“ Shooting you in the head would definitely end your usefulness, ” said the Talking Head, “ For a while, at any rate, I admit. There are other means that might be brought to bear to ensure your compliance and keep you useful, however. ”
“To the point where, if I was absolutely and persistently determined to screw up whatever it was you want me to do, you’d be able to stop me every single time?”
“ Can this be the itinerate and inveterate fuck around who we’ve come to know and love speaking? ” said the Head. “ You don’t have persistence and determination in you, boy. ”
There was a slightly odd set to the Talking Head’s synthetic features, Eddie thought, but he couldn’t quite work out what it was.
It would only be later that he pegged it: somebody who was well aware of the effect a foot-long talon might have on a lump of relatively fragile biogel-and who was doing their very best not to bring the matter up.
“Do you want to try me?” Eddie said. “Just tell me, okay? And I’d be grateful if you stopped ripping the piss out of me and the way I talk while you do it.”
For a few moments the talking head was silent. Then:
“ I’d do a little exasperated sigh, at this point, ” it said, “ if I had the lungs.
“ All right, already. Okay. I’ll let you in on one of the somewhat larger secrets, if it’ll stop the pissing and moaning and get you at least halfway back in line… ”
21.
It was twenty-four hours later.
Eddie, for his part, was finding his time-sense becoming uncomfortably acute in that respect. The way that something inside him now incremented the passage of time in multiples of twelve. There was something about having the day bisected by the twelve-hourly shots of the Leash that gigged in him.
There were any number of people in the world, he supposed, people with straight jobs in the Multicorps, say, who lived their lives to a regimen of getting up at a certain time, eating at fixed other times, doing some one particular thing for hours on end… but until he had got mixed up with GenTech he’d had nothing in common with the sorry jerks living drone-lives like that. Whatever else he had been through and done, he had never done that.
It was an imposition. The simple fact of living to a schedule not his own. And if he ever got himself into the position of, what, finding himself with a lifetime supply of the Leash and with nobody to dole it out in return for a favour of any kind, wouldn’t that just simply mean that GenTech had in a certain sense won after all? They’d have left their mark on him-and would be leaving needle-marks on him for the rest of his goddamn life.
Over twenty-four hours the chamber under Shed Seven containing the Artefact-or the Ship, or, apparently, Eddie had recently learned, the Hammer of God -had changed markedly. The butterfly wing blast hatches in the main elevator shaft had been retracted and locked back; cables snaked down from the Brain Train Command rig and hooked to servomanipulators.
The elevator platform itself had been disabled, meaning that human access to the chamber of the Artefact was now limited to the emergency maintenance shafts off to one side.
The canisters containing the Brain Train’s cargo were now being lowered down the elevator shaft by way of what was basically an automated bucket-chain. Then the manipulators took them and cracked open the canisters. Then a collection of other, specialised mechanisms took care of the rather more horribly organic containers thus revealed.
“It’s an old pathologist’s joke, apparently,” said Trix Desoto. “The human brain is a remarkably delicate and slippery little customer to deal with. Fortunately it comes in a padded case. With handles.”
She didn’t seem one bit distressed at all the busy servomechanical activity as the heads were shelled and discarded in untidy piled, their contents slopped onto conveyor-belts that trundled them off, through an intake hatch, into the dark bowels of the Ship. She just stood there, relaxed, the case she had brought from the Command rig hanging from her hand.
The case was of around the same size and construction as might be suitable for carrying a snare drum around, built from rib-reinforced aluminium with polycarbon impact-pads.
Eddie had an idea of what might be in it. All the clues were there. He shuddered, and recalled what the Talking Head with the persona of Masterton had finally told him.
Now the thing you have to bear in mind (said the Talking Head) is that almost everything you think you know, everything you’ve been told so far, is basically a lie.
Oh, do stop growling at me like that. It’s not impressing anyone. What you’ve been told is technically factual, so far as such things can be known, given that we’re dealing with things that nobody sees the same way and everyone has a different opinion about. You’ve been told the truth, just not all if it-which is, of course, the very best kind of lie there is.
The He, er, lies in the ambiguous nature of the Artefact itself. The fact that in a certain sense it lies outside the bounds of human comprehension has given the impression that the very issues that surround it he outside the bounds of human comprehension. This isn’t actually so. The issues themselves are really quite simple. Ridiculously so, in fact. You’ll laugh when I tell you. Oh, go on.
The fact is that there are many… well, let’s call them Factions in this world. And, whoops, that’s a tricky one right from the start. Let’s just say that by world we mean, you know, maybe it’s not just this world and leave it at that, all right? That’s not the point.
The point is that these Factions are real. Now, it’s not like you can categorise them as Light and Dark-while remembering that “light” doesn’t necessarily mean good any more than “dark” means evil. You need to think in terms of team colours for some sport or other. And think of their supporters as being like the soccer fans the Brits have over the pond, who aren’t exactly charmers, whichever team they root for.
They’ve existed as long as man has walked the earth. Even before the early humans learned not to walk with their knuckles scraping the ground, they were forming up into tribes and marking their territory and hunting grounds. Not unlike how things are today, it’s just that the hunting grounds have changed somewhat. Instead of an acre of fertile soil, today’s territories are the airwaves, the boardrooms, the human spirit, the space between your ears and other less tangible frontiers that you just wouldn’t be able to get your head around.
But what is important, and what you can comprehend, is that everything that happens of any importance on this planet is a direct result of a Faction’s influence. If two African nations go to war because one side doesn’t like the shade of the other side’s skin, it’s because one Faction or another made it happen. If a young starlet at the peak of her career is brutally slain in her Beverly Hills mansion, you can bet there’s Faction involvement somewhere along the line. And if the Colombian coffee crop fails for three consecutive years then you can stake your house on its cause having something to do with a Faction. It’s just the way of the world and it’s how it’s been for thousands of years.
In any event, the thing we’re calling the Artefact was discovered some time during our planet’s history by one of these Factions, here in its chamber on Earth. Ever since then it’s been guarded and protected, kept in reserve for some grand strategic move or other a couple of thousand years down the line-so far as here and now we reckon time.
But why, and more importantly, how is it here? Is it, as one particular Faction believes, a gift from some ancient alien culture? Or an ancient alien culture in its entirety as another believes?
Or is it, in the end, nothing more nor less difficult and complicated than a Ship? The space-going equivalent of an aircraft carrier, from what I’m told, designated by a name that comes out in the translation as Hammer of God or some such.