a sudden I felt so...oh not again—”
“Oh, jeezus, what’s that smell! I—I can see it—”
Elizabeth was having olfactory hallucinations; Neil held onto her while she tried to savagely paw at her face with her long-nailed fingers. Huoy had her fingers on either side of her head, covering the branches of her trigeminal nerves, as she gasped, “Classic migraine. Need...vasoconstrictors...now. Hurry, Scott...make...useful....” right before she collapsed, her left arm and leg twitching spasmodically. Neil fell after that, a heap of limp flesh, then Jimmie, and Reba, and finally Elizabeth, and I remember heading for the storeroom where the unneeded medical supplies were kept, but I don’t remember falling down on the floor, even though that’s where I woke up hours later....
I came to experiencing simultaneous hunger pangs and dizziness; by my watch, it took me a good five minutes to get to my feet and stand upright, for the hallway kept looping and un-looping, now curled tightly, now infinitely straight. And sometimes the voices of the crew were loud, clear, while other times they’d fade into echoing dimness. But I made it to where I’d left them. The others hadn’t had the strength to make it out of the entry dock; they lay next to puddles of their own pulpy vomit, unable to crawl away from the mess and the stink. Reba opened her eyes first, and tried to reach for my leg, but kept missing, as if I had a third, invisible leg that stood next to my left one. Hallucinations, persistent ones, for when I bent down to grasp her cold hand in mine, Reba’s eyes widened and she ducked her head, as if unable to look at me.
Pulling her to her feet, then looping her vomit-encrusted uniform arm around my shoulder, I led her to the supply room, where I lay her down on a plastiform case, and began pawing through the color-coded boxes, looking for codeine, steroids, vasoconstrictors, even plain old aspirin, anything to ease her pain. Reba kept moaning, and her entire body shook with fine tremors, as I began to look for some pneumatic syringes to inject the codeine I’d just found.
“Scotty...so sick...so siiick—”
“Not in here, okay?” I asked weakly, as the lights haloed around the box I was looking in (damn those multipurpose storage containers and their hard-to-differentiate colors!), creating rings of rainbows around the pastel plastic. Reba slumped forward, feet first, until she almost slid off the plastiform case onto the floor, making gagging sounds deep in her throat. I caught her by the armpits before she landed on the floor, and dragged her up into a sitting position again. Tearing off her uniform sleeve at the shoulder, I fed the codeine insert into the syringe, and worked the handle of the syringe against her arm.
It took another five minutes, but Reba was finally able to sit up unassisted, and within ten minutes, I was able to walk her down the curving hallway, codeine inserts and pneumosyringe in hand, to where the others lay incapacitated....
Day 168:
It’s been a long time—
Just like before, the last long blackout. Thinking hurts so much now—bombs going off in my head. But I have to write. Helps me focus. Helps me—
Day 169:
Write about emotions. I can do that at least. Emotions. Write about the last days before the blackout. I can remember parts of those days, dimly glowing patterns of a campfire, like I remember instincts, like the way your eye holds the after-image of a campfire.
I remember the woods. No, further back. I remember loneliness, wishing, crying out for someone, anyone. Huoy. Jimmie. Reba!
Our lab held a collection of cobbled together genetic engineering equipment, from those days so long ago when Reba was trying so hard to find out what was hurting us. I began the tests again in those days of lucidity, searching madly for something, anything that would kill off the virus. Something that would stop the pain, stop the blackouts, anything. What happened next? The transition is hard to recall, like in a dream. You’re walking down the street one night in a dream when suddenly you realize the street is a river. It was like that. The next I recall, I was engaged in some project to create my own companion.
Somehow I was going to try and alter the chromosomes of my own tissue, changing my XY chromosomes, but I didn’t really know how. Could I split the chromosome into its autosomes and duplicate just the x-half? I didn’t know how.
In this dream of mine I thought, no, knew that I only had to get other chromosome samples. Would it matter that they weren’t human? Still hard to think, I’m not sure. Well, Jimmie and Reba had killed off the lab animals, so I had nothing with which to test out my theory. Catching a ’lope was beyond me; I never knew when a blackout would overtake me. But if I could somehow manage to get a hold of a sample of crusher flesh, just a tiny piece...
It was pure madness on my part to think that I could saunter up to a crusher and casually slice off a sample of living tissue; but living day after day with an A-bomb going off and off again in one’s skull doesn’t make for a healthy state of mind, or rational, coherent thinking. Hell, maybe I was trying to impress the ’lopes, show them who was the superior specimen on this planet. But I didn’t really need them, I’d make my own society...all I clearly remember is that the sun was looking like a moldy hard-boiled egg in the sky, all soft and mossy-green and luminescent, as the scummy pond waters scintillated underfoot, divided into sparkling waves by the limp-vines, and the crusher wasn’t all that big or awful-looking, why its horns were just tiny needles—
The sharp splash of something fast-thrown and heavy hitting the water brought me back to a semblance of painful reality. I’d waded out into the middle of the pond, up to my armpits, with my extended toes barely touching the muddy bottom—and there was a crusher no more than a foot away from me, head down, twin horns aimed for my skinny, pale-skinned chest, only when the second splash occurred, the crusher turned its head away from me, to stare at the ripples in the murky water.
Before the third splash, I heard a keening mewl, one I’d never heard a ’lope utter before, with the sound coming from behind me. I turned my head and upper body to look in that direction...and saw Penti, standing there on the limp-vines, making a gesture I’d seen before, in a slightly different social context:
Get over here, or near as dammit...
I went, dog-paddling through the turgid water, until her brown-toed feet were within arm’s reach, while she kept throwing stones into the water, until the crusher forgot about me and glided over to the opposite side of the pond, ripping up great mouthfuls of limp-vines with thunderous churnings of water.
Pulling myself weakly through the mud, I crawled to Penti’s feet. Without thinking, I wrapped my right arm around her ankles and slumped into the mud.
Grunting, I got to my feet and began shambling. I walked aimlessly, without thought, like a masterless puppet. The crazed notion of remaking the human race for my own benefit was gone. I don’t know how long I went, before my consciousness raised itself again, and I found myself on the ship. I looked around myself to get my bearings. Behind me stood Penti, in the hatch none of her kind had breached before, even when left open in invitation. I turned away, and she followed.
Penti let out a yelp when a dangling handgrip smacked her in the head (I avoided them almost unconsciously), but remained silent as I led her on a tour of the ship, jabbering all the while. I don’t recall what I said, and I rarely looked back to see if she still followed.
I do remember a feeling of foolish futility registering in my aching brain. Why was I talking to this animal, this alien who had no way of understanding my words? I stopped talking. And when I turned around, Penti-Lope-Lope had gone.
Day 171:
Yesterday I kept my consciousness, but I didn’t write. I didn’t think, I didn’t analyze, I didn’t plan. I simply was—a conscious was, like in battle or stress, where you simply do what you need to and you don’t know what you’re doing or know what you’re feeling. But you make no choices. But today I need to work; I must write while I can.
Yeah, I left off after the first attack, just about two weeks after we started eating the native food. The remembrance hurts. Oh, it hurts! Reba! As I think of the past, my head begins to ache again, like before. Wait a minute....