And he needed the strong gray hand holding the knife. He needed to remember that he was a soldier. And he needed to smell his way home, if he still could.
Feel his way home. Stumble. Crawl if he had to. Wriggle through the loamy dirt with all its hidden threats and sweet/salty delicious smells. Find the group. Find himself.
Take control. Take command. He was a soldier. He was still that.
He had to remember who he was. What he was. He was Dresser, but he couldn’t say that. Couldn’t form the words. Couldn’t really hear that way anymore. Couldn’t make that sound. Not that sound.
So then, what did you do, when you were a bug and you had to find your way home?
Get up, that was what you did.
He was still a soldier. Take command. Take control.
He had to get up, before something dashed from the shadowy jungle and caught him in its jaws. He had to find the others. He had to get on with his mission.
He had a mission. One hell of a mission. The most important one of his life. Maybe the most important one of anybody’s life.
It had cost enough in lives, to put him here.
He remembered a bit of combat, an exploding globe of force; a blue glow that both attracted and repelled him: home; the enemy. Home sign. Enemy spoor. Both and neither.
Jesus God, what had he let himself in for?
He was in the body of the enemy, shoehorned in here like a wrecked pilot punching out of a derelict vehicle in an escape pod.
But worse. There was no place to go home to, when you were a man in a bug suit.
Or a bug with a man in your head.
He shook his, and the antenna he’d hacked at twinged warningly.
He raised his head to the sky that must be up there somewhere and screamed his name as loud as he could.
Dresser! he wanted to shout. Now you’ve done it, Sergeant Asshole. See where your macho bullshit got you this time?
But nothing came out.
He tried again, as hard as he could, to bellow at the sky. Somewhere up there, his guys were waiting for his report. He had to take control. Take command.
Or was it the other way around?
He heard his own voice, screeching: Greel.
He screamed it three times and then had to drop his head to shake the blood from his eyes. Green blood. Green. Greel. Greel. Greel.
What the hell did it mean when you wanted to say your name and it came out sounding like that.
Greel.
Not even close. If his head didn’t hurt so much, and if the blood wasn’t still streaming over his face, he’d have banged his forehead on the ground.
Stupid fool. Why’d you volunteer? Huh, Dresser? Why?
Dresser couldn’t remember why. He didn’t care why. He wanted to check in with his controller. Hear his name. Have somebody validate him.
Maybe he was a bug with delusions of humanity.
But he knew better.
He was Sergeant Dresser. If he played his cards right, he’d come out of this war a hero. Somebody had said to him, a world away when he awoke in this body, “Your men are all right, Sergeant. So is your human self. Your memory will return in a few minutes.”
Maybe he was still waiting for those minutes to pass. Maybe he was still in the experimental station.
No way. No such luck.
His mind wanted to hear him say that he was Sergeant Dresser, but he couldn’t say that. He didn’t have the lips for it.
What was in a name if you couldn’t say it?
He was Greel, anyhow. He knew it. His body knew it. The name felt good along his entire length. It made his thorax warm and he felt, for the first time in this nightmare shadowscape, safe. Greel. Greel. Greel.
Mama come and get me. Brothers, gather ’round. Greel is here.
Alive. Safe. With stories to tell and a dark spot inside full of wisdom. Knowledge such as none have ever had. Feast with me, feast of my knowledge, and learn all of my stories if you can.
Dresser pushed himself to his feet and didn’t realize he was licking his own blood from the knife until he began to chew a severed chunk of his antenna. Chew your own flesh.
Dresser’s heart shriveled.
But the antenna was in his mouth.
It tasted good. It tasted of home and hearth and salts so precious that they’d heal any hurt.
He sucked at the knife until the blade was shiny because every drop of precious blood was in his happy mouth again. He examined the knife with his eyes and with his antenna, making sure it was spotless, perfectly clean.
Then he put the knife in its sheath on his belt and trudged on, feeling stronger. He held his head up, so that the blood didn’t run into his eyes.
He knew he was leaving a trail for the carnivores that had overun this place and destroyed the balance of nature here.
But he couldn’t stop to worry about it. He had to find his unit. Take control. Take command.
He was a soldier. Lost or not, alone or not, he was still that. Both of his souls knew it. Both of his hearts were sick at the way he’d broadcast fear all around him.
He was disoriented, but that was no excuse for hacking himself up like that. You didn’t try to kill yourself. You didn’t maim yourself. You didn’t weaken yourself or make yourself a target. Especially now, when the enemy was everywhere, lurking in a jungle of alien spirit on a planet only a fool would die to save.
All around. In the jungle, full of shadowy, creeping, choking growth and hiding vermin. In the huts of the carnivores that ate all the other food here. In their skies. And beyond. Even beyond the sky, enemies were hiding—stinking things with obscene desires and infectious ways.
Coming to get him.
He bolted. He ran unseeingly through the thick growth until his heart nearly burst.
When he stopped, bent nearly double in pain, he had no idea where he was in relation to the original bearing he’d taken.
He was doubly lost. Doubly afraid. And mortally alone.
Dresser didn’t know how to stop the fear in his heart, but at least this time his new body wasn’t broadcasting that fear by rubbing its antennas together.
One antenna was swollen, stiff and short and caked with blood.
So he’d stopped his new body from broadcasting that telltale fear. He’d win this war yet. Take control. Of his flesh, at least. Take command of his exoskeletal, six-limbed, horror-story self.
Do his mission. Get home. Get out of this despicable body and eat out on the war stories for years to come.
Sure he would. Tell Codrus how he’d been so freaked when they’d dropped him in the jungle that he’d hacked off one of his cloned antennas before he realized what he was doing.
And ate it. Funny how that made you feel better, when you were an Ichton on an alien world.
He was getting the hang of it. Sure he was. This place gave both of his minds the willies and was wrong to both sets of his senses, the remembered ones and the actual ones.
He’d give anything to see this world through human eyes. See the trees he knew were there. See the grass, so green, underfoot. See the local teddy-bear inhabitants for what they were, not as enemies. See the sky, blue with fleecy clouds, not gray and grainy and muzzy and dark.
So he missed being human. So what? If this had been an easy job, anybody could have done it. He had to find the nest, or whatever it was.
Find his target. Do the infiltration.
Find the group. Report to group leader. Section Leader Greel, reporting. . . .
Oh, man. This was harder than he’d thought it was going to be. He turned in place and his good antenna waved violently. The wounded one only twitched.
But he caught a directional telltale, a sound, a waft of homelike scent, of female musk and warm metal.
This was so damn bizarre, being down here this way. Harder than anybody’d thought it was going to be. Harder than anybody’d warned him it would be.
Being human was a piece of cake, next to being a three-meter tall soldi
er bug who’d lost his unit.
He reached up to brush the sweat out of his eyes and saw the ugly bug hand just as it swiped bug blood from his bug eyes.
This was one creepy-crawly mission, that was for sure.
But somehow he felt better, having sensed a new direction.
Finally, his limbs seemed to know how to behave. His head still hurt, so he carried it to one side, favoring the hacked-up antenna. Well, he had a war wound. Close contact with the enemy, he’d tell them when they asked. Lost his helmet that way, too. And his battle suit, along with most of his weapons, in life-and-death combat with one of the sluglike monster soldiers of the enemy. Escaping with his life had been a near thing.
Ha. That was the truth, in a way. Only he had to make sure they didn’t realize that he’d brought the enemy back with him—that the enemy was within him, inside him, a part of him?
No, that wasn’t quite right. Take command. Take control.
Whose bright idea was it to make an infiltration agent wear a cloned bug body, anyhow?
He couldn’t imagine how he’d had so much trouble moving through the growth before. Now he was on the right track. His path was clearly marked.
Olfactory clues nearly sparkled before him. His four legs churned with a professional efficiency. He knew where he was going. He found a clear place without even thinking about it.
His antenna hurt. Some enemy had jumped him, after the battle. He’d been out picking up chunks of dead carnivore—as bad as the hairy things tasted, food could not be wasted.
He remembered. One of those slugs had come out of nowhere, shooting.
He touched his chest, remembering the pain, the blast overpressure his suit couldn’t absorb or deflect.
One of those slugs had overpowered him. They were so slow-moving, they were hard to see when at rest. But this one hadn’t been at rest. Greel had struggled, but it had nearly hacked him apart.
He remembered the terror. When it got him out of his suit it was going to eat him alive. It was peeling him as if he were a Meal, Ready to Eat.
He wanted to wipe the alien memories away. But they wouldn’t go away.
And at the end of all the alien memories waited Dresser—the unpronounceable name, the alien identity—and the key to resolving all this confusion.
Dresser understood everything important. Take command, take control. Do the mission. Report back.
Almost everything important. He couldn’t fathom how to find his way home, through the growth, to his cloned body’s unit. . . .
Dresser felt as if he were coming up for air, breaking the surface of a dark deep pool.
For a moment intent sparkled like sunlight, mission overcame misery, and Dresser was fully in control of everything—except his limbs, his senses, and his body. Even the pain receded. It belonged to somebody else.
Then he sank back, inexorably, as if an undertow were pulling him down. But he had no choice. He was drowning in unresolvable stimuli, in knowledge that wasn’t his and impulses he couldn’t sort.
This body had once belonged to someone named Greel who’d known how to use it—who still knew how to use it. Greel knew everything necessary for Dresser to survive. How come they hadn’t warned Dresser about this, when he’d been briefed?
You couldn’t be yourself and somebody else—especially when that somebody was as alien as this bug, whose body had its memories of personality genetically imprinted in its every fiber. You couldn’t try to be a human in a bug suit and succeed well enough to survive.
But Dresser had to do it. Somehow. Or he’d die here.
And he didn’t know what to do next. But Greel did.
Dresser couldn’t see right. Greel saw just fine.
Why the hell hadn’t somebody warned him that this was a suicide mission?
Darkness full of memories that Dresser couldn’t sort lapped at him, threatening to close over his head like oily water. Dresser panicked.
Panic shut down every reasoned impulse, even doubt. It nearly shut down thought.
Take command. Take control.
Take . . . a step.
Move! Blindly, he rushed forward at hellish speed. He crashed onward, away from confusion, toward certainty.
Away from the alien presence in his head. Away from the ghost of madness.
Toward home. Toward help. Toward his own kind.
He kept his wounded head to one side, to ease the pain that was driving him home.
Greel knew the road back. He’d helped build it. The road was broad and clear of the mold that grew over this world so thickly.
He could nearly make out the encampment’s identifying signature.
It was going to be good to be home—or, at least, among soldiers, among the force, among his own in their home away from home—among the people.
How did you lose your weapons, brother?
Say again the story of escaping from the slugs.
Tell the tale of capture, of being stripped of your suit, and of your triumph and escape.
Now, all together: Sing of valor; sing escape; sing return, brothers and sisters.
Mama, our valiant Greel is back with us!
Sister ReScree, your beloved section leader is full of wisdom, back again.
Under a canopy of blue, the people sat to feast the dead and sing. Around them were ranged the fierce-armed cars of their battle and the deep-dug engines of their home and hearth. And these space-going sons and daughters of a race of voyagers sang sweet songs: all who’d found a home here, on a distant shore, sang of where they’d been, and what they’d left behind. And brave songs, too, they sang: songs of a new home here to fight for and to win. All together, they raised their voices to praise their hundred heroes newly fallen, and one more.
In the place of honor, Greel sat, saying long songs of strife and woe, his mutilated antenna waving stiffly, his voice soft as a soldier’s song always is when loss and death make victory partial and life so sweet.
He was witness to the battle, sole survivor. He had braved the clutches of an awful enemy and survived.
Sweet was the feast they gave him, of dead brothers and lost songs, sitting all around the sacrificial ground where a festival for heroes was laid.
Drink was there, and meat of long acquaintance. Everyone tasted the souls of dead friends and lost comrades, of lovers who could only be redeemed through ceremony.
Immortality was close, for the dead. It hung over the festival site and it sweetened the meat of the departed. It made every mouthful of lost heroes’ flesh a sacrament to be savored before swallowing.
And in all the remembering of all the dead and gone, Greel took part with his lies and his split soul crying out for redemption. But Greel could not redeem his sins before the family, before the ancestors, before eternity.
The enemy was within him, looking out through his eyes. The enemy didn’t understand how beautiful were the songs of dead heroes.
The enemy was repelled at the most sacred ritual. But the enemy dared not move or speak or do any obscene thing at all.
This was Greel’s place, Greel’s world, Greel’s seat at the heroes’ table.
All spread before them, on a long cloth of gold, were the hearts and eyes and heads and hands of a hundred departed heroes. On plates and dishes of copper lay the brains and tongues of the dead.
And as the extended family of the Four Hundredth Unit of Mother Sree feted its dead and ate their wise flesh, Dresser was only an obscene dream that had overcome Greel in his terrible ordeal.
There was no enemy within him. There was only the new life ahead, and the new struggles to come. There was only this moment to revere the dead and take them into every living soul.
The bodies of their heroes, whatever had been salvaged, were ready to eat. Lying in state.
Greel had come home just in time. Woe if he had not, and missed a chance to eat the flesh of his beloved group leader, of whose eye and of whose brain he was privileged to taste.
The stories of his beloved g
roup leader took a long time to tell. Each who ate must stand and say his part. And when those tales had all been heard, then the heroes who’d died while Greel had lived must be eaten, too, and learned by all.
Learned by heart. Learned by hearth. Never forgotten, but becoming one with every other soul.
And Greel was honored, strengthened, and filled with wisdom he hadn’t had before.
Singing and dancing and night-long prayers left every soul among them better. Even Greel’s uncertain tale and the lies he told went into every heart with reverence.
But though he was ashamed, Greel could do no different. He had eaten of his group leader’s eye, and now all eyes were on him.
His sister ReScree, who led the unit for Mama Sree, was watching him with soft and inviting looks.
He had survived a test of soul. He was group leader now.
Before him was the greater portion of his former group leader’s brain, to prove it.
Such a gift was more than he deserved, and he tried to tell the true story of unworthiness, but Dresser stopped his story, froze him with fear.
Take command. Take control.
The threat was clear. The struggle inside him made him shiver with its onslaught. And he understood the warning for what it was. Let loose this evil phantom from inside him and he would die. Should he be found out, the thing within would die as well. Then what?
All the smells and sights, all these memories and gifts from brothers and sisters will be lost if you say wrong things. No one will eat of you. You will be desolate and forgotten, a rotting carcass left behind to become nothing forever.
No one could imagine the horror inside Greel. The worst horror anyone could comprehend was being Missing In Action, lost to the group, lost to the people, lost to history, to time itself.
And Greel would suffer all those punishments, if Dresser were a real presence in him, not just a figment of stress and sadness.
But Dresser was a figment. Must be. Would be. Around Greel were all his comrades. In his heart was a battle song. And in his veins ran the blood of heroes stretching back a million years.
Battlestations Page 26
