Coven

“Yes, my lord!” Jervis cried up.

—SIGNS AND WONDERS, JERVIS. THE GHOST OF FUTURE TIDINGS.

“You are my life! My redeemer!”

—LIKE A PROMISE IN THE WIND.

The Supremate left his head, and left Jervis shuddering in the graveyard. His lord’s commandment was clear; this old life was fading, racing toward a new wondrous eternal life. Jervis drank Kirins and smoked as he buried the remaining bodies. It was refreshing work, burying the dead. The corpses were part of the promise too, and Jervis the very arm of the ghost of future tidings. He was nearly done now, like an apostle nearing heaven.

“You lurp lurpfffeeeevii prick ick ick!”

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 mlutherfucker 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 piss 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 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/accelerationendodiermicmassenergydefr actingpi-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.”