“I was expecting something monstrous.”
“Ah, but we are monstrous.” The Irishman laughed. “Monstrously successful.”
The Scotsman glowered in my direction. “Leviathan Corporation is by far the largest and most successful archive and storage business in the knoon universe.”
“Archive and storage?” I said. “You’re not serious?”
“Storage is a universal problem, laddie.”
“So?”
The Englishman smiled. “Leviathan offers the solution. We find a planet with the right kind of environment, where the indigenous population has physiognomies capable of sustaining our kind of information, and we simply download it into their systems. Most planets in this part of the galaxy are annexed to the needs of Leviathan.”
I stared at them in horrified disbelief. “That’s what all this has been about? You’re storing information in people? You’re using human beings as living files?”
The Englishman smiled. “You hew down trees for paper. The principle is the same.”
“How can you be a party to this? You’re the same as us. You’re human beings.”
The Scotsman shrugged. “Just between you and me, Mr. Lamb, there’s nae much of us that you could really call human any more.”
Why should we apologize? We were simply supplying a need. If we had not offered the service, if we had not transformed planets into filing cabinets, then you may be sure that someone else would have done the same, and almost certainly at considerably less reasonable rates. Such are the demands of business.
For the first time since I had entered the room, Joe Streater spoke up, his voice weedy and pathetic. “You said you’d make me a hero. You promised me you’d set me up amongst the gods.”
I couldn’t help myself at this, couldn’t stop myself from laughing.
Joe turned his sharp little face in my direction. “What’s so funny?”
“You won’t be a god,” I gasped. “You’ll be a filing clerk.”
The Scotsman shook his head. “You’ve let us doon, Joseph. The prince has nae been persuaded tae our way of thinkin’.”
“He was getting help!” Streater protested. “Course I see that now.”
Just to add to the sense that this was a peculiar dream, packed with people you haven’t thought about in years and face you half recognize from the telly, the door behind me was thrown open and the heir to the throne strode thunderously in.
The Englishman spread his hands in oleaginous welcome. “Good afternoon, sir. We’re delighted you could join us.”
The prince scarcely looked at the men behind the desk. His wrath was directed toward an old friend. “Streater!”
“All right, chief?” For an instant, there was a flash of the old Joe, a little of the cocky opportunist who must once have dazzled my poor Abbey.
Never yours, Henry Lamb. Have you still not understood that? She was never yours.
A surge of pink crossed Streater’s face, a flush of scarlet. He dropped the teacup, which splintered on the floor.
The Scotsman looked up at him. “We’re going to have to let ye go, son.”
Streater squealed. “Come on, lads. Fair’s fair. I don’t deserve this. I’ve served you faithfully.”
He was evidently in a great deal of pain and I strongly suspected that he was soon to be in receipt of a good deal more. The floor around his feet began to liquefy, melting into sludge around his shoes. He looked up at us with horror in his eyes.
“Please…” he stuttered. “Please help me.”
I stared at him, appalled, immobile. But the prince was actually shaking his head.
“No,” he said. “Not any more. Got a bit of steel in me now.”
Joe looked imploringly at the prince and let out a feeble moan.
“Finally,” Arthur purred. “I’ve been blooded.”
A tentacle, bristling with protuberances, slithered out of the wall, clamped itself against Streater’s mouth and forced its way inside — wriggling into his throat, pumping him with alien words and figures, filling him up with an unbearable volume of information. Streater’s eyes seemed impossibly large. Bucking against the horror of it all, his mind snapped.
The floor around his feet had opened like a quagmire. It sucked at poor Joe’s legs, heaved at his thighs, genitals and torso, dragging him down, still screaming into the depths.
Arthur barely seemed to have noticed all this. He turned to the Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman. “I wish to revoke the deal made by my great-great-great-grandmother.”
“Terribly sorry,” said the Englishman. “Afraid that can’t be done. We drew up the contract, after all. Naturally, it’s absolutely watertight.”
“I refuse to parlay with footmen. Fetch me the manager.”
The Irishman: “You want ter speak to the boss?”
Arthur nodded.
The Scotsman grinned and gestured toward the jade door. “Through that duir, sairr, if you’d like a were wuid.”
The Irishman reached across the desk and pressed a button on his intercom. “Sorry to bother you, sir, but is dare nay chance of the prince havin’ a quick ward?”
The sound that came from that machine was wholly indecipherable. It had no business being heard on Earth. An awful, piercing roar, the ululating cry of something born billions of light years from the South Bank.
Our manager, as it happens. The most successful CEO Leviathan has ever been lucky enough to have at its helm. Lamb should feel honored even to have been allowed an audience.
“He says you can go in now,” the Englishman said smoothly, evidently long fluent in whatever evil language that creature spoke. “I don’t recommend you dilly-dally. I know from painful experience that he doesn’t care to be kept waiting.”
“May I bring my friend?” Arthur asked nonchalantly.
The Scotsman shrugged. “Yuid better get a move on.”
The prince approached the jade door and beckoned for me to follow.
“You want me to go with you?” I asked, hoping more than anything that he’d say no. The prince nodded. Reluctantly, I drew near.
From the other side of the door we could hear the movements of the CEO. We could hear its creeps and slithers, the rattling hiss of its breath, the swish of its tails, the wheezing, sipping noise it made in preparation for our arrival.
“Please,” I said. “Please don’t make me go inside.”
“You have to.”
Everything within me screamed at me not to go beyond that door — the same atavistic fear of the Neanderthal who stares into the dark as, behind him, his fire gutters and dies.
“I can’t.”
“Henry, this is what you were born for.”
Behind us, the Englishman stood up. “Wait a moment. May I ask the name of that young man?”
“Aye.” The Scotsman rose to his feet. “Guid question.”
Inevitably, the Irishman did the same. “Tell us.”
Slowly, the prince turned to face them, his arm outstretched to protect me. “Go,” he snapped. Smiling, he addressed himself to the legal firm of Wholeworm, Quillinane and Killbreath, to those wretched refugees from a joke my granddad never finished. “His name is Henry Lamb,” he said. “And he is the engine of your destruction.”
Suddenly, the Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman were upon us, moving faster than any human being should be able, hissing out their rage, teeth ripping, nails rending, reaching past the prince and toward me like hounds deprived of their kill.
The Scotsman had been right — there was very little left of those creatures which anyone would call human anymore.
A little changed, perhaps. A few pro bono augmentations.
But make no mistake — those men were grateful to us, happy to be employed in the service of Leviathan, all too eager for the perks and bonuses which come with long and faithful service.
“Go!” shouted the prince, as he grappled with the Englishman. “For God’s sake, do what you have to!”
My hand touched the door handle but I felt fingers pulling at my shirt, the Irishman and the Scotsman dragging me backward into the melee. But I knew what was required of me and so I struggled free.
Too late for them to stop me now; I stepped inside and for a shaving of a second-
— I was back in 1986, eight years old again and walking onto set to deliver the laugh line. I could feel the heat of the studio lights, see the camera crew, glimpse Granddad patiently looking on, willing me to say the words he’d written.
Then the fiction fell away and it was just me and the CEO — a mass of teeth, tentacles and claws, its great eye, milky white, scored as though by chisel marks — Miss Morning’s vision made flesh.
I wanted to scream. All rational thought fled my mind and I felt faint, as close to passing out as I had on the day that I first met Dedlock. But somehow I stood firm. Somehow I managed to say something, the only sentence I could think of — a daft old joke nobody understood, written for me years ago and which had followed me around ever since. My line. The old line. The incantation at the heart of the Process.
“Don’t blame me…”
The creature, aware, too late, of what was happening, began to fight back, pitting its vast intelligence against my own puny equivalent. I could hear the blood pounding through my head as I channeled my last remaining strength into the final line…
“Blame Grandpa.”
The Process did its work — bending time, compressing matter, and I saw, as though from a great distance, my past laid out like train tracks beneath me, all leading to a single destination, a terminus chosen for me long ago. The Process had hollowed me out, reformed me for a single purpose — to hold the genie in the bottle, the spider in the jar.
I can only explain what happened next as a kind of drawing in, a sucking, an inhalation. I felt the beast, the great serpent, the tyrant of the seven heads, struggle against me, thrash and flail furiously against my gravity until at last I pulled it into me and bound it, deep inside, where my soul ought to have been.
Chapter 30
The city survived, of course, as it always does.
The Directorate, on the other hand, is officially closed for business. Dedlock, Jasper, Barnaby and Steerforth are gone, the war is over and, mercifully, the secrets of the Blueprint Programme perished with the man whose real name (if I am to believe anything he told me) was Richard Price, at the moment when he slipped away, drugged up to the point of happy insensibility, in the honeymoon suite of one of London’s premiere hotels.
But I suspect that the Directorate is still not quite done. It has survived too long and against to fantastic odds for there not to be some glimmer of life there yet. Think of it what you will, but you have to admit that it’s an institution with the survival skills of a cockroach. And, so far as I am aware, poor, transformed Barbara remains at large.
Whilst the essence, the mental energy of Leviathan writhed and squirmed within me, its physical form, that fleshy, dead bulk, still wallowed in the Thames, cooling down and beginning to putrefy. There was fierce enthusiasm from a great number of professionals in dissecting and studying the creature, but in the end it was decided, in the interests of public safety, that the carcass should simply be burnt — the great serpent consigned to the flames, the mighty corporation of Leviathan, that market leader in storage and record retrieval, stuffed piece by piece into the furnace.
It took an unprecedented collaboration between the military and emergency services to haul the monster from the water, saw it up and cut it down in preparation for transportation, but even then this wasn’t done quickly enough. The meat began to spoil at an impossibly fast rate and the smell, I am told, lingered in the streets for weeks.
Those who had suckled at its teats were gone for good. A faintly mawkish memorial service was held in Trafalgar Square, presided over by the prime minister, who, although visibly aged by events, had fortunately been in Geneva at the time of the snowfall. A number of his cabinet had not been so lucky.
Anyone who hadn’t reached the river to gobble greedily on that liquid data recovered. There was much confusion, angry refutation, tearful acceptance and, ultimately, a good deal of a deep and queasy kind of grief. A lot of people came close to the brink that day but the majority were saved. In the end, everyone did the only thing they can do — take a deep breath, put their best foot forward and carry on with their lives, settling back in the old routine, the working week, the morning commute, the daily stampede into the center of the city.
And then there was me, of course. I was saved, too.
After the trap of the Process snapped shut, everything went black and I can remember only flashes of what happened next, a sequence of flash-bulb pictures — strong arms pulling me from the water, a warm, restorative liquid being poured down my throat, the sensation of being lowered onto something soft, the soporific motions of a long car journey.
Apparently, I was delirious when they found me, still chattering about the snow, the CEO, the information. The first thing I can really remember is waking up here, in bed, at Highgrove, where you’ve undone so much of the damage caused by the errors and misjudgments of your ancestors and been gracious enough to make me feel welcome.
I have taken great pleasure in getting to know you and your lovely wife and I would enjoy nothing more than to meet your son or daughter, whose arrival, as I write, is expected any day now.
There is a voice in my head. The first time that it spoke it uttered only nine words and then fell silent. Naturally, for a short while, I tried to convince myself that I had imagined it, that it was all some strange aftereffect, an auditory hallucination brought on by extreme fatigue.
But it has grown worse — much worse — in the past few days and it is high time that I accepted the truth. Leviathan is awake inside me and growing in strength.
What Estella held within her was merely a branch of Leviathan. What I have is its head office, its nerve center, its business brain. I’m afraid it will take a considerable sacrifice to bind it for good.
Actually, I think I know how it’s going to go. You might even have noticed it yourself. Over the past few days, my clothes have been getting bigger and baggier. My voice has seemed a little higher in pitch, often cracking and squeaky, sometimes child-like. But, strangely, I feel better than before. There are times when I even feel like laughing.
You may do what you like with this manuscript. Keep it in a locked drawer. Burn it. Publish it, even. Only words, after all.
One last thing. The truth about that voice which has split from my head and onto the page.
The first time I heard it, I had just woken on my first day here, and at the sound of it, I began to shake. It was more than just a voice, it was a chorus of voices speaking as one. It was the voice of Leviathan, the voices of the Englishman, the Irishman, the Scotsman, of the old Queen, the creature behind the jade door, the buzz of the drones and, buried deep in some murky quarter of its being, impossibly bitter but still cocksure, the voice of Mr. Streater.
This is not the end, it said. The wilderness is waiting.
EDITOR’S POSTSCRIPT
At the time of writing, two nights have passed since I said goodbye to Henry Lamb. Until now, I have not found sufficient courage to set pen to paper. Indeed, I find that I am able to write only in the daylight, with my wife and daughter comfortably close by, with the lamps on full to chase away the shadows, and far from any mirror or reflective surface.
We found him in the end. After abandoning the manuscript on my doorstep, he had taken one of our cars and driven into the Fens intending to do battle with what lay within him, with whatever it was that had written those parts of his book in a hand which was not his own.
But it was not Henry Lamb who came stumbling out of the wilderness toward us, toward the sirens and the flock of media who had gathered there against my ardent protestations. The man I knew had vanished from the face of the Earth.
Since reading what Henry wrote, I think often o
f Estella, about her description of what happens when you carry Leviathan inside you, of how the monster strips away artifice and unveils the real person underneath.
What staggered from the wilderness was a little boy, eight or nine years old, looking miniscule and ridiculous in adult clothes which hung pathetically off his body and trailed in the mud. I recognized that awful yellow jumper almost at once but it took me some time to identify the child lost inside it. In the end, I had to be shown old television footage before I was wholly convinced.
The boy was not loquacious. In fact, he would only ever utter a single phrase, the same quintet of words repeated over and over. It was an old catchphrase, devoid of meaning and even less amusing now than ever.
Two days ago, I went to say goodbye. Of course, Silverman arranged the whole thing wonderfully — the little lie in my official diary, the plainclothes security team, the discreetly unmarked car. In my new position, one can hardly be too careful.
The reader might find a bleak humor in where we keep Henry nowadays. He lies underground, deep beneath the town house of my first minister and at the exact center of a white chalk circle.
He does not seem to have aged a day but remains, eternally, a child. He does not perspire even slightly. No drop of sweat has been found beneath his prepubescent armpits, no trickle of perspiration on his calves or boyish moisture on the small of his back. He is well cared for, and although he is kept under lock and key, I make certain that the best of everything is brought to his cell. I have been adamant that those who keep and care for him are scrupulously vetted in order to avoid any repetition of what has come euphemistically referred to as “the Hickey-Brown problem.”
Naturally, Henry never leaves his cell. I owe him my life but it would hardly do for the poor fellow to walk abroad.
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