Warren Fahy - Fragment

“OK,” Dante grunted. “I am almost to the top of Henders Island…”

“We’ve got a live shot coming from Henders Island as one of the crew of SeaLife , without our permission or authorization, is about to reach the top of the island’s cliff, and broadcast the first images of the island’s interior,” Cynthea narrated. “What do you see, Dante?”

“Damn it-those things have teeth, I think. Uh, fuck, I’m just getting up the last bit here, hang on.” The camera swept across pale rock illuminated by night vision as they heard his grunts and hard breathing.

“Keep talking, sweetie, keep talking!” Cynthea coaxed. “Don’t swear, though, honey!”

Dante reached a grasping hand up over the lip and hauled himself to the top of the cliff. His muscles trembled with exhaustion, and he lay still on his back for a moment, breathing and giving thanks. He had made it.

He raised himself to his feet.

“Oh shit!”

One of the giant tigers flashing orange-and-pink stripes sat in front of him. The thing was the size of a tractor.

As Dante spun and dove back into the crevasse, he saw a luminous figure, on the opposite side of the crevasse, jump in the air and spread out four arms in an X.

“Oh shiiiiit ! ” Dante heard it screech, in a warbled imitation of his own voice.

“We’re cutting this off, Cynthea!” yelled Barry. “Are you crazy?” she screamed.

The rope yanked on his harness as it belayed inside the gri-gri and tightened the cam driven into the ledge.

He dangled and spun, head downward, on the rope. A cloud of bugs circled him, chased by leaping gliders.

He righted himself and climbed the rope, drawing his body up under the ledge.

Above him, the tiger-spider suddenly loomed over the edge, blocking the moonlight. He saw it reach two long black spikes down into the crack and hook his rope. It pulled Dante up like a fish caught on a dropline.

As its jaws peeled open, revealing dark appendages, he smelled the sour stench of its breath and felt a splatter of stinging drool on his face. The rope lunged upward as the beast yanked it with two arms, and its head stretched down over the rocky edge on an elastic neck. He felt its hot breath and his heart pounded as the creature screamed a sound he never imagined could come from a living thing.

Dante heard the taunting voice of the other animal, from somewhere above on the cliff: “Oh shiiiiiit ! ” it echoed.

He knew that with one more pull of the rope he would be inside the monster’s mouth. Dante chose to die another way.

“Bye, guys,” he said, and he unclipped.

The creature screamed like a hoarse siren, its voice receding away from him as he fell.

The last thing they saw on-screen was the camera eye tumbling through the chasm as the scream of the beast faded-the transmission fizzled on impact with the ground.

“Cynthea, Christ! What are you doing to me?” Barry yelled.

“Oh God,” Cynthea screeched. “When did you cut it?”

“Not soon e-fucking-nough!”

Captain Sol used surgeon’s forceps to place a small brass cannon on the gun deck of the Golden Hind.

“Good.” Zero nodded.

“Does it look straight?”

“Yeah,” Zero said.

“Good.” Samir nodded.

Captain Sol lifted his thimble-sized shot glass. “Here’s to it, eh?” He toasted Zero with a sip of anejo tequila.

Zero toasted him back.

Watching Captain Sol build his model was just about the only entertainment available on the Trident lately.

The ship-to-ship phone bleated suddenly and Samir rose from his chair and picked it up. He listened for about ten seconds. “Uh, wow, I think you need to speak to the captain,” he said, handing the phone to Captain Sol. Zero looked on curiously.

The captain smirked, putting the phone to his ear as Samir shrugged.

“Captain Sol, this is Lieutenant Scott of the U.S.S. Enterprise informing you that a communication signal has been detected coming from the vicinity of your vessel. In fact, we believe it came from your vessel. Broadcasting is unauthorized and contrary to the orders you have been given from the U.S. Navy. We must demand you prepare for immediate boarding.”

“Cynthea!” Captain Sol growled.

“Please copy that again?” said the voice on the radio.

“Thanks, Enterprise , I agree, whatever you are detecting is unauthorized. Let me check my ship now to find out what’s going on, over.”

“Uh, we will help you , Trident. Is that understood?”

They heard motors and saw three high-speed gray inflatables speeding into the cove, toward them.

“Yes, Enterprise! That is understood.” Gritting his teeth, Captain Sol turned off the radio. “Damn it, Cynthea, what now?”

Once again, Lillie Auditoriumwas packed to the rafters on a crisp autumnal Thursday night.

The lights dimmed and Geoffrey strode out onto the stage wearing yellow sneakers, jeans, his Kaua’i T-shirt, and a lime-green velvet Nehru jacket with red piping.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Why does a Galapagos tortoise live a hundred and fifty years, a mayfly a single day, and a human being rarely past the age of eighty? Is it simply because our parts wear out at different rates? Or is there a reason, or even some evolutionary advantage, for the very shortness of life? And if there is some positive biological purpose, does this mean the clock can be reset, presuming evolution has used some mechanism to ‘set’ the timer of life in the first place?”

Geoffrey clicked the remote. A close-up of an egg timer on a 1950s-style kitchen counter appeared behind him, to a smattering of nervous chuckles.

“The question I want to pose and offer a possible answer to tonight is: Could the speed with which death arrives have a survival advantage? On its face, it seems like a ridiculous notion, but I believe there might be a very simple explanation for the variation in animal life spans: Animals may actually grow old and die only to prevent them from breeding with their own offspring.”

Geoffrey clicked to a picture of Cousin Itt from The Addams Family. A few laughs bubbled up from the audience.

“Of course, we have had strict taboos against incest since time immemorial. Indeed, parent/child breeding causes particularly disastrous damage to the genetic integrity of almost all life on Earth, causing sterility in both plants and animals in only a few generations. Prior to human taboos, nature may have enforced its own taboo by imposing life spans to prevent that genetic catastrophe from occurring.”

Geoffrey clicked again. A scene of microscopic cells on a blue field appeared.

“In the ancient seas of Earth where DNA first formed and single-celled life helped replicate it for over a billion years, there was no need to limit life span. Bacteria and most cells did not even reproduce sexually, and if they did, the chances of encountering one of their own progeny were practically nil. Scientists have speculated that certain forms of bacteria may actually be immortal. In the year 2000, researchers at West Chester University found bacteria that had remained alive for two hundred and fifty million years, locked inside salt crystals buried deep underground.”