James Gardner - The Young Person's Guide to the Organism

“We’re going for a closer look at the surface,” the she-bear said. “Interested?”

“Certainly,” Esteban said, smiling his professional smile. In fact, he’d heard that vicious quakes rocked the surface from time to time, scattering rubble into the air. Getting too close was dangerous…but his first patient Rachel had hesitated to approach her angel, and for that cowardice, she’d gone mad.

No, he corrected himself, she’d succumbed to delusional paranoia brought about by unresolved guilt.

No, he corrected himself again. She’d gone mad.

[Bogey] In the docking bay, Jenny Harrington slid into the shadows of an inactive minishuttle storage tube when she heard approaching footsteps. Not that Jenny was afraid to be caught here—Ms. Verhooven said guests could go where they liked. But Jenny didn’t want to talk to anyone now, didn’t want the pointless rituals of making conversation with strangers. In her hand was a bouquet of daisies, hard-grown in Mars’s sterile soil…well, to be honest, grown in spite of Mars’s soil, because it had been necessary to add so much: fertilizer, water, several strains of bacteria.

Jenny didn’t want any of Verhooven’s other guests to see the flowers in her hand. They’d all heard her story. They’d think she was going to drop the flowers on the spot where her father had died because she loved him. Nothing could be further from the truth. Her father had been a militaristic blockhead who died trying to kill some harmless hulk…and it was all pointless, wasn’t it, because the hulk was still here and all that was left of her father was a dent in the hulk’s side. Love was for people who deserved it, and her father had never ever deserved it.

The flowers were an exorcism, nothing more. A way to close off the past, once and for all.

Three people passed her hiding place and entered another minishuttle tube. Soon the blast door shut and the mini blasted off.

Jenny clutched her flowers fiercely and headed for the next active shuttle.

[Daemon] Gregor Petrozowski did nothing as the first shuttle emerged from the dormitory. His yacht hovered above the dormitory, several kilometers sunward; he could see everything, with little chance of being detected himself, just a fleck in the fireball’s face. When the second shuttle took off, the old man gave his computer a single soft command. “Down.”

The sound of the sun was loud static over his radio speakers. In his years of isolation, he’d developed a distaste for both music and the human voice. Staying in contact with humanity had been impure, in a way he couldn’t explain. If he was to become worthy to rediscover his daemon, he had to cut himself off from the mundane world. Now the only voice he could stand was the sun’s.

Obviously, other people had discovered the daemon while he was searching alone in space. They’d tried to build something on it—temples, maybe; he couldn’t tell now that everything was in ruins. If he’d been listening to human broadcasts, he would have come here much earlier.

But he was here now. He had found the daemon, unaided, in the vast depths of space. And he could feel in his bones that he’d arrived just in time.

“Down,” he whispered. “Down.”

[Boojum] “That’s Petrozowski’s yacht,” Emil Mayous told his son Yorgi. “Petrozowski himself.”

The boy hauled himself off his acceleration couch with a great ripping of Velcro and floated over to the viewscreen. “Yacht looks like shit,” he said after a moment’s inspection.

The boy Yorgi thought he was an expert on yachts now that he owned one himself. Emil didn’t want to know where the boy got enough money to buy the ship. Emil hadn’t wanted to come to Heaven either, but Yorgi thought the Verhooven woman might pay big money to hear about his father’s boojum hunt.

“Petrozowski’s probably been in space ever since he abandoned the company,” Yorgi said. “I bet he hasn’t—Jesus Christ!”

A jet-black wing swept past the viewscreen like a flapping chunk of night. Proximity alarms blared throughout the ship.

“You stupid flea!” Emil shouted at his son, for no reason except his fear.

[Titan] The last maxishuttle to Heaven was en route to the main dormitory when the Organism lifted its wings to full height. Suddenly, the shuttle found itself in a trough six kilometers deep, the walls and floor so black they were nearly invisible. Overhead, the wide face of the sun burned down into the chasm; but it was far, far away, like a glimpse of sky to a child trapped in a well.

“Ooooo,” said Beatrice Mallio, age four.

“Wow,” said Benedict Mallio, age five.

“Something nice on the viewscreen?” their mother asked. Like the other adults on board, Juliet Mallio was tired of looking outside after days of travel; but she dutifully prepared herself to admire whatever piece of space debris her children were watching now.

Her eyes widened as she saw the deep black of the Organism’s skin towering over both sides of the ship, the wings forming massive walls of starless night. At first she thought the shuttle had entered some sort of landing bay; but as she watched, dim flecks of blue-tinged light flickered into life against the blackness.

“Pretty!” said Beatrice.

“Like electric spiders!” said Benedict.

And they did look like spiders, skittering out of their nests and racing across the surface of both wings. The spiders danced madly, colliding with each other, coalescing…and suddenly one leapt across the gap between the wings, trailing a pale thread of lightning directly in front of the shuttle. Without thinking, Juliet stamped down with her foot, as if she had a brake pedal that could stop the ship from flying through the lightning. The shuttle’s pilot must have had reflexes equally quick, for the ship suddenly dipped, just managing to slip under the glowing thread.

All over the cabin, people cried out at the ship’s sudden maneuver; but Juliet remained tensely silent, her eyes on the screen, her arms reaching out to wrap around her children’s shoulders.

More and more of the lightning-threads sparked from one wing to another, weaving a net, a web across the trough. There was no way the pilot could avoid them all. One thread whipped against the shuttle’s hull, and for a moment the viewscreen image twisted into jagged distortion; but a moment later, the picture snapped back into focus with an audible crackle. Another lightning strike, another crackle, a third, a fourth; then a fountain of light gushed crimson and the viewscreen went dead.

“Children,” said Juliet Mallio, “are your safety belts very snug? Yes, make sure, let me check. Good. Good. A kiss for each of you. That’s nice, very nice. Now it’s too bad the pretty show has gone off the screen, but maybe you’d like a story instead. Yes? Maybe a story about a Titan.” The shuttle veered sharply upward. “A Titan named Prometheus. A sad story, but a brave one.”

The shuttle rocked like a cradle under an impatient hand.

“Ready? Once upon a time…”

[Dragon] Sunward, the Narukis looked back for a final time on their dragon. The wings were now pulled so far forward it seemed as if the Laughing Dragon of Heaven had reshaped itself into a cavernous mouth and its breath was a rainbow of fire.

“A true dragon,” said Yushio, awestruck.

“It always has been,” his wife answered.

“Change course, change course!” Yushio shouted to their yacht’s navigation computer. “Into the dragon’s mouth!”

For a moment, Mrs. Naruki considered countermanding the order. But when she saw the exhilaration on her husband’s face, the joy of jumping into something new and exciting, she held her silence. The sun, the dragon, never mind.