THE BURNING HEART OF NIGHT

by Ivan Cat

  Karr thrashed harder.

  Yll turned heavy-lidded eyes on Karr. "Please attempt to conserve your dignity." The old doctor-abruptly swayed. "Oh my. I seem to have miscalculated the onset of fugue coma..."

  Suddenly, in the midst of all the pain, the peculiar scene made sense to Karr. They were extracting fugue from his tissues and injecting it into theirs to save themselves from Scourge. The giddy expressions, Yll's increasing stupor and lack of balance were all textbook responses to a high dose of fugue. Any moment now, Karr calculated, the next reaction would set in.

  Yll collapsed to the floor.

  A brief silence followed. The sound of many voices arguing in the streets outside entered through the lab's only window, but neither that nor Yll's comatose form stopped the progression of colonists. They merely grabbed their own syringes from the crate and the line, if anything, moved even faster.

  "Blessed be the Body Pure. Blessed be the Body Pure."

  The ghoulish faces paid no attention to Karr's discomfort. Cha-chik, cha-chik, cha-chik, cha-chik. Only the arrival of Panya Hedren diverted the single-minded progression in and out of the lab. Looking as though her pregnant belly would burst at any instant, Panya carefully retrieved a syringe from the crate on the floor and waddled over to Karr.

  "Oh the poor, poor Pilot," she cooed, removing her instrument's sterile wrapper. "He looks so pathetic."

  The colonists giggled nervously. Karr stared daggers at Panya. Derogatory words from a dozen different colony worlds popped into his head; none of them seemed strong enough to express how much Karr hated her at that instant.

  Panya smirked. "A kiss for good luck," she said, bending and pressing her lips onto his. Karr tried to bite her, but his teeth suddenly clicked onto a hard object. He froze, confused. Panya winked and tongued the object firmly into his mouth. Then she stood back up and made a show of using her syringe. The device clicked and whirred, and she rolled her eyes, but the blades never actually touched Karr's flesh and therefore did not inject anything into her own.

  Lips held firmly shut, Karr probed the object in his mouth. It was an inch long cylinder with one tapered end and a conspicuous bump halfway along its length. Karr pressed the bump with his tongue. Immediately, a spot within his mouth began to burn. Karr clicked the activator bump again, but not before a painful blister formed inside one cheek.

  It was a beam cutter of some kind!

  Before Karr could smile a confused thank you to Panya, she turned away. Reaching the doorway she abruptly clutched her distended belly, let out a theatrical moan and collapsed blocking the stairs.

  Karr needed no prodding. As distracted colonists clustered around Panya, he maneuvered the beam cutter between his teeth. Crooking his head, he pointed the emitter end at the wrist restraint that the colonists could not see from the doorway. The beam was invisible, and weak, but Karr was able to correct his aim by observing the welts that bubbled up on his skin. The pain was hardly noticeable compared to the throbbing of his cratered arm. The restraint began to smolder. Karr prayed no one would notice the burning smell.

  "Oh, oh!" Panya groaned right on cue. "It's time! It's time! Find a doctor!"

  Ten seconds, twenty seconds. Snikt. The fibers parted. Karr fumbled one handed to free his other wrist, then released his neck and waist straps, but when he sat up and unbuckled his ankles, the colonists looked up from Panya.

  "The Body Pure escapes! Stop him!"

  Karr hit the floor running and dove out the open second story window onto a rooftop. He spit the beam cutter into his hands, then ran to the roof's edge. The clamor of many voices washed up from below. Two factions of colonists were facing off below: the mob surrounding the vivisection building, all of whom wore green-and-red armbands, and the Guardsmen who in turn surrounded the mob. Colonel Halifax and Jenette stood toe to toe with Subconsul Bragg.

  "By the authority of the Prime Consul," Halifax ordered, "I order you to put down your weapons."

  "The Prime Consul is on his deathbed!" Bragg shot back. "There is no authority here except the will of the Body!"

  Halifax protested something about an orderly transfer of power, but the roaring crowd drowned him out. Jenette waved her arms in an attempt to calm them.

  "Stop! Think! Is this what you want? Anarchy? Humans fighting humans, humans eating humans? What's wrong with you people?"

  The mob, in no mood to be lectured, roared its disapproval.

  Bragg's boyish face appeared. "You don't get it, do you Consul Jenette Tesla? Do you think we want to do these things? Do you think we enjoy doing these things? We don't! But we want to live! While you've been gallivanting around the planet, we've been fighting for our homes and dying of Scourge! Look at us; we're all wounded. We can feel the worms growing inside us, but we can't even make Final Sacrament, because Halifax stole our domestics to man the battle lines!"

  "I didn't have anything to do with that," Halifax responded angrily. "They volunteered."

  "It's your fucking domestic that's turned ours against us."

  Halifax clenched his jaw. "It's those fucking domestics that are keeping your sorry asses alive."

  "Wrong!" Bragg said pointing up at the vivisection lab, where he believed Karr still lay. "It's fugue and only fugue that's going to keep us alive! His life for ours, it's a good trade!"

  "It's murder!" Jenette accused.

  The mob roared louder and pushed forward. Halifax's Guards shifted sweaty palms on pulse-rifles (Karr noted Liberty, Skutch, and Grubb front and center beside Jenette), but Karr didn't get to watch the confrontation unfold. Boots scraped behind him. Colonists were clambering out the lab window, their ravenous eyes fixed upon him.

  XLVI

  CHOREA VERMICULORUM, Latin (dance of the little worms), scientific name for deadly xenoparasite commonly known as Scourge, which was responsible for nearly wiping out the colony seeded at New Ascension [4609 A.D.].

  —New Encyclopedia Galactica, 34th edition

  Karr ran around the lab to the back of the roof. There was no way down and, even if there had been, the narrow alley separating the vivisection building from its nearest neighbor was crammed with frenzied colonists.

  "There he is! Grab him, grab him!" pursuing voices cried from behind Karr on the roof.

  With no alternative, Karr backed up, took a running start, and jumped. He sailed across a ten-foot gap, falling down hard onto a darkened roof across the alley, but quickly gathered his legs under him. A colonist leapt after Karr, bloodlust in his eyes. He, however, fell short of landing on the neighboring roof and ended up hanging from its edge by his fingertips. The mob cheered and shouted encouragement as the colonist scrambled to climb up. Karr stomped fingers until the crazed pseudo-juvenile fell into the mob below.

  "He's getting away!" colonists on the lab roof shrieked in alarm.

  Karr fled across the dark roof as the clamor increased below. He bruised his shins on shadowy condensers and scraped his arms on half-seen cooling fins as the sound of opposing colonists' voices merged into a violent din. Weapons fire cracked as Karr scampered around a series of pipes, jumped up, and then pulled hand over hand along a cable to the next darkened structure. Across its roof he went. Smoke billowed from broken skylights, choking his breath. At the far end, he clambered down a ladder and dropped the last few feet into an alley.

  Karr's arm throbbed. He ignored the pain and ran out into the street. The glow from burning structures and vehicles shone brighter at ground level. In one direction, the parasitic grasses grew thick and high. In the other, those fronds had been trampled down. Karr saw colonists fighting one another in that direction. Pulse-rifle reports echoed off plasteel and ceramite.

  Karr turned and walked at a measured pace toward the untrampled grass fronds, hoping to avoid notice, but after only a few steps, a hue and cry arose. "There, in the white! There!" Cursing his beloved uniform, Karr charged into the disturbing sea of grass. Bulb-headed stalks enveloped Karr, battering his face. Cloying, mildewy, malodorous fronds i
mpeded his speed. He could see no further than an arm's length ahead. And there were things in the deep grass. Karr stepped on them all too frequently; they were both squishy and brittle at the same time. Karr tried not to think what they might be as he ran pell-mell down the street.

  Tesla lay in the records room alone. The pain of his wounds was overwhelming, fogging his mind. He struggled to differentiate between reality and hallucination...

  The door opens again.

  Once more Tesla strains to look, but he cannot see who it is and there is no other sound.

  "Jenette?" he calls. "Jenette?"

  The faint tik-tik of four multi-clawed legs sounds on the hard floor. Through the fog of his pain, Tesla hears them move tentatively closer.

  "Toby? Is that you?"

  The footfalls stop halfway across the room.

  "Toby," Tesla says harshly. "Come here."

  But the only response is a suspicious sniffing. Teeth chatter indecisively. Finally, a hushed voice speaks. It is not Toby.

  "Master?"

  The sound triggers a flood of bad memories. Tesla remembers a battle-torn Coffin Island. He is on an overloaded jump-lifter. Below are the domestics that must be left behind, their forlorn faces upturned—one in particular locks eyes with Tesla.

  "Blacky?" he says aloud into the room.

  "No," says the voice from the past. It sounds irritated and confused. "Not Blacky."

  Again the voice triggers bad memories. "Come closer," Tesla croaks weakly. "Come."

  The four-legged shape shuffles nearer. The room is dim and Tesla's vision is blurred from his injuries. He cannot identify the domestic, but the voice is the voice from his nightmares. It must be Blacky. Only, why does the hunched form look pink? Tesla reaches out a shaky hand. At first the domestic flinches away. Then, with renewed sniffing, it allows contact. Tesla feels a warm muzzle under his palm—and then he feels the instinctive nose-butt that the domestic from Tesla's memories always gave to a scratching hand.

  "Blacky, it is you."

  "No," the voice denies. "Blacky is dead."

  "Dead? But you are Blacky."

  "No. In-humans killed him."

  "In-humans...?" Tesla wonders if he is dreaming. He can feel all the needles and hoses connected to his body. Are the anti-pain drugs affecting his mind? It seems so real—the breath, for instance, huffing on his hand, becoming more rapid and agitated. "Be a good boy," Tesla says, feeling ill at ease with the hallucination. "Be a good boy, Blacky."

  "Blacky was a good boy!" the voice snivels. "Master says guard the Null. Blacky guarded the Null. Master says keep the Null safe. Blacky kept the Null safe. Master says he will come back. But master never comes back. Why?"

  Tesla knows he has no worthy answer. Blacky was courage, loyalty, and honesty embodied. Blacky was one of the hard decisions.

  "Why master never comes back?" the domestic asks again.

  "You would never understand," Tesla says.

  There is silence, and then anger. "Understand master lies. Understand only Ferals come. Ferals try to kill Blacky, Ferals and in-humans." Tesla feels the domestic push closer still. He feels its breath on his neck. Tesla's feeble hand and arm, still in contact with the familiar muzzle, stiffen apprehensively. "In-humans get Blacky first," the voice whines and accuses. "In-humans take Blacky away from the light. In-humans take the light away from Blacky!"

  Now the alien head bows under Tesla's fingers, allowing Tesla's fingers to slip up along its bullet-shaped skull. Tesla feels an awful coldness as his fingertips drop into empty eye sockets.

  "Because master does not come back," the voice snarls.

  Tesla withdraws his hand from the horror he has created.

  The Khafra looms over Tesla. "Master is bad. Very, very bad. Master says he is good. But master does bad. Master says he does bad to do good. But only bad happens."

  "No," Tesla protests, "the Body will be Pure. It must...."

  Tesla feels paws pressing down on his chest, talon tips pressing painfully into his solar plexus.

  "Now what must Blacky do?" the menacing voice half growls, half weeps. "Blacky tries to do good but only bad happens. Blacky tries to be good, but Blacky only becomes evil." The voice rises in tone and desperation. "Blacky must be like master!" the specter decides, voice cracking from the strain of seventeen years of torture. "Blacky must not do good! Blacky must be like master! Blacky must do bad to do good! That is what Blacky must do! Then maybe good will happen to Blacky! "

  All at once the talons pressing in the center of Tesla's chest gouge down, ripping skin, tearing and breaking cartilage, burrowing down, pressing aside fat and muscle and finally grasping the pulsing red organ so revealed. It tries to beat in Blacky's tightening grip, tries to pump blood. Tesla feels unbearable pain. His head swirls. Oblivion closes in. And suddenly he has a vision that it is not Blacky who is squeezing the life from his heart, but a much younger, idealized version of himself, before disillusionment, before all the choices that have brought his feeble body to this desolate end—before the hard decisions have come full circle.

  The old man's heart exploded.

  The alien's head hung low.

  "Blacky is dead, " it said.

  The sound of many pursuing feet drowned the sound of Karr's own passage through the polyp fronds. Karr fled as fast as he could, but no matter how he twisted between prefab domes or around blocky storehouses, he could not avoid leaving a trail of trampled stalks snaking out behind him like a beacon. It would inevitably lead the mob to him, and in the mood they were in Karr considered it a distinct possibility that they would resort to cruder methods than sterile syringes to extract the fugue they so desperately wanted from his body.

  In an effort to break the trail Karr ducked into a squat building with tall, narrow windows, but the instant he kicked the heavy door open, he skidded to a halt. The structure was an armory of some kind. Two colonists looked up from charging pulse-rifle clips. Two more in Guard uniforms stood before racks of weaponry.

  "Wait!" they called as Karr fled back into the street. "We mean you no harm!"

  Karr ran faster. He was not about to entrust his life to unknown colonists in uniforms—anyone could put on a uniform. Behind Karr, a cloud of dust and chaff, rising from the passage of the mob through the polyp fronds, was drawing uncomfortably near. Karr tried another trick. Darting along the side of a recycling-vat yard, he turned left at each corner until he came full circle. Where his noose-like path rejoined itself, a wide swath of crushed fronds crossed in front of Karr. Karr edged forward and peeked out into the swath. To his left, colonists carrying improvised weaponry were disappearing around the recycling vats, hot on his trail. Karr turned right and ran back toward the vivisection lab, his footsteps hidden in the already trampled fronds. His head scanned from side to side, searching for something, anything, that would allow him to extricate himself from the situation. He could hear the cries of the mob echoing from behind the recycling vats; any instant now they would complete the loop around the yard and see him.

  Karr spotted a ladder on the side of a building. That would work fine, he decided. Veering toward it, he trampled an especially obvious path to its foot, then carefully retraced his steps back to the wide swath of trampled fronds, and then took a running start and leaped as far as he could into the untouched fronds on the other side.

  Karr landed face down next to a squishy object.

  Deep in the shadows, the reason for the polyp frond overgrowth on the colony island became clear. The parasitic grasses had sprung up around, and were feeding upon, the bodies of humans and Khafra who had fallen in combat. Ravenous tendrils, snaking from every polyp stalk within sight, wormed into a bloated purple cadaver. Karr lay next to it, touching it, its swollen eyes gaping inches from his own. Revolted, he wanted to leap back, but howls of rage rang down the street as the mob completed the loop around the recycling-vat yard and realized Karr's deception. Stampeding feet hammered in his direction. Karr dared not move away from the c
lammy corpse or the mob would surely spot him—they might spot him anyway. A hundred pairs of eyes seemed to bore into the back of Karr's neck as the rumble neared, but just like clockwork, they spotted the decoy path. Hands and boots clattered, going up the ladder. Other footfalls swarmed around the building on the ground.

  "The other side! Cut him off!"

  The mob's rumble diminished. Karr rose onto his hands and knees, the movement throwing a different light on the nearby cadaver. Karr suddenly recognized the features. It was the very first colonist who had touched him and then licked the sweat off his hand (a face Karr would never forget). The colonist was frozen in a wide-eyed rictus of agony. It was a pitiable sight; even as Karr hid from the dead boy-man's bloodthirsty brethren, Karr was conscious of the fact that the dead second-generation colonist had not asked to come to a plague-infested planet and die such a gruesome death. Whatever transgressions this fellow human may have made, he had paid the ultimate price for them.

  This was a thought process that would not have occurred to Pilot Lindal Karr previous to this ill-fated mission, but his recent first-hand experiences on New Ascension were changing the way he looked at things. The dead man was no longer just an unfortunate number on a roster. Karr actually felt sympathy. On impulse, he reached to close the staring eyes.

  That impulse was not a good one.

  The face flinched on contact. Karr jerked back as the head abruptly twitched erect on its dead neck, the distended eyes bursting as pungent, lifeless breath howled from a mouth stretching wider and wider. The bloated body split open. Fetid, infectious ichor, in which swam countless tiny, writhing black worms, vomited out of the fissures, splattering Karr and every polyp stalk within ten feet. Karr wiped the vile ejecta from his mouth, nose, and eyes, realizing that he had, no doubt, come face to face with the Scourge and one of the methods it used to propagate itself. Suddenly it was clear why Jenette and the Guards had been so particular about burning their dead quickly.