He wondered about making a scale-model spaceship and dropping it in for the cavity lining to explore.
Because it was a remarkable organ, that lining. The very hollow heart of the beast. A sense organ, they’d said, but by now Geordi knew it wasn’t just a complex sort of tongue or hand. Whatever went into the cavity triggered a cascade of changes through the snail. It reconfigured its ersatz neurology around what you gave it. Seeking understanding, but that wasn’t right. That was a human idea.
He reckoned he had it, by now. What went into the snail’s inner chamber wasn’t just pawed at and inspected, tasted and sniffed. It became a part of the thing’s world. He could almost read the neural changes, now, seeing configurations and structures assembling themselves to represent the new acquisition. Give them a more complex toy, they grew more complex. The one with Orindo Snapper’s arm had possessed a remarkable new flourishing of growth. Its horizons had expanded to include human physiology and biochemistry. And, until it disposed of the arm, digested it or spat it out or whatever the process was, the snail’s inner world was that much richer.
We have evolved them.
He met his own gaze across the clean room. The splayed, flayed snail seemed to be begging him for release. Or perhaps it was begging him for more. Another eye. A hand. He wondered what would happen if he just lay down there, head on the fleshy thing like a pillow. What would happen if it grew into him and touched his brain. Oh brave new world that has such people in it!
The soft chime of a communication snapped him from his morbid reverie. Bain was calling a meeting. Compared to that, the thought of having his brain peaceably devoured by a snail seemed almost merciful, but Geordi levered himself from the floor, made a mumbling apology to the glowering eye, and went to decontaminate.
* * *
They shambled in, one after another, took their seats at the shoddy little printed table Bain had insisted they spend resources on. Geordi, Shay, all the rest of them. Not Lena. Not Orindo. Not those who had died in the initial attack on the research dome, nor those whose paths had taken them beyond the charged fence and who just hadn’t come back. We’re besieged, Bain told himself. Save that, if you just looked out past the fence, what was there? A badland of salt-saturated soil, the sea one horizon and the trees at another. And rocks, dotted here and there, deceptively random looking. Look long enough and those rocks would move, though. And yet there was no sense of assault, no aggressive charge at the fortifications by an army of snails with catapults and ladders. But anyone going out didn’t come back, these days.
“I’ve called this meeting because . . .” and that was as far as his words took him. Because. Just because. First lesson of leadership school: always be seen to be doing something. Even when there is nothing to be done. Haggard eyes stared back at him on every side.
“Because . . .” he repeated, trying to give the word such a determined spin that it would somehow take on a life of its own and come to his rescue.
Geordi Gownt came to his rescue instead. Looking like he’d died a day before, the emaciated biologist raised a hand. “New agenda item, director. I’ve . . . It’s all solved now. I’ve cracked it. Celebrations are in order.” His face was deadpan, his voice level. There was no way to know if this was some misfired joke or if he’d gone mad.
“Perhaps you’d like to elaborate?” At least it got Bain off the hook of having to say the words he didn’t have.
“The reason we’re here. The incompatibility. The biology of this place.” Nice to see all those thousand-yard stares directed at someone else for a change, even though Geordi didn’t seem to register them. “I can save us,” the xenobiologist said. “We just need . . . a change of wardrobe. Go . . . native, you might say.”
“What are you—”
“You really should,” Geordi shouldered on, and right now his stop-start speech meant it was impossible to know if he’d finished or not, “get hold of the main expedition and tell them.”
Bain felt tears spring up in the corners of his eyes. “You know I—”
“Because we can live,” said Geordi. “We can . . . clothe ourselves in this world and . . . live, director. We have already found the interface that will let us become naturalised here. It’s right there.” He giggled, a high, horrible sound. “We can live in the snails. But I don’t know what it might do to them. We may need to run an impact assessment, director.”
“Geordi, I . . .” Bain waited, but the expected interruption didn’t come. “I don’t understand what you’re saying. Maybe you should . . .” Get some rest, but that went the same for all of them and double for some.
“Maybe I should go put my head in a snail,” Geordi said, still utterly without any indication of humour.
A soft chime sounded. Dimly, Bain registered that the perimeter gate had been keyed open. Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill. “Geordi,” he pressed on, clawing for reason, “can you please put this in some way I can understand?”
“The walls of the snail’s internal cavity contain a membrane that acts as a perfect mediator between biologies, any two biologies. I’ve not . . . I’ve tried to kill them, poison them, infect them. They’ll take anyone, director. Anything.”
“But your last report said that you couldn’t isolate the effect. You said it was”—Bain raked through his crumbling memory—“distributed throughout the organism. It’s not like we can just skin them and wear them,”
Again that ghastly titter. “We can’t wear them, no,” Geordi said sepulchrally. “But—”
“Who just came in?” Shay asked suddenly. “That was the gate. Who just came in? We’re all here.”
Bain felt that he should feel some dreadful shock, but he just sat there. It was easier to just sit there. Across the table, Geordi trembled, blinking rapidly.
They all heard the chime of the airlock being accessed. In the chasm of everyone else’s silence, Geordi’s giggle was appallingly loud.
“I worked it out,” he said, a reverent whisper as though to make up for it. “We’re saved,” meeting Bain’s eyes with his bloodshot orbs.
They heard the shriek of abused metal, the whip of plastics suddenly released as the first snail forced its way in. But they could have just come through the walls, Bain thought numbly. Why did they bother to knock? Everyone else was on their feet, shouting, screaming. He just sat there, scrolling down the virtual agenda as though snail attack was somewhere there close to any other business. Geordi met his gaze again and mouthed the word saved.
They forced their way into the central dome, their ridged shells stretching the fabric to tearing point and beyond, their hideous grey arms scrabbling at the edge of the doorway like gigantic fingers. Shay attacked the first one, and it flicked her away irritably, still trying to negotiate the ruin of rods and rips it had made. A second monster came in half over the top of it, clambering across the shell and then descending onto the part-collapsed dome roof, shearing through it to crash onto the table, scattering everyone. Bain just sat there, still somehow in his chair, although the rest of his precious meeting had been strewn to the winds. The snail reared up before him, standing high so that its finger-fringed mouth gaped, so that he could see within to the hollow heart of it.
Lena Dal looked back. Lena Dal reached for him, arms part melded to the oozing substance of the snail’s interior. Scattered fragments of Geordi’s words rattled about in his head. They beat us to it, he thought. We were going to wear them, but they beat us to it.
Lena Dal’s face twisted, something trying to express itself through her. At the same time, it was her face, and she was still behind it. She said his name.
It wasn’t the radio silence that ate Bain alive.
IX
I WAS PROUD OF my people, then. Faced with this prodigy, if any had run, all would have run. I would have run. The Bandage-Men live on the edge of natural and unnatural, but this was so far into the latter that we were lost in its wilds.
The crisp vo
ice said something else, but the weird, antique inflection meant I didn’t catch the words to translate them. Click-click went those hard eyelids over the pearls of the man’s eyes.
I said that if any had run, I would have. In truth, had they not been there, I’d have been gone from that chamber in a heartbeat. It was the Order at my back that kept me there, because I was priest and they relied on me. Sometimes strength is a strange thing, owned by none and yet everyone borrows it from their neighbour.
“My name is Handry,” I said, “of the Order of Cain.”
The thing that called itself Bain gave a small, rattling sound that wasn’t really a laugh. “And are you marked so that, though all men’s hands be turned against you, yet they are not permitted to slay you?”
I almost collapsed then, legs gone to water. Then I remembered where Sharskin had gotten his talk of Cain and marks. It was a story of the ancestors, one of their library of mostly incomprehensible doggerel that had taken his fancy.
“Bain,” I addressed it. “What are you?” I tried to say it as the ancestors would.
“A talking harp owned by a giant. Or, if you are Cain, let me be Jonah who has sung to Leviathan and lulled him to sleep, for now, so that I may speak with you. And yet I am nothing. I am the snail who dreams it is a philosopher, and thinks itself a philosopher dreaming of the snail.” And other nonsense I cannot now recall. Its jaw hinged and the segmented tongue flexed, but they were like a child’s toys for which the child provides the voice. Bain spoke to me like the ancestors in the House do, the sound originating invisibly within it.
“You came here across the night sky.”
“Across . . .” Its voice trailed off, and for three breaths it was just a dead thing, all animation gone from it. Then the stone eyes rolled, and it said, “Yes. The night sky. To make a new home in this land.” Only it used the ancestors’ word, which meant a land hanging like a ball in the night, not just a far place one might walk to. “And what are you, Handry of Cain? For I have not smelled the blood of a true human for a long time. The beasts of this land are not like us, Handry. Though I will tell you a secret. There are beasts in this land that walk like us, have bodies like us, even speak with words that are like ours, but they are not humans. The poison of this land courses through their veins. I am a scientist, Handry, and when I am conjured by Leviathan, I try to solve this mystery, but I cannot.”
It was a strange thing, to stand before something as ancient and uncanny as Bain, and know I understood the world better than it did. It must mean the people of Portruno, or some other place the stone-things had encountered. They had shown me and mine a peculiar deference, recognising the Original Condition in us. For those others, no such mercy had been extended. In finding a balance with the nature of this land, they had made themselves no more than beasts in the eyes of Bain.
“If you are human,” I said, following its own usage carefully, “how are you not poisoned?” Even then, in our extremity, the thought came to me that this was something Melory or Iblis could find a use for. I realised I was standing taller, the embodiment of the Order, staff planted in the rubbery floor, the standard my people rallied around.
Bain made the nonlaughing sound again, as though ossified parts of it had come loose within its rib cage. “We sought to tame Leviathan,” it told me, “for in the stomach of the monster we found the secret of life. And yet, when we came to it and set our strength against his, it was Leviathan who triumphed, and tamed us. And at first, I was joined with one of the Children, and we became more than we had been. And then, when that Child ailed, they brought me here to Leviathan so that I might dwell forever within her thoughts. And now I am no more than the dream of Leviathan.”
“You are all the dreams of Leviathan,” another voice came. Only because it issued from a different dead mouth did I know it for a separate speaker.
“Quiet, Geordi,” Bain hissed, but the new tones croaked on.
“There is nothing of us but Leviathan and her dreams,” uttered the thing called Geordi. “I told you. Before she took us, I told you. Whatever she swallows becomes her mind. Whatever she takes within herself becomes a dream in her, and though she is slumberous and insensate, those dreams can think for her and advise her and give her a mind and a purpose. And so she calls to the Children, our Children, in the voice we give her, and they act as her hands and haul her across the land. You stand within her, and so you will be her dreams soon enough, and perhaps you will guide her purpose when she dreams you.”
I took all my borrowed courage and leant in close to Bain, staring, trying to see the life in the petrified corpse. “Dreams,” I echoed.
Rattle. Click. Geordi droned on. “Whatever is placed upon Leviathan’s altar becomes real in her imagination. She conceives only of those things that the Children give her, just as their worlds consist only of those things that they devour and hold within themselves. What a thing we made, when we wrestled Leviathan and let her swallow us.”
“A great thing.” A third voice, that was the same voice. Another ancient corpse spoken for. “A purpose. Survival. For we were beset by the world and betrayed by our kin, and we would have died. Now we live forever in the dreams of Leviathan.”
“Lena, I am director. I speak for us,” Bain interrupted peevishly, but the one called Lena ignored him.
“We are the masters of this land,” she said. “Better become a dream of Leviathan than let our Children devolve into beasts.” And there was a hard tone to the old voice that reminded me of another man, who’d spoken of destinies and purposes and a grand crusade against those who lived as part of the world.
“Your Children you speak of, they are the human children or the stone-things? The shell-bearers who carry them. Your people ride them, or . . . ?”
“A symbiosis of alien and human,” said the voice coming from Geordi. “Unintentional, unanticipated. Unprecedented. In investigating and absorbing us, replicating our complexity within itself, the native fauna becomes a mirror that shows us our likeness. And though we perish, the reflection lives on so long as our bones remain interred here.”
Ghosts, I thought. That was what they had become. But unlike the expert system ghost in Melory’s head, or even the voices of the House, these truly were the ancestors speaking to me.
“It wasn’t worth it,” Bain said, surprising me, but then Lena came back with, “It was!” As forceful as that withered voice could be. “We survive. We preserve the colony. We are all that is left.”
I took a deep breath, steadying myself. “You say the beasts they brought you looked human. You must know that those are also your Children, born of the same ancestors.” A hard thing to phrase when you speak to the very ancestors themselves, people who in their own flesh had seen the night sky from within, had known the House when it still moved.
They all spoke, and I had to concentrate to disentangle them. Bain was saying, “No, they are but beasts,” and Geordi, “We had no proof from the expedition that their experiments had born fruit,” but Lena told the truth behind the other two lies. “If that is so,” she said, “then they are our rightful prey, for they abandoned us and our Children in the wilderness. We are owed our revenge against them.”
“But not you,” Bain said, in the tangled echo of all that. “You seem as our Children to us. Or as the children of our parents. Have you come from our far home?”
I almost said yes. I had wild thoughts of making a compact with the voices, bargaining so that they turned away from the places where people dwelled. That seemed an eminently fitting thing for a priest to accomplish. But then Geordi added, “You must sit with us. We are hungry to understand all that you have learned. Let us have all your dreams of our home.” And I had a sudden thought about just what a long conversation with these ghosts might mean. I had no wish for a stone prison, nor eternal life as a dream of this Leviathan.
I took one step back. I had worked out by then that, just as the stone lips made no words, the stone eyes saw nothing, no more than an ec
ho of a remembered sense. And yet, as we started to pad back the way we had come, Bain called out.
“You must not leave,” it said, almost plaintively. “We have such things we can learn from you. New things. It has been so long since anything new came to us.” And, as we were crowding the entrance, about to sally to the egg chamber, “It is lonely, being a dream. It is hard, being a fossil in the mind of a giant. We cannot change by ourselves. We cannot become new things. We rehearse the same arguments, over and over. We are frozen in time at the moment Leviathan took hold of us. Do not go, Handry of Cain. Bring your stories to us so that we can become something new.” An old, old man calling from his deathbed for someone to comfort him. And, despite everything, I felt a pang of pity in my heart.
But not enough to turn back, and so we pushed out to where the blisters hung over us, with their developing burdens. I thought again about trying to destroy as many as we could then, a mass infanticide to slow down the stone-things in their expansion. But I don’t know if it would have achieved anything, and I am sure it would have called down the wrath of Leviathan on us. Two of her Children were even then tending the brood. We hurried on past them.
From behind us, the voice of Bain lifted, edged with anger. “The singing harp cried out,” it called, “‘Master, here are thieves come to steal your treasures!’ And the giant broke from his slumber and bellowed, ‘I smell the blood!’”
A convulsion seemed to ripple through the walls around us, not strong but vast. Leviathan stirred. The stone-things there paused in their work, as though hearing a voice we could not, the same voice the ghosts used to speak to one another.
“Go!” I drove my followers before me, out into that first chamber, where the tilted rim of the shell and the edges of its mouth gave us a sight of the outside air. Before we had run halfway, though, a shadow fell across the exit. One of the larger stone-things shunted its way into the gap and stayed there, so that there was barely a hand’s span of space above it, and none on either side.
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