Golgotha Run (22 page)

“
However discontinuous, however dislocated the Other might be from human experience and terms, those terms are still the only things that count. We eat what we bring to the table, no more, no less.
”

“So what you’re telling me, basically,” said Eddie, “is that it doesn’t matter
a damn what’s really going on because humans are screwing around with it, and
it’s only the human screwing around that counts.”

“
If I could nod all sagely and smugly I would,
” said the Head. “
As it is I’ll just settle for a somewhat smug precisely’. Listen up, sport, and I’ll clue you in on all the human-level poop.
”

“And it’ll finally be the complete and actual truth?” Eddie asked.

“
True as anything else,
” said the Head. “
Sure, why not. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…
”

In the bottom drawer of the desk was a barely half-finished quart of Wild
Turkey, and Colonel Roland Grist could hear it calling to him. It was the
proper twenty-five year-old article as well, turn of the century, no dicking
around.

He wasn’t going to reach for it, though, not with this… well, let’s be
honest, here, this jumped-up
whore
watching him with her mocking eyes.

Grist found himself longing for the days when life had been simple, the days
when he’d seen the world and killed people as an airborne ranger. Afghanistan,
Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Zimbabwe. Even twenty years after a bunch of
fundamentalist ragheads had flown a few planes into innocent buildings it
could still be used as justification for invading hostile nations. God bless
America. And if you happen to blind or cripple a few stone-throwing children
or make some Congolese girl do something she doesn’t want to do on one of
these extended vacations then whose to argue? Say what you like, an officer in
the US Army still got you some goddamn respect.

Grist couldn’t imagine this Desoto girl being made to do a single thing she
didn’t want. Quite the reverse, in fact.

In fact, Grist had the distinct impression that, should she ever feel like it,
she was perfectly capable of spending months of research to find the single
worst thing that he would rather stick a gun in his mouth rather than do, just
so’s she could force him to do it.

“Where’s your friend?” Grist asked, more or less for the sake of something to
say, and break the contemptuous silence with which she was currently regarding
him.

“Eddie’s off getting some Head.” The Desoto woman shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry
about it. He’s just funny that way.”

Her manner became more businesslike.

“The operation’s a go,” she said. “I want you to lock the base. Total embargo
on communications: nothing coming in, nothing going out, you get me?”

It wasn’t even an order. It was a flat statement of how the world was going to
be.

Nevertheless, Grist felt he ought to stick up for the autonomy of the US
Military from commercial concerns.

“That might be, uh, problematic,” he said. “We maintain first-strike
capability here. We have to maintain constant contact with the Pentagon, with
the White House. I can’t simply—“

The Desoto woman snorted. “The White House doesn’t know you exist and the
Pentagon doesn’t care. You can try them, if you like, before you lock this
place down, but do you know what they’re gonna tell you to do? They’re gonna
tell you to shut up and do exactly what I say because they’re picking up the
check for this little operation.”

The Wild Turkey was really calling now. For an instant, Grist was struck by
the vision of racking back the drawer, hauling out the bottle by the neck and
smashing it against the side of the Desoto girl’s head.

The vision was so profoundly strong that, a second later, Grist realised that
he was still sitting there, staring somewhat dumbly at a miraculously
reconstituted and unbloodied Trix Desoto.

He even had to make a quick scan for a general lack of broken glass and a
closed desk drawer, just to be sure.

He realised that the Desoto girl had spoken and was looking at him, coldly,
for an answer.

“I, uh, beg you pardon?” he managed at last. “Ma’am.”

“I was merely saying,” the Desoto girl said, “that you’d better get used to
the fact that you’re currently not a lot more than a cloakroom attendant for
GenTech, looking after our crap. Now we’re handing in the ticket and we want
it back.”

It happened back in the last century (said the Talking Head), back in the
early 1960s and the classified fusion-bomb tests out here in Nevada.

Fusion, as we all know, doesn’t produce gamma or particle-radiation fallout,
it just makes a fucking great hole in the ground. So it was with some
surprise, and not without a certain degree of trepidation, that those involved
subsequently detected massive amounts of radioactivity emanating from the
impact-crater.

It wasn’t
radioactivity
, of course, not in any actual sense we know. It just
tripped the Geigers in more or less the same way that radioactivity would.

It exhibited wave-particle properties similar to those of X-rays, or for that
matter photons, but there were marked dissimilarities… What do I look like,
some science-lecturer guy?

There’s reams of waveform analysis and whatever in the files, but the upshot
is that there’s simply nothing to compare it
to
. It’s dissimilar to
everything else in the world we know, in certain fundamental respects, and
only similar to itself.

The phenomenon was ultimately termed Upsilonic Radiation (the Head continued)
and people have spent lives and careers—their own and others—attempting
to determine its basic nature and effect.

That’s secondary, though. The important thing is that, when they finally
managed to knock up suits capable of protecting humans, well enough and long
enough, to survive in the test-bomb crater, they found that the detonation had
breached what was obviously an artificial chamber containing what we call the Artefact.

Bit of a suspicious coincidence, that, you say? Well, for one thing, there
were one hell of a lot of bomb tests in the Fifties and Sixties, so you might
say that we were due. If there was something hanging around down there and
waiting to be found.

But more importantly you’re talking about what we’ll call a false congruity, a
confusion between cause and effect. The only reason that we’re here to talk
about the confluence of events—any confluence of events, for that matter—is
that they happened in the first place.

You might was well say: isn’t it lucky trousers have two legs, otherwise they
wouldn’t fit. Isn’t it lucky we have all these dogs to eat all the dog-food
people make. When people actually had dogs as pets and didn’t eat them,
anyway. Sometimes shit just happens, basically, to make a profoundly original
philosophical point, and you simply have to deal with it.

As for the Artefact itself. You say it’s obviously a Ship, and that’s good.
Very good, in fact. That’s the whole point of what we… well, we’ll get to
that later.

The thing about that is that the first investigators on the scene didn’t see a
Ship of any kind at all.

They saw any number of things, from a churning glob of protoplasm, to an
insanely complicated mass of clockwork, to the Living Christ nailed to the
cross, somehow transported through time and actually there. A giant telephone
wrapped in barbed wire. Someone’s fat ugly mother dead and lying in state. A
set of animated nest-tables dancing to “La Cucaracha” but not actually doing
it…

It was different for everyone, what they saw—save for those who for some
reason simply didn’t see a thing at all, and who went into spontaneous
psychopathic fits when others insisted that there was, indeed, something
there.

Film footage and, later, video, had the same general effect; nobody could
agree on what they were seeing. Digital photography, on the other hand,
interestingly enough, just shows a haze of dead pixels to everyone.

The Artefact was, simply, Other. It came from Somewhere Else. Some place where
human words and concepts simply don’t apply. And the upshot was, of course,
that the US Government found itself in sole possession of something supremely
powerful and unique… with not the slightest idea of what it was.

So they decided to damn well find out.

Disinformation operations were set up, more or less along the lines of Roswell
and the like to keep those who might be drawn towards the whole idea of
“aliens” the hell out of the way.

Samples were taken, by way of the discovery that… well, samples were taken,
anyway. Study of those samples led to quantum jumps in any number of fields,
from the processes informing the Rapture Bug field-test in Des Moines and the
subsequent Zarathustra procedures, to Al-grade transputer technology, to the
containment fields that made hydrogen fusion in vehicles a practicality. The
basis for our world, in fact, such as it is.

All very nice, if that’s the sort of thing that floats your boat… but none
of it led to a breath of understanding as to what the Artefact actually
was.

A partial breakthrough came just after the turn of the century, when a
programme was instituted of exposing live subjects to minute traces of
Artefact material.

This was while the US Government was engaged in what was called a War on
Terror. Complete and utter nonsense, of course; you might was well declare a
War on Literacy—which they were also doing, believe you me; they just
didn’t come right out and say it.

Anyhow. The thing about waging a war on a
methodology
, as opposed to
anything concrete, was that you could target anyone who you pretty much liked,
and pretty much get away with anything in the name of it.

Initially, the live subjects were suspected so-called “terrorists”, who at the
time were busily being detained and stockpiled without due process. The
experiments were… not a success, unless you count spontaneous mutation into something abominable, feculent and dead to be successful.

It was believed that the material itself was in some way attempting to adapt
those to whom it was exposed, so they could survive the exposure, and
spectacularly failing.

The theory was then advanced that, since the experimental subjects were mostly
adults, the altered
genome
was fighting against an already established
phoneme
to catastrophic effect. It was suggested that the procedure be tried
using infants.

I know, I know, but remember that the US was fighting, so it said, monsters
who would cheerfully murder American babies—and if the cost of fighting them
was to do likewise then what were the odds?

In any case, once the idea was mentioned, some bright spark remembered some
research that had been done more than twenty years before, in that previous
period of venal Republican numbskullery, the 1980s.

The precise same experiments, it transpired, had been conducted under
something called the Janus Project, under the aegis of a Secret Service
offshoot calling itself Section Eight. And yeah, but of course, didn’t that
lead to a lot of bureaucratic confusion. Intentionally so. It kept the Project
buried under disinformation.

The Janus Project had been reckoned to be a failure, too. The subjects either
spontaneously mutated into monstrous et cetera, or absolutely nothing seemed
to happen to them at all. Those who survived were dispersed in a manner that
wouldn’t arouse undue attention, as opposed to merely killing them, and the
Project was quietly wrapped up.

Twenty years later, when they went through the files and tracked down the
survivors, the government found a small surprise. The science of genetics had
advanced more than somewhat—and they found some really freaky things
happening with the survivors’ junk DNA. And the interesting thing about that
was that it was generational. The survivors had passed the modifications on to
their kids.

So, of course, there was nothing for it but to haul that second generation of
kids in and start the whole procedure of exposing them all over again.

The problem was that, once again, the Project failed. Oh, fewer of the kids
actually died, but nothing much else happened either. The Government gave up,
dumped people like you out in various out-of-the-way shitholes, decided to go
back to being a glorified gun-runner and washed its hands of the whole sorry
business.

So, basically, after all that work and effort, all that suffering, the whole
thing just turned out to be totally without meaning and pointless. Oh,
well. You gotta laugh, eh?

The communications lockdown of Arbitrary Base did not, of course, extend to
official GenTech traffic. In his spartan quarters in the San Angeles Factory,
Masterton was now in the process of conversing with Trix Desoto via secured and
scrambled satellite phone.

“So you put our Mister Kalish together with the Talking Head?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Trix Desoto. “He was getting somewhat vehement. Seemed like the
best thing to do at the time.”

“Well, I’m just thanking Christ that I remembered to seriously downgrade its
access and capacity,” said Masterton. “He should get enough of the truth to
satisfy his curiosity, give him some idea of the actual state of play on top
if he’s lucky and asks the right questions—but it wouldn’t do for him to
learn…
absolutely
everything, now, would it?”

“If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about, then no,” said
Trix Desoto on the other end of the line. “You’d have no hold on him
whatsoever if he happened to learn that particular little titbit. I think it’s
safe to say that Eddie learning that particular little titbit would end up
very bad for you indeed.”

“Why, do my ears deceive me, Trix,” said Masterton, “or do I hear a note of
cunning speculation in your voice?”