The reason why it projects such a sense of Otherness, the reason why so many can’t see it for what it is, is simply that it’s discontinuous with the here and now of our world. It has no place here, no common terms of reference.
Imagine if Neanderthal man were to come across an F1-11 fighter plane that had somehow been dropped in through a hole in space/time. Somebody might learn that if you stick a finger in the electrics, you get a nasty shock. Somebody might accidentally switch on the comms and get an earful of static. That’s about the extent of what anyone would learn-and that’s the equivalent of what human beings, here and now, have managed to achieve by a process of back-engineering.
The thing about that, though, is that by just generally decking around, we came to the notice of its owners. Somebody heard us babbling into the radio, as it were.
And so this new Faction made contact. Datanets had nervous breakdowns, the heads of scores of sensitives around the world literally exploding, the whole bit. It was chaos for a while, before the Faction caught on to what was happening and ramped their processes down.
Anyhow. Contact was eventually achieved, and a deal brokered. The new Faction are to get their Hammer of God back and we, well we get our hands on some a simplified extraterrestrial craft that we can actually understand and reverse engineer. Just as the technology recovered from the Roswell craft led to the invention of microwave ovens, e-mail and pay-per-view porn, these new discoveries will lead to hundreds more breakthroughs. Teleportation. Time travel. Perpetual motion machines. You name it, we could have it.
And the best thing is that they think we’re doing them a favour. They haven’t got a clue that we don’t know the first thing about how to extract the Artefact’s secrets and its very presence here is beginning to throw things way out of kilter. Do you think it’s a coincidence that the land for hundreds of miles around here is so dry that even cacti have difficulty growing? So we’re going to exchange this unknowable heap of junk for an alien museum piece that was obsolete before Cain even threw Abel a funny look.
To do that, though, they need the damn thing up and running. Maintenance and activation sequences have to be carried out-bit of a tricky thing to do if you happen to be an entity that can’t access the world in any truly physical sense without bursting the whole thing like a soap bubble. And doubly problematic if you then have to rely on a bunch of overgrown monkeys who see the thing as any and all manner of other weird things, if they can even see it at all.
The solution, in the end, was to engineer some overgrown monkeys who could see the thing for what it was-and this is where the operation directly concerns you. A routine gene-examination of your body, after you got yourself shot up in New Mexico, threw up a whole bunch of flags.
There are standing orders to bring in anyone showing signs of being legacy offspring from the old Janus Programmes, because the modifications to their junk DNA already put them halfway down the road. There was only an off-chance possibility that you might be viable, but the opportunity was too good to miss. That’s why we patched you up.
The Faction worked with GenTech in tweaking a whole bunch of back-engineered Zarathustra processes to produce the Loup. We heaved in a lot of other stuff, of course, but the main thing-the important thing-is that you can see the Hammer of God for what it is and, to some extent, manipulate its systems. Your mind and body have been retuned to have an affinity with it on several quite profoundly fundamental levels.
You’re not buying this, are you, Eddie? It’s written all over your face. Okay, try this one: what if this new alien Faction isn’t a new Faction? What if it’s just a different aspect of one of the already existing Factions and it’s been fighting against the other Factions out in space? What if it’s been fighting them since the dawn of time, is still fighting them now and will, in all likelihood, be fighting them for eternity?
What if this ship isn’t here by accident? What if the Faction has been using this planet as storage depot for the last however many years and now they need the Artefact to wage a war a million billion light years away? What if there aren’t thousands of different Factions but just four? What if what we think are different Factions are just aspects of these four?
Do you buy that? Well do you, Eddie? Would you give me a dollar for that? No. I didn’t think you would.
The upshot is, you took one look at something that drives almost any other human into the bughatch, in any number of ways, and just went, “Oh, yeah, that’s a Ship. “You got the right stuff, Eddie boy. Congratulations.
Or maybe everything I’ve just told you has been another huge lie just to keep you off balance and under control. Either way, I wouldn’t let it bother you. All that matters in the here and now is that there’s a job that needs doing and you’re the only person who can do it for us.
Don’t get too far up yourself though. In the end you’re still not much more than a chimp whose been trained to use a spanner. Now, if we’ve all finished sucking one another’s dicks, let’s get to work.
22.
The tubular passages running through the Ship were far more brightly lit than the last time Eddie Kalish had been here. Electrical activity crackled and seethed along the walls, which had themselves taken on a glowing and translucent aspect, complicated forms like multicoloured oils mixed with water spiralling lazily within them.
For hours Eddie and Trix Desoto worked their way through the Ship, following a schematic that had been, apparently, downloaded by the Faction into the GenTech datanet in a kind of abreactive cybernetic fit that had cut services to three entire GenTech-owned compound-blocks for a month.
They worked to a step-pattern so that Trix was always working on a node while Eddie worked on another nearby. The work itself, it seemed to Eddie, was remarkably simple; he would simply place his fingers on a node and sense a change in the energy flows within, redirect them by a repositioning of his fingers until he felt inside himself that their configuration was correct. Presumably this knowledge had been implanted on some subconscious level via the Loup.
He was reminded of the time back in the hospital room of the Factory, where he had accessed the datanet without ever quite knowing how he was doing it.
Their tandem path took them through spaces that might or might not have been living-quarters, command centres, chambers that appeared to be armament-depositories or hangars for small craft that were, he supposed, the extraterrestrial equivalent of tactical fighters. All the while, the throbbing sense of power accumulating inside the Ship grew stronger.
This reminded Eddie, despite himself, of what was actually feeding it.
“What’s it eating?” he asked Trix. “Neuropeptides or something? And thank you, Mister the Loup, for throwing up the word neuropeptides when I don’t know what the hell it actually means. What I mean is, if it’s eating stuff you find in the brains then why can’t GenTech just synthesise it or something?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” said Trix. “The Ship isn’t digesting the… material as nutrients.”
The material, Eddie thought. She’s acting like she just doesn’t care, but she’s putting up another front. Like she tried to turn it into a joke before. Why didn’t I notice that before?
“The Ship’s liquefying and extruding the material,” Trix Desoto was saying. “Patching it into her own neurotecture. I gather that she operates by way of an interconnected complex of microtubular filaments, operating on the quantum level, hooking into the very fabric of space/time. Drawing power from the fundamental wave-form resonance of the universe itself.
“We got the model from a basic template that the Faction encoded into a clone-host-that old guy I was transporting when we first met, yeah? The parameters were quite clear. And the only real source for those particular microtubular constructs, here and now on Earth, is the human brain.”