Lenny’s working life didn’t lend itself much to squeamish-ness, but the current circumstances were definitely heading into the country of the too much.
Possibly it was all the evidence of what the hanging bodies, those who had not managed to join the mass exodus on the arrival of the Code 23, had been about before they died.
The basic purpose of the chamber had precluded bright lighting in the first place; now even the blacklights ‘were out. In the foetid darkness, Lenny half-expected to hear the rasp and rumble of some Great Beast’s breath.
He’d have preferred that to the clink of chains in what was otherwise silence, come to think of it. At least that might give some clue as to what was lurking in the dark, and where.
He realised that he lad lost contact with Karl.
“Karl?” he rasped, casting about with his SAP-issue flashlight. Flashes of variously depending bodies catching the beam. Nothing more.
Then, off to one side-and literally in the space of half a second-the sound of something scything through flesh, the clunch-clunch-clunch of impossibly busy mastication, and then dead silence again.
Whatever had just happened, had happened too fast for Lenny’s mind to process.
“Karl?” he called again, still casting somewhat bemusedly around with the flashlight.
Something bony and razor-sharp swung in out of the darkness. Before it lopped his head clean off, Lenny caught the impression that it seemed to be attached to a tube of fleshy and possibly living matter.
Lenny’s body spasmed and keeled over, the head spinning off into the dark, to rebound off a chain and fetch up wedged against one of the hanging bodies in a manner that would have almost certainly startled the owner of it, had they been alive.
All of this had happened so suddenly, though, that it was some time before the impulses in his brain shut completely down. Thus, with the last of his dying perceptions, he was able to perceive the sudden flash of alien light from nearby, the subsonic-loaded roar of something in pain and the thump of something big hitting the ground.
He was able to hear the cheerful, female voice saying: “You see what I mean, Masterton? I told you it was a good idea to arrange things so some of the dumb SAPs went in first.”
11.
… And we’re outside (I don’t know how we got here), shot from the geodesies to the gravepits, and she’s leading me, sylph-like now, albified. She’s shucking non-essentials left and centre as she hauls me through the mud and ruptured coffins, past the thieves new-gutted hanging from their ropes; past the shamen with their mortified and wormy hearts. The schimiraras an th’ tomajawks an knifs with grey hairs stick to the heft. She’s positively glowing.
You made this, she’s telling me. Do you see? You made it and you own it and it’s yours.
I slipped on something (momentarily). Ointment made from monkshood, nightshade, hemlock blended with the fat of children. They use it, apparently, to fly.
She dips a wafer in the stringy half-clotted mess (it’s something else, now, and something not entirely pleasant) and proffers it (I’m kneeling, now, before her; begging for something that I cannot now recall). The monkey still hanging from my neck, enraged, attempts to snatch it away.
She avoids the little clutching hands. Looks down on me. You really don’t, she says. You have no idea. You made yourself forget.
Her fingers taste of earth and shit and chemicals as she shoves them into my mouth, and works it open, and at last administers the eight-pointed communion wafer.
“The process of living,” said Masterton with relaxed and somewhat weaselly smugness, “is one of dynamic recursion. We do all this crap, all manner of crap, and like as not it comes to nothing and we just end up back where we started.”
Eddie Kalish scowled around himself at the Factory medical-centre room.
Everything was as he had left it, save that Laura Palmer’s blood had been cleaned from the wall-and for the flexible yet stout woven polycarbon straps, around his forearms and shins, that now secured him to the frame of the bed.
“Screw you,” he said. Whatever the Zarathustra processes had done for him, in this form at least, they hadn’t made him strong enough to break loose from woven polycarbon straps.
“And the wit just keeps on scintillating,” Masterton said, still with that same shit-eating grin.
“Imagine it as similar to the processes of any other life, if it makes you at all happier,” he continued. People wake up, they do stuff and then they go to sleep again. Wake up, do stuff and go to sleep all over again. We just run through the iterations over and over again, with minor variations, until we get to the point where we’re doing things more-or-less right. Like that computer program about an ant, or whatever it is, that blunders around erratically for a while and then starts progressing on a line.
“Now, are you finally going to stop thrashing around and screaming abuse and injuring yourself long enough so I can give you the true skinny? It really won’t take that long, and at the moment you’re just wasting everybody’s time, including your own.”
Eddie considered this. When he had first woken up-again-here in the Factory an indeterminate number of days before, the knowledge of his recapture, together with disjointed half-memories of what he had done in the interim, had alternately plunged him into hysteria and catatonic shock. The latter, of course, being exacerbated by an increased regimen of anaesthetic hypos.
Things had not exactly been improved by the fact that Masterton had insisted on showing him, in more lucid moments, securicam footage of the events that had occurred out in the No-Go and the Mimsey World of Adventure.
The thing that Eddie Kalish had turned into. The things that he had done.
Now it seemed that, temporarily at least, the sheer hysteria had burned itself out. It was time to start thinking again. Time to think in terms of formulating a plan. And for that Eddie needed hard information.
“So why don’t you tell me all about it?” he said. “Pretty please, with sugar and shit on top?”
“Screw you,” said Masterton, without apparent rancour. “First thing I gotta tell you-which you probably worked out yourself already-as that as a part of the Zarathustra process we’ve been electromagnetically pulse-pumping data into your head. Uploading you with all manner of useful info, including an enhanced vocabulary-and hard though it is to imagine, it’s pretty much working. What’s a Benedicta? ”
“An angel-girl,” said Eddie, automatically. “The sort of girl who, when you see her for the first time, she’s like some evidence of God. Baudelaire wrote a prose poem about it-“
“And there you go,” said Masterton. “You didn’t get it right, but it was a reasonable guess, and a while back you couldn’t read the caption under a Hustler cartoon without moving your lips. And I’ll bet you dollars to day-old dogshit you never even heard of Baudelaire.”
Eddie thought about it. “What good does me knowing about Baudelaire do?”
“Cause we’re turning you into a fag, all right?” Masterton shrugged. “It doesn’t have to mean anything, and a lot of it’s just random. The more you know, the more you have to think with, you know? Bang it around into new shapes in your head.
“Anyhoo. The process messes with your dream-imagery as the brain tries to sort it all out-but you’ll have noticed how your dreams are getting seriously out of whack, you know what I mean?”
Masterton moved around the bed forcing Eddie to strain his neck to keep him in sight.
“If you sat down and tried,” Masterton continued, “knowing all the stuff that we’re streaming you, knowing the stuff that happened in your life, there’s still shit coming in from somewhere entirely else. Information there’s no possible way you should know. Some whole other world.