Second Genesis gq-2

by Donald Moffitt

The skeletal apparitions gave everybody cause to remember their childhood ghost stories in Chin-pin-yin; the word for a foreigner was, literally, a “bones-outside,” and now Bram heard people around him starting to call the Earthlings that.

  Jorv could hardly contain himself. “You see the pulsating of the abdomen? I think they breathe through their anus. I wonder what evolution gave them in place of lungs.”

  “What are they?” Ame asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jorv said. “They may have been aquatic. In that case—”

  He was interrupted by a chattering Cuddly that skidded to a stop in front of the group and climbed up the nearest person to reach the shelter of human arms. The person happened to be Ame, who petted the fluffy little beast and cooed, “There, there, nothing’s going to hurt you.” The Cuddly had ventured too close to a prowling insect-thing and had had second thoughts about approaching it.

  The insect-beings, in fact, had quite an audience of Cuddlies by this time. When the strange creatures had arrived and shucked their space suits, the couple of dozen Cuddlies that normally mooched around the chamber looking for handouts had immediately disappeared. After a while, when nothing much happened and the human beings seemed unconcerned, a few cautious little furry heads had popped up.

  Now the Cuddlies were getting bolder. One fat little creature sat up on its haunches and scolded an insect-being that had paused, for a moment to survey the arena floor.

  “Isn’t that cute?” Ame said. “It wants the bones-outside to pay some attention to it.”

  “If we can’t get their attention with computer displays and polarized light, there’s not much hope for a Cuddly,” Shira said.

  The little beast hopped closer and chittered more loudly.

  “It’s getting awfully close to the avoidance zone.” Heln frowned. “I wonder…”

  “I think the thing’s showing some reaction,” Jao said.

  The face-legs, liberated from their box, swung idly to and fro. There was something about the stick-creature’s stance. It seemed to lower itself a few inches and become utterly still.

  Encouraged, the Cuddly made another little hop forward.

  There was a blur of motion so fast that Bram saw it only as an afterimage. The masklike face of the alien split vertically, and a long scooplike lip tipped with teeth flicked out and captured the little furry beast.

  The hinged lip, longer than a man’s arm, snapped back, bearing the ensnared Cuddly to a barbed mouth. There was a single high-pitched squeal, and then with two crunches, the Cuddly was gone. The lobes of the toothed structure folded over to become a mask again.

  The hum of human conversation in the chamber stopped abruptly. People stood frozen. Every Cuddly in sight streaked for a hiding place and disappeared. The insect-being stood preening itself with its hooked facial limbs. Its fellows paused in their rambles and turned their jelly-domed heads in its direction.

  In the stunned silence, Jorv stood with dropped jaw, breathing hard. Suddenly he exclaimed, “Odonata!” and before Bram could stop him, he stepped up to the immobilized creature for a close look at its face.

  There was another blurred movement as the creature seized Jorv with its facial limbs and bit his head off.

  A woman screamed. People came out of their trances. The creature calmly continued crunching its way through Jorv’s neck and shoulder. Jao grabbed one of the picks that the archaeologists had left lying around. Bram found a steel pry bar. Several others joined them, and they ran to recover what was left of Jorv’s body from the leggy horror that was chomping its way through it.

  It wouldn’t let go. A couple of men had Jorv’s body by the feet and were trying to pull it away. Bram grabbed the creature by one of its facial palps and tried to lever its jaws open with the pry bar. A hooked leg came up and raked him across the ribs. There was a sound of ripped cloth and a searing pain, but he held on. Jao swung his pick handle and smashed one of the bulging green eyes.

  Even then it wouldn’t let go. It rotated in injured circles, still munching, lashing out at the struggling men with its barbed legs. The long abdomen whipped around and a man screamed as its horned pincers tore at his flesh.

  Bram went berserk. He beat at the armored hide with his steel bar while Jao, grunting, labored with his pickax at the ruined jelly of the head. The thing refused to die. The limbs slashed blindly at the air. But it dropped its grisly meal, and the long toothed lip struck out again and again, looking for prey. Finally someone got a sharpened pole—one the diggers used for soundings—and ran the creature through, repeatedly, till it stopped moving.

  Bram stood wearily, drenched in blood and gore, holding the slippery pry bar. He couldn’t tell how much of the blood was his own and how much had spilled from Jorv.

  Shouts and screams echoed through the huge arena. The other insect-creatures, as if by a common signal, had gone on the attack. On a high balcony, the tragedy of Jorv was repeated as a stick-being pursued a fleeing woman and caught her with its facial snare. People came running, too late, to her aid. They beat and stabbed at the creature with whatever came to hand. One of the rescuers was flung away, disemboweled by a stroke of a hind claw. The tattered body tumbled slowly through the air toward the distant floor below.

  Elsewhere, one of the spindly horrors ran at a group of people and emerged with a screaming victim in its mouth. It ran off with its prize, munching as it went, dropping a trail of arms and legs behind it.

  Two more of the insect-beings bore down on the group of shaken people gathered around Jorv’s headless body. They were a terrifying sight, but no one ran. An extensible lip shot out and clasped someone’s leg in its prehensile hooks, but two quick-witted people threw themselves on the victim and prevented him from being dragged back. Men and women with poles, shovels, axes—anything that could be used as a weapon—converged on the monster from both sides. It loosed its grip, leaving a mangled leg that would have to be regenerated if the victim lived, and swung its three-lobed head at its tormentors. The lip raked across one victim, tearing flesh, and another man went down under the onslaught of the barbed head-legs. But other people harried it from behind, and when it swiveled its killing apparatus around to deal with them, a brave woman with a pole leaped high into the air and jabbed at a globular eye from above.

  Meanwhile Bram saw the other creature rushing straight at him. The facial limbs were already extended for grasping. He knew he would be no match for the lightning thrust of the feeding apparatus—it surpassed his reach, even with the iron bar in his hand.

  He dropped the bar and wrenched one of the heavy display tables from the ground. He put his whole back into it, swiveling from the hips. It was a massive piece of rough carpentry, twelve feet long, laden with rock and metal fragments that the archaeologists had not bothered to pack up. In the infinitesimal gravity, he could have lifted a weight ten times as heavy, but speed was the problem, and he needed all his muscular strength to overcome the inertia.

  The table became his shield as the creature’s lip struck. There was a sound of splintering wood, and Bram felt himself being driven back by the thrust. A rain of jagged stone and metal pelted his adversary. Bram shoved back, hard, and the weight of the table helped him; his feet were braced against the ground, while his opponent, losing contact, clung to the table as Bram ran it at full speed into the wall.

  Three or four people ran to help him keep the creature pinned against the wall while somebody finished it off with an ax.

  They stood around panting. “We’re monkeys, monkeys,” Ame sobbed beside him, and he became aware that she was one of the people who had helped him keep the creature pinned. “I thought we were human, but we knew in our bones how to gang up on them.”

  “All the rocks and junk confused it for a minute,” Jao said. “Just long enough.”

  That gave Bram an idea. “Throw things at them!” he shouted.

  The carnage on the floor was terrible. The insects had better reach with their legs and facial snares than the humans
did with their shovels and axes, and they were very quick.

  Jao was the first to react. He scooped up an armful of archaeological detritus from one of the big tables and sent a hail of missiles at another of the spindly creatures that was heading in their direction. It veered off. A sharp fragment caught it in one eye. Its lip shot out reflexively to find an enemy.

  People were quick to get the idea. There were plenty of sharp objects to throw: shards from the long tables, cast-off equipment, and rubble from the floor itself. A barrage of missiles peppered the creatures from ground level and pelted them from the balconies. They came from all directions, thunking into the stiff hides, finding pulpy spots. There was no way for the creatures to avoid them, as marvelous as their eyesight was and as quick as their reflexes were. Every time they made a dash at a group of people, they were met by a volley of hurled objects.

  Not that they were always turned aside. Sometimes they barged into a group, knocking people over and lacerating them, and carried someone off. They seemed to have no concept that they were outnumbered.

  And then some brainy person reinvented the spear.

  It was only a kitchen knife lashed hastily to a pole, but its-owner—maybe losing his nerve about running it into an enemy personally—flung it at an insect-thing as it passed him. The blade hit a soft spot, and the creature ran by with the pole sticking out of it. Another person threw another improvised pike, then everybody who had a sharp stick seemed to join in. The wounded creature began to run in circles, snapping at the skewers in its hide, then grew weaker and less purposeful, sinking to its four skeleton knees. When the surrounding people saw that it was safe to approach it, they hacked it to pieces.

  Something new had entered human affairs—a thing that could kill at a distance.

  It was over in another fifteen minutes—not without more human casualties. The last insect survivor, seeing that it was alone, fled.

  “Don’t let it get to its space suit!” Heln cried.

  A bunch of people took off in pursuit, but it evaded them. Later, Bram reconstructed what had happened. The insect-thing had killed two people it found in the tunnel on the inner side of the air lock, retrieved its space suit, and charged into the crowd outside. With its coffer of a helmet on—its facial limbs caged up, and, perhaps, its senses muffled—it was no longer aggressive. Nobody outside knew what had been going on. The crowd parted to make way for it, and the deputies were pleased to see that nobody interfered with it. It hightailed it back to its barrel-wheeled vehicle and drove out of town.

  The killing spree had left seven dead aliens and more than thirty dead and dismembered human beings. It was going to be hard to tell the enact number until the body parts that were strewn over the chamber were matched up. Bram moved among the weeping people, viewing the butchery. One of the dead was Alb, the junior archivist whom Bram had reprimanded. Somehow he had slipped past the deputies and gotten inside; poor Alb, he had thought it all a lark.

  “I suppose it was the space suits,” Heln said, white as flour. “We didn’t look appetizing to them inside ours, and their own feeding impulses were stifled with a sheet of plastic cutting off their sensory world.” She shuddered. “They like their food live and moving. I wonder what kind of livestock they carry with them in that tube vehicle of theirs.”

  Nobody had thought about that part of it. Ame looked ill. Bram remembered the creatures’ behavior just before they had taken time out to return to their vehicle for a rest break.

  “Maybe animals about the size and shape of a Cuddly,” Bram said. “Possibly even mammals.”

  “Yah, the Cuddly popping up in front of that thing was what tripped the switch,” Jao said.

  Heln gave the others a bleak look. “Yes, that and poor Jorv, sticking his face inside their unobstructed striking range. Their brains are rewired now. They’ve been programmed to see human beings. As food.”

  They spent the next day burying the dead—what could be found of them. Bram found some words in King James that seemed to express what everybody was feeling and read them aloud over his suit radio while the surviving human population stood around the grave site, heads bowed inside their helmets. The terrestrial biology group under Jorv’s assistant took charge of the insect carcasses and began to do autopsies.

  When Bram called Yggdrasil, Jun Davd urged him to close down the digs and return at once. “It’s an unlucky place now, I fear. If Heln is correct, the danger’s just beginning.”

  “I’m sending the first shuttle loads out today. We should all be evacuated by the day after tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ve posted a guard. The main thing is not to let them get inside the pressurized buildings with us.”

  “You ought to know that radio traffic between the colony and the father ship has resumed.”

  “They’ve renewed their connection?”

  “For the time being. They had something to say to each other. You can imagine what it is.”

  “I take your meaning, Jun Davd. I’ll try to speed up the evacuation.”

  “It’s hard to abandon what we’ve found of our heritage, I know. But we were going to leave soon, anyway.”

  Bitterness clogged Bram’s voice. “Yes, but we always meant to come back one day. Now…”

  “Yes,” Jun Davd said somberly. “They’ll have spread to the other disks by then. But Bram, we’ve done wonders in the year we’ve been here—thanks in large part to the spadework the rat archaeologists did for us. We’ve got the great libraries of mankind and a whole biological repository of extinct life forms…”

  “I know, Jun Davd. We never thought we’d regain so much of our heritage. Still…” He felt suddenly weary. For the first time, the centuries of wandering seemed to have caught up with him—more than six of them by now, while the clock of the universe had ticked off its tens of millions of years.

  “What did Jorv mean, ‘Odonata’?” Bram said.

  Jorv’s assistant, Harld, faced him, a scalpel in his hand, still looking pale and shaken. He had a thick white bandage on his head, covering the scalp wound he’d received trying to save a woman from the jaws of an insect-creature, and there were deep scratches down one long bony cheek.

  Harld put the scalpel down, looking thoughtful. He paused to look around behind himself where the other two surviving members of the zoology department continued their dissection of one of the insect corpses. The body cavity was laid open, with internal organs spread out fanwise, and Bram did not care for too close a look.

  “Odonata? Is that what he said?”

  “Yes. Just before he died. He said it after he saw the way the creature grabbed the Cuddly, as if that had made him remember something.”

  “It comes from a root in a pre-Inglex language called Greek. It means ‘tooth.’ Original Man used Greek prefixes a lot in scientific classification. Ever since Jorv got back from his trip to the insect camp, he’d been poring over the old archives for insect references, especially from an institution known as the Smithsonian. But there was just so much material to absorb…”

  “What does ‘tooth’ have to do with it?”

  “It sounds as if it may be the name of the insect order.”

  “Can you…”

  “There’s nothing to it, now. It’s all alphabetical. Come back in an hour.”

  Bram spent the hour arguing with one of the curators from the art team, who wanted to pack an entire shuttle with a collection of paintings and photoplastic art that had been discovered at the last minute.

  “It’s irreplaceable,” the man pleaded. “Originals that were on loan from Earth museums. Art that was produced here on the diskworld over a period of several centuries—some of it of the very highest order. We can make a selection—let me assure you that we’re prepared to be very stringent with ourselves—and have it vacuum crated within a Tenday.”

  Bram tried to explain that there was neither the space nor the time. “There are still crates of last-minute finds out next to the shuttle pad that are going to have to be aban
doned,” he said. “Can’t you make microreproductions of it?”

  “You don’t understand!” the curator wailed. “These are originals!”

  In the end, it was decided that the curator and his staff would be allowed to take a selection of some of the smaller objects with them as their personal baggage. “The Rembrandt engravings,” the curator decided. “The little votive figurines from the Falwellite thearchy. The photoplastic diskscapes from the neo-literalist period. And some of the small table sculpture. Oh, dear, how will I ever winnow it down?”

  Bram suggested that the museum staff load all the excess artwork that they could manage during the next twenty hours on one of the unused rocket-assisted pallets. Some tens of the pallets were slated to be left behind along with a lot of cargo walkers and heavy machinery. “See Jao,” Bram said. “He’ll compute a rough trajectory for you. We’ll have to shoot it off unmanned, but with luck, one of the interbranch vehicles from Yggdrasil will snare it and bring it in.”

  “B-but it could be lost forever,” the curator said. “Better to leave it here.”

  “No,” Bram said, looking him in the eye. “It wouldn’t.”

  That got through. The curator nodded grimly. “I’ll get moving on it right away.”

  When Bram returned to Harld, the thin-featured zoologist was waiting for him next to a table spread with photoplastic readouts. He handed one to Bram without comment.

  Bram took the stiff sheet from him. It showed a slender, jewellike creature with bulging metallic eyes and four fragile, veined wings.

  “Odonata,” Harld said. “Suborder Anisoptera. Also known as the dragonfly, or sometimes by such names as the devil’s darning needle, the mosquito hawk, or the bee butcher.

  Bram studied the photograph. He could see several features that suggested a possible provenance for the insect-folk: the domelike eyes, the long segmented body with the claspers at the end, the six wiry legs all grouped together just behind the head.

  “Our neighbors across the plain don’t have wings,” he pointed out.

  “Neither did their ancestors,” Harld said. “You’re looking at the adult form of the dragonfly. That creature on the dissecting table is descended from an immature form called a nymph.”