—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.”