In a blur of brown hair and blue brocade, a woman appeared in front of me.
“You need to get out of here. Now.”
Her face was worried but kind-looking, and she glanced from my obviously-broken arm to the vampires drawing ever closer.
“I’ll hold them off,” she assured me. “Just go, while you can.”
A million questions flooded my mind, wrestling with one another to be the thought expressed. At last, I managed to ask her, “Who are you?”
“My name is Lena, and I am strong enough to stop them. That is all you need to know. Now, stand.” She reached down and took the hand adjoined to my uninjured arm, pulling me swiftly to my feet. “There is a storm drain a few paces behind you. Follow it downward and then take the tunnels. I will buy you as much time as I can.”
I remained immobile, stunned and unable to take a single step. “Why are you helping me?”
“You do not deserve to die like this.”
“I owe you a life-debt, Lena.”
“Perhaps you will one day be given a chance to repay it. But you will not unless you go, now.”
I nodded and began to move steadily backward, watching as Elisabeta and Lysander encroached on our location. My fall had broken the skin of my arm, and the scent of my blood was heavy in the air. If they had been determined before, now their resolve was unshakable. My greatest hope was that Lena could manage to buy me time.
I felt the ground beneath my left foot disappear, and I glanced quickly downward. I had reached the storm drain, and I knew I would find my knife at the bottom. I glanced up then to Lena, who had taken several steps toward the vampires.
She seemed to sense my gaze had fallen on her. “Go!” she commanded.
Unnerved despite my training and trembling, I lowered myself into the drain by means of the metal ladder within, watching my protector as she stepped between me and my attackers. Lena raised both of her hands toward them.
“Enough,” she commanded. “Leave her.” Her tone was forceful and confident, but it did not halt the advancing vampires. She let out a heavy sigh and shifted her posture, slipping into a low crouch strongly reminiscent of those she sought to stop. A low growl rumbled from within her.
I lost my footing, startled by this display from the woman who was attempting to save me. A sharp gasp escaped my lips, and Lena’s head whipped toward me as I tightened my grip on the slippery rungs of the ladder, using my broken arm as sparingly as I could manage.
“Get out of here!” she cried. I nodded unsteadily and began my descent.
As Lena turned to face Elisabeta and Lysander once again, she opened her mouth and breathed a long hiss through her sharp, elongated teeth.
THE END
RHAPSODY by Joseph Cusumano
I
Jag Blake, age twenty-nine, used the mirror above his bathroom sink to stare into his own dilated pupils. His first experimentation with the small purple mushrooms used by the natives of this planet had begun shortly after dinner. Captain Wilson and Ensign Cruz, occupied in another part of the ship, wouldn’t interrupt what was about to unfold unless something urgent came up.
Although they had divided the planet’s day into twenty-four equal length segments which they called hours, each hour had only fifty-three standard minutes. Jag had chewed the mushrooms at 1830 hours and left himself a written note to this effect since he had no idea of how the mushrooms would alter his perception of time or how long the psychoactive compounds would remain in his blood.
His quarters were fairly spacious for those in a jump ship, and they had been furnished according to his preferences. These included a rather ordinary six foot by two foot rectangular glass coffee table on which lay several unread antique books, the kind with hard covers and paper pages. Shortly after he had ingested the fungi, the edges of the table began acting like prisms, throwing off sectors of color. The colors gradually combined above the table to create a rainbow which grew more brilliant with each passing moment. As Jag gazed at it with unblinking eyes, the colors composing the rainbow took rhythmic cues from Ravel’s most beloved composition and began rotating around one another. By then, he was unsure if the hypnotic themes of Bolero were emanating from his wall speakers or from his own temporal lobes.
As an alternative to hallucinogenic botanicals, all manner of legal and illegal electronic cerebral implants were available, but these held little attraction for Jag, who regarded them as unnatural. He couldn’t have afforded one anyway.
The rainbow rotating above his glass table straightened itself and then curled around its long axis to form a tube. When Jag peered into one end of it, he saw Melanie, his lady love. She suddenly turned to face him. Her initial confusion gave way to pure joy, and the green eyes he worshiped sparkled with a new intensity. Jag was tempted to climb into the tube to join Melanie but was interrupted by a knock at his door. When he opened it, Captain Wilson, the mission’s no-nonsense commanding officer, was standing in the hallway. Jag noticed the two sharply pointed horns that had erupted from her forehead since dinner, but he said nothing. He had long since learned that the trick to safely enjoying hallucinogens was to remember that he had ingested them.
Wilson’s voice seemed to ricochet off the inner surfaces of his skull when she spoke, and what she said was the last thing he wanted to hear at that moment. “We’re going back out. Be ready in ten.”
“But…it’s getting dark, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Cruz thinks they’re going to begin an important religious ceremony on top of the pyramid. Bring your recording equipment.”
II
Nearly everyone making a jump to a distant part of the Milky Way finds the process terrifying, especially the first time. Not so with Jag, who in his own mind credited his relative composure to his experiences with peyote cactus and psilocybin mushrooms. Even though the jump occurs instantaneously and without relativistic effects, trained members of the American Interplanetary Corp (AIC) and colonists alike reported the bizarre feeling that “time was moving sideways.”
When the jump was completed, Wilson and Cruz had determined their precise location within the new solar system and began to search for the best route to the fourth planet. For the AIC, the best route was not necessarily the most efficient route suggested by the ship’s computers. Wilson and Cruz were expected to modify the route to obtain information about any unexpected phenomena present at the time of their mission, and their intuition or gut feelings were not to be ignored in assessing potential hazards.
The trajectory of Jag’s life was also not the most efficient route to wherever he was headed, but after serving eight years as a model inmate at Leavenworth for selling recreational plant extracts, a rare opportunity was presented to him. A pressing need had arisen for a replacement botanist on a mission that could be not be delayed without introducing major changes into the general colonization schedule - a schedule which had taken on a new urgency in recent months as conditions on Earth continued to rapidly deteriorate.
If Jag were to satisfactorily complete a hazardous duty mission in the AIC, he would be granted parole on his return. Jag, completely alienated within the prison population and sometimes fearing for his safety, didn’t think twice. And Melanie, who had rescued him from despair, was all for it. They could marry when he was paroled and start a new life together, maybe on one of the many colonies.
“Hazardous duty” often meant the final phase of evaluation of a planet for possible colonization. Jumper probes could be sent to obtain most of the data for a planet that had been identified as promising by deep space telescopes, but additional information was still needed for compliance with the international standards governing colonization. And for that, a special section of the corps was deployed. Jump technology, created and unleashed on mankind long before its predicted arrival, had produced earth’s first undisputed trillionaire along with major economic and social dislocations in the second half of the twenty-first century. As a result, strict international regulations had ev
olved, including those related to colonization. Of course, rogue states had a way of ignoring these international standards, and uncovering these violations constituted the remainder of the corps’ hazardous duty work.
After Ensign Cruz had given final navigation instructions to the ship’s main computer, the Captain called a meeting in the wardroom, an area specially designed for relaxation in comfortable surroundings. Walls covered with light brown fabric and thick carpeting provided excellent sound insulation from the various electrical and mechanical devices spread throughout the remainder of the ship, and the ceiling was elevated an extra ten inches to lessen the claustrophobic effects of ship life. When Jag arrived, the two officers were already seated in deep leather armchairs around a polished mahogany table.
But any sense of comfort or relaxation the room had created for Jag quickly dissipated when Cruz greeted him. “Well how’s our jailbird today?” Since Cruz had not taunted him in this manner before, Jag gathered that Wilson must have waited until now to inform Cruz of his past. In any case, Jag was caught off guard and didn’t know how to respond.
“Crewman, you’ve been asked a question,” Wilson said. “Has your training prepared you for what you’ve seen so far?”
“Considering how little time was available to train for the mission, I believe I'm doing well, Captain. The equipment in the botanical lab is excellent. Everything I’ll need is there, including a genomic sequencer and a massive database of organisms from earth and various colonies.” Wilson nodded. She knew that Jag had been released from prison under the terms of a special arrangement, that he was a competent botanist, and that there was a fiancé waiting for him back on Earth. In Wilson's mind, these were all pluses, and her superiors on Earth must also have believed that Jag could handle his assigned duties. If the mission was completed on schedule, another promotion would be likely in the captain's rapidly advancing career. But she had also been informed that the Chinese were aware of the opportunities here and may have already prepared an exploratory team to establish their own colonies. There could be no delays or snafus on her part. On Earth, almost the entire African continent had come under Chinese dominion, leaving no doubt about the Chinese government’s intentions or competence in this regard.
“Did you study the download from the jumper probe?” Cruz asked. Jag again wondered if Cruz was challenging him, but responded in calm, even tones.
“Most of it. The planet exhibits so many earth-like qualities that I expect we’ll find many plants and animals, maybe even intelligent hominids, which will seem familiar to us.”
“Well, that’s one of the things we wanted to talk to you about,” Cruz replied. “The probe data showed no evidence of industrial activity, but Captain Wilson and I have to determine if there are intelligent species here and what role they might play in the colonization of this planet.”
“How would that affect us?”
“If we were to find a primitive civilization, we would need to evaluate their culture and eventually place it into one of several categories,” Cruz said.
“These would be categories that have already been created by the AIC?”
“Yes,” Wilson said, “the most desirable being category A, in which the indigenous people are judged to be no threat to our colonization and may even have the potential to integrate into the colony. Category A societies are not hard to recognize as such. More than half are matriarchal, and it’s not uncommon for our colonists to eventually adopt some of the native culture. Type B includes those societies whose members are not a threat to colonization, but who are unable to form substantial ties to the colony for whatever reason. They’re the co-existers, and so far, they’re the most commonly encountered type.”
“Is there a category C?” Jag asked. Cruz glanced at the captain before answering.
“Definitely. As you might guess, they’re hostile and implacable. They can’t integrate into our civilization and they resist any human attempt to establish an outpost. They become masters of asymmetric warfare and, in some cases, learn to use our own technology against us. In many aspects, their actions have the markings of a religious war, a defense of sacred territory against invasion by outsiders. There can also be a Darwinian process in which the most brutal and intolerant groups eventually eradicate their more peaceful and tolerant brothers. Sound familiar?”
III
Three females and three males emerged from the dense foliage into the small clearing where Jag had stood only moments before. He had been examining a six foot by two foot patch of soil containing small mushrooms with purple caps when he heard the sound of a flute or similar instrument. Taking cover behind a large rock formation, he watched as a small procession of human-like natives entered the clearing and encircled the small rectangular patch of ground he had been studying.
The females, slightly taller than the males, wore long white robes and gilded tiaras, and their slow deliberate motion suggested to Jag that this was a religious ceremony. The males, thickly muscled underneath sun darkened skin, wore nothing except loincloths.
Jag could have regarded them as human except for a single grotesque facial characteristic. Their eyes were widely separated, giving them a freakish, amphibian appearance. On Earth, this feature would have been attributed to a deforming chromosomal condition. Had the natives not been so humanoid in all other aspects, Jag might not have found them so repugnant. Instead, he saw them as disfigured humans rather than as a species that had evolved naturally in its own environment far from Earth.
Five of the natives knelt, leaving the oldest appearing female standing at one end of the small patch of land in which the purple mushrooms grew, and all began to chant in unison. Jag quickly activated his audiovisual recorder.
When the chanting ended, one of the kneeling females plucked two of the mushrooms growing directly in front of her, and all rose as she brought them to the older female whom Jag took to be their priestess or queen. The older female accepted the mushrooms with reverence, murmured a short prayer, and placed them, one at a time, into her mouth. These she chewed and swallowed. When she finished, all of them left the clearing in single file as they had entered, one of the males again playing the flute-like instrument. But now the queen was not at the front of the procession. She had been placed in the middle, as if under the protection of the group.
When he was certain they had departed and would not return, Jag reentered the clearing and considered harvesting a few of the mushrooms. He could perform a variety of analyses on them and possibly discover why the natives treasured them. He wondered if they contained various tryptamines that might induce religious visions, but if these mushrooms were sacred to the natives, the absence of even a few from a patch this small might be noticeable. Then Jag reminded himself that the only reason he was part of this mission was to function as a botanist. And with that rationalization, he plucked several, being careful to remove them from separate portions of the plot to minimize the possibility that their absence would be noticeable.
IV
“What about the mineral content of the soil?” Wilson asked at morning report. The three of them had finished breakfast, pushed dishes to the side, and were sipping coffee in the ship’s wardroom.
“Not a problem. The ratios of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are favorable for Earth crops, and with some variations in different geographic locales, the levels of trace minerals are also good.”
“And your sampling radius?”
“With the aircycle, I’ve been up to a hundred and twenty miles from the ship.”
“Find anything unusual?”
“Not really, just the two other villages you told me about.”
“You kept your distance?”
“Absolutely.”
“What about your plant cultivation?” Cruz said
“With one exception, very successful. I’ve had no trouble getting Earth plants to take root in the native soil or getting native plants to grow in Earth soil on board the ship.”
�
�And what was the exception?” Cruz asked.
“Well, it’s an oddity. It’s a mushroom with a purple cap, but I can’t cultivate it in Earth or native organic matter. It’s the one the natives were using in that recording I showed you. I sequenced its genome, and it has far more DNA base-pairs than mushrooms and fungi found on Earth. But the patterns of the base-pairs are strange.”
“And what does that mean?” Wilson said.
“Well, I’m still puzzling over it. Maybe we’ll eventually decide that in spite of its morphology, it’s not really a fungus at all. Its nuclei contain over a million base-pairs which don’t fit patterns of any fungus in our database. This suggests that the organism makes enzymes for chemical reactions not used by Earth fungi.”
“But you don’t know what purpose the enzymes serve or why the natives ingest it.”
“Right.” This was a partial lie, but Jag knew better than to tell her everything he had discovered about the purple mushrooms.
After a pause, he asked, “Any news from Earth?” Cruz gave Wilson an inquisitive glance, and when she nodded, he shared the information obtained from a messenger probe that had made the jump from Earth the previous day.
“More of the same - millions dying of starvation overseas, constant military confrontations over fresh water, flooding in coastal regions, record-breaking heat, and more species declared extinct. The evacuation of Australia was completed, but levels of ultraviolet radiation around the world are now approaching those measured down under just a few months ago. Skin cancers and retinal diseases are skyrocketing in spite of all the warnings and precautions.”
“Nothing catastrophic in Kansas?”
9 Tales From Elsewhere 6 Page 13
