Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (25 page)

He’s fully dressed, even his shoes, thank god!
She
thought and the sound of a cooing pigeon filled the air with music.

Linda
Purdy could handle a hangover. Years of partying at the beach had provided the
test bed for the development of the concoction she about to make: Phase One—a
big breakfast with lots of tomato juice, forced down; Phase Two—six or seven
aspirin.

She was
just finishing Phase One, when George Greenbaum appeared in the dining room
arch trying to smile. Linda looked up from her eggs and did the same.

“Hi,” she
said. “How are you feeling?”

“Great.
Thank you. And you?”

“Perfect.
Perfect. Would you like some breakfast or a noose to hang yourself with?”

“Neither.
I think I’ll be off. Thank you.”

“You’re
welcome.”

“Quite an
evening, what I can remember of it.”

“Quite.”

“See you
soon.”

“Ta. Are you sure you wouldn’t
like some aspirin?”

“Morphine if you have it.”

“Sorry, I
used the last of it.”

George
grinned. “I’ll call you in a day or two. Bye.”

“Bye.”
She wanted to hear it from him—just to be sure. “George?” she asked.

Greenbaum
waited.

“Did we
have sex last night?”

He
pretended to think about it.

“I don’t
think I could drink enough to black out that particular memory. No, we did
not. I did undress you though. I didn’t think you’d want to wake up in your
clothes. That’s very unladylike. You seemed to think it was very funny as I
remember.”

Linda
smiled. So he’d been a perfect gentleman, almost. In spite of herself, a petulant
feminine troll deep inside wanted to slap him for not making love to her when
he clearly had the chance.

“Thank
you,” she said instead.

“Any
time.”

She
crawled back into bed with her robe still on and pulled up the bedclothes until
they covered her nose and mouth. She closed her eyes and breathed her own
breath and with her stomach full of nourishment and her brain re-hydrated and
her veins flowing with pain killer, she started Phase Three.

Wait.

It was
just short of noon. She expected to convalesce there until dusk at least.

When the
bedside phone rang, the chirping ringer sounded like an injured animal to her.

If she
could have stood the annoying sound for three more rings, she would have just let
the machine pick up the call. She couldn’t though, and she reached over, picked
up the phone and croaked “hello” into it.

*
 
*
 
*

When the
seam above his head ripped open and the vine pulled him up out of the goop,
Phil was way ahead of it. He clamped onto it high up with both hands long
before the upward tug started, avoiding the sudden yank on his neck and spine
he took the first time. When the vine released the tendrils around his head and
pulled out of his gullet, he closed his eyes hard and let himself gag as loud
as he possibly could. It felt better that way.

Wiping
his mouth, he looked in the corner for the body of Pui Tamguma and wasn’t
surprised when he didn’t see it. He wondered if the larvae would eat their way
out of a dead body and hoped they’d put him down a hole before that little phenomenon
got tested.

He was
tired, but he wasn’t sick or exhausted or even especially hungry. He thought
about the technology that could use his flesh then rejuvenate it. They used it
as if it were a thing, a nest, a reusable host
—fucking
food.
Then they healed what was left, and renewed it.

I’m a
field, a garden, a planter for their strange crop. In between plantings they
condition the soil, fertilize it. Christ. They’ll use us right up.

He leaned
against the rubbery wall of the water tube and tried not to remember the last
twelve hour’s pain.

He
couldn’t do it.

He
slammed his fist into the wall of the tube. It sounded just like he’d punched
a side of beef. It looked like the wall actually shrank from the blow a little
and encouraged that he might be having some effect on the thing, he punched it
again and again in his rage.

He
stopped suddenly, breathing hard from the effort.

The
ship’s a slave, too.

This
animal might be hundreds, thousands of years old. And it might live for a
thousand more years in a state of perpetual bondage to these fuckers. When I’m
used up as an incubator, they’ll attach what
S
left of my flesh to some
other organic thing or organism. Maybe they’ll keep my brain alive, too. Who
knows how long I’ll live like that. Maybe they can keep me alive forever, just
cement me to something and keep me alive forever. Maybe we can’t die here at
all. Maybe there is no goddamned escape here, not even death. Maybe Pui Tamguma
has been revived like a zombie. I bet they can do that.

Panic
swelled in him. He breathed deeply and evenly, trying to regain his composure.
After the tenth breath or so, he was close to being in control again. It didn’t
do to have too much imagination. He looked at the fine, new scars on his legs
and realized that the reality of the situation was bad enough.

Why me?

The
question had no answer.

Nobody’s
keeping score. Except me.

He put on
a shirt and jeans that fit his frame, trying not to think about the fact that someone
else had worn them, maybe for the last time. He found a pair of heavy work
boots with high tops that were about his size. Boots could be a weapon; not elegant,
but a weapon just the same. These had hard toes, probably steel, and thick
soles. He liked the way they felt.

He
climbed in his chamber and lay down on the mat of blankets the former occupant
had left. He’d made no attempt to personalize this dungeon for himself, not
even in the smallest way. There were only the blankets and some plastic bags
for carrying food from the grocery, and that was about it. He looked up at the
dark brown ceiling and the dark brown walls and that dull light pressed in on
him as if it had weight. He longed for the light and the air of High Ridge so
much it hurt.

Linda
might be there now,
he thought.
It’s hers, that high, bright place. I’ve left her heaven.

The
sudden urge to see Earth was like an electric prod to his back. He shot up and
out the hole and sprinted to the view chamber. His eyes were glued to the
floating globe before he was all the way in.

He let
the image fill his eyes and heart and never had he felt such longing. He wanted
to shoot down to it like a meteor, to fly at supersonic speed and spread his
atoms over that blue and brown sphere on joyful impact with it. He’d never
known it until now, this very moment, his home, his planet, his
planet.
He raised his
arms out wide to it and let the clean blue light of it splash on him like cool
water.

God, my
place, my home it is that beckons me with this light.

He soared over the Earth’s
richness and saw it for the first time.

He saw its forests and plains and
rivers and mountains and he could smell the earthen banks of sweet rivers and
fields of poppies and wheat that flowed and rolled in waves and hissed gently.

He walked on a mountain trail
covered with wet clean, clear ice and snow and felt it crunch under his boots
and the sun bounced off that white sheet and blinded him with its brightness.

An ocean wave pushed him into the
sandy ocean bottom and rolled him and tumbled him and ground his knees and
hands into it as the water boiled around him and filled his head with its sound
and his mouth with the primal taste of salt water.

He ran down a rocky hillside and
dug his boots deep into the soft earth in a long slide near the bottom. He spat
dust then turned and ran back up to do it again. On the way up he felt the
sun-heated, immutable mass of granite under his young hands as he pushed off
the boulders in his climb.

He stood there
with his arms stretched out and let the memories come and savored each in turn
until he could stand no more. Then, his arms fell to his sides like heavy, dead
wood, and he slumped against the curved wall of the chamber. The images dimmed
slowly and left his mind as blank as slate.

*
 
*
 
*

Mary had
seen him walk in from the soakers, but decided to let him rest before she told
him of her discovery. When she peeked into Phil’s chamber some time later and
found him gone, her next stop was the view chamber. The Earth could pull, even
from this distance, and she’d succumbed to the healing force of its gravity
herself many times after being used.

Phil was squatting like an
aborigine when she entered the chamber, his arms resting straight out over his
knees. She thought about leaving him to his meditation for a while but decided
the news about the phone was too important. She walked over and squatted down
next to him.

“You okay?” she asked.

Phil raised his head slowly
and opened his eyes then rubbed them with his palms. “Sure. Peachy.”

Mary wasted no time. “Tom
Moon found a cellular phone in the dump with a big battery, fully charged. I
made an antenna, a dish, about this big out of tin foil.” She framed a space
in the air with both arms open wide then grinned uncontrollably. “When I put .
. .” She had to put her hands over her mouth for a second to smother her
hysteria. “When I connected the dish to the antenna and pointed it at Earth . .
.”

“What happened?”

“It worked. I got a good
signal.

“I beg your pardon.”

“The damned thing works!”

“What do you mean
works
?”

“I mean we can phone home,
ET!”

“Bullshit.”

“Get up wise ass, I’ll
show you.”

She grabbed his wrist with
a smile and pulled him to his feet. She glanced down at the Earth. “We’re over
California right now. Perfect timing.”

The
antenna she’d fashioned didn’t look like it had been made from aluminum foil by
hand. From a few feet away, and with a little imagination and forgiveness, it
looked like it could have been factory-made. It was about the size and shape of
an umbrella, and it took Phil a moment to realize that it
was
an umbrella, lined
perfectly and smoothly with foil. The handle had been removed and a piece of
thin, stiff wire about a foot long substituted for it. Running out of the other
side was a piece of wire that terminated with a sleeve made of foil. This piece
she carefully slipped over the phone’s own little antenna attaching it to the
dish. The dish itself was perfectly uniform around the edges and very smooth on
the inside.

“Cool,
huh?” she said.

Phil just
stared.

“Now
watch this. Come ‘ere.” Phil stepped up closer. Bailey was lying with her face
to the wall. Mary toed her gently in the rump. “We’re gonna test the phone
again. C’mon.”

“It’s
cool. I’ve seen it,” Bailey said and yawned.

Mary
eyeballed where she thought the Earth was relative to their position, then
holding the antenna with one hand, she pointed the yard-wide dish down at it
and turned the phone on with the other. The phone chimed a note, “Ready”
displayed on the little screen, and the signal strength indicator jumped up to
the halfway mark.

“See
that?” she said, handing the phone to Phil and pointing at the indicator. “I
told ‘ya.”

“Yeah, I
see it.”

“See?”

“Yeah, I
see it.”

She
turned the phone off with a forefinger and grinned. “Gotta save the batteries,”
she said and started to giggle. “I dialed the operator and said . . . I says
‘Hello from outer space . . . I’ve been
captured by aliens.’
The operator says
‘That
happened to me once, too.’
What a riot, huh?”

“Corny,”
Bailey said, barely audible, not turning around.

“Right.
Lemme see,” he said and took it from her. He held the phone up to his ear to
test it and sure enough, the aluminum foil sleeve slipped off the phone’s antenna.

“Damn.
You can kinda hold it like this,” she said and moved it around.

It
slipped off again.

“I can
fix that. Don’t force it. Give it back.”

Knitting
her brow, she put the dish down and considered how to modify the fitting.