Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (39 page)

Lin Fong
had been assigned to him after his last ridiculous attempt at Brunigea
blending. What a klutz. He’d killed at least two more subjects that they knew
of, and the one he was able to preserve had been so weakened that she biased
Erhlich’s entire next experiment. Her paltry metabolism had dragged the whole
organism down, stressed it severely, and what could have been a brilliant
construction turned out behaving like one of his early ones with barely any
viability at all. Ehrlich had been so pissed he’d wanted to graft Fong to the
wall and leave him there.

“Fong!”

Lin Fong
jogged in from the adjoining chamber with a big fake smile on his face. Erhlich
didn’t hate him. He’d known him since school. What he felt for Lin Fong was
intense disdain—and a disgust for his all-tensed-up and trembling
competitiveness. To Erhlich’s mind, he was like an eight-year-old child,
gritting his teeth, running to catch the older, stronger boys, his little feet
pounding, determined in his naive mind to catch them at any cost.

“Yes,
Gerome?”

Ehrlich
wanted to roll his eyes at Fong’s niceness, but contained it. “Can you clean up
this mess, please? Then find Epstein and get the surgery ready. We’re scheduled
to begin later this morning.”
 
He knew
the grunt work would infuriate Fong, and he took some pleasure in the fact.

Run, damn you.

“Okay.
I’ll take care of it. Shall I assemble the tools for you?”

“No, I’ll
take care of them,” Erhlich said and grinned inside.

You can’t
even touch my tools, boy.

“I
understand.”

“Okay,”
Erhlich said brightly. “Thanks.”
 
He
could almost feel Fong’s quivering anger from across the room. “Thanks a
bunch.”
 

* * *

Rachel
had been reading and re-reading for over an hour. Leaning against the smooth
wall with the notebook on her lap, her fingers turned the pages so lightly, it
was as if they hardly touched them. Her face was flushed, and she kept shaking
her head in disbelief and knitting her brow. Sometimes, one hand would go to
her mouth and cover it momentarily as if what she was reading was just too much
to believe. John lay close by, propped up on an elbow, watching her, yet not
watching her; trying, above all, not to disturb her concentration, but wanting
desperately to know, as well, what was in the notebook. At one point, he’d
tried to sit next to her and read over her shoulder, but he got a steely look
from her and slinked back to the floor. He’d just have to wait.

Finally,
she squared the notebook on her lap, leaned her head back and took a deep breath.

“Well?”

She
closed her eyes.

“Hello?”
he said.

She
opened her eyes slowly and looked at him without speaking. Her face was blank.
She didn’t know where to begin. Which facts should she tell first? Which of the
horrific details contained in this diary should she relate? She thought about
just handing it over to him, but she didn’t want him to touch it just yet. She
folded it gently closed.

She began
to piece it all together. Jacob No Name had been telling the truth. He had been
there a thousand years ago when the Verdian ship came to Earth. He had suffered
the ordeal of repeated parasitic infestation and surgical removal of the insect
progeny as Bailey Hall had described it. A final entry describes that she and
her friends had found a way to escape by “hijacking,” as she put it, one of the
Verdian sub-ships. It was safe to say that Bailey and the others in her
party—Phil Lynch, Mary Pope, and the Indian—were long dead. But Gilbert Keefer
had survived, kept alive by a parasite from the Verdian seas. He was here now
in the form of Jacob No Name, the same stooped and hideous being. It was all
right there in the faded pages of Bailey’s paper notebook. The drawings,
thoughts and emotions—described with the purity of a child’s guileless mind
were all there. The minutia was incredible. She couldn’t have done a better job
herself.

“Well, do
I have to guess or what? What the hell is it?” John said.

Her mouth
rose up in an amused and misshapen grin. “No, you don’t have to guess,” she
said, gently handing the notebook over to him. “Here. But don’t damage it. It
belonged to someone very special.”

What had
happened to them, she wondered? To Bailey Hall and Phil Lynch and Mary Pope?
What influence had they had on the way things are?

The wasps
were interesting to the biologist, but they were also frightening. They were a
perfect biological weapon as Bailey had described them—conceptually clever, and
Rachel knew from her own experience how devastatingly effective parasitic wasps
could be. She was sure she had seen the species described in the
notebook—finger-sized, iridescent wraiths hovering or zipping through Verde’s
jungle—but they seemed to pose no threat to humans. It was fascinating to her
that the Verdians had learned how to condition them to parasitize one species or
another, selectively. The way they did it was brutal, and the fact that they
had planned on releasing them on the human population was horrible, but the
idea wasn’t without its fascination.

She
pondered these things while John read. It occupied her mind and kept her from
thinking about what Jacob had planned for them. But every so often the
loathsome image of him would materialize and block out all other thoughts, and
she would groan inside. He was waiting for her, and she would become paralyzed
with fear. She wished she could disappear, just vanish like a puff of smoke.
She wanted to become a gnat and fly out of this cage. They were going to die.
If not die, then change to something unrecognizable—something hideous and
inhuman.

Her life
had been good, she decided with finality. She had achieved some goals for
herself, worked hard and enjoyed what she did. What else was there for her?
There had been lovers and fun and now, though she’d never live to see her, a
child. And there was John. She looked at him reading Bailey Hall’s notebook,
his brow tight with thought and wonder, and the sight made her glad. He was so
curious about things. She loved that about him.

“So what
happened to them?” he asked. “I wonder what happened to these people.”

They lived,
she thought.
They lived until they died.

John
handed the notebook back to Rachel, and she laid it gently aside. John scooted
over and put his head on her lap. The warmth of her thigh was comforting.

He seemed
suddenly so childlike to her—quiet and innocent with a child’s thoughts. She
remembered when she first saw him, all virile and confident and talky,
strutting around, telling her of this great biological find in the jungle. She
smiled at the memory and stroked his face.

“This is
bad,” he said.

“Yes,”
she replied. “It’s bad.”

“Are you
okay?”

“Not
really. I’m just trying not to think about it.”

John
wasn’t that fortunate. He felt his heart beginning to pound in his chest,
partly out of fear, mostly out of anger. He wanted to beat something, hit
something. He closed his eyes and shook his head.

Rachel
saw the angst. “Tell me again about your family,” she said, trying to keep his
mind off what was coming.

“Brazilian
father of mixed descent who thought he was part German but didn’t know for
sure. He worked as an assembler on a single contract with Yertz Aerospace in
Sao Paulo his entire life. My mother was Brazilian, too. She claimed to be part
Indian, you know, like the guy in the notebook there, some jungle dweller, but
nobody believed her much. It was a family joke to tease her about shooting
monkeys for dinner. She was tall and strong. She didn’t look like those old
pictures I’ve seen of those extinct Indian people at all.”
 
He smiled. “She was good to us and did her
best, I suppose. Raising two wild-assed sons isn’t the easiest thing in the
world, I guess. She died when I was twenty.”
 
He paused. “Tell me about yours again.”

“Me? I
don’t have a family. I was hatched. Hatched from under a rock, remember?
 
That’s why I like bugs so much.”

“Come
on,” he teased. “Tell me about your crazy sister.”
 

“She was
not crazy,” she said emphatically.

“You said
she was.”

“Well,
she just had her own way of looking at things. She was an independent thinker
is all.”

“Crazy.”

“All
right, she was crazy.”

“Go on,” he
prodded. God, he loved her voice. It was the sound of Heaven itself. He didn’t
care what she said. He just wanted to hear its perfect sound.

“Hazel
was a designer.”

“That
part I know,” he teased. “Of what?”

“Okay,
she designed . . . stuff . . .”

“What stuff?
Tell me again,” he insisted.

“You
would have liked my sister,” she said.

“We
discussed that, too.”

“She had
a nice butt.”

“Not as
nice as yours.”

“Well,
that’s true.”

He rubbed
his hand along her leg, feeling its strength. He reached up; and when he
touched her breast and found her nipple, it hardened under his gentle pinch.
She moaned softly. He pulled her head down and kissed her.

“Let’s
make love,” he whispered.

“Here?
They can see in,” she whispered back.

“I don’t
care. I want you right now.”

“I’m not
sure,” she said, but she was. She knew they wouldn’t get another chance. They
stood up and stripped out of their clothes. They moved behind a pile of ancient
clothing to a spot partially hidden from the cell’s door. He watched her supple
movements as she sprawled on the smooth, clean surface. The sight of her limbs
moving made him dizzy. Her thick hair fell and framed her lovely face and her
mouth and legs parted in unison. Her eyes were fixed on his in dreamy
anticipation.

He
slipped one arm under her head to cradle it and clasped her neck with the other
as he mounted her. He breathed into her mouth as he kissed her. There was a
moment of excited, nearly frantic adjustment as they shifted and struggled for
perfect contact. Her legs slid up his legs and high up over his back, and he
pushed. When their union was complete, they each gasped breath-moistened air
and breathed it back through a wet kiss. He caught her scent, a sweet, fragrant
musk that rose around them in a cloud of sexual warmth. She felt the thick
muscles in his back and legs and hips as he worked. She wanted to stay joined
like that forever.

He held
her there and pumped in a strong and rhythmic motion that slowly gained tempo.
He started to sweat, and she felt the slickness along his torso and on the
inside of her legs where they pressed against his flanks. Their kissing became
more ardent, reckless, wet and loud. He pumped and pumped, and she matched his
thrusting as much as she could or just pressed up with her pelvis and let his
movements do it all.

She
chuckled thickly into this mouth from the sheer joy of it, and he bit her lips
and sucked in response. She could feel sweat running down her sides and her
hands and arms slid over his back as if oiled.

She felt
her body begin to tingle and tickle from a spot between her legs, and the
feeling radiated outward, uncontrollably. She gasped and groaned in ecstasy and
watched his head go back, the veins and tendons in his neck stretch tight and
his body turn to wet stone. From deep inside him came the sound made when two
bodies become one—a deep guttural grunt that racked his strong frame with spasm
after spasm.

* * *

Donna
plucked the pupae from the transport’s vent and examined it in a beam of
reddish sunlight. She could see the immature organism inside it, lighter in
color, pressed firmly against the brown covering, seemingly crammed into it. It
was large but nothing too remarkable for Verde’s Revenge.

“What is
it?” Paul asked.

“Who
knows? Some kind of larvae. This place is filled with things like this,” she
said and tossed it down. “The fact that they’re raining from the canopy is odd
though.”
 
She mooshed it with her boots,
and then ground it into the soft dirt. All she could think about was getting Rachel
and John back.