by David Coy
“You’re sure?”
“He’s not the kind of man you’d confuse with somebody else. Oh, it was him all right—limping around, whispering orders like always.”
“John must have just wounded him,” she said. “And thought he was dead. Shit.”
What was the use? She was so tired. All she wanted to do was get her family back. She wanted John and Rachel and Eddie and herself together again. She wanted to build a nest, safe and secure and well-feathered. She wanted a fresh start, a simple fresh start without the burden of hatred or the fear of tyranny. It would be hard enough to live on this planet without a stream of supplies from Earth. The hideous human baggage they’d brought with them from their home planet only made it worse.
“Tell me. Where are they taking them?” she asked. “Tell me what they plan to do—these bastards called The Sacred Bond.
“They’ll take them to a cell about midway down corridor And stash them until Jacob is ready.”
“Ready? What do you mean, ready?”
Paul looked at her and wondered if he should go on. “What?” she asked. “Keep talking.”
“Jacob and the Council’s scientists are using the alien technology to make things—horrible things.”
“Yeah. I know that part.”
“What you don’t know is why. I got this from a Council member’s concubine. She used to be a lab tech, but she couldn’t stand what they were doing and quit. It almost got her killed, but the Council member protected her. So this comes from a pretty good source.”
“How do you know her?”
“We had a relationship. It didn’t last very long, but long enough for her to tell me all about what they’re doing in there.”
“Speak.”
“Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“Yes.”
“She says Jacob has this idea that a man and woman should be literally glued together forever, cleaved is the word she used because that’s what they call it. Cleaved one to the other— something like that. She says Jacob is completely obsessed with these things. They somehow modify the brain’s pleasure centers to run at full speed, out of control. Then he . . . he . . . ”
“Mates?” she offered. “Is that the word you need—mates with these creatures?”
“Well, something like that.”
“Something like that—the polite way to put it?”
“Yeah.”
“God . . . ”
“The problem is that until now, the things didn’t live very long.”
“You said until now. What’s different?”
“She says they’ve reached some kind of breakthrough. She says they’ve found a way to combine two or more people into one and keep them alive. She says Jacob wants to be one of the first to try the new procedure and that he wants to be joined to your friend Rachel. That’s why he’s so fixated on her.”
“For how long?”
“How long . . . what?”
“How long can they keep them alive?”
“Forever. She says they’ve found a way to keep them alive forever.”
Donna’s hand went up to her mouth as if she’d just heard the worst, the most sickening thing imaginable. To be physically, surgically, joined to Jacob No Name in some obscene sexual union—forever—like profane Siamese twins . . . it was too ghastly to contemplate. Her mind refused it further entry. “No,” she said dimly.
“No, what?” Paul replied.
“No. It can’t be true.”
“Well, there’s more,” he said tentatively.
Donna closed her eyes. Of course, there is. There’s always more hideous news. “What?”
Paul sighed. “She says that once they’re joined, they can make babies one after another. Drop one, have another. Drop that one, have another one. She says that’s what they want. They want to cement people together like that so they can breed and breed, you know, like machines. Then, according to her, they can use them for whatever they want.”
Donna suddenly felt frantic. The feeling rose up from her feet, making her want to move, to run, to do anything. She started to squirm in her seat. “We have to do something. We have to stop this. We have to make it go away.”
We have to kill all of them, she thought.
The first pupae dropped onto the top of the transport with a boink sound—just like any number of things, living or dead that can drop out of the canopy. When the next five or six bounced off the roof and windows in quick succession, they caught Donna’s attention, and she thought briefly that the tree under which they’d stopped was shedding its breeze-loosened seeds.
* * *
Rachel lay with her head against something hard, but she couldn’t tell what it was. When she felt it move and heard him groan, she realized it must have been some part of John, perhaps his knee. She felt his hand grope her face and hair and the awkward, spastic movement was strangely reassuring and almost funny to her, though she didn’t feel like laughing. Over the next few minutes, she managed to get her own limbs working and, finally, when she thought she could do it without falling down, she slowly stood up.
She turned around as if she were standing on slick ice and looked down at John. He lay there flexing his hands, arms and mouth at the same time, trying to get any of them to work properly. He must have gotten a stronger dose of the gas than she did, because he had a ways to go before gaining anything like coordinated motor control. She rubbed his arms and legs vigorously, trying to stimulate them into working. “Thank you,” he croaked.
“They’ve got us,” she said, working his thigh. “They’ve got
us good.”
“But I’ve got you,” he said, trying to smile.
She looked at his drug-warped smile and touched it with her fingertips. He had come for her, risked his life to save her. She blinked back a tear. “Yes, you do. You’ve got me good,” she said.
She didn’t know if this was the right time to tell him, but if she didn’t do it now, she might not get the chance. She took his hand and placed it on her belly then covered it with both of hers. “Do you feel that?” she asked.
“Feel what?”
“That’s you in there. That’s you and me growing there.”
John let the words sink in. “You’re pregnant?”
“Yes. I’m pregnant with your child.”
A swell of brief joy raised him up, but reality brought him down with a thud. Barring some miracle, they’d never live to see the child. He pressed his hand a little tighter against her womb, feeling the warm resilience there. Under normal circumstances, he could have thought of no more secure place to nurture and sustain a developing child. Rachel was strong and her body inviolate. But now her womb was not a warm and secure place, but a prison within a prison. Now three, not two, had been captured.
“I love you,” he said.
She looked at his handsome face through a mist of tears.
“Now ain’t that sweet,” a mean voice behind her said.
Rachel turned around to see a disheveled soldier standing on the other side of the cell’s bars. He was leaning against the wall on one arm, legs crossed, the very picture of smug superiority. He turned Rachel’s stomach. He’d obviously heard their conversation.
“What do you want?” she asked, wiping at her tears with a fingertip. You can’t see these. These are John’s.
“Don’t matter what I want,” the man said. “It only matters what the Council wants. You got a surprise coming.”
“Really?” Rachel said. “Well, life is one big adventure.”
“Too bad you’re so damned pretty,” he said. “If I were you, I’d be wishin’ to be real ugly about now.”
“Fuck off,” John said, trying to get up.
“Go back to sleep, buster,” the soldier said. “You’re gonna need your rest.”
The soldier walked away from the door, running his thumb around under the rifle’s sling.
“Bastard,” John said.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“He’s gone. Forget it.”
Rachel stood up and looked around. They’d put them in what looked like a storage area of some kind. It was new to her. “I don’t recognize this cell,” she said.
“One you missed?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
There were piles of ancient clothing that crumbled to the touch, and some other very odd items laid out around the cell’s walls. There were two very strange chairs with bent aluminum arms and legs that had woven material stretched between them. There was a pile of ceramic dishes and actual glass drinking glasses. There were several cracked and crumbling plastic carrying baskets, and inside them were the crisp and dried remains of packaged foods. She picked up a tubular container, its surface cracked and peeling and shook it. It rattled.
“This stuff is very old,” she said, puzzled. “It must have come from Earth. Look at this stuff.”
Propped neatly against the wall was an antique knapsack, dark green in color. When she bent down and touched it, the material, stiff and dried, cracked under her touch. She took hold of the zipper and tried to work it around the seam, but it broke and fell to pieces. She gently tore the weakened seam with her fingers and looked inside.
She pulled out a pair of antique binoculars, the lenses dulled by the out-gassed resins of the pack’s contents. When she turned the focus knob, it cracked in two in her hand. There was a plastic bottle, stiff and cracked, its contents long-lost. There were two glass jars, their labels cracked and crumbling, filled with a material she didn’t recognize. The cement-like contents didn’t give when she shook them. She read the labels, printed in old English. One had been filled with what was formerly peanut butter, the other with grape jelly.
Stuffed into an inside pocket was a paper notebook with a faded blue cover and a springy, coiled binder. It was permanently bent and dented by the binoculars that had pressed against it for eons.
Rachel took it out, very gently, and as if turning the petals of a dried flower, opened it to the first page. The ink had separated from its base, leaving yellow halos around the letters, but the neat printing was still legible. She cocked her head and smiled at the misspelled title printed in big block letters on the first page.
Tracing the edge of the paper gently with a forefinger, Rachel began to read “Bailey’s Dairy.”
19
Jerome Ehrlich liked his job. It was challenging and made him the center of attention besides. No one could do what he did quite as well as he did. He was always the best. He always had been. It was in his genes.
It was Gerome Ehrlich who had discovered how to operate the plasticizing equipment in the first place. It was he who had figured out how to use the cutters and gluers and burnishers and how to trigger the very fine tips of the micro-nippers. The hardest part was figuring out how to turn on the plasticizing applicators and how to apply the chemical catalysts. Released from the organ above, they blended the plastered area into one seamless joint. It was the catalyst that allowed the foreign tissues and nerves to grow together as one. By using them, one could glue anything to anything. They’d even named the organ that produced it “Ehrlich’s Body” after he figured it out. That’s how smart he was.
It was logical, after all, and you could tell what a thing did just by looking at it, if you just tried. One thing led to the next and to the next. Once you determined what the goal of the thing or things were, the logic just evolved out of them.
He’d had his failures over the last few months—but who wouldn’t have had them under these circumstances? He was way out in front here with this technology. This was cutting-edge stuff.
And the last two or three experiments looked really promising. He’d figured out how to overcome the stresses on the separate nervous systems when they were combined, as well as the sheer gross anatomical strain on bones and muscles that kept the organisms largely supine to reduce the damage such tensions produced over time. Part of the problem there, he’d discovered, was that he was trying to preserve far too much material in the combination. By truncating the larger components from at least one of the subjects, he could keep the overall mass down and hoped, in his next design, to enable something resembling real perambulation, even if it meant using four legs.
They should be able to move around for God’s sake, he thought. Not just flop around like blobs.
The problem was he wasn’t quite ready. He needed at least another week to perfect the technique.
But the heat was on, and he had to begin this morning with the Rachel woman. She was at the end of this particular experimental road. There could be no stalling for time. He had to plasticize her and her boyfriend to Jacob before the day was out, and it better work because if they died, he himself would be dead just minutes thereafter.
Jacob had provided the general design. He wanted a symbiotic sexual graft like the others but wanted the boyfriend to occupy a truncated, parasitic role with no nervous system interaction so that what was left of him would be a mere passive, eternal observer. He should be able to see and hear, at least for the time being, but not talk. Jacob could always change the configuration later if he wanted. Ehrlich didn’t like the basic idea—it wasn’t using his skill to best advantage. Hell, anybody could do that little job. All you had to do was extricate the eye, brain and stem, trim out the speech and motor centers to save space, graft it to an available venous structure, cover it with any epidermal tissue you had lying around, catalyze it all and actuate it. You could stick it anywhere for Christ’s sake.
Simple.
The tough part, the part he was really good at, was getting the nervous systems in sync and indistinguishable from one another. That took genius. What took even more genius was keeping the thing alive. He’d better be right about the stress factors—especially now.
“Fong!” he yelled. “I need you.”
Lin Fong had been assigned to him after his last ridiculous attempt at Brunigea blending. What a klutz. He’d killed at least two more subjects that they knew of, and the one he was able to preserve had been so weakened that she biased Erhlich’s entire next experiment. Her paltry metabolism had dragged the whole organism down, stressed it severely, and what could have been a brilliant construction turned out behaving like one of his early ones with barely any viability at all. Ehrlich had been so pissed he’d wanted to graft Fong to the wall and leave him there.
“Fong!”
Lin Fong jogged in from the adjoining chamber with a big fake smile on his face. Erhlich didn’t hate him. He’d known him since school. What he felt for Lin Fong was intense disdain—and a disgust for his all-tensed-up and trembling competitiveness. To Erhlich’s mind, he was like an eight-year-old child, gritting his teeth, running to catch the older, stronger boys, his little feet pounding, determined in his naive mind to catch them at any cost.
“Yes, Gerome?”
Ehrlich wanted to roll his eyes at Fong’s niceness, but contained it. “Can you clean up this mess, please? Then find Epstein and get the surgery ready. We’re scheduled to begin later this morning.” He knew the grunt work would infuriate Fong, and he took some pleasure in the fact.
Run, damn you.
“Okay. I’ll take care of it. Shall I assemble the tools for you?”
“No, I’ll take care of them,” Erhlich said and grinned inside.
You can’t even touch my tools, boy.
“I understand.”
“Okay,” Erhlich said brightly. “Thanks.” He could almost feel Fong’s quivering anger from across the room. “Thanks a bunch.”
* * *
Rachel had been reading and re-reading for over an hour. Leaning against the smooth wall with the notebook on her lap, her fingers turned the pages so lightly, it was as if they hardly touched them. Her face was flushed, and she kept shaking her head in disbelief and knitting her brow. Sometimes, one hand would go to her mouth and cover it momentarily as if what she was reading was just too much to believe. John lay close by, propped up on an elbow, watching her, yet not
watching her; trying, above all, not to disturb her concentration, but wanting desperately to know, as well, what was in the notebook. At one point, he’d tried to sit next to her and read over her shoulder, but he got a steely look from her and slinked back to the floor. He’d just have to wait.
Finally, she squared the notebook on her lap, leaned her head back and took a deep breath.
“Well?”
She closed her eyes.
“Hello?” he said.
She opened her eyes slowly and looked at him without speaking. Her face was blank. She didn’t know where to begin. Which facts should she tell first? Which of the horrific details contained in this diary should she relate? She thought about just handing it over to him, but she didn’t want him to touch it just yet. She folded it gently closed.
She began to piece it all together. Jacob No Name had been telling the truth. He had been there a thousand years ago when the Verdian ship came to Earth. He had suffered the ordeal of repeated parasitic infestation and surgical removal of the insect progeny as Bailey Hall had described it. A final entry describes that she and her friends had found a way to escape by “hijacking,” as she put it, one of the Verdian sub-ships. It was safe to say that Bailey and the others in her party—Phil Lynch, Mary Pope, and the Indian—were long dead. But Gilbert Keefer had survived, kept alive by a parasite from the Verdian seas. He was here now in the form of Jacob No Name, the same stooped and hideous being. It was all right there in the faded pages of Bailey’s paper notebook. The drawings, thoughts and emotions—described with the purity of a child’s guileless mind were all there. The minutia was incredible. She couldn’t have done a better job herself.
“Well, do I have to guess or what? What the hell is it?” John said.
Her mouth rose up in an amused and misshapen grin. “No, you don’t have to guess,” she said, gently handing the notebook over to him. “Here. But don’t damage it. It belonged to someone very special.”
