Interzone #265 - July-August 2016

by Andy Cox [Ed. ]

  April turned to May. As the weather warmed, friction between Irregulars and Thistledowners ramped up again. General McKenzie ordered his Irregulars to help the Thistledowners with spring planting, to give the restless men a sink for their energy.

  One morning around the middle of May we were working the fields. Johnson drove a team of four horses that strained to pull a quad-bladed plow intended for a tractor. Peggy, I, and a couple others walked behind, planting corn from sacks we carried. The sun was hot, the soil just now warm enough to plant a crop. The loam curled like a yellow wave against the blade of the plow, and fell over, releasing its rich and musky scent.

  We had sown in about an acre, a good morning’s work. At noon we rested. Thistledown women came out to the fields to feed us dinner, buttered cornbread and a casserole. Johnson had removed his shirt on account of the warmth. Glistening rivulets of sweat rolled off his dark skin. His shoulders and upper back were encased in armor, overlapping pearly gray plates. It swam with faint rainbow colors, like oil on a puddle. Johnson claimed it would stop a 9 millimeter slug. He was crazy proud of that armor. I had never seen him take it off.

  Peggy sat beside Johnson, running a finger nail over the armor plates. It made a throbbing musical note, like running a wet finger around the rim of a water glass. “I bet I can play a tune,” Peggy said. She gave me a mischievous look. “Listen, Frenchie. I’ll play that thing you’re always whistling. Terrell, hold still.”

  “Babe, I’m still eating here—”

  “Hush, you. Just be still.”

  Using her fingernail, Peggy made an eerie squeaking noise on the armor. “I’m awful at this,” she said finally, with a giggle. She whistled a few bars of ‘Peggy-O’.

  “Oh, that tune,” Johnson said. “Frenchie, what’s it called? Did you make it up?”

  I shook my head. “Old song, from the north of England. Lots of folksingers covered it.”

  “Are there words?”

  I sang the lyrics for them. I omitted the last verse. That verse has always disturbed me.

  “You dog,” Johnson said when I was done.

  “Woof, sir,” I said.

  “I like that song,” Peggy said delightedly. “It’s all about us.”

  “Those are really the words?” Johnson said.

  I nodded.

  “Where’s this Fenario, that they’re going to?”

  “No one knows,” I said.

  “Oh, rats,” Peggy said. She tugged her right hand, which was resting on Johnson’s armored left shoulder.

  “What is it?” Johnson asked.

  “My finger’s stuck.”

  I will never forget the look of terror on Captain Johnson’s face.

  In a blur of motion, he half-turned, his right arm swept around, seized Peggy’s wrist, and yanked her hand off his shoulder. She shrieked. Other Irregulars and Thistledowners turned their heads.

  Peggy looked at her hand. A bright drop of blood trickled down the index finger. “It hurts,” she said, and pouted. She stuck the finger in her mouth.

  Johnson shook his head. “Boo, I warned you. You can’t touch the armor too long. It’s like a kid putting his tongue on a freezing doorknob.”

  “Then I’d be stuck to you forever!” She smiled around her finger.

  I hadn’t realized Johnson’s armor did that. The armor had been made by French military labs, out of the flesh of Vour Faad. Johnson had been stationed at the US consulate in Marseilles when Vour Faad heaved out of the Mediterranean, over the Corniche, and into the city. Cubic miles of Him, churning and gelatinous, cascaded down streets and boulevards like a torrent of living sewage. “It smelled like falling face first into a maggoty corpse,” Johnson told me once. Vour Faad’s flesh consumed every living thing He touched. Johnson had helped evacuate the consular staff as far as Aix-en-Provence, where he witnessed the first demonstration of what came to be known as the ‘French Solution’. A Dassault Mirage fighter-bomber dropped a single airburst thermonuclear device on Vour Faad.

  That was the end of Vour Faad, and the end of the ancient and fabled city of Marseilles.

  After that, the French sealed their borders. Anything or anyone that came by the sea, over the passes of the Pyrenees or the Alps, across the Rhine or the Somme, was instantly and without hesitation destroyed with thermonuclear fire. Whether it was a Meteor God or a column of starving German or Italian refugees. France was taking no chances.

  The US had waited too long. Dithered. Debated. Had moral qualms. Until San Francisco and Los Angeles were gone, and New York, and Miami, and New Orleans and Galveston. Until the Air Force ran out of fuel and our nuclear subs had been taken by vast things that now ruled the ocean trenches. France still had an industrial civilization, air power, and global reach. The US had horse-drawn plows, and us. McKenzie’s Irregulars.

  “I think your armor’s handsome,” Peggy said. “Because it’s dangerous.”

  “They say that if you’ve got part of a Meteor God on you, another Meteor God can’t eat you,” Johnson said.

  “Really?” Peggy said.

  “It’s unproven,” I said.

  “Why do they say it?”

  “They fight sometimes,” I said. “The Gods. They fight among themselves. They’re all different. Not one species. Or, at least not as we conceive ‘species’.”

  We still don’t know what CA19 was all about. The Meteor Gods may exterminate us before we figure it out. Was CA19 a multi-species, multi-generational starship, whose politics had gone off the rails? Was it a lost prison hulk, and the Gods a random lot of interstellar criminals? Was it a biological weapon, designed to clear the Earth of life in preparation for the coming of some yet greater race? Or maybe extrasolar political and social norms are simply beyond our puny understanding. Perhaps the entire universe is no more than a Hobbesian war of all against all.

  I said, “The popular idea is that the Meteor Gods all hate each other, so part of another God would repel them. It’s a sort of folk understanding of science: ‘opposites repel’.”

  Peggy was looking at me curiously, with a lop-sided smile. “Say that again.”

  “What?”

  “‘…not as we conceive…’ Say it.”

  I blushed.

  “Do you know you talk like a book?” Peggy said. “Oh, don’t be upset. I think it’s cute.”

  “Frenchie’s an educated man,” Johnson said. “He used to work in some sort of laboratory, near Raleigh. I think he knows more about the Meteor Gods than he wants to let on. He won’t talk about it, though.”

  “Because it’s scary?” Peggy asked.

  “Because there are things worse than the Meteor Gods,” I said.

  “Oh, you’re so mysterious!” Peggy said, clapping her hands together. “I love a mystery.” She leaned in and whispered in my ear. I could feel the warmth of her breath on my cheek. “Tell me? I can keep a secret.” She reached out to pull Captain Johnson in. “Just me and Terrell.”

  I would have ducked the question a couple of weeks ago. But as I have said, my darkness had begun to lift. My guard was down.

  There’s an area in the North Carolina Piedmont called the Research Triangle. In the last century, the state invited tech companies to locate there and partner with universities. Intel, Genentech, Lucent, Monsanto, that sort. After CA19, the universities crumbled, but some of the research outfits burrowed underground. By now their labs are holed up in miles of tunnels and caverns, hundreds of feet deep beneath the red Carolina clay. I used to work there.

  “I was with an outfit called NuLife,” I said. We were working on a way to fight the Meteor Gods.

  “Did you know the Gods are related to us? Related to us the way apes and goldfish and bananas and bacteria are related. They have DNA with the same four bases. RNA coded by the DNA. Proteins coded and assembled by the RNA. Do you understand what those words mean? The chemicals, the matter of which their bodies are made, is arranged according to the same plan as ours. There’s about ten percent gene homology
between us and the Meteor Gods. That’s not much. Even bananas share about fifty percent of their genes with us. But what’s surprising is that there’s any similarity at all.

  “But in practical terms, it means that the DNA of humans and the Meteor Gods can be merged. That we can share each others’ genes.”

  Peggy looked quickly back and forth between Captain Johnson and me. “‘Merged’?”

  “Does that shock you? It should,” I said. “But it gets worse. My project team was trying to fight fire with fire. They thought that the way to destroy a Meteor God was to make our own Meteor God. We were trying to create a hybrid being. A warrior. A mix of human and Meteor God genes. Immense in size. Its flesh – ” nausea rose in me “ – of jelly-like consistency. Fast growing. Covered with…tentacles and feelers…a fringed, palpitating mouth like a hagfish… A monster to fight monsters.” I stopped, closed my eyes, and swallowed hard. “The unspeakable obscenity of it. Of all the horrors our sorry human race has accomplished, surely what we were doing was the worst. I was part of it, Christ, I was the project leader. I hate myself for that. I always will.”

  There. I had said it. What I had been afraid to say to anyone, almost afraid to say to myself, for months.

  “Would it have worked?” Peggy asked.

  The clarity of her voice brought me back from my private purgatory of memory. I tried to parse her words. I could not make sense of them. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Do you think the, whatever you called it, the ‘hybrid being’, could have fought a Meteor God and won?”

  I rose and faced her. I was trembling. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. My voice was higher-pitched than I intended.

  Johnson’s eyes narrowed. He leaned a little closer to Peggy. “Frenchie,” he said. “Chill.”

  “It matters,” Peggy said, “because the human race doesn’t have much else going for it right now. Is France going to nuke their own country until they run out of bombs? What then?” She looked up at me, with those green eyes that measured all things. “I want to live, Frenchie. I don’t want to cower on a farm in the woods until something like a million gallons of green quince jelly slithers out of the sea and eats me and everything I love. If there’s a weapon that can beat the Meteor Gods, we should be using it. I don’t care if it’s covered with tentacles. I object to dying, that’s what I object to. I object to the human race dying. If you invented something that might stop the Meteor Gods, in the name of all that’s holy, you should be using it, not running away from it!”

  I tried to speak, but my heart was beating so fast it must have done something to my vocal cords. “How…how…how…” I stuttered. How can you say that? I couldn’t get the words out. My face burned. I balled up my fists.

  “Soldier!” Johnson’s voice, like ice water. He leaped to his feet. The plate from which he had been eating flipped off his lap and smashed. He planted himself between Peggy and me. “Stand down!”

  I let my hands drop. Peggy stared at me, biting her lip. My head was buzzing.

  The buzz became louder. No, it wasn’t in my head. I looked up. Around me, everyone else was looking up too, shading their eyes.

  A droning six-engine prop plane circled above, not more than a thousand feet above the ground. As we watched, rear fuselage doors opened. A skid piled with boxes tumbled out. After it came another, another, another. As each fell, a parachute bloomed like a white tumor on the blue sky. The French had never sent us an airdrop this big.

  Johnson whistled. “Fat loot,” he said. He threw his arm around Peggy’s shoulders and hugged her tightly. “It’s gotta be the marshmallow guns.”

  Peggy hugged him back. “You’re going away, aren’t you?” she said. “I’m going to lose you.”

  “I’ll be back, babe,” Johnson said, planting a big kiss on her lips. “I promise.”

  ***

  What will your mother say, pretty Peggy-O?

  What will your mother say, pretty Peggy-O?

  What will your mother say,

  When she finds you’ve gone away,

  To places far and strange, to Fennario?

  We unpacked the skids like kids opening Christmas presents. The ‘marshmallow bullets’ weren’t bullets, but rocket-propelled grenades. The warheads were soft and rubbery, a little firmer than hardboiled egg. Hard to believe they would do any damage. The material was translucent, swimming with ghosts of color. It felt greasy to the touch. Made of the flesh of Vour Faad, Camille Girard had said.

  “I want to see this shit fight!” McKenzie yelled.

  So we all trooped down the drive, through the Thistledown Sidhe gates, until we were a quarter mile down the road, in a stand of loblolly pines. “Bring down a tree for me,” McKenzie said. “One missile. I’m not wasting ammo better spent on Liloouu.” The gunner picked a big pine, sighted along the barrel, and squeezed the trigger.

  The rocket whined through the air, leaving a trail of smoke. The pine shivered with the impact. The rocket’s metal case split apart, the pieces bounced away. The bullet inside simply vanished. Snorts and giggles from the onlookers. “What the hell was that about?” McKenzie said. “Damned soft bullet didn’t do anything.” He stomped forward to inspect the tree.

  A chunk of bark fell to the ground. More chunks fell. And what was happening to the needles? They were drooping, softening, contracting.

  McKenzie halted and scowled.

  Bark rained down until it surrounded the trunk in a pile. I approached the tree, kicking my way through the pine bark.

  A sheath of seething gray mucus covered the tree’s sapwood core. Shivers passed through it, up and down the trunk. It expanded, contracted. It was clearly alive. I decided not to touch it.

  “Sir, that shot was successful,” I said. “The tree is gone.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, son?” McKenzie grunted. “It’s still standing.”

  “But it’s no longer a tree,” I said. “Whatever it is.” As we had in the NuLife labs, Camille Girard must have discovered that Meteor God DNA and the DNA of terrestrial life were easily merged. Loblolly pine + Vour Faad = what? “That bullet was made out of the flesh of Vour Faad. I think what’s happened is that Vour Faad’s genes have spliced into the tree’s living tissue – the phloem. This is now a composite organism.”

  “Frankentree.”

  “You could call it that, sir.”

  “So what the hell good is it?” McKenzie said. “I don’t want Liloouu to turn into some ‘composite organism’. I want to kill Her.”

  “Sir, the French didn’t make those bullets to be used against pine trees,” I said. “They may work differently on the Meteor Gods.” The idea excited me. Maybe there was some scientific truth behind that folk belief that the Meteor Gods could not stand each other’s flesh. Maybe that was the secret that Girard’s lab had stumbled on.

  McKenzie looked into space. The Irregulars fell silent. I saw fear in McKenzie’s face, for an instant. Then his jaw tightened.

  “I don’t trust the French for crap,” McKenzie said, “but I’m sick of waiting.” He looked around, at his troops. “Pack up your kit, boys,” he yelled, “we’re leaving tomorrow. Liloouu…will…die!” A full-throated cheer went up from the men. They were sick of waiting, too.

  McKenzie feared Liloouu, and feared that Girard’s oddball ammunition wasn’t up to the task of defeating Her. So did I. But McKenzie was the sort of man to whom fear is a personal affront. Once he feels fear, he must squash it down. He must deny it. Whatever his fears tell him, he must do the opposite.

  Such a man tells himself that fear has no power over him. But the truth is that he is fear’s puppet, every bit as much as the man who runs away.

  ***

  We left in the chilly, damp hour after dawn, a couple dozen horse-drawn wagons clattering down the drive, followed by a column of soldiers. McKenzie and a handful of his colonels were mounted, most of us were on foot. I had expected tears from Peggy, but she was smiling and cheerful, running and
skipping alongside Johnson as far as the gate, where she gave him a last, lingering goodbye kiss. She was glowing. Huh. Glowing. I am stupid in the ways of women. I didn’t figure it out until later.

  We passed by that ex-loblolly pine tree on our way down the road. Now it looked like a dead tree stuck into a pile of boiling gray-green mucus. I wondered how long it would take to die. Or if it would die at all. I worried about those fancy French bullets. I respected Girard and her team, but I used to be a researcher too, and I know this: a lot of clever ideas work on the bench, but fail when you try to take them into the field.

  We spent the next two months trekking down the ruins of I-85 and I-65. We found Mobile empty of human life. Northward, between Mobile and Tuscaloosa, we found eerie, empty little towns, and skeletons, human and animal. No corpses. The bones had been picked clean. Piles of bones, sometimes shoulder-high, probably where Liloouu shat them out. Liloouu ate everything that lived. We found trails through the forest fifty yards wide, swept clean of trees, shrubs, grass, lichen, right down to the raw earth and rock. She was ravenous for all life.

  We traveled slowly. Without human habitation or farm animals, we had trouble living off the land. Quartermastering an army is a challenge in the middle of an extinction event.

  Rangers on horses scouted ahead of the column. We kept the marshmallow guns out, and our FAMAS, but it’s hard to stay nerve-edge ready, twenty-four hours a day, month after month. The first clue we had that Liloouu was near was when one of the ranger guys came flying at us through the air. Part of him, that is. His right leg and haunch flew over a rise in front of the column and landed in the dirt. It took us a moment to understand what we were looking at. I think She had eaten most of him, but one leg had accidentally squirted away like a watermelon seed.