Pressure Suite - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 3

by Various Writers

  Charley lay on his left side with the dwarfish legs folded beneath him, a crazed grin on his face, eyes nearly puffed shut, the knife back in his hand. He resumed growling, trying to achieve a maddened, stampede mentality, an absence of mind. He set the knife edge to the root of his twin again, the side with the arms and bulbous head.

  The twin came alive and snatched Charley’s head in its hands and began shouting into his face. The same idiot syllable over and over. “Ooowwww! Ooooowwww!” It sounded pitiful and angry.

  Charley dropped the knife and grabbed the amorphous head in his own hands and began shouting back at it in an ecstasy of animal fury. They carried on this way a while, struggling for the position of victim, of outrage, mimicking one another until they weakened and tilted onto the floor. Then Charley seized his twin in his arms, crushing it against him and wailing he was sorry, so sorry, oh please forgive me.

  Ambrose looked defeated.

  Tom bounced off the doorframe on his way out, but speed was no longer of the essence. The feed was nearly 36 hours old.

  Charley’s door was always open. He wanted that known on the off chance that a beautiful girl or a drinking buddy might think of him and remember: “That’s right, Charley’s door is always open!”

  Charley’s door was still open.

  The ranch’s interior smelled of acrid sweat and unwashed hair. Even the low steakhouse lights had died, and only the spectral glow of the gas cloud interfered with the deepening shadows of the astral night. Tropical stalks and fronds wavered like praying insects against the glass doors of the pool house and solarium.

  Tom stayed close to the wall. He cursed when he accidentally crunched a beer can with his heel.

  “Charley?” he called. “You okay, cowboy?”

  A low grunt came in answer from the bedroom hall. A weight shifted but did not approach. “They don’t want to take my money, those doctor friends of yours?” He snorted like a bull and sounded like he had wads of cotton stuffed into his cheeks and down his throat. “My rock’s not good enough?”

  Tom strained to see down the hall, but the shadows were unmoving. “They’ll try to treat you if you’ll go to them.”

  “I poured my life into this rock. If I can’t get a good doctor out here, then what’s the point? What’s it all for?”

  “You mind if I take a look at you now, Charley?” Tom peered into the dark hallway.

  “You damned well ought to. I paid you. I paid you to come out here and be the doctor. You ought to do your job.” A great shuffling began, and a moving shadow that Tom couldn’t interpret filled the end of the hall.

  Then the creature emerged from darkness.

  “God!” Tom shuffled backward until he came up against the bar. Out of instinct, he grabbed a green bottle by the neck and prepared to wield it.

  It had become bigger than Charley. Now Charley’s legs sprouted from its side, and Charley’s arms sprouted from its other side. It had swollen to become balloon-like, gushing, somehow larval, and Charley’s face floated at the edge of its chest like an ugly, bruised tattoo. Charley’s mouth yawned like a slit in its skin. “Jesus, Tom,” the tattoo said, “don’t look at me like that.”

  But Tom wasn’t looking at him. The great growth’s head had fully formed, and two slanted black eyes regarded Tom with a quick glance full of narrow suspicion before it moved into the kitchen and began fixing itself a meal. Charley was along for the ride. “I’m just resting,” Charley-tattoo said, yawning lazily. “I’m so tired.”

  Tom moved around the opposite side of the L-shaped bar until he was sure the creature was incapable of rapid movement. “What are you?”

  Charley answered him. “He won’t talk to you. He doesn’t trust us. I can tell. What did you find out?” One of his legs kicked out at the growth in frustration, and missed. He was at a bad angle. “Why can’t you pour him a drink, you big galoot?”

  The growth ignored him and poured uncooked oatmeal into its mouth, followed by milk straight from the canister. Then it jammed a raw hotdog into its cheek like a squirrel and continued rooting.

  Tom squeezed his eyes shut for a long moment, gathering his wits to speak while ignoring the bizarre scene in front of him. He needed to talk to Charley—he needed to talk to his patient. “Charley,” he said, “I have a theory about this.”

  “It’s about time, Doc. My back has been hurting something awful, carrying this S.O.B. around like furniture. Have that drink?”

  “No thanks.” Actually, it was Ambrose’s theory, and thin but not implausible. “Your—the growth—has been altering your metabolic process. You haven’t been aging.”

  “I don’t exactly feel twenty years younger, here,” said Charley, his grin a purple-lipped wound in the growth’s side.

  “Whatever it is, it’s not mortal like we are. It never dies. Because it needs you to live, you’ll never die either. You could live for thousands of years. But you’d be living like this.”

  “I’m just resting.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “I’m alright, partner. How are you?”

  “I don’t know how you can say that.”

  “It’s true.”

  “It must be doping you. Charley, it’s making you into a cow.”

  “Where’s the beef, heh heh.”

  “But you have a choice.”

  “We all have choices, Tom. Life’s full of them, every day. Have a drink. Get me one while you’re at it.”

  “It needs you because it’s incomplete. It was drifting around as a virus, a set of instructions for building what it used to be. We think it used to have its own form, it used to make babies and grow old and die. But it can’t get back to that completely. With you, it can get close. But it can’t live without you. It’s been too long. It’s full of holes.”

  “What do you propose, Tom?”

  “We can help it. We can make it human. With gene therapy, we can fill in some gaps. You can walk away from each other.”

  A dark cloud passed across Charley’s face. His voice turned to gravel. “Don’t you give me fairy tale endings, Tom. I’ll kill you if you do.”

  “I’m not saying it’s a hundred percent.” Tom grabbed a half-full shot glass from the bar top and clanged it back before he knew what he was doing. He wiped his dry lips with his sleeve. “But it’s worth a try.”

  Charley became wistful. “I feel such a love-hate for it, Tom. I can’t be trusted. You make the call.”

  “There are dangers, Charley. It could turn around and consume you instead of letting you go. We don’t think it will, but…”

  “Put yourself in my place, you egghead doctor.”

  “So,” Ambrose said at breakfast, waving his cigar stub speculatively, “they needed to hide, to survive. Maybe these asteroids are what’s left of their planet. There was some kind of natural catastrophe they couldn’t escape. So they changed themselves into something that could survive it.”

  Tom felt too pressed to delve into far-flung theories. He listened while Ambrose plummeted on.

  “We can already tailor viruses by directed evolution. Sloppy, but we can do it. These guys grew themselves smaller and smaller until they achieved a viral form. It would have to be abbreviated—all kinds of streamlining and retrograde evolution, getting rid of spare parts, jettison an appendix here, a kidney there, until they arrived at an essence. An echo of themselves in the universe.”

  Tom stopped with his upside-down fork halfway to his mouth. “There’s fossil virus all over the place out here. Billion years old.”

  “I bet it’s them.”

  “Jesus.”

  “They were playing the odds, betting that sometime, millions or billions of years in the future, they’d run across something they could infect—whose genetic code would be…parallel. Vulnerable. They must have had ingenious mechanisms for protecting their code all that time, or they would have evolved into something much simpler in this environment.”

  “A cure for evolution?”

>   “You have to admit it’s interesting.”

  “I’m more concerned with making this procedure work.”

  “I’ve got a long trip ahead with nothing to do, so I’ll be thinking about it. I’ll be there in a few days.”

  V. Ambition

  Tom ran local surface samples looking for fossil virus and found it. The low-end electron microscope he’d ordered from Asshole Fleas showed him the exact same morphology as the samples he’d scraped from Charley.

  He isotope-dated the fossils; they had ingrained their precise shapes inside of certain microcrystals. The result staggered him. The virus—the ancient people—had waited three quarters of a billion years for reincarnation. More than anything, the hardiness, the stability, of the genetic material made Tom stare out his porthole at the cosmos and wonder. The final frontier: our own building blocks.

  Know thyself.

  Ambrose might be right.

  Doctor Ambrose landed just after 0800 on a Tuesday. He was smaller and more withered than he looked in holographic form, hat slanted on his head and old-fashioned coat hung over his arm, looking lost in the little plaza around the base of the Needle.

  Tom took him to his apartment and told him what he’d discovered, and the old man seemed to liven.

  “What makes you think,” said Ambrose, “they stopped here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He waved his hand at the porthole in Tom’s front wall. “What if they’re scattered across the galaxy, or the universe?” He bent down and swiped his fingertip along the floor, and it came up dusty. “And maybe they’re not the only ones?”

  Ambrose got up and took a flask of double-malt whiskey out of his jacket pocket and poured them each a drink. He seemed intensely alive. “They’re still discovering new forms of life in the Amazon Basin on Earth. What’s the genome of this bit of dust from beyond the Rim? Who might be waiting on the tip of this old finger?”

  He handed Tom a glass. “Or what. Viruses can be used to build a lot more than flesh. We’re already using them as scaffolding for all kinds of materials. There could be whole cities in here. The universe is made up entirely of information, if you look at it right.”

  “What about Charley?”

  “Right now Charley’s genetic machinery is geared up to tell two different stories. He’s swelled up with conflicting information. He needs editing.” Ambrose held up his drink for a toast. “Thanks to genetics and social selection, we’re evolving again, ourselves. There is no human race in the absolute sense. Raise your glass, Tom. To art.” Ambrose had to reach across the table to bang the edge of Tom’s glass, which had stopped over his lap. “Now, what do you want to do? Ever played God before?”

  “I’m a doctor.”

  “Because we can either kill this thing once we get it out of your friend…or we can be midwives at the rebirth of a race.”

  Their first stop was the edge of the colony’s modest interior mall. Unemployed men and women stood in lines waiting to be looked over by the colony’s few wealthy inhabitants for service jobs, from carrying luggage to bedroom favors. Tom and Ambrose engaged two largish men for a day’s physical labor, no questions asked. The men took this to mean that they were not to speak at all, and followed at a slight distance behind the doctors, carrying the equipment.

  Tom went into the ranch first, straining to see in the faint quartz glow of the cloud, the two hired men staying behind him. He didn’t think, but he feared, that the growth had become menacingly huge or hostile in his absence, so he called out for Charley before going in. The others followed until the atmosphere of vigorous sickness stopped them like a wall.

  “I’m in here.” Charley’s cotton-balled voice came from the pool. “Don’t think I’m getting out any time soon. Nice to meet you, Ambrose! Fix yourselves some drinks!”

  Ambrose shot Tom a look: You were right. He doesn’t comprehend this.

  Tom began setting up: stainless steel surgical table made for livestock, an IV drip, light racks, latex sleeves, hypos, scalpels, retractors, clamps, and gauze. Ambrose moved carefully around the ranch, his eyes huge, touching nothing. “It stinks to holy hell in here.”

  The hired men looked at each other, folding their hands at their waists and flanking the door.

  Tom explained the creature to them as best he could. “It hasn’t hurt anyone so far, and I don’t think it will. It’s like a child. I’ll give you gloves if you want, but I’m sure it’s not infectious.”

  “If you say so,” one of them said. He was young; a curl of black hair hung against his forehead like a question mark. The other might have been his brother.

  Tom hung the drip bag and locked the legs of the table into place. He made sure none of the leather restraints would be trapped beneath Charley’s new bulk, hanging them over the ends of the table.

  The hired men shifted their weight.

  Tom test-squirted a syringe in the air. “Ready?” he asked. He led the way back to the pool. “He might struggle, but he’s not himself. He gave his consent. We’re going to help him.” He stopped, turned. “Don’t be afraid of what you see.”

  Tom remembered it like a fever dream: the shouting, the warm water loosening his testicles, the thrashing, his hair hanging in his eyes. The hired men moving around and around in the pool, looking for a place to grab Charley where his offspring couldn’t reach them.

  Charley/alien fought them without seeming to know why—it wasn’t a desperate effort, only desperately confusing. To all of them. The creature didn’t like to be restrained. It flailed with panicked strength. It struck rather pitifully when it tired, and in the end even Ambrose jumped into the water and seized a limb. It impressed Tom as something like a pre-human mammoth hunt in slow motion. Charley had passed out by then, and his symbiont struggled alone, weakening, protesting with moans as they dragged the great wet mass across the floor.

  They had to heave three times to hoist it onto the table. Its eyes searched wildly around the room for some rescue and found none. The mouth opened and closed like the mouth of a landed fish. Tom strapped it down and stuck a needle in its neck, applied cotton and tape.

  Charley woke up twice in shock, seemingly lost in a dream, his eyes never opening, even when he spoke. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay. Don’t worry. You’ll be okay.” But then he would scream in rage and push and shove at the creature in a claustrophobic frenzy. Tom gave him more dope.

  Ambrose pulled a hypo from a leather case in his pocket. “This is it,” he said. He’d had access to more comprehensive facilities on his own world and used them to create the vector that would deliver the needed gene sequences to the creature—to free it from Charley and Charley from it. A retrovirus.

  Tom stared at the clear contents of the syringe.

  Using samples he’d sent to him, Ambrose had shuffled the DNA of the alien virus, diversifying it, and created a statistically huge library of sequences. He exposed each resulting virus to human cells weakened by necrotic spider venom, then selected the daughter cells that became alien and subsequently split from their hosts—as opposed to those that remained attached, sharing cytoplasm and genetic machinery. He’d made a serum of genes from these sources and spliced them into an aggressive retrovirus.

  Tom injected the contents into the IV drip.

  Five hours later, the alien opened its eyes. It looked around at Tom and Ambrose peacefully, accepting. They looked back at it. Ambrose laid his palm across its forehead. “Unbelievable,” he said.

  They shared a toast.

  Within three days, the fleshy stalk binding the creature to Charley had begun to apoptose, shriveling and thinning until the narrowest umbilicus connected them. The creature seemed to rise out of Charley like baking bread, revealing a whole separate physiology, including well-defined genitalia.

  Tom and Ambrose blindfolded it and sunk a long needle into the space between its narrow hips, pulling up on the plunger. The alien gasped as if cold but did not struggle. Then it slept. Ambrose l
ooked across the table with his intense eyes and said, “We’ve got it!”

  Tom reached his hand across the sleeping patients—there were definitely two of them now—and said, “Doctor.” He shook Ambrose’s hand.

  Tom turned to the hired men. “Thanks, guys. I think we’re alright now. Come by the clinic tomorrow and we’ll settle up.”

  The next night, as they lay sleeping on Charley’s plush leather couches, the last shred of the umbilicus connecting Charley to the creature snapped with a dry sound like jerked beef. Inside was nothing but dust that spilled onto the stainless steel table.

  The tall, spindly creature woke first and slithered to the floor, where it examined its own smooth limbs in wonder, then began trying to walk around on uncertain legs. It noted the apparently sleeping doctors with a questioning eye, though Tom looked quietly back at it.

  Tom didn’t move. He did not feel particularly threatened.

  The creature came closer by degrees the longer they both lay still. Tom prayed that Ambrose wouldn’t wake in its shadow and make a sudden movement or shout in surprise. For several minutes this went on, the fronds of the tropical plants waving behind the creature, the menace gone out of them, the stars beyond a perfect backdrop to the unfathomable spindle-legged antiquity that now walked and stared among them, having stored itself away in questionable life that had blown in dust across the heavens for most of a billion years. Then it gave Tom a tremendous idea. His eyes lit with twin flames of intense intellectual curiosity and ambition.

  Then he saw Charley, free as he’d been born. Tom smiled at first because he couldn’t see Charley’s face in the spectral glow of the gas cloud.

  He couldn’t see the mad fury, the twisted rage and hatred that filled him like electricity, strengthening his limbs and will. The creature half turned. Charley dove at it with the scissors clutched in a two-fisted grip—dove right over the couch where Ambrose slept. The old doctor came to his senses in time to grab Charley’s foot.

  Charley landed short of the creature and grabbed its foot. They all began tugging on each other like a chain of ants.

  Tom felt like he couldn’t move. He actually did move, steadily but not quickly, like a nightmare self encased in drying concrete.