Unseen Demons

by Adam-Troy Castro

  “I was eight years old,” she said, hating the defensiveness that always came over her whenever she was questioned about the hated summer. “It was a long time ago.”

  “No, it wasn’t. I just have to look at you to know it’s still happening.”

  Cort wanted to rip the prying son of a bitch a new asshole, but for the life of her she couldn’t think of anything to say.

  He astonished her with what he said next: “You’d be surprised how much we have in common…”

  11

  The hive Whalekiller had selected (Calcutta, he said), was nestled in a chain of remote rust-colored hills somewhere in the temperate band of Catarkhus’s southern hemisphere. It occupied pebbly ground that crunched with every step they took — the kind of terrain that would have rendered stealth impossible on any world where the deafness of the natives wouldn’t have rendered stealth irrelevant. The vegetation was so sparse and scrubby it seemed to have established a toehold here out of obstinacy alone.The main entrance to the Catarkhan hive was a spiral funnel, sinking diagonally into the earth. There were a handful of Catarkhan footprints near the entrance, but otherwise no sign that anything lived below.

  Cort hesitated when, taking her first step into the tunnel, she sank up to her ankles into soft sand, considerably more yielding than the desert terrain she had just left. She was not yet ready to forgive Whalekiller enough to speak to him, but necessity obliged her: “Just how stable is this place?”

  Whalekiller saw she was about to stumble, and steadied her with a tug on her upper arm. “Very stable, Counselor. The walls aren’t made of this stuff, fortunately; they would collapse in a second if they were. This is just flooring the Catarkhans carry from a sand quarry about seven klicks away. The walls themselves come from some tougher kind of gravel the locals gather somewhere else; they do something biological to it that makes it liquify into a kind of malleable cement. It’s an entirely different kind of construction than that used by their cousins in the other hive I showed you — but that was half a world away, where they have a different set of raw materials.”

  She pulled free of Whalekiller, tested her footing with another step, and decided that it seemed safe enough, if a clumsy medium for human feet. Several steps further in, her eyes narrowed: “So their behavior isn’t all hardwired, after all.”

  “Not entirely. They’re sentient, after all; they can override instinct when they absolutely have to. But it’s not so much creative thinking or the ability to learn as it is a facility for rewriting survival behaviors on a group-by group basis. For instance, the guys down here don’t have any decent farmland, like their cousins up north; they’d starve if they tried to support themselves that way. So they subsist on some kind of foul-smelling yeasty stuff they cultivate in ground water cisterns about half a kilometer straight down. Itís nasty, but it sustains life.”

  “Which shows a certain degree of adaptability,” Cort said.

  “Within a very narrow range. If you took a bunch of random Catarkhans from this hive and transplanted them to the location I showed you before, most of them would starve to death; a few of them would rewrite their personal software to match the new paradigm, and thrive up there while becoming totally helpless here. None of that equips them to deal with a truly random factor, like a cave-in, an offworld maniac cutting them up for fun, or…”

  “Jury duty,” Cort said.

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  It was, after all, the problem at hand.

  They descended deeper into the hive, leaving even the ghost of daylight. Their portable lights provided poor alternative. They were bright enough, but something about the congealed stone burrows openly rejected illumination; the little circles of daylight Whalekiller and Cort carried with them seemed tentative and afraid in this place, as if recognizing how unwelcome they were and unwilling to completely banish the darkest of the shadows. Things didn’t get any better when Whalekiller and Cort travelled far enough to encounter their first residents, a parade of Catarkhans who marched along in single file, intent on their robotic errand and oblivious of the two invaders who had just landed in their midst.

  “This is as close to the surface as these guys usually get,” Whalekiller explained. “No topside farms to tend. They’ll go up for building materials, but not for much more than that. I’d call it a cultural difference if I was willing to think culture had anything to do with it.”

  Cort considered just how often the various diplomats here were reduced to disparaging the limitations of the natives. She didn’t blame them; the more she heard about this species, the more she found herself thinking of them as a locked door with no available key.

  They descended still further, into realms where the air started to deteriorate. They passed more Catarkhans conducting errands, immobile Catarkhans who seemed to be sleeping, and communicating Catarkhans who knelt funnel-face to funnel-face, linking the cilia on their lower legs. Every pair of communicating Catarkhans she encountered looked like every other pair; she knew she’d been assured how intricate and complex their conversations were, but there was nothing else in the Catarkhan demeanor to provide a context capable of allowing her human eyes to see those conversations as prayers, negotiations, ironic banter, dirty jokes, heated arguments, or any combination of the above. Still, the stiff robotic regimentation she had encountered on the upper levels seemed absent in those encounters; whatever these particular Catarkhans might have been saying, they were in the residential district, and they gave the impression of being at leisure. That might not have been recognizable sentience, but it was a start.

  “I call this the Main Boulevard,” Whalekiller said. “It’s a section common to most hives, where they have what passes for their social life.”

  “When do we find a dying one?” Cort asked.

  “It’s not all that easy, most hives. Like I said before, Catarkhans don’t seem to get sick much; disease isn’t totally unheard-of, but they usually just wear out when they get too old.”

  “And this hive is different?”

  “Yep. The stuff these particular folks cook in the cisterns has a tendency to turn septic if allowed to sit too long. They’re susceptible to the infections. The death rate here is much higher here than anything you’d find elsewhere on-world. As it happens, I’ve been here a few times and I’ve seen what they do to the afflicted. — Down this way.”

  Whalekiller led her through another series of tunnels. The Catarkhan traffic, crowded in the busier sections of the hive, here grew sparse, then nonexistent. The air got worse, and they switched to oxygen distillers, with masks worn over nose and mouth. They descended another set of tunnels; a nearly vertical shaft they had to descend on ropes. Cort reeled, wondering just how far the hive extended, and how it endured the weight of all the earth pressing down upon it. But just as she began to doubt that Whalekiller really knew where he was leading her, they came to the place he called The Sick Ward.

  12

  It was a long, narrow chamber stuffed with a huge writhing sea of Catarkhans giving their all for the right to occupy the same space at the same time. They all wanted to be at the center; they all wanted to be surrounded by all the others. The result was a lot like watching maggots swarm over something recently dead; there were so many of them, in such a constricted space, that they literally swam in a sea of each other’s bodies, submerging when they could, emerging when the struggle taking place all around them ejected them from the composite body mass. Some of those she saw on the surface were clearly dead, but she couldn’t keep her eyes off one twitching specimen whose limbs had been broken by the eternal struggle. Constantly hurled free of the fight, he just as constantly struggled back, managing a return to the sick ward only to be fling free once again.

  Andrea Cort had seen sentient beings slaughter each other. She had seen people she loved, meaning only to protect her, commit acts that had poisoned the very memory of their faces. She had visited worlds wracked by poverty, and worlds where war and starvation and disease h
ad ripped across entire populations in waves, leaving hollow-eyed survivors whose only deliverance was to stand weak and defenseless against whatever came next. She had hardened her skin in a vain attempt to become unshockable, but she had found that there were always fresh horrors capable of touching the soft spots between the scabs. This was one of them. “What are they doing?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “No, I’m not. What are they doing?”

  “Quarantining themselves. There’s almost no infectious disease among the Catarkhans — they seem largely immune to it, and most of the researchers here have never seen any — but what little they do have prompts a quarantine response. Most of the hives we’ve explored have a special chamber set aside for just that purpose; we don’t usually find more than three or four residents. Sometimes they get better, and rejoin the hive; sometimes they die, only to be walled in where they drop.”

  “But that’s not the way it’s working here.”

  “Clearly,” Whalekiller said. “No, unfortunately for these fellas, the little food-poisoning problem of theirs activates the quarantining instinct — and they’re too ruled by their hardwiring to build larger chambers for increased demand. They’ll keep jamming themselves into this space until they reduce each other to fruit squeezed of its juice.”

  Cort winced at the phrase. “It’s horrible.”

  “It’s the way they are.”

  She watched a little while longer and wondered whether she should revise her feelings about sentience. True, it offered tremendous capacity for evil and madness; it was the soil which nurtured tragedies like Vlhan and Bocai; but instinct, raw robotic instinct, was potentially even worse. Instinct could never be reasoned with. Worse still was the idea of sentient creatures so chained by instinct that they were incapable of ever making any decisions for themselves. She didn’t want to know if the Catarkhans before her now had any idea what they were doing; both possibilities struck her as equally terrible.

  “What happens if there’s an infected Catarkhan too sick to move?”

  “They tend to realize they’re sick before they show symptoms. But if they don’t come down here on their own, they get dragged or carried.”

  She found herself focusing on one Catarkhan in particular - an emaciated, bloody thing with only three functioning limbs out of the original six, the others so bloodied and broken that they hung from its torso like flexible ropes. Banished by weakness to the outer edges of the sick ward, unable to fight its way deeper into the place where it was obliged to lie down and die, it seemed to be spending most of its passage from this life stumbling, falling over, struggling to stand, attacking the wall of writhing bodies, and then stumbling once again. It was pathetic and it was trapped and it was incapable of giving up, even when another of its limbs snapped, and it fell back, twitching and trembling and gathering up the will for another go.

  Surprising herself, Cort bolted from Whalekiller’s side, seized the prone Catarkhan by its hindlimbs, and began to drag it away from the riot at the threshold to the Sick Ward. As if in protest, it dug two of its forelimbs into the tunnel floor, clawing deep gouges in the sand as she pulled it farther from the impossible destination its hardwiring demanded. The gesture seemed less reluctance than reflex. Beyond that, the Catarkhan didn’t particularly seem to mind; it didn’t struggle or grow frantic or slash at her in its eagerness to escape. It just continued trying to crawl forward, with a typical Catarkhan lack of awareness that anything was interfering with its progress.

  Whalekiller rushed to her side and grabbed the Catarkhan too. “Please tell me what you think you’ re doing.”

  “I’m taking a look,” Cort said.

  “You don’t actually think you can help this guy? —Look at him. He’s holding on to life like it’s just a bad habit he’s ready to drop.”

  “I see that,” Cort said. “But hold on to him anyway. I want to figure out something. She passed the Catarkhan’s hind legs to Whalekiller, then scrambled around its body to face the hollow, unmoving funnel up front. Even now, after years of dealing with aliens, after a career spent teaching herself that facial expressions were just illusory anthropomorphic structures that couldn’t even be considered reliable windows to the soul on human beings, and meant even less when used to judge sentients from elsewhere, she found herself searching that eyeless noseless faceless face for how it regarded such a violation. She waved that thought away and grabbed the edges of its funnel-mouth with both hands.

  Whalekiller held the Catarkhan in place with no difficulty. “Again, Counselor: what are you doing?”

  “Taking a message.”

  The cilia at the edges of the creature’s funnel-mouth were slimy with blood and other bodily excretions, and gritty with sand from the tunnel floor. She thought of human equivalents and gagged, but brushed her hands through the little undulating fingers anyway. She circled the funnel-mouth twice, then knelt, grabbed the forelimbs seeking purchase in the sand. and brushed her hands through the limb cilia as well. They were if anything even more moist; when she pulled her hands away, her gloves glistened in the glow of Whalekiller’s lamp. So did Whalekiller’s.

  Then she stood, and stepped out of the way. “I’m done. You can let it go, now.”

  Whalekiller released the Catarkhan’s hindlegs. It hit the ground and immediately began to thrash its broken limbs, struggling with every ounce of strength in its possession to reach the Sick Ward that had expelled it so many times. At its current speed and apparent stamina, it might have managed to get there in an hour or so; Cort was not willing to place any bets about the journey being at all worth the effort. She said, “I really do wish there was something we could do for him. For all of them.”

  Joining her, Whalekiller said: “You’ve already been given one impossible job on this planet. You don’t really want to try for two.”

  “It doesn’t stop me from wanting it, “she said, with sadness so palpable that her voice cracked from the weight of it. “I don’t like death.”

  “I don’t either,” he said — and the sympathy in his voice, while real, was like a knife cutting into old wounds. “But sometimes, if you’ve seen enough of it, you stop feeling it. It was like that where I came from. And down here, with the Catarkhans, you get clinical. You stop feeling. There’s a—”

  “Get me the hell out of here,” she said, cutting him off.

  He blinked, taken off guard by the return of the iron in her voice. For a moment, he looked like he was going to insist on showering her with his empathy. But then he straightened, nodded, and began the task of leading her out.

  But then they were attacked by Catarkhans on their way out.

  13

  Both before and after Mankind met its first alien sentients, Hom.Sap popular culture was filled with scenarios where heroic human protagonists withstood assault by wave after wave of marauding monsters.

  All of those scenarios presupposed that the marauding monsters in question would be dangerous in some way.

  Cort and Whalekiller were several minutes into this attack before either one of them realized that the Catarkhans were not just blindly blundering into them by accident, but ramming them with deliberate intent. The Catarkhans moved so slowly it was more like an organized jostling than a riot. It caused the two humans no damage whatsoever, and rendered escaping the hive just like struggling through any other large crowd. The greatest hardship Cort and Whalekiller suffered was tempering the force of their own struggle to escape enough to avoid doing the delicate Catarkhans any harm.

  Whalekiller said: “I don’t believe this. They’ve noticed us.”

  Cort had suspected they might. “We can get past them, right?”

  “I don’t think getting past them will be our biggest problem.”

  A Catarkhan rammed its head into Whalekiller’s chest, not inconveniencing him at all. Another grabbed hold of his arm and tugged; he flexed, and easily lifted the feeble creature off the ground. It lost hold and tumbled to the tunnel floor in a
scramble of arms of legs, with still more Catarkhans, moving no faster than molasses, already scrambling over its body for another attack. He pressed himself against a tunnel wall and said: “You get it? We’re like heroes out of myth in here. As long as the tunnel prevents them from coming after us in numbers, we can knock down hundreds of these guys. The problems going to be getting past them without harming any. Kill one, and we start sharing a cell with Sandburg.”

  “That would amuse him,” Cort said.

  “Yeah, well, amusing multiple murderers is not one of my life’s greatest ambitions.”

  They inched along the wall, all but impervious to the assaults of Catarkhans trying to drive them back by the sheer weight of their massed bodies. Slow as they were, the Catarkhans seemed frantic, even desperate — maddened by the need to keep the two humans from leaving; but it might have been an attack by origami animals, incapable of wreaking harm despite all the ferocity they could muster. Cort had a memory-flash of the massacres at Bocai, but the thought was a mere reflex, with no real weight behind it. At Bocai, two species of equivalent strength had turned upon each other in spasms of equivalent madness; the war had been like many wars, filled with hundreds of life-or-death dramas where the only real factor in who lived and who died had been who was fast enough to strike the killing blow first. This was something else. This was total war fought against a blind enemy that possessed all the strength of a soft breeze brushing against exposed skin. This was not violence, so much as delusion.

  Then one of the Catarkhans, launching itself against Whalekiller, scraped a forelimb against his face. He yowled, shoved it aside, and fell back, clutching at his eyes. “Shit!”

  “What happened?”

  “Lucky shot — poked my eye. Bastard could have blinded me if it had known what it was doing. Hurts like hell.”