A piece of transparent plastic tarp had been taped over the hole broken in Talina Perez’s living room wall. Once a couch had rested in the middle of the floor; after a raging quetzal had batted it through the wall, the couch’s splintered remains had been hauled off. But not before one of the women had salvaged the upholstery for its fabric.
Nothing was wasted on Donovan. No telling if there’d ever be another ship from Solar System. And the textile industry in Port Authority remained in its infancy.
When she had awakened that morning, Talina had splurged, brewed a cup from her stash of coffee. Doing so was a reckless indulgence, given that she only had a few packets left. So far no one had found an equivalent to caffeine on Donovan.
“Please, by all the powers of the universe, let those coffee trees survive and flourish,” she said, lifting her cup in a toast to the heavens. Then she savored the last, wonderful, rich swallow.
Setting her cup in the sink, she took another glance at the damage to the side of her dome. A reminder that no place on Donovan could ever be considered safe.
The quetzal had sneaked in past the shuttle field gate—apparently rode across town atop a shipping container—and managed to get inside her house undetected. Then it had taken Cap prisoner, used him as a shield in its attempt to kill her.
The plastic flapped back and forth in time to the breeze outside. A sort of reminder of futility.
The quetzal inside her coiled and tightened around her stomach.
“Yes, you piece of shit. That was your brother, lover, or whatever.” She still wasn’t sure which, but the quetzal that had invaded her house had come strictly for revenge. The only logical conclusion was that it had loved the one that now resided in Talina’s gut.
“Close.”
“Yeah, it came close, all right. But I killed it. Just like I killed you.”
She shook her head, grabbed her jacket, and flipped it across her shoulders before she slung her rifle.
Stepping out the door, Talina looked up and down the street. She lived in the residential section. When Port Authority was originally laid out, the land had been cleared and surveyed. Polymer-fiber domes were then placed and inflated in nice orderly rows. Kitchen modules and walls were erected inside, and the whole thing sprayed with a catalyst that hardened into a shell. Quick and easy housing. The hacks at the time had called them “instant igloos.”
Originally, according to plan, they’d been laid out in a perfect Cartesian grid. What Talina looked upon that morning as she stepped out into the street still echoed that original plan, but additions, sheds, ramadas, and small houses built of local stone and wood had created a jumbled clutter between and around the domiciles.
Call it a metaphor: The Corporation had arrived all tidy, ordered, and set in ranks. Then Donovan mucked it all up into a chaotic, but utilitarian, functionality.
Talina sighed, the coffee buzzing her brain.
She set off down the avenue, possessed as she was with a sense of weary frustration. How did a woman get her life back when an alien was lurking inside her? She could feel the beast, as if it were plucking emotional strings that sent vibrations of irritation through her.
She passed the education building where the children were locked away with their lessons. In addition to basic science, math, reading, history, social science, mining, mineralogy, agricultural science, and genetics, they were taught survival skills. How to cope with Donovan, recognize its plant and animal threats, and purify water of the heavy metals found in just about everything but rainwater.
The kids spent ten hours a day, six days a week, having their heads crammed full. On Donovan, only the smart survived.
Talina waved to Inga Lock as she approached the town’s large-domed tavern. Inga was an imposing woman in every aspect: big-boned, with silver-blonde hair. Tall and busty. For whatever reason, she was sitting on the bench out front, thick arms crossed, enjoying the sunshine.
The large dome behind her hid the tavern’s actual size. Mining colony, right? It had been dug out underground to accommodate more patrons.
“Hey, Tal,” Inga called. “I’m tapping a new brew tonight. A heavy, thick, rich stout. You come try one.”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
The tavern’s official name was The Bloody Drink—a moniker that derived from Port Authority’s early, more sanguine days. Most folks called it Inga’s. Behind it stood the two-story, stone-and-log building where Inga kept her brewery, distillery, and winery. The second floor had been partitioned into rooms she mostly rented out to Wild Ones who traveled into Port Authority to sell their harvest, hides, and the fruits of their various mining and prospecting ventures.
Just past Inga’s came the assay office, the various small workshops, spare parts warehouse, the weapons factory, sawyer’s, the hospital, and finally the admin dome where it backed onto the shuttle field fence on the east side.
Talina opened the door to the hospital and started down the hall. Donovan had one physician: Raya Turnienko, a forty-five-year-old Siberian woman with almond eyes, straight black hair, and a no-nonsense disposition.
As the population had dwindled, the back of the fifty-bed hospital had been converted into labs. The domain where the chemist Lee Cheng and his assistant Mgumbe, the exobotanist Hiro Iji, and the exozoologist Step Allenovich conducted constant research on Donovan’s plants, animals, and microbial life.
If survival on Donovan depended upon a single person, it was Lee Cheng. In the years before Turalon finally popped into orbit, Cheng had been called upon more than once to save the day and the colony.
Cheng had somehow managed to synthesize everything from aspirin, antibiotics, psychotropic pharmaceuticals, anesthetics, salves, antivenoms, poisons, glues, and, well, just about everything under Capella’s shining rays that humans found themselves out of and had to try and manufacture.
Nor were Cheng’s days of weary toil over. Odds were good that Turalon would not make it back to Solar System. And even if she did, it would be at least another five years before The Corporation could possibly outfit and send a return vessel.
Donovan was on its own, abandoned. What both Port Authority and Supervisor Aguila had on hand would have to last them. What they didn’t, they would have to try and fabricate. Like rubber. That was Cheng’s latest challenge.
Talina made her way to Turnienko’s office. Found it empty, and proceeded down the hall. Four of the remaining twenty hospital beds held patients: three were injuries; one was a guy named Mullony who was recovering from a fair fight stabbing at The Jewel.
“Tal?” Raya called from a doorway down the hall. “Down here. Cheng and I were just going over notes.”
Talina averted her eyes as she passed the room where Cap had been murdered—as if, by not looking, she could somehow ignore that pain.
In the conference room, Cheng, Mgumbe, and Raya had already taken seats at the battered table. Talina’s old friend, Hiro Iji, sat beside Cheng, eyes closed as he scanned something on his implants.
Only two of the three light panels still worked, and of those, one was flickering on its last legs. Apparently, like so many of Port Authority’s failing parts, either replacement light panels hadn’t been included in Turalon’s cargo, or the parts The Corporation had sent didn’t fit, were the wrong model, or were somehow incompatible.
A holo projection glowed in the air above the table, displaying lines of data as well as a hovering three-dimensional molecule of some sort. The thing reminded Talina of a short, thick, three-strand section of rope.
“Have a seat,” Turnienko told her.
Talina slipped into the chair, giving Mgumbe a nod and a smile. “How have you been?”
“Up to my ears in emergencies,” the big African told her, flashing a tired smile. “You?”
“About the same.”
Turnienko settled into the seat next to Talina and pointed at the molecule. “There’s your beast.”
“That’s a quetzal genetic molecule,” Cheng added as he fingered his chin and stared at it. “One taken from your blood. Deconstructed and catalogued. Fascinating, actually. We’d never have taken the time to unravel—”
“How do we get rid of it?” Talina interrupted what she knew was going to be a long and complex lecture on a quetzal’s unique biochemistry that she’d never have a prayer of understanding.
Into the sudden silence, she added, “I want every trace of the quetzal gone. All of it. It’s messing with my head, Lee. Fooling with my body. Granted, I’m stronger, more agile, and I can see and hear like never before, but this thing’s talking to me. Screwing with my dreams. It did its best to kill me that night its partner got into my house.”
She felt the beast smugly rearrange itself against her backbone, as if proud.
Cheng turned his dark eyes her way. “Tal, we’re working on it. To be honest, we haven’t a clue. Hell, we can’t even explain how these molecules have managed to establish themselves in your system. Normally, foreign molecules trigger an immune response, T cells are activated. Antibodies lock on, triggering the body’s defenses. Your white blood cell count isn’t even elevated. We can’t find any trace of a titer in your blood that would relate to the quetzal molecules.”
Turnienko added, “Either they somehow manage to suppress an immune response, or they are recognized as either friendly or neutral.”
“It sure as hell is not friendly. It tried to paralyze me when I was fighting with its mate.” Talina narrowed an eye, remembering the incredible stab of pain her quetzal had sent through her body.
A sudden hot flash left her uncomfortable, and she could feel the quetzal’s hand in it, as if the beast were reminding her of its presence.
Cheng nodded toward the molecule. “It is a really a fascinating molecule. The more we study it, the more amazing we discover it to be.”
On the screen the three stands of the rope began to unwind and fray, each strand separating into fibers.
Cheng said, “Think of it as an analog to our DNA. It’s the coding molecule for Donovanian higher life. Our DNA resolves into two strands, the Donovanian equivalent into three. We currently hypothesize that as happened on Earth, life here began in the seas. In Donovan’s unique evolutionary history, some ancient adaptation selected for an ancestral morphology that consisted of three conjoined organisms. The adaptation was so successful that, like the vertebrates on Earth, they proliferated into the dominant phylum. Trilateral symmetry—that is, having three sides—isn’t a handicap in a liquid environment. But when life moved on land, some lucky adaptation—perhaps a parallel to methylation in our own DNA—stifled ontological development of one of the TriNA strands. Allowed the development of what we perceive of as bilateral symmetry, which was the key to land adaptation and subsequent species radiation.”
Iji spoke for the first time. “Though it doesn’t look like it, the plants are still trilateral. That’s why the branches are triangular. So are some of the stems. When we look closely at the physiology of the trees, they may have round trunks, but cross-section them, and you can see the three divisions in both the cellular structure and circulatory systems.”
Mgumbe then said, “All of which makes our classification of ‘plant’ and ‘animal’ on Donovan suspect. Working out the cladistics for speciation is going to be fascinating and complex.”
Iji shook a finger. “If ‘speciation’ even exists as we think of it in the Terrestrial sense.”
“That’s all nice and interesting, but what does it have to do with me?” Talina leaned forward.
“We think the quetzal you killed that day in the canyon purposely infected you.” Raya crossed her arms. “Given the subsequent actions of its mate, it wanted to mark you for later revenge. Easy to track. Have you dripping scent, if you will.”
At the hesitation in Cheng’s eyes, she asked, “But?”
He shrugged. “It could have had other motives as well. We’re just not sure.”
“Lee, if it has other motives, I don’t want to find out what they are. Get it the hell out of me.”
“We’re not sure how to rid your system of the quetzal TriNA, if we can call it that. We could filter some of it out of your blood, but we can’t figure out how to flush it out of your tissues. And Talina, it is changing your body, slowly and surely. Vision, hearing, taste, musculature, they’re incorporating Donovanian cells. But it’s being done selectively. Why just those organs? Why not your hair, fingernails, skin?”
Turnienko added, “It’s as if there’s a logic behind what’s being enhanced. My tests show no modification of your liver, spleen, or kidneys. What’s going on in your brain? That, too, is targeted to the sensory areas of the brain, the language and imaging centers, but not the neocortex, the frontal lobes, any of the reasoning or memory centers.”
“In short,” Mgumbe added, “You’re not going insane. Nor is it fooling with the personality centers. It’s as if it wants to leave you, you.”
“Why? It wanted me dead.”
Three shrugs around the table were hardly encouraging.
“Tal,” Cheng said wearily, “At this moment, there’s nothing any of us can do to rid you of your parasite.”
Iji added. “We’re off the maps here. Tal, since you were infected with this thing, our knowledge of quetzals and their capabilities has grown exponentially. We now know that the beasts communicate, and how they do it. Even have a handle on how they think. Why this particular one chose you, who knows?”
“It wanted me dead,” she repeated doggedly.
“But you say it talks to you?” Turnienko asked.
“Single words, almost like an impulse. Like a whisper in my mind. Or I’ll have a flash of intuition. A ‘don’t go that way,’ or maybe a ‘danger is lurking there’ feeling. Sort of like a sixth sense. It’s not like we’re discussing the philosophical meaning of the multiverse. Mostly it reacts to emotions.”
“Somatic reactions rather than cerebral,” Cheng noted, eyes going vacant as he made some sort of notation in one of his implants. “Makes sense. Any kind of limbic response releases adrenaline, lipids, and other compounds into the blood. Nerves are aroused. Those are old vertebrate responses, and we now know that quetzals communicate by means of chemistry as well as visual displays.”
“Isn’t this a lot to be hanging on one little molecule?” Talina asked.
“A molecule with a lot more storage space for information than you’ll find in your own DNA,” Cheng countered. “Remember, DNA codes for all of you, how to construct, maintain, and run your body, not to mention a host of innate behaviors. It took quantum computers to finally sort it all out, and years of research. There’s no telling what’s in that lump of quetzal TriNA. Which is a misnomer since it may be an acid, but it’s not nucleic. Donovanian cells don’t have a nucleus.”
“I want it out,” Talina insisted. “I want to be me again.”
Cheng rubbed his eyes. “Mgumbe, Iji, Raya, and I are doing the best we can. Personally, I’d love to turn you into my very own fascinating research project. But I’ve got the whole damned colony asking me to perform miracles. Love and respect you as I do, your case is way down the list. Right now, rubber is at the top.”
She read the exhaustion in his eyes. Nodded. “Yeah, Cheng, I know. I’m sorry.”
She’d seen him before when she asked for a cure. Had seen the look in his eyes when he hadn’t been able to formulate or manufacture antibiotics in time to save Mitch’s life. Or medicines for the kids who succumbed to simple diseases. Cheng had suffered with them, empathetic, working without sleep until he finally unlocked enough secrets from Donovanian plant chemistry to synthesize a suitable replacement for something as simple as megacillin.
“Sorry, Lee.” She leaned back and closed her eyes, aware of the beast huddled so smugly inside her.
“You can control it, right?” Mgumbe asked. “Didn’t I read somewhere in your report that you just imagine yourself drowning, and the creature desists?”
“It panics,” she told him. “Almost goes catatonic. Quetzals are totally terrified of drowning.”
“I know how hard it is for you to hear this, Tal.” Raya had on her “doctor” face—the one she adopted when she was telling someone they were dying. “But for the time being, you’re stuck with your beast. I’m sorry, but you’re our guinea pig, our test case. So we want to monitor you every couple of days. If it happened to you, it will happen to someone else.”
“If it hasn’t already among the Wild Ones,” Iji retorted, a frown on his broad forehead.
“Great.” Talina scowled down at her gut. “Just what I wanted to be: a monument to science.”
“Beats being a partially digested corpse in a grave,” Turnienko shot back. “Which is what you’d have been if you hadn’t killed that creature whose remains are inside you.”