by James Morrow
The funeral done, the android rabbit burned, the storybooks and little clothes given away, he was finally ready to start forgetting. Should I sue the nurse? The thought clawed at him repeatedly, but eventually he decided he must put this impossible death as far from his external experience as possible. As for his marriage, Francis and Luli both realized there was no grace in keeping the poor benighted thing in one piece. Within the month they were rid of each other.
Francis resolved to lose himself in scholarship. He wrote his paper, “The Spirituality of Beanlice,” for the prestigious Journal of Evolution. The prestigious Journal of Evolution turned it down flat. Then a minor-league periodical called Bestiary accepted it for their winter issue. They sent him a check for twenty dancs, and he spent it at the circus.
Francis used beanlice as a metaphor for Phthiraptera in general. Chemically, beanlice posed few puzzles. They were a rational arrangement of molecules. But how, Francis asked his colleagues, could you account for the will of the beanlouse, its spooky ability to go on eating, breathing, moving, and churning out further beanlice when it didn’t possess enough physical substance to choke a swamp aphid? How could so much behavior be squeezed into so small a space? He hoped that his paper would open new vistas in biology, but he knew that it would not.
The day the winter issue of Bestiary appeared on the stands, Francis walked through four kilometers of snow and bought eight copies. He took one copy, cut out the title page of his article, and framed it. He hung the display over the bookshelf in his apartment. Nobody ever noticed it.
TRUE TO FRANCIS’S FAITH in natural law, Nearth reached the frigid farpoint of its orbit, rounded the corner, and pushed on toward perihelion and warm, sunny weather. One especially photogenic day he was sitting in his compacted office, wondering whether he would ever become a full professor, when a secretary whose name he couldn’t remember peeked in to say that a videophone call awaited him down the hall. Francis’s office did not come with a videophone; at times he was surprised that his office came with a floor.
Burne Newman of the institute’s archeology department was calling to say that he had pried a larcenous amount of money from the government, a grant for a scientific expedition to Arete. Kappie McKack, the enfant terrible of anthropology, and Luther Gorst, the vieillard terrible of chemistry, had already signed up. Would Francis like to join them, look for bugs, and become famous?
It took Francis ten seconds to realize that his personal terror of space travel was vastly overshadowed by his professional itch to be the first entomologist to luck into insect life on Arete. “Save me a seat,” he said.
The trip was a mammoth and costly failure. Kappie and Burne found no natives to study, Luther found no crystals of note, and Francis found only that spacefood was at best boring and at worst constipating.
When Burne attempted to return the remaining funds, two thousand dancs, he was told to go away please. It would cost the government more time, more trouble, and ultimately more money to take back the surplus than to pretend that Burne had managed to unload the entire grant somewhere in the economy. Then Luther received a belated Poelsig Award for doing something about the weather. Pooled with the unspent two thousand, it was enough to put the group in business again.
This time they landed in the eerie north, where the craters spawned by errant asteroids, twenty pocks in the planet’s face, had by dint of underground rivers and Aretian rains begun evolving into lakes. Reaching the first lake, Luther availed himself of scuba gear, plunged into the dark waters, and emerged with a meteorite of collector’s-item caliber. Two lakes later, Kappie and Burne found a fishnet, then a canoe, then a native Aretian. Jealous, Francis decided he would spend the next day in the likely marsh that adjoined the Aretian village, and he wouldn’t come out until he’d found something with six legs, three body sections, and the soul of a beanlouse.
UW Canis Majoris nuzzled the horizon as Francis put on his nyoplene boots, shouldered his pack, and tiptoed out of Darwin. After two soggy hours, he seriously considered changing professions. If he were a botanist, for example, he would have reasons to delight in this marsh—in its portly trees, its migrating vines, and its bizarre shrubs that showed even evidence of reproducing by coitus and liking it. Then he saw an unusually solid patch of mire spreading among monster ferns. There, in the knife-cold Aretian morning, with dirt on his hands and triumph on his mind. Francis turned over the right rock.
The moment he saw that proboscis, he knew he had discovered a new genus. His specimen must be called Cortexclavus areteus, the Corkscrew of Arete.
The corkscrew beetle’s proboscis was a spiraled, rotary tool that it used to bore through tree trunks and boulders. If you took the corkscrew beetle in your hand, it would penetrate your palm like a crucifixion nail. If you put the corkscrew beetle in a wooden cage, it would saw away the lid. Big as a beet, green as the sun, the creature sat smugly in the shadow of the overturned rock, confident that its thick shell, unappetizing midgut, and deadly nose would forever deliver it from natural enemies.
A sudden inspiration sent Francis scrambling through his pack. He found the kit by which he kept his diabetes in check, opened it, and carefully set the insulin flask and the two five-cc, crysanium-needled syringes on the ground. Maneuvering Cortexclavus areteus into the empty box, he counted to three and shut the lid. Furious, the beetle rushed forward, proboscis whirling, then tumbled back in defeat: like the needles it contained, the box was made of pure crysanium.
Walking back to Darwin, Francis began composing the lead paragraph of his paper on the corkscrew beetle. Will the Journal of Evolution publish it? Publish it, hell, they’ll make me an editor. And the Poelsig Award in entomology is sewn up, unless some dwartch at Sarl Lab discovers what makes gorgathons weep. As for the Galileo Institute, I’ll settle for nothing less than the Atwill Chair.
True: such optimism was uncharacteristic, yet Francis could foresee no disaster capable of keeping him from these assorted gains.
The day they blasted off from Arete and set their course for home, he finished his Cortexclavus paper, sneaking in lots of points about the spirituality of beanlice. At two minutes before midnight, Nearth Equatorial Time, Francis turned thirty-seven. He still had all his hair.
3
FRANCIS PEERED OUT of the hatchway and gulped down a healthy helping of troposphere. After three months of canned air, the real thing tasted like honey. Smiling upward, he noted with pleasure that Carlotta’s sky was no longer a dead-liver yellow, but a warm, melodious gold.
Burne had brought them well beyond the ice, within spitting distance of the equator. Spitting, however, was not advised. They were in the kind of dry, sandy country where spit ranks next to blood.
Straight ahead, east, the sand rose and fell like convolutions on a cerebrum. Animals with outsized rib cages were nowhere to be seen. But Kappie was. She bounded among the dunes like a puppy. If Carlotta’s northern hemisphere contained a fossil, Kappie would surely find it before the day was out.
Francis thought he would like to join her, perhaps using the opportunity to hint of his crush. But it was time to feed the corkscrew beetle. His affection for Ollie, thank God, was unencumbered by lust.
Entering the specimen room, dashing to the vitreousteel cage, he saw that Cortexclavus areteus was its usual grumpy, gorgeous self. He had been giving it live verneworms whenever it scuttled a certain way, pairing each tidbit with a bright light aimed directly into the left compound eye. After three lessons, all he had to do was strike a match and Ollie, a fast learner as well as an insatiable carnivore, would start tap dancing.
Francis harbored no illusions about the cognitive powers of insects. Their intelligence, he knew, was amazing, profound, sinister—and startlingly narrow. Like all beetles, Cortexclavus areteus was locked into an evolutionary niche. Its drilling behavior provided one clear demonstration. A surface creature, it lived and hunted in open air. Whenever it encountered a tree or boulder, it simply swirled its proboscis and scuttled f
orward until the obstacle was traversed. Above ground, this was a useful and straightforward way of operating. But, as Francis put it in his paper, “plant a Cortexclavus areteus six feet under, and you will see how single-minded Nature can be.” The beetle, of course, would just keep drilling, kilometer after kilometer, halfway around the globe if necessary, until the earth sloped down and set it free, assuming that exhaustion did not kill it first.
Francis struck a match, and Cortexclavus danced for its supper.
ON THE FLOOR of the control deck, Burne and Luther had assembled a dozen spectroprints into a huge jigsawed picture of Carlotta, and when Francis arrived both scientists were creeping around like babies, pens and protractors in hand, drawing lines.
“Any luck?” Francis asked.
Burne swirled his extended index finger near the center of an outer photograph, then pressed it down suddenly as if snuffing a gnat. “We’re here.” The finger was aloft again, spiraling east across thirteen hundred kilometers. “The closest pollucite is here.” The finger came down, another gnat gone. “And in between is…well, you’ve seen the view.”
Francis walked to the edge of the map. “That’s what this planet has to offer? Sand?”
Burne nodded. “Enough to fill every catbox on Nearth for the next million years.”
“Oh, there’s more than sand,” said Luther. “The pollucite is in a jungle. Then there’s this thing.” His unlit pipe traced a warm aberration that snaked along the jungle’s western edge.
“A river?” asked Francis.
“Yes, but an uncommon river, hot and pulsing, like some transcontinental blood vessel.”
Rhetoric made Francis itch. “How long before the ore’s in hand?”
“Three days by magnecar should get us to the river,” said Burne. “We put on the pontoons, float the car across, then forty-eight hours of plowing through the jungle and we’re at the northern edge of the vein. And, of course, it’s a round trip.”
“Oh.” Francis’s mood hit bottom. Ten days!
Francis detested the magnecar. The magnecar reciprocated. Whenever he drove down Nearth byways looking for insects, the spiteful invention invariably snapped a tread or cracked a chip, and he had to waste the rest of the afternoon reading a repair manual written in some cretinous rendition of English. Francis would have preferred spending ten days deveining shrimp.
“And once we’ve got the mineral on board?” he asked.
“If I had a real lab,” replied Luther, “I could remove the cesium in two hours. In Darwin’s lab…hydrochloric acid as the extracting agent…two days.”
“Does it matter if—?” Francis stopped when Kappie ran through the doorway, panting and thrilled.
“Look!” In her hands she cradled a face. Not a live face, but the grim toothy framework of a face.
“God’s sacred tax return!” said Burne. “The engines aren’t even cool and McKack here thinks she has to go find a fossil skull.”
Haughtily, Kappie cleared her throat. “Burne, dear, look closer. This is no fossil. We’ve got natives.” She held it out like a gift.
The fact of the skull was less troubling than its condition. There was no cap to the thing, only a ratty rim, crudely scalloped by human purpose and human tool. Francis, Luther, and Burne shuddered in unison.
“A head is typically pried open for one reason,” said Kappie softly. “To get at—”
“I saw no neurosurgery clinics on the horizon,” said Burne.
“Which forces us to assume that the brain was used as…nourishment.” She passed her discovery to Burne. “These interior scars lend weight.”
“Yes,” he said. “And look at the foramen magnum. This species walks upright.”
“Stop being so goddam deductive!” Kappie blurted. “Don’t you recognize a male adult human when you see one?”
Francis accidentally bit his tongue, and his eyes teared up. “Folks, I was wondering, do you think maybe I could stay on board?”
“I’ll vote against you on that, Lostwax,” said Burne. “This skull is lousy news, and we’d better start thinking of ourselves as a small army. I have a feeling we’ll be killing cannibals before the week is out.”
“I can’t kill,” said Francis. “Not me. It’s against my nature.”
“The bumblebee can’t fly,” noted Luther. “It’s against his nature. He’s too heavy for his wing size.”
“You needn’t tell me.”
“Then how does he stay in the air?”
Francis pondered a moment, then smiled weakly. “The fact is not widely known, but bumblebees possess a tenacious faith in miracles.”
THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN off first thing in the morning, only Kappie and Burne got to scrapping. The early sun was flowing through the porthole of Francis’s cabin, spotlighting his stomach, when two voices—loud but not screeching, razzing but not ridiculing—reached his ears. “You’re out of your skull!” “You’re not being a scientist!” He blinked himself awake, just as Kappie and Burne broke in.
“Hi, Lostwax, friend, how did you sleep?” asked Burne.
“Don’t soften him up,” said Kappie. “Francis, dear, we want you to settle an argument.”
“How did I sleep? How do you think I sleep in cannibal country?”
“Burne insists we should travel light,” Kappie continued. “Nothing but food, a proximascope, his yeastgun. Now, my idea is, hell, we’re the first scientists here. We can’t betray the cause of knowledge just because we might lose a day or two. We should take cameras, soil-test kits, wistar rods, shovels. We’re standing on the greatest find since…since Cortexclavus areteus.” She smiled coyly.
This hit home. “What does Luther say?”
“He’s on my side.”
Francis thought: Come on, Lostwax, don’t be Burne’s puppet. Besides, Kappie has breasts. “I guess I’m on your side, too.”
Throwing up his hands in mock despair, Burne marched out of the cabin.
Kappie shot a pleased look at Francis. “If we could fit Burne’s mouth over the accelerator grids,” she said, “we’d have enough exhaust to leave here and tour the rest of the Milky Way.”
By midday they had detached the magnecar, jammed it with the necessities of science and outdoor living, and locked up the ship. Each explorer carried a personal copy of the key, a bumpy cylinder threaded onto a thong and slung around the neck. Francis was also careful to bring the two most important objects in his life: his insulin kit and his corkscrew beetle.
When everybody was stuffed inside, Kappie, in the front seat, typed the proper latitude and longitude into the microputer. The magnecar got the message, spinning itself twenty degrees and ka-thunking away at an unimpressive velocity. Looking toward the back of the viewbubble, Francis endured neck cramps long enough to see Darwin become a tiny metal seashell on an endless beach.
Within an hour the monotonous dunes yielded to the kind of titanic chiseled rocks that invite one to see things. The magnecar zagged past forms that were to Francis morgs—the great spuming seabeasts of Planet Kritonia. Later they came upon a wall of upright screws, as if a colony of giant Cortexclavus areteuses was about to surface. This time Luther insisted not only on taking a photograph, but on putting Francis in it.
“Why do I have to be in it?”
“For scale,” Luther explained, lining up the shot. “And don’t stare into the lens. It looks gauche.” Francis was happy to oblige. He wanted to keep an eye out for cannibals with giant rib cages.
Before they left the screwrocks, Luther chipped a dozen samples into a plastic bag. Wandering again, Kappie returned with a bleached relic. The second skull differed from the first in that it was young and female. It resembled the first in that it had no cranium.
With daylight’s departure they stopped in a canyon and made camp. Burne brought out a luminon and placed it in the middle of things. “These are pure gems,” he said. “One flick of the switch and we’ll be dining by a light to rival the sun’s.” He flicked the switch, and there
was a faint mechanical cough—no light.
“Must be an eclipse,” Kappie said, no sarcasm in her tone because the words were enough. Burne snarled.
That night they dined by firelight. The main course was boiled beans from Nearth and raw three-eyed fish from Arete. Carlotta’s bounteous oxygen inspired the flame to a soaring blue fountain, superior to luminons in every way.
A wind came, nibbling at noses and earlobes. The scientists sought their sleeping bags and installed them close to the fire. For Kappie the occasion required horror stories told in strangled whispers. Francis fell asleep in the middle of a werewolf attack.
THE NIGHT LEFT DEW and took his fear—some of it, anyway. He awoke feeling strangely adventurous. Wiggling out of his sleeping bag, knocking away the sand deposited in his hair by the nightwind, he resolved to work up a spectacular appetite for breakfast. He said to himself: I’m more like Burne than I thought.
When he got to where the canyon turned a corner, he met a wonder and stood blinking. He was fewer than ten meters from the ruins of an immense spaceship.
“Burne! Kappie! Luther!” His friends were soon there. For a full minute amazement locked them into a tight band of passive onlookers. Slowly Kappie ventured forward until she could touch metal.
There wasn’t much left. Cabins, computers, greenhouses, stockyards, field generators, hull plates, reactors, holojectors—all, Francis surmised, had been pelted to nothing by the diligence of wind. Only the superstructure remained, rearing up from the sand like the ribs of some blessedly extinct behemoth, its every bone picked clean of carrion by a flock of steel condors. Ribs! Smiling hugely, Francis turned to Luther.
“That’s one mystery solved. Now we know about your blurry close-up.”
“Two mysteries solved,” said Luther. “Whoever flew this thing must have had a skull in his head.”