Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (9 page)

This was
the dumping ground for the experimentation in the lab, she was sure of it. This
is where the failures—or the successes for all she knew—found themselves;
dumped into a pit of something nasty or caustic to be stripped of flesh already
ruined by maniacal manipulation.

The pit
was deep, and she had no intention of going down into it. She fashioned a loop
from a length of rope in her pack; and using it as a lasso, managed to pull up
pieces of one of the more freakish constructions. It looked to her to have been
a biped at one time, but had been modified into a quadruped. It was smallish,
no larger than a child of six or seven years, and she was only a little
relieved when a moment’s examination of the teeth and jaw showed it to be
nonhuman in origin. That fact didn’t diminish the empathy she felt for a
creature so abused and tortured. The limbs looked as if they had been stretched
and curved into arcs, for no other reason than it was in the designer's power
to do it. The head, too, looked to have been stretched and pushed and pulled
here and there like so much clay. The entire skeleton was covered with
attachments that made no sense to her. To Rachel’s trained eye, this couldn’t
have been the work of a scientist, no matter how alien; it was the work of an
unhuman—and unfeeling—artist, creating transmogrified organisms at will, and
for the unfathomable, amoral sake of being able to.

The
skeleton was fragile so she wrapped the rope around it to hold it together,
then headed back to the shuttle. She’d had enough of these alien riddles for
one day.

When she
got back she was surprised to see Jacob sitting at their table with Donna and
eating from a platter with a fork. The sight of him there, dressed in standard
contractor’s cottons with his strange head drooped over the plate, made her
want to vomit. Donna was sitting opposite him, watching him eat.

“Hey,
Jacob,” she said. “Recognize this?” she held the skeleton out to him like a
bundle of sticks. He acted like he’d heard nothing at all.

Donna
turned around and looked.

“What the
hell is
that?”
she asked, leaning away from it. “And where in hell did you get
it?”

“Ask
Jacob, there,” she said putting it gently down. “He can tell you more about it
than I can. Oh, I can tell you what it is all right. I can describe the parts.
What I can’t tell you is why it exists. That’s the mystery, isn’t it, Jacob?
What about that? Care to comment?”

Jacob
continued to eat, slowly, without looking up as if there were no one else in
the room.

“What
would he know about it?” Donna asked.

“I think
he knows exactly why it exists, don’t you, Jacob?”

Donna
looked over at Jacob. “Do you? Do you know?” she asked of him.

“Ask him
why his entire external physiology is so strange,” Rachel said. “Ask him.”

Jacob
continued to eat as if he were the only one in the chamber.

“Well,
I’ll tell you why,” Rachel said. “This place is the sickest fucking place in
the universe.”

“It’s
bad, I know but . . .” Donna began.

“No. It’s
not just bad. This place is the center of evil in the universe. And Jacob knows
all about it.”

“Rachel?
What are you talking about?” Donna asked. She was beginning to worry about
Rachel’s mental state. It was one thing to have seizures and another to babble incomprehensibly.
In Rachel’s case the two often occurred in close proximity.

“Okay,
it’s like this,” Rachel began. “The aliens who lived here had a way with living
things. They didn’t just experiment for the sake of science. They were more
interested in art, you know, the creation of things, like playing God.”

“I don’t
get it,” Donna said.

“See this
thing?” Rachel pointed at it. “This thing is a fabrication. They made this
thing from parts of other fucking things. They violated natural laws and
combined one animal with parts from another to get this, this abomination.”

“How?”

“All that
shit in the lab is designed to do just that—to make goddamned things like this
thing here.”

“Yikes,”
Donna said, studying her patient for a response to Rachel’s rant.

“Yikes?
Yeah, I’d say
yikes
to that,” Rachel said with a sneer. “How about you Jacob?
Yikes?
Doesn’t that say it all?”

No reply.

“Well,
yikes
to that,” Rachel mocked and walked away indignantly.

“He’s
tired and obviously doesn’t know anything about what you’re talking about,”
Donna said apologetically to Rachel’s back. As strange as Jacob was, he was
still her patient. She did have an investment in him, if a somewhat reluctant
one. She didn’t know if defending Jacob was entirely appropriate, but it seemed
the thing to do.

Jacob put
a slow forkful of food in his mouth.

He waited
until Rachel was across the chamber before he spoke. “You said there was a
settlement not too far from here?"

“Yes.
It’s about two hundred kilometers away,” she replied. “Why?”

“I think
I’d like to go there. I don’t feel welcome here.”
 
Donna thought it over. Maybe it was best. He
was having a very bad influence on Rachel. The problem for Jacob was that there
was no guarantee he’d get a better reception at the settlement. He was too
damned weird. “We’ll see in a few days,” she said. “Let’s see how you’re
feeling then.”

“Can you
tell me about it?” he asked. “Can you tell me about the people there?”

Donna
thought about it, then began to tell him what she knew about The Sacred Bond of
the Fervent Alliance.
 

For the
first time, she got the feeling Jacob was really paying attention to what
someone was saying. She also got the sense that he didn’t want her to notice
that fact. She talked for a long time.

* * *

Rachel
unslung her pack and threw it down.

Her
fascination with the structure and its contents had turned to something else
entirely. She had stumbled upon something unique in the universe, found
interesting evidence and unraveled it. She should have been happy about it.

It had
been the tree’s sheer enormity and its organic perfection she’d admired. But
the truth hiding inside it had finally revealed itself like a rotten corpse. It
had come to her in the form of dreadful remnants of an alien science that was
less science than the simple torture of living things.

When
Rachel was ten years old, she’d plucked a few flowers from her mother’s little
flower garden—a poppy, a rose and a purple morning glory—brought them inside
and drew them with pencil on sheets of yellow paper. Thus began her journey
into the realms of the living. A profound respect for the denizens of those
worlds became her lifelong companion. In time, her love became suffused with
reverence for all things living. But there was none of that within these
strange walls; only some wicked, selfish desire to change, mold and modify for
reasons which had nothing to do with natural attributes. Evolution shaped all
perfectly, exquisitely over eons. Each limb was immaculate, each turn ideal.
There was no better sculptor than time and tide. She tried to imagine what it
would be like for some perfect but hapless entity to find itself in the hands
of these beings—to wake up with its physiology painfully altered by them.

She wanted
to cry, not out of sadness, but out of anger. No tears came, only rage.

It was
Jacob who was the source of it, the rank nucleus, and the filthy center. It was
as if some feeble scent from him set her anger on fire like a pheromone in
reverse. There was something about him that tugged on a raw nerve like a
gnawing rat. She could feel it but just couldn’t think out the reason for it.

“What’d
you find?” John’s voice said.

She
turned, took a step toward him and leaned against him for a hug. “It’s there,
over by the table. It’s there. The thing is there . . .”

“You
don’t sound happy,” he said.

“No,” she
said weakly. “I’m not happy.”

“Okay,”
he said, “maybe you’ll have better luck next time.”
 

“There
won’t be a next time. I’m not going back in ever again.”

“That’s
serious,” he said.

“Yeah, I
guess it is.”

“How
come?”

“Go look
at it. Go see what this place was all about.”

* * *

Two days
later, in darkness softened only by the light of twin moons, they flew in and
dropped Jacob off within walking distance of the settlement. They watched him
limp across the plain with his net suit hanging from his thin frame like a
gossamer tent. His Bible, as requested, had been stored in an airtight case
and hung down low from his longer arm. He looked to Rachel like some lopsided
specter, stumbling across the field. He stopped and turned for a last look, and
Rachel could feel his eyes on her.

“Good
riddance,” she said under her breath, certain he couldn’t hear her.

“Well,
he’s gone now, Rachel,” Donna said. “You can relax now.”

“Can I?”
she replied.

As he
walked slowly along, Jacob rehearsed, as he had for every waking minute over
the last few days, precisely what he would say to this group of profane
sinners, this Sacred Bond. He knew all he needed to know about their
sacrilegious practices, thanks to the sinner called Donna.

As the
truthful words, the real words of God, played over and over in his head, they
grew in strength like a mighty oak. As God had promised, his thousand waited.

5

I
t was a summary execution,
the tenth in as many days. The doomed man, a laborer named Duggings, had been
accused of using foul language in the presence of a member of the Council. One
of the ones who saw and heard what happened, said the foul language had not
been used in the Council member’s vicinity but had been directed right at him—a
fatal mistake.

“You
can’t do this!” Joan yelled. “He didn’t do anything to you!”

“Shut up,
Joan!” Bill snarled, shaking her arm. “You could be next!”

“This is
bullshit,” someone else muttered. “Bullshit. I’m for taking my chances in the
green.”

“Me,
too,” another said. “Screw this. We should just gather up our stuff and march
right outta here.”

“We’d
last about a week,” someone said.

“They’re
gonna kill us all if this keeps up. Then whose gonna do their work?”

“Look at
those bastards,” another said. “Have you ever seen such bullshit?”

Execution
at the hands of the Council’s guard wasn’t a pretty sight. The mode of
execution was newly monstrous. But making the event as ugly and public as possible
was as old as tyranny itself.

Duggings
was in a steel cage just big enough to sit in. The look on his face wasn’t
fear, but bemused arrogance. Duggings was braver, or more stupid, than any of
them realized.

“Here
they come,” someone said. “I can’t watch this.”
 

“You’d
better stay and watch or they’ll put you in that thing,” someone offered.

“This is
your goddamned Sacred Bond of the Bullshit Alliance. Fuck ‘em.”

Two men,
covered in protective suits from head to foot, walked up to the cage. The Council
members sat or stood some distance behind it all, carefully watching, or
pretending to watch, the procedure.

One of
the rubber-clad men held a flask of clear liquid, very carefully with both
hands. They took up positions on either side of the cage, faced the crowd and
waited, as executioners had always done, for the command to do their killing
work. Duggings just scanned the crowd and shook his head as if it were somehow
funny.