Coven (40 page)

“
Aw, Jesus,” Wade groaned
low in his gut.

“
So behave yourself. And
until we meet again…welcome.”

—
YES, WADE,
another voice announced.
—WELCOME TO MY FAMILY.

—

CHAPTER 34

Symbols,
he thought.

Jervis reminded himself to be creative. More
and more, he viewed his new life as a progression of symbols. He
was not so much doing things as he was wielding the hand of
destiny. Everything meant something else, something deeper. But
what else could the warm, black cube symbolize but death?

Besser had called it an
s classtacticlepyrotechnicserviceordnance—its yield was
equivalent to about five hundred kilotons. Jervis understood the
importance of the Supremate leaving it behind, but…

Was he actually having doubts, after all he
had done, after all the people he’d murdered?

No, it wasn’t doubt. It was despair.

Paragons don’t
despair,
he thought.

It was Sarah.

Jervis forced the thought shut. It was one
or the other. It was destiny or sucking up to the bitch who’d
dumped him. Could love be so focused as to divert him from
immortality?

“
No!” he shouted aloud.
“No!”

I will not despair.

The pyrotechnic would kill thousands. It
would kill Sarah too.

“
I will kill them all,”
Jervis said. “But I’ll kill her first, and I’ll do it
myself.”

««—»»

Lydia retrieved her Colt Trooper Mark III
from Besser’s office, where Wade had dropped it. Even though she
knew it was useless, she felt she had to bring it. It was the only
good luck charm for a girl who didn’t believe in luck. The
office was silent. There was no sign of the exchange that had taken
place earlier in the day.

Next she drove back to her apartment.
Absurdly she took a shower, brushed her teeth, and put on a new
uniform.

Am I really going to do
this?
she thought. It was still not too
late to get on the interstate and blow. Something was giving her a
dozen last chances to balk.

She drove the Vette to the student shop. She
had the UV spotter, but she didn’t even know if it would work. When
she entered the shop, she felt more asinine than scared. “Goddamn
you, Wade,” she said to herself. “You better be worth this.”

Tom’s pendant hung around
her neck; the extromission key felt warm in her cleavage. Her eyes
scanned the wall and found the dot. One last luxurious image lodged
in her mind: the Vette cruising swiftly into the next state, the
top off, and Lydia behind the wheel, her hair a blond tumult in the
breeze.
I’m walking to my death,
she thought giddily. “Oh, what the fuck,” she
said.

She inserted the key into the dot and
entered the labyrinth.

—

CHAPTER 35

Wade sat drenched in sweat in the hold. A
lot of sisters seemed to be filing by. He knew now, they were just
bred to order slaves, like drones in a bee colony. That’s
all the Supremate wanted. Unifying the galaxies under one peaceful
order was bullshit—he wanted brainless, obedient laborers to
harvest the resources off all the planets for the material benefit
of his own race, whatever and wherever that was. The Supremate was
as diabolical as anyone in a position of power.

Sisters kept peeping in as they filed by.
Hundreds must’ve done so thus far—where were they all going to?
This was the first opportunity he’d had to see them up close
without their sunglasses. Their eyes were huge silver orbs—the size
of cue balls—each with a black point for a pupil. The black, he
guessed, was just an inbred variation of the same material in
Besser’s sensor ring, and the rods in Tom’s and Jervis’ heads, a
genetic conduction relay that linked all of their minds to the
Supremate. Instant blind allegiance built right in. What more could
tyranny ask for?

And what of him?

Yesterday I was a college student. Today I’m
an intergalactic stud. What a deal.

“
What are you looking at!”
he yelled at the screen. Another sister was grinning in. “How about
a little privacy, huh!”

—
We wish we could be
you.

“
Yeah? Why?”

Black veins traced faintly
beneath her white chiffon skin. Her large breasts were
nippleless.
—We want to make babies
too.

“
Make
tracks
instead. Leave me alone.
Bubblehead.”

But why did she seem so
sad? She was a clone.
—We’re going now.
The Supremate is done with us.
She smiled a
last time, showing rows of glassine teeth.
—Goodbye, Wade.

“
Good riddance. And see a
dentist.
Soon.”

Then she was gone. Her strange laments
surprised him; perhaps they weren’t as mindless as he thought. It
wasn’t Wade they envied—it was life itself. It was love, joy,
passion, creativity, all the things that their warped existence had
left them without. Wade almost felt sorry for her.

We’re going now,
she’d said. But going where? The labyrinth wasn’t
set to leave until midnight. When Wade looked up at the screen
again, the melancholy procession of sisters had ended.

Then a shadow loomed. Besser. “It’s time,
Wade.”

“
Time for what?
Tea?”

Behind the screen’s electrostatic fog,
Besser’s goateed face looked like a cross between Henry VIII and
Lucifer. Two sisters stood at his side. “It’s time for
immortality,” Besser said. “The Supremate wants to give you his
gift now.”

“
Tell him to wait till my
birthday. I hate to feel obliged.”

Besser dropped the screen.
The sisters’ huge eyes blinked above their grins. They grabbed Wade
and pulled him out. They followed Besser down the servicepass and
extromitted several times. The sisters exchanged grins as their
hands roamed Wade’s body.
I’m being felt
up by aliens!
he thought, outraged. Their
curiosity grew incessant; their fingers worked into his shirt. More
envy: the sexless exploring the fertile, touching that which it
wasn’t. “Hey, careful with the merchandise!” Wade complained when
one of the hands slid over his crotch.

Wade sensed he was higher in the labyrinth
now. The servicepasses were darker, the psilight had grown dull.
Warrens he’d seen glowing earlier were black now; others blinked
off before his eyes. It was obvious: They were conserving their
stored energy, shutting down their production areas. Wade presumed
that just about everything here sapped power in some way—power they
no longer had. The psilight seemed to waver, soon in time with a
familiar screech.

The hash room,
Wade realized. That’s where the sisters had been
filing to. He gazed into the channelwork and saw them.

There were hundreds.

“
Power conservation,”
Besser said. “Transception cells consume power, so we’re disposing
of most of the sisters. Now that the initial bifertilizations are
done, only a skeleton crew is required to maintain the replication
systems.”

“
You’re turning them into
food? All of them?”

“
Of course. It’s a perfect
cycle, Wade. When things are no longer needed, we turn them into
something else.”

Food,
Wade thought. He watched the conveyor feed living sisters into
the shredder one by one. Each shriek of the blades was followed by
a soft
splat.
Gobs
of black meat poured into hoppers, which then rolled to dropchutes
and emptied.

“
How many sisters will be
left?”

“
Just a few, to monitor the
systems once we’ve departed. And when we need more” —Besser smiled—
“we’ll
make
more.”

If this was perfection, perfection sucked.
“You’ve got your holotype and surrogates now. What are you waiting
for? Why doesn’t the labyrinth leave right now?”

“
Wade, haven’t you learned
anything in college? I’ve already explained, the labyrinth
assimilates electromagnetic energy as a propulsion mode. The earth
attracts EM waves to the contour of its physical shape. But the
sun’s constant radioactivity, and its equally constant release of
neutrons, exert force against any lateral EM plane. Thus, the field
surrounding the planet is depressed on one side.”

“
The side facing the sun,”
Wade realized.

“
Yes, and that’s why
recharge must occur at night, when there’s more electromagnetic
energy at our disposal.”

“
The Supremate,” Wade
remarked. “He’s one smart dude.”

“
He’s part of the greatest
intelligence that’s ever existed.”

“
How about letting me meet
him?”

Besser turned. “You want
to
meet
the
Supremate?”

Wade knew he was beaten. He wanted at least
to see the face of the force that had beaten him. “It would be an
honor to meet the guy responsible for unifying all collective life
in the universe. It would be a trip.”

Besser pondered the request. “I’m glad
you’re coming around.”

“
Look, I’ve seen it all now
and I know it’s all for the best,” Wade lied through his teeth. “So
I might as well go with the flow.”

“
A sound conclusion.”
Besser’s face was a smiling nod. “Very well, Wade. You shall meet
the Supremate.”

They extromitted through several subinlets.
Again, Wade sensed they were rising. More signs floated by:
SYSTEMSJUNCTURE#730, SYSTEMSJUNCTURE#525, SYSTEMSJUNCTURE#419. With
each extromission they covered a great distance in no time.

“
The extromitters are
programmed by thought,” Besser mentioned. “Without that function,
it would take weeks or even months to cross merely from one level
to the next.”

“
How long would it take to
walk the entire labyrinth?”

“
Years,” Besser
said.

This impressive statistic deepened Wade’s
despair. The further up they went, the more bizarre he felt, the
more abandoned.

Was this how slaves felt before they met
their lords?

Next sign: SYSTEMSJUNCTURE#1.

Wade felt light headed. Besser inserted
his key and extromitted them into the Supremate’s shrine.

They stood tiny in vast, black space. Wade
thought of an auditorium the size of a football field, with black
walls, a black floor, and a black ceiling. Wade was about to meet
the brains behind this entire business. What could something like
that look like?

Set into the corner was a kind of inverted
sconce. Wade could easily picture something grotesque sitting in
it, an abominable, fleshy overlord with giant eyes and fish lips.
Yet all that seemed to be resting in the sconce was a black box
about the size of a VCR. The Supremate must be farther back in the
nave, having not yet emerged.

The two sisters fell immediately to their
knees.

“
Okay,” Wade said. “I’m
ready. Where is he?”

“
Right there,” Besser
said.

Wade squinted. All he saw was the black box
in the empty sconce. “You mean the box?”

Besser nodded, his face uplit in a
triumphant, twisted smile. “Say hello to your new master.”

Wade looked at the box and
frowned deeply. “You’ve got to be shitting me. That
box
is the
Supremate?”

“
Yes.”

Wade was mortified. “That thing looks like
my fucking CD player.” He glared disgusted at the meager black box.
“I was expecting some big toad faced thing sitting on a
throne.”

“
It’s a logic circuit,
Wade, an integrated processing terminal. It’s as conscious as you
or I—only that consciousness is too complex for a physical
body.”

The Supremate’s a
machine,
Wade thought.
A bunch of transistors and solder.
No, it was impossible. It must be a joke. “I cannot believe
that the brains behind this entire operation is a ridiculous black
box!”

—
GREETINGS, WADE,
the black box said.

Besser chuckled.

—
HOW DOES IT FEEL TO MEET
GOD?

««—»»

Her extromission seemed to turn her inside
out and back again. Lydia stood in the mouth of a subinlet. The
production warrens were in total darkness. The psilight was much
dimmer now. And where were the sisters?

She spent a half hour extromitting from one
random place to another. The mindsigns numbered in the hundreds,
but each extromission progressed her only one number at a time.
POINTACCESSMAIN#16, the next sign read. She examined the keyplate.
It was just a black plate with a hole in it, nothing more. There
weren’t even any buttons on it, just a keyhole. There had to be
some trick to this, some way to program extromission to a specific
location.

When she inserted the key, she was
inadvertently remembering her brief stay in the temphold, and the
absolutely disgusting thing that awaited her in the next cell. When
she came out the next access, she expected to find herself at
pointaccessmain#17. Instead, the mindsign glowed TEMPHOLDS.

Thought,
she thought.
Maybe that’s
the trick.
The idea had some definite
possibilities, but before she could contemplate them, footsteps
stopped behind her.