Eating Memories (13 page)

“I think . . .” He took a step backwards.

“It’s hard being alone with Jimmy Lee gone. I don’t mean . . .” she seemed embarrassed for a moment. A seemingly impossible blush spread across her sun-wrinkled cheeks. “I don’t mean that, exactly. But you’re different. From the city. Maybe he wouldn’t come tonight if you was here. It’s scary all alone.”

He backed away another step. “I’m pretty tired and everything.”

“If you don’t stay, you’ll tell somebody? The government’ll come out and tell the man to go away?”

“Yes. I could send somebody out,” he agreed, knowing he’d never have the courage to talk about Mrs. Foote’s visitor. Being a UFO researcher had held him up to all the close-minded ridicule he could stand. He had a sudden mental image of an army of Catholic priests, maybe a Bishop or two, standing around a plaid-shirted, jeaned Jesus, telling him to put the heart back in Mrs. Foote’s chest. He tried to end the image by Jesus disappearing, but all his mind would picture was the sullen, angry look on the large-eyed face and the gout of blood as he squeezed his hand into a fist.

She shot him a knowing glance as if she had seen inside him to the dark nest where his cowardice lay. “Mind that you do,” she said curtly. Then she gave up on her brief attempt at courage and started to cry silently. “It don’t matter any more if he tells us why he’s doing it. I’m way past that, now. Just want him to stop. Please. You got learning and all. Just make him stop.”

Harry turned his back on her and started down the hill fast. The dog had come out of the barn and when it saw him it turned and ran again. Yard dogs don’t run, Harry thought. Holy Mother of God. I’ve never seen a yard dog run.

He hit the dirt road at a brisk trot, his camera bouncing against his chest. Down by the lake night pooled among the trees. Bullfrogs thumped in the reeds.

After a few yards Harry slowed reluctantly to a fast, purposeful walk. His lungs hurt; the backs of his legs were on fire. For the first time in five years he wanted a cigarette badly. Ahead of him he could see lights: the squares of the windows yellow. His flight became a limping, sore walk. Remembering his tape recorder, he glanced down to turn it off.

A strobe light went off in his face.

Flinching, he looked up. The light came again, turning a twenty-degree arc of the sky into noon. Above his head small orange spheres were dancing a waltz in the purpling, star-lit sky.

“Damn!” he said. Raising his camera quickly, he started snapping pictures. Behind him a big dog howled a single, bass note of terror.

He saw the plaid-shirted blur through the lens first and
slowly
lowered his camera. The man was standing in the middle of the now-bright road, his arms down at his sides, a cryptic, gentle smile en his face.

“Please,” Harry whispered.

The man walked towards him. Without wanting to, without having willed his legs to move, Harry found himself stepping forward to greet him. When they were inches apart, the distance of a lover to his beloved, the man put his hands up and tenderly slipped off Harry’s glasses. Staring directly into Harry’s eyes, he folded the glasses and put them into Harry’s shirt pocket.

“No. Please.” Harry was crying now, his cheeks and mouth twisted. He tried to move, but, like all the nightmares of his childhood, he couldn’t.

Harry couldn’t move his head, but his mouth was still under his control. There was no one around to see, and no one who needed him to act brave, so like Donnie, he started to scream.

The man seemed oblivious. There was a piercingly sweet smile on his face, one that was sad but at the same time intensely, hurtfully loving. He put his fingers up, up, up towards Harry’s eyes as if all in the world he wanted was to wipe the tears away.

Author’s Note:
I loved this story, and it was the first that Gardner Dozois bought for Isaac Asimov’s Magazine of Science Fiction. The first time I met Gardner, he stopped me while I was walking past his table at WorldCon Orlando to tell me that he had anthologized “For No Reason” in his new Robots anthology. I was happily surprised both by the inclusion in the anthology and by the fact that he recognized me. It took me a while to realize that this was most probably due to my name tag.

I don’t know why some other writer didn’t write this story first. At that time I took both Scientific American and Discover, and in one issue of Discover was an article about nanotechnology and one about the new social structures of fire ants. Whoa! Short story city! I hurriedly wrote it and sent it off, meantime scanning all the mags wondering when my nanoant story was going to be scooped. It never was.

A few yards into the tunnel, there was a dead Pharaoh. It lay on its side, both antennae ripped away, the round, pebbly eyes tweezered out. From the scent, the body had been killed elsewhere and dragged to this place. It was a billboard of sorts. Without tasting the chemical signs that had been left, Morgan could read the typical invicta warning; what would have been a crude warning for man, but was a terrifying sophisticated warning for ants.

If the invictas caught a spy, they cut out his tongue and gouged out his eyes.

Don’t fuck with us
, the warning said.

Morgan took a narrow side tunnel that led to an abandoned food chamber. The room stank of battle.

Most of the brown pharaohs had been carried away to be eaten. The invictas weren’t choosy about meals, and they needed the chitin, anyway.

But in the sand of the tunnel the Pharaohs had left their dying last words, not as profound as some of the messages often left by their attackers, but still poignant. The first to enter the chamber had only the time for a chemical scream. The rest, outnumbered, bewildered by their defeat, had stroked the soil with their slow agony.

Morgan was glad to see a few bright red bodies littering the chamber floor. The Pharaohs had lost, of course, but they had taken some of the invaders with them.

In their sense of justice, the invictas were barbarians; but in their battles, they were as perfectly organized as the old Roman army. This nest of Pharaohs, like all the rest the invictas had invaded, had never had a chance. At the end, the Pharaohs had known it. Resignation had been left scrawled in the sand of the chamber.

There were three exits from the room. Morgan dug his sensors into the dirt at the mouth of each. The taste didn’t tell him much. The victorious army had divided and taken all three routes home.

They knew he was coming.

He chose the middle exit and stepped forward cautiously. A few yards into it, the tunnel began to narrow until the dirt brushed his legs to either side. He negotiated a difficult ninety degree turn and suddenly his headlights lit up a wall to his front. He groped forward and touched his sensors to the fresh earth of the cave-in.

His name was written there.

Backpedal. His legs butted against the tight walls. Sand grains clicked as they fell against his metal hide.

He knew what would come next.

Frantically, he dug a little chamber for himself, large enough for him to turn around. The lights set above his optical scanners dipped and rose as he shifted, making the shadows dance. He twisted, bent in half, and suddenly he was stuck.

Looking over his shoulder, he found himself staring into the expressionless eyes of invictas.

There were three of them; two tagged with blue stripes; one tagged yellow. The Yellow one moved. His forelegs scraped at the ceiling. At last, too late, Morgan noticed the dirt walls of the tunnel were new. They had never really been tightly packed.

A blue-striped ant rose to help the first. The two were prying at a sand grain the size of a boulder that was set into the ceiling.

Morgan was fighting to flip himself over and free his rear legs, fighting so hard he feared he was about to cause his own avalanche.

The boulder dropped a little. The invictas backed up quickly and stood waiting. But Murphy’s Law caught up with them. The boulder, in dropping, had crushed two smaller grains together, and the grains had form a makeshift latch. The latch was stuck on CLOSED.

Morgan’s foreleg was wedged between the tunnel wall and his shoulder. He shifted his weight furiously back and forth.

An invicta, number three, stepped forward and reached up, up for the precariously balanced lever. The delicate red foreleg touched the rock.

Morgan reared. His body popped free.

The ant tugged. There was a grinding sound. A ghostly puff of dust dropped onto the invicta’s glossy back.

“NO!” Morgan screamed.

With a crack, the boulder fell. After a brief hesitation, the tunnel went with it.

* * *

Novotny was staring into Morgan’s face, the remote helmet in his hand. “So. You lost another one.”

Still streaming tears, Morgan bent over. He gulped air and blinked at the light. Once, just for fun, Novotny had left him buried for over a hour.

“How many this month?” Shirley asked in her deep alto voice.

On the other side of the room, the techs were still laughing. Novotny was laughing, too. “Should have seen your face.” Morgan took another deep breath. The room smelled of stale cigarette smoke and plastics. He coughed, raised his eyes, and stared for a moment at Shirley. The lab coat nearly swallowed her. He noticed how curious small she was: small for a worker; much too tiny for a female.

“I can’t believe they buried you again,” Shirley said.

Novotny chuckled, “The invictas tell me, ‘We’ll bury you.’ Just like another old Red, Nikita K., used to say.”

Morgan’s hands trembled as he peeled the leads from his fingers. It took two tries before he made it up out of the chair.

Shirley followed him out of the room. “I noticed in the monitor that Blue Nest warriors have integrated fully with Yellow. That’s why they’re on this territorial kick with the Pharaohs. The nest needs more space. We’ll knock off for today. I’ll send for another unit and we’ll go in tomorrow morning to see if they’re food-gathering with Yellow, too. Then we’ll get the queens.”

He stumbled into the locker room. Shirley, who was not squeamish about those things, followed. She watched as he peeled off his wet shirt.

“Scares the shit out of you, doesn’t it?” she asked.

Morgan sniffed cautiously at the shirt, grimaced and tossed it to a pile of dirty towels at the side of the bench. He unzipped his fly, ran out of energy all of a sudden, and had to sit down quickly. He put his head in his hands.

“You still think they sucker you in?”

“Yes,” he whispered.

They knew his name. It had been written on the end of the tunnel. This one’s for you, they’d said.

“Well, burying you is their only way of fighting back. Nobody ever said ants were completely stupid.”

The invictas knew his name, but not his human one. They’d made one up for him, and now the taste of that new name was more familiar than the sound of his old.

Some things, of course, were beyond the invictas’ understanding. They knew of war, certainly. They knew about killing. It was motiveless murder they didn’t understand.

Morgan neither ate nor did he invade. When the workers were tagged and the nest was empty of queens and eggs he walked away, leaving stunned turmoil behind him.

Had they known the term they would have called him Serial Murderer. As it was, they took the essence of what he was doing and called him by the scent-name For No Reason.

His very name was the question they longed to ask him:
Why?

An invicta could have understood the human robber killing for money. They certainly would have understood the plea of self-defense. But what Morgan was doing was a type of murder not even humans understand.

For absolutely no reason.

He figured the invictas thought he was crazy. He knew Shirley thought he was.

Morgan was so tired that it was an effort for his mouth and tongue to form the words: “They know when I’m coming.”

“Yeah. No surprise. That’s what this research is all about, isn’t it? Finding out how they set up communications. When the queens are dead, the colony is dead, right? And the survivors have to move it or loose it. Question is, how do they integrate and why do the other nests let the alien workers in? Myself, I think it’s for entertainment value. Invictas are like Boy Scouts around a campfire. They get out their marshmallows and listen to horror stories the new guys tell about you.”

He stood up, swayed for a moment, and then dropped his pants. With his undershorts still on, he walked into a shower. He turned on the water, slipped off his jockey shorts and tossed them over the opaque glass door.

“Hey! Watch it!” Shirley shouted.

With the hot water beating into his face, Morgan leaned against the tile wall, closed his eyes and laughed silently. In a moment the edges of his lips pulled down and, still without sound, he was sobbing.

There was a soft thud. Shirley had thrown his shorts against the shower door. “Jesus Christ,” she whispered in disgust.

He wiped his face. “You just going to stand there? You coming in here with me, or what?”

There was a muttered reply.

“If you don’t want my bod, then what is it you want?”

“It is your bod, Morgan . It always was your bod. You’re going in tomorrow, right?”

He took a bottle of shampoo from a side ledge and squeezed some onto his hand. It was a woman’s shampoo that was pink and smelled like a discount whorehouse. After a hesitation, he wiped it over his head.

“You’re the best robot manipulator we’ve got. And you understand the damned fire ants.”

Morgan had become sensitive to smells. The musk scent of the shampoo nearly made him sick. He quickly worked it into a lather and rinsed.

Scents. That’s how the ants spoke, in scents. Morgan could read them, but in the land of the ants he was mute. If he could tell the invictas anything, it would be to get out of the cities while they could. He’d tell them to go back to the country while they still had a chance, even though the Solenopsis invicta-specific poison was there. When Shirley and the others figured out how the nests worked, the invicta would have no chance.

Invictas were taking over the household nesting spots of the Pharaohs, the Argentines, the carpenters. They had left the pastures and were fucking with human habitats, and the humans were finally pissed. That’s why Shirley was studying them so intently; and that’s why Morgan was murdering them.

He
did
have a reason. However convoluted, murderers always do. He just couldn’t explain.

“I always come back, don’t I?” he asked.

“Yeah. I just keep thinking that one day you won’t.”

“Maybe I won’t. But it won’t be tomorrow.”

In a minute, he heard the locker room door creak shut.

* * *

The wide treeless expanses of the suburbs bothered him, but the day made up for it. The clouds were low, the dusk light deceptive as if it were about to storm. In the distance, Dallas rose like a shrouded specter; and the proscribed path of Central Expressway was a river of small, bright bodies: Red ones heading north; white ones heading south.

He took the Greenville exit and entered the close-packed apartments by The Village. The joggers had gone in, but the dogwalkers were out en masse. He walked quickly from his car to his darkened living room and peered into the light beyond tile breakfast bar, watching Donna move, an ant behind glass.

She left dinner simmering and came out into the living room with him. “Home early? You want a drink?”

“Yes.” Then he thought about it. “No.”

She walked back in the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. He followed.

At the stove she flinched away from him. “You stand too close, you know that? It’s spooky.”

He stepped a pace back and looked at her.

“Don’t watch me. You’re always watching me lately.”

“Sorry,” he said, and looked away, riveting his eyes to the picture on an empty tomato can.

Without warning, she was crying.

He was afraid to come too close; afraid to stare at her. “What is it?” he asked from a few feet away. The tomato can was green, The tomatoes were bright red. There was white and black writing across the front of the tomato picture.

“You’re not a
human
any more, Stevie. You don’t act like a human, you don’t think like a human.”

He wondered if it would be all right for him to look at her now. He tried it. She wasn’t looking his way, anyway.

“Don’t you know I love you?” he asked. He would die for her. He would kill for her. And he didn’t understand why. All he knew was that Donna and the apartment were wrapped up into the same package in his mind. It upset him when he went out.

She was still crying, so he stepped forward, stood at her shoulder and ran a hand down her arm. Donna shivered and jerked away. He was confused because he thought he remembered that was the way he should act. “You don’t want me to touch you?”