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 mlutherf.u.c.ker 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 p.i.s.s 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 s.h.i.t," 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 servicepa.s.ses 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 f.u.c.king s.p.a.ceship, and those women are...aliens."

"They're crossmultibredintegratedhybrids, but 'aliens' will suffice, as I suppose 's.p.a.ceship' will suffice for the labyrinth. Actually it's a valencecorehypervelocityorbitalmagneficpulse- momentyrayquadrupoularcoulombMeVspontaneousbosomwavelengthdecay/accelerationendodiermicma.s.senergydefractingpi-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-s.h.i.t like that, right?"

"Yes, Wade, s.h.i.t...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 pa.s.s. "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 s.p.a.ce."

"To where?"

"The next acquisition a.s.signment. We go from world to world, Wade. From galaxy to galaxy."

Wade was boggled. "What the f.u.c.k 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 pa.s.sages, pushing things about in some nameless onus.

"What the f.u.c.k 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 d.a.m.ned 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 b.u.t.ton. Whatever ma.s.s filled the canister twitched once, quivered. Part of the ma.s.s 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."

Wade was leaning against the warm wall, wiping his mouth. "The girl in that thing-she's from the college, isn't she?"

"It's not a thing. It's an incubreedcatalyzationcapsule, with an expans...o...b..lus to allow for natal growth. And, yes, she's one of the five surrogate procurements from this planet."

"What the h.e.l.l did you do to her?"

"We removed her bones, of course. Antirejectorybifertilization demands some rather drastic acclimations. You don't just impregnate one life form with the reproductive genes of another and expect to produce an interspeciel. The two physiologies aren't compatible. So we make them compatible. One thing we do is modify the reproductive systems of the surrogates, but in this forced compatibility they wouldn't survive the physical stress of intercourse and birth."

"Like trying to drive a bus through a rabbit hole."

"Crude, but correct. We remove their bone structures." Besser picked up a big syringe. "Calciumdecimationliquefactor agents dissolve all bone material in the body, which is then drained off in a suspended state and disposed of."

Besser pointed to one of the jugs. It was full to the top. Wade remembered seeing Jervis milking white sludge out of the girl in the harness, and how she stretched like putty afterward.

"We can produce primary interspeciels in a matter of hours, and the surrogates can be used repeatedly for future bifertilizations. It's marvelous."

Wade was not inclined to agree.

In the next warren, rows of glowing compartments throbbed with feeble movement. The noise was relentless, a raucous rise of squalls and whines.

Wade looked hard. The plump, misshapen things he saw lying there sent him back in an impact of vision. Tiny pudenda wriggled. Chubby arms and legs rowed the moist air. Some seemed to grow even as he watched.

"This is the biomaintenancecarbonsourcehypersaturationvault," Besser proudly stated.

"It's a f.u.c.king baby ward!" Wade yelled.

"Newborn interspeciels under hyperincubation. In mere days they'll have sufficiently matured, hosting successfully bifertilized reproductive genes, which will then be transfected again and again until the target species has been produced. Then the desired gene groups will be stored in the cryowarrens until colonization time."

"When's that?"

Besser shrugged casually. "Only the Supremate knows. A year from now, or a thousand years. The labyrinth stores interspeciel gene groups for every annexation target."

"You mean every planet."

"Yes, and there are thousands, Wade-multiple thousands. Each interspecies, regardless of cla.s.sification, is genetically created with identical sensor and transception cells. Born in total allegiance to the Supremate's objectives. Whole worlds, Wade, which will live to serve his will. When the time comes, the stored gene groups will be exogenically ma.s.s produced...and dispersed."

Wade's brain felt like it was broiling. "Why?" was all he could groan. "Why, why, why?"

"Ma.s.s recolonization." Besser held a finger up. "One day, a new social system will reign over all worlds, myriad populations under one guiding light. No war, Wade, no crime, no aggression. Imagine a world like that, then imagine a thousand worlds just the same. The second phase is merely implementation, and function is the third phase. Perfectly adapted beings will join hands in a new order and live forever."

"You want to turn the universe into an anthill."