A second later, a slightly bemused Eddie Kalish was looking down at his hand, in which was held the automatic pistol which the lieutenant had instantly unclipped from the side of his radiation armour and had given to him.
“Good job you didn’t ask him to do the job for you,” said Trix Desoto, a little sardonically. “You wouldn’t believe your current clearance so far as these guys are concerned.”
Eddie handed the gun back to Butcher, who racked it back onto his rad-armour without comment.
“The reason I bring it up,” said Trix Desoto, “is that there are a number of people out there, you know, out there in the world, with a specific and particular variety of Alienation Syndrome.”
She pronounced the term in a way that you could hear the capitalisation.
“The effect’s quite subtle,” she continued. “It’s very easy to confuse with merely having a touch of Asberger’s, or Adoptive Syndrome-you know, dislocated from any family with a similar genetic makeup-or just being, basically, a bit of a sad little dork who’s a failure in everything and who doesn’t have any friends.
“The symptoms include a total failure to understand how humans can go crazy for things, any number of things-for a girl or a boy, or for money, or for a leader giving orders. A certain lack of concern for other human beings and what happens to them, however bad. There’s a connection simply broken in there.
“These people always seem to have murky and displaced origins-like foundlings, you know? But whereas most displaced persons tend to spend their lives trying to find out who they are and where they came from, searching out living relatives and trying to go home, that sort of thing just never even so much as occurs to these people…”
Eddie, for his part, was starting to wish that Trix Desoto would go back to digging at him about his sexuality. At least such jibes could be defended against by a general and generic response.
This specific detailing of his character and its flaws, on the other hand, was just hurtful.
“Well pardon me for living!” he snapped. “Okay, so I don’t know exactly where I came from before, I dunno, the first places I remember being and the first things I remember doing. Forgive the fuck out of me for not tearing my hair out all the live-long day and wailing about it!”
“Hey, I’m just saying,” said Trix, “that some people just don’t have the homing-instinct. They don’t have it because they know, on the deep subconscious level, that to have one would be completely and utterly pointless. There’s nowhere in the world for them to go.”
The elevator platform gave another lurch.
“I think we’re coming to the end of the line,” said Trix. “Don’t take what I just said to heart. I’ve been trying to prepare you a little, just so’s you don’t go completely bat-shit on me. And a second from now, you’ll see what I mean…”
Abruptly, the sequence of butterfly wing hatches slamming shut behind them became a single armoured hatch locking into place in a rock ceiling. The elevator platform rack-and-pinioned down support pylons through a cavern.
The cavern was not impossibly vast, just bigger than the mind was comfortable with.
Visitors to the ventilation galleries of coal mines, or to the overly grandiose subway stations of the world, have reported just that vertiginous sensation: it’s not that this empty subterranean space is big, but that it’s obviously man-made, imposed on the bedrock of the world, and so feels somehow wrong.
Or if not man-made then at least artificial-and one can ponder that particular distinction later.
Concrete stanchions reinforced the rock walls in the manner of the support superstructure of a cathedral dome. Their undressed surfaces seemed to have been colonised by some strange fungoid organism: fleshy webs of tendrils from which cilia rippled like the soft spines of a sea urchin; clusters of globular fruiting-members that by some inner process appeared to give off their own light. Clusters of jewels sprouting in flesh.
The fungus might or might not have been found anywhere else on Earth, but Eddie recognised it. If you took into account all the screwing around that dreams do, where you can go to sleep thinking about a leaky transmission and suddenly it’s three mice playing maracas, these were the cavern walls he had fallen through in one of his dreams when being inducted into the Loup.
All of this was purely secondary. The larger part of Eddie’s mind and focus was fixed on the object that all but filled the cavern, the object that they were descending towards. The object that for all the world looked liked a spiked chainmail glove, except about a million times bigger and bristling with enough weapons to turn the eastern seaboard into nothing more than a ketchup stain. The object that was floating in the middle of the chamber as if it had just bitch-slapped gravity and was now enjoying a celebratory drink. The object that Trix Desoto had, somewhat euphemistically, referred to as the Artefact.
As Eddie stared at it, he felt several entire areas of his mind shut down… and several he had never been aware of before, start up.
A number of things, now, became clear-not least being what he had thought was meaningless taunting on the part of Trix on the way down.
The stuff about how there are some people in the world who never bother looking for home, for example-for the simple reason that there is nowhere on this world for them to look.
“Oh God…” he breathed.
“The Artefact,” Trix Desoto confirmed. “I tried to clue you in a little, and did I get any credit?”
“Yeah, well you could have done a better job,” said Eddie Kalish. “You could have included the single most salient point. That’s not a fucking Artefact, that’s a fucking Ship.”
18.
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?”