The Paul Di Filippo Megapack

by Pau Di Filippo

  “Oh, 3-Peach, I’m so glad you made it!”

  “And me for you, 6-Lick!”

  3-Peach fondly patted 6-Licorice’s wet detumescing genitals as they withdrew into their pouch. He stroked her flat, nippleless chest in return.

  “That was nice,” said 3-Peach. “I’m sure it’ll be five healthy ones this time.”

  “Me too,” replied 6-Licorice.

  Arm in arm, they set off easily, but with an underlying wariness, to meet briefly with others of their kind.

  * * * *

  Out of the large cluster of vesicles, only a bit over two hundred had managed to make contact with the host, the rest sailing off into the cold, destructive darkness. A small percentage of these vesicles had contained children of varying ages. The rest had harbored adults, like 3­Peach and 6-Licorice. And like that couple, the others had quickly mated: with their prior mates, if those individuals had chanced to come aboard the host also, or with new partners whose mates had also failed to be picked up like interplanetary cockleburrs on the back ofthe host.

  Thus, within an hour of the invasion of the host, roughly a hundred pregnancies had been successfully started.

  With this all-important task out of the way, the neohumans set about establishing themselves firmly in the host.

  Basically, this procedure involved scattering themselves throughout the interior of the gargantuan alien. They could not settle down into a single large community at this stage, unless they wished to chance being completely wiped out in a massive attack by the host’s defensive entities and its immune responses. The concentration of so much nonhost antigenic protein would have stimulated an immense marshaling of macrophages and lymphocytes by the host, floods of interferon analogues, which the neohumans would have been hard-pressed to survive.

  Therefore, the various couples betook themselves to isolated portions of the host, living for a time like independent frontiersmen of another age. They walked through mazed passages crimson as blood, and rode the sticky turbid currents through large arteries. (These neohumans could go without breathing for as long as twenty minutes, thanks to their seal heritage.) They climbed through honeycombs of spongy lipid-yellow wet tissue just as their remote ancestors had climbed through vines and branches. They burrowed through thin cellular walls when necessary, using their teeth and tough nails.

  Some died along the way, by drowning or suffocation or ingestion by the patrolling macrophages: roving jelly­globes as big as the neohumans, motivated by chemotaxis, attraction along chemical gradients. If a couple were threatened together, the male would often sacrifice himself, to ensure the escape of the female and her gestating burden.

  Eventually, nearly two hundred neohumans were distributed throughout the entire host.

  And exactly thirty days to the minute after their entry into the host—the neohumans monitored the passage of time with unerring precision, thanks to long-ago modifications in the suprachiasmatic nuclei of their brains, which provided them with accurate biological clocks—roughly one hundred women gave birth to their litters.

  * * * *

  “Get ready, 6-Lick—they’re coming!”

  3-Peach rested in one corner of the red-walled, veined humid cavity she and 6-Licorice called home, her legs wide apart, knees drawn up to her ears and gripped tightly. 6-Licorice squatted patiently in front of her, awaiting the births.

  Without visible effort, 3-Peach squeezed out the first of her litter. To the eyes of another era, the infant would have looked premature, almost fetal. And in truth, it could not yet survive on its own.

  Which was why 6-Licorice took it tenderly and, pulling open the crease of flesh across his abdomen, inserted it gently inside, where it fastened to a hidden nipple.

  He did the same with the other four.

  Then he and 3-Peach immediately had sex again, to start another batch, moving less frantically than that first time, cautious of the pouched young ones.

  When they were finished, 3-Peach—always more optimistic than her mate—said, “They all looked fine, didn’t they, 6-Lick?”

  6-Licorice softly pressed his abdomen. He had been worried about mutations—induced by cosmic radiations experienced as their vesicles had traveled through space—as much as she.

  “Yes, they did. And I’m sure the next four or five litters will be just as strong.”

  * * * *

  The neohuman population of the host, after the first birthings, now stood at roughly seven hundred, more than double the number of initial invaders. True, there was not much outward show of this leap yet, since the newest neohumans were all still pouch-bound.

  However, at the end of the second month, when all the males were waddling about awkwardly, the first litter came forth, independent, self-mobile, able to feed themselves from the body of the host, not talking yet, but on the verge of speech. They vacated the pouches of the males just in time for the next generation to go in.

  (6-Licorice, at the end of each cycle, looked more pregnant with his distended abdomen than 3-Peach ever did.)

  The second litter safely pouched, the first afoot, a third litter soon occupied all the neohuman wombs.

  By the end of six months, the neohuman population of the host stood at three thousand plus. And the oldest children were half as big as their parents.

  At the end of one year, there were six thousand members of the community of invaders who had never known a life outside this present host. The original two hundred settlers, through attrition, were down to one hundred and fifty, 3-Peach and 6-Licorice being among them.

  Now the oldest children, aged one year and fully adult, began to breed, along with their still fertile parents.

  There were four hundred breeding pairs that month. At the end of thirty days, they gave birth to two thousand children.

  And the second-oldest generation, a month behind the first, began to breed. Six hundred and fifty pairs gave birth to 3,250 children.

  The next month, nine hundred breeders birthed 4,500.

  When the next two hundred and fifty pairs came on-line, the result was 5,750 newborns.

  And the next month, and the next month, and the next…

  By the end of the second year, the neohuman population inside the immense host was nearing one hundred thousand.

  And they had barely got going.

  * * * *

  Eldest by a few seconds of 3-Peach’s and 6-Licorice’s first litter, 2-Honey was now slightly more than a year old, an energetic adult with his mother’s optimistic nature.

  The male neohuman’s full designation was 2-Honey­4-Licorice-9-Clove. His parents’ signatures had recombined uniquely in him, as they would in all his siblings.

  By these unique families of signatures the neohumans were divided into clans. Clan membership circumscribed mating, the heart giving way—or rather, indulging itself only within certain boundaries—according to an inbuilt determinism. The long-dead chromosartors had limited their progeny in this way for a particular purpose.

  Knowing that thenceforth the human race would possess a basically nonmaterial culture, the chromosartors had pondered what faculties, what cargo of knowledge, they could pass on to the neohumans as a legacy of six thousand years of civilization. They had eventually settled on several talents, chief of which was mathematical skill.

  The entire corpus of mathematics was literally encoded in, and distributed across, the collective neohuman genome.

  2-Honey’s clan was the bearer of Riemann integrals. They were born with a predisposition toward solving those abstruse functions in their heads. The circumscribed mating choices insured that the ability would be passed from generation to generation.

  2-Honey had taken for his mate a female named/tasted 7-Apple-1-Clove-8-Peach, whom he had met half a host away, while eluding a persistent lymphocyte. Ducking into a fibrous maze too small for the lymphocyte to enter, 2-Honey had stumbled on the home of 7-Apple and her family, distant cousins. It had been love at first scent.

  One day shortly
after birthing their own first litter, the couple was traveling together to visit 2-Honey’s parents. The son and his wife had lately, during a heated session, discovered what they believed to be a new aspect of unbounded Riemann integrals. Now they wanted to confirm with their elders that their discovery was actually original and valid. If such was the case, then the new information would be disseminated as widely as possible among their clan, to insure the survival of this knowledge.

  As 2-Honey and 7-Apple loped speedily through the corridors, they fell into speculating on the importance of their discovery.

  “If only it’s real,” said 7-Apple. “It would be such an honor. Why, who knows, it might even lead someday, somehow, to the race returning home, to Earth.”

  “That’s a nice dream, 7-Apple,” replied 2-Honey absentmindedly. “Even if it is unlikely. Still, we can always hope…” 2-Honey’s voice trailed off. He was really in no mood to chatter. The long graceful S-curves of integrals occupied his vision, and he was lost in a numinous realm of abstraction.

  7-Apple saw the newly grown patch of acid blisters too late, and 2-Honey never saw them at all. She swerved, but he ran right across them.

  The blisters exploded, drenching 2-Honey and just spattering 7-Apple.

  When 7-Apple opened her eyes, she saw 2-Honey writhing on the floor. Ignoring her own pain, she moved to touch him.

  “No—” gritted 2-Honey through clenched teeth. “You’ll burn yourself. Liquid. Wash me—”

  2-Honey yowled then, high and long. The sound went right through 7-Apple like a cartilage knife. She ran off, trying to erase the image of 2-Honey’s bare white bones showing through his flesh.

  When she returned, quickly as possible, with a sac of cool juice pinched from a cluster, 2-Honey’s legs, the last part of him visible, were just disappearing into the bulk of a macrophage. His appointed fate, delayed since their initial meeting, had at last overtaken him.

  7-Apple threw the sac at the macrophage, where it burst uselessly against its peristalsis-heaving form. Then,stifling her grief, sensible that to lose her own life would be to deprive the neohumans of a possibly important discovery, 7-Apple turned and loped on.

  She swore every neohuman would come to know of 2-Honey’s bravery and genius. Yes, they would!

  2-Honey: from birth to maturity, from nescience to supreme intellectual accomplishment, his life had spanned less than four hundred days.

  Mayflies, fast-fading blooms, the little creatures of a short hour. Yet to themselves, their lives still tasted sweet as of old.

  * * * *

  More neohumans lived than died. Naturally, the burgeoning population had its effect on the host. This proliferation was the process by which its kind reached their untimely deaths. The neohumans lived off its tissues and byproducts, producing waste products of their own. Such a crowd as now existed was literally devouring it from the inside out, and filling it with metabolic poisons.

  The host responded desperately with chemical/biological/physical attacks.

  Cell-dissolving enzymes dripped from certain walls and formed pools, which the neohumans warily avoided. Patrols of jelly-globes that would ingest men and women on contact increased. (The neohumans were forced to lick each other regularly from head to toe, in a kind of social grooming designed to remove the chemical tags that allowed the macrophages to zero in on them.) Temperatures in certain areas rocketed to fever levels.

  But all these measures were simply too late. The neohumans met the host’s offensives with cunning and biological resiliency. The macrophages they simply overwhelmed by numbers, tore apart, and devoured. Eat or be eaten was the only law. The destructive enzymes and other long-chain molecules they countered with biological agents of their own, the neohumans’ bodies having been engineered in the distant past precisely to meet such challenges. The walls of living quarters were laved with micturants that had responded to the crisis by altering their composition in a useful manner. Some of the attacks the neohumans were able to shut off by subverting some of the many ganglia possessed by the host.

  All was not gloom during these days of increased biological warfare, however. The interior of the host was filled with song. It was the only art form left to the artifact-free neohumans, and they exploited it to its utmost. Intricate choral threnodies for an ancient racial loss, plangent dirges interspersed with bright individual notes celebrating present-day survival, vibrated the tissues of the host with alien stirrings. Plainsong and partsong, madrigals and chorales, these were the supreme weapons in the neohumans’ armory of spirit.

  At the end of the second year, with the neohuman population approaching half a million, the interior of the host began to appear ineluctably ragged and sick. There were structural failures and organic decay, nauseating stinks and food shortages.

  The neohumans were not troubled, for they had expected as much.

  They began to prepare for departure.

  * * * *

  6-Licorice and 3-Peach stood at a thick transparent portion in the host’s outer skin, once intended to admit sunlight on a bank of dimpled blue swellings, for reasons obscure to them, but obviously plain enough to the host. Now the swellings were dead. But the sunlight entered still.

  The host had lost its ability to maneuver against solar gravity, by jetting waste gases and liquids, and had been falling for some time down the invisible gravity well into the Sun. It was also rotating slowly without control. However, its own internal gravity remained constant, keeping the feet of the neohuman couple secured firmly to the wet floor, even when that surface had spun one hundred and eighty degrees.

  The rotation brought a new sight into the window: a planet and its satellite. The satellite was immemorially grey and dead, with markings that moved the humans strangely, awaking ancestral emotions. The planet, once green and blue, now resembled a white featureless ball, exactly the texture and composition of the host.

  3-Peach and 6-Licorice were silent while the planet remained in view. When it had vanished, 3-Peach said, “Do you think they’ll ever leave, 6-Lick?”

  “Who can tell? Who knows why they even came? We can’t even say if they’re natural or artificial. Why do we have weight inside them, for instance? And if they did go, what would they leave behind? Bare rock, no life? No,we can’t count on it, we can’t even dream about it.”

  A troop of youngsters surged by, laughing and playing tag. 3-Peach said nothing for a time, until they were gone. Then: “I guess you’re right, 6-Lick. We just have to make the most of the life we have.”

  They left the window, holding hands.

  * * * *

  In the last month of life aboard the host, no females became pregnant, although the couples continued to engage in sex, for reasons of comfort and pleasure. Metabolisms were changing in anticipation of departure.

  At last the day arrived. All signs pointed to the imminent collapse of the weakened host.

  Each human sought out a macrophage. There were plenty left for everyone, and their viciousness had decreased in these end-days, almost as if they had internalized chemical messages of defeat. These former enemies were now to become the means of escape for the humans.

  Approaching the scavengers one on one, the human sallowed themselves to be ingested.

  The encounters were far from fatal. A new secretion produced by the humans overrode the macrophages’ instructions. In the ultimate subversion, the defensive eaters became protective vesicles, settling down by the thousands to the floor. The humans inside inhaled the altered cytoplasm of the vesicles and gradually lost awareness.

  Watching their fellows become encysted by the scores al1 around them, 3-Peach and 6-Lick paused for a moment before allowing the same necessary fate to overtake themselves.

  “It was a sweet couple of years, 6-Lick.”

  “I can’t remember better.”

  “The kids grew up fine.”

  “The songs were glorious.”

  “The math was exciting.”

  “The sex was mar
velous.”

  “As always.”

  Silence, save for other soft and private goodbyes. Then 6-Licorice spoke.

  “You’re the only one for me, 3-Peach.”

  “And you for me, dear. I can’t wait til1 we’re to­gether again.”

  6-Licorice, not so sanguine as his mate, made no reply but just squeezed 3-Peach’s hand.

  They went under then, enlarvaed, cocooned.

  Only an hour or two passed, so nicely had the humans timed events.

  The host exploded silently, its internal pressure rupturing its damaged skin: the end point of the process begun so many human births ago, with the initial pinholes of entry. It looked like a gigantic seed pod distributing its seeds.

  Vesicles were scattered in every direction.

  Some embarked on a course straight for the Sun; others seemed destined to impact the Moon or burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. Chance dictated the course of each, since they lacked maneuvering capabilities.

  3-Peach and 6-Licorice were lost amid the thousands. They had been side by side prior to the explosion. Perhaps they would stay together in their long drift. Perhaps not.

  But many would live to breed again.

  And again.

  And again…

  GRAVITONS

  June 10

  Karla again today attempted to dissuade me from conducting the trial upon myself. I believe her exact words were: “You can’t possibly go through with this insane plan, Alex.”

  “I have to,” I said, in what I hoped was an assured and confident tone. If truth be told—and where else might I tell the whole truth, if not in my private journal?—I was feeling a little trepidation myself. But I was determined not to let Karla see it.

  “There’s no other way to prove my theory,” I continued rationally.

  “What about animals? You’ve completely skipped that stage.”

  “The phenomenon I expect to observe would be impossible to measure from outside. It’s a perceptual alternation, and an animal cannot report on what it’s experiencing. No, animals are useless for my purposes.”

  Karla grew frustrated at my insistently logical manner, as she so often did. It’s always been a sticking point between us, she claiming I exhibit an unwholesome lack of emotions—“an unnatural gravity,” she once called it—and I countering by accusing her of flightiness, of being unconnected to the solid earth of reality. So different are our basic personalities that I’m surprised we’ve remained lovers for as long as we have.