“Yeah, but if you got it from a clone-host, whatever the hell that is, then you can clone a-“
“Doesn’t work,” said Trix Desoto. “A clone we’re capable of producing unassisted, under the current state of the art, by its very nature never makes synaptic links or achieves consciousness. Has to be a brain from someone conscious and alive-or at least who was.”
“All the same,” Eddie said. “It all still seems a bit-“
“I know what you mean,” said Trix. “Fundamental lack of connection with other human beings is one thing, but I still think it’s a little bit off.”
Eddie couldn’t work out for the life of him if she had meant that as a joke or not. It would open up a number of not entirely comforting questions either way.
He realised that Trix Desoto had said something else.
“What?” he asked her. “What did you say?”
“I said that, on the other hand, what’s the alternative? The destruction of the universe? Or at least, the destruction of that bit of it with Earth and all the human beings on it?”
Eddie Kalish pondered that for a moment.
“I’m going to ask you what you said again,” he said at last. “But, you know, I mean it in a slightly different way.”
“We don’t get the Ship up and running,” said Trix Desoto, “then the Faction who wants it is just going to lean in-from wherever it is they lean from-and simply grab it. You think the world’s showing cracks now, just you wait until the Hammer of God starts shaking it up like a snow globe. Didn’t the Head get around to telling you that?”
“Not as such, no,” said Eddie. “And on the whole I’m somewhat glad it didn’t.”
They continued on through the Ship, reconfiguring the nodes, Trix still lugging whatever it was that was in her case. The corridors branched and interconnected in any number of ways, but they followed the schematics on a rough trajectory spiralling to the centre.
They were getting quite close. It was hot and the Ship was pounding around him and Eddie’s skin tingled. He felt muscle-masses shifting around under it. Up ahead, Trix Desoto’s form seemed slightly more bulky, her gait more loping.
He hurried forward to catch her up, laid a hand on her shoulder. She swung round, snarling, for a moment her eyes blazing. Then she visibly caught herself.
“I think the Ship’s triggering the Loup,” he told her, taking a somewhat hurried step back. “Even through the Leash. Maybe I need a booster shot or-“
“An imposed reversion would probably kill you at this point,” Trix Desoto said. “It’s the other way around. The Loup’s cutting in, despite the Leash, this near to the core, to compensate for an increase in upsilonic radiation. My advice is just to go along with it and-“
And it was at this point that the explosive charges detonated outside and things went, even more than usual, totally to hell.
23.
It might have been wondered, by those in a position to wonder, why the various GenTech technicians and operatives were going along with something like the Brain Train. They did not, after all, have the Alienation Syndrome shared by Eddie Kalish and Trix Desoto, and so presumably cared about their fellow human beings and what happened to them-at least so much as human beings generally do.
One reason, of course, was that it is very hard to overestimate what people will do as part of the drudging and day-to-day business of participating in atrocity.
And then there are those who simply have a propensity for cruelty and violence-indeed, the Brain Train’s security force, the outriders and those who handled the weapons systems, were of just that sort. Violent men, and for that matter women, who didn’t care who they might end up fighting just so long as they fought.
Just the sort of people you needed, in fact, out on the dangerous and somewhat crazy blacktops of America.
As for the technicians themselves, most of them didn’t call the Brain Train by that name, and probably didn’t even know it. In the time-honoured commercial tradition of the left hand not knowing what the right was doing, most of them thought that they were delivering components for a new supercomputer-system-components which had to be kept in refrigerated canisters on account of their extreme delicacy.
Those who knew the actual nature of the Brain Train’s cargo thought that they were still components for a new supercomputer-system-but they were clone-brains, grown whole in the GenTech skeining vats. One or two might have had their suspicions-in the same way that an employee in a Mister Meaty burger bar might have suspicions as to precisely what goes into the burgers-but not to the point where they might investigate, due to the horrible possibility that their suspicions might be confirmed.
Besides, it wasn’t their job. Let someone else get into trouble and take the heat for it if they wanted.
In short, while they might be living under a certain element of corporate-drone denial, the GenTech Brain Train technical crew were not particularly bad or callous people.
As such, it could be argued that they did not deserve what would happen to them when as squad of US troops from the Base approached them, as they were going about their business, brought up their MultiFunction rifles and began to slaughter them out of hand.
For a while it was bloody. Then the Brain Train’s own security forces woke up to what was happening, weighed in on the side of GenTech and things got bloodier still.
Outside, from outside the Ship, there was a heavy concussion. The ship lurched.
Somewhere in the back of Eddie’s head, a gentle murmuring of which he had been barely aware other than that it was vaguely comforting, suddenly became the shriek of fingernails on slate.
It was the Ship, he realised. Up until now the Ship had just been murmuring about how happy it was to be here and alive and waking up-and now it was squealing in alarm.
“That came from outside!” Trix Desoto snapped. “That was an attack! Go and see what’s happening.”
Eddie Kalish was of the profound opinion that, if something were attacking, the least safest place to be would be outside the protection afforded by a Hammer of God.
“What about the activation?” he said. “We can’t just-“
“I can take care of the rest of the nodes,” Trix Desoto said. “There’s only a few left.” She hefted the case she was carrying meaningfully. “And plus I’m the only one who knows what to do with the… final component. I’m the only one who can get it done.”
“I don’t suppose you could give me a quick run down, then?” Eddie asked. “I mean listen, I’m really not trying to be the rat here-all right, who am I kidding, course I’m being a cowardly little rat. But the fact remains that you’re the lethal one. You’ve got the Loup under control. Whatever’s out there, you’re the one who can flip out and waste it, while I-“
“Trust me, wouldn’t work,” said Trix Desoto. “There’s no time to explain it but just trust me but there’s no way it would work. I wish to God, quite frankly, that there was someone else who could go out there and watch my back, but you’re the only one I’ve got. Just get out there and do it, okay?”
Eddie Kalish took of the larger tubes and just trusted that it would lead to a sphincter-hatch that would let him out of the Ship.
Some large part of him, of course, hoped that it would just lead to a dead end, giving him the excuse to just blunder about and get confused and not have to go out in the end at all.
In the event, though, the tube led him straight to a hatch in a matter of minutes, bang on order. Just his luck.
He wondered, briefly, if he should stroke the wall in the same way that Trix Desoto had done, but the hatch simply dilated in front of him. He would never be sure if the Ship itself was trying to be helpful-or if it simply wanted to be rid of him.