“Jesus! You’re messin’ yourself, Dad!”
“Please, just get the tube back in.”
But his son had just backed away from him, looking at the body of his origin wasted by the disease. His son’s face was full of fear and loathing for the disease. Alec had spent hours explaining the nature of the disease, how no one was going to “catch” it. But now he could see that little of that must have sunk in. His son was seeing his own body lying there on the bed, spent and wasted.
“You’re always asking me to touch you like that, and there’s machines, Jesus. I mean, you can afford it.”
“Gene, the tube!”
But Gene had already left the room. Alec could hear him debating with his brother and sister about whose turn it was to help, and arguing over the personal-care machinery again. They hated him, or maybe they hated the disease, not that there was much difference anymore. And Marie was off at some club meeting again, so she couldn’t talk to them.
“Get in here, all of you!” No one answered. He’d shouted for several minutes before giving it up. He’d lost them. He couldn’t even tell them to do something as simple as throwing an empty milk carton away, and be sure they’d do it.
A hand was rocking his shoulder. His eyes blurred. Sometimes it seemed that, when he wasn’t remembering the bad times, he couldn’t recall their faces at all. The hand touched him again. “Rick?” he whispered.
“Yes, Mr. Bennett. Want a bath today?”
Alec looked down. Rick’s arms were protected by membranous gloves, a little paler than white flesh, more the color of cotton after it’s been boiled. He’d thought the man had finally gotten over the fear of infection. “Afraid of catching a cold?” Rick didn’t respond. “Talk to me, Rick.”
Rick busied himself with the covers. “Just trying to be sanitary, Mr. Bennett. Now, how about that bath?”
Actually, Rick was braver than most; money could buy a little courage now and then when he really needed it. But it was getting harder every year, and Alec wondered how long Rick was going to last. They all thought they were going to catch the disease, and he honestly couldn’t reassure them completely; no one knew enough about Bennett’s Sclerosis.
Sometimes Alec imagined tiny cracks appearing in his skin. Sometimes he could swear he could see them, and they would spread onto Rick’s arm, flaking the flesh away.
That first year after Alec came back from Bennett the media had been in a state of excitation that was almost sexual. The Bennett story had encompassed a number of topics sure to tantalize and entertain the public. The corporation-owned planet. The father’s questionable business deals. And the rich, pampered son who was the first and only known victim of an extraterrestrial disease. Payoffs to regulating agencies. Aggressive exploitation of the strange new landscape. Rumors of safety violations. Rumors of dragons.
An insistent touch at his shoulder. “Mr. Bennett? Your bath?”
“No,” he said, staring at the gloves covering Rick’s arms and hands. “No, no thanks.”
Rick didn’t seem surprised. In the best of times Alec had an intense fear of the water. Even taking a bath, Alec would picture himself sinking beneath the surface, unable, even unwilling, to raise his arms to save himself. Whenever he and his assistants drove or flew over rivers or lakes, he’d have to turn from the window. “Messages this morning?”
Rick pulled the recorder out of his back pocket and pushed the red button. After a squawk of interference Alec could hear the voice of Malcolm, nominal head of Bennett Corp. “…everything’s ready. Not much chance of anybody catching on. Needless to say, I would still like to talk you out of this. We have an entire squadron of pilots ready to send up after this thing.…”
“Shut it off,” Alec said.
“There’s more.”
“I don’t need any more.”
Alec looked at the wall. The polished mahogany beyond his feet stretched a good twenty feet left of his bed, another twenty feet right. Patterns of light and shade moved across the segments of bone that had been set into the wood planks.
The enormous skull had been taken apart; the three plates that had formed the cap of the skull had been spread and mounted here into a broad arch. A six-foot nasal ridge hung from the center. Below these pieces, bolted to the wall a few inches from the floor, were the numerous broken sections of a long, thin jawbone. Alec could slice his hand open with just a careless touch along that bone, but he was far removed from that kind of danger.
Rick followed his gaze. “I don’t know how you can stand to look at that thing. Makes my skin crawl just to be in the room with it.”
“In fact, I don’t think it’s that skull making your skin crawl.” It was hardly a skull, more like a collection of armored plate, what had been left once the skin had burned away. Alec could picture where the creature’s gas sacs had been—in both cheeks and temples, and suspended under the jaw. The eyes had been deeply set on either side of the nasal ridge. Dark red, glowing like the mahogany. The mouth so wide. That last time on Bennett he’d peered directly into that hunger, the jaws steadily expanding until he’d thought the mouth might swallow the ship whole.
It had been night, and his father had insisted that the pilot shield the exhaust so the creature’s infrared wouldn’t pick them up. His father had wanted to show Alec. He was always showing him things. The crash had been sudden, unexpected. An accident. No one had thought the dragon intended to attack. When the mouth had dropped open and they had stared at the night inside, it had seemed that the beast was showing surprise rather than hunger or rage.
Alec had been thrown out before the explosion. Soaked in the creature’s vital fluids, he’d escaped with just a broken leg and a few scrapes. Or so they had all thought.
Watching the shadowed mahogany for movement, for the faintest flicker of light, he heard Rick say, “So they think that’s the carrier. That thing.”
The fire had been nightmarish in its speed and volume. With three to four percent more oxygen than Earth, the planet was a fire-trap. The creature’s sacs had exploded. It had roared, its head blazing, wings shrinking in the heat.
Rick’s voice continued to intrude into Alec’s thoughts. “Why don’t you let them take care of it? You’ve got lots of pilots, and most of them better than you.”
Either he had been delirious or the creature had turned its burning skull his way, looked at him, before falling ponderously into the flames.
“You’re a rich man, but you’re ill.”
Alec willed himself to move, but could not. He felt huge, impossibly heavy. He felt his skin burning, imagined catching the sheets on fire. Rick started to move toward him. “Don’t…” Alec gasped. “Let it be.”
Rick stepped away from the bed and stared out the open window. “Just tell me when you’re ready, Mr. Bennett.” A tiredness was evident in the young healthy voice.
Standing by that window, Alec had first felt the symptoms of Bennett’s Sclerosis. He’d had his father buried on the planet.
Rick was pulling nervously at the arm coverings he wore, as if trying to protect a larger portion of his body. As if the sclerosis might reach out and penetrate his skin. As if Alec had brought back from Bennett something more than a viral disease—a native of that planet, an alien that thrived within the house of his body.
“My best people don’t think it’s contagious, Rick. I’ve told you that before.” That was true—his top researchers thought there had to be actual contact of body fluids—but all the same Alec felt like a liar.
Rick just stood there, his back to Alec, watching the sun through the window. “Just being careful, Mr. Bennett.” Rick scratched at his sleeves.
“I pay you enough, don’t I?”
“You do that. And I have a family to support. But that’s not the only reason I stay.” He said the last part almost angrily.
“I had a family.…” Alec stopped, embarrassed.
Alec had been back on Earth a month when he had felt the first signs of his illness
. He’d been standing in this bedroom he’d shared with Marie and watching nothing in particular, still feeling a little disoriented because Bennett’s sun was the same size and color as Sol and because this time of year the climate was similar.
His arms and legs had begun to tingle, a low-grade burn deep under his skin that had made him think at first that he must have stepped onto an exposed wire. No matter where he had moved, the strange, vaguely disturbing sensation continued. He had begun to feel dizzy and had sat back down on the bed for a time.
When after an hour the sensation had passed, he had gone in to work. He’d thought it was odd, but since it went away, he’d chalked it up to a sleep disturbance, the flu, maybe something he’d eaten. Then a month later his vision had begun to blur. A month after that, he had lost control forever. The illness progressed like a brush fire.
The disease made him feel, simply, other. It resembled multiple sclerosis in many ways, but MS had been cured over fifty years before. And Bennett’s Sclerosis, as it was soon to be labeled, worked more quickly, scar tissue grew more rapidly—like a fungus, some said—and there appeared to be no periods of remission. People wouldn’t touch him, as if afraid something might burst through his skin.
It had been like a machine running down. The immune system backfiring. The alien virus replicating the body’s nerve tissue. So his body had become alien to itself, the body had become a dragon, attacking itself. It couldn’t help itself—the invader had to be repelled. Scavengers in the immune system ate away at the myelin. First, its layers were pried apart, then nerve transmission began to short-circuit, then the myelin simply disappeared so that Alec became all exposed wires and loose electrical impulses. Scare tissue had crept over the nervous system the way ice sheathed the skeletal branches of a tree in winter.
His brain had been less seriously affected, his thoughts intact. Except sometimes thoughts arose that he did not recognize as his own.
“We’re running a little late,” Rick was saying, moving toward him. “Let me help you.”
He tried to turn himself in bed. His arms flopped uselessly; he couldn’t even feel them. He had the sudden, nonsensical fear that someone had cut them off when he wasn’t looking.
A tremor began in his right leg. He tried to shut it off, but the mental plea had no effect.
“When are you leaving?” Rick asked.
“Next week.”
“You know, I don’t understand you. What if this just makes it worse?”
“I made intimate contact with the dragon. I was drenched in it. They think that’s where the disease might have come from. Somebody has to get one of those things, dead or alive, so they can study it. Maybe they can find a cure.”
“Let them send a professional pilot. Or a full-time hero.”
“I have to see one again, myself. There may not be any more. My people have sighted only one the past four years. They think it’s the last dragon. I just can’t risk waiting.”
Rick kept his eyes on Alec. When he walked around the room, he moved awkwardly, his head turned toward the bed. It was obvious to Alec that he was trying to avoid looking at the dragon skull.
“Want to get ready for the day, now?”
“Sure, why not?”
Alec dozed as Rick began rubbing him down with a damp cloth. Rick used to carry him into the bathroom for this. Not anymore. Alec had felt too vulnerable, sitting slumped over the toilet. He used to fantasize Marie coming to him, taking off her clothes. They hadn’t made love in a very long time.
Someone stepped into the bedroom. He could sense someone by the door, just beyond the limits of his vision. He saw Rick turn around.
“Machines and some special clothes can do this, too, you know,” Marie said. Alec felt momentarily disoriented. Rick turned back toward the bed, looking irritated. He bent over, grunted, and pulled up Alec’s pants a little too roughly.
Alec tried to clear his eyes. He felt on the verge of tears. “Rick, my eyes…” Rick dabbed at his eyes and cheeks with a towel. Marie swam suddenly into focus. Dark-haired, doe-eyed, beautiful. “Machines have their place. But not here, not like this.” Rick was wiping at the metallic caps set into the back of Alec’s skull. “Careful, there. I’m going to be needing those soon.” He looked up at his wife. “So…when are you leaving?”
“An hour, maybe two. You forgot to give me the key to storage.”
Alec found himself chuckling mirthlessly. “I haven’t been too good with details of late.”
“Well, that makes you the perfect pilot, now doesn’t it?”
Rick sighed. “He’s a good pilot, actually. Or so I hear.” He worked so furiously at the clothes that Alec was afraid they were going to rip.
“It’s not safe!” Marie snapped.
“I have to do this. If you really still cared, you’d know that.”
“They’re really going to let you do this, huh? Go back there, find the thing?”
“They’re not going to let me do anything.”
“Chasing dragons, like some kid.”
“There are dragons everywhere, Marie.” Alec chuckled again. “It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.”
Marie’s voice broke. “Stay here, Alec. We’ll stay. I don’t really want to leave—you must know that. But I can’t sit still while you do this stupid thing. It’s bad enough watching you die from something you can’t help. But you don’t have to go back to Bennett. Stay, Alec. I’ll talk to the kids.”
Alec tried to control his trembling, but could not. He was broken meat, flopping, ugly. “No.”
Alec heard the sound of ripping cloth. Rick cursed and began removing the shirt.
The bedroom door slammed. Alec felt a need to say something, but the silence was suddenly intimidating.
“Mr. Bennett?”
“Yeah?”
“Good luck.” Rick gripped his hand, tightly enough that he eventually felt it.
Again he was seven years old. Again his father tossed him into the air. Again his father did not catch him. But he wasn’t so afraid this time—he felt himself flying, despite his weight, despite his awkwardness, despite his doubt.
Alec dropped rapidly toward the enormous canyon bisecting the northern hemisphere of Bennett. He was fully plugged—adjusting the intensity of his more private thoughts against the almost subliminal babble of the computer medium. At last achieving some sort of balance, he felt the mental underpinnings of his ghostlike arms and legs reach out gradually and drift into the composite wings and weave-layered hull of his craft.
The illusion was that these actions were all conscious and deliberate on his part. In fact, the computer’s controls had taken over and were leading him gently into the system, allowing him to become part of the machinery with the least possible discomfort and disorientation. Before most of his impulses to act had even reached the conscious level, they had been recognized, evaluated, then accepted or rejected by the computer. Reaction times were crucial on Bennett—with a gravity slightly higher than Earth’s, even a short fall could be fatal. The dragon had evolved under those conditions; no human could beat that.
Here, he was as light as a dream.
The compound’s staff was down eighty percent since his father died, for Alec no longer saw the need for personnel largely involved in resource exploitation. They had been all set up for him, the plane fueled, checked and ready, and everyone seemed remarkably compliant to his wishes. Malcolm must have already explained to them that their novice employer was stubborn. But when they first carried him in, Alec did notice a few disgruntled-looking pilots standing around.
He spun the plane upside down, then dropped and rolled to the left. Up here, it was as if his muscles could do anything. The computerized controls made each arm seem to have numerous independently moving joints. At times he was afraid of folding up like a suitcase and plummeting to the ground.
The predominant colors on Bennett were gray, gray-green, and red. Some of the red came from rock formations in and around the n
umerous canyons and short mountains. Earthquakes brought bits of red up into the gray rock fields.
The other red came from a short, thick plant—a strange amalgam of moss, fern, and shrub—with a brilliant crimson center. It grew everywhere on the planet. Many of these plants were spoiled by spots of black char.
A third of the plain south of Bennett Compound was now on fire, filling the thick air with carbon dioxide and tiny particles of black ash that attacked his windscreen like hyperactive gnats. Periodically, a cleansing spray washed through the microscopic V-grooves which tattooed the hull. Alec was aware of this spray as a vague, ghostlike dampness somewhere in his skin.
But even with the spray, particles occasionally burst into flame along the ship’s fuselage. A sudden nimbus of white light or a rainbow blazed off the forward canard.
The constant fires were a nuisance, but they destroyed enough plants to keep the oxygen level down. A couple of percentage points more, and Bennett could have been an inferno.
Every few minutes the computer cycled through a systems check. He could eavesdrop when he was in the right state of mind. Electrical schematics overlapped microhydraulic graphic simulations on the undersides of his eyelids. Weaponry alignments multiplied across the mindscreen, then suddenly burst like bright, incendiary bombs.
He could visualize the wide telemetry shield, fielding impulses from his skull plugs and transmitting them to the computer controls, then feeding it all back through his ethereal, yet perfect-looking arms and legs and the parts of the plane his arms and legs had become.
The plane dropped past red-brown walls dirty with gray-green and crimson growth. He didn’t see any fires in the immediate vicinity, but they were raging only a few miles away, and he appeared to be dragging the ash down with him. It swarmed over him so thickly that at first he thought his eyes had suddenly grown worse.
Broad plateaus and massive chimney formations rose from a valley floor still miles below him. At times they came close enough together to form their own narrow passages. He was afraid to drop much farther. It would be like a labyrinth down there. And he would need the height when the dragon ventured out, if it did.
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