Tainted Garden Read online

  Rodriguez squealed. The ceramic surface beneath his palms was cold, slick. Thick with some sticky substance. A coppery scent. Blood. He jerked his hands away, raised them in the watery light and stared at the dripping crimson.

  Thudthudthud-THUD.

  Sweat bathed him.

  Flaunt the Lord’s Word, will you? Alberto, my son, you are surely damned! The Lord hates pride and arrogance, evil behavior and perverse speech.

  “It’s not evil! It’s . . . it’s science! The pursuit of knowledge. Surely God—”

  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.

  Something crept closer within the darkness, something powerful, oppressive, certain. Rodriguez trembled. He tossed over his chair, which twitched and melted away, forming a pair of hooded vipers that hissed at him, spitting poison. Where the venom touched his skin it smoked, burning holes deep into his flesh. Rodriguez screamed and huddled beneath the table, his arms wrapped around his knees. He rocked back and forth, screaming.

  Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching. They will be a garland to grace your head and a chain to adorn your neck.

  “No! That’s you! That’s you! It’s never been me! Never! I don’t have your calling!”

  My son, if sinners entice you, do not give in to them. If they say, ‘Come along with us; let’s lie in wait for someone’s blood, let’s waylay some harmless soul; let’s swallow them alive, like the grave, and whole, like those who go down to the pit . . .’ my son, do not go along with them, do not set foot on their paths; for their feet rush into sin . . .

  He could feel it, the almost-touch, the hated, feared, loved hand, heavy and firm upon him. He shook, paralyzed, unable to cease his rocking. Pressure, like a great weight, pressed down on his chest.

  THUDTHUDTHUD-thudthudthud-THUD.

  What you call knowledge, the Lord calls SIN!

  “NO!” Rodriguez sprang up from his crouch and sank into the darkness . . .

  . . . And awakened, bathed in sweat, a scream bitten back by his tight-clenched lips. His hand shot out, passing over the light-sensor. Brilliant, glaring white light spilled from the panels overhead, casting his sleeping alcove in harsh relief. His feet lay tangled in the silvery thermal blanket. Kicking it aside, Alberto swung his feet to the cold metal floor. His hands clutched at his head, at hair drenched with sweat. His heart beat furiously in his chest, like a kettledrum of distant Terra.

  “No.” He swallowed, his throat raw, dry. “No. It’s a dream. Just a dream.”

  The same dream, with the same theme. One of two. Pride and lust, the duo that struck him deep. He shook his head to clear it and glared at the pristine, unadorned white walls. Only the display screen, with its recessed photon keypad, relieved the monotony. The message light blinked slowly.

  “Time.”

  Oh-four-hundred, twenty-eight hours. The soft voice of Ship trickled from speakers hidden in the walls.

  A message, at this hour? He rose and crossed to the display, triggering the playback. Lt. Marissa Flaherty’s face winked into view on the plasma display. The time record indicated the message had come through only moments before. Perhaps it was what had awakened him from . . . from the nightmare.

  Even in the dead of the night Marissa’s face kept its beauty. Her soft auburn hair curled seductively around the high collar of her regulation uniform. She licked her lips, staring into the recorder, and he felt her gaze upon him, even through the time lag.

  He shivered. Yes. It was good the nightmare, his father’s voice, had not concentrated on the perils of lust.

  “Sir, there’s an anomaly. I . . . I’m not sure what it is. I think you should see this, sir.” Her voice held confusion, concern. It sent a shiver of pleasure through him. He licked his lips and rubbed a hand over his face. The room’s sensors, registering him awake, had adjusted the ambient room temperature, evaporating the sweat from his skin and collecting it for recycling. In the closed environment of Ship, nothing could be allowed to go to waste.

  The message concluded, the screen again went blank, the blinking light falling into quiescence.

  A quarter-hour later, Biological Sciences Officer Alberto Rodriguez exited the lift and entered the BS primary lab, abustle even at this hour. With so much analogous information to process, a wealth of alien material to study and catalogue, Biological Sciences was never left vacant. And, as its chief, Rodriguez was seldom given a full-night’s sleep.

  An inconvenience of his position.

  The fear of the Lord is the beginning . . .

  No! Stop it! More and more often the waking dream-voice intruded, despite the null capsules Rodriguez popped like candy. He knew he should make an appointment to visit with Dr. Singh, Ship’s psych officer, but . . . his mind was a Pandora’s box he was not wont to open fully to the light of scrutiny. Service offered few avenues for psychological treatment. The space-crazed were often put into the void of cryo, many never to be awakened. On such a mission as this . . . who could argue with the choices made in the interests of safeguarding the larger scheme of things?

  Lt. Flaherty—Marissa—looked up from the ’scope at his entrance. Her hand rose to brush back a strand of auburn hair that had come loose from its tight coiffure and dangled tantalizingly across her high cheekbone. No smile. Only concern, puzzlement, the anticipation of input from a superior.

  “Commander, thank you for coming down.” Her voice was neutral, consumed with the science of her calling. “I don’t know what to make of this, sir. I wouldn’t have called during your sleep period, but . . .”

  He waved aside the characteristic platitude and offered up what he hoped was a dazzling smile. She seemed unaffected, returning a shallow curve of her full, perfectly shaped lips. Stuffing disappointment deep, he said, “I wasn’t sleeping, Lieutenant. What is it?”

  “I was analyzing the latest samples brought up by planetary recon. The landskin is . . .”

  “Landskin?”

  She blushed, dropping her eyes and gesturing toward the plastic tray on her workstation. The powerful lenses of the ’scope hovered over the tray, casting a brilliant beam upon the sample within it. A grayish-pink swatch of twitching biomass lay in a pool of liquid. Striated and honeycombed with pockets of clear jelly, the biomass seemed somehow much more complex than its simple cellular structure allowed.

  “It’s what I’ve been calling the biomass, sir. Pardon my presumption, I—”

  “No, no. It fits. I like it. There’s no reason it can’t serve as the common name for the material.” He leaned over the tray and prodded at the biomass with a light-probe. It reacted to the contact, constricting around the probe before springing back to its flat state. “Landskin. For a living mass covering most of the habitable surface area of this world, it seems apropos. Explain your puzzlement.”

  Marissa sank onto the ergonomic chair before the tray. The position put the curve of her neck tantalizingly close to Rodriguez’s face. He breathed in the unique scent of her body, closing his eyes for a moment and savoring it. She picked up another probe and touched the biomass. The back of her hand brushed his wrist, and he suppressed a shiver of excitement.

  “These wells along the outer perimeter, sir. Alveoli? They are not a feature common to the other virgin samples. In fact, they weren’t common to this sample, either, until a few hours ago.”

  He frowned, focusing on the biomass, the landskin. “You’re certain?”

  She nodded. “They emerged after the most recent battery of tests, spontaneously.”

  “Cancerous?”

  She shook her head, a delicious spill of auburn hair escaping to cascade down the nape of her neck. “Not at all. I’m uncertain of their function, but they do seem to have sprung up as a reaction to the experiments. I’ve tested it, of course. Over there are other samples, now bearing similar structures. None of which displayed such features beforehand.”

  “Remarkable. Your surmise?�
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  “It’s reacting. Evolving.”

  “Evolving? That’s a great stretch, Lieutenant.”

  “I know, sir. But I’ve tested it repeatedly, including a genetic composition analysis. The landskin before the tests and that after are different. Profoundly different.”

  “That’s impossible,” Rodriguez muttered. He rose and walked to the other samples, spread across the wide surface of a workstation. Each bore the telltale features, ringing the exposed area where the landskin had been cut from the surface of the world.

  “There’s more, sir.”

  “More?” He returned to Marissa’s side. A muted part of him still drank in the sight, scent, and electric feel of her, but most of him had grown quiescent, absorbed by the biological puzzle before him.

  “Yes.” She swiveled in her chair and toggled a switch. Above them, a display lit up with an abstract representation of the electrical currents within the landskin sample. “Watch this.” Marissa took a pipette and siphoned a few CCs of amber fluid from a beaker marked with a chemical tag; he recognized the sequence as human urine. She tapped out a few drops of the urine onto the surface of the landskin. Rodriguez followed her motions, watching the reaction of the landskin. It seemed to drink in the urine, a boil-like blister rising on its surface and soon shrinking.

  “Look at the display,” she told him.

  Rodriguez watched as electrical activity sprang up within the biomass, traveling outward from the area of the urine deposit. “It’s processing! Those sine waves! They’re close to cognitive spikes!”

  “I thought so, too. But we know there’s no intellect at work here. There are no cells specialized enough to serve as neural processors, no central nervous system of any kind.”

  “Not as we recognize them,” Rodriguez agreed. “Still . . . It’s gone. The electrical spikes have dissipated.”

  “Look into the tray. See the fluid at the outer rim? That’s the urine. Over here, in this beaker, is a previous sample of the discharge. I’ve run the usual battery of tests, of course. It’s urine—mine, to be precise—but it’s not. It’s been altered. There are additional genetic tags within the dreg-cells embedded in the urine.”

  “Genetic alteration? Impossible! Let me see your data.” Rodriguez seized the printouts Marissa held up and scanned them with increasing agitation. Mutation, alteration of such a nature was a physical impossibility without profound procreative acceleration. And so quickly! Yet the empirical data was incontrovertible. The numbers stared him in the face and he could not contest them. “Remarkable. Have you sampled other tissues? Dermis? Brain tissue? Reproductive?”

  She drew back from him, smiling slightly in the face of his obvious excitement. “Dreg-cells are readily available, as are dermis and a few others. I wasn’t keen on extracting brain tissue, or reproductive cells. At least not from myself. And I need your approval for extraction from the cannery.”

  The cannery? Rodriguez knew the less scientifically minded members of the crew sometimes referred to the vast banks of frozen human zygotes by the term, but he was surprised to hear it coming from her. One of the chief attractions he held for her lay between her ears.

  “You have it. More, I’ll work with you. There are dozens, hundreds, of tests. This is remarkable. Remarkable!”

  Marissa smiled, and he felt an urge to engulf her.

  Chapter 10

  She raised her head and sniffed at the sputtering breeze, localizing the sensory input. Olfactory sensation. Unpleasantness. Decay. Rot. Pain. Fear. A ridge of naked stone rose from the landskin, bearing the markers of old depredations: deep scars in the crumpled rockface.

  Aural sensation came next: shrill cries of avian lifeforms, groaning rumble of tumbling stone. Buzzing hiss of something . . . something dangerous.

  Pulling her feet from the landskin’s recognition, She walked toward the naked ridge. Trees stood in her path. She brushed against one of them. Sharp leaves sliced her skin, drawing fluids that dripped down her arms and stomach, pooling at her feet, where the landskin drank.

  She stepped back from the trees. Warmth arose in her chest, suffused her torso, limbs, head. Breakages in her skin sealed, locking precious fluids inside. This was a thing She could do, that all of her God’s children could do.

  She walked around the trees. Something dark, brown, and many-legged leaped from naked rock to naked rock. It gathered its rear legs and sprang with an uncoiling of taut muscles. Missed. Scrambled against the unyielding surface of rough stone. Fell onto the landskin, dazed. Its stillness called to the landskin, which sent questing tendrils. Spurs bit into brown skin, drilled inside. The creature awakened, squealing. Stilled. Its body rippled, swelling. Tendrils retracted. Reborn, the creature scuttled away across the landskin.

  She watched it move away, what had been alien, foreign, was now familiar.

  A portion of the ridge had crumbled away. She climbed sharp, broken rocks, cutting her feet and hands. Warmth flowed outward, healing her breakages. She left blood, patterns of herself, behind on the rocks.

  The sun sank toward the horizon as she reached the top of the ridge. She rose, questing for He, desperate. Her body shook for him, cried out in agony.

  Visual input, limited—deficiency—revealed a deep valley beyond, thick with landskin that had begun a bulge in its center. Now, a seething swarm of annelids worked at consuming a massive humped organism crushed against the spears of naked rock. Tentacles stretched from one end of the valley to the other, twitching with crumbling, tossed stone, ravaged by other annelid swarms. Huge, filmy bladders rose and fell, rose . . . and fell.

  Dying.

  The ool, the womb where She had spent almost her entire existence. Mother.

  Visual input: motion. She focused on bipedal movement. Grouped bipeds worked at a tentacle-mouth, dragging other, still, bipeds out onto the heaving landskin. Rows and rows of motionless bipeds already lay on the landskin. Parasites. Leeches on the bounty of the Mother. These were the creatures her God had created her and her kind to replace.

  She could smell fear. Fear from the bipeds, borne on the stuttering breeze.

  Ache. The scents pained her.

  Daughter.

  The voice came to her through the medium of the landskin. The touch was ecstasy, joy. Reunion promised. She opened herself, spreading her arms wide, waiting. Images danced in her mind, a flood of perception, a deluge of cresting thought. She experienced. She learned. She drank deep and long.

  Do not fear. I am coming for you. I will bring you back into the family. Find your mate. Wait, and I will find you.

  Promise of reunion.

  In the valley below, her mother lay dying, while parasites scurried about, abandoning her collapsing flesh.

  Find him, my daughter. Find him. Pain. Longing. Separation.

  He was not here. He was elsewhere.

  Reunion. The vast mind faded. Aid comes.

  She fled from the valley.

  Dersi turned into the corridor leading to her suite and stopped. A troop of guardsmen, Captain Lhedri among them, emerged from her chambers. They dragged Savhari behind them. They shoved Dersi’s servant to the vessel floor. Another man stalked out into the corridor, hands balled into fists at his sides. Pinch-faced and broad-shouldered, there was no mistaking Meloni.

  Dersi caught her breath and ducked back into the cross-vessel. Leaning against the artery wall, she released her pent breath. She shivered and felt her heart slamming into her ribs.

  “Where is she?” Dersi heard Meloni demand. “Where is Lady Dersi?”

  “Lord, I don’t know,” Savhari said. “I swear. I thought she was in her bed, sleeping. She was when I went to bed.”

  “Search the corridors,” Meloni ordered the guardsmen. “I’ll take word to Veil Lord Huldru. When she’s found, don’t hurt her, or you’ll regret it.”

  A dozen guardsmen barked acknowledgement. Dersi heard the butts of their acidrods strike the spongy floor. Their footsteps approached.

  Dersi pu
lled free from the arterial wall and sprinted down the corridor. Behind her, she heard the guards getting closer. But she felt certain she had not been seen. She gulped air like water.

  Glancing around, Dersi noticed a capillary that veered away to her right, sloping downward. Without thinking, she dove into it, sliding face first through pooled fluid. Sticky blood clung to her face and arms, soaking through her gown. As the tube entered a sharp curve she crashed into a buttress of built-up plaque. Shards rained down, tiny slivers that nibbled at her skin. She stifled a gasp of pain.

  “What was that?” she heard from above. Lhedri’s voice. The sound reverberated through the capillary. She dragged herself down, down, deeper into the shrinking vessel. Broken fragments of plaque, like brittle daggers, raked through her soft robe, scoring her skin.

  Before her, the capillary continued to shrink, growing tighter. Its walls pressed against her shoulders now. The hardened walls scraped at her skin through her robe. Her breath came ragged and hot, tasting of bile and blood. The darkness spawned unseen horrors that grabbed at her feet.

  Behind her, she heard the voices again. She wedged herself forward until she could turn her head and look. A light danced in the distance now, shining on the encrusted walls.

  “Something came this way,” she heard Lhedri whisper. Scattered tinkling sounds came to her as someone shifted the broken chunks of plaque. The light panned across dripping pools on the capillary floor, and bruises and abrasions on the walls.

  “It can’t be her,” another man said. “She wouldn’t go down there. Why should she?”

  “I don’t know,” Lhedri answered. “But if she did . . .”

  “You’re right,” the other said. He sighed. “Dersi! Lady Dersi! Are you there? Are you well? Do you need help?”

  Dersi’s heart slammed against her ribs. She squirmed forward, away from the voices.

  “There! I heard something. I know I did,” Lhedri said.

  “I heard it, too.”

  Dersi squeezed forward, surging against the constriction of the vessel. She stretched out her arms, clawing at the vessel wall. Her toes dug into the spongy flesh, thrusting her onward.