by Ivan Cat
Tlalok and the female spiraled ever closer to one another, first their blank, grieving flanks facing inward, then their brilliant, radiant sides.
In some dim part of Tlalok's mind, he regretted. Ghosts of Lleeala haunted him. He saw her echoes everywhere, in the proud arch of the strange female's neck, or the shades of compassion in her fierce radiance. No two sunrises had passed with Tlalok apart from Lleeala since the day she opened her heart to him. He remembered her eyes sparkling with mirth as he bumbled at learning the ways of Pact life. He remembered the heat of her breath and the softness of her muzzle. He remembered her shaking with grief after the blank-one murder of their nurslings and he remembered holding her tight because Lleeala, his savior and Radiance of their pack, needed comfort from Tlalok the Shamed. These things were precious to Tlalok. He did not want to let them go.
But they were letting him go. The biological compulsion drew him closer to the new female. Instincts were cleansing his heart of grief, whether he liked it or not. It was the way of Balance, the way of Pact, the way of survival. A new beginning. If one alone would die, then two alone must be bonded together. The immune venom must be exchanged. Pact must be preserved. The cycle of things must continue. Tlalok might regret, but Tlalok must not resist, not against these things he and Lleeala believed so strongly in. Balance and Pact allowed no endless grieving. Besides, Tlalok knew, Lleeala would not want Tlalok to resist, to be alone. She would have approved of the brave female with the sad eyes.
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They touched, blank side to blank side.
Luminescent patches erupted. Glowbuds twinkled like opening flowers and spiraling galaxies, crossing from male to female and female to male, where they contacted at shoulder, hip, and muzzle, growing more intricate and synchronous with each breath and heartbeat. They began to fill each other's blank sides with light. Tlalok's filled Kitrika. Kitrika's filled Tlalok. They surrendered to it. It was good. It was right.
But then why did Tlalok feel the sinking feeling in his loins, the tightening around his heart?
Suddenly Tlalok convulsed. His glowbuds strobed, freezing the motion of his flailings into many brief tableaus of pain. Kitrika at first recoiled from the sickening light, but then drew her eye orbs back deep into her skull and crept forward. She grabbed Tlalok gently, but firmly, and held on. Some time passed before his convulsions eased.
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Eventually Tlalok clattered his teeth. <
Kitrika flinched. She looked away in shame.
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Kitrika was reassured, but still confused. <
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Kitrika glowed with determination. Again Tlalok saw ghosts of Lleeala; these ones told him there was no point arguing against a female with such a set to her radiance. So he did not. Tlalok gathered his strength and composure. Kitrika waited until he was ready, and then accompanied him out of the glade toward the cinders and flame.
PART FIVE:
Dance of the Little Worms
XXXVIII
She imagines Feral lovemaking as she lies on the cold surface. She imagines a year's bottled passion, brewing, building, like magma doming up under bedrock, then releasing in a single glorious night of union. She imagines tenderness. Orgasms of radiance.
No restraints, no muzzles, no blindfolds.
Those are Sacrament.
Tables side by side. Medical spotlights glare in a sterile operating room. A figure in hooded surgical greens inserts the needles, runs TVs from human veins into those of a domestic. A litany of pseudo-religion spills from the hooded figure's mouth. The Body Pure. The Body Pure. Blessed be the Body Pure. The domestic makes no sound, tries to be brave.
Her mind wants to flee, but every cell in her body thirsts, giddy for the nectar that will keep her alive.
The hooded figure activates the transfusion. Milky ochre flows in the tubes from the domestic to her. Machines pump worthless plasma back into the alien. A faint salt and blood smell burns in her sinuses.
Now the domestic whimpers. It hurts. And there can be no anesthetic. That would taint the transfusion. It will hurt the domestic a lot more as the process nears its end. But that is not the worst thing about Sacrament.
The worst thing about Sacrament is how much she loves it.
When the immune venom hits her blood, it hurts for a while. A horrible burning, as if each and every one of her cells is on fire. And she is glad of this, for while there is pain, she feels less ashamed, less guilty. At least she is suffering for her sins. But once enough of it circulates in her veins, it turns off switches in her brain. Her conscience disappears. Boundaries crumble. And the euphoria hits. Glorious, self-preserving, self-centered bliss. She cannot stop now, no matter how the domestic wails.
And it wails.
(In her state she wishes to think of the quadruped only as "it." Not as "him." Not as "friend.")
She cares not.
Sight and sound accelerate the rush. How much horror-pleasure time elapses, she cannot gauge. She wants it to go on forever, to draw every last succulent drop of immune venom. No matter the consequences.
But the hooded figure stops the flow.
The golden sense of well being trickles away. She rails. Threatens. Begs. Despicably. But the hooded figure will not reopen the flow. And she cannot. She, like the domestic, is also strapped to her table.
Doesn't the figure understand? Doesn't it know how badly she needs the Sacrament to go on?
Against her will, she ramps down.
Of course the figure knows. All the colonists know. This is the way they survive. Some, this knowledge breaks. Others, it makes hard. How long, she wonders, can it go on?
When is enough too much?
Her mother believed that never was too much. Her mother let herself die to prove her conviction. Sometimes, the woman on the Sacrament table wishes her mother had taken her with her. And sometimes, like now, the woman hates her mother for abandoning her to face the misery alone.
Now, the hooded figure injects the domestic with a sedative.
It is a mercy that the domestic will not remember. It is her punishment that she can never forget, even as she lapses into post Sacrament coma.
—a confession, in the black book of J. Tesla
Jenette did not feel well. She shambled across a patchwork of base camp tarps and bedrolls, only half aware of her surroundings. She must stay upwind of the smell or it would surely drive her mad. Crinkling her nostrils as tightly closed as possible, she bent over Guardsman Grubb and checked the biosentry on his neck. His skin was ashen, but the buzzer-venom paralysis had subsided and the indicators all blinked green. Probably, Jenette tried to reason, those were good signs.
It was so hard to think straight.
Ten yards beyond the base camp tarpaulins, an incinerod did its grim work. Black smoke rose from a humanoid body bag, wh
ich combusted under the squat disk's intense heat. A scorched patch beside that body bag evidenced the remains of a previous humanoid cremation and a third body bag lay on the other side, as yet untouched, the features of a quadruped outlined by the shrinktight plastic. It was that quadruped form which Jenette tried desperately to ignore. The bags contained, or had contained, Mok and Toliver. The last contained Bronte. Immune venom had spilled on the body bag's hermetic seal. Jenette could smell it, even from upwind. And she wanted it. Craved it. With every cell in her body.
Far beyond the base camp, the shortened remnant of Coffin Island's keelroot lay flaccid across a belly-up landscape of slouching tubules and mounds of slime. The heavy lifter labored up out of a ragged hole in the reactor-chamber bulge, its extended robotic arms appearing next, then the null-fusion reactor, held tight in grappling claws. Tendrils of ghutzu fought against the heavy lifter, drawing tight between the reactor and their unseen anchor points. Karr, a tiny figure standing on the double-coned machine, waved frantically as the roots snapped and lashed up at him. Thruster hum decreased as Arrou lowered power in the cockpit.
Jenette moved from one prone form to another, checking for progress. Crash slept, a clean dressing covering his missing eye. Liberty was much the same as Grubb, but passing in and out of consciousness.
"You did it. You got us out," Liberty mumbled to Jenette. "For a woman, you got king-sized gnards."
Jenette's mouth twitched: not a smile, not a grimace.
"That's a compliment," the Guard added, and then promptly dozed off.
Bigelow was faring pretty well, physically. Most of the buzzer-venom was out of his system. Emotionally, however, that was another story. His eyes flitted over to Bronte's body bag as Jenette removed a spent osmosis pack from his arm. Sorrow contorted his pudgy features and Bigelow quickly averted his eyes, looking into the distance.
Pilot Karr shot clinging ghutzu roots off of the null-fusion reactor as Arrou hovered. Karr was not a good shot with a pulse-rifle. He expended quite a few charges to sever each of the organic restraints.
"It will make a superb explosion," Bigelow murmured as the last tendril broke free and the heavy lifter began rising with its prize once again. "A trifle too strong for our purposes, perhaps, but an excellent substitute for the missing C-55s."
"Oh?" Jenette said, not really paying attention.
"Indeed," the scientist continued, happy for any distraction from the death around them. "An overloading null-fusion reaction converts a phenomenal amount of matter to energy in an extremely short period time. The sequence in which the null-fields drop will be critical in shaping the escaping energies and extinguishing the fire over Pilot Karr's fugueship. I will have to confer with Guardsman Skutch." Bigelow craned his neck up off his bedroll. "How is he?"
Jenette turned to the explosives expert, who slept fitfully, covered in sweat. "The biosentries. think he's going to live," Jenette answered, no less remote.
"Excellent," Bigelow said, trying to sound chipper, but his sadness over Bronte showed as he closed his red-rimmed eyes.
Jenette continued her rounds of the patients on the tarps. I should be more sympathetic, she berated herself. I must concentrate. But to Jenette's displeasure, she found that her apparently random movements around the base camp had drawn her to the edge of the tarps that was nearest to the incinerod and body bags. The body bag.
Jenette shook her head in denial. "No."
Dr. Marsh lay nearby. Eyes that had been slitted and watching Jenette for some time fluttered open. Dry lips parted.
"Ask Bigelow. He won't object."
"What?"
"I said, 'Dr. Bigelow won't object'."
Jenette brushed sweat from her forehead. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Don't waste your breath," Marsh croaked. "You can't even fool yourself. You're not going to fool me: you look like shit."
"I told you, I don't know—"
Marsh abruptly levered her head and shoulders up. Her arm shot out and grasped Jenette's chin. Fingers probed swollen glands under her jaw. "As I thought," the doctor pronounced. "Feeling giddy?"
"Maybe a little."
"Chills. Hot flashes?"
"Not yet," Jenette lied. Marsh glared and felt Jenette's forehead. "Well, some," Jenette admitted.
Marsh moved her fingers down Jenette's neck and, frowning, took a pulse.
Jenette gulped, suddenly fearful. "Second stage?"
Marsh nodded.
Jenette tried to hide her reaction, but her arms and head hung with the weight of the revelation. It was the Scourge. No more denying it now. The pathogen followed no exact timetable, instead it progressed through stages that could take months, weeks, or only days. The host's immune defenses and stress levels played a critical role in the progression. The opportunistic parasite was always alert to exploit weakness and escalate to its next growth cycle. Jenette's last few days had been particularly stressful; if that kept up, she worried how quickly she would progress through the remaining stages.
Unless, unless....
Jenette tore her eyes away from Crash's body bag.
"I shouldn't be getting sick. I'm not pregnant."
Marsh withdrew her hands, cold and sober. "You know very well that refusing Sacrament leaves you defenseless, you will get sick whether you are pregnant or not. Again I say, ask Dr. Bigelow." Marsh rolled over to get the scientist's attention, but found the large man already staring in their direction.
"It's all right with me," he said solemnly.
Jenette clenched her eyes. "But it's not all right with me."
"Why not?" Marsh asked.
"How can you ask that? Bronte's dead, Deena, dead. Don't you care?"
"I care. That is not relevant. All the combined knowledge of colonized space can't change dead. What is relevant is that you are alive and we want to keep you that way. Isn't that right, Dr. Bigelow?"
Bigelow nodded, eyes glistening.
Jenette gritted her teeth. She wanted to give in.
Marsh eased back on her bedroll. "Think of it as a transplant— like how we'll replace Crash's missing eye."
"That's not the same thing."
"Yes it is. In fact, since Bronte is already dead—since we are not killing her with Sacrament—it's no different than implanting biofactured cells into your eyes to cure myopia or inoculating your teeth against dental caries bacteria, or any of a dozen other routine procedures that I have done for you in the past."
"Deena, stop, please."
A few seconds passed. Bigelow marshaled his grief. "Jenette," he said, "you got us into this. We believe in the cause, and we believe in you and that means you have to live, otherwise—" Bigelow waved an arm to encompass the wounded, Coffin Island, the body bags, "—otherwise all this was for nothing."
Marsh piped up again. "That's right. Don't get me wrong, we're all in this together—but you are the one with the vision." Marsh chose her next words carefully. "Some of us have seen the worms too many times, and it isn't nice. I don't know how Dr. Bigelow feels, but some of us don't want to end up that way—we've vowed to never end up that way. We're not evil people. We'll do anything for the cause, except commit suicide. We're not as strong as you. So when it comes right down to it, we'll keep on going to Sacrament and domestics will keep on dying unless you find a solution."
Confession over, Marsh closed her eyes.
Jenette found herself staring down at Bronte's shrinktight cocoon. Somehow, she had moved over to it. The smell of immune venom was overwhelming. A few feet to the right, the incinerod had charred Mok's remains to ash.
"Who's going to carry the torch if not for Jenette Tesla?" Marsh asked, eyes still shut.
What should she do? What?
The fate of every human and domestic on New Ascension hinged on what Jenette chose. The options were horribly simple: compromise her principles and have a chance to find a solution to Scourge and Sacrament, or stand firm to those principles and die. This, she realized, must have
been how the whole travesty of Sacrament started, with her father making a series of pragmatic decisions to stay alive, convinced that he was making the high moral choice every step of the way.
As Jenette agonized, the heavy lifter floated slowly closer, the heavy reactor skimming a few yards above the ground, then sinking as Arrou let the thrusters idle down. An uncomfortable flatulence sounded as the reactor compressed heaps of slime, forcing bubbles of trapped air through the grim goo. The lifter's robotic grappling arms disengaged and folded under the lifter's belly. Then the orbiter itself landed.
Jenette forced her hands off of the body bag.
Every fiber in her body protested, crying out with craving. Craving!
Jenette picked up the incinerod. Shook off the ash.
"There won't be a torch to carry if I give in," Jenette said, as much for herself as for Marsh and Bigelow.
Flip, flip, twist. She reset the burn cycle. Click.
Get up now. Steady. Don't look back.
The incinerod began its task yet again as Jenette turned and, stumbling, fled into the lurid landscape.
XXXIX
Pilot Academy transcript, 10.21.3530.
Subject: Lindal Karr, aged sixteen years.
Document status: CLASSIFIED.
(Vidun and Uttz march down a sterile looking corridor.)
Vidun: Why haven't you examined the surveillance recordings?
Dr. Uttz: I am no voyeur, sir. If you desire information, I suggest you examine them yourself.
Vidun: I suggest you attend to your duty, Doctor. Pilot candidates must procreate.
Dr. Uttz (annoyed): We are using all possible methods to breed candidate Karr. We have extracted every drop of semen that he's produced since becoming pubescent. We've artificially inseminated thousands of women. We've isolated DNA sequences, which we suspect code for fugue immunity, and spliced them into human zygotes. Nothing works. None of the resulting children exhibit fugue-immunity. Obviously, whatever makes Lindal Karr a Pilot is not reflected in his sperm cells.