Golgotha Run (17 page)

(There’s a black iron engine hanging in a hot red sky and the machine is me and as I try to comprehend its vast and churning maze of internal conduits my mind shifts and slips like shale and suddenly I crazy-move to:

Sand dunes under an azure summer sky. A salt breeze ripples samphire. A blonde and beautiful child, a girl, offers me a clump of tiny, pale blue flowers. It’s not, she says, it’s not—and the light, the crushing light comes down, washing out my field of vision with its flat blank white.)

Hooknails bite into shoulders and rake down. Slithers up: slugtrail tongue.

(And we stumbled through the tunnels ’til we found the husk of Nail: wasted and flaking and propped against the wall, crumbling into papergrey ash. The Strata Angel was there, a construct now, like gelid glass, shot with wormholes filled with lambent fluid. Shadowplay on translucent surfaces, macroforms splitting and flickering and pulsing. Somewhere somebody was shrieking, clawing at his face in a room of broken machinery…)

She half-smiles, catlike.

(She pirouettes in mid-air, screaming tactile subsonics from her eyes and mouth and vagina, down corridors and catwalks and vast brick vaults with chessboard floors and halls hung with shredded membrane and the false backs of cupboards and skylights and holes in the wall. A dark room hung with burning kites. The death of the hollow age.)

She shoves into him, digging nails into his back to afford purchase, and
gouges down.

(An exquisite awareness of a slight mass under me. She’s slipping faster now and I’m shuddering and—)

Eddie Kalish jerked awake.

He wasn’t sure if something inside him had actively ejected him from the half-world of dreams—but he was damn glad that it had.

The dream had been so vivid that it recalled those he’d had while his brain
was being physically rewired under the Loup. Information being downloaded from
some actual other world, or from some future that might be, or some past that
might have been if he… no, the details fled from him even as he tried to pin
them down.

It was dark outside. He wondered if he had slept so long that he had missed
one of his periodic inoculations with the Leash, thus explaining this sudden
strength of his dreams. The Testostorossa’s time readout told him, though,
that he had several hours to go.

It wasn’t so much that the dream had been unpleasant, he thought. Not as such.
It had been like patching into a glimpse from some other actual life, one he
might have had—now or in the future—if someone, or something, or anyone
and everybody wasn’t fucking him around in this one.

The end result was one of just feeling a mindless rage for having something
taken away from you, without ever knowing precisely what it was.

The Loup, obligingly, dropped a piece of information into him. It was called
an “involute”—a self-referring complex of ideas and images and emotions
that lodges in the mind with such force that it seems more real than real,
despite all evidence or logic. And in the hypnagogic state of waking up from
sleep, Eddie was just having trouble working out what was real or not.

Ah, well. That explained everything then.

“
Had a nice sleep, then
?” the Testostorossa said, bringing Eddie instantly back to reality, or some reasonable approximation thereof. “
Dreaming about scamming on some guys, I’ll bet.
”

Road signs swept past outside in an unreadable blur. Eddie didn’t have the
slightest idea of where he was.

The nature of running covertly meant that the Testostorossa was essentially
now on autopilot, following a pre-programmed route. If they hit serious actual
trouble then Eddie could override the controls and take them back to the Brain
Train, but to all intents and purposes they were out of contact.

It was the sense of disassociation that was getting to him, Eddie thought—and when you came to think about it, that was slightly weird in itself. For
most of his life Eddie Kalish had lived quite happily without much contact
with other people at all.

Off to one side, through the Testostorossa window, the lights of some
settlement or other hazed by, detached and drifting.

The quiet, smooth motion of the car under its state-of-the-art suspension, was
hypnotic. Without being quite aware that he was doing so, Eddie drifted off to
sleep again…

“
So what are we thinking?
” Masterton said over the comms-link. “
Are we
thinking that he bought it?
”

“Yeah,” said Trix Desoto, in the Brain Train Command and Control rig. “He
bought it enough that he didn’t get we were using the idea of a communications
blackout to isolate him. Give the Loup in him some more time to do some deep-level restructuring.”

She glanced at the readouts from the front-runner Testostorossa, which,
despite anything Eddie Kalish might think, was in constant contact with the
Brain Train. The readouts were predominantly concerned with scans of Eddie’s
neural activity, picked up by sensors hidden in the headrest of the driving
seat.

“He’s developing quite the little personality in there,” Trix said. “Should be
something to see, you know—if it ever coheres and overtly evidences
itself.”

“
If?
” the voice of Masterton said. “
You’re saying that even with this extra time, he won’t be in a fit state to, uh, eat?
”

“It’s just too little, too late,” said Trix. “If you want my opinion. I really
don’t think he’ll be ready when we hit the Base. We could try it, I suppose,
but God only knows what a partially functioning memoplex might do. Could be
worse than nothing.”

“
How so?
” asked Masterton.

“Think of the differences between a skilled pilot at the stick of a
Thunderstrike XIV, or nobody at all—or a brain-damaged moron flailing around
every which way,” said Trix. “Even nobody at all would be better.”

“
I get your point,
” said Masterton, “
but nobody at all simply isn’t an option. Our… associates are getting really insistent that we get this operation up and running as soon as possible. I’d hate to think what would happen if they get tired of waiting and decide to act directly, you know?
”

“Would we?” Trix asked. “Would we even know?”

“
Damned if I want to find out,
” said Masterton. “
Use the boy if you can, if there’s any chance he’s ready—but you know what you have to do if he isn’t.
”

“Yeah,” said Trix Desoto, grimly. “I know what I have to do.”

Eddie was awakened by a discreet chime from the dashboard HUD. At least, he
would have been wakened by a discrete chime, had it not been drowned out by
the Testostorossa shouting.

“
Wake up, fucker!
” the Testostorossa was bellowing. “
I got problems.
”

“What?” said Eddie. “What problems?”

“
Do you want the short explanation, or the technical one that’ll leave your brain running out of your ears?
”

The thought crossed Eddie’s mind that he could tell the Testostorossa to just
go screw itself. There was nothing technical the Testostorossa could tell him
that he wouldn’t understand, with the possible exception of the radio,
courtesy of the Loup.

Then again, he was just too tired. “Give me the short explanation.”

“
A number of my fusion-compensatory systems have drifted out of alignment,
” the Testostorossa said. “
We need to get off the road and stop so I can run a self-diagnostic recalibration.
”

“What?” Eddie said. “Now, hang on, GenTech must have spent millions on you—you’re telling me that, after all that, you have to stop for repairs after
only a few hundred miles? What sort of shitty quality control do they have back there at the factory?”

“
Hey, they made
you,
fucker, yeah?
” The Testostorossa’s belligerence seemed a little defensive. “
I’m just saying that this is my first time out of the box, and there are some things you have to tweak when you’re on the actual road. To a certain extent I’m still prototypical; this is a shakedown-operation in more ways than one. I need to get off the road for a while, and for some reason doing it isn’t flagged as mission-critical—you have to tell me to do it.
”

Eddie thought about this. That was the first time he’d had the upper hand. The
idea of cracking the electric whip, as it were, was a little bit tempting.

“Supposing I say no?” he asked. “Purely for the sake of argument, you
understand.”

“
Ever seen a hydro-fusion explosion from ground zero?
” the Testostorossa said.

“Do it!” Eddie snapped. “Do it now!”

The Testostorossa segued off onto a slip road and ramped its power down,
gliding to a halt.

“Is this gonna take long?” Eddie said. “Cause I’m telling you I don’t like
this. We’re out of contact with the Brain Train, stuck alone in the middle of
nowhere and—oh fuck. There’s something up there.”

Off to the side of the road, firelight and the bulky, silhouetted forms of
vehicles.

“Just my luck,” Eddie muttered to the Testostorossa. “You go wrong just in
time to drop us in the middle of a gangcult camp.”

Uncharacteristically, the Testostorossa remained silent. Presumably it was
devoting its run-time to performing the self-diagnostics it had mentioned.

Eddie fired up the microcams and cut in the image-enhancement. The monitor
showed a collection of parked vehicles ranging from ancient pickup trucks to’
sixteen-wheeler RVs, daubed with cruciforms and what Eddie recognised as
Burning Hearts and what, he presumed, were quotations from the Bible.

This latter presumption was confirmed by the HUD, which ran the configurations
and attempted to pull an ID from its database. All it came up with was UNKNOWN
and a potential threat-factor of, likewise, UNKNOWN.

“Shit,” said Eddie.

He was left with two choices. He could just sit there and pray that nobody
noticed him, or leave the car and try to get a handle on what was going on.

After maybe twenty minutes, however, Plan A began to pall. It was the sheer
uncertainty that was the worst thing; sitting in the dark and waiting for God
knew what to fall on him. At length, Eddie eased open a door and snuck towards
the firelight, taking advantage of what ground-cover he could.

Eddie made his cautious way around the bulk of a bulky sixteen-wheeler,
wondering what gangcult-related horrors might meet his eyes. In the event, and
horrific enough in its own way, he was utterly unprepared for a bunch of
bearded, bespectacled freaks in jumpers, sitting around a campfire, strumming
on guitars and singing “Kumbaya”.

And, as the old joke goes, that was just the women.

Actually, he saw, as his eyes accustomed themselves to the new lighting
conditions with Loup-accelerated speed, that was just the group around the
campfire that just happened to be near him. Around other fires, dotted around
the patch of desert corralled by the various RVs, there were other figures.

There was a confusing mix of attire and demeanour, but each of the people
seemed to be what Eddie vaguely thought of as religious types. Prim church-ladies and Lutheran pastors rubbed shoulders and broke bread with ascetic and
somewhat ragged figures in monk robes that looked more like what Rasputin
would have worn—as opposed to those worthy Trappists who brew delicious
beer to the glory of God, the aid and benefit of the Walloons, and walk in
truth and beauty all their days.

In fact, these robed figures seemed… not out of place exactly, but more
definite and distinct than all the other religious types. In every group, they seemed to be the centre of attention. It was as if they had been imposed on the others, in the sense of stripping some new element into a photograph, and were guiding them.

Shepherding
was the word, Eddie supposed.

“Greetings, brother,” said a voice behind him. “And how might we assist you
this fine night?”

Eddie nearly swallowed his tongue. There was just no way that someone could
have come up from behind him like that, not with his well-known rat-line, and
not to mention Loup-enhanced, senses alert for danger.

He turned to see one of the thin robed figures. It was as if the man had
simply materialised out of thin air.

“I’ve, uh,” Eddie said, “I had a bit of car trouble. Nothing to worry about,
it’s being… and then I saw your fires.”

“A decided boon against the chills of the desert night,’” said the man.
“Father Barnabas at your service. Might I invite you to warm yourself, a
little, before going on your way?”

“Uh…” Eddie didn’t have anything much against the religious types of the
world; he didn’t bother them so long as they didn’t bother him. But there was
something about this Father Barnabas that just creeped him out. He seemed
entirely affable and harmless on the surface—but Eddie got the distinct
impression that was what it was. The face was absolutely composed in a
friendly smile, but there could be anything behind it.

Of course, Eddie’s unease might have been due to the small fact that all those
gathered here—every single one—had stopped their guitar-playing and
breaking bread and whatever else the fuck it was they had been doing, and had
silently turned towards him with similarly fixed and gnomic smiles.

Eddie wondered about that, too, until the Loup supplied the information that
the word “gnomic” had nothing whatsoever to do with gnomes.

“Hey, listen,” he said. “I don’t want to… say, who are you guys, anyway?”

“Josephites, for the most part,” said Father Barnabas. “A small cross-denominational sect, to be sure, but gaining some small degree of significance of late.” He gestured to take in the assembled multitude. “As it is, we are currently on our way to Utah, there to gain admittance to a certain seclusionary at the behest of our great leader. I have, myself, made a small hymnal to this most wondrous endeavour…”