Butcher and his men remained out in the cavern, guarding the elevator platform against the ravening hordes of those who might, for some strange reason, want to spirit it away.
Weirdly enough, you could tell by their postures that each and every one of them was doing his absolute best not to look directly at the Ship.
Eddie Kalish couldn’t help noticing, also, that in addition to their heavy armour they had taken up position behind heavy lead shields.
“Look, I’m not trying to be funny or anything-“ he began.
“I wouldn’t either,” said Trix, “the material you’ve got. This is funny, and there you are over on the other side of the room, the material you’ve got.”
“Thank you very much,” said Eddie. “You’ve been a lovely audience and I hope you rot in hell. The thing I was going to say is, how come the soldier-boys get all the neat gear, body armour and shit and we get…” he plucked distastefully at the thin polymer of his coverall “this.”
“We don’t need anything else,” said Trix Desoto. “At least, I don’t need anything else and you probably don’t. You passed the first test.”
“Oh, yeah?” said Eddie. “And what test would that have been, exactly?”
“Here we go,” said Trix.
They were at what appeared to be an airlock hatch, a sphincter-like arrangement in the skin of the Ship that seemed every bit as semi-organically repellent, to Eddie, that the word sphincter might suggest.
Trix Desoto ran her hand lightly down the… well, down the whatever it was that the skin of the Ship was made of.
“Come on, baby,” she murmured. “Open up for me.”
Smoothly and silently, the hatch relaxed open.
Eddie gazed dubiously into the darkness beyond.
“I’m not going in there,” he said. “There’s things in there. Things in the dark. Moving around. I’ve seen them.”
“What are you talking about?”Trix snapped. “What things? Where?”
“Things. Bad things. I’ve seen them in my head.” Eddie had not been entirely serious, of course, but he was still feeling decidedly nervous.
“So we really have to go in there?” he said. “Would it not, I’m saying basically, have been an idea to bring along a couple of flashlights?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Trix said, climbing up into the hatch. “You coming or not?”
Eddie considered this, for a moment, with some seriousness.
Whatever the soldiers were protecting themselves against might be doing horrible things to his body, but he was probably right in assuming that the Loup in Trix and himself was counteracting the effects.
Then again, how much worse might those effects be if you were actually inside the thing that was producing them?
On the other hand, nothing exactly bad had happened so far-and how many chances did you get to go inside a genuine alien starship? With the off-chance of coming out with your colon and memoplex intact, in any case.
He realised that he was looking at the outline of Trix against a pale and shifting glow. At least there was light of some kind in there, in any event. He shrugged to himself and followed her inside.
The tunnels winding through the main mass of the Ship had a tubular and somewhat organic quality, not as if they were crawling through the bowels of some living organism or some such, but like the ship had in some way been grown on organic principles.
Fitful tendrils of electrical activity crackled along the tunnels, clustering in the areas where Trix and Eddie walked. It was as if the Ship itself were attempting to light their way.
“I think she’s trying to be helpful,” Trix said.
“She?” said Eddie.
“It’s just nomenclature,” said Trix. “I don’t mean anything by it.”
“Well I’ve gotta tell you,” said Eddie, “that I can’t imagine thinking of this thing as anything other than an it.”
“Suit yourself,” said Trix Desoto. “Now, I’ve been here before, so we’re not going on the grand tour. We just need to find what we’re calling a node… and speak of the devil. There we go.”
The so-called node was little more than a place where some of the smaller tubes, running through the main tube of the passageway in a manner no doubt analogous to cables or ducts, clustered and fused together in a malformed lump. The electrical activity within it glowed in a way that, while still faint, was markedly brighter than in the tunnel itself.
“These are basically the equivalent of control panels, I think,” said Trix. “Put your hand on it.”
“What?” said Eddie.
“Put your hand on it. See what happens.”
Later, Eddie would think of any number of reasons why just slapping your hand on some unknown piece of alien technology might be a bad idea. At the time, none of them occurred to him. He just did it. It must have been Trix Desoto’s tone of voice.
The panel ignited with a blaze of white light. Electrical fire crawled up Eddie’s arm and squirrel-caged around his head. His eyes rolled up in his head and the whites glowed, cutting beams through the darkness of the passageway. Flame in the dark.
Eddie snatched his hand away. The electrical activity dissipated instantly, leaving him pale and shaking.
“That’s the biggie,”Trix Desoto was saying happily. “That’s the test. You made basic contact and survived with at least some of your neurones intact.” She looked at him, slightly concerned. “How do you feel?”
It was a few seconds before Eddie pulled himself together to the point of being capable of speech.
“It’s like it… it’s like she knew me,” he managed at last through chattering teeth. Like she’s been waiting. Waiting so long and… oh, she’s hungry… she wants food. In her mouth she… oh God!”
Abruptly, as though galvanised, he lunged for Trix and grabbed her, pinioning her upper arms. For a moment Trix was startled enough that setting loose the processes of the Loup-processes that might have turned a firmly Leashed Eddie Kalish into the general consistency of guacamole-never occurred to her.
“You’ve been here before,” Eddie rasped, glaring into Trix Desoto’s eyes with such ferocity that, for an instant, they seemed to glow every bit as much as when he had laid his hand upon the Node. “You’ve talked to this thing. You know what she… what it wants to do…”
“Well, uh, yeah, of course,” said Trix. “I know what we, that is GenTech, have to do to-“
“Then tell me what the fuck is really going on!” Eddie thundered. “You’ve been screwing me around from up to down, and now you want me to, you want me to be involved in… I want a proper explanation and I want it now!”
“ Now you’ll remember, ” said the Talking Head that was currently assuming the persona of Masterton, “ because I must have said it before-I’m sure of it, in fact-that we keep coming back to the same situation over and over again? ”
“You-that is, the real you-might have mentioned something,” said Eddie Kalish, “to that effect. You know, in odd moments.”
“ Well, quite, ” said the Talking Head. “ And one of those situations is that you come out and say something, and I tell you not to be a particular thing. Can you remember what it is, that particular thing?”
“I remember,” said Eddie Kalish.
“ And what would that particular thing be? ”
“A fucking tool,” said Eddie Kalish. “All right?”
“ A fucking, as you so rightly say, tool, ” said the Talking Head.
The Talking Head was, basically, a lump of mimetic biogel, hooked up to the Brain Train’s command centre systems and imprinted with the memory engrams of Masterton.
Trix had told him that, while he was talking to the Head, she was going to be implementing a lockdown procedure for the entire Base. In a secure situation such as this, with no communications traffic going in or coming out, it was sometimes useful to confer with a player from the outside.
The Talking Head was capable of giving a clear approximation of what Masterton himself might think and say in any given circumstance-and if circumstances happened to fall outside of its parameters it would say so, allowing one to determine if it was worth breaking communications silence and talking to the man himself.
Eddie had decided, for any number of reasons, that he’d leave talking to the man himself as an absolute last resort.
“ There’s no way you’re any kind of fucking alien, or descended from aliens, ” the Talking Head was saying. “ Not in any sense you’re capable of understanding the word alien, in any case. That would be completely and utterly ridiculous. ”
The Head formed its biogel mouth into a grimace of irritation. “ The word itself has a bad rep these days, what with being appropriated to fuck and back by sad Abductee-Syndrome fuckos sleeping too close to an electrical outlet, and think that every tick they ever get off their dog is a fucking implant. ”
“ If it’ll make you any happier-and fuck knows, that seems to be my function in life at the moment-think of it in terms of Otherness with a capital O. Contact with the Other. ”
“Other?” Eddie Kalish said. “Other than what?”
“ Other than whatever you got, fucko, ” said the Talking Head. “ Tyre irons, butch-wax, precooked individually wrapped sausages, hockey pucks, cellular phones, string, Danish pastries, sousaphones, hydrogen fusion reactors, the complete works of the Marquis de Sade, submarines, small trees, dogshit, what the fuck you want? Lemons, printed circuits, soap, novelty key chains… ”
It occurred to Eddie that, through the slightly limited and simplified responses of the Head, he had just learned something about the character of Masterton the man.
He had listened to the Head converse with a technician or some such, and the conversation had been purely technical, without a trace of antagonism or extraneousness. Now the Head seemed to have fallen into the persona of Eddie Kalish, himself, as Masterton the man seemed to do when they actually talked. Masterton the man, he realised, had something of the mimetic about him.
The Loup took this opportunity to take a little bit of information from a pocket and dropped it into his conscious mind:
Pacing and leading, it was called. The operator falls into the physical and verbal rhythms of the subject, reinforces them by the repetition of key words and gestures, the glib recitals of lists-and then takes the subject off in a direction that he, the operator, wants. Just the sort of semi-hypnotic managerial shit that a managerial shit like Masterton would have down pat-only filtered through the somewhat cruder mechanics of the Head it became that much more jarring and noticeable.
Eddie wondered if the almost constant swearing-from both the Talking Head and Masterton himself-when in conversation with him was just an exaggeration for the sake of imitation, or a true representation of how he, Eddie, really spoke. Pain in the ass if the latter were so, but then again you could never tell with something like that.
“… trapeze artists, ” the Head was saying, “ Stilton cheese, grommet-hearings, tapas, gingham, loudhailers, Billie Holliday platters, loam… ”
Eddie glanced to one of the technicians who ran the Command Module. “Is there a reset button on this? I think it’s gone into a loop or something.”
“ Hands off, fucko, ” said the Talking Head. “ I haven’t crashed or anything. I can just do that shit for longer than is humanly possible. ”
“So you’re, uh, aware of the basic nature of your existence, then?” said Eddie.
“ Course I am, ” said the Head. “ I’m not a complete fucking moron, and it’s more than I can say about you. ”
“What,” said Eddie, “that I don’t know the basic nature of my existence, or I’m a complete moron?”
“ Look into the dead flat marbles that are my eyes, ” said the Head. “ What are the fucking odds. What do you know about Butts? ”
“Do you know,” Eddie snapped. “These last few months, seems as like every sucker and his pooch has some snide little thing to say about me and sex. I’ve got a Testostorossa who thinks I should be mincing around in a pink tutu, Trix Desoto just assumes I like boys as a matter of course and now some glob of solidified goo in the shape of a disembodied head is coming it with the goddamn butts!
“Well, I’m getting sick of it-so let me lay it out once and for all, and you can tell any asshole who asks. I’ve done it maybe four times in my life, with backroom girls, when I’ve managed to scrape together the coin. I’ve got nothing so against the backroom boys that I’d run a mile, but then again I don’t feel any real need to go across the street. I’ve no idea what I want out of the rest of my life, you know, if I happen to meet someone, and maybe that’s because of this Alienation Syndrome Trix was talking about-but maybe, just maybe, it’s because I’m only fucking seventeen years old! So get off my fucking back, okay?”
There was a pause.
“ That must have been building up for quite a while there, ” said the Talking Head.
“I suppose,” said Eddie.
“ Feel better for getting it off your chest? ” said the Talking Head.
“I suppose,” said Eddie.
“ Well, cathartic as all that might be, in a Reichian sort of way, ” said the Talking Head. “ I was actually talking about the author, Oscar Butts. ”
“Oh,” said Eddie.
“ Two-bit crime writer who had a lot of stuff published in rags like Spicy Detective either side of the Second World War. I’m surprised you didn’t get a complete bio and bibliography along with the Loup, since the knowledge might have been of actual use. ”
“Yeah, well I got stuff about the Romantic Movement that would blow your socks off,” said Eddie. “As they all did to each other on a regular basis, by all accounts.”
“ In any event, ” said the Talking Head, “ Butts’s stock in trade was definite C-grade detective fiction. The kind of story where roscoes belched and people flung woo. The guy was going nowhere fast, so his getting drafted and sent to fight in Europe in ’42 was no great loss to literature. But something happened to him in Europe, something that would change the direction of his future writings.
“ Nobody’s quite sure what that something was. Some people say it was because he was in the same unit as Henry Kuttner and the horror writer did a complete number on Butts. He introduced him to the Cthulhu Mythos-you know, the stuff that Lovecraft, Derleth, Ashton-Smith and guys like that used to write-and it coloured his fiction for the rest of his life.
“ Other people say that his unit were ordered to guard an artefact that the Nazis were caught trying to smuggle from North Africa through Italy and the experience drove him mad. Depending on who you listened to, this artefact was anything from the Spear of Destiny to a fully operational inter-planetary craft complete with alien corpses. Sound familiar?
“ Either way, as soon as he got back stateside he began writing again. Not the sub-Dashiell Hammett crap he churned out before the war, but genre-splicing innovative fiction where private dicks were just as likely to go insane staring at the visage of Tsathoggua as they were to solve the case and get the girl. Magazines and publishers started to take note of Butts and his work and it wasn’t long before his novels started to be published. The first was The Lady From Beyond the Stars and that was swiftly followed by The Killer had a Million Faces, Murderphillia, The Star Goat-
“Hang on,” said Eddie. “You mean like ‘Attack of the Mutant Star Goat’-no tin can is safe? Did it have a big straw hat on?”
“ At the time, ” said the Head, “ people found his tales quite terrifying. The stories haunted them. The most horrific things they’d ever read. ”
“Doesn’t sound all that terrifying to me,” said Eddie.
“ Well, other times and other sensibilities, ” said the Head. “ Of course, the main reason was that, as a writer, Butts was frankly just a little bit rotten. He tended to cop out of actually describing his entities, ending the story with the narrator delirious, or writing that they’re coming for me with their aarg aarg aargh. That left a hole for people to fill with their own worst nightmares. Like looking at a dark reflector. Stick one finger in the pool, there’s three fingers pointing back at you, you know?
“ Of course, you can’t get away with ambiguity much these days, ” the Head continued. “ Suckers who can even read, after a fashion, can only follow something simple and point-to-point. Nobody has the nuts for inference in fiction, these days. There’s quite enough of that in real life. They need things all spelled out when they read books. ”
“And that’s why Butts is important?” said Eddie. He wondered if he was still, somehow, totally failing to grasp the point.
“ It’s important as a model for humans dealing with the Other, ” said the Head. “ I mean, ninety per cent of our universe is made up of Dark Matter, which is basically stuff just hanging around-but the name itself makes it sound a bit dangerous and mysterious. Dark Matter, you know?
“ 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… ”