by David Coy
The skeleton was fragile so she wrapped the rope around it to hold it together, then headed back to the shuttle. She’d had enough of these alien riddles for one day.
When she got back she was surprised to see Jacob sitting at their table with Donna and eating from a platter with a fork. The sight of him there, dressed in standard contractor’s cottons with his strange head drooped over the plate, made her want to vomit. Donna was sitting opposite him, watching him eat.
“Hey, Jacob,” she said. “Recognize this?” she held the skeleton out to him like a bundle of sticks. He acted like he’d heard nothing at all.
Donna turned around and looked.
“What the hell is that?” she asked, leaning away from it. “And where in hell did you get it?”
“Ask Jacob, there,” she said putting it gently down. “He can tell you more about it than I can. Oh, I can tell you what it is all right. I can describe the parts. What I can’t tell you is why it exists. That’s the mystery, isn’t it, Jacob? What about that? Care to comment?”
Jacob continued to eat, slowly, without looking up as if there were no one else in the room.
“What would he know about it?” Donna asked.
“I think he knows exactly why it exists, don’t you, Jacob?”
Donna looked over at Jacob. “Do you? Do you know?” she asked of him.
“Ask him why his entire external physiology is so strange,” Rachel said. “Ask him.”
Jacob continued to eat as if he were the only one in the chamber.
“Well, I’ll tell you why,” Rachel said. “This place is the sickest fucking place in the universe.”
“It’s bad, I know but . . .” Donna began.
“No. It’s not just bad. This place is the center of evil in the universe. And Jacob knows all about it.”
“Rachel? What are you talking about?” Donna asked. She was beginning to worry about Rachel’s mental state. It was one thing to have seizures and another to babble incomprehensibly. In Rachel’s case the two often occurred in close proximity.
“Okay, it’s like this,” Rachel began. “The aliens who lived here had a way with living things. They didn’t just experiment for the sake of science. They were more interested in art, you know, the creation of things, like playing God.”
“I don’t get it,” Donna said.
“See this thing?” Rachel pointed at it. “This thing is a fabrication. They made this thing from parts of other fucking things. They violated natural laws and combined one animal with parts from another to get this, this abomination.”
“How?”
“All that shit in the lab is designed to do just that—to make goddamned things like this thing here.”
“Yikes,” Donna said, studying her patient for a response to Rachel’s rant.
“Yikes? Yeah, I’d say yikes to that,” Rachel said with a sneer. “How about you Jacob? Yikes? Doesn’t that say it all?”
No reply.
“Well, yikes to that,” Rachel mocked and walked away indignantly.
“He’s tired and obviously doesn’t know anything about what you’re talking about,” Donna said apologetically to Rachel’s back. As strange as Jacob was, he was still her patient. She did have an investment in him, if a somewhat reluctant one. She didn’t know if defending Jacob was entirely appropriate, but it seemed the thing to do.
Jacob put a slow forkful of food in his mouth.
He waited until Rachel was across the chamber before he spoke. “You said there was a settlement not too far from here?"
“Yes. It’s about two hundred kilometers away,” she replied. “Why?”
“I think I’d like to go there. I don’t feel welcome here.” Donna thought it over. Maybe it was best. He was having a very bad influence on Rachel. The problem for Jacob was that there was no guarantee he’d get a better reception at the settlement. He was too damned weird. “We’ll see in a few days,” she said. “Let’s see how you’re feeling then.”
“Can you tell me about it?” he asked. “Can you tell me about the people there?”
Donna thought about it, then began to tell him what she knew about The Sacred Bond of the Fervent Alliance.
For the first time, she got the feeling Jacob was really paying attention to what someone was saying. She also got the sense that he didn’t want her to notice that fact. She talked for a long time.
* * *
Rachel unslung her pack and threw it down.
Her fascination with the structure and its contents had turned to something else entirely. She had stumbled upon something unique in the universe, found interesting evidence and unraveled it. She should have been happy about it.
It had been the tree’s sheer enormity and its organic perfection she’d admired. But the truth hiding inside it had finally revealed itself like a rotten corpse. It had come to her in the form of dreadful remnants of an alien science that was less science than the simple torture of living things.
When Rachel was ten years old, she’d plucked a few flowers from her mother’s little flower garden—a poppy, a rose and a purple morning glory—brought them inside and drew them with pencil on sheets of yellow paper. Thus began her journey into the realms of the living. A profound respect for the denizens of those worlds became her lifelong companion. In time, her love became suffused with reverence for all things living. But there was none of that within these strange walls; only some wicked, selfish desire to change, mold and modify for reasons which had nothing to do with natural attributes. Evolution shaped all perfectly, exquisitely over eons. Each limb was immaculate, each turn ideal. There was no better sculptor than time and tide. She tried to imagine what it would be like for some perfect but hapless entity to find itself in the hands of these beings—to wake up with its physiology painfully altered by them.
She wanted to cry, not out of sadness, but out of anger. No tears came, only rage.
It was Jacob who was the source of it, the rank nucleus, and the filthy center. It was as if some feeble scent from him set her anger on fire like a pheromone in reverse. There was something about him that tugged on a raw nerve like a gnawing rat. She could feel it but just couldn’t think out the reason for it.
“What’d you find?” John’s voice said.
She turned, took a step toward him and leaned against him for a hug. “It’s there, over by the table. It’s there. The thing is there . . .”
“You don’t sound happy,” he said.
“No,” she said weakly. “I’m not happy.”
“Okay,” he said, “maybe you’ll have better luck next time.”
“There won’t be a next time. I’m not going back in ever again.”
“That’s serious,” he said.
“Yeah, I guess it is.”
“How come?”
“Go look at it. Go see what this place was all about.”
* * *
Two days later, in darkness softened only by the light of twin moons, they flew in and dropped Jacob off within walking distance of the settlement. They watched him limp across the plain with his net suit hanging from his thin frame like a gossamer tent. His Bible, as requested, had been stored in an airtight case and hung down low from his longer arm. He looked to Rachel like some lopsided specter, stumbling across the field. He stopped and turned for a last look, and Rachel could feel his eyes on her.
“Good riddance,” she said under her breath, certain he couldn’t hear her.
“Well, he’s gone now, Rachel,” Donna said. “You can relax now.”
“Can I?” she replied.
As he walked slowly along, Jacob rehearsed, as he had for every waking minute over the last few days, precisely what he would say to this group of profane sinners, this Sacred Bond. He knew all he needed to know about their sacrilegious practices, thanks to the sinner called Donna.
As the truthful words, the real words of God, played over and over in his head, they grew in strength like a mighty oak. As God had promised, his thousand waited.
5
It was a summary execution, the tenth in as many days. The doomed man, a laborer named Duggings, had been accused of using foul language in the presence of a member of the Council. One of the ones who saw and heard what happened, said the foul language had not been used in the Council member’s vicinity but had been directed right at him—a fatal mistake.
“You can’t do this!” Joan yelled. “He didn’t do anything to you!”
“Shut up, Joan!” Bill snarled, shaking her arm. “You could be next!”
“This is bullshit,” someone else muttered. “Bullshit. I’m for taking my chances in the green.”
“Me, too,” another said. “Screw this. We should just gather up our stuff and march right outta here.”
“We’d last about a week,” someone said.
“They’re gonna kill us all if this keeps up. Then whose gonna do their work?”
“Look at those bastards,” another said. “Have you ever seen such bullshit?”
Execution at the hands of the Council’s guard wasn’t a pretty sight. The mode of execution was newly monstrous. But making the event as ugly and public as possible was as old as tyranny itself.
Duggings was in a steel cage just big enough to sit in. The look on his face wasn’t fear, but bemused arrogance. Duggings was braver, or more stupid, than any of them realized.
“Here they come,” someone said. “I can’t watch this.”
“You’d better stay and watch or they’ll put you in that thing,” someone offered.
“This is your goddamned Sacred Bond of the Bullshit Alliance. Fuck ‘em.”
Two men, covered in protective suits from head to foot, walked up to the cage. The Council members sat or stood some distance behind it all, carefully watching, or pretending to watch, the procedure.
One of the rubber-clad men held a flask of clear liquid, very carefully with both hands. They took up positions on either side of the cage, faced the crowd and waited, as executioners had always done, for the command to do their killing work. Duggings just scanned the crowd and shook his head as if it were somehow funny.
One of the leading Council members, the new one known as Jacob, stood up and addressed the crowd.
He was the strangest looking man Joan had ever seen. He frightened her to her core.
“This man is profane and has shown disrespect for the will of God,” he said gently. “He has used profanity to erode the Godliness of this holy body. The Lord God now will punish him for his transgression. Let this be a lesson to us all, not to trifle with the holy will of God and always to show respect to his agents seated here.”
What shallow crap, Joan thought. What absolute bullshit. If they’ll kill us for that, they’ll kill us for anything.
When he stopped speaking, the rubber-clad man holding the flask turned to Jacob for the signal, and Jacob nodded. The man began to pour the liquid over the head of Duggings. Duggings blinked as the liquid ran into his eyes, and then he wiped it away with a disgusted hand. He spat it away from his mouth and just tried to smile as the stream covered his head and upper body.
“Fuck you,” he said, spitting and trying to grin. “Fuck you and your Council, and I hope you go straight to Hell, since you believe in it so damned much. We all gotta die of something.”
“Go now,” Jacob said to the crowd, “and listen to the profane man die.”
It was dusk, and they knew that before dawn, they’d be hearing Duggings scream as the fecund juice from the Vilaroos plant penetrated his skin and turned his body into a living incubator for its seeds. Short of being burned or skinned alive, it was the most grisly death Joan could think of; slow and painful and hideous.
“Why don’t they just shoot him?” Joan wanted to know. “Dammit! They could just shoot him, couldn’t they? Assholes.”
“Joan, shut up,” Bill said, “unless you wanna be next in that goddamned cage.”
Habershaw happened to glance at Jacob and saw that he was looking their way, and thought for a brief, gut-churning second that Jacob could hear what he just said.
Jacob, they say, had walked in out of the jungle and become an immediate member of the Bondsmen’s Council. Some said it was just because he was strange, and the Council itself was strange so they matched right up. Others said it was because he carried with him a book called The Bible that had been printed almost a thousand years ago. The Bondsmen’s laws were supposedly based on that book and much of the original meaning, changed and watered down through the years, had been re-claimed, and rejuvenated from it. Now they said, they had the authentic document, the original blueprint. They said the Bondsmen’s scientists looked at it for a week before deciding it was genuine. There were other rumors about how Jacob was God’s Chosen One and destined to become High Priest. Almost everyone believed that one. The stuff about being in suspended animation for a thousand years got sideways looks most of the time.
He scared the hell out of everybody, even the other Council members. That part was true.
“Somebody ought to come out here tonight and kill Duggings,” Lavachek said. “That would be the humane thing to do.”
“You’d be right in there with him if they caught you,” Habershaw whispered. “Let’s get out of here. Maybe he’ll go quick.”
“They never go quick,” Joan said as they turned away.
When Jacob came along some ninety Verdian days ago, things began to get much worse and much stranger fast. They couldn’t say or do certain things now and wear certain clothes—even certain colors on certain days. Rules had been applied to almost everything. Each day the bulletins would describe some weird-assed thing to be done. Things they’d taken for granted as commonplace suddenly couldn’t be done anymore. One of the worst offenses was speaking against the Council, and Joan constantly walked that razor’s edge. Habershaw worried constantly that she’d be taken away and executed. Oddly, no women had been executed yet, but there was always a first time. Habershaw prayed that Joan, with her quick tongue, wouldn’t be the one to set that unfortunate precedent.
“I heard today that Jacob found that thing he’s been looking for,” Lavachek said as they walked along.
“You know, that big-assed plant thing he’s been talking about. They found it over by the shore.”
“What kind of plant thing?” Joan asked. “There're lots of plant things on the planet.”
“I heard it was some huge hive or something. Big. We’re talking a half a kilometer big.”
“No plant’s that big,” Joan said.
“Hey, you asked,” Lavachek said with a shrug.
“What’s he going to do with it?” Habershaw asked.
“You won’t believe what I heard,” Lavachek said.
“Try us,” Habershaw said. “I’d believe just about anything that bastard did at this point.”
“Well, I heard he was going to move the entire settlement to it.”
“Now that is bullshit,” Habershaw said.
“That’s what I heard,” Lavachek said. “I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“How would he do that?” Joan asked, mirroring Habershaw's disbelief.
“Well, if you stop to consider that the machinery is already
sitting on this ball to cut a road thirty meters wide—in one pass I might add—from here to the sea, it’s not such a dumb idea.”
“You mean you and me cut the road is what you mean,” Habershaw asked to make sure he understood.
“That part’s possible.”
“Yep. Then the trucks start hauling the stuff over. The only thing is whether he can get the other Council members to go along with it. I heard they don’t have a choice.”
“Goddamn, Lavachek,” Joan said. “You hear it all, don’t you?"
“Hey, it pays to have your ear to the ground.”
“So it sounds like a done deal,” Habershaw said.
“I’d say so. Weird, huh?”
Joan shook her head in disgust. “Who is the sonofabitch th
at says he can do that to us? Somebody tell me.”
“He’s the Grand Poobah, is what he is,” Lavachek said. “He can do anything he wants. Did you hear the rumor about the women?”
Joan swallowed involuntarily. “No. What about them?”
“I heard he—excuse me there, Joan. I heard he wants to fuck all of them.”
“Oh, for shit’s sake, Lavachek,” Habershaw said, trying to put Joan at ease. “It’s bad enough without you making it up.”
“Hey, don’t blame me,” Lavachek grinned. “I’m just tellin’ you what I heard—I’m just the messenger.”
“They used to kill the messengers, too,” Joan said setting his coffee down hard in front of him. “Don’t you go repeating that little rumor. You’ll have every woman in the settlement in hysterics.”
Lavachek shrugged. “Fine, then.”
“So if you’re right we should be hearing about the road at any time,” Habershaw said, wanting to change the subject.
“Any day now, I expect.”
The phone buzzed and Habershaw picked it up. Joan and Lavachek looked at nothing and sipped coffee as Habershaw listened, I-see’d and uh-huh’d a few times. Finally he said, “We’ll be there.” Then he closed the connection.
When he was done, he drew a deep breath through his nose.
