Mute (49 page)

“So while they’re seedlings, you’re still in
charge,” Moni said inside her airtight bubble. Mariella gazed at her as if she
could hear her voice—not that she needed to. “What happens when they come out?
They don’t know me or anybody on earth. What will they think of me?”

It wouldn’t make a difference. She would join them
before the master species awakens. That’s how Mariella would protect her.

“Everything you’ve told me about how the lagoon is
all your kind wants, that’s coming from you, not them. What if they wake up,
look at this big planet and still want more?”

Mariella answered by reaching through the bubble,
taking Moni’s hand and showing her. She cast away the barrier that had
separated Moni from the alien species’ consciousness. She immediately detected
so many more of them. They were thickening inside the narrow vein of the lagoon
like a blood clot. The resourceful worm had 31 embryo pods growing with seven
babies inside each of them. Their Garden of Eden wouldn’t have an Adam and Eve.
It would have a small community. She tried peering into their thoughts, but she
couldn’t read them. Even compared to gators, birds and fish, their minds were
so far outside her comprehension. She couldn’t detect the most basic of
emotions from them.

Moni wondered whether the aliens were so young that
they didn’t have clear thoughts or feelings. Mariella didn’t answer. She
understood anyway. Only if she joined them physically and mentally, would she
understand the beings from across the galaxy. Without that link, she couldn’t
protect Mariella from her masters. Once the aliens got on their feet—or
flippers, or tentacles, or whatever they had—they wouldn’t need the hosts. They
might use some mutated animals that excelled at physical labor, but they
wouldn’t need an independent brain in a tiny body like Mariella’s.

Before Moni could ask, Mariella reached into her
own mouth and extracted a smooth purple marble. The ambassadors inside this
“tablet” had been ordered to adapt a human body to the alien environment and
connect its brain to the neural network, but without voiding its independent
thought. Since Moni had become her friend and guardian, Mariella couldn’t throw
away the soul that made her so special.

Moni gazed at the smooth violet marble her child
dangled before her as if it were a crystal ball. She could join their family.
She and Mariella could become inseparable—a bond in mind and body in
consummation of their love.

And yet, Moni wondered why she found love in this
alien consciousness implanted through tiny robots into a girl. Why couldn’t she
love a real human being? So many of them had hurt her, and betrayed her, but
Aaron hadn’t. Even after she killed four police officers, and left two people
to die in her backyard, he had helped her save Mariella. She thanked him by
leaving him trapped on the beachside. She should…

No, she shouldn’t. Moni realized that people only
respected her when they feared her. The police badge had given her so much
power, and masked her vulnerabilities, but it didn’t faze people like Sneed,
Darren or her father. Aaron only helped her reach the lagoon because she had a
new badge, one in the form of a girl who crushes minds. The people out there,
even those who she thought loved her, would pick her apart unless she
transformed into something stronger. The spirit inside Moni shined too bright
for a flimsy, inferior human body.

She plucked the purple marble from Mariella’s hand
and swallowed it. Moni expected that it would plop down into her stomach.
Instead, it dissolved inside her throat. Everywhere the pieces spread, they
swept a stinging jolt through her body. Her lungs seized up and swelled with
fluid. She started suffocating. Moni clenched her throat. Her stomach cringed
and contorted violently while the intestines below it began recoiling into new
configurations like a bed of snakes. Even without a visible cut, she felt her
blood rushing from her body. Her arms and legs became so scrawny and dehydrated
that they numbed over. Ever so slowly, they were inflated with watered-down
blood that required rapid pumping from her heart to circulate through her body.
Before she could adjust, Moni’s flesh burned. She started scratching at herself
violently. Her skin shed off in flaky lumps. From underneath, a new layer of
skin arose that matched her complexion perfectly, but it felt thick and
rubbery. It took a few minutes before she could distinguish her own flesh from
a bodysuit, and actually feel through it with her nerves. When she did, Moni
felt wet. The bubble had been removed. She hacked and coughed the water out of
her lungs. Then it hit her. The liquid in her lungs wasn’t drowning her. It
sustained her.

The acidic water seared off her clothes, leaving
only her slowly decaying boots, but it lathered her new skin like warm
bathwater. Moni held her palm before her face. She didn’t see the reflection of
a purple glow from her eyes. She controlled her movements and thoughts. They
had accepted her.

“Can
you hear me, Mariella?”

“Of
course I can. You’re with your family now, mommy.”
The girl smiled as her mental message rang clearly inside Moni’s head.
The connection ran both ways equally. She clearly differentiated Mariella’s
thoughts from her own and she could access the girl’s memories as easily as
pulling up files on a computer. She zoomed back to when they first met and saw
through the girl’s perspective as the black policewoman in the muddy uniform
scooped her out of the mangroves and whisked her past a hostile detective Sneed.

Moni felt an odd parallel. This time, Mariella had
delivered her from the wilderness and welcomed her into a new world.

Greetings from thousands of voices echoed through
her head. From the intelligent dolphins to the crawling critters with simple brains,
they all paid their respects. Their animal sentiments were translated into
things such as, “
Happy you will help us,”
and
“I won’t eat you now.”

She could access their minds as well, and even gaze
through their eyes. She saw a bird’s eye view of the altered lagoon from the
vantage point of one of the alien flying creatures. Then, from a mutated
snake-headed turtle on the edge of Patrick Air Force Base, she saw hundreds of
terrified civilians huddled on the ground behind a thin line of soldiers. Colon
stood at the head of the formation looking like a cornered alley cat.

“We
don’t intend to kill any more of them, but we can’t let them leave,”
Mariella said.
“The thoughts of their commander told us that they
weren’t engaging us with their most powerful weapons, because of the presence
of non-combatants. I hope you can talk to them and buy us more time. The master
species will be ready soon.”

How the alien race would make a difference in
relations with the military, Moni didn’t know. So she probed Mariella’s mind.
They could either initiate direct diplomatic efforts with some help from mental
“persuasion” or they could ratchet up the war machine and raze Patrick along
with everybody there. They had gained a detailed layout of the base by
capturing a soldier’s head and accessing his brain.

“Before
you do anything, let me speak with my government,”
Moni told the thousands of collective mental listeners.
“I don’t
think they’ll launch an attack if they understand that we’re the only surviving
refugees from your planet. If you let the civilians go, and sign a peace
treaty, they might back down. But, in case they won’t listen, you better get
ready because the military will go all out.”

Moni figured she’d help them by probing deep into
the captive soldier’s brain and looking for signs only a human would
understand. The massive worm hosted the collection of brains, which it utilized
much like a computer might use spare hard drives or backup servers. The
consciousnesses were gone, but the memories and processing power remained.
Since they weren’t labeled neatly, Moni skipped between each captive brain and
combed through its memories looking for the soldier.

She saw herself topless on the bed with tattooed
black hands squeezing her breasts. That familiar deep voice said, “Yeah, girl!
Give it to me!” Moni tried pulling out of his head, but Darren wouldn’t let her
go. She watched through his eyes as he grabbed her hair, called her a bitch and
then smacked her in the eye. The battered woman fell to her knees. Not reaching
for the firearm at her side, she buried her face into her hands and pressed
them on the kitchen tile as she balled tears. Standing over her, Darren said,
“You ain’t leaving me.”

She didn’t leave. Moni had stayed with him for
another month—until he cheated again. With his memories now open, she found
that he had been fucking around since their third month together and she had
caught him only twice.

Darren wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been honest
with her.

“Why’d
you keep his horrible mind? Why didn’t you erase what he did to me?”

“We
could have destroyed his memories, but that wouldn’t erase what happened to
you,”
Mariella said.
“You must remember why you can’t
return to the humans. Their nature is violent.”

Meeting her with a steely glare, Mariella no longer
resembled a little girl who drew adorable pictures with crayons. Her words
sounded so stark when they came directly from her mind, instead of as
persuasive thoughts inside Moni’s head. She wondered whether she had been
talking to a clever machine the whole time.

“Humans
are violent. And your nature is peaceful?”
Moni
asked.
“So many people died so you could have your lagoon.”

“They
died out of the necessity for our survival. We didn’t take anyone without
reason. Most of them were hostile toward us.”

“For
real? I’ll see about that.”

Moni cycled through the brains tethered to the worm
until she found the one. Accessing the last memories before the woman had been
taken, she saw her wading into the lagoon and grabbing a girl floating face
down with her black hair swaying in the emerald green water. “Mariella!” she
cried as she rolled her daughter over and gawked at her puffy face. The girl’s
eyes didn’t open, but she retched up water and gasped for air. “
Gracias a
Dios!”

The
woman scooped her limp daughter up in her arms and brought her ashore. She
asked the girl how she felt. Mariella shivered and chattered her teeth. Her
husband rushed over and asked her what happened in Spanish, which Moni
understood from the woman’s perspective. She chastised him for not watching
her. In the middle of his apology, Mariella wiggled out of her mother’s arms
and knelt by her side pointing at the lagoon. “No, you’ve had enough of that
for one day, muchacha,” the woman said. Stubborn little Mariella felt
otherwise. She took the woman’s hand and led her to the water’s edge. Her
husband followed curiously.

“That’s
enough,” the woman said as she stopped and planted her feet. She didn’t know
why, but the woman sensed impending danger in the water. The girl clenched down
on her hand. When she tried pulling free, Marellia’s grip intensified until a
bone in her hand snapped. “Ow! Mariella, what are you doing?”

Those
were the woman’s last words. Without understanding why, she knelt down and
stuck her head into the lagoon. Scrambling for air, she pushed against the
ground and kicked her legs through the dirt. A tiny yet firm hand on the back
of her neck wouldn’t let her reach the surface. She felt her husband’s strong
hand grip her around the waist. She latched onto him and nearly left the water.
A second later, he fell in with her. She saw her husband’s bushy eyebrows and
cheeks beside her in the lagoon as they were drowned by their young daughter.
The purple mist fogged the water. Her memories ceased.

They
had murdered a family. First they crushed the blossoming mind of a little girl
and then they baited her parents into the lagoon by posing as their precious
child. They had conned everyone, including Moni.

Mariella
wasn’t a person. She was a vessel they had used for luring unsuspecting people
into their possession. Sure, they hadn’t beheaded Moni, and plugged her brain
into the worm, but she had helped them much more by being so susceptible to
their manipulation. As Moni gathered information from the thousands of minds
around her, it became so obvious. No adult could function as a mute, and still
monitor the human response to the invasion. A little girl would draw less
suspicion, yet she needed a guardian that she could speak through. Moni had
fiercely shielded Mariella from questioning, and aided their ruse to make the
Lagoon Watcher the focus of the investigation. By tapping into her mind, and
the heads of those around her, the aliens had a player in the other team’s
huddle.

They
had identified the witnesses and killed them. They staged Mariella’s kidnapping
with the gator, so they could kill the two people who pursued her. They led
Mrs. Mint into the forest, so they could exact revenge on her for not
protecting their prized host. Their sea turtle knocked Professor Swartzman out
of his boat, and drowned him in acid because he had learned too much. They
would have killed Aaron too, if he hadn’t escaped. And they knew full well that
building their bubble over the lagoon would ignite a massacre, and trap the
people on the beachside.

“You selected their fate,”
Mariella
said.
“When you decided that your father
must die so you could live safely, you demonstrated the moral choice for us. We
can’t live safely on this planet without the barrier protecting us, and housing
our world’s atmosphere.”