by David Coy
DOMINANT SPECIES
Volume Three
acquired traits
David Coy
Dominant Species Volume Three: Acquired Traits
Copyright © 2007 by David Coy, All rights reserved.
Third Edition
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher or the author, with the exception of brief quotes used in reviews. Contact the publisher for information on foreign rights.
Cover art by Ivaylo Nikolov.
For more information on this title, characters, and forthcoming books in this series, www.DominantSpeciesOnline.com.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
ISBN-10: 1-4196-6839-0 EAN-13: 978-1-4196-6839-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007903580
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To Susan
The Dominant Species Series
Volume One:
Natural Selection
Volume Two:
Edge Effects
Volume Three:
Acquired Traits
Everything in nature contains all the power of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
1
“Bibles. I’ve heard of those,” he said, looking at it like it was a bug. “You can’t do anything for him. He’s barely alive.”
“If we could get that thing off his head, he might be okay. You never know. Donna might be able to do it. First, we have to cut these things off his legs. Give me your knife.”
John sighed and slipped his knife out of the scabbard. “I’ll do it,” he huffed. “Get out of the way.”
A few minutes later, they had the figure lying on the floor, arms and legs stiff and twisted, the book still clamped, almost fused, in its hand.
“Now what?” John said, wiping his hands on his pants as if he’d touched something dirty.
“We carry him back,” she said.
“I’m not carrying that goddamned thing anywhere.”
“Why not? He doesn’t weigh much.”
“It’s filthy! I don’t want to touch it any more than I already have!”
“Fine. I’ll do it,” she said working her arms under the frail figure.
“Yeah, you do that.”
Rachel shot him a look, and then hefted the figure up like a tall, thin child. “Lead the way,” she said.
Halfway back to their new, improvised living quarters, John relented and took the figure from her, scowling and vowing to burn his clothes when he got back to the shuttle.
When Donna saw the figure, her first impression was of some strange artwork. When John put it down, and she realized it wasn’t just an object, she felt her guts lurch in a spasm of disgust.
“What is it?” she asked, scowling.
“Who might be a better way to put it,” Rachel said.
“And what the fuck is that on his head?” Donna went on. Her scowl got deeper as she leaned in and looked at the bulbous thing attached to the figure’s head. “What the fuck is that? It’s got tentacles stuck his godamned ears . . . and his godamned nose! What the fuck?”
“Don’t know yet,” Rachel said. “We’ll have to find out.”
“Where did you find him?” Donna asked, puzzled. “How long has he been in there? Is he one of ours?”
“We don’t know any of that yet. We found him in one of the deeper chambers,” Rachel said, stripping off her pack. “There were others, other life forms in the chamber. But those weren’t human.”
“Huh!” Donna said. “This thing gets stranger by the day.”
“Yep,” Rachel said.
“There was what we think was a laboratory, too,” John said.
“A laboratory?” Donna said with a note of doubt.
“Yeah. Laboratory,” Rachel said. “Or something like one. I’ll have to go back and check it out some more.”
“I’m sure you will,” Donna said. “You’d think you were being paid to explore this thing. Never mind what you drag back in.”
Still scowling, Donna leaned in and considered the man’s head and the thing attached to it. She folded her arms in defense of it. “This is one very fucked up medical situation,” she said.
“Rachel likes him. Be careful,” John said, not trying to hide his sarcasm.
“I don’t like him. He needs help is all.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this thing on his head,” Donna said getting down even closer to look at it.
“I think it’s keeping him alive somehow,” Rachel said.
“Alive? You call that alive?” Donna asked, studying the form.
“If a thing’s not dead, it’s alive. It’s alive.”
“What do you want me to do with it?” Donna wanted to know.
Rachel looked at John for support, but got only pursed lips and a downcast head in return. “Try to save him,” she said, still looking at the top of John’s head. “It’s a human being.”
Donna thought about it. She stepped back and studied the form from head to toe.
She had worked on patients with a wide range of unsavory, often disgusting, conditions, especially since landing on Verde, but this one was the worst by far. The skin was loose, shrunken and grayish. The limbs, stiff and tortured, were strange, and she got the distinct impression that one arm was longer than its mate. The tendrils running into the man’s head produced the worse kind of viscera-wrenching effect. This was the most hideous thing she’d ever seen, she was sure all the more so because the thing was, or had been, human. The thought of working on it turned her stomach. She drew a breath and thought about it some more, trying to find some reason to do it. By the time she’d let the air out, she had her answer.
She was a nurse. It was her job.
She squatted down and touched one of the rubbery tendrils running into the corner of the man’s mouth. When she took her hand away, she wiped and whisked her fingers together to clean them and felt compelled to wash her hands several times.
“Let’s move him into the shuttle where the tools are,” she said.
A few minutes later, she was ready to work, gloves on and an assortment of glass and stainless steel implements in a tray, clean and waiting. Their polished cleanliness, in contrast to the man’s fetid condition, gave her at least bare comfort.
She rested her hands lightly on the figure’s shoulder and pressed. The flesh felt tough and dry but was loose and seemed to float over a layer of congealed material beneath.
“Odd,” she said.
“I’d say so,” John replied with a smirk.
“I might be able to dislodge the thing by making the host so noxious it wants to let go.”
“What if you put some current into it?” Rachel asked. “Just enough to irritate it.”
“That might work, but I’m afraid any more trauma to the victim might kill him.”
“He’d be better off,” John said.
Rachel gave him a look. “Shut up, John,” she said.
Donna didn’t know if the being could feel anything, but it was better to be safe than sorry. She filled a needle with painkiller and injected the contents into a vein she found in his arm. A moment later, she though
t she heard just the slightest sigh from him, like a distant and gentle breath, so weak it was barely audible.
She inserted an IV into the same vein, taped it down, and started a flow of nutrients from a bottle. That done, she tightened her gloves over her interlocked fingers, and began.
The way she figured it, the direct approach was best.
She grasped one of the tendrils snaking into the man’s mouth and pulled gently. There was a moment when the eel-like organ seemed to cling tighter, but then it slipped down and out of the corner of the man’s mouth like a long, smooth rope, the very tip of it bristling with wire-like hair, vibrating and twitching. The entire length of it was covered with brownish fluid that seemed to lubricate it.
“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, he
r 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.
