Super Extra Grande (3 page)

That explanation should satisfy all the laymen, I’m sure.

You could also think of them as gigantic sea worms. Basically, they’re huge worms with segmented bodies covered in bony plates (articulated exoskeletons), legless, with multiple hearts (two per segment; as for Laggorus, heart attacks don’t cause these critters much more than mild discomfort), and so on and so forth. They are hermaphrodites and reproduce simply, without going through metamorphosis; females of reproductive age lay eggs that hatch into small versions of adult tsunamis.

Too large to be bothered by predators, tsunamis swim wherever they please, and when they’re hungry they simply open their cavernous circular mouths, filtering entire cubic kilometers of water through the sieve formed by their enormous teeth (their only function), then swallow everything trapped in the net. They are the Nerean equivalent of Earth’s blue whales, though they often swallow “planktonic” organisms half the size of a full-grown man.

At first, the new human colonizers on the planet were appalled by the amount of edible biomass these coldblooded behemoths were consuming and feared they would damage their fishing boats and ferries, so they tried to exterminate them with bombs, mines, and torpedoes.

But their exoskeletons proved so tough and their tissues regenerated so quickly and with such vitality that the colonizers soon realized it would take too many powerful bombs to destroy them all. The shockwaves alone would have destroyed much of the rest of the planet’s rich marine life, too.

Their next plan was to poison them, or engineer viral plagues specifically targeting tsunamis. Of course the Ecology Subcommittee of the Galactic Community would never have allowed anything so risky, biologically speaking. Also, luckily, someone realized in time that leaving thousands of tsunami corpses to decompose all at once would create a terrible hygiene problem. There simply aren’t enough scavenger organisms in the Nerean ecosystem to process that many enormous corpses at once. The risk of epizootic disease would be too great.

Taking all of this into consideration, plus the “friendliness” that made them tourist attractions (many visitors pay good money to experience the thrill of swimming with these titans—while wearing ultraprotective suits, of course; the “frolicsome” creatures never attack anything too big to swallow, and we humans are a little large for them, but you might as well guard against a chance swipe of the tail that could almost send you into orbit, right?), not to mention their status as the planet’s unique and iconic species, the human colonizers finally decided to let the tsunamis continue happily scarfing down most of the seafood on their planet.

I imagine they also came to understand that any cure would be worse than the illness. As is so often the case in ecology.

That’s what I call taking lemons and making lemonade.

Though many people still get a shock every time one of these “harmless little worms” pokes its enormous cylindro-conical head through the water’s surface.

I can perfectly picture Mrs. Tarkon, leaning sensually against the rail of the high-speed ferry on which local political bosses transport her powerful husband from one island to another, playing with the limpid water… when suddenly one of those gigantic maws emerges beside her, the innocent tsunami version of a kid jumping out from behind a column and shouting, “Boo!”

Or rather, in this case, “
BOOOOOO!
”

Maybe I misjudged her; you can’t blame her for dropping the bracelet. It’s a miracle she kept the hair on her head…

“How go todo, Boss Sangan?” Narbuk asks, worried by my silence. “Be problemas? Malos intestinal parasites? It be jewel o no?”

My assistant isn’t kidding about the parasites. The “illegal aliens” these super-extra-grande creatures may harbor often constitute the greatest danger to those who venture inside them.

Once when I was working inside a juggernaut, removing an
in situ
pulmonary neoplasm, half a dozen freeloading nematodes almost half a meter long decided I was a competitor and, more than willing to get rid of their bothersome rival, attacked me with their suckers.

Their circular mouths produced a powerful acid. Good thing I was wearing my ultraprotective suit, which they weren’t able to pierce. But it was an experience I’m not anxious to go through again. Not one bit.

Fortunately I haven’t found any unexpected guests inside the tsunami. If juggernauts—mollusks from the planet Colossa that are “only” six hundred meters across—can host acid-spewing worms like those, this giant could be infested with parasites twice the size of a rhinoceros on Earth.

“No. If there had been alguna, the laxative must have gotten rid de ella. As for the sludge—todavía I can’t say,” I grumble, disappointed. “It’s resisting, por ahora. Must be a very old cyst. Dáme more time.”

Indeed, the mass adhering to the mucous membrane of the anesthetized giant’s intestine won’t budge, unmoved by the suction hose.

I turn up the power and keep going, absorbed in thought.

Such a fuss over a simple bracelet. If it had been a wristband terminal belonging to any citizen of Nerea, it would have been tough luck, adiós, fuggedaboutit. After all, it’s so cheap to make them, so easy to buy a new one.

But this was the governor’s respectable wife’s very own priceless, irreplaceable platinum wedding band, inlaid with Aldebaran topaz, so of course it was a disaster.

Tarkon’s security detail reacted swiftly. One of the muscular bodyguards grabbed a harpoon gun (there’s one on board every ship on Nerea) and tagged the monster with a radio transmitter dart—showing off his excellent aim in the process, since it’s never a bad idea to angle for a personal recommendation for your next job from an influential governor.

Then they dumped hundreds of gallons of fish blood (the best possible bait) into the water to draw the tagged giant into a shallow naval repair dock nearby. Shallow for a tsunami, that is; it’s more than two hundred meters deep. They penned it in there by lowering the sluices and brought me in as quickly as possible.

Good thing the lovely little beastie didn’t start wagging its tail before I got here. No matter how strong the monomolecular steel a sluice gate is made from, it could not withstand more than a few blows from an armored tail half a kilometer long and weighing dozens of tons.

Setting a new galactic speed record, I was here just four hours after the worm swallowed the bracelet uninvited. Since the metal detector found no trace of the jewel at the bottom of the dry dock, I deduced that it must still be inside the worm’s guts.

Wasting no time, Narbuk and I anesthetized it by filling the dock with morpheorol. Using a couple of cranes, we lifted its head above the waterline, and just when it looked like the whole operation was going to be easy as pie—localize the bracelet, give the worm a little jab, and extract it…

Things started getting complicated.

Tsunamis are blind as bats. Their most important sense organ for detecting prey in the oceans of Nerea is electromagnetic.

If anybody plans to press a metal detector against the skin of an animal that can sense electromagnetic fluctuations of a few microvolts or a tenth of a gauss ever again, he’d better warn me first—so that I can get as far away as possible.

Half a galaxy away would be nice.

For the record, it wasn’t my idea. A certain irresponsible Laggoru came up with it… But in any case, the immediate result of the attempt was a reflexive flick of the tsunami’s tail that sent a couple dozen tons of water sailing into the air. The water fell more or less uniformly onto Mr. Tarkon, his wife, their bodyguards, the local political honchos and their guards, the Amphorians… and me.

Most ironic of all, the only person that the downpour missed was Narbuk himself. Thanks to his animal allergy, he was standing a good hundred meters back.

Since the “find and recover” tack was obviously not going to work, I went to plan B: force the worm to let go of it. The massive dose of laxatives that we administered orally worked great. In less than five minutes, the stuff filling the dock wasn’t exactly water anymore… and the smell forced us all to put on gas masks.

You could tell right away, our tsunami lives on a fish-based diet.

And its stomach is so big that a good part of the menu must have time to rot inside before it even starts getting digested.

A lovely scent for aiding digestion, to be sure.

Everyone whose appetite is piqued by scatology, raise your hands… Sorry if I didn’t raise mine. I had one hand busy pinching my nose and the other covering my mouth to keep me from retching.

Without much luck, I admit.

Good thing we didn’t give it the laxative before trying the metal detector, otherwise we would have gotten splashed with… Better not even think about it.

But the damn bracelet still refused to appear.

When my stomach was more or less back to normal, it occurred to me that the priceless jewel might have gotten caught in one of the creature’s stomach pleats, or lodged in one of its intestinal folds, and I decided to go after it the old-fashioned way.

In situ
.

Even if we had something that could overcome the minor obstacle of its exoskeletal plates, it would have been insane to try drilling through the epidermis of a creature with a nervous system so rudimentary that even while deeply sedated it was capable of reflexive movements such as the unforgettable crowd-bathing swipe of the tail. Nobody wanted to risk a second shower, especially since this time the water falling on us wouldn’t precisely be crystalline.

So with a vacuum hose in my hand, and wearing a proper anti-magnetic, everything-proof suit that an aide to Mr. Tarkon had quickly commandeered from one of the planetary system’s solar patrol ships (I’d have been crazy to go in without one, after the incident with the little worms and their acid suckers inside the juggernaut), I marched smugly, a new and voluntary Jonah, straight up to the monster’s jaws.

My thinking was that, if animals half the size of a man fit through its mouth, I could get inside, too. With a little effort, some lubricant, and a bit of pushing, of course.

Twenty minutes later, perhaps due to my somewhat larger-than-average body type, it was proving to take an awful lot of pushing. Not only by me, but also by four of Tarkon’s bodyguards, who were trying to use brute muscular strength (something they don’t lack, let me point out) to shove me down the monster’s gullet.

Since none of my lubricants were helping much either, I cut to the chase and injected twenty kilos of an extra-powerful muscle relaxant straight into the worm’s pharynx. This dilated the creature’s throat enough to let me through, making me the first veterinarian biologist to study the digestive system of the largest aquatic animal in the galaxy from the inside—and while the animal was still alive.

That was six hours ago.

Since then I’ve been wading ponderously in my ultraprotective suit (designed to protect an astronaut from cosmic rays and micrometeorite impacts in the weightlessness of space, it isn’t exactly light or easy to move in on the planet’s surface, not even with the aid of its powerful servomotors), through a thick, dark haze that my helmet’s headlamp can’t truly dissipate.

Luckily, after my tight squeeze down the tsunami’s throat, its esophagus and stomach both turned out to be large enough to walk through standing upright, which was really something for me. I could even have parked a small spaceship inside if I’d had one handy.

The cartridges of monster muscle relaxants I brought with me have allowed me to make my way through the valves of the digestive system, from one to the next: stomach, small intestine, and finally, large intestine. I still have two shots, which I’m saving for my triumphal exit: the anal sphincter.

Lucky I can’t smell the liquid I’m walking through. Sometimes up to my waist, sometimes all the way up to my neck. Glad I’m not a Juhungan now. With no sense of sight or sound, they rely entirely on smell, touch, and taste to understand the world. This would not be any fun for them, I’m sure.

Ever since the laxative episode, I thought the whole operation stank, no pun intended. But I never expected I’d be regressing to my infancy. Playing with poo—and for keeps, on a grand scale.

I don’t even want to think what would happen if the ultraprotective suit failed…

It’d make for a pretty tragicomic epitaph:
ASPHYXIATED IN EXCREMENT.

Of course, there’s shit and then there’s
shit
.

The laxative was a good idea… Considering the consistency of the fecal matter the colossus expelled in its first bowel movement, I would have needed a sonic drill or an even more powerful excavation tool to make my way through a full colon.

Maybe the critter had been constipated, and that’s why it had surfaced, to swallow some air…

This piece of sludge here won’t come loose. With all the accretions removed, it turns out to be a nearly perfect sphere, some ten centimeters in diameter. In the dim light of my personal spotlights it looks an iridescent white, like mother-of-pearl. A fecal pearl? Interesting… But now’s not the time to study digestive-system oddities.

I’m starting to lose my patience. Narbuk, who can see everything from his vantage point, tells me it’s less than a hundred meters to the back end. But I’d rather buy Mrs. Tarkon a new bracelet, Aldebaran topaz-encrusted platinum and all, than go through the whole business of sedating this monumental worm and inspecting its digestive system a second time…

So I give the old sphere a few light taps with my ceramic-armored glove, testing it…

Hurray for intuition! On the third tap it splits in half, proving to be more a thin crust than a gelatinous coating.

And, hallelujah, the glimmering bracelet falls straight into my hand!

Almost clean even.

Almost. Let’s not exaggerate.

A moment of triumph like this makes the whole intestinal trek of the past few hours seem worth it.

I dance a quick jig, shit-kicking included.

“Misión accomplished—got it,” I announce, terse but contented, unceremoniously pocketing the bauble in a flap of the suit. I keep moving along, much more quickly now. “I’m heading out de aquí like a rocket, Narbuk. Quieres saber something funny? Sabes what pearls are? The bracelet was encased in a structure muy similar. Fecal pearls! Probablemente tsunamis secrete a kind of nacre, aunque they aren’t mollusks, to proteger themselves from contaminantes de heavy metal. Platinum es básicamente inert, though… They must grow increíblemente quickly también, unlike oyster pearls en la Earth. I wonder if they’d be worth algo…”