by Lisa Mangum
“Belton, we got a problem,” he said, stumbling into stride alongside me as I made my way down the line, checking on things generally: the state of tack, the freshness of hay, the number of available stalls.
“We do?” I asked. Sweet Bettie was getting along; we probably needed to move her soon. I liked to give the ones in foal a little extra space around their time. It’s smarter, and safer, if a pain in the ass.
“Color’s wrong,” he said, and something about the way he bit at the word had me stopping short.
“What color’s wrong?”
“The foal. She came early, way too early. Impossibly early, records must be wrong, and—and her color’s wrong.”
I swore and turned back where he’d come from. “Which?” I asked.
“Starmeadow,” he said.
I swore again. We had some sixty mares in foal, but I knew Starmeadow wasn’t close to time. “How early?” I asked. He wouldn’t answer, so I moved faster, knees crackling with the effort.
Most animals had struggled to adapt to the change in days on the planet, but the horses had adjusted surprisingly well. The tour around the local star took almost two old Earth years, and with the change in the length of the day, the number of gestational days was shorter. Still, it took the same actual length, normally—the same hours, if you will. Gestation was still gestation.
“She premature, or just looking dysmature? You sure on gestation? We got jaundice?”
“I only saw her legs, though they weren’t looking premature. Her days says she should be. But her color—” He went quiet again, though our feet were working even faster, and people and horses flowed out of our way, sensing the tension.
I didn’t get much more out of him, not even the mare’s previous gestational length, which would have given us a clue how bad this was. For some reason I couldn’t pull it up on my flat, the thing insisting her files were all completed and unavailable.
Macarty meanwhile swore up and down Starmeadow hadn’t been showing signs, no leaking colostrum, no vulvar laxity, no hint she was going into labor, though he also admitted they probably hadn’t been looking too close since she was nowhere near term.
We finally rounded the corner, dropping to a slow walk as we did so. Macarty said that when they realized she was in labor, they’d moved her to the empty corner stall. He swore she’d barely gotten inside when she dropped the foal, and he’d gone running for me as soon as he saw the feet, which had me even more confused. Feet wouldn’t show jaundice; how had he known her color was wrong?
The answer was clear as I looked over the stall door. I stood, a little stunned, watching everything. One of the corral girls, barely fifteen, was gently swabbing the foal’s umbilical cord stump and clearing away a little of the afterbirth, carefully avoiding spooking the dam. I was surprised she was in there; normally, a proper hand would be handling the mare. The dam’s placenta had already come out, and the foal was already standing, which wasn’t normal.
The kid—Olympia?—was doing a good job, though, calm and gentle and methodical, and quick without seeming like it, too. I made a mental note to tag her in the logs; she was a good one, the kind of kid who belonged around here. She was out of the stall in a few minutes.
“Interesting horse, huh?” she said quietly.
“That’s not a horse,” I said, finally finding my tongue.
The thing in front of me had so many genemods I couldn’t even count them. It had been a long time since molecular bio—everyone had to study it on the way over, back in the day; with a nine-year voyage, you were pretty lazy if you didn’t have at least one PhD by the time you arrived—but even aside from the pale purple color, you had to be blind not to see the miniscule beard under its muzzle, or the leonine curve of that tail.
It even had a native block like the umph-bangs have embedded in the end of it, one of those weird mother-of-pearl things that some of the native creatures use to bludgeon prey to death while the larger of their mouths go in to crush the critter bit by bit into a nice, senseless, edible blob.
Its hooves weren’t right, either, too slender, as were its legs, and the muscle that rippled along it seemed more like the impression of a horse than the real thing. The whole thing was too damn sinuous, too un-horselike, though its dam didn’t seem to notice, nuzzling at it affectionately. It headed straight for her teats, too, none of this wandering-around nonsense that most foals do. No, this was pure programming, the jazzed-up dream of some nativist sympathizer, that was clear.
“It has a horn,” Olympia said quietly, and I looked at her, disbelieving. I hadn’t noticed one, and said so.
“It’s just a little thing, a little … I don’t know. A knob, kinda. But it’s bigger than it was when it came out, and it’s that same shiny color, like its tail. Like the umph-bangs have, you know.”
I nodded; the kid wasn’t slow.
“How did we not notice something in the medicals?” I asked, and Macarty crept up guiltily next to me.
“Ah, well, minor administrative issue,” he said. “It seems quite a few of her appointments have been sort of missed. Signed off on, even though they didn’t happen. And you know how it is, they get signed off, it’s hell pulling up the old paperwork from the main server.”
I groaned. I reviewed that paperwork, the summaries, anyhow, every month, but everyone knew I only glanced at the damn reports. It would have taken something big, usually an official red flag, for me to actually sit down and read. And no vet’s going to look up old reports when there’s no flagging. Not worth the trouble.
“How many days?”
“Two hundred twenty-nine.”
Now that threw me; I sat down. Even with the change in day lengths, she should’ve made a good two-eighty, at least. This wasn’t just tinkering with DNA; it was really good tinkering.
“I have to report this to the Standard,” Macarty said slowly.
I growled. “Course you do. Just not today. I need to know where this came from. I’ll send a notice about the pending investigation.”
“I thought the nativists had all died off,” Olympia said. She was watching the foal—hell, the damn unicorn—like it was the answer to her prayers. She’d laid her head on the stall door, a stupid kind of smile on her mouth.
“Mostly, kid,” I muttered. “Mostly.” The nativists had nearly brought us to a collapse twenty-some years ago, but believing you should be one with the planet’s true nature had mostly led to a lot of suicides, or semi-suicides, depending on whether you believed they became one with the planet or just fertilizer. Kids Olympia’s age barely knew anything about them, probably ’cause folks like me didn’t like talking about them. As far as I was concerned, they were fertilizer, except one, and he was on his way.
I pulled up the records, looking for the sign-off. I groaned when I found it: it was my code. Well, the generic one, anyways, the one I gave out to a dozen administrators to use at some time or another when something failed and they needed to sign off on something. I shouldn’t have been that stupid, but it had been a long time since I’d had to worry about security. I’d be real easy to hang for this.
“You should tell ’em to let her live,” Olympia said. “I mean, maybe she could give the monsters a run for their money, protect the horses. She’s going to have a horn, and she’s got that tail. She could beat them at their own game. She could protect the herd.” The kid started to get excited, turning to me. “My dad’s on the Standard. I could tell him—”
“You just hold your horses, kid,” I said softly but sharply, my tone reminding her to keep it down. Macarty snorted behind me. I forestalled her from speaking further, holding up a hand. “Macarty, I want you digging for whomever has seen this mare and signed off on any medical in the past four hundred days, and I want a thorough interview on each of them. Today. Go.” He looked ready to protest, but with the look on my face, left after a minute.
Olympia looked at me with the wounded innocence only a kid her age could manage.
�
�Olympia, right?” I felt like a million years old as I said it.
She nodded grudgingly.
“Look, you may be the only thing between me and a real quick Excommunication,” I said. “I appreciate it. But I need to be able to say more than I screwed up and whoops, we got a hybrid on our hands that we don’t know anything about. A hybrid like they made when we first settled, when they were so sure we could modify our critters to live better here, but that ended up as Rollers and Killags and those horrible wounded rabbit-looking things that took so damn long to kill off. They don’t take kindly to unplanned hybrids. I need a day or so, kid, and then you can throw everything you got at your father.”
“Interviews won’t help,” she said. “They’ll all find a way to blame someone else.”
“Probably so,” I agreed, amused. If I survived this mess, the kid was getting hired for real. “It’s mostly busywork. I’m actually going to see an old friend.”
* * *
I still miss Joe. José Antonio Ramirez Suarez, really, but Joe to me. I talk to his widow, if that’s what you should call her, now and again. She’s getting her feet under her now, but there was a while when she was on the edge. Hell, I think we all were. Joe was one of the few that was almost as old as me, an old shitkicker picked off one of the last real working horse farms back on Earth. We knew he was sympathetic to the nativists, a lot of us old guys were, but no one ever really thought he was one. Least, I didn’t.
He was right about it, though. While all the other nativists were doing crazy things like throwing themselves to the predators to become one with the planet (“One with shit,” he’d say, and we’d all laugh), or jumping into the ponds of that glittering sludge covering so much of the planet, or even injecting themselves with the native microbes, he actually seemed to know what he was talking about.
If anyone was actually going to transition, the way to go about it would be through slow induction, like on one of those cliff faces where some of the birds we’d imported had been seized by the cliff sludge and integrated into it. They didn’t always die straight off, you see; they were stuck like flies on sticky flypaper, desperately trying to escape. And the sludge didn’t exactly eat them.
Joe had done a lot of studying en route to the planet and had become the most serious specialist we had on the planetary natives. He’d showed me once some of the data he’d pulled off the sludge. It was crazy—what little I could understand of it: wild perturbations in the brain and flesh of the poor little aves, comingling of DNA and thought and pattern. He figured they died only because they starved or dehydrated. A few of them had managed to nip a few insects from the air, and they survived much longer.
I figured that’s where he got the idea. Like a lot of us here, Joe and Loua lost their youngest kid a few years back. Colony life is never easy: disease, and the native creatures (some say monsters), not to mention the wild wet season and the storms that come through. Truth was, her death was nastier than most. She survived the initial attack from a Roller, but was torn up bad. She didn’t make it in the end.
After that, the fight sort of went out of them both. He’d done so much good work, fixing a lot of the mistakes some of those idiots had made on arrival. Made us all feel safe, really, even with what happened to his little girl. I think, stupid as it sounds, we all figured that just meant he’d conquer Rollers next. Only instead he went to the cliff.
By the time we found the note, Joe had strapped himself to the cliff face, a medical assist device under him, an IV in his hand, and a food tube at mouth level. Don’t let anyone tell you different, that sludge moves fast. By the time we got there, it had moved over most of his body, dissolving what, I guess, it had identified as dead matter: his clothes, most of his hair and eyelashes, even some of his nails. It was pretty horrible.
He seemed surprised we’d found him so quickly. I guess he hadn’t expected I’d remember where those birds had been, all those years before. We considered trying to pull him free, but he assured us he’d just die then, bereft of the greater Colony. He was a little out of it, and we weren’t exactly sure what we could do, but we finally left him alone to talk with his wife.
Loua told me, later, that he said he’d wanted to learn whether there was a greater mind on the planet, didn’t want to die without knowing if there was a real way to understand the alien—the unknown here on this planet. Said he didn’t belong anymore there with her, as if he belonged strapped up there on the side of that cliff.
She’d gone back to visit him in the subsequent months, daily for a while even, though I heard she’d stopped about a month ago. I’d visited regularly, too, at first, but truth was I hadn’t been in a long time. I wasn’t even sure there was a him truly left to visit, but he was the only living nativist I knew of now, if living he was.
It’s a short trip there with a good horse, and I was at the cliff that some call Mount Olympus in two hours. It was a tiny thing compared to the real thing, but most of the kids here had never seen anything resembling a mountain in this flat land. Folks like me, first-landers who knew what real mountains looked like, were mostly dead and gone now, one way or another.
I left my gelding far below the cliff’s face; I didn’t want to risk it touching any of the sludge, so I ground hitched it before I started up. Thankfully, Joe hadn’t gone far. If it had been me, I’d have gone as high as I could, so I could have a good view for the rest of eternity. But he’d found an outcropping of rock that, I guess, he’d thought felt like a good seat to spend the rest of his life in, and it wasn’t too far up. Easier to visit, at any rate.
I almost wished I hadn’t found him when I got there. He’d assured me many times he felt no pain, and within two months of his transition’s start, the tubes were long gone as he’d begun synthesizing his dietary needs. But his legs and arms had long been absorbed, and here and there parts of his bone were exposed. His torso was mostly veiled, for which I was grateful, but his head remained stubbornly visible, to our simultaneous relief and disgust. Joe still talked, in a way, though his vocal chords had developed a distinctly sappy sound, a wet smack, almost, in every word.
Now that I had him in front of me, his lips, and a lot of other parts, looked ready to go. He used to stand out from the wall, a little, anyhow, but now he was all sucked into it, head turned awkwardly so I could only see one eye really. I thought I could see part of his spinal column peeking out at the nape of his neck. I didn’t meet his eye as I said hello.
“J-Joe,” I stuttered.
“I had almosst givnup,” he said, the words slurring together. His jaw barely moved. This was it, I realized, this was why Loua had stopped coming. “Wanted to say good-bye, old friend.” The D was a whisper. I had a feeling there wasn’t much tongue left. I shivered, then sucked it up and looked at him.
“Loua didn’t tell me,” I said, embarrassed, trying to pretend I didn’t see what I saw. “Hell, Joe, I’d have come earlier. I’m sorry.”
“Ah. May have felt it was … unfair to ask. Some disturbed. I told her you would not … mind.”
I tried to act like I didn’t, and nodded.
“You’re going be even more annoyed when I tell you why I’m here,” I said. I sighed and pulled out my flat. I leaned as close to him as I could make myself and showed him the picture of the unicorn. “Seems like an old friend of yours is doing some interesting things to my horses.”
“Yesssss,” he slurred, and I tried not to shudder as something dripped off his lip. My stomach churned, and I couldn’t help myself; I looked away. “Fassscinating,” he murmured, his eye moving quickly over the picture.
“You regret your decision?” I asked.
“You always ask,” he hissed, though not unkindly, glancing toward me. I guess it was hard for him not to hiss now.
“I hate the thought of you suffering for however the hell long this shit lives. I could laser this whole damn cliff side, and you’d be gone. Over. Done.”
“It isss beautiful,” he said. That’s what he
always said. Sometimes I woke up in the night, wondering if it made him say that. Maybe he was right, and it was alive and conscious, but how did we know it was good?
“You like the unicorn?” I said abruptly, turning back to the picture.
“Horn?” he said.
“Yeah, I didn’t see it either,” I said. “There’s a little nubbin. See?” I zoomed in on the head, then held up the flat again for him to look, and an mmm issued from his throat.
“Excellent. They will have good … defenssse.”
“Yeah, and they used my code to get away with it. I’ll be hanged for this. Maybe literally. We’re talking Excommunication.”
“No … problem. You ssstay at myplace,” Joe hissed, and I laughed. His lip curled in something I was pretty sure was supposed to be a smile. “Hybrid is necessary to sssurvival. But if you are … thinking I can … tell you who … did this, do not know. I would have sssaid me. I sssuggested … horn implant. Defense.”
“Oh.” I felt deflated, and put the flat back in my pocket. “You were my big lead.”
“Take sssampling. Review. Maybe … genetissist could guessss handiwork. Someone who liked my work.”
It took me a second to figure out what he said with his words running together, but when I did, I brightened and mumbled a thanks, my eyes still on the much less unnerving-looking floor. I shuffled my feet nervously. It was hard to know what to say. Had Joe died that day he’d strapped himself here, or was he dying today? What do you say when someone’s maybe not even the someone you knew?
“You really still you?” I asked. I’d never asked that before. It had seemed kind of rude, though Loua had told me she’d asked him many times.