Golgotha Run (10 page)

Something between a rumble and a growl came from her, in rhythm with sleep-breathing. Something that might or might not have been words. She might or
might not be saying the word “mouth”, for some reason, over and over again.

In terrified silence, Eddie slipped into the room. Something slithered under
his foot—something hard and thin and slippery like the cover of an antique
glossy magazine—and for a moment he stumbled, arms pin-wheeling in an
attempt to regain his balance.

Something in her alerted by the shift in the air, the partially transformed
Trix Desoto stirred and grunted. Then she settled down again.

Somehow, at the expense of crushing a fold of inner cheek between his molars,
Eddie preserved his silence. The taste of fresh blood, The sickening feel of crushed mucus-membrane in his teeth.

At last he made it to the sleeping form. There was an area of skin below her
left scapula that looked to be more human than otherwise. So Eddie used his
purloined anaesthetic hypo on that.

Trix Desoto’s breathing slowed. She relaxed further into sleep. It might have
been Eddie’s imagination, but he was sure that, for a moment, the
transformation of her body had kicked into reverse, leaving her form looking
visibly more human.

Last of the brilliant escape-plans, here; a simple case of trading up.

Eddie rooted through the various possessions and clothes on the floor until he
found the thing he needed.

There was also a pair of generically nondescript jeans and a shirt, no doubt
used when just generally slobbing around, that served at a pinch to fit Eddie
due to Trix Desoto’s somewhat overstated curves. When in a halfway human form,
at least.

The timeclock in Eddie’s head—another enhancement courtesy of Prof
Zarathustra, he supposed—ticked off the patrol-pattern changes in the guards
in the corridors outside. Not particularly good or easy to get past them, here
and now, but it wouldn’t get any better. It was time to move.

Eddie Kalish went steppin’ out.

He no longer recalled a specific point of origin. (Some big stone egg spat
uterine slick from a fissure in Mount Fuji? Hatched by sun and acid rain;
autonomic, anthromythic monkeyman.) The strings of RNA detached and shifted,
the meme inside the meat machine supplanting and segueing, supplanting once
again like a set of nested cones twisted through Dimension X (where the
loathsome cilia-things squatted and watched, at this particular and palsied
section of the Millennium, through their fiendish and segmented telescopes)
in a recurring and perpetually re-evolving loop. (The canisters were
coming.)

He could no longer remember a name. Not to feel it. He inhabited a world without sequence or names.

And the meat machine like a philosopher’s axe; replace the head and change the pole. The same man every time or someone new?

In Barranquilla, in 3017, they had done coca cut with methyl-dex and pigshit ’til hearts stopped cold, sold still-warm suka for the upkeep on their own implants, caught the uplink to the Hook for hypoxia and calcium depletion and polycarbon substrates shot through bone. Converted airborne oestrogen in the geodesies on the Mare Iridium, our swollen glands and our burst and haemorrhaging eyes. Kamo had died there, he recalled. (Kamo who?)

Took the freezer up and out for cryogenic renal shutdown. That was 2434. Took the infra to CI and it excised the CNS and ate it. Worked the meat rax of the Malay Chain, up on poppers built from Bhopal ketones; in the mouth for food and airspace, up the butt for credit for lymphatic system-swap before the virus went syndromic (I don’t recall.) Periodic inert plugs of biomass to plug the minor spirochaetal holes…

If we were to live in these new quasi-spaces, he supposed, we had to leave the very idea of our bodies and our physical brains behind, shearing off in little dislocated fragments under an abstract acceleration, perpetually renewing, a perpetual disconnected death of memory-attrition (of which we are the sum).

And so, at last, after several major refits and a conceptual rebore, after several empty centuries of wandering, the patchwork mariner comes at last again to Eden, a misnomer, where the coffins gawp like open presses. Searching for something lost and gone, that he cannot name but wants. They killed a world, here. Men, I mean. I think. They killed it and they kept on killing it and then they stopped. No big story, no big deal. They just stopped when it was dead.

There are people, obi-people in the wreckage, who restore the memory and thus a name, the price is that everybody dies, the result is that, of course, at some point, everybody comes.

Everyone came back to Planet Earth. At some point. Back to Planet Earth in the past, when it was still there…

Trix Desoto came across Masterton, in the sparely furnished and vaguely
monastic chamber that served him, here in the Factory, as his office and
living quarters combined, in the process of flipping through a one-shot
disposable LCD data-wafer, of the sort that had entirely supplanted bound
paper books in the last decade and a half.

A twentieth-century eye might have been puzzled, insofar as an eye can be
puzzled, at a piezoelectric unit being more disposable than paper, but these
days it wasn’t even an issue. Sand and synthesized chemical crystals were
plentiful and cheap. Trees were on the ragged edge of extinction and
priceless.

Masterton had a faint and absent sneer on his face that spoke ill of the half-hour to come.

“Do you know, I think it’s at this point,” he said, confirming it, “that I
think the whole intrinsic structure of the thing falls spectacularly apart.”

Masterton, Trix knew, had pretensions to being a man of literary
sensibilities—and that he sometimes played that up to type. He used it as a petty form
of minor torture; pontificating endlessly on the subject of something
meaningless and banal when he knew that there was something you were desperate
to talk about.

“I mean,” he said, tapping the data-wafer meaningfully, “I like a
somnambulating prolapse of coruscating bog-postmodernist elliptical prose as
well as the next guy, but this is just completely disappearing up its own
ass. We now have a grand total of
three
oblique but ultimately ambiguous
explanations as to what’s going on—alien intervention, interdimensional
incursion, and now even
time
-fracture references for fucks sake—all to
explain the big news that some guy meets this girl and they end up screwing. I
really do have no idea why I read this crap.”

“Masterton…” Trix Desoto said, hoping to God she wasn’t sounding apologetic.
“We really need to talk about the situation.”

“And you can just see how it’s all going to end up, right,” continued
Masterton, seemingly all oblivious. “Our confused and battered and power-imbalanced male-principle guy is gonna end up sorta
merging
in the heat of
passion with our dominant but ultimately power-uncorrupted female-principle
girl in a million little variegated twinkly lights, there to produce some sort
of mythical and metaphorical hybrid; some fabulistic gestalt that—Jesus, but
it’s all so goddamn old…

“Screw it, let’s hunker down. Have you any idea about what it was set Johnny Fucko off?”

“…” For a moment Trix Desoto experienced a clash of mental gears before
realising that Masterton was suddenly back on the job. “Best we can work out,”
she said, “it was just a confluence of events. Nothing sinister as such. No outside factors. The certain… peculiarities of his Zarathustra treatments—you know, because of the thing—had him developing his techno-mesh skills well ahead of schedule.
This allowed him to get into the systems, and the nearest thing we guess is
that he came across
this…
”

Trix Desoto crossed to the playback-monitor on Masterton’s desk and punched
up a playback. On the screen, the pale figure of an elderly man was in the
process of being cut into bloody slices by a laser-cutter unit.

“He wouldn’t have known what was happening,”Trix Desoto said. “He wouldn’t
have known that the package was just, in the end, a clone, schematic data
cytoplasmically encoded into its neurotecture. He must have thought that this
was what we’re in the business of doing to, uh,
real
people.”

“Well, yeah,” said Masterton. “We
are
in the business of doing that sort of
thing to real people. The Harvesting programme out there in the No-Go…”

“Granted. But he never got the chance to be acclimatised and indoctrinated. He
just rabbited. He took down the med-tech, Laura Palmer—“

“How is our lovely Laura, by the way?” Masterton asked, seemingly all concern.
You’d have to know him to realise that he didn’t give a shit and was just
saying it for the sake of sounding even remotely human.

“Give it some years,” Trix said, “and she might be able to eat with something
other than a spoon. Anyhow. He took down Laura Palmer, boosted what he thought
of as a sedative hypo and her keycard—“

“Which only opens internal doors,” said Masterton. “Medical staff aren’t
permitted to carry anything else for just this reason.”

“Right. So maybe he tried the main access hatch with it and then had to
rethink, or maybe he knew that in the first place. It’s impossible to tell
since he blinded the securicams.

“Whatever. He ended up in my quarters. I suppose he really bought the idea
that the hypo contained a sedative and just gave it to me to keep it down—pure luck that it put me down and
out
, you know, because of the thing.

“Then he just picked up my personal keycard—which of course works on the
main hatch—and just strolled out. He’s out there in the No-Go, now. He could
be out there anywhere.”

“Hmf.” Absently, Masterson tapped the pulp-fiction data wafer he had been
reading against the edge of his desk. Then he threw it over his shoulder. It
hit the wall and shattered into dust.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky quick,” he said. “Maybe a SAPS squad’ll come across him
and realize what they have before it’s too late.

“In any case, it won’t ultimately matter. The second the… peculiarities of
his Zarathustra processes go from latent to overt, we’ll draw a bead on him
the same way we tracked you out there in New Mexico. You know. Because of the
thing.”

And it’s 2914. An Underlevel backroom in the southern continental colony
arcologies, hermetically sealed from the irradiated gravepits. I’m looking
and thinking human, now; more human than I’ve approximated in a while, since
the fashion’s swung away from it and I like to buck the fashion: ectomorphic,
parchment-pale and worn black suit and stovepipe hat. Curled around my neck
the remnants of a modified spider monkey, picked up exactly where I can’t
recall, its remaining flesh desiccated and partially mummified. It can still
move, and think, but there’s nothing much inside. Other things are here, all
entirely unlikely. I think-process they’re human, but how does one tell?

One is human in precise and absolute detail, down to the DNA. An aboriginal, in the present sense, obviously. There are still some left. Her disguise is complete. I’m trading half-hearted favours, secret, sweet and precious with Mine Host’s late wife (he laughing fit to bust, a ready chorus, she pendulous and greasy and long-since sloughed and stuffed and mounted).

And she’s looking at me ‘cross her glass of Soma sunshine (3-methyl–4.5-methylinedioxyamphetamine spiked with strychnine for that little extra body, natch) with eyes simultaneously dark and flaring, like polished onyx. A deep one, this; a strata angel, impact-fractured. You can see down to the animal core.

Change the senses by a conscious act of relay-switching will. You’re male, I think, she said. Have you always been male?

I can’t remember. It’s true; I can’t.

This is all conducted by way of the eyes. One never knows, quite, how it happens; the transition point between apperception and appreciation; mumbled inanities that remain unmemorable and inane; tracing tissue hard and arabesqued and hitting something engorged and slippery (is this mine?).

Mandible-glands extend into the throat, skeening complex and febrile, pumping a thin sugar-syrup down a gullet that swallows, convulsively, on its sweetness, and something inside fractures…

Eddie Kalish came to in what had once been the restroom of a Mister Meaty
burger franchise.

It was daylight outside, but with the shifting quality of day moving on
towards night. He must have been asleep for hours.

The tenor of his dreams had shifted since busting out of the Factory, possibly
in response to the simple fact of his change of circumstances in real life.

Something inside was trying to tell him something new. He tried to remember
what the dreams had actually been about.

Eddie took stock.

The face in a surviving scrap of mirror, which had once covered an entire
restroom wall, was pretty much the same as Eddie remembered, if rather more
lined and drawn, and he felt a bit relieved about that.

He’d had the horrible suspicion that the Zarathustra processes might resculpt
his face into something like that of a movie star—and while a lot of people
would have probably preferred that, or at least welcomed some slight reduction
in the general rattiness-quotient, then it just wouldn’t have been
him
anymore.

The body—and Eddie wasn’t quite ready to call it
his
body, yet—was
lean and well-toned, certainly not muscle-bound, which was a bit of another relief on account of how Eddie didn’t really feel
like coming it with the dickless fuck in a posing pouch.

Premature unplugging from GenTech medical devices did not seem to have
affected it unduly. Indeed, the puncture wounds from the unplugging had
already healed to small white scars which would themselves fade to nothing in
a matter of hours.