“Pierre! But Chris said nothing on the phone—”
“No?”
They kissed lightly. Pierre held her by the shoulders to look into her eyes—which seemed older and cooler now.
He gestured uncertainly at the other room, where the TV was playing hurdy-gurdy music.
“I never knew—Chris didn’t mention anything. I—I am right, aren’t I?”
“Yes—his name’s Peter. My Chris doesn’t seem to have said much—”
“Ah—Chris has gone up to the Hospital for something. Maybe to give us a moment together?”
Pip floated into a corridor which carried cable-bearing pipes around the inner skin of the Globe—now they were buckled and ruptured. Further along, the corridor was pinched together by the shock wave of the explosion and its roof scraped the floor like a coalmine gallery squashed flat by subsidence.
Nearby, a hatch had sprung open. A ladder with metre-wide spaces between the separate rungs led down to a lower level. Blocking the view drifted the body of one of the angular aliens, surrounded by a frozen pink haze.
Pip bounced himself cautiously upward from rung to rung till he reached the dead unhuman floating in the nebula of its blood. He hauled the corpse aside. Its grey clothes—or was that stuff skin?—tore away from the chilled metal leaving a frozen layer behind.
Pip pushed himself into a high, vaulted corridor more spacious than the first corridor had been. He shone his light around. The corridor led off in one direction along a buckled curve, vanishing out of sight. In the other direction it opened into a hallway of idle, dead machines. A second alien body hung midway between them, turning very slowly end over end. Fingers splayed out like tree twigs. Ears had burst open into grey streamers from its skull. Pip swung his body round so that the roof became the floor again, then pushed his way by gentle shoves towards the machinery. Ambassador from the world of whipped cream, he inspected these first pickings of the meal of Mind. He snapped holograms, checked his Roentgen counter.
After ten minutes, when he couldn’t make out the function of the machines, he drifted down a long rumpled ramp to a lower level still…
Sole carried the sleeping Vidya up in the lift and along the corridor. Outside the hairmesh security glass, the green barbed woods pressed a corset round the building. It was quiet.
He unlocked the first door.
In the interface between the two doors, Lionel Rosson stood waiting for him. He didn’t seem surprised to see him, or the boy in his arms.
“What are you up to, Chris? Sabotage? Or is it sentimentality? I suppose I ought to say welcome home to Haddon. But let’s get that boy back to his proper place first, hmm? Oh, I would have wanted you back here so desperately, a week ago! But now… well—it’s different, isn’t it?”
Sole whispered furiously:
“I’m taking Vidya out of here. To live a real life. I’m sick of bogus science and lying politics. Projects for the advancement of Mankind! Codename after codename for bestiality—their Leapfrogs and Mulekicks. And Haddon’s just as bad—”
“What’s a Leapfrog, Chris? What’s a Mulekick?” Rosson asked, humouringly, keeping a wary eye on the sleeping boy, and keeping his own back to the outer door.
“Hasn’t it all been on the telly then? Flying saucers. Alien menace. All that crap. I hear it knocked the wind out of the sails of revolution in South America!”
“You’ve been involved in that then, Chris? Ah well!
Time enough to tell me. You’ve seen the injuries? You realize the boy is tranked? And needs to be, damn it!”
“I’ve had my fill of needs. Political needs. Scientific needs. Humanity’s needs. Bugger all needs!”
“You don’t understand the situation, Chris. Let’s take Vidya downstairs again. We’ll work out a strategy, hmm?”
“Who wants a ‘strategy’?” sneered Sole.
“We do, Chris. Things reached crisis point—”
“You’ve ballsed things up, you bastard—you didn’t look after Vidya!”
Sole put the boy down on the floor gently.
“For Chrisake, Chris, listen to me—the language programme broke down. The kids accepted the overload on short term memory up to a certain point. But it’s broken down now like a dam bursting.”
Sole growled at the foggy figure before him.
“Bloody well leave dams bursting out of it!”
“Sure, Chris. Anything you say. But listen, will you? The kids reverted to babbling. Not baby babbling. It was concepts, ways of thinking—”
“Get out of my way, you. Fuck your ways of thinking.”
“The thing is, your embedding has—”
Sole hit Rosson in the stomach.
“—taken place,” gasped Rosson. Sole caught hold of his mane of hair and swung his head against the wall violently till Rosson crumpled up and sagged to the floor.
He picked Vidya up again and unlocked the outer door.
Pip floated into what would later be known as the First Chamber of the Brains.
His light fell on many crystal life-support boxes—row upon row towering up to a vaulted dome. Tendrils of wires led up to them, like jungle creepers climbing trees, from the instrument panels below. Wires led into the plastic jelly that filled the boxes, where they split into a million filaments, that touched every part of what those boxes contained: naked brains—set in the jelly like fruits in a trifle.
There were brains of many forms and sizes. Some resembled fungi. Some, corals. Some, rubbery cactus plants. Sections of spinal columns jutted below the brains, some as straight as ram-rods, others curled like drawn bows, others ripple-form like waves. Sense-organs stood out, attached to the brains on muscular cords and bony rods. A few were recognizable as eyeballs; others ambiguous. Were they for seeing light at all—or some other form of radiation?
Pip gazed up in a mixture of awe and disgust. The set-up reminded him of a biology lab in school—pickled sea-creatures drained of colour, floating in alcohol.
None of the life-support boxes had ruptured, though, when the Globe burst.
He wondered—could their minds have survived inside that protective gel of theirs—quick-frozen so fast that they had no time to die, but only hibernated?
There’d been no vital organs to rupture, no lungs to burst. The life support systems had just suddenly cut off—and the brain had already been plunged to a temperature where all functions were suspended.
Could cryogenics engineers from Earth restore any sort of consciousness to these creatures? Was there any chance they could reactivate the life support systems? Warm the brains up? Bring them back again?
Maybe the shock of pseudo-dying when the cold rushed in would have been too massive for the mind to come through intact, even if a trace of consciousness still lingered.
Yet if there was the slightest chance! Surely Humanity owed it to these prisoners, to bring them back again. And owed it to itself. As many mental sciences could stem from the contents of this chamber, as physical sciences from the machinery of the Globe.
Such thoughts exalted him—eagle scout, PhD cum laude, veteran of the crusade for Asian freedom—as he hung there among the brains of beings from across a thousand light years, and whispered a prayer.
Lord, may these brains be resurrectable.
May they be raised to a new life by Ettinger Foundation engineers. To a true mind alliance, which those ghouls denied them—as they would have denied Humanity—rushing in here to pick our brains and fly off again. Please, Lord, for Humanity’s sake.
God bless the Ettinger Foundation, whispered Pip into his helmet. Bless them and help them to bring the frozen body back to life and cure it.