least he’d been somebody to talk to. Guilder had trusted him, confided in him. Across the years there wasn’t much they hadn’t gotten around to saying. Guilder had even told him about Shawna, though he’d masked the story in irony. A whore, can you believe it? What a jackass I was! My, but they’d had a good, long laugh at that. The thing was, this was just the sort of unconstructed, vaguely anxious hour when Guilder would have stuck his head from the door, summoning his friend into his office on some pretense—“Fred, get in here!”—but really just to talk.
His friend. He supposed they were. Had been.
Darkness came on. Guilder’s gaze traveled down the hill to the Project. It would need a new name now. Hoppel would have been the guy for that; no doubt about it, he’d had a way with words. In his former life he’d been an ad guy with a big Chicago agency, experience he’d put to plentiful use concocting the catchphrases and jingles that kept the troops in rhetorical line, right down to the words of the anthem. Homeland, our Homeland, we pledge our lives to thee. Our labors do we offer, without recompense or fee. Homeland, our Homeland, a nation rises here. Safety, hope, security, from sea to shining sea. Corny as hell, and Guilder hadn’t been so keen on the word “recompense”—it seemed a little bookish—but the thing scanned nicely and was, by the standards of its genre, not too hard on the ears.
So, what should they call it there? “Bunker” was too martial. “Palace” had the right general ring, but there was nothing palatial about the place. It looked like a big concrete box. Something religious? A shrine? Who would not go willingly into a shrine?
Just how many of the flatlanders would have to go, and at what frequency, remained to be seen; Guilder had yet to receive specific instructions from Zero on this point, the general sense being that things would come out in the wash. The Twelve—or rather, Eleven—might be different from your garden-variety viral, but they were what they were—eating machines, basically. No matter what directives came down from on high, a century of gobbling up everything with a pulse would be a hard habit to shake. But in the main, their diet would consist of a combination of donated human blood and domestic livestock. The right ratios needed to be scrupulously maintained; the human population had to grow. Generation by generation, human and viral, working together—which was, come to think of it, not a bad way to sell the thing. It was positively Hoppelesque. What was the term? Rebranding? That’s what Guilder needed. A fresh point of view, a new lexicon, a new vision. A rebranding of the viral experience.
He might have really hit on something with this shrine business. The establishment of something rather like an official religion, with all the mumbo jumbo and ritualistic trappings, might be just the lubricant the gears of human psychology required. State worship was all stick and no carrot; it produced only an arid obedience to authority. But hope was the greatest social organizer of all. Give people hope, and you could make them do just about anything. And not just your average, everyday kind of hope—for food or clothes or the absence of pain or good suburban schools or low down payments with easy financing. What people needed was a hope beyond the visible world, the world of the body and its trials, of life’s endless dull parade of things. A hope that all was not as it appeared.
And there it was, the name. How simple it was, how elegant. Not a shrine; a temple. The Temple of Life Everlasting. And he, Horace Guilder, would be its priest.
So, not such a worthless day after all. Funny how things could just come like that, he thought with a smile—his first in weeks. Screw Hoppel and his ditties. And while he was at it, screw Wilkes, that ingrate. Guilder had everything in hand.
First the injection, and the wooziness, and Sara, lying on a wheeled gurney, observed the ceiling flowing past.
“Alley … oop.”
Now she was somewhere else. The room was dim. Hands were lifting her onto a table, tightening straps around her arms and legs and forehead. The metal was chilly beneath her. At some point her robe had been removed and replaced by a cotton gown. Her mind moved with animal heaviness through these facts, noting them without emotion. It was hard