The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  Headed toward the portable walkway, a sudden chill came over Yanni, and it had little to do with the marks on the plane. A poor donkey protested the heavy load being placed upon it by two porters, under the direction of Nesbitt.

  Should have left that one in Tibet, Yanni thought. The new chill inside her arose from seeing—and in her own way simultaneously feeling—the ache in the donkey’s clearly unsteady legs. A noise from within the plane caused her to glance away. Cousteau was at the hull’s side, and one of the crew had gone back aboard, attending to something behind the open blister window.

  Yanni half-turned, trying to keep her eyes fixed on the donkey. “Nesbitt! You need to lighten—” But those were the only words she got out before Cousteau came back across the ramp in a hurry, and a new movement turned her fully around.

  It had begun with a ripple on the surface—something displacing water as it slid into the shallows on the plane’s port side. Two more ripples appeared, flanking the first, and throwing off sparkles of reflected sunlight. Straining against the glare, Yanni could see submerged rocks shifting and blurring. She scarcely noticed Mac and Cousteau at her side until one of them grabbed an arm and tried to draw her back, but she shook the hand away with a firm rebuke and stepped nearer the disturbance. A dark shape broke the surface of the water, barely more than thirty-five feet from where she stood. It rose silently—a fleshy pedestal bulging up until it extended above the level of the dock, helical and glistening, and standing about the height of a man.

  There came a loud cry from one of Nesbit’s two porters, but Yanni did not turn. She did not see the expressions of startled surprise giving way to terror on the faces of a half-dozen donkey porters. Even among the Catalina’s crew, there was a general movement toward higher ground.

  As Yanni watched, mesmerized, the column began to change—subtle curves and indentations now appearing. Then a color shift, from a shade of blue she had never before observed, to swirls of khaki and red, topped with a flowing pattern of black. For an instant, just for an instant, Yanni saw that the structure was actually a convergence of no fewer than four elongated sections.

  “Holy shit,” Yanni said, out loud and to herself. They’re tentacles! Mac and Cousteau said nothing. She would not have heard them in any case. Her world was all tunnel vision now, and adrenaline. As the colors shifted and resolved themselves, the column underwent astonishingly rapid adjustments and Yanni stood facing the figure of a human—near-perfect mimicry, she thought. Except for minor distortions, still under adjustment, it was as if she were looking across the dock and over the water, into a mirror.

  Slowly the figure began to close the space between them, gliding along the water’s surface while whatever extended beneath its feet—more of them?—gave the illusion of semitransparency against the rocky bottom.

  “Everyone hold still!” she called out, without turning away from the creature.

  Now “standing” near the edge of the dock, the figure began changing color again—still a human form but with a concentric pattern of stripes radiating from its midsection, out along extended arms. A more distinct, broken circle pattern quickly followed, radiating from the center at increasing speed, through the tips of its “fingers.” Yanni had a sudden, intuitive sense that she was to imagine the circles rippling out far beyond the lagoon until after only a few seconds, she began to suspect that the creature was trying to make her understand something incredibly vast. Abruptly the shapes ceased radiating. They switched to newer and more complex patterns, some familiar, others abstract. They fluttered, one after another. During one astonishing flicker, Yanni believed she glimpsed a trio of divers. During the next second: a silhouette that resembled a submarine. All of them shifted in synchrony with the sudden addition of instantly familiar clicks—the drumming of the severed limb in the tray, the same drumming of her fingers when their boat approached the Catalina.

  The clicking quickened and changed. Yanni studied the patterns, trying to link them to the accompanying language of color—but as the pace picked up she found it maddeningly confusing.

  Something about the entire situation caused her to laugh. Then, extending her arms, she made a series of palms-down waves. “All right there, Gorgeous George, slow down, huh.”

  Remarkably the figure responded, and the color patterns shifted from double time to a more deliberate tempo, as did the castanet accompaniment of keratinous barbs.

  Very slowly, Yanni removed her backpack. As she reached inside, the mimic drew back several feet. In response, she removed two objects from her pack and held them out—a blunt probe, and a metal specimen dish “borrowed” from the hotel room.

  Dragging the tip of the probe across the brass rim, Yanni began producing a series of sounds that she hoped would do a serviceable job of replicating what she was hearing. She started with half of the duet she had briefly performed with the severed tentacle, and which she had reproduced against the side of a boat in the lagoon.

  The mimic responded with silence. “I get the feeling it understands me,” Yanni thought aloud, “but it’s pretending not to.”

  “Who knew they were French?” Cousteau said softly.

  For a while it continued to listen, and to occasionally blush new colors. Then, abruptly, it snapped back again to “Yanni mirror mode,” albeit with some measure of difficulty. The features of her identical twin’s face weren’t identical anymore. They were shifting—shifting like wax, from the familiar to something else, then trying to mirror her again, but not getting the image quite right.

  Losing no part of her composure, Yanni continued her rhythmic scraping. “We can talk about that nose later, but you’re gonna have to help me out here.”

  Instead, either displaying defiance or trying to communicate some stance not easily understood, the other Yanni came ashore. There had certainly been at least two or three companions beneath it, lifting her—but they apparently retreated without so much as a blur of distorted light or a splash of water being noticed. The other Yanni was a master at distraction.

  “Ever seen anything stranger than this?” Yanni whispered.

  “Close, maybe,” Mac whispered back. “But why is it mimicking you?”

  “Wish I knew. Whatever it’s trying to say, I think it’s a little over my head.”

  As perhaps it was. Dance too many times with Death, Yanni told herself, and sooner or later why shouldn’t She gaze into you—as a mirror?

  Undeterred, Yanni continued trying to communicate by the clicking and scraping of tray and probe; Death attempted to signal back to her in a slightly different beat, but the apparition seemed suddenly to falter, as if distracted and in pain. That quickly, it lost two feet of height, and its click-and-scrape tempo collapsed into a long, drawn-out wheeze. In that moment, gravity and bright sunlight became its newest worst enemies. Nonetheless, from the place where the mimic would have had feet, two large cephalopod eyes fully revealed themselves from behind unwinding coils, then fixated on Yanni, Mac, and Cousteau. The mass of musculature and tentacles that framed those eyes regrouped and moved with keen determination again. In the next moment, it stood tall, its entire skin surface conveying the billowing clouds of red smoke Cousteau had described.

  Now that the initial shock was wearing off, Yanni could appreciate that it was, in its own way, a surprisingly beautiful beast. Calling it a “mimic” was true but probably misleading. It was much more—she was certain of this, even as its imitation of the red smoke transformed into a human figure, first male, then female, then back to male again.

  Mac, me, then Jacques.

  The castanet chorus was back again, repeating a new rhythm in synchrony with another concentric series of broken rings, spreading out so fast that Yanni believed they might soon become a continual, indistinguishable flutter.

  “Mac,” she said, keeping up with the rhythm. “Try to see it as I see it. Try.”

  “Rings spreading out, beyond here . . . beyond the whole sea?”

  “Beyond the whole wor
ld—and in just minutes, at that rate, maybe past the moon and the Sun.”

  “Something vast.”

  “Yes, Mac. I don’t think they even see time the same way we do.”

  “Is that what it’s showing? Time’s vastness?”

  “They think in eons.”

  A pulsating, bioluminescent limb snaked gently toward Yanni—and exploded, just as she was about to take her first tentative step forward. A spray of flesh struck her forehead. The continual booming of a large-caliber machine gun completely drowned out Mac’s cry of “Cease fire!” Mac and Cousteau pulled Yanni to the ground and shielded her body with their own, but by the time the Catalina’s turret gunner paused to reload, tentacles were already torn off and strewn about, and the mimic was cut practically in two.

  Throwing Mac off to one side, Yanni scrambled to her feet and saw the Catalina’s eyeball turret shifting position, beginning to track the remaining tentacles to their source. Half of that source scuttled and rolled to the edge of the dock and spilled into the shallows.

  “Hold your fire!” Mac commanded the unseen gunner. Yanni heard Nesbit holler the same command, but the gunner disobeyed. With clearly no thought at all for his own safety, Mac rushed toward the narrow portable walkway. Yanni and Cousteau started after him but were halted by the second volley—which struck a segment of tentacle in their path, spraying it apart and by sheer dumb luck not simultaneously spraying anyone with bullet pieces.

  The chaos ended so abruptly that Mac was not yet at the ramp before the gunner had slumped down and McQueen emerged from the plane, holding a wrench.

  “Guy panicked and fired against orders,” the private said, waving the wrench. “Needed to be sedated.”

  The flying boat rocked sharply to one side and McQueen leaped onto the dock, then grabbed a length of rope and tried to anchor the ramp more firmly.

  Along one side of the dock, where Yanni’s mimic had stood, tentacles and blasted remnants were struggling to reach the water. Many were already splashing into the lagoon. Some emitted flashes of color. Others blushed an angry red and died.

  At least five shadowy figures, each about the size of a bear, were moving among the pieces and along the dock. Yanni felt more than heard something rush past her, snatching up shreds of tentacle. This individual was smaller than the other shapes, and it covered the ground with such speed that the human eye and mind could only have registered it as a flash of movement, even were the cephalopod not trying to blend in with its surroundings. She found the creature less difficult to follow once it had returned to the water. Inexplicably, it seemed to be parceling out gathered pieces of Kraken to the other shadows.

  Yanni would later swear that the cephalopods appeared to be examining and maybe even tasting segments of the dying mimic—in what struck her as an act born somewhere between mourning and reverence.

  The shadows in the water were continually changing, reproducing whatever they encountered along the stony bottom with such fidelity, on their dorsal surfaces, that even when moving busily to and fro, they appeared translucent, like windows of frosted glass.

  As she watched the cephalopods, and as the flying boat shifted again against its moorings, Mac helped Private McQueen drag the unconscious turret gunner across the ramp.

  “Looks like you’ve really found something extraordinary,” Nesbitt said. Yanni did not notice that she’d come running up beside her despite the danger. The Catalina bucked violently side-to-side. Two shadows seemed actually to have unscrewed the turret. They took its hood and twin .50-caliber machine guns with them into the sea. The port side blister broke, and its gun also disappeared beneath a shadow that became wing-shaped once it slipped below the surface, as did its companions. They swam away like undersea bats toward deeper water, as graceful as manta rays.

  “Nora, you’ve got it backwards,” Yanni corrected. “Something extraordinary has found us.”

  5.33 Million b.c.

  The Lost World of Mediterranean Canyon

  Seed remained crouched at the canal’s edge, paralyzed with astonishment. The water had been watching her—with two pairs of fist-sized, alien eyes.

  If the child of Proud One lived through this strange encounter, the moment would never cease to haunt her.

  In this time of expulsion from their highland feeding grounds and a forced march into unknown lands, she had been drawn to the water by intensifying hunger and a fiery sting to her hand from a hopper snail.

  Seed both heard and felt the galloping of her mother’s hands and feet along the ground. Proud One called out to her, a loud and plaintive cry of denial, like a long and guttural “Nooo . . .”

  In that moment, Seed was struck by the most pitiful sensation any thinking species—simian or cephalopod—would ever know: If only . . .

  If only nature, in some horrible spasm of malevolence, had not chosen to spawn stone-throwing monsters who chased her entire clan down to the canyon, and into the path of new monsters.

  If only the monsters could talk to her clan. “Leave us alone,” the cephalopods might have tried to say. “Leave us alone,” the bonobos would certainly have replied.

  If only . . .

  The child let out a shriek while her mother managed a galloping leap that sent her airborne toward the threat in the water—a splendid but useless display that ended with two barbed spears and five tentacles rising up and plunging Proud One below the surface in a harrowing glut of blood.

  Seed let out a piteous howl but remained motionless, as if unable to quite comprehend what death signified, as if unwilling or unequipped to understand that it meant the end of her mother.

  A hand gripped Seed’s shoulder, and saved her. More than half of the clan had come running down to the water’s edge. All of them were signing the direction north and away from the canal in which the smaller of two shimmering shapes had begun removing and consuming Proud One’s organs.

  “Go all,” commanded the Large One who had once challenged Seed’s mother. “Go now,” she signed, and pointed north.

  Had Large One and her allies arrived only a very short time later, Seed would by now have leaped into the water after her mother. The rest of the clan stepped out from the reeds, but kept their distance, and made waving motions north and “Away.”

  A stinging surge rose up through the ground itself and caused old Broken Tooth to jump up and sign “Away” more vigorously. The slayers beneath the water seemed either not to have felt the sting or not to care. They stopped feeding on Proud One and moved nearer the shocks, nearer the water’s edge.

  Something much larger also approached, towering above the brush. On four extraordinarily wide and muscular legs, a shell-less, elephantine mollusk sent forth a series of electrical discharges that traveled in random directions along the ground. Seed realized that the elders seemed suddenly confused about the direction of escape. One cried out in pain and signed toward the southern highlands. Another signed toward the water. Directly ahead of the new threat, swarms of termite-like slugs had abandoned a bright red mound and were fleeing toward Seed’s clan in such multitudes that, collectively, they moved like a mist along the ground.

  The elephant snail stopped radiating electrical shocks, trampled the crimson mound, and fed upon it. Seed realized that they now stood on a low, muddy hill turned suddenly into an island, with a writhing wave of slugs running like a flood tide, expanding its dimensions and nipping at their ankles. The wave was cutting off the way north, and spreading along the path west. The way south was blocked by water, and by tentacles rising. On the east side, the giant was on the move again. Something snakelike had sprung out of the demolished red mound and seemed to be fighting back.

  One of the clan ran toward the elephant snail, hauled himself up one side, bit at the place where a head should have been, and was flung dead to the ground as if by an invisible force. Simultaneously, they were all numbed by a shock surge running beneath their feet. Seed’s skin flushed with horror, her legs felt like tightening springboards, and sh
e chose the direction of flight—straight through the tide of biting slugs, now even more active under a strengthening pulse of electrical discharges.

  She fled, and the rest followed. Sharp pains radiated from the bites to her feet and her calves, but Seed did not pause until she and the rest of the clan were far from the elephant snail, the water, and even the fields of reeds and trees.

  By midnight they were beyond the Devil’s Hole’s salt marshes and Mediterranean floor’s most westward extension of the new Nile. They stood near the fringe of the great western desert—watching, waiting.

  A bright crescent moon was rising. Tonight the clouds did not come near, and only the slightest drizzle of rain reached them, carried by a wind from the east.

  “They will not come,” Seed signed hopefully. Even the large female who had challenged her mother acknowledged that Seed had chosen the right direction out of the marshlands, and saved their lives. They were looking toward her now, and she was looking toward the northwest, into a desert.

  Those eyes! Seed could not suppress the memory of the two monsters in the water. In that moment, she had become the first primate to behold a sense of curiosity in a cephalopod’s eyes. Though the two species were entirely alien to each other in both physiology and the minds that dwelt within, as each gazed into the eyes of the other—during that instant of mutual terror, fury, and astonishment—each understood instinctively that there was a compulsively curious being on the other side.

  After the moon set and Venus heralded dawn, Seed gazed north toward distant mountaintops that were not yet the island of Crete.

  It became possible for her to hope that if they could stay to the west of the rains and rivers and the trees—if they could continue their journey north along the borders of the desert—the hot sun and the dry, salty sands would keep them safe. And beyond this lay the hope that, if only they survived the journey north and tentacles could not follow them onto the sands, they would come to a mountainous refuge of streams and fruits where no elephant snails or wide-eyed monsters lived.