The Engineer ReConditioned

by Neal Asher

  “Do you know why they are called sugar dogs?” Erlin asked.

  “Because they like sweets,” said Beck.

  “Sugar kills them though.”

  “Yes, it also kills anyone caught feeding it to them.”

  Erlin waited for an explanation.

  He told her, “They are protected by Church and civil law. Anyone caught feeding any form of sugar to a sugar dog is executed by posting.”

  “Posting?”

  “Chained to a flockland post.”

  “Sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “You will soon.” He pointed ahead to a distant object jutting up out of the leaves. They walked in silence until they reached it. Here was a steel post cemented into the ground, from which hung a chain and a steel collar. All around it the leaves were trampled and scattered with chewed human bones. At the base of the post lay half a human skull that had been scraped empty. Erlin quickly grasped what it meant to be posted.

  “The sheep don’t attack Baptisers, so the Church tells us. I don’t believe everything the Church says.” With that Beck drew his gun and checked it, as he had done a number of times since leaving the church. He also made sure the shells in his belt were easily accessible, despite the Gurnard pot hanging at his side.

  “Isn’t that a bit awkward?” asked Erlin, indicating the pot.

  “The discomfort would be greater if I did not carry it,” said Beck. “Let’s keep moving.” He gestured with his gun and then kept it in his hand as they continued walking.

  The sun was a blue-green ellipse on the horizon with the box moon in silhouette just beside it, when they saw their first sheep close to. A flock of twenty of them had trapped a ground skate and were levering up its wings with their claws and biting off chunks of fishy flesh.

  “Sheep are nothing like this on Earth,” said Erlin, then regretted speaking when two sheep turned their curled-horned heads towards her and exposed yellow fangs.

  “Quiet. Keep walking,” Beck whispered.

  The sheep returned to their easy meal and did not pursue.

  “Their heads are like the heads of Earth sheep and they have hooves on their feet, but on Earth, sheep are quadruped. They don’t have claws.” Erlin shivered. “They’re like something out of Christian fable: Satan, or satyrs.”

  “You’ve never seen our sheep before?”

  “No.”

  “Surely, when you came to the church?”

  “I was dropped off there by air transport directly from the port.” Beck was vaguely aware that somewhere there was a spaceport, and he had often seen the transports flying overhead and the occasional flash of a star drive starting up out beyond the moon. It had been his intention to find out about these things. Then the impulse had taken away all his choices. It made him sad and it made him angry. I am only just become a man, he thought, and my life is not to be used to my purpose. He considered suicide and awoke pain in his guts.

  “Tell me about parasites,” he said.

  “Will you listen?”

  “I will there,” he said, pointing at a low stone sheep sanctuary—a building that in another place might have used for protecting sheep from predators, but not here.

  Within the sanctuary, coke was provided for a fire but there was no kindling to set it burning. Erlin started the fire with something that flared red and left burning bars of afterimages in Beck’s eyes. He placed the Gurnard pot near the fire and removed the bung. A dead-fish smell filled the sanctuary, but movement in the pot showed that the Gurnard was not dead. Thankfully the smell of the burning coke soon displaced that smell. Beck and Erlin sat then before the fire and ate from their respective provisions.

  “You know, any fish from Earth would have died in such a container.”

  “Why?”

  “Earth fish require oxygenated water. Your Gurnards require no oxygen whatsoever. Oxygen is in fact deleterious to them, which is why they seek out still water at the end of their journey.”

  “Journey?”

  “I was going to tell you about parasites.”

  “Do so, then.”

  “I am not entirely sure of some aspects. I don’t know why there is only one Baptiser for each church. I can only presume messages are passed by pheromones or some such.”

  “This is about me,” said Beck.

  “Yes.”

  He nodded and Erlin continued. “I’ll describe to you a life-cycle. You know what I mean when I say that?”

  “I am not a complete idiot.”

  “Very well. As I said: The eggs hatch out in the mountain springs. After that males and females travel downstream, in water and on land, to the richer feeding grounds in the lowlands…where the churches are. After it has reached first maturity the female finds a pond—usually recently vacated by another female—and there starts laying unfertilized eggs out of which hatch the neuter parasites. These infect the water supply and end up being ingested by most life forms that drink from the pond. These neuters grow inside their hosts and can, to a certain extent, control them. The neuters are in turn controlled by the females, though I’ve yet to work out the mechanism of that…Second maturity for the female impels it to return to the hatching grounds to lay more eggs there. It is carried by a neuter-controlled host to do this. I believe that at one time the only hosts were sugar dogs, though I am relying on someone else’s research for that information.”

  “I’m a sugar dog,” said Beck. He wanted to explain to Erlin that it felt too dangerous to say outright that he understood.

  She nodded and continued her narrative. “Sugar dogs vomit food into the ponds. The Clergy bring consecrated offerings to the tank room. All are infected.”

  Did that relieve them all of responsibility, Beck wondered, but he said nothing.

  “All this while the males had been feeding in the same areas. The males have a higher resistivity to oxygen and feed mainly on land, on the various blanket funguses. When they reach maturity—they only have one kind—they head for the hatching grounds as well. Males and females from the same hatching do not return at the same time, which prevents interbreeding. Upon arriving at the hatching grounds, the females get their neuter carriers to place them in the waters. In those waters they lay eggs, usually attaching them to the bottom, to rocks, in the sand. The males, by the time they are mature, are usually averse to water and too big to get all the way to the hatching grounds. They release sperm packets which travel alone to the mountain springs to burst in the water in which eggs have been laid.”

  “Water worms,” said Beck. “No one I know ever had a reasonable explanation for that. In some places they call them suicide worms. It never made any sense to me.”

  “Well, you have the sense now. They have one purpose in their brief lives and that is it.”

  “What are the males?”

  “We saw one today.”

  Beck nodded. “Of course—ground skate.” He felt slightly sick. So there was something inside him, jamming its spines into his guts. He realised some other things as well.

  “The Eucharist, that’s when we get infected.”

  “Quite likely.” Erlin slipped into her sleeping bag and rested her head back against her pack. “I imagine that right about now the Wife of Ovens is having the ponds around the church netted in search of the Reborn Gurnard. Of course it won’t be found until that one,” she pointed at the pot, “is out of the area. Adolescent Gurnards don’t encroach on a mature Gurnard’s territory. Perhaps in the past they were killed, or perhaps it is because the hosts are all used up. I don’t know.” Beck rolled himself in his blanket. He had the answer; the eighth moon netting of the ponds and the killing of the Gurnard Ghosts. That then was just the killing of immature Gurnards. He told Erlin about this.

  “Yes, that makes sense,” she replied. “Once established in its territory the new gurnard sends out the neuter-controlled hosts to kill off the competition, and keeps killing off the competition. I take it this netting and killing is continuous?”

  �
�Every eighth moon,” Beck confirmed. Then he asked, “What about the neuters left behind—from the old gurnard?”

  “They die, their purpose served. Most of their hosts survive it, and survive to become hosts to the next Holy Gurnard.”

  Beck thought about the priest coughing up blood in the church and it took him a long time to get to sleep. He lay there listening to the sheep sharpening their claws on the stone walls and tried to come to terms with harsh truths.

  There were no windows for morning light, but it did filter through cracks in the walls. Beck was beginning to feel discomfort as the impetus to move on grew in strength, when the door crashed open and figures crowded into the single room. For a moment he thought that sheep had learned to operate the locks and in panic groped for his gun. A heavy boot came down on his wrist and the butt of a heather wood staff pressed on the centre of his chest to hold him down.

  “Do not struggle, Baptiser. I do not wish to strike you.”

  Beck recognised the two thugs from the church. One of them had Erlin pinned in her sleeping bag, the barrel of a gun, much like Beck’s own, pressed against her forehead. After them, momentarily silhouetted in the doorway, came Morage, grinning unpleasantly. Morage was a master of unpleasant grins.

  “Oh Baptiser, you have a travelling companion. Even the Wife will not berate me for my actions now. The Baptiser must seek loneliness and purity in prayer,” he said.

  “Sugar dog crap,” said Beck. The thug holding him pinned was uncomfortable with such blasphemous profanity. Morage turned his attention to the thug who was holding Erlin.

  “Let her up.”

  Erlin kicked out of her sleeping bag and stood up carefully, her gaze locked on the barrel of the gun.

  “Now, Earther,” said Morage. “I want you to undo your belt and drop your weapon to the floor.” This Erlin did and Morage grinned his unpleasant grin again. “Now I want you to empty your pockets of all those wonderful gadgets.” Erlin began to do this also, dropping device after device on her pack.

  “This is not about religion. This is robbery,” said Beck.

  “Be silent, Sirus Beck, I will deal with you presently,” said Morage without turning.

  “You would delay me?” asked Beck, expecting some result of his query, perhaps some wince of pain from their captors.

  Morage turned and grinned nastily at him. “I suppose she has told you all about the parasites?” Morage’s grin got nastier when he saw Beck’s surprise. “Do you think such knowledge would be lost to us? The Wives know, as do all members of the Inquisition. It is best that we are the only ones to know. You see, we keep ourselves pure, and we never truly take part in the Eucharist.”

  “You are free of neuter parasites,” said Erlin.

  Morage glanced at her.

  “Yes, as are my friends here,” he gestured at the two thugs, “which means there are things we can do that so many others in the Church cannot do.”

  Erlin shot a warning look at Beck, but he did not need it. He knew that Morage intended to kill the both of them. He noted that the thugs were uncomfortable with what was just beginning to occur to them. Well they might be; there probably had not been a Baptiser in their lifetimes, and now they might be told to kill one.

  “Strip that garment from her,” Morage instructed the one who held Erlin at gunpoint. “I don’t want to have missed anything before she goes to the post.”

  Lying where he was Beck had a view of the door and realised that no-one else was looking in that direction. He swore at his captor to keep his attention. The thug became even more uncomfortable. The other thug was reaching for Erlin when Morage screamed.

  The sheep had come in quickly and sunk its yellow teeth into Morage’s upper arm. Beck knocked the staff from his chest, caught the foot of his captor and shoved him off-balance. There was a flash of red between Erlin and the other. A hand, severed and smoking at the wrist, thudded on the floor still clutching a gun. Beck came up onto his feet holding his own gun as he was grabbed. He sunk the barrel deep into a fat belly and pulled the trigger once. With a muffled boom and a horrible grunting sound, his attacker went up off his feet before thumping face down on the floor. Beck turned, saw the sheep fleeing from the sound of the weapon, saw Morage on his knees cradling an arm from which all the flesh had been stripped between shoulder and elbow. He was screaming. Beck pulled the trigger again and Morage flipped backwards out of the door, most of his head left on one of the door posts. One shot left. White shapes beyond the door baaing and snarling over Morage’s corpse. Time. Beck turned. Erlin was back up against the wall, her face pale. The one left was trying to take his gun from his severed right hand with his left, while the stump of his right wrist squirted blood. He looked up, began to yell, the bullet went into his chest then out from his back, folding out one shoulder blade like an escape hatch. The impact threw him at Erlin’s feet where he made bubbling sounds and died. Time. Beck cracked open his gun, pulled hot shell cases from their chambers, the skin of his finger-tips sizzling, put in three fresh rounds. He did not allow himself to think of anything else until he had done this. Then he stepped towards the door, shooting the first sheep as it came in, trapping the head of the second in the door as it tried to follow, shooting it through the eye then managing to get the door closed against the rest of the flock. Locking the door.

  “Sirus…Sirus.”

  The thumping and battering against the door was shortlived. Beck rested there with his forehead against the wood, trying to get his breathing under control. Shit, that had been close. When sheep went into a feeding frenzy, God help anyone who got in the way.

  “Sirus.”

  What the hell does she want now? Look after herself. Hah.

  Beck turned and regarded Erlin. She stood in the middle of the room, distaste writ on her features. She pointed down by the fire. It hit him at once; the wrenching tearing in his gut. The pot was spilled, and the Gurnard lay on the stone, bulbous stalked eyes blinking, mouth gaping occasionally, spines fanned out around its head. Before he knew what he was doing Sirus scooped it up and put it in its pot, oblivious to the spines piercing his fingers. He then emptied his water canteen in it. It wasn’t enough. He took up the pot and headed for the door.

  “They’ll kill you if you go out there. I’m sorry about this,” said Erlin. What is she talking about?

  As he reached the door something hit him like a falling wall and a bright and painful light took him away. Having filled the pot with water Beck corked it. As he did this he felt himself coming back to normality, gaining some control over his actions. He put the pot aside and knelt there with his hands resting on the fronts of his thighs. He felt tired and his head ached.

  “I’m back now. I’m in control,” he said.

  “Then you can carry your own pack,” she said, and his pack thumped down next to him. He’d woken still under the same powerful impetus. He’d picked up the pot, opened the door, and taken the Gurnard to the nearest source of water. He shivered at the thought of what would have happened had he gone out the door the first time, when the sheep were in feeding frenzy. He’d noted but had not been concerned about the blood, the few fragments of bone, clothing, and one chewed sandal which was all that remained of Morage. He turned to face Erlin, who was sitting wearily on the near-petrified stump of a tree that had fallen when this area had been forest, and when the sheep had walked on four hooves.

  “You can have your blood sample,” he said.

  “I already took it,” said she.

  “What did you learn?”

  “Not much, I merely confirmed.”

  “Can you free me?”

  “Possibly. Are you sure you want to be free?”

  “Yes,” said Beck vehemently.

  “Let’s eat,” said Erlin. “Then we can move on.”

  Beck agreed. They unpacked their supplies and ate their food. When it came to drink, Erlin filled a small container with water in which it boiled in moments.

  “You drink boiled water
from now on,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know how long the neuter parasites encyst for.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You could be rid of one only to be already carrying its successor inside you.”

  “I see.”

  After eating, drinking, and resting for a while they moved on. They reached the next sanctuary in darkness, watched by the night-glow of sheep eyes.

  “Did you leave the door to the other sanctuary open?”

  “Yes.”

  Erlin understood him perfectly. There would be nothing to incriminate by the time anyone else came to that place. She spoke with Beck for a little while about parasites and ways to get rid of them, then she watched him while he slept. It was her turn to find it difficult to sleep. What was she? Ten times older than him, yet she had never experienced such violence. She had frozen back there and it shamed her, shamed her so much she was now prepared to interfere, prepared to do something about the parasite he carried. She owed him at least that.

  “Why are the sheep like they are here?” asked Beck when the mountains were in sight.

  “I don’t have all the answers. Don’t make that mistake.”

  “Perhaps your guess would be better than mine though.”

  Erlin smiled before replying. “Livestock was brought to worlds like this, worlds with indigenous life, in what was called genetically plastic form. That means that they are able to adapt to environments very quickly. From what I have seen, grass did not take here and most of the other plants are highly toxic. The sheep adapted. They became carnivores rather than herbivores. As to the details…”