Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (17 page)

As she moved on, corpuscles like stars about her, the surrounding activity grew more intense. She was swept along, as by a glutinous current, moving under arches, among branches, past weed tangles, through nets, and the way ahead grew dark and stagnant; though she still drifted forward, the half-live things about her were squirming away, repulsed, flickering with crude blueprints of pain.

She was nearly at the infected kidneys now.

Only the stern disciplines of Medical Meditation now prompted her on. The atmosphere was so thickly repellent that she might have been wallowing in a sewer. But medicine had long ago discovered the powers of self-healing that lie within a body; high-ega and the yogas on which it was founded had pointed the way to releasing those powers. Nowadays, with the psyche of one of the Order of Medicine to spur it on, a patient’s body could be made to regenerate itself: to grow a new limb, a new lung, a new liver. The doctors, the modern skin-divers, submerged to marshal the forces of the anatomy against its invaders.

Cyro called to those forces now. About her, layer on layer, horizon high, the cells of the invaded body, each with its thirty thousand genes, lay silent and seemingly deserted. Then, slowly, reluctantly, as her summons persisted, reinforcements came to her, like rats crawling out of a ruined city.
The enemy is ahead!
she pulsed to them, moving forward into the tattered darkness. More and more, they were coming to her cause, lighting the sewer with their internal fires.

Things like little bats hurtled, chittering, out of the heart of the darkness, were struck down, were devoured. And then the enemy launched his assault. He struck with the suddenness of a closing trap.

He was one, he was a million!

He was nothing the textbooks know of — unknown, unknowable.

He fought with laws and powers entirely his own.

He was monstrous, bestial, occult, a greed with fangs, a horned horror, newly hatched. He was so overwhelming that Cyro hardly felt fear: the puissance of the unknown can kill everything but calm in us. She was aware only that a random radioactive particle had struck down and buried itself in a random gene, producing — with a ferocious defiance of the laws of chance — a freak cell, a mutant cell with unfamiliar appetites; nothing in her training prepared her to understand what the appetites were.

Those appetites had lain dormant until
she
approached.
She
had triggered them, woken them. She had breathed her touch of consciousness onto them, and at once the cell had filled with its own awareness. And its awareness was of the desire to conquer.

She could see, feel, hear, sense, that it was tearing through cell after cell, a maniac through empty rooms, filling them with its rebellion. The healing forces about her turned and fled in panic, winging and swimming against a wind which held them helpless. Cyro, too, turned to escape. Her own body was her only refuge, if she could get there.

But the nailed streamers came out of the darkness and wrapped themselves about her. She cracked open her jaws to their toothed extremes, struggling to scream; at once her mouth was filled with sponge, from which little creatures flung themselves and scampered wildly through her being, triumphing...

Gerund and Jeffy sat smoking on a bench under the eyes of the grey-bearded bondman, Laslo. Empty mugs stood beside them; Jeffy had boiled them a hot drink. Now they sat waiting uneasily for Cyro to reappear, their uneasiness growing as the time slipped away.

“I’ve never known her to take so long on a case before,” Gerund said. “Five minutes is generally all she needs. As soon as she has organized the powers of recovery, she comes back.”

“This engineer — he sounded pretty bad,” Jeffy said.

“Yes, but all the same... Five minutes more and I’m going in to see her.”

“That’s not permitted,” declared the greybeard; it was almost the first time he had spoken. What he said was no less than the truth. The etiquette governing doctor and patient was strict, in their own interests; they could not be viewed together, unless by another doctor. Gerund was perfectly familiar with this rule; he had, indeed, a reluctance to see his wife in a trance state, knowing that the sight would only serve to emphasize the constraint he felt between them. All the same, Cyro had been in that room for half an hour; something must be done.

He sat there for two more minutes before getting up and going over to the cell door. Laslo also rose, shouting angrily. As he started to intercept Gerund, Jeffy blocked his way.

“Sit down or. I’ll pull your nose off,” Jeffy said unemotionally. “I’m very strong and I got nothing better to do.”

The old man, taking one look into Jeffy’s face, went obediently back and sat down. Gerund nodded at his servant, opened the cell door, and slipped inside.

One glance told him that something was wrong — gravely wrong. His wife and the massive engineer lay side by side on a bunk, their arms touching. Their eyes were open, bulging coldly out into space like cod’s eyes on a slab, containing no life whatsoever. But their bodies were alive. Every so often, their frames vibrated and bulged and settled again. Cyro’s right heel kicked briefly against the bunk, beating a meaningless
rat-tat
on the wooden bed foot. Her skin was gradually suffusing with a crimson blush like a stain; it looked, thought Gerund, as if every shred of flesh in her body had been beaten to a pulp. For a while he stood there transfixed with horror and fear, unable to collect his wits and decide what to do.

A cockroach swarmed up the leg of the bed. It passed within six inches of Je Regard’s foot, which protruded bare from under his blanket. As the cockroach moved by, a section of the sole of the foot suddenly grew into a stalk, a dainty thing like a blade of grass; the stalk licked out as quickly as a tongue and caught the cockroach, its legs waving. Gerund slid quietly to the ground in a faint.

Now the flesh on the bed began to change more rapidly. It had organized itself. It slid and smeared out of shape, or flowed in on itself with smacking noises. The cockroach was absorbed. Then, compressing itself, the mass formed back into one human form: Cyro’s. Face, body, colour of hair, eyes — all became like Cyro’s, and every drop of flesh was squeezed into her making. As her last fingernail formed, Gerund rolled over and sat up.

Surprise seized him as he stared about the cell.

It had seemed to him that he had been senseless only a second, yet the sick man had gone! At least Cyro looked better now. She was smiling at him. Perhaps, after all, his anxiety had produced some kind of optical illusion when he entered the cell; perhaps everything was all right. But, on looking more closely at Cyro, his returning sense of reassurance vanished.

It was uncanny! The person sitting on the bed was Cyro. And yet — and yet — every line of her face, every subtle contour Gerund loved so well, had undergone an indefinable transmutation. Even the texture of her flesh had changed. He noticed that her fingers had grown. And there was another thing — she was too big. She was too thick and too tall to be Cyro, as she sat on the bed looking at him, trying to smile.

Gerund stood up, faintness threatening to overwhelm him again. He was close to the door. He could run, or he could call for Jeffy, as his instincts bid him.

Instead, he conquered his instincts. Cyro was in trouble, supreme trouble. Here was Gerund’s chance, possibly his final one, to prove his devotion to her; if he ran from her now, his chance would have passed forever — or so he told himself, for Gerund could not believe his wife’s indifference rested on anything but a distrust of his integrity.

He turned back to her, ignoring her frightfulness.

“Cyro, Cyro, what is wrong?” he asked. “What can I do? Tell me what I can do to help. I’ll do anything.”

The creature on the bed opened its mouth.

“I shall be better in a minute,” it said huskily. The words did not quite coincide with its lip movements.

With a heave, it stood on its feet. It was over seven feet tall, and burly. Gerund stared at it as if hypnotized, but managed with an effort of will to hold out a hand to it. “It’s my wife,” he told himself, “it’s only my wife.” But as it lumbered toward him, his nerve broke. The look on its face was too terrible... He turned, too late to get away. It stretched out its arms and caught him almost playfully.

In the cloister, Jeffy was growing bored. For all the affection he bore his master, he found the life of a bond servant a tedious one at times. Under the fishy eye of the old guard, he spread himself along the bench, preparing for a nap; Gerund would call him soon enough when he was wanted.

A bell rang in the radio room.

Casting one last suspicious look at Jeffy, the old man went to answer the call. Jeffy settled back to doze. In a minute, scuffling sounds made him open an eye. A monstrous form, its details lost in the feeble lighting, lumped along on eight or ten legs and vanished into the street. Jeffy was on his feet instantly, a wave of cold horror brushing tenderly over his skin. He turned and made at a run for the sick cell, instinctively connecting this monster with a threat to those he served.

The cell was empty.

“Here, what are you up to?” asked a voice behind him. The greybeard had come up at the sound of Jeffy’s footsteps. He peered past Jeffy’s elbow into the room. As soon as he saw it was empty, he pulled out a whistle and began to blow wildly on it.

Judge: “You offer as an explanation of the disappearance of your master and mistress the possibility that they may have been — er — devoured by this monster you claim you saw?”

Jeffy: “I didn’t say that, sir. I don’t know where they went to. I only say I saw this thing slipping out of the hospital, and then they were gone.”

Judge: “You have heard that no one else in the subport has seen any such monster. You have heard the evidence of Laslo, the hospital guard, that he saw no such monster. Why, then, do you persist in this tale?”

Jeffy: “I can only say what happened, can’t I?”

Judge: “You are
supposed
to say what happened.”

Jeffy: “That
is
what happened. It’s the truth! I’ve no secrets, nothing to hide. I was fond of my master. I would never have done away with him — or my mistress.”

Judge: “Bonded servants have expressed such sentiments before, after their masters were dead. If you are innocent of what you are accused of, why did you attempt to escape when old Laslo blew his whistle for the police?”

Jeffy: “I was rattled, sir, do you understand? I was frightened. I’d seen this — thing, and then I’d seen the empty cell, and then that fool started blowing. I — I just hit him without thinking.”

Judge: “You do not reveal yourself as a responsible man. We have heard already the witness Laslo’s account of the way you threatened him with force soon after you arrived at the hospital.”

Jeffy: “And you’ve heard me tell you why I did so.”

Judge: “You realize, I hope, the serious position you are in? You are a simple man, so I will put it to you simply. Under world law, you are charged with the double murder of your master and mistress, and until their bodies are recovered or further evidence comes to light, you are to be housed in our prison.”

There were two ways up from the subport to the surface of the Lanic. One way was the sea route, by which both the
Bartlemeo
and the Gyreses’ plane had arrived. The other was a land route. An underground funicular railway climbed through three thousand feet of rock from the submerged city to the station in Praia, the capital of the island of Satago. It was by this route that Jeffy was brought to prison.

Overlooking a dusty courtyard sheltered by a baobab, Jeffy’s cell window allowed him a glimpse of the sea. It was good to be above ground again, although the cloudy overcast created a greenhouse atmosphere which was particularly oppressive after the cool air of the subport; Jeffy sweated perpetually. He spent a lot of his time standing on his wooden bed, staring out into the heat. Other convicts, out for exercise, talked to each other under his window in the local
lingua crioula
, but Jeffy understood not a word of it.

Toward the evening of the second day of his confinement, Jeffy was at his usual perch when a wind arose. It blew hotly through the prison, and continued to blow. The heavy cloud was shredded away, revealing the blue of the sky for the first time in days. The chief guard, a swarthy man with immense moustaches, came out into the courtyard, sampled the air, approved, and strolled over to a stone seat under the baobab tree. Dusting it carefully with his handkerchief, he lay down and relaxed.

On top of the wall behind the guard, something moved. A thing like a python uncoiled itself and began to drop down into the courtyard; it seemed to spread over the wall like a stain as it came, but the heavy foliage of the baobab made it difficult to see what was happening. It looked to Jeffy now as if a rubbery curtain set with jewels and starfish were gliding down the wall. Now it landed behind the guard.

Whatever the thing was, it raised a flapper like a snake about to strike and clamped it over the unsuspecting guard’s face. Then the rest of its bulk flowed over the man, damping his struggles and covering him like a cloak. Jeffy cried out furiously from his cell, but no one answered, no one cared; most of the staff were down on the waterfront with their girls.

When the thing slid off the chief guard, only a limp and flattened body lay on the bench. The hot wind trifled with its moustaches. The thing grew fingers and expertly removed the ring of keys from the dead man’s belt. A segment of it then detached itself from the main bulk, which remained in the shadows as the segment scampered across the yard with the keys. It looked like an animated stool.