Analog SFF, September 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  His superiors had been correct to send an investigator here!

  But, Vik realized, he now held the power to even those future odds. Once he transmitted a description of Besnoitia and its mite back to Eiriksson—even better, what if he managed to carry home a sample of koningmycin for analysis?—then his own people could free themselves of the parasite, too. Who knew what insights and breakthroughs might follow? And what accolades for the humble soldier who'd brought his people such knowledge?

  He was picturing himself at the christening ceremony for a battlecruiser bearing his name, when he realized that Dr. Steibs had risen from her chair.

  “Now that you can see the mites, you can assist in your treatment. After feeding, the mite disengages for 48 hours, until its next blood-meal. You'll find them lying in your bed-sheets, or hiding in corners. Kill them as you discover them.”

  “And then I can leave this room?”

  She smiled. “72 hours after the last sighting, yes. Though you'll still need to complete a full two weeks of the koningmycin to guarantee the eradication of your Besnoitia.”

  Even as the curtain slid closed, Vik approached the inverted juice glass on the floor. He bent over and lifted the glass, leaving its inhabitant behind. Then he returned the glass to the floor right-side-up—with, as his therapeutic pathology instructor had been fond of saying, extreme prejudice.

  * * * *

  Vik's clothing, fumigated and laundered, had preceded his breakfast through the delivery slot this morning. While the maroon turtleneck sweater, black denim trousers, and lightweight boots were barely familiar to him—he'd chosen the ensemble from his ship's extensive wardrobe, and worn it for less than a day—he found their weight and varied fabrics reassuring after a week of flimsy hospital pajamas.

  When Dr. Steibs opened the curtain he told her, “I'm going to miss our little chats.”

  She granted him a slight smile. “I'm sure that you'll find your doctor in the rehabilitation clinic at least as entertaining. Or have you recovered your memory since yesterday?”

  Vik hurried to don an expression of Deep Concern. “No, nothing at all.”

  “The Hollebeke clinic has a very good reputation; they've managed tougher cases than yours. Stil....”

  “What?”

  “The train to Hollebeke doesn't come through until late this afternoon. You might want to spend the next few hours wandering around town. See if you can stir up any recollections before you leave.”

  Vik nodded. “We're done, then?” He stood.

  “Apart from some paperwork, yes.” She wagged a finger at him. “And you must finish all of your antibiotics.”

  He patted the trouser pocket that held his bottle of pills. “Don't worry. I'm not going to lose these.”

  Vik turned toward the room's locked door.

  “One last thing,” said Dr. Steibs.

  He turned back. She pointed to her drawings.

  He had to laugh. “Believe me, Dr. Steibs—after three days of hunting and squashing mites, I'm never going to forget that pattern!”

  She smiled politely. “Humor me.”

  With a sigh, Vik glanced at the drawings, then back to her. “Still the same pattern. Really.”

  She reached toward the wall beside her window, pressed some control there. Vik heard a click from the door's lock. As he turned again toward that door, Dr. Steibs said, “Good luck, Mr. Boeykens.”

  One day, Vik thought, Dr. Steibs's descendants were going to wish that his luck had been a good deal worse.

  * * * *

  “All right. No, don't follow him any further. Yes, okay. Good.” Steibs hung up the phone. She clucked her tongue as she stared out her office window.

  After strolling apparently aimlessly through the village for over an hour, Boeykens had abruptly headed straight for the pub where he'd originally been picked up. But he spent only a few seconds loitering outside that pub before turning and marching into the nearby woods.

  The woods where last week they'd found his spaceship.

  Until the ship had been discovered, Steibs hadn't been as convinced as her colleagues of her patient's otherworldly origin. But after that discovery—not to mention the analysis of his genetics—she'd relinquished any doubts.

  Steibs sighed. No one could be sure that “Boeykens” came from the same world that had sent the infertility plague. While his DNA did bear many of the same engineering residues as that of the modified Wolbachia, this was at best circumstantial evidence—some other world might have happened to employ the same splicing enzymes. She'd hoped to get a rise out of him when she'd related the story of the discovery and analysis of the Wolbachia plague; if he'd been surprised by her tale, though, he had covered his reaction immediately. He really was very good.

  Steibs turned back to her computer, where her unfinished report waited.

  They'd been fortunate that the bartender had recognized the mite crawling along his counter, and that he'd so promptly called the health department. She'd already written a commendation for her assistant's quick thinking in knocking out Boeykens and hauling him to the hospital. Even so, two-dozen people had needed prophylactic koningmycin, and the bar had to be closed for intensive fumigation.

  Wherever he came from, Boeykens would presumably soon be flying home to share the discovery of koningmycin with his people. In that, at least, she could take some professional pride—she was a public health officer, after all.

  Steibs lifted her two drawings from the desk. She winced at the clumsiness of their execution; still, she felt that she'd captured the mite pattern rather nicely.

  She had not enjoyed the heated arguments over teaching Boeykens about Besnoitia and the mite. The military had been against treating him at all, not to mention educating him and handing over samples of koningmycin. In the end, though, it was her colleagues’ plan—conceived, engineered, and put into a freezer half a century ago, against the possibility of someday receiving just such a visitor as Boeykens—that had carried the day.

  Yes, Boeykens's people would rid themselves of Besnoitia. And yes, they would therefore gain pattern-matching skills to rival those of Nieuw Vlaanderen. But those skills would never be used to attack her world.

  Twice a year, for the rest of his life, Boeykens was going to develop a mild respiratory infection. His sneezes were going to expose his colleagues to a very special pair of viruses, both of which should spread quite widely in just a few seasons—unimpaired by koningmycin or any other antibiotic. Then, once a given populace developed a high enough prevalence of the viruses, a very specific side effect would kick in.

  As a test, Boeykens's isolation room had been sprayed not only with the two viruses but also with an aerosol mimicking the virus-induced pheromones of an infected population. The side effect had worked perfectly, leaving Steibs confident that her descendants would never meet anyone from Boeykens's world—unless it were her descendants who took the initiative.

  She looked again at her drawings. The image of a mite that humanity hadn't noticed for millennia. And the image of her own planet.

  An image that Boeykens hadn't noticed for days.

  Copyright (c) 2008 David W. Goldman

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Serial: TRACKING: PART II OF III

  by David R. Palmer

  * * * *

  Illustration by William Warren

  * * * *

  * * * *

  It's wisely said that “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent"—but sometimes even the very competent have few alternatives.

  * * * *

  SYNOPSIS

  Archivist's Note(I)

  Quoting some of her own favorite self-deprecating, self-descriptives, Candy Smith-Foster is a “Plucky Girl Adventurer,” a “Spunky Girl Aviatrix,” an “Intrepid Special-Ops Girl,” an “Apprentice Girl Assassin,” and, last but certainly not least (and, factually, the absolute, literal truth), the “Plucky Girl Savior of Our People.” (Not to mention,
as she is too, too fond of saying: “etc.")

  An eleven-year-old Homo post hominem child, like the rest of us she is (we suspect) the product of evolution's genetic engineering, courtesy of the great influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, which killed at least fifty million people worldwide, and possibly as many as a hundred million, during its approximately two-year rampage.

  We speculate that what happened is that, at the moment of conception, the flu virus invaded either or both of the participating gametes before or during formation of a very few female zygotes. Something in the virus mutated the DNA content of the target cells, which thereafter gestated, were born, and grew up to contribute, as mothers, half of the new matrix which fitted together two generations later to produce Homo post hominem: Man who follows Man.

  Immune to all “human” disease; smarter, stronger, faster; with visual perception extending further into the ultraviolet and infrared spectrum; possessed of more sensitive hearing and olfactory senses; even “breeding true” when crossed with Homo sapiens; emerging finally from concealment within the population which produced it to inherit Earth after our predecessors eliminated themselves in a brief, efficient, radiation-triggered biological war, Homo post hominem is apparently destined to replace Homo sapiens.

  Soo Kim McDivott, himself, as it turned out, a “typical” overachieving hominem, with doctorates in pediatrics, psychiatry, and anthropology, and a Tenth Degree Black Belt in karate, known as “Teacher” to hominems worldwide, had discovered the new species while exploring the question of “nurture versus nature": whether the actions of “normal” (i.e., mediocre or worse) parents might tend to keep intrinsically genius-level children from achieving their potentials, inadvertently, or possibly even due to resentment.

  Orphaned when her birth parents were killed in a traffic accident months after she was born, Candy was adopted immediately by Marshall and Megan Foster ("Daddy” and “Momma,” in Candy's lexicon), Teacher's long-time friends, and, in Marshall's case, in everyday life an internationally well-regarded pathologist, but actually a top-secret government biowarfare consultant.

  Following several years’ preternaturally rapid intellectual growth, possibly contributed to by the whipsaw effect of Momma's quietly clandestine encouragement and furnishing of any reading matter the child indicated a curiosity about, while Marshall, unaware of Megan's educational supplementation, worked to raise a “normal” girlchild, full of “sugar and spice,” Candy was revealed at about age five to be a Homo post hominem, and rather an advanced one at that.

  Shortly thereafter, Megan died of leukemia. Teacher moved in next-door and assumed her role as Candy's apparently clandestine educational facilitator and mentor, while Daddy, now aware of the situation, continued in his role as brake. Teacher also took her on as his personal karate student.

  By the time Khraniteli zealots struck, wiping out all unprotected Homo sapiens on Earth, Candy, at age eleven, had absorbed substantial elements of a college education and achieved a Fifth Degree Black Belt in karate.

  Home alone at the time (Marshall had been summoned to Washington, which was in effect carpet-bombed during the attack), Candy rode out the holocaust in the huge shelter complex which Daddy had had built in secret deep beneath their small-town Wisconsin home. Thereafter she and Terry, her “retarded adopted twin brother,” a Hyacinth Macaw and her closest companion nearly from birth (with a history of never having been wrong about whether a new acquaintance was really friendship material), emerged into a depopulated world.

  Learning of her Homo post hominem heritage from the letter Teacher had left her, Candy set off to search for others of her kind. The first person she met during her travels was “Adam,” a thirteen-year-old hominem boy (actually named Melville Winchester Higginbotham Grosvenor Penobscot-Jones, IV, by his parents, who had died in the holocaust), whose brashly obnoxious, rich-kid persona concealed astonishing electromechanical, musical, paramedical, and culinary talents. Ultimately, these qualities, as well as his compulsion for outrageous puns, helped endear him to her almost as much as the fact that, within hours of meeting, they had saved each others’ lives:

  Initially, during their first encounter, Adam was unconscious, trapped in a burning car. Employing conscious control of hysterical strength, which Teacher had taught her as part of karate discipline, to extract him, she then had to overuse it further to remain conscious long enough to complete the necessary trauma treatment, which included stitching a nicked femoral artery (she had acquired advanced paramedic training “at Daddy's knee"). This cost her a metabolic burnout and, ultimately, cardiac arrest. However, her treatment had been adequate: Adam woke shortly afterward, found her unconscious and fading, was able to restart her heart when it stopped, nursed her back to health, and they've been together since.

  During their search they encountered Rollo, an adult hominem physician with years of worldwide survival skills, who turned out to be a sociopath, living with his dead wife's cat, Tora-chan, who hated him. Rollo offered Candy his loyalty, skills, and experience in exchange for access to her bed. Candy deliberated and concluded, objectively, the benefits to Adam and herself outweighed the cost, and was on the point of accepting when Terry, who had disliked the man on sight, bit him severely. Rollo went berserk, tried to kill the bird, and, when Candy used her karate skills and hysterical strength to intervene, he turned on her. Strong and fast, he hurried her; she was forced to kill him. Thereafter, of course, Tora-chan joined their party.

  Later, in California, while chasing on foot after a half-glimpsed child, Adam tripped and broke his arm; then taught Candy to fly his ultralight aircraft to perform a grid search, which turned up Kim Mellon, a young computer engineer, and her daughter, six-year-old Lisa, who joined them in the quest.

  A subsequent engine failure forced Candy down in the Sequoia National Forest and separated her from the others. Repairing and restarting the engine, she observed a contrail that led her to the Vandenberg Space Shuttle Launch Complex, where she found Teacher and his community of hominems in the process of readying an orbiter for launch.

  They had learned of a huge strontium-90 bomb left in orbit by the Khraniteli, programmed to descend and render the Earth uninhabitable for unprotected human life for the next two hundred years. Because the bomb lay in geosynchronous orbit, far above the shuttle's normal operating range, the necessary modifications meant the launch would be a one-way, suicide flight: The three-person crew would neutralize the weapon and die.

  Almost at the last moment, the robotic device with which the hominems had planned to disarm the bomb proved inadequate, and Candy realized that only the unique combination of her diminutive size and hysterical strength could save what remained of humanity, so she volunteered for the mission.

  Once in orbit, however, crewman Kyril Svetlanov turned out to be a Khraniteli agent and killed the third crewmember. And while Candy managed to kill him and then successfully disarm the bomb, in the process she learned that the Khraniteli were alive, well, and still actively plotting to kill off everyone who wasn't one of them, which meant all her newly found hominem friends and unofficial family members such as Adam, Teacher, Kim, and Lisa still were in danger.

  At about the same time, Adam and Kim, searching the sequoias for Candy's downed plane, were coming to the unlikely conclusion that Terry's endless blatherings, reminiscent of CNN's spaceflight coverage, might actually be connected to Candy; that perhaps she was not where they thought she had crashed; that, unlikely as it seemed, she really might be in orbit, and in danger.

  Belatedly, Candy realized that, with the detonator pulled, she could send a warning back down to Earth in the bomb-delivery vehicle; she could reprogram it to land at Edwards Dry Lake air force base—then it occurred to her that maybe she could ride down in it herself. But the vehicle was far from man-rated, and, by the time it touched down, she was again clinically dead.

  However, having become convinced by then that Terry's continuing spaceflight monologue was in fact a direct, realtime link
into Candy's mind, Adam and Kim made it to Edwards just in time to extricate her from the smoking hot reentry vehicle, and for Adam again to resuscitate her.

  Thereafter, Candy, Adam, Kim, Lisa, Terry, and Tora-chan moved in with the hominems in Teacher's growing community near Mount Palomar, where, following Candy's recuperation, he and his colleagues resumed her education.

  To Candy, however, the most enjoyable part was special-operations training under Danya Feinberg, an ex-Mossad field agent, and number two among Teacher's pseudomilitary operatives. With her karate Black Belt as a departure point, Candy progressed rapidly, achieving proficiency in the most advanced levels of hand-to-hand combat, use of nonstandard weapons, plus the more arcane skills which form the basis of special operations: infiltration, taking out sentries, undercover work, interrogation, ultra-long-range sniper marksmanship, and the like.

  Several months into this idyllic existence, one of the hominems’ recon expeditions brought back word from the Russian/Kazakhstani Urals that Candy's adoptive father had not died in the bombing of Washington; that he might in fact still be alive, a prisoner of the Khraniteli in the laboratory at their main base, Serdtsevina Rasovyi. But, Teacher told her, regretfully, it would be at least another six months before the hominems could mount another expedition into the area.

  The delay simply was not to be borne. Within hours Candy had gathered copies of the hominems’ expeditionary recon reports, weapons, clothing, supplies, and equipment, left a note assigning Lisa Terry-sitting duties, and was in the air in a “borrowed” bushplane, bound for Serdtsevina Rasovyi.

  Her absence was not discovered until day's end. However, little detective work was required to figure out where she was headed.

  At which point Teacher reconsidered: It was time after all, he announced, that they went on the offensive, and the hominems began preparing an all-out invasion. Their primary objective was elimination of the base and cleaning out the Khraniteli living there; but rescuing Marshall and intercepting Candy before she got into trouble were next on the to-do list.