Lydia's Mollusk

by Sean Monaghan

  "But we'll come back to that," Samena said. She took the display and turned it so that Lydia could see.

  It showed a maze of lines of all colors. A kind of a three dimensional image. Anatomical stuff. Veins and nerves and tendons. The bones were kind of obvious—fat white shadows within the tangle.

  And the nodules with their bristles. Dark shapes.

  They had their own little nodules leading from them, as tied on tiny tethers.

  "My arm?" she said. "I don't know what all that is."

  "Bone," Samena said, pointing. "These are tendons here. All this is your circulatory system. Muscle here."

  She tapped something and some of the tangle faded back and other parts became highlighted.

  "Nervous system."

  Another tap and most of it faded out, leaving just the calcareous nodules.

  "This is intriguing," she said. "These are foreign bodies, but they're using your own systems to grow and develop."

  "Parasitic," Arnt said.

  "Well, possibly symbiotic."

  "What does she get from the deal, then?"

  "You're not going to like my answer."

  "Which is?" Lydia said.

  "More tests."

  "Great," Arnt said.

  From out in the hospital garden, one of the gazelles made a kind of baaa sound. Almost plaintive.

  "But there's more to show you right now," Samena said. "Give me a second here."

  She tapped at the display, and gave some waved commands.

  "We could rent an apartment," Arnt said. He had his phone out and was waving at its display.

  "You have a house already," Lydia said. "I have a house already, and that's perfectly serviceable."

  "It's tiny."

  It was small, but with just one person there was plenty of space to kick around. She had two bedrooms—one for sleeping and one as her studio.

  She was missing it now. At least, missing being close to the ocean.

  "I mean," Arnt said, "that if we're going to be stuck here in Cooperville getting you tests, we should find a place to stay. I don't want a hotel."

  "You don't want to commute?" It had taken three hours to drive in, and traffic had been light.

  "Do you?"

  They'd driven up in Ed's ancient Volvo. Ed was that kind of guy. It smelled of cinnamon gum, which was cute. At one time it had been the safest car on the planet, but five years could change a lot.

  "We have to return the car anyway," Lydia said.

  "I've already phoned mine. It's on its way."

  "You phoned your Mustang? That's even older than Ed's car."

  "Yes, but it can still drive itself. It'll be here in an hour. I'll drive Ed's car back to his place and let my car follow, then be back before midnight."

  "Assuming we don't admit you both," Samena said.

  "What?" Arnt said, eyes wide. He lowered his phone.

  "Come take a look at this." Samena pointed at the display with the imagery of Lydia's arm. "This here is what's intriguing. I don't want to make any diagnosis from this, but I do have to tell you about it."

  "About what?" Lydia said.

  "These lines here. And here and here."

  Samena indicate some gray lines that ran up the arm, from the wrist, going on beyond her elbow.

  They connected into the mini-nodules around the calcareous growths.

  "You don't know what they are, do you?" Arnt said.

  "Not yet."

  "I felt them," Lydia said. "I felt them tugging at me."

  Chapter Nineteen

  Despite some well-reasoned arguments, Samena admitted Lydia and got the screenwork started to ensure everything was well-documented.

  When Lydia and Arnt's parents had gotten sick, there had been a whole lot of insurance hurdles and hoops to leap over and through. The current system, with universal care, meant that the process was relatively straightforward.

  Lydia's room—she had it to herself—was peach-colored, with a view out into the gardens. A scraggly tree had a dense nest in the crook of two branches and a small bluish bird, with gold in its tail feathers, alighted on the edge and fed the fledglings juicy morsels. Green caterpillars and wriggling bugs.

  Samena left Lydia and Arnt, promising to return soon with a colleague. There was going to be some remote dial-in too, with medical people from other locations.

  As if Lydia was a laboratory specimen to be examined. She said as much to Arnt.

  "I guess you are," he said. He'd gone to the room's window and was looking out into the garden.

  "I am?" she said.

  "Look at your arm."

  She did. She rubbed at the skin around the holes. The skin was still soft. The sensation of rubbing was strange. The nodules were hard and moved with the skin's movement, twisting and turning. The tugging through her arm came again.

  The tendrils stuck up, waving.

  Just as the ones on her mollusk had done.

  "At least there are none with eyes," she said.

  "Eyes?"

  "She looked at me. She was intrigued."

  "We're talking about that mollusk? Right before she attacked you."

  "She didn't attack me. She was just doing what came naturally."

  "Hardly anything natural there. She's a genetic hybrid. Designed specifically for ocean clean up."

  "You know that?"

  "Look." He took his phone from his pocket and stretched its display out to book size.

  It showed an encyclopedia entry, with a photograph of a mollusk very similar to her own. A Whorl of shell with purple and gold, the purple foot with tendrils at the snout.

  "Is that it? Or something like it?"

  "Exactly her. How did you know?"

  "When I was looking for you first thing. When you went to the lake. I looked in your studio and saw that sketchpad on your desk."

  "You went into the studio."

  "I didn't know where you were! I was worried."

  Lydia nodded. He was just her brother. It wasn't really a violation. But it was her private space. She needed it to paint. Needed it to remain undisturbed.

  "All right," she said.

  "I photographed the image and used it to search."

  "You can do that from a drawing?"

  "It was a pretty amazing drawing. The net had no trouble identifying it."

  "Apparently. So tell me more about her."

  "It's—she's—a lamensian. It was developed by a Sondrel-ProDot partnership about six years back. They released two million eggs in the North Atlantic then. There's an estimate that there are over half a billion now."

  "I saw the babies."

  "Supposed to be very stable. Fully UN Gene Tinker Agency approved."

  "Do they know about this?"

  "They will soon."

  Lydia felt her lips thin. "We should go back. Back home."

  "Lyds."

  "This isn't right."

  Arnt frowned. "You... you want it to run its course, do you? See where this... parasite? symbiote? See where it goes? Where it takes you?"

  "It's not taking me anywhere bad."

  "Superhero? You know that's ludicrous."

  "As ludicrous as having a symbiote?" Lydia rubbed her arm again. It tingled. "Is it really that? It's a growth, but I doubt that it's symbiotic. Or parasitic. It's just a thing that will fade and—"

  "I don't know how you can say that! Look at you. Look at it. There are holes in you. Tendrils that stabbed me. Knocked me out."

  "Arnt."

  "Maybe those things, you know, those threads in your arm, maybe they've reached your brain. Maybe they're tugging at your... I don't know. Your hippocampus or something. Medulla oblongata?"

  Lydia watched him. He still had his enlarged phone out. The image of the mollusk still there. Lines of information along the side. A wide habitat, a short life span, a reproductive cycle measured in weeks.

  "It would be my cerebrum," she said. "Where I do my conscious thinking."

  "Yeh," he sai
d. "Sure. Your cerebrum." He seemed to have calmed a little.

  Still, there was a gulf there now, between them. A vast stretch of water.

  A separation. Unsaid things that had lingered since forever. Since they'd become orphans. Adults, but orphans nonetheless.

  And nothing here was healing that divide.

  Chapter Twenty

  From the corridor outside the hospital room came the clanking of a trolley and the smell of fresh-baked bread. Someone was getting lunch.

  Lydia sat on her room's bed, watching out the window. The gray bird with the yellow in its tail returned to the nest, more bugs in its mouth for the hungry babies. Everyone was getting lunch.

  Arnt's phone made a quiet pip sound as he reduced the display size.

  "They don't live long," Lydia said. "A few years."

  "Genetic design there. They're doing important work, but they need to have inbuilt redundancy."

  "Population control, huh?"

  "There are thousands of cases of the introduction of certain things wreaking havoc on vulnerable ecosystems."

  "The rabbits in Australia. Sedgefish in the Everglades that were supposed to control those introduced mosquitoes."

  "Yes. And we think we're so much smarter than those people were back in the day. But there are always things that nature does that we can't think of."

  "Sounds like you're against the efforts at ocean clean-up and climate stabilization."

  Outside, one of the gazelles strode into view. It looked around, wide-eyed, and bent to nibble at the grass. It was a pretty creature, with tan fur highlighted by dark stripes around its rump. Probably a hybrid. The garden enclosed in the H's long legs would be doing a whole lot of work in terms of cleaning up the hospital's footprint.

  Footprint was still a big word. Everything had a footprint, and the idea was to have as small a footprint as possible.

  "Of course I'm not against climate stabilization and so on," Arnt said. "Of course not. But I am against this kind of thing." He pointed at her arm.

  "Yeah," Lydia said. "I'm not exactly thrilled."

  "You're not? You seem to be embracing it. You seem excited by the possibilities. You don't feel cold. You're calmer."

  "Am I?"

  "Looks that way to me."

  Lydia smiled. It was a nice thing to say. She liked to be calm, but sometimes—too many times—she could be agitated or frazzled or just plain worried.

  Arnt looked sheepish. He moved toward the door.

  "I'm going to see what's taking them," he said. "Maybe I can rustle up some food too. You'd think starvation was part of their plan."

  Lydia smiled. It wasn't a funny joke, but at least he was lightening up a bit.

  "Let me see your arm first," she said.

  "My arm."

  "I want to see."

  He stepped back to her bed and jacked up his sleeve.

  There were marks there. Little scabs, perhaps. But no evidence of anything like what was happening to her arm.

  A surprising wave of relief washed through her.

  "Good," she said. "This is good."

  "Yeah." He slid his sleeve down. "They're still going to do tests and what have you. Bloodwork on me."

  "It was pretty unusual."

  "Yes. So let's see your arm now."

  Lydia held it out.

  Arnt put his own hand out, but stopped. He peered closer.

  "Doesn't look any different," he said.

  "I guess all the changes are internal now," she said. "Or maybe it's just saving energy for the next stage."

  "The next stage." Not a question. Just a bald statement.

  "I think they'll move fast now. I think they'll operate. Take it out of me. I mean, it's only be little over a day. Two days. Since it happened. Nothing should really grow that fast. I bet that it's exhausted itself. It's already dying."

  "Lyds. Are you trying to convince me, or yourself?"

  "Little of both," she said with a smile.

  Out in the garden, the fledglings began twittering as the adult bird flew again to the nest edge with more bugs. The adult had to be ranging farther than just the hospital garden for all that. The rate it was going, it would exhaust it all by the end of the afternoon.

  "We'll work this out, you know," Arnt said. "You'll be well again. Samena seems pretty sharp."

  "She's a doctor. That's usually the case."

  "You might be surprised."

  Lydia managed another smile. "Go," she said. "Go do your thing of finding us some lunch. I'm starved."

  "That thing's taking all your energy."

  "Stop it." But she smiled. "Get out and let me get into my silly robe and get under the covers."

  He gave a vague smile back and went to the door.

  He stopped. Looked back.

  "Promise me you'll be all right."

  She looked at him for a long moment. "I'll be all right," she said. "I promise."

  Arnt nodded and swallowed, as if he wasn't convinced but was trying to put a brave face on it.

  "Okay," he said. "Back soon with lobster mornay or caviar or whatever it is they serve someone who's got your kind of seafood symbiote."

  "Very funny."

  Then he was gone and the room seemed colder and smaller and less lively.

  It would be okay. It had to be.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The meal Arnt found consisted of a plate with mashed potato, some kind of brown meat casserole that might have had onion in it, with broccoli—itself pretty mashed—a roll on the side with a tiny knob of margarine, and an orange jelly in a small transparent cup. All on a steely tray, with a cup of water. Shiny stainless steel utensils.

  A robotic arm whirred from the wall near the bed and took the tray from him, moving it across above Lydia, now sitting in the bed.

  "Apparently," Arnt said, "hospital meals haven't changed since the late middle ages. At least, since Mom and Dad were there."

  "Why change a formula that works?" Lydia said. She'd changed out of her clothes and into the standard hospital smock Samena had left. A single piece of fabric like a reverse coat, with arm holes and a tie at the back of her neck. The fabric was printed with images of stars and moons and planets. Very stylized. Saturn looked as if it was a marble stuck in a tiny plate.

  Lydia ate, and it was much tastier than it looked. Despite its appearance, the broccoli was actually crisp.

  "You're in bed," Arnt said. "Clearly not arguing about a return home today."

  Lydia swallowed and jabbed her fork in his direction.

  "Today I'll let them poke and prod me. Tomorrow, we go home."

  "So I'll cancel the apartment then."

  "You never even got an apartment."

  He smiled and shrugged.

  A nurse came by. A tall, burly man with purple tufts in his blonde hair.

  He checked her name and date of birth.

  "I love your work," he said.

  "My work?"

  "Your paintings. We have a print of one in our toilet." He put his hand to his mouth. "Oh. I know that's not very polite? But it's a waterfall. The one plunging fast and huge from the scarp with heavy bush all along the rim."

  "Catsen Falls," Lydia said.

  "You can practically hear the water rushing." A sheepish grin. "Kind of helps you pee."

  Arnt sniggered.

  "That's fine," Lydia said. "Whatever works."

  "Anyway," the nurse said. "On to the task at hand."

  He pulled out a piece of thin metal with a point on its tip.

  "I won't lie," he said. "This actually will hurt just a little."

  He had smile lines on his face and grinned at Lydia as he took miniscule blood samples from the tip of her right thumb while he sat on a rolling stool that had appeared from under the bed. The point did hurt, but not much.

  Five drops. That was all.

  Each of them went onto a stick of aluminum, and then into separate test tubes, held away from the glass by the way the aluminum stick
was mounted on the lid.

  He put a tiny sticking plaster on her thumb tip.

  "All done," he said. He glanced at her left arm, which just lay against her, almost hidden by the meal tray.

  "Did you want to see it?" Lydia said.

  His smile kind of faded. "I'd like to say that it's professional curiosity," he said. "But I suspect it's more like morbid fascination."

  "Things growing in my body, right."

  He gave a short nod.

  Lydia pushed the tray away and lifted her arm for him to see.

  The tendrils stretched in his direction, but he managed to just hold his flinch in check.

  "People are saying symbiote," Lydia said. "It feels like it's stopped growing. But the tendrils there are very active."

  "Has someone checked their genetic make up?"

  "I guess those results are still to come in."

  Arnt stood at the end of the bed. "This only really happened yesterday," he said.

  "An octopus attacked you?" the nurse said. "A genetic hybrid. I've never worried much about that, but maybe I should. My sister is right over there in the terrified and angry camp."

  "It was a mollusk," Arnt said.

  "What is the 'terrified and angry camp'?" Lydia said.

  "People who think that we should stop tinkering with nature. Every time we do, we only make things worse."

  "Rabbits in Australia," Arnt said.

  The nurse turned to him. "That's exactly one of the things she quotes."

  The nurse stood. He put the labeled tubes into a rack.

  "Still," he said. "A conversation for another setting. Right now, we'll focus on getting you well."

  "Well?" Lydia said. "I'm not sick."

  The nurse fully beamed, his teeth huge and white. "That's right. We haven't worked out enough about this yet, have we?"

  Lydia met Arnt's eyes. He seemed to be very brooding.

  "On the technical, medical side," Lydia said. "With that, I'd tend to agree. On the other side, I'm not so convinced."

  "The other side?" The nurse's smile faded.

  "She's drawn to the ocean," Arnt said. "To bodies of water."

  "Drawn?" The nurse looked between them. "Artistically?

  "Metaphorically," Arnt said. "From the old day when a team of oxen would draw a cart along a rutted road. The cart was drawn."