She blinked, images flashing behind her eyes. In an instant, she was running through dense bush, every sense alert. She could smell prey, some hopping thing that was made of all legs. No name for it, just the image, the knowledge of it, and the fact that she was hunting it.
She was close now. Inhaling its scent as she eased between the aquajade trees. An instant later, something snapped past her head. A loud crack. Then came the feel of air patting her head.
Bullet. Run!
Her vision blurred at the sides, and she came to appreciate the three-eyed triangulation, the superior depth of field as she ducked and darted among the aquajade trees.
The memory faded, leaving Talina gasping and panting, sweat beading on her skin.
She cried out, sat up in bed, and stared out at the morning light beaming through her bedroom window.
“Fuck this shit,” she growled, climbing out of bed.
She was standing in the shower, her head splitting. Her mouth had that foul taste, her tongue like a piece of wood.
Hangover.
Funny, she could remember . . . Yes. She’d closed Inga’s last night. Vaguely she remembered Step Allenovich had walked her home. Something about people couldn’t be trusted anymore.
“What the hell are you doing, Tal?” she asked herself as water ran down her head. “That’s three nights in a row.”
But, truth was, alcohol helped. It deadened the presence of the demon quetzal in her guts. Let her sleep the whole night through.
But like this morning, it wasn’t enough anymore.
“Getting worse.” She palmed off the water and stepped out into her bedroom. “I am not going to live like this.”
So, was it Whitey’s doing? Something about the TriNA he’d given her? Maybe some molecular time bomb to make her go crazy?
An image flashed, vivid. Kylee’s laughter. A sudden memory of her. Blond hair flying about, her incisor teeth looking too large behind her pink lips. Blue eyes sparkling with humor. In the background Mundo Base rose on its central tower.
Plants. What looked like squash. They were in the farm area.
“Kylee. Damn.” Talina fought her way back to the world, struggled to towel herself off.
Why the hell couldn’t she keep a cogent thought in her head?
Her stomach queasy, she fought the urge to throw up.
She needed to eat, and she forced down a big plate of beans, poblanos, and crest meat seasoned with ancho and annatto.
The edges of her vision rippled with waves of color from infrared to ultraviolet.
Kylee, dressed in a blue smock, reached out, seemed to be petting Tal with a small hand. “You’re my best friend.”
Talina shook herself. The words had been crystal clear.
She glanced around her empty house. Knew she was alone.
“Fuck this.” She slipped off her stool, fastened her old black uniform with its various patches, and pulled her rifle from the rack.
Outside, she squinted in the light. Capella burned down with a passion. When had it gotten to be midday? Muttering to herself, she stalked down the avenue, hardly aware of the people she passed.
There had to be a way to get the damn molecules out of her body.
At the hospital, she stopped, flashed back to the night when she’d faced down the mothers who wanted Rocket gone. She was there, living it. Trish standing off to the side, telling her to get Rocket . . .
Ought to just shoot the bitch.
Sian Hmong was in her face, eyes burning. Shaking a finger within inches of Talina’s nose.
The hiss came from down deep. What the hell had Sian ever contributed to Port Authority but the fruit of her womb? The woman’s only saving grace was as a breeder. A friggin’ two-legged baby machine. She couldn’t even shoot a pistol, let alone . . .
“Either you get rid of that quetzal, or we’ll do it for you!” Sian’s voice seemed to heterodyne in Talina’s skull.
And the pistol was in Talina’s hand.
Then she was back in her mother’s kitchen. Horror filled her as the beautiful bowl tilted off the table, falling, turning in the air. She could see the bright images of One-Hunahpu and the hideous Lords of Death. The Way glyph mocked her with its three internal divisions and meanings. Instead of hearing a hollow pock when the bowl hit the floor, she jerked at the sound of a gunshot.
The pistol recoiling in her hand brought her back.
She gaped, stared stupidly at the avenue. People were stopped dead in the street, staring. The entire world seemed to be on hold.
What the hell?
Talina looked down at the pistol. Felt the familiar grip. The faintest threads of smoke rose from the barrel.
Dya Simonov burst out the door behind her, a look of surprise on her face. She took in Talina. The pistol.
“I heard a shot. Was that you?”
Talina ground her teeth, shoved the pistol back into its holster. “I . . . Damn. I think I just shot Sian Hmong. It was so clear. Just like that night.”
“Shot her where?”
“Right here in the . . .”
Talina took a breath. “Listen. You’ve got to help me. I mean, this is new. The visions. They’re like real. I’m a quetzal. Then I’m not. I keep seeing Kylee. Hunting things in the bush.”
“You drunk?”
“I friggin’ wish. It’s the only way I can keep that little shit in my gut under control.”
“God, Tal. You look like hell.”
“Hey, everything okay?” Step asked, appearing at her elbow. “What was that shot about?”
“I don’t . . .” Talina shot a worried look at Step. “You sure it was me?”
“Listen, I was following you up the street. Then you stop outside the door here. You start looking back and forth, as if talking to somebody. Then, like a flash, your pistol’s out and you’ve sent a shot right into that shipping container over yonder. What gives?”
“I shot Sian Hmong.”
“Sian? Why? She’s harmless.” Step was watching her with skeptical eyes. “Not to mention that she’s not here.”
Tal was aware that old Artie Manfroid, Port Authority’s oldest citizen, was watching from the side, his grizzled face looking appalled. Quetzal crap! The story would be all over town within an hour. Not that everyone hadn’t turned to watch at the sound of a gunshot.
“She was with the others. Amal and Friga. Bernie Monson had a broken arm. Wouldn’t set foot in the hospital so that Raya could set it. They were afraid of Rocket.” Talina reached up, grabbed a hank of her hair to keep from reaching for the damn pistol again. “And I took Kylee, Rocket, Dya, and Talbot back to Mundo that night. Which is why Spiro shot him.”
She made a face. “Fuck! It’s all my fault.”
“Talina,” Dya said softly. “Come on. Let’s go inside and get to the bottom of this.”
“What the hell came over me? I mean, it was so clear. I was back there. That night.” She knotted a fist. “But, damn it, I didn’t shoot Sian. I wouldn’t.”
But she just had. The fact that a new bullet hole could be seen in the shipping crate was pretty conclusive.
Talina gave Step a worried look, then Dya, and licked suddenly dry lips. Fear tickled like frost down her spine as she looked down at her hand. Remembered the feel of the pistol in her grip. The bucking recoil and bark of the shot.
But I did. Would have, if she’d been standing there.
Time seemed to stop, the world sharpening as her vision clarified in the IR and UV ranges. An “otherness” possessed her. A feeling of dissociation from her flesh. Step reached out and steadied her as she wobbled unsteadily on her feet.
“Come on,” she heard Dya say. “Let’s get her inside.”
Talina shook loose of Step’s hold, saying, “Hey, I can still walk. It’s not like I’m an invalid or some
thing.”
The last glance she had over her shoulder was of the street, the people still standing there, watching silently as she passed inside the hospital doors.
12
Supervisor Kalico Aguila sat at one end of the conference table in Port Authority’s admin dome. A mint tea steeped in her cup as she studied the people around the table.
She should have been down at the mine. It wasn’t like she didn’t have more than enough on her plate. Especially since the mucking machine in the Number One was giving her mechanics fits.
Shig Mosadek—who’d radioed down to ask her to attend the meeting—was in his mid-fifties. She had come to cherish the small brown man with a pug-nosed round face as one of the most remarkable men she’d ever known. He barely topped five foot three—even in his boots. Shig’s ragged mop of unruly black hair earned him another couple of inches, but not enough to matter. He was dressed in a simple fabric shirt woven of local textiles.
Friga Dushku, one of the townswomen, had discovered that by pounding claw shrub branches with a hammer, she could separate the long fibers. Then, once boiled, they created a fine filament that could be spun into thread. Overnight Port Authority had created its first textile industry.
Still the hot new thing, the fabric had caused Shig to give up on his old chamois-hide shirts and pants. The stuff was lighter and more airy than hide, and almost as tough.
Kalico had come to value Shig. Hard to believe that once upon a time she had fully intended to have him shot for conspiracy, theft of Corporate property, and rebellion.
Same for the tall, ash-blond woman who sat to Shig’s right. Yvette Dushane, also in her fifties, topped six feet. Austere, hard-eyed, and imminently practical, Dushane saw to the day-to-day management of Port Authority. Kalico thought of her as the nuts-and-bolts go-to person when it came to land, labor, or resource procurement.
Next to Dushane sat Dya Simonov. The attractive blue-eyed blond xenobotanist had proven herself as the leading authority on Donovan’s plant life, its chemical and medicinal uses. She also understood quetzals, having lived with the one that had bonded with her daughter, Kylee. At least until Deb Spiro shot it.
Now Dya asked, “So, Supervisor, do you have any idea of when you’ll be sending my husband back?”
“Mark’s out in the forest running a survival training exercise. Shouldn’t be more than four or five more days. He keeps complaining about being too long away from that new baby.”
“The fact that you let him wait until Su gave birth was very kind. We appreciate it. You can tell him that we’re all fine and missing him.”
“Of course. And your own infant?”
“Three months now. Doing well.”
Across from Dya sat Trish Monagan, tough-eyed, with a grim expression on her face. Now she met Kalico’s thoughtful stare and lifted an eyebrow.
Kalico allowed a wary smile to escape her lips. Monagan had always been something of an enigma. She might have been Talina’s second-in-command, but something about her was off-putting. The young woman rubbed Kalico the wrong way with her bucolic air of superiority. Part of it could be explained by the fact that Monagan had never been off planet.
“Okay, so we’ve got some new information on quetzals. Shall we get started?” Having lost twenty-one of her precious personnel to Donovanian wildlife in the last year, Kalico was interested in anything that changed the dynamic when it came to people and deadly beasts.
“Thank you all for coming,” Shig said thoughtfully as he studied his own cup of tea. Something green.
They all ached for coffee, but the trees—carefully nursed in the greenhouses outside of Port Authority—were still years from bearing.
“So this new quetzal has somehow compromised Talina?” Kalico asked, glancing down at her quetzal-hide jacket where it glistened in sheets of flowing color with every movement she made.
She’d been horrified the first time she had seen piles of excrement where a quetzal had eaten four human beings, shredded their clothes, and gone on to infiltrate Port Authority. In the year since, she’d lost additional people to quetzals.
Unlike the bush that surrounded Port Authority, Corporate Mine was in thick forest. Only once had she and her people managed to track down and kill a marauding attacker, and her jacket was crafted from a piece of that very beast.
The rest had melted away into the forest.
“How’s Talina?” Kalico asked.
“Sedated.” Dya fiddled with the holo projector she’d brought. “Raya’s keeping an eye on her.”
“She imagined she was killing one of the local women,” Trish told her. “Some hallucination. Discharged her pistol into a shipping container. Just lucky that no one was in the way.”
Yvette said, “Not to mention that it’s inconceiveable, even in a delusion, that Tal would actually shoot Sian. She’s one of the teachers at the school, a mother of three. That’s just not the Talina we know.”
“Speak for yourself,” Dya said, voice clipped.
Kalico remembered that Talina had shot the woman’s husband on orders from Clemenceau.
“The fact is”—Shig rotated his cup of tea—“that something’s wrong with Talina. I figured she was in trouble when she started spending every night in the tavern. Tal has always enjoyed her stout, but in moderation. Step said she could barely walk that night when he saw her home.”
Dya said, “My guess is that she was self-medicating. Alcohol was damping the effects the quetzal molecules were having on her system. Or so she thought.”
Kalico asked, “How is this working? These molecules. What are they doing to her physiologically?”
Dya flipped on the holo projector. “From the beginning, we’ve known that the basis for Donovanian life is a three-strand deoxyribonucleic acid. Chemically it’s the same as our DNA.”
Shig asked, “Does this imply that Donovan and Earth organisms share some common origin? Seeding? The hand of God, alien intelligence, or purposeful action like the old stories would insist?”
Dya gave him a wry smile. “Sorry. Like so much in science, it’s a matter of universal and basic chemistry. Ultimately, the most efficient molecule for the compilation and transmission of information is the basic deoxyribonucleic acid strand. Think Occam’s razor. Some chemistries, molecular structures, and shapes are simply more efficient solutions to problems in a given environment than others.”
“How so?” Yvette asked.
“Deoxyribonucleic acid, which makes up our DNA and quetzal TriNA, is the most efficient way to encode all the information necessary for life. The molecule’s perfect for the job. Easily replicable, the helix design is relatively durable, and it compresses to maximize storage space. The two base pairs, purines and pyrimidines, when patterned, allow infinite combinations in a small space.”
“So we have the same genetic material?” Kalico asked.
“But a different structure.” Dya used the holo to show the standard DNA double helix that reminded Kalico of a spiraling ladder.
“Next we have TriNA.” Dya projected an image where the groove in the DNA had been filled with another strand. “The difference between DNA and TriNA is that third strand. The downside is that the Donovanian molecule is stiffer than our DNA. Replication isn’t as simple as it is for DNA. TriNA depends on a different polymerase during replication that bends each of the pentose sugars one hundred and twenty degrees along two atomic bonds. That allows the base pairs to bond with two other strands instead of one. Following practice, we label the strands A, B, and Z. One from each progenitor. Can’t really say they have three sexes since Donovanian life doesn’t exhibit sexual dimorphism. Makes sense given that Donovanian life developed from trilateral symmetry.”
“So, is it better?” Yvette asked.
“Different. The payoff is an increase of information storage of three to the third power multiplied by the number o
f base pairs. And the molecules are smarter. What we’re seeing suggests that they communicate with each other in an exponentially more sophisticated way than DNA does. And that, in itself, is mind boggling.”
“Okay,” Shig noted warily. “What does this have to do with Talina?”
Dya arched an eyebrow. “Roughly a third of the population of Port Authority and all of the Wild Ones test positive for TriNA in their blood. My daughter bonded with a quetzal. When the quetzals took her after Rocket’s death, she admitted she’d been an experiment. My call, backed by Raya and Lee, is that Talina’s an experiment, too.”
Kalico went cold in her gut. “You’re telling me that Talina’s compromised? Being used by intelligent molecules?”
“I’m not sure I’d use those terms.”
Shig was looking worried. “How does an alien molecule, no matter what its intelligence, affect Talina this way? I mean she says the thing talks to her. It’s changing her body.”
“Ultimately, it’s deoxyribonucleic acid that we’re talking about.” Dya leaned back, expression thoughtful. “Just like DNA, TriNA unzips, controls the formation of all the different RNAs. Keep in mind, the underlying chemistry is the same. RNA, be it Donovanian, or terrestrial, has the same morphology. RNA functions the same way in our cells as it does in Donovanian cells.”
“Thought Donovanian cells were different.” Yvette was frowning into a distance only she could see.
“They are. They’re prokaryotes. Don’t have a nucleus. Don’t have ribosomes, either. Instead they have analogous structures that function like Golgi bodies, ribosomes, and the rest. But forget structure. It’s the underlying chemistry that’s the same.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Shig said. “How is it actually manipulating Talina?”
Dya took a deep breath. “We’re still working that out, but the operative hypothesis is that the TriNA is interacting with Talina at a cellular level. We know that she’s grown optical cells that allow her to see in the UV and IR ranges, that her musculature and stamina have been enhanced. She claims the ‘quetzal inside’ has learned to manipulate the language cognition centers of the brain at a basic level. That it is doing so means it is communicating through RNA that stimulates those specific neurons.”
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