Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

And nowhere near as weird as the gathering horde of human faces.

Hundreds of heads turned toward the crawler. Mouths hung open. Silent. Not cheering, not welcoming, like the crowds of other worlds. Enraptured colonists stared, unblinking, eyes locked, focused in religious fervor.

A murmur swept down the street. "The man in white... A Pilot... Can it be?"

The crowd parted as the crawler inched forward.

"The Body... the Body Pure.... "

The crowd was young, eerily young. Some were tall like adults, but all were too thin. Males were gangly and awkward, females sprightly like gymnasts. Their adolescent faces gaped at Karr, changed by the alien forces of New Ascension. Jenette had warned Karr about hormone inhibitors, but it was startling to see the effects en masse. It was a colony of proto-humans, not quite teenagers, not quite adults, looking ghostly with their gray-white hair and simple earthen-colored coveralls. Here and there were young adults, men and women hardly older than Jenette, but who were world-weary where youthful optimism should have reigned. More rare still were those nearing their thirties, worn beyond their years, glowering at Karr bitterly but unable to turn away. Tesla was the only truly old face. And there were no children.

"Welcome to your new home," said Tesla.

Karr gulped, wanting to flee from the hollow faces. He had nothing in common with them, a Pilot, born and bred to solitary life between the stars, bound to duty, to sacrifice, to self-reliance. These were victims. Unmoving. Needy. They didn't even look human. What did they want from him?

The gates boomed shut behind Karr. Cell doors, locking.

The horde pressed closer as the crawler inched on, their strange stillness holding, for now. Halfway down the street, where buildings crowded closer to the golden pavement, a colonist suddenly dove at the crawler, his arm thrusting in over the crawler deck, fingers brushing Karr's boot before he tumbled off.

Karr looked back as the young man picked himself up, waving his hand triumphantly.

"I touched him! I touched him!"

The man licked his hand.

Like a pebble starting an avalanche, the zombie crowd began to move. Outstretched hands pressed in, straining to reach Karr. And they found their voices, calling for his attention.

"Me, pick me, touch me... please!"

"Father..." Jenette warned, worried by the crowd's behavior. They began to push and shove.

Hundreds of hands tried to get closer to Karr.

"Out of my way! The Pilot! I must touch the Pilot! No, me!"

The crawler jerked to a halt, its path jammed. Karr clutched the deck railing, feeling the same uneasy dread as when crazy Bob had danced around him like a high-speed gnat. Looking back anxiously for orders, the honor guard tried to hold the colonists off.

"Stand clear!" Tesla thundered. The colonists bunched up momentarily. "I bring you a Pilot and this is how you shame me, how you shame the Enclave? How dare you!"

Karr saw that the colonists were beyond words, immobile for a few split seconds like a frozen wave, but indignant, swelling stronger in anticipation of its final crash on shore. Fear motivated them? the same fear that told Karr to run. He felt that. Fear about to explode.

Tesla motioned the Guards to arm their rifles.

"No," Karr said suddenly. There were too few soldiers; all they could do was trigger the explosion.

And Karr had seen enough riots to know he didn't want to be at the center of one. Because he was a

Pilot, he was bad with crowds; because he was a Pilot, he must now take action. "It's all right. It's okay."

Before Tesla could stop him, and before he lost his nerve, Karr slipped over the railing onto the crawler's engine cowl and reached out to the frightening mob. The wave of humanity broke then, a surf of hands rushed up onto him. Warm hands, sweaty hands, cold clammy fingers, callused palms, soft palms.

So many, so close. The sticky intimacy threatened to overwhelm Karr.

"Easy! Easy!" roared Tesla.

Karr focused on single faces in the ghoulish crowd. There was need and terror. There was shock and wonder. On the right were faces full of longing and there on the left were hopeful ones. Karr reached from side to side; there were the disbelieving and the eager. Obsessed and desperate swept by as the crawler began to move again, as well as angry and jealous. Karr saw adulation and felt tears against his palms. These people looked strange, but they had human emotions.

And there, at least, Karr saw common ground. A place he could cling to and not be completely overwhelmed by his fear.

The crawler made the slow journey up the street. More people poured onto the cobblestones from buildings and alleys. Jenette and Tesla watched nervously, hoping the tenuous balance would hold.

XXI

4609 A.D.

New Ascension colony at Elysium island. Three months after seeding.

Olin Tesla's blood-engorged face stares down at Dr. Ponder Yll. Yll fears. Tesla's meaty hands clutch the collar of Yll's pristine labjumper, shaking the smaller, slender man. Tesla's wintry blue eyes are shot with red.

"Please Olin!" Yll squeaks. "Control yourself!"

"Control myself?" Tesla rages. "It's too late for control! We're all dying, you stupid sonofabitch!" Tesla's grip tightens.

"Olin, please!"

"It's all your fault, Yll!"

Yll gasps, thin appendages clawing at Tesla's overpowering limbs. "Olin, you're choking me."

Tesla shoves Yll away. The smaller man slumps against a counter as the big man angrily sweeps a rack of test tubes and glass piping to the floor. Crash!

"You told me there was no disease on this planet!" Tesla pitches a beaker into a wall. The purple fluid of another failed vaccine trickles down sterile surfaces.

"Very little disease," Yll squeaks.

"Eleven hundred dead and you banter words?" Tesla turns a darker shade of red. More beakers shatter against walls and floor.

Yll cringes. The dream is dying. Olin's dream, Yll's dream, the colony's dream. To live the Body Pure, free of corrupting intoxicants, masters of their own bodies and minds ? but the human colonists have exchanged the narcotic vapors of Evermore for another, less forgiving contagion.

The New Ascension of Fallen to the Body Pure may not happen now.

Three months ago, Kismet off-loaded two thousand dreamers, fifty percent men and fifty percent women. This day barely half that number survives. Five hundred women, those who were pregnant in transit, gave birth, as planned, two weeks ago. Today they are all dead. Six hundred of the colony's nine hundred sexually active men are also dead.

"I'll... I'll ask Pilot Malda for a dustoff," Yll stammers as Tesla trashes more beakers full of failed science. "I'll reason with him, beg him, whatever it takes ? "

"There isn't going to be any dustoff," Tesla spits. "Didn't you hear? Pilot Malda has just declared this planet a Plague World. Interdicted. No contact. We stay. We stay and we live or we stay and we die, but nobody's going to help us. Do you understand? Nobody!"

Yll flinches, understanding all too well.

A lot more dying is to come.

A second wave of prescheduled pregnancies was set in motion before the first mothers began to die, before the awful discovery that the human population was infected with a pestilence the likes of which had never been seen on a human-settled world. Too late came the knowledge that what Yll at first believed to be a shared planetary super-immune system, was actually a deadly pathogen; there appeared to be no other disease on New Ascension because that pathogen was territorial and aggressive, allowing no other organism to harm one of its hosts before it eventually decided to consume that host. Too late came the knowledge that this pestilence ? the Scourge, as Olin has named it ? is triggered by the very basic biological function that New Ascension's human colony depends on for survival: procreation.