Holtzmann nodded. “Of course, well send them samples of the asteroid.”
I had to convince him that what I was about to propose was the only solution. “How do you know they’ll be able to culture it again? What if your bodies hold the only viable members of the life form? Do you want to take a chance on exterminating them forever?”
Holtzmann paled. “You’re not suggesting that we just let it continue to breed in us, as if we were lab animals…”
Amy broke in. “No, well take the bug. We should be able to keep it alive in ourselves, while holding the manifestations down.”
“On conditions,” I added. “Return passage to Earth, of course. And a complete pardon. Or else well let you and the others just bloom until you can’t move. And believe us, they’re ready for a replicatory burst. We both saw it yesterday.”
Holtzmann fingered the gun on the cot beside him, hesitating.
“C’mon, Weegee, face it, it’s a great deal. You can kill us, but you can’t force us to cure you. But if we get what we want, you all walk out healthy. And you’ll have a legitimate reason to replace us with a peeker who’s here because he believes in what you’re doing.”
Holtzmann sat rigid for a minute before speaking. “If you succeed—”
“Oh, we will,” I answered with more confidence than I felt. “I take it we have a deal.”
He was too mad to speak, and could only shake his head.
“I assume you still want to be last,” I told him, just to twist the knife a little. In front of the others, he couldn’t deny it.
Amy and I moved to one of the women. We both placed our hands on her shoulders.
Then we were inside her, working as a team, merging our skills.
This time we shot straight to the stems of the fleshflowers.
For a moment, sharing this patient with Amy, I felt exposed, as I did standing unsuited on the Martian surface. Amy could commit any treachery now, attack me through the channel of our mutual patient. Would our truce hold? Was it real?
It dawned on me that she must be having the same doubts.
Then I didn’t have time to worry anymore.
The first sentries awaited.
Just as in my—our—dream, I pinned the first organism down immobile, and Amy lysed its cell wall.
Novel organelles, unlike anything on Earth, spilled out, trailing rainbow sparks, dying without their cytoplasmic support. I could leave them for the body’s macrophages. I dove into the free-floating nucleus and unspooled its genetic material. The bases were strange, stranger, and they were coiled right-handed, the opposite of all earthly DNA. No wonder it had thrown us. Amy and I studied it for a timeless interval. This look was all we had needed.
Now we could kill. Alone, or together.
We shot through all the nodes of unhealthy, warped flesh, slaughtering invaders by the thousands. We left their carcasses behind us, peeking regenerative changes in the humans that would soon erase all traces of the fleshflowers.
When we were done with the first woman, we moved on to one of the men.
Despite being able to kill the virus separately now, we tackled him and the others together.
It just felt good.
Finally, we had only Holtzmann left.
In the heat of the crisis yesterday, if Holtzmann hadn’t stopped us when we instinctively moved to probe him jointly, he probably would have been cured by now. But he did, and we had tackled the viroids separately, and we had failed. And had enough time to conceive our little blackmail scheme.
He seemed to realize this now, and the knowledge rankled. But he was at our mercy.
Amy and I laid our curative hands right atop four of his blossoms. It was the first time we had touched them. They felt cold and hard, like certain fungi.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
It took no time at all to exterminate Holtzmann’s unwanted guests. All except for a few in the colonies beneath our hands.
At the proper moment we split our flesh, opened up bloodless wounds in our palms, and also in Holtzmann’s fleshflowers. We drove the remaining alien viroids up into our stigmata, and closed the exit.
It was just like slaughtering Indians, and corralling the surviving few on a reservation. What man had always excelled at.
We came back to ourselves.
Holtzmann spoke.
“It’s over,” he said with relief.
“For you,” said Amy.
“But for us,” I said, “it seems to have just begun.”
bookmark:The Mill
This is the most autobiographical story I have ever written. Many of my relatives were employed in New England textile mills, before those milk closed their doors in the wake of, first, the industry’s flight toward cheaper conditions in the southern United States, and, more recently, foreign competition. I myself spent a fair number of summers earning college tuition in such a clangorous, dusty, dangerous setting. But as I try to convey in this story, the old milltown communities—mostly vanished already by the time I encountered their sparse remnants—had their own allure, a kind of tight-knit (pun intentional) camaraderie of the working man, many of whom gratefully fled the uncertainty of rural existences for indoor work and the security of a steady paycheck.
The Industrial Revolution—and hence in a sense science fiction itself—was led by the textile industry and its quest to automate ancient processes. But that era has come and gone. Our world will never see such all-encompassing mills again.
But will the future? Perhaps, perhaps.
In its first draft, this story ended with the fourth section. I owe editor Kim Mohan thanks for urging me to write the necessary coda.
The Mill
1.
Brick dust mottled the still valley air around the noisy scrambling boys, rising and quickly falling like their cries and shouts in thin ragged clouds that puffed from beneath their hands and feet as they clambered clumsily upon the vast irregular pile of broken and discarded bricks. Its dry powdery sunbaked scent—as familiar as the odor of homemade waterwheat bread—filled their nostrils, even as the settling pale orange-red powder layered their dull black clothing, penetrating its very weave and filtering through to veneer their skins with an ineluctable talcum, so that mothers, washing these boys later, would exclaim, “I swear by the Factor’s immortal soul, this brick dust is leaking out from inside you. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover you’re nothing but a human brick yourself!”
But the kettle-filled tub and the scrubbing with smoke-colored sea sponges and the gentle feminine upbraiding would come later, and was not to be worried about now. Now only the mad, ecstatic spirit of competition held sway, raging in their veins like the Swolebourne at flood. On and around the huge tumulus of bricks the boys swarmed, in a single-minded and almost desperate game to reach the top. Hands relinquished their holds to reach for the shirttails of those who surged ahead, to yank them back with savage glee. The boys seemed oblivious to the impact of the corners and edges of the broken blocks on their knees and shins and forearms, intent only on achieving the instant and insurmountable but fleeting glory of standing upon the pinnacle of the heap.
The boys ranged in age from five to just under twelve. No distinction in treatment was made between younger and older, all ages giving and taking equally in the mutual ferocity of the jagged ascent.
Dislodged bricks tumbled down the pile with a resonant clatter, and it seemed as if the pile would soon be leveled before any individual could reach the top. In the next instant, though, one boy emerged above the rest, eluding the outstretched hands that sought to capture him and deny him the top. Bent almost parallel to the slope of the heap he clawed like an animal with hands and boot-shod feet working alike to reach the apex of the mound. Sweat turned the dust upon his face into a crimson paste.
All the boys seemed to realize at once that victory for this upstart was now foregone, all their own chances lost in the sudden burst put on by the boy now nearing the top. Instead of reacting b
adly, they gave in to their natural inclination to cheer an honest victor, and exhortations and encouragements replaced their wordless exclamations of struggle. “Go it, Cairncross!” “Yay, Charley!” “They can’t stop you now, Charles!”
With the cheers of his peers ringing in his ears, the boy reached the top.
His heart was pounding, and he could hardly see. His white sweat-soaked shirt clung to him like the mantle of a cape-wolf. He feared he might faint, but knew also somehow that he would not. It was not destined for his body, the instrument of his victory, after all, to spoil this moment. Getting his feet precariously under himself, he stood erect atop the crumbling mass, panting, bruised, sweaty, triumphant, and surveyed those below him, who had come to a complete cessation of movement, as if they had finally assumed the earthen nature of the brick they had so long played upon.
For the first time in all the years he had been competing in this brutal, vital, irreplaceable game, he had won. He had won. And there could be only one reason why. Tomorrow he turned twelve. When you turned twelve you entered the Mill to work. You played on the bricks no more. This had been his last chance ever to stand here, in unique and poignant relation to his fellows. And he had been granted the privilege. Through some unseen intervention of God or Factor, unwonted energy and determination had flooded his limbs, urging him on to the top, where now he stood with shaky knees. He had won.
For the next twenty years this moment would be the highlight, the indescribable epiphanic summation and measure of Charley Cairncross’s life. Neither his first kiss from his betrothed nor commendation from his superiors; neither the birth of his children nor the praise of the Factor himself would equal this heartbreaking moment.
Moved by a premonition of what this moment meant, under the impulse of forces he could neither identify nor control, Charley, risking a tumble and cracked skull, began to jig and prance, whooping and yelling in a giddy crazy dance atop the bricks, unimpeded by his heavy leather shoes, like a fur-faced South Polar savage gloating over the skulls of his vanquished enemies. The boys below Charley watched in fascination, as the skinny lad flailed his arms and legs about. No one had ever done this before, and they were utterly baffled, but at the same time respectful.
There was no telling how long Charley might have continued his victory dance, had not noontime intervened. From some distance away came the loud tolling of a big bell, echoed up and down the Valley by remoter cousins. Its brazen strokes pealed out, shattering both Charley’s visionary state and the hypnotic trance of his audience. Immediately boys began to descend the heap of rubble, brushing futilely at their clothes.
Charley, recovering from his ecstasy, looked up at the cloudless summer heavens. Several kites and cliff kestrels glided lazily in the depths of the aquamarine heavens. The enormous blue- white sun was directly overhead. Noontime indeed, and lunch still had to be delivered, despite the unique and magnificent events of the day. Not even for transcendence—especially not for transcendence—could the routine of Mill and Valley come to a halt.
Lowering his center of gravity so as not to topple, Charley crabbed backwards down the pile. By the time he reached the ground, all the other boys had already vanished among the houses not far off. Charley hastened after them.
The brick dump lay on the outskirts of Charley’s village, just beyond the outermost houses. In neat, garden-broken ranks the brick bungalows marched alongside the Mill with geometric precision. They clustered familiarly together, despite the abundance of open space in the Valley, as if making a united front against the mystery of the world around them.
By tradition, the master masons of Charley’s village for centuries had dumped their waste here, on the last bit of level cleared ground before the land became wooded and began to slope up, forming the eastern side of the Valley. All the subsequent decades of weathering and decomposition had permeated the original soil with the sterile runoff from the pile, rendering it mostly fruitless. Among the trailing tendrils of discarded brick grew only the hardiest weeds. Sourpeas, their gaudy spring flowers only a memory now, their poisonous yellow pods harvested occasionally as an emetic; dangletrap, its jaws snapping softly on the odd insect; maidenhair, its black tendrils lying wispily atop red shards.… A foot-beaten path, trod by generations of boys, led back to the houses.
Halfway across the waste, the path was intersected at a right angle by a twin-rutted dirt road with a thin grassy median. The road, like the Swolebourne, like the Mill itself, ran north and south, leading in the latter direction down the length of the Valley to where the Swolebourne emerged from its human-made brick shell. Here, new construction was always going on.
Once among the shadows of the somber brick dwellings—each two stories tall and divided by an interior wall so as to house two separate families, whose compact and well-tended garden plots flanked each proud owner’s door, serving in lieu of useless grassy lawn—Charley speeded up his pace. He knew his mother would be waiting for him. More importantly, so would his father.
On the paths threading the village, Charley passed many boys bent on errands identical to his. They had already been home, however, and now raced by carrying tight-lidded tin pails that they swung by their handles, and stone bottles stoppered with ceramic plugs and wire caps, and suspended from twine knotted around the bottlenecks. The stone bottles were slick with condensation, their contents cool from all-morning immersion in the family wells.
Soon Charley reached the doorstep of his house, indistinguishable from all the rest and yet so deeply and immutably known by him as his. A woman with plaited honey-colored hair stood impatiently in the doorway, tapping a foot beneath her long baize skirts and holding his father’s lunchpail and beer crock. The left corner of her lips twitched the big dark beauty spot above it in a familiar gesture of annoyance.
His mother cut off Charley’s attempted explanation of his lateness and disheveled condition. “No excuses, boy. Just get your Da’s meal to him before it gets cold.” Without even stopping, Charley grabbed the pail and bottle and took off.
Down the narrow cindered lanes—which had just lately dried completely after the final spring rains—Charley raced, his tough leather-soled high-topped shoes crunching the grit as if it were rock candy. Eventually he caught up with the other boys, who had not been so far ahead of him after all, and who—by an unconscious and daily urge to gregariousness, as if they were determined to offset now the future semi-isolation they would endure when tending their machines in the Mill—had funneled together from their various starting points and subsequently moved in a jubilant pack through the last shadowy stretch of serried houses. Occasionally a pail would bang up clumsily against one of its mates, eliciting dull clunks and anxious belligerent warnings to “watch out for my Da’s dup, you dodder!” Some boys carried two or more pails, for both brothers and father.
Sighting Charley, many of the boys whooped out fresh congratulations for his recent performance on the brick heap. Several of them mimicked his celebratory dance, infusing it with an absurdity he had surely not felt. Had he really looked so foolish? Or was it the perceptions of his friends that was distorting the reality of what he had experienced? Not for the first time, Charley felt distanced from the other boys. He wondered whether anything as intense as what he had just experienced could ever be truly communicated or understood.…
At last the boys burst out from the maternal embrace of the houses, leaving behind shadow for diamond-hard translucent sunlight that fell sharply on a wide swath of wildflower-spotted, untamed emerald field that stretched away to the Mill. The cindered path continued across this intermediate zone between home and work, heading toward the immense brick structure that was the Mill.
The Mill was ungraspable from this vantage in its entirety, looking merely like a high endless madder-dark windowless wall capped by a mansard roof whose expanse of thick slates looked like the spine of some unknown beast. It stretched to right and left as far as one could see, dividing the Valley like a ruler laid across a bea
r-anthill. Its majestic presence was so much a given, so taken for granted, that the boys truly did not even really see it. Their attention was focused on meeting their fathers.
The boys moved on through the fragrant waist-high unscythed grass, spreading apart a bit, some stopping to investigate a flower or insect, then having to run to rejoin the rest. In a minute or so they had crossed this interzone and entered upon the territory of the Mill proper. Here, as at the brick heap, the ground was bare of anything but the most tenacious and hardy of weeds, due to the accumulation of generations’ worth of waste oil. The smell from the organic detritus—Charley had once heard that the oil came from a special kind of plant that did not grow hereabouts—was dense but not overpoweringly unpleasant, especially to those who had lived with its smell engrained in the creases of their fathers’ rough hands ever since those selfsame hands had first reached to absent-mindedly stroke the new babe in its cradle. The air here smelled rather like slightly rancid fried food.
Charley and the others hurried across this oily waste toward an opening in the Mill’s flank. A wide double-doored portal of thick planks, this entrance was marked by the rising of a clocktower up from the roofline above its location, and also by a heterogenous collection of backless benches scattered around just beyond the entrance. Above the benches, the gilded hands of the clock hung at ten past the hour, scything inexorably toward the inevitable return to work. Under their stern progress, the benches were already filling up with sweaty, hungry, brawny, tired-looking men, and many of their older sons, looking like shrunken or as yet uninflated replicas of their sires.
When the lunch-carriers saw their relatives waiting they picked up their feet even more fleetly and began to cry out like a flock of particularly limited birds. “Da! Da! Da! Da!” The men and workerboys perked up, hearing these youthful voices and knowing their meals had arrived. More and more laborers—those who worked farther inside the depths of the Mill and so had farther to walk for lunch—continued to pour out of the doors.
Strange Trades Page 33
