Jillian vs Parasite Planet

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “Really?”

  “I didn’t test the swamp as drinking water before because it didn’t come up. Field crews generally bring their own water or sterilize and purify rainwater. If I’d been testing the swamp as drinking water, I would have run a more thorough test and gotten a very different result. I’m testing this now, and yeah, no, you don’t want to drink it. It’s gross. But the actual waterfall is coming up pretty clean.”

  Jillian looked up. “Where’s it coming from? Can you fly up and see? There could be a million more dead worms up there, and I wouldn’t know.”

  SABRINA flew a little moth shape up the falls. “Nothing up here,” the part that was sitting on Jillian’s shoulder said. “I think it’s too rocky up here for them.”

  That was all she needed to hear. Clean, drinkable water, hers for the taking. She edged around the pool toward the rocky wall that housed the falls.

  The rocks around the pool edge were flat and smooth with erosion, which made them slippery. But SABRINA adjusted the grippiness of her boot soles automatically, and Jillian tiptoed from rock to rock like she’d been born graceful, which under most circumstances she most assuredly was not.

  As she walked, she was already emptying the water container, cramming objects into the pockets of her podsuit. The tape, the insta-stitches, the brick of food bars. She slung the extra jumpsuit over one shoulder. She was just beside the falls now, the water kicking up into spray that wet her face and podsuit. That close, the falls were deafening.

  She’d been too worried about her parents to think much about her own thirst, but the spray hit her from the falls, cold and wet, and suddenly she couldn’t stop herself. She cupped water in her hands and slurped it up, over and over, until she felt like she’d never be thirsty again. She knew it wouldn’t last. It was just her brain and stomach tricking her. She’d be thirsty again too soon.

  That done, she propped the container against a rock to fill. The falls soaked her face and hair and ran down through the neck of the podsuit, but she stood in the spray until the container filled and overflowed and was ready to be carried back in triumph to the boulder where her parents were waiting.

  She steadied her stance to lift the container, as careful as if it were a bomb she was defusing. If she broke that container, broke it for real this time, it was game over for all of them.

  It was heavy. So heavy she could barely shift it, let alone lift it up and carry it safely off the rocks.

  “Lift with your legs,” SABRINA advised her. “Whatever that means. I don’t know. I saw it in a movie. I thought humans lifted with their hands.”

  “I’ve heard that too,” Jillian said, shouting over the falls. “I think it means don’t bend your back. Bend your knees and hold the thing and just . . . stand . . . up.”

  She tried to do it as she said it, but it was hard. Even with the extra grippies SABRINA added to her gloves, and the SABRINA ferret doing its best to help out, she couldn’t lift it beyond a few inches before it slipped from her grasp, and then it was all she could do to keep it from crashing back to the rocks.

  Jillian thought back to stuff she’d learned in school. How did people used to move heavy, awkward objects way, way back in ancient times when they didn’t have high-tech machines to help them?

  “SABRINA,” she said, “can you get under it and, like, lever it up off the rock so I can get my fingers in underneath? I might be able to carry it better that way.”

  “Can try,” the SABRINA ferret replied, changing into a shape kind of like a crowbar, the prying end already under the container. “Okay, go.”

  Jillian pushed, and the container levered up easily. She worked her fingers in underneath, then inched the container up to her chest, but then it slipped again and landed on the rock so hard it dented. Jillian held her breath as she inspected it for cracks. The drop hadn’t broken it, but the next one definitely would. “This was supposed to be the easy part,” she muttered.

  “Five gallons of water weighs almost forty-two pounds,” SABRINA informed her, turning back into a ferret and yawning hugely and adorably. “That, if it makes you feel any better, is a five-gallon container.”

  Forty-two pounds. It didn’t sound like that much. That was the weight of, say, a little kid, or a medium dog. Jillian could lift that, she thought.

  But a little kid had arms she could lift under. A dog she could scoop up. This was sheer, slippery, wet plastic, with no handholds, balanced on a rock. And the next wrong move would break it.

  Despair settled on her like a heavy blanket. All this way, she thought. I came all this way.

  Jillian straightened up and glared at the container for a full minute, hands on hips. Slow anger built in her like a fire, burning all the hopelessness away.

  “No,” she whispered aloud. She had to do this. SABRINA couldn’t carry a container this full. Even nearly all of SABRINA hadn’t been able to bear much weight for any kind of distance, and most of it was with her parents now. This part was on her.

  She bent down again, readjusting her grip. If she scooted backward along the rocks, she could slide the container toward her, inch by inch. She did that for a few minutes and made it a little ways away from the pool, then stopped in the middle of the clearing.

  She’d figure out how to get it the whole way back through the forest and the field to the boulder in a second. For now, she collapsed on a rock to catch her breath. Her heart was pounding in her ears. Between that and her breathing and the now-distant roar of the falls, she almost didn’t hear the SABRINA-ferret, right there on the next rock over, give a little melodic laugh.

  “What?” Jillian gasped. “Oh my god, this thing is a lot heavier than I—”

  SABRINA lifted its anglerfish lure, and Jillian almost screamed. There, in the cage, the worm was going absolutely nuts. It was trying to burrow out through the bottom of the cage. Worse, it was trying to burrow out through the bottom of the cage toward Jillian. It was snapping and thrashing in her direction, inches from her arm. She scrambled away. She had to put a distance of a few feet between herself and the worm before it started to calm down.

  “Think it finally decided it likes you,” SABRINA said.

  “Not me,” Jillian said, understanding. “My podsuit. It’s all wet.” She shoved up her sleeve, exposing a stretch of dry arm. “I want to try something. Hold it over this way. Um. Not too close.”

  She held her arm right in front of the worm’s face. Nothing.

  Then she pulled the sodden podsuit sleeve back into place, and the worm went berserk. “Was it going after the water in the pool?”

  “Oh yeah. The whole time you were filling the container. It calmed back down when we left. Until, well.”

  “Huh,” she said. “But my parents’ suits weren’t wet . . .”

  Jillian puzzled over that for a moment and got nowhere. An idea was struggling to piece itself together in the back of her mind. Something about how this worm was responding to water, not prey, but also about how the same batch of worms that had attacked her parents had then obsessed over the puddle of water from the broken container near the boulder . . .

  But if they’d been going after water, why didn’t they just crawl down to the swamp without attacking her parents at all? Plenty of water there.

  “You found this worm by the swamp?” she asked SABRINA. “This is the same one you brought down here?”

  SABRINA nodded, blinking up at her with all eight eyes.

  “So it was already looking for water,” Jillian murmured. “And not looking for stuff to bite.” She gave the idea another few seconds to take shape, but its edges stubbornly refused to fit together.

  In the meantime, the water container wasn’t about to walk itself back to camp. She levered herself up from the rock and went to begin the painstaking grind of sliding the sloshing heaviness of that container, inch by inch, across open ground, the whole way th
ere.

  She shoved it forward one foot, then another. It was going to take forever. She’d be lucky if she got back before dark.

  Worse, gravel rattled beneath the container. Too loud. Way too loud. Sending vibrations down into the ground. She needed something to pad the bottom with. If she sent SABRINA down there, it wouldn’t be able to protect her feet and legs. If she knew how to weave the long grasses, she might have been able to make a kind of sled to drag the container on. But she didn’t.

  What she did have was the spare jumpsuit. She lay it down flat on the ground and muscled the container on top of it, tying the arms and legs together on the top like an ugly present. It gave her a handle to drag with, and muffled a bit of the sound. It would have to do.

  She dragged the container a little farther away from the falls while SABRINA floated along beside her, the worm snapping at Jillian’s soaked hair.

  “Bored now,” SABRINA told it. “Enough.”

  “Go put that thing somewhere,” Jillian said. “It’s starting to creep me out.”

  The cage vanished and was replaced by pincers that held the worm by the tail, dangling at the end of the lure. “Where do you want it?”

  “I don’t care. Not here. Go put it by the pool if it wants water so badly.”

  SABRINA shook its head at the worm fondly, which shook the lure, which shook the worm, and as it passed nearest Jillian’s wet hair, it threw itself toward it so hard that Jillian thought it was going to let the pincers take off the end of its tail. SABRINA hovered away with it.

  For a few seconds, Jillian watched them go. Then she jumped to her feet, pointing toward the far side of the pool. “Look! There’s something weird by the water.”

  She hurried over, and SABRINA followed. Then she realized what she was looking at—what she was really looking at—and stopped again, staring.

  One of the rocks lining the pool . . . was not a rock at all. It was a dark shape, uniformly dark now, but Jillian knew what it was.

  The alien deer.

  It was definitely the same one. Jillian recognized it from the pattern of burns on its legs and back. But it wasn’t tracking anything in the distance anymore, wasn’t moving with such single-minded purpose. It had reached its destination, and now it wasn’t doing anything at all.

  It must have gone down between two rocks to the water’s edge and put its face down as if to drink. And then gone in farther, and farther, until only the back half of its body was visible, because the rest was in the pool. No part of it was moving. Water lapped over its sides in tiny waves, but its colorshifting surface did not change. It lay there, dark and flat and inert, like a solid lump of shadow.

  “Oh no,” Jillian whispered. She speed-walked over as lightly as she could and started dragging the alien deer back out of the water, even though she knew she couldn’t help it anymore. Leaving it there in the water, like all the dead things in the swamp, suddenly seemed impossible.

  Even up close it was hard to tell whether the alien deer had skin or scales or feathers or what. It was kind of a mix of all three, putting Jillian in mind of pictures of dinosaurs in books. But the back half of the creature was dry, and Jillian still had the SABRINA grippies on her gloves, so she dug her feet into the gravel and her fingers into the sides of the alien deer and pulled as hard as she could until the front half of it came sliding limply back out of the pool.

  “We’re too late,” she said quietly. “It’s dead.”

  The SABRINA ferret flew over on its bat wings and landed on the alien deer’s back. Poked it with a paw a few times. “Agreed,” it said. “Hey, check me out.”

  Suddenly it was a perfect miniature copy of the alien deer, six inches tall, perching on top of the dead one. Like some kind of magic trick, the worm in its cage had vanished.

  Jillian shooed SABRINA off the alien deer’s corpse. “That’s not nice,” she said. “It’s dead. Go mess around somewhere else.”

  “With pleasure,” SABRINA said. It made a show of throwing its head back, opening its mouth, reaching in with one spindly leg, and pulling out the worm, which had apparently been stored in the new cage of its alien deer body. Holding the worm aloft like a banner, it pranced away.

  Which left Jillian alone with the dead alien deer. She wasn’t entirely sure why this aloneness was something she had wanted, or what she planned to do now that she had it. She found herself looking at the alien deer in the way people in wilderness survival movies looked at dead animals they’d found in the woods.

  She knew it had died of natural causes. Well, as natural as these causes could be called. Its meat was fresh, not rotten, not poisoned. It could be food.

  Jillian had never eaten meat before. Meat, real, true, dead-animal meat, was a food of her grandparents’ generation. She knew it used to be a big deal for humans all throughout history up until just decades ago, but the only meat she’d personally ever even seen had been vat-grown from proteins in a lab, not cut off a dead animal by hand out in the middle of nowhere and cooked somehow.

  She reached out with a gloved fingertip and touched one of the wounds. It had mostly healed over, though the acid in the bite seemed to have permanently damaged whatever made the alien deer’s camouflage work, causing the white dead-pixel patches Jillian had noticed before. But she knew what an infection looked like—at least, what an infected wound on a human on Earth looked like—and she didn’t see any sign of that here. The alien deer had probably been bitten days ago and then recovered. In any case, Jillian thought no sign of infection meant probably okay to eat, even if the idea of eating this creature was a little overwhelming and made her feel slightly sick to her stomach.

  She sat back on her heels and tried to remember how people in movies went about turning animals into food. You took the skin off, she knew that much, and then you cooked . . . some other part. What were you supposed to do with the parts you didn’t use? Where were you supposed to put the blood? There was a whole chapter on this stuff in her wilderness survival book, but she’d skipped it. Here, now, she was starting to wish she hadn’t.

  Something near the alien deer’s face was moving, rescuing Jillian from her questions. But then she looked, and immediately regretted it.

  Something was crawling out of the alien deer’s nostrils. Or—no—something had been crawling out of its nostrils, but stopped halfway, and was now bobbing slightly back and forth, as if confused. Something a tiny bit like a centipede, and a tinier bit like a tadpole, but about as much like either of those as the alien deer was like an actual deer.

  “SABRINA!”

  “You just told me to go away!” SABRINA called back.

  “Forget that. Look!” Jillian nodded at the centipede thing, which was now seemingly trying to decide whether to finish crawling out or go back in. “What is that thing?”

  SABRINA looked. “Huh,” it said after a moment. “You don’t see that every day.”

  “What’s it doing?” Jillian asked. But before SABRINA could answer, an idea seized her. She thought of the worms, thought of the swamp, and she dragged the alien deer’s head back into the pool and lay it down gently in the shallow water at the edge.

  Immediately the centipede thing shot out into the water and was gone.

  Jillian jumped to her feet with a startled yell. So fast, she thought, so fast.

  Then she gathered herself and shaded her eyes against the glare of sunlight on the surface to peer into the depths of the pool. Away from the pounding of the falls, the water was very clear. Down along the bottom she could see several more of the centipede things paddling slowly around. One looked to have laid a cluster of eggs, like a tiny shimmering nest of beads strung across a bit of plant matter.

  That gave Jillian a nasty chill. Whatever these centipede things were, eggs meant more of them. No way could that be good news.

  She pointed them out to SABRINA.

  “Oh,” S
ABRINA said, “that explains a lot, actually.”

  “It does?”

  “Sure. There are life cycles of parasites on Earth that look a lot like this.”

  “No way.”

  “Very much yes way.”

  Jillian waved incredulously at the alien deer, dead with its face in the water. “This thing just drowned itself on purpose, and a bug or whatever just crawled out its nose, and more of them are laying eggs in the water, and you’re telling me there are things that do this on Earth?”

  “You’d be surprised. You just think Earth is normal because you’re used to it. Trust me, biped, Earth is completely bonkers.”

  “You’re going to have to draw me a picture here, because I don’t get it. From that”—Jillian indicated the worm in SABRINA’s pincers, then swung her pointer finger over to the alien deer, then down to the strings of eggs in the water—“to that.”

  “Okay,” SABRINA said. “So. These stupid little guys”—it shook the worm—“probably ate those eggs. You can see right there that the eggs float up to the surface of the water, very likely when they’re ready to be found and eaten.”

  Jillian crinkled her brow. “Why would it want its eggs to get eaten?”

  “Depends on what the baby parasites are after. Look.”

  Jillian looked, and sure enough, there were two more strings of eggs being pushed out of the water by the little wavelets in the pool, out onto the shore. “They go onto the dirt,” she said wonderingly. “The worms eat dirt. Tiny stuff in the dirt. Like my dad said.”

  “There you go. So the worm eats the egg by accident, the egg hatches in the worm, and baby centipede parasite guy has a cozy new home. Circle of life.”

  Jillian made a face. “That’s disgusting.”

  “That’s nature, new kid. Got plenty of it where you come from too.”

  “But the worms bit the alien deer. They didn’t just go straight for water. The deer did.”