The next thing that Mercer knew, he was in a cool, cool room, much chillier than the bedrooms and operating rooms of the satellite. Someone was lifting him gently onto a table.
He opened his eyes.
An enormous face, four times the size of any human face Mercer had ever seen, was looking down at him. Huge brown eyes, cowlike in their gentle inoffensiveness, moved back and forth as the big face examined Mercer’s wrappings. The face was that of a handsome man of middle years, clean-shaven, hair chestnut-brown, with sensual, full lips and gigantic but healthy yellow teeth exposed in a half-smile. The face saw Mercer’s eyes open, and spoke with a deep friendly roar.
“I’m your best friend. My name is B’dikkat, but you don’t have to use that here. Just call me Friend, and I will always help you.”
“I hurt,” said Mercer.
“Of course you do. You hurt all over. That’s a big drop,” said B’dikkat.
“Can I have a cap, please,” begged Mercer. It was not a question; it was a demand; Mercer felt that his private inward eternity depended on it.
B’dikkat laughed. “I haven’t any caps down here. I might use them myself. Or so they think. I have other things, much better. No fear, fellow, I’ll fix you up.”
Mercer looked doubtful. If the cap had brought him happiness on the ferry, it would take at least electrical stimulation of the brain to undo whatever torments the surface of Shayol had to offer.
B’dikkat’s laughter filled the room like a bursting pillow.
“Have you ever heard of condamine?”
“No,” said Mercer.
“It’s a narcotic so powerful that the pharmacopoeias are not allowed to mention it.”
“You have that?” said Mercer hopefully.
“Something better. I have super-condamine. It’s named after the New French town where they developed it. The chemists hooked in one more hydrogen molecule. That gave it a real jolt. If you took it in your present shape, you’d be dead in three minutes, but those three minutes would seem like ten thousand years of happiness to the inside of your mind.” B’dikkat rolled his brown cow eyes expressively and smacked his rich red lips with a tongue of enormous extent.
“What’s the use of it, then?”
“You can take it,” said B’dikkat. “You can take it after you have been exposed to the dromozoa outside this cabin. You get all the good effects and none of the bad. You want to see something?”
What answer is there except yes, thought Mercer grimly; does he think I have an urgent invitation to a tea party?
“Look out the window,” said B’dikkat, “and tell me what you see.”
The atmosphere was clear. The surface was like a desert, ginger-yellow with streaks of green where lichen and low shrubs grew, obviously stunted and tormented by high, dry winds. The landscape was monotonous. Two or three hundred yards away there was a herd of bright pink objects which seemed alive, but Mercer could not see them well enough to describe them clearly. Further away, on the extreme right of his frame of vision, there was the statue of an enormous human foot, the height of a six-story building. Mercer could not see what the foot was connected to. “I see a big foot,” said he, “but—”
“But what?” said B’dikkat, like an enormous child hiding the denouement of a hugely private joke. Large as he was, he could have been dwarfed by any one of the toes on that tremendous foot.
“But it can’t be a real foot,” said Mercer.
“It is,” said B’dikkat. “That’s Go-Captain Alvarez, the man who found this planet. After six hundred years he’s still in fine shape. Of course, he’s mostly dromozootic by now, but I think there is some human consciousness inside him. You know what I do?”
“What?” said Mercer.
“I give him six cubic centimeters of super-condamine and he snorts for me. Real happy little snorts. A stranger might think it was a volcano. That’s what super-condamine can do. And you’re going to get plenty of it. You’re a lucky, lucky man, Mercer. You have me for a friend, and you have my needle for a treat. I do all the work and you get all the fun. Isn’t that a nice surprise?”
Mercer thought, You’re lying! Lying! Where do the screams come from that we have all heard broadcast as a warning on Punishment Day? Why did the doctor offer to cancel my brain or to take out my eyes?
The cow-man watched him sadly, a hurt expression on his face. “You don’t believe me,” he said, very sadly.
“It’s not quite that,” said Mercer, with an attempt at heartiness, “but I think you’re leaving something out.”
“Nothing much,” said B’dikkat. “You jump when the dromozoa hit you. You’ll be upset when you start growing new parts—heads, kidneys, hands. I had one fellow in here who grew thirty-eight hands in a single session outside. I took them all off, froze them and sent them upstairs. I take good care of everybody. You’ll probably yell for a while. But remember, just call me Friend, and I have the nicest treat in the universe waiting for you. Now, would you like some fried eggs? I don’t eat eggs myself, but most true men like them.”
“Eggs?” said Mercer. “What have eggs got to do with it?”
“Nothing much. It’s just a treat for you people. Get something in your stomach before you go outside. You’ll get through the first day better.”
Mercer, unbelieving, watched as the big man took two precious eggs from a cold chest, expertly broke them into a little pan and put the pan in the heat-field at the center of the table Mercer had awakened on.
“Friend, eh?” B’dikkat grinned. “You’ll see I’m a good friend. When you go outside, remember that.”
An hour later, Mercer did go outside.
Strangely at peace with himself, he stood at the door. B’dikkat pushed him in a brotherly way, giving him a shove which was gentle enough to be an encouragement.
“Don’t make me put on my lead suit, fellow.” Mercer had seen a suit, fully the size of an ordinary space-ship cabin, hanging on the wall of an adjacent room. ‘When I close this door, the outer one will open. Just walk on out.”
“But what will happen?” said Mercer, the fear turning around in his stomach and making little grabs at his throat from the inside.
“Don’t start that again,” said B’dikkat. For an hour he had fended off Mercer’s questions about the outside. A map? B’dikkat had laughed at the thought. Food? He said not to worry. Other people? They’d be there. Weapons? What for, B’dikkat had replied. Over and over again, B’dikkat had insisted that he was Mercer’s friend. What would happen to Mercer? The same that happened to everybody else.
Mercer stepped out.
Nothing happened. The day was cool. The wind moved gently against his toughened skin.
Mercer looked around apprehensively.
The mountainous body of Captain Alvarez occupied a good part of the landscape to the right. Mercer had no wish to get mixed up with that. He glanced back at the cabin. B’dikkat was not looking out the window.
Mercer walked slowly, straight ahead.
There was a flash on the ground, no brighter than the glitter of sunlight on a fragment of glass. Mercer felt a sting in the thigh, as though a sharp instrument had touched him lightly. He brushed the place with his hand.
It was as though the sky fell in.
A pain—it was more than a pain; it was a living throb—ran from his hip to his foot on the right side. The throb reached up to his chest, robbing him of breath. He fell, and the ground hurt him. Nothing in the hospital-satellite had been like this. He lay in the open air, trying not to breathe, but he did breathe anyhow. Each time he breathed, the throb moved with his thorax. He lay on his back, looking at the sun. At last he noticed that the sun was violet-white.
It was no use even thinking of calling. He had no voice. Tendrils of discomfort twisted within him. Since he could not stop breathing, he concentrated on taking air in the way that hurt him least. Gasps were too much work. Little tiny sips of air hurt him least.
The desert around him was empty.
He could not turn his head to look at the cabin. Is this it? he thought. Is an eternity of this the punishment of Shayol?
There were voices near him.
Two faces, grotesquely pink, looked down at him. They might have been human. The man looked normal enough, except for having two noses side by side. The woman was a caricature beyond belief. She had grown a breast on each cheek and a cluster of naked baby-like fingers hung limp from her forehead.
“It’s a beauty,” said the woman, “a new one.”
“Come along,” said the man.
They lifted him to his feet. He did not have strength enough to resist. When he tried to speak to them a harsh cawing sound, like the cry of an ugly bird, came from his mouth.
They moved with him efficiently. He saw that he was being dragged to the herd of pink things.
As they approached, he saw that they were people. Better, he saw that they had once been people. A man with the beak of a flamingo was picking at his own body. A woman lay on the ground; she had a single head, but beside what seemed to be her original body, she had a boy’s naked body growing sidewise from her neck. The boy-body, clean, new, paralytically helpless, made no movement other than shallow breathing. Mercer looked around. The only one of the group who was wearing clothing was a man with his overcoat on sidewise. Mercer stared at him, finally realizing that the man had two—or was it three?—stomachs growing on the outside of his abdomen. The coat held them in place. The transparent peritoneal wall looked fragile.
“New one,” said his female captor. She and the two-nosed man put him down.
The group lay scattered on the ground.
Mercer lay in a state of stupor among them.
An old man’s voice said, “I’m afraid they’re going to feed us pretty soon.”
“Oh, no!”
“It’s too early!”
“Not again!”
Protests echoed from the group.
The old man’s voice went on, “Look, near the big toe of the mountain!”
The desolate murmur in the group attested their confirmation of what he had seen.
Mercer tried to ask what it was all about, but produced only a caw.
A woman—was it a woman?—crawled over to him on her hands and knees. Beside her ordinary hands, she was covered with hands all over her trunk and halfway down her thighs. Some of the hands looked old and withered. Others were as fresh and pink as the baby-fingers on his captress’ face. The woman shouted at him, though it was not necessary to shout.
“The dromozoa are coming. This time it hurts. When you get used to the place, you can dig in—”
She waved at a group of mounds which surrounded the herd of people.
“They’re dug in,” she said.
Mercer cawed again.
“Don’t you worry,” said the hand-covered woman, and gasped as a flash of light touched her.
The lights reached Mercer too. The pain was like the first contact but more probing. Mercer felt his eyes widen as odd sensations within his body led to an inescapable conclusion: these lights, these things, these whatever they were, were feeding him and building him up.
Their intelligence, if they had it, was not human, but their motives were clear. In between the stabs of pain he felt them fill his stomach, put water in his blood, draw water from his kidneys and bladder, massage his heart, move his lungs for him.
Every single thing they did was well meant and beneficent in intent.
And every single action hurt.
Abruptly, like the lifting of a cloud of insects, they were gone. Mercer was aware of a noise somewhere outside—a brainless, bawling cascade of ugly noise. He started to look around. And the noise stopped.
It had been himself, screaming. Screaming the ugly screams of a psychotic, a terrified drunk, an animal driven out of understanding or reason.
When he stopped, he found he had his speaking voice again.
A man came to him, naked like the others. There was a spike sticking through his head. The skin had healed around it on both sides. “Hello, fellow,” said the man with the spike.
“Hello,” said Mercer. It was a foolishly commonplace thing to say in a place like this.
“You can’t kill yourself,” said the man with the spike through his head.
“Yes, you can,” said the woman covered with hands.
Mercer found that his first pain had disappeared. “What’s happening to me?”
“You got a part,” said the man with the spike. “They’re always putting parts on us. After a while B’dikkat comes and cuts most of them off, except for the ones that ought to grow a little more. Like her,” he added, nodding at the woman who lay with the boy-body growing from her neck.
“And that’s all?” said Mercer. “The stabs for the new parts and the stinging for the feeding?”
“No,” said the man. “Sometimes they think we’re too cold and they fill our insides with fire. Or they think we’re too hot and they freeze us, nerve by nerve.”
The woman with the boy-body called over, “And sometimes they think we’re unhappy, so they try to force us to be happy. I think that’s the worst of all.”
Mercer stammered, “Are you people—I mean—are you the only herd?”
The man with the spike coughed instead of laughing. “Herd! That’s funny. The land is full of people. Most of them dig in. We’re the ones who can still talk. We stay together for company. We get more turns with B’dikkat that way.”
Mercer started to ask another question, but he felt the strength run out of him. The day had been too much.
The ground rocked like a ship on water. The sky turned black. He felt someone catch him as he fell. He felt himself being stretched out on the ground. And then, mercifully and magically, he slept.
3
Within a week, he came to know the group well. They were an absent-minded bunch of people. Not one of them ever knew when a dromozoan might flash by and add another part. Mercer was not stung again, but the incision he had obtained just outside the cabin was hardening. Spike-head looked at it when Mercer modestly undid his belt and lowered the edge of his trouser-top so they could see the wound.
“You’ve got a head,” he said. “A whole baby head. They’ll be glad to get that one upstairs when B’dikkat cuts it off you.”
The group even tried to arrange his social life. They introduced him to the girl of the herd. She had grown one body after another, pelvis turning into shoulders and the pelvis below that turning into shoulders again until she was five people long. Her face was unmarred. She tried to be friendly to Mercer.
He was so shocked by her that he dug himself into the soft dry crumbly earth and stayed there for what seemed like a hundred years. He found later that it was less than a full day. When he came out, the long many-bodied girl was waiting for him.
“You didn’t have to come out just for me,” said she.
Mercer shook the dirt off himself.
He looked around. The violet sun was going down, and the sky was streaked with blues, deeper blues and trails of orange sunset.
He looked back at her. “I didn’t get up for you. It’s no use lying there, waiting for the next time.”
“I want to show you something,” she said. She pointed to a low hummock. “Dig that up.”
Mercer looked at her. She seemed friendly. He shrugged and attacked the soil with his powerful claws. With tough skin and heavy digging-nails on the ends of his fingers, he found it was easy to dig like a dog. The earth cascaded beneath his busy hands. Something pink appeared down in the hole he had dug. He proceeded more carefully.
He knew what it would be.
It was. It was a man, sleeping. Extra arms grew down one side of his body in an orderly series. The other side looked normal.
Mercer turned back to the many-bodied girl, who had writhed closer.
“That’s what I think it is, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. “Doctor Vomact burned his brain out for him. And took his eyes
out, too.”
Mercer sat back on the ground and looked at the girl. “You told me to do it. Now tell me what for.”
“To let you see. To let you know. To let you think.”
“That’s all?” said Mercer.
The girl twisted with startling suddenness. All the way down her series of bodies, her chests heaved. Mercer wondered how the air got into all of them. He did not feel sorry for her; he did not feel sorry for anyone except himself. When the spasm passed the girl smiled at him apologetically.
“They just gave me a new plant.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7 - [Anthology] Page 39