Escape Pod, page 11
They ran back to the vat where Wolfgang was punching the glass. Spidery cracks leaked a thick stream of synthamneo. Hiro was yelling at Wolfgang to stop; Maria just watched, her arms crossed.
“He’s got an anger problem,” Maria said as Regina and Alex raced up to them. “And he doesn’t know how to vat the clone. So he’s going at it the direct way.”
Alex swore and ran back to Regina’s terminal. Regina leapt forward and, with Hiro’s help, they managed to pull Wolfgang away from the vat. He threw a long elbow and caught Regina in the forehead, splitting the skin and knocking her off him. She sat against an empty vat, stunned. Other sounds happened. A crunch. A cry of pain. Then the sound of synthamneo being drained.
She wiped the blood out of her eyes and saw a short woman exit the vat, holding the gravitas of who knew how many lifetimes. Her eyes were honey brown and her skin a darker shade than Maria’s. She looked at each person in turn, focusing, surprisingly, on Regina.
“You, I don’t know,” she said. She walked over and offered Regina a hand up. “I’m Sallie.”
Surprised, Regina took the hand, still slick with synthamneo, and awkwardly got to her feet. “I’m the systems engineer,” she said, dumbly. “Regina.”
Wolfgang sat on the floor next to the vat, cradling his hand. “You broke my thumb,” he said to Hiro, cold violence in his tone.
“You nearly knocked out our new friend,” Hiro said calmly, with no trace of the flippancy he’d used before. “We wouldn’t be here without her. And what the hell were you trying to accomplish? If you’d punched through and killed her clone, that would have done no good. They’d just grow another one.”
“Wolfgang, Maria, and Hiro!” Sallie said, delighted. “What brings you here? And where are we? And what year is it, anyway?”
Alex came up to them carrying a towel, a tablet, and a bathrobe.
“Igor, it’s been a long time,” Sallie said, taking the towel.
Alex—Igor?—nodded. “It’s 2493. You contain the last virus-free mindmap of Sallie Mignon. You sent me here with this file to ask the First if they would help with a crisis among clones back on Earth.” He handed her a tablet with a document pulled up. She took the towel, wiped her hands, and then took the tablet.
“Igor?” Regina demanded. “You’re Igor?”
He looked at her with the haughtiness she had come to notice in older clones. The “you couldn’t possibly understand” look. “I told you Igor was being punished. That was true. I had to act like a human and manage your team.” He shook his head in disgust and waved his hands at the newcomers. “And you had to fuck it all up with them.”
“So what, sneaking on a clone of a hated person from Earth is your payback to the First? What will that get you?”
“That remains to be seen. The hope is she can get my insular peers to help their own people back on Earth, and then I can get out of here. Middle manager on God’s Eye is not the goal of all the lifetimes I have lived.”
“Better to reign in hell, huh?” Maria asked.
Sallie had finished reading the tablet. She looked thoughtful. “I’m not the only version of me. I’m also back on Earth right now, which makes her superfluous if I ever got back there. She’d be destroyed. She risked a lot sending me here.”
“She sent you here to die, probably,” Regina said. “You can’t just go ask the First a favor. Apparently, you have to do a survival competition or something.”
Sallie ignored her. This information didn’t surprise her. “And you three?” she asked the other new clones. “Last I remember, you were on the Dormire.”
“We’re here to accuse you of multiple counts of attempted murder,” Maria said. “And bring you to justice.”
“You figured it out,” she said, nodding. “And even made it back here for revenge. I have to say I’m impressed. Well,” she said, taking the robe from Igor. “We can talk after I am done with the Game.”
Igor nodded. “I had expected to offer you to the First, but things just got a lot more interesting.” He tapped a few times on his tablet. “I have to fire an engineer and figure out how to jail some stowaways.” He gave them an appraising look. “Or just kill you all here. Wouldn’t do for you to talk,” he added to Regina.
His tablet beeped. “Geneviève,” he said.
“What is it, Igor?” the voice demanded. Clearly busy and clearly not happy to hear from him.
“I’m going to need some firearms in the cloning bay. You wouldn’t believe what just happened.”
“Get them yourself,” she snapped.
Regina’s head was whirling. The three clones had their heads together and were talking. It sounded like they were going to run. This would do them no good, as the shuttle bay was currently empty. She opened her mouth to tell them this, and then an idea came to her.
“What if we make it through the Game?” she asked.
All of them looked at her. She realized every person in the room was hundreds of years older than she was, and she felt very small. But she continued.
“Look, we can’t run away. There’s no shuttle in the bay right now. There’s nowhere to go. If they’re going to kill us anyway, why not give us a sporting chance? Sallie is going through the Game to ask for a favor. Why can’t we all have that option?”
She looked at the three clones. She’d just offered them up too. They were free to try to run through an unknown space station if they thought it was a better bet, but Maria was nodding.
“Kill each other?” Sallie asked, cocking her head like a hound as if Regina was a rabbit.
“Nah, there are plenty of things in there to kill you anyway,” Igor said thoughtfully. “We’re not barbaric.”
Maria snorted, looking between Igor and Sallie.
“But if it happened accidentally,” Sallie said, leaving the sentence open.
The line was still open to Geneviève. “All right, no firearms. What about the Game? Is it ready to start?” Igor asked, his eyes fixed on Regina.
“Yeah, just got the last of the animals into their habitats. Why? You wanna vacation there?”
“No. Tell the council I have the first contestants.”
“Oh really?” She sounded interested for the first time. “Plural?”
“Yes. Five of them, in fact.”
“Where did you get five? Are you cleaning house in the lab?”
Regina felt her stomach drop. Was this happening? She had no survival skills. She wasn’t in shape. What was she thinking? Surely a bullet to the head was preferable to being ripped apart by wolves.
Maria put her hand on her arm. “Are you sure about this?”
“Too late now,” Regina said, smiling weakly.
Igor put his tablet away, smiling widely. “They love the idea. We can start right away. Now, there are weapons stashed around the preserve, and please don’t kill the female large cats.”
“Is this guy for real?” Hiro asked, looking at Maria. She shrugged.
“Let’s go,” Igor said, and herded them in front of him.
“We could kill him,” Wolfgang said, still holding his injured hand to his chest.
“I think this is a better chance of having someone listen to us. We didn’t come all this way to immediately become fugitives,” Maria said.
Wolfgang swore quietly and didn’t say anything else.
They passed no other people in the corridor as Igor ushered them along. All too quickly, they came to a locked door. He shouldered past them and keyed in a code. “There are no rules, except for the cats, and don’t see this as a Battle Royal thing,” he said. “They’d much rather watch you die after a futile attempt to work together than kill each other.”
“How kind of them,” Maria said dryly.
Wolfgang was looking at Sallie like he wanted to eat her alive, and she blithely ignored him.
Then it hit Regina. Of course she doesn’t care. Igor can just print another copy of her if she dies in here. She gets multiple chances. We only have one.
A blast of humidity hit their faces when they opened the door. Regina hesitated and then sighed, stepping forward. The others followed her.
All around them was a lush forested landscape, complete with bright light overhead and spongy floor underneath.
“Pretty,” Sallie said. “So, should we look for weapons or build a shelter first?”
“We’re not working with you,” Wolfgang said flatly.
Sallie smiled as if she’d expected it. “Your loss.” She disappeared into the trees, jogging in bare feet, still clad in only a robe.
“I guess we look for weapons now,” Maria said. “I don’t want to give Sallie any advantages. And then we give them the show they’re asking for.”
“This was a terrible idea,” Hiro said.
“You came here to take things apart. ‘For want of a nail,’ you said,” Maria reminded him. “Three nails, and her kingdom falls. We beat Sallie once. Her plan, anyway. We can do it again.” She looked at Regina. “Are you in?”
Regina swallowed her fear. “I just want to survive, but I’m on your team if you’ll have me. I’m not sure what I can add, though. I haven’t beaten anybody before.”
“There’s always a first time,” Hiro said, smiling at her.
“Can we get moving? We need to map this place,” Wolfgang said. “I need to splint this thumb.”
“Well, Fourth Nail, do you know any first aid?” Maria asked.
Regina brightened. “Yeah, actually. I trained with the National Guard and was a nurse during the Chicago siege.”
“OK, we’re going to have to hear about that later,” Maria said, looking interested.
Regina took in their area. Beyond the trees lay a vast plain with tall grass. She had to admit the area was a mastery of engineering, even if she were to die here. She pointed into the dense forest. “I’ll tell you that story later. But for now, let’s go.”
John Scalzi has achieved fame by taping bacon to his cat, writing a book about an alien diplomatic incident involving a fart, and being nominated for a short story Hugo Award for an April Fool’s joke posted on Tor.com that used 318 words to say, “it was a dark and stormy night.” He’s done some other stuff, too, I guess: consulted on TV shows, written some books, won some awards, outraged some people online, and DJ’d a mean dance party. If you’re talking about contemporary humor and science fiction, his name will inevitably come up, and this story from early in his career shows you he’s always been this twisted and funny.
MUR
ALIEN ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS
JOHN SCALZI
Each week, we here at SSWR step right outside of our offices here on 54th and ask folks on the street our Question of the Week—sometimes topical, sometimes whimsical, always intriguing.
Our question this week: What is the most interesting encounter you’ve ever had with an alien animal species?
* * *
Rowenna Morello, Accountant, Staten Island:
That’s gotta be the time we got the cat high with a glyph. My college roommate worked in the xenobiology lab and brought the glyph home one night in a shoebox. It’s just this little mouse-like thing, so of course the cat wanted at it right away. It’s cat-food-sized. We pushed the cat away from it a couple of times, but then I had to go make a call. I left the glyph alone in its box on the table, and the cat hopped up and started poking at the thing with its paw, you know, poke poke poke.
Thing is, the glyph is a total predator, and it’s got this mouth that opens up like a little umbrella and surrounds whatever it’s going to eat. So there’s the cat, batting at the glyph, and suddenly the glyph lunges forward, opens its jaws, wraps them around the cat’s paw, and clamps down hard. It’s trying to eat the cat. Well, the cat’s freaking out, of course. It’s scooting backwards, trying frantically to shake this thing off its paw and wailing, you know, like a cat in heat. My roommate had to use a Popsicle stick from the trash to pry the glyph’s mouth open.
The cat ran away and seemed to be pissed-off but okay. Then a half hour later I caught him just staring at a bookshelf and wobbling back and forth. Seems that glyphs paralyze their prey with venom; it kills just about anything on the glyphs’ planet but here it just makes you hallucinate. It’s a chemistry thing. After we realized the cat wasn’t going to die, it was actually pretty funny to watch him bump into walls and stare at his own paws. Although at one point he sprinted right towards an open window and my roommate had to make a lunge to keep him from jumping out. It was a third-floor walkup. I guess the cat thought he could fly.
Anyway, the glyph went back to the lab the next day. The funny thing is that for the next couple of days, the cat seemed to be looking around to find the glyph, circling the table and poking into boxes and stuff. I think he wanted a fix.
* * *
Alan Jones-Wynn, Copywriter, Manhattan:
My daughter’s third-grade class was taking a trip to the Bronx Zoo and it was my turn to be a parent assistant, so I got the day off from work and helped her teacher herd a couple dozen kids around the place, which, if you’ve never done it, is just as aggravating as it sounds. This was around the time that the zoo was just opening their “Alien Animals” exhibit, and the place was jam-packed; it actually helped that we were on an official educational field trip, because otherwise we probably wouldn’t have been able to get through the crowds.
We filed through and the tour guide pointed out all the popular alien animals, like those omads and the revers and the neyons, right, the ones they make stuffed-animal toys of to sell at the gift shop. But then we came to this one habitat and the tour guide stopped and pointed out what had to have been the ugliest lump of fur in the whole zoo. She told us that the lump we were looking at was called a corou, and that it was an endangered species on Tungsk, and that the Bronx Zoo and others were trying to start a captive breeding program. As she was saying this, her eyes were welling up with tears, and it seemed like she was about to break down right then and there.
Well, obviously, this seemed like pretty bizarre behavior, but then I looked at the corou, and it swiveled an eye stalk at me, and I swear I was overwhelmed with this wave of sadness and regret that was so overpowering I can’t even describe it. It’s like what you’d probably feel if you’d just heard that a bus carrying everyone you ever knew just went off a mountain trail in Peru. And it wasn’t just me; all those kids, who you couldn’t have shut up if you wired their jaws shut, were all just standing there silently, staring at the corou and looking like they’d just seen their dog run over by a car. One of the kids actually tapped on the glass of the habitat and said, “I’m sorry,” to the corou, over and over. We had to literally drag some of the kids away. I mean, I wouldn’t call it telepathy or mind control, but something was going on there.
My kid and I went back a couple of years later and the corou exhibit wasn’t there anymore, and I was sort of glad—it’s never a good thing to worry that you’re going to get clinically depressed at the zoo. At a dinner party a little later I met a vet who worked at the zoo, and I asked him about the corou. He said that one zoologist working with the habitat committed suicide and another was placed on leave after she took the zoo’s breeding pair, drove them up to Vermont, and tried to release them into the wild. She kept telling everyone afterwards that they told her it was what they wanted. They eventually had to get rid of the exhibit altogether. I haven’t heard about the corou since. I think they’re extinct now.
* * *
Ted McPeak, Community College Student, Jersey City:
Some friends and me heard that if you smoked the skin of an aret, you could get monumentally wasted. So we bought one at a pet store and waited a couple of weeks until it shed its skin. Then we crumbled up the dry skin, put it in with some pot, and lit up. We all got these insane mouth blisters that didn’t go away for weeks. We all had to eat soup for a month. Though maybe it wasn’t the skin; the pot could have been bad or something. We flushed the aret down the toilet after we got the blisters, though, so we’d have to go buy a new one to try it out again. I don’t think we’ll bother.
* * *
Qa’ Hungran Ongru, Cultural Attaché for Fine Arts and Literature, Royal Kindran Embassy, Manhattan:
Well, I am myself an alien here, so I suppose you could say that my most interesting incident with an alien animal was with one of your animals, a dog. Shortly after being assigned to the embassy here, I was given a Shih Tzu by a human friend. I was delighted, of course. He really was an adorable thing, and he was very loving and devoted to me. I named him Fred. I like that name.
As you may know, the male of the Kindra species is a large non-sentient segmented worm which we females attach across our midriffs during the mating process; the male stays attached while a four-part fertilization process occurs over several days. It’s not very romantic by human standards, but obviously it works well for us. Shortly before one of my ovulatory periods, I had managed to score a rather significant diplomatic coup when I convinced the Guggenheim to tour selections of its collection among the Kindra home planets. As a reward, I was allowed to choose a male from the oligarchical breeding stock for my next insemination. The one I chose had deep segment ridges and a nicely mottled scale pattern; again, not something a human would find attractive, but deeply compelling for Kindrae. He was attached to me in a brief conjoining ceremony at the embassy, attended by selected Kindra and human friends, and then I went home to Fred.
Fred came running to meet me at the door as he always did, but when he saw the male across my belly, he skidded across the tiles and then started growling and barking and backing away slowly. I tried to assure him that everything was okay, but every time I tried to reach for Fred, he’d back away more. At one point he snapped at my tendrils. I was surprisingly hurt; although it seemed silly to want Fred and the male to “get along” (considering that the male was doing nothing but lying there), I did want them to get along. If for no other reason than that the male would be attached to me for the next week or so. But for the next few days Fred would have nothing to do with me. He wouldn’t eat from his bowl until I left the room. He even peed in my shoes.
