its mortal paralysis. There lay his nightmare part, a nothingness freely possessed by an unspeakability. The corpse said:
“ Rotten blood. Thin nourishment. Only one hour alone
before you came. Fed from neighbor to my left—barely had
strength to extend siphon. Fed from the right while you
worked. Tricky going—you are alert. Expected Dr. Parsons.
Energy needs of animating this” —one hand left the doctor’s
thigh and smote the dusty overalls—“ and a host-transfer, very
high. Once I have you synapsed, will be near starvation
again. ’ ’
A sequence of unbearable images unfolded in the doctor’s
mind, even as the robot carrion turned from the gurney and
walked to the instrument table: the sheriff’s arrival just after
dawn, alone of course, since Craven always took thought for
his deputies’ rest and because on this errand he would want
privacy to consider any indiscretion on behalf of the miners’
survivors that the situation might call for; his finding his old
friend, supine and alarmingly weak; his hurrying over, his
leaning near. Then, somewhat later, a police car containing
a rack of still wet bones might plunge off the highway above
some deep spot in the gorge.
The corpse took an evidence box from the table and put
the scalpel in it. Then it turned and retrieved the mortuary
knife from the floor and put that in as well, saying as it did
so, without turning, “ The sheriff will come in the morning.
You spoke like close friends. He will probably come alone.”
The coincidence with his thoughts had to be accident, but
the intent to terrify and appall him was clear. The tone and
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timing of that patched-up voice were unmistakably deliberate—sly probes that sought his anguish specifically, sought his mind’s personal center. He watched the corpse—back at
the table—dipping an apish but accurate hand and plucking
up rib shears, scissors, clamps, adding all to the box. He
stared, momentarily emptied by shock of all but the will to
know finally the full extent of the horror that had appropriated his life. Joe Allen’s body carried the box to the worktable beside the gurney, and die expressionless eyes met the doctor’s.
“ I have gambled. A grave gamble. But now I have won.
At risk of personal discovery we are obliged to disconnect,
contract, hide as well as possible in host body. Suicide in
effect. I disregarded situational imperatives, despite starvation before disinterment and subsequent autopsy all but certain. I caught up with crew, tackled Pollock and Jackson microseconds before blast. Computed five days survival from
this cache, could disconnect at limit of strength to do so, but
otherwise would chance autopsy, knowing doctor was alcoholic imcompetent. And now see my gain. You are a prize host, can feed with near impunity even when killing too dangerous. Safe meals delivered to you still warm.’’
The corpse had painstakingly aligned the gumey parallel
to the worktable but offset, the table’s foot extending past the
gumey’s, and separated from it by a distance somewhat less
than die reach of Joe Allen’s right arm. Now the dead hands
distributed the implements along the right edge of the table,
save for the scissors and the box. These the corpse took to
the table’s foot, where it set down the box and slid the scissors’ jaws round one strap of its overalls. It began to speak again, and as it did, the scissors dismembered its cerements
in unhesitating strokes.
“ The cut must be medical, forensically right, though a
smaller one easier. Must be careful of the pectoral muscles
or arms will not convey me. I am no larva anymore—over
fifteen hundred grams.”
To ease the nightmare’s suffocating pressure, to thrust out
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some flicker of his own will against its engulfment, the doctor flung a question, his voice more cracked than the other’s now was:
“ Why is my arm free?”
“ The last, fine neural splicing needs a sensory-motor standard, to perfect my brain’s fit to yours. Lacking this eye-hand coordinating check, much coarser motor control of host. This
done, I flush out the paralytic, unbind us, and we are free
together.”
The grave-clothes had fallen in a puzzle of fragments, and
the cadaver stood naked, its dark, gas-rounded contours making it seem some sleek marine creature, ruddered with the black-veined, gas-distended sex. Again the voice had teased
for his fear, had uttered the last word with a savoring protraction, and now the doctor’s cup of anguish brimmed over; horror and outrage wrenched his spirit in brutal alternation
as if trying to tear it naked from its captive frame. He rolled
his head in this deadlock, his mouth beginning to split with
the slow birth of a mind-emptying outcry.
The corpse watched this, giving a single nod that might
have been approbation. Then it mounted the worktable and,
with the concentrated caution of some practiced convalescent
reentering his bed, lay on its back. The dead eyes again
sought the living and found the doctor staring back, grinning
insanely.
“ Clever corpse!” the doctor cried. “ Clever, carnivorous
corpse! Able alien! Please don’t think I ’m criticizing. Whom
am I to criticize? A mere arm and shoulder, a talking head,
just a small piece of a pathologist. But I ’m confused.” He
paused, savoring the monster’s attentive silence and his own
buoyancy in the hysterical levity that had unexpectedly liberated him. “ You’re going to use your puppet there to pluck you out of itself and put you on me. But once he’s pulled you
from your driver’s seat, won’t he go dead, so to speak, and
drop you? You could get a nasty knock. Why not set a plank
between the tables—the puppet opens the door, and you scuttle, ooze, lurch, flop, slither, as the case may be, across the
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bridge. No messy spills. And in any case, isn’t this an odd,
rather clumsy way to get around among your cattle? Shouldn’t
you at least carry your own scalpels when you travel? There’s
always the risk you’ll run across that one host in a million
that isn’t carrying one with him.”
He knew his gibes would be answered to his own despair.
He exulted, but solely in the momentary bafflement of the
predator—in having, for just a moment, mocked its gloating
assurance to silence and marred its feast.
Its right hand picked up the post-mortem knife beside it,
and the left wedged a roll of gauze beneath Allen’s neck,
lifting the throat to a more prominent arch. The mouth told
the ceiling:
‘ ‘We retain larval form till entry of the host. As larvae we
have locomotor structures, and sense-buds usable outside our
ships’ sensory amplifiers. I waited coiled round Ed Sykes’
bed leg till night, entered by his mouth as he slept.” Allen’s
hand lifted the knife, held it high above the dull, quick eyes,
turning it in the light. “ Once lodged, we have three instars
to adult form,” the voice continued absently—the knife might
have been a mirror from which the co
rpse read its features.
“ Larvally we have only a sketch of our full neural tap. Our
metamorphosis is cued and determined by the host’s endo-
somatic ecology. I matured in three days.” Allen’s wrist
flexed, tipping the knife’s point downmost. “ Most supreme
adaptations are purchased at the cost of the inessential capacities.” The elbow pronated and slowly flexed, hooking the knife body-wards. “ Our hosts are all sentient6, eco-dominants, are already carrying the baggage of coping structures for the planetary environment. Limbs, sensory portals” —the fist planted the fang of its tool under the chin, tilted it and rode it smoothly down the throat, the voice proceeding unmarred from under the furrow that the steel ploughed—“ somatic envelopes, instrumentalities” —down
the sternum, diaphragm, abdomen the stainless blade painted
its stripe of gaping, muddy tissue—“ with a host’s brain we
inherit all these, the mastery of any planet, netted in its dom
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inant’s cerebral nexus. Thus our genetic codings are now all
but disencumbered of such provisions.”
So swiftly the doctor flinched, Joe Allen’s hand slashed
four lateral cuts from the great wound’s axis. The seeming
butchery left two flawlessly drawn thoracic flaps cleanly outlined. The left hand raised the left flap’s hem, and the right coaxed the knife into the aperture, deepening it with small
stabs and slices. The posture was a man’s who searches a
breast pocket, with the dead eyes studying the slow recoil of
flesh. The voice, when it resumed, had geared up to an intenser pitch:
“ Galactically, the chordate nerve/brain paradigm abounds,
and the neural labyrinth is our dominion. Are we to make
plank bridges and worm across them to our food? Are cockroaches greater than we for having legs to run up walls and antennae to grope their way! All the quaint, hinged crutches
that life sports! The stilts, fins, fans, springs, stalks, flippers
and feathers, all in turn so variously terminating in hooks,
clamps, suckers, scissors, forks or little cages of digits! And
besides all the gadgets it concocts for wrestling through its
worlds, it is all knobbed, whiskered, crested, plumed, vented,
spiked or measeled over with perceptual gear for combing
pittances of noise or color from the environing plentitude.”
Invincibly calm and sure, the hands traded tool and tasks.
The right flap eased back, revealing ropes of ingeniously
spared muscle while promising a genuine appearance once
sutured back in place. Helplessly the doctor felt his delirious
defiance bleed away and a bleak fascination rebind him.
‘‘We are the taps and relays that share the host’s aggregate
of afferent nerve-impulse precisely at its nodes of integration.
We are the brains that peruse these integrations, integrate
them with our existing banks of host-specific data, and, lastly,
let their consequences flow down the motor pathway—either
the consequences they seek spontaneously, or those we wish
to graft upon them. We are besides a streamlined alimentary/
circulatory system and a reproductive apparatus. And more
than this we need not b e.”
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The corpse had spread its bloody vest, and the feculent
hands now took up the rib shears. The voice’s sinister coloration of pitch and stress grew yet more marked—the phrases slid from the tongue with a cobra’s seeking sway, winding
their liquid rhythms round the doctor till a gap in his resistance should let them pour through to slaughter the little courage left him.
“ For in this form we have inhabited the densest brainweb
of three hundred races, lain intricately snug within them like
thriving vine on trelliswork. We’ve looked out from too many
variously windowed masks to regret our own vestigial senses.
None read their worlds definitely. Far better then, our nomad’s range and choice, than an unvarying tenancy of one poor set of structures. Far better to slip on as we do whole
living beings and wear at once all of their limbs and organs,
memories and powers—wear all as tightly congruent to our
wills as a glove is to the hand that fills it. ’ ’
The shears clipped through the gristle, stolid, bloody jaws
monotonously feeding, stopping short of the stemo-clavicular
joint in the manubrium where the muscles of the pectoral
girdle have an important anchorage.
“ No consciousness of the chordate type that we have found
has been impermeable to our finesse—no dendritic pattern
so elaborate we could not read its stitchwork and thread ourselves to match, precisely map its each synaptic seam till we could loosen it and re-tailor all to suit ourselves. We have
strutted costumed in the bodies of planetary autarchs, venerable manikins of moral fashion, but cut of the universal cloth: the weave of fleet electric filaments of experience which
we easily re-shuttled to the warp of our wishes. Whereafter—
newly hemmed and gathered—their living fabric hung obedient to our bias, investing us with honor and influence unlimited.”
The tricky verbal melody, through the corpse’s deft, unfaltering self-dismemberment—the sheer neuromuscular orchestration of the compound activity—struck Dr. Winters with the detached enthrallment great keyboard performers could
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bring him. He glimpsed the alien’s perspective—a Gulliver
waiting in a brobdingnagian grave, then marshaling a dead
giant against a living, like a dwarf in a huge mechanical
crane, feverishly programming combat on a battery of levers
and pedals, waiting for the robot arms’ enactments, the remote, titanic impact of the foes—and he marveled, filled with a bleak wonder at life’s infinite strategy and plasticity. Joe
Allen’s hands reached into his half-opened abdominal cavity,
reached deep below the uncut anterior muscle that was exposed by the shallow, spurious incision of the epidermis, till by external measure they were extended far enough to be
touching his thighs. The voice was still as the forearms advertised a delicate rummaging with the buried fingers. The shoulders drew back. As the steady withdrawal brought the
wrists into view, the dead legs tremored and quaked with
diffuse spasms.
“ You called your kind our food and drink, doctor. If you
were merely that, an elementary usurpation of your motor
tracts alone would satisfy us, give us perfect cattle-control—
for what rarest word or subtlest behavior is more than a flurry
of varied muscles? That trifling skill was ours long ago. It is
not mere blood that feeds this lust I feel now to tenant you,
this craving for an intimacy that years will not stale. My
truest feast lies in compelling you to feed in that way and in
the utter deformation of your will this will involve. Had gross
nourishment been my prime need, then my gravemates—
Pollock and Jackson—could have eked out two weeks of life
for me or more. But I scorned a cowardly parsimony in the
face of death. I reinvested more than half the energy that their
blood gave me in fabricating chemicals to keep their brains
alive, and fluid-bathed with oxygenated nutriment.’’
Out of the chasmed midriff the smeared hands dragged two
long tresses
of silvery filament that writhed and sparkled with
a million simultaneous codings and contractions. The legs
jittered with faint, chaotic pulses throughout their musculature, untfl the bright, vermiculate tresses had gathered into
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two spheric masses which the hands laid carefully within the
incision. Then the legs lay still as death.
“ I had accessory neural taps only to spare, but I could
access much memory, and all of their cognitive responses,
and having in my banks all the organ of Corti’s electrochemical conversions of English words, I could whisper anything to them directly into the eighth cranial nerve. Those are our
true feast, doctor, such bodiless electric storms of impotent
cognition as I tickled up in those two little bone globes. I
was forced to drain them yesterday, just before disinterment.
They lived till then and understood everything —everything I
did to them.”
When the voice paused, the dead and living eyes were
locked together. They remained so a moment, and then the
dead face smiled.
It recapitulated all the horror of Allen’s first resurrection—
this waking of expressive soul from those grave-mound contours. And it was a demon-soul the doctor saw awaken: the smile was barbed with fine, sharp hooks of cruelty at the
comers of the mouth, while the barbed eyes beamed fond,
languorous anticipation of his pain. Remotely, Dr. Winters
heard the flat sound of his own voice asking:
‘‘And Eddie Sykes?”
‘‘Oh, yes, doctor. He is with us now, has been throughout.
I grieve to abandon so rare a host! He is a true hermit-
philosopher, well-read in four languages. He is writing a
translation of Marcus Aurelius—he was, I mean, in his free
time. . . . ”
Long minutes succeeded of the voice accompanying the
surreal self-autopsy, but the doctor lay stilled, emptied of
reactive power. Still, the full understanding of his fate reverberated in his mind—an empty room through which the voice, not heard exactly but somehow implanted directly as in the
subterranean torture it had just described, sent aftershocks of
realization, amplification of the Unspeakable.
The parasite had traced and trapped the complex interface
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 37
