Feeling movement on her leg Frisk rolled over and batted away one of the many lice that occupied the ship. As she donned her environment suit, she tried to imagine a future where she could continue to let loose the full extent of her malice and have it responded to. She tried to relish the prospect, but imagination had become dull, and interest lacking. In this she found another source of anger.
Standing up, she said, ‘I will just have to work at it.’ But the words seemed to be sucked away by the coldness of the ship surrounding her.
‘I will work at it,’ she said, and smashed her foot down on the louse, crunching it into the floor.
7
The cloud of disturbed silt, broken shell, gobbets of flesh and yellowish chyme now covered five square kilometres of seabed, and when one edge reached the oceanic trench it waterfalled into the cerulean depths. On a good day for glisters, this waterfall would have descended upon certain entities down there and elicited only the waving of siphons like hollowed trees, the contemplative thump of a fleshy foot capable of tipping boulders to see what might be for lunch underneath, and the blink of a slot-pupilled eye the size of a dinner plate. Today was a bad day, however. The monstrous whelk — which had as its minuscule kin both the hammer and frog varieties, for it was into his kind that they transformed upon surviving long enough to finally become sexually active — had not had a particularly good day himself, nor week either. For longer than had seemed fair, a deepwater flesh-eating heirodont had hunted him through the boulderfields that were his natural home below and, of necessity, he had escaped into the deep crevices found higher up the face of this underwater cliff. Below, encountering such tastes in the water would merely have whet his appetite for one of the huge filter-worms that lived underneath the boulders. Those worms were now far out of reach, and the source of this taste was very close. Rolling out masses of tentacles, with skin so thick and fibrous even leeches could not penetrate, he hauled himself up the face of the cliff and went to dine.
He was on the deck and prill were coming over the rail. There was no one else on board but something shadowy and insectile steered the ship down an avenue made in the sea by the reared trumpet mouths of giant leeches. He backed away from the prill but his fear was more of the leeches and the way their mouths were watching him. Too late he realized he had backed up against the mast and his fear twisted its knife in his gut. He looked up and the sail shrugged at the inevitability of it all before it dropped on him. He tried to run but just could not move fast enough. Sheets of pink-veined skin enfolded him and dragged him down. Only then did it occur to him how ridiculous this whole situation was and that he was dreaming. He woke with the twisting fear in his gut, turning to a gnawing hunger.
Janer opened his eyes and immediately sat upright. He looked at his bandaged hand and flexed it. It was stiff and slightly sore, but not half so painful as he expected.
‘How long?’ he asked.
‘You’ve missed a day and we are now halfway through a second,’ the mind replied.
‘I’ve got the virus in me.’
‘Five per cent of visitors here end up infected. The ones uninfected are those who take precautions. You took none, though you were advised at the runcible terminal and took the information pack on offer. Did you scan it?’
‘No,’ said Janer.
‘You wanted to end up infected,’ the mind stated.
‘Perhaps. Not consciously anyway. Fait accompli now. What are the disadvantages?’
‘There are few. If you spend sufficient time away from reinfection during your first century, the virus will die in your body, and as it breaks down, will cause most of your major organs to fail. Your sensitivity to pain will be greatly reduced, though some might not consider that a disadvantage. You’ll be more susceptible to certain fungal infections. There are three known diseases that would kill you in a protracted and painful way, whereas before you would have survived them… There is a long list and it is in the information pack you took.’
‘Advantages?’
‘Extreme resistance to injury. Gradual increase in physical strength. Higher resistance to other viruses — some of which would kill you, had you not had this virus. And, of course, reduced sensitivity to pain — if you consider that an advantage.’
Janer looked at the hornet squatting on the table by his bunk. Minds did not feel pain. How could something scattered between thousands of nests feel pain? How could a mind that once thought at the slow speed of pheromonal transfer understand physical injury?
‘Would you consider pain an advantage?’
‘I consider anything that increases my sensitivity to the world around me to be an advantage. The unit that is with you now died some time in the night, and all I experienced was the loss of sensory input from that world.’
Janer more closely inspected the hornet. He hadn’t realized. He prodded it with his finger and it went over on to its back with legs in the air like a pincushion.
‘What killed it?’ he asked.
‘The same thing you have been infected with,’ said the mind.
‘I thought you said these hornets had been altered.’
‘Two different alterations, one of which I predicted to have a low chance of success.’
‘I don’t get it,’ said Janer. ‘How was it infected? It couldn’t have been bitten.’
‘Insects, unlike humans, cannot avoid infection here. The viral spores which only take hold inside a human after a massive infusion — like through a leech bite — can enter insects through their breathing spiracles,’ was the mind’s sarcastic response.
‘I thought the virus didn’t survive for long outside of a body.’
‘It doesn’t. The spores can enter when the insect feeds on something infected. They can even enter when it lands on something infected, or even flies past it. In the case of insects it only takes a few viable spores for the virus to be established.’
‘Why? Why so different from humans?’
‘Obviously we are the more primitive life form,’ said the mind.
‘Oh, you poor thing, you,’ said Janer.
‘Of course,’ said the mind. ‘I meant physically, not intellectually.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Janer. He slid his feet from under the cover and sat on the side of the bunk. He removed the dressing from his hand and looked at the ugly wound in which it seemed a blue ring had been tattooed. He was a Hooper now. He had the mark.
‘What do you want to do with… this lost sensory input?’ he asked, pressing the dressing back into place.
‘Return it,’ said the mind. ‘There is still much to learn about this virus and its effect on hymenoptera physiology.’
Janer reached under his bunk and pulled out his backpack. From this he removed a two-pack of brushed aluminium cylinders. Each cylinder was ten centimetres long and three in diameter. One end was rounded and the other end was a spike. He took one cylinder out of the plastic wrapping, pressed his fingernail into an indentation, and a small door flipped open. He used the plastic wrapping to pick up the dead hornet and drop it inside the cylinder. His years of being indentured, and the two decades thereafter, had enabled him to tolerate the presence of these insects but had not relieved him of his fear of actually touching them. He closed the lid and stood. Then he went out on to the deck.
The signal bell from the scooter comunit was chiming, but Keech ignored it as he waited for the last lights to change to green on the cleanser. Shortly after the chiming ceased, he got a message through the audio input from his aug.