Strange Trades (44 page)

Fourier saw the POGO appear first, and directed our attention to it. For a second it stood atop the northern rim like a Masai warrior on one leg, or a sleeping stork. Then it bounced up and over, and began to descend the long slope in puffs of dust.

The Comity base was situated in the middle of the bottom of the Valles Marineris, that wide, continent-long rift on the Martian equator. The decision to plant the colony there was psychological, a reaction to the destruction of the first base. The valley seemed somehow to offer more shelter than the barren plains—although another determined asteroid would have no trouble fitting into the thirty-seven-mile-wide cleft. Also, the decision reflected long-range plans. The eventual goal was to roof over the entire valley, section by section, and establish a shirt-sleeve environment. Lots of living space for the bucks, and a damn sight cheaper than terra-forming the whole world.

Other colonists had come to the garage to help, although no one knew precisely what would be required. The POGO bounced closer and closer, eventually stopping about fifty feet away from the dome. It was too big to enter through the crawler lock. Its passengers would have to disembark and walk. If they still could.

A hatch opened in the stilted pod. A ladder of plastic chains unfurled.

I didn’t know what to expect. Victims of decompression or explosion or rock fall, limbs torn or puffy or mangled, carried out by limping survivors—

The last thing I expected was to see five agile figures drop down the ladder, jumping off while still ten feet above the red soil, and begin trotting for the dome.

They entered the lock and were lost from our sight.

The speaker above the inner door came alive while the lock was cycling.

“Clear everyone out except the medical personnel,” said Holtzmann’s officious voice, a trace of nervousness underneath. “Have cots set up in the chipfab clean room. We’re going to use it as an isolation chamber. We’ll reach it by Alleys Eight and Twelve. After we’ve passed, have the whole route disinfected. We’ve just sterilized our suits, and won’t be cracking them, but we can’t take any chances.”

I punched the intercom button. “Holtzmann, are you crazy? You’re talking like you’re infected. You know as well as I do that except for whatever imported terrestrial organisms might have escaped and survived, Mars is dead.”

There was silence for a long ten seconds. Then Holtzmann said, “Not anymore, Doctor Strode. Not anymore.”

Weddig Holtzmann was thirteen years old. He had sharp Teutonic features and a blond brushcut. An East German, he was the product of their super-accelerated neurotropic education. I had never agreed with those who claimed the miracle catalysts allowed everything an adult needed in terms of sheer knowledge to be force-fed to someone by the time he was only thirteen. I was relieved when Congress—despite the pressure from the Gerontocrats, who wanted plenty of young workers to support them—killed the bill to lower the U.S.’s franchise to that age.

Fifteen was just right; those extra two years made a big difference. I know that I myself wouldn’t have been ready for college at thirteen. As it was, by the time I emerged from Johns Hopkins and the Banneker Institute, at age twenty, I was hardly mature enough to handle my powers. As can be adduced by the way I’ve fucked my life up.

Now, at thirty-one, I felt practically ancient next to Holtzmann and his peers. I knew Amy shared these feelings, for we had spoken of it, in our more rational moments, as one of the causes of our sense of alienation.

Holtzmann, whether as a by-product of his hothouse growth or due to congenital tendencies, was a perfect little martinet. No doubt one of the reasons he had been chosen as leader. I always called him “Weegee,” because it pissed him off.

Standing now in the makeshift isolation chamber with Holtzmann, Amy and the other expedition members, I considered foregoing the jibe today.

There were no conventional hand weapons on the base. They would have done little good against the one real threat of asteroids, and nations at peace had seen no need to arm their representatives against one another. But Holtzmann had remembered the flare pistol aboard the POGO, and he now had its ugly wide snout pointed squarely at my gut. Its self-propelled, oxy-fed load would punch a hole in me that no amount of peeker skills would be able to rebuild.

“You’re going to find out what’s wrong with us,” said Holtzmann sternly, an almost imperceptible quaver under his words, “and fix it. And this time there’ll be no tricks.”

I had to smile then at the memory. He was referring to the last time everyone had come to us for a bone toning. In the lower gravity of Mars, minor osteoporosis was a problem, and we had regular sessions where we dealt with it, as well as searched out incipient skin cancers due to Mars’s high UV. This time, out of boredom and disgust with our roles as captive shamans, Amy and I had added a little fillip to the treatment.

The morning after, all the colonists had woken up bald, their hair bestrewing their pillows. The uproar was wonderful. Things had taken months to get back to normal.

And the best part was, they couldn’t even really discipline us, needing us as they did.

I carefully considered Holtzmann’s emotional state, the muzzle aimed at me, and my integrity, then said, “Whatever you want—Weegee.”

Holtzmann’s finger tightened visibly on the trigger, I made ready to fling myself aside—when Amy stepped between us.

“Listen, so far we’re totally in the dark. What’s wrong with the five of you? You look okay. What happened?”

Holtzmann passed the back of his free hand across his sweaty brow and made a visible effort to calm down. “You’re right, Doctor Sanjour. I’ve been remiss. I should have explained everything over the radio, and made the arrangements for the antiseptic precautions ahead of time. But we were all too preoccupied in running what tests we could. You know that Kenner doubles as our biologist.” Holtzmann indicated a dark-haired seventeen-year-old sitting on a cot, hands folded morosely in his lap. “Well, he’s been unable to learn anything about what’s gotten into us.”

Seeing our puzzlement, Holtzmann backtracked.

“You know we were making the first real survey of the ruins of the original base, at Pavonis Mons, to see if there could possibly be anything salvageable, or any surviving personal effects for the relatives of the colonists. Also, we wanted pieces of the asteroid that wiped out the base, since we seldom get a chance to study such objects uncontaminated by terrestrial organisms.

“Well, the first part of our mission was fruitless. The base was entirely destroyed by the shock waves of the strike, which must have been measurable in megatons. The inhabitants, I’m sure, died almost instantly, as painlessly as possible. There were no artifacts left.

“However, we did succeed in finding portions of the asteroid itself. They’re in the POGO now.”

Holtzmann paused. “Oh, Christ, did I say not to let anyone near the POGO?” He walked to the wall and issued the order over the base’s PA. My stomach muscles—which I hadn’t even known were tight—relaxed.

Still slumped by the curving wall, Holtzmann turned back to us, raising the gun almost absent-mindedly.

“We kept most of the samples in isolation, so as not to contaminate them. But one piece—one small piece—we handled with our bare hands, all of us marvelling, I think, at the distant origins of this innocuous rock, and how it was fated to wipe out so many lives. And now, God knows, it appears ready to do more destruction.”

Amy said slowly, “You believe that you’ve been infected by an organism from the asteroid fragment?”

“It’s not that implausible, Amy,” I interrupted. “We know that interstellar clouds seem to contain free-floating amino acids. And those famous Antarctic meteorites on Earth appeared to have prebiotic molecules on them. There was even a theory—the guy’s name was Doyle, Hoyle, something similar—that the late-twentieth-century epidemics were caused by extraterrestrial microbial agents.”

Holtzmann jerked erect, gun quivering. “There’s no need to debate so coolly, people. We’re compromised. Our bodies are hosts now to something unknown. There is no doubt, no doubt whatsoever.”

“Well,” I said, almost tauntingly, not quite willing to believe yet, “what are the symptoms, Weegee?”

Holtzmann’s hand shot to the chest seam of the coverall he had worn beneath his discarded pressure suit. He ripped the fabric away from himself. Velcro peeled apart with an insulting noise.

There are colors, shades and hues, which human flesh does not normally wear—at least not on the surface. The yellow-brown of rotten bananas. The mottled purple of bruised plums. The green-tinged gray of wet sharkskin. Yet these were the colors visible in the intricate shiny folds and convolutions of the growths bursting from Holtzmann’s chest and abdomen.

I was next to the man before I knew I had moved. Amy too. We didn’t touch him at first, but only stared.

Each growth was only about as big as an infant’s fist, and there were only seven of them, irregularly spaced. It was their startling incongruity that had made them at first appear to dominate his body, from across the room. They emerged subtly from his skin, the alien colors, textures, and shapes grading away into normal skin.

Their shapes—consider brain coral, roses, ranunculus, anything complexly enfolded and recomplicated, gleaming slickly, throwing back highlights from the room’s illuminants. They differed slightly, one from the other, like individual faces.

Holtzmann seemed a garden of exotic blooms, his body cultivated soil.

“There are more on the parts of me still covered,” he said, although their numbers have stopped increasing. Luckily, we are still able to sit and walk, although lying on them is—uncomfortable.”

Amy and I both raised our hands in unconscious synchronization, and made ready to enter him.

“No,” warned Holtzmann, gesturing with the gun. “Treat the others first. Ill go last.”

It was impossible to tell if he spoke from sense of duty, or fear. But it didn’t matter, since we had to obey in either case.

The others had opened their coveralls down to their waists, after their commander’s example, as if to offer mute testimony to their common affliction. One of the two women had symmetrical fleshflowers on both breasts, where her nipples had been. A man sprouted one from his armpit. I felt my own skin crawl.

Amy moved to delve into one of the women. I went to Kenner, sitting on the cot.

In and down, down, down, past his ephemeral agonized epidermis, into the arteries and cells and meat.

I had expected to spot signs of the infectious agent everywhere. I was disappointed. It had to be something like a virus, I was assuming, but the man’s bright blood was clean of any such deadly packets. There weren’t even any raised levels of antigens, no pockets of invaders hiding inside macrophages or T-cells. Kenner’s psychic aura was one of utter health, tallying with his lack of debilitating symptoms.

Alien tropisms, alien life cycles, meant alien patterns of conquest, I thought to myself.

I had been avoiding the obvious locales of the invaders, the fleshflowers themselves. Now, stymied elsewhere, I moved my perceptions cautiously toward them.

There were outriders to the colonized territory: sentry organisms, far from the main concentrations, whose like I had never before encountered. I tried to pin them down for examination, but they squirmed out of my mental pincers. Trapped in some Heisenbergian quandary, I could not both hold them and pick them apart.

I have used my PK talents on everything from mosquitos to man, microbes to elephants. The Mars colony’s cacti presented no resistance to my skills. But all life on Earth stems from a common ancestor, has a shared biochemistry. These things were the product of some completely alien course of evolution, with different mechanisms of life.

While I was planning my next move, the organisms counterpunched.

I never got anywhere near the main flowering bodies. Somehow, in an inconceivable manner, I was repelled, my advance thwarted. I got a fleeting impression of masses of single-celled viroids, alien genetic material coiled snakelike in their nuclei, massing, breeding, preparing to fission —

Kicked violently out of Kenner, I opened my eyes. Amy was reeling back from her patient, obviously dealt a similar defeat.

“Are you done?” Holtzmann demanded. “Did it work? Are they dead?”

I rubbed the stubble on my chin. I caught Amy’s green eyes. I spoke.

“Uh, I think we’ve got them on the run.…”

That night Amy and I slept together for the first time in months. And I mean simply slept together, for our sexual encounters had always continued, even during our worst periods. We fell exhausted into her bed after a hasty meal and pointless discussion of what we had experienced.

Holtzmann had been reluctant to let us leave the clean room, after our exposure to their bodies. I convinced him of the truth, which was that we had not been infected. He had been forced to believe us, and let us go. There was nothing any of us could do right then but get some rest.

As I held Amy’s sleep-slackened body from behind, my mind drifting aimlessly for the few minutes I took to fall asleep, I thought of all we had been, all we had become—

Then I dreamed.

Peekers don’t generally dream.