Jillian vs Parasite Planet

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “Obviously,” SABRINA said, “the parasite larva got into this creature. In all probability, through the bite.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know for sure. But there are parasites on Earth that do that kind of thing, jump hosts if a bigger or stronger host can serve it better. Maybe a bigger host, say this alien deer, provides more food for the centipede larva while it grows to maturity.”

  “It was eating it?”

  “Just little bits, I imagine,” SABRINA said. “Tiny little nibbles. Probably never even noticed.” Then, catching sight of Jillian’s face, it added, “Oh, don’t be so squeamish. Animals eat each other on your planet for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and dessert.” The tiny alien deer SABRINA nodded its dinosaur-like head toward the dead alien deer. “Anyway. So baby parasite grows up big and strong in there, and then when it’s ready to go back to the water and lay its eggs . . .”

  “It makes the host take it there,” Jillian said, understanding. “So it was, what, controlling the alien deer? And all those worms? Driving them around until they found water?”

  “You got it.”

  Jillian made a face. “How does that even work?”

  “I never said it wasn’t weird,” SABRINA said. “I said there was plenty of precedent. On your very own planet, even. Look it up.”

  Jillian chewed this over for a full minute. Then her gaze fell on SABRINA’s captive worm.

  “So you’re saying that worm has a centipede thing inside it that’s ready to hatch. That’s why it didn’t want to bite me—it just wants to get back to the water. So the thing can get out.” She thought for another few seconds. “And the ones that bit my parents, and the ones that bit the deer, they had centipede things in them too, but theirs weren’t big enough to hatch yet, so they were looking for bigger prey.”

  “A reasonable hypothesis,” SABRINA said. “Shall we test it?”

  For a moment there was a war in Jillian’s mind. She wanted answers, but she also wanted never to go near or even look at one of the centipede things ever again.

  But, as always, the needing-to-know won out. “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

  “Sweet,” SABRINA said. “I was hoping you would say that.”

  It morphed into a bowl, and Jillian used it to scoop up some water. Then she braced herself and picked up SABRINA’s worm. Even through the podsuit glove, its desperate wriggling grossed her out deeply. She dropped it quickly into the bowl.

  As soon as it hit water, the worm went still. So still that at first she thought it had died. But then it started convulsing, its whole body heaving like a cat about to puke. It’s drowning, Jillian realized, feeling sick. I’m watching something drown.

  The worm could have easily crawled out of the bowl if it had wanted to. But it didn’t even try. It stayed at the very bottom, and it was very hard for Jillian not to reach in and scoop it out. These things had bitten her parents. She had to know.

  She crossed her arms and hugged herself and watched the worm convulse and heave, and after about two agonizing minutes of this, it opened its mouth wider than it looked like it could comfortably go, and out shot one of the centipede things.

  It was smaller than the one that had come out of the alien deer. That one had been about the length of Jillian’s finger, but this one was more the size of her fingertip. Still the same shape, still fully formed.

  “This one’s smaller than the one that came out of the deer,” she observed.

  “Bigger host, bigger parasite, remember?” SABRINA said.

  “Right,” Jillian said faintly.

  “To baby parasite over there, that alien deer probably looked how a pizza the size of a zero-gravity football stadium would look to you.”

  “Well, I’m totally not going to think about that every time I see a pizza from now on.”

  “Oh, good. I wouldn’t want to put you off pizza. I am told it’s delicious.”

  The hatched centipede thing settled at the lowest part of the bowl and lay beside the worm, making tiny scuttling motions like it was testing out its legs.

  Jillian stared at it for another moment, imagining what it would feel like to have one of those driving her around, the way people used to drive their own cars before they had computers to do it for them. Except she wasn’t a car. She had a mind of her own. She pictured one of these centipedes living in her head, nibbling away at all of her thoughts and ideas and dreams.

  Before she could think better of it, she reached into the bowl with her gloved hand, past the now-dead worm, and grabbed the centipede.

  Parasite, she thought. That’s what SABRINA called you. That’s what you are.

  She threw it down to the gravel and ground it to paste beneath her heel.

  SABRINA, meantime, had reverted to its six-legged dog shape and was giving Jillian a dopey, open-mouthed dog smile.

  “Told you so,” it said.

  Jillian’s mind was spinning. The worm, the centipede parasite, the deer. The worm ate the egg, the egg hatched in the worm, the worm bit the host, the baby parasite traveled through the bite, and when it was done growing, it drove the host to water to escape and start the life cycle all over again.

  All the information she had gathered was lining up in her head. The logic of SABRINA’s hypothesis, now that it had been proven correct, only led in one direction. No matter how hard she tried to make it go somewhere else.

  “Then,” she asked SABRINA in dawning horror, “what’s going to happen to my parents?”

  Chapter 11

  Thankfully, it took SABRINA less than a second to come up with an answer. “They’re fine,” it said. “They woke up twenty-seven minutes, forty seconds ago and twelve minutes, fifteen seconds ago, respectively, and drank some water. I’m making them some lunch right now. Look.”

  SABRINA projected a video in midair, the way it had done with the countdown clock.

  In it, Jillian’s parents were sitting, backs propped against each other, in visible pain but awake. Alive. Her throat tightened. She folded her arms around herself to keep from reaching out and trying to touch the projection.

  The fluffy pillows and sentry telescope and other SABRINA things were gone, and it whirled around them now in a slowly orbiting particle swarm. Here and there small clouds of SABRINA’s nanobots grouped together to help Jillian’s mom adjust her blanket a fraction of an inch, or smooth one of her dad’s smart bandages back into place. Little things that made Jillian think of a healthy person standing by a sick loved one’s bed, fretting and wringing their hands. She smiled a little. “Thanks, SABRINA,” she said softly. “You’re doing great.”

  “Doing my job,” SABRINA said, like it was embarrassed by the compliment, but then after a moment it made a throat-clearing sound—having no throat to clear—and said, “You’re not doing too bad yourself.”

  Before Jillian could respond, she noticed the part of SABRINA that was making soup for her parents in the video feed. That part hadn’t taken any specific kind of shape. No velociraptor, no octopus, no six-legged dog. It was streamlined to the most efficient possible version of thing that can make soup, a no-nonsense kind of scaffolding with swiveling claws.

  This was so completely unlike the goofball showiness Jillian expected from SABRINA that for a moment she didn’t even recognize it, and thought it was a piece of equipment salvaged from the pod.

  For all that SABRINA liked to joke around when it sensed no danger, Jillian realized, back by her parents it was on full red alert. Nothing was going to happen to them on its watch.

  “They look okay,” she whispered. Unsure why she was whispering. Doing it anyway.

  “Well, they are okay,” SABRINA said. “I may not be a medbot, but I’m not completely incompetent.”

  “But the worms. The parasite . . . thing. Isn’t . . . that . . . going to happen to them too?”


  “Not necessarily. Your human parents are biologically different than the fauna native to 80 UMa c. As of yet we have no evidence that they’re viable hosts for the parasite. And even if they are, I’m unsure of the timeline. Your parents will be in an Earth hospital within the week. Their biggest concern right now is that.” SABRINA tapped the water container.

  “Fed and watered,” Jillian said.

  “Got it in one.”

  “All right.” Jillian sighed. “Let’s go.” She crouched beside the container and inspected it. The jumpsuit tied around it had helped a little, but while the slithery fabric was tough, the gravel was tougher, and already rubbing holes through the body of the suit.

  That was bad news. When the suns went down, she’d need every layer of clothing she had. She untied the jumpsuit from the water container and tied it around her waist instead. She squatted down beside the water container, got both arms around it, and stood with it hugged to her chest.

  She made it four steps before she lost her grip. The container slipped from her arms, and this time she thought fast and dropped with it, guiding its fall to keep it from breaking. SABRINA appeared out of nowhere, a gelatinous cloud that did not stop the container but managed to slow it down just enough for Jillian to set it on the gravel safely.

  Jillian stood over it, counting her breaths until her heart stopped hammering. “Okay,” she said at last. “No more of that.”

  “Advisable,” SABRINA agreed.

  Which left her with what options? She couldn’t carry it. SABRINA couldn’t carry it. Dragging it across the ground, especially without the jumpsuit handle, was going to take forever.

  She was beyond tired of thinking about this stupid water container. Getting the water was supposed to be the hard part. This part should have been a piece of cake. She should be halfway back to the boulder by now, helping SABRINA protect her mom and dad. Instead, she was stuck out here, moving at the approximate speed of a half-dead snail dipped in superglue, because of this stupid water container. She wished she were faster, stronger, older. She wanted long legs and powerful muscles. She wished the wings on the SABRINA boots could actually make her fly. She wished her parents had a normal job that kept them safe on Earth, or that she’d been able to figure out a way to get them through the portal in time, or a way to heal them up so she didn’t have to solve all these problems on her own, or—

  She shut those thoughts down hard. She couldn’t waste time feeling sorry for herself if she wanted to survive.

  The gelatinous cloud was hovering directly in front of Jillian’s face now, staring at her eyelessly, awaiting instruction. “SABRINA,” she told it, “I know you can’t lift the container far. Could you make, like, rollers for it instead? Just something to make it a little easier and quieter to push back”—for one awful second she almost said home—“to, um, camp?”

  “I don’t see why not,” SABRINA said.

  Jillian took a big step away from the container and gestured down at it. “All yours.”

  The cloud floated over and slid itself in under the container, as fluid as fog. There it turned into a set of crawler treads. Jillian got behind the container and pushed. It crept forward a foot, then another. It was still pretty slow, and awkward, but better than ripping the spare jumpsuit to shreds.

  It got them as far as the edge of the meadow that circled the forest. There, the tough, sharp grass stopped them in their tracks. Even if Jillian had flattened a path with her boots beforehand, it just wasn’t working. The crawlers caught and tangled, and when Jillian tried to mash the grass away from the sides, it slashed at the legs of her suit and nearly spilled the container all over again.

  After about twenty minutes of this, she gave up. She almost started stomping her way back out of the grass field, then froze, realizing what she was about to do. Instead, she stood looking out over the sea of grass, fists jammed down into her pockets, clamping down on a whole lot of yelling. More frustrated than she’d maybe ever been in her life. They’d finally figured out how to move the full container, and then they’d only actually shifted it a couple hundred feet, tops. She wanted to dropkick the thing up a tree. It had taken them, what, an hour to get to the falls? At this rate, it was going to take the whole rest of the day to get back.

  “Sorry,” SABRINA said. “I told you I wasn’t good at heavy lifting.”

  “No, I know,” Jillian said. “I’m sorry too. It’s not your fault.” She ran her hands up her face and into her hair. “Okay. New plan. What if you, like, made several little containers instead of this big one, and we poured the water into you like we did back there with the worm?” But her mind was following that thought-path ahead of her mouth, and she immediately saw the problems. “But I’d still have to carry them. And there’s not enough of you here to make that many containers; I’d have to get rid of the boots you made me, which I don’t want to. And I’d have to keep going back and forth every day to get more water anyway.”

  “You could do that,” SABRINA said. “Or, on the off chance you were looking for a more elegant solution, you could pour some of the water out and bring it back partially full, then go back tomorrow. Somebody was just telling me a little while ago how hiking is good for humans.” It turned back into the six-legged flame dog. “Probably good for dogs too.”

  “If I can get this water back, it’ll be enough for days,” Jillian said. “I don’t want to leave my parents and wander around out here any more than I have to. What if the portal comes back early and I’m not there?”

  What if the worms attack me out there? she thought but did not say. What if my mom and dad get infections and fevers and die?

  “I want to try to go around and find another way. You know the landscape. It should be easy. Right?”

  “I perform standard recon diagnostics every six weeks, and I run extra coverage of the research sites before the quadpods arrive. Your parents made me run this last one twice.” SABRINA projected a map into the air. “Take a peek.”

  Jillian stepped in to study the map. She squinted at the various rings and squiggles and shook her head. “I can’t read this.”

  A big red X appeared near one edge of the map, in some area that looked pretty much like everything else. “Here’s us,” SABRINA said. Then a blue star blinked in near the center. “There’s base camp.”

  Jillian was sort of familiar with that area by now, and she thought if she leaned in and studied hard, she could learn to read this map, identify the ridge, the crater, the swamp, the path they’d taken. But there was no time.

  The X was on the edge of a faint purple expanse. “That’s the forest,” she said. It went down the left side of the map toward the middle, but disappeared off the top edge. “This goes off the map. Which way takes us around this faster?”

  “This is what I mapped right before your quadpod came through the portal,” SABRINA said. “I have last month’s data, but it might be inaccurate by now.”

  “Like the swamp,” Jillian said.

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s the best we have. Bring it up anyway. Please.”

  SABRINA projected a bigger map. The little square of the first one fit into it neatly. “This is fifty square miles.”

  Jillian didn’t need to know, but her curiosity got the better of her. “What’s past that?”

  There was the briefest possible hesitation before SABRINA said, “80 UMa c is forty-six percent the size of Earth. I could show you all my maps, but we’d be here all day.”

  But Jillian had already seen everything she needed to see. The razor-grass field stretched on a long way, north and south. Three miles, maybe four. That was a long way lugging water. But there was a spot on the map just north of here where it looked like some kind of rocky hills cut through it, almost the whole way back to the ridge.

  “Can you blow that up?”

  SABRINA did. Jillian was right; it was a
line of low-looking hills, like the spine of some huge creature mostly buried in the dirt.

  She didn’t know how high it was, how hard it was to climb. The worms didn’t go after rock—she’d seen that with the boulder—so that was a plus. But she’d be lugging the water container this time.

  Heading off blind into the wilderness was the kind of thing that, if she were in a movie, would get her killed. But she hated this stay-put, wait-and-see thing. It made her mind itch like poison ivy.

  She could send SABRINA to scope it out, but as great as SABRINA was at a ton of things, she wasn’t too sure she could trust it to make an accurate decision about what Jillian could and could not climb with a water container. Or without one. And if SABRINA was wrong, they’d have to double back anyway, and it’d be all kinds of time wasted.

  “The suns are still high,” she said, working it out aloud. “I still have the food bars in my pocket. My parents are just two miles away.” She nodded once, decisively. “I say we go there. If it doesn’t work, we can go around the bottom of the hills and still be headed in the right direction. Worst case, I can dump some of the water if I absolutely have to. But I want to try this first. Okay by you?”

  “You’re the boss, Boss.” Already the six-legged dog was dissolving, reforming, going back to being crawler treads for the water container.

  Jillian glanced toward her wristband. Nodded. Glanced once more at the map. Off the edge of it could be anything. What was it that it was supposed to say on really ancient maps? She’d learned it in history class earlier this year: Beyond this point there be dragons.

  “Hey. Can I get you to send just a tiny bit of yourself ahead, make sure everything’s safe in front of me? Something that might not have shown up on the map? Or that showed up but you didn’t know was a problem? Like the swamp?”

  “I told you, the swamp—”

  “I know, SABRINA, but right now I need to stay safe. I know you can keep me safe. That’s all I’m asking.”