Pariah

by W. Michael Gear

  “Never what?”

  “Well, they never lasted. The relationships, I mean. My partners always demanded too much. Wanted too much of my time. That or they didn’t understand the value of my work. Why it was so important that I finish that next paper, complete that next project. They didn’t understand the stakes, that it was a battle to save the planet. Conserve something of the past when human inevitability stands poised to destroy it.”

  The girl was giving him a skeptical look. “I don’t get it. You like to call yourself a fighter. How come you’re so squeamish? You almost threw up handling Talina’s soiled pants.”

  “That’s a job for nurses, medical technicians, other menials.”

  “And moms and dads and sisters and brothers.”

  “Well, professors don’t do those things. We hire it to be done.”

  “Sounds like we’re back to that waste of skin thing.”

  He laughed at the insanity of it. “What could you know of the better things in life?” He looked around at the bare stone—reddish tan in the morning sun—at the distant ridges and bluish-green forested bottoms.

  “You understand Darwin, right? The whole notion of adaptation to changed environments?”

  He shot a worried look at the child. “To quote you in your most eloquent of phrases: Duh.”

  “So when are you going to start adapting?”

  “Oh, go to hell. I’ve been a scholar all of my life. Always a master of my discipline and a force to be reckoned with.” A beat. “It’s just that none of this makes sense. It’s Radcek’s fault. All of it.”

  Kylee handed him the basket and started down the scuffed trail in the sandstone. “You’d think a professor would at least know something worthwhile. I can’t even let you go to the garden without being there to make sure you don’t get eaten.”

  “Do you have any idea how humiliating it is to know that my life depends on an unwashed urchin such as yourself?”

  “Yeah, lucky me.”

  He made a face. He hadn’t been able to tell the difference between a rock and the bem they’d run into. Not even after she pointed out the patterns that exactly mimicked the bedrock the beast was leaned against. She’d had to hit it with a thrown stone, startle it enough that it changed color before he’d finally been able to admit the loathsome creature was actually there.

  “It’s just so much to learn,” he muttered under his breath. “And besides, if you find me so meritless, why do you keep me alive? You could have told me to walk right up to that bem. I wouldn’t have known any difference.”

  She threw a taunting smile over her shoulder. “You can do some stuff. Like wash the dishes. Carry some stuff I can’t. So, if Talina dies? How do I get her body out of that bed and down to where I don’t have to smell it when it rots?”

  “That’s a callous way to talk about your friend, isn’t it?”

  Kylee stopped short, head down, features hidden by her blond curls. When she looked up, it was with haunted eyes. “You ever see anyone die?”

  “Die? Of course not.”

  “And you’re old. How do people die in Solar System?”

  “They die in hospice. When their systems fail and they can’t afford the medical to keep their organs functioning. Or sometimes, rarely, in accidents.”

  “Nobody eaten? Nobody murdered?” She shook her head and continued down the trail. “Must be a weird way to live.”

  He followed her down the steps cut in stone, watching, as he always did, when she stopped at the bottom to sniff the breeze that blew up from the canyon bottom.

  “Smell anything?” he asked.

  “I think that bem moved on. I’m not getting that vinegar smell like last time. Maybe he didn’t want to be whacked by another rock.”

  “You do amaze me sometimes.”

  As she led the way to the path, he tried to look for the common threats. He was still new enough to Donovan to be surprised that the trail had changed from the day before. Some of the plants had moved. He stepped wide around the thorncactus, but had to duck back before he encountered the gotcha vine. The damned thorncactus would have the trail blocked by tomorrow, which meant they’d have to figure another way to the garden. Or maybe Kylee could just whack it with a rock?

  Somehow he didn’t think the thorn-thick plant would get the hint.

  When they reached the garden, he let Kylee go first, hoping she’d see anything dangerous that might have crawled in around the stems or hidden in the leaves.

  “I really think the smartest move is to fix the radio,” he told her. “Seriously, even if you don’t want to go back to Port Authority, Talina needs medical aid. I wouldn’t make you go. I give you my word.”

  She ignored him until she finished her inspection of the garden. “Don’t get close to that mating cluster of invertebrates. Those red ones with the black spots? When they’re in a ball like that, they’ll attack you. Not only do they take a chunk out of your skin, but it burns like fire.”

  Dortmund bent, studying the roiling ball of active creatures. Each was about the size of his thumb, all shell and milling legs as they climbed over each other.

  “I won’t.”

  Ten minutes later, their basket was full. Kylee gave him a skeptical look. “Do you think you can take the basket home, start the beans and sugar peas to cooking?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Remember that snare I set down at the canyon mouth on that chamois trail?”

  “I do. Are you sure that it’s a good idea for you to go down there by yourself?”

  She brushed unruly hair back from her face, that now-familiar disapproving scowl on her face. “If there’s something in the snare, it’s cruel to leave it hanging. Worse, what if I wait until tomorrow and go down there to find it half rotten? Then we killed something for no reason. Finally, if there is something hanging there, better we get it before a wandering quetzal, skewer, or that blue nasty vine sends a tendril up to start eating it.”

  “What if you run into something dangerous?”

  She arched a thin “are-you-kidding” eyebrow.

  “Sarcasm ill suits you. I should go with you.”

  “Yeah? Like the day we set the snare? Took us two hours just to get down there because I had to make sure you didn’t step in anything, get stung, bitten, skewered, or grabbed. You can’t even smell a bem when it’s five paces in front of you.”

  He winced at the tone in her voice, allowing his petulance free rein. “Well, go on then. Just don’t be late for supper.”

  He watched her grin, shake her head, and like a wraith, disappear silently into the foliage.

  Turning, he sighed, shouldered the basket, and carefully made his way back up the trail. Yes, concentrate. Look. Think about where you’re putting your feet.

  He veered wide of the gotcha vine, skirted the thorncactus, and safely made his way to the steps. Not that the load was heavy—what did the vegetables weigh? A couple of pounds—but he was panting by the time he’d climbed up to the flat.

  Feeling secure out in the open, he trudged his way up to the dome. Not for the first time did he stare longingly at Talina’s aircar. Why the hell had he never learned to fly one of the things?

  Because people who spend their lives in the vested halls of higher education use automated transportation. Even in the re-wilded areas, vehicles drive themselves. State a location and an aircar carries you there.

  But here he was, smack in a world where global navigation wasn’t even a dream. Talk about primitive. It was like stepping back in time to the twentieth century.

  Dortmund slapped a hand to the aircar’s side and puffed out a weary breath. He’d go in, check on Talina Perez, and then take another look at the radio. As if he were any more knowledgeable about radios than the last time he’d looked.

  “Go ahead,” Kylee had told him. “Try and fi
x it. If you really screw it up, or worse, electrocute yourself, that’s one less thing that I need to worry about.”

  “Asshole kid,” he muttered, and turned away from the car.

  Right face-to-face with a quetzal.

  The thing was huge. So much so that its body seemed to blot out the world.

  As close as he was, Dortmund had to stare from eye to eye to eye atop the big wedge of a head. He could have reached out without fully extending his arm and touched that fearsome jaw. That it could come so close, and do it soundlessly, left him in momentary disbelief. He could smell the beast—a curiously spicy scent that hinted of cardamom, mint, and saffron.

  Terror locked him up. Paralyzed him as his heart began to pound, and fear ran liquid through his body.

  Time ceased. Every feature of the creature’s muzzle, the wide jaw, the tooth-like serrations, had a crystalline clarity. Scars crisscrossed the leathery gums, bits of what might have been tissue could be seen stuck at the roots of the teeth.

  And the color nearly overwhelmed him—so bright with that laser-like radiance. The creature’s hide simmered through intricate patterns of violet, mauve, and orange that might have had an infrared element given the heat projected onto Dortmund’s face.

  The ruff-like collar membrane spread like a giant sail and puffed air against Dortmund’s skin as blazing patterns of color intensified. Dazzled. They caused him to blink in an attempt to clear the afterimages from behind his eyes.

  Dortmund sucked a panicked breath. Whispered, “Oh, God.” And tried unsuccessfully to swallow.

  It’s going to kill me.

  He couldn’t move. Like some great hand squeezed him, his heart and guts felt crushed inside him. The muscles in his legs shivered and shook.

  He whimpered as the jaws parted, expected to see them open wide as the beast lunged and bit.

  Instead the tongue flicked out; snakelike, it traced around his face, the touch light, and then it slipped along his lips like an alien finger.

  Dortmund threw himself backward, would have toppled over the aircar’s railing, but the two forelegs flashed out and trapped him—the curve of the claws hard against the small of his back.

  Dortmund tried to jerk his head away from that horrible questing tongue, only to have the monster shake him. As he opened his mouth to scream, the tongue darted past his lips. Hit the back of his mouth.

  The gag reflex made him heave.

  Through it all, his brain remained terror-shocked, his body disconnected. He slumped, ragdoll-flaccid in the beast’s grip.

  Then the tongue was gone. The grip receded. Dortmund collapsed like a pile of boneless meat on the sandstone, his back partially braced by the aircar. A bitter and wretchedly astringent taste filled his mouth.

  The quetzal loomed over him, blanking the sky, the great expanded collar shooting psychotic patterns of white, pink, yellow, violet, and orange.

  Dortmund could hear a melodic, flute-and-oboe-pitched sound as the terrible beast vented.

  “What . . . what do you . . . ?” He gasped for breath, felt oddly hot, his skin beginning to perspire.

  Again the quetzal drew air and vented it in a musical tremolo that sounded of tubes and flutes.

  “I don’t understand!” Dortmund cried. Every urge was to huddle into a ball. Accept the inevitable. What the hell was the thing waiting for? Get it over with already.

  But the jaws didn’t reach down to crush and maim his body. Instead the beast reached out, opened its right front hand, and spilled a collection of blue-and-white ceramic shards to clatter musically onto the sandstone.

  Dortmund gaped in disbelief, seeing the Delft bowl fragments. As out of place as they might have been in the trash pile outback, to see them spilled upon the sandstone by an alien predator was mind-boggling.

  Dortmund stared up at the three gleaming black eyes. More of the insane patterns were flowing across the beast’s hide. Then it gestured with the forelegs, the claws flashing.

  Alien the monster might be, but the intent of the gesture couldn’t be misread: it wanted him to do something with the fragments of broken bowl. But what?

  Dortmund blinked, his lungs now heaving in desperate breaths.

  Again the gesture—accented this time with an irritated harmonic blown out of the posterior vents.

  Somehow Dortmund managed to get his feet under him. Trembling, damp with fear-sweat, he took three tries to stand. Mouth salivating, he kept having to swallow the odd mixture of bile and the new hint of bitter peppermint.

  Bracing himself against the aircar, on the verge of tears, he demanded, “What do you want from me?”

  The quetzal’s head lowered and extended; jaws parted, it made a gargling sound. The patterns of color went insane again, flickering in violet, orange, snowy white, taupe, and umber madness. The thing pointed down with its long claws. As it did, its sides beamed in yellow, green, and pink.

  “I don’t understand!”

  The quetzal paused. Then, deliberately, it reached down with a claw and rearranged the bowl shards. Dortmund flinched as it tapped the long claws on the sandstone. His guts clenched with each loud click.

  The gargling sounded again from deep in the beast’s throat. Then, with the other clawed foreleg, the quetzal made a circular motion. The head cocked in a most terrestrial manner. suggestive of an interrogative.

  “Yes, it was once round,” Dortmund told it, understanding flooding through him. “A bowl.” With trembling hands, he pointed at the shards and then made a cup of his hands as if mimicking a bowl.

  This time the patterns flashed in blaze-orange. The quetzal made a gurgling half chitter. The claw pointed at him. Then the shards.

  “No. I can’t fix it. It’s broken. You don’t have all the pieces.” How the hell did he communicate with the thing? Outside of a cocked head and pointing, what did they share in common?

  Dortmund tapped himself on the chest, ground his teeth in frustration, and clapped both hands to the sides of his head in despair.

  To his surprise the quetzal mimicked the gestures.

  “No, no.” Dortmund took a steadying breath and pointed at himself. “Me.” He pointed at the quetzal. “You.” Then he repeated the gestures, saying “Me” and “You.”

  The quetzal snapped its jaws closed with a painfully loud clap that caused Dortmund to jump half out of his skin.

  Orange patterns flashed across the beast’s hide as it pointed at itself and made a sound like water draining down sewer pipes. When it pointed at Dortmund it made a sound like elephant belching.

  Dortmund turned toward the dome. Pointed at it. “Other bowls,” he said. “I could get you a complete one. This one is broken.”

  Brown, yellow, and green flashed across the quetzal’s hide.

  Again it tilted its head down, flicked the claws to rearrange the shards, then made the “you” sound, indicating Dortmund.

  “You want me to fix the bowl? What could have possibly possessed you to pick the Delft shards in the first place. Why come to me?”

  That was when the quetzal stiffened, glanced off to the west, and uttered a clicking.

  Dortmund turned, seeing Kylee as she climbed the long sandstone slope from where the snare had been placed. She carried a limp creature over her shoulder.

  “She caught something,” Dortmund told the quetzal.

  Again the clicking sound from deep inside the beast. It watched Kylee with two eyes, the third still fixed on Dortmund.

  “She’s the one you really ought to talk to. She was bonded with a quetzal. She . . .”

  In a swift move, the quetzal trapped Dortmund’s arm between two of its three fore claws. As Dortmund cried out, the other foreleg flashed, one of the claws driving deep into the meat of his forearm just below the elbow.

  To Dortmund’s horror the beast pierced its own foreleg and pressed it
against the oozing wound in Dortmund’s arm.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he wailed in shock. The stinging pain built as images of terrible infection flashed in his head.

  He threw himself against the restraining hold. The grip held him like the jaws of a vise. For maybe a minute the quetzal kept him pinned, the two wounds bleeding against each other.

  As if a final insult, the creature pulled Dortmund’s arm out straight, shot its tongue into the puncture. Dortmund screamed as he felt the thick knot of tongue probe the inside of the wound.

  And then he was free, the action so quick Dortmund tumbled down onto the hard stone. “Why’d you do that?” he demanded, clutching his traumatized arm to his chest and gripping the wound to staunch the flow of blood.

  The quetzal bent its head down low to peer at Dortmund. Whites and iridescent reds flowed across the hide, intermixed with yellow, green, and pink patterns. Then came combinations of colors Dortmund could barely see, so fast did they flash across the beast’s scaly skin.

  Climbing to his feet again, Dortmund shot a glance in Kylee’s direction. The kid was coming at a trot, her body swaying under the weight of some colorful scaled creature that was slung over her shoulder. Even as he watched, she dropped it and came on at a run.

  “It’s all right,” he shouted.

  “What the hell? I leave you alone for five minutes and you’re in trouble!” Kylee cried between panted breaths as she closed the distance. “Don’t piss him off!”

  “Too late,” Dortmund said through a grimace. His arm was really starting to hurt now.

  The quetzal backed away, all the while sounding a clucking, clicking gurgle. Then it vented another musical harmony.

  Kylee puffed her way to a stop on the other side of the aircar. The quetzal flashed a series of white, pink, orange, and red of various patterns and hues.

  “Okay,” Kylee said, the tension easing from her voice. Then she flapped her arms at the thing, saying, “Go on! Get.”

  The quetzal turned a combination of snowy white and glorious red as it made a chittering sound, backed another couple of steps, and took off down the hill at a lope. It never even hesitated as it scooped up the rainbow-scaled creature Kylee had left on the bedrock. Tilting its head back, it gulped the creature down in one swallow.