by David Coy
His will be done.
“Wea . . . ther,” he croaked.
The witch stopped cutting and looked at Gilbert’s head as if it was a troublesome piece of equipment. It reached over and felt the head with its steely fingers and turned it and probed at the voice box. This clearly should not be happening.
“I . . . know . . . weather,” Gilbert barely said.
The witch spoke out into the chamber and the sound came out like leaves shaken down a wooden chute. Soon there were two others at its side poking and probing at Gilbert’s head and throat, trying to find the source of the malfunction.
Once Gilbert had made the alternate connection between brain and voice-box, he found it somewhat easier to speak. Splayed open like a laboratory frog and with the spiny fingers of aliens crawling over and probing his head and neck he said, “I should speak to . . . the alpha.” The witches couldn’t understand English any better than Gilbert could understand their odd language, but the speech sounds came through loud and clear.
“I should speak to the alpha,” he repeated mechanically.
The witches conferred among themselves, and then the two newcomers left the first with the job yet to complete, and the malfunctioning head making human noises.
“I have . . . information . . . for the alpha,” Gilbert said.
The witch put down the cutter with a show of alien impatience, picked up a syringe-like device, clamped Gilbert’s wiggling lips together with thumb and forefinger and glued them shut with one quick motion. That done, it went back to work, moving somewhat faster as if all this bother had put it behind schedule.
Gilbert’s rubbery lips struggled against the thick, elastic glue, still trying to form words behind the closure.
His will be done.
When the last worm had been removed from Gilbert’s body, the witch glued the last incision closed and hissed for a lab goon to carry the object away. The witch halted the goon before it left by issuing another quick hiss, then it squirted the seam holding Gilbert’s mouth shut with a thick, brown softening agent from another syringe and rubbed it briefly with a spiny forefinger. By the time the goon got to the chamber’s opening, Gilbert’s struggling lips had worked free of the glue.
“I should speak with the alpha,” he continued as if his speech had never been halted by alien glue. “I have information for the alpha person.”
He still couldn’t move his head well enough to aim his speech directly at the goon’s face and so had to be content to let the words go at the goon’s huge breast.
The goon ambled down the tunnel toward the alpha’s chamber while Gilbert prayed to the glory of God and repeated his intonations like a limp doll whose pull-cord was stuck.
“I should speak to the alpha,” he said. “I have information about . . . the weather.”
* * *
Bailey was beaming. She was studying Phil’s every reaction to the drawings and loving it. She’d worked hard on them and now there might be a real use for them.
“These are great,” he said. Mary craned her neck over his shoulder to get a look, too.
The drawings were highly detailed. She’d identified each weird protuberance and alien structure with arrows that terminated with neat block letters. She’d given the devices names much like Mary would—it had become a common syndrome where nothing in the environment had a true earthly analog.
Phil turned a page and the neat table of the times of arrivals and departures might have looked typewritten from a distance of a few feet.
“Amazing. What’s the time frame? Overall?”
“We stayed about twelve hours,” Bailey said leaning and reaching in to point to the time column. “These are when they left, these times are when they arrived. There’s exactly sixty-six minutes between each of these departure times. Count ‘em.”
“I believe you,” Phil said. “Excellent.”
“Bailey did it all. All’s I did was sleep,” Ned said with a plump chuckle.
“These are just great.” He turned another page. On the next was an overall rendering of the shuttle-bay from their perspective high in the chamber wall. The shuttle-bugs as Bailey called them could be seen in a ring around the star-shaped seam on the far side of the divider. Everything was neatly labeled. The perspective was torqued a little, but the objects were tightly drawn. She’d even included a little scale with hash marks at the bottom that tried to show the size of the chamber and the relative distances between the things in it.
“How do we know which one to get on?” Phil asked, winking at her. They hadn’t discussed Bailey’s plan to stow away on one of the shuttles yet at all, but the question filled in all the blanks.
Bailey, all excited, poked Ned in the ribs and laughed. “See! I told ‘ya dough-boy!” she giggled. “I told ‘ya it was a good idea!”
She beamed broader and swung around so she could share the same view as Phil.
“They always . . . always . . . take the one directly opposite the one that just came back and one place clockwise,” she said pointing. “Turn the page—go, go.” Phil did. The next page showed a direct overhead view of the ring of shuttle bugs surrounding the star-like seam in the floor. Each of the shuttles occupied the space at each point of the star. Each one had a perfect block lettered number on it—one through six.
“Look,” she said. “When this one comes back,” she traced with a finger across the star and then moved around one place clockwise. “This one leaves next.” She held up her wrist with the watch on it. “With this cheap watch and a piece of paper, I can tell you which one will be leaving a month from now—to the minute.”
Clearly impressed, Mary raised her eyebrows. “I’m amazed.”
“Yeah,” Ned said. “Ain’t it somethin’?”
Bailey beamed at them.
“How do we get down from the . . . ” Phil started.
“I know! I know! Turn the page, turn the page!” Bailey wiggled.
The next page showed a sketch of the wall of the shuttle port and the tunnel opening high up on it. A human figure had been drawn repelling down from the opening on what looked like a long rope. The block letters calling out the rope read GARDEN HOSE FROM DUMP. The other end of the hose was shown anchored somewhere on the floor of the tunnel, but Phil noticed that no details of how that would be accomplished were provided.
“We’ll have to find a way to attach the hose somehow,” Bailey said, reading his mind. “I don’t know how yet.”
“So how do we get past the big bastards operating the place.”
“Easy,” Bailey said. “They leave the place unattended between departures and arrivals. All we have to do is time our escape right, and we can walk right through the doors of the air lock. It takes about fifteen or twenty minutes to get a shuttle thingy unloaded. Once that’s done, the operator goon guys and the pilot bastards all leave the place by this door.” She thumbed back to the overall view and pointed out a larger, but otherwise normal-looking seam at the back of the facility, “Right there.”
“Perfect,” Phil said.
Mary’s eyes were as big as saucers. Both she and Ned both had that stunned look as if they were watching the news of an enormous natural disaster. Ned, it seemed, hadn’t quite believed it until now.
Mary’s head started to nod as the possibilities sank in.
“We can do this. We can do it. We have to reconnoiter one of the shuttles and find out where we can hide in it. How do we get inside them?”
Bailey thumbed quickly forward a page or two. Phil was amazed at the amount of information she’d compiled in a twelve-hour period. The notebook and its drawings were a testament to the power of a desperate and focused mind. She stopped at a detail of a side section of one of the shuttles. There, next to a lateral seam were two openers.
“That’s it?” Phil asked. “Just openers?”
“When you push that . . . ” she pointed. This whole section opens up like one of those . . . um . . . what’d ‘ya call those big planes?”
Phil had no idea which one she meant. “Transport planes?” he pretended to guess. It didn’t matter at this point.
“Yeah, yeah. One of those. The whole butt part raises up and a ramp comes out of its guts. All this metal stuff just folds out of the way. It’s real cool.”
“I’ll volunteer to go and check it out,” Mary said. “I think I could climb down that hose easy enough.”
Phil nodded at her in agreement. “Let me get this straight. There’s at least a half hour period when the entire place is unoccupied?”
“More like forty minutes,” Bailey said smiling.
Phil turned the pages back to the first drawing of the control panel.
“And we know which ones of these opens the seams to the air lock?”
Bailey pointed them out. “This one opens;this one closes.” Unable to contain herself, she covered her mouth with her hands to keep from squealing out of joy.
“I’ll be damned,” Phil said. He closed the book up and flapped it gently, thoughtfully, against his thigh.
“Okay, Mary,” he said to her.
“Okay, what?” Mary asked.
“We’re gonna check out the inside of one of the shuttles. The next time the dump opens, we grab that fucking garden hose.”
“You bet.”
“You’ll have to go back with us, Ned. We’ll need you to anchor the hose while we climb down it. Do you think you can do it.”
“If I can wedge myself in, I think so,” Ned replied.
The ugly sound of a goon’s hissing whistle caused them to break up and move toward their holes in slow motion. A few minutes later, as he sat studying the drawing under the single dim light of the chamber, Phil watched as Bailey ambled past just ahead of a big bastard.
She turned toward him, smiled a big defiant smile and gave him a thumbs up.
10
S eseidi squatted in the quiet depression of the two short hills and waited until the bird-god stopped its shrill sound. Care had to be taken: if the spider was frightened, he would refuse to come out and be captured. It was a good spot for spiders, with good, soft soil and plenty of food crawling by. He had found hundreds of spiders here over the years and his first son, little Pudabi, who squatted quietly next to him now, would continue to hunt spiders here long after Seseidi’s spirit joined the trees.
He placed the long, thin twig just inside the three-inch-wide hole and tapped it against the smooth side of the tunnel, like one would tap the ash from a cigarette. He tapped quickly and randomly to simulate the scrabbling legs of a beetle. If the spider was home, Seseidi would call him out with his tapping. No sooner had he begun that the woolly legs of the spider appeared just where the light reached them and Seseidi moved the stiff, thin twig back a little and tapped some more. To trick the spider, the spider must never get close enough to smell or touch the twig, for he would know it was not a beetle then and not be lured up by the tapping for hours or even days if he were too frightened. But Seseidi had captured many spiders this way and this one followed the tapping twig up out of the hole and along the ground while Seseidi kept it just out reach. It was a big one, with plenty of good eggs inside the round belly. Little Pudabi squatted motionless, swallowing his saliva, watching the fat, hairy spider as it crawled along after the vibrating twig.
With the spider now more than a foot from its hole, Seseidi reached down slowly with his outstretched thumb and pinned the spider firmly to the ground with it. He held the spider so firmly that it could barely move the last joints of its legs.
Seseidi’s hands were well practiced at the next step and one by one he lifted the spider’s legs up and worked them under his thumb until he had them all bent back and pinned. Then, using a two-foot-long piece of thin fiber he had prepared earlier, he wove it around the spider’s legs until they were tied tight making the woolly, leggy spider into a tight little bundle with its black fangs clearly visible. That done, he mounted the spider on a stiff stick about a foot long, by sliding it along its back and under the juncture where its legs came together. He handed the spider-on-a-stick to young Pudabi whose white teeth shone with a grin at the prize so received. The little fire had burned down to coals just right for roasting a fat, eggy spider.
“Big spider,” Pudabi said in his native tongue, tempting the spider’s fangs with a cautious finger.
“A big one,” his father said. “Go cook him. I’ll get another one.”
The gray hunter burst from the brush just ten feet from Seseidi and stood on all fours spread wide, turning its head from boy to man and back, defying them to move. The shock at seeing such a demon startled Pudabi, who dropped the spider with a trembling start as if he’d stepped on an electric eel. Seseidi froze motionless, and knew he was looking at a real tree spirit; it had to be—what else could look so fearsome? He didn’t know if tree spirits could be killed, but Seseidi was a survivor of many battles and knew how to use spear, and bow and arrow, and he would not let even a tree spirit kill him without a good fight. His needle-sharp spear was propped against a large leaf just a few feet away. He flashed his eyes toward it then back again just to be sure of its exact location. He could hear little Pudabi whimpering behind him, but could not turn fully to look, keeping his eyes instead on the ugly face of the tree spirit.
When the tree spirit raised its head and called up to heaven with a loud roar, Seseidi shifted over, grabbed his spear, pulled it back with both hands and lunged at the monster’s chest. Before the poisoned tip reached its skin, the monster swooped down with its head in a flashing arc and clamped onto the spear with its teeth. Twisting slowly, it rose up on its hind legs and wrenched the spear from Seseidi’s grasp like a toy. It snapped its head to the side and tossed the spear so violently that the spinning weapon whirred several times, like the wings of a bird, before disappearing into the brush.
The tree spirit loomed over Seseidi like a huge panther, daring him to move; and once again it called out to heaven. The sound was so deep, Seseidi could feel it in his chest.
“Run!” he said to Pudabi. “Run!”
As if the words were magic, the stunned boy came back to life and ran into the brush. The gray hunter gave only a glance as the boy ran. Such prey lacked substance and was of little concern when it had the larger one.
What will he do with me? Seseidi thought. Eat me, or carry me off? Perhaps he’ll just beat me. He wondered what sin he had committed to bring the wrath of a tree spirit down on him.
“I have cared for your forest and have not been wasteful,” Seseidi prayed to the gray hunter. “I have killed no forbidden spirits and have eaten only the allowed ones. Must I die?”
The gray hunter listened to the squeaky noises the prey made, then bellowed again. It extended its neck and sniffed loudly at Seseidi’s leg and let the warm scent of prey fill its head with thoughts of blood and tearing flesh. It hoped the prey would attack again so those images might become manifest.
The burr came in from the thick brush with a phoop and a hiss and struck Seseidi in the side. A moment later he slumped, as if dead.
With the prey safely removed, the gray hunter, curious by nature, found the spider and sniffed it to make sure it was food. It took the spider into its mouth, then shook its head to fling off just the stick the spider was mounted on. It lifted its head, chewed down once and swallowed. The lack of blood in the morsel was disappointing.
It lifted its head and breathed the faint scent of new prey on the still air. The gray hunter took a few steps, and moving its head back and forth in a wide sweep, was able to tell the exact direction of the source of it.
With more hunting to do, the creature loped off into the brush toward the prey. It barely made a sound and slipped around the brush and vines like a snake. The dark and wet warmth of the jungle thrilled it, and in some deep recess of its mind, it felt at home.
* * *
Gilbert sat with his thin, white legs spread because he was too weak to cross them. Sitting there on the stool-like protuberance, naked, was most
unpleasant. He looked down at his bent and dark yellow nails and slowly wiggled his toes. Gilbert Keefer had no interest whatsoever in the appearance of his feet. They could have been shaped like duck’s feet and would not have changed his expression from the brief, solitary tightening of his mouth on viewing them. He looked at his sagging belly and the fine scars that criss-crossed it and thought of them as suddenly noble, even holy. He imagined a full-sized sculpture of himself, which would have laced on its naked torso the facsimile pattern of these virtuous scars.
Yes, he thought, if God thinks it not too vain, perhaps.
He was in the alpha’s chamber. It had to be. There were demon things all about: strange objects and containers hung from the ceiling and littered the floor. There were several other stools in the chamber and a single long ledge, which ran around most of it, was covered with even stranger objects. Without his glasses, he found it difficult to see clearly, but if he squinted, he could make out that several of the objects were alive. They twisted and squirmed like upright eels, but were attached to bases that looked like they themselves might have eyes. He couldn’t tell. He drew his mouth into a brief line and had absolutely no further interest in such things.
He propped his thin arms on his pale, soft knees and waited. He wondered if he would get to go into the soakers and have his new wounds cleansed and healed there. He hoped so because the wounds were beginning to sting as the anesthetic wore off.
He drew his mouth into a thin line, then wiped the corners of his mouth with his thumb and middle finger.
The pain is nothing, he thought. The pain is nothing.
The seam at the far end of the chamber bloomed open and the alpha came through it flanked by two other aliens. They came right to Gilbert and began to examine him carefully, touching his arms and scrutinizing his new incisions. Gilbert just stared forward and let them know with his face that he did not fear being touched so. They lifted his arms up over his head and exposed his white ribs. To this also, he stared.
