Alan Foster: Exceptions to Reality

He lowered the scope. “Christ—they’re metamorphosing. And moving. I wonder how extensive the metamorphosis is?”

Bowman already had the command heads-up in place. A few verbal directives were sufficient to materialize an image. Atop the single-story station, remote instrumentation was responding efficiently.

The plain around the outpost was alive with rustling, festering movement. Come midday they no longer needed the instruments to show them what was happening. The two men stood on the porch, seeing with their own eyes.

All around them, as far as they could see and beyond, the grass was coming down, mowed flat by a suddenly ravenous, insatiable horde. Within that seething, frenzied mass of brown fur, red eyes, and munching teeth, nothing survived. Grass, other plants, anything living was overwhelmed and consumed, vanishing down a sea of brown gullets. From the depths of the feeding frenzy arose an unsettling, relentless, ostinato peeping that drowned out everything from the wind to the soft hum of the outpost’s hydrogen generator.

Bowman and LeCleur watched, recorded, and made notes, usually without saying a word. By evening the entire boundless mass of muffins had begun advancing like a moving carpet in a southeasterly direction. The Akoe, Bowman suddenly recalled, had gone northwest. The two agents needed no additional explanation of the phenomenon they were observing.

The migration was under way.

“I suppose we could have offered to let the Akoe stay here,” he commented to his partner.

LeCleur was tired from work and looking forward to a good night’s sleep. It had been a busy day. “I don’t believe it would’ve mattered. I think they would have gone anyway. Besides, such an offer would have constituted unsupported interference with native ritual. Expressly forbidden by Church protocols.”

Bowman nodded. “You check the systems?”

His friend smiled. “Everything’s working normally. Wake-up alarm the same time tomorrow?”

Bowman shrugged. “Works for me.” He spared a final glance for the heaving, rippling sea of brown. “They’ll still be here. How long you estimate it will take them to move on through?”

LeCleur considered. “Depends how widespread the migration is.” Raising a hand, he pointed. “Check that out.”

So dense had the swarm become that a number of the muffins at its edge were being jostled off into the ravine. The protective excavation that ringed the station was ten meters deep, with walls that had been heat-sealed to an unclimbable slickness. A spider would have had trouble ascending those artificial precipices. The agents retired, grateful for the outpost soundproofing that shut out all but the faintest trace of mass peeping.

The station AI’s pleasant, synthesized female voice woke Bowman slightly before his partner.

“Wha…?” he mumbled. “What’s going on?”

“Perimeter violation,” the outpost AI replied, in the same tone of voice it used to announce when a tridee recording was winding up or when mechanical food pre-prep had been completed. “You are advised to observe and respond.”

“Observe and respond, hell!” Bowman bawled as he struggled into an upright position. Save for the dim light provided by widely spaced night illuminators, it was dark in his room. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Four AM, corrected Hedris time.” The outpost voice was not abashed by this pronouncement.

Muttering under his breath, Bowman shoved himself into shorts and shirt. LeCleur was waiting for him in the hall.

“I don’t know. I just got out of bed myself,” he mumbled in response to his partner’s querulous gaze.

As they made their way toward outpost central, Bowman queried the AI. “What kind of perimeter violation? Elaborate.”

“Why don’t you just look outside?” soft artificial tones responded. “I have activated the external lights.”

Both men headed for the main entrance. As soon as the door opened, Bowman had to shield his eyes against the artificial brightness. LeCleur’s vision adjusted faster. What he exclaimed was not scientific, but it was certainly colorful.

Bathed in the bright automated beams positioned atop the roof of the outpost was a Dantean vision of glaring red eyes, gnashing teeth, and spattering blood; a boiling brown stew of muffins whole, bleeding, dismembered, and scrambling with their two tiny legs for a foothold among their seething brethren. Presumably the rest of the darkened plain concealed a similar vision straight out of Hell. Presumably, because the astounded agents could not see it. Their view was blocked by the tens of thousands of dead, dying, and feverish muffins that had filled the outpost-encircling ravine to the brim with their bodies. At the same time, the reason for the transformation in the aliens’ dentition was immediately apparent.

Having consumed everything green that grew on the plains, they had turned to eating flesh. And one another.

Bulging eyes flared, tiny feet kicked, razor-sharp teeth flashed and ripped. The curdling miasma of gore, eviscerated organs, and engorged muffin musk was overpowering. Rising above it all was the stench of cooked meat. Holding his hand over mouth and nose, LeCleur saw the reason why the outpost had awakened them.

Lining the interior wall of the artificial ravine was a double fence of waved air. Frenzied with instinct, the muffins were throwing themselves heedlessly into the lethal barrier, moving always in a southeasterly direction. The instant it contacted the electrically waved air, a scrambling muffin body was immediately electrocuted. As was the one following behind it, and the next, and the next. In their dozens, in their hundreds, their wee corpses were piling up at such a rate that those advancing from behind would soon be able to stumble unhindered into the compound. Those that did not pause to feast on the bodies of their own dead, that is.

“I think we’d better get inside and lock down until this is over,” LeCleur murmured quietly as he stood surveying the surging sea of southeastward-flowing carnage.

An angry Bowman was already heading for the master console. Though it held an unmistakable gruesome fascination, the migration would mean extra work for him and his partner. The perimeter fence would have to be repaired. Even with automated mechanical help it would take weeks to clear out and dispose of the tens of thousands of muffin corpses that had filled the ravine and turned it into a moat full of meat. They would have to do all that while keeping up with their regular work schedule. He was more than a little pissed.

Oh well, he calmed himself. From the first day they had occupied the outpost everything had gone so smoothly, Hedris had been so accommodating, that it would be churlish of him to gripe about one small, unforeseen difficulty. They would deal with it in the morning. Which was not that far off, he noted irritably. As soon as the greater part of the migration had passed them by or settled down to a more manageable frenzy, he and LeCleur could retire for an extended rest and leave the cleaning up to the station’s automatics. Surely, despite the muffins’ numbers, such furious activity could not be sustained for more than a day or two.

His lack of concern stemmed from detailed knowledge of the station’s construction. It had been designed and built to handle and ride out anything from four-hundred-kilometer-an-hour winds to temperatures down to 150 below and the same above. The prefab duralloy walls and metallic glass ports were impervious to windblown grit, flying acid, ordinary laser cutters, micrometeorites up to a diameter of two centimeters, and solid stone avalanches. The interior was sealed against smoke, toxic gases, volcanic emissions, and flash floods of water, liquid methane, and anything else a planet could puke up.