Eddie jammed his stolen keycard into the slot. A panel readout pulsed from red to amber and the door slid open onto darkness. The faint smell of someone else-and someone, or some thing, that might or might not be entirely human.
Eddie had never, really, been in a room used by a single person as entirely personal space. He had no idea if what he could make out of the contents, in the light spilling from the doorway from the corridor outside, was usual or not.
A scattering of discarded holo-vid disks, data-wafers and actual bound paperback books which must have cost a fortune to whoever had paid for them, decomposing in some abstract sense to informational mulch. Visible tides, in the second-hand light, included: Briefing for a Descent into Hell, A Cure for Cancer, The Eye of the Lens, The Odyssey, Paradise Lost, The Medusa Seed -that one quite obviously torn to shreds with some anger, and hurled away with some force-and Camp Concentration.
A collection of dolls-or rather, a collection of broadly humaniform figures ranging from proprietary children’s toys to an antique, jointed, wooden artist’s marionette. Each of these figure had been twisted into postures suggestive of agony, laughter, orgasm, some particular and telegraphic emotional state.
All had been modified in some manner. A stuffed rag doll, for example, had been meticulously skinned with hand-stitched thin black leather. Scrawled in bright pink lipstick across something that looked like a huge egg with diminutive arms and legs stitched on (Eddie had never heard the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty) with poppy eyes, stringy hair and an approximation of green velveteen pants, was the word SUCK.
A brightly-keyed technocrome poster of the old movie goddess, Anna Nicole Smith, arching her back in a pose and gold lame borrowed from the even older movie goddess, Marilyn Monroe.
Mismatched four-colour facial features, ripped from other sources and pasted, turned her smile into something insane and rictive, her eyes burning holes of psychosis.
The sleeping form of Trix Desoto on the somewhat foetid expanse of a mattress. She was half-transformed into… well, whatever the hell it was she transformed into.
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.
9.
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.