Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (25 page)

Now she
remembered. The others hadn’t been asleep; they only looked asleep. They were
not right somehow, as if they had no brains. That’s why they didn’t say
anything. They didn’t say anything because they couldn’t talk—they could only
laugh like idiots and grunt without minds.

And they
wouldn’t stop because they didn’t know how.

Help! Get out of me!

Now the
incessant probing and rubbing began to hurt. It felt like they were eating her
with their touching and sucking. Where her nipples had gushed pleasure, they
now burned as if rubbed raw. She hurt and burned deep between her legs.

God! Please stop!

She
forced one arm to move and felt flesh, real flesh, just next to her. Her hand
moved up a sweaty flank and found rows of smooth tendrils. Frantic, she groped
behind her and felt more smooth flesh that seemed to writhe. Her hand reached
up to her own head and felt it wrapped in tendrils, then down to her legs where
she found more, wrapped tight like smooth ropes in neat rows.

She was
bound tight.

She
struggled and pushed with her hips, and her free hand slipped against slick
flesh. She tried to pull her head loose, but
  
it didn't move at all.
 
Her panic
flared.

They were
all inside her, stretching inside her, filling her up to exploding. They
grunted and groaned and squirmed, and she felt the hateful touch and burned.

Uhhhhnnnn . . .

They
wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop. She felt the pain of their violation as it
reached an unbearable peak, and her body stiffened against it. Deep, deep in
her mind she felt herself shrink from the trespass.

Finally,
she felt relief.

Her mind
shrank to a tiny point of dull light, and the pain shriveled with it.

In time,
her mind vanished completely.

She
laughed and grunted like the others. The sounds had no meaning.

Other
sounds came to her that rang familiar to her tiny, hidden mind. She knew they
were something but didn’t know what. They were important—they had to be. She
let the sounds tap on her. They were nothing and something—important, yet
meaningless. She squirmed against the bonds and grunted, while a sound slowly
formed in her head.

Wor . . . words . . .

* * *

 
“This isn’t working,” Kropp said. “Look at
this mess. They’re dead, or nearly so. Whose idea was this, anyway?”

“Mine,
sir,” Lin Fong said. “I wanted to know if the plants could support them in a
state of unified and sustained ecstasy. The hypothesis was that a sufficient
number of Brunigea connections, mated to a sufficient number of specimens,
would succeed where plasticizing recombination has failed.”

“But look
at the brain patterns, for Christ’s sake,” Kropp said. “The subjects are
practically vegetables themselves.”

Lin Fong sighed.
“That’s true, but look at the endorphin levels—the phenylethylamine especially,
it’s very high. Higher than can be achieved via surrogate drugs. It’s true it
spikes then diminishes, but look at the first part—it’s amazingly high. I see
that as very hopeful.”
 
His finger traced
a jagged line on a graph.

“But it’s
flat at this juncture,” Kropp said. “Your design has failed to support your
hypothesis.”

“It’s
true it’s not high now,” Lin Fong continued. “But the results overall are far
better than plasticizing because of the synoptic links in the hypothalamus
facilitated by the Brunigea stamen. There . . . there doesn’t seem to be a
limit to the number of connections that can be made without killing the
subjects.”
 
Lin Fong felt himself
rambling to cover his failure. Kropp would see right through it. Lin Fong ,
plunged forward, hoping for the best. “In this configuration, we get multiple
limbic to limbic links that compound the euphoria and the . . .”

“You’ve
turned them to useless putty,” Kropp said, curtly. “Is the damage permanent?”

Lin Fong
turned with his hands on his hips and looked down at the squirming mass of
bodies and Brunigea tendrils.

“Perhaps,”
he said. “I’d have to extricate one and see. That can be tricky. These are
undomesticated Brunigea.”
              

Lin Fong
knew Kropp was right. Now two days of work had been wasted. He should have
stopped yesterday when the endorphin levels dropped to zero. His lab coat
suddenly felt like lead.

“Undomesticated
Brunigea are very aggressive,” Kropp added knowingly.

“Yes.”

“They are
parasites, you know?”

“Yes,
sir.”

“Well,
stop your tests. This is a dead end. Jacob wants results. Get one of the
subjects out and see if you can revive it. Erhlich needs more in the
plasticizing lab. He’s still prototyping. He needs them more than you do. We
don’t have an inexhaustible supply.”

“Yes,
sir.”

“Get on
it right now.”
 

* * *

Betty was
aware of being moved and thought one of the dulling lovers had pushed her away.
There was more rough movement and she felt real hands on her weak arms and
legs. There was a buzzing sound, and she felt rain on her back and down her
neck. Slowly, the despicable touching faded, and she felt rid of it at last.
She felt herself being moved roughly; and this time when she opened her eyes,
she could see lights above that made her squint. She saw movement in big
flashes of white. She felt a pinch in her arm and saw a bright line of green
tracing up to a round thing next to a bright light. The light felt good. There
was pressure in her nose and then something went in it and down her throat. She
tasted plastic and wanted to gag.

As her
eyes drifted closed, the lights changed to bright lines of jagged radiance,
then faded to nothing.

She
slept.

“Betty?
Betty can you hear me?” a voice said.

She tried
to swallow, but it was too difficult. Something was blocking her throat. Her
hand wanted to rise and remove the thing, but her hand couldn’t move. She was
strapped down. She felt anger.

“Can you
hear me?”

She
nodded her head just slightly.

“Let’s
get this tube out of here, shall we?” the man said. She felt the tube slide out
of her throat and smelled the clean scent of the man’s hands. She finally
swallowed.

“What . .
. ?” she asked.

“A
question? That’s good.”

“What . .
. did you do to me?”

“Wasn’t
it fun?”

“No.”

“I’m glad
you can speak and see and all that. That’s good,” the man said.

“Is it?”

“Oh, yes.
It means I still have a job.”

“You hurt
me. You said you wouldn’t . . .”

“Well, it
was supposed to be fun,” Lin Fong said.

“It
wasn't.”

“Well,
maybe next time,” he said to her, then to someone else, “Syringe.”

“What are
you doing?” she asked weakly.

“My job,”
Lin Fong said.

She felt
a pinch then a warm glow, then the world drifted into darkness.

When she
awoke the next time, all was confusion, and she the center of it. There was no
right or left to the world and no up or down. She felt a sensation of weight
that shifted from place to place like a roller going over her body. When she
turned what she thought was her head, she saw flesh where no flesh should be.
The out-of-place flesh was welded to her by a purple seam. Above her and below
her were arms and legs that felt like hers but didn’t look like hers. She heard
noises—gurgling and wheezing and somewhere someone was trying to speak. When
she opened her mouth to respond, she felt one hand open as if connected to it.
She felt her fingers moving in rhythm with her tongue. No words came out. She
heard voices, but the sounds had no meaning. She tried to move but the limbs
would not obey.

Much
later, the world began to move. She recognized the smooth walls of the
monolith’s interior and watched them glide past. Then she saw freshly scraped
ground. Soon her confused senses picked up the unmistakable scent of rotting
flesh.

12

T
hey had been leaning
on the railing in full view, watching. After Lavachek got caught watching them
dump body things yesterday with no repercussions, they figured it didn’t
matter.

They watched the men
swing the thing out and drop it in the pit. Then one of them fired two shots
down into it. On the way back, one of the men waved to Habershaw and Lavachek
like a friendly neighbor.

“There’s
another one,” Lavachek said. “That’s the second one today.”

“Looks
like they’ve slowed down a little, though,” Habershaw replied, half listening.

“Yeah,
hi, you sonofabitch,” Habershaw said to the figure below in a voice that
couldn’t possibly be heard. “Your days are numbered, asshole.”

Habershaw
was worried about Joan. He hadn’t heard from her since yesterday. That was a
bad sign. He took the phone out of his pocket and tried her numbers, first her
office. Nothing. Then he tried her personal number. The same error message
appeared on the phone’s display.

“Unit
disabled. What does that mean?” he harshly questioned Lavachek, as though
Lavachek bore some personal responsibility.

“Is it
working?” Lavachek asked, taken aback, and not knowing what else to say.

“Mine’s
working! Hers is the one that’s not working! She should have called by now!”

“Sorry .
. .” Lavachek said.

Habershaw
put the phone away. Christ.

“Something’s
up. Something’s gone wrong,” he said. “We gotta get back to the settlement.”

“How?
Patel told us to wait right here. If we take off and Patel finds out . . .”

“Hey,
Patel can suck my dick,” Habershaw said. “I say we take a truck and drive back
tonight. We can be back by dawn.”

“That’s a
four-hundred kilometer round trip. I don’t know. If we get caught disobeying
orders, Patel could really screw us over.”

Habershaw
felt the fear in Lavachek’s voice like a tangible thing. Watching the strange
goings-on below could spook anybody, even someone as tough as Lavachek.

“Then
stay here. You can cover for me.”

“How?”

“Are you
worried about catching hell ‘cuz I’m gone?”

“Well . .
.”

“Forget
it. Just . . . just stay here.”
 

* * *

That
night, dressed in a net suit, Habershaw made his way down off the rig and
across the open space he’d scraped out of the jungle with the heavy machine.
His target was a row of utility trucks on the northern side of the monolith.
The law about being out after dark was especially true so close to the ocean.
The insect life released from branches, bark and leaves at nightfall here was
unusually thick and virulent, even for Verde. The air seemed filled with them
like enormous ash or snowflakes blown at random in the twin moons’ light. By
the time he got to the first truck, his suit was covered with flying and
crawling bugs. He brushed off as many as he could before getting in the cab.
Some of them stuck, snagged by sharp feet in the mesh. He kept batting at them,
his gloved hands tearing them to pieces.

In the
process, he accidentally unzipped his net suit partially open at a seam.