Dangerous Offspring

by Steph Swainston

  –Splash! Splash!

  Freezing muddy water swirled up around me. I sank in a chaos of bubbles. Something tugged me and I broke the surface, spluttering. Up came Cyan, and the Vermiform held us above the algae of a stinking, misty swamp.

  The sky was monochrome grey, filled with cloud and a hazy halo where the sun was trying to break through.

  ‘Infusoria Swamp.’

  Cyan wiped slime off her face and hair. ‘Hey! This is my dream and I want to go somewhere nice!’

  ‘Shut up!’ The Vermiform seethed in fury. ‘All for you, little girl! We don’t see why we have to do this and now we’re being chased! We don’t know how to get rid of it. We don’t know where to go next that won’t kill you!’

  She shrieked in frustration, grabbed handfuls of worms and tried to squash them but they forced her fists open and crawled out.

  ‘Shifting is sapping our strength,’ said the worms.

  ‘Come on!’ I shouted at it. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘It’s my dream so get off me!’

  ‘Stop squeezing us.’

  ‘Piss off and keep pissing off, piss-worms!’

  A colossal blob of gel flowed towards us on the water’s surface. Flecks and granules churned inside it as if it was a denser portion of the swamp; it extended pseudopodia and started to wrap around the outlying worms.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Cyan.

  ‘Amoeba.’ The Vermiform pulled its worms out and hoisted us up higher with a sucking noise.

  ‘Isn’t it rather large?’

  ‘We’re very small here.’

  ‘Look at the sky!’ said Cyan.

  The bright patch was growing in size. Violet forks of lightning cracked the sky in two, leapt to the swamp, hissed and jumped between the reeds. The Gabbleratchet arced out.

  The Vermiform gave one completely inhuman scream with all its strength and jerked us out–

  –A hot plain with cycads and a volcano on the horizon. Giant lizards were stalking, two-legged, across it towards a huge empty sea urchin shell with a sign saying ‘The Echinodome–Sauria’s Best Bars’.

  A flash of green on the scorched sands before us. The Gabbleratchet burst towards–

  –Cyan screamed and we both fell onto a cold floor, knocking the breath out of us. We were in an enclosed space; we Shifted so fast my eyes didn’t have time to focus.

  The Vermiform parted from us in one great curtain. Its exhausted worms crawled around with Sauria sand and Infusoria gel trickling from between them. I stamped my feet, feeling water squeeze out of my boot lacings.

  ‘We must have thrown it by now,’ the worms moaned. ‘We must have…We think…’

  Cyan and I looked up and down the corridor. It was unpainted metal and very dull. ‘That’s more steel than a whole fyrd of lancers.’

  The Vermiform started sending thin runners around the curve of the corridor. ‘We’re above Plennish,’ it said.

  ‘Wow,’ said Cyan. ‘What an imagination I have.’

  I found a tiny, steel-framed window. I stood on tiptoe and tried to peer through the thick glass. ‘It must be night time. Look at all the stars.’ There certainly were an awful lot of stars out there, filling the whole sky and–the ground! ‘Cyan, look at this–there’s no ground! There’s nothing under us but stars!’ I looked up. ‘Oh…wow…’

  ‘Let me see,’ she said.

  I refused to let her take my place at the little window. I pressed my face to the glass, gazing intently. ‘The grey moon fills the whole sky!’

  ‘It isn’t a moon,’ said the Vermiform. ‘It’s Plennish. It’s grey because it’s completely covered in Insect paper.’

  ‘Ah…shit…All that is Paperlands?’

  ‘Yes.’ It sighed. ‘The Freezers once tried to bomb it. Now radioactive Insects come from there to infest many other worlds.’

  ‘I’d like to fly around outside. There’s so much space.’ I looked down again–or up–to the stars. A little one was racing along in relation to the rest, travelling smoothly towards us. It was so faint it was difficult to see. I said, ‘A star is moving. It’s coming closer fast. Shift us out of here.’

  A shiver of apprehension flowed over the Vermiform. ‘We can’t keep going. We’re exhausted.’

  ‘You have to!’

  ‘We can’t…We can’t! Anyway, this is a refuelling dock. If any ship tries to land without the protocol the Triskele Corporation will blow it to cinders.’

  I glanced out the window, and saw them from above. Horse skulls like beaks, pinched withers falling to bone. Their long backs carried no corpses now. Sparks crawled around them, flicked up to the window glass; they ploughed straight into and through the metal wall.

  ‘It’s the Gabbleratchet!’

  Human screams broke out directly underneath us. The Vermiform threw a net of worms around Cyan and myself. Sparks crackled out of the floor beside us. The muzzle of a hound appeared–

  Rushing air. I was falling. I turned over, once, and the black bulk of the ground swung up into the sky. The air was very thin, hard to breathe. I fell faster, faster every second.

  I forced open my wings, brought them up and buffered as hard as possible against the rushing air. I slowed down instantly, swung out in a curve and suddenly I was flying forwards. I rocketed over the dark landscape. Where was I? And why the fuck had the Vermiform dropped me in the air?

  And where was Cyan? Had it separated us? I looked down and searched for her–saw a tiny speck plummeting far below me, shrinking with distance. I folded my wings back, beat hard and dived. She was falling as fast as I could fly. She was spinning head over arse, so all I could see was a tangle of arms and legs, with a flash of white panties every two seconds and nowhere to grab hold of her.

  ‘Stretch out!’ I yelled. ‘Stretch your arms out!’

  No answer–she was semi-conscious. She wouldn’t be able to breathe at this altitude. I reached out and grabbed her arm. The speed she was falling dragged it away from me.

  She rotated again and I seized a handful of her jumper. I started flapping twice the speed, panting and cursing, the strain in my back and my wings too much. Too much! We were still falling, but slower. My wings shuddered with every great desperate sweep down–and when I raised them for the next beat, we started falling at full speed again.

  ‘Can’t you lift her?’ said a surprised voice, faint in the slipstream. A wide scarf wafted in front of my face, its ends streaming up above me. It was the Vermiform: it had knitted some worms around my neck!

  ‘Of course I can’t!’ I yelled. ‘I can barely hold my own weight!’

  ‘Oh.’

  The scarf began spinning around us, binding us together. More worms appeared and its bulk thickened, sheltering Cyan but her head bobbled against my chest.

  We fell for so long we reached a steady speed. I half-closed my eyes, trying to see what sort of land was below us. I could barely distinguish between the ground and the scarcely fainter sky. There were miniscule stars and, low against the far horizon, two sallow moons glossed the tilting flat mountaintops of a mesa landscape with a pallid light.

  The ends of the scarf swept in front of my face as they searched the ground. ‘I’ll lower you.’

  It shot out a thick tentacle towards the table-topped mountain. The tentacle dived faster than we were falling, worms unspooling from us and adding to it. It reached the crunchy rubble and anchored there. We slowed; the wind ceased. It began lowering us smoothly, millions of individual worms drawing over each other and taking the strain. They coiled in a pile on the ground. We came down gently on top of them and toppled over in a heap.

  The Vermiform uncoiled and stood us on the very edge of an escarpment that fell away sheer to a level lake. Other plateaux cut the clear night sky. In places, their edges had eroded and slipped down into stepped, crumbling cliffs. Deep gorges carved dry and lifeless valleys between them. They gave onto a vast plain cracked across with sheer-sided canyons. The bottom of each, if they had floors at all, wer
e as far below the surface as we were above it.

  A series of lakes were so still, without any ripples, they looked heavy and ominous, somehow fake. It was difficult to believe they were water at all, but the stars reflected in their murky depths. The landscape looked as if it was nothing but a thin black sheet punched out with hollow-sided mountains, with great rents torn in it, through which I was looking to starry space beneath. There were no plants, no buildings; the grit lay evenly untouched by any wind.

  The Vermiform threw out expansive tendrils. ‘How do you like our own world?’

  ‘Is this the Somatopolis?’ I said. ‘It’s empty.’

  ‘It is long dead. We were the Somatopolis, when we lived here. Once our flesh city was the whole world. We covered it up to twice the height of these mountains. We filled those chasms. Now it’s bare. We are all that is left of the Somatopolis.’

  The pinkish-white moonlight shone on the desolate escarpments. I imagined the whole landscape covered in nothing but worms, kilometres deep. Their surface constantly writhed, filled and reformed. I imagined them sending up meshed towers topped with high parapets loosely tangled together. Their bulk would pull out from continents into isthmuses, into islands; then contract back together, throwing up entire annelid mountain ranges. Caverns would yawn deep in the mass as worms separated, dripping worm stalactites, then would close up again with the horribly meaty pressure of their weight.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘The Gabbleratchet will appear any second.’

  ‘Wait until it does,’ said the Vermiform. ‘We are bringing it here deliberately. We have an idea.’

  ‘The air’s so stale,’ said Cyan.

  ‘It is used up. The Insects took our world.’

  I said, ‘Look, Cyan; this is what happens to a world that loses against the Insects.’

  The Vermiform raised a tentacle that transformed into a hand, pointing to a plain of familiar grey roofs–the beginning of the Insects’ Paperlands. Their raised front arced towards us like a stationary tidal wave and their full extent was lost to view over the unnervingly distant horizon. The cells were cracked and weathered–they were extremely old. They were darker in colour than the Paperlands in our world, but patched with pale regions where Insects had reworked them hundreds of times.

  ‘They bring in material from other places to build with,’ said the Vermiform. ‘There is nothing left for them to use on my entire planet.’

  As we grew accustomed to the distance, we began to distinguish them: tiny specks scurrying over the plain, around the lakes and along the summits. It was like looking down into an enormous ant’s nest. I stared, forgetting this was a whole world, and imagined the mountains as tiny undulations in the soil and the Insects the size of ants, busy among them. There were single Insects, groups of a few or crowds of several thousands, questing over the grit from which everything organic had been leached. They swarmed in and out of their hooded tunnels.

  The Paperlands bulged up in one or two places and paper bridges emerged, rose up and vanished at their apex. In other places the continuous surface of the roofs sank into deep pits with enormous tunnel openings; places where Insects had found ways through to other worlds. They were carrying food through–a bizarre variety of pieces of plants and animals: legosaurs, Brick Bats, humans, marzipalms. Countless millions bustled down there, pausing to stroke antennae together or layering spit onto the edges of the Paperlands with an endless industry and a contented mien. Their sheer numbers dumbfounded and depressed me. I said, ‘We’ll never be able to beat them.’

  ‘We could have defeated them,’ the Vermiform choired. ‘We were winning our war. We fought them for hundreds of years. We forced inside their shells, we wrapped around their legs and pulled them apart. We even brought parasites and diseases in from other worlds and infected them, but the Insects chewed the mites off each other and evolved immunity to the diseases, as they eventually do in all the worlds of their range.’

  ‘They’re tough,’ I said.

  ‘They become so, over many worlds, yes. We turned the battle when lack of air started to slow them down. We gained ground. We forced them back to their original tunnel and they built a final wall. One more strike and we could have driven them through and sealed their route. But then Vista’s world collapsed and its colossal ocean drained through. See those lakes? It was their larvae that did for us.’

  ‘Their young?’ I asked.

  ‘Once the Insects started to breed in their millions. Their growing larvae are far more ravenous than adults. They scooped up mandiblesfull of worms and ate the city.’

  Cyan shrieked, ‘Look out! There’s one coming!’

  Twirling antennae appeared over the escarpment edge and an Insect charged towards us. Cyan and I turned to run but the Vermiform shot out two tentacles and grabbed the Insect around its thorax, jerking it to a halt.

  The tentacles snaked around the Insect, forced its mandibles wide–then its serrated mouthparts. The Insect ducked its head and tried to back off, but a third stream of worms began to pour into its mouth, keeping the mandibles open all the time. Worms streamed up from the ground and vanished down its throat.

  The rest of the Vermiform still pooled at our feet waited. For a couple of seconds, nothing happened. Then the Insect exploded. Its carapace burst open and flew apart. Its innards splattered against us. Its plates fell in a metre radius leaving six legs and a head lying with a huge knot of worms in the middle where its body had been. They moved like a monstrous ball of string, covered in haemolymph, and reformed into the beautiful woman. The worms of her face moved into a smile. ‘We love doing that. Wish they would line up so we can burst them one by one.’

  ‘Ugh,’ said Cyan.

  I said to her, ‘Keep watching for more Insects.’

  Cyan said, ‘I hate this place. I want to go. I want to see the cave.’

  ‘The market was destroyed.’

  ‘No. This is my dream and I say it wasn’t. Take me back; there are too many bugs here.’

  ‘Why do you think I dropped you in the air?’ the Vermiform said bitterly.

  It was easier to speak to the worm-woman than the amorphous bunch of annelids. I asked her, ‘What has the collapse of Vista got to do with you losing the war? Did Vista’s sea drown you, or something?’

  ‘It drowned billions of us.’ She pointed down to the lake. ‘The Somatopolis was dry before that, very hot and arid. That is how we like it; in fact we brought you here during the night because otherwise the sun would roast you. The waterspout surged from an Insect tunnel beneath us and forced up between us. It erupted a kilometre high and Vista’s whole ocean thundered out. We fled–how could we cope with running water? Still, it was salt water and we might have survived…But the ocean began to evaporate, clouds began to form and, for the first time ever in the Somatopolis, we had rain.’

  The worm-woman indicated the pools. ‘Freshwater lakes formed deep among us. We recoiled from the water and erroneously left it open to the air. And the Insects began to breed. We tried to stop them. We kept fighting but, as our numbers diminished, we found it harder to cover the ground. Generations after generations of larvae decimated us, so we sought shelter under the surface. From there we Shifted to find a new world to colonise…as many worlds as possible from the construction of the Insect’s nest.’

  The Vermiform woman dissolved into a snake and slithered to rejoin the main mass. ‘We hope the Gabbleratchet might destroy some Insects,’ it added. ‘Brace yourselves. We will try to shake it once and for all by retracing our steps.’

  We looked around for the Gabbleratchet, in the cloudless sky, against the rounds of the moons, among the peaks of the Paperlands and directly down to the lake.

  I thought I saw something moving in it! I blinked and stared. Something was swimming in its murky abyss. It became darker and clearer as it rose close to the surface. It moved with a quick straight jet, then turned head over tail along its length and disappeared into the depths.

  ‘What
the fuck? What was that?’

  A flash of green on the sheer rock face below us. The Gabbleratchet hurtled straight out of it. Empty white pelvic girdles and scooping paws reflected in the lake.

  Cyan screamed. The Gabbleratchet turned; it knew where we were.

  ‘Now!’ The Vermiform lifted us off our feet, through–

  –Plennish–

  –Infusoria Swamp–

  –Sauria–

  –Precambria–

  –Epsilon Market–

  –Somewhere dark…?

  Somewhere dark! Cyan cried, ‘Are you there?’

  ‘I’m here, I’m here!’ I felt for her hand. I opened my eyes wide, just to be sure, but there was not one shred of light. Then, seemingly in a vast remoteness I saw a faint glow, a thin vertical white beam seemed to…walk past us. It stopped, turned around and began to hurry back again with the motion of a human being, though it was nothing but a single line.

  ‘Where are we?’ I demanded. ‘You said we were going back to the Fourlands!’

  ‘Stupid creature! This is your world. We want to hide for a while in case the Gabbleratchet comes.’

  ‘But…’

  The Vermiform said, ‘This is Rayne’s room. That is Rayne.’

  I think the Vermiform was pointing but I couldn’t see anything.

  ‘She is pacing back and forth. She’s anxious; in fact, she’s panicking. Can’t you feel it?’

  Curiously enough, I could. The intense emotions were radiating from the white ray and putting me on edge. ‘But what’s happened to her? That’s just a thin line!’

  ‘Hush. If we see the Gabbleratchet’s sparks, we will have to leave fast. This is the Fourlands, the fifth to the eighth dimensions. You occupy those as well as the ones you’re familiar with, seeing as you’ve evolved in a world with ten. You can’t see them with your usual senses, but you do operate in them. We are amazed that you never consciously realise it.’

  Close by, Cyan shouted, ‘It’s talking crap! Tell it so, Jant.’