At last, we were led to the door of a huge lab. Through the clear window in the door, I saw a room as vast as the inner Tabernacle above us, but stuffed full of laboratory equipment. As we approached, a motion detector felt us coming and opened a panel in front of a palm-size touchplate.
Arlene and I stopped abruptly, looking back and forth to each other. I was quite disturbed to see the wild light of hope in her eyes. “Look, don’t get your hopes up into orbit, A.S. You know you’re not going to find Albert, so don’t even think it! I don’t want you collapsing later, when you finally realize the truth.”
She just looked at me, and I don’t think her expression changed a millimeter. “You going to touch it—or should I?” she asked.
I inclined my head. I was sure Jill would have programmed both our palm prints into the doorlock, since both were on file in the old FBI database. Arlene reached her hand out, hesitated a moment, then placed her palm against the plate. I heard a loud click, and the door rolled down into the floor so quickly that I almost didn’t see it moving.
We entered the huge lab, and the door slid up and locked behind us. We were probably trapped until Jill’s AI program decided to let us leave. We strolled around a bit, taking in the sight: tables, tables, tables, full of elaborate machinery and strange swirls of tubing; rows of tiny devices that looked suspiciously like computers linked together into a neural network; huge tubes big enough for humans, full of humans, I should add, doubtless in some sort of life stasis; and glassware everywhere . . . test tubes, beakers, flasks, you name it—but nobody walking around tending things. It was entirely automated.
And in the center of it all was a huge sarcophagus, like the things they buried Egyptian mummies in. We approached, and Arlene suddenly reached out and grabbed my hand, squeezing so hard she almost cracked my bones! I knew exactly who she expected to find, and exactly who she wouldn’t find in the case.
Sadly, I was right. We got closer, and it was obvious that whoever was in there, it wasn’t Albert . . . who was, after all, about my size. The sarcophagus was much too small.
But neither of us was prepared for what we did find: the case contained the fifteen-year-old body of Jill! She looked like she was just sleeping, nude and serene, but I couldn’t see her breasts rise and fall, as I would have expected if she were breathing.
Arlene leaned over the case while I was still staring, trying to avoid looking at parts I wasn’t supposed to look at. “Jesus, Fly!” said my bud. “It’s a clone!”
“A . . . clone? How do you know?”
Arlene reached over and picked up a nameplate, handing it to me:
* * *
Sleeping Cloney—
A prick on the finger shall make her sleep
A hundred years in dreams so deep,
Until she wakes in love and bliss,
Restored to life by a princely kiss.
We stared at Jill, Arlene and I. “Do you think it’s the real Jill?” I asked.
Arlene shook her head. “That’s not how Jill would do it. She’d want to live her life and die normally, or at least preserve herself as an adult. No, I’ll bet you this is a clone, grown to the age she was when we left, her brain filled only with the memories a fifteen-year-old would have.”
“Does she remember us?”
“Why not? Jill isn’t cruel. She wouldn’t put that torture on us, Fly . . . to know the new Jill, but not be known, to see her as sullen and withdrawn as she was before, after the monsters killed her parents.” Arlene reached out and gently touched the glass cover of the sarcophagus. “Hang tight, honey, we’ll come back, as soon as we’ve seen the present you left us.”
“Maybe that’s it,” I said, nodding at Jill.
But Arlene shook her head impatiently. “Come on, Fly! She’s a pest, but she’s certainly not that egotistical!”
A booklet sat on the case, and I took it down and skimmed it. Then I stopped and said, “Holy cow! You know what this is, A.S.?”
I handed it to her. The title was: The Deconstructionists’ New Clothes, Being the Oh-so-secret History of the Galaxy’s Most Stupidest War. The author was Jill Lovelace, PhD, LLD, CIA, MAD.
It was a short story, but we both realized what it really was. Somehow, Jill had managed to pry out of someone, maybe the Klave—Sears and Roebuck’s uncles?—the whole freaking mystery that we never could get . . . what the damned war was all about! Yeah, right, the Six Million Year War that resulted, eventually, in a strategic chess move by the Freds, of House Deconstructionists, to invade Earth and kill us by the millions. The war that had started the whole thing.
I’m not going to quote the whole story. It was long and pretty damned good, and I don’t want Jill’s electrifying prose to make my own look lamer than it already does. So I’ll paraphrase the intel instead.
Of all the secrets Arlene and I had faced since we first found ourselves under attack by space demons, that was the most frustrating, the most galling . . . or to Arlene, the outright funniest: that a war could erupt and be prosecuted for six million years between two competing schools of literary criticism! But at last we got the full, complete story of how it happened.
According to Jill’s book, the same “First Men” who built the Gates and the gravity zones and scattered them throughout the galaxy left behind only one other legacy—eleven fragments of prose.
That’s it, the sum total remains of a race that was technologically sophisticated and advanced at least three billion years ago: Gates, gravity zones, and eleven pieces of literature. All the races of the galaxy in roughly our own time (six or seven million years ago, which on the three-billion-year scale is negligible) began to analyze these fragments—each used its own most highly refined theories of literary criticism, but because literary criticism is at us core nothing much but a projected map of whatever weird cobwebs infest the mind of the critic, naturally each race painted a different picture of what the First Men were really like.
Eventually, the war of words turned ugly, and important literary critics became casualties—not that anyone cared much. But when one coalition, the Deconstructionists, decided to end the argument by deconstructing the Klave homeworld—and they failed!—the Great Divide became law and eventually custom, which is a billion times stronger than law. For six million years, give or take a month, the Deconstructionists and the Hyperrealists had been duking it out for control of the literary forms of the galaxy . . . and for the right to reconstruct the past.
And that was it! As Arlene said when she finished reading, quoting some sci-fi book she loved, Nineteen Eighty-Four:
* * *
Who controls the past controls the present;
who controls the present controls the future.
So ever since just around the time the first proto-humanoids were climbing down out of the trees on Earth and looking up at the great white light in the night sky, wondering if it were a divine eyeball, these ginks have been murdering each other over half the galaxy over some artsy-fartsy, lit-crit interpretation of eleven story fragments. Then, when they got tired of fighting in their own backyard, the bloody-handed Deconstructionists decided to take their college literature thesis to our lovely planet! God, this universe is an absolute treasure. I love every centimeter of it—no, really.
I put the book back down, resisting the impulse to fling it across the room. To hell with them all, Hyperrealist and Deconstructionist alike! I didn’t give a damn about the stupid fragments—I had more important fish to smoke.
We hunted around for a few minutes, and suddenly Arlene let out a glad cry. Another arrow! J.L., it read, and pointed at a small room.
The room had a regular door, with a good, old-fashioned handle. I turned it and opened her up.
The room was bare, save for a single card table, dust free. On the table was a small black box with a single orange light showing unwinking on the side. We crossed the space together, my lance and I, and together we saw the single sign left on the box.
It was hand-lettere
d, and I recognized Jill’s atrocious handwriting. There was a single word: Albert.
We stared. Arlene fell to the ground on her butt, but she didn’t take her eyes off the black box with the bright glowing eye.
Albert!
Albert?
I didn’t know what to say, so, Goddamn it, I decided to just shut up and be a Marine. Semper fi, Mac . . . I know when I’m beat!
22
It was Arlene who found the Door, but Slink Slunk was more excited than the rest of us, for she recognized what it was. All of the rest of our apostles—Whack, Sniff, Chomp, and Swaller, our spineys, and Pfc. Wilhelm Dodd, the zombie—had been created within the simulation by the normal “monster-spawn” process that mimicked the vats and genetic programming the Freds used to create the original monsters.
But Slink was the prototype spiney; she was the “firssst and only,” as she put it, generated specially by the Newbies inside their program environment, before the rest of the simulation was even running. And Slink remembered her existence before the rest of the simulation was built. The Newbies were better artists than they realized: they hadn’t intended to give freaking free will to their program demons, and they sure as hell didn’t want the code to remember its own creation!
We had searched the immediate vicinity of the star-shaped chamber after ducking out Arlene’s crack, but we didn’t find anywhere else to go but the huge Gate. “It’s me,” she said, crestfallen. “I still remember the last time, and I searched for almost a whole day before giving up and heading through the Gate.”
The ground was jagged with sharp broken pieces of dead plant life, and the stench of sulphur almost knocked me out. The spineys seemed to love it, though, and even Dodd looked a little less tormented. The sky overhead was inverted, white with black stars; I tried not to look at it, since it gave me vertigo like I’d never felt before, not even in zero-g.
“Fly,” said my partner. “I’m trying to remember how Olestradamus managed to escape his doom at the claws of the hell princes. He survived, didn’t he? He’s out here somewhere, waiting for us?”
I tried to “remember” it that way with her, but Olestradamus’s death was too vivid. In the end, we both had to give it up—the poor pumpkin would have to remain our first martyr.
Damn it! I thought. What’s the use of lucid dreaming if you can’t actually control everything? I didn’t have a good answer, so I pointed wordlessly at the Gate.
Holding hands, we shot through, then we fairly flew through the Deimos base, avoiding traps we remembered, converting a few more monsters, and killing what we couldn’t convert. We picked up a Clyde—despite my objections that I didn’t remember the genetically engineered human with the machine gun until we got back to Earth—three more spineys, and a passel of zombie buddies for Dodd. We even managed to convert a fatty, but the planet-shaped critter with the fireball shooters where its hands should have been, Fats Jacko, he called himself, was so overweight that he just couldn’t keep up. In the end, I dubbed him our first missionary and sent him off at his own pace to convert the rest of monsterland.
But before we got to the nasty spidermind at the bottom of Deimos, Arlene finally managed to find the Door.
She first started looking for the Door when she remembered the three courses in program design that she took during her brief stint in college. “Fly,” she whispered, while we crouched in the hand-shaped gully where Arlene had killed the Dodd-zombie the last time. “Whenever we wrote a program, we always used to stick in what we called back doors. Maybe the Newbies did, too!”
“What the hell is a back door?”
She licked her lips, sighting along her .45 rifle at a lumbering pinkie. So far, it hadn’t smelled us. We weren’t worried about it hearing us; they made so much noise just walking and breathing that they probably wouldn’t hear a freight train coming up behind them on the railroad tracks. But there were other creatures out there with acute hearing—silence was best.
“When you want to test some aspect of a program, you create routines to set the various variables to, well, anything you like.”
“Ah, setting variables. More college stuff. How’s this supposed to help us, Lance?” College was insidious. You started out just to learn a thing or two, then suddenly—wham, bam—you’re wearing lieutenant’s butter-bars on your collar! No thanks. I would never become an officer—and I would never go to college.
“You need a combination,” Arlene answered. “A password to access these procedures, but if you have it, you can move around the software like a ghost in a haunted house, passing right through walls and doors like they weren’t even there.”
I stared at a rough rock wall to our left. “You mean, if we found this back door, we could phase right through that stone wall?”
“Fly, if we found this back door, we might be able to get out of the whole simulation and get loose in the Disrespect’s operating system.
I stared at her, feeling real hope for the first time in days—simulated days. “Jesus, Arlene! Maybe / should have gone to university!” We both stared at each other, shocked by the words that came out of my mouth. “Ah, that is just a joke,” I explained.
“All right . . . I’m remembering now.” She stared at a particularly juicy rock. She grunted with the strain of “remembering” a Door. She sweated, but nothing happened to the rock. “Christ, I can’t just visualize it from nothing!”
Too loud: a horde of imps heard and came over to investigate. We shot them from cover while they threw their mucus wads at us. I took a shot in the face and was blinded again—criminey! Arlene backed away, pumping shot after shot from the lever-action rifle she had picked up in a storage locker in the inverted-cross chamber on Deimos. It was easier for her to remember the most recent weapon she actually remembered using; I tried for a double-barreled shotgun, but I was still stuck with the damned Sig-Cow.
The spineys moved close enough that our own spiney corps could open fire from the sides with their piles of sharp rocks. The imps didn’t know what to think! They hurled their snotballs for a while until they realized their attackers were other imps, immune to the fire, then the enemy broke and ran.
Arlene cleaned me up with a medical kit, also salvaged from the locker where she had found the rifle—same place we found uniforms (but no armor) to cover our nakedness right after the jump. Dodd was perfectly content to wander around starkers, once we got him a shotgun, but a red-faced Arlene ordered him to cover himself up. Evidently, the sight of her naked ex-lover, the one she had killed once, brought back too many horrific memories. Bad memories could be savage enemies in this place.
I was thinking about the Door, or lack of a Door. “I think just visualizing isn’t enough. You have to have it really strong in your mind.”
“I did!”
“No, I mean like obsessing about it. You have to anticipate, salivate for it, visualize it some distance ahead of you and hold the thought in your mind as your life’s goal all the way down there.”
She sat down beside me and put her arm over my shoulders, holding me like a frightened lover. “It’s a pretty horrible thought, Flynn Taggart. Means we have to go deeper, doesn’t it?”
“ ’Fraid so, A.S.”
Arlene nodded slowly. “Well, that’s why they let us wear the Bird and Anchor. Okay, Fly, it’s all starting to come back to me, now. I remember where the Door is.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s three levels down. Remember that head-twisting open courtyard with all the freaking teleporters that zapped us to all the different rooms? Well, it’s—it’s in the room at the back of the courtyard with all the crushing pistons.”
I struggled to remember. In the intervening months (and thousands of monsters), it had all become a blur. But I thought I remembered what she was talking about. “Good deal, kiddo, just keep visualizing it. When we get there, we’ll see it—I guarantee.”
I hoped I wouldn’t have to eat those words, but the only thing that might do the trick now
was total assurance on my part. Maybe it would be infectious.
Three levels down, we entered the courtyard. I decided we had better clear the central buildings first, which contained pumpkins, some spineys, and a hell prince—too much firepower to leave at our backs. With so many of us, virtually an army, we could use real tactics. Arlene volunteered to take point, which in this case meant she got to jump from teleporter to teleporter, until she found the one that dropped her in the center of the courtyard again, incidentally activating the door to one of the buildings.
She did it. When she appeared, she took one look into the eyes of a hell prince, squawked, and fell facedown in the dirt. Smart girl: we were all in ambush position, and we opened fire on the poor hell-spawn.
The minotaur never knew what hit it. Nine flaming snotballs, a machine gun, shotguns, and my own M-14 BAR—I’d found one at last!—and the hell prince staggered back against the rear wall of his building, unable even to muster up a lightning ball from his wrist launcher.
We repeated the process with the other three buildings, and when we finished, we had four empty bunkers and one very dizzy female Marine. I picked her up off the ground and held her under her arms, while we approached the chamber at the rear of the courtyard—that was where we both clearly remembered we would find the Door.
The front Door was locked. I was about to waste a few rounds when Slink stepped forward. “This one may?” she asked, and before I could answer, she shoved her iron fingers behind the latch, splintering the wood, and ripped the entire mechanism off the Door! The unbound wood swung slowly open, creaking like the cry of a banshee.
Inside were three zombies waiting for any visitors. Pfc. Dodd staggered forward, pushed past us, and entered the room. He strode up to his zombie brothers (two brothers and a sister) and began to “talk” in the swinelike grunts and moans of the recently undead.
Endgame Page 23