Earth in Twilight, page 3
Disgorging the last meal he had eaten in the elevator, Ferrer crouched and cursed his thundering heart. What was this mad vision his traumatized imagination concocted? The ornad looked somewhat like a gigantic green and yellow caterpillar, having a body made of nimble sections. The head was also similar to that tiny life of the past, being snouty and round or slanted near the brow, but there were no ineffectual little feet on this creature. He had sixteen green legs with long toes and thumbs on his feet or hands. As for his teeth, they were sharp and prominent. Now he laid his bloody head on his nest and groaned in pain and rage. Once in a while he looked up to see what had become of the walking reed of brown and yellow colors.
His sensibilities offended by everything that had happened to him thus far, Ferrer tramped nearer to the hideous beast and then began walking on tiptoe. Somewhere a whirlwind was born, came to buffet him, tried to fling him away. He buried his feet in tangled vines and cursed aloud. Behind him were miles of strands and the jutting steeple while ahead was what looked like a forest. Between both was the ornad who had decided to try to sleep away his discomfort.
Stepping to the edge of the bridge Ferrer leaned down and hunted until he found what he was looking for, a solid under-bridge or some pathway on the underside of the span that he could use to sneak past the creature. At this point he was reckless almost to the point of insanity. When in the midst of hell, why search for the angelic? Such was his rationalization to himself.
The air on the bridge had become extremely redolent since he was fairly near to the creature’s nest and the various remains of meals. The smell heightened his sense of indignation and he readily swung over the side, found a foothold, positioned himself securely and crept forward along narrow strings. Even the loose ones were wide enough to support him though most of the time he had to give up walking and crawled because they didn’t hang down far enough.
Some movement or bodily sound he made intruded upon the ornad’s consciousness. He was directly beneath the nest when the beast poked its head over the edge to see what was happening. Ferrer shrieked but managed to maintain his balance, even when the ornad came partially into his territory under the bridge. Its front feet probed for him as did the dripping fangs but he moved sideways so that the beast momentarily raised up and tried reaching for him from another direction. Meanwhile he continued moving ahead, and it abandoned its ploy and moved along with him. Debris slipped through the cracks between strands and rained on him like the shredded contents of many coffins.
Choking and cursing, now and then giving voice to a frantic bellow, he crawled and scrambled toward the tree. He didn’t dare look up for fear he would spy a green hand coming through or around after him, and he was afraid to look down because the loose strings were growing farther apart. There were a hundred ways in which the strands ran through and outside the large tree. Some disappeared below the clouds while others missed the growth altogether and reached into the fog toward another steeple many miles distant.
In desperation Ferrer heaved himself free of the confining strands, dangled toward the faraway lake and painstakingly began working his way toward a limb. Hand over hand he went, gasping and still cursing, confident that the strands would hold so that he could survive and be subjected to more torture and horrifying visions in the foliage beyond.
The ornad realized what his prey was attempting to do and moved his great carcass as rapidly as he could. He was even tempted to try a jungle swing but then recalled what happened the last time he tried it. Not wishing to lose his other ear, he remained on top of the bridge and hoped to arrive in the tree before the worm.
He was too large and the tree limbs were too flimsy. The brown one swung hand over hand to the first green protuberance, grasped a handful of leaves and pulled himself from the span. The last the ornad saw of him was his skinned behind fading into the leaves. The creature could have followed him. Often he climbed into the tree and roamed about, marauding and terrifying the natives, but the confines were tight and today he had a sore head. Besides he wasn’t really hungry. With a sigh of relief he turned and lumbered back to his nest.
Calming down a bit and satisfied that his heart wasn’t going to burst through his chest just then, Ferrer slowly traversed the limb. He marveled that he still wasn’t chilled though he was now in deep shade. Standing with his hand gently clutching an overhead leaf, he stood staring about him at the most verdant spot he had ever seen or imagined. The scenes in antique Tarzan films that he had viewed in his anthropology classes were nothing like this, and not just because those old films were in black and white. Nowhere had there been trees this size with limbs, mere limbs, ten and twenty feet in diameter. Nor did those ancient reels show fruit as big as baskets. It was more than just what he saw. Every sense that he owned was being bombarded with a single stimulus and he finally realized what it was. Life.
As for the colors, he closed his eyes because his body was beginning to feel like a sponge soaking up too much sweetness. Cautiously he opened them. He stood still not knowing which way to go when all of a sudden a lilting tune came to him from an unseen source, piercing the raucous cacophony of birds and other fauna. It sounded like a radio and he thought for a moment that the heat had finally gotten to him and he was hallucinating. Then the sound came again, soft and delicate, like tiny tappings against fragile chimes, low at first and then tripping up the scale of notes to a quick clustering that sounded like laughter.
Full of curiosity he stepped toward a lavender-colored flower, stuck his ear nearer to it and listened. From the deep opening came a few musical notes. The plant was singing. Most of it was green but its blossoms at the end of long stems were vivid enough, ranging in shade from deep purple on the edges of the petals and gradually becoming white. They were like open bells and inside them were writhing tips or fingers that seemed to be beckoning to him. Captivated by wonder he stepped closer and moved to cup one of the bells in his hand. He wanted to touch it, smell it, examine. It suddenly opened wide and darted forward to slap itself flat against his arm. He didn’t feel anything but he couldn’t pull away from the blossom.
All at once he stopped and stared at something behind the plant. Straight ahead and looking out at him from between two huge green leaves were two eyes in a face.
His lower jaw dropped while his own eyes went round. What he was seeing had to be impossible. There were no people on Earth nor had there been for thousands of years. The last men to travel to the stars had been the … last … men.
This specimen stepped onto the limb and stood regarding him with interest. It was taller by a head than he but was about the same weight. The hair was short, curly and black, the face was round like the moon, the eyes were small and lacking any white, just green, like marble with light shining through. The skin was smooth and almost shiny as if it were stretched taut or as if it were simply different.
Ferrer’s second thought was that the creature wasn’t human, could never be human. Again he remembered that Earth held none of his species. Since birth or shortly thereafter he had been taught as much.
“Hello,” he said.
The person came forward, one foot in front of the other as any person would walk and then Ferrer became aware of the stranger’s clothing. It wore an almost transparent garment, like onion skin, from waist to knee. As for the torso, it seemed familiar enough, what with jutting ribs and collarbones, but where each flat breast should have been was a small round globe. Ferrer felt insane. Not only were there things on the planet that looked like men, there were also things that resembled women.
His breath suddenly began coming in gasps. Waves of horror swept over him as he felt the strength of his beliefs washing out of him. It wasn’t that he was afraid of women. He feared no woman or man as long as they fit into the preconceived notions set up in his mind by several generations of Laredo ancestors.
This woman frightened him nearly to death. She had all the fixtures of a human being but something was terribly out of focus. Perhaps it was her skin. Yes, that was probably it. She was green like the pulp of an unripe honeydew melon; not dark green at all; a little bit green; a light tinge; almost human but not at all pink or brown as humans should be.
Wondering if he was staring straight into the face of a walking plant, Ferrer swayed on the limb. He felt as if he were behaving badly but he couldn’t help it. No matter what he faced he ought to have the courage of a civilized man.
“Careful or you’ll fall,” DeLoona said in the clicking, slurred speech of her kind. Plainly the brown one didn’t understand her. Tone, though, counted more than words. “Are you all right? Can I help you in any way?”
A walking, talking plant that looked like a woman. Ferrer was near enough to smell her perspiration. She smiled at him with teeth the color of a dowager’s hair, so white with that faint hint of blue. Why weren’t they green? Walking, talking, sweat that reminded him of the smell of sassafras, green eyes, blue teeth, two breasts like his mother, it was too much, too clashing, too unexpected for him to absorb. Earth had no right to support mutations. It belonged to him and his kind.
She shocked him even further. Raising a wicked-looking weapon that looked like a piece of bone, she whacked the flower off his arm, sliced it away along with a layer of his flesh.
“You shouldn’t have gotten so close to the siren,” she said. “It would have eaten you, you know. Don’t you know? Really, you’re the strangest stranger I’ve ever met.”
There was a loud buzzing in Ferrer’s ears. The last hours had been too much for him and then there was the added trauma that his arm pained him terribly while his blood ran down onto his feet.
As far as he was concerned he pitched out into empty space in a dead swoon. As far as DeLoona was concerned the brown man fainted in her arms.
Chapter 4
Peru acquired his formal name by virtue of the fact that his first host or discoverer had a speech defect. It came from the letters P.U. which the host repeated every once in a while after he stumbled into the old cave and picked up the infection.
Having lain dormant since no one knew when, Peru wasn’t grateful to be carried from the dark cave into the light of day. He hadn’t the sense to know the difference. If one were to describe his inner and outer package one might have said he was an ugly little microbe.
Following the dictates of his nature he worked his way into the shoulder of his host who had brushed against a nasty spot sticking to the wall of the cave. From there the germ sought daylight by boring-through the man’s body.
There was little intelligence in the human for he had been dropped on his head in infancy, but he knew a bad smell when one confronted him, and so whenever the odor from the suppurating sore on his chest wafted upward he said, “P. U.” The sound of the utterance resounded inside the scant corporeal makeup of Disease which later decided to take it for his name, or one of them. Before he was through he would be called many things, mostly disparaging.
Peru had feelings of nostalgia whenever he thought of the two noises comprising his title, a sensation of homesickness and a longing to return to the nest, though he forgot where or what the nest had been. Had he recalled the characteristics of his original host he would have been filled with anger and disgust. At any rate, his affinity for his nomenclature might well have been his sole claim to good, as opposed to evil or as opposed to whatever the other life forms around him wanted or did. He wasn’t like any of them and indeed, in an abstract way of thinking, he was an absolute antithesis to them and their existence. He was non-direct, non-forward, not backward. He was nothing. Being annoyed him, not his own but that of reality. He hated things, sights and realizations. As he matured he dedicated himself to ridding the world of them and detected no contradiction in the concepts.
After he killed that first man he lay in the corpse under some tall grass until a chicken came by and stepped in the putrefying mass. The bird carried Infection away on his feet and went about his business until his legs rotted off, at which time he fell down and died.
Meanwhile Peru ate the chicken’s head and brain. The inferior memory cells were stored in his body until he acquired a rudimentary intellect. If he walked about he would find food. There were dangers and sensations that weren’t unpleasant but he needn’t waste time worrying about disaster because life was brief anyway. So thought the chicken while he was alive and so thought Peru later. In addition there was virulence, greed and an unspoken and unrealized longing to play havoc, to seep, consume, stink, befoul and utterly ruin. These qualities were innate in the murderous infection so he didn’t have to pick them up from any of his victims.
It was also innate in the tiny criminal to wish to travel in a benevolent disguise, therefore had anyone told him he looked like a globule of bloody pus he would have been offended. Having the intelligence of a chicken he didn’t know what he looked like but secretly he realized how much more rewarding his days would be were he to appeal to the better nature of his victims and not the worst. Thus, after his intelligence grew, he tried to be fastidious in speech, appearance and manner, except of course when he stooped to doing what he liked best which was to make a mess of everything and everyone around him. Save for a few subconscious wishes to die before he matured, his view of himself and his mission was sanguine.
One day a man from a tribe of woman-haters came through the upper forest in search of the wife he had stashed away in a cavern of ivy. It bereaved him to discover that some filthy kind of disease had gotten to her while he was gone and now she sat swooning against a limb while an infection gorged on the side of her face.
The woman had picked Peru up on a stick, held him higher to get a good look at him and then couldn’t get out of the way quickly enough when he dropped onto an open sore on her face. Her husband tried treating her but she was plainly going to die and was suffering a great deal so he mercifully shoved his sword into her heart. Then in a rage because he loved her he cut off her head and set fire to it in hopes of getting revenge on the disease. Unwittingly he had rammed his sword into the wound and carried Peru’s essence away with him to his camp. On the way home he cleaned his weapon on his thigh and accidentally gave himself a minor slice.
This time infection wasn’t so obvious and afflicted his host in secretive places so that the man’s companions couldn’t account for his behavior. He had fits and experienced inexplicable rages and eventually they isolated him in one of the innumerable ivy caves and carried food and water to him.
“I have a wife, you know,” he said to the guard who was seldom away from his duty.
“How can you say such a thing? We’re dedicated to non-reproduction!”
“Maybe so, but I still have a wife, or I had one until that thing killed her. Spread the word in case someone gets an idea about how to combat it. I don’t think it’s a common ordinary infection or disease. If I didn’t know better I’d say it was intelligent. Tell the others to be careful and not let it near a cut in the skin. I think it’s … I don’t know what it is but I figure I didn’t kill it. I thought I did but the bugger’s in my gut playing games.”
“Don’t tell anybody about what you said,” said the guard.
“You mean about my wife? Why not? You have one, too.”
“Of course I have nothing of the kind!”
Peru’s host groaned and suffered. “We should have named ourselves the society of hypocrites. Hate women? That’s easy to do until you reach puberty.”
“That’s only nature’s way of beguiling you into fertilizing one of them.”
“Don’t I know it? It’s a way of life, dum-dum. It’s the way of life. Like the bugs and the bees one of my primary missions in life on this earth is to pollinate.”
By and by Peru reached the brain of his host.
“You won’t tell anyone about my wife, will you?” said the guard.
“They don’t care. Most of them have wives or girlfriends.”
“Not Candress, the leader. I’ve seen him with women but he really hates them.”
“Candress hates everybody,” said Peru. “He’s the only intelligent person among you.”
Something in the prisoner’s voice made the guard turn around. Short and stocky, breechclouted and armed with a sword, he stood staring into the black cave. His mouth quivered while his fingers were sticky upon his weapon. “Who was that? Who said that? Who’s in there?”
“Your destiny.” Peru stepped into the light. He resembled his dead host but was more handsome. His skin had a faint yellow tinge to it.
“Lampla! What happened to you?”
“What do you mean?”
With a gasp the guard came closer. “You look different. You’ve changed.”
“For the better, I trust.”
“Not necessarily. In fact I’m not sure I like your eyes. They’re more red than green and there’s yellow all around them. They remind me of something sickening.”
“Believe me, I’m a definite improvement over your friend.” Peru smiled with an attractive show of whitish-blue teeth. “Here, give me your hand.” The guard didn’t move, so the disease reached out and took hold of the appendage. His demeanor was genial, and though the guard wasn’t beguiled out of his senses, he was too confused to be defensive. Taking a small piece of slate from his fiber belt, Peru made a slit in the startled man’s flesh and then laid his lips to it.
Somewhere deep inside Lampla’s body Disease’s soul resided, minuscule in both dimension and benevolent potential. Though he pressed the dreaded microbes into healthy flesh he by no means imparted that which was himself in the spittle. That small node remained in the host body.
The guard cried out and pulled his hand free. A yellow bubble formed on the cut, swelled, bled, began to smell bad. Even as he stared at it the sore grew and became more malevolent in appearance. He howled in pain, disgust and fear. The pestilence crept up his arm before his very eyes, splitting the skin as it went, putrefying the flesh and bones, making the blood thicker and more yellow.
