Christopher Brookmyre - Pandaemonium

Prologue The Resurrectionists Price

Were going to Hell for this.

It is one of the soldiers who speaks, talking almost under his breath to the similarly sculpted muscular redoubt standing beside him. Their arms are bare from the shoulders down, dark green sleeveless slips the only clothing between the skin of their chests and sweat-streaked grey tabards of body armour. Their biceps are taut from the weight of their weapons, or maybe thats just how it looks, because Merrick knows what those things feel like to hold; knows a weight in them that derives from more than simply mass and gravity. Those muscles are US military: built, trained and maintained. You could sling a feather duster across those forearms and the musculature would look just as pronounced, just as swollen and primed.

Merrick recalls a detached fragment he glimpsed surfing the digital channels, showing a poster from the Weimar Republic. It depicted an Aryan god of an athlete above the slogan: A healthy body houses a healthy mind. To which some seditionary artist had added: but often a very small one.

All of the soldiers in here look like gay porn. So much muscle on show, all of it glistening with moisture, fresh beads of sweat pooling for a moment, then suddenly swooping in rivulets in response to a slight movement, a shift in stance, and not infrequently a nervous shudder. Its the heat: thats why theyre dressed that way. Its so hot in this place, so infernally hot, always. No amount of venting seems to make a difference. Hes stood right next to the giant fans at the base of the intake regulation shaft, walked beneath the coolant transit vessels in the heat-exchange orbital, several miles of insulated alloys thrusting through a circular tubeway engirthing the primary accelerator chase. You can put your left hand next to the vent outlet, or up close to the transit vessel, remind your fingers what cool air feels like; but if you place your right hand a few inches further back, then they might as well be in any other room in the facility, as theyll feel no change. Its like the principles of conductivity have been suspended, or some inexhaustible energy supply keeps pumping more warm air in to replace every atom that gets cooled.

Merricks going through tubs of Vaseline trying to reduce the chafing of his thighs and where his arms brush his sides, and thats just wearing trousers and a shirt, sometimes a lab coat. What must it be like for these guys, strapped, clipped, belted and burdened until they look like cyborgs and gladiators?

Not that the soldiers would be complaining. They didnt complain, they didnt argue, they didnt question. But that didnt mean they werent sweltering, didnt mean they werent blistered worse than Merrick, and most certainly didnt mean they werent scared.

Going to Hell? replies the second soldier. We aint going. Were standing down all border patrols and letting Hell come to us.

They dont know he can hear them. Theyre talking in whispers and the sound of the machine - the incessant sound of the machine - would make it hard enough to catch anything below a shout from the other side of the chamber. Merrick, however, is picking them up through his headphones from one of the directional laser-mikes hes deployed, monitoring a range of sound frequencies calibrated far outwith the spectrum of human hearing. Hes also running all pick-ups through a counter-frequency interference filter, which cancels most of the frequencies coming from the tooth-rattling, pulsatile hum that is as unresting a constant of this place as the stifling heat. Its only with his headphones on and those filters running that he can escape it, can hear a human voice resonate like it would in a normal room in a normal building back in the lost innocence of the normal world.

Maybe he was mistaken, however, and the soldiers said nothing. Maybe all he heard was the words inside his own head.

Were going to Hell for this.

Im going to Hell for this.

This is Hell.

Here beneath the world, held fast by adamantine rock, impenetrable. Here impaled with circling fire, yet unconsumed.

He recalls the words of a senior cleric a few years back, in a predictably alarmist harangue of Merricks fraternity.

One might say that in our country we are about to have a public Government endorsement of experiments of Frankenstein proportion - without many people really being aware of what is going on. Thus he had warned the nation about the unchecked recklessness of those mad scientists, still grasping for that apple despite God having been quite unequivocal on the subject. Or as every monster-movie aficionado knows, there are some things man was never meant to tamper with.

This moral colossus had gone on to suggest that he might even be willing to help redeem the scientific community by stepping down from on high and granting an audience to a delegation of their representatives.

In agreeing to such a meeting my only condition would be that the scientists were also willing to accept instruction from our Churches and peoples of faith on basic morality.

Merrick still feels the smouldering embers of his indignation at the way he and his peers were being maligned as so many Mengeles, as Frankensteins unfettered by any consideration of morality, driven remorselessly by the pursuit of discovery at any cost. But now he would concede that perhaps it had angered him so much because, like a stopped clock hitting the right time, amid his automatedly dogmatic declamations the cleric had stumbled on to a nasty little truth.

There was a question you could never answer while it remained purely hypothetical, a measure of your character you could never record until it was truly put to the test. That question was: how far would you be prepared to go, what sacrifices would you be willing to make, and most pertinently, what values would you be prepared to compromise, in order to know that bit more, in order to glimpse that bit further than anyone had before you?

It was a question, a test that would only ever be truly faced by a tiny few; but not, he understood now, a lucky few. Those were the ones who would have to live with the consequences of their choice: to pass up seeing what was behind the curtain for personal ease of conscience, or to accept that an eternal burden of shame and guilt might be the price they must pay as individuals in order to secure greater knowledge for all - albeit with no guarantees that this knowledge would be a blessing or a curse.

Merrick knew the cleric was right, because so many had taken the latter choice. Where would we be otherwise? The myth of Prometheus, like all myths, had its root in a human truth. Scientists had forever defied the values of their societies in order to get that elusive further glimpse, but lets not sugar-coat it as a question of shifting mores and challenging attitudes. They had sometimes done what they knew to be wrong: horribly and hideously wrong. They had robbed graves, or paid the resur rectionists to do it for them. And when the likes of Burke and Hare got creative, they had asked no questions. The promise of that glimpse compelled them to override their morality. Merrick knew this now, knew how little that cleric truly understood with his debates over whether the end justified the means. It wasnt about justification. It was that the promise of the glimpse could obviate the very need for a justification. The glimpse could become its own supreme, unchallengeable justification.

The researcher sacrificing laboratory animals could justify his practices to himself on the grounds that the resultant understanding protected his species. Natural selection had put us in this superior position, he could tell himself, and his responsibility was to his own kind. But Merricks compromise in this was something far worse than a reluctant vivisectionists guilt. Maybe the Mengele comparisons werent so hysterical after all. And the worst part was knowing hed make the same decision, accept the same tainted deal, if the choice was offered over again. Galling as it was that the glimpse be so small, so needlessly small, and the shame he was party to so utterly unnecessary, if it was the only way to get a glimpse at all, he knew hed still do it again.