The Moldy Dead (2 page)

Replaying in a tiny corner of his
mind for a thousand years, the face had always watched them die.

They’re going to kill us.
 
Crown sent his message out, and immediately the other Philosophers responded. 
Their fear was increasing, not because of what Crown had said, but because the
aquatic alien had changed form.

It had
changed form.
  It had
placed a tiny piece of material into a receptacle in its head, swallowing it
with squirming red appendages, and then its entire body shifted to something
else.

Something that could move unseen
under the Philosophers.

And now it was spying on its
fellows.

#

It was a young Ooreiki who finally
named the mold.

Wiping it off his boots after another
slogging adventure through the glistening black terrain, he wrinkled his meaty
Ooreiki face.

“Man, this stuff’s as nasty as
geuji.”

Geuji.

Or, in Old Poen, ‘Draak shit.’

The name stuck.  It became so
colloquial that Esteei even used it in his reports to Congress by accident. 

Outraged, the Botanical Committee
immediately came up with a new name—something in ancient Ueshi meaning ‘great
black sleeper’—but to everyone actually living with it, the mold was known as
the Geuji.  Fondly capitalized, since it was a
lot
of geuji.

The Geuji resisted every attempt to
control it.  With the high tides threatening to invade the ship, Nirle led
patrol after patrol out over the glistening landscape, attempting to carve a
landing clearing into it with fire and shovels.  It was pointless—the Geuji
healed in hours, leaving unblemished, glistening terrain behind.

Esteei caught Nirle on his way back
from another failed attempt.  Frustration emanated from the Ooreiki in an
emotional barrage on Esteei’s
sivvet
.

“Still doesn’t work?” Esteei asked,
nodding at the slime-covered shovel the Ooreiki carried with him.

“If you look hard, you can
see
it growing back,” Nirle growled.  He stalked onto the ship.  Inside, Esteei
heard a shovel clang against the wall, then hit the floor in a clatter.

Esteei glanced down the beach.  The
Geuji remained in a perfect line above the high tide mark, never dipping below
it, following it with extreme precision.

If they grow so fast, why
haven’t they grown toward the water?

Suddenly very conscious of being
alone outside the ship, Esteei hurried back inside, where Nirle and his
grounders were shrugging off their gear in disgust. 

#

Panic was spreading amongst the
Philosophers.  Something horrible was going on, something they had no control
over.  The aliens were fast, horribly fast, yet their minds were slow.  The
aquatic tripod seemed to be the only one to realize what the Philosophers were,
but for some reason it hadn’t told the others.

Something was wrong.

#

Two days later, the patrol came
back one short.

It was an odd day, one where the
Geuji erupted in constant motion around the ship, coursing with wave after wave
of activity that almost appeared to have a pattern to it.  Entranced, Esteei
had stepped outside to watch it.

It reminded him of the rolling
oceans of grass on his home planet, yet here there was no wind.  The mold had
been doing it since early morning, a few hours after Nirle left with his
groundteam.  The longer Esteei watched it, the more it made his pores itch, yet
he could not look away.    

“Esteei,” Nirle called, breaking
the spell.  He was jogging up the beach to him in a heavy, lumbering Ooreiki
gait.  With him were four of his five groundmates.  All of them emanated fear. 
“Did Tafet come back?”

“No,” Esteei said, tearing his eyes
from the Geuji.  The waves had stopped suddenly.  They were now as utterly,
glistening calm as if they were the fields of ebony they appeared to be. 
“There’s nobody here but me.” 

Esteei had been choosing to stay
behind lately.  He’d quickly learned that the mold was some sort of emotional
magnifier for the Ooreiki, giving his
sivvet
the equivalent of an
emotional beating when he got too close.  He could only handle one or two hours
at a time without feeling sick.

And now the Ooreiki were afraid. 
It was as palpable as if someone had opened up Esteei’s skull and wrapped his
sivvet
in wet, putrescent cloth. 

“Where’s Bha’hoi?” Nirle demanded.

“Down the beach.”

“Which
direction
?” the Prime
demanded.

“West,” Esteei said, stunned at the
fury emanating from the Ooreiki.  “You think
Bha’hoi
would—”

“You haven’t been to war with the Huouyt,” Nirle
said.  “I have.  They’re smart and they’re psychotic.  If he thought he could
kill us all and get away with it, he probably would.  Just for the hell of it.”

Esteei stared.

“But we went east,” Nirle said,
almost reluctant.  “Climbed through a rock formation, and that’s where we lost
Tafet.  Spent all damned afternoon looking for him.  He’s not answering his
headcom.”

“He fall asleep?” Esteei asked.

Nirle gave him a dark look.

“What about your PPU?” Esteei
quickly said.

Nirle brought it out and showed it
to him.

Five small green dots clustered
near the point Nirle had marked ‘Slime Removal Station.’

“Where’s Tafet’s?” Esteei asked, confused. 

“There’s only two ways the PPU
stops picking up the signal,” Nirle said.  “Either something fried his tag, or
something killed him and removed it.”

None of them bothered stating the
obvious—in a land of rolling waves of mold, there was very little
electro-magnetic interference.

Esteei glanced out at the gleaming
black landscape, fearful now.  Tafet was the one who had named the Geuji. 
Aside from Nirle, Tafet had been Esteei’s favorite Ooreiki, the least likely to
assault his
sivvet
with a barrage of harsh emotions.

“You think the Geuji—”

“No,” Nirle said, harsh.  “I think—” 
He choked off his words with a glare down the beach.

Bha’hoi was trudging toward them
from the west, his three muscular legs working awkwardly in the sand and rocks.

Nirle’s sticky brown eyes fell to
the Huouyt’s legs, obviously looking for signs that he’d been walking through
the mold.  One didn’t need to have
sivvet
to feel the suspicion in the
Ooreiki’s gaze.

The Huouyt reached them, then
scanned the six faces gathered at the ship.  Concern brushed Esteei’s
sivvet.
 
“Where’s Tafet?”

“Not here,” the Ooreiki said.

Bha’hoi’s white-blue eyes
unreadable.  “Where is he?”

“We’ll take care of it,” Nirle
said, starting to put his PPU away.

The Huouyt saw the instrument and his
gaze immediately sharpened.  “Give me that.”  He held out a downy, paddle-like
tentacle.

The two of them faced off, the
shorter, brown-eyed Ooreiki glaring up at the taller, electric blue-white eyed
Huouyt.

Don’t fight,
Esteei prayed,
afraid to move.  His
sivvet
were rated sixteenth in all of Congress for
sensitivity.  Fighting, especially between two different species, hurt.

Reluctantly, Nirle handed the PPU
to the Huouyt Overseer.

Bha’hoi’s mirror-like eyes
flickered to the screen only a moment.  “There’s only five tags registered on
your Planetary Positioning Unit, Prime Commander.” 

Nirle wrenched the PPU away from
the weaker Huouyt’s cilia-covered tentacle.  “We’ll find him.”  Without waiting
for further orders, the Ooreiki Prime Commander led his grounders back over the
moldy black hills, toward the east.

For a brief instant—less than a
quarter of a second—Esteei felt satisfaction emanate from the Huouyt.  Then it
was gone, replaced with nothing.

He’s pleased,
Esteei
thought, startled.

Esteei was still staring at Bha’hoi
as he climbed back onto the ship, leaving him standing on the beach alone.

#

It was well past nightfall by the
time the Ooreiki groundteam finally returned.

When their shambling forms neared
the lights of the ship, Esteei’s internal pressures spiked.

They were dragging a corpse.

Esteei ran out to them, stretching
his
sivvet
to capacity, straining to get any sign that Tafet was alive.

“Don’t bother,” Nirle said,
bitterness hardening his voice.  He and the other four Ooreiki carried their
friend aboard and set him inside one of the vacuum-casks set into the far
wall.  Seeing it in the light, Esteei recoiled.

The corpse was still covered with
black slime, and his head had been torn open.

“From now on,” Nirle said, “We go
out in twos or we don’t go out at all.  Esteei, you won’t be going anywhere
without at least three Ooreiki to guard you, understand?”

“Commander, I really don’t need—”

“You’re the most important person
on this ship,” Nirle interrupted.  “The rest of us, especially that useless
Huouyt, are expendable.  You’re our best chance of contact with whatever killed
Tafet.”

Esteei felt his eyes dragged back
to Tafet’s corpse, to the sticky blackness clinging to it.  “You don’t think it
was the Geuji?”

“It wasn’t,” Nirle said.

“Then what was it, Commander?” 
Bha’hoi was climbing down from abovedecks.

Nirle glared.  “Not the Geuji.”

“Enlighten us, since you obviously
saw the tracks,” Bha’hoi said. 

Nirle remained silent, loathing
filling the ship as he glared up at the Huouyt Overseer.

“You found no tracks.”  Bha’hoi did
not bother to hide his smugness.

Nirle looked ready to draw his
weapon on the Huouyt.  Behind him, his grounders fidgeted.  “It wasn’t the
Geuji,” Nirle repeated, his voice dangerously calm.

Bha’hoi glanced at Tafet’s corpse,
which was still visible through the lid of the cask.  Black slime still coated
his gelatinous body.  “Then he simply decided to roll in the stuff before he
died?”

Nirle swiveled and left the ship. 
Alone.

#

No, this was all wrong.  The aliens
were killing each other.

The aquatic one, the
smart
one, was hunting the others.  It spied on them from beneath the Philosophers,
then, when the others weren’t looking, it had dragged one of them underneath
the Philosophers and killed it.

It was framing them.

But why?

Crown’s peers were in an uproar,
trying to determine what was going on.  Was it simply an inter-species
scuffle?  They didn’t think so.  They’d already pieced together most of the
aliens’ speech, and from what they could tell, they were on the planet to seek
out intelligent life.

Yet the aquatic one was killing its
companions.

Why?

#

It was on one of the rare days that
Esteei went out with the Ooreiki when another grounder went missing.

One moment, he had been with them,
laughing, joking.  The next, Esteei’s
sivvet
were crushed with someone
else’s terror.  He fell to his knees in the slimy black Geuji, curling into an
instinctive ball at the agony in his head.

“What?” Nirle demanded.  “Emissary?”

The fear was so thick Esteei could
not respond.  He simply whimpered and curled tighter.

Faintly, he heard one of the
Ooreiki shout, then a commotion and weapons discharging.  Esteei could not even
bring himself to open his eyes as his chambers purged themselves over his skin.

And still the terror continued to
grow.  The Geuji magnified it, contorted it, and made it so unbearable that
Esteei had to choose between voiding his chambers a second time or exploding
from the inside.

Somewhere, he knew he was
screaming, but it was a faraway place.  Only the horrible pounding in his
sivvet
was real.

“Get him back to the ship!” Nirle
shouted.  “Gratii can wait!”

Two grounders carted Esteei back to
the ship as fast as their meaty legs could carry them.  As soon as Esteei was
safely back in his room, they hurried back to rejoin their friends.

It took Esteei several hours to
recover.  He lay in bed, enduring the pounding waves of the residual emotions
like a seasick traveler endured the ebbing waves of a dying storm.

When he finally managed to steady
himself enough to look outside, the Geuji was rolling in rapid, eerie patterns,
some of which almost made sense to him.

Fearing he was losing his mind,
Esteei went back to his room and stayed there.

Later, during the night, the four
Ooreiki returned with another body.

It, too, was covered with Geuji
mucous.

“That’s it,” Bha’hoi snapped. 
“Nirle, no more outings.  I’m declaring the Geuji a hostile non-sentient.  I’m
going to request eradication measures.”

“It wasn’t the Geuji!” the Ooreiki Prime
Commander roared, turning on the Huouyt.  “It was something else.  I saw a
portion of it, right before Gratii disappeared.  Like a Jreet, but thinner,
without scales.”

Bha’hoi was clearly irritated. 
“You saw a
worm
kill your grounder, Commander?”

“It would explain why there’s no
tracks.”

“If it’s a worm, then it’s using
the Geuji as cover.  We wipe out the cover, the worms cannot surprise us, and
no more will die.”

“No!” Nirle snapped.

The Huouyt cocked his head.  “No, Commander?”

“I think the mold is…”  Nirle
hesitated, catching Esteei’s eyes.

Nervousness doused Esteei’s
sivvet.
 
Nervousness and suspicion.

He was going to say ‘sentient,’
Esteei realized, stunned. 
And he doesn’t want to say it in front of
Bha’hoi.