Beyond the Ice Limit

48

MY DRINKING DAYS are past,” said McFarlane, in answer to Gideon’s invitation. It was one AM and McFarlane, in his usual brusque way, had invited himself into Gideon’s cabin to discuss the seismic results, which Gideon had recently downloaded into his laptop.

The results couldn’t have been worse—and were a bad shock to Gideon. McFarlane, Cassandra that he was, had been correct in his pessimistic speculation. Like the icebergs that surrounded them, almost ninety percent of the creature was below the seabed.

He heard a brief commotion in the hall; voices raised in argument. The entire ship was awake, and a few were already becoming strung out on amphetamines. Gideon felt the bulge in his own shirt pocket: a bottle of the pills sick bay had been liberally passing out. He hadn’t taken any, and didn’t intend to unless it became absolutely necessary. The truth was, he had no desire to sleep—and probably couldn’t have even if he wanted to.

The sweep of the ship, now being led personally by Garza, was still under way, although half the search parties had been pulled off to help with repairs. Not a single worm had been found. But in the interim, someone had sabotaged the CT scanner—destroyed it completely. The same had happened to the X-ray machine. Clearly, more people had been parasitized and were apparently doing the bidding of the mother creature.

But how was the thing giving instructions? There was no way for it to communicate to the worms in the brains of the infected—was there? The very low-frequency sound it emitted was fully damped down before reaching the ship. How did it even know what to do? Sabotaging the CT and X-ray machines required not only intelligence but a sophisticated understanding of human technology. How was it possible?

And this thought was what led to a sudden revelation. It was a crazy, perhaps even insane idea. But it was the only thing that fit all the facts and explained everything—even the mysterious kill me plea.

Gideon would have to think hard about voicing his idea, because it seemed so outlandish. He glanced at the lean, weathered figure of McFarlane, bent over the laptop. He had rapidly come to respect, and in some ways depend on, the man’s judgment, even if the way he expressed himself was frequently offensive. He would test his idea on McFarlane first.

“Look at this,” McFarlane said. “That cluster, there.” He turned the laptop screen toward Gideon, which displayed a picture of the area underground, surrounding the creature. “I’ve been using software to enhance it.”

Gideon saw what looked like a grouping of ovoid objects, connected by thick cables.

“It’s deep—over a thousand feet below the seafloor. You know what I think? I think those are developing seeds. Or eggs.”

Gideon stared.

“Look closely at the structure. There’s a hard shell around them, forming a covering. And then a liquid medium surrounds a round nucleus, a sort of yolk-like suspension.”

“How large are these? What’s the scale?”

McFarlane did some typing and a scale bar appeared. “Each one is about three feet in diameter along the long axis, two feet along the shorter axis. The nucleus inside is about nine inches by six.”

“The size and shape of a human brain.”

A long silence. He found McFarlane looking at him curiously.

“Note,” said Gideon, “that there appear to be six of them.”

“Noted. What are you getting at?” McFarlane asked.

“We’ve lost two people to the creature: Lispenard and Frayne. We also found three headless corpses in and around the wreck of the Rolvaag.”

Gideon saw the light of dawning understanding in McFarlane’s eyes. “Go on,” the meteorite hunter said quietly.

“Note also that Lispenard videoed what appeared to be a brain-like organ in the trunk of the creature. But that brain is much larger: about fifteen inches in diameter.”

A long silence. “And?”

“I have a theory.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“The Baobab is a parasite, of course. But it’s parasitism of a kind unknown on earth. It takes the brains of other organisms. Why? Two reasons. First, because it has none of its own. So it parasitizes the brain of another organism, which provides it with the intelligence it requires.”

McFarlane listened intently.

“Now for the second reason. Dr. Brambell said Alex Lispenard’s brain was missing when the thing voided the remains of her DSV. Not just missing, but carefully removed. The same thing may well have happened to Frayne before his DSV was excreted. And as I said, we found three corpses from the Rolvaag that were all missing their heads. But the Rolvaag is a damned huge wreck. Who’s to say there wasn’t a fourth headless body somewhere inside that we haven’t seen?”

“Two plus three plus one,” said McFarlane.

“Precisely. That cluster of six objects, a thousand feet below the seabed, are developing into seeds. But I think that, at their core, they contain human brains. Six new creatures, each with its own intelligent brain. The fifteen-inch brain inside the trunk of the creature, on the other hand, is the one it brought with it—from outside the solar system.”

“An alien brain.”

“Exactly. Kill me, kill me. That was the alien brain speaking directly to us—that was not the Baobab speaking. The alien brain wants to die, desperately. Can you image what it would be like, to have your brain removed and incorporated into another life-form, used as a slaved processor or computer? And kept alive against its will—for millions of years? Kept nourished, functioning…and sane. Think about the four things Prothero has so far translated from blue whale speech: Kill me. Long time. Far away. And, perhaps most telling of all: net. It explains the final words of both Alex and Frayne—words that suggest a sudden, surprising meeting of some kind. A meeting between the human brain and…the alien brain. And it explains how the worms work. All they do is put a goal into their human’s brain. A simple little goal. The parasitized human brain does all the complex thinking of how to achieve that goal—either to protect the mother plant, or to steal a DSV and drive down to unite with it. To make another egg. Just like the toxo infection in a mouse brain Glinn described. Makes the mouse go to the cat: to be eaten. The parasite in the mouse isn’t giving it detailed instructions; it just causes the mouse to lose its fear of cats.”

He paused, realizing how ridiculous it all sounded.

McFarlane didn’t respond right away. He sat back in the chair, crossed his legs, and closed his eyes. For a long moment he made no movement. And then he said, without opening his eyes: “Think of the existential horror of it. A brain with no body, no life, no interactions, no sensory input. Just endless existence. No wonder it wants to die. And no wonder, as Prothero reported, the communication ended so abruptly, both times: the Baobab silenced the alien brain, kept it from continuing the conversation.”

Gideon let that thought sink in. If McFarlane was right, that meant Alex, effectively, was still alive: her memories, her personality, everything she was. But trapped, disembodied, in the creature, to be used as a vehicle for its procreation. The horror of it was almost beyond imagining.

He opened his eyes.

“Are you all right?” McFarlane asked.

“No. Because you know the biggest irony of all? That thing had harvested four brains from the Rolvaag, probably when it first sank—yet it remained quiescent. Now it has two more—and it’s suddenly growing active. I think by coming down here, we provided it with just enough additional brains for it to move to the next stage of development. Instead of killing it, we’ve helped it to propagate.”

“Maybe so.” McFarlane waved his hand. “But you know what? I think you’ve just figured out how to kill it. By destroying all seven of those brains.”