Golgotha Run

by Dave Stone

  “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.

  Eddie wondered if the almost constant swearing—from both the Talking Head and Masterton himself—when in conversation with him was just an exaggeration for the sake of imitation, or a true representation of how he, Eddie, really spoke. Pain in the ass if the latter were so, but then again you could never tell with something like that.

  “… trapeze artists,” the Head was saying, “Stilton cheese, grommet-hearings, tapas, gingham, loudhailers, Billie Holliday platters, loam…”

  Eddie glanced to one of the technicians who ran the Command Module. “Is there a reset button on this? I think it’s gone into a loop or something.”

  “Hands off, fucko,” said the Talking Head. “I haven’t crashed or anything. I can just do that shit for longer than is humanly possible.”

  “So you’re, uh, aware of the basic nature of your existence, then?” said Eddie.

  “Course I am,” said the Head. “I’m not a complete fucking moron, and it’s more than I can say about you.”

  “What,” said Eddie, “that I don’t know the basic nature of my existence, or I’m a complete moron?”

  “Look into the dead flat marbles that are my eyes,” said the Head. “What are the fucking odds. What do you know about Butts?”

  “Do you know,” Eddie snapped. “These last few months, seems as like every sucker and his pooch has some snide little thing to say about me and sex. I’ve got a Testostorossa who thinks I should be mincing around in a pink tutu, Trix Desoto just assumes I like boys as a matter of course and now some glob of solidified goo in the shape of a disembodied head is coming it with the goddamn butts!

  “Well, I’m getting sick of it—so let me lay it out once and for all, and you can tell any asshole who asks. I’ve done it maybe four times in my life, with backroom girls, when I’ve managed to scrape together the coin. I’ve got nothing so agains
t the backroom boys that I’d run a mile, but then again I don’t feel any real need to go across the street. I’ve no idea what I want out of the rest of my life, you know, if I happen to meet someone, and maybe that’s because of this Alienation Syndrome Trix was talking about—but maybe, just maybe, it’s because I’m only fucking seventeen years old! So get off my fucking back, okay?”

  There was a pause.

  “That must have been building up for quite a while there,” said the Talking Head.

  “I suppose,” said Eddie.

  “Feel better for getting it off your chest?” said the Talking Head.

  “I suppose,” said Eddie.

  “Well, cathartic as all that might be, in a Reichian sort of way,” said the Talking Head. “I was actually talking about the author, Oscar Butts.”

  “Oh,” said Eddie.

  “Two-bit crime writer who had a lot of stuff published in rags like Spicy Detective either side of the Second World War. I’m surprised you didn’t get a complete bio and bibliography along with the Loup, since the knowledge might have been of actual use.”

  “Yeah, well I got stuff about the Romantic Movement that would blow your socks off,” said Eddie. “As they all did to each other on a regular basis, by all accounts.”

  “In any event,” said the Talking Head, “Butts’s stock in trade was definite C-grade detective fiction. The kind of story where roscoes belched and people flung woo. The guy was going nowhere fast, so his getting drafted and sent to fight in Europe in ’42 was no great loss to literature. But something happened to him in Europe, something that would change the direction of his future writings.

  “Nobody’s quite sure what that something was. Some people say it was because he was in the same unit as Henry Kuttner and the horror writer did a complete number on Butts. He introduced him to the Cthulhu Mythos—you know, the stuff that Lovecraft, Derleth, Ashton-Smith and guys like that used to write—and it coloured his fiction for the rest of his life.

  “Other people say that his unit were ordered to guard an artefact that the Nazis were caught trying to smuggle from North Africa through Italy and the experience drove him mad. Depending on who you listened to, this artefact was anything from the Spear of Destiny to a fully operational inter-planetary craft complete with alien corpses. Sound familiar?

  “Either way, as soon as he got back stateside he began writing again. Not the sub-Dashiell Hammett crap he churned out before the war, but genre-splicing innovative fiction where private dicks were just as likely to go insane staring at the visage of Tsathoggua as they were to solve the case and get the girl. Magazines and publishers started to take note of Butts and his work and it wasn’t long before his novels started to be published. The first was The Lady From Beyond the Stars and that was swiftly followed by The Killer had a Million Faces, Murderphillia, The Star Goat—

  “Hang on,” said Eddie. “You mean like ‘Attack of the Mutant Star Goat’—no tin can is safe? Did it have a big straw hat on?”

  “At the time,” said the Head, “people found his tales quite terrifying. The stories haunted them. The most horrific things they’d ever read.”

  “Doesn’t sound all that terrifying to me,” said Eddie.

  “Well, other times and other sensibilities,” said the Head. “Of course, the main reason was that, as a writer, Butts was frankly just a little bit rotten. He tended to cop out of actually describing his entities, ending the story with the narrator delirious, or writing that they’re coming for me with their aarg aarg aargh. That left a hole for people to fill with their own worst nightmares. Like looking at a dark reflector. Stick one finger in the pool, there’s three fingers pointing back at you, you know?

  “Of course, you can’t get away with ambiguity much these days,” the Head continued. “Suckers who can even read, after a fashion, can only follow something simple and point-to-point. Nobody has the nuts for inference in fiction, these days. There’s quite enough of that in real life. They need things all spelled out when they read books.”

  “And that’s why Butts is important?” said Eddie. He wondered if he was still, somehow, totally failing to grasp the point.

  “It’s important as a model for humans dealing with the Other,” said the Head. “I mean, ninety per cent of our universe is made up of Dark Matter, which is basically stuff just hanging around—but the name itself makes it sound a bit dangerous and mysterious. Dark Matter, you know?

  “However discontinuous, however dislocated the Other might be from human experience and terms, those terms are still the only things that count. We eat what we bring to the table, no more, no less.”

  “So what you’re telling me, basically,” said Eddie, “is that it doesn’t matter a damn what’s really going on because humans are screwing around with it, and it’s only the human screwing around that counts.”

  “If I could nod all sagely and smugly I would,” said the Head. “As it is I’ll just settle for a somewhat smug precisely’. Listen up, sport, and I’ll clue you in on all the human-level poop.”

  “And it’ll finally be the complete and actual truth?” Eddie asked.

  “True as anything else,” said the Head. “Sure, why not. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…”

  19.

  In the bottom drawer of the desk was a barely half-finished quart of Wild Turkey, and Colonel Roland Grist could hear it calling to him. It was the proper twenty-five year-old article as well, turn of the century, no dicking around.

  He wasn’t going to reach for it, though, not with this… well, let’s be honest, here, this jumped-up whore watching him with her mocking eyes.

  Grist found himself longing for the days when life had been simple, the days when he’d seen the world and killed people as an airborne ranger. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Zimbabwe. Even twenty years after a bunch of fundamentalist ragheads had flown a few planes into innocent buildings it could still be used as justification for invading hostile nations. God bless America. And if you happen to blind or cripple a few stone-throwing children or make some Congolese girl do something she doesn’t want to do on one of these extended vacations then whose to argue? Say what you like, an officer in the US Army still got you some goddamn respect.

  Grist couldn’t imagine this Desoto girl being made to do a single thing she didn’t want. Quite the reverse, in fact.

  In fact, Grist had the distinct impression that, should she ever feel like it, she was perfectly capable of spending months of research to find the single worst thing that he would rather stick a gun in his mouth rather than do, just so’s she could force him to do it.

  “Where’s your friend?” Grist asked, more or less for the sake of something to say, and break the contemptuous silence with which she was currently regarding him.

  “Eddie’s off getting some Head.” The Desoto woman shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry about it. He’s just funny that way.”

  Her manner became more businesslike.

  “The operation’s a go,” she said. “I want you to lock the base. Total embargo on communications: nothing coming in, nothing going out, you get me?”

  It wasn’t even an order. It was a flat statement of how the world was going to be.

  Nevertheless, Grist felt he ought to stick up for the autonomy of the US Military from commercial concerns.

  “That might be, uh, problematic,” he said. “We maintain first-strike capability here. We have to maintain constant contact with the Pentagon, with the White House. I can’t simply—“

  The Desoto woman snorted. “The White House doesn’t know you exist and the Pentagon doesn’t care. You can try them, if you like, before you lock this place down, but do you know what they’re gonna tell you to do? They’re gonna tell you to shut up and do exactly what I say because they’re picking up the check for this little operation.”

  The Wild Turkey was really calling now. For an instant, Grist was struck by the vision of racking back the drawer, hauling out the bottle by t
he neck and smashing it against the side of the Desoto girl’s head.

  The vision was so profoundly strong that, a second later, Grist realised that he was still sitting there, staring somewhat dumbly at a miraculously reconstituted and unbloodied Trix Desoto.

  He even had to make a quick scan for a general lack of broken glass and a closed desk drawer, just to be sure.

  He realised that the Desoto girl had spoken and was looking at him, coldly, for an answer.

  “I, uh, beg you pardon?” he managed at last. “Ma’am.”

  “I was merely saying,” the Desoto girl said, “that you’d better get used to the fact that you’re currently not a lot more than a cloakroom attendant for GenTech, looking after our crap. Now we’re handing in the ticket and we want it back.”

  It happened back in the last century (said the Talking Head), back in the early 1960s and the classified fusion-bomb tests out here in Nevada.

  Fusion, as we all know, doesn’t produce gamma or particle-radiation fallout, it just makes a fucking great hole in the ground. So it was with some surprise, and not without a certain degree of trepidation, that those involved subsequently detected massive amounts of radioactivity emanating from the impact-crater.

  It wasn’t radioactivity, of course, not in any actual sense we know. It just tripped the Geigers in more or less the same way that radioactivity would.

  It exhibited wave-particle properties similar to those of X-rays, or for that matter photons, but there were marked dissimilarities… What do I look like, some science-lecturer guy?

  There’s reams of waveform analysis and whatever in the files, but the upshot is that there’s simply nothing to compare it to. It’s dissimilar to everything else in the world we know, in certain fundamental respects, and only similar to itself.

  The phenomenon was ultimately termed Upsilonic Radiation (the Head continued) and people have spent lives and careers—their own and others—attempting to determine its basic nature and effect.

  That’s secondary, though. The important thing is that, when they finally managed to knock up suits capable of protecting humans, well enough and long enough, to survive in the test-bomb crater, they found that the detonation had breached what was obviously an artificial chamber containing what we call the Artefact.