Golgotha Run (23 page)

“I’m just saying that I know for a fact that there’s some stuff you’re not
telling even me,” said Trix Desoto. “You’ve got my loyalty in this—but
don’t forget that I’ve got what Eddie’s got. We’re not like… basic humans,
and you’re basically human, and I know the sort of deviousness that basic
humans get up to. The games within games you like to play.

“I’m telling you, Masterton, that if you try to pull any of that shit with us,
then Eddie Kalish learning an interesting little particular titbit is going to
be the least of your worries.”

After Trix Desoto had cut the connection, Masterton just sat there for a
while, doing and thinking nothing in particular. Then he raised his hands to
his black wraparound shades and pulled them from his head.

The shades were inset with remote-feed microcams, hooked to an implant in his
visual centre.

Masterton turned the shades around and used them to examine the strange new
growths taken root and growing in the involuted ruins of what had once been
his eyes.

“Basic human…” he mused to himself. “Ah, Trix, Trix, if you only knew.”

For what seemed to be a long time, Eddie just stood there looking at the
Talking Head.

“And that’s it, is it?” he said at last. “That’s all there is?”

“
You got your special secret origin,
” said the Talking Head, “
plus an
explanation for why you don’t quite seem to fit into the world. Why you have
problems relating to other human beings on even the most basic level. What
more do you fucking want?
”

“Well for one thing,” said Eddie. “You’ve just gone out of your way to tell me
what happened to me as a kid and then pull the rug out from under me and tell
me it’s totally meaningless.

“You and—well,
you
—never seem to lose an opportunity to tell me how
insignificant I am in the greater scheme of things, how I’m basically nothing
but an ambulatory tool… but that’s not strictly true is it? There’s something more that you’re still not telling me.”

“
Do you realise,
” said the Talking Head, “
that you managed to get through that entire little speech without saying the word ‘fuck’ once? I have to admit that I’m rather impressed.
”

“Fuck being rather impressed!” Eddie shouted. “Stop trying to deflect the
question and answer! Tool I might be, but I’ve got a function that for some
reason is incredibly valuable to you and GenTech—and you’re gonna fucking
well tell me what the fuck it is!”

“
Well, if you’re going to be like that,
” said the Head, “
then I’m telling you, yet again, that you simply don’t Need to Know. All you need to know is how to do what we tell you, when we tell you. We have… ways of teaching you, if you can’t get that little fact through your head.
”

“Oh yes?” said Eddie, softly. “I’d like to see you try.”

(It would be later, looking back, that he would realise that this was the
point that several technicians in the Command Module started backing away from
him in startled alarm. Pressing themselves against the walls in the cold fear
of prey finding some predator suddenly dropped into the middle of their
enclosure. Replaying the scene, mnemonically, he would recall image-flashes of
the muscles of his arms visibly swelling and bulking, his hands elongating
into claws. At the time, he simply didn’t notice.)

“Let me guess how that might work,” Eddie continued, all unaware that his
voice was roughening into a snarl. “You threaten to overdose me with the Leash
to the point where I simply can’t flip out whatsoever happens, then shoot me
in the head if I don’t follow orders. I suspect that either way—and
whether you shoot me in the head or not—that would mess up whatever it is
you want me for.”

“
Shooting you in the head would definitely end your usefulness,
” said the Talking Head, “
For a while, at any rate, I admit. There are other means that might be brought to bear to ensure your compliance and keep you useful, however.
”

“To the point where, if I was absolutely and persistently determined to screw
up whatever it was you want me to do, you’d be able to stop me every single
time?”

“
Can this be the itinerate and inveterate fuck around who we’ve come to know and love speaking?
” said the Head. “
You don’t have persistence and determination in you, boy.
”

There was a slightly odd set to the Talking Head’s synthetic features, Eddie
thought, but he couldn’t quite work out what it was.

It would only be later that he pegged it: somebody who was well aware of the
effect a foot-long talon might have on a lump of relatively fragile biogel—and
who was doing their very best not to bring the matter up.

“Do you want to try me?” Eddie said. “Just tell me, okay? And I’d be grateful
if you stopped ripping the piss out of me and the way I talk while you do it.”

For a few moments the talking head was silent. Then:

“
I’d do a little exasperated sigh, at this point,
” it said, “
if I had the lungs.

“
All right, already. Okay. I’ll let you in on one of the somewhat larger secrets, if it’ll stop the pissing and moaning and get you at least halfway back in line…
”

It was twenty-four hours later.

Eddie, for his part, was finding his time-sense becoming uncomfortably acute
in that respect. The way that something inside him now incremented the passage
of time in multiples of twelve. There was something about having the day
bisected by the twelve-hourly shots of the Leash that gigged in him.

There were any number of people in the world, he supposed, people with
straight jobs in the Multicorps, say, who lived their lives to a regimen of
getting up at a certain time, eating at fixed other times, doing some one
particular thing for hours on end… but until he had got mixed up with GenTech he’d had nothing in common with the sorry jerks living drone-lives like
that. Whatever else he had been through and done, he had never done that.

It was an imposition. The simple fact of living to a schedule not his own. And
if he ever got himself into the position of, what, finding himself with a
lifetime supply of the Leash and with nobody to dole it out in return for a
favour of any kind, wouldn’t that just simply mean that GenTech had in a
certain sense won after all? They’d have left their mark on him—and would be leaving needle-marks on him for the rest of his goddamn life.

Over twenty-four hours the chamber under Shed Seven containing the
Artefact—or the Ship, or, apparently, Eddie had recently learned,
the
Hammer of God
—had changed markedly. The butterfly wing blast hatches in the main
elevator shaft had been retracted and locked back; cables snaked down from the
Brain Train Command rig and hooked to servomanipulators.

The elevator platform itself had been disabled, meaning that human access to
the chamber of the Artefact was now limited to the emergency maintenance
shafts off to one side.

The canisters containing the Brain Train’s cargo were now being lowered down
the elevator shaft by way of what was basically an automated bucket-chain.
Then the manipulators took them and cracked open the canisters. Then a
collection of other, specialised mechanisms took care of the rather more
horribly organic containers thus revealed.

“It’s an old pathologist’s joke, apparently,” said Trix Desoto. “The human
brain is a remarkably delicate and slippery little customer to deal with.
Fortunately it comes in a padded case. With handles.”

She didn’t seem one bit distressed at all the busy servomechanical activity
as the heads were shelled and discarded in untidy piled, their contents
slopped onto conveyor-belts that trundled them off, through an intake hatch,
into the dark bowels of the Ship. She just stood there, relaxed, the case she
had brought from the Command rig hanging from her hand.

The case was of around the same size and construction as might be suitable for
carrying a snare drum around, built from rib-reinforced aluminium with
polycarbon impact-pads.

Eddie had an idea of what might be in it. All the clues were there. He
shuddered, and recalled what the Talking Head with the persona of Masterton
had finally told him.

Now the thing you have to bear in mind (said the Talking Head) is that almost
everything you think you know, everything you’ve been told so far, is
basically a lie.

Oh, do stop growling at me like that. It’s not impressing anyone. What you’ve
been told is technically factual, so far as such things can be known, given
that we’re dealing with things that nobody sees the same way and everyone has
a different opinion about. You’ve been told the truth, just not all if it—which is, of course, the very best kind of lie there is.

The He, er, lies in the ambiguous nature of the Artefact itself. The fact that
in a certain sense it lies outside the bounds of human comprehension has given
the impression that the very
issues
that surround it he outside the bounds
of human comprehension. This isn’t actually so. The issues themselves are
really quite simple. Ridiculously so, in fact. You’ll laugh when I tell you.
Oh, go on.

The fact is that there are many… well, let’s call them Factions in this
world. And, whoops, that’s a tricky one right from the start. Let’s just say
that by
world
we mean, you know, maybe it’s not just this world and leave it
at that, all right? That’s not the point.

The point is that these Factions are real. Now, it’s not like you can
categorise them as Light and Dark—while remembering that “light” doesn’t
necessarily mean
good
any more than “dark” means
evil
. You need to think
in terms of team colours for some sport or other. And think of their
supporters as being like the soccer fans the Brits have over the pond, who
aren’t exactly charmers, whichever team they root for.

They’ve existed as long as man has walked the earth. Even before the early
humans learned not to walk with their knuckles scraping the ground, they were
forming up into tribes and marking their territory and hunting grounds. Not
unlike how things are today, it’s just that the hunting grounds have changed
somewhat. Instead of an acre of fertile soil, today’s territories are the
airwaves, the boardrooms, the human spirit, the space between your ears and
other less tangible frontiers that you just wouldn’t be able to get your head
around.

But what is important, and what you can comprehend, is that everything that
happens of any importance on this planet is a direct result of a Faction’s influence. If two African nations go to war
because one side doesn’t like the shade of the other side’s skin, it’s because
one Faction or another made it happen. If a young starlet at the peak of her
career is brutally slain in her Beverly Hills mansion, you can bet there’s
Faction involvement somewhere along the line. And if the Colombian coffee crop
fails for three consecutive years then you can stake your house on its cause
having something to do with a Faction. It’s just the way of the world and it’s
how it’s been for thousands of years.

In any event, the thing we’re calling the Artefact was discovered some time
during our planet’s history by one of these Factions, here in its chamber on
Earth. Ever since then it’s been guarded and protected, kept in reserve for
some grand strategic move or other a couple of thousand years down the
line—so far as here and now we reckon time.

But why, and more importantly, how is it here? Is it, as one particular Faction
believes, a gift from some ancient alien culture? Or an ancient alien culture
in its entirety as another believes?

Or is it, in the end, nothing more nor less difficult and complicated than a
Ship? The space-going equivalent of an aircraft carrier, from what I’m told,
designated by a name that comes out in the translation as
Hammer of God
or
some such.

The reason why it projects such a sense of Otherness, the reason why so many
can’t see it for what it is, is simply that it’s discontinuous with the here
and now of our world. It has no place here, no common terms of reference.

Imagine if Neanderthal man were to come across an F1–11 fighter plane that
had somehow been dropped in through a hole in space/time. Somebody might learn
that if you stick a finger in the electrics, you get a nasty shock. Somebody
might accidentally switch on the comms and get an earful of static. That’s
about the extent of what anyone would learn—and that’s the equivalent
of what human beings, here and now, have managed to achieve by a process of
back-engineering.

The thing about that, though, is that by just generally decking around, we
came to the notice of its owners. Somebody heard us babbling into the radio,
as it were.

And so this new Faction made contact. Datanets had nervous breakdowns, the
heads of scores of sensitives around the world literally exploding, the whole
bit. It was chaos for a while, before the Faction caught on to what was
happening and ramped their processes down.

Anyhow. Contact was eventually achieved, and a deal brokered. The new Faction
are to get their
Hammer of God
back and we, well we get our hands on some a
simplified extraterrestrial craft that we can actually understand and reverse
engineer. Just as the technology recovered from the Roswell craft led to the
invention of microwave ovens, e-mail and pay-per-view porn, these new
discoveries will lead to hundreds more breakthroughs. Teleportation. Time
travel. Perpetual motion machines. You name it, we could have it.

And the best thing is that they think we’re doing them a favour. They haven’t
got a clue that we don’t know the first thing about how to extract the
Artefact’s secrets and its very presence here is beginning to throw things way
out of kilter. Do you think it’s a coincidence that the land for hundreds of
miles around here is so dry that even cacti have difficulty growing? So we’re
going to exchange this unknowable heap of junk for an alien museum piece that
was obsolete before Cain even threw Abel a funny look.