The Moldy Dead (3 page)

“The mold is
what?
” Bha’hoi
demanded, harsh now.  When Nirle didn’t reply, he continued in a low, hard
tone.  “From now on, Commander, you will clear all excursions with me.  I will
have no more deaths.  Your buddy system is obviously not working.”

“Burn you, Huouyt.”  

Nirle grabbed his rifle and left.

“Ooreiki, go retrieve Commander
Nirle and lock him in his room.”

“No.  He can go.”

The Huouyt turned to Esteei. 
“Excuse me?”

Esteei continued to watch Nirle
depart.  “Let him go, Overseer.”

“But, little Jahul, military matters
are clearly—”

“You will address me as Emissary
Esteei,” Esteei snapped, “Not ‘little Jahul.’”

The Huouyt gave Esteei a cold look,
then flung a cilia-covered, paddle-like arm at the other Ooreiki, “Put that
body away.”

Esteei turned to see the Ooreiki’s
figure fade into the darkness.

Suddenly afraid for him, Esteei
jogged off the ship and sloshed through the tide after the Prime Commander. 
Behind him, he heard the Huouyt give orders for the other Ooreiki to stay.

Esteei’s pores prickled at the thought
of being out in the Geuji alone, but he kept going.

A strange, percussive sound stopped
him.  Esteei hesitated outside the threshold of the ship’s light, turning back
to glance at the figures on the ship.  He thought he saw flashes from the
inside.

Is that weapons-fire?

Then,
This mission is getting to
me.

Feeling tired, Esteei hurried into
the darkness after the Ooreiki Prime Commander.

“Nirle!” he called, after the
Ooreiki’s lumbering bulk. 

“Go back to the ship, Jahul.” 
Nirle didn’t slow.

Esteei felt the first bit of Geuji
squish under his feet, but he kept moving.  Ahead, he could feel Nirle’s pain
like hot irons in his
sivvet.
  “Nirle, wait!”

The Ooreiki slowed, his fleshy
sudah
flapping in the sides of his neck, betraying his anger.  “Esteei, was Bha’hoi
on the ship when the grounders took you back?”

Esteei flinched, coming to a halt
beside him.  “I can’t remember.”

“
Think!
  This mission’s lost
nine out of fifteen members.  Don’t you think that’s a bit odd?”

Insanity, yet…  “Why would Bha’hoi
kill your grounders?”

Glaring, Nirle turned to look the
way they had come.

In the distance, the ship’s lights
were drowned out by the darkness of the night and the eerie blue light of the
moon.

All around them, waves of Geuji
glistened in the night.

Esteei got the distinct impression they were being
watched, their every word consumed and analyzed by alien minds.

“It’s sentient,” Nirle said,
staring at the Geuji.

The Geuji seemed to shudder, the
texture shifting and changing, going from glossy to rough in ripples around
them.  Suddenly nervous, Esteei started backing toward the ship.

Nirle caught his arm.  “It’s not
gonna hurt you, Jahul.”  He sounded awestruck, like a creature in love.

Esteei had the sudden concern that
the Geuji could broadcast emotional energies, much like the Jahul could receive
them.  It would explain what was wrong with his
sivvet.

It would also explain why Nirle was
acting so strangely.  If they were lulling his fears, preparing him for some
symbiotic organism to eat him…

“Sit with me, Emissary.”

Esteei recoiled.  “Nirle, I really
don’t think—”

The stronger, heavier Ooreiki
yanked him down with him, forcing Esteei’s six knees to collapse or break. 
Reluctantly, he sank into the squishy black mass with the Ooreiki Prime,
uncomfortable at the way the Geuji pressed against his belly and legs.

“Look,” Nirle said.  He reached out
with a tentacle and touched the Geuji in front of him.

A wave of rolling black current
spread outward, flowing away from them, disappearing over the hills.

“They’re greeting us,” Nirle
whispered.

Esteei found it particularly
disturbing that Nirle was communing with the mold so soon after finding another
grounder dead.  He tried to stand.

Nirle kept him in place with a
tentacle forged of ruvmestin, forcing Esteei to endure the tickling sensation
of the slime against his belly.  He began to panic.

“Be still, Jahul,” Nirle said. 
“They’re curious about you.  You’ve been avoiding them.”

Esteei’s internal pressure climbed
until his inner chambers were near bursting.  He tried to stand again, but the
stronger Ooreiki held him, entranced by the rolling waves of ebony.

“Nirle…” Esteei began, fear
burrowing into his soul like poisonous worms.  “I don’t think you’re well.”

The Prime Commander released him
suddenly, laughing.  “Maybe you’re right.”  He glanced back at the mold.  “But
I’ve spent so much time out here—I know it’s not the Geuji killing my boys.” 
He absently began to draw lines in the glistening surface of the Geuji, symbols
spiraling outward from a single point in the Congie style.  In moments, he’d
written the Ooreiki proverb, “
Trust thyself, and thy works will soar.
”

Quietly, Nirle repeated it to himself.  Then,
“Emissary, I caught the Huouyt making a call off planet, short-wave.  I thought
we were supposed to be alone out here.”

“We are,” Esteei said, frowning.

Suddenly, Nirle’s writing vanished,
the surfaces of the Geuji tightening into a glossy blackness.  To Esteei’s
amazement, the Ooreiki proverb appeared again a couple rods away, and it was
not a copy.  The words were bigger, with more flourish, and a tighter spiral. 
It was, in truth, better than Nirle’s writing.

Esteei sank back to his stomach,
stunned.  “You can communicate with it?”

Nirle looked as shocked as he was. 

Emissary instincts taking over,
Esteei said, “Let me try.”  Esteei leaned forward and wrote a simple note, “
Do
you understand us?
”

Nothing.

“Speak it aloud,” Nirle whispered. 
“They’ve heard me and the boys chatting enough…maybe they understand our
speech.”

Though skeptical, Esteei did.  “Do
you understand us?”  He drew the words for ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

“Yes,” was the immediate reply. 
“Yes, yes.”  Insistent.  Like it wanted more.

All around them, the land was
rolling again, like it did when the Tafet and Gratii disappeared.  The sight of
it made Esteei tense. 
Is this where it eats us?

Yes, yes, yes…

Esteei wanted to run back to the
ship, but now duty bound him to stay.

Nervously, Esteei began his
Emissary duties, introducing them and their purpose, but before he could
finish, his medium went stiff, erasing his work.

In an enormous, acre-wide spiral,
the Geuji wrote, “
No trust Huouyt.
”

Esteei stared.

All around them, the Geuji was
rolling waves of insistency, flashing patterns that only now began to make
sense.

“I knew it,” Nirle growled,
tentacles tightening over his rifle.

“How pretty,” a cold voice said
behind them.  “And they did it with such flourish.  Almost makes you think
they’re sentient, doesn’t it?”

Even as Nirle was swiveling, rifle
in hand, Bha’hoi fired an energy burst point-blank into the Ooreiki’s meaty
head.

Nirle collapsed without a sound,
his body pooling on the ground in a gelatinous, boneless huddle.

“Well,” Bha’hoi said, lowering the
gun.  “I can’t say I haven’t been looking forward to that.”

The Geuji began to flash its
message, angry, defiant.

“
No trust Huouyt.  No trust…”

The Huouyt fired into the center of
the Geuji’s warning, and the Geuji flinched away from the wound, in obvious
pain.

Esteei stared at the gun in
Bha’hoi’s grip. 

The Huouyt could change form.  They
could take patterns of other creatures as it pleased them, as long as they had
water to negate it afterwards.

It was him all along.

“The Geuji didn’t kill the
Ooreiki.  You did.”

Amusement wafted over the Huouyt’s
sivvet
as Bha’hoi looked at him.  “What gave it away?”  When Esteei did not respond,
the Huouyt’s amusement increased.  “Because I really want to know.  Was it all
the suicides?  Was it the Geuji flashing warnings these last few days?  Or was
it the fact I just shot your friend in the face?”

Glancing at the corpse, feeling
shamed and scared, Esteei backed away.

“Now, little Jahul, don’t run off. 
You have a report to make to the Planetary Claims Board.  Come with me.”

“
NO,
” the Geuji flashed,
over and over.  “
No, no, no, no…
”

Bha’hoi shot the Geuji again, but
this time the message kept flashing.  “
No, no, no…
”

Esteei hesitated, caught between
the urge to run and the fear of being alone on this alien planet.  Even the
Huouyt, who had murdered the Ooreiki in cold blood, was at least familiar to
him.  The alien blackness was not.

But when Bha’hoi took a step toward
him, his electric, white-blue eyes were more alien than anything Esteei had
ever known.  He ran.  And, as an ancestral prey species, the Jahul were fast. 
The Huouyt, with his three legs, was not.

Behind him, the Huouyt laughed.  “I
can always take your pattern and do it myself, Jahul!”

Panic powering him, Esteei didn’t
stop running.

Once Esteei was out of range, he
turned back to look.  He saw Bha’hoi’s silhouette against the light of the ship,
saw him climb aboard and watched the tiny square of light disappear as the gate
drew up.  An instant later, the ship began drifting into the night sky,
blocking out the stars. 

In moments, Esteei was alone with
the Geuji.

#

The hexapod wasn’t listening to
them.

Not smart enough, his peers
thought.

But Crown was skeptical.  The
hexapod wasn’t even
trying
to communicate with them.  Like Crown, he was
scared.

He thinks he’s going to die.

Apparently, he didn’t realize what
the aquatic alien was doing.  The aquatic alien wasn’t there to kill the
hexapod.  He was there to kill the Philosophers.

And, Crown knew with horrible
certainty, he would be back.

#

Bha’hoi returned, two days later. 
Esteei was burying the dead Ooreiki that the Huouyt had pushed off the ship and
was collecting their
oorei
for transport back to Poen when the ship set
down in the same indentions in the sand from last time, startling him.  When
the gate began to open, it didn’t even cross Esteei’s mind to pick up one of
the Ooreiki’s weapons.

He fled.

When Bha’hoi stepped out, he was
dragging a wooden crate.  He saw the Ooreiki rifles still strewn on the beach,
looked out at Esteei, and snorted laughter.

“What are you doing?” Esteei
called, eying the crate.

“Come find out,” the Huouyt offered,
disappearing once more into the ship.

Hesitantly, worried at the range of
the Huouyt’s weapon, Esteei got just close enough that he could hear something
moving inside the crates, then stopped.

“What is it?” Esteei called.

“
Vaghi
,” Bha’hoi said, dropping
a second crate beside the first.

Esteei recoiled.  “The
vermin?
”

“The very same,” the Huouyt said. 
He boarded the ship once more and returned with a third crate.  “I hear they
have an appetite for the same molecular makeup as the Geuji.  We’ll see.”

Esteei was stunned.  Voracious,
vaghi
could eat six times their own weight each day and breed dozens of times a
week.  More, if food was plentiful enough. 

“But the Geuji are sentient.”

The Huouyt snorted.  “Of course
they are.  It took me two tics after first stepping off the ship to determine
that.”  The Huouyt tapped its downy head.  “Simply because your brain is the
size of a pebble, you assume everyone else’s is, too.”

“Then what…?”

The Huouyt’s cilia rippled over its
body, amusement pouring off of him in a wave.  “The Huouyt are next in queue
for a planet, little Jahul.  This one has an ocean absolutely unpopulated by
native filth.”

The Huouyt are aquatic.

Terrified, Esteei said, “You don’t
need to kill them.  The Geuji aren’t using the ocean.  You can share the
planet.”

“The Huouyt don’t share.”

Esteei stared at him, unable to
speak.

“Now,” Bha’hoi said, returning his
attention to the crates.  “You have a decision to make, little Jahul.  Will you
hold still while I kill you quickly, or will you make me leave you here on
Neskfaat, to starve to death?”

“Neskfaat…?”

“It’s what we’re naming it.  It
means—”

“Holy water.”

Bha’hoi’s face twisted into a
frown.  “Yes.”  He moved to the closest box of
vaghi,
which squealed
when he neared.

“You loose those things on the land
and you’ll never get rid of them,” Esteei said, desperate, now.  Around them,
the empty shoreline stretched miles in any direction, the blackness of the
Geuji reaching to the highest flood mark.

Bha’hoi snorted.  “We don’t care
what happens to the land.”  He kicked open the first crate and watched the
scaly flood that followed with greedy eyes.

The sudden, intense fear emanating off the Geuji as
the vermin coursed over its glistening black body almost drove Esteei over the
edge.  He stumbled back, toward the water.

Bha’hoi kicked open two more boxes
before Esteei regained his wits.  He ran forward, intending to knock the Huouyt
away from the box.

The Huouyt caught him and held him
by the throat, his downy arm like solid ruvmestin.

“Listen to me very carefully,
little Jahul.”  The Huouyt’s mirror-like eyes were icy cold.  “I’m not an
Overseer.  I never went to Huouyt Basic.  I was trained in a different place,
one you might know.  Does ‘Va’ga’ mean anything to you?”