Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (2 page)

Donna
covered the twisted form with a light sheet, and they left him there.

Before
she left the room, Rachel gently pried the brittle book from the man’s hand,
one stiff finger at a time and set the book gently down on a clean table.

* * *

That
night Rachel lay naked in her bed with John’s warm body wrapped around her. She
could see through the partially open door of the shuttle. Weak light
illuminated the awkward form of the stranger under the twisted and tent-like
sheet. She was suddenly filled with a sick dread as if she’d eaten poisoned
meat. The ill man’s presence was pulling something from her from deep inside.
He was taking something from her that was strong and fearless, and then
stuffing the space left behind with some black organ of hate and loathing. She
tried to close it out, shut the feeling off, but could not. She could clearly
see his hand, the one she’d pried the book from, sticking out from under the
sheet like some bent root, and was struck with the desire to run over and hack
it off—to hack and cut the entire figure to pieces.

She
forced her staring gaze away finally and twisted around until she could see
outside. She watched the life forms flying in the bands of light just outside
the opening. The sight gave her comfort, and she forgot about the man’s
loathsome image. Later, still unable to sleep, she turned to John. Pressing
herself to him, she ground her smooth flesh against him until he responded.
They made love, and she found respite in his strength. Her orgasm washed the
sick feeling away with a moment of pleasure, but the black and ugly feeling
crept back and persisted until the red and sleepless dawn.

“What
have we done?” she whispered.

“What?”
John asked.

“Nothing,”
she said. “Never mind.”

When it
was light enough, she walked naked out to the stream and bathed from the
filtered cache they’d rigged there. She poured the cool water over her head and
face and back and legs, wishing each cupful would wash from her the feeling of
dread.

She
dressed, and then forced herself to walk into the shuttle to examine the
patient. She was determined. She would know what he knew, repulsed or not.

She
pulled the sheet back from his twisted shape. The vision filled her head in one
foul gush, and she almost wept from the horror of it. She watched his thin
chest rising and falling just slightly. He was still alive. She touched the
skin on his upper arm, cool and dry. She pressed and felt bone just under the
surface like a stick wrapped in soft rubber. She felt some connection by that
contact as if some ancient channel had been opened and through which slowly
flowed some dark, formless memory.

You make me sick, but
you know something we don’t know
—
can't know. I'll find it out. Goddamn
you, I'll find it out. You are holding it in there like some small animal in a
cage. I’ll free it, you sick bastard.

“How’s he
look?" Donna’s voice startled Rachel from her inner conversation with the
disgusting patient.

“He’s
alive,” Rachel said. “I guess that’s a good thing.”
 
Donna checked the IV and mounted another
bottle in the system. She took his temperature, then checked his pulse.

“He’s
very much alive this morning,” Donna said. “This is one tough bastard. His
temperature is down a little from normal, but that’s all right.”

She was
examining one of the holes in the man’s head when his mouth opened with the
sound of tearing fruit. There was the sound of air sucked down ragged channels,
then the sound of it coming back out again past torn reeds. Under the hiss, was
a long and faint groan.

“Christ,
what’s that smell?” Rachel asked.

“Him. I’d
say that’s the first real breath he’s taken in some time. I’d say he’s going to
make it.”

When
Donna looked at Rachel, she saw concern. “What’s with you? I thought you wanted
him alive.”

Rachel
couldn’t tear her eyes away from the gaping hole that was the man’s mouth.
Strands of wet material stretched across that rank cavity like a spider’s web.
Deep inside it the squirming shape of a worm-like tongue reflected a brief
glimmer from the lights above as it moved.

“I want
him dead,” she said aimlessly.

“What?”
Donna asked, surprised.

“I said I
want him dead. But not yet. The sonofabitch is trying to talk.”

2

“I
t’s really bad,”
Eddie Silk was saying. “There’s nothin’ but fightin’ and starvin’ and people
dyin’ all over.”

“How
many?” Donna asked.

“Almost
all of them from what I heard.”

She
didn’t need details; she could imagine it clearly. To begin with, there were
too many lives hanging from the ledge of a system that barely worked. Now their
weight had crumbled it, and humanity had dropped into the pit.

“What
about the off-world projects? They must be okay.”
 

“Same
thing on Fuji and Cunningham. They only had food and stuff that they got from
Earth, so when the transports stopped coming, the people there died,
too—mostly. That’s what I heard.”

Donna
thought it over. “And this,” she said, “is the only one with any substantial
food supply. The last human conclave.”
 

“The
what?”

“The last
. . . place . . . for humans. Here.”

“I guess
you've got your Bondsmen to thank for that,” Eddie said. Donna closed her eyes and
felt herself sinking. Less than two hundred kilometers from where she sat could
be the last meaningful human gene pool, relatively small, but highly motivated
and organized—The Chosen, The Sacred Bond of the Fervent Alliance.

She stood
up and wanted to kick something. Instead, she slumped back down and shook her
head. It seemed the thing to do. “God . . .”
 
she whispered.

“Do we
have any more chocolate?” Eddie asked. “I’ll sneak in and get us some next time
if we’re out of it.”

She
smiled, almost laughed. It was funny. Something had to be funny.

Ever
since Donna had found Eddie, stealing goods from one of the storage warehouses,
just as she had been doing at the time, and no less guilty of theft than she,
her instincts to mother him had grown. After his heartfelt confession about
Mike Kominski and his involvement with Del Geary, it was obvious he had no more
of a position in the colony to return to than they did, and that staying with
her, John and Rachel in the monolith was his only option. Living on the
jungle-choked perimeter of the settlement had made him consider many things
about his past life. Most importantly, he’d learned what it meant to share and
work with others. Donna was pleased with the way he had fit in. His willingness
to help was, to Donna, his most endearing quality.

“We have
some left,” she said. “Sure. Help yourself. Just don’t spoil your appetite for
dinner.”

Early
meals and afternoon meals were basically formless, but they’d made a regular
event of the evening meal and had a place in the center of the chamber just for
that purpose. The spot was dominated by a large flat protuberance about two
meters across that rose less than a half- meter from the chamber’s floor,
providing a perfect table to sit around. They’d fashioned a rough tablecloth
out of fine vines Donna had woven and pounded, and the centerpiece, always a
bouquet of the jungle’s most stunning and fragrant flowers, rested in a crude
clay vase courtesy of Rachel’s artistry.

Like most
chores, they took turns with meal preparation as well. Tonight, it was Rachel’s
turn to set the table and cook. There wasn’t a lot to it, just heating the
packages and carrying them over, but the task was a necessary one and now
established in their minute culture as tradition.

That
evening, Donna waited until the meal was done before asking Eddie to relay the
news of the collapse to the others. She couldn’t say why she waited. It just
seemed the thing to do. Before Eddie started, he asked Donna how come she
didn’t tell them. She just shook her head and gently told him to tell them
instead. That seemed to be the thing to do, too.

Eddie
began in his not-quite-grownup voice. The unsureness of it somehow softened the
hammer blows the words contained. At times, Donna would take over, finishing
the idea Eddie was trying to convey with her own editorialized version. It
didn’t take long to tell it, and Donna thought to herself how odd it was that
the death of human culture could be expressed in so few words, so briefly.

John
listened stoically to the news; and when the telling of it was done, he rose
silently from the table and walked away. Rachel had a few questions, but not
many.

They sat
and did not speak since there was little to say at the moment that had meaning.

The quiet
in the chamber was slowly filled with the jungle’s sounds; sounds of insects
that hummed and hissed and clicked and did not care a whit that humankind had
fallen into the chasm.

“My
family is probably dead,” Rachel said flatly. “They lived right in New York
City. It was my father and brother. They're all I had really.”

“Mine,
too,” Donna said. “Los Angeles.”

They sat
for a few silent moments more, and Donna didn’t cry until Rachel did. Neither
sobbed, but the tears streamed down and were wiped away on a cotton sleeve or
sometimes were missed and splashed with sounds too light to hear on a breast or
lap.

“Oh well
. . .”
 
Rachel said. “Oh well . . .”

“Yeah . .
.”
 
Donna said.

John went
over to the chamber’s massive opening. His eyes fixed on a single leaf some
meters away and wouldn’t let go; he simply stared. He stood there for some
minutes like that and was dimly aware that the others had drifted into their
own protective fugue state.
 
He let the
growing din from the jungle fill his head with its chaotic noise, drowning the
dark thoughts of human chaos and destruction, like some nightmarish echo light
years away.

The
jungle insects filled the air like flying ash brought to life by darkness. Only
a few entered the chamber; little harmless ones that were not warned off by the
chemical barrier. He watched as a massive beetle, one of the ones Rachel called
Axolotise Grominea, plowed through the undergrowth and moved tank-like to
within a few meters of the chamber’s opening. He knew this one. As it had,
almost every night since their arrival, the creature stopped there, antennae
waving, sniffing the chamber’s contents, testing it. John was sure the thing
knew they were there and could smell the fresh meat, but dared not enter. He’d
wanted to shoot it since the first night, but Rachel had rightly pointed out
that its carcass, weighing perhaps three metric tons, would be hell to move and
would rot there.

He could
imagine the damage those enormous mandibles could do and, as if to show him
just how, the thing opened its maw and stretched the dark apparatus out wide
and back again. The parts came back together like machinery that clicked and
snapped.

“Get out
of here,” he said to it. “You’re not a member.”
 
It stood there as if only its antennae were alive, waving at random,
smelling him. Then, finally, it turned on its huge brown insect legs and moved
off, back to the jungle’s anarchy in search of more promising fare to rend,
tear and eat.

He waited
until it vanished completely before he went back to join the others.

“Your
friend was at the door again,” he said to Donna.

“He’s not
my friend. I want to kill it, too.”

“Leave it
alone,” Rachel said. “It’s a beautiful insect.”
 

“You
wouldn’t say that if you’d had one trying to eat you all damned night.”

“There won’t
be any more transports,” John said, changing the subject.
 
"No more supplies. No more packaged food
or equipment or material of any kind. Maybe the Bondsmen saw it coming, and
that’s why they’ve been stockpiling so much goddamned stuff.”

“That
makes sense,” Rachel said.