Futures Near and Far

by Will McIntosh

  The pricking started again, only this time it ran right up the center of her belly and chest, and it was less painful, more of a prod. Philippa thought she knew what it wanted. She stepped forward between Melba and the medic. The pricking stopped for an instant, then started up again right up her center. She took another step, then another. The pricking stopped.

  “What are you doing? Where are you going?” Melba asked, following her.

  “The pain—it’s directing me with the pain. If I move where it wants, the pain stops.”

  “Wait,” Melba called as Philippa stepped out of the little room right into an open field. For a moment, Philippa didn’t understand where she was. The repulsion fence was fifty meters away. Hundreds of people were lined along the other side, peering…out. They were peering out at her—she was outside the fence. The encampment for the banished—those condemned to die outside the walls because they were both low value and criminal—was a hundred meters to her left.

  The people inside the perimeter were staring, their eyes wide. There were shrieks of surprise and alarm at the sight of Philippa. Two security people who had been waiting outside the hut eyed her with outright suspicion.

  The pain started again, prodding her to walk forward—toward the fence. The thing’s head was darting left, right, up, down, taking in everything. Philippa stepped toward the fence and the pain eased somewhat. She wasn’t wearing shoes; the rocky, sloped ground was cold and uneven underfoot.

  “Don’t go near the fence,” Melba called from behind, her tone suddenly authoritative. “Philippa, stop.”

  “I don’t have a choice,” Philippa said over her shoulder. “It will hurt me if I don’t do what it wants.”

  Melba shouted an indecipherable command, and a moment later she and the two security people rushed past Philippa, motioning at the crowd behind the fence. “Back. Everyone back.” The onlookers surged backward, away from the fence.

  “You can’t go inside. Under no circumstances will you be allowed inside,” Melba said. The creature’s prodding shifted, directing Philippa to turn left, along the perimeter of the settlement.

  She turned, walked along the fence line, among thick weeds and stone. She’d never been outside before—few had—and she was terrified, even with two armed security people trailing her. A growing crowd of onlookers followed inside the fence, most of them silent, a few shaking their heads, tsking in empathy.

  As she walked, Philippa tried to absorb what was happening. The Senate must have called a meeting as soon as Philippa was unconscious and voted to move her out because people were scared. Scared the parasite would tire of Philippa and choose one of them as her replacement. Scared it would lash out and bite a child’s nose off. Maybe scared it would lay eggs, like the marabi had done when they burrowed into the settlement last year. So they’d decided to toss Philippa out to die with the other problem settlers.

  Why not? She was a low-value person, after all. Philippa was well aware that the Senate calculated a numerical value for each resident, but had no idea that value impacted not only how much she would be paid, but also the value placed on her life. If this animal was on one of the senators, that senator would not be banished to a hut outside the settlement. On the ship, she hadn’t been good at engineering or biology or any of the other high-value skills, so she’d been trained as the sole Earth historian, to carry the knowledge of their home world. No one had much use for Earth history since they’d arrived a decade earlier and realized this settling thing wasn’t going to be as easy as they’d thought. Cyan just wasn’t cooperating.

  After walking a few hundred yards, the prodding had mostly stopped. Philippa tried to slow down, and it started up again. Quickly she resumed her pace.

  The wheem of a three-wheeled scout vehicle rose behind her. Philippa glanced back, saw it was Melba, catching up to her. Melba pulled to a stop, hopped off carrying a pack, and fell into step a few meters to Philippa’s left.

  “I’m sorry, Philippa. I don’t agree with this quarantine,” Melba said.

  “Have you figured out how to get this thing off me?” Her bare feet were aching from the sharp stones, her ankles bleeding from the lashing of sandpaper weeds.

  “That’s what I’m here to talk to you about. It turns out this is not the first time we’ve encountered one of these parasites. Someone on the advance team—a construction specialist—had one attach itself to him. Since then, a few others have been killed in the wild by the survey team. What we know from those encounters and from studying the dead specimens is that we can’t kill it. It has a reflex that prevents that.”

  “What sort of reflex?” Philippa felt a creeping dread.

  Melba looked her up and down, as if deciding how much she could handle. “When they’re killed, they plunge all of their legs into their host and kill it.”

  Philippa nearly stumbled. Her vision was suddenly swimming, like she was falling from a great height. “Are you saying I’m going to have this thing on me for the rest of my life?”

  “No,” Melba said. “I’m saying that at this point, we don’t know how to get it off you.”

  “Who’s working on it?” Philippa asked.

  Melba sighed, not meeting her eyes. “The Senate assigned Anatoly Keyes, along with an apprentice.”

  “That’s it?” The parasite swayed its head, warning Philippa. She struggled to calm her voice. “Why isn’t a whole team working on it? Why isn’t everyone working on it?”

  Melba started to speak, stopped herself, shook her head. “I’m not sure what to tell you. They have their own priorities.”

  “They have their own priorities.” Meaning Philippa wasn’t one of them. She was low value, had no useful skills. All she did was teach the children about a place they would never see, that no one alive had ever seen. They were going to let her die out here.

  “We’ll figure this out, Philippa,” Melba said. “I promise. We’re not giving up on you.”

  Her words sent a chill through Philippa. Melba was acknowledging that giving up on her was a possibility. Maybe the Senate preferred her dead. She was nothing but a threat, carrying a hostile species that might lay eggs in her, or spread disease. It smelled like something that might be a disease carrier, like it was made of rotten meat.

  “So when it’s finished with me, when it gets tired of me, it will just kill me,” Philippa said.

  “No, it can’t do that. Stinging takes a toll on it. If it stings you enough times to kill you, it will die, too.”

  Like honeybees on Earth, Philippa thought.

  Melba opened her mouth to say something further, then seemed to think better of it.

  “Tell me.”

  Melba nodded. “What I was going to say was, that’s what happened to the man on the advance team. As a last resort, the xeno team tried to anesthetize the parasite without killing it, and it stung until both of them were dead.”

  While Philippa digested this, Melba tossed her the pack she’d been carrying. “Food and water, and a pistol. To defend yourself if something comes out of the rocks.”

  Or to shoot herself in the head. But Melba wouldn’t say that aloud. “Can someone please get my shoes?”

  * * *

  The parasite prodded her awake before sunrise. She jolted upright, every fiber of her screaming with exhaustion. It kept prodding until she set one raw, blistered foot on the floor of the hut.

  Philippa groaned from the pain. It had forced her to walk the entire perimeter of the settlement—thirty-one miles. She was filthy, her chest and abdomen itched and throbbed under the parasite’s scaly grasp. The unpopped blisters on the pads of her feet felt like acid-filled pads; the popped ones were raw, open sores.

  It prodded her to stand. She grabbed the pack, stepped into her shoes as it forced her outside into the thick bluish Cyan fog. It pushed her to move, faster, faster.

  It made her run.

  Each step was excruciating but not as bad as the stings. The stings were worse than anything she’d ever ex
perienced. She could feel the poison exploding in her flesh with each sting.

  She ran until she collapsed. The parasite allowed her to lie there, her face pressed to the harsh grass, for a minute or two; then it made her stand and run some more. There was nothing but pain and exhaustion—no other thoughts, no space to feel sad or scared.

  * * *

  Philippa dreamed she was back in the starship and woke crying in the middle of the night. She missed the starship. Running in the huge open commons with her friends, dinners elbow to elbow at the long tables. For the first sixteen years of her life, she’d looked to Cyan as salvation from the tedium and certainty of the ship, a chance to feel real sunlight, and air that was too hot, and too cold. As soon as they landed, she’d realized how misguided her hope had been. Then she lost her parents to the ketamite plague after the disinfector system failed for the first time.

  She hated this backward world. If her grandparents had stayed on Earth, there would be no parasite on her. She’d be living in a clean, civilized world with advanced technology, with parents to watch out for her. At school on the ship she was taught how great Earth was, how proud they should be of their native world. If it was so fucking great, why had her grandparents left?

  The parasite raised its sickening round head from where it had been resting on her collarbone. She tried to close her eyes, but it saw she was awake. It prodded her to get up.

  “I’m too tired. I need more sleep.”

  It pinched her with a dozen legs.

  “Please. I need to sleep.”

  It stung. Blinding pain. Pain shooting off pinwheels beneath her clenched lids. She howled, leaped to her feet. On the way out she grabbed her backpack and swung it gently over her shoulders, trying not to disturb the parasite.

  It steered her away from the fence toward the wild. Philippa stumbled into the dark, gasping. No one went into the wild except heavily armed teams, and there was no one waiting outside her hut to go with her. The security people were at home in their warm beds.

  The landscape dropped steeply into pocked, black rock jutting from pools of brackish water. Here and there, stubby yellow shrubs clung to cracks in the rock. The parasite goaded Philippa to leap from rock to rock.

  The light of the settlement receded. Plopping and groaning rose from the pools while screeching and chittering drifted from farther off. Every time Philippa jumped over a pool she expected a thick tentacle to lash out of the water and grab her ankle, then pull her down into some unseen mouth.

  They passed through copses of jagged unzi trees, their branches like lightning strikes and roots running over the rocks and into pools. Occasionally, she heard a snuffling among the rocks, and she would draw the pistol as the parasite steered her away from the sounds.

  When the city was a distant glow, the parasite stopped her beside a tiny pool, little more than a crack between two rock formations, then inched her toward the edge. She tried to move in another direction, but it held her there, pushed her toward the water like a skittish horse.

  “I’m not going in there. Please.”

  The pricking got stronger. The stinging would begin soon. Panting, trembling, Philippa took a step into the pool. She plunged into the dark water, chest deep, felt something slimy and tubular squirm under her feet. She squealed, clawed at the rock, trying to pull herself out, but the parasite stung and she stopped struggling. She clung to the rock, sobbing, trying to avoid the thing in the water.

  The parasite’s head disappeared below the water’s surface. Its neck swayed from side to side; then she felt a jolt, as if the head had suddenly extended. It was feeding.

  The slimy thing under the water slid along her ankle; Philippa jerked away but immediately pressed up against another, or maybe part of the same one. She held perfectly still then, barely breathing while the parasite shifted and bobbed, feeding on whatever was down there. Finally its head emerged from the water. It prodded her to climb. She frantically clawed her way out of the pool.

  Philippa tried to rest on the rocks, but the parasite wouldn’t allow it. It pushed her on, choosing ever-harder routes, goading her to leap between rocks that were five or six feet apart. As she jumped, Philippa thought of how it had made her run. Had that been practice for this? If so, it had no idea how long it took to get a human body conditioned. She glanced down at its ugly round head, at those strange, eager little eyes. God, she hated it.

  As if reading her thoughts, it turned her toward what was easily a ten-foot jump. Philippa balked. “It’s too far. I can’t jump that far.”

  The legs squeezed.

  “I can’t.” She eyed the pool of thick black water a dozen feet below. Before it started stinging, she backed up as far as she could, ran, and leaped.

  She landed on the slanted face of the rock, her feet scrabbling for purchase as her forearms scraped the rough rock. Straining with all her might, she pulled herself up an inch, then another, until her foot found purchase in the porous stone. Standing, she examined the scrapes on her forearms, then held them so the parasite could see. “Are you happy now? That’s the point, isn’t it—to make me suffer?”

  A new series of pricks got her attention. At first she thought it had understood what she’d said; then she spotted a hulking animal squatting across the next pool, drinking. It was shaped like two ragged balls of connected fur, four legged, with a nub of a head. In the dim light it took her a moment to notice that it had a parasite wrapped around its chest and shoulders. She gasped.

  Her parasite goaded her sharply, steering her to back away and jump into the deep shadows of an outcropping. Heart racing, she squatted there until she heard the animal wander off. As it went, it made a peculiar peeping sound that didn’t fit its size at all.

  They moved off as Philippa wondered about the encounter. Had her parasite warned her off because the big animal was dangerous? That didn’t make sense, assuming its parasite wielded as much control over it as hers did over her. Then what? Why didn’t her parasite want to encounter one of its own? It was a shock to see another parasite, to see the sort of creature it was attached to. She would tell Melba. It might help them figure out how to remove the thing.

  The parasite steered her farther into the rocks until they were at the edge of the forest. Surely it wasn’t going to take her in there. The rocks were bad, but the forest was worse. There were terrible things in the forest, she’d been told. She drew the pistol from her pack with a trembling hand as the ground grew soft.

  The parasite kept her pace slow and deliberate. After eleven years on Cyan, she had no idea what sort of animals she might encounter. She knew so much about lions and tigers and bears, but nothing about her own home. The survey teams were secretive, the Senate eager to withhold information if it meant more power for them.

  It steered her around an area where a strange black grass was growing, and as she passed alongside it, some of the grass pulled away, exposing an eye with one of Cyan’s moon reflected in it. She made out the line of a very large mouth as they moved away. The thing was alive, growing right into the forest floor.

  * * *

  Although nothing else about her life pleased her, it pleased Philippa to move as she did. She’d never been a natural athlete, but after the past eight or nine months of training under the sadistic parasite, she had no doubt she could outrun anyone in the settlement, male or female. Of course, that assumed anyone in the settlement dared come out from behind the perimeter fence to race.

  Reaching a high spot with no rocks in leaping distance, Philippa dove headfirst, anticipating the parasite’s wishes before it could express them. The wind rushed in her ears for a moment; then she broke the surface of a shallow pool and pulled up before colliding with the muddy bottom. She leaped to her feet, sprinted out of the pool before the spiked kite things that lurked in the mud could respond to the churning commotion she’d created.

  Scrambling up a nearly sheer wall, she paused to take in the settlement in the distance. There was a commotion at the encampmen
t of the banished. She took a step toward it. When the parasite didn’t object, she picked up her pace.

  Still winded and slick with sweat, Philippa paused twenty meters from the camp and called out, “What happened?”

  A wiry young man turned at the sound of her voice, shielded his eyes from the sunlight. “A marabi got Kelvin. No one saw it until it was right on top of us.”

  Philippa nodded. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  The young man, whose name Philippa did not know, raised a hand in thanks and turned away. They would all share Kelvin’s fate eventually. Except, ironically, for Philippa, who was kept relatively safe by the parasite. It knew how to stay alive in this place, and was teaching Philippa with barbed lessons. She was going to meet a different fate. She’d decided if she was still under the parasite’s control in another six months, she would jump off a cliff, making sure to land parasite first.

  Philippa took one last glance at the encampment, wishing she could sit by their fire at night, before heading toward her hut. She wondered if it was more the parasite or her stink that kept them from inviting her to join them. The parasite didn’t tolerate washing.

  Inside the gates, armed security forces were set every fifty meters, watching for threats from outside. The repulsion field was down again. One day, they weren’t going to be able to get it up again.

  When she found Melba waiting inside her hut, Philippa’s pulse quickened. “Have they found something?”

  Melba shook her head. “I’m sorry, no.” She was wearing a long black overcoat against the chill of evening.

  Very gently, Philippa lowered herself to her bed, the only place in the hut to sit. “Are they even trying anymore? Tell me the truth.”

  “Of course they are,” Melba said so quickly that Philippa suspected she was lying. “No one is giving up on you, Philippa. You’re not out here for the same reason they are.” She jerked a thumb in the direction of the banished.

  “So, is this just a social call?” Philippa knew it wasn’t, but couldn’t imagine why Melba had come.