The Galactic Circle Veterinary Service

by Stephen Benjamin

  More radially arranged, tentacle-like appendages poked out from the base. The creature was a mottled red-brown that shaded more toward red at the necks. The inside of the mouths was the color of human blood.

  “Cute bastards, aren’t they?” Grof said.

  I shuddered and turned to Petor. “Are these things dangerous?”

  “Not usually.”

  “What in hell is that supposed to mean?”

  I stepped back to the edge of the clearing. So did Fur. The thing had done nothing but sit there, yet it raised an instinctive fear and loathing in me. Fur’s frown was prodigious.

  “It is quiescent now and no danger,” Petor said. “But some have attacked and eaten our livestock.”

  “How in hell could this thing catch a cow?” I demanded.

  “Um, just before this stage.”

  “This stage?” My voice rose.

  Before I could speak again, Fur’s deep voice asked, “Just what is the problem here, Petor? What is it you haven’t told us?”

  Petor physically cringed as he answered. “You see, they are also, er, eating people.”

  “What?” Fur and I exclaimed simultaneously.

  “They have taken to attacking and eating colonists. This has never happened before in our two hundred years of colonization. We don’t know why.”

  Both Fur and I edged farther away from the beast. Who knew how fast it could move when it wanted to? I glanced behind me to be sure I had not encroached on some other Ulmian monster.

  “Have you provoked them?” Fur asked.

  Petor shook his head. “Not that we are aware. Their nervous system is not as complex as in animals. Responses to stimuli are quite slow in comparison, but still far faster than the responses of Terran plants or even the non-mobile Ulmian plants. They are hunters, but their normal prey is sessile vegetation. Their movement is slow. Slower than a large tortoise.”

  That was a relief. Even I could run faster than that.

  “The first attack occurred two years ago. We thought the person stupidly got in front of a feeding hydra, and the beast could not distinguish between its normal diet and the unfortunate farmer. Then there were other incidents scattered over the next year. We puzzled over that, but still did not see it as a general pattern. Now, it appears that the hydras have taken to hunting people and animals, um, deliberately.”

  I stared at the hydra. Given Petor’s history, my mental picture of what it could do to a person was no longer so imaginary. I almost felt the teeth as they rended my flesh. First, they would eat off my arms, then my legs, like some giant gingerbread man.

  Fur’s voice interrupted my descent into daymare. Ever practical, he asked, “How can these things hunt people if they are so slow?”

  “They position themselves at doorways during the night. Then they, er, grab someone as they emerge in the morning. Once they have seized a person, unless help is immediate, it is too late. The mouths bite off anything they touch. Usually, um, several places at once.”

  Why this was so much worse to me than any other form of violent death, I didn’t know, but it was.

  “But as slow as they move, that’s got to be disaster for the hydra as well as for the person,” I said.

  “True,” Petor said. “The hydra is dispatched by rescuers, but the damage is done.”

  “Okay, so these things know enough to set up an ambush, but they can’t connect actions and consequences, that they’ll be killed if they do that.”

  Petor nodded. “There is more that I must tell you. I said that they are not dangerous at this stage...” He motioned with his head toward the creature in front of us.

  “You did say something about stages,” murmured Fur. His instinctive horror of these monsters seeped past my shields and added to my own queasiness.

  “Yes. It is just before the stage you see here that the hydras are most mobile and, um, dangerous. Once that stage passes, the creatures become sessile and their headstalks become rigid. They stay paralyzed like this one and die. We have no idea why any of this has occurred. That is the reason why we asked you to come to Ulm.”

  I asked, “These ‘stages’ you mention, are they a normal phase for the hydras?”

  “We did not start evaluating their behavior until after attacks began, but nothing like this was reported before.”

  I thought for a moment. “This one seems pretty dormant. You say it’s paralyzed. Can I examine it without risking my ass?”

  “Well, I should think so.”

  I took Petor’s ringing endorsement of my safety into account and picked up a seedpod. I stopped and said, “Oops. I didn’t ask whether this was dangerous or not.” I waved the pod at Petor.

  “Well, no, but ask before you touch anything else.”

  “Right.” I flung it at the hydra and hit one of the necks. Not so much as a tremor.

  I decided to approach Hell’s representative on Ulm. I kept my sphincters clenched and moved to within an arm’s length of the thing. So far, so good. I reached out and touched its trunk. Nothing. I felt up and down the side I could reach. It felt like any other plant stem I could recall, smooth with a slightly fuzzy surface, some sort of hairs for transpiration, I supposed. That brought to mind another question.

  “Do these things move around all the time or do they set down roots?”

  “When they are young, they begin as a rooted plant. When mature, they become mobile. They have never been observed, um, taking root after that. They just stop moving.”

  “How do they get water if they don’t have roots?” Fur asked.

  “We assume they get everything they need from their, um, prey.”

  Fur continued. “If the biochemistries between the Ulmian and Terran species are incompatible, how can they eat and utilize humans? Or cattle?”

  “We surmise that the reason they go immobile and die is because we are toxic to them.”

  “So why in hell are they eating us?” Fur’s voice rose as he spoke.

  While I mulled over this information, I walked around the hydra. There did not appear to be any back or front. I reached up again and ran my hand over one neck. I could have sworn it twitched. My leap away from the hydra might have put me in contention for the interstellar Olympic broad jump—if they had a backwards category—and if I hadn’t slammed into Fur’s massive body.

  “Did you see that?” I screeched. “It twitched. It’s alive.”

  “Well, yes,” Petor said. “I said it was dying, not dead. Decomposition is rapid when they die. They lose color within minutes. Ulmians have evolved to return to the ecosystems very, um, efficiently.”

  Fur muttered, “So, colorless, dead; colorful, alive. That helps.”

  There was no further activity from the hydra, so I walked up to it again. Fur accompanied me and ran his hands over the trunk and the necks.

  “I feel no movement,” he said.

  “It’s probably afraid of you,” I answered.

  He did not respond. He could reach quite a bit higher than I could and extended his hand almost to the mouths without eliciting any reaction from the beast. I wouldn’t have done that.

  “How long will it stay like this?” Fur asked.

  “We are not sure. They have been observed in this state for as much as three days.”

  I pointed to a large branch that had fallen from a nearby tree. I looked at Petor. “That okay to use?”

  He nodded.

  I grabbed the branch, wound up, and whacked the hydra in the side of the trunk.

  Fur let out a squawk. “What in blazes are you doing?”

  Grof laughed.

  I watched the hydra before I answered. It moved neither leaf nor stem. “I wanted to see if this thing would object.”

  I threw the branch at one of the heads. It bounced off the open mouth. Again, no reaction. I perceived no emotional aura from the hydra. This could be because it was too far-gone, or because it was a plant. My talent did not work with Terran plants.

  “Good enough. Pe
tor, if these things decompose so fast, we need a live one to start with if I’m going to do a dissection.”

  “Yes. I would think so.”

  “I want one in this stage, where it does not respond to external stimuli. Can you get one to our ship? Or can we transport His Stiffness here to that location? I need our instrumentation.”

  “We will have a, um, specimen for you tomorrow.”

  As we walked back to the whirlydrone, I shook my head to clear a strange fuzziness in my mind that accompanied the buzzing in my ears. The odors nauseated me. I would be glad to get away from these plants.

  ***

  Except for some green mottling over its trunk, this hydra seemed identical to the first specimen I had seen. The beast had been whirlydroned to the spaceport and deposited near the GCVS. Onlookers, including spaceport personnel and a large contingent of military types, surrounded us. One character with lots of braid on his shoulders barked orders to everyone. I ignored him until he pushed his way to my side. The side away from the hydra, I noted.

  “Are you going to tell us why these things have attacked our people?” he demanded.

  I glanced at him. “Maybe.”

  He harrumphed. “What do you mean, maybe? We brought you here for that reason.”

  His arrogance nettled me. I turned to him. “Look, Sir. I came because you people asked me to assist. You haven’t been able to learn anything useful, from what I gather. I’ll do my best. I can’t promise any more.”

  “But we are paying you—”

  Steckel pushed his way through what had become a military cordon. “General? Petor Steckel.” He held out his hand, which the general ignored. “We are pleased you were able to, um, attend. Dr. Berger is being most helpful. Why don’t we allow him to do his work? Yes?”

  It surprised me that the general allowed Steckel to lead him off. Maybe Steckel had more clout than his personality suggested.

  Levi had toured the city on one of his usual espionage jaunts. This was his first chance to see a hydra, and it left his usually red face more of an ashen gray. “This cannot be a Godly creature,” he muttered.

  I ignored him and looked around. “Do I just start cutting on it? Does anyone know if it feels pain?”

  “I know plants can react to outside stimuli, but they don’t feel pain, do they?” Fur asked.

  One bystander piped up, “My ma used to talk to plants and said they had feelings. Does that count?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Thanks, I’ll take that into consideration.”

  Even if it did feel pain under normal circumstances, the tree-branch whacking I had given the other one suggested it should not be an issue now. But a paralyzed human or animal might feel pain and not respond to it. Argh. Worrying about this had paralyzed me.

  “Get that crane over here and let’s lay that thing on the ground.”

  That done, Steckel returned. Alone. Fur and I approached the hydra. I had a knife and Fur wielded a small cutting laser. We both wore isolation suits but breathed ambient air. Based on Petor’s description of the trumpet flower, I worried about the toxicity or corrosiveness of the thing’s fluids. I made a cut across one of the base tentacles. The consistency was like a piece of very soft wood. Pink fluid oozed from the cut. It had a sharp, nutty, but not unpleasant odor. I dropped a piece in preservative fluid.

  A deep vertical cut in the trunk with the laser yielded more ooze; lots of it—sort of like blood-tinged sap. I hoped that this particular specimen had eaten a cow, not a human. I shuddered.

  The internal tissues were uniform except for some longitudinal tubes that looked too much like blood vessels for my comfort. I took more samples for preservation. Just below the necks, my efforts hit pay dirt.

  “Look here. The tubes are larger.” Even more sap exuded from the cut surfaces. “And there are solid white ones, too.”

  “I’ll bet you anything that those tubes are a circulatory system,” Fur said. “And maybe the solid white cords are the nervous system.”

  A cut in one of the necks revealed a hollow central tube about as large as my wrist.

  “Aha. Feeding tube, I’ll bet,” I said. “There’s got to be a stomach of some kind where these come together from all nine necks.” I gave Fur pieces of esophagus to preserve.

  “Shit,” I cried. “The thing is starting to lose color. It’s dying.”

  I cut samples from around the mouth and threw them to Fur. I cut out a couple of teeth, then stopped.

  “What the hell is that?” I looked at a coiled black rope. Its surface was smooth and it glistened. I followed the coils with my eyes and saw that the rope disappeared down the throat into the neck. Even as I watched, the inky blackness paled to gray. Fast decomposition didn’t even begin to describe this process.

  “Good lord. I think it’s a tongue,” I said. “How can a plant have a tongue? And we haven’t seen any organs of vision. How in hell can these things get around without eyes?”

  Fur walked over to a mouth, reached in, and dragged out a tongue. I shuddered again. I would not have done that.

  I heard a retching sound and when I turned, Levi had disappeared.

  The front end of the tongue was as thick as two of Fur’s fingers, and tapered to a point. He pulled it hand over hand until he had a three or four body lengths stretched out. The tongue’s middle was as thick around as his wrist. Now, the whole carcass slumped like a grotesque mound of melting ice cream.

  “I’ve wondered how they captured prey,” he said.

  “Prehensile tongue? What other surprises do these things have for us, Petor?” I demanded. “We were well within the thing’s range where we stood yesterday.”

  He cleared his throat and looked away. “We have observed the hydras feeding, so we know about the, um, tongues. But I assure you they are no danger when they become, er, immobile.”

  “So you say.” Schmuck. I turned back to the hydra. “You’re a bundle of surprises, aren’t you?”

  I made a few more cuts where the necks swelled as they merged with the trunk. Delving downward, I hit an empty cavity, likely the stomach. Below that I hit a node of soft, white tissue with a cauliflower-like shape. The thin threads of white that looked like nerves spread out from there.

  “I haven’t found anything that looks like a circulatory pump,” I said, “but this will be hydra soup in a few minutes.” I looked at Petor. “What do we do with this mess?”

  “It will be gone by morning. Just a bit of, um, staining on the ground.”

  I shook my head. “Every species we meet seems to get weirder. Let’s get those samples to the lab and see what we can find out.” I looked at Petor. “I’d like to have a chance to see the hydras in the wild. Normal and abnormal ones. Can we do that?”

  Petor grimaced. “It might be, um, dangerous. But if you need to.”

  “Yeah, I need to. And you make sure that it’s not dangerous...to me.”

  ***

  Levi and Fur looked over my shoulder as I examined the photomicroscopic image on the screen.

  “The tubes are some sort of circulatory system. These cells surrounding the tubes are muscle, just like our own smooth muscle cells.”

  “But we still need our heart to pump blood,” Levi said. “Don’t we?”

  “We do, but maybe these things don’t. They probably have low fluid pressures in this vascular system and don’t need a heart to get enough pressure to move the sap. Rooted plants suck up water from the soil. This gives pressure for the upward movement of fluid from roots to leaves, but that’s not enough for tall plants or trees. The pores on leaves must be open to take in carbon dioxide for photosynthesis and they constantly lose water to the atmosphere. The water loss causes negative pressure that helps draw the water up from the roots.

  “I think this is a combination of factors. The adult hydra may harvest its water from whatever it eats, but there still has to be circulation. We can see here that each hair on the surface contains tubes just below it. I’d say the hydra loses water t
o transpiration through the hairs, and this helps the fluid move through the body. If the muscle cells direct movement of fluid, they can use that to help them move the root tentacles. That gives them mobility. Also, the directed fluid movement is likely to make the movement of the necks and mouths possible.”

  “And the tongues?” asked Levi. His slight nausea as he spoke affected me, too, but he seemed interested despite his usual disdain for anything nonhuman. Maybe he didn’t have to worry about souls in plants.

  “There, I’m not so sure,” I replied. “That movement would have to be rapid, from the descriptions of attacks on prey. I don’t think fluid movement could account for that.”

  “That’s where the nervous system would come in,” Fur said. “They have to have some way to interact with their environment, to perceive the presence of prey, and to get them to move in that direction. The white mass and fibers look like nervous tissue. But we still have found nothing that resembles eyes.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “how do they perceive their environment? No eyes or ears rules out sight and sound. I suppose that taste is possible with that tongue, but that doesn’t get them from place to place. Touch is possible. The root tentacles are in contact with the ground and other vegetation. But that still doesn’t get them to prey that’s a distance away.”

  “That leaves smell,” Fur said. “I can see how the hydra could operate on scent. Prey plants might emit distinctive molecules that the hydra homes in on. Since the prey plant is rooted, it doesn’t matter if it takes the hydra all day to cover a hundred meters. It will get there eventually and eat the emitter. That could even explain how it homes in on people if we are stationary all night.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “we give off enough noxious fumes to attract a variety of predators.”

  Fur chuckled. “Nice image. Maybe you should lay off the garlic on Ulm?”

  I did not grace him with an answer. “Let’s see if we can find anything that resembles chemoreceptor cells.”