by Bill Adams
“Yes. Or no—I didn’t explore those.”
“We haven’t been in one either,” she said, “just peeked.”
“Have you seen a pseudo-gastropod?” Friar Francisco asked. “They would rarely come this high.”
“Would I know if I’d seen one?”
“Count on it.” Ariel grimaced.
“Then I haven’t. I’ve seen some insects and a rat, though.”
“Indeed?” Friar Francisco stuck his head out from his cowl, his eyebrows halfway to his bare crown. “A Terran-derived rat?”
“I don’t know, Friar. A ratlike animal.”
The Green monk began to drift down the tunnel, poking among the vines. “Rats,” he muttered—almost a curse.
“Maybe we should inspect one of the red areas before going ahead with my plan,” I suggested. “Maybe that scary red light is the only thing we have to go ‘through’ to get ‘out.’ As simple as facing our fear—which used to be spelled f, e, a, r, by the way. See what I mean?”
“Hmm,” Ariel said. “The main thing is, let’s do something, and not just talk about it. What do you say, Friar Francisco? A red section first?”
“All right,” Friar Francisco agreed. “Though I don’t think there’s anything special about the red sections. I’ve the notion that they’re—”
“Help!”
The cry was faint. I was only sure I’d heard it because the others looked toward the hole, too.
“That sounds like Harry,” Ariel said. I was the first to drop through the connector. On the new level, a shout gave me the direction. Soon Ariel and Friar Francisco loped close behind me.
The corridor branched. Ariel and I took one side, the friar another. Our tunnel straightened out, and suddenly I had to jump over a hole to keep from falling through, while Ariel barely stopped short.
Another high-pitched shout came through the narrow portal between us. It sounded lost. “Over here, Harry!” we called.
“It’s coming!” came his voice. “Can’t believe…fast!” I heard the squeegee noise of yielding vine-mat below, and a dull hard impact—I knew the sound, had made it myself when bad bounces sent me into the ceiling. Before I could drop down and offer help, the teenager appeared in view, holding his head and white with terror.
He glanced behind him. “Still coming!”
Friar Francisco appeared at the end of our tunnel and approached Ariel’s kneeling figure, his dark brown face worried but stern. “Don’t panic, they’re harmless,” he called down.
“What are?” I asked—the kid was hysterical; there was no sound of anything approaching him—but Ariel, more practical, just told him to jump up.
Harry wasn’t quite tracking. As he reached up a hand instead, I saw more than one bruise on his forehead. By lying across the hole, I could just reach him, but his hand was sweaty with fear and I couldn’t get enough grip to lift with.
“It’s not stopping!” he cried, looking back, and the friar said something I couldn’t catch.
The bright strips lining the connector were blinding me. “Just jump up and down,” I said. “Like a trampoline.”
I reared back on my knees to give him room. After a few spastic twitches, he tried the mat, but missed his footing on the first bounce. He fell over, his foot caught between vines. Struggling ineffectually, he closed his eyes to whatever he thought was approaching.
Francisco was saying only “Silly, silly, silly,” and I had braced my hands and lifted my bent legs forward, intending to elbow-jam down slowly since I couldn’t jump without stomping the boy, when Ariel gave a little cry and pushed me back.
Purple afterimages from the light-strips swam in front of my eyes. I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing, hadn’t expected there to be anything to see. But at the bottom of the connector, something white and glistening flowed over Harry Lagado as he screamed desperately. Then his shrieks were cut off and the mass kept coming, engulfing and then building on top of him, higher and higher, semitransparent but containing cloudy orange shapes that soon eclipsed the boy’s image. A wave of sickly sweet odor filled my nostrils. I had a momentary impression of a thin jet of white jelly coming up the connector, a red eye the size of a golf ball at its tip—and my head jerked back. Ariel faced me across the hole, silently mouthing, No.
And when I looked down again, there was nothing left. Just the mat, covered with that clear gel I’d thought of as “sap” when I’d seen it on leaves—the trail of slime a garden slug might leave, if it were the size of a hippo.
Chapter Twenty
“Oh God,” said Ariel. “Oh God, it swallowed him whole.”
“A slug?” I said, still blinking. “A giant slug?”
“Of course not!” Friar Francisco snapped—at both of us, apparently. He gathered the skirts of his robe in one hand and without further warning vanished down the hole.
Confidence is contagious. So is stupidity. Another moment found me standing behind the Green monk in the lower tunnel, watching the creature retreat.
“I trust Harry had the sense to hold his breath,” he said.
What the friar had called a pseudo-gastropod looked even more grotesque and impossible when seen whole. A glistening pale sack about man-high, it slopped outward to brush the lower tunnel on either side, like a rubber balloon full of gelatin, air bubbles, and candy-colored guts. Now ten meters down the tunnel, leaving uneven swatches of clear slime on floor and walls behind it, the creature moved like nothing I’d ever seen. The outer skin appeared to go up and over, as if the animal were rolling, but the inner structures didn’t follow as fast, nor did the overall shape rotate, always tapering toward the top. And when it looked back at us, nothing turned; instead, its two long eye-stalks seemed to skate across its rippling upper surface.
The large blood-red eyes waved randomly, and then the stalks bore them away again. The creature slowed, shuddered, and heaved, expelling a mummy-shaped turd of slime—which drew erect, developed legs and arms, and began to paw at the gunk all over its face, crying with humiliation and spitting schoolboy curses.
“Harry?” Ariel had descended unnoticed behind us.
The boy did not seem to be hurt. Even the coating of slime could have been worse, its faint fruity smell almost pleasant. Harry wiped gobs of the gunk from himself and flung them about, and we fell back to give him room.
Friar Francisco tutted at my side. “We’ll have to wipe you down with dry leaves,” he said when Harry gave up in disgust.
“We thought they were so slow.” Harry’s voice was shrill but steadying. “Even when it got interested in me, I wasn’t afraid because I could just walk away from it. But when it made me run, I started hitting the ceiling and everything got cloudy and scary…”
The slug stopped and gave its impression of turning around, a topological mystery in aspic. Then it raised what would have to be called its head. A long vertical slit puckered into existence, then gaped in a rude yawn, and the creature stuck its tongue out at us. The organ uncoiled to the length of a man’s arm and revealed a toothed, raspy surface. We fell back even further. The creature seemed to taste the air, then licked at the leafy wall. The tongue, not unlike an elephant’s prehensile trunk, coiled back into the maw with a large swatch of leaves; the creature began to munch.
“I knew it!” Friar Francisco pushed forward for a closer view. “They feed on the vines. And look! It’s rasping off the larger, tougher leaves. Younger shoots will now get the benefit of the light.”
“Why didn’t Harry get chewed up, too?” Ariel asked as the creature continued its noisy grazing.
“It never swallowed him,” the monk replied. “Not only is Harry too large, he’s an animal, and the pseudo-gastropods are vegetarian. Everything has its own nature; you must learn to trust that.”
“It didn’t eat me, Ariel,” Harry said. “It sort of made a tube around me. Then it coated me with gunk and squeezed me through, somehow.”
“Peristaltic contractions,” the friar explained.
“Harry doesn’t belong in the creature’s simplified world, so it went around him—all the way around. The pseudo-gastropod feeds on vines. It must contribute food to them in turn—its lubricant slime or its feces or both. Essentially a closed ecosystem, driven by the light-strips.” He paused thoughtfully. “It can’t be quite that simple, of course. The insects probably play middleman in various ways.”
“And are there many of these slugs?” I asked.
“From what we saw yesterday, I doubt there are more than a dozen or two. They can flow up or down the vertical shafts, but downward must be easier. The upper floors will be fertilized less often, and I don’t know why they aren’t worse off for it.”
I told him about the grill I’d seen; the news pleased him.
“I knew the system couldn’t be entirely closed. So water and nutrients do come in, and the slug-poor upper floors strain out what they need before allowing it to trickle down. It all balances out.”
“Where do the rats fit in?” I wondered.
“They don’t belong here,” he said dogmatically. I reminded myself that this was his true field. “Too busy, too destructive. They don’t belong here at all.”
“Neither do we,” Ariel said. The slug had started drifting in our direction again.
“Their size is intimidating,” the friar admitted. “Let’s move back upstairs and dry Harry off.”
◆◆◆
The leaves with which we scrubbed Harry proved to be slightly less absorbent than vinyl. But wherever we scraped the slime thin it soon dried into fine white powder, easily dusted off.
“How can a slug that big live?” I asked. “Not to mention haul itself around.”
“I do wish you’d stop calling it that,” Friar Francisco said. “It’s not a slug. More likely inspired by the jellyfish and not naturally evolved at all. It’s been genetically engineered for sheer improbability, like those mock eels you told us about. And it’s not one creature, but a colony of many, like a Portuguese man-of-war.”
“How much of this did you read the other day, and how much are you guessing?”
Now I’d offended him. “There wasn’t time to read up on specific life-forms,” he said. “But I don’t have to guess anything. Eel, slug, caterpillar, snake—each moves in a characteristic way that reveals its inner structure. The peculiar flowing forward you just saw is unique to Gyal-wa colonies.”
“Gyal-wa?”
“That’s what we would call them, after their inventor. Gyal-wa was one of the first great genetic engineers of classical times. The colonies he created were tiny things, designed to clean out occluded coronary arteries. But the Titans must have invented them independently, along with tools for composing them on a grand scale—their usual style.”
“What do you mean by a ‘colony’?” Ariel wanted to know.
“Just that. A collection of independent creatures. Billions of unicellular animals organized into ‘binders’—spongy accretions of hairlike proteins. A Gyal-wa binder is built and maintained by cells which live in its interstices and control its flex and consistency with their secretions. Along the outer skin, the binders are of course knit tightly together; within, a more fluid structure facilitates the ablative transport of nutrients.
“Eyes, tongue, digestive organs—these are all quasi-independent creatures, composed of more specialized binders. They can travel wherever they have to without forcing the whole colony to shift its weight by turning around.
“This conserves energy—one of the reasons why it can be so huge, Commissioner. And it’s not nearly as massive as you think. Some of those large internal organs must be pneumatophores—gas pockets, like those which cause jellyfish to float.”
“But everything has to work together, too,” Ariel said. “Without a common brain?”
The friar shrugged. “Have you ever seen a school of fish, or birds in formation? Plenty of coordination—though little sense of purpose.”
“Then why did it follow Harry?” she asked, and added, her voice carefully controlled, “Why is it following us?”
She pointed at the hole near the end of our tunnel. A narrow column of pinkish white jelly was rising from the connector. It grew taller and thinner until it fell over, and then the mass below began transferring up and across its L-shape in little waves.
“Wonderful, isn’t it?” the friar asked.
“Nifty,” Ariel said. “But why do they follow us around?”
“They must feel or hear the vibration in the vines and think we’re other pseudo-gasts,” the friar said. “But when they catch up with us, we’re not, and they don’t know what to do with us.”
“Are they looking for mates?” I asked, thinking of the eels.
“Doubtful,” the friar said. “With Gyal-was you keep everything very simple. Constituent cells reproduce, even organs may, but the colony itself does not. The same twelve or twenty have roamed this place for a thousand years. They don’t breed, they just live forever.” He smiled mischievously. “Like monastic orders.”
“Why do they look for each other, then?” I asked.
“They may struggle for territory…Also like monastic orders, I’m sorry to say.” He beamed at a new thought. “And that would keep them patrolling actively, which is better for the vines.” I understood why Ariel was treating this gentle soul with such irritation. He was in heaven, enjoying himself too much to help us leave.
So I tried to make my question sound like a challenge. “What are they for?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“They’re not natural animals; they were engineered for a purpose. The eels were for air travel. What are the slugs for?”
“They’re not…slugs,” he said, but his pensive tone indicated that I might have set the hook.
Ariel was watching the slug accumulate with an expression of distaste, and tall Harry had moved behind her, trying to look indifferent.
“Harry’s ready,” she said. “Now let’s go.”
◆◆◆
The entry shaft of the red section glowed dully at my feet, the color of hot coals. I looked across at the others and Friar Francisco nodded at me as if he thought I needed reassurance.
Maybe I did. I finished clearing away the last of the creepers we’d torn out of the connector; they might have been climbable if they hadn’t taken up so much room.
“That mat looks too thin for a jump down,” I said.
The Green monk silently pointed to the forgotten coil of supercord tucked into my belt, saved from my last testing ground. I took it out, doubled and redoubled it to the necessary length, which would also make the fine wire less painful to hold, and tied one end to the nearest ceiling loop. Amazing what people expect of a man in uniform—even more so what he finds himself agreeing to do. I climbed down into the crimson unknown. My knees and elbows occasionally bumped the connector’s interior strips, but they proved as cool as rubies.
There were no surprises at the bottom. It was another vine tunnel, the only difference being that the connector frame and overhead strip had dimmed to red; the vines were accordingly less healthy, kinked and coarse-barked, with far fewer leaves. They hung in dull gray tangles against the slick black rock and its blood-colored reflections. A child’s dream of hell.
“It’s only the lights,” I called up to the others, and they joined me.
“God!” Ariel said after looking about. “This place is awful.”
“Death on low heat,” I agreed.
“On the contrary,” Friar Francisco said. “Just autumn or winter, a phase of necessary dormancy, like human sleep. Artificial ecosystems often retain the seasonal cycles of the genome they were modified from. A good engineer obeys the trace of Mother Goddess that remains in his creations.”
“Then why is it ‘winter’ in some places, but not in others?” Ariel asked.
“I know!” Harry said. “You can’t shut everything down. The pseudos wouldn’t like that.”
“That’s my guess,” the friar agreed. “A stag
gered schedule. Every section dims occasionally, but never too many at one time.”
On we walked. The red tunnel’s vine mat, though still well-knit, lacked resilience. Without so many leaves to absorb sound, our voices returned in hollow metallic echoes that killed conversation. Instead we listened to the soft pitter-patter of unseen rats.
We found dead ends to several tunnels, doubling back when necessary. We made slow progress, but no one suggested splitting up.
“I still say this red looks like emergency lighting,” Ariel said. “Or even a warning.”
“Feces!” blurted the friar.
“I beg your—”
“Excuse me for interrupting,” he said, reaching into one of his capacious robe pockets, “but I see some pseudo-gast feces I should collect.” He pulled out a sample box and a plastic bag, kneeling down next to a large dark cake on the mat.
“Do you absolutely have to?” she asked. “Is it sanitary?”
He delivered his “Silly, silly, silly” litany, using a folded leaf like a pair of tongs, and added, “We didn’t even know slugs would visit red sections until now. As for their dung, you saw what I collected yesterday. Inoffensive as creamed peas, with a few white stems thrown in. It’s only the red light that makes this look brown.”
“Okay, okay, let’s not dwell on it,” Ariel said, walking away with her face to the wall. A few paces later she stopped short. “Do you think your flashlight still works?” she asked.
From another pocket the Green monk produced a metal cylinder the size of a large cigar and handed it to Harry. “Give her this, please,” he said. “I don’t know, Ariel. It was even worse this morning. I bought it new for this trip, but that electromagnetic pulse has done something to it.”
I saw what he meant when she turned it on. The beam flickered from bright to dim to nothing at all. A few blows from the heel of her palm revived it for the moment.
“Well, what do you make of this?” she said, a note of triumph in her voice.
The friar dropped what he was doing and joined the rest of us.
