Strange Trades (45 page)

As a side effect of our training, we lose most of our dreamlife. A fully integrated subconscious both attends to superior autonomic functioning, and dispenses with the necessity of sorting through experience and filing it away as dreams.

The last time I had dreamed, it had been a nightmare, a vision of my hands rotting, indicative of my confusion at the time.

Tonight’s started pleasantly enough, but turned nightmarish too.

Amy and I stood on Earth again, atop a high hill, covered with grass and tall multicolored flowers on waving stalks. There was a breeze, and sun on our faces. We held hands like children. We were happy again.

Then the flowers began to attack.

They whipped around our ankles and calves, growing upward to strangle us. We pulled and twisted, Amy screaming, myself howling, to no avail.

Suddenly, a pair of scissors appeared in Amy’s hands. She tried clipping the flowers, but they writhed away.

“Hold them, Jack, hold them!”

I grabbed a stalk, immobilizing it; Amy snipped off the bud; the thing withered and died.

In a few moments we had destroyed them all.

We fell down to the soil. Our clothes were gone. We made love.

I awoke in the middle of the night with an erection which, for a change, I hadn’t willed into being. Which I soon convinced similarly awakened Amy, using more gentleness than I had employed in a while, to help me with.

But even better, I had an idea that might help us. An idea that needed no explaining, for I had been under Amy’s skin during the whole dream and she had impossibly shared it all.

The five infected colonists were miserable that morning, having hardly slept for fear and physical discomfort. Their eyes were pouched in shadows, their postures poor. They looked wilted—except for the glossy vitality of their fleshflowers.

Holtzmann glowered at us as we entered.

“Have you worked on the problem? Do you think you can rid us of this contagion?”

He was so anxious he forgot to threaten us with the flare gun.

“Yes, we’ve got an approach we think might work. But first, I want you to consider something. What if we had killed off all the organisms yesterday?”

“I don’t understand—”

“Weegee, you surprise me. This is a long-awaited event, man’s first contact with an alien life form. Microscopic, I’ll admit, but still nonterrestrial life! Don’t you think the scientific community on Earth might be mildly interested in such a thing?”

Holtzmann nodded. “Of course, well send them samples of the asteroid.”

I had to convince him that what I was about to propose was the only solution. “How do you know they’ll be able to culture it again? What if your bodies hold the only viable members of the life form? Do you want to take a chance on exterminating them forever?”

Holtzmann paled. “You’re not suggesting that we just let it continue to breed in us, as if we were lab animals…”

Amy broke in. “No, well take the bug. We should be able to keep it alive in ourselves, while holding the manifestations down.”

“On conditions,” I added. “Return passage to Earth, of course. And a complete pardon. Or else well let you and the others just bloom until you can’t move. And believe us, they’re ready for a replicatory burst. We both saw it yesterday.”

Holtzmann fingered the gun on the cot beside him, hesitating.

“C’mon, Weegee, face it, it’s a great deal. You can kill us, but you can’t force us to cure you. But if we get what we want, you all walk out healthy. And you’ll have a legitimate reason to replace us with a peeker who’s here because he believes in what you’re doing.”

Holtzmann sat rigid for a minute before speaking. “If you succeed—”

“Oh, we will,” I answered with more confidence than I felt. “I take it we have a deal.”

He was too mad to speak, and could only shake his head.

“I assume you still want to be last,” I told him, just to twist the knife a little. In front of the others, he couldn’t deny it.

Amy and I moved to one of the women. We both placed our hands on her shoulders.

Then we were inside her, working as a team, merging our skills.

This time we shot straight to the stems of the fleshflowers.

For a moment, sharing this patient with Amy, I felt exposed, as I did standing unsuited on the Martian surface. Amy could commit any treachery now, attack me through the channel of our mutual patient. Would our truce hold? Was it real?

It dawned on me that she must be having the same doubts.

Then I didn’t have time to worry anymore.

The first sentries awaited.

Just as in my—our—dream, I pinned the first organism down immobile, and Amy lysed its cell wall.

Novel organelles, unlike anything on Earth, spilled out, trailing rainbow sparks, dying without their cytoplasmic support. I could leave them for the body’s macrophages. I dove into the free-floating nucleus and unspooled its genetic material. The bases were strange, stranger, and they were coiled right-handed, the opposite of all earthly DNA. No wonder it had thrown us. Amy and I studied it for a timeless interval. This look was all we had needed.

Now we could kill. Alone, or together.

We shot through all the nodes of unhealthy, warped flesh, slaughtering invaders by the thousands. We left their carcasses behind us, peeking regenerative changes in the humans that would soon erase all traces of the fleshflowers.

When we were done with the first woman, we moved on to one of the men.

Despite being able to kill the virus separately now, we tackled him and the others together.

It just felt good.

Finally, we had only Holtzmann left.

In the heat of the crisis yesterday, if Holtzmann hadn’t stopped us when we instinctively moved to probe him jointly, he probably would have been cured by now. But he did, and we had tackled the viroids separately, and we had failed. And had enough time to conceive our little blackmail scheme.

He seemed to realize this now, and the knowledge rankled. But he was at our mercy.

Amy and I laid our curative hands right atop four of his blossoms. It was the first time we had touched them. They felt cold and hard, like certain fungi.

“Let’s do it,” I said.

It took no time at all to exterminate Holtzmann’s unwanted guests. All except for a few in the colonies beneath our hands.

At the proper moment we split our flesh, opened up bloodless wounds in our palms, and also in Holtzmann’s fleshflowers. We drove the remaining alien viroids up into our stigmata, and closed the exit.

It was just like slaughtering Indians, and corralling the surviving few on a reservation. What man had always excelled at.

We came back to ourselves.

Holtzmann spoke.

“It’s over,” he said with relief.

“For you,” said Amy.

“But for us,” I said, “it seems to have just begun.”

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The Mill

This is the most autobiographical story I have ever written. Many of my relatives were employed in New England textile mills, before those milk closed their doors in the wake of, first, the industry’s flight toward cheaper conditions in the southern United States, and, more recently, foreign competition. I myself spent a fair number of summers earning college tuition in such a clangorous, dusty, dangerous setting. But as I try to convey in this story, the old milltown communities—mostly vanished already by the time I encountered their sparse remnants—had their own allure, a kind of tight-knit (pun intentional) camaraderie of the working man, many of whom gratefully fled the uncertainty of rural existences for indoor work and the security of a steady paycheck.

The Industrial Revolution—and hence in a sense science fiction itself—was led by the textile industry and its quest to automate ancient processes. But that era has come and gone. Our world will never see such all-encompassing mills again.

But will the future? Perhaps, perhaps.

In its first draft, this story ended with the fourth section. I owe editor Kim Mohan thanks for urging me to write the necessary coda.

The Mill

1.

Brick dust mottled the still valley air around the noisy scrambling boys, rising and quickly falling like their cries and shouts in thin ragged clouds that puffed from beneath their hands and feet as they clambered clumsily upon the vast irregular pile of broken and discarded bricks. Its dry powdery sunbaked scent—as familiar as the odor of homemade waterwheat bread—filled their nostrils, even as the settling pale orange-red powder layered their dull black clothing, penetrating its very weave and filtering through to veneer their skins with an ineluctable talcum, so that mothers, washing these boys later, would exclaim, “I swear by the Factor’s immortal soul, this brick dust is leaking out from inside you. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover you’re nothing but a human brick yourself!”

But the kettle-filled tub and the scrubbing with smoke-colored sea sponges and the gentle feminine upbraiding would come later, and was not to be worried about now. Now only the mad, ecstatic spirit of competition held sway, raging in their veins like the Swolebourne at flood. On and around the huge tumulus of bricks the boys swarmed, in a single-minded and almost desperate game to reach the top. Hands relinquished their holds to reach for the shirttails of those who surged ahead, to yank them back with savage glee. The boys seemed oblivious to the impact of the corners and edges of the broken blocks on their knees and shins and forearms, intent only on achieving the instant and insurmountable but fleeting glory of standing upon the pinnacle of the heap.

The boys ranged in age from five to just under twelve. No distinction in treatment was made between younger and older, all ages giving and taking equally in the mutual ferocity of the jagged ascent.

Dislodged bricks tumbled down the pile with a resonant clatter, and it seemed as if the pile would soon be leveled before any individual could reach the top. In the next instant, though, one boy emerged above the rest, eluding the outstretched hands that sought to capture him and deny him the top. Bent almost parallel to the slope of the heap he clawed like an animal with hands and boot-shod feet working alike to reach the apex of the mound. Sweat turned the dust upon his face into a crimson paste.

All the boys seemed to realize at once that victory for this upstart was now foregone, all their own chances lost in the sudden burst put on by the boy now nearing the top. Instead of reacting badly, they gave in to their natural inclination to cheer an honest victor, and exhortations and encouragements replaced their wordless exclamations of struggle. “Go it, Cairncross!” “Yay, Charley!” “They can’t stop you now, Charles!”

With the cheers of his peers ringing in his ears, the boy reached the top.

His heart was pounding, and he could hardly see. His white sweat-soaked shirt clung to him like the mantle of a cape-wolf. He feared he might faint, but knew also somehow that he would not. It was not destined for his body, the instrument of his victory, after all, to spoil this moment. Getting his feet precariously under himself, he stood erect atop the crumbling mass, panting, bruised, sweaty, triumphant, and surveyed those below him, who had come to a complete cessation of movement, as if they had finally assumed the earthen nature of the brick they had so long played upon.

For the first time in all the years he had been competing in this brutal, vital, irreplaceable game, he had won. He had won. And there could be only one reason why. Tomorrow he turned twelve. When you turned twelve you entered the Mill to work. You played on the bricks no more. This had been his last chance ever to stand here, in unique and poignant relation to his fellows. And he had been granted the privilege. Through some unseen intervention of God or Factor, unwonted energy and determination had flooded his limbs, urging him on to the top, where now he stood with shaky knees. He had won.

For the next twenty years this moment would be the highlight, the indescribable epiphanic summation and measure of Charley Cairncross’s life. Neither his first kiss from his betrothed nor commendation from his superiors; neither the birth of his children nor the praise of the Factor himself would equal this heartbreaking moment.

Moved by a premonition of what this moment meant, under the impulse of forces he could neither identify nor control, Charley, risking a tumble and cracked skull, began to jig and prance, whooping and yelling in a giddy crazy dance atop the bricks, unimpeded by his heavy leather shoes, like a fur-faced South Polar savage gloating over the skulls of his vanquished enemies. The boys below Charley watched in fascination, as the skinny lad flailed his arms and legs about. No one had ever done this before, and they were utterly baffled, but at the same time respectful.

There was no telling how long Charley might have continued his victory dance, had not noontime intervened. From some distance away came the loud tolling of a big bell, echoed up and down the Valley by remoter cousins. Its brazen strokes pealed out, shattering both Charley’s visionary state and the hypnotic trance of his audience. Immediately boys began to descend the heap of rubble, brushing futilely at their clothes.