Limbus, Inc. Book II Read online

  “I’m going to kill that dinosaur and its mate, or cousin, or butt-hole buddy. Whatever it is,” I said, “I’m going to kill it.”

  “Catch, not kill, that is our desire.”

  “But it’s not mine. I’m going to kill it.”

  “As I explained—”

  “Sometimes an agent in the field is killed. I know. But that doesn’t change that sometimes a dinosaur in a vast expanse of water is sometimes killed, and his pal as well, and that’s what I’m trying to explain to you, the sanctimonious ass-wipe.”

  “We can’t allow that.”

  “You certainly aren’t one for feelings, are you, Cranston?”

  “Not particularly, no. But I will tell you this. Ayesha has been with us for some time, except for occasional trips back to Africa. She has been a good employee. She may have just naturally weaned herself out of her position.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that, but I didn’t care. Nature may have been involved in her death, but there was nothing natural about how it happened. All I wanted right then was for those dinosaurs to die, and if I could make them suffer, all the better. I suppose I could look at it as our fault. We were fishing for them. They were dumb beasts. They had no particular intent but to survive. Cranston was right, why kill them? But I wanted to anyway.

  And then it hit me. Why did they want to capture them? What was the point? If they were trying to keep the lost world below the crust from being discovered, what purpose did they have in capturing a dinosaur, or dinosaurs?

  I asked him what I was thinking.

  Cranston nodded at the question, as if it were the first time he had ever considered such a thing, which, of course, it was not. “Very well,” he said, “but it’s not that mysterious. I’ve told you our main purpose, which is to protect the world down under, but there’s also the scientific research we’d like to conduct. There is much to be learned from captured aquatic dinosaurs, and nothing to be learned from vengeance against a dumb creature.”

  “They are not that dumb, trust me.”

  “They are merely trying to survive. We have large places where they can live, where they can be contained.”

  “Why don’t they just go home?” I said.

  “Because they are trapped in a volcano of boiling water. They are comfortable this high up. We find the water uncomfortably warm, but they do not. Down deep, however, it’s another matter. We’ve dropped devices into the depths to measure the heat, and for them to go to those depths, it would be like dropping a lobster into a pan of boiling water.”

  “After today,” I said, “I love that idea.”

  “Ayesha understood the risk. We have global warming to contend with, which has made larger holes in the ice, larger gaps to the world below, and that in turn has been filled with volcanic activity, and dinosaurs. Now, I’m leaving. You will continue to be held. That will give us time to decide if you are in fact going to be useful, or if your employment for this job was a mistake.”

  “I’ll kill those big bastards.”

  “That’s what we don’t want,” Cranston said. “That is not your job. That is not what you were hired on to do.”

  “It’s all I want to do,” I said.

  “I know, and that gives me pause for consideration. I think your wiring may not be just right.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” I said.

  *

  In the middle of the night I heard a noise and came awake, but the thick straps around my shoulders, middle and legs, the leather clamps on my wrist and ankles, didn’t allow me to rise and investigate. I had gone down so deep into sleep again—perhaps a secondary rush of the drug—that I awoke as refreshed as I had felt in years; I felt brand new. No less sad, but brand new. It was like electric-hot spiders were crawling about in my brain, giving me juice.

  It was dark in the room. Then there was a light. A single light. The light moved across the floor and came to rest by my bed. The carrier of the light sat in the chair by the bed and turned out the light. But as he lifted it to push a sliding button on the instrument, I saw standing behind the chair Bill Oldman. I got a glimpse of the man in the chair as well. Short, middle-aged, ruggedly attractive in a ravaged sort of way. He looked as if he had seen all there was to see and hadn’t liked much of it, and what he had liked he was suspect of. It was the man I had seen cleaning the library.

  “I know you,” I said.

  “My name is Quatermain,” he said. “Alan Quatermain.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I am thinking I might want you. Bill and I, that is.”

  “Bill, you’re with him?”

  “Yep,” Bill said.

  “He is a man of true source,” Quatermain said, “as am I, though for a while I was tainted with a uniqueness of a sort that has worn me thin in spirit, something that was in me, eating away at my character like carnivorous worms.”

  “I’m not up for riddles,” I said.

  “Nor do I mean to bring you a riddle without a solution, though the solution may be hard to understand, as your brain is little more than a bundle of frayed impulses and a mess of contradictions. Let me begin this way. You, according to Bill, want to kill the dinosaurs.”

  I gave an honest answer. “I’ve thought it over, or rather I did so in my sleep. I don’t want that anymore. My mind wasn’t working right. They’re just beasts, as Cranston said.”

  “You could just be saying that,” Quatermain said.

  “I know. But I mean it. Killing them makes no sense.”

  “It makes all the sense. That’s why you must kill them,” Quatermain said.

  I didn’t know how to answer that. Quatermain sighed and stretched his legs and then tucked them under the chair and leaned forward. He turned the flashlight on and flashed it on my face. The light was a pool of yellow against my eyes. I turned my head.

  He said, “You didn’t turn your head right away. Something in your skull made you think about it. Something short of common reaction. Something that has to do with quicker adjustment to light. You didn’t like it, but you could take it.”

  I didn’t know why this mattered, but I said, “I’ve been drugged. I’ve been under a bit of stress, as Bill might have explained to you… Bill, what are you doing with this guy? What is this about?”

  Bill didn’t answer.

  “Let me say this first,” Quatermain said. “They want the dinosaurs to examine. Bill, would you come around in front of the chair, please?”

  Bill came.

  “Show him,” Quatermain said.

  Bill took off his shirt, pulled his pants over his shoes and stood before me naked, except for his socks and shoes which he had not removed. Quatermain flashed the light over him. He was covered in huge scars, some of them puckered from stitches, others mounded up like some kind of huge animals had burrowed beneath the skin. Some of the scars were light-colored, nearly healed, others were angry and red. Even his penis was scarred.

  I said, “Why are you showing me this? Put on your clothes, Bill.”

  “This is what happened in captivity,” Quatermain said. “He would be there still, except on a whim, the Professor, the Doctor, the fellow with the bronze skin, decided he needed someone as an aide. And finally Bill, fortunately, at least at the time, began to work for The Fucked Up Rulers of the World. Goddamn shit-eating bastards.”

  Bill was putting his clothes back on.

  “I’m growing old and weak,” Bill said. “Not by common human standards, but by their standards, and I am denied the fuel.”

  “The fuel?” I asked. “What in hell are you talking about?”

  “You drank it,” Quatermain said. “Ayesha fed it to you. It was to be absorbed by your body. I used to have the drink too. They say it is permanent, but it isn’t. It lasts for several years, and then it begins to fade, and so do you, faster than you would have from old age if you don’t get it. But once they give that drink to you, and you learn how good it feels, and they finally let you kno
w you really do have to keep drinking it, and they are the providers, well, then you owe them. You will want that drink. The things you’ll do for that kind of strength, that near immortality.”

  “He said it was in my DNA—”

  “You don’t have your own DNA, friend.”

  “Of course I do… Come on, man. What is this?”

  “I am your salvation if you choose it.”

  “Oh hell,” I said. “And now you’re going to tell me I’m going to be sucked up to heaven in some kind of rapturous blast. You may have converted Bill here, but I’m not interested. I went to church when I was young. I had enough of it then.”

  Quatermain leaned back against the chair and stuck out his legs again. He turned off the flashlight. “Church,” he said. “Tell me about it.”

  “What?”

  “Where did you go to church?” he asked. “Where was it? Tell me about it.”

  “Mud Creek Methodist, Mud Creek Texas. Minister was Reverend Crutcher.”

  “Tell me about Crutcher.”

  “Tall, dark-haired.”

  “No. Tell me about him, the man.”

  “I didn’t know him that well.”

  “Tell me about your father. What happened to him?”

  I hesitated, but finally went on with it. It was the same story Cranston had known.

  “That is such an odd and unique story it would be hard to believe it isn’t true.”

  “Of course it’s true.”

  “And your mother running off, leaving you, that’s good too. That way you couldn’t have known her past a certain age. You’ve got a back history, but nothing else you have to remember about them. They are gone.”

  “I don’t understand you at all.”

  “You are made of flesh and bone, but it’s not yours.”

  “Bill, please take this man with you, and leave.”

  Bill had returned to his position behind the chair. I could see his shadowy shape more clearly now, quite clearly actually. My eyes had adjusted well. I saw him gently shake his head.

  “You have microcosmic creatures running through your veins, pumping in your blood, the blood from transfusions. Bill here was one of the transfusions. Right, Bill?”

  “Right,” Bill said.

  “You are not truly human,” Quatermain said. “You are not born of man and woman. You are cells and borrowed blood and bone and skin. Your brain tissues, so wormed with microscopic wires, were essentially grown in a jar and fed little wires so small they are smaller than capillaries.”

  “Wires? A jar?”

  “Well, a beaker and such. Large vats and electrodes and crawling flesh that attached itself to bone with the aid of microcosmic assistance. Nano stuff.”

  “Yeah,” Bill said. “It’s little. I mean small. You can’t see it with the eye. It’s like if a gnat were compared to them it would be, relatively speaking, to them, the size of an elephant.”

  “You’re crazy. Both of you.”

  “I am crazy,” Quatermain said, “but not as much as you might think. What you have in your head is information, stuffed there like cotton in a teddy bear. You have experiences you never experienced. Knowledge you never learned. A childhood that never happened. No parents. No dogs or dates to the prom; no connection between the two meant there.

  “None of what happened to you happened. Ayesha, hell, boy, she was a fine looking woman, smart, but she was playing you like a cat plays with a mouse. They all are. You aren’t but a few months old. You haven’t even had your first birthday. You think you’ve had ass before, but I got to tell you, Ayesha, she was your first. You didn’t screw that cheerleader from Mud Creek I read about in your computer file. An advantage of having been more important to the Rulers in the past and knowing what kind of codes they used in their computers, and being the fucking janitor and go-to-guy for all manner of shit. Beside the point. Thing is, none of the girls they gave you memories about ever happened. Now, close your eyes, think on things. See what you really know. Compare your long past to your recent past. The recent stuff, that’s the real deal. You can feel that like a thorn in the side, the rest, it’s not even as substantial as a cloud, now is it? You got loose from where you were born, broke free, picked up some old clothes that were meant for the trash, put them on, made a loop like a homing pigeon, and then didn’t quite understand why you escaped. You had a moment of clarity, my man-made boy. You are a type of Pinocchio, but made from a chemistry set, not wood.”

  “You’re reaching now, Alan,” Bill said.

  “Yeah, that was a metaphor too far, like trying to cross a bridge with bad support posts. Listen here, boy. You had a moment when you knew you were being bamboozled and buffaloed and filled with their shit, and then it was gone. In that moment you proved, man-made or not, you have free will. Then the coding kicked in. You circled back, came home. Your real home. That was no storage building, was it, Bill?”

  “Nope,” Bill said. “Least not all of it was storage.”

  “And that little trip you took from the warehouse to the infirmary, the library. Same building, son. They knocked your ass out and drove you around the block and turned that car into the glitzier side of their operation. The ones with the elevators that went down under, the compartments where they did their Doctor Frankenstein business on you in the first place.

  “That building was your true-ass home, and your natural desire was to return to it, though your false memories were starting to kick in at the same time to confuse you. Those memories were made of little nano-bots, racing about, running up your cortex and flowing through your blood, tossing mini-miniature wires and doo-dads all about. And when they were finished, you knew what you were meant to know, nothing more. You’re a human-made machine without the machine oil and the squeaky wheels. By the way, that DNA they made you with? Part of it’s mine. You are my son in a sense, or at least part of you is. There’s some of Bill in there too, the big guys, the hot blonde, Jane. You are the son of many fathers and mothers, a mass of meshed DNA. If you have a big pecker, that part is me. Ha!”

  “He gets silly when it gets late,” Bill said.

  “Ah, hell,” I said, because right in that moment I knew they were telling me the truth. And not just about the pecker.

  *

  I have memories, experiences, a childhood fall when I was ten that left me in the hospital for a week, lots of cuts and scratches. The fall broke my leg and left me in a cast and crutches for three months. But there are no scars. I attended school, college, but never really did much with my life, went homeless. All because my father killed himself accidentally while trying to kill himself on purpose. My mother ran off and left me.

  Except none of it was true. I am the product of large machinery and small machines not visible to the eye. I am made of bone, flesh, and blood transfusions, none of it mine. I have knowledge, except I didn’t actually learn anything for myself. I had never thrown a javelin in my life until Ayesha put one in my hand. I had been geared for the knowledge to see how it translated from brain to muscle and bone, but until then, I had never touched a javelin. I realized that now.

  Bill Oldman is a Neanderthal from the Rim World. He was brought to the upper crust against his will because he and his kind reach the age of about forty in appearance and stay there. They do not continue to age. They live for over a thousand years and then die suddenly, their clock runs down, their light goes out. That was where Cranston and his people who rule the earth got their juice—blood and bone transfusions from Bill and others like him, others from way down under. And then, when they didn’t have enough of it, they began to artificially create it. The only problem is, made from Bill or his kind, or synthetically made, they have to be injected over and over. And the originals, those like Bill, they begin to fade after a hundred years above ground. So it may be their DNA is activated by the strange fires of the Rim World, flaming warmth and light from miles up, fastened to the roof of their world.

  Same with the dinosaurs. They had the natural ju
ice, same as the primitives down below. They needed to be caught to be experimented on. Sliced and poked and cut and pulled and clipped and burned and twisted some. It was a way the Secret Rulers might discover a better formula to make them live longer, maybe with only one injection.

  But those experiments, as Bill’s body revealed, were ugly stuff for men and creatures. Terrible slicing and dicing, harsh chemistry and surgical operations so a bunch of men and women, Ayesha included, wouldn’t get any older and wouldn’t need injections to stay young. Ah, the vanity of it. The conceit. And me. I had been handmade as an experiment. That’s all I was, something else for them to study tissue and wiring and new ways to live forever. They had already decided I was a failure. It was the damn free will.

  “Bill,” Quatermain said, interrupting my thoughts, “is fading, and he knows it, and they know it, of course. When they decide they have learned all they can from him, or can no longer use him for anything, he will cease to be of importance to them. Just like me, who no longer will accept an injection or drink their smoothies, and therefore has been demoted from a position of prominence to a position over a mop. Like me, who has killed everything in this world that flies or crawls or walks or swims. Like me, who has helped capture one beast after another, bring it into their realm, where they can torture it with their experiments in search of the secret of longevity. I am their awful puppet. Or have been. The water beasts should die rather than be subjected to such, don’t you think?

  “I am here to take you with me, if you wish to go. They have tired of you quickly. You have changed and matured rapidly. You see them for the shit stacks they are. Like me, they were once heroes. People to look up to, but then they got the immortality shots, and with that, they got power. Then the shots backfired, didn’t do what they thought they would, and that realization gave them fear. The fear of losing youth and power. It soured them, made them bitter as unripe persimmons. Have you had one of those, it’ll make your lips suck in behind your teeth. Wait a minute, of course you haven’t had them, and I bet that isn’t something they put in your brain. That’s too unlikely. Too rare.”