Interstellar Pig

by William Sleator

  "Brilliant induction!" Zena snapped. "Pull out the card!"

  I pulled it out. Once again, the sun's glare made the writing seem to squirm for an instant. Then I read, "Minor malfunction in communications system. Go into orbit around nearest foreign planet and sacrifice next two turns making repairs."

  "That's Ja-Ja-Bee, right there," Zena said. "Go on, go into orbit."

  "I have to miss my next two turns?"

  "That's what it instructs." She smiled at me.

  I orbited impatiently around Ja-Ja-Bee, which had a climate so frigid that glaciers covered the entire planet. At least the card had not instructed me to land there.

  Zena, meanwhile, whistling happily, rolled a 9 and then a 12, moving ever closer to Flaeioub, the planet most important to her, because she had picked it first. Was she trying to get there ahead of me, to protect The Piggy? Or was she merely leading me on a wild-goose chase? I whiled away the time in orbit checking out the information about Flaeioub from the rule book. There was enough data there to keep me occupied for weeks. Flaeioub was inhabited by gas bags, flying octopi with claws who were kept aloft by their inflated heads. The atmosphere was high in hydrogen, which didn't matter to the lichen, but meant that Zulma would need breathing gear. Under the surface of the planet was an intricate maze of deep, lightless caverns, which would make it a good hiding place for The Piggy. Zulma would need special glasses in order to see in the caverns, but the lichen would be able to get around without equipment, since they could "see" without light, according to the rule book.

  The planet Flaeioub, on the whole, seemed a more comfortable place for the lichen than for Zulma. Had she really hidden The Piggy there? And if so, why?

  I checked her vital statistics and found that her intelligence rating—IRSC—was only 10. The lichen's was 150. She had been bluffing, and was actually much less intelligent than the lichen! And so the poor idiot had hidden The Piggy on a planet where the lichen would be more comfortable than she was. I couldn't wait to get there.

  I glanced back at the timer as Zena handed me the dice. The white part was now almost half covered by a semicircle of black. "Hey, it looks like an eclipse," I said.

  "You got it, Barney. And at the instant of totality, you and your lovely little Mbridlengile will be blown to smithereens."

  "Not if I can help it," I said. But things looked pretty grim. I was halfway across the board from Flaeioub, but Zulma now only had two stars to go—she'd be there for sure on the next move. Idiot though she was, she'd now have time to get The Piggy into her hand before I could reach it. Then I'd have to catch up with her before totality—and the shadow seemed to be moving ever more quickly across the timer's disk.

  I: But I rolled only a 3. Hopelessly, I moved the lichen across three stars. They landed square in the middle of a black funnel. "Oh, no, now what?" I groaned.

  "But lichen, you're in luck," Zena said brightly. "You hit one of the hyperspace tunnels. Now you can go anywhere in the universe, instantly."

  "On the same move?" I cried, hope rushing back.

  "Instantly," she affirmed. It occurred to me that she didn't seem very upset by my good fortune, but I was too excited about entering hyperspace to think much about it. "Flaeioub, here I come!" I said, and plopped the lichen down in the center of the planet. "And now, the envelope, please," I demanded.

  Zena rummaged through the black bag and produced the Flaeioub envelope. There were only two cards in it. The first one I pulled out, like all the others, was black on one side. The other side had a simple face drawn upon it, like the head of a stick figure. It was nothing but a circle containing a vapid, half-smiling mouth, and one wide-open eye, with a vertical iris like a cat's.

  But the single eye, and the unexpected crudeness of the drawing, gave me an unpleasant jolt. The ugly thing did not resemble a pig, but it was so pink and round, and so different from everything else in the game, that there was no doubt what it was. "I got it! I got The Piggy first!" I shouted at Zena.

  "Don't count your offspring, lichen," Zena said quickly. "Hurry! Take out the other card."

  The other card contained a wormlike, segmented thing, the carefully detailed shading giving it the three-dimensional quality of a scanning electron microscope photograph. "What is it?"

  "Lanthrococcus moJIuscans," Zena said promptly. "A virulent bacteria, fatal to your species. By now, Flaeioub is permeated with it. It first attacks your digestive enzymes, so that you wither up, a helpless starving blob. After that, loathsome excrescences protrude agonizingly through your membranes." She smiled. "Too bad, lichen. You've had it."

  "But—"

  "Quick! The dice! Time's almost up!"

  There was only a sliver of white on the timer. Zena rolled a 4, Zulma zoomed down to the surface of Flaeioub, and, using the special glasses she had carried with her, ripped The Piggy from the dry, crumbling mass that had once been the lichen.

  The timer went black and emitted a piercing shriek. On the board, Mbridlengile flashed out of existence.

  "But wait a minute! How come you didn't get killed by the bacteria?"

  "Zulma had the vaccine, of course." She flashed a card. "See? She was immune." "But what about the other creatures on Flaeioub. What did the bacteria do to them?"

  "Sure, the gas bags that live there might get sick too." She shrugged. "But what was I expected to do? Sacrifice my own planet to protect them? Don't be absurd."

  The disappointment I felt was not entirely due to having lost—which I had expected anyway. “Okay,” I said, "but. . . but wasn't it just chance that you got the bacteria and the vaccine? What kind of brilliant strategy is that? Anyone could win who happened to get those two cards."

  "That's why it's superior to play with four in-id of two. With four, the chance of getting a dis-plus the vaccine is minimal. But it still isn't by chance. If you're clever enough, you can best someone who has almost anything. I'm afraid the lichen just didn't have the smarts."

  I was insulted. "But the lichen are smarter than Zulma," I argued. "Their intelligence was 150, and hers was only 10."

  "The lower the IRSC number, the higher the intelligence, Barney. Interstellar Relative Sapience Code, it represents."

  Suddenly I became aware of a peculiar sensation on my bare skin. I looked down. My shoulder was bright pink. "Oh, no!" I wailed, jumping to my feet. "Look how red my skin is already, and it's not even the next day yet! This is going to be the worst burn I've ever had in my life." I sloppily began pulling on my shirt.

  "Don't overreact, Barney. That cream will guard you." She didn't sound very concerned.

  "I better get inside now, anyway," I said, beginning to move away.

  "Why don't you hold the rule book with you for a little while," she said.

  "We'll come and retrieve it when we need it. That way you might get a chance to catch up with us. We do want a fourth player. It's much more sensational than just three."

  "Okay," I said, picking up the book. But now I wasn't thinking about the game. I was thinking about the document I had found in Zena's bedroom, which was still in my pocket. When would I get a chance to put it back, without being noticed? And when would I get a chance to find out anything about them, as I had planned to do today? The document was fascinating, but it didn't tell me who Zena and Manny and Joe were. I decided to plunge right in, as I had plunged headlong into the game. "Thanks," I said. "And thanks for letting me play. Uh . . . And I know you think I ask too many questions, but all three of you, you're so interesting, and unusual, and . . . and you look like you spent more time than most people in the sun. We couldn't help being a little curious about what you do. I mean if you're doctors, or models, or what?"

  She stared up at me in her white bikini. Her strong chin and heavy eyebrows gave a hint of masculinity to her face, all the more striking in contrast to her luscious body. She laughed. "Your curiosity is quite natural," she said.

  "You likely never have met anyone like us before, Barney. I imagine you could call us ... bon
s vivants. Playboys. We are all fortunate in that money has never been a serious issue for us." She raised her eyebrows; they emphasized her words like two dark exclamation marks. "Nothing has. We are able to do whatever we like doing."

  "But if you could do anything, go anywhere, then why come here?" I paused, my shirt half on. "I mean this is kind of a run-down, nature reserve beach area. Why not go someplace more exclusive?"

  "For a change, Barney. We've been to the exclusive ones. We've met those people. At times you need a change. Even a primitive minor dump like this cottage can be an interesting experience, if you don't feel the drawbacks too seriously." She lifted her chin. "We try not to feel anything too .seriously."

  "Except for your tans," I quipped, aware of my skin again.

  That's right, Barney." She lay back on the towel, tans are serious business."

  Your tans and your games, I thought, heading toward our house. Why didn't I believe her?

  Her explanation made a certain kind of sense— more sense than the crazy ideas Mom and Dad had about them. Who else but wealthy playboys could afford to devote so much energy to those empty pursuits? There had been little evidence at their house that they had any other serious interests.

  Except for the document. The document that had brought them here, purposefully, to search our house. That search had been very serious indeed, so serious that their personalities had changed; so important to them that they had forgotten everything else.

  Especially when they had been examining my room, and the scratch marks on the walls.

  7

  I shut the door of my room, flung myself onto the bed, pulled the document out of my pocket, and began to read.

  Again, weeping overcame him. I pushed him aside with an oath and tore the bedclothes from the shape beneath. And there I beheld an apparition so ghastly that my senses reeled, and I did swoon against the bedpost, blotting out the vision with my two trembling hands.

  A moment later I bared my eyes, and beheld— merely the body of a strangled man. Black and hideous of countenance it was, yes, with staring eyes and distended tongue. And yet not what I had seen—or imagined I had seen—at first impression.

  It had been a false vision, my first impression, the product of my overwrought condition, and of my brother's hysterical utterance—of that I am now convinced. For what I had thought to be a coarse leathery, greenish, reptilian hide was indeed only a man's flesh ravaged by the elements and the unnatural manner of his death; and what in horror I had perceived against all reason as some invertebrate organism, gelatinous, sluglike, protruding from the cracked, blackened lips, that in my swoon had appeared actually to writhe in a most grisly and somehow beckoning manner—I quail now at the very memory—was in truth merely his deformed and swollen tongue; and most ghastly of all, the third eye, the yet living eye, that had appeared to wink from the folds of his forehead, yellow and filmed with slime—'twas not but a bruise, a swollen contusion of the struggle, partially obscured by matted hair. Nothing, nothing but that.

  "The Devil, Tobias, can you not see? It was fate that brought him to me, and I could only do what I have done," gasped my brother, weeping.

  "It is not only fate, my dear Ethan, but how a man responds to the blows dealt him by fate, that determines his true destiny," 1 spoke, my rage abated, my grief only commencing to flower.

  And though to kneelhaul a man is indeed a cruel and unusual punishment if any there be, yet it could not be by my hand that my own flesh and blood should actually be put to death. And so it was done. Yet even as Ethan was pushed from the bow, he continued to maintain, with the utmost conviction, that the false vision was in fact the truth.

  And, taking pity, I did not give orders to wrest from him the trinket, which it appeared he had taken from his victim's garment and which seemed to give him some comfort. I could see no harm in it, an ornament perhaps, to which he clung so desperately, to which he clung even as he was pulled from the water, to which he still clings. . . .

  I let the papers fall from my hand, staring at the marks around the windows.

  It was just about the grimmest thing I had ever read. And it felt very odd to be lying in the very room in which Ethan had spent the rest of his life. What had it been like to be locked in this room for twenty years?

  I got up, feeling like an idiot, and checked the door to make sure I wasn't locked in.

  The strangest thing about the document was the captain's hallucination. For a moment, he had seen what his simpleminded brother had imagined—a three-eyed creature with a greenish hide and a slug in his mouth. What did the captain's vision really mean? I couldn't figure it out.

  There was one thing I was sure about: Despite the relaxed impression Zena was trying to make, the neighbors' interest in the captain's story wasn't trivial at all. But what were the three of them looking for? Whatever it was, they hadn't found it in the house this morning. And where else was there to look?

  I was a little drowsy from all the sun that afternoon. As I lay there, my eyes kept returning to the markings on the wall. And perhaps they did form a sort of pattern after all, like the spokes of a lopsided wheel. The lines were spaced in such a way that they did seem to radiate from some point within one of the windows. Yet the generalized halo they formed around the rectangle of glass was not symmetrical. The angles between the lines varied, as though the point from which they sprang was not in the exact middle of the window, but toward the bottom and off to the side. And perhaps they were not shooting out from this off-center spot at all. Perhaps they were rushing toward it, zeroing in on some focal point in the glass. Or some important location in the view beyond the window. . . .

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes. I told myself I was imagining things. They were the random scratches of a madman. There was no way they could be precise enough to indicate any one particular spot in the landscape. The way they seemed to focus in so neatly toward a single point was an illusion, like one of those psychological tricks of perception in which straight lines appear to be curved. My brain was deluding me, trying to make sense where there was none. It was like the captain's sympathetic hallucination, a product of his brother's power of suggestion. And now the maniac was trying to fool me as well!

  I lay down again and tried to doze. But the scratch marks wouldn't let me escape, burning against the blackness of my eyelids. The only way I was going to get them off my mind was to prove that they were not all pointing at the same spot. I dazedly tried to convince myself that if the pattern were that obvious, someone else would have noticed before now. But that wasn't good enough. I was going to have to demonstrate it for myself, once and for all.

  In the kitchen I found a ball of twine and cut off a three-foot length. I got a roll of tape and borrowed a pink felt-tipped pen from Mom's purse. I stood beside the window and taped the string to the end of a scratch mark. I stretched it along the mark and across the window, and drew a faint line on the glass with the pink pen. I pulled off the tape, selected another scratch mark, and repeated the process.

  The two lines crossed directly over a large boulder at the southern tip of the island.

  But that didn't prove anything. Almost any two random lines would cross somewhere on the window. I picked another scratch mark and drew another line.

  The three lines intersected neatly at the same spot.

  It had to be a coincidence. All I was doing was wasting my time and making a mess on the glass. The only sensible thing to do was to stop immediately and wipe off the glass. But I couldn't stop. I drew a fourth line, a fifth, a sixth. My hands were sweating, but I didn't notice. I drew ten lines, fifteen lines, oblivious to everything but the web of pink slowly forming its relentless pattern across the foam-flecked bay, the fat clouds, the small, steeply sloped island.

  And every line met at precisely the same point.

  "Barney, what are you doing?"

  I dropped the pen and spun around. Mom was wearing her skirted, one-piece pink-flowered suit, and her skin tone had deepened from b
ubble gum to puce.

  "I was just ... I don't ..." I explained.

  "But just look at the mess you've made! Like a baby. How do you think you're going to get that off?" She squinted at it. "What is it, anyway? It looks like geometry."

  "It's just ... an idea I had."

  "An idea?"

  "Well, you know, it has to do with that story about the house, about the captain who—"

  "You sound feverish. Let me feel your forehead." She started toward me, her hand lifted, her eyes on the window.

  "No, I'm fine," I said, stretching out my hands to protect the window."Let me clean it. You can make your little drawings on a piece of paper. Let—"

  "No, no, I'll clean it later," I said, backing against the window. "It'll come off real easy. I tested it first," I lied.

  She tried to edge around me, her hand reaching for the glass. "Will you please get out of the way? If I can't get it clean, we'll have to pay them for a new window. I don't suppose you thought of that, did you?"

  "I'll clean it, I told you!" I insisted and spun around to face the window.

  Next door, I saw then, the men had just returned. Plastic surfboards and poles were piled beside the car. All three neighbors were standing on the lawn, motionless. Joe was pointing out across the water—it looked, in fact, as though he was pointing directly at the large boulder on the southern tip of the island—and there was an eagerness in the way there were all staring at the island, like beasts of prey tensed to pounce.

  Then Mom nudged me out of the way with her shoulder. A second later she was busy with both hands.

  "No! Don't!"

  "Paper towels and window cleaner, that's what it's going to take," she said."I just hope I can get this mess off my hands." She studied her palms, clucking her teeth. Nothing was left of my neat and perfect design but a pig pink smear.

  "Oh, now you've ruined it," I sighed, and sank down onto the bed. But it didn't matter. I knew where the lines were pointing.

  The problem now was to figure out how to get out there first.