Shadow Box, page 23
Bry looked mystified. “What is Voynich?” he asked. “Is that the language she’s writing in?”
“No,” Lakesh told him, “Voynich was a mysterious book that was discovered at the start of the twentieth century, named after the book collector who initially acquired it. Assumed to be at least four hundred years older, the artifact is a book written in an unknown language that no one has ever been able to decode. I saw an article on this somewhere, Scientific American maybe, back before skydark. The pictures, they’re what made me think of it. I think that Brigid is writing in, well, in Voynich. Whatever Voynich is.”
As Lakesh explained it, Bry was already working the keys of one of the computer terminals, dragging all the information he could about the Voynich manuscript.
“According to this, the Voynich book baffled all attempts by cryptanalysts and was widely considered to be a hoax, although the true nature of that hoax, the why and wherefore, was never established,” he paraphrased, skimming the information. “You’re right, though, the pictures bear a striking resemblance to Brigid’s, as does the script that she is using.”
“The crucial point of the Voynich analysis,” Lakesh recalled, “is that no one could ever work out how the hoax worked. It seemed too elaborate, somehow.”
“It says here,” Bry continued, “that some inroads were made in decrypting the manuscript when a version of Ukrainian was applied to it. John Stojko made some translations using a coded version of Ukrainian that dropped all vowels and replaced the letters with secret characters. But these findings—my goodness, Dr. Singh—this is the language of nightmares. Listen—
“‘Eye of God, you are measuring empty religion for the world. Your aim, not religion, is living in you.’
“And—
“‘Why are you measuring the measure? The measure is the same? Even after Great One, the bones will be broken. I am telling you.’” Donald shook his head, exhaling a long stream of breath.
“It has the illusion of making sense, yet never does,” Lakesh agreed, turning his attention back to Brigid. She was still sitting there, rocking back and forth in her seat, the pen clutched in her hand. As Lakesh watched, he saw her lips moving, speaking words in a mumbled track that he could not quite decipher. “Hang in there, Brigid,” he told her firmly. “Stay with us.”
DOWN IN THE BASEMENT corridor, the two guards heard a sudden crashing coming from the converted storage room. The man on the left pulled his MP-9 subgun around and rushed down the corridor while his partner waited by the stairs.
When he reached the storage room, the guard stepped warily forward, peering through the little square of reinforced glass. The smoky gas of the anaesthetic filled his vision and, for a moment, the guard could not make out anything at all. Then, as the fog cleared, he saw the monstrous form of the creature.
It was still lying there, held by restraints at ankles, wrists and neck, the chains bolted to the floor with the same huge rivets that had been used to reinforce the Cerberus redoubt itself after attacks by the Annunaki. But it was moving now, legs and arms twitching, its head rolling this way and that. It was still asleep, but it looked to be struggling back to wakefulness, trying to shake itself out of a bad dream.
Disturbed, the guard turned back down the corridor and called to his partner. “I think we need more anaesthetic,” he reasoned.
“You’re kidding,” his partner called from the stairwell. “They’re pumping enough crap in there to fell a grizzly.”
“Well, that isn’t a grizzly,” the guard told his colleague. “Maybe it’s building up an immunity to the knockout juice.”
“I’ll alert the brainiacs,” his partner decided.
REBA DEFORE RAN back along the corridor from her medical bay, carrying her black bag of instruments. As she turned the corner, she very nearly ran into Kane.
“Sorry, Kane,” DeFore apologized, “kind of in a rush.”
“I can see that,” he said, keeping pace with her as she hurried along the long, wide corridor back to the control room. “What’s going on?”
“It’s Brigid,” DeFore told him. “She’s taken a turn for the worse.”
“What?” Kane cried. “She was fine, absolutely fine. That anaesthetic can’t still be in her system, can it?”
As DeFore reached the high double doors to the control room she turned back, shaking her head. “I don’t think this is the anaesthetic, Kane. Let me work—I’ll come tell you as soon as I know anything.”
With that, the blond-haired medic slipped through the doors, closing them behind her and leaving Kane with the massing crowd of staff who had been evacuated from the room.
INSIDE THE CONTROL ROOM, DeFore rushed across to Brigid’s desk and began attaching a monitor unit that could provide more information than her subcutaneous transponder alone. As she pumped air into the blood pressure hose, DeFore turned to Lakesh.
“Kane’s waiting outside,” she told him.
“Not good,” Bry said quietly, as if to himself. When he realized the querulous looks that DeFore and Lakesh were giving him, he elaborated. “Once Kane’s involved, trouble always follows,” he said.
“Respectfully, I think trouble’s already here,” Lakesh chastised him.
“My instruments would tend to disagree,” DeFore said, confused. “Brigid is a little hotter than normal, but she seems to be in basically good health.”
Brigid seemed to be oblivious to the conversation. She gazed around the room as though seeing it for the first time. Suddenly, she stood, the blood pressure sleeve still attached to her arm, and wandered away from her desk.
“Brigid?” Lakesh called. “Brigid, where are you…?”
“Lakesh,” Brigid slurred, smiling and turning to him. “It’s so strange, I forgot you were here for a moment.” Her eyes seemed to be looking through him, their color now washing away, a light, sandy yellow where they had once been green.
Lakesh strode over to her and placed his arms firmly on her shoulders. “Brigid, I need you to sit still,” he told her. “I need you to explain what it is that you can see.”
“See?” she asked, baffled. “You’re just…” Her voice trailed off and she shook her head in confusion.
“Just what?” Lakesh encouraged her.
Brigid looked at him, trying to remember what the question was.
THERE WERE TWO of them where Lakesh stood. In Brigid’s eyes, there were two people, two living, breathing creatures.
Lakesh was one. She knew Lakesh, her old friend and confidant. It was as if there were a tag, a label in her mind that read Lakesh—Friend when she looked at him. Brigid supposed that was how she saw everyone, how everyone saw everyone else, really, when you got down to it. We weren’t really people at all, she realized, we were just the labels that people assigned to us.
Everything else in the familiar room was the same. The desks, the monitors, the keyboards, the huge, beautiful map that ran across the length of one wall of the room, its twinkling lights showing all the different ways to Sante Fe.
But there was something else, and she felt it, in her eyes, in her mind, as she looked at the living creature designated Mohandas Lakesh Singh.
Ape-thing. Primitive. Irrelevant. Dangerous. Survival dictated that this thing die. Survival for her, and for all of her people.
And the desks were just hunks carved from the trees, and the computer monitors were just smoothed glass like ice, and the keyboards were blocks of shining solid and the map on the wall just a splash of colors and lights with no meaning, no discernible pattern.
Brigid turned to Lakesh, to the ape-thing that held her, and she urged her voice to speak, to tell him what it was.
“It’s nice,” she began, her head swirling with the other’s thoughts, eating into her very identity, her very soul itself.
LAKESH PULLED Brigid closer as she whispered two words: “It’s nice.”
“What is?” he asked. “What is nice, Brigid? Tell me.”
Her pale yellow cat’s eyes locked with his for a moment, and a silly, girlish smile crossed her lips as her head began to loll back.
“It’s nice…to forget…who you are…sometimes.”
And then she dropped, all the strength leaving her muscles, and Lakesh grabbed her in an automatic reaction before she fell to the floor.
“What’s happened to her?” Bry asked, with DeFore beside him clearly hanging on Lakesh’s answer, as well.
“Unconscious,” Lakesh decided. “But I don’t think that that’s all it is.”
Chapter 17
The doors to the control room burst open and Lakesh and DeFore rushed out, clearing a path through the crowd of waiting staff as Donald Bry followed, struggling with Brigid’s weight draped in his arms. When Kane saw them, he pushed the staff members aside and demanded to know what was going on.
“Brigid fainted,” Lakesh told him, concern etched on his brow. “We’re taking her to the med bay so that everyone can get back to work,” he added, raising his voice midsentence for the benefit of the other personnel waiting with Kane.
Kane turned to Bry. “I’ll carry her,” he told the smaller man, and when Bry looked at Kane he saw something almost territorial in the ex-Mag’s expression.
Bry rolled Brigid into Kane’s waiting arms. “Thanks, Kane,” he said, his breathing heavy. “Not really my thing, fetching and carrying.”
Kane ignored him. He was already turned, jogging down the corridor with Brigid in his arms, making it look effortless. Donald Bry remained behind to ease the other staff members back to their tasks.
When they reached the medical bay, Kane was ahead of DeFore and Lakesh.
“Come on, people,” Kane said, swinging the limp body round as he backed through the doorway. “Let’s pick up the pace.”
DeFore followed a moment later, still clutching her medical bag. “Just put her down on the couch and I’ll start an IV to raise her blood sugar,” she told Kane.
Lakesh was breathing heavily by the time he came into the little warren of rooms, and he apologized, explaining how he wasn’t as young as he used to be.
Kane glared at him, anger seething just below the surface.
“Just a joke, Kane,” Lakesh told him apologetically. “Brave heart now. Dearest Brigid will be fine.”
“No, she won’t,” Kane muttered as he watched DeFore roll Brigid’s sleeve and tap for a vein to insert the IV.
“It’s probably just an aftereffect of the anaesthetic,” DeFore explained. “It hits people differently, delayed reaction. That’s all.”
“And her eyes?” Kane inquired. “Did you see her eyes?”
DeFore didn’t answer. Instead, she kept her head down as she worked the IV drip.
“Lakesh?” Kane asked, turning to the Cerberus leader.
“Yes, Kane, I saw her eyes,” Lakesh admitted. “They’re gradually bleaching of their color.”
The three of them waited in silence, as DeFore adjusted the IV line that fed solution into Brigid’s vein. The quiet humming of the air-conditioning suddenly seemed very loud, the whirring fans and clanking parts like an orchestra tuning up.
Then Kane spoke, breaking the horrible silence. “It’s my fault,” was all he said.
“No,” DeFore said, turning to the ex-Mag. “No, Kane, don’t say that. It’s not—”
“I saw it,” Kane admitted. “I saw it touch her and I said nothing. I pretended it hadn’t happened. I told myself that I hadn’t seen it.”
“Seen what?” Lakesh asked gently.
Kane’s eyes looked off into the middle distance as the images replayed in his mind’s eye. “When we used the interphaser to bring the creature back, landing in the mat-trans chamber where you could pump the sealed room with knockout gas, I saw it move. I saw it reach for her, just before I went under. Two breaths, that’s all it took until we were all unconscious. But I saw it twitch, I saw its hand stretch out. Its knuckle brushed her bare hand, just for an instant, not even a second.”
Lakesh and Reba were standing stock-still, hanging on every word of Kane’s admission.
“And when I woke up I told myself I hadn’t seen it,” Kane continued. “That I had imagined the whole damn thing. Because I didn’t want it to be real. I lied to myself about what I saw because I didn’t want it to be real, you understand?”
Lakesh looked Kane squarely in the eye, and all traces of his usual good humor had left his voice when he spoke. “Kane,” he began, “this isn’t your fault. The anaesthetic knocked you out, the same as it did Brigid and Grant and Domi and that terrible, awful thing that we have penned downstairs. You could not be expected to trust your senses during those last instants before you sank into unconsciousness.”
“I know what I saw,” Kane told him.
“No,” Lakesh assured the tortured warrior. “You’ve pieced together what you think you saw, because you have the evidence now. You couldn’t have known what had really happened given the condition you were in at the time.”
Kane’s gaze swept the floor for a few moments before he muttered his assent.
“Now,” Lakesh told him, “let’s work on your information and see if we can’t reverse whatever it is that’s affected her.”
Kane looked at him then, his gray-blue eyes touched with sadness. “It can’t be reversed,” he said quietly. “You had our reports, and you heard what Decard said about his Incarnates. They all died. Every last one of its victims died. Baptiste is dead, Lakesh. She’s breathing just now, sure, but she won’t be. Not for much longer. First it takes your mind, then it takes your body, eating away at you from the inside. Baptiste told me, when we first saw its effects, that it was using up people’s energy at a fantastic rate. It was that use that was killing its victims.”
“Thus, we need only find another energy source for it to feed on,” Lakesh stated matter-of-factly.
“Can’t be done,” Kane stated.
“Has it been tried?” Lakesh asked.
Kane shook his head, teeth gritted in annoyance. “How would you do it? What do you plan to do? Plug her into a battery? A jenny?”
“Trial and error, Kane,” Lakesh assured him. “Scientific method until we find what works.”
Kane bunched his fists in his frustration, looking around the little room as though for something to hit. “She’ll be dead inside of five hours, Lakesh. There’s no time for trial and error. There’s no time for anything.”
The two men stood at the side of the couch where Brigid lay, deep in their own thoughts, puzzling their own conundrums, when suddenly, almost magically, Brigid’s voice came faintly from where she lay.
“Keep the noise down, guys,” she muttered. “I’m having enough trouble concentrating already.”
Lakesh, Kane and DeFore all turned, leaning down to hear Brigid.
“What did you say?” Lakesh asked. “Brigid, are you…Is that you?”
Her eyelids fluttered a moment, and her pale, washed-out yellow irises looked eerily out from her skull. “I remember who I am,” she said, “but it’s hard. It’s so hard. Like I’m not me anymore, like I’m not one but two.”
“Who’s the other?” Kane urged, his deep concern clear in his tone.
“I don’t know its name,” Brigid admitted. “I think there may be more than one here, inside me. Igigi. They’re called Igigi.”
Lakesh’s eyes flicked to Kane, seeing if the man showed any recognition for the word, but Kane was focused utterly on Brigid Baptiste as she spoke in halting, strained tones.
“They were slaves, Kane,” Brigid mumbled, her voice low. “They were Enlil’s slaves, back when the Annunaki first walked the Earth, millennia ago. The Igigi were the royal family’s treasured slaves.”
“I remember Lilitu telling us about them now,” Kane stated, recalling the alien woman who had brought them so much knowledge after the Annunaki had finally revealed themselves from the chrysalis state of their hybrid baron bodies.
“They knew about the Flood beforehand,” Brigid breathed the words. “The knew about Enlil’s plans to destroy humankind, to start afresh. Oh, it hurts so much now, Kane, it hurts so much,” she said, her washed-out eyes tightly closed against the pain.
“I’m here,” Kane assured her, his hand cupping over hers. “We’re all here, Baptiste.”
“They’re in me, Kane,” Brigid explained. “They’re in me and they don’t want to die. They didn’t want to die.”
Lakesh leaned forward, transfixed by the revelations that Brigid Baptiste was bringing them. The slave caste of the Annunaki were still here and somehow inside Brigid?
“A group of them hid,” Brigid said, the words strained in her throat, “protected themselves using the same Magan technology that the Annunaki accessed in times of death and rebirth. I think that they died so that they could live, Kane. I think they died to live again.” Brigid’s head tossed backward, pushing into the cushions of the couch, and she let out a strained howl from deep in her throat.
“Come on, Baptiste,” Kane instructed, “stay with us. Don’t lose it now.”
“Th-the upload went wrong,” Brigid whispered. “The bodies never materialized. The Shadow Box broke but there was nothing for them to inhabit, no bodies waiting for them so that they might live again. Oh, Kane, help me, please, I can’t do this anymore. It burns. It burns inside.”
“You show me what I’ve got to fight and I’ll fight it,” Kane told her. “Just point me at it, Baptiste. I’ll go through Hell and back if that’s what it takes. We’re anam-charas, remember. Our souls are entwined. There is nothing I won’t do to make this right.”
“The ville,” Brigid muttered, “the city. It’s too full. There are too many of them fighting for control, for domination. No, not a ville. A uni-mind. A prison. It’s a prison, Kane, a prison where you are absorbed if you don’t escape. And it’s breaking apart. Oh, help me. Help me now.”
Suddenly, Brigid’s eyes snapped open and Kane saw that they were pure white orbs now, no color left. Even the sickly yellow had dissipated, washed away with her tears.
