by David Coy
It was logical, after all, and you could tell what a thing did just by looking at it, if you just tried. One thing led to the next and to the next. Once you determined what the goal of the thing or things were, the logic just evolved out of them.
He’d had his failures over the last few months—but who wouldn’t have had them under these circumstances? He was way out in front here with this technology. This was cutting-edge stuff.
And the last two or three experiments looked really promising. He’d figured out how to overcome the stresses on the separate nervous systems when they were combined, as well as the sheer gross anatomical strain on bones and muscles that kept the organisms largely supine to reduce the damage such tensions produced over time. Part of the problem there, he’d discovered, was that he was trying to preserve far too much material in the combination. By truncating the larger components from at least one of the subjects, he could keep the overall mass down and hoped, in his next design, to enable something resembling real perambulation, even if it meant using four legs.
They should be able to move around for God’s sake, he thought. Not just flop around like blobs.
The problem was he wasn’t quite ready. He needed at least another week to perfect the technique.
But the heat was on, and he had to begin this morning with the Rachel woman. She was at the end of this particular experimental road. There could be no stalling for time. He had to plasticize her and her boyfriend to Jacob before the day was out, and it better work because if they died, he himself would be dead just minutes thereafter.
Jacob had provided the general design. He wanted a symbiotic sexual graft like the others but wanted the boyfriend to occupy a truncated, parasitic role with no nervous system interaction so that what was left of him would be a mere passive, eternal observer. He should be able to see and hear, at least for the time being, but not talk. Jacob could always change the configuration later if he wanted. Ehrlich didn’t like the basic idea—it wasn’t using his skill to best advantage. Hell, anybody could do that little job. All you had to do was extricate the eye, brain and stem, trim out the speech and motor centers to save space, graft it to an available venous structure, cover it with any epidermal tissue you had lying around, catalyze it all and actuate it. You could stick it anywhere for Christ’s sake.
Simple.
The tough part, the part he was really good at, was getting the nervous systems in sync and indistinguishable from one another. That took genius. What took even more genius was keeping the thing alive. He’d better be right about the stress factors—especially now.
“Fong!” he yelled. “I need you.”
Lin Fong had been assigned to him after his last ridiculous attempt at Brunigea blending. What a klutz. He’d killed at least two more subjects that they knew of, and the one he was able to preserve had been so weakened that she biased Erhlich’s entire next experiment. Her paltry metabolism had dragged the whole organism down, stressed it severely, and what could have been a brilliant construction turned out behaving like one of his early ones with barely any viability at all. Ehrlich had been so pissed he’d wanted to graft Fong to the wall and leave him there.
“Fong!”
Lin Fong jogged in from the adjoining chamber with a big fake smile on his face. Erhlich didn’t hate him. He’d known him since school. What he felt for Lin Fong was intense disdain—and a disgust for his all-tensed-up and trembling competitiveness. To Erhlich’s mind, he was like an eight-year-old child, gritting his teeth, running to catch the older, stronger boys, his little feet pounding, determined in his naive mind to catch them at any cost.
“Yes, Gerome?”
Ehrlich wanted to roll his eyes at Fong’s niceness, but contained it. “Can you clean up this mess, please? Then find Epstein and get the surgery ready. We’re scheduled to begin later this morning.” He knew the grunt work would infuriate Fong, and he took some pleasure in the fact.
Run, damn you.
“Okay. I’ll take care of it. Shall I assemble the tools for you?”
“No, I’ll take care of them,” Erhlich said and grinned inside.
You can’t even touch my tools, boy.
“I understand.”
“Okay,” Erhlich said brightly. “Thanks.” He could almost feel Fong’s quivering anger from across the room. “Thanks a bunch.”
* * *
Rachel had been reading and re-reading for over an hour. Leaning against the smooth wall with the notebook on her lap, her fingers turned the pages so lightly, it was as if they hardly touched them. Her face was flushed, and she kept shaking her head in disbelief and knitting her brow. Sometimes, one hand would go to her mouth and cover it momentarily as if what she was reading was just too much to believe. John lay close by, propped up on an elbow, watching her, yet not watching her; trying, above all, not to disturb her concentration, but wanting desperately to know, as well, what was in the notebook. At one point, he’d tried to sit next to her and read over her shoulder, but he got a steely look from her and slinked back to the floor. He’d just have to wait.
Finally, she squared the notebook on her lap, leaned her head back and took a deep breath.
“Well?”
She closed her eyes.
“Hello?” he said.
She opened her eyes slowly and looked at him without speaking. Her face was blank. She didn’t know where to begin. Which facts should she tell first? Which of the horrific details contained in this diary should she relate? She thought about just handing it over to him, but she didn’t want him to touch it just yet. She folded it gently closed.
She began to piece it all together. Jacob No Name had been telling the truth. He had been there a thousand years ago when the Verdian ship came to Earth. He had suffered the ordeal of repeated parasitic infestation and surgical removal of the insect progeny as Bailey Hall had described it. A final entry describes that she and her friends had found a way to escape by “hijacking,” as she put it, one of the Verdian sub-ships. It was safe to say that Bailey and the others in her party—Phil Lynch, Mary Pope, and the Indian—were long dead. But Gilbert Keefer had survived, kept alive by a parasite from the Verdian seas. He was here now in the form of Jacob No Name, the same stooped and hideous being. It was all right there in the faded pages of Bailey’s paper notebook. The drawings, thoughts and emotions—described with the purity of a child’s guileless mind were all there. The minutia was incredible. She couldn’t have done a better job herself.
“Well, do I have to guess or what? What the hell is it?” John said.
Her mouth rose up in an amused and misshapen grin. “No, you don’t have to guess,” she said, gently handing the notebook over to him. “Here. But don’t damage it. It belonged to someone very special.”
What had happened to them, she wondered? To Bailey Hall and Phil Lynch and Mary Pope? What influence had they had on the way things are?
The wasps were interesting to the biologist, but they were also frightening. They were a perfect biological weapon as Bailey had described them—conceptually clever, and Rachel knew from her own experience how devastatingly effective parasitic wasps could be. She was sure she had seen the species described in the notebook—finger-sized, iridescent wraiths hovering or zipping through Verde’s jungle—but they seemed to pose no threat to humans. It was fascinating to her that the Verdians had learned how to condition them to parasitize one species or another, selectively. The way they did it was brutal, and the fact that they had planned on releasing them on the human population was horrible, but the idea wasn’t without its fascination.
She pondered these things while John read. It occupied her mind and kept her from thinking about what Jacob had planned for them. But every so often the loathsome image of him would materialize and block out all other thoughts, and she would groan inside. He was waiting for her, and she would become paralyzed with fear. She wished she could disappear, just vanish like a puff of smoke. She wanted to become a gnat and fly out of this cage. They wer
e going to die. If not die, then change to something unrecognizable—something hideous and inhuman.
Her life had been good, she decided with finality. She had achieved some goals for herself, worked hard and enjoyed what she did. What else was there for her? There had been lovers and fun and now, though she’d never live to see her, a child. And there was John. She looked at him reading Bailey Hall’s notebook, his brow tight with thought and wonder, and the sight made her glad. He was so curious about things. She loved that about him.
“So what happened to them?” he asked. “I wonder what happened to these people.”
They lived, she thought. They lived until they died.
John handed the notebook back to Rachel, and she laid it gently aside. John scooted over and put his head on her lap. The warmth of her thigh was comforting.
He seemed suddenly so childlike to her—quiet and innocent with a child’s thoughts. She remembered when she first saw him, all virile and confident and talky, strutting around, telling her of this great biological find in the jungle. She smiled at the memory and stroked his face.
“This is bad,” he said.
“Yes,” she replied. “It’s bad.”
“Are you okay?”
“Not really. I’m just trying not to think about it.”
John wasn’t that fortunate. He felt his heart beginning to pound in his chest, partly out of fear, mostly out of anger. He wanted to beat something, hit something. He closed his eyes and shook his head.
Rachel saw the angst. “Tell me again about your family,” she said, trying to keep his mind off what was coming.
“Brazilian father of mixed descent who thought he was part German but didn’t know for sure. He worked as an assembler on a single contract with Yertz Aerospace in Sao Paulo his entire life. My mother was Brazilian, too. She claimed to be part Indian, you know, like the guy in the notebook there, some jungle dweller, but nobody believed her much. It was a family joke to tease her about shooting monkeys for dinner. She was tall and strong. She didn’t look like those old pictures I’ve seen of those extinct Indian people at all.” He smiled. “She was good to us and did her best, I suppose. Raising two wild-assed sons isn’t the easiest thing in the world, I guess. She died when I was twenty.” He paused. “Tell me about yours again.”
“Me? I don’t have a family. I was hatched. Hatched from under a rock, remember? That’s why I like bugs so much.”
“Come on,” he teased. “Tell me about your crazy sister.”
“She was not crazy,” she said emphatically.
“You said she was.”
“Well, she just had her own way of looking at things. She was an independent thinker is all.”
“Crazy.”
“All right, she was crazy.”
“Go on,” he prodded. God, he loved her voice. It was the sound of Heaven itself. He didn’t care what she said. He just wanted to hear its perfect sound.
“Hazel was a designer.”
“That part I know,” he teased. “Of what?”
“Okay, she designed . . . stuff . . .”
“What stuff? Tell me again,” he insisted.
“You would have liked my sister,” she said.
“We discussed that, too.”
“She had a nice butt.”
“Not as nice as yours.”
“Well, that’s true.”
He rubbed his hand along her leg, feeling its strength. He reached up; and when he touched her breast and found her nipple, it hardened under his gentle pinch. She moaned softly. He pulled her head down and kissed her.
“Let’s make love,” he whispered.
“Here? They can see in,” she whispered back.
“I don’t care. I want you right now.”
“I’m not sure,” she said, but she was. She knew they wouldn’t get another chance. They stood up and stripped out of their clothes. They moved behind a pile of ancient clothing to a spot partially hidden from the cell’s door. He watched her supple movements as she sprawled on the smooth, clean surface. The sight of her limbs moving made him dizzy. Her thick hair fell and framed her lovely face and her mouth and legs parted in unison. Her eyes were fixed on his in dreamy anticipation.
He slipped one arm under her head to cradle it and clasped her neck with the other as he mounted her. He breathed into her mouth as he kissed her. There was a moment of excited, nearly frantic adjustment as they shifted and struggled for perfect contact. Her legs slid up his legs and high up over his back, and he pushed. When their union was complete, they each gasped breath-moistened air and breathed it back through a wet kiss. He caught her scent, a sweet, fragrant musk that rose around them in a cloud of sexual warmth. She felt the thick muscles in his back and legs and hips as he worked. She wanted to stay joined like that forever.
He held her there and pumped in a strong and rhythmic motion that slowly gained tempo. He started to sweat, and she felt the slickness along his torso and on the inside of her legs where they pressed against his flanks. Their kissing became more ardent, reckless, wet and loud. He pumped and pumped, and she matched his thrusting as much as she could or just pressed up with her pelvis and let his movements do it all.
She chuckled thickly into this mouth from the sheer joy of it, and he bit her lips and sucked in response. She could feel sweat running down her sides and her hands and arms slid over his back as if oiled.
She felt her body begin to tingle and tickle from a spot between her legs, and the feeling radiated outward, uncontrollably. She gasped and groaned in ecstasy and watched his head go back, the veins and tendons in his neck stretch tight and his body turn to wet stone. From deep inside him came the sound made when two bodies become one—a deep guttural grunt that racked his strong frame with spasm after spasm.
* * *
Donna plucked the pupae from the transport’s vent and examined it in a beam of reddish sunlight. She could see the immature organism inside it, lighter in color, pressed firmly against the brown covering, seemingly crammed into it. It was large but nothing too remarkable for Verde’s Revenge.
“What is it?” Paul asked.
“Who knows? Some kind of larvae. This place is filled with things like this,” she said and tossed it down. “The fact that they’re raining from the canopy is odd though.” She mooshed it with her boots, and then ground it into the soft dirt. All she could think about was getting Rachel and John back.
“You have to help me,” she said to Paul.
“No. You’ll have to help me,” he smiled. “I know where they are.”
“How do we do it? Tell me.”
“You’re very direct, aren’t you?”
“Yeah? So?” she said puzzled.
“So we’ll take the direct approach,” he said.
* * *
They lay with sweat-slickened arms and legs entwined, the scent of their coupling adrift on the chamber’s still air like a warm fog. Rachel brushed a wet strand of hair from his forehead. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“For what?” he asked, almost breathlessly.
“For loving me.”
“That’s easy.”
“I remember when I first saw you,” she said.
“Do you?”
“Yes. All macho and cocky . . .”
“That’s me.”
“All cute and everything . . .”
“That’s me.”
“And dumb . . .”
“You’re confusing me with someone else, obviously.” She pressed her lips against his brow. He pressed back gently with his head and smiled.
“We’d better get dressed,” he said with a sigh and started to get up. As he turned, he saw the slovenly guard standing at the barred door, watching them with a leer. The sight of him made John tense up with anger.
“What?” Rachel asked.
“It’s our voyeuristic friend . . . What’s your problem, asshole!”
“Just enjoying the show,” the man said glibly and sucked his teeth, “well, what ther
e was of it.”
“Go away, creep,” Rachel said.
“You should be nicer to me,” the man said.
“No,” Rachel said. “I don’t have to.”
John stood up naked, and staring right back at the man, put his clothes back on. When he was done, he handed Rachel her clothes and used his body as a barrier from the guard’s dirty sight. When he turned around to look again, the bastard had slipped away.
“Snake," Rachel said.
“Rodent,” John said.
“Cockroach.”
“Piss ant.”
* * *
They sat down against the wall, close, arms tangled, waiting. Rachel’s mind started to race with fear, and she pressed her head against John’s shoulder. His scent swept the fear away like a breeze for a moment.
“I’m hungry,” she said.
“Me, too,” he replied.
“I guess they don’t like you to eat before surgery,” she said. It was meant as a stupid comment; an attempt at dark humor. What it did was drive home the appalling reality by saying it—like a spear, by the act of being thrown, pierces a heart
Rachel’s face contorted with fear, and she clung to John so tightly with her strong hands, he nearly winced. “I’m scared. I’m so scared,” she said. “Help me. Help me.”
“Sh . . .” he said. “Sh . . .”
“They’re gonna . . . they’re gonna . . . Oh, God . . .”
Words lost meaning to her, and she whimpered and squirmed against him, her feet and hands working uncontrollably. Screams rose up from deep inside her, only to be stifled by a wad of John’s cotton clothing clenched between her teeth. He put his arm around her and held her as tightly as he could. When he looked down at her, her eyes were clamped tight to block the universe out. He was sure the stress would catapult her into the abyss of a seizure. He held her tight, uselessly staring straight ahead, waiting for the seizure to carry her away to some stormy sanctuary, if only for a few moments.