Hive (32 page)

The building plan was chaotic at the very least.

The floors were not necessarily distinct nor differentiated from one another. There was no first floor, second floor, third floor etc. The stories converged into one another, rooms and chambers dropping from above or rising up from below, tangled in lattices like diamond crystals.

Five minutes into it, the three of them were sweating and shaking and having trouble catching their breath. The marrow of that damnable city was claustrophobic, profuse, and intersecting. The angles were wildly exaggerated, roofs becoming floors and floors arching up into roofs that were walls. Chambers were never perfectly square but slightly off-kilter and set off-center. Corridors were never exactly linear, but convoluted and sloping, tall then squat and then enormous. There was something geometrically perverse about any brain that could make sense of such a thing without backing itself into some jagged, narrow corner and screaming itself insane. Moving through there was like navigating through the tangled, surreal gutters of a lunatic's mind, looking for reason that did not exist . . . for reason here was swallowed by amorphous shadows, the shattered wreckage of paranoia as imagined by German expressionists.

They followed the electrical cords that had been attached to walls and strung over black depths below. Even so, it was not long before they had to rest. This place was not engineered for the ease of mobility of the human race. And moving through it was not only psychologically exhausting, it was physically fatiguing as well. Constantly climbing through those tomblike hollows, scuttling down threaded tunnels, and crawling over the litter and debris of collapsed partitions.

They finally paused amidst a line of rooms that were not rooms at all, but sunken chambers with translucent concave floors made of some transparent glass or plastic. If you rubbed very hard, you could clean the grit off the material just enough to make out structures lying far beneath.

“This is a fucking madhouse,” Cutchen said. “What the hell was wrong with Gates? This should have been pulled down. You know? Just fucking pulled down.”

Sharkey said, “It seems mad, but I think it's all very carefully systematic if you happen to have a brain that can understand the system. I'm afraid our simple mammalian brains are not up to the task . . . maybe not for another couple million years anyway.”

“Can we just get out?” Cutchen said. “Christ, I've never felt like this before . . . half the time I'm so nervous and depressed I want to slit my wrists, the other half I feel like I could vomit my intestines out.”

“Just a little while longer, then we'll call it quits,” Hayes said.

Cutchen rested his head on his knees, squeezing his eyes very tightly shut.

Hayes felt for the guy, for he knew exactly how he felt.

The way this place opened up a can of something creeping and ugly inside of you and shook it around. Tied your belly in knots and made your head ache and your eyes bulge. The human mind was designed to consider regularities, straight lines and simple angles, forms and shapes that were consistent with themselves. But this place . . . it was mathematically distorted, a fourth-dimensional madness. Like being inside some alien wasp hive. It was just too much.

After a brief rest, they moved on and suddenly discovered themselves in an immense courtyard set between rising blocks of that nightmare city. They moved between colossal seventy-foot walls and around towering spires that seemed to serve no earthly purpose. The courtyard was tiled and roofless, nothing above but empty blackness reaching to dizzying heights. Now and again there were domes like buildings set about, but the only way of getting into them was scaling the smooth walls and entering from apertures at the top. There were also high blank facades lacking egress that were set with jutting rectangles fifty and sixty feet above that looked like nothing but perches for rooks or hawks.

They had left the strings of lights behind and were moving with flashlight and lantern again. They came to another of those crazy domes and this one was honeycombed with oval passages that seemed to lead down.

“Give me the lantern, Cutchy,” Hayes said. “I'm going in there.”

Sharkey shook her head. “No, Jimmy . . . it's too dangerous.”

He took the lantern. “I'm going. I'll be careful.”

He chose a passage and entered it.

It was about five feet in diameter at the opening and he had to move downwards at a crouch. It was like being inside a funhouse twisty slide, just a hollowed tube that moved this way, then that, ever downward. But the walls and floor were set with tiny bumps so there was no chance of losing your footing or sliding away into darkness. Hayes kept going, his throat constricting and sweat beading his face. Finally, the passage opened into a series of massive rooms with hooded ceilings.

He stood there in that shrouded darkness, panning the lantern around. He instantly did not like the place. That terrible sense of deja-vu was haunting him again, clawing and worming at the pit of his mind.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “I remember this place, too, but why?”

He moved on, passing beneath archways and steering himself around accumulated heaps of detritus. He came into a room that seemed to be nothing but an ossuary, a collection of aged bones . . . skulls set into little cells in the walls, the skeletons of men and extinct animals fully articulated, great birds dangling from above with nothing seeming to hold them. The floor was a litter of bones as if most of the displays here — and there must have been thousands at one time — had collapsed through the ages, maybe from their own weight or seismic activity shaking them loose. It was tough going climbing over those heaped bones, the lantern casting flying and grotesque shadows, the air swimming with clots of dust. But it was necessary. For as much as this place disturbed him, he knew it was no simple natural history collection.

This was much more.

At the far end, there were cylindrical plastic cases that he had to scrape the grit off. Inside were more human skeletons . . . but most were small and hunched, not quite erect, the craniums set with great brow ridges that sloped ever backward to braincases much smaller than those of modern men. Some of those skulls had exaggerated canines and incisors, heavy jaws. None of them were anatomically the same. These were the skeletons of manlike apes and quasi-human types —
Afropithecus
and
Australopithecus
— and their proto-primate ancestors and primitive forms of anthropoids, homo erectus and Neanderthal man, and something like an archaic form of homo sapien.

Hayes scraped the gunk from a dozen of those cylinders, but there must have been hundreds.

You know what this is, don't you?
he thought.
You know what kind of awful, gruesome place this.

And he did.

The very idea of what he was seeing and feeling and thinking and remembering made the sap of his race run cold and poisoned.

In the next room, more skulls and more bones.

They were all carefully arranged on tables and hung from the walls, set into recesses . . . they were all human or proto-human and they had to span millions of years. A paleoanthropologist's wonderland. But as Hayes examined many of the skulls, they fell apart like delicate crockery, but he did notice that a great many of them had what appeared to be holes in their craniums that had either been drilled into them or burned through. There were several tables upon which the articulated skeletons of prehistoric men had been strapped down with what appeared to be some sort of plastic wire . . . and the fact that they had been bound so, made Hayes think that they had not been skeletons when they were brought in here.

The next of those gigantic vaults was piled floor to ceiling with more plastic tubes, but these were much smaller like laboratory vats. Once he'd used his knife to scrape them clean, Hayes could see pale, fleshy things floating in solidified serum like flies trapped in amber. They were all anatomical specimens . . . glands and muscles, ligaments and spinal columns, brains and sexual organs, eyes drifting like olives in ancient plasma and hundreds of things Hayes simply could not identify.

The next room held more tables made of some unknown quartz-like mineral, perhaps fifty or sixty of them. There were weird spirals of discolored plastic tubing and spidery nets of hoses and conduits leading from spheres overhead that must have been some sort of biomedical machinery. There were racks of instruments . . . at least what he thought were instruments . . . some were made of a transparent glassy material that might have been some alien mineral. There were great assemblages of these things . . . hooks and blades and probes and others that were flat and hollow like magician's wands. Hundreds of varieties and everywhere, those spiraling tubes and things sprouting from the walls like fiber optic threads. Great convex mirrors and plate-like lenses set upon tripods. There were other things that had gone to dust and wreckage and a great part of the room had been buried in a cave-in.

Another massive chamber led off from it, but debris blocked the doorway. Hayes climbed up it and could see through a three-inch slit at the top of the door that it was cavernous inside and set with dusty helixes of alien machinery, things that looked like black, fibrous skeletons with thousands of appendages and reaching whip-like protrusions. Other things like giant gray oblong blocks, the faces of which were profuse with biomechanical knobs and ribs and scaled ridges, fluted poles and serpentine coils and interlocking disks. All of them were set with recesses that were shaped like human beings into which subjects could be placed. There were other tables and the framework of some huge glass wheel that seemed to be made of mirrors and dusty lenses. And coming from overhead was a triple cylinder like that of a compound microscope, except where the optical mechanisms would have been there were a protruding series of glass blades . . . some short and serrated, others long and forked like snake tongues, and still others composed of thousands of tiny shards each of a different shape and texture. There were other machines in there that left Hayes cold and gasping, but he could look no more.

This entire place was some arcane biomedical laboratory and he knew it.

The sort of place and the level of specialized technology that man would not be able to guess at for ten-thousand generations.

Hayes slid down the heap of debris, pressing his hands to his head, trying to shut out the memories of this place . . . the torment and the torture, the cutting and burning and severing, the draining of fluids and the samples of blood, marrow, and brain tissue extracted. The graftings and injections and metabolic manipulation.

Yes, this is where it all happened.

This was where the true origin of species was to be found.

This was the factory of the helix and the primal white jelly Lind had raved about. This was where the evolution of terrestrial life was studied and cataloged by extraterrestrial minds. This was the place that man was born and modified. This is where Hayes' own ancestors were bagged and tagged and classified, stuck on pins like rare insects, bottled and dissected. Yes, throughout prehistory, possibly every fifty thousand years or so, populations of men and the anthropoids that would become men, were scooped up, brought down into this hideous catacomb and altered, enhanced via microsurgery and vivisection, eugenics and genetic engineering, forced mutation and special adaptation, careful and meticulous modification at the atomic and molecular levels. And all with one ultimate ambition: to bring forth an intelligence that the Old Ones could harvest.

Hayes laid there, at the bottom of that debris heap, his mind racing in a thousand different directions leaving him confused and numb and maybe even slightly insane. There was too much coming at him, way too much. Seeing his origins and knowing it all to be horribly true, he felt . . . artificial, synthetic. Not a man at all, but cold plastic protoplasm squeezed and worked into the shape of a man. He felt that his soul had withered, crumbled, gone to ash. He lay there, staring, in that tenebrous, diabolic workshop, feeling the ghosts of his ancestors haunting him, invading his mind and screaming in his face.

He was emptied out now. Used up and gutted, nothing inside but bones and blood and a heart that beat with a hollow cadence. And outside, just a reflection of a man, a grim set of mouth and eyes dead as grimy pennies staring up at you from a dirty gutter.

All those voices and shrill cries, misty race memory and screeching long-dead minds finally boiled down into a flux of gray, running mud. And a single voice spoke from the bottom of his mind:
Isn't revelation something, Jimmy? All these years people were wondering who they were and what they were and where they came from and what their destiny might be and you were one of them ... but now you know the truth and there's no joy in knowing, is there? There's only madness and horror. The collective consciousness of the human race is not ready for any of this. Men and women are still primarily savages, superstitious gourd-rattling, spell-casting yahoos . . . and the knowledge of this will utterly destroy them, won't it? That all that we are and ever can be can be reduced to an equation, a test tube, chemicals and atoms worked by forbidding alien hands, an ambitious experiment in molecular biology. This will kill the race. This will crush our simple, pagan minds and leave nothing behind. All those years creationists and evolutionists have been battling it out and now, it turns, they're both wrong and they're both right... life can arise just about anywhere from a fixed set of variables and there is such a thing as the Creator. Only those variables were manipulated by cold and noxious minds and the Creator is something alien and grisly from some invidious, cosmic gutter out of space and out of time.

Kind of funny, ain't it?

Life probably would have happened here without them, but men probably wouldn't have. Not as we understand them. And what a serene and peaceful place this would have been. Eden. Only, Jimmy, you know who that slithering serpent was and what it brought to being: your race.