by Nancy Kress
“I can’t be sure, but I think she—”
Something screamed.
Rachel glanced at Ta-Nin and began to run, veering off the path at a 45 degree angle, plunging through the shoulder-high plants in the direction of the scream. It sounded again, a horrible animal shriek. Ta-Nin made an unintelligible noise and crashed after Rachel. I followed them both, easily passing Ta-Nin but catching Rachel—God, she was fast—only when she stopped at the lip of a sudden shallow depression ringed with rocks. She paused only a second, then leaped the rocks and seized what crawled on the spongy ground.
“Get that one there, Jake! Off her leg!”
But I couldn’t. My knees gave way and my stomach rose. I had never seen it happen before.
The Sha female within the dell screamed again. Rachel seized the maggoty whiteness on her leg and pulled hard. I expected the grub to scream too, but then I saw the circle of suckers fastening it to the alien fat. Rachel yanked again, wrapping both her arms around the slimy, limbless body. The suckers did not come loose. Another of the things crawled from between the Sha’s legs. Its head swayed, blind, and then it crept up its mother’s side and its mouth closed on her warm belly.
Rachel’s face never lost its expression of intense concentration. Kneeling beside the Sha, whose eyes had closed, she pried open the alien’s mouth, forced her head to lean over her belly, and rammed two fingers down her throat. The Sha vomited over her child.
So did I.
When the last of the heaves had passed, I stumbled forward, too late to be of any use. But of course it had always been too late. The Sha had stopped struggling and lay with her eyes closed, head thrown back against the rim of the shallow dell. Her three offspring sucked at leg, belly, and chest. Smeared with vomit and slime, Rachel stood erect at the formless end of one of the grubs, staring down at them with her abstracted concentration.
Behind me, Ta-Nin wailed.
“Those things could have turned on you,” I said, hours later. It took me hours to say it. If they had attacked Rachel, I would have been no help.
“They won’t use human hosts,” Rachel said. She stood in a short blue-green robe in front of my mirror, brushing her hair. I had pulled the standard utility lighting out of my quarters and put in old-fashioned lamps, heavy metal tubes ending in swells of glowing yellow. God knows that Kelvin, its one colony city stubbornly Basic Humanitarian, was already full enough of anachronisms without my anachronistic lamps. The colonists had chosen anachronism; the scientists in the compound were stuck with it, or leave. No light on Kelvin flowed into bio-enhanced vision, or bio-enhanced anything. I watched the compound personnel who entered my quarters catch sight of my lamps, glance at me warily, and pretend not to have noticed.
Or maybe I just liked the circles of yellow light overlapping on Rachel’s skin.
She said, “Didn’t I tell you the grubs won’t feed on humans? I must have, Jake, at some point.”
“I don’t think so.” I stretched out on the bed and watched her raise her arms to stick little red sparkly things in her hair.
“You probably weren’t listening. The pheromones don’t attract the offspring to human flesh. Wrong odor. We tried.”
“You tried?”
“Under controlled circumstances.”
“How the hell do you control circumstances like that?”
She turned her head and smiled at me. Light ricocheted off the red sparkles. I saw from the smile that she did not hold my squeamish failure of the afternoon against me—did not in fact hold it at all. Over and done. She was tough and clean as machinery, and nothing I did or did not do affected her much. I grinned and reached out to tug at the edge of her robe.
“Come on, how do you control circumstances like that?”
“You don’t really care.”
“Sure I do. I’m fascinated.”
She laughed. “I’ll tell you anyway. With the same elaborateness—stop that, Jake, the material will tear—with the same elaborateness you use to control tests on your life-support machinery.”
“I don’t test it. No, sir, ma’am—I just fix it. You got an air-lock broke? Which one, this—no, that’s the storage bay? Sure looked like an air lock to me, a lowly engineer.”
She laughed. But a second later her face grew abstracted again.
I said, “Is your team any closer? To an answer?”
“No.”
“Not even the hard-working and estimable Lemke?”
Rachel grimaced. Her team second was an ass. “The enzyme just isn’t there any more. We estimate that in nearly half the female population, the vomit shows not even a trace.”
I pictured the controlled circumstances her team must have used to determine that, and let go of her robe.
“There’s no logical answer,” Rachel went on, almost to herself. Her hands still moved in her hair, fussing with it. Healthy, brown hair, masses of it. Despite myself, I looked away. “It can’t be a spontaneous dominant mutation. Too dysfunctional. The Sha are literally consuming themselves. Self-genocide.”
“Cannibalism,” I managed to say.
“Well—no. That usually results from a protein deficiency, or else some mystical nonsense. Besides, human patterns don’t apply. These people are used to a non-sentient host for the grub stage of their children. Cannibalism is deliberate.”
“So where was the non-sentient this afternoon? Its absence looked pretty deliberate to me.”
“The Sha know there’s no point any more. That woman today knew her vomit wouldn’t counteract the suckers—she’d birthed before. But that time, her sisters had pulled her away in time. Ta-Nin told me.” “Woman.” “People.” “Children.” And Rachel cautioned me, the mild xenophobe, not to think in human patterns. I said sourly, “Then why didn’t her sisters pull her away this time?”
“They’re all dead.”
“Ta-Nin—”
“—is not her sister. It’s a kinship thing. The only ones who are allowed to help with birthing are sisters or, in extreme cases, a male by whom one’s sister has become pregnant.” She frowned. “We think. It’s still a little murky—informants give contradictory information.”
“In other words, they lie like hell.”
Rachel ignored that. “What bothers me more than all that is why the woman didn’t even try to vomit until I forced her. There have been a few cases of spontaneous enzyme re-appearance, and she must know that. But she didn’t even try.”
I saw again the repulsive alien and her monstrous grubs, not trying. Rachel stopped fussing with her hair and came closer. “You all right, Jake?”
“Yes.” I reached for her, sliding one hand under her robe. She gave me her cool smile.
“Yes? What are you trying to prove now?”
“That you’re smart enough to see what I’m trying to prove now.” Which was, of course, a lie. I had told her a lot in the few months, more than I should have, probably. But never about Cassie. Rachel could not know what I needed to prove.
She laughed. “We don’t have time for proof.”
“Sure we do.”
“I have to be in the lab in twenty minutes.”
“That’s time.”
“Maybe for you. Not for me.” She kissed me lightly and reached for her clothes, which she had draped over my tool case. I hadn’t noticed that before. I glanced away from the case—a stupid, reflexive gesture that immediately killed my mood. Rachel went on dressing, and I watched her, and the yellow light from another time lay over the room.
“Rachel—”
She half-turned towards me, her smile growing puzzled when she saw my face. What was I going to tell her? I didn’t know; her name had just surfaced with that unexpected intensity, that involuntary suddenness I hated. My fists clenched at my sides.
“What is it, Jake?”
“Nothing.”
She dropped whatever she was holding, reached for my right hand, and uncoiled my fingers. Her hair fell forward in a smooth brown river. I wanted to tell her
not to look up, not to raise to me a face with any trace of question, or my arm would hit her.
Before I could say anything, someone pounded on the door, and I turned to open it.
“You witnessed another birth!” Lemke said. He pushed past me and rushed over to Rachel. She looked up and I saw that her face was as controlled and calm as ever, except for the allowable irritation of talking to Andrew Lemke.
Almost as short as the Sha, angular and brittle as corroded re-entry alloys, Lemke peered at his world from myopic eyes feverishly bright with envy. His world was Kelvin. Rachel told me he had been born to first-generation colonists, core-hot Basic Humanitarians, so convinced of the evolutionary wrongness of altering the human body that they had permitted their brilliant and misfit son neither eye implants nor the biogenetic altering that would have prevented his weak heart. Lemke had never been off Kelvin. He never would be. The transition from colony to compound had taken everything he had, consumed every skinny bitter tendon. He was Rachel’s team second only because of Kelvin’s stubborn refusal to allow on-planet any permanent scientist with significant biological engineering. There weren’t many. Despite his education, Lemke was compound and not colony by default, and he knew it.
Once, by the river, I had seen him kick a Sha offspring, not a grub but a young maturant only days out of her safehouse. The Sha had crumpled, and Lemke had walked on.
“What happened at the birth? Tell me everything, Rachel.”
“Nothing we haven’t seen before.” She sketched briefly the afternoon’s events in the dell.
Lemke hit his open palm with the opposite fist, a ridiculous and theatrical show of frustration. “Didn’t you have any enzyme with you?”
“I don’t carry it on picnics,” Rachel said calmly. “Do you?”
Lemke lowered his chin and looked at her; for a moment, his eyes glittered. It was impossible to picture him on anything as casual as a picnic. I said, “What enzyme?”
Rachel said, “An artificial synthesis of the enzyme the Sha have lost.”
“You can do that?”
Lemke snorted, turning imperious with the machinery tech. “Of course we can do that, Razowski. A chemical formula is a chemical formula.”
I spoke directly to Rachel. “Then why not just give the enzyme to the Sha? To use it when they birth?”
“They won’t. We can synthesize chemicals to alter nearly any biological given, but we can’t make them use it. At least, not so far, not even the few who communicate with the compound. It must touch on a taboo of some sort—we’re not sure. The information is contradictory.”
“Liars,” Lemke said. “A Sha is a Sha.” I had thought the same thing—but not with such native contempt.
“A colonist is a colonist,” I murmured, too low for Rachel to catch it. Lemke turned towards me with a peculiar slow swivel of his gaze that stopped just short of meeting my eyes and then turned slowly back. It was an eerie gesture, buried as the ponderous slide of tectonic plates under deep and muddy water.
Rachel said, “Ta-Nin tried to keep us away from the birth. The privacy thing. But she let me talk to her about it afterwards, and I explained about the synthetic enzyme. Again. But really, Andrew, that was all. Nothing to add to what we already knew.”
Lemke went through his palm-smacking theatrics again. Rachel reached for her shoes, a fluid graceful gesture that parted her robe enough to flash white thigh. Lemke stopped grimacing and for a moment his face went still. Rachel didn’t notice; she was pulling on her shoe. I suddenly wondered if there was any woman on Kelvin, colony or compound, who would not reject Andrew Lemke.
He said, his voice just slightly too shrill, “We’re all looking forward to your father’s performance tomorrow night.”
She glanced at him and reached for her other shoe.
“It isn’t often Kelvin gets a performance from somebody like Justin Harbatu.”
Rachel pulled on her shoe. Lemke couldn’t leave it alone.
“I hope he performs something from Rage. That’s my favorite. I’ve seen it twice.”
Rachel stood. Her face was calm as usual, smooth dark metal. Rage was based on the kidnapping and murder of her mother, when she was four years old. Rachel herself had been left alive by the same men. I strode past Lemke and opened the door.
“Out. Goodbye. We’re busy.”
He scuttled out; maybe he even felt a little ashamed. I doubted it. When I turned back to Rachel, she was smiling and shaking her head. “God. Lemke.” She stripped off the robe and reached for her tunic. Relief burned my eyes. No averted face, no suppressed tears, no sudden moody quiet to have to question or ignore. No hurt clutching, not even about something as painful as Rage must be for her. Or maybe it wasn’t even painful any more; maybe her calm ran all the way through, the efficient cool energy of a solitary system.
Like Lemke, I couldn’t leave it alone.
“Let’s not go tomorrow night. To your father’s show.”
She fastened the front of her tunic. “We have to.”
“No, we don’t.”
“Yes, we do. Or at least, I do. You can skip it if you want, Jake.”
“You wouldn’t mind going alone?”
“No. Why should I?”
Despising myself, I said, “Even if he does something from Rage?” Rachel looked at me, level. “You can do what you want, Jake.”
I saw that she meant it. No averted face, no suppressed tears. I put my arms around her and nuzzled her neck. Against my cheek, I could feel her mouth smile.
“No. I have to get to the lab. Stop that . . . later.”
“Now.”
“No. Later, Jake. I’ll be back in a few hours and we’ll laser the floor if you want. There’s plenty of time.”
A memory stirred in my head. There’s never any time. I pushed it away and stood up, a little ashamed of myself. I had been setting Rachel up, yet another petty test—when would I stop doing that? But she had passed. No tears, no clutching. She was not Cassie.
“I love you,” I said. But she was already out the door, and I knew she would not hear.
Cassie and I had spent nearly a year on Janos, as the advance team for the Corps: life-support engineer and reconnaissance biologist. Janos was empty. No artistic performances, no scientific compounds, no colonists, no aliens with three-stage life cycles. There was only volcanic fire and rock and plants and worms and microbes, all of it, in memory, in shades of blood. And my wife, restless enough to want to breathe a barely breathable atmosphere whose heat slicked her skin with constant sweat, gleaming and sweet.
On Janos, Cassie suddenly refused to cut her hair. It grew wild in thick black masses that curled in the heat and clung to the sides of her neck. She pushed it back with a quick impatient gesture, both hands. At first only whenever the hair fell forward. Then as habit. Then more and more, until she did it constantly—her slim darting hands scraping raw the sides of her face, over and over, out of control.
“Don’t do that, Cassie. Stop it.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Hold me, Jake, hold me tighter . . . I’m afraid!”
“Of what, for Christ sake?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know!”
“Cassie . . .”
“You don’t love me. Not when I’m like this.”
“I love you.”
“But not enough.”
“No matter what I say to you, it’s not enough!”
“That’s not true. It’s inside, the fear, it’s always inside . . . don’t get up! Don’t go!”
“Damn it, I have work to do!”
“I know. I know. I’m sorry. There’s never any time.”
But that had been in the beginning, when we still thought it was just we two, machinery wizard and gene wizard, on Janos.
Cassie never succeeded in isolating the microbe, despite her formidable equipment and training. Much later, the Corps medical officer told me that wasn’t surprising.
“Then how the hell are you so God damn sure it’s there?”
He wouldn’t look at me. He stood in the middle of his clean sick bay, surrounded by glassware that had not been hurled and walls that had not been pounded and furniture that had not been soaked with endless tears, and the son of a bitch would not look at me.
I shouted, “The drugs you give her aren’t working! They don’t calm her fears, they don’t damp her emotions, they don’t do anything!”
“I know. We don’t understand what the alien virus does to brain transmitters. It’s not chemical. We just don’t understand.”
“Damn it—”
“She can’t help it, Razowski. What she does. Not any of it. The heightened emotionalism, all directed at one source . . . it’s a part of the pattern. The most you can do is try to go on reassuring her.”
“Try something else!”
“We can’t. Anything else would kill her.”
And I had said nothing, and the doctor had looked at me hard, because he had heard it anyway.
For months after Cassie finally died, I had had the same dream. She and I stood at the edge of a cliff that was both dream place of red carbon steel, and the Great Rift on Janos. Below us the cliff face sheered straight down, without shadows. Cassie’s legs were severed at the knees. Her blood pooled on the steel ground.
“Help me, Jake!”
“I can’t. I can’t, any more!”
“Give me your legs.”
“Cassie . . .”
“Give me your legs!”
And I did. Suddenly they were on her knees, and I lay with wriggling stumps at the edge of the red cliff. Cassie stood above me, her face momentarily calm. Into that shocking calm I spoke quietly, more quietly than I had spoken to my wife in that entire last tormented year.
“You’re killing me, Cassie.”
“I know,” she said, and spat blood, and looked out over the empty Rift into a sky white and hard as bleached bone. “I know.”