Scattered clothing, male and female.
A mattress lies against one wall. A radiator pipe and broken radiator. A small pile of various unused condoms in their wrappings by the bed. A ceramic bowl containing four used condoms beside it. There is blood on them; smears on the mattress.
A MAN, naked and face-down on the mattress, legs splayed and tied by ankles to steel rings bolted to the floor. His left wrist is handcuffed to the pipe. His right hand grips the pipe tightly. He wears a number of heavy rings.
There is a wad of bundled clothing under him, raising him slightly. Well defined musculature. Scratches fresh and half-healed on his back. A tattoo on his shoulder and another and another on his upper arm. A solid-black Cocteau design.
Longish, fine and off-blond hair. His face is pressed into the mattress. Straddling one splayed leg, on her knees, a WOMAN: mid-twenties, punkshock hair that might once have been blonde, face intent and childlike-serious.
(And in the Calibrian part of Italy, women saved a few drops of their menstrual fluid in a small bottle which they carried wherever they went. It was believed that when such drops were secretly administered to the man of their choice the man would be bound to them forever. The Elixir Rebeus!)
She smears her palm across her mouth. A slick film of saliva.
She falls upon the man, gnaws gently on the back of his neck.
(And the weight on top of me, pressing on me, and a mouth pressed to my ear and murmuring.)
She finally passed out. And when she finally passed out I hamstrung her, dislocated her hips and shoulders. It was vital that she remained immobile, absolutely still.
(Saline drips and bloodpacks. I inserted a catheter and I fed her through a needle. I kept her alive for months. It was quite difficult. Slaying skin and muscle and glucaea a single tiny shred at a time. A fragile tangle of veins and arteries and lymph ducts. Lymph and bile and cephalic fluid stored in individually-labled bottles and refrigerated. It’s… You have to believe. Have to believe I never…
Her voice is cool and monotonic, matter-of-fact flipping someone I don’t know from vanilla fern to ritual butchered meat. In that instant I don’t know if she’s making it up or not.)
She slithers down. Teeth clench lightly, momentarily and release. A tongue slips inside.
(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 Naiclass="underline" 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.”