Alien Contact (24 page)

“Fractal randomness?” asked Po.

“I don’t think so,” said Sel. “Random, yes, but genuinely so, not fractal. Not mathematical.”

“Like dog turds,” said Po.

Sel stood looking at the columns. They did indeed have the kind of curling pattern that a long dog turd got as it was laid down from above. Solid yet flexible. Extrusions from above, only still connected to the ceiling. Sel looked up, then took the stick from Po and raised it.

The chamber seemed to go on forever, supported by the writhing stone pillars. Arches like an ancient temple, but half melted.

“It’s composite rock,” said Po.

Sel looked down at the boy and saw him with a self-lighting microscope, examining the rock of a column.

“Seems like the same mineral composition as the floor,” said Po. “But grainy. As if it had been ground up and then glued back together.”

“But not glued,” said Sel. “Bonded? Cement?”

“I think it’s been glued,” said Po. “I think it’s organic.”

Po took the stick back and held the flame of the lamp under an elbow of one of the twistiest columns. The substance did not catch fire, but it did begin to sweat and drip.

“Stop,” said Sel. “Let’s not bring the thing down on us!”

Now that they could walk upright, they moved forward into the cavern. It was Po who thought of marking their path by cutting off bits of his blanket and dropping them. He looked back from time to time to make sure they were following a straight line. Sel looked back, too, and saw how impossible it would be ever to find the entrance they had come through, if the path were not marked.

“So tell me how this was made,” said Sel. “No toolmarks on the ceiling or floor. These columns, made from ground-up stone with added glue. A kind of paste that can hold up a chamber this size. But no grinding equipment left behind, no buckets to carry the glue.”

“Giant rock-eating worms,” said Po.

“That’s what I was thinking, too,” said Sel.

Po laughed. “I was joking.”

“I wasn’t,” said Sel.

“How could worms eat rock?”

“Very sharp teeth that regrow quickly. Grinding their way through. The fine gravel bonds with some kind of gluey mucus and they extrude these columns, then bind them to the ceiling.”

“But how could such a creature evolve?” said Po. “There’s no nutrition in the rock. And it would take enormous energy to do all this. Not to mention whatever their teeth were made of.”

“I don’t think they evolved,” said Sel. “Look—what’s that?”

There was something shiny ahead. Reflecting the lamplight.

As they got closer, they saw spotty reflections from various spots on the columns, too. Even the ceiling.

But nothing else was as bright as the thing lying on the floor. “A glue bucket?” asked Po.

“No,” said Sel. “It’s a giant bug. Beetle. Ant. Something like—look at this, Po.”

They were close enough now to see that it was six-legged, though the middle pair of limbs seemed more designed for clinging than walking or grasping. The front ones were for grasping and tearing. The hind ones, for digging and running.

“What do you think? Bipedal?” asked Sel.

“Both. Bipedal at need.” Po nudged it with his foot. No response. The thing was definitely dead. He bent over and flexed and rotated the hind limbs. Then the front ones. “It could do both equally well, I think.”

“Not a likely evolutionary path,” said Sel. “Anatomy tends to commit one way or the other.”

“Like you said. Not evolved, bred.”

“For what?”

“For mining,” said Po. He rolled the thing over onto its belly. It was very heavy; it took several tries. But now they could see much better what it was that caught the light. The thing’s back was a solid sheet of gold. As smooth as a beetle’s carapace, but so thick with gold that the thing must weigh ten kilos at least.

Twenty-five, maybe thirty centimeters long, thick and stubby. And its entire exoskeleton thinly gilt, with the back heavily armored in gold. “Do you think these things were mining for gold?” asked Po. “Not with that mouth,” said Sel. “Not with those hands.”

“But the gold got inside it somehow. To be deposited in the shell.”

“I think you’re right,” said Sel. “But this is the adult. The harvest. I think the Formics carried these things out of the mine and took them off to be purified. Burn off the organics and leave the pure metal behind.”

“So they ingested the gold as larvae…”

“Went into a cocoon…”

“And when they emerged, their bodies were encased in gold.”

“And there they are,” said Sel, holding up the light again. Only now he went closer to the columns, where they could now see that the glints of reflection were from the bodies of half-formed creatures, their backs embedded in the pillars, their foreheads and bellies shiny with a layer of thin gold.

“The columns are the cocoons,” said Po.

“Organic mining,” said Sel. “The Formics bred these things specifically to extract gold.”

“But what for? It’s not like the Formics used money. Gold is just a soft metal to them.”

“A useful one. What’s to say they didn’t have bugs just like these, only bred to extract iron, platinum, aluminum, copper, whatever they wanted?”

“So they didn’t need tools to mine.”

“No, Po—these are the tools. The factories.” Sel knelt down. “Let’s see if we can get any kind of DNA sample from these.

“Dead all this time?”

“There’s no way these are native to this planet. The Formics brought them here. So they’re native to the Formic home world. Or bred from something native there.”

“Not necessarily,” said Po, “or other colonies would have found them long before now.”

“It took us forty years, didn’t it?”

“What if this is a hybrid?” asked Po. “So it exists only on this world?”

By now, Sel was sampling DNA and finding it far easier than he thought. “Po, there’s no way this has been dead for forty years.”

Then it twitched reflexively under his hand.

“Or twenty minutes,” said Sel. “It still has reflexes. It isn’t dead.”

“Then it’s dying,” said Po. “It has no strength.”

“Starving to death, I bet,” said Sel. “Maybe it just finished its metamorphosis and was trying to get to the tunnel entrance and died here. Or stopped here to die.”

Po took the samples from him and stowed them in Sel’s pack.

“So these gold bugs are still alive, forty years after the Formics stopped bringing them food? How long is the metamorphosis?”

“Not forty years,” said Sel. He stood up, then bent over again to look at the gold bug. “I think these cocooned-up bugs embedded in the columns are young. Fresh.” He stood up and started striding deeper into the cavern.

There were more gold bugs now, many of them lying on the ground—but unlike the first one they found, these were often destroyed, hollowed out. Nothing but the thick golden shells of their backs, with legs discarded as if they had been…

“Spat out,” said Sel. “These were eaten.”

“By what?”

“Larvae,” said Sel. “Cannibalizing the adults because otherwise there’s nothing to eat here. Each generation getting smaller—look how large this one is? Each one smaller because they only eat the bodies of the adults.”

“And they’re working their way back toward the door,” said Po. “To get outside where the nutrients are.”

“When the Formics stopped coming…”

“Their shells are too heavy to make much progress,” said Po. “So they get as far as they can, then the larvae feed on the corpse of the adult, then they crawl toward the light of the entrance as far as they can, cocoon up, and the next generation emerges, smaller than the last one.”

Now they were among much larger shells. “These things are supposed to be more than a meter in length,” said Sel. “The closer to the entrance, the smaller.”

Po stopped, pointed at the lamp. “They’re heading toward the light?”

“Maybe we’ll be able to see one.”

“Rock-devouring larvae that grind up solid rock and poop out bonded stone columns.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to see it up close.”

“But you do.”

“Well. Yes.”

Now they were both looking around them, squinting to try to see movement somewhere in the cavern.

“What if there’s something it likes much better than light?” asked Po.

“Soft-bodied food?” asked Sel. “Don’t think I haven’t thought of it. The Formics brought them food. Now maybe we have, too.”

At that moment, Po suddenly rose straight up into the air.

Sel held up the stick. Directly above him, a huge sluglike larva clung to the ceiling. Its mouth end was tightly fastened on Po’s back.

“Unstrap and drop down here!” called Sel.

“All our samples!”

“We can always get more samples! I don’t want to have to extract bits of you from one of these pillars!”

Po got the straps open and dropped to the floor.

The pack disappeared into the larva’s maw. They could hear hard metal squeaking and scraping as the larva’s teeth tried to grind up the metal instruments. They didn’t wait to watch. They started toward the entrance. Once they passed the first gold bug’s body, they looked for the bits of blanket to mark the path.

“Take my pack,” said Sel, shrugging it off as he walked. “It’s got the radio and the DNA samples in it—get out the entrance and radio for help.”

“I’m not leaving you,” said Po. But he was obeying.

“You’re the only one who can get out the entrance faster than that thing can crawl.”

“We haven’t seen how fast it can go.”

“Yes we have,” said Sel. He walked backward for a moment, holding up the lamp.

The larva was about thirty meters behind them and coming on faster than they had been walking.

“Is it following the light or our body heat?” asked Po as they turned again and began to jog.

“Or the carbon dioxide of our breath? Or the vibrations of our footfalls? Or our heartbeats?” Sel held out the stick toward him. “Take it and run.”

“What are you going to do?” said Po, not taking the stick.

“If it’s following the light, you can stay ahead of it by running.”

“And if it’s not?”

“Then you can get out and call for help.”

“While it has you for lunch.”

“I’m tough and gristly.”

“The thing eats stone.”

“Take the light,” said Sel, “and get out of here.”

Po hesitated a moment longer, then took it. Sel was relieved that the boy would keep his promise of obedience.

Either that, or Po was convinced the larva would follow the light.

It was the right guess—as Sel slowed down and watched the larva approach, he could see that it was not heading directly toward him, but rather listed off to the side, heading for Po. And as Po ran, the larva began speeding up.

It went right past Sel. It was more than a half-meter thick. It moved like a snake, with a back-and-forth movement, writhing along the floor, shaping itself exactly like the columns, only horizontally and, of course, moving.

It was going to reach Po before he could get out of the tunnel.

“Leave the light!” shouted Sel. “Leave it!”

In a few moments, Sel could see the light leaning against the wall of the cavern, beside where the low tunnel began, leading toward the outside world. Po must already be through the tunnel.

But the larva was ignoring the light and heading into the tunnel behind him. With Po struggling to move through the low tunnel, the larva would catch him easily.

“No. No, stop!” But then he thought: What if Po hears me? “Keep going, Po! Run!”

And then, wordlessly, Sel shouted inside his mind: Stop and come back here! Come back to the cavern! Come back to your children!

Sel knew it was insane, but it was all he could think of to do. The Formics communicated mind to mind. This was also a large insectoid life form from the Formics’ home world. Maybe he could speak to it the way the Hive Queens spoke to the individual worker and soldier Formics.

Speak? That was asinine. They had no language. They wouldn’t speak.

Sel stopped and formed in his mind a clear picture of the gold bug lying on the cavern floor. Only the legs were writhing. And as he pictured it, Sel tried to feel hungry, or at least remember how it felt to be hungry. Or to find hunger within himself—after all, he hadn’t eaten for a few hours.

Then he pictured the larva coming to the gold bug. Circling it.

The larva reemerged from the tunnel. There had been no screaming from Po—it hadn’t caught him. Maybe it got too near the sunlight and it blinded the larva and it couldn’t go on. Or maybe it had responded to the images and feelings in Sel’s mind. Either way, Po was safely outside.

Of course, maybe the larva had simply decided not to bother with the prey that was running, and had come back for the prey that was standing very still, pressing himself against a column.

“Nice larva,” whispered Sel. “How about some nice dried dog?”

When he reached for his pack, to extract the food, it wasn’t there. Po had his pack.

But he had the little bag at his waist where he carried the food for each day’s hike. He opened it, took out the dried dog meat and the vegetables that he carried there, and tossed them toward the larva.

It stopped. It nudged the food lying on the ground. Then it rose up and plunged its gaping mouth down on the food like a remora attaching itself to a shark.

Sel could imagine a smaller version of the larva being exactly that—a remora, attaching itself to larger creatures to suck the blood out of them. Or to burrow into them?

He remembered the tiny parasites that had killed people when the colony was first formed. The ones Sel had invented blood additives to repel.

This creature is a hybrid. Half native to this world. Half formed from something from the Formic world.

No, not “something.” Formics themselves. This thing was a hybrid between Formic and parasite. It would take very expert gene-splicing to construct a viable creature that combined attributes of two species growing out of such disparate genetic heritages. The result would be a species that was half Formic, so that perhaps the Hive Queens could communicate with them mentally, control them like any other Formics. Only they were still different enough that they didn’t completely bond with the queen—so when this world’s Hive Queen died, the gold bugs didn’t.