by David Coy
Maybe the water wasn’t a good idea.
He coughed again, a deep wet cough, and tasted copper. He yacked up and spat a wad of red onto the shower’s bottom. The horror of its sight made him swoon, and he seemed to fall with the leaden weight of the thought pulling him to the ground—I’ve got those damn little things inside me, too.
He remembered the plant juice and every detail about it. He remembered with dread how it had soaked through his pants legs and dropped into his belly button. He remembered how it had tasted.
“Oh, man . . . I got to get to the doctor.”
He stepped carefully out of the shower. Stinging with every move, he walked stiffly as if sunburned. He opened the bathroom door and walked out of the steam into the relative cool of the bedroom.
Help.
Villaroos waddled down the narrow hall to Brown’s chamber and pounded on the door.
His voice was high-pitched, nearly shrill. “Hey, Browny—open up!”
The door opened a moment later, and Brown stuck out his narrow face, squinting and scrunched up from the light, and he hissed through his nose.
“What?”
“I gotta get to a doctor, man. That plant put something in me. We gotta go now.”
“Huh?”
“Just get dressed and fast. I gotta get to the doctor on the orbiter. I think—I'm dy-een.”
“We’re going up now? I thought we weren’t going ‘til morning.”
“Get dressed, damnit! Get Douglas up already!”
Villaroos waddled back to his chamber; and by the time he got there, the patches felt like they’d been branded on. He tried to get into his pants, but couldn’t stand the pain the material caused when it rubbed over him. He settled for a pair of shorts. He managed to get a loose shirt over his arms; but, by the time the shirt was on, the touch of the collar on his neck was almost more that he could stand.
He held his arm out into the light from the bathroom and looked at it. The reason for the pain was clear. The hard-rimmed little holes had grown in size and the balls inside them as well. His entire arm was swollen from the widening of the holes. A trickle of blood ran from one.
He yacked hard in a deep, squint-eyed and racking cough. The shock of it almost knocked him down. Blood ran out of his mouth in a long stream.
“Hel . . . ” he tried to say. He could feel the pits on the inside of his mouth.
Eating me. Eating me alive.
He sank to his knees.
Douglas was the first through the door and put his hand on Villaroos’ shoulder.
“What the hell is it?” he asked.
The touch made Villaroos jerk upwards, and Douglas saw his face. The pits were swollen to the diameter of pencils, and the hard, shiny balls in them looked as if they wanted to burst. His face and neck were covered with them.
“Christ . . . ” he said and took his hand off as if he were touching a leper. He backed away involuntarily, almost stumbling over the end of the bed.
When Brown came in and saw it, all he could do was swallow and stare. Villaroos just stared glassy-eyed at his crew and shook as if he were connected to live current.
“What is it?” Douglas asked.
“He said some plant put something in him. We gotta get him to a doctor like he said.”
Douglas looked and thought.
“Can you get up!” he asked loudly. Do you want us to help you get up?”
When Villaroos opened his mouth, blood ran out of it. Douglas was close enough to see the mass of red nodules lining the inside of his mouth.
“Go get some goddamned gloves. I’m not touching him without gloves.”
The pain flushed away his human thoughts and left only the most primitive animal one of flight, of escape. He had to get out of his skin. If he couldn’t tear it off, maybe he could run away from it. He leapt to his feet, and—snorting like a wounded animal—ran, crashing out the flimsy plastic door, past Douglas and Brown.
He heard a noise, a meaningless voice behind him. He ran and ran but the pain stayed with him.
Faster . . .
He ran across the vast field of pulverized plant stuff and fell down in it, and the pain shot through him like lightning. He got to his feet and ran on and on toward the jungle’s edge beyond the cleared zone. The nodules had filled his mouth and throat until he could barely suck air past them. His hands were so swollen that he couldn’t close them. The taste of blood filled his mouth.
He ran and stumbled, feeling with each movement the painful stiffness in his arms and legs and neck. Reaching the jungle’s edge, he batted the thick, wet leaves out of the way in his rage, feeling the contact with his swollen skin like a whip. Plummeting forward blindly through the tangle of vines and ferns and branches, Villaroos saw nothing, felt only pain.
He didn’t see the deep ravine ahead, its steep edge hidden by thick foliage. He stumbled through the green veil at the brink, and the ground vanished from under his swollen feet.
The jungle swallowed him.
He tumbled down the slope, his raging limbs flailing against the wet ground and leaves.
God.
He rolled into the deepest part of the ravine and stopped face up, and with a deep, low groan, Hector Villaroos sank into shock. The pain lifted like a dark fog and vanished with his senses.
He could not feel the hardened tissue squeeze tight against the base of the balls inside the pits in his skin. Nor did he feel the seeds pop and shoot from the pits in his face and neck and arms and mouth like round little shells from tiny mortars.
He was quite dead.
* * *
Brown and Douglas found him the next morning, his body covered with empty pits just a centimeter deep. The ground around him was littered with hundreds of strange, hard and orange seeds. His sleeves and the creases on the inside of his shirt held hundreds more.
Wearing thick coveralls, gloves and air-filtering respirators, they tied a rope around the body and hauled it up out of the ravine with the truck’s winch. Douglas didn’t know what Villaroos had got on him and figured the doctors could sort it out. One thing was sure; he’d had enough of this job. He’d been thinking of changing to something less dangerous lately. Now was a good time to do it.
On the way out of the jungle, Douglas tried not to touch any leaves that looked too weird.
3
“What is it?”
“Ask the cat. She dragged it in.”
“Well get rid of it. I don’t want it rotting in the entryway.”
Damned cat. I should have left it on Earth—given it to Phyllis and Drake—they like cats.
“Get away from it!” he barked at the feline.
The cat stared up at him wide-eyed, hunched over its prey and refused the order. When Habershaw shooed it with a rude nudge of his booted foot, the cat bolted out the door and into the thick black-green foliage with a flourish of feline temper.
He plucked one of his gloves out of a pocket of his coveralls and slipped it on. He didn’t think the thing contained any microbes that could hurt him. But you never knew.
The law said no construction personnel could set foot on any damned planet where any dangerous indigenous species had not been eliminated or had not otherwise been brought under control. Something like that. That included the damned microbes and the stuff you couldn’t see. Tests had to be done, immunizations made up, or whatever. He knew that much. That’s what the law said.
He squatted down, picked it up and let its limp body roll down into his palm. As long as a finger, its body was softer and less stiff than it looked. Using the tip of his unprotected forefinger, he poked at it and rolled it around. In spite of its limpness, he got a sense of tough resilience from it. Most of it was dark green in color, almost black like the foliage, and Habershaw wondered how in hell the cat could have found it in the first place.
Its body was long and flat, and the rear legs were hinged halfway up like a grasshopper’s. The head was small and pointed; and when he touched it with his f
ingers, he could feel fine, stiff hairs on it. There didn’t seem to be a mouth that opened, but there was a small hole on the very tip of the pointed head. The other legs were short and strong and shaped like sharp hooks.
Juice sucker of some kind.
He stepped outside and pitched the life form’s limp body over into the trash barrel. It bounced off the bottom of a cardboard box, then slid down out of sight.
He took off his glove, shook it a time or two just to be sure, then shut the thin rear door of the shelter and latched it.
“Did you get rid of it?” Joan asked.
“Yep.”
“Did you talk to Smith about the time off like I asked?”
“Nope. Not yet.”
“Are you going to? You said you would.”
“I will. Just like I said, the next time I see him.”
Joan sighed and put the dinner platter down in front of him with a huff. His little ruse wouldn’t work this time.
“You’re not going to see him, and you know it. You have to call him, Bill.”
“Fine, then I’ll call him up,” he said.
“No, you won’t. If you were gonna do that, you’d have done it already. Well, I don’t give a shit what you do. You can rot in this shelter until the whole big shit installation is built for all I care.”
“Fine.”
“I’m going home for the holidays, and I don’t care if I have the time saved or not. You can do what you want.”
“I said fine.”
“Oh, fuck you.”
His face stony, Habershaw looked up at her briefly and reached for the salt “You don’t have to get nasty.”
“Why not? What do you care?”
“I care.”
Joan dropped her own platter on the table with a clank and sat down heavily. She studied his face, which now pointed directly at his food. She could hear the stone door closing. Time to take another tack.
“Then please come home with me, Bill. Please. Please.”
Habershaw put his fork down on his food and pushed the platter away. Joan knew just what that little gesture meant.
Before he had a chance to begin his speech, she lowered her head and, shaking it in disgust from time to time, began to shovel in food. It hadn’t worked.
Not even begging worked. She wasn’t surprised; nothing ever worked on Bill.
“I work hard,” he began. “I’ve got five more years until I can retire legally. Richthaus-Alvarez has been good to me. As good as I can expect. I don’t have enough accrued time off to make the trip back. You know that. If I take time off without authority, Smith won’t like it. He can hold up my retirement and ding my pension. He’s got the authority. It’s in my contract. I can't go.
She knew the rest of the story. Indentured workers didn’t have many rights nowadays. The contracts minimized personal freedom. You jumped from site to site, task to task, and did whatever it was in their power to make you do. Retirement was the goal. Healthy retirement even better. You bought your retirement in advance at a fixed rate of interest from the Commonwealth then worked off the debt within the terms of your contracts. Retirement was all there was. She knew the rules. She was indentured, too.
If your contract owner was willing to wink at a breach of contract, you could get away with quite a lot. If he or she was a good guy, you could get away with murder. Nobody ever accused Ed Smith of being a good guy.
“You can if he says so! You haven’t even asked him yet!”
“He’ll just say no, so what’s the use?”
“How do you know?”
Habershaw picked up his fork again and used it to drag the platter back over. “He’s got too much to lose. He’s got the license, and he doesn’t want to lose it. You know that.”
“He can do without you for a month.”
“No, he can’t.”
“Oh, shit, can to.”
“He can’t. I’m the Operator. It’s in my contract that I’m the only Operator.”
“What?”
“They can’t bring in another Operator. You heard me.”
“What kind of crap is that, Bill?”
“I know how to get what I want is all.”
“You locked yourself down, didn’t you? You get no off-time at all under those terms, right?”
“Yep,” he said taking a bite. “No off-time. But I get my retirement six months earlier. And I’m saving the bastards a lot of money on the excavation and grading.”
“You sonofabitch . . .
She knew how much Habershaw wanted his retirement. Retirement was the Promised Land. No more work, no more hopping from project to project. The company would give you a whole section on the settled planet of your choice, a deluxe shelter and all the supplies you’d need to live out your life in comparative luxury if you chose Option One. That was Habershaw’s choice. He talked about it all the time.
Joan shook her head and shoveled in another forkful. “You know where I’ll be, then,” she said.
“Yep.”
“Bastard,” she said.
“Smart bastard,” he said.
“Selfish bastard.”
* * *
Habershaw figured it wasn’t the night to share Joan’s bed. Grabbing a sheet from the closet and a pillow from the sofa, Habershaw made a nest on the cot in the rear entryway. It wasn’t the first time he’d spent the night in a less than premium location since he’d taken up with Joan. She’d get over it.
If he turned on his side, he could look out the screen and down into the valley that extended twenty kilometers to the sea. And if he waited long enough, and didn’t fall asleep, he could see the twin moons rise, one after the other, casting their bright reflections on the still water.
It was an interesting planet, but far too wet and muggy for his tastes. When the wind blew, if it blew at all, it barely rustled the tops of the trees, and down at ground level, the heat hung in the air like steam all day. It wasn’t the kind of place he’d be comfortable retiring in.
Besides, the planet wouldn’t be ready for habitation for another ten years, and by then, he’d be long gone.
He remembered how Verde had looked from space: a dark green ball with a single shallow ocean draped around it like a wide, careless ribbon. The climate was uniformly hot and steamy, allowing the primordial jungle to cover the entire land mass. From two hundred kilometers up, the little cleared section had looked like a minuscule pit cut in green velvet, and he wondered how long it would take the planet’s vegetation to reclaim that bald little patch. If there were no graders or defoliators to beat it back, how long before the jungle swallowed it, healed it over? A season? Less?
No, this wasn’t the place for him. Too woolly. In five years' time, he’d be firmly planted on Cunningham, sailing its Earth-like seas or enjoying his remaining days hiking in its pristine forests. Cunningham was cleaner, crisper, cooler; its geography more manageable. This swamp of a planet was for someone else. By the time the first settlers and miners arrived, he’d be headed for paradise—and this wasn’t it.
The sky at the end of the valley began to brighten as the moons rose into the horizon. He reached over with his foot, unlatched the door and kicked it gently open so he could see the moons rise. There were twenty or so shelters lined up along the edge of the clearing, and he’d made sure he and Joan got the one with the best view.
* * *
Position had its privileges.
There were approximately forty people on the planet’s surface, but Habershaw was the Operator. The Operator was the one who could make the massive machines work their blades into the thick, clay-like soil to scrape and scratch it away. He would make the blades cut and level and scrape the ground into neat piles to be loaded on the trucks and moved to the perimeter of the clearing. A thousand cubic meters at a time, he’d reshape the entire section.
The others played secondary roles during this phase of the project; moving the loosened soil, stacking it up, redistributing it a little. Some, like Joan, pla
yed support or logistical roles; distributing supplies or doing maintenance.
The Operator’s effort, however, was the measure of progress. His blades cut and his treads beat the ground into the correct vertical elevation, slope and plane. As he transformed this patch of planet surface from wild nothingness to linear perfection, so went the project. Before the first heavy mining and processing components were put in place, the Operator would have his way with the ground, by kneading it and shaping it until he was finished.
The first moon rose like a bright white dish, followed a few moments later by the second, smaller one below and behind it. Before the second moon was fully up, Bill Habershaw was sound asleep
* * *
Just three meters away, deep in the trash barrel, the life form stirred from its slumber, quickened by some unseen radiance from Verde’s twin moons. Nocturnal, the creature and its millions of ancestors had survived by remaining in a state of motionless inactivity during the daylight hours. Night and the light of the moons brought it to life to seek a host on which to attach and suck.
Upside down in a small cardboard box, the creature arched its flexible thorax and righted itself with a quick flutter of its short, hard legs, making a brief drumming sound against the hollow container. It raised its pointed head on its slender neck and rocked it back and forth, and, aiming itself at the edge of the box, took its exact distance. It froze stock-still for a moment, then when the time was just right, sprang up to the ragged edge and scrabbled and scratched at it until its legs found purchase. The next target was the rim of the barrel. The parasite waved its head back and forth until the precise distance to the barrel rim was calculated. With the spurs of its rear legs making good contact with the edge of the box, the creature sprang upwards, with its hook-like legs spread wide, and hit the metal edge perfectly. The parasite scratched and scrabbled at the smooth edge but couldn’t stick and fell to the ground with a plop. Righting itself, it gathered its rear legs under it just right, lifted its head so the minute sensors on the tip of its head had a forward aspect, and waited patiently.
