“Don’t worry about it,” Trix said, climbing up into the hatch. “You coming or not?”
Eddie considered this, for a moment, with some seriousness.
Whatever the soldiers were protecting themselves against might be doing horrible things to his body, but he was probably right in assuming that the Loup in Trix and himself was counteracting the effects.
Then again, how much worse might those effects be if you were actually inside the thing that was producing them?
On the other hand, nothing exactly bad had happened so far-and how many chances did you get to go inside a genuine alien starship? With the off-chance of coming out with your colon and memoplex intact, in any case.
He realised that he was looking at the outline of Trix against a pale and shifting glow. At least there was light of some kind in there, in any event. He shrugged to himself and followed her inside.
The tunnels winding through the main mass of the Ship had a tubular and somewhat organic quality, not as if they were crawling through the bowels of some living organism or some such, but like the ship had in some way been grown on organic principles.
Fitful tendrils of electrical activity crackled along the tunnels, clustering in the areas where Trix and Eddie walked. It was as if the Ship itself were attempting to light their way.
“I think she’s trying to be helpful,” Trix said.
“She?” said Eddie.
“It’s just nomenclature,” said Trix. “I don’t mean anything by it.”
“Well I’ve gotta tell you,” said Eddie, “that I can’t imagine thinking of this thing as anything other than an it.”
“Suit yourself,” said Trix Desoto. “Now, I’ve been here before, so we’re not going on the grand tour. We just need to find what we’re calling a node… and speak of the devil. There we go.”
The so-called node was little more than a place where some of the smaller tubes, running through the main tube of the passageway in a manner no doubt analogous to cables or ducts, clustered and fused together in a malformed lump. The electrical activity within it glowed in a way that, while still faint, was markedly brighter than in the tunnel itself.
“These are basically the equivalent of control panels, I think,” said Trix. “Put your hand on it.”
“What?” said Eddie.
“Put your hand on it. See what happens.”
Later, Eddie would think of any number of reasons why just slapping your hand on some unknown piece of alien technology might be a bad idea. At the time, none of them occurred to him. He just did it. It must have been Trix Desoto’s tone of voice.
The panel ignited with a blaze of white light. Electrical fire crawled up Eddie’s arm and squirrel-caged around his head. His eyes rolled up in his head and the whites glowed, cutting beams through the darkness of the passageway. Flame in the dark.
Eddie snatched his hand away. The electrical activity dissipated instantly, leaving him pale and shaking.
“That’s the biggie,”Trix Desoto was saying happily. “That’s the test. You made basic contact and survived with at least some of your neurones intact.” She looked at him, slightly concerned. “How do you feel?”
It was a few seconds before Eddie pulled himself together to the point of being capable of speech.
“It’s like it… it’s like she knew me,” he managed at last through chattering teeth. Like she’s been waiting. Waiting so long and… oh, she’s hungry… she wants food. In her mouth she… oh God!”
Abruptly, as though galvanised, he lunged for Trix and grabbed her, pinioning her upper arms. For a moment Trix was startled enough that setting loose the processes of the Loup-processes that might have turned a firmly Leashed Eddie Kalish into the general consistency of guacamole-never occurred to her.
“You’ve been here before,” Eddie rasped, glaring into Trix Desoto’s eyes with such ferocity that, for an instant, they seemed to glow every bit as much as when he had laid his hand upon the Node. “You’ve talked to this thing. You know what she… what it wants to do…”
“Well, uh, yeah, of course,” said Trix. “I know what we, that is GenTech, have to do to-“
“Then tell me what the fuck is really going on!” Eddie thundered. “You’ve been screwing me around from up to down, and now you want me to, you want me to be involved in… I want a proper explanation and I want it now!”
“ Now you’ll remember, ” said the Talking Head that was currently assuming the persona of Masterton, “ because I must have said it before-I’m sure of it, in fact-that we keep coming back to the same situation over and over again? ”
“You-that is, the real you-might have mentioned something,” said Eddie Kalish, “to that effect. You know, in odd moments.”
“ Well, quite, ” said the Talking Head. “ And one of those situations is that you come out and say something, and I tell you not to be a particular thing. Can you remember what it is, that particular thing?”
“I remember,” said Eddie Kalish.
“ And what would that particular thing be? ”
“A fucking tool,” said Eddie Kalish. “All right?”
“ A fucking, as you so rightly say, tool, ” said the Talking Head.
The Talking Head was, basically, a lump of mimetic biogel, hooked up to the Brain Train’s command centre systems and imprinted with the memory engrams of Masterton.
Trix had told him that, while he was talking to the Head, she was going to be implementing a lockdown procedure for the entire Base. In a secure situation such as this, with no communications traffic going in or coming out, it was sometimes useful to confer with a player from the outside.
The Talking Head was capable of giving a clear approximation of what Masterton himself might think and say in any given circumstance-and if circumstances happened to fall outside of its parameters it would say so, allowing one to determine if it was worth breaking communications silence and talking to the man himself.
Eddie had decided, for any number of reasons, that he’d leave talking to the man himself as an absolute last resort.
“ There’s no way you’re any kind of fucking alien, or descended from aliens, ” the Talking Head was saying. “ Not in any sense you’re capable of understanding the word alien, in any case. That would be completely and utterly ridiculous. ”
The Head formed its biogel mouth into a grimace of irritation. “ The word itself has a bad rep these days, what with being appropriated to fuck and back by sad Abductee-Syndrome fuckos sleeping too close to an electrical outlet, and think that every tick they ever get off their dog is a fucking implant. ”
“ If it’ll make you any happier-and fuck knows, that seems to be my function in life at the moment-think of it in terms of Otherness with a capital O. Contact with the Other. ”
“Other?” Eddie Kalish said. “Other than what?”
“ Other than whatever you got, fucko, ” said the Talking Head. “ Tyre irons, butch-wax, precooked individually wrapped sausages, hockey pucks, cellular phones, string, Danish pastries, sousaphones, hydrogen fusion reactors, the complete works of the Marquis de Sade, submarines, small trees, dogshit, what the fuck you want? Lemons, printed circuits, soap, novelty key chains… ”
It occurred to Eddie that, through the slightly limited and simplified responses of the Head, he had just learned something about the character of Masterton the man.
He had listened to the Head converse with a technician or some such, and the conversation had been purely technical, without a trace of antagonism or extraneousness. Now the Head seemed to have fallen into the persona of Eddie Kalish, himself, as Masterton the man seemed to do when they actually talked. Masterton the man, he realised, had something of the mimetic about him.
The Loup took this opportunity to take a little bit of information from a pocket and dropped it into his conscious mind:
Pacing and leading, it was called. The operator falls into the physical and verbal rhythms of the subject, reinforces them by the repetition of key words and gestures, the glib recitals of lists-and then takes the subject off in a direction that he, the operator, wants. Just the sort of semi-hypnotic managerial shit that a managerial shit like Masterton would have down pat-only filtered through the somewhat cruder mechanics of the Head it became that much more jarring and noticeable.