Golgotha Run (21 page)

Fitful tendrils of electrical activity crackled along the tunnels, clustering
in the areas where Trix and Eddie walked. It was as if the Ship itself were
attempting to light their way.

“I think she’s trying to be helpful,” Trix said.

“She?” said Eddie.

“It’s just nomenclature,” said Trix. “I don’t mean anything by it.”

“Well I’ve gotta tell you,” said Eddie, “that I can’t imagine thinking of this
thing as anything other than an
it
.”

“Suit yourself,” said Trix Desoto. “Now, I’ve been here before, so we’re not
going on the grand tour. We just need to find what we’re calling a node… and
speak of the devil. There we go.”

The so-called node was little more than a place where some of the smaller
tubes, running through the main tube of the passageway in a manner no doubt
analogous to cables or ducts, clustered and fused together in a malformed
lump. The electrical activity within it glowed in a way that, while still
faint, was markedly brighter than in the tunnel itself.

“These are basically the equivalent of control panels, I think,” said Trix.
“Put your hand on it.”

“What?” said Eddie.

“Put your hand on it. See what happens.”

Later, Eddie would think of any number of reasons why just slapping your hand
on some unknown piece of alien technology might be a bad idea. At the time,
none of them occurred to him. He just did it. It must have been Trix Desoto’s
tone of voice.

The panel ignited with a blaze of white light. Electrical fire crawled up
Eddie’s arm and squirrel-caged around his head. His eyes rolled up in his head
and the whites glowed, cutting beams through the darkness of the passageway.
Flame in the dark.

Eddie snatched his hand away. The electrical activity dissipated instantly,
leaving him pale and shaking.

“That’s the biggie,”Trix Desoto was saying happily. “That’s the test. You made
basic contact and survived with at least some of your neurones intact.” She
looked at him, slightly concerned. “How do you feel?”

It was a few seconds before Eddie pulled himself together to the point of
being capable of speech.

“It’s like it… it’s like she
knew
me,” he managed at last through
chattering teeth. Like she’s been waiting. Waiting so long and… oh, she’s
hungry…
she wants food. In her
mouth
she… oh God!”

Abruptly, as though galvanised, he lunged for Trix and grabbed her, pinioning
her upper arms. For a moment Trix was startled enough that setting loose the
processes of the Loup—processes that might have turned a firmly Leashed
Eddie Kalish into the general consistency of guacamole—never occurred to
her.

“You’ve been here before,” Eddie rasped, glaring into Trix Desoto’s eyes with
such ferocity that, for an instant, they seemed to glow every bit as much as
when he had laid his hand upon the Node. “You’ve talked to this thing. You know
what she… what it wants to do…”

“Well, uh, yeah, of course,” said Trix. “I know what we, that is GenTech, have
to do to—“

“Then tell me what the
fuck
is really going on!” Eddie thundered. “You’ve
been screwing me around from up to down, and now you want me to, you want me
to be involved in… I want a proper explanation and I want it now!”

“
Now you’ll remember,
” said the Talking Head that was currently assuming the
persona of Masterton, “
because I must have said it before—I’m sure of it,
in fact—that we keep coming back to the same situation over and over
again?
”

“You—that is, the real you—might have mentioned something,” said Eddie
Kalish, “to that effect. You know, in odd moments.”

“
Well, quite,
” said the Talking Head. “
And one of those situations is
that you come out and say something, and I tell you not to be a particular thing. Can you remember what it is, that particular thing?”

“I remember,” said Eddie Kalish.

“
And what would that particular thing be?
”

“A fucking tool,” said Eddie Kalish. “All right?”

“
A fucking, as you so rightly say, tool,
” said the Talking Head.

The Talking Head was, basically, a lump of mimetic biogel, hooked up to the
Brain Train’s command centre systems and imprinted with the memory engrams of
Masterton.

Trix had told him that, while he was talking to the Head, she was going to be
implementing a lockdown procedure for the entire Base. In a secure situation
such as this, with no communications traffic going in or coming out, it was
sometimes useful to confer with a player from the outside.

The Talking Head was capable of giving a clear approximation of what Masterton
himself might think and say in any given circumstance—and if circumstances
happened to fall outside of its parameters it would say so, allowing one to
determine if it was worth breaking communications silence and talking to the
man himself.

Eddie had decided, for any number of reasons, that he’d leave talking to the
man himself as an absolute last resort.

“
There’s no way you’re any kind of fucking alien, or descended from aliens,
” the Talking Head was saying. “
Not in any sense you’re capable of understanding the word
alien,
in any case. That would be completely and utterly ridiculous.
”

The Head formed its biogel mouth into a grimace of irritation. “
The word
itself has a bad rep these days, what with being appropriated to fuck and back
by sad Abductee-Syndrome fuckos sleeping too close to an electrical outlet,
and think that every tick they ever get off their dog is a fucking implant.
”

“
If it’ll make you any happier—and fuck knows, that seems to be my function in life at the moment—think of it in terms of Otherness with a capital O. Contact with the Other.
”

“Other?” Eddie Kalish said. “Other than what?”

“
Other than whatever you got, fucko,
” said the Talking Head. “
Tyre irons, butch-wax, precooked individually wrapped sausages, hockey pucks, cellular phones, string, Danish pastries, sousaphones, hydrogen fusion reactors, the complete works of the Marquis de Sade, submarines, small trees, dogshit, what the fuck you want? Lemons, printed circuits, soap, novelty key chains…
”

It occurred to Eddie that, through the slightly limited and simplified
responses of the Head, he had just learned something about the character of
Masterton the man.

He had listened to the Head converse with a technician or some such, and the
conversation had been purely technical, without a trace of antagonism or
extraneousness. Now the Head seemed to have fallen into the persona of Eddie
Kalish, himself, as Masterton the man seemed to do when they actually talked.
Masterton the man, he realised, had something of the mimetic about him.

The Loup took this opportunity to take a little bit of information from a
pocket and dropped it into his conscious mind:

Pacing and leading, it was called. The operator falls into the physical and
verbal rhythms of the subject, reinforces them by the repetition of key words
and gestures, the glib recitals of lists—and then takes the subject off in
a direction that he, the operator, wants. Just the sort of semi-hypnotic
managerial shit that a managerial shit like Masterton would have down
pat—only filtered through the somewhat cruder mechanics of the Head it became that
much more jarring and noticeable.

Eddie wondered if the almost constant swearing—from both the Talking Head
and Masterton himself—when in conversation with him was just an
exaggeration for the sake of imitation, or a true representation of how he,
Eddie, really spoke. Pain in the ass if the latter were so, but then again you
could never tell with something like that.

“…
trapeze artists,
” the Head was saying, “
Stilton cheese, grommet-hearings, tapas, gingham, loudhailers, Billie Holliday platters, loam…
”

Eddie glanced to one of the technicians who ran the Command Module. “Is there
a reset button on this? I think it’s gone into a loop or something.”

“
Hands off, fucko,
” said the Talking Head. “
I haven’t crashed or anything. I can just do that shit for longer than is humanly possible.
”

“So you’re, uh, aware of the basic nature of your existence, then?” said
Eddie.

“
Course I am,
” said the Head. “
I’m not a complete fucking moron, and it’s more than I can say about you.
”

“What,” said Eddie, “that I don’t know the basic nature of my existence, or
I’m a complete moron?”

“
Look into the dead flat marbles that are my eyes,
” said the Head. “
What are the fucking odds. What do you know about Butts?
”

“Do you know,” Eddie snapped. “These last few months, seems as like every
sucker and his pooch has some snide little thing to say about me and sex. I’ve
got a Testostorossa who thinks I should be mincing around in a pink tutu, Trix
Desoto just assumes I like boys as a matter of course and now some glob of
solidified goo in the shape of a disembodied head is coming it with the
goddamn butts!

“Well, I’m getting sick of it—so let me lay it out once and for all, and
you can tell any asshole who asks. I’ve done it maybe four times in my life,
with backroom girls, when I’ve managed to scrape together the coin. I’ve got
nothing so against the backroom
boys
that I’d run a mile, but then again I
don’t feel any real need to go across the street. I’ve no idea what I want out
of the rest of my life, you know, if I happen to meet someone, and maybe
that’s because of this Alienation Syndrome Trix was talking about—but
maybe, just maybe, it’s because I’m only fucking seventeen years old! So get
off my fucking
back,
okay?”

There was a pause.

“
That must have been building up for quite a while there,
” said the Talking Head.

“I suppose,” said Eddie.

“
Feel better for getting it off your chest?
” said the Talking Head.

“I suppose,” said Eddie.

“
Well, cathartic as all that might be, in a Reichian sort of way,
” said the
Talking Head. “
I was actually talking about the author, Oscar Butts.
”

“Oh,” said Eddie.

“
Two-bit crime writer who had a lot of stuff published in rags like
Spicy Detective
either side of the Second World War. I’m surprised you didn’t get a complete bio and bibliography along with the Loup, since the knowledge might have been of actual use.
”

“Yeah, well I got stuff about the Romantic Movement that would blow your socks
off,” said Eddie. “As they all did to each other on a regular basis, by all
accounts.”

“
In any event,
” said the Talking Head, “
Butts’s stock in trade was definite C-grade detective fiction. The kind of story where roscoes belched and people flung woo. The guy was going nowhere fast, so his getting drafted and sent to fight in Europe in ’42 was no great loss to literature. But something happened to him in Europe, something that would change the direction of his future writings.

“
Nobody’s quite sure what that something was. Some people say it was because he was in the same unit as Henry Kuttner and the horror writer did a complete number on Butts. He introduced him to the Cthulhu Mythos—you know, the stuff that Lovecraft, Derleth, Ashton-Smith and guys like that used to write—and it coloured his fiction for the rest of his life.

“
Other people say that his unit were ordered to guard an artefact that the Nazis were caught trying to smuggle from North Africa through Italy and the experience drove him mad. Depending on who you listened to, this artefact was anything from the Spear of Destiny to a fully operational inter-planetary craft complete with alien corpses. Sound familiar?

“
Either way, as soon as he got back stateside he began writing again. Not the sub-Dashiell Hammett crap he churned out before the war, but genre-splicing innovative fiction where private dicks were just as likely to go insane staring at the visage of Tsathoggua as they were to solve the case and get the girl. Magazines and publishers started to take note of Butts and his work and it wasn’t long before his novels started to be published. The first was
The Lady From Beyond the Stars
and that was swiftly followed by
The Killer had a Million Faces, Murderphillia, The Star Goat—

“Hang on,” said Eddie. “You mean like ‘Attack of the Mutant Star Goat’—no
tin can is safe? Did it have a big straw hat on?”

“
At the time,
” said the Head, “
people found his tales quite terrifying. The stories haunted them. The most horrific things they’d ever read.
”

“Doesn’t sound all that terrifying to me,” said Eddie.

“
Well, other times and other sensibilities,
” said the Head. “
Of course, the main reason was that, as a writer, Butts was frankly just a little bit rotten. He tended to cop out of actually describing his entities, ending the story with the narrator delirious, or writing that they’re coming for me with their aarg aarg aargh. That left a hole for people to fill with their own worst nightmares. Like looking at a dark reflector. Stick one finger in the pool, there’s three fingers pointing back at you, you know?

“
Of course, you can’t get away with ambiguity much these days,
” the Head continued. “
Suckers who can even read, after a fashion, can only follow something simple and point-to-point. Nobody has the nuts for inference in fiction, these days. There’s quite enough of that in real life. They need things all spelled out when they read books.
”

“And that’s why Butts is important?” said Eddie. He wondered if he was still,
somehow, totally failing to grasp the point.

“
It’s important as a model for humans dealing with the Other,
” said the Head. “
I mean, ninety per cent of our universe is made up of Dark Matter, which is basically stuff just hanging around—but the name itself makes it sound a bit dangerous and mysterious.
Dark
Matter, you know?