Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (38 page)

“Well,
something like that.”

“Something
like that—the polite way to put it?”

“Yeah.”

“God . .
.”

“The
problem is that until now, the things didn’t live very long.”

“You said
until now. What’s different?”

“She says
they’ve reached some kind of breakthrough. She says they’ve found a way to
combine two or more people into one and keep them alive. She says Jacob wants
to be one of the first to try the new procedure and that he wants to be joined
to your friend Rachel. That’s why he’s so fixated on her.”

“For how
long?”

“How long
. . . what?”

“How long
can they keep them alive?”

“Forever.
She says they’ve found a way to keep them alive forever.”

Donna’s
hand went up to her mouth as if she’d just heard the worst, the most sickening
thing imaginable. To be physically, surgically, joined to Jacob No Name in some
obscene sexual union—forever—like profane Siamese twins . . . it was too
ghastly to contemplate. Her mind refused it further entry. “No,” she said
dimly.

“No,
what?” Paul replied.

“No. It
can’t be true.”

“Well,
there’s more,” he said tentatively.

Donna
closed her eyes. Of course, there is. There’s always more hideous news. “What?”

Paul
sighed. “She says that once they’re joined, they can make babies one after
another. Drop one, have another. Drop that one, have another one. She says
that’s what they want. They want to cement people together like that so they
can breed and breed, you know, like machines. Then, according to her, they can
use them for whatever they want.”

Donna
suddenly felt frantic. The feeling rose up from her feet, making her want to
move, to run, to do anything. She started to squirm in her seat. “We have to do
something. We have to stop this. We have to make it go away.”

We have to kill all of them,
she thought.

The first
pupae dropped onto the top of the transport with a boink sound—just like any
number of things, living or dead that can drop out of the canopy. When the next
five or six bounced off the roof and windows in quick succession, they caught
Donna’s attention, and she thought briefly that the tree under which they’d
stopped was shedding its breeze-loosened seeds.

* * *

Rachel
lay with her head against something hard, but she couldn’t tell what it was.
When she felt it move and heard him groan, she realized it must have been some
part of John, perhaps his knee. She felt his hand grope her face and hair and
the awkward, spastic movement was strangely reassuring and almost funny to her,
though she didn’t feel like laughing. Over the next few minutes, she managed to
get her own limbs working and, finally, when she thought she could do it
without falling down, she slowly stood up.

She
turned around as if she were standing on slick ice and looked down at John. He
lay there flexing his hands, arms and mouth at the same time, trying to get any
of them to work properly. He must have gotten a stronger dose of the gas than
she did, because he had a ways to go before gaining anything like coordinated
motor control. She rubbed his arms and legs vigorously, trying to stimulate
them into working. “Thank you,” he croaked.

“They’ve
got us,” she said, working his thigh. “They’ve got us good.”

“But I’ve
got you,” he said, trying to smile.

She
looked at his drug-warped smile and touched it with her fingertips. He had come
for her, risked his life to save her. She blinked back a tear. “Yes, you do.
You’ve got me good,” she said.

She
didn’t know if this was the right time to tell him, but if she didn’t do it
now, she might not get the chance. She took his hand and placed it on her belly
then covered it with both of hers. “Do you feel that?” she asked.

“Feel
what?”

“That’s
you in there. That’s you and me growing there.”

John let
the words sink in. “You’re pregnant?”

“Yes. I’m
pregnant with your child.”

A swell
of brief joy raised him up, but reality brought him down with a thud. Barring
some miracle, they’d never live to see the child. He pressed his hand a little
tighter against her womb, feeling the warm resilience there. Under normal
circumstances, he could have thought of no more secure place to nurture and sustain
a developing child. Rachel was strong and her body inviolate. But now her womb
was not a warm and secure place, but a prison within a prison. Now three, not
two, had been captured.

“I love
you,” he said.

She
looked at his handsome face through a mist of tears.

“Now
ain’t that sweet,” a mean voice behind her said.

Rachel
turned around to see a disheveled soldier standing on the other side of the
cell’s bars. He was leaning against the wall on one arm, legs crossed, the very
picture of smug superiority. He turned Rachel’s stomach. He’d obviously heard
their conversation.

“What do
you want?” she asked, wiping at her tears with a fingertip. You can’t see
these. These are John’s.

“Don’t
matter what I want,” the man said. “It only matters what the Council wants. You
got a surprise coming.”

“Really?”
Rachel said. “Well, life is one big adventure.”

“Too bad
you’re so damned pretty,” he said. “If I were you, I’d be wishin’ to be real
ugly about now.”

“Fuck
off,” John said, trying to get up.

“Go back
to sleep, buster,” the soldier said. “You’re gonna need your rest.”

The
soldier walked away from the door, running his thumb around under the rifle’s
sling.

“Bastard,”
John said.

“It’s
okay,” she said. “He’s gone. Forget it.”

Rachel
stood up and looked around. They’d put them in what looked like a storage area
of some kind. It was new to her. “I don’t recognize this cell,” she said.

“One you
missed?” he asked.

“Yeah,”
she said.

There
were piles of ancient clothing that crumbled to the touch, and some other very
odd items laid out around the cell’s walls. There were two very strange chairs
with bent aluminum arms and legs that had woven material stretched between
them. There was a pile of ceramic dishes and actual glass drinking glasses.
There were several cracked and crumbling plastic carrying baskets, and inside
them were the crisp and dried remains of packaged foods. She picked up a
tubular container, its surface cracked and peeling and shook it. It rattled.

“This
stuff is very old,” she said, puzzled. “It must have come from Earth. Look at
this stuff.”

Propped
neatly against the wall was an antique knapsack, dark green in color. When she
bent down and touched it, the material, stiff and dried, cracked under her
touch. She took hold of the zipper and tried to work it around the seam, but it
broke and fell to pieces. She gently tore the weakened seam with her fingers
and looked inside.

She
pulled out a pair of antique binoculars, the lenses dulled by the out-gassed
resins of the pack’s contents. When she turned the focus knob, it cracked in
two in her hand. There was a plastic bottle, stiff and cracked, its contents
long-lost. There were two glass jars, their labels cracked and crumbling,
filled with a material she didn’t recognize. The cement-like contents didn’t
give when she shook them. She read the labels, printed in old English. One had
been filled with what was formerly peanut butter, the other with grape jelly.

Stuffed
into an inside pocket was a paper notebook with a faded blue cover and a
springy, coiled binder. It was permanently bent and dented by the binoculars
that had pressed against it for eons.

Rachel
took it out, very gently, and as if turning the petals of a dried flower,
opened it to the first page. The ink had separated from its base, leaving
yellow halos around the letters, but the neat printing was still legible. She
cocked her head and smiled at the misspelled title printed in big block letters
on the first page.

Tracing
the edge of the paper gently with a forefinger, Rachel began to read “Bailey’s
Dairy.”

19

J
erome Ehrlich liked
his job. It was challenging and made him the center of attention besides. No
one could do what he did quite as well as he did. He was always the best. He
always had been. It was in his
genes.

It was
Gerome Ehrlich who had discovered how to operate the plasticizing equipment in
the first place. It was he who had figured out how to use the cutters and
gluers and burnishers and how to trigger the very fine tips of the
micro-nippers. The hardest part was figuring out how to turn on the
plasticizing applicators and how to apply the chemical catalysts. Released from
the organ above, they blended the plastered area into one seamless joint. It
was the catalyst that allowed the foreign tissues and nerves to grow together
as one. By using them, one could glue anything to anything. They’d even named
the organ that produced it “Ehrlich’s Body” after he figured it out. That’s how
smart he was.

It was
logical, after all, and you could tell what a thing did just by looking at it,
if you just tried. One thing led to the next and to the next. Once you
determined what the goal of the thing or things were, the logic just evolved
out of them.

He’d had
his failures over the last few months—but who wouldn’t have had them under
these circumstances? He was way out in front here with this technology. This
was cutting-edge stuff.

And the
last two or three experiments looked really promising. He’d figured out how to
overcome the stresses on the separate nervous systems when they were combined,
as well as the sheer gross anatomical strain on bones and muscles that kept the
organisms largely supine to reduce the damage such tensions produced over time.
Part of the problem there, he’d discovered, was that he was trying to preserve
far too much material in the combination. By truncating the larger components
from at least one of the subjects, he could keep the overall mass down and
hoped, in his next design, to enable something resembling real perambulation,
even if it meant using four legs.

They should be able to move around for God’s
sake,
he thought.
Not just flop around like blobs.

The
problem was he wasn’t quite ready. He needed at least another week to perfect
the technique.

But the
heat was on, and he had to begin this morning with the Rachel woman. She was at
the end of this particular experimental road. There could be no stalling for
time. He had to plasticize her and her boyfriend to Jacob before the day was
out, and it better work because if they died, he himself would be dead just
minutes thereafter.

Jacob had
provided the general design. He wanted a symbiotic sexual graft like the others
but wanted the boyfriend to occupy a truncated, parasitic role with no nervous
system interaction so that what was left of him would be a mere passive,
eternal observer. He should be able to see and hear, at least for the time
being, but not talk. Jacob could always change the configuration later if he
wanted. Ehrlich didn’t like the basic idea—it wasn’t using his skill to best
advantage. Hell, anybody could do that little job. All you had to do was
extricate the eye, brain and stem, trim out the speech and motor centers to
save space, graft it to an available venous structure, cover it with any
epidermal tissue you had lying around, catalyze it all and actuate it. You
could stick it anywhere for Christ’s sake.

Simple.

The tough
part, the part he was really good at, was getting the nervous systems in sync
and indistinguishable from one another. That took genius. What took even more
genius was keeping the thing alive. He’d better be right about the stress
factors—especially now.

“Fong!”
he yelled. “I need you.”