by James Morrow
“The combination has never been tried on a human subject,” said Tez, kicking one of the stone jaguar-heads that hedged the steps. “I think you are too quick to ignore the possibility of cure through neurogestalting.”
“And I think you are too quick to ignore who is the chief surgeon at this hospital and who the resident.” End of debate.
Teot Yon was a victim of his profession, stonecutter. When not engaged in the universal Quetzalian pursuits of tea, chess, and incessant conversation, he had worked the eastern quarries, splitting and shaping the mammoth blocks that constituted the city of Aca. It was an honored trade. Stonecutters enjoyed the prestige of clergy. They also got maimed.
To dislodge a block, the cutters perforated its contours, filling the deep holes with water. When the water froze, a simple matter of inserting an icestick, the stone split. The sport of cutters was to stand on the block until a KRAACK was heard, then jump off.
Ten days ago a block holding Teot Yon had split with freakish silence. His fall damaged his spinal cord. It ripped one of his kidneys. He came to the Hospital of Chimec paralyzed and afraid.
An odd coincidence: the same sorts of icesticks used at the quarries were also used at the Hospital of Chimec, to freeze brain tissue and prevent its hemorrhaging during surgery.
On her knees, Tez clasped the stem of a large coyo and pulled until the root dangled freely. It was studded with short, pulpy shoots. Nesting the herb among the folds of her robe, she felt like a snake: a venomous snake equipped with a toxin it didn’t particularly want to use.
She would use it. She would bow to Mool’s deftness. To Mool’s wisdom. To Mool’s reputation.
But she would not bow to Mool’s unholy certainty.
FOR A GROWN-UP, Tez Yon was notably new-looking, remarkably vigorous, and unrepentantly playful. Since age five she had regularly staged marionette shows, a hobby she betrayed no sign of forsaking even now, at age thirty. Walk Naked in the Rain was the title of her most recent production. It was not for children.
Her frame was diminutive, as though a full-scale human had been magically reduced ten percent, all proportions intact. Her face suggested something far tougher than flesh. It was not molded but carved out, carefully, chip by chip. The resulting hard angles and sudden turns avoided austerity through a supple mouth. It smirked constantly, as if in on some joke that eluded her other features.
Besides puppets, Tez enjoyed wine, theory of any kind, and playing gobletball on Tolcaday afternoons. She was by some standards slovenly, failing to see any virtue in made beds, since, as she put it, you are either asleep or somewhere else. On her birthdays she was sad. This tradition traced to earliest childhood, when she had consistently misinterpreted her birthday parties to mean that she was dying. Why else would the world be going to such exorbitant lengths to cheer her up?
Science was her first love. Long after the preschool years, she aspired to know the why of everything. Why babies had a Babinski reflex, and why the reflex disappeared. Why people licked their upper lips when concentrating, and why there was humor. Tez wanted to understand light. She wanted to solve mud, decipher rocks, and unlock grass.
As an adolescent, Tez had come close to disproving the Darwinian theory of inheritance, a doctrine that traced clear back to her ancestors’ Terran days. Darwinists viewed evolution as an immense poker game in which Nature never folded. This obstinacy on Nature’s part apparently owed to the occasional big pots (the eye, the gill, the thumb, the wing), which presumably compensated for such painful losses as brontosaurus and Neanderthal man, and for such tainted winnings as predation and cancer.
By contrast, the beaten theory, Lamarckism, also imported from the old planet, saw evolution as willful improvement. Tez liked this. It had heart.
Her heretical experiments involved the chactol, a native fish that, through a combination of extraordinary parenting and unbridled luck, she had bred in her basement to the tune of eleven generations. Chactols had no eyes. As cave dwellers, they didn’t need them. She reared her chactols amid odorless food and omnipresent enemies, an environment that made eyes desirable. In her maiden attempt at surgery, she gave the first generation narrow incisions where sighted fish had eyes. The incisions went clear to the brain. Scar tissue closed them.
Tez performed the same operation on the second generation, then on the third, then on the fourth. By the fifth generation, the incisions were closed not by scars but by corneas. Finally: a tenth generation, and the only word for the healed wounds was eyes.
She stopped making incisions. The eleventh generation was born with eyes.
Medical school forced Tez to interrupt her work. When she came home for Legend Eve, she was devastated to find her specimens dead, their inherited eyes reduced to an amorphous putrescence. She vowed to repeat her experiments one day. If the Hospital of Chimec ever opened a research wing, as Dr. Zoco continually claimed it would, she intended to hang up her scalpel, tell Mool what she thought of him, and set biology on its ear.
AAARRRRRRRNNNNNNNNNNN. What was that?
Tez faced the forest. Everything was as usual: chunks of sun, fluttering leaves, slithering vines. In the distance a stone aqueduct sat high and silent while, farther still, the Library of Iztac and the Hospital of Chimec thrust their temples above the treetops.
She turned, stared across a kilometer of wasteland, and fixed on the wall, which at this distance, in this sun, seemed little more than a long mound of sand, hardly the impregnable rampart it was supposed to be. As she walked forward, the noise seemed to grow.
No question now. It came from behind the wall, presumably from the writhing hot dunes on the far bank of the river made of hate. Were the neurovores, the awesome devourers of central nervous systems, up to something?
The mildest recollection, the smallest mention, the puniest thought of neurovores was enough to rattle any Quetzalian to the bone. In Tez’s mind a doctor rushed up. “I’m sorry to tell you, my dear, but you have a tumor. You’re doomed.” That was how she felt.
Although only a dozen living Quetzalians had ever seen a tribe, neurovore phobia stood palpable in the soul of every citizen. Even today, unimaginative fathers and mothers were known to inspire discipline by announcing that the Brain Eaters, you see, have a taste for ungrateful little girls, and the Brain Eaters, I fear, come in the night and steal away boys who won’t consume vegetables, and the Brain Eaters, it is known, offer irresistible quantities of gold to parents who want to rid themselves of lippy progeny.
When these same children turned thirteen, they were told the facts of life. Not the sexual facts, which were mastered at four along with compound fractions and Latin, but the hereditary facts. Truth to tell, the neurovores were not some irrelevant aberration, a remote species with nothing to say to the human race. Truth to tell, neurovores and Quetzalians traced to the same genetic stock.
Tez shook. She would prefer being close kin to a carcinogenic virus.
Pure logic, of course, assured everyone that between the rapacious contents of the moat and the unscalable heights of the wall, their civilization would never be breached by Brain Eaters. But pure logic broke and ran, soiling its pants all the way, at the idea of even one neurovore, through some trick of Nature or turn of luck, finding itself inside Quetzalia. The conservative estimate, happily, was that the neurovores would not achieve a culture capable of bridges and ladders for at least eighty generations. By then it would be somebody else’s problem.
And yet the noise persisted, ominous and insectile. Returning to the forest’s edge, Tez paused under a tree and plucked a red, squooshy relative of the Terran apple, forgotten dabbling of some selective breeding hobbyist. Afraid that in her nervousness she would choke, she gave the fruit to her lipoca, which dined eagerly and listened with politeness to words it couldn’t comprehend.
“Mixtla, my friend,” the words went, “what an exquisitely stupid beast you are. I can say you have the mental powers of broccoli, and you don’t even care. And yet, somewhere deep w
ithin that delightfully absurd little brain of yours, you are hearing that sound, and, and”—here she began stuttering—“you sense that it signals a change for us all.”
Aaarrrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnn. “You know what I think, Mixtla?” Fear ground her flippancy to a grotesque whisper. “I think we’ve been invaded from outer space.”
5
AAAARRRRRRRNNNNNNNNNNN. They were submerged in dirt. Down, down the magnecar plunged. Theirs was a stop-start, back-forth sort of progress. The huge drill choked noisily on Carlotta’s crust.
Francis, of all people, had initiated the journey by musing absentmindedly that if no way existed to cross over the moat, then they must cross under it. Burne added a practical touch by recalling that the magnecar’s snout accepted a miraculous perforated bit that gulped down earth, chewing it, compacting it, and spewing it out with such velocity that the hole was transformed into a rigid tunnel. He had used the attachment only once before, to bore through a Giant Tree of Kritonia; given a sufficient portion of eternity, the diameter of a Kritonian tree reached two kilometers.
Francis loathed the journey only slightly more than he thought he would. He felt entombed. He sat facing the rear of the car, Ollie’s vitreousteel cage cradled between his knees.
“Don’t doze off,” Burne told him. “They might try to follow us down.”
“And what if they do?”
“Don’t keep it a secret.”
Lunchtime arrived, and from his pack Francis rummaged a dried Aretian fish. It tasted like aspirin. He pushed the more unsavory parts between the bars that roofed the vitreousteel cage. Before applying its mandibles, Cortexclavus inspected the fish by walking on it. The insect could smell with its feet. Francis remembered telling his ex-wife Luli about this common talent of insects, and Luli, who was not really listening, said, “I once put my foot in something that sure smelled.” Francis felt that in many ways this exchange summarized their relationship.
The car continued to lurch and burrow, its drill shrieking like a tortured animal. Francis watched the cylindrical wake and imagined he was a germ sitting in the anus of a corkscrew beetle. After an hour’s travel, the control panel announced that they were twelve meters down, presumably below the riverbed.
Burne rushed the news into the microputer. “The river’s edge is only a meter away,” he concluded, “if the Pythagorean theorem has anything to say about it.”
Under orders from the microputer, the magnecar ate its way into a new course, parallel with the planet’s surface, and jumped forward. “Ten decimeters,” said Burne. “Nine…eight…seven…”
But Francis’s mind was not on the metric system. It was on dying horribly. If the car were too high it would drill into the bed, and the river would gush upon them. Their chances would be those of sherbet on the sun.
“Three…two…”
“This is it,” whispered Luther.
“One.”
Francis gulped. Luther spat. The earth held.
New troubles arose. The dirt, wet with the river’s exotic seepage, clung to the bit, filling the threads. The bit became smooth and impotent, its sound a blend of gargling and birdsong.
Burne killed the drill motor, threw it suddenly into reverse. He backed up the magnecar. Clots of mud took to the air and splattered the front of the viewbubble.
Burne pushed the drill’s forward lever and drove mole-blind into the mud. The bit penetrated ten centimeters and clogged.
Each man took a sweating, swearing turn at the controls. Luther got the car to go two meters per hour. Francis, exhibiting a talent he didn’t know he had, boosted their speed to three.
When at last they reached the far side of the moat, Luther’s wristmeter disclosed that they had drilled all afternoon and well past sunset. They could no more see the galaxy’s stars above than the planet’s leaden core below, yet their knowledge of the night was throbbingly real. Each man winced with fatigue.
“Let’s assume our wall is thirty meters thick.” Burne twiddled the machscope controls. “Right, Luther?”
“Fifty to be safe.”
“This toy will tell us for sure.”
The machscope blinked on, its needle turning in silent circles. Burne pressed a button inscribed with the numeral 12, the needle accelerated, and a listless electric sound bleeped out whenever a revolution was completed. The sound meant: solid stone twelve meters above.
Progress came easily now. The earth was firm, and their speed increased. Three meters bounced by. Six. Nine. The machscope began to pulsate. Bright, dim. Bright, dim. A sound like a happy piccolo filled the magnecar. The sound meant: open air twelve meters above.
Burne glanced at the odometer. They had traveled under nine and a half meters of foundation. “Narrower than we thought, but reasonable.” He brushed the keyboard and the microputer started them on a severely angled ascent.
Thrown against the rear of the viewbubble, Francis steadied the vitreousteel cage and told Ollie not to worry. Forty minutes later, the bit broke the surface and the magnecar shot out of the hole, righting itself on solid ground.
They had tunneled into a starless room of glass.
“GOD’S MAGIC MOUSETRAP!” said Burne when everybody was out of the muck-encrusted car. Luther activated a luminon, spilling light in all directions.
The room was not large—almost any eighty-thousand-dancs-a-year vice-president back on Nearth had an office that dwarfed it—but its featureless vacancy made it seem ample. Austere taste had furnished the place. Before the Nearthlings arrived, there was nothing in it. No window, chair, couch, bed, rug, door, baseboard, fissure, or mousehole. No dust. The four identical walls were as smooth and dark as frozen beanlouse-blood. The high ceiling, also smooth and dark, capped the room like the lid of a specimen jar. The floor was dirt.
Luther walked to the south wall and touched the surface tentatively. “Transpervium,” came the verdict, “probably from Eden Three.”
Transpervium, an obsolete synthetic, had at one time been used for the portholes of spaceships. It could withstand meteor showers, intense radiation, laser beams, and almost anything else you cared to throw at it. From one side transpervium was dull as lead, from the other it was just like a window. The dull side mockingly faced the scientists. Whatever wonders lay beyond, they would remain tonight unseen.
Francis did not like the room. Its sterile symmetry chilled him; its infinite opacity made him feel he was inside a blind man’s eye. As far as he could tell, the room’s only virtue was that it was not the magnecar.
He looked at the magnecar. At least it had aspects: lights, treads, a viewbubble, and, of course, the drill, jutting like a nipple designed to suckle some gross war machine. A pit yawned where the magnecar had blundered into the room, halfway between the south wall and the center of the floor.
Holding Ollie’s cage tight, Francis kicked the nearest surface. “I don’t suppose transpervium ever cracks,” he said wearily.
“Easier to carve marble with your teeth,” Luther replied.
Burne beamed a wicked smile at Francis. “Of course, maybe a Cortexclavus could chew through it. Shall we test his nose against transpervium?”
Francis pulled the cage hard against his stomach. “Don’t think of such things. You could damage him.”
As an alternative, Burne drew out his yeastgun and fired point-blank at the north wall. Like a harlot fly encountering a viewbubble, the bullet splashed helplessly.
“So we go down to riverbed level and we keep on going,” said Luther automatically. “We dig far, really far, and we don’t end up in any more goddam crystal outhouses.”
Burne said, “Let me remind us that we’re all about to fall down. I vote we make camp here, nab a good night’s—”
“First we’d better fix that.” Luther was pointing to the ruptured floor. “The savages haven’t the manners to let us sleep.”
There was much huffing and sweating until at last the magnecar blocked the hole. If the room smelled like a stink bug’s armpit, Fra
ncis did not mind. For the first time in days, he felt that being eaten was unlikely.
DINNER WAS CONCISE: dried fruit, dried fish, freeze-dried coffee. Only fifteen words were spoken during the entire meal. Francis said, “Do you suppose somebody built this room?” and Burne replied, “Do you suppose God can do long division?”
As if to persuade himself that he was in some snug bedchamber on Nearth and not some barren crypt on Carlotta, each man methodically smoothed his sleeping bag into a corner and piled his belongings—electrostylus, wristmeter, carrybelt—on the tidy surface of an imagined nightstand. Burne reduced the luminon to a whisper of light. In minutes the organic drone of snores echoed off transpervium walls.
Francis’s snores were not among them. He thought: Why can’t I sleep?
Apparently his body was in one of those moods. It demonstrated how wide awake it was by opening its eyes to their fullest. An hour snored by. The corkscrew beetle scuttled in its cage.
Bits of Francis’s life jumped in and out of his mind. Losing his insect collection, losing his son. Finding Cortexclavus, finding he had diabetes. Pretty Darlene Spinnet, who taught biochemistry down the hall. Pretty Kappie McKack, who got her head sucked out. Francis decided that his life was a kinepic edited by someone who didn’t care what he was making as long as he got the splices to hold.
Why can’t I sleep? He rolled over and faced the magnecar, blinking until its dim bulk came into focus. And suddenly he knew.
Someone had entered the room.
Francis felt his stomach unhook itself and plunge downward. His impulse was to shout and wake his friends. But something held him back. Mysteriously, the terror left him as quickly as it had come. He said to himself: It’s true, I am more like Burne than I thought.
The stranger was no savage, but a timeworn man in dark robes. He sat on a stool. Tall and serene, with a dense white beard that came to a perfect point, he seemed oblivious to Francis and the magnecar, so attentive was he to the movement of his hands. Slowly, precisely, with the help of slender fingers and a tongue that curled firmly against his upper lip, the man fashioned an intricate cocoon from yarn, hide, and strips of supple wood.