Asimov's Science Fiction: December 2013 (18 page)

Ki's neck cramped, a sudden stabbing pain, a pull to the right. She clamped her jaws.

"Later, it hurt," she said. "On the way back. And despite the coiltails plugging the wounds, I started to lose blood, got dizzy. If they hadn't picked me up on a tracking camera, I'd have bled out within sight of the base."

"And then?"

"After that, well, if you saw the coverage, you know as much as I. They sedated me and pulled out the coiltails, one at a time. Four thousand, three hundred and four, though some broke apart during removal. I have pieces still in there, little pockets of alien DNA. They pumped fluids in me as fast I was leaking them out, until they could regrow a skin. You can see how well
that
worked."

"Not here in the dark," Andrea said, gently.

Ben said, "There's something she's not telling you."

"About the Blooms?"

"About the sharcoats."

Ki shut her eyes again.

"The sharcoats, they're kind of like giant sheep, yeah? Only green. And carnivorous. But still, they're herd animals."

"I've seen videos," Andrea said.

"So, up in the ridges, the big males, they lead the herd, watch for predators, find the best crap to eat, look for sharcoat babes, whatever the hell it is that makes a boss sharcoat happy. The juvenile males stay in the back, far away from the leaders as they can get, with the old and crippled and sick ones straggling along afterward. And the moms and babies, they're clumped up in the middle, safety in numbers, you know?"

"You
seem to know," Andrea said. "What is it, another betting pool on the sharcoats?"

"I told you I was a research assistant. That's what I do, fly a drone, track the herds. Anyway, down here on the plains, it's different. The herd goes backward; the alpha males in the rear, old ones first. And the cripples, yeah, Ninurta? You know why?"

Ki's eyelid twitched to her heartbeat.

"Because the fucking Blooms
aim.
They take the one or two nearest the center. If they kill something outside the Circle, it doesn't do the colony any good. The herd goes backward out here because the ones that go first are expendable."

"So?" Andrea asked.

"So maybe it won't get all of us. If we just jump for it, maybe some of us will make it."

"You're the one who broke through the crust, Ben," Ki said. "You want to take that chance?"

"I didn't think so," Ki said.

"Which one is Canopus?" Ki asked.

"Huh? Uh, it's up... um. Okay, see those three stars at ten o'clock, make a sort of triangle? Reddish one on the lower left?"

"Yes."

"Follow that arrow down to the horizon. That bright white one is Canopus."

"So that's south?"

"Yup."

"Sasquatch, Yeti, Nessie, Chupacabra," Ben said.

"What?"

"The Southern Group," Ki said. "Like I said, we named the Blooms. My great contribution to exobiology so far. If that's south, and that ridge ahead of us is the one west of the Base, then we're much closer to the Southern Group. But..."

"Yeah," Ben said. "This bastard
leapt.
The betting pool, it's about which Bloom moves the farthest, which way they go. And the Southern Group—"

"Moves very slowly," Ki said. She tilted her head a few centimeters each way, slowly, watching the stars slip in and out from behind the ridge, trying to get a bearing. They were further east than she had thought. "The Eastern Group is divided into two genetically related subgroups."

"Jubjub and Borogove, they move all the time, but not very far," Ben said. "And then there's Tove, Bandersnatch, Snark, and—"

"Boojum," Ki said.

"That one is, uh, is yours? I remember that, from the reports." Andrea said, not quite a question.

"That one is mine," Ki said. "That group, they can cover ground," Ben said.

"They average twenty, thirty meters during feeding. Snark made the largest move yet recorded, almost two hundred meters, after catching a pregnant sharcoat. But Snark was half a kilometer north of the ridge this morning."

"It's Boojum," Ben said.

"We can't be certain," Ki said, though her heart said otherwise with every racing beat.

"Boojum's been weird ever since you stepped in it. The thing caught some of your crazy."

"There
is
a possibility that—"

"It's fucking Boojum. And you're immune. That motherfucker already took a bite, and spat you out."

"Ki, why you?" Andrea asked.

Ben snorted, swallowed, said nothing. Nor did Ki.

"What I meant was, Ki, why did you survive? Why did the Bloom stop and not, you know,
take
you?"

"We don't know. Not enough data points. Not with humans, anyway."

"How many other people have..." Her voice shook for a second. "How many survived?"

"None. Out of eight human subjects, I am the only survivor."

"Oh."

"There are three recorded incidents of sharcoats surviving attack. Same behavior as with me; the coiltails fired, but stopped in the dermal layer. Sharcoats have a heavy layer of blubber under the skin; it helps them maintain water, like a camel's hump, but it also protects them in one of these events. They survived, where I would not have, not without aid. It's possible the aborted attacks have something to do with sexual reproduction; an exchange of genetic material if the subject is later taken by a different Bloom. That's just a hypothesis."

"So, if this
is
Boojum, wouldn't it be done with you? Wouldn't it
want
you to survive, then, to get caught by another Bloom? Does it
know
you?"

"It doesn't know
us,"
Ben said.

"It's just a hypothesis," Ki repeated. "Anyway, this could be Snark. Could be something new."

"It's pretty fucking obvious," Ben said.

"What is?" Andrea asked.

Ki knew what was coming.

"Why she's the only one that didn't get eaten. She's a fucking ET. A Gennissean. Seven generations, now? Eight? Under that crazy giant star, and that gravity. You think the Blooms are a textbook example of evolution, take a look at her. You want a data point? All seven
humans
died."

"Asshole," Andrea said. "Ki, I'm so sorry. I just don't get it."

"Actually, it is plausible," Ki said. "The gene pool on the original Gennissea colony was limited, and as Ben says, there are significant environmental stresses on my homeworld. Island populations tend toward extreme genetic drift. Like the Blooms: they're genetic islands, always changing, always drifting toward something new. Boojum
has
changed since my encounter; Ben's right about that as well.

"But the variation on Gennissea is within the range of pre-Expansion Earth, and so far I haven't found any markers that might explain my survival. Earthers and Gennissans are still the same species; we can still interbreed."

"Wasn't going to happen even
before
your accident," Ben said.

"I hope it takes you first, Ben," Andrea said.

"Never should have left," Ben said again, his voice distant, as if he was speaking up into the stars.

"Ki, what I meant was, I don't understand why you stay here. The colony is so small, and everything else is so alien. Doesn't it just remind you... I mean, how can you get past what happened when it's always right in your face?"

Ki laughed, too sharp and loud for safety.
"In
my face is right. Not likely to forget, am I, when it's literally under my skin.
Everywhere
is alien to me now." But before the silence could take hold again, she added, "You came out, out from Earth, out from the base, even though you know the dark is dangerous. Why was that?"

"Because..." Andrea said, very quietly. "To see Canopus in that dark, and know
everywhere
is home. Ki, it was worth it. Even this." And then, "They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care, they pursued it with, um..."

Ki's breath hung; her chest rang like a bell. "They pursued it with forks and hope; they threatened its life with a railway-share; they charmed it with smiles and soap."

"What the hell?" Ben said.

"It's a poem," Andrea said, "about searching for something you can't—"

"Shitshitshit,"
Ben said, too loud. "Something just
moved.
Under my goddamn foot."

"Sssh," Ki hissed. "It's the grigs, molting. During the night after a move, they go through larval stages before taking their adult form." She tilted her wrist, checked the time. "Getting late."

They were facing west; the sun would be behind them. In Ardun's thin, dry air, dawn came fast, with little warning, and the ridges in front of them were beginning to take on form.

"We should try calling," Ki said.

"You said you wouldn't risk it," Ben said, his voice still loud, and shaky.

"I lied," Ki said. "What you said before, about me out here at night, walking the valleys and screaming at the Blooms.... It's true."

Neither Ben nor Andrea said anything. Ki almost laughed into that silence; she thought that if she had done so, it would have been her first laugh without bitterness since her Bloom. "Calling them names? Yes, calling them the names we gave them. You know what I shouted? 'Here I am. Come and get me.' "

Andrea said, "I understand."

"I don't need your pity," Ki said.

"You're the bravest person I've ever met," Andrea said.

Ki had no reply to that. But before they could lapse back into the silence, Ben snorted. "

'Here I am, come and get me' works for me," he said. "Now I'm thinking we're too far east for the base sensors to pick us up, but what the hell, huh?"

They all shouted.

"No one is coming," Ben said. His voice was dry, cracked but calmer. "We gotta do something, and it's gotta be soon."

Ki took a deep breath, held the scent of Bloom and planet and human swirling in her lungs. She thought of island genetics. Stigmergy and emergence. She breathed out again.

"Here's something else I didn't tell you," she said. "When you are really lonely... not the sort of loneliness you can have on Earth, or any of the settled planets, or on a ship; there's always something familiar there, that can trick you into thinking you're part of something. When you are out here on the edge, in the damn dropshadow of human space, and everything that connected you to your species has been stripped down by something you will never truly understand, because it is truly alien, and you don't even have that
hope..."

She reached up and scratched her damn ear, rubbed her eye. Nothing happened, beyond a brief respite from the itching.

"When you are really lonely," she started again, more quietly, "you aren't sad. You don't sit around and pity yourself. You don't need people. You don't need anything."

She could see the ridge in front of them now, no detail, just a basic sense of line and plane.

"But you
want.
You want everything, with a desire so clear and pure it burns like anger, so intense that you have to scream it into the dark every night. Every minute..."

Three years, seven months, four days, fifteen hours, nineteen minutes.

"Every moment, you burn with it."

Ki could see her own hand, a dark cutout against the surface grown pale in the rising light. There was a line in the dust, a subtle flattening of the texture, an edge. The dawn would wash it out in a few minutes, but in the dim flat light she could see an edge running behind her to curve around the lump that was Ben. Andrea was a shadow against shadow beyond him, no more than a meter inside the circle.

Or maybe she was imagining that line.

If she wasn't, the center of the Bloom was
there.

The shape that was Andrea moved: a glint of an eye, a curve of cheekbone pale and pure and whole.

Ki stood up slowly. The dawn broke behind her ravaged face, rimmed her hair into a flower of fire. She said, "Andrea, I think, I hope, you
do
understand. I can't get past what happened, and I don't want to. I can only go
through
it."

"Oh, Ki," Andrea said. She sounded sad.

Ki thought of a cool pool after the heat. Forks and hope,
she thought. The center
was
there.
Boojum, love, is that you? It's me.

"Back."
Back out of the circle, she meant. Back to your ship. Back out of the dark, back home where Canopus was far away in a familiar sky.

Ki jumped toward the center, arms flung wide like an embrace.

Ben fell backward toward the edge; the foot caught in the crust spinning him sideways, arms flailing, face twisted in fear.

Andrea rose up, arched in a graceful curve, not away but toward Ki, one hand up to catch the sun, the other stretched to pull Ki back.

For a moment, the three of them hung in the alien light, in silence.

Want more Neube?
Old-School Neube,
which contains fifteen stories that originally appeared in
Asimov's
is available for Kindle. Also at Amazon is the Cincinnati Writers Project's latest anthology
A Few Good Words,
which includes a pair of the author's tales. In his latest story for us, two people manipulate the same means to achieve vastly different goals.

"They aren't responding to our mayday." Mayor Keenan's voice cracked like cheap glass. "I knew this wouldn't work."

"It will work," I shouted into the microphone.

Keenan was a good man, wherein lurked the mayor's ultimate weakness. I would have preferred someone whose corruption could be computed and utilized.

"Broadcast our coordinates. That warship is hiding out there for a reason. Let's become a raving nuisance."