by Yoss
I suppose I’ll have to explain how I guessed General Kurchatov’s secret password to the gatekeepers from Military Security, and also answer for each of the missiles I just fired as if they were members of my own family.
I hope they cost less than my reward for rescuing the girls. Otherwise, I might be in serious trouble; the military doesn’t like it when folks mess around with their toys, much less their budgets.
But the main thing is that now I’ve blasted a way clear through for my Beagle.
I drive on, a little worried to find my path closing up this fast behind me.
Aftershocks rumble through the protoplasm. Maybe the explosions were directional, but Cosita must be asking itself what’s going on. I don’t think it comes down with digestive ailments very often.
But over there, at last, I see the digestive vacuole where my old assistants are trapped. One last little push with all engines blasting, and I punch through the membrane…
Well, that wasn’t so hard, after all.
I’m inside now.
Shit, what if I didn’t get here in time…
Cosita’s digestive enzymes are stronger than we thought. Or else laketons find the carbon-reinforced germanium foam in Juhungan bioships more tempting than we’d figured.
I can barely recognize the ship’s original form, it’s so deteriorated. Whole chunks are gone. The outer shell isn’t a shadow of its former self. And forget about it being hermetically sealed.
I gulp. Did Enti and An manage to…?
They did; there they are, alive and kicking. They must have detected me the moment I blasted my way through. They waddle over in their ultraprotective suits, which fortunately aren’t organic. The suits are too heavy to swim in, as I should have expected. At least they can still walk, leaning against the vacuole membrane for support.
I open the airlock—and they’re inside. A quick decontamination cycle, off with the suits, which are a little deteriorated after all—this vacuole is pure acid—and then…
I’m no fan of gratuitous pathos, so I won’t linger over a description of the scene that comes next: how they crawl and drag themselves into the cabin, how they hug me (An-Mhaly rubs her six pectoral protuberances all over me, and I don’t object), how they kiss me, cry, accuse each other, accuse their bosses, their subordinates, Cosita, the Galactic Community Coordinating Committee, and the universe itself.
The important thing is, they’re both unharmed, though pretty shaken up.
But no time for gushing; we’ve got to get out of here.
This second.
First, out of the vacuole—because even Beagle’s theoretically inert metal casing is under attack from the aggressive enzymes, and suffering for it. And it’s made from a smart alloy that can’t regenerate at all, unlike living tissue, unfortunately.
A short engine pulse—and we’re out.
The bad thing is that now, according to the radar densimeter, there aren’t any gel-phase currents within several kilometers of here.
Am I going to have to use more missiles? I never found brute force very convincing as a solution to all my problems. Besides, it would take too many…
I explain things to my two new passengers, since they always say three heads are better than one… and An-Mhaly comes up with the idea that might save us: Why worry about extracting yourself from a place when it’s easy enough to get yourself kicked out?
All we have to do is make ourselves so undesirable and uncomfortable that Cosita expels us of its own accord.
Seconds later, I discharge all the salt I have left, together with two tons of colchicine (an eighty-percent concentration), into the cytoplasm around Beagle.
I knew it would come in handy.
It’s like pouring gasoline onto an anthill and setting it afire.
Cosita writhes in pain. But can this giant really feel pain?
Then, in less time than it takes to tell the story, we’re encased in an excretory vacuole, and three minutes later we’re expelled.
Hurray for the instinct of self-preservation.
Free at last!
It was practically child’s play.
The rest of the rescue, including our return to orbit via the nanotube cables suspended from the Juhungan ships, is mere routine, little more than retracing my steps. Though to lift us in this gravity, the heroic Beagle has to give every remaining drop of its strength.
Hard to believe, but from the time Gardf-Mhaly first contacted me to the moment she and her milk cousin embraced (back-to-back, as is their people’s bizarre custom), only sixteen hours have passed.
And just thirty-two hours passed from the moment the human and the Cetian fell into Cosita’s alimentary vacuole to when they were freed.
I dare anybody to do it better—or faster.
*
All’s well that ends well, as somebody once said.
Enti Kmusa and An-Mhaly returned home, unharmed and on time, and no one guessed why they had taken so long or what they’d been up to in the meantime. The super-duper-top-secret negotiations between Cetians and Olduvailans remained under wraps.
The human, Cetian, and Juhungan generals and Coordinators breathed a sigh of relief.
And, as they had all hoped, after the two negotiators reached a fair (and ultraconfidential) solution to the New Olduvai/Canaan/Urgh-Yhaly-Mhan disagreement, hostilities ceased.
The fifty-five thousand illegal colonizers remaining on Canaan, feeling undefeated, agreed to relocate to the second planet of Theta Muscae. Not as green or as fertile as New Olduvaila, but at least nobody else had ever claimed it before.
They named it Mvambaland. And who did they unanimously elect president but Enti Kmusa. That didn’t even take me by surprise.
The Cetians finally occupied Urgh-Yhaly-Mhan. Their Assimilation master was An-Mhaly, whose chief adviser was her milk cousin, Coordinator Gardf.
General Junichiro Kurchatov tried to lecture me about my unauthorized use of the missiles, but since nobody asks a winner for receipts… Let’s just say, they took the cost of the seventeen bunker-buster missiles out of what they paid me for “valuable services rendered.”
Which added up to quite a discount, but still, twelve million solaria (“we threw un pequeño incentivo for you to mantenerlo todo hush-hush,” said Admiral William Hurtado) is enough money that I wasn’t going to start complaining about a minor though fundamentally unfair tax.
On the other hand, good thing I didn’t use the thermonuclear warheads or I’d still be paying for them.
Truth is, I wasn’t expecting medals or public recognition (a secret’s a secret), but what I liked least about the whole deal was not being able to talk about it with anyone.
Not with my parents, who, for their part, each kept on grumbling that I’d wasted my life mucking through slime and mucilage.
Not with the eight veterinarian biologists from different species who had “observed” the whole rescue mission from their four observation vessels orbiting Brobdingnag.
Not even with Narbuk. To my endless surprise, and I suspect also to the amazement of the ecologists on Abyssalia, my secretary-assistant had dealt with the out-of-season spawning of the grendels with consummate skill. And entirely on his own! Though he never came within two kilometers of any of the gigantic crustaceans, it took him no more than twenty-six hours to analyze the water and discover the biochemical pollutant that, even in extremely diluted concentrations, was disrupting the critters’ life cycle.
How smug he was when he told me!
If he only knew…
As a reward for his splendid independent performance, I prepared a dish of fried eggplant with seasoned tomatoes and capers. And he loved it.
After wolfing down his second helping, the impudent little fellow hinted he’d like to set himself up on his own as a second “Veterinarian to the Giants.”
Fine by me, I told him. A little competition lends spice to life.
But he shouldn’t even dream of me lending him the money to get his business started.
And the slogan was all my idea.
Fair’s fair, but too much is too much. Love your neighbor as yourself, sure—but not more than yourself.
And Cosita?
Fine, thanks. From what we could tell, it hadn’t even noticed anything.
And that’s where matters would have ended, with no further repercussions, all of us more or less satisfied. Except my parents, of course. And grumpy old Juni Tacho, maybe.
But the fact is, the story didn’t end there.
Not at all.
Three weeks after my lucky rescue, the veterinarian biologists orbiting Brobdingnag (new ones, of course, not the same eight) noticed that Cosita was starting to display behaviors no one had ever seen in a laketon.
First it stopped moving, regardless of how many tasty cometoids rich in carbonaceous chondrites fell within a few hundred meters of it. It didn’t even stir when other, smaller laketons ate them, taking advantage of its peculiar quiescence.
It didn’t react to anything.
Over the following weeks, its enormous body began to reorganize as it slowly took the shape of a giant cone whose apex towered nearly thirty-five kilometers above the ground. A living mountain that left even the famous Olympus Mons of Mars in the dust.
Its cytoplasm also changed from a translucent blue to pitch black, and its cell wall seemed to grow markedly harder, until it assumed nearly the consistency of horn.
Since it gave no signs of metabolic activity, the general opinion was that Cosita was dying… and everyone was getting ready to observe that exceptional event.
It would be sort of like witnessing the death of a god.
When I found out, I admit I felt pretty guilty. Could I have killed it, what with the missiles, and the salt, and the colchicine?
Half the galaxy was fixated on Brobdingnag for the next two weeks. Until one fine day, after some people had started to think nothing else would happen, when suddenly Cosita exploded.
Not a metaphor.
It literally EXPLODED.
A good part of the matter that formed it was ejected at high speed from the small “crater” that opened up at the apex.
The living mountain really was a volcano, it turns out. Except that when it erupted, instead of red-hot lava, in a final titanic effort it ejected billions upon billions of oval capsules, barely half a meter across each.
Spores!
Due to the tremendous gravity on Brobdingnag, almost ninety percent of that eruption of life fell right back onto the planet’s surface, though some of them landed thousands of kilometers away.
I’m certain that some of them will germinate.
But the lucky and determined ten percent of these condensed seeds of life did escape into space, where they dispersed in every direction.
And that’s when the trouble started all over again.
My colleagues were thrilled. They’d finally solved the long-standing mystery of how laketons reproduce! And it was as spectacular as everything else having to do with the titans of Brobdingnag!
So many fascinating new questions now arose. Could those traveling spores be the original panspermia that had dispersed from the depths of the cosmos and gave rise to oxygen-based life on so many worlds in the galaxy? (Oh, Arrhenius, what you’re missing!) Could we Laggorus, humans, and Cetians all be distant descendants of Cosita, Tiny, and company? Since all three species share DNA as our means of transmitting and replicating biological information, that could well be the case…
More research was called for. And since inorganic machines hold up better to extreme accelerations than their makers, a variety of automatic probes were soon on their way to the surface of Brobdingnag to recover some of the millions of spores that hadn’t made it off the planet.
That’s when they discovered something very curious.
As is usually the case with spores, each contained all the genetic information needed to give rise to a new laketon, an exact replica of Cosita.
Or rather, not quite exact… Because, buried inside the DNA, there were a few curious chains that had hydrogen and germanium foam bases. What the…? The three or four distinguished Juhungan biologists on the team immediately identified these chains as coming from one of their bioships.
One of the biologists even broached the possibility that, merely by physically penetrating the laketon without exchanging genetic material with it, a Juhungan vehicle could have set its reproductive mechanism in motion.
Unheard of. A Juhungan bioship had fertilized Cosita? But how? Why? And when?
I could have explained the whole thing to them. Apparently, the final dose of salt and colchicine I administered to Cosita to force it to release us must have sent its metabolism into crisis mode, and its nucleus must have decided that under such harsh conditions the best thing to do was sporulate.
But the weirdest and most awful thing was that since the remains of the Juhungan bioship were still inside the digestive vacuole at the time, its genetic information must have gotten mixed up with Cosita’s. So the bioship’s genes were reproduced billions of times, in each and every one of the spores.
An original… plus n tending to infinity copies.
Even at this point, properly managed, there wouldn’t have been any scandal.
But of course, given the military’s secrecy complex, it didn’t occur to any of them to warn the Juhungans not to analyze the elements of their bioship they found inserted in the laketon genetic code carried by the spores.
Likewise, no one had let Enti Kmusa or An-Mhaly know that the biocomputers built (or cultivated, actually) by the deaf and blind hydrogen breathers function as virtual black boxes, preserving a full record of every operation they carry out.
Since the representatives of the two opposing camps had nothing else to do while captive in the cytoplasm, they’d used their ship’s on-board computer to finalize the details of the Olduvailan-Cetian treaty. It turns out, all the details of their top-secret negotiations were recorded inside every one of Cosita’s spores.
And millions of them were now zooming all over the galaxy, no less.
We should acknowledge that the Juhungan biologists behaved properly: as soon as they discovered what had happened, they immediately reported it to their bosses, who were already up to speed on the whole affair.
But by then it was too late to stop the avalanche. Veterinarian biologists were flocking to Brobdingnag to investigate Cosita’s sporulation, and it had occurred to plenty of them that there was something strange about finding Juhungan bioship records encoded in the spores… So they set about deciphering the DNA, no easy task. That’s how they learned about the secret treaty between Olduvaila and Tau Ceti. And all the rest.
In less than three hours, every ship that found a spore in space, every planet where a spore was found orbiting—the whole galaxy, in a word, would learn about the supersensitive accord.
It was a disaster.
A genuine credibility crisis for the Galactic Community Coordinating Committee.
The Amphorians, Laggorus, Kerkants, even the Parimazos, all burst into laughter, not so much at our human and Cetian obsession for keeping up appearances as at our obvious inability to do so successfully.
The Juhungans, with their lame excuses, just added fuel to the fire.
Feeling they had been made fools of in front of the whole galaxy, the former Olduvailans, now Mvambese, rose up in arms against their leaders, demanding instant death for those who had shamed them.
The brand-new planet’s entire governing cabinet was tried, found guilty… and executed.
Luckily for President Enti, she wasn’t on her planet at the time; that was the only reason she escaped her fellow citizens’ fury.
They’ve also demanded my head, by the way, but a planet’s sentences are only valid on its surface… Well, there are still lots of other worlds in the Milky Way for me to visit, aren’t there? And Mvambaland isn’t high on my list.
The Cetians, as dramatic as the Olduvailan-Mvambese, though
I admit rather less bloodthirsty, passed an irrevocable sentence on the Assimilation master in their new colony on Urgh-Yhaly-Mhan, my old secretary-assistant An-Mhaly: banishment from their culture for life. And the hunt for scapegoats to answer for the “affront to the honor of the Goddess’s own People” did not stop there. An-Mhaly’s milk cousin, Gardf, lost her position on the Galactic Community Coordinating Committee, and along with Conflictmaster Jhun-Likha was condemned to “ritual death”: returning to the same Cetian sea from which they had once emerged as shivering eel-like spawn, entering it dressed in the full garb and regalia of their offices, and emerging without insignia or clothes, and with new names.
But still alive, at least.
I pity them for their political ambitions. I really do. I had come to feel… a kind of affection for them. And their downfall doesn’t make me happy.
Actually, given that they both had enough inner strength not to commit suicide when their reputations were ruined, I’m fairly confident they’ll win back prestige and responsibility. Though it may take some time.
As for me, the agent of their race’s discredit, I was forbidden to set foot ever again in any Cetian colony or ship anywhere in the galaxy, under penalty of death. And all the lovely six-breasted humanoids were informed that it was taboo to even think of contacting me.
That really did hurt. Cetians used to be my best clients.
Admiral Hurtado and General Kurchatov were likewise immediately demoted. I think Juni Tacho went back to Anima Mundi to resume his studies of veterinarian biology, but I haven’t confirmed it.
I suspect he’s really trying with all his might to get a PhD in oceanography. Bar to bar, dive to dive…
The Army and Space Force of Earth tried to sue me over my “unauthorized utilization of classified military materiel,” based on the episode of the seventeen bunker busters, and they demanded I return the “material incentive received for disinterested assistance” to pay for “moral damages”…
But I’m not Enti or An. I stopped them dead in their tracks; if they kept pressing their ridiculous claim, I’d divulge every detail about the ultrasecret design of Beagle…
They gulped and dropped the matter.
