were accidents or suicides.

In such a case, one could do nothing except put the comatose bodies in tanks and force feed them for the next few decades. Nathans recalled the introverted scientist, Ferdinand, one of the original team who had developed the resurrection process: for his chosen reward Ferdinand had asked to become an Interface and spend the rest of his natural life swimming free in The Net.

Nathans shook his head at the waste, but Ferdinand had been happy.

Supervisor had no such excuse, though—she had simply failed to appear at work for several days. Nathans sent two reluctant Enforcers into her darkened den; there, surrounded by unpleasantly warm, stale air and burned-out incense, they found her emaciated, uninhabited body.

Not relishing his next communication, Nathans drummed his fingertips on the side of the keyboard before entering the proper sequence. In a moment the face of the false Vincent Van Ryman appeared. The imposter’s dark square-cut hair was in disarray; he looked agitated and very old, but with a young man’s face.

Nathans placed a reassuring smile on his lips and spoke. “It worked.”

The imposter’s expression filled with relief. “And? What’s our next step? What happened?”

Nathans hesitated a moment. “Unfortunately, he got away.”

“What!”

“The trigger was more dramatic than we had anticipated. He broke loose and moved with such blinding speed it was amazing! He killed my double and then fled. On his way out, he also killed one of my technicians. An Enforcer shot him in the shoulder, but he escaped into the streets, where he seems to have started a sizable riot.”

The false Van Ryman tugged at his hair, squeezing his eyes shut. “How could you let him get away!”

“I didn’t have much choice in the matter. Now be quiet and listen.”

But the imposter frantically continued. “What if he comes back here? If he remembers things, then he’ll know what we’re trying to do! What if he tries to kill me?” The imposter suddenly looked over his shoulder. “I’m turning on the Intruder Defense Systems and they’re staying on, so don’t try to come and see me.”

“Calm down!” Nathans barked. “I don’t think he remembers anything specific—he hasn’t got it all back yet. He’s seen only me, and there’s nothing else from his past that he could blunder into.”

“Well, what about all the details around here? What about all this time he’s been in his old house? Looking at me? All that must have been sparking something—I could tell.”

“Yes, yes. But that was a gradual pressure, building up, preparing him. When he saw my double, he got a severe mental jolt. He has to get another jolt like that to regain everything. All he’s got now are some of his emotions, vague responses. We’ll be safe for the moment.”

“Once you find him,” the imposter muttered.

“We’ll find him. Don’t worry.”

Looking angry and very distressed, the false Van Ryman signed off without acknowledging. Nathans let out a lungful of air, whistling between his teeth, and sat back down to concentrate. He flung off his tousled brown hairpiece and used his fingertips to massage his scalp where the thin surgical scars still itched.

20

As Danal plodded back to consciousness, he saw the concerned face of the matronly nurse/tech staring down at him. Reality returned with the force of a released bowstring. But still nothing made sense.

Danal realized how much stronger he felt, renewed. He turned his head to see that the wound on his shoulder had been covered with flesh-colored plaskin; after an hour or so, the synthetic melanin in the plaskin would adjust itself to the exact color of the pale, dead skin it was supposed to match.

The nurse/tech regarded him with a hardened and calculating gaze that looked alien on her heavily made-up face. “You were muttering while you were unconscious. You were having a nightmare.” She watched him closely as she spoke. “Servants aren’t supposed to have… nightmares.”

He looked around the room and saw that he and the nurse/tech were alone. Her brow creased as if contemplating a difficult decision. “Should I go notify your Master? Maybe he can explain why you were having nightmares.”

“No!” Danal burst out. He hoped he could restrain his own strength this time, that he could merely knock her unconscious and out of the way. He would have to flee again. The thoughts and the decision charged through him instantly as he leaped to his feet. He reached out with his arm, intending to strike her on the back of the neck, to knock her aside.

But the heavyset nurse/tech moved with equally blinding speed and impossible strength as she blocked his blow and grabbed his arm in an unbreakable grip like a steel hinge. Her rubber-gloved hand shook slightly as he strained against it with all his might, but then she turned him and forced him to sit back down on the padded table. Danal’s eyes grew wide, and he stopped resisting.

“Now,” the nurse/tech said firmly as she peeled off one of her gloves to reveal the pallid, bloodless skin of her hand. A Servant’s skin! “Tell me. Truthfully. Do you remember anything of your first life?”

He had met Julia under one of his pseudonyms.

Even after taking the High Priest’s mantle of the neo-Satanists, Vincent had continued to pursue his alternate lives on The Net, the identities under which he carried on business and correspondence.

Using the name of Randolph Carter, Vincent kept up a long running dialog through chat groups with a woman named Julia. For weeks they exchanged rhetoric back and forth, with Randolph Carter arguing for one basis of religion, basically repeating the earlier discussions between Francois Nathans and himself, and Julia responded with the same logic, but interpreted through a different point of view, reaching very different conclusions.

Vincent quickly grew to respect the mind behind those discussions and proposed to meet her in person.

They sat down together in a worn plastic booth at a bustling cafeteria. The clatter of an automatic dishwasher came from the end of a conveyor belt; listless cafeteria patrons piled their dirty dishes and trays on the belt and didn’t stop to watch as the dishes traveled into the back rooms filled with hissing water and chaotic sounds. Multicolored section barriers broke up the large room; forced-air currents made an invisible corral around the small smoking area. The buzz of conversation rose and fell.

Julia leaned across the nicked and stained tabletop and smiled at him. “We can be more alone in a place like this. And we can discuss anything we want.”

Julia was thin, of medium height, and wore her long blond hair simply, parted in the middle and hanging down behind her shoulders. Her eyes were bright, and Vincent thought he could see dozens of thoughts behind them, waiting to be brought to the surface. Her high cheekbones and delicate face made her seem fragile, but she argued vehemently and intelligently, in a no-nonsense way that quickly dispelled any impression of helplessness.

They both had coffee, which Vincent found to be a rather bitter, recycled-tasting restaurant blend; Julia had insisted on paying for her own. Impulsively, Vincent kept stirring his cup as they talked; she slurped her coffee and more than once sloshed over the edge of her cup during her animated gestures.

“But suppose, just suppose,” Vincent said, “that the neo-Satanist movement isn’t supposed to be true, or even believable. What if it’s more like a net to capture people with their own silliness? Certain people. To show them how gullible they can be? What if it’s a trick, a practical joke that has, well, backfired?”

Julia considered this for a moment. “Then whoever planned it was wrong from the start. If you have such power and influence, then you shouldn’t purposely mislead the public. Why not take them down the right path from the start?”

He sat in silence for a long moment. She seemed puzzled, but waited. “I’m Vincent Van Ryman,” he said in a soft voice.

And then, of course, he told her everything.

Vincent rented a hovercopter, and the two of them went alone up the California coast to the Point Reyes seashore. Julia had read a great deal and filled her conversation with interesting and exotic trivia, but she had never before left the boundaries of the Metroplex, nor had she ever been inside a hovercopter.

Vincent awkwardly worked the unfamiliar controls that lifted the vehicle from the mansion’s rooftop pad and swung around to the side of the building. He enjoyed watching Julia’s rapt attention as she splayed her fingers on the curved windowshield glass and peered out, wide-eyed, at the chesspiece buildings of the Metroplex from far above.

The copter shot northward, and the boundaries of the Metroplex faded into wooded hills and crowded tourist-filled seaside communities. The old road below wound precariously along the side of a cliff that plunged to the ocean. A few breakers against the rocks looked like tiny flecks of foam in a gigantic basin.

Vincent felt daring as he swooped the hovercopter down to skim barely above the surface of the choppy water, paralleling the cliff face. Spray bounced up and misted the windshield. Julia clapped her hands and laughed—nervously, it seemed.

Far ahead, partly surrounded by wads of fog rising in the morning heat, Vincent could make out the lighthouse on its tiny promontory jutting out into Drake’s Bay. The ocean rolled beneath the craft, and the sheer cliff beside them gave way to a wide expanse of beach next to a black honeycombed cluster of tide pools. Vincent flew ahead, then circled back; under the clear water the beach gradually sloped beneath the depths.

The hovercopter settled onto the sand, skittering pebbles and debris. From what he could see, the two of them were completely cut off in an area accessible only by air.

Julia jumped out of the craft and gleefully ran to the breakers. She kicked off her shoes and splashed up to her knees in the water, heedless of the rocks on the beach. Vincent laughed at her expression of shock. “It’s cold! It’s freezing cold!”

“Of course it is. It’s the ocean.”

She splashed out and tried to brush droplets of water from her calves. “But the ocean is supposed to be warm. ”

“Not at Point Reyes.” He turned back to the hovercopter and opened the storage compartment. “Come on. Let’s have a picnic.”

Vincent had gathered a lunch for just the two of them, even purchased a wicker picnic basket so that it would seem more like the real thing. Handing Julia the basket, he took the blanket out of the bottom shelf and spread it on the sand.

As they ate, Julia breathed deeply, looking around, staring at the tall beach grass and the sheer cliffs towering above them. Seagulls flew in the air.

After lunch, they went exploring together up and down the beach. Julia was fascinated with the tide pools, squatting on the rocks and looking into the orphaned puddles, poking her fingers at the small sea anemones, tipping over snails, and watching the thumb-sized hermit crabs crawl over the palm of her hand.

“I found you some seashells,” Vincent said. She accepted them reverently and put them in the pocket of her blouse.

Back at the copter, Vincent withdrew some equipment and began setting up on a tripod.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I want to capture this moment. So I can remember every wonderful detail of this day.” He paced off a distance and erected the beam-splitter on a second tripod, then returned to focus the holocamera’s laser on the splitter. Satisfied, he set the splitter on an automatic slow-scan, panning down the long beach and the ocean, following their footprints in the sand. Later, Vincent would pack up the camera and treasure the disk. Already he intended to project the hologram as a grand mural on the study wall.

“I’m very happy, Julia. Did you know that?” Vincent said with an alien tone of amazement in his voice.

She smiled and flipped her long blond hair behind her shoulders. “Yes. I gathered that.”

They made love on the blanket on top of the soft yielding sand. The seagulls flew overhead and cried righteous indignation at the brazenness. The waves pounded with a sensual power, a whispering, rushing sound that made everything perfect.

And everything was perfect. They didn’t even notice their stinging sunburn until that evening.

If he had pressed the point, Julia probably would have moved in with him anyway, but first she insisted that he publicly denounce the neo-Satanists and expose the sham.

In just a short time Julia had put another dimension into his life, showing him a world that didn’t always have to be dark, uncaring, self-centered. She gave him tenderness, she made him malleable again, she smoothed out the jagged edges of his personality.

At the next High Sabbat, Vincent commanded all the neo-Satanists to listen, and he confessed everything. “All of this”—he indicated the grotto, the robes, the relics, the symbols—“is the biggest practical joke in history. All of neo-Satanism is make-believe, fabricated—we concocted it one night when we were bored. We brainstormed all the Writings. We choreographed the rituals. We graphic-designed the symbols.”

He cracked open the display cases that held the relics. “The hoofprint in the linoleum—didn’t anybody realize there’s a three-century gap between the time when Faustus lived and when linoleum was invented? And this, the black claw of Satan… plastic. Plain old plastic.” He pulled off his High Priest’s robe and tossed it on the floor in disgust.

“Go home. Spend your time doing something worthwhile. Try to better the world, or better yourselves. We were just pulling your leg.” He turned his back and walked toward the exit alcove. “I’m disappointed at how easily you fell for it.”

Vincent left the sacrificial chamber, slipping into the dark and hidden catacombs that would take him to a mass-trans station, where he could catch a skipper back to the mansion before curfew. He had no desire to see any part of the tumult he had left behind….

Like a careening pendulum, once set in motion he turned against the neo-Satanists and became their most outspoken opponent. In a press release Julia had written, Vincent told the cult’s dark secrets and the sham. Normally reclusive, Vincent Van Ryman appeared on several news services and found himself quoted liberally in the current-events databases.

He sent a copy of the press release to Nathans with a note that said, “Sorry, Francois. But this has gone on long enough.”

Vincent had not spoken to the other man since meeting Julia, and he wanted to let Nathans settle down before trying to get in touch again. Now that Vincent spent his days with Julia, he had little time for anything else.

Sweating and precariously balanced on the eaves of his home, Vincent took down the gargoyles from the roof gables; Julia stood on the ground next to the sharp wrought-iron fence, apparently ready to catch him if he fell. Later, armed with paintbrush and scrubbing tools, she went about defacing all the pentacles from the mansion.

Afterwards, as dusk settled on a very different Van Ryman mansion, they sat in the sauna next to the master bedroom, drinking iced tea. A full pitcher rested on one of the floorboards, water beading down its sides from the heat and steam.

“I think I’m going to purchase a Servant, maybe two,” Vincent suggested. “That way we can have more time with each other.”

She closed her eyes and nodded wearily. “Mmmm.” She ran the cold, wet surface of her iced tea glass along her chin and jaw, relishing the coolness. Julia looked completely content.

He felt satisfied himself. He had been afraid that challenging the neo-Satanists would be much more difficult, with far greater repercussions. But it had been so easy. And it was all over now.

21

Enforcer Jones ran blindly through the streets, waving his hands in front of him though the crowd had long since thinned out. He breathed heavily; the damp, unfiltered air whistled through his nostrils.

The Enforcer wore only his armored boots and his black skin-pants; everything else was gone. He had discarded the rest of his armor in scattered pieces during his dazed flight. The suit radio had gone with it, smashed under someone’s feet. His skin crawled with the memory of hundreds of hands grasping, groping, tearing, trying to kill him by sheer force of numbers.

His ears roared, but Jones kept himself from screaming, from releasing the pressure still building within him. What had he done? How had he deserved this? The Enforcer continued to run, trying to flee farther, hide deeper into anonymity.

Enforcers weren’t supposed to run. But right now his Guild status didn’t concern him. Most of all he wanted to forget the nightmarish memories, sharpened by his own fear….

As the rebel Servant had vanished down the streets, moving faster than seemed humanly possible, Jones found himself trapped by the murderous mob. He had killed someone. Maybe more than one. The people surrounded him like the tentacles of a voracious squid. Chaotic anger filled the air, making it difficult to breathe with the sweat and shouts and liquid hatred. Hands, bodies, people pushed at him.

Some of the pedestrians began to throw things. Jones felt his armor battered and pummeled—and he struck back. He fired his weapons, hoping to awe and frighten the mob, to drive them away, to give him some breathing room.

He was an Enforcer. His friend Fitzgerald Helms had died for Jones to get into the Guild. He wasn’t after the pedestrians—he wanted the Servant. He had to stop the Servant, because he didn’t want to think where the Guild would demote him if he screwed up one more time. Jones had no more amnesty units left to his name.

But the runaway Servant had escaped—wounded but gone, and the mob remained. The mob wanted only blood anyway, and they hated Enforcers almost as much as they hated Servants.

A suicidal old man managed to snatch one of Jones’s weapons and cradled it gleefully in his gnarled hands, but the Enforcer shot him. The weapon spun away into the crowd, and moments later someone else picked it up and began shooting indiscriminately. Jones realized with horror that several people in the crowd were laughing.

Two more people reached for the remaining weapons that bristled from his armor. Training and blind reflexes took over now; panic smothered all thoughts from the rational part of his brain. Moving jerkily, Jones shot in all directions until the pocket bazooka was empty.

But still the people didn’t fall back.

Someone yanked the heater-knife from its socket at his side, and the seal broke with a thin pop. The hot blade glanced off the Enforcer’s white armor. Grasping hands tore the other two projectile weapons from their sockets, and Jones knew that even the dura-plated armor couldn’t withstand such an attack.

The people continued to press forward. Frantic, unable to escape, Jones fled deep inside himself, letting the body fend for itself. Uninhibited, his hands chose the last alternative open to him.

Someone was trying to break his arm, but the Enforcer managed to wrench it free, blessing the slickness of the polished armor. His finger found a depression in his chest plate and pushed a release button.

Dense clouds of stinging black smoke poured from the joints of his armor, pushing the mob back with its foul smell. Hidden by the smokescreen, Jones pulled off his helmet and threw it far into the unseen crowd. He held his breath and ran through the blinded and choking people, trying to remain unobtrusive, shedding pieces of armor and hoping to become invisible, normal, just another face on the street. The armor was his protection, a part of him insisted; it made him an Enforcer, someone to be feared and respected, and he shed it with a growing horror at himself. But he had to get rid of the armor, had to get away from the clutching, murderous crowd….

Still moving mechanically, dazed, Jones came to an enclosure between two tall blank-faced buildings. A chain-link fence surrounded the enclosure, topped with glistening barbed wire. Inside the fence a mushroom forest of satellite dishes stood skewed at various angles, a haphazard array pointing toward invisible targets in high orbit. Some of the dishes were solid, some made of wire mesh.

The shadows of the struts and the dishes beckoned him, and some irrational impulse told him he had to get inside. Jones glanced along the ground, found a crumpled aluminum can, and tossed it at the chain-link fence, watching carefully for sparks.

The Enforcer felt a rush of adrenaline again as he visualized the hands reaching toward him… his own weapons stolen, playfully turned against him… the mob’s anger pouring down like boiling oil, knowing that in an instant he would be torn limb from limb….

Jones grabbed the chain-link and scrambled up. He paused at the barbed wires, wondering if they might be coated with some deadly substance or paralytic drug. Even though he had no armor protecting him this time, his Enforcer training had taught him how to avoid barbed wire. He swung his slim dark body over and let himself drop to the ground. The armored boots absorbed much of the impact, and he crouched, looking around, then sought the safety of the tangled shadows.

His chest heaved as he lowered himself under one of the deepest shadows, sheltered from sight. Jones let the last adrenaline course through his bloodstream, making lap after lap of his circulatory system. And then he drowned in a numbing grayness of exhausted sleep.

He awoke long after nightfall. Cool darkness around him made the satellite dishes seem like alien sentinels. He could look through the wire mesh of one dish to see scattered stars far above, most of them washed out by the ambient glow of the Metroplex.

Jones sat up with a jolt and looked at his wrist chronometer. After midnight—past curfew. And he was an Enforcer, out of uniform, with no ID.

He shuddered. He had left his armor behind. Was he even an Enforcer anymore? He had deserted his duty. He had let another rebel Servant escape. He had killed pedestrians. He had been the cause of a bloody riot.

How would the Guild look at it? Would they punish him, demote him to some even worse job? Would they dismiss him, make it impossible for him to find other work—force him to become one of the jobless blues? Or would they quietly kill him, an embarrassment best forgotten?

Jones crouched, unmoving, debating with himself whether he should try to avoid the Enforcer curfew patrols, try to make it back to his own dwelling without being caught. Or should he just stay put where he was, shivering in the wet coldness of the night, and hope nobody found him before morning?

Hiding under the skeletal support beams of the satellite dishes, he felt lost and cold and confused. He was a disgrace. He didn’t want to confront his peers. Only the familiar surroundings of his apartment would help. He wanted to go home. He wanted to clutch at the things around him like a security blanket.

Jones grasped the chain-link fence and started to climb. He froze, motionless, when the fence rattled in the after-midnight silence. He waited, then scrambled the rest of the way up. From this direction the barbed wire slanted outward, much easier to crawl over.

He dropped to the ground and tried to remain in the building shadows, slipping from one street to the next, looking for familiar landmarks, trying to get his bearings. Off in the distance and in the after-curfew silence, Jones could hear the sounds of one of the mock street battles staged by the Guild. But this one was far away. He was safe.

The lights from the silent hovercar stabbed down at him as he tried to cross an unlit intersection. Jones stopped dead in his tracks and then slumped his shoulders in defeat.

While he and Frampton had been on their curfew patrols, most people caught out after midnight tried to escape and hide, making the Enforcers use the hovercar’s scatter-stuns, but Jones knew flight was useless. He surrendered without resistance.

The Enforcers emerged from their vehicle and strode toward him. Jones waited, feeling fear grow—but he dismissed it—he had had enough of fear for one day.

The shorter of the two Enforcers gruffly began to quote the specific sections of the Guild code Jones had broken. Jones raised his hand and began to quote the same words in unison until the other patrolman stopped speaking.

“I know,” Jones said. “I’m an Enforcer, too. Used to be on curfew patrol.” He gave his name and ID number, and told his story, knowing exactly what the two curfew patrolmen thought of it; he had encountered enough different excuses while on patrol. “Maybe you have an A.P.B. out on me?” They had to, of course. He was an Enforcer missing in the line of duty. Someone had to be looking for him. He could explain.

The taller of the two Enforcers, who had not yet spoken a word, entered Jones’s ID number and description into a portable Net terminal. Jones waited for it to be verified, but then the silent Enforcer keyed everything in again, deeply puzzled. He called the other Enforcer over and keyed in the information a third time.

Dread grew in the pit of Jones’s stomach. What had the Guild done to him now? All this was getting to be too much, and he didn’t think he had any more panic left inside him. “Look, I can take you back to my apartment. You’re going to have to escort me there anyway. The Net will let me in, and I can prove my identity to you.”

He waited, exasperated. The two Enforcers looked at him, then looked at each other, considering.

“I can prove it! Come on.”

“I think you’d better do that, Mr. Jones,” the shorter Enforcer finally said. His voice came out hollow behind the face mask.

Jones followed the two Enforcers to the large armored hovercar. He stopped himself from clambering in front with the two patrolmen and complacently went into the segregation chamber.

The chamber had no windows, and Jones sat sulking, drawing his knees up against his bare chest. Shivering, he wondered what he was going to do. The hovercar lifted off and rose into the air. He waited; it seemed like forever.

But at last the hovercar drifted back to the ground again with a muffled thump as it came to rest. Jones blinked and stepped out into the darkness as the pressurized hatch hissed open. The two Enforcers flanked him on either side. He recognized the tall complex of Guild dormitories, and he glanced at the repetitive rows of windows stacked up several stories. Each window looked the same, and Jones couldn’t begin to guess which one belonged to his own quarters.

Watching Jones skeptically, the two curfew patrolmen escorted him to the terminal mounted beside the sealed door. Showing a confidence that he did not feel, Jones entered his logon name, ID number, and access code. His knees felt weak with relief as the screen flashed “ACCESS GRANTED” and the door opened.

“We’d better accompany you to your room,” the shorter Enforcer said.

“Certainly,” Jones said, more confident now. The three entered, taking a lift up to the sixth floor.

He reached his door and said, trying to hide the relief in his voice, “This is it. I’m sorry for the trouble, and I’ll be facing a few reprimands tomorrow.”

Jones opened the door and took a step inside. He saw motion in the dimness of his own room, and he let out a gasp as two blue-armored members of the Guild’s Elite Guard stood up simultaneously from where they had been waiting for him.

The two white-armored curfew patrolmen stiffened in shock and confusion. Jones wanted to say something, but the words crumbled in his mouth. He had seen the Elite Guard only once or twice, escorting very important people or performing extremely dangerous high-visibility missions. He could not imagine what he had done to attract their attention.

The two Elite Guards stepped closer to Jones. “We’ll take him now,” one of them addressed the curfew patrol men. “I suggest you don’t report your pickup. We’ll handle all the details. Now go back to your patrol.”

The white-clad Enforcers saluted mechanically and turned to leave, as if they were running away.

Jones stood motionless, terrified. One of the Elite Guards closed the hall door, sealing the room and leaving the three of them alone together.

22

“Tell me about it,” the nurse/tech said.

Still frightened and confused, Danal reached into the open trapdoor of his mind, hauling out the last captive memories like strongboxes from a musty cellar.

Vincent Van Ryman’s carefree, euphoric attitude had lasted only a few days after he had denounced neo-Satanism. At first he felt victorious, childishly proud of himself and happy to have made a difference. Several times Vincent tried to contact Nathans, but the other man refused to speak to him, not acknowledging or even reading Vincent’s messages. Vincent brooded over his mentor’s cold treatment, sad and disappointed. Julia convinced him that Nathans would calm down, given time.

Then he received the first death threat from a disgruntled neo-Satanist cult member, someone whose focus in life had been stripped away because of Vincent’s cynical revelations. Other threats came in rapid succession. Particularly vicious were the jobless blues, so long dejected and hopeless, the ones who had fastened upon neo-Satanism as a new light at the end of their tunnel. Now they felt cheated once more.

Vincent received anonymous messages dropped into his electronic mail files, one of them even addressed to Randolph Carter, his carefully guarded secret identity. Someone tied a handwritten threat to a rock and threw it at the shatterproof transplastic windows of the Van Ryman mansion. The rock thumped harmlessly off the glass, disturbing Vincent and Julia from a game of cribbage in the study.

The vehement anger behind the threats bothered Vincent. Julia had convinced him that the truth was always best, but now he began to experience a growing horror, wondering if perhaps these people didn’t want the truth, but preferred something exotic to believe in.

Vincent went outside, picking up the rock from the thorny shrubs around the house. Whoever had thrown it was gone, fled into the thinning crowds as dusk began to settle over the Metroplex.

Some of the threats were crudely veiled; some were blatant and explicit. He knew that simple Servant bodyguards—such as those his father had owned years before—could not offer sufficient protection, especially if one of the disgruntled fanatics decided to blow up the entire mansion. He glanced at the scrawled threat, then destroyed the note before Julia could see it.

It gave him an odd, warm sensation to realize that he was actually more afraid for Julia’s sake than for his own.

With his father’s share of the neo-Satanist profits, Vincent Van Ryman compiled the most effective, most sophisticated Intruder Defense System ever designed. He supervised its installation himself and spent hours studying its complexity, poring over blueprints as he sat on the hard floor of the study, legs crossed, soaking up the warm purple glow of the crystal fireplace.

A deadly force-field shell surrounded his property in a protective dome over the mansion; intricate computer-monitored surveillance systems detected external motion, activating additional alarms when objects moved too close to the perimeter; a pack of repair-rats labored in the conduits beneath the ground, mechanically inspecting and maintaining the network of power cabling.

Three times within the first week Vincent found blackened corpses slumped against the invisible force field, people who had tried to creep up to the mansion from the back.

Isolated in their island of protection, Vincent and Julia remained absorbed in each other, content with each other’s company and needing no one else. Together they decided to get a pair of Servants for the cooking and cleaning and housework, leaving them more time with each other. They ordered one male and one female Servant, Joey and Zia.

The Servants filled their roles, did their jobs, remained unobtrusive and patient in the mansion. Waiting. Vincent did not see any significance in the fact that Joey’s physical build was oddly familiar, identical to his own. Vincent had been too naive, too trusting.

He of all people should never have underestimated Francois Nathans.

On their last evening together, the night of Julia’s murder and the beginning of Vincent Van Ryman’s long nightmare that transcended even death, Julia had sat across from him in the formal dining room, resting both elbows on the tablecloth. It had started out as an argument, when both of them slowly let down their careful barriers of close confinement. Their mutually obsessive companionship began to wear on the nerves after a while. But for the time being they steered the conversation to more lighthearted things.

They talked with their mouths full, savoring the meal the two new Servants had cooked for them. “I’m glad we decided to give them both gourmet programming,” Julia said as she slurped a mouthful of fettuccine. Joey and Zia stood just outside the door of the formal dining room, watching with oddly alert eyes.

Vincent picked up the bottle of cheap pink champagne to refill both of their glasses. The bottle seemed slippery and unwieldy; he knocked it over, spilling half the contents on the tablecloth. Vincent couldn’t reach forward fast enough to catch it. The champagne foamed as it spread across the table. It all began to look blurry to him….

Julia giggled at his clumsiness, but then stopped laughing abruptly—

He awoke in the artificially dank chamber underneath the mansion, manacled to the walls. He recognized it as the cellar room where they had once held secret Inner Circle meetings with some of the highest-ranked neo-Satanist fanatics. But he and Julia had sealed that door, plastered over the opening. Who had torn it open again?

As his eyes came into focus, he noticed Francois Nathans waiting there. He couldn’t see Julia.

“Good. You’re finally awake,” Nathans said, taking a step toward him. Vincent gaped at the other man, confused, not quite ready to believe that Nathans would actually do anything to harm him. He looked at his wrists and ankles chained to the wall.

“Manacles, Francois? You’ve got to be kidding.”

Nathans smiled to himself. “It appealed to me.”

Vincent became dizzy again, and a rush of confusion swirled around his head. Nathans? What was he doing in the mansion? Why hadn’t the man answered any of his messages before?

“Julia. What happened to Julia?”

Nathans made a wry scowl. “Oh how noble of you to think of the poor lady first, Vincent. She’s already dead—dumped on the street and deleted from The Net.” Nathans seemed to take a wry pleasure in watching Vincent’s response.

“I don’t believe it.”

“When have I ever lied to you, Vincent?” The man’s cool expression gave only faint hints of the anger that boiled inside.

Vincent wanted to imagine that he had hurled himself against the chains, wanted to think that he had vengefully tried to strangle Nathans where he stood. But instead he responded as if someone had struck him in the stomach with a sledgehammer, knocking the wind from his lungs and destroying the will to live. He slumped against the stone wall like a beaten pet.

Nathans drew a deep breath, as if not pleased with his own decision. “You, on the other hand, are a much bigger PR item. Our first ‘Traitor to the Faith.’ I couldn’t have dreamed up a better unifying force if I tried.” Nathans laughed, “Oh boy, we’re going to milk this for all it’s worth.”

Vincent’s mind spun in circles, trying to find something to hold onto. Julia couldn’t be dead. They had just been talking and laughing together…. Nathans would never turn against him—he had taught Vincent so much, discussed so many things with him, hung so many dreams on his head. Nathans was too great a man, too sharp a thinker to stoop to childish and petty revenge games.

Vincent saw movement out of the corner of his eye as a doctor stepped forward. Vincent noticed a star-in-pentagram logo embroidered on his white jacket.

The doctor spoke to Nathans, ignoring the captive. “Now that he’s awake, the drug must be out of his bloodstream. We’re ready to begin.”

“We need to take some blood samples, Vincent,” Nathans said flippantly. “I hope you don’t mind.”

Vincent found the strength to struggle, but the manacles held him, and both men managed to grip his arm, holding it motionless. Vincent rolled his eyes downward to watch as his dark and syrupy blood bubbled up from the vein into a small sterilized vial. He breathed heavily as the doctor smeared his arm with coagulant. The medical man packed the vial of Vincent Van Ryman’s blood in a padded case, which he then snapped shut.

But Nathans wasn’t a murderer—he wouldn’t have just killed Julia in cold blood.

“He’ll have to hold absolutely still for the next part,” the doctor mumbled to Nathans as he fitted another hypodermic syringe with a capsule of yellowish liquid. He turned toward Vincent, and as Vincent cringed backward, the medical man injected him in the neck.

“Sorry,” Nathans said.

Vincent gasped, and his muscles turned cold, swallowed up in a blanket of frozen jelly. The rest of his body felt like a deadweight dangling from his brain stem.

“A nerve paralyzer, Vincent. It’ll wear off, sooner or later. For now, we have to see about giving you a new image.”

Vincent’s tongue thickened in his throat, but with the greatest effort of will, as if he were commanding every nerve one at a time, he managed to croak out a single word before his mouth froze half open.

“Why?”

Nathans’s eyebrows shot up, and his left fist clenched convulsively. He seemed to have been waiting for Vincent to ask his question. “Why? Because you told—that’s why! Don’t you realize how much damage you caused? You may have snatched away mankind’s last best hope for the future! You idiot, I trusted you! I saw promise in you, but you turned into a romantic sap instead!”

Nathans hung his head. His eyes glistened, and his face flushed red. “By introducing Servants, I offered common people the greatest gift—an opportunity to become part of the intelligentsia, the elite, free of charge. No strings attached. All they had to do was take the trouble to learn, to better themselves, use their free time to benefit us all. But they snubbed the offer and held tight to their ignorance instead. So with neo-Satanism I shoved their own stupidity right back in their faces—and they ate it up!”

The man’s rage continued to pour out, and he looked ready to pound Vincent’s face even as he hung suspended like a marionette on the manacles.

“Can’t you see? Of course neo-Satanism is a sham, but the people have to realize it for themselves! You’ve cheated them out of their own realization. Prophets have been giving the public an endless string of truths since the beginning of civilization. Now, by your confession to them, by giving away our secret, you became just another debunker, just another man at a podium with another story to believe in. You’ve stolen the opportunity of self-enlightenment away from thousands of them. So many, so many!”

The doctor lifted Vincent’s chin upward, holding his slack jaw in position. Another needle, another syringe—only this time the doctor left a thin line of pricks, one after another, along his jawline, up behind his ear. The medical man hummed to himself as he moved with the careful precision of a tattooist, jabbing with the needle, squirting a tiny amount of the milky gray substance under Vincent’s skin, and then moving half a centimeter over to repeat the process.

Nathans calmed himself again. “You probably never heard us speak of surface-cloning, Vincent. That was something we kept under lock and key at Resurrection, Inc. While my special hotshot team worked on developing the resurrection process, one of the bioengineers stumbled upon a spinoff technique, a special type of permanent biological disguise. Your father knew about it, but he didn’t quite see its potential.

“You see, after taking a blood or skin sample from one person, we can use the genetic information to ‘grow’ an identical face on someone else, to clone someone’s appearance. We strip the nuclei from the cells and then piggyback the genetic information on a special virus. After we’ve cultured the virus, we can inject it into many sites on the imposter’s face, beginning a ‘clone infection.’ The virus spreads, carrying with it someone else’s genetic information.” He smiled, but anger burned behind his expression. “A new face is going to grow on you Vincent, spreading slowly. You’ll be someone not so recognizable. We can even do your hands, if we want to change the fingerprints.”

Paralyzed, Vincent could not blink, could not cringe, could not respond—he sagged against gravity, humiliated. Preoccupied, the doctor injected a string of clone infection nodes around his hairline, pricking the scalp.

“The whole process will take about a week. I’m told that the itching and burning sensations are almost unbearable while you’re growing a new face. But don’t worry, we can keep you pleasantly sedated until all that’s over with. Now that we have a clean blood sample from you, your own double can begin the same process of his own.”

The doctor finished and put away his equipment. Without a word to Nathans, he packed up the case containing Vincent’s blood sample and carried it reverently up the stairs.

“Maybe you’ve done irreparable damage to my plan, Vincent. But there might be a way to fix things, a last-ditch effort. We have someone who matches your physical build and genetic type. We’ll give him your face, your fingerprints, and when he’s completely ready, he will become Vincent Van Ryman. It won’t be perfect, because he’ll only look like you, but he’s studied your mannerisms, and his fingerprints will be identical. Only a retinal scan, voice print, or maybe a chromosomal match will tell the difference. Besides, we used drugs to get your Net password while you were unconscious, and that’s really all he needs.

“I have already written the publicity speech for when ‘you’ make a sensational return to neo-Satanism, born again, denouncing your previous heretical babble. We could survive this after all—no thanks to you.”

Behind his unblinking eyes Vincent saw a reflection of his own shock, horror, and bafflement. Francois Nathans was his idol, his friend, his teacher… and now his condemner, his torturer. At the same time, Nathans looked furious with Vincent, choking on righteous indignation.

“In a few weeks, after your new face has grown and you look just like any other neo-Satanist convert—and when your replacement has fully taken his role as High Priest Van Ryman—we’ll have another High Sabbat, with you as the guest of honor at the sacrificial altar.

“And no one will know the difference… because you aren’t you anymore.”

23

An hour after all evidence had been expunged from his lower office chambers, Francois Nathans received reports that the disturbance in the streets was completely quelled. He was relieved and overjoyed that the Enforcers had found only one destroyed Servant among the casualties, a female Servant—definitely not Danal.

Danal had somehow gotten away. Now all that remained was for Nathans to find him.

Sleepy, mentally exhausted, his stamina and his nerves stretched and frayed: Nathans dimmed his office and lit a scented candle, letting the warm, flickering illumination soothe him. Turned down so low that he could barely hear it, a scratchy tape of Fats Waller sent strains of jazz through the dimness.

The message light sprang to life on the communications screen, and Nathans required a great effort of will to lift his finger and respond.

A white-armored Enforcer appeared on the screen, fidgeting. Nathans opened his eyes, trying to stare the man down, but he could see no response behind the black polarized faceplate.

“Mister Nathans?” the Enforcer asked.

“Yes? What is it?”

“I—I have been instructed to inform you that there has been another… that the body of the technician Rodney Quick has disappeared. We suspect it might be the Cremators, sir.”

The news struck him like a knife in the back, an unexpected blow from a forgotten adversary. Nathans surged fully awake. At another time he would have found this exhilarating, but too much had already gone wrong for one day. He clenched his fists, whitening the knuckles as he struck the side of his desk. For a moment he could find no words, and then they all seemed to burst out of his mouth at once.

“But how could he have been taken? He was right in our own building! Who was watching him? Where was his body taken for storage? How could someone have gotten to him?”

The Enforcer looked ready to break down. “We took him to the resurrection levels, sir. With Rodney Quick killed, there was no other alternate tech designated for that section. We had the riot to attend to, sir, as well as trying to find your Servant. But we didn’t think there would be a problem. There shouldn’t have been. And now the body is gone, without a trace. As far as we can tell, no one entered or left the resurrection levels.”

“Then your information is wrong!” Nathans snapped.

“There’s another thing, too—” the Enforcer began, hesitant and uncertain.

“What?” Nathans stared furiously for a moment, then dropped his gaze. No use frightening the man so much he couldn’t speak.

“One of the Servant assistants in Lower Level Six seemed extremely agitated when we tried to question her about the disappearance. We had to use the Command phrase to get her to respond at all, but she dropped to the floor before she could answer. Rolled up her eyes and fell over. Apparently dead. I swear we didn’t do anything to her. It seems that she nullified her own microprocessor.”

Nathans sat back heavily in his chair, frowning deeply. “But how? How can that be?” he mumbled, mostly to himself.

With a backhanded gesture Nathans muted the screen and continued to mutter to himself. Servants committing electronic suicide? Rodney Quick taken from Nathans’s own doorstep at Resurrection, Inc.? Danal lost in a mob? He tried to think of a suitable curse to spit out of his mouth, but could come up with none.

All evidence suggested that the Cremators did not take their subjects at random, only those who entered into a special contract. Did Nathans have a traitor in his own midst? It was a particularly sharp blow to think that Rodney Quick could have been involved with the Cremators. It infuriated him, made him feel blindingly impotent.

He gritted his teeth and switched on the screen again. The Enforcer jumped. “I don’t care what you have to do, or how you go about it. But I want you to find Rodney Quick’s body.”

With a gesture of finality, Nathans blanked the screen, watching the nervous Enforcer vanish into dark static. He paced the room, talking to himself, thinking through possibility after possibility. Some of them worked out in his favor, some of them didn’t.

A whispered voice in the background, Fats Waller continued to sing the blues.

He had not quite managed to walk the perimeter of the room twice before the message light signaled again. Nathans scowled impatiently at the interruption, but then he realized the communication came from a different channel, one of the more highly secured outlets.

A blue-armored Elite Guard stared back at him as the screen came into focus. “We’ve found him.”

Nathans felt a surge of excitement. “Who? Rodney Quick?”

“Who?” the Elite Guard asked.

“Never mind. Who did you find?”

“Your Servant, sir.”

Nathans gripped the edge of the desk, feeling his heart pound. “Where is he? Is he injured?”

“We think he’s holed up in a medical center in another district. One of the Guild Interfaces spotted his name and ID code entered into The Net. A nurse/tech apparently processed him for physical repairs. As your receptionist implied, Enforcer Jones seems to have injured him during his escape. He’s been recuperating there most of the afternoon.”

“Can we get him? What’s the situation?”

“Probably. We’ll have to be careful.”

“Damned right you will! I don’t want him damaged. He’s too valuable. I’ve got a lot riding on that particular Servant. Do you understand?”

“Ours is not to reason why.” The dry tone from the faceless Elite Guard almost startled Nathans. “We’ll capture your Servant.”

Nathans rubbed his hands briskly together, but then realized it was an old habit he had picked up from Stromgaard. “I’ll wait for you to bring him to me.”

24

“I remember the pain of the knife, like an explosion. And then… everything turned black, a hard black, like a polished rock. I can’t describe it,” Danal said, focusing his gaze deep into the distance.

“Then I was blinking my eyes and looking out of the vat on the resurrection levels. Amniotic fluid was draining down into grates in the floor—I could hear it. All of that’s still very vivid to me. A tech stood in front of me.” Danal hung his head. “I killed him later on.”

The nurse/tech didn’t seem concerned. “Nothing in between? Just the knife thrust and then waking up in Resurrection, Inc.?”

Danal wrinkled his smooth forehead as he considered. “Nothing. It’s like a cassette tape that’s been spliced together. First my death, and then a gap, and then… coming back.”

The nurse/tech did not seem surprised, as if she had heard it all before.

Suddenly Danal’s own mind doubled back on him, and other questions—previously held at bay by his recurring memories—began to push forward. “But who are you? You’re a Servant! I can tell by your skin. You were a Servant… you’re alive!”

She smiled placidly. “Just like you.”

Her words struck him like a splash of cold water on his face. “Are there… others?”

“Yes, others who have awakened—through some traumatic experience—and now they can access the memories of their previous lives. After you meet Gregor, he’ll explain it a lot better than I can.”

Danal sat with his eyes wide and his mouth open in wonder. Possibilities echoed inside his head, and he had to hammer them back, forcing them to come one at a time so that his consciousness would not be overwhelmed by awe. “What do we do now?”

The nurse/tech grasped at his practical question, as if the more esoteric explanations made her uneasy. “First of all, we have to get you out of here. And soon. Upon admitting you, I entered your ID and your Master’s name into The Net—anybody with sense enough to look will be able to track you down, sooner or later. We’ll have to get you out unobtrusively, to a safe place.”

Then her eyes grew hard. “But one thing I absolutely must impress upon you, something you have to keep at the front of your mind above all else. Something you can’t forget.”

“What?”

Like someone sharing a secret initiation, the nurse/tech lowered her voice. “We must not be discovered. If the public knew that Servants can awaken, maybe return as lost loved ones, or lost enemies—well, I don’t want to consider the consequences. People are already uneasy enough about us.

“We’ve got to keep it secret—that’s our greatest advantage. We Wakers can do things, support ourselves and plan for our future. It’s delicate stuff, with such far-reaching consequences as the future of all Servants, so we’ve got to proceed with the utmost care. We don’t want massacres of Servants, and we don’t want an upheaval of all society, you know.”

She ran out of patience with herself. “Gregor will explain it all to you. He’s a lot more eloquent. For now, I’m more concerned with getting you to him. Stay here a minute.”

The nurse/tech left the bright room, sliding the door shut behind her. She hurried out to the front lobby with a firm, businesslike stride, but stopped abruptly upon looking out the transplastic entry doors.

Outside, the black hulking shape of an Enforcers Guild hovertransport hung in the air with its tonguelike ramp extending to the ground. A second transport lowered itself into position. White-armored Enforcers filed out of the first craft, taking positions near the door. An Elite Guard, accompanied by one regular Enforcer, strode to the sliding transplastic doors; his midnight-blue armor made him look much larger than he actually was.

Several of the techs and waiting patients pushed excitedly to the window, watching and whispering to each other; other patients remained apathetic, scanning Net periodicals or staring at the artificial plant-things in the lobby.

As the doors slid open for the Elite Guard and the first Enforcer, the nurse/tech moved to meet him before anyone else could speak. The Elite Guard was startled by her abrupt presence, and she used it to push her advantage.

“Yes, Guildsman, how may we be of assistance? I can see this is serious. Please be careful. The safety of our patients is paramount.”

The blue-armored Guard turned his opaque visor toward her. “You have a Servant here. He was injured, and someone healed him.”

“That is our business after all,” she said, smothering her own sarcasm.

“My orders are to apprehend him.”

The troops of Enforcers outside had surrounded the medical center. Other men in the second hovertransport stood waiting.

“Are we in danger from this Servant?” She placed a worried tone in her voice. “May I ask what he’s done?”

“No, you may not. Please direct me to him.” The accompanying Enforcer tensed. His hand strayed toward a weapon. “Now.”

“Yes, yes. One moment.” The nurse/tech bustled behind the counter. She rattled her fingers over a keyboard, ostensibly calling up information on Danal, stalling for time, trying to think.

“Ah, yes. He was injured in the shoulder, but he’s recuperating now. Claims his name is Danal—well, of course his name is Danal, since Servants can’t lie.” She let out a little laugh. “Says here that the attending physician suspected your Servant might be violent or something. Here, follow me.”

She strode down one of the corridors with the two armored men marching closely on her heels. “He’s in this one—it’s one of our high-security chambers, designed to restrain the more violent patients and to ensure that they can’t escape.”

“Good.” The Elite Guard pulled out his scatter-stun, and the other Enforcer did the same. They both tensed. “Now let us in.”

The nurse/tech activated the door, and both men leaped into the empty chamber. Just as quickly she reversed the switch and slammed the door back into its closed position, affixing the edges with magnetic seals. Smiling to herself, she illuminated the “CAUTION—VIOLENT PATIENT” designator and turned rapidly to walk away as the two trapped Enforcers began to pound on the door.

For lack of a better idea, the nurse/tech activated the emergency fire alarms as she hurried back to Danal’s room. An urgent ratcheting sound filled the halls. The other people in the medical center milled about, confused.

The nurse/tech slid open the door to Danal’s room and threw him an apron like those worn by the orderly Servants. “Put this on. And come out in just a minute. Trouble. I think this is going to be tough.”

The nurse/tech popped out into the hall again, ushering the people toward the front door. “We all have to evacuate! We’ve got a situation here. The Elite Guard wants us out—come on, let the Enforcers do their job! Everybody out!”

Without their Elite Guard leader, the massed Enforcers outside were completely at a loss when the patients and medical personnel began to crowd out the doors. The Enforcer troops could not retain control, short of stunning the front lines of refugees, and they did not want another mob disturbance so soon after the riot outside Resurrection, Inc. The uncertain chaos outside even exceeded the nurse/tech’s expectations.

As she returned to get Danal, she noticed that the door of the confinement chamber had buckled outward slightly, glowing a dull red as the two trapped Enforcers used their own weapons to blast out.

Danal emerged from his room, uneasily wearing the orderly smock. The stain-killing enzymes in his own gray jumpsuit had by now managed to dissolve much of Nathans’s blood, and the apron made him look more unobtrusive.

The grating evacuation alarm continued to pound through the air, adding to the confusion. The nurse/tech grabbed his arm and propelled him toward the front.

“Everybody out!” she shouted, then lowered her voice to Danal. “Remember what I said. No one can find out about us, especially not the Guild. We’ll take advantage of the confusion and try to get away, but they’ve got two transports of Enforcers out there. Somebody must want you very badly.”

“Nathans is dead. I’m surprised the imposter has that much influence.”

As they reached the lobby, the nurse/tech put on a harried commanding voice. “Servant! Take that box and follow me. Quickly!”

The nurse/tech pointed to a box filled with small vacuum sealed bottles; a label, “BIOLOGICAL SAMPLES—IN STRICT CONFIDENCE,” stood out prominently on the outside of the box. Danal picked up the package, made sure to keep a blank, mechanical expression on his face, and followed her outside. He tried to hide his face behind the box, though Danal doubted any of the Enforcers had a good description of his facial characteristics anyway.

Some of the Enforcers stood rigid, at attention; others ran around, chasing people, trying to look authoritative.

The nurse/tech hopped from one person to another in the crowd, tending the displaced patients. One man squatted on the ground, crying, staring at his knees. The nurse/tech went by, patted him on the back, and went to a woman who was adjusting her own bandages on a burned hand. “You all right? Good.”

She moved on. Danal followed her obediently, like a good Servant. She spoke to him quietly out of the corner of her mouth. “Over there—see it? If we’re careful, I think we might be able to just walk out of here.”

Danal looked where she indicated. A block and a half away, one of the broad KEEP OFF THE GRASS patches glowed threateningly with its lush, vibrant green lawn, fenced off with a knee-high barricade. One Enforcer stood stationed beside it, presumably to make sure no one slipped and fell into the deadly disintegrator patch. The single Enforcer watched the chaos around the medical center, but made no move to help out, refusing to leave his post.

When the two nearest Enforcers moved aside to break up a fight between a medical center tech and a patient, the nurse/tech stepped up her pace and bustled down the street, trying to get away from the crowd.

Behind them, the trapped Elite Guard and his accompanying Enforcer burst out of the medical center entrance, successful in blasting their way through the door of the confinement chamber. Both of them had weapons in each hand. They began shouting, causing a large commotion.

The nurse/tech did not look back, but moved more quickly instead. Danal saw the lone Enforcer ahead of them by the disintegrator patch and prayed that he wouldn’t pay any particular attention to them.

“Hey! Wait! You—” one of the Enforcers behind them bellowed.

The nurse/tech broke into a run. “Follow me! Now!”

Danal dropped the box of samples with a crash at his feet and leaped over it as it fell. Someone else shouted, and a ping! exploded at Danal’s feet.

“No, you idiot! Not projectile weapons!” someone screeched behind them. “We’ve got to take him alive! Scatter-stuns, everyone!”

Danal ran. The Enforcer in front of them stood with his legs spread, intimidating, but not moving from his position. He held one gloved hand out, waggling it slightly in a strange gesture. The nurse/tech ran directly toward him.

“Danal! Command: Follow!”

Unable to resist and suddenly betrayed by the Command phrase, Danal leaped after her. He heard the buzzing hum behind him as scatter-stun fields radiated outward.

He and the nurse/tech had almost reached the lone Enforcer. The gaping deadly maw of the KEEP OFF THE GRASS patch shone a beautiful green, beckoning.

Then Danal’s left leg went completely numb and useless as a scatter-stun field struck it. His own momentum carried him forward, but he tripped and fell directly into the arms of the waiting Enforcer.

The white-armored man grappled with him, wrestling the Servant in a bear hug. Danal tried to struggle, but the Enforcer began to tip backward, stumbling into the low fence surrounding the disintegrator patch.

The nurse/tech let out a wild howl and also leaped to tackle the Enforcer. All three of them toppled over the low barricade toward the deadly shimmering grass.

With the speed of his microprocessor Danal felt himself falling with agonizing slowness, unable to escape. The last thing he saw was the sharp and distinct green blades of grass. As he reached out his arm to try to stop their fall, Danal saw his own hand disappear into nothingness as a brief rush of ozone filled his nostrils. Then the rest of his body fell through the disintegrator field, engulfed completely.