Tainted Garden Page 6

  Dersi found sleep elusive. Her thoughts tumbled, incoherent.

  She rose from her bed. The cilia, which had begun their silent, dream-weaving caress in the wake of Erekel’s departure, jerked back. Dersi caressed the light-tumor and used the violet glow to rummage through her wardrobe. Shrugging into a loose-fitting robe and comfortable shoes, she left her chambers.

  The winding corridors of the ool thrummed with the rhythmic, sonorous sounds of home. The steady thump of blood streaming through the massive arteries lining the hall waged a losing battle against her turbulent thoughts.

  At an intersection of main vessels she turned to the right and trod the spongy flesh of the ool until she came to a pulsing sphincter. Lacelike ribbons of flesh hung in curtains before the door, twitching at her approach. She allowed the ribbons to brush across her skin, felt the tiny stings of their recognition. In a few moments the sphincter irised open, and Dersi stepped into a Veil Lord’s chamber.

  “Merisi,” she called. “Are you awake?”

  “You know we don’t sleep, Dersi,” her sister replied. The column in the center of the room pulsed. A ring of eyes opened above the slit-like mouth. “And you announced your presence. Actually, I’ve been expecting you.”

  “You have?” Dersi walked across the hardened resin toward her sister.

  Merisi chuckled in the Veil Lord fashion, thousands of dripping tentacles that spanned the ceiling writhing together in a wet, slurping sound. “You are to be veiled tomorrow. I anticipated you might come to see me. We were always the closest of our father’s children.”

  Merisi broke open a crack in the chamber floor and raised a mound of warm flesh. Dersi sat on the mound, crossing her legs and staring up at her sister. So different. So inhuman.

  “I can imagine how you feel, Dersi.”

  “Can you?”

  The Veil Lord laughter erupted again. “I too had doubts before my veiling.”

  “You did? I didn’t know.”

  “Of course. What sane person would not?”

  Dersi kept silent. She had seen the joy, the rapture, that contorted her other siblings’ faces as the mucus covered them, entombed them.

  “But there is nothing to fear, Dersi. Nothing. Communion is . . . indescribable.”

  “Father said much the same thing,” Dersi said.

  “It is. Joyous, Dersi. To be bonded, a part of a vast whole. The sense of community, of union, is like nothing else. All our wonderings as children did not approach the truth.”

  “You have no regrets? You don’t miss anything?”

  “What would I miss?”

  “Walking?” Dersi could not keep the sarcasm from her voice. “Talking, like a person. Touching, with fingers and hands rather than a mass of tentacles.”

  Merisi laughed long. “Walking? Why would I wish to walk when I am everywhere, experiencing everything? Where would I go? And talking—I communicate on more levels than you can imagine. Human speech is a poor medium, limited as communion is not. Touching?” A thousand thin tentacles snaked out of the ceiling and floor, flooding over Dersi, who resisted the impulse to cry out. The knobbed heads touched her, caressed her, wound through her robe and her hair, touching even her secret places. “How can ten fingers and a limited expanse of skin compare to this?”

  Abruptly Merisi withdrew her touch, tentacles retracting. Dersi pulled her robe shut, looked everywhere, at anything, but the column that housed Merisi’s mind.

  “The completeness is without parallel in your limited experience. Your sensations cannot compare.” The Veil Lord paused. “Look,” she said, and the floor split apart at Dersi’s feet, ripping with the squealing protest of torn flesh. A thousand arteries snapped, spilling blood and other fluids down into the crevice. Below, Merisi continued, broadening, flaring out into a mammoth, opaque sack scrawled with throbbing veins. Inside the sack Dersi could see movement. Something touched the taut membrane, a five-fingered hand.

  “Even now I grow heavy with child. Soon, I will birth my children. A few, hopefully, will ascend to become Veil Lords. What human experience can compare to this?”

  Dersi shook her head. She knew she should be impressed, awed. Envious, perhaps. But she was not. Disgust crawled up from the pit of her stomach, a revulsion so powerful she had to swallow to prevent herself from vomiting.

  “Go, Dersi,” Merisi said, closing the rent in her body. “Go and sleep. You have a big day tomorrow, the most wonderful you’ll ever experience. I’m so happy to have you joining us, Sister. I can’t wait to commune with you, to share with you all the pleasures and passions of the Veil Lords.”

  Dersi rose and touched the dangling tentacles that Merisi dropped to caress her in fond farewell. She forced herself to smile, to pretend. She bid her sister pleasant dreams—did the Veil Lords dream? No one had ever told her—and left Merisi’s chamber. As the door sphinctered shut she ran down the corridor. She did not have the strength to hold in her horror. She burst into tears.

  Chapter 8

  Rian entered the Elders’ workroom with the stranger in tow. One of the guardsmen, a massive hulk whose twisted spine forced him to walk while leaning on the knuckles of one hand, kept a sporelance trained on the stranger’s back. The room was square, with walls and floor of worked stone inlaid with shining metal. The ceiling breathed rhythmically. Landskin had been allowed access, and now it nippled in the center of the room, directly over a workbench crowded with implements of metal, glass, and living tissue. Huge, steam-belching pipes rose from the floor at the far end of the room and pierced the landskin ceiling. A network of smaller pipes and tubes crisscrossed the other walls. A ring of artificial light circled the chamber, halting the landskin’s encroachment.

  The Elders, the prime intercessors with the Father in the Enclave, clustered around the huge workspace. They looked up at Rian’s entrance. In the flickering lights of a hundred display screens, the Elders’ faces were deeply seamed, like cracks in hard stone. Their eyes seemed flat and cold. They wore smocks that concealed their bodies to their jawlines, and surgical gloves of glistening landskin film.

  Puzzled expressions washed over them at the sight of the stranger in Rian’s wake.

  “What is this?” One of the Elders, Pallas, approached. He stared at the mute stranger, his lipless slit of a mouth drawn taut. Long, tapered fingers, sheathed in landskin film gloves, stroked the patches of scales that smothered his chin. His nose crinkled as he sniffed and then turned his attention back to Rian. “Where did you find it?”

  The stranger stood with his arms lax at his sides, staring into space. A bit of drool trickled from his lips, tracing a thin path down his chin.

  Other Elders came close, crowding around the stranger, poking at him. The stranger roused from his dreamstate to stare at those who touched him, though he made no effort to stop them. He raised his hand, palm up, and stared at it, closing his fingers one by one until he stared at a clenched fist. Then he opened his hand once more.

  Elder Pallas studied the stranger, a small frown on his face.

  “I don’t know who . . . what he is, Elder. I found him senseless in the middle of ool-waste. I thought to kill him, but . . .” He related the circumstances behind his discovery of the stranger. Pallas’s eyes widened at Rian’s tale, and he watched the stranger with renewed appreciation.

  “You did well not to kill him, Rian. Very well.” He turned to the stranger, stepping close. The guardsman shifted his sporelance closer to the naked stranger’s back. “Who are you?”

  “He doesn’t really talk,” Rian said.

  “Hmm. Doesn’t, or can’t? There’s a vast difference, you know.” The Elder touched the smooth expanse of the stranger’s chest with a fingertip. “Fascinating. Elasticity in the exterior dermis. Porous, indicating the presence of sweat glands.” He ran his fingers up into the stranger’s red hair, tugged at the roots. “Firmly affixed in the transdermal layer. Odd pigmentation. A recessive trait?”

  Pallas lowered his hand, tracing along the
base of the stranger’s skull. “Smooth, rounded skull, with shallow basal flanges, indicative of well-developed frontal and rear orbital lobes.” He circled the stranger, who attempted to turn with him. Pallas frowned in consideration. “Wait like this, fellow. For just a moment.”

  The stranger’s lips twitched and slowly curled downward in a close approximation of Pallas’s frown. Rian sniffed at the reaction.

  Pallas circled the stranger and ran a palm down his spine to his pelvis. “Slight curvature, within symmetrical norm, to the spine. Well-developed discs. Wide hips. The musculature of the back seems complimentary to the skeletal structure. Lower legs straight, unmarked by osteodegeneration.” He walked back around to the front of the stranger and snorted. “No visible sign of mutation. What are you, my friend? Surely you can’t be what you seem.”

  “What does he seem?” Rian asked.

  Pallas ignored the question, ignored Rian. He addressed his comments to the other Elders, all of whom crowded close. “No characteristics indicative of Bhajong heritage, either. Pigmentation in excess of Bhajong statistical norm. The body mass is exceptional, as well.”

  Rian felt himself pushed back by the press of the Elders’ bodies. He edged toward the entrance. The guardsman heaved himself erect, towering over the others, and glared at the stranger.

  Pallas demanded a scalpel and used it to scrape at the stranger’s palm, soft enough so as to not draw blood. The stranger only stared at him, continuing to ball his hand into a fist. Pallas wound his way through the gathered Elders with the scalpel. Rian followed at the edge of the crowd, watching the Elder. The nipple of landskin hanging down from the ceiling seemed to throb as Pallas approached, the scalpel held out before him. With his other hand Pallas seized the nipple and pulled it closer to the table, stretching it taut. Thin needles sprang out of the puckers in the landskin. As Pallas held the scalpel beneath the bulge, one of the puckers in the knob yawned open, and dozens of wormlike tongues slithered out, flickering across the blade.

  Rian shivered. No matter how many times he saw the Elders at work with the landskin, he could not prevent the unsettling of his stomach. The things they had done with it, the changes they had wrought . . .

  “Fascinating!” Pallas said. Several of the other elders echoed the sentiment.

  The terminus of the nipple swelled into a translucent globe, pulsing with spiderwebbed veins. Within, something dark twisted, coiled. One of the other Elders used a scalpel to pierce the thin membrane. Thick fluid spurted out, and a squirming mass spilled into a tray placed beneath the sphere. The landskin snapped back toward the ceiling, gushing fluid that began to harden.

  “Fascinating,” Pallas repeated, absorbed in studying the squirming mass. “Have you ever seen such a reaction? Almost recognition, I’d say. Or antagonism. It’s difficult to tell.”

  “What is it?” Rian asked, hovering at the edge of the Elders.

  “What? Eh? Oh, you. You may go now. Don’t go far. Hold yourself ready to meet with us again. There may well be further questions for you. And you’ll want to see medical. I’ll transmit the order to your duty officer.” He turned away again, absorbed by the mystery before him. “This is remarkable.”

  Thoroughly dismissed, Rian turned away and headed for the door. He glanced over his shoulder, seeing the stranger standing mute and motionless. He frowned, feeling that there was something he was missing, something important.

  He realized he was still standing beside the door when the other sentry coughed under his breath. Rian shook his head and ducked out of the Elders’ workroom.

  After leaving his contact information with the sentry, in the event the Elders decided they needed him sooner rather than later, Rian walked back down the wide corridor. He ducked beneath a billowing cloud of steam that jetted from a pipe mounted on the wall. Other pipes lay along the floor, close to the walls, studded with valves and gauges and wheels, carrying power to all parts of the Enclave.

  Emerging into the central cavern, Rian headed toward his quarters, knowing he should report to the duty officer and debrief his cadre. And there was the matter of his lost sporelance. Hopefully it could be recovered from above. But boreworms in the frenzy of a swarm could consume just about anything.

  He sighed, knowing disciplinary action was likely.

  Hours later, after a debasing interview with the duty officer, Rian lay on a cold metal table, staring at the light panel mounted on the ceiling. The low hum of the artificial light grated on his nerves, set his teeth grinding. Instruments embedded in the walls moved slowly up and down his body, accompanied by a slight tickling that sank all the way through to his bones. Needles and probes riddled his body, making movement impossible; the slightest shifting on the cold metal brought stabs of pain as bits of metal gouged his flesh. The landskin tendrils attached to the base of his skull throbbed.

  “There is some scar tissue accumulation where you said the boreworms attacked you.” His head held immobile by a strand of landskin, Rian could just make out the figure of the technician leaning over a hump of pulsing landskin, his eyes pressed to a lenslike bubble. “The scarring would, however, appear to be quite old.”

  “You’re calling me a liar? I was there. I felt them. I saw them. I . . . I don’t know what happened. The anellidicidal foam killed most of them, but even as it did, I knew I had no hope of surviving. I could feel the boreworms in me.”

  “I doubt that. There is no trace of poison in your system. And there’s no evident tissue trauma.” The technician stood, gesturing with his three-fingered hand toward the bubble-lens. “You’re in perfect health, considering. Certainly there is evidence of wounding, but wounding long since healed. Calcium deposits in your right femur, indicative of previous breakage. Several bone-spurns along your ribs. Slight depression in the base of your skull. Other than that, there’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “That’s impossible,” Rian muttered under his breath.

  Immediately following his debriefing with the duty officer he had been sent to medical. The holes in his tunic and the stains covering it and his skin were enough to convince the duty officer that something had happened, even if he did express some disbelief in Rian’s description of his wounds. But Rian had to admit, at least to himself, that aside from a slight soreness in his muscles, he felt fine. He could find no trace of bores in his skin, not even the slight puckers that had dotted his flesh just hours before.

  “I’m clearing you for duty,” the technician said. He stepped up to the table and touched a panel set into its base. The probes hissed as they withdrew from Rian’s skin and sank back into the wall. At a stroke of the technician’s hand the landskin straps trembled, then, retracting, slithered away. The man smiled, his thin lips revealing the solid ridge of bone that served as his teeth. He took up a memo board and scrawled a few lines on the screen with a light pen. “Light duty, just to be on the safe side, though I don’t see anything that would hamper your ability to carry out your assignments. Take this to your duty officer. I’ll also be sending a copy to the Elders.”

  Rian swung his legs to the floor and stood, wincing in anticipated pain. There was none. He accepted the memo board the technician thrust at him and left the examination room.

  In the hallway outside, chill with a draft from the gratings mounted high on the walls, Rian moved through the hospital wing of the Enclave. He stepped to one side as a Profound shuffled past. The . . . man’s? . . . eyes were shrouded with massive folds of skin rife with tumorous growths. His jaw hung slack to his chest, huge tusks curling up from his lower gums to touch the skin of his cheekbones. One shoulder hunched forward, swollen with twisted musculature that dwarfed the rest of him. The other thrust backwards, with three too many joints and a hand the size of Rian’s head. The Profound’s right leg was a titanic mass of flesh oozing with sores; he thrust his left leg forward and dragged the right behind him, leaving a slimy trail behind him on the polished metal floor.

  Behind the Profound came his caretakers, two k
ind-faced Gagash who followed his every move with their eyes. Traffic in the hallway flowed smoothly past the trio without pause. Rian could not help wondering at the Profound’s presence here in the upper levels of the Enclave, though the guilt accompanying the thought gave him pause. The lower levels of the Enclave swarmed with Profounds, but their presence above was a rarity.

  He exited the hospital complex and rode a lift upward. Klaxons sounded in the distance, signaling the beginning of another shift. From the central core, huge puffs of gray smoke spewed toward the cavern’s ceiling. The clank of machinery, the buzz of a thousand conversations, the hiss of steam and the crackle of flames rose in a miasmic cacophony, singing of comfort, of home. Rian smiled, watching the industry of the Gagash, and thought to himself, we will reclaim what’s ours.

  Chapter 9

  Approaching Planetfall

  Thud.

  Alberto Rodriguez jerked at his workstation, his eyes widening at the unexpected sound. The pool of watery light in which he sat seemed to fall from some unexplainable place above him. Around him his equipment cast oblong shadows over the ceramic surface of the table. The mass spectrometer hissed as its smooth planes suddenly wrenched. The fluoroscope’s shielding hood wobbled, becoming hinged jaws that clamped shut with a bang. And the collider . . . Rodriguez shivered and pushed back from the collider.

  Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall!

  Thud-thudthud.

  “No. Father, no.” Rodriguez felt the darkness closing in. Something moved, something vast and slithery. Something that moved with a dry, rasping scrape. “No. Father!”

  Skeletal fingers reached for him. A chill breeze touched the back of his neck. The stench of carrion leaked out of the cloying darkness.

  Rodriguez shivered, his gaze darting around, programmed to penetrate the darkness, but desperate not to.

  Pride ends in humiliation, humility brings honor.