Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits

To Susan

Everything in nature contains all
the power of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

1

“B
ibles. I’ve heard of those,” he said, looking at it like it was a
bug. “You can’t do anything for him. He’s barely alive.”
 

“If we
could get that thing off his head, he might be okay. You never know. Donna might
be able to do it. First, we have to cut these things off his legs. Give me your
knife.”

John
sighed and slipped his knife out of the scabbard. “I’ll do it,” he huffed. “Get
out of the way.”

A few
minutes later, they had the figure lying on the floor, arms and legs stiff and
twisted, the book still clamped, almost fused, in its hand.

“Now
what?” John said, wiping his hands on his pants as if he’d touched something
dirty.

“We carry
him back,” she said.

“I’m not
carrying that goddamned thing anywhere.”

“Why not?
He doesn’t weigh much.”

“It’s
filthy! I don’t want to touch it any more than I already have!”

“Fine.
I’ll do it,” she said working her arms under the frail figure.

“Yeah,
you do that.”

Rachel
shot him a look, and then hefted the figure up like a tall, thin child. “Lead
the way,” she said.

Halfway
back to their new, improvised living quarters, John relented and took the
figure from her, scowling and vowing to burn his clothes when he got back to
the shuttle.

When
Donna saw the figure, her first impression was of some strange artwork. When
John put it down, and she realized it wasn’t just an object, she felt her guts
lurch in a spasm of disgust.

“What is
it?” she asked, scowling.

“Who
might be a better way to put it,” Rachel said.

 
“And what the fuck is that on his head?” Donna
went on. Her scowl got deeper as she leaned in and looked at the bulbous thing
attached to the figure’s head. “What the
fuck
is that? It’s got
tentacles
stuck his
godamned ears . . .
and
his godamned
nose
! What the fuck?”

“Don’t
know yet,” Rachel said. “We’ll have to find out.”

 
“Where did you find him?” Donna
asked, puzzled. “How long has he been in there? Is he one of ours?”

“We don’t know any of that yet. We found him in one of the deeper
chambers,” Rachel said, stripping off her pack. “There were others, other life
forms in the chamber. But those weren’t human.”

“Huh!” Donna said. “This thing gets stranger by the day.”

“Yep,” Rachel said.

 
“There was what we think was a
laboratory, too,” John said.

“A laboratory?” Donna said with a note of doubt.

“Yeah. Laboratory,” Rachel said. “Or something like one. I’ll have to
go back and check it out some more.”

“I’m sure you will,” Donna said. “You’d think you were being paid to
explore this thing. Never mind what you drag back in.”

Still scowling, Donna leaned in and considered the man’s head and the
thing attached to it. She folded her arms in defense of it. “This is one very
fucked up medical situation,” she said.

“Rachel likes
him. Be careful,” John said, not trying to hide his sarcasm.

“I don’t
like him. He needs help is all.”

“I’ve
never seen anything like this thing on his head,” Donna said getting down even
closer to look at it.

“I think
it’s keeping him alive somehow,” Rachel said.

“Alive?
You call that alive?” Donna asked, studying the form.

“If a
thing’s not dead, it’s alive. It’s alive.”

“What do
you want me to do with it?” Donna wanted to know.

Rachel
looked at John for support, but got only pursed lips and a downcast head in
return. “Try to save him,” she said, still looking at the top of John’s head.
“It’s a human being.”

Donna
thought about it. She stepped back and studied the form from head to toe.

She had
worked on patients with a wide range of unsavory, often disgusting, conditions,
especially since landing on Verde, but this one was the worst by far. The skin
was loose, shrunken and grayish. The limbs, stiff and tortured, were strange,
and she got the distinct impression that one arm was longer than its mate. The
tendrils running into the man’s head produced the worse kind of
viscera-wrenching effect. This was the most hideous thing she’d ever seen, she
was sure all the more so because the thing was, or had been, human. The thought
of working on it turned her stomach. She drew a breath and thought about it
some more, trying to find some reason to do it. By the time she’d let the air
out, she had her answer.

She was a
nurse. It was her job.

She
squatted down and touched one of the rubbery tendrils running into the corner
of the man’s mouth. When she took her hand away, she wiped and whisked her
fingers together to clean them and felt compelled to wash her hands several
times.

“Let’s
move him into the shuttle where the tools are,” she said.

A few
minutes later, she was ready to work, gloves on and an assortment of glass and
stainless steel implements in a tray, clean and waiting. Their polished
cleanliness, in contrast to the man’s fetid condition, gave her at least bare
comfort.

She
rested her hands lightly on the figure’s shoulder and pressed. The flesh felt
tough and dry but was loose and seemed to float over a layer of congealed
material beneath.

“Odd,”
she said.

“I’d say
so,” John replied with a smirk.

“I might
be able to dislodge the thing by making the host so noxious it wants to let
go.”

“What if
you put some current into it?” Rachel asked. “Just enough to irritate it.”

“That
might work, but I’m afraid any more trauma to the victim might kill him.”

“He’d be
better off,” John said.

Rachel
gave him a look. “Shut up, John,” she said.

Donna
didn’t know if the being could feel anything, but it was better to be safe than
sorry. She filled a needle with painkiller and injected the contents into a
vein she found in his arm. A moment later, she thought she heard just the
slightest sigh from him, like a distant and gentle breath, so weak it was
barely audible.

She
inserted an IV into the same vein, taped it down, and started a flow of
nutrients from a bottle. That done, she tightened her gloves over her
interlocked fingers, and began.

The way
she figured it, the direct approach was best.

She
grasped one of the tendrils snaking into the man’s mouth and pulled gently.
There was a moment when the eel-like organ seemed to cling tighter, but then it
slipped down and out of the corner of the man’s mouth like a long, smooth rope,
the very tip of it bristling with wire-like hair, vibrating and twitching. The
entire length of it was covered with brownish fluid that seemed to lubricate
it.

“Yuck!”
she said, fighting down nausea.

Holding
the tendril away from the man’s mouth, which the tentacle now sought to reclaim
with writhing, organic persistence, she snipped it away from the main body of
the organism with shears, then dripped the severed part into a stainless steel pan.
It continued to writhe, making light slithering noise against the hollow pan.

“Well,
that was easy enough.”

“Maybe he
has a chance,” Rachel said.

“We’ll
see,” Donna replied.

She
pulled the other tendrils out, one by one from his ears, nostrils and a few
that had chosen to pierce the sides of his head directly. Those were smaller,
but she wondered how she was going to close those stab-like wounds whose edges
were already healed over.

When the
last probe was removed, she pried the globular body off his head with her
fingers and added it to the pile of wet and tangled tendrils in the pan.

“So much
for that.”

“Will he
live?” Rachel wanted to know.

“I have
no idea,” Donna replied. “I just don’t know. I’ll shoot him up with
antibiotics, and we’ll leave him alone until tomorrow. Then we’ll clean him up
some and see how he’s doing. If he’s alive in the morning, I’d say he has some
kind of chance.”