Sentenced to Prism

by Alan Dean Foster

  Evan recalled his earlier thought, about heat raising the conductivity of silicon. "Is that why you joined me? Not for the protection of the cave but for my body heat? Did I enable you to stay powered up for an extra hour or two?"

  He shrugged, ate his breakfast, and then carefully washed out the foil packet it had come in. The foil would make a serviceable cup to complement his broken piece of bubble grass. After stowing the makeshift utensils in his pack, he donned his crude sunshade. The throbbing which the rising sun had induced behind his eyes began to fade as the reflective glare from the surrounding growth was reduced.

  Odd, but he felt he could see the bizarre shapes a little more clearly now, could perceive the fractal surfaces in greater detail— though he still had trouble telling where some ended and others began.

  Throughout his breakfast his alien companion had neither moved nor displayed anything resembling intelligence. Idiot, he chided himself. If anything on Prism had the brains of a rat it would be a scientific revelation. His desires and emotions had momentarily overcome his good sense. There was nothing on this sterile world to keep him company, even inadvertently. Out of a desire for companionship he was ascribing characteristics to this particular creature which it did not possess. The inhabitants of this world were as much machine as animal.

  You couldn't even say that such an automaton was alive, in the normal sense of the term. Was a solar-powered surveyor alive? Did it have a soul? True, other worlds had provided some extreme examples of divergent intelligent evolution, but however outré their basic design, all such examples of known lifeforms were fashioned of flesh and blood.

  Time enough for such speculation when he'd completed his current search. If he located the Ophemert beacon within the next couple of days, all well and good. if not, he intended to start back toward the station to begin the serious business of somehow getting in touch with his rescue team.

  Checking his position by the sun, he chose a course and started off into the fantastically colored forest. As he did so the giant blue caterpillar behind him generated a series of loud buzzes and ambled off in his wake. After walking a dozen meters or so and noting that this peculiar silicate shadow was no coincidence, Evan halted. So did the caterpillar. Raised up off its first two pairs of legs, it regarded him out of cold glass eyes, apparently waiting for him to resume his march. The yellow cilia on its back swung around to face the sun.

  Was it following him because it was attracted to him, or in hopes he would die and provide it with a harmless source of rare minerals? He shrugged. "All right, tag along if you want, but give me my room." It pleased him to talk at the creature if not to it. Understanding was a moot point. The caterpillar had no ears.

  It couldn't match his stride, but with five times as many legs it managed to keep up with him. Gradually it drew nearer, until it was paralleling instead of following him. Most of the time it kept its gaze fastened to its own course, but from time to time it would glance up and over to check his position to make sure he was still there.

  It occurred to Evan that it might be waiting for nightfall again, and the comfort of his body heat. Well, he had no objection to sharing his sleep with the creature. By now he was pretty much convinced of its harmlessness.

  A bed warmer, he mused. That's what my status has been reduced to on this crazy world. A simple heat engine.

  Any kind of benign company was welcome. Besides, if something dangerous prowled these glass woods at night, perhaps his new companion would react to its presence and awaken him.

  The heat engine and the caterpillar alarm. Better material for a poem than a dissertation on xenobiology.

  Chapter Seven

  The long day wended its way toward evening. Nothing plunged from the sky or the cascalarians and condarites to smash him flat. Nothing charged from the forest to crush him beneath massive silicate paws. The acid-spitters left him alone; the quartz-eaters ignored him as they browsed contentedly on fields of citrine and chalcedony.

  His initial terror at moving about without the protection of a proper suit had almost vanished. He was more confident than ever. All you had to do to avoid harm on this world, he decided, was simply to exercise a little prudent judgment and work to stay out of trouble's way, and you would be left in peace to continue your journey. Traveling without the encumbrances of an MHW was not only possible; it could be educational and invigorating. He wasn't dead, had no prospects of immediately entering that state, and was making good progress toward the location of the beacon.

  As he walked he tried to estimate the distance he'd covered since abandoning his suit. It was impressive, if he did say so himself. So pleased was he that he decided to treat himself to an early supper of real food.

  Neither pool nor stream was close at hand, but he wasn't especially thirsty. A brief search for a place to relax turned up a shallow depression beneath an entirely new growth.

  Instead of branches or leaves or the torus of the cascalarians, this new plant consisted of broad pink plates growing from the ends of short, thick stems. Each plate was about four centimeters thick and more than two meters in diameter. They grew one atop the other, competing for space and for access to sunlight. This particular growth had opted for several large photoreceptors instead of hundreds of smaller ones.

  Evan scrunched down into the shade they provided and took his time with his food. When he'd finished he packed away the debris and lay down beneath the translucent pink plates. With the sun behind them, he found he could now make out the delicate tracery of individual substructures within each plate, the network that drew energy from the sun and delivered it to the thick stems rooted in the ground.

  Rose-colored glasses, he thought, recalling an ancient rhyme. He was looking at the whole world through gigantic rose-colored glasses. The plates provided so much shade that he found he was able to remove his effective but uncomfortable sunshade. Thus screened, he was able to see around him so long as he was careful not to look directly at any of the highly reflective growths that ringed his resting place. It was a relief to get the knot of plastic off the back of his head.

  He lay there, content and confident, while his food was digested. An hour's siesta didn't seem out of the question.

  When the hour was up he prepared to resume his trek. The only trouble was that he couldn't. He twisted hard. His legs wouldn't budge. It was all he could do to sit up. He looked down at his suddenly immobile legs. What he saw made him want to vomit.

  Something, or rather some things, were moving about beneath his pants legs. It was a sinuous, rippling motion, smooth and supple. As he stared, little dots of red began to stain the beige of his lower clothing. Blood.

  His blood. It had to be, because he'd seen nothing to indicate that any of Prism's inhabitants possessed anything in their bodies like that rich red, unmistakable fluid. He felt no pain.

  Reaching out and down, he slapped at his right leg. Several twisting, curling shapes burst through the thin material of his pants. None was thicker around than his little finger.

  The worms were the same color as the sandy soil he was lying on. Indeed, they were composed of the same elements as that soil. Half a dozen of them were snaking up each leg of his pants, linked to one another head to tail by means of powerful little suckers. Two were linked head to side.

  He leaned over and looked at his left side. More worms there, dozens more, fastened tightly to one another in a living net that was binding him with increasing strength to his place of rest. And more of them emerging to join their brethren every minute.

  The soil all around and beneath him was alive, rippling with the movements of hundreds of anxious, hungry shapes.

  Horror lent strength to his efforts. He gave a tremendous jerk with his legs and succeeded in wrenching the left one free. Linked worms flew in all directions. As soon as they struck the ground they began crawling back toward him, joining in lengths off twos and threes in expectation of re-forming the cocoon around him.

  Yet Evan couldn't pull
his right leg free of the ground. Twisting around onto his belly, he scrabbled at the earth, trying to reach the nearest stem of the plants shading him. His tranquil resting place had all the hallmarks of becoming his coffin, and a particularly revolting one at that, unless he could pull or push himself loose.

  The stem was far out of reach. Sitting up again, he tried to grab one of the overhanging plates, just did manage to grasp the lowest. Hope turned to powder along with the plate, however, as it disintegrated in his hand. Like so much of Prism's flora it was far more fragile than it appeared. Frantic now, he started looking for a rock, wishing he'd kept one in his pack. Nothing was within reach but fine sand.

  His silent attackers re-established their grip on his freed leg, and this time it didn't seem likely he'd be able to pull it free. From the knees down both of his legs were stained with blood. It suddenly occurred to him that the mineral salts in his blood were what the worms were after. He'd be willing enough to share it with them if they'd just let him go. But why should they have to share, he thought wildly, when they could have it all? They would pin him down until they'd drained him of the last drop and then abandon him to the scavengers. First his skin would be dissolved and digested, then the calcium-rich bones.

  He found a small rock, began battering away at the living chains encircling his thighs. But the worms were made of stronger stuff than their terrestrial cousins. They were neither soft and pulpy nor brittle like the growth beneath which he was being patiently devoured. They were flexible, rubbery, and tough as bundles of silicate fibers. When he finally did manage to kill one by smashing its head, two more appeared to take the dead worm's place.

  Evan was leaning on his left arm, flailing away with the rock in his right hand, when three worms popped out of the ground, linked together, and encircled the thumb of his supporting hand. With a cry, he turned and pounded them back into the soil. More appeared in the wake of the initial trio. It dawned on him that he'd chosen to lie down in a hive or nest of the loathsome creatures. The commotion caused by his resistance was awakening more and more of them, excited by the activity and the taste of fresh food. If they managed to tie his hands down he'd be utterly helpless.

  Though he was losing blood slowly, the worms had been at it long enough to have drained a pint or more out of him. He was weakening just when he needed strength. Evan, however, was not the type to concede any argument, least of all that acknowledging his own demise. He kept bashing away with his wholly inadequate weapon.

  Somehow he had to free his legs before he passed out. But with his increasing weakness, his aim and the force with which he delivered his blows were failing him and he was hitting himself as often as his targets. He put his left hand down to balance himself again, raised the rock high over his head, and promptly fell backward as his left arm was yanked out from under him. Thirty or more worms had formed a double-thick cable to pull him down.

  He twisted onto his left side and tried to knock them away. On the third blow the rock slipped out of his hands. Exhausted, he lay there breathing hard and contemplating the tiny lifeform which had defeated the finest mind humanity had to offer. Not for Evan Orgell false modesty even in the face of imminent death.

  Strange how calm he suddenly was. Composed. His greatest disappointment was that he wouldn't live long enough to study the exact nature of his passing.

  What a stupid, ridiculous way to die, he thought tiredly. After surviving a broken MHW suit and a host of dangerous alien lifeforms. Brought down by a colony of communal worms. Food for worms, true enough. But that wasn't supposed to be the case until after you'd been dead for a while. The worms weren't supposed to hurry the inevitable. Of course, these weren't terran worms. They hadn't been instructed in their proper place in the scheme of things.

  They had him pinned to the ground the way the Lilliputians had tried to pin Gulliver, and they'd done a much better job of it. He passed out.

  The sun was high in the sky but in the wrong place when he opened his eyes again. He was excruciatingly tired, more than he'd ever imagined being. It went beyond exhaustion. There was about and throughout his body a numbness that belonged to inorganic things like rocks and metal, not poor flesh and blood.

  And blood. He raised his head and looked down at himself. From the knees down his pants were gone, torn away by some agency unknown. He could see the worm scars clearly, long and thin and caked with dried blood. He had no idea how much they'd sucked out of him, but evidently not enough to kill him.

  The pink photoreceptors that had shaded him were gone. His unprotected eyes squeezed together to shut out the unbearably bright light, but he could still make out things in his immediate vicinity. He was lying beneath a growth that looked very much like a normal tree. Closer inspection revealed it to be plated with long strips of brown silica, but it had a green heart. He tried hard to tell himself it was made of wood.

  On both sides of him clumps of bright yellow flower shapes that resembled blue-and-green striped ultrasound projectors moved lazily in the gentle breeze— but not so lazily that they didn't keep themselves oriented to the sun. They might very well be ultrasound projectors, he told himself, given the insane world on which they grew.

  The flowers and tree were comforting, but where were the worms? How long had he lain unconscious? Minutes, hours, longer still? His stomach felt empty but he wasn't starving, so it couldn't have been too many days, if days it had been. A single day or so, then. Thirty hours or more of unconsciousness while his body recuperated from the assault. He felt oddly lightheaded, and not just from loss of blood.

  Then he remembered what he'd seen just before he'd blacked out. Or what he thought he'd seen.

  The blue caterpillar, coming down the slight slope, wading into the milling worms and scattering them with swings of its legs, crunching them in its mouth and spraying them with the mysterious fluid from the hypodermic organ beneath its jaws. A drop of that liquid caused the worms to break their links, to contort violently as their bodies cracked open and they died.

  Undoubtedly the caterpillar had been partaking of an unexpected abundance of prey, feasting on the worms even as they had been feasting on Evan. Perhaps that was why the creature had been following him all along. But that didn't seem right, he thought. Surely the caterpillar was a photovore, with all those light-gathering cilia on its back?

  Even so, it probably required minerals. So it would take them, when the opportunity presented itself, from the small worm bodies in which the minerals had been concentrated. Sure. The caterpillar was after the same substances as the worms.

  Then why hadn't it attacked Evan that night in the cave?

  It didn't matter now. What mattered was that the caterpillar's unexpected assault had killed so many of the worms that the rest had given up and retreated to their underground sanctuary. Weak and barely conscious, Evan then must have managed to crawl out of the lethal depression to this place of safe rest, where his wounded body had taken the opportunity to repair itself.

  Operating on instinct, then, the caterpillar had inadvertently done him a good turn. He hoped to encounter it again. Maybe, somehow, he'd have a chance to repay the favor. If his memory of events was correct and if that was truly what had happened. Perhaps it would turn up to follow him again. If he could entice it to follow him back to the station he'd feed it the remnants of the chemical lab until it couldn't consume any more. It could ingest rare minerals to its heart's content— assuming it had a heart instead of a collection of silicate batteries.

  The lightheadedness wouldn't go away. His body had done its best, but now it needed more than rest to continue the rejuvenating process. His stomach insisted on it. As he tried to sit up, he found himself listing to his left. Something was tugging at his left ear. Frowning, he reached up to scratch the itch, to remove whatever loose bits of matter had fallen on him while he'd slept.

  His fingers contacted two extremely thin tendrils dangling from his head. They were not wrapped around his ear, entwined in his hair, or
stuck to his sideburns. They hung from the ear itself. Out of it.

  He looked sharply to his left. A pair of bright green glassy orbs stared back into his own from a distance of a few centimeters. It was the caterpillar.

  It was sitting on his shoulders, curled around the back of his neck like a silicate stole. The legs gripped his clavicle and shoulder muscles, digging in lightly but firmly. Those jaws, which were capable of shredding rock, rested lightly against the flesh of his upper arm.

  The two thin tendrils emerged from its head to enter Evan's ear, in their penetration bypassing the tympanum without damaging it and slipping deeper into the skull. Something tickled Evan's brain. It was as though he'd been given a slight shock.

  What happened next was that he blacked out without losing consciousness. To put it another way, he went slightly mad for a while, jumping to his feet and running and twisting in circles, bouncing off the glassy growths around him, all the while trying to dislodge the creature on his shoulders and the tendrils it had inserted into his brain. He pulled and tugged and yanked at the thin filaments. They would not break, and even at full strength it's doubtful he could have broken that ten-legged grip.

  Throughout it all, the caterpillar did not move, did not utter a sound. Only its black eyelids reacted, closing to protect the green lenses from Evan's desperately stabbing fingers. It was like jabbing a mirror. He did more harm to himself by banging into trees and rocks than he did to the caterpillar.

  When he pulled at the filaments dangling from his ear he only succeeded in causing himself the most excruciating pain.

  His throat gave out first, raw from nonstop screaming. During his wild dash through the forest he'd sloughed off the last vestiges of confidence that he'd succeeded in building up since he'd abandoned his suit, along with much of what would be called civilized behavior. First the worms, then seeming salvation, and now this. Only an unshakable confidence in his ability to survive, somehow, kept him from going completely insane. Others might have called it arrogance.