Coven (38 page)

A piece of paper was stuck in the visor, a
note in Wade’s yuppie scrawl.

Lydia,

White, Peerce, and Porker are dead. So is
the dean. I still don’t know what any of this is about. Don’t go
back to the grove—it’s getting worse by the minute. Leave town
right away, Jervis is planting a bomb, but I don’t know where. Just
leave town and forget about me. Doesn’t that sound corny?

Wade

P.S. —Take good care of the Vette!

The dolt could’ve at least signed off saying
he loved her. Men could be such assholes. So what else was new?

She didn’t know what to make of this
business with the bomb, or all the people Wade said were dead. But
none of that mattered. For now she had to work on her plan, and she
only had half a day to do it.

««—»»

—
WE HAVE WADE NOW. WE HAVE
EVERYTHING WE NEED.

“
Great!” Jervis exclaimed,
shovel in midstroke. “We did it!”

—
YES,
the Supremate said.
—AND SOON YOU
WILL JOIN ME IN ETERNAL GRACE. BUT TAKE CARE IN YOUR FINAL TASKS,
JERVIS. SIGNS AND WONDERS, MY SON. YOU ARE MY SCRIBE.

Jervis fell to his knees in the dirt. Dead
face turned to the sun, he raised his hands in obeisance to his
invisible lord.

—
THINK NOT OF THE LIVES OF
CATTLE. THEY SERVE AS SACRIFICE TO MY HOLY WILL, A PORTENT TO THIS
WORLD THAT I WILL ONE DAY RETURN AS DELIVERER. TODAY SHALL BE A
GREAT AND HOLY REMEMBRANCE. I MUST BE REMEMBERED. LIKE A PROMISE IN
THE WIND.

“
Yes, my lord!” Jervis
cried up.

—
SIGNS AND WONDERS,
JERVIS. THE GHOST OF FUTURE TIDINGS.

“
You are my life! My
redeemer!”

—
LIKE A PROMISE IN THE
WIND.

The Supremate left his
head, and left Jervis shuddering in the graveyard. His lord’s
commandment was clear; this old life was fading, racing toward a
new wondrous
eternal
life. Jervis drank Kirins and smoked as he buried the
remaining bodies. It was refreshing work, burying the dead. The
corpses were part of the promise too, and Jervis the very arm of
the ghost of future tidings. He was nearly done now, like an
apostle nearing heaven.

“
You lurp lurpfffeeeevii prick ick ick!”

Jervis looked down. Here
was poor Penelope again, clambering out of her hole. She churned
upward, flesh the color of spoiled milk, almost out of the grave to
the waist.
Blessed are the
boneless?
Jervis thought. He should write
his own testament, for hadn’t he, too, returned from the
dead?
Yeah! Sermon on the
Mounds!

“
Gll ff gliv gliv give me back my
bah bah bones!” Penelope blubbered. Her face looked
curdled. “Glive me black my baby!”

“
Your baby’s dead, funky,”
Jervis said.

“
Mlup mlup mlutherfucker ler ler!”

Jervis flicked ashes on her, impressed. It
wasn’t easy being buried alive, and probably harder still to
continuously unearth yourself to face your conquerors. Boneless or
not, she had guts.

“
Pluh pluh pleeze
helup helup help me!”

“
Sure,” Jervis said, and
planted his foot in the middle of her amorphous face. He shoved her
squealing back into the hole, flabby hands dragging at his pants
cuffs. “Down you go,” he said.

“
I’ll lyle lyle
kah kah kah—”

“
Shut up and have a drink.”
Jervis unzipped and sent a stream of dark dead man’s beer piss
into Penelope’s mouth. Soon all she could do was gargle in protest.
“There. That should wet your whistle,” he remarked. He refilled the
hole again, then packed the mound down flat and hard as a
sod pounder with his foot.

The hot sun drew a haze of
death up into the clearing. He glorified in its humid stench and
walked back to the Dodge Colt.
Everything
is beautiful,
he mused.
Like a promise in the wind.

—
YOU ARE MY SCRIBE,
the Supremate fleeted back.

Jervis swam in the heavenly caress. Yes, he
was an apostle nearing the pillars of heaven. An existential
proselyte.

—
TODAY SHALL BE A GREAT
AND HOLY REMEMBRANCE.

The black cube grew warm in Jervis’
palm.

—

CHAPTER 33

Wade’s gaze drew ahead of him like an
endless ribbon unreeling into a bottomless pit. “Holy shit,” he
whispered.

“
Welcome to the
labyrinth.”

The sisters dispersed, leaving Wade alone
with Besser in the recepetioncove of pointaccessmain#1. A single
black corridor stretched before them. Its end could not be
discerned.

“
This place is the box in
the grove?”

“
Yes,” Besser replied. “Our
master’s sanctuary.”

“
But the box in the grove
is no bigger than a coffin.”

“
On the outside, yes. But
inside, its verges are more vast than any building on earth. Its
actual proximities are incalculable.”

“
That’s impossible,” Wade
scoffed.

“
No, it’s physics. An
applied system of the manipulation of physical dimension. All
things are malleable, Wade.” Besser loped ahead. “Come along. I’ll
show you what destiny looks like.”

Wade followed him through corridors, through
blackness.

Besser inserted his pendant into one of the
dots, above which a sign seemed to glow SUSTENANCEPROCESSING. Wade
saw it, yet he didn’t.

“
We call them mindsigns. A
servopathic transponder identifies the designation to the reader. A
Russian person, for instance, would see it in Russian.”

Besser opened the extromitter. Dark, pulsing
green light extended through a channelwork of odd machinery, chutes
and lifters, and something like a conveyor belt. Wade saw the backs
of several naked sisters bent over in their tasks. Intermittently
the silence was ruptured by a sudden screech which reminded Wade of
tree branches being tossed into a wood pulper. Each screech sent a
shiver up his spine. He peered deeper into the channel and saw that
the conveyor was carrying white, naked bodies.

“
You’ve got to be kidding
me,” he said.

Besser seemed dismayed. “It’s waste
processing. The Supremate is merely recycling material that’s
outlasted its usefulness.”

“
Material!”
Wade objected. “Those are
people!”

“
Well, they’re sisters,
yes. But no longer serviceable.”

Wade squinted closer through the gaps.
Twisted, crushed, squashed—these were the sisters Wade had run over
in White’s cruiser. They lay alive on the conveyor, bespattered
with black blood. The belt fed them one at a time into a gaping
bin—then came the screech—and from a chute at the other end, out
poured big spews of black meat, like hash. This was how they dealt
with damaged goods. They ground them up for food.

“
We eat well around here,
Wade. And you will too.”

Mobile sisters shoveled the meat into
hoppers that automatically rolled off. Wade felt himself grow
faint.

Besser led on. Subinlets led to more
servicepasses which led to more warrens. SUPPLYIMPLEMENT,
ACCLIMATIONPOST, CHARGESTABILIZATIONMOMENTOR. Sisters moved about
like grinning idiot slaves.

“
The sisters are examples
of the Supremate’s technologies.”

“
This is no cult,” Wade
realized. “It’s a fucking spaceship, and those women
are…aliens.”

“
They’re
crossmultibredintegratedhybrids, but ‘aliens’ will suffice, as I
suppose ‘spaceship’ will suffice for the labyrinth. Actually it’s a
valencecorehypervelocityorbitalmagneficpulse-
momentyrayquadrupoularcoulombMeVspontaneousbosomwavelengthdecay/accelerationendodiermicmassenergydefractingpi-mesicphotofissionalfieldeffeettransistingvan
denhulmaxirnalentryreentrypointphasemobilekeneticmotionvessel.”

Wade stared at him. “Oh, is that all.”

Besser took him along and extromitted into a
sloped, threadwalled warren whose mindsign read
EMWGUIDANCETRACKINGPOINT.

“
Do you know what
electromagnetic energy is?” Besser asked.

“
Light, sound,
radiation—shit like that, right?”

“
Yes, Wade, shit…like that,
stretched over an infinite wavelength, and those wavelengths exist
everywhere.” Besser took a moment’s silence, for effect. “They’re a
power source.”

“
You mean you don’t fill
this thing up with gas?”

“
Picture the entire
universe as a lake, Wade. The surface of the lake is
electromagnetic energy, and the labyrinth is, in a sense, a boat.
The apparatus in this room countercycles electromagnetic waves,
allowing the labyrinth to float, so to speak, on the lake, while
conduction devices harness the active properties of the same EM
waves, creating a kinetic energy pulse that propels the labyrinth
at phenomenal speeds.”

“
Then how does it sustain
itself when it isn’t moving?”

Impressed, Besser turned. “Excellent
question, Wade. When not in motion, the labyrinth of course cannot
utilize active EM motility. So it creates its own static EM field
by releasing stored molecular activity previously processed during
propulsion transitions. We call it the stasisfield.”

“
A battery,” Wade
concluded. “And that’s why you have to leave soon. Because your
batteries are draining.”

“
Exactly. Your
perceptiveness is noteworthy.” Besser took him into another service
pass. “Before full depletion is experienced, we recharge the
stasisfield in a single spontaneous pulse with the remaining stored
potential electron activity. That will occur tonight at five
minutes before midnight. Then—”

“
Blast off,” Wade
said.

“
More like a magnetic
repulsion, but, yes, the labyrinth will project itself back into
the active EM flux of space.”

“
To where?”

“
The next acquisition
assignment. We go from world to world, Wade. From galaxy to
galaxy.”

Wade was boggled. “What the
fuck for?” he shouted. “To bury coeds? To pull people’s heads
off?
Why?
”

Besser chuckled deeply. “I’ll show you why.
Follow me.”

Strange light hummed around Wade’s head.
There were no light fixtures, yet somehow he could see through the
solid blackness. A mindsign hovered by: SUBINLET#4. And the very
next: SUBINLET#5; and next: SUBINLET#999. The labyrinth was an
endless maze.

But the next sign glowed
GERMINATIONWARREN.

Dark, orange light pulsed in a long, narrow
chamber. Large canisters sat in racks along one wall. The other
side was a half wall, which looked down.

Besser pointed. “A thousand kingdoms, whose
end is perfection.”

Wade lost his breath peering over the edge.
From layers of orange light, production stratas descended ever
downward. It was like looking down the slope of a mountain miles
high. Each level bore movement, white bodies busying back and forth
in arcane passages, pushing things about in some nameless onus.

“
What the fuck is this?”
Wade whispered, more to himself.

“
A womb for whole
civilizations,” Besser symbolized. “A processing plant where
genetic structures are isolated for their most useful features,
bred into one another, regressive genes removed, vital genes
amplified. We distill life, combine it, and re create it—all
to the Supremate’s specifications.”

Wade’s eyes locked down into the glowing
chasm.

“
Nature is base, but we’re
making it serve a higher purpose. The labyrinth is only one of
many; from world to world they go, processing dominant
life forms for what will one day effect a flawless realm. We
take the best of everything and make it better.”

“
For the
Supremate?”

“
For the master plan. Our
world is damned by its own error. War, hate, crime, etcetera. And
all the other worlds in this universe, I’m sorry to say, are the
same. All except one. The Supremate’s.”

Wade couldn’t look anymore, not into this
Grand Canyon of flesh. He backed up, reeling, sick.

“
Productivity versus
waste,” Besser glorified on. “Mankind is wasteful, here and
everywhere else. But the master plan culls the good from the bad,
from all worlds, to a single, objective end. What better definition
can there be for perfection?”

Wade turned, spied the canisters in the
racks.

“
And this room is where it
all begins. The activeports.”

At first Wade thought they must be fuel
cells of some kind, but Besser had said the labyrinth needed no
fuel. Wade rolled one of the transparent canisters out. There was a
bubble, and he saw something that looked suspiciously similar to a
belly button. Whatever mass filled the canister twitched once,
quivered. Part of the mass was a human face. Wade put it back in
the rack.

“
Prototypes are made here.
A computer calculates the most useful possibilities, then the best
prototypes are removed for further genetic embellishment. We breed
females from one world with males from other worlds. Females are
fissionizationvessels; males are holotypes—”

That word rang a bell, and Wade didn’t like
the sound of it.

“
Each target sector is
indexed into the Supremate’s intelligence: natural resources,
industrial potential, and environmental characteristics. Also
indexed are the anatomical characteristics of each species. Then
the Supremate calculates which combinations of which species would
effect a superior
interspecies.
Initial prototypes, which we call
interspecielmetisunits, are produced very quickly. The entire
process involves a complex system of biological acclimations and
growth acceleration sciences.”