The ragged and blood-matted hair that Edie remembered from the van in New Mexico now fell in platinum-blonde curls that suggested regular washing in a rejuvenatingly herb-steeped stream next door to a chemical plant.
Trix Desoto crossed the room, with quick scissor-steps, and activated a wall panel by the door. “He’s awake now. You can come in.” Then she turned to regard Eddie with a not unkindly smile.
“You’re safe enough, in the relative scheme of things,” she said to him. “We’re in the San Angeles Sprawl, in a GenTech facility. Welcome to the Factory.”
The door slid open, and a Suit came in.
That wasn’t mere colloquial hyperbole. The Suit was a dead and perfect black so that, for example, if an arm was laid across the chest, it was impossible to see the distinction between them; you could only see the Suit in one-piece silhouette.
Protruding from the neck of the Suit, by means of the usual human arrangement, was the neatly groomed head of a man-and once again, neatly-groomed was not mere hyperbole. The hair and beard were cropped and shaped in a manner so precise that one could imagine it having been done follicle by follicle, by micromanipulator, under the direction of a team of design consultants, in an operation costing tens of thousands of dollars.
The effect, however, was somewhat spoilt by the fact that there are some men who simply cannot carry off cropped hair and beards. And there are some men, frankly, who are con-genitally unsuited to waiting a suit. Or even a Suit.
Later, Eddie would learn that the ensemble was basically a uniform, the standard outfit for GenTech field-management of a certain level-and you damn well wore what was given to you-but for the moment the main impression was a little like that of a child somewhat ineptly dressing up.
This new arrival in the Suit grinned at Eddie-a little shiftily, Eddie thought. The effect might have been due, though, to the black wraparound shades that gave no idea whatsoever of what the eyes might be doing underneath them.
“So you’re our mystery wonder-boy,” he said, leaving no doubt that wonder-boy actually meant: some little squit I don’t particularly give two shits about. “Eddie, is it? Eddie Kalish? Doesn’t quite seem to fit with anything, if you get what I mean. Doesn’t fit right with where you were. Where we found you. Where does it come from?”
Eddie shrugged, rattling a couple of tubes.
Far as he could recall, that was just always what he had been called. He had simply never thought about it. And he certainly wasn’t going to start thinking about it now at the behest of this individual, who he was already beginning to dislike intensely.
(And just when and where, he would wonder later, had he started thinking in terms of this “behest of individual” crap?)
The man shrugged himself, utterly unconcerned rather than sullen. The matter was simply not worth bothering about.
“Call yourself whatever you want,” he said. “What do I care? You can call me Masterton-and I’ll tell you right now that’s not what you might call my real name. That, you’ll never know. The important thing is… do you read at all, Eddie?”
“I can read,” Eddie Kalish said, shortly. He was getting seriously tired of this guy Masterton’s somewhat overly familiar manner. “I can write words, too.”
Masterton sighed.
“Good for you,” he said. “What I meant was, do you read many actual books. No? Well colour me surprised.
“In any case, in a lot of books, you get what they call exposition. Some guy tells you what’s been happening and what is going to happen. He might be lying like a bastard, and making it up off the top of his head, but the point is that he makes it all hang together and makes it work. He tells you what to do, and what you’re gonna do next.
“I want you to think of me as your exposition, Eddie, yeah? I’m the one who tells you what you’re gonna do.
“Now, a little while back you blundered in on the retrieval operation we were running on Ms Desoto here, and the package she was transporting. You didn’t know what you’d got into, and you certainly didn’t know any command-identification codes, so our guys just shot you to hell and back. Shot you dead. You’re dead.
“Fortunately for you, being dead isn’t quite the handicap it once was. We here at GenTech have the technology. We can rebuild, and all that happy crap. Resurrection-and-regen processes courtesy of the good Doctor Zarathustra. It’s one of the things we do… and the conditions happened to be right for us to do it to you.
“Now at this point, Eddie, you must be thinking: gee, wow, what’s so special about me that I get the Zarathustra treatment? Well, let me tell you, you’re goddamn nothing. You’re just some sorry sap who happened to be on the spot. The upshot of that, what with all the expense and all, is that we now own your sorry ass. You’re just stone cold nothing and we get to do what we like with you.”
Eddie Kalish realised that Masterton had stopped talking, and was just grinning at him in the manner of one having successfully completed a recitation. There was an air, indeed, that he had been subjected to a polished and often-repeated spiel.
Off to one side, he noticed, Trix Desoto was watching him, too, with a sense of expectation. Eddie wondered how many times they had put someone in this situation, whether they had a bet on how he would now react.
Well, screw ‘em, frankly. Eddie wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of any reaction at all. He just looked dumbly down at himself-and for the first time caught sight of his own body. In this he was aided, in that it was covered with a slightly cloudy but mostly transparent polythene sheet, rather than a bed sheet.
People tend not to consciously examine their own bodies without some external impetus in the manner of, for example, pain. This is for the simple reason that-barring the obvious effects of working out, or having an arm lopped off by a rotary saw or the suchlike-there are certain fundamentals that the mind absolutely refuses to recognise might change.
Now Eddie Kalish stared down at himself, positively goggle-eyed, as rafts of certainty broke apart and sank behind his eyes. “Jesus fucking Christ! ”
Off to one side Trix Desoto smirked maliciously.
“That’s a fin you owe me, Masterton,” she said.
7.
He was in:
A limitless, deprisensory gulf, strung though with bright tendrils of some drifting gas that seemed to twist and curl in on itself resolving itself into discrete and dislocated images. Lantern fish of the bulbously misshapen sort one finds in ocean trenches, twisted so that the mouths of comedy-and-drama-mask faces yawned on their flanks; the masked face of a surgeon, a light clipped to his temple blazing as a scalpel flashed across it; the sliced and encrusted remains of some horse-like creature, with two heads, wrapped within rusting coils of razorwire; an antique roll-top desk with something horrible inside; snipping windshield and a hole under the wall and the red wet razors sliding soft inside the…
All of this was:
Background. All of it. He drifted through it feeling the actual physical slicing of something sharp-edged flowing in his head; drifted from the slit he had made and the red wet tunnel and those cloying skeletal hands…
It was some time before he realised that he was flying.
Eddie Kalish jerked awake, under his transparent polythene sheet, dream-images still crawling through his head. There was definitely something happening in there, something inside actually shifting into some new alignment.
He couldn’t escape the feeling that, somewhere in their narrative, the dream-hallucinations were actually trying to tell him something. Something was being downloaded into him, the nature of which at this point he could not quite grasp.