Judith Merril - The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7

“It’s not quite that,” said Mercer, with an attempt at heartiness, “but I think you’re leaving something out.”

“Nothing much,” said B’dikkat. “You jump when the dromozoa hit you. You’ll be upset when you start growing new parts — heads, kidneys, hands. I had one fellow in here who grew thirty-eight hands in a single session outside. I took them all off, froze them and sent them upstairs. I take good care of everybody. You’ll probably yell for a while. But remember, just call me Friend, and I have the nicest treat in the universe waiting for you. Now, would you like some fried eggs? I don’t eat eggs myself, but most true men like them.”

“Eggs?” said Mercer. “What have eggs got to do with it?”

“Nothing much. It’s just a treat for you people. Get something in your stomach before you go outside. You’ll get through the first day better.”

Mercer, unbelieving, watched as the big man took two precious eggs from a cold chest, expertly broke them into a little pan and put the pan in the heat-field at the center of the table Mercer had awakened on.

“Friend, eh?” B’dikkat grinned. “You’ll see I’m a good friend. When you go outside, remember that.”

An hour later, Mercer did go outside.

Strangely at peace with himself, he stood at the door. B’dikkat pushed him in a brotherly way, giving him a shove which was gentle enough to be an encouragement.

“Don’t make me put on my lead suit, fellow.” Mercer had seen a suit, fully the size of an ordinary space-ship cabin, hanging on the wall of an adjacent room. ‘When I close this door, the outer one will open. Just walk on out.”

“But what will happen?” said Mercer, the fear turning around in his stomach and making little grabs at his throat from the inside.

“Don’t start that again,” said B’dikkat. For an hour he had fended off Mercer’s questions about the outside. A map? B’dikkat had laughed at the thought. Food? He said not to worry. Other people? They’d be there. Weapons? What for, B’dikkat had replied. Over and over again, B’dikkat had insisted that he was Mercer’s friend. What would happen to Mercer? The same that happened to everybody else.

Mercer stepped out.

Nothing happened. The day was cool. The wind moved gently against his toughened skin.

Mercer looked around apprehensively.

The mountainous body of Captain Alvarez occupied a good part of the landscape to the right. Mercer had no wish to get mixed up with that. He glanced back at the cabin. B’dikkat was not looking out the window.

Mercer walked slowly, straight ahead.

There was a flash on the ground, no brighter than the glitter of sunlight on a fragment of glass. Mercer felt a sting in the thigh, as though a sharp instrument had touched him lightly. He brushed the place with his hand.

It was as though the sky fell in.

A pain — it was more than a pain; it was a living throb — ran from his hip to his foot on the right side. The throb reached up to his chest, robbing him of breath. He fell, and the ground hurt him. Nothing in the hospital-satellite had been like this. He lay in the open air, trying not to breathe, but he did breathe anyhow. Each time he breathed, the throb moved with his thorax. He lay on his back, looking at the sun. At last he noticed that the sun was violet-white.

It was no use even thinking of calling. He had no voice. Tendrils of discomfort twisted within him. Since he could not stop breathing, he concentrated on taking air in the way that hurt him least. Gasps were too much work. Little tiny sips of air hurt him least.

The desert around him was empty. He could not turn his head to look at the cabin. Is this it? he thought. Is an eternity of this the punishment of Shayol?

There were voices near him.

Two faces, grotesquely pink, looked down at him. They might have been human. The man looked normal enough, except for having two noses side by side. The woman was a caricature beyond belief. She had grown a breast on each cheek and a cluster of naked baby-like fingers hung limp from her forehead.

“It’s a beauty,” said the woman, “a new one.”

“Come along,” said the man.

They lifted him to his feet. He did not have strength enough to resist. When he tried to speak to them a harsh cawing sound, like the cry of an ugly bird, came from his mouth.

They moved with him efficiently. He saw that he was being dragged to the herd of pink things.

As they approached, he saw that they were people. Better, he saw that they had once been people. A man with the beak of a flamingo was picking at his own body. A woman lay on the ground; she had a single head, but beside what seemed to be her original body, she had a boy’s naked body growing sidewise from her neck. The boy-body, clean, new, paralytically helpless, made no movement other than shallow breathing. Mercer looked around. The only one of the group who was wearing clothing was a man with his overcoat on sidewise. Mercer stared at him, finally realizing that the man had two — or was it three? — stomachs growing on the outside of his abdomen. The coat held them in place. The transparent peritoneal wall looked fragile.

“New one,” said his female captor. She and the two-nosed man put him down.

The group lay scattered on the ground.

Mercer lay in a state of stupor among them.

An old man’s voice said, “I’m afraid they’re going to feed us pretty soon.”

“Oh, no!”

“It’s too early!”

“Not again!”

Protests echoed from the group.

The old man’s voice went on, “Look, near the big toe of the mountain!”

The desolate murmur in the group attested their confirmation of what he had seen.

Mercer tried to ask what it was all about, but produced only a caw.

A woman — was it a woman? — crawled over to him on her hands and knees. Beside her ordinary hands, she was covered with hands all over her trunk and halfway down her thighs. Some of the hands looked old and withered. Others were as fresh and pink as the baby-fingers on his captress’ face. The woman shouted at him, though it was not necessary to shout.

“The dromozoa are coming. This time it hurts. When you get used to the place, you can dig in—”

She waved at a group of mounds which surrounded the herd of people.

“They’re dug in,” she said.

Mercer cawed again.

“Don’t you worry,” said the hand-covered woman, and gasped as a flash of light touched her.

The lights reached Mercer too. The pain was like the first contact but more probing. Mercer felt his eyes widen as odd sensations within his body led to an inescapable conclusion: these lights, these things, these whatever they were, were feeding him and building him up.

Their intelligence, if they had it, was not human, but their motives were clear. In between the stabs of pain he felt them fill his stomach, put water in his blood, draw water from his kidneys and bladder, massage his heart, move his lungs for him.

Every single thing they did was well meant and beneficent in intent.

And every single action hurt.

Abruptly, like the lifting of a cloud of insects, they were gone. Mercer was aware of a noise somewhere outside — a brainless, bawling cascade of ugly noise. He started to look around. And the noise stopped.

It had been himself, screaming. Screaming the ugly screams of a psychotic, a terrified drunk, an animal driven out of understanding or reason.

When he stopped, he found he had his speaking voice again.

A man came to him, naked like the others. There was a spike sticking through his head. The skin had healed around it on both sides. “Hello, fellow,” said the man with the spike.

“Hello,” said Mercer. It was a foolishly commonplace thing to say in a place like this.