Jillian vs Parasite Planet

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “SABRINA,” Jillian asked, “can you pull up that footage of the swamp for me real quick? Show Dr. Vasquez what it used to look like before the crater appeared? And then what it looks like now?”

  “Weird,” SABRINA said. “I thought humans didn’t like looking at disgusting things while eating. I guess it’s true what Dr. Park’s desk calendar says. You really do learn something new every day. Wait. Does that count? Did I just learn two things?”

  “SABRINA,” Jillian and Dr. Vasquez said together.

  “Fine.” Up came the footage of the swamp. “Enjoy your soup.”

  “This is right by where our pod landed,” Jillian told Dr. Vasquez.

  “I’m not familiar with this site,” Dr. Vasquez said. The creases in her brow were deeper now. She ran one hand back through her spiky hair and narrowed her eyes. “SABRINA, coordinates, please.”

  The lightning bolt/praying mantis/pin/thing must have done something out of sight, because Dr. Vasquez looked even more puzzled than before. “I do know that site. That’s where they always land the pods. But I haven’t seen that swamp before.”

  “It didn’t used to be there,” Jillian went on. “SABRINA said it wasn’t there just six weeks ago when they checked out the site. It appeared sometime after that.” SABRINA popped up the contrasting footage and arrayed the two side-by-side for comparison. “See? And then you said the parasites just started showing up a month ago . . .”

  “You think whatever made that crater introduced the parasite to 80 UMa c?” Dr. Vasquez said. “It’s not implausible. Microscopic organisms can and do hitch rides on meteors and comets all the time. Come to think of it, I did hear something a while ago that I thought at the time was a quake but may well have been that asteroid landing. But my sweep hasn’t gone that far out that way. It’s been kind of going in the exact opposite direction. I never would have known about this.” She looked momentarily sheepish. “Pods tend to land out there. Pods full of people who know me. I’m supposed to be dead, after all.” Then, straight back to business: “SABRINA, I trust you took core samples of the impact site?”

  “Me?” SABRINA protested. “Sample that? Are you looking at it?”

  “I’ll definitely look into your theory,” Dr. Vasquez told Jillian. “For now, let’s get you out of here. Another storm might delay you, and I want you back with your parents well in advance of that portal coming back.”

  “Wait,” Jillian said. “What about you?”

  Dr. Vasquez arched an eyebrow. “What about me?”

  “Well, this planet isn’t exactly safe anymore,” Jillian said. “I mean, yeah, Earth still has blackouts and water tickets and everything, but on the other hand, no parasites that crawl into your brain and make you want to drown. You know?”

  “Different planet, different parasites,” Dr. Vasquez said softly.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I’ll consider it. Meantime, you grab a backpack or something and start filling it up. Deal?”

  Jillian nodded once. “Deal.”

  SABRINA, up along the ceiling again, dropped a bulging backpack on the table before her. It rattled her soup bowl. “Way ahead of you.”

  “When did you—”

  “Told you I was sneaky.”

  “The sneakiest,” Jillian said. She reached out and fist-bumped SABRINA. “Don’t ever change.” She got up to go. “Thanks again,” she told Dr. Vasquez.

  “Anytime,” said Dr. Vasquez. “Oh, hey, wait up a second. What was your crew here for in the first place? Still the algae? Or has StellaTech moved on to something else?”

  “Um, the algae,” Jillian said. “I think. That’s what my mom said, anyway.”

  “There’s some in the back,” Dr. Vasquez said. “SABRINA knows where.” She nodded to SABRINA. “Can you—”

  SABRINA saluted and disappeared from the room.

  “May as well not go back empty-handed.” Dr. Vasquez winked.

  “I won’t tell them you’re out here,” Jillian promised. Then, feeling dramatic, like something out of a movie, she blurted: “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  Dr. Vasquez lifted her chin slightly at Jillian. “I know.”

  “But why don’t you come back with us? You’ve studied the parasite. You know it better than anyone. If it’s coming from something that made the swamp crater, then that’s it, mystery solved, right? Why stay? Go home and tell everyone about your discovery. You’d be, like, a scientist superhero.”

  “Even if I wanted to, I’m hundreds of miles from the rendezvous site. I’d never make it in time for the portal without SABRINA.”

  “If I told them about you, they could send another portal for you. I’d come back through it to pick you up myself.” As Jillian said it, she realized it was true. She’d almost been too scared to come to 80 UMa c in the first place, and yet here she was, volunteering for round two.

  “I believe you,” Dr. Vasquez replied.

  “So why stay here? There’s nothing here.”

  For a long moment Dr. Vasquez didn’t answer, just tilted her head back to look up at the sky. “Yeah,” she said at length, smiling a little. “That’s kind of what I like about it.”

  When SABRINA led her back outside, Jillian tried for a moment to see 80 UMa c through Dr. Vasquez’s eyes.

  It wasn’t as hard as she thought. The night was dark and clear, and smelled like rain had passed through recently. The stars seemed to number in the millions. Except for the breeze and the sound of some distant thing that might have been a bird, it was silent. If she hadn’t been so preoccupied earlier with the water and the worms, the hike to the waterfall would have been one of the high points of her year. She’d only just begun exploring, and it was almost time to leave. She wished her parents were here. Had they ever seen the waterfall? Or one of the alien deer up close? Had they looked up and made their own constellations from these stars?

  Next year, she promised herself. Either they’ll have figured out how to get rid of the parasites here, or we’ll go to some other planet instead. And everything else, all the storms and sharp grass and nature stuff, we’ll be ready for. Just like old-time explorers had to be on Earth.

  For now she just took a minute and let herself be calm. She didn’t let herself think about what had already happened, what might happen in a future she couldn’t predict. She smoothed her mind to stillness and tried to lock this moment in her memory. The feel of the air, the smell of the breeze.

  If she was on Earth, Jillian would have said it was maybe an hour before dawn, but she couldn’t place exactly why she thought that. Something about the color of the sky, although a comparison to Earth sky was impossible since the number of suns and moons and stars, and the length of days and nights, were all wrong.

  Maybe even especially the stars. The only time Jillian had ever seen so many of them back home was when the power cut out so she couldn’t play video games before bed, and she’d go out onto the apartment balcony instead and wait for the lights of the city to flare back to life. There’d be stars then, so many stars it was impossible to count, with a massive splash of them running from one side of the sky to another, so dense it didn’t even look like stars, just some jagged spill of light.

  She’d looked it up and learned that the spill of light was actually the Milky Way, that she could look out from Earth and see the actual shape of the galaxy in which it spun. It occurred to her that she didn’t know where Earth was from here. Which of these unfamiliar constellations it was part of. Or whether looking up at this night sky now she was even looking back toward Earth, or whether Earth was somewhere beyond her line of sight, and kids back there were looking up at her.

  She could have asked SABRINA. SABRINA would know. But for once Jillian didn’t actually want or need the answer. There was something comforting about being so very tiny, looking out at something so unbelievably vast. Like she could nev
er be lost, not really, at least not any more than anybody else.

  “Good to go?” SABRINA asked behind her.

  Jillian turned.

  There, completely eclipsing the cave entrance, was a dragon. It was the size of a school bus, and it gleamed gold and blue and reddish black. It lowered a wing for her to climb aboard.

  When they rose into the sky, the stars looked close enough to touch.

  Chapter 14

  They flew for hours, into a rising sun and then beneath it as it climbed the sky. The second sun came up on Jillian’s left, larger and warmer, and she shivered, grateful for the heat.

  “Should’ve said something,” said the dragon-SABRINA, and slow, delicious warmth began to radiate up from its back. Jillian snuggled in and watched the landscape of 80 UMa c go by.

  They must have been approaching the crater from a different direction, because nothing looked familiar. There were wide-open plains of the razory grass; more forests; hills and valleys; a huge, dark jungle; and a lake draining into a river that seemed to go on forever, glittering shocky white like a giant bolt of lightning in the suns.

  When they reached the ridge, SABRINA deposited Jillian directly on the boulder beside her parents. She pulled the backpack down after herself, and SABRINA unloaded the cargo of algae. It was dried and bundled, much smaller and lighter than Jillian had expected. It could have fit in a few duffel bags, no problem. “Don’t get that wet,” SABRINA cautioned her. “Unless you want us all to get buried under ten feet of stinky reconstituted plant matter.”

  More SABRINA was already busy prepping the next dose of painkillers for Jillian’s parents.

  “How’re they doing?” she asked it.

  “That’s a complicated question with a complicated answer,” SABRINA said. “The good news is, their wounds are healing nicely, thanks to Dr. Vasquez’s stash of smart bandages. Infection’s gone. See?” It peeled up an edge of a smart bandage to reveal fresh new skin on Jillian’s mom’s forearm. It looked different than before, shiny-smooth with scar tissue, but infinitely better than the burns.

  “And the bad news?”

  “Same bad news as before.”

  Jillian noticed that none of SABRINA was bandages anymore. Apart from the fluffy pillows and the feeding apparatus, it was all restraints. Even as she watched, some of the dragon detached and reallocated itself until Jillian’s mom and dad looked much as they had when she’d first found them on the boulder. Totally cocooned.

  “It’s for their own good,” SABRINA said gently.

  “I know,” Jillian said. She felt very tired all of a sudden. Tired and sad.

  She checked the countdown clock, which SABRINA seemed to be leaving up all the time now. Two days, eight hours, twenty-one minutes, thirty seconds. Just hold on a little longer, she thought at her parents. It’ll be over soon.

  She dragged the backpack over and dumped it out on the rock. Then she unzipped all the outside pockets and dumped those too. SABRINA had been outrageously thorough. There was so much stuff. After all the soup and tea and the whole day’s worth of emergency food bars she’d eaten, Jillian didn’t have much of an appetite, but sorted through the supplies all the same. Partly out of curiosity, partly to pass the time.

  That was all she really had to do now. Pass time. She should have been grateful for that. Instead, she was bored out of her skin.

  There wasn’t much in common with what she’d salvaged from the pod. No freeze-dried food packages or emergency bars. Jillian thought back on the obviously homemade soup, the tea, the three zillion planters full of alien vegetables, and wasn’t terribly surprised.

  After all, Dr. Vasquez had been out here a long time. StellaTech had been sending field crews to 80 UMa c for about eight months, her dad had said. But Dr. Vasquez hadn’t been part of a field crew. She’d gone before that, and she’d gone alone. And ever since then, she’d remained alone, just her and SABRINA, fending for herself in the wilderness.

  The survival movie fan in Jillian thought the idea had a certain appeal. But the rest of her, the part that had nearly been murdered by worms and grass and dehydration and free falls into pits and storms, disagreed.

  She went through packets upon packets, all made of leaves. They contained an unfamiliar flatbread; something that was maybe some kind of alien nuts or seeds; and a kind of tough, unidentifiable thing that she thought was probably dried meat of some kind. There was also a knitted scarf like the one Dr. Vasquez had been wearing, which Jillian put on immediately. And a few more smart bandages. That posed a mystery for about five seconds, the fact that Dr. Vasquez still had smart bandages to spare. Either she was very careful and good at not getting injured, or—more likely, Jillian thought—SABRINA had been stealing them from the lab for her.

  “Hey,” SABRINA called over. “Earth to Jillian.” Then as one register of its voice giggled at what it apparently thought was a fantastic joke, the rest of its voice said, “Pass me one of those water pouches, will you? The old supply ran out last night.”

  Jillian rooted through the pile until she came up with something that looked like an empty freeze-dried soup bag, heat-sealed shut (probably by SABRINA) and outfitted with a kind of valve that might have been an oxygen regulator from the pod. “This?”

  “That’s the one. Chuck that over.”

  Jillian carefully walked it over instead and handed it to SABRINA.

  But as soon as the water left her hands, she realized she was thirsty. Better to stay hydrated. There’s plenty of water left. She found a second water pouch, opened the valve, and drank.

  More than she meant to. She hadn’t thought she was that thirsty. Careful, she thought. At least the portal was due to arrive tomorrow. Running out of water now would be annoying, but it wouldn’t kill them.

  She found herself watching SABRINA tend to her parents. “Can you wake them?” she asked. “If they’re not in pain anymore? Is that okay?”

  “I could,” SABRINA said, “but you don’t want me to.”

  Jillian thought back on the footage SABRINA had played for her. Her parents trying to reach that swamp so forcefully, so violently, it had looked like they were trying to rip free of their own bodies to get there.

  No. Not them. It wasn’t them doing any of that. She had to remember that. Her parents were still her parents, still the same people they were before. But the parasite was piloting them, the way Jillian had piloted the SABRINA mech suit to salvage supplies from the pod. Except she hadn’t controlled SABRINA’s mind. They’d worked together. This was the exact awful opposite of that.

  “No,” she said, and sighed. “I guess I don’t.”

  She fit everything back into the backpack, mostly to give herself something to do. Then she watched the countdown clock until it ticked down the last few minutes into two days, seven hours, fifty-nine minutes. She’d hoped the change of the hour section would feel like progress. It didn’t.

  She got up and stretched her back. Bounced up and down on her toes. Swung her arms around. Paced the top of the boulder a few times, eight steps and turn. That made her dizzy, so she stopped, gazing out over the place where the quadpod had gone down. No sign of the worms. They’d probably gone off after different prey, more alien deer probably, or down to the swamp to contribute their part to the parasite’s life cycle.

  Then an even stranger thing hit her. There was no sign of the pod either. It was utterly, completely gone. The worms must have devoured it all, down to the very last bolt.

  Jillian thought of her dad explaining to her that the pods were made almost entirely of plastic, different densities of plastic. She thought of what Dr. Vasquez had said. They love plastic. Maybe it’s like junk food to them.

  She thought of Earth, how there were news stories every day about plastic, and none of them good. Plastic overflowing the landfills. Plastic that no amount of recycling could keep up with. So much plast
ic in the ocean that it gathered into entirely new islands, the way particles of SABRINA gathered bit by bit to make a whole new giant shape.

  “Real world-saving stuff,” she whispered to nobody in particular.

  “Hmm?” SABRINA asked.

  “Just something my dad said.” Jillian was still dizzy. She tried to push it away. “Hey. While we’re just here waiting, do you think you could go back to Dr. Vasquez’s place and get me a few of those uninfected worms?”

  “You know we brought food, right?”

  “I’m serious. The ones in the cave don’t have parasites. That’s a proven fact. And they eat plastic. That’s a proven fact too. You said the field crew that discovered the worms never brought any back to Earth.” She paused for breath, shivering a little, and pointed down at the site where the devoured pod had been. “Maybe they should’ve.”

  SABRINA’s sigh lasted easily fifteen seconds. “You’re asking for so much decontamination protocol right now.”

  “I’ll tell them to name the worms after you.”

  “Oh!” SABRINA brightened. “Well! Why didn’t you say so?”

  Excess bits of it were already gathering into a blob the size and shape of a large beanbag chair. Jillian raised an eyebrow at it.

  “Do you really need to take that much?” she asked, gesturing at the SABRINA cocoons. “Does that leave enough here for my mom and dad?”

  “Oh yeah.” What was left of SABRINA gathered up before her in demonstration, floating shapelessly. It was smaller than the beanbag chair, smaller than the cocoons, smaller than Jillian. It turned into the six-legged dog again and sat before her, wagging its tail. Jillian wondered if SABRINA made this shape so much because it liked to, or if it had been a programmed preference the StellaTech people had given it. “See? Plenty left over. I move faster if I bring more. Besides, they’re not going anywhere. I’ll be back before you can say major scientific breakthrough.”

  “Major scientific breakthrough,” Jillian said dryly.

  “Well, you have to say it slower than that,” SABRINA replied. “Silly.”