by David Coy
“Yuck!” she said, fighting down nausea.
Holding the tendril away from the man’s mouth, which the tentacle now sought to reclaim with writhing, organic persistence, she snipped it away from the main body of the organism with shears, then dripped the severed part into a stainless steel pan. It continued to writhe, making light slithering noise against the hollow pan.
“Well, that was easy enough.”
“Maybe he has a chance,” Rachel said.
“We’ll see,” Donna replied.
She pulled the other tendrils out, one by one from his ears, nostrils and a few that had chosen to pierce the sides of his head directly. Those were smaller, but she wondered how she was going to close those stab-like wounds whose edges were already healed over.
When the last probe was removed, she pried the globular body off his head with her fingers and added it to the pile of wet and tangled tendrils in the pan.
“So much for that.”
“Will he live?” Rachel wanted to know.
“I have no idea,” Donna replied. “I just don’t know. I’ll shoot him up with antibiotics, and we’ll leave him alone until tomorrow. Then we’ll clean him up some and see how he’s doing. If he’s alive in the morning, I’d say he has some kind of chance.”
Donna covered the twisted form with a light sheet, and they left him there.
Before she left the room, Rachel gently pried the brittle book from the man’s hand, one stiff finger at a time and set the book gently down on a clean table.
* * *
That night Rachel lay naked in her bed with John’s warm body wrapped around her. She could see through the partially open door of the shuttle. Weak light illuminated the awkward form of the stranger under the twisted and tent-like sheet. She was suddenly filled with a sick dread as if she’d eaten poisoned meat. The ill man’s presence was pulling something from her from deep inside. He was taking something from her that was strong and fearless, and then stuffing the space left behind with some black organ of hate and loathing. She tried to close it out, shut the feeling off, but could not. She could clearly see his hand, the one she’d pried the book from, sticking out from under the sheet like some bent root, and was struck with the desire to run over and hack it off—to hack and cut the entire figure to pieces.
She forced her staring gaze away finally and twisted around until she could see outside. She watched the life forms flying in the bands of light just outside the opening. The sight gave her comfort, and she forgot about the man’s loathsome image. Later, still unable to sleep, she turned to John. Pressing herself to him, she ground her smooth flesh against him until he responded. They made love, and she found respite in his strength. Her orgasm washed the sick feeling away with a moment of pleasure, but the black and ugly feeling crept back and persisted until the red and sleepless dawn.
“What have we done?” she whispered.
“What?” John asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Never mind.”
When it was light enough, she walked naked out to the stream and bathed from the filtered cache they’d rigged there. She poured the cool water over her head and face and back and legs, wishing each cupful would wash from her the feeling of dread.
She dressed, and then forced herself to walk into the shuttle to examine the patient. She was determined. She would know what he knew, repulsed or not.
She pulled the sheet back from his twisted shape. The vision filled her head in one foul gush, and she almost wept from the horror of it. She watched his thin chest rising and falling just slightly. He was still alive. She touched the skin on his upper arm, cool and dry. She pressed and felt bone just under the surface like a stick wrapped in soft rubber. She felt some connection by that contact as if some ancient channel had been opened and through which slowly flowed some dark, formless memory.
You make me sick, but you know something we don’t know—can't know. I'll find it out. Goddamn you, I'll find it out. You are holding it in there like some small animal in a cage. I’ll free it, you sick bastard.
“How’s he look?" Donna’s voice startled Rachel from her inner conversation with the disgusting patient.
“He’s alive,” Rachel said. “I guess that’s a good thing.” Donna checked the IV and mounted another bottle in the system. She took his temperature, then checked his pulse.
“He’s very much alive this morning,” Donna said. “This is one tough bastard. His temperature is down a little from normal, but that’s all right.”
She was examining one of the holes in the man’s head when his mouth opened with the sound of tearing fruit. There was the sound of air sucked down ragged channels, then the sound of it coming back out again past torn reeds. Under the hiss, was a long and faint groan.
“Christ, what’s that smell?” Rachel asked.
“Him. I’d say that’s the first real breath he’s taken in some time. I’d say he’s going to make it.”
When Donna looked at Rachel, she saw concern. “What’s with you? I thought you wanted him alive.”
Rachel couldn’t tear her eyes away from the gaping hole that was the man’s mouth. Strands of wet material stretched across that rank cavity like a spider’s web. Deep inside it the squirming
shape of a worm-like tongue reflected a brief glimmer from the lights above as it moved.
“I want him dead,” she said aimlessly.
“What?” Donna asked, surprised.
“I said I want him dead. But not yet. The sonofabitch is trying to talk.”
2
“It’s really bad,” Eddie Silk was saying. “There’s nothin’ but fightin’ and starvin’ and people dyin’ all over.”
“How many?” Donna asked.
“Almost all of them from what I heard.”
She didn’t need details; she could imagine it clearly. To begin with, there were too many lives hanging from the ledge of a system that barely worked. Now their weight had crumbled it, and humanity had dropped into the pit.
“What about the off-world projects? They must be okay.”
“Same thing on Fuji and Cunningham. They only had food and stuff that they got from Earth, so when the transports stopped coming, the people there died, too—mostly. That’s what I heard.”
Donna thought it over. “And this,” she said, “is the only one with any substantial food supply. The last human conclave.”
“The what?”
“The last . . . place . . . for humans. Here.”
“I guess you've got your Bondsmen to thank for that,” Eddie said. Donna closed her eyes and felt herself sinking. Less than two hundred kilometers from where she sat could be the last meaningful human gene pool, relatively small, but highly motivated and organized—The Chosen, The Sacred Bond of the Fervent Alliance.
She stood up and wanted to kick something. Instead, she slumped back down and shook her head. It seemed the thing to do. “God . . . ” she whispered.
“Do we have any more chocolate?” Eddie asked. “I’ll sneak in and get us some next time if we’re out of it.”
She smiled, almost laughed. It was funny. Something had to be funny.
Ever since Donna had found Eddie, stealing goods from one of the storage warehouses, just as she had been doing at the time, and no less guilty of theft than she, her instincts to mother him had grown. After his heartfelt confession about Mike Kominski and his involvement with Del Geary, it was obvious he had no more of a position in the colony to return to than they did, and that staying with her, John and Rachel in the monolith was his only option. Living on the jungle-choked perimeter of the settlement had made him consider many things about his past life. Most importantly, he’d learned what it meant to share and work with others. Donna was pleased with the way he had fit in. His willingness to help was, to Donna, his most endearing quality.
“We have some left,” she said. “Sure. Help yourself. Just don’t spoil your appetite for dinner.”
Early meals and afternoon meals were basically
formless, but they’d made a regular event of the evening meal and had a place in the center of the chamber just for that purpose. The spot was dominated by a large flat protuberance about two meters across that rose less than a half- meter from the chamber’s floor, providing a perfect table to sit around. They’d fashioned a rough tablecloth out of fine vines Donna had woven and pounded, and the centerpiece, always a bouquet of the jungle’s most stunning and fragrant flowers, rested in a crude clay vase courtesy of Rachel’s artistry.
Like most chores, they took turns with meal preparation as well. Tonight, it was Rachel’s turn to set the table and cook. There wasn’t a lot to it, just heating the packages and carrying them over, but the task was a necessary one and now established in their minute culture as tradition.
That evening, Donna waited until the meal was done before asking Eddie to relay the news of the collapse to the others. She couldn’t say why she waited. It just seemed the thing to do. Before Eddie started, he asked Donna how come she didn’t tell them. She just shook her head and gently told him to tell them instead. That seemed to be the thing to do, too.
Eddie began in his not-quite-grownup voice. The unsureness of it somehow softened the hammer blows the words contained. At times, Donna would take over, finishing the idea Eddie was trying to convey with her own editorialized version. It didn’t take long to tell it, and Donna thought to herself how odd it was that the death of human culture could be expressed in so few words, so briefly.
John listened stoically to the news; and when the telling of it was done, he rose silently from the table and walked away. Rachel had a few questions, but not many.
They sat and did not speak since there was little to say at the moment that had meaning.
The quiet in the chamber was slowly filled with the jungle’s sounds; sounds of insects that hummed and hissed and clicked and did not care a whit that humankind had fallen into the chasm.
“My family is probably dead,” Rachel said flatly. “They lived right in New York City. It was my father and brother. They're all I had really.”
“Mine, too,” Donna said. “Los Angeles.”
They sat for a few silent moments more, and Donna didn’t cry until Rachel did. Neither sobbed, but the tears streamed down and were wiped away on a cotton sleeve or sometimes were missed and splashed with sounds too light to hear on a breast or lap.
“Oh well . . . ” Rachel said. “Oh well . . . ”
“Yeah . . . ” Donna said.
John went over to the chamber’s massive opening. His eyes fixed on a single leaf some meters away and wouldn’t let go; he simply stared. He stood there for some minutes like that and was dimly aware that the others had drifted into their own protective fugue state. He let the growing din from the jungle fill his head with its chaotic noise, drowning the dark thoughts of human chaos and destruction, like some nightmarish echo light years away.
The jungle insects filled the air like flying ash brought to life by darkness. Only a few entered the chamber; little harmless ones that were not warned off by the chemical barrier. He watched as a massive beetle, one of the ones Rachel called Axolotise Grominea, plowed through the undergrowth and moved tank-like to within a few meters of the chamber’s opening. He knew this one. As it had, almost every night since their arrival, the creature stopped there, antennae waving, sniffing the chamber’s contents, testing it. John was sure the thing knew they were there and could smell the fresh meat, but dared not enter. He’d wanted to shoot it since the first night, but Rachel had rightly pointed out that its carcass, weighing perhaps three metric tons, would be hell to move and would rot there.
He could imagine the damage those enormous mandibles could do and, as if to show him just how, the thing opened its maw and stretched the dark apparatus out wide and back again. The parts came back together like machinery that clicked and snapped.
“Get out of here,” he said to it. “You’re not a member.” It stood there as if only its antennae were alive, waving at random, smelling him. Then, finally, it turned on its huge brown insect legs and moved off, back to the jungle’s anarchy in search of more promising fare to rend, tear and eat.
He waited until it vanished completely before he went back to join the others.
“Your friend was at the door again,” he said to Donna.
“He’s not my friend. I want to kill it, too.”
“Leave it alone,” Rachel said. “It’s a beautiful insect.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d had one trying to eat you all damned night.”
“There won’t be any more transports,” John said, changing the subject. "No more supplies. No more packaged food or equipment or material of any kind. Maybe the Bondsmen saw it coming, and that’s why they’ve been stockpiling so much goddamned stuff.”
“That makes sense,” Rachel said.
“All the livestock, too,” Donna said. “They’ve got all those sheep, cattle and chickens in Warehouse Three.”
“Well, I’ve got news for them,” Rachel added. “Those species won’t survive here—not unless they plan on totally isolating them from the environment. They have no immunity. The parasitic species on this planet will literally eat the stock alive.”
“It also explains all the farming equipment and seed in Number Five,” John said. “They were never planning to rely on a flow of resources from Earth. It looks to me like they planned to become independent from the beginning.”
“I doubt farming will work either,” Rachel said. “From what I can see, any species, plant or animal that you tried to transplant to this environment from Earth would be devoured by it. We humans can survive only because we have the tools and medicine to fight the planet’s life with. But things like crops, animals—any native species from Earth will croak here. You couldn’t take enough measures to protect them. Eventually, they’d succumb to something ugly.”
“Then the Bondsmen are doomed, too,” John said.
“Not necessarily,” Rachel said. “Humans have an incredible ability to adapt. They’ll just have to figure out how to live on what’s already here, like we have. This place is one huge green salad with lots of meat mixed in. The problem is figuring out how to eat it before it eats you. That’s what the biological surveys are supposed to do—provide a foundation for all that. I hope they’ve got some good biologists among their ranks, but I doubt that.”
“Why do you say that?” Donna asked. “They’ve got everything else. I bet they’ve got the best technical people and equipment. They proselytize like all hell.”
“Yeah, but I’m talking specifically about biologists,” Rachel said. “Biologists have a unique view. It’s just a personal opinion I have about mixing theologies. Some things don’t mix.” Finally, the talk of collapse and survival died to the sound of Verde’s jungle, and the talkers drifted away to their private places, thoughts, and overwhelming grief.
Rachel was sure the last few minutes of talk, though somewhat useful, had been only a mask, a temporary barrier against the coming grief. The conversation had helped them choke down the worst of the news, to nibble tentatively at its awful edges when its freshness was the most debilitating and toxic.
Sometime later she found herself in bed crying silently. She heard Donna’s occasional sniffing and knew she, too, was weeping for the loss of home and family. She could see Donna’s form on the bed across the chamber, a tight knot with arms pulling her knees up to her chest.
With a long sniff, she wiped her eyes, rose up and saw John staring out into the green from the entrance, a mere shadow in the dim light. The shock of the earlier news, now unfettered by talk of other things, seemed to have rendered him motionless and silent. She thought he might have been there for hours, but couldn’t be sure. She had lost track of time as if it had vanished completely.
She hoped when morning came the world she lived in would ground her once more, or perhaps let her forget, at least a little. She wasn’t sure anything ever could again.
Finally,
she slept.
* * *
Donna thought her patient was doing better. His breathing was regular, and his temperature was up to normal. When she checked his pupillary response with a sweep of her light, she thought she felt him move, just his left arm, ever so slightly. She couldn’t be certain it had moved; but ever the optimist, she took it as a good sign. She made a few notes and decided that tomorrow she would irrigate his wounds again and decrease the flow of antibiotics. It had been five days since Rachel brought him to her; and although he was still in a state resembling a coma, she was fairly sure he would live, if not fully recover. He would have to wake up first; but she had decided that, if he did, she would put some effort into trying to restore his hearing.
The organism had penetrated both ears, ruining any chance of him ever hearing without the help of technology. She had never actually installed an auditory prosthesis before but had seen the operation a few times. She had some reference material that described the procedure in detail. She was pretty sure she could do it. All she needed were the devices themselves. They weren’t all that common, but she’d wager there were some, at least one set, somewhere in the Bondsmen’s stores.
She took another look at what used to be his auditory canals.
There was no need to close them off; they were completely healed. They were nothing more now than two extra holes in his head. Fairly smooth and as big around as her thumb, they terminated deep inside with no remnant of his hearing apparatus in sight.
“Is the guy going to live or what?” Eddie asked from the doorway.
“I think so. I was just thinking about how to get his hearing working again. I need some equipment to do it with.”
“What kind of equipment?”
