The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991)

by David G. Hartwell (Ed. )

  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