27 Short Stories

by Orson Scott Card

  "Antipersonnel hell," Vladimir said. "They don't need antipersonnel. All they have to do is open a little hole in our suits and let the germs come through."

  "Our suits close immediately," Amauri said, but then corrected himself. "I guess it doesn't take long for a virus to get through, does it?"

  Harold didn't get it. "Let one of those bunnies try to lay a knife on me, and I'll split him from ass to armpit."

  We ignored him.

  "What makes you think there are germs in here? Our suits don't measure that," I pointed out.

  Vladimir had already thought of that. "Remember what they said. About the Russians getting those little amino-acid monsters in here."

  Amauri snorted. "Russians." "Yeah, right," Vladimir said, "but keep the voice down, viado."

  Amauri turned red, started to say, "Quem ‚ que c. chama de viado!" --but I pushed the discipliner button. No time for any of that crap.

  "Watch your language, Vladimir. We got enough problems."

  "Sorry, Amauri, Captain," Vladimir said. "I'm a little wispy, you know?"

  "So's everybody."

  Vladimir took a breath and went on. "Once those bugs got in here, 004 must have been pretty thoroughly permeable. The, uh, Russians must've kept pumping more variations on the same into Post 004."

  "So why aren't they all dead?"

  "What I think is that a lot of these people have been killed-- but the survivors are ones whose bodies took readily to those plugs they came up with. The plugs are regular parts of their body chemistry now. They'd have to be, wouldn't they? They told us they were passed on in the DNA transmitted to the next generation."

  I got it. So did Amauri, who said, "So they've had seven or eight centuries to select for adaptability."

  "Why not?" Vladimir asked. "Didn't you notice? Eleven researchers on developing new weapons. And only two on developing new defenses. They can't be too worried."

  Amauri shook his head. "Oh, Mother Earth. Whatever got into you?"

  "Just caught a cold," Vladimir said, and then laughed. "A virus. Called humanity."

  We sat around looking at the holomap for a while. I found four different routes from where we were to the secret area-- if we wanted to get there. I also found three routes to the exit. I pointed them out to the others.

  "Yeah," Harold said. "Trouble is, who knows if those doors really lead into that unknown area? I mean, what the hell, three of the four doors might lead to the broom closets or service station."

  A good point.

  We just sat there, wondering whether we should head for the Pollywog or try to find out what was in the hidden area, when the Russian attack made up our minds for us. There was a tremendous bang. The floor shook, as if some immense dog had just picked up Post 004 and given it a good shaking. When it stopped the lights flickered and went out.

  "Golden opportunity," I said into the monkeymouth. The others agreed. So we flashed on the lights from our suits and pointed them at the door. Harold suddenly felt very important. He went to the door and ran his magic flipper finger all the way around the door. Then he stepped back and flicked a lever on his suit.

  "Better turn your backs," he said. "This can flash pretty bright."

  Even looking at the back wall the explosion blinded me for a few seconds. The world looked a little green when I turned around. The door was in shreds on the floor, and the doorjamb didn't look too healthy.

  "Nice job, Harold," I said.

  "Gra€as a deus," he answered, and I had to laugh. Odd how little religious phrases refused to die, even with an irreverent filho de punta like Harold.

  Then I remembered that I was in charge of ordergiving. So I gave.

  The second door we tried led into the rooms we wanted to see. But just as we got in, the lights came on.

  "Damn. They've got the station back in order," Amauri said. But Vladimir just pointed down the corridor.

  The pea soup had gotten in. It was oozing sluggishly toward us.

  "Whatever the Russians did, it must have opened up a big hole in the station." Vladimir pointed his laser finger at the mess. Even on full power, it only made a little spot steam. The rest just kept coming.

  "Anyone for swimming?" I asked. No one was. So I hustled them all into the not- so-hidden room.

  There were some little people in there, cowering in the darkness. Harold wrapped them in cocoons and stuck them in a corner. So we had time to look around.

  There wasn't that much to see, really. Standard lab equipment, and then thirty- two boxes, about a meter square. They were under sunlamps. We looked inside.

  The animals were semisolid looking. I didn't touch one right then, but the sluggish way it sent out pseudopodia, I concluded that the one I was watching, at least, had a rather crusty skin-- with jelly inside. They were all a light brown-- even lighter than Vladimir's skin. But there were little green spots here and there. I wondered if they photosynthesized.

  "Look what they're floating in," Amauri said, and I realized that it was pea soup.

  "They've developed a giant amoeba that lives on all other microorganisms, I guess," Vladimir said. "Maybe they've trained it to carry bombs. Against the Russians."

  At that moment Harold began firing his arsenal, and I noticed that the little people were gathered at the door to the lab looking agitated. A few at the front were looking dead.

  Harold probably would have killed all of them, except that we were still standing next to a box with a giant amoeba in it. When he screamed, we looked and saw the creature fastened against his leg. Even as we watched, Harold fell, the bottom half of his leg dropping away as the amoeba continued eating up his thigh.

  We watched just long enough for the little people to grab hold of us in sufficient numbers that resistance would have been ridiculous. Besides, we couldn't take our eyes off Harold.

  At about the groin, the amoeba stopped eating. It didn't matter. Harold was dead anyway-- we didn't know what disease got him, but as soon as his suit had cracked he started vomiting into his suit. There were pustules all over his face. In short, Vladimir's guess about the virus content of Post 004 had been pretty accurate.

  And now the amoeba formed itself into a pentagon. Five very smooth sides, the creature sitting in a clump on the gaping wound that had once been a pelvis. Suddenly, with a brief convulsion, all the sides bisected, forming sharp angles, so that now there were ten sides to the creature. A hairline crack appeared down the middle. And then, like jelly sliced in the middle and finally deciding to split, the two halves slumped away on either side. They quickly formed into two new pentagons, and then they relaxed into pseudopodia again, and continued devouring Harold.

  "Well," Amauri said. "They do have an antipersonnel weapon."

  When he spoke, the spell of stillness was broken, and the little people had us spread on tables with sharp-pointed objects pointed at us. If any one of those punctured a suit even for a moment, we would be dead. We held very still. Richard Nixon Dixon, the top halibut, interrogated us himself. It all started with a lot of questions about the Russians, when we had visited them, why we had decided to serve them instead of the Americans, etc. We kept insisting that they were full of crap.

  But when they threatened to open a window into Vladimir's suit, I decided enough was enough.

  "Tell 'em! " I shouted into the monkeymouth, and Vladimir said, "All right," and the little people leaned back to listen.

  "There are no Russians," Vladimir said.

  The little people got ready to carve holes.

  "No, wait, it's true! After we got your homing signal, before we landed, we made seven orbital passes over the entire planet. There is absolutely no human life anywhere but here!"

  "Conimie lies," Richard Nixon Dixon said.

  "God's own truth!" I shouted. "Don't touch him, man! He's telling the truth! The only thing out there over this whole damn planet is that pea soup! It covers every inch of land and every inch of water, except a few holes at the poles."

  Dixon
began to feel a little confused, and the little people murmured. I guess I sounded sincere.

  "If there aren't any people," Dixon said, "where do the Russian attacks come from?"

  Vladimir answered that one. For a bunny, he was quick on the uptake. "Spontaneous recombination! You and the Russians got new strains of every microbe developing like crazy. All the people, all the animals, all the plants were killed. And only the microbes lived. But you've been introducing new strains constantly, tough competitors for all those beasts out there. The ones that couldn't adapt died. And now that's all that's left-- the ones who adapt. Constantly."

  Andrew Jackson Wallichinsky, the head researcher, nodded. "It sounds plausible."

  "If there's anything we've learned about commies in the last thousand years," Richard Nixon Dixon said, "it's that you can't trust 'em any farther than you can spit." "Well," Andy lack said, "it's easy enough to test them."

  Dixon nodded. "Go ahead."

  So three of the little people went to the boxes and each came, back with an amoeba. In a minute it was clear that they planned to set them on us. Amauri screamed. Vladimir turned white. I would have screamed but I was busy trying to swallow my tongue.

  "Relax," Andy Jack said. "They won't hurt you."

  "Acredito!" I shouted. "Like it didn't hurt Harold!"

  "Harold was killing people. These won't harm you. Unless you were lying."

  Great, I thought. Like the ancient test for witches. Throw them in the water, if

  they drown they're innocent, if they float they're guilty so kill 'em.

  But maybe Andy Jack was telling the truth and they wouldn't hurt us. And if we refused to let them put those buggers on us they'd "know" we had been lying and

  punch holes in our monkeysuits.

  So I told the little people to put one on me only. They didn't need to test us all.

  And then I put my tongue between my teeth, ready to bite down hard and inhale

  the blood when the damn thing started eating me. Somehow I thought I'd feel better about going honeyduck if I helped myself along.

  They set the thing on my shoulder. It didn't penetrate my monkeysuit. Instead it just oozed up toward my head.

  It slid over my faceplate and the world went dark.

  "Kane Kanea," said a faint vibration in the faceplate.

  "Meu deus," I muttered.

  The amoeba could, talk. But I didn't have to speak to answer it. A question would come through the vibration of the faceplate. And then I would lie there and

  - it knew my answer. Easy as pie. I was so scared I urinated twice during the interview. But my imperturbable monkeysuit cleaned it all up and got it ready for breakfast, just like normal. And at last the interview was over. The amoeba slithered off my faceplate and returned to the waiting arms of one of the little people, who carried it back to Andy Jack and Ricky Nick. The two men put their hands on the thing and then looked at us in surprise.

  "You're telling the truth. There are no Russians."

  Vladimir shrugged. "Why would we lie?"

  Andy Jack started toward me, carrying the writhing monster that had interviewed me.

  "I'll kill myself before I let that thing touch me again."

  Andy Jack stopped in surprise. "You're still afraid of that?"

  "It's intelligent," I said. "It read my mind."

  Vladimir looked startled, and Amauri muttered something. But Andy Jack only smiled. "Nothing mysterious about that. It can read and interpret the electromagnetic fields of your brain, coupled with the amitron flux in your thyroid gland."

  "What is it?" Vladimir asked.

  Andy Jack looked very proud. "This one is my son."

  We waited for the punch line. It didn't come. And suddenly we realized that we had found what we had been looking for-- the result of the little people's research into recombinant human DNA.

  "We've been working on these for years. Finally we got it right about four years ago," Andy Jack said. "They were our last line of defense. But now that we know the Russians are dead-- well, there's no reason for them to stay in their nests."

  And the man reached down and laid the amoeba into the pea soup that was now about sixty centimeters deep on the floor. Immediately it flattened out on the surface until it was about a meter in diameter. I remembered the whispering voice through my faceplate.

  "It's too flexible to have a brain," Vladimir said.

  "It doesn't have one," Andy Jack answered. "The brain functions are distributed throughout the body. If it were cut in forty pieces, each piece would have enough memory and enough mindfunction to continue to live. It's indestructible. And when several of them get together, they set up a sympathetic field. They become very bright, then." "Head of the class and everything, I'm sure," Vladimir said. He couldn't hide the loathing in his voice. Me, I was trying not to be sick.

  So this is the next stage of evolution, I thought. Man screws up the planet till it's fit for nothing but microbes-- and then changes himself so that he can live on a diet of bacteria and viruses.

  "It's really the perfect step in evolution," Andy lack said. "This fellow can adapt to new species of parasitic bacteria and viruses almost by reflex. Control the makeup of his own DNA consciously. Manipulate the DNA of other organisms by absorbing them through the semipermeable membranes of specialized cells, altering them, and setting them free again."

  "Somehow it doesn't make me want to feed it or change its diapers."

  Andy lack laughed lightly. "Since they reproduce by fission, they're never infant. Oh, if the piece were too small, it would take a while to get back to adult competence again. But otherwise, in the normal run of things, it's always an adult."

  Then Andy Jack reached down, let his son wrap itself around his arm, and then walked back to where Richard Nixon Dixon stood watching. Andy Jack put the arm that held the amoeba around Dixon's shoulder.

  "By the way, sir," Andy Jack said. "With the Russians dead, the damned war is over, sir."

  Dixon looked startled. "And?"

  "We don't need a commander anymore."

  Before Dixon could answer, the amoeba had eaten through his neck and he was quite dead. Rather an abrupt coup, I thought, and looked at the other little people for a reaction. No one seemed to mind. Apparently their superpatriotic militarism was only skin deep. I felt vaguely relieved. Maybe they had something in common with me after all.

  They decided to let us go, and we were glad enough to take them up on the offer. On the way out, they showed us what had caused the explosion in the last "Russian" attack. The mold that protected the steel surface of the installation had mutated slightly in one place, allowing the steel-eating bacteria to enter into a symbiotic relationship. It just happened that the mutation occurred at the place where the hydrogen storage tanks rested against the wall. When a hole opened, one of the first amino-acid sets that came through with the pea soup was one that combines radically with raw hydrogen. The effect was a three-second population explosion. It knocked out a huge chunk of Post 004. We were glad, when we got back to our skipship, that we had left dear old Pollywog floating some forty meters off the ground. Even so, there had been some damage. One of the airborne microbes had a penchant for lodging in hairline cracks and reproducing rapidly, widening microscopic gaps in the structure of the ship. Nevertheless, Amauri judged us fit for takeoff.

  We didn't kiss anybody good-bye.

  So now I've let you in on the true story of our visit to Mother Earth back in 2810. The parallel with our current situation should be obvious. If we let Pennsylvania get soaked into this spongy little war between Kiev and N.ncamais, we'll deserve what we get. Because those damned antimatter convertors will do things that make germ warfare look as pleasant as sniffing pinkweeds.

  And if anythmg human survives the war, it sure as hell won't look like anything we call human now.

  And maybe that doesn't matter to anybody these days. But it matters to me. I don't like the idea of amoebas for grandchildren, and having an
antimatter great- nephew thrills me less. I've been human all my life, and I like it.

  So I say, turn on our repressors and sit out the damned war. Wait until they've disappeared each other, and then go about the business of keeping humanity alive-- and human.

  So much for the political tract. If you vote for war, though, I can promise you there'll be more than one skipship heading for the wild black yonder. We've colonized before, and we can do it again. In case no one gets the hint, that's a call for volunteers, if, as, and when. Over.

  * * *

  Not over. On the first printing of this program, I got a lot of inquiries as to why we didn't report all this when we got back home. The answer's simple. On N.ncamais it's a capital crime to alter a ship's log. But we had to.

  As soon as we got into space from Mother Earth, Vladimir had the computer present all its findings, all its data, and all its conclusions about recombinant DNA. And then he erased it all.

  I probably would have stopped him if I'd known what he was doing in advance. But once it was done, Amauri and I realized that he was right. That kind of merda didn't belong in the universe. And then we systematically covered our tracks. We erased all reference to Post 004, eradicated any hint of a homing signal. All we left in the computer was the recording of our overflight, showing nothing but pea soup from sea to soupy sea. It was tricky, but we also added a serious malfunction of the EVA lifesupport gear on the way home-- which cost us the life of our dear friend and comrade, Harold.

  And then we recorded in the ship's log, "Planet unfit for human occupancy. No human life found."

  Hell. It wasn't even a lie.

  IN THE DOGHOUSE

  As Mklikluln awoke, he felt the same depression that he had felt as he went to sleep ninety-seven years ago. And though he knew it would only make his depression worse, he immediately scanned backward as his ship decelerated, hunting for the star that had been the sun. He couldn't find it. Which meant that even with acceleration and deceleration time, the light from the nova-- or supenova-- had not yet reached the system he was heading for.