Almost Complete Short Fiction, page 93
“Maybe they did,” Ian said, “and lost.”
Mike shook his head and looked up at Epsilon Eridani, a smaller disk than Tau Ceti as viewed from his home world and not much larger than Sol viewed from Earth. “I can’t believe a First Contact would come down this way. The handful of people wouldn’t be much of a threat to them—besides, anyone watching us ought to be too far ahead of us to be doing that kind of thing, wouldn’t they?”
Ian nodded, but frowned. “That’s the prevailing theory. On the other hand, there are human beings that torture insects, dogs and cats just for the fun of it. I’ll have the Cochran do a more intense survey of the highlands. Keep an eye open for evidence, just in case.”
“Which brings us back to a possible survivor,” Nadine said, fixing her hair behind her back. “Ouch.” She pulled what looked like a caterpillar from her hair, frowned at it momentarily, and tossed it aside. “I need a shower. This jungle isn’t all nice—he or she may be in trouble.”
“OK,” Mike conceded. “It’s a long shot, but you could be right. He or she may be in trouble, but may just as easily be dangerous—to us. We’ll reallocate some of the robots to guard duty from now on. Yeager,” he spoke to the ship, “notify everyone on the ground net so they don’t get irritated.”
Nadine shook her head and sighed. She thought he was overdoing it, he knew. But he was responsible for everyone. He touched her mud-splattered arm. “And please don’t you go off alone either,” he implored. She gave a noncommittal shrug. Constraints on a free spirit were a hard thing—but Mike needed her, and needed to be sure of her.
“Wouldn’t think of it,” she muttered.
Nadine’s tiny lab filled one side of Yeager’s infirmary, and its autodoc and a bunk over it hung like porch swings to stay level under any combination of lift or thrust. Cabinets filled the walls above and below the lab bench, and video screens lined the wall at eye level, above a work surface brightened by a vase of Wendy flowers. Nadine sat on the stool in the center.
Mike watched her work—she was concentrating very hard on something more important than his questions—and he was reluctant to interrupt. Besides, the wait gave him precious time to think.
Even in virtual reality, the autopsies were . . . grisly . . . and time-consuming. From the start it was obvious that all 126 had died violently. Gunshot wounds, stabbings, bludgeonings, immolation, and signs of torture marred each corpse. Aliens wouldn’t be using human-style weapons. . . .
“That should do it,” Nadine finally said. “Gunshot wounds. The trajectories indicate the bullets radiated from about here.” She held a hand out in front of her chest as if holding a handgun. “I’d say they were self-inflicted. Mike . . .” She was trembling. “The subject was a ten-year-old boy.”
He put a hand on her shoulder. “Care to go for a walk?”
She sighed, then turned and smiled at him. “I’d love to.”
With surveillance robots silently winging overhead, they left the ship and trudged up past what they now called “Boot Hill” to a dome of rough lava that stuck out above the trees. There were plumeria and Wendy flowers about and the smell was heavenly.
From the hilltop they could see “Chip,” the ruddy, pockmarked natural satellite of Griffith’s World cut in half by the sea horizon. It looked like a huge flattened half dome, ten times the apparent radius of Luna from Earth and distorted like a wavering mirage by refraction through the thick atmosphere. A synchronous moon, it would never rise or set, but it always seemed to be doing one or the other, bobbing slightly up and down on the planet’s thirty-four hour diurnal cycle.
Nadine started to undo her suit’s fasteners.
“We’re being watched,” Mike reminded her.
“Good,” she said. “I itch all over. Prickly heat. I feel like one big sweaty itch and I want out.” She gave him a grin. “Mike, there’s not a damn thing out here to worry about. It’s gone now.”
He shrugged his shoulders and glanced at the moon on the sea behind her. The environment was, he thought, almost obscenely erotic. The heat, the odors . . . Leaves rustled; from the wind or an animal, Mike couldn’t tell. Life all around him. “Are you ready to release the autopsy reports?”
She frowned. “No. It’s been slow—eighty bodies to go yet. One really curious thing.”
“Oh?”
“Endorphins. After seventeen years, in the brains of the ones that weren’t burned, evidence of endorphins. Mike, some of these people died happy. Really happy.”
Mike felt a chill—and not from the slight breeze. Think of something else, he told himself. “Crazy moon. Sits there on the horizon like a big tit. Never goes anywhere.”
Nadine grabbed him, released the fasteners of his suit, and began to take it off.
“Hey,” he laughed. Nudity was no problem; the two people who had brought swimsuits along had quietly abandoned them on reaching the planet. But lovemaking, Mike thought, was a little more private, especially if you’re in charge and didn’t want to look ridiculops. What had gotten into Nadine, he wondered? She’d always been the shy one on public displays of affection.
“Nadine, I feel like someone’s watching us.”
“Please. Shut the surveillance off if it bothers you. But please. The bones, the corpses, the heat, all the bones . . . Mike, I need you.”
He didn’t resist—in fact he cared too much about his best friend and lover to deny her. His coveralls dropped to the rock as her warm sticky body rubbed against him.
Then she pulled him down on her.
“Your back,” he protested. She was lying on the raw lava of the hilltop.
“It’s OK; it needs scratching. If I get a scrape, I can fix it. I’m the doctor, remember.” She giggled. “I want you, lover. Here and now.”
Then her mouth was on his, precluding further argument.
Nadine’s back, indeed, looked like she’d been lashed when they were done, but she didn’t seem to mind even when they dressed. Mike had to insist that they go to the tiny infirmary. People looked at them as they passed and smiled. Was their recreation that obvious, Mike wondered, or was he just imagining it?
At the infirmary, she gave him a clean towel and disinfectant spray.
“No anesthetic?”
“No. I don’t want it. That’s strange, isn’t it? Some people say sex acts as an anesthetic. An endorphin thing. Ah, rub there.”
The lacerations “there” were deep, with grit still in some of them. “Nadine, that’s raw flesh.”
“Do it,” she demanded.
“Monitor,” he said. “Show Dr. Havel her back.”
The clear space on her wall filled with a picture of her devastated skin.
“Look at that, Nadine. I can’t rub that.”
She looked confused. “No, of course you can’t. But—but I want you to. It would feel good.” She got a strangely puzzled look on her face. “Something’s happening to me, Mike. My sense of pain seems to have been changed. I mean, it’s still there—but I like it. Like a good itch, like I want to rake myself with something sharp and pointy.”
Mike felt a tightness in his gut. “Nadine, when did you start feeling like this?”
“That should be my question.” Her eyes said it all. Despite every test and every reasonable precaution, something was happening. “I don’t know. I was hot, it might have been an immunological reaction. But we’re all hot.”
“Scary.”
“I know, Mike. Look, maybe it’s psychological. The people here died happy, and maybe somehow—I’m getting in tune with that. Empathetic.” She laughed brittlely. “But, OK, I’ve got to put myself in the autodoc. Get fixed before this, this empathy gets the best of me.”
Mike kissed her briefly and helped her into the coffin-shaped unit.
Before she lay down, she took his hand. “Mike, about Dena. I wish she were still with us, but whatever it was, I think she didn’t suffer. I think I understand that now. I’m going to put mass hysteria, self-abuse, and sadomasochism on the sleep reader while I’m in here, and study up on it. I didn’t think it could do this, but . . .” Nadine shook her head. “Maybe something in the environment—a combination of things that are individually benign. See you in the morning.”
We’ve seen the face of the enemy, Mike thought as he watched the autodoc lid slide shut. In a few hours the battle would begin.
Hours turned into days. Nadine identified Dena’s charred remains from bone marrow DNA, ending any hope—or fear—Mike had that she, alone, might somehow have survived.
As it became more and more clear how the colony had met its end, the level of tension had risen among the rescuers. People were looking over their shoulders.
Then they found the horses.
Toward the mountain end of the valley were a dozen waterfalls and sheer lava cliffs that rose vertically out of the alluvial plain. At one of those places, there was a slight basin filled with sand. It looked like a jumble of tree limbs on radar, but there were no trees.
Ian explored the site and found some bleached bones sticking out of the black sand. Excavation revealed dozens of horse skeletons, many with their skulls cracked. It was as if they had charged the wall full-tilt and died trying to butt their way out of the valley.
Dinner had been silent that night. No evidence of an alien presence showed up at all.
Back on the bridge, Mike stared at the holographic image of a very concerned-looking Rodrigo Cruz. He wanted to touch the man, and had to remind himself that Rod was some twenty thousand plus kilometers away, at the L4 point of Chip’s orbit.
“We could bring another shuttle down, within range of the Yeager. In an emergency, we fly it out by infrared data link regardless of crew condition.”
“Or,” Mike said, “we could lose both shuttles. No, stay up there for now.”
“Mike . . .”
“I mean it, Rod. We have no clue as to how this happened, but Nadine may have it. It seems biological, but all the life-forms we’ve found match their gene patterns stored in the colony’s design plan, so we’re baffled. Until we know more, you are to stay in orbit. Even if we start joyfully blowing ourselves to smithereens, stay up there. Because if you don’t, you might take whatever it is back to Tau Ceti, and we damn well can’t have that. Understand?”
Rodrigo Cruz nodded. “Order received. But Mike, if you go crazy, the discretion is mine.”
“Chaos! I know that. But, Rod, if that happens, use your head. Don’t stick my memory with another thirty lives!”
Or another planet, or a starship bound for Earth, or . . . Mike didn’t want to complete that worst-case thought.
Rod looked down and brushed a shock of jet black hair from his brow. “Order received.”
Mike sighed. “OK. Now put everything into searching for a survivor. The odds are small that we can locate him through the foliage, but it’s our best chance of finding answers. And maybe solutions. Yeager out.”
Silently, he called up a review of the data. It filled the wall—other pieces of the puzzle had come in: the personal effects of the colonists had been left untouched, except here and there where they had apparently been used as weapons of opportunity on each other. Food and water supplies proved to be free of poison, drugs, or biologicals. One maser transmitter had been torched, and the two backups taken out with axes.
Various discharged weapons were found all over the colony—many more than occasional hunting would explain. They had been made locally, by the colony’s nano-replicator. Bullets, arrowheads, and crossbow bolts found in the bodies of some of the colonists matched the weapons.
In the main dormitory, the crew of Yeager had made perhaps their most disturbing discovery. One wall was covered with primitive drawings of stick figures dancing around a fire. One female figure was being carried into the flames by others. The scene was done in what turned out to be human blood. There was another blood painting of a dagger in a human heart, with one word: “Why?”
“Psychotic art?” Mike asked.
Nadine shook her head. “Maybe an effort to communicate the horror of what they were doing, even as they did it. That’s the last of the autopsies.” She gestured to a holographic display over her lab bench. She was hollow-eyed and weary from ten days of intensive effort. “That woman burned to death, leaving charred bones and little else.”
Mike regarded what was left of this body with revulsion. “I don’t know how you keep going,” he told her. “Have you slept at all?”
She flashed a quick, wry smile. “I dope myself down for four hours out of twenty, then dope myself up again. Don’t look at me! Doc Bailey on the Cochran has been working just as hard.” She sighed. “I haven’t been outside for over a week. At least the work keeps my mind off . . . other things. I heard it rained today,” she said with a weak smile.
“Just a shower. Prettiest rainbows I ever saw. The flowers smell like a dream.”
“I don’t dare dream, Mike. Corpse after corpse. These people deliberately, willfully destroyed their bodies while they were still alive.”
Mike looked at her bleakly, and nodded. She was different, older, harder. It wasn’t just tiredness; she hardly looked like the same person. She . . . “You’ve cut your hair.”
“I wanted to do something, something really self-abusive. But I didn’t dare do anything really significant. Not while I have all this responsibility. So I just hacked it away—butchered it.” She laughed like a wicked child. “A self-destructive catharsis, and Harrison said he liked it!”
“You hacked pretty evenly, I’d say. Got it kind of tapered.”
“I used the scalpel.” She stared at him.
He pulled her from her chair and put his arms around her.
“Squeeze tighter, lover. It helps a little. Pain helps. I’ve stabbed myself twice, you know. Deliberately. Just for a release. Felt great. Almost like, you know—”
“Nadine!”
She made a hollow laugh. “I took care not to hit anything vital, and I’m taking an endorphin antagonist to dull the response now. But I’m walking a chemical tightrope. Too much and I can’t think, too little and . . .” She looked into his face with haunted eyes.
He hugged her as hard as he dared.
After a squeeze that hurt his arms, she said, “OK, back to work.” She pointed to a fractured bone in the video. “The left arm—two of those bones had been broken at least a week before she died. She was right-handed.”
“Why didn’t they tell us?” Mike asked, rhetorically more than anything else.
But Nadine answered. “I think they were ashamed.”
“Ashamed?”
“Suppose itching, or maybe sex, became fatal, but we couldn’t stop doing it?” Nadine looked at him. “Sex was really dangerous once, you know. People died in childbirth. Then there was a fatal sexually transmitted virus that fed on the immune system itself. People did it anyway.”
He looked at her, remembering.
She flashed a smile at him. “Have you looked at the data stick we found in the computer room yet?”
Mike shook his head and grimaced. “Damn. I forgot I had it.” He patted his coverall pocket and found it. “Here. Since Ian found the graves it’s been one thing after another.”
Nadine touched his arm gently and motioned to her reader. Mike dropped the wand in the hole.
“Left wall,” Nadine said. “Let’s see the last thirty minutes.”
A monotone holographic image sprung up in front of the clinic wall screen: a half-sized view of the colony’s central data room, then intact, and two occupants walking eerily in front of the screen like ghost images. The maintenance surveillance record was silent—a privacy constraint—and of course, its subjects were now “ghosts.”
Mike froze as their appearance sunk in. They looked like primitive aborigines, naked except for tattered shorts and an unbelievable number of rings and other things piercing their bodies—noses, ears, biceps, lips, everywhere. They were caressing each other with an almost crazy intensity, tearing at their adornments as they did, and blood flowed freely. Mike shot a look at Nadine. Her eyes were wide with horror—or fascination—and oblivious to him. He touched her arm.
She nodded slowly. “In my considered medical opinion, they’re having fun. Maybe too much fun.”
The man fell to the floor, clearly exhausted, and said something. The woman shook her head and kissed him. He spoke again, seeming to plead, and she finally nodded. Suddenly the man flung out his arms and yelled what was clearly: “Now!”
The woman took a knife from somewhere, held it high, then brought it violently down. Nadine stared. Mike turned away.
When he turned back, the woman’s image stood over a mutilated body, the knife still protruding from a mass of gore in the abdominal area. She cried and laughed at once, grinning, almost prancing around the room, raking herself with her nails. She went to the optical interface shelf and, one by one, pulled the CPUs off, threw them on the floor, and began stomping on them. White bone shone through her bloody, shredded feet before she was done with the third one. When she took the fourth, the record went blank. Without regulation, power had shut down. Mercifully.
Mike shook his head, shuddering. “We’ll have the Cochran play back everything. There may be some . . . clue.”
Nadine shivered, but seemed fascinated as well. “I think she wanted to protect us from knowing. But why is she so happy? Why the endorphins?”
“Madness?”
“That’s the symptom—what’s the cause? Got to be biological,” Nadine whispered. “You don’t want to be cured. You want madness to run its course. That utter destruction gave them an ecstasy literally worth dying for. She wanted to keep us from knowing what—what I’m beginning to feel.”
“Nadine . . .” Mike put his hands on her shoulders. “I don’t want to lose you.”
She grabbed his hands hard and dug her fingernails into his skin. “Then join me,” she whispered.
“Nadine!”
