Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (48 page)

They went
back inside. Martha was now curled up in the chair, her plump form molded to
the chair’s shape like a soft, pink and white sculpture.
 
Donna sat down on the sofa next to her and
leaned in with a sympathetic expression.

“I know
you have a lot to deal with right now, Martha, but I’d like to do some tests.”

Martha’s
lower lip trembled. She dabbed her eyes. “It’s okay,” she said. “He’s dead
already. God has him in His care now.”

Donna and
Rachel exchanged looks. “Not on him, Martha,” Donna said. “On you. I need to do
some tests on you.”

Martha
looked confused. “Me? Why me?”

“I just
want to make sure that whatever killed your husband hasn’t somehow contaminated
you.”

Martha’s
lip stopped trembling and her look changed from grief to stony concern. “You
think that fucking thing that got on him somehow did something to me, infected
me?”

“Well, we
don’t know,” Rachel chimed in. “We just want to be sure.”

“That’s
right,” Donna added. “We just want to make sure.”

Martha
studied both of them, a black cloud of fear coming over her. “Okay. You do your
tests,” she said firmly. “I don’t want to die.”
 
She started to get up out of her chair. “I have to go to the bathroom
first.”

“Uh,
that’s not a good idea right now,” Donna said, exchanging looks with Rachel.
“I’d rather you do that in the clinic. I’ll need the sample.”

“Yep,”
Rachel said. “Not a good idea. Need that sample.”

Martha studied
them. “Oh, my God,” she said, figuring it out. “You think that goddamned thing
put….when Tim…when he…oh, fuck. Fuck me!” She started to get up out of the
chair, her plump arms and legs squirming in a panic.

“Don’t,”
Donna said, easing her back into the chair. “It’s just a safety precaution,
that’s all. There’s nothing to worry about now. Not yet.”

“That’s
easy for you to say, goddamn it!” Martha screamed. “You don’t have bugs in your
woo woo
!”

* * *

Rachel
loved the soft purr of the shuttle’s motors. The easy drone merged with the
panoramic view of the jungle below and washed away thoughts of the biological
perils teeming just under its green surface. She curled in her seat, took a
drink of coffee and let the view fill her.

Before
she arrived on the planet, she’d fallen in love with Verde’s Revenge sight
unseen, and as she knew it would be, this fertile environment was a perfect
match for her—and her love had grown.

It is so beautiful. This planet is so
beautiful. But so dangerous. So poisonous.

The green
seemed to stretch forever. The gently rolling terrain was only rarely
punctuated by an upheaval of rock, those too, deeply cloaked in green.

Surely there is nothing like it in the
universe. Nothing this fertile, this rich and teeming. Nothing this—lethal.

She
believed that Verde’s Revenge had entered something akin to Earth’s Cambrian
Explosion, an epoch when life had sprung up and crawled, scrambled and grown
over itself in wet masses of limbs, claws and eggs. Verde’s Revenge seemed
stuck in that period of fertile grandeur where species clamored and struggled
and evolved and morphed to fit ever better into the competitive biosphere of
the planet.

She would
never understand it fully. The systems, the relationships, the dependencies of
one life form to the others, would be too deep, too wide and too complex for
one person to fathom in a single lifetime. Perhaps in a few generations, should
the colony survive, her own progeny might yet unravel Verde’s biological chaos.
The most she could do was start the work. Just start it.

She
rested her hand on her womb and imagined she felt a motion there, a gentle
twist of vulnerable life. The growing child within her seemed so impossibly
fragile against the teeming threats just a few thousand meters below them. She
imagined her young daughter suddenly born, and sitting on her lap on just such
an outing as this some two or three years from now, brimming with eager
questions about the spooky environment around her, would cause Rachel to frame
her answers just
so
to abate the
inevitable nightmares that would accompany them.

Don’t be afraid. It’s life. Doing what life
does.