by J. J. Keller
“That wall’s going to cave in!” Reigo felt a hand grab his arm below the elbow, and he looked down at Ogonaovan. In a sudden resurgence of awareness he saw Ceril with his arm raised as if to fend off an invisible attacker, his shirt undone. Hectar and Aspera stood side by side, hands clasped, looking up aghast.
“The door.” Reigo pointed to the opposite end of the tunnel that traversed the phytoculture tank, and they immediately began to move toward it, Ogonaovan lurching from his knuckles to his thighs, swearing all the time.
Reigo reached the door and seized the locking wheel. “Turn it, turn it!” were Hectar’s petulant words in his ear and, for an awful moment, Reigo thought they were trapped here. A terrible groaning, tearing sound quickened his hands and the wheel flew. Ceril and Ogonaovan wrenched open the door. Hectar turned.
“Aspera!”
Ogonaovan hit Reigo and he fell into the room. As he pushed himself up on his elbows on the floor, the walls gave way. Aspera was not behind Hectar and Ceril as he’d assumed she would be, but standing in the middle of the tunnel. He only caught the briefest glimpse of her, arms upraised, eyes closed, water and light and green motes cascading over her, like a portrait of some otherworldly martyr. A tepid spray of water hit him in the face before the door slammed. A crazy whirlwind of water and air and greenness hurled against the little window in the door, before the lights went out and he was once more in darkness.
If the light had been paradise, the darkness was hell a hundred times over. A dread sense of despair and insignificance sank into Reigo. Someone fell on him and rolled off, retreating and crying out, and he grabbed for its unseen limbs, pleading for company and fearing being left alone. It seemed he lay there for an eternity with hideous voices whispering in his ears. He fancied he saw Aspera’s drowned body flung against the now-dark window, the eyes wide and unseeing, and the darkness was distorted by a heaving unevenness of brown and gray. It was as though an immovable night had settled deep within his soul, upon which no dawn would ever break.
After a long time, he began to make out the paler shape of his hand against the dark floor. A pallid light came through the window of the phytoculture tank. Reigo twisted on his side and saw the dead phytoculture, no longer green, but phosphorescent.
Reigo got up onto his knees. He became aware of a thin, whimpering sound, and looked about for its source. He found another darker shape, standing out against the wall and floor. It was a man, hunched up with his knees against his chest and his arms wrapped around himself.
“Ceril?”
The man twitched, but did not respond.
“Where are Hectar and Ogonaovan?”
“I don’t know.”
“The phytoculture is glowing.”
“The cells are breaking up. When they die, their genetic material falls apart. The pyrimidines emit light.” Then he said, “Do you know what a prion is?”
Reigo shrugged in the dark. “Perhaps not to the extent that I should.”
“A prion is non-living, like a virus. It’s a protein. But if it gets into your body it interacts with your cells, and it makes you make more of it. The thing with Lazarus is that its victims don’t want to be studied. Lazarus prion develops fast and your immune system will attack it. But its full-blown sufferers, like Naral, don’t seem to have an immune response at all. Somehow this disease is intelligent and it brainwashes its sufferers’ biochemistry as well as their minds.” Ceril let out a hollow laugh.
“I do not understand how light can transmit a protein.”
Ceril laughed again. “It doesn’t, that’s the beauty of it. It transmits a signal to make the bacteria on our skin start making the prion. The phosphorescence is the sporulating stage of the disease.”
“So they need normal light after being exposed to the spore light that Naral made, to make prion? And not lack of light?”
“Who knows? All I know is that this darkness is killing me.”
“Where are Hectar and Ogonaovan?”
“I think they have gone back into the ship.”
Reigo paused and breathed deeply. “Mother?”
“Oh, she can hear you. But she does not avail you. Indeed, you may be our one wild card.” Ceril paused, apparently pensive.
“She can’t control the ship.” Reigo shook his head. “She gave it a non-countermandable order to move into orbit and go into lockdown for the next forty-eight hours. She’s disconnected from it.”
Ceril made a motion with his head, his face still in shadow. “And I suppose what happened in there was merely a coincidence. If the fermentation tank spontaneously broke by itself, that would be rather a poor feat of engineering, one which I doubt would be installed as standard on all ships of this size.”
“Are you trying to say my mother just tried to kill us all?”
“What I’m saying is a merchant like Tiorné cannot simply disconnect from a computer as complex as her ship, as you or I can. Her interface is far more intimate than ours. Even when it is in lockdown, it remains responsive to her subconscious mind. A computer is an intelligence in its own right, and it’s capable of self-defense. It may choose to react to extreme states of mind. The sort of states of mind this disease may indeed induce.”
“So which is it?” Reigo asked. “Is it the light or the dark that makes the disease better? Or worse.” The distinction didn’t seem so clear any more. Reigo shut his eyes and put his hand to his forehead. When did logic become this illogical?
“Here.” A metallic object clinked against the wall and sapphire lights began to flash in alternating sequence. The snake staff. Reigo stood still as Ceril passed the flashing-eyed heads up his right side, over his head, and down on the left. The glint of the snakes’ heads looked sinister in the dim light, their metal surfaces taking on an almost lifelike quality.
Ceril stood the staff up on its point, head bowed close to it, considering the snake heads in a brooding sort of way. He exhaled through his nose.
“Ceril, what is it?”
The doctor didn’t answer.
“Ceril?”
Beneath the shadow of Ceril’s face Reigo thought he caught a flash of a tongue from one of the heads on the staff, whispering a hiss. “Perhaps it is for the best,” Ceril murmured.
“Ceril, what are you talking about?”
Suddenly Ceril uncoiled from his hunched position, swinging the head of the staff at full arms’ length at Reigo’s head. Reigo ducked, landing on the floor on hand and knee, and rolled out of the way.
“What are you doing? Ceril, you took the Hippocratic Oath! First, do no harm! Do no harm!”
“Yes, I took the Oath! I swore to do no harm. Doing no harm does not equate to not killing. That would be naïve, a fool’s interpretation. I swore to heal, where I could, and I swore to give mercy in cases beyond hope. Euthanasia is the strength to see when disease’s toll dishonors life, and to honor life with a clean death.
“Ceril, listen to yourself! It’s the disease speaking, not you!” Before he could say more, Ceril punched him in the sternum and he fell back. The bigger man’s hands closed upon his neck. At once, metal snakes extruded themselves from the walls and fell upon Reigo. He felt their suffocating coils wrap his head and pin down his limbs.
“Mother?” he thought in panic. “Mother!” he tried to cry out, his voice constricted by Ceril’s grasp.
“Yes, help him, Mother!” Reigo felt the grip tighten. His throat felt crushed and his diaphragm wrenched painfully to no avail. “Give us light, Tiorné, or your son dies!”
Ceril’s breath gusted upon his face as Reigo’s mouth opened and closed in silence, the sinews in his neck straining against the man’s fingers. “What’s this? Your mother still does not avail you?” Ceril shook Reigo hard. A shrill ringing filled his ears. No, Tiorné would not save him.
The memory of the light and the glory it brought returned to him. The image of Aspera’s death, an implosion of light and water, replayed itself in his mind. If he, Reigo, were to die, he wished i
t to be like that, not here in the darkness, weary and without honor. Not here where these snakes would eat him.
Reigo’s forced his arms up, seizing Ceril’s wrists and sinking his thumbnails into tendons and arteries. Ceril gasped and Reigo threw his hands away and pulled back hard as air screamed into his lungs. Pain shot through the muscles between his ribs. He felt the rush of air as Ceril came at him and threw out a blind punch with all the force he could muster, feeling anything was preferable to having Ceril’s hands around his neck again. His fist connected with Ceril’s nose and he felt cartilage shatter. The doctor spun back with a howl, and Reigo heard him hit the wall and slide off it. There was a loud noise, and a red light lit up as Reigo recognized the whirr of one of the safety doors which closed in the event of a hull breach.
Ceril screamed as the door came down on his chest. His voice was awful and a sudden pang of remorse hit Reigo. The motor faltered and stopped. The machinery shuddered.
He crouched on the floor and took hold of the doctor’s hand. “What do I do? I’ll try to find something to jam under the door!”
“It’s too late for me.”
“There must be something someone can do! Ceril?”
“We are all infected, you know,” Ceril wheezed from the floor. “Our first idea may have been right. Lazarus needs light to progress.” A heavy gurgling bubbled up from deep within Ceril’s thorax. Reigo heard his ribs crack under the straining machinery, and his last words were barely more than a breath. “The question you must answer for yourself is whether the cure is worse than the condition.”
Chapter 7
Ceril said nothing more, and Reigo could sense he had stopped breathing, and the mechanism on the door was no longer active. He did wonder if Tiorné intended to evacuate the corridor and kill him too, but he heard no further noises nor sensed any change in pressure. He returned to the phytoculture collection lobby and filled one of the transparent-walled bottles from the tap. Spores as well as liquid came through the valve. The glowing filaments and tiny beads cast a pallid glow upon his hands. He held up the lantern he had made, but although it illuminated the walls, he saw shapeless forms moving in his peripheral vision. Ceril lay under the door in the corridor, his hands raised and clawed like talons, blood staining the floor beneath him. Reigo thought he saw malign things moving in the dead man’s eyes.
Holding his light in front of him, he advanced into the one corridor that remained open to him.
The access ways in this part of the ship were branching and tortuous, and Reigo ended up coming round to face the phytoculture hold. The same pale glow of the phytoculture lit this place too, and he remembered there was a large viewing window in one room. But when he came to the doorway, a plate of vitreous alloy had come down and blocked the entrance. Hectar’s broad-shouldered figure sat, silhouetted against the phosphorescence. His head was dropped, arms clutched around his chest. He rocked backward and forward on his heels, twitching convulsively.
“Hectar!” Reigo banged on the transparent plate.
The man whirled about and flattened himself against the phytoculture window. Reigo held up his lamp to Hectar’s face, seeing a livid fear in the man’s eyes. “This light,” he gabbled, “it does not cure this disease.” The door muffled his voice.
“It’s the wrong wavelength,” Reigo said. “Or it’s not intense enough.”
“I can hear Aspera calling to me.” Hectar shook his head vigorously. Clumps of his hair stuck out and greasy locks hung over his face. “I can’t find her! Please, Reigo, help me find Aspera!”
“Aspera’s dead, Hectar. She drowned in the phytoculture.”
Hectar fell down on his knees, his face contorting. He crouched, burying his face in his hands, and began a piteous wailing.
“Hectar!” Reigo hit the surface again. “Why is this door shut?”
“I closed it.”
“Open it, then! What are you doing, man?”
“Ogonaovan tried to kill me! He murdered Aspera. He’s insane.”
Reigo knelt before the door and pressed his hands to its surface. “Hectar, Aspera was in the tank when the walls broke. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, but she couldn’t have survived!”
“But I can still hear her! She says she has passed into something...something.” Hectar wriggled onto his back and pushed himself up on his elbows. “What the hell’s that?”
“What’s what?” Reigo banged on the door again.
Hectar began shuffling over the floor to the door, backward on his hands and feet, his stare fixed upon some unseen thing in the far corner of the room. He pushed his back up against the door’s corner, and his wild eyes strained to the side, taking in Reigo. “Can you not see it?” He struggled still, feet working on the ground as though trying to push himself through the wall.
“There’s nothing there,” said Reigo. “It must be an artifact of the disease.” He fumbled about the edges of the door. “Hectar, open the door. Let me help you. We’ll be better off together.”
“No!” Hectar head-butted the door, making Reigo start backward. “Not while that murdering lunatic’s at large on the vessel!”
“Hectar, what you said about being able to hear Aspera. Sometimes if people die when they’re connected to computers, they can leave ghosts in the machines. It might be that you think you can hear her.”
“No!” Hectar took a deep snorting breath and spoke quickly, his words running into each other. “I’ve never been connected. It got tried...once. It didn’t work. They said I wasn’t enough...that my Blood wasn’t good enough.” A loud cry escaped him, and his head dropped forward. He began to sob--great gulping yelps of pure despair.
“You need to come with me.”
Hectar’s wailing petered out to a whimper and he looked Reigo in the eye through the door for a moment. “No!” Twisting over with wild eyes, he threw himself away from the door. “You stopped me from saving her. Ceril and Ogonaovan dragged me out of the phytoculture tank!”
“To save you!”
“To save me from what? Not the dark. Certainly not these things!”
A choking, gurgling sound rose from the man’s throat, and his hands flew up to his neck, as though trying to fight off an unseen assassin. He rolled over and over, and as Reigo watched, amorphous black shapes flowed over the floor, winding around his ankles and binding his limbs, smothering him. Hectar and the shapeless things thrashed and writhed, and desperate, strangulated screams echoed through the dark corridors.
Reigo beat his fists against the door, but a pounding fear began in his chest, and more darkness flowed from the crack under the door, curling toward his feet. A susurration and a sound like a hundred voices singing a dirge came to his ears over the thunder of his own pulse. He could not look, and in panic fled down the corridor, his feeble lamp casting distorted shapes on the blank walls, until he reached a corner and hid behind it, his back sliding down the wall until his buttocks hit the floor. Setting the light down between his feet, he covered his face with his palms.
He hunched, shivering, in this wan sphere that protected him from the madness that lurked in the shadows. He closed his eyes, yet still he saw things that moved and crawled upon the insides of his eyelids. The dark cures the disease, he repeated to himself, over and over in his mind. These symptoms were intended to drive him into the light. He had to remember that this was just his own imagination revolting against him.
Lifting his head, he put his hands to the floor, and his fingertips touched moisture. At first he thought the bottle must be leaking, and felt the bottom of it and the neck for wetness. It wasn’t that. He stared about the corridor. A figure stood at the far end, faint green light shining from its skin. Dark hair hung sodden upon her shoulders, and her clothes were heavy with saturation.
“Aspera?”
Reigo got to his feet, and found a smile coming to his face. “How did you survive? Hectar’s trapped back there. He needs you. Aspera?”
Something was wrong. Aspera’s eyes had the u
nfocused look of someone in a trance, and she stared blankly ahead as though she saw neither Reigo nor the corridor. And when he looked at her closely, he saw water spilling endlessly from her nostrils and lips, running down her body and sodden clothing to the floor.
Reigo stepped back. He felt his heel connect with the glass bottle, heard the clink of it tip over and the dull grinding sound of it turning upon the floor. As he crouched slowly, reaching behind himself until his fingers found his light, the specter sank into the wall and was gone.
A singing, whining sound merged into the range of hearing, of the sort dead silence creates in one’s ears when shut in a room alone while straining to hear something that’s not there, but over it he could make out a faint slapping, repeating steadily like wet fabric being flapped against a wall.
Something clammy and snakelike wound about his forearm. He jumped and pulled his arms in, holding up his bottle to his chest.
“Reigo?”
A morran. He exhaled in relief and turned to it.
“Na’Athril?”
When he held his light to the morran, its skin was still covered with burns, its eyes sealed with dried blood and discharge. Morrans have warm blood, but the tentacles Na’Athril clung so helplessly to Reigo’s arm with were cold and sticky, and an unwholesome smell rose from the creature as he leaned toward it. Fluids oozed from beneath its body onto the floor.
“I can’t see,” Na’Athril pleaded, “but my eyes are full of horrors and my ears are full of noises.”
“Na’Athril, you’re dead.” Reigo stepped back and pulled his hand away. “Be at rest! Be at peace!”
“Reigo, please, help me.”
Reigo felt along the wall to a storage cupboard. He put down the bottle on the floor and opened the cupboard, digging out a scaffolding pole. “Forgive me,” he said, taking up the metal rod in both hands and gripping it tightly. He closed his eyes, steeling himself in his own mind, rehearsing the action in his head. The pole swung through the air with a dull rush, and hit the morran’s head with a heavy thud and a crack of bone.