Deadstock

CHAPTER FOURTEEN the outsider

Dai-oo-ika lifted his eyeless head to watch Dolly appear out of the labyrinth of sewer tunnels, a plastic shopping bag in hand. She stepped over the streaming brook of a run-off channel and hoisted herself up onto the tiled platform that was their home, pulling the hanging blanket back into place behind her to offer some illusion of security. As she hunched down beside him and started opening her bag, the old woman paused to frown at her companion.

"Did you get bigger while I was gone, or what? I don't know how you keep looking bigger but you won't eat a damn thing I give you." She rustled through her bag. "Can't say I haven't tried. How about this?" She extracted a banana, all black and soft except for its end. She broke this off and extended it to him. The tentacles that were all he had for a face, ringed in black and silvery bands, writhed and squirmed but did not reach out for the morsel. His hands remained on his knees. "No?" Dolly said. "Christ, are you fussy or don't you ever eat at all?" She crammed the good banana end into her mouth, then peeled the gelatinous rotting section and ate that, too.

Watching her, Dai-oo-ika thought of his child mother again. Nourishing him with her love. Embracing him to her chest. He missed her; a yawning canyon of inarticulate yearning. Yes, that was the hunger he always felt.

Dolly settled in beside him, sitting on her stained mattress. She produced her syringe filled with a metallic sand of microscopic nanomites, almost insects and almost machines. "Time for my medicine again, Junior," she told him. "You be a good boy and watch over me while I rest." She injected a measure of the nanomites into a vein in her wrist, then sighed and hid the syringe back inside her coat. She leaned her head against the tiled wall, closing her eyes. "Don't let those punks steal my stuff while I'm resting," she purred grumpily. "They try to… steal… my mediciii…"

Dai-oo-ika continued to watch her, as she had requested. He watched her eyeballs move back and forth beneath their thin lids as if tossing and turning under a ratty blanket in troubled sleep. He sensed that there was no rest for her species, even at rest. But then, he had his own disturbing dreams, didn't he? Not only of the past-of his lovely, angelic child mother, kissing his belly-but of a future time that would come, or at least was intended to come. He had been having one of these dreams just before Dolly had returned from foraging. Dai-oo-ika had envisioned a burning and mostly flattened city, stretching out black and twisted to all horizons. Below him, thousands of upturned faces and arms lifted in praise. The faces were a mix of human and nonhuman, but all were charred black, blistered by fire and deformed with radiation. Silvery pus ran out of heat-sealed eyes. Yet despite the pain these people must be feeling, they were singing to him, all in one voice of adoration. And he looked down upon them from a great height. For he was huge. Huger than an elephant. Vast. He was their god.

Arms lifted, so many arms lifted as if to embrace him. It would take that many to embrace him. But when he had been small, it had taken only one pair. Having remembered those arms, he could not forget them again. How he longed to be enfolded in them just one more time.

Dai-oo-ika stirred, shifted his growing bulk. The blue tarp he had been wearing as a poncho made a crinkling sound as he removed it, but Dolly was too lost in her dreams to be bothered by the noise. He moved closer to her. And spread his thick arms, to embrace her. His friend. He loved her. She was all he had for a mother now.

Dolly gave a dreamy, muffled moan as her face was pressed against his white belly. He squeezed her tighter, until she not only indented his flesh, but began to slide into it. Where only moments earlier the flesh of his belly had been firm as the flank of a whale, now it was a yielding cloud of cells, a raw pudding of protoplasm that let Dolly's body break its surface, submerge beneath it.

Dai-oo-ika embraced Dolly until there was nothing left to embrace. And when he opened his arms again, she was gone.

He knelt there in their little corner of Punktown, surrounded by her cartons of junk, his arms spread empty. On one level, he felt nourished again at last. But on another level, the embrace had left him feeling only emptier still. His friend had fed him. And his friend had gone.

A confusion overwhelmed him. A sense of helplessness. He did not understand his world. He did not understand what he was, or what he should expect of himself. Had what he'd just done been against his nature, or a fulfilling of it?

Piercing through all this turmoil was one bright, burning ray. It shot out of him as if to burn this whole city to a crisp. Though he could not utter a sound, it was a howl to burst the eardrums-or mind-of every life form in the universe. It was something he had never felt before.

Guilt.

Along with the nanomites in Dolly's system he had absorbed her syringe as well, and the entire swarm now coursed through Dai-oo-ika, racing madly, exploring and mapping this terra incognita and adapting their programming to tickle and soothe a new kind of brain. But their thousands of minuscule claws only itched at it, scratched at it, irritated it instead. A maddening infestation of fleas in the hide of his mind. Gripped in a humming spasm, Dai-oo-ika spread open his wings, their struts like clawed fingers to rake an unknown enemy. Like the wings of a butterfly fresh from its cocoon, drying in the air. But at that moment, Dai-oo-ika wished he had never emerged from his chrysalis of forgetfulness.

Then, abruptly, he cocked his Medusa-faced head, as if a faraway sound had caught his attention. It was as though his silent howl of rage and loss had burned a tunnel through the ether, allowing this distant sound to come to him. It was like a ghostly but familiar voice. It possessed a quality of kinship.

He turned toward it, because he had nowhere else to go. He would follow the voice like a beacon. But rather than lead him up out of the sewers, it led him deeper into their maze instead.

"Want anything from the caf?" Mirelle asked her coworker Suuti.

Mirelle was attractive, he supposed, for a woman of Earth ancestry, but he just couldn't get past those terribly small mouths of theirs. Still, the Choom found her company pleasant. They were cooped up together in this small monitoring office of Fallon Waste Management Systems for their entire shift, and so a harmonious atmosphere was paramount.

"Uhh, how about a mustard?" he said. Hot mustard was a traditional Choom drink that he had coaxed Mirelle into trying, and now she even bought the occasional cup herself. He began reaching for some change.

"No, no." She held up a hand. "It's my treat." Mirelle left the office, and Suuti leaned back in his chair, stretched and groaned. His bored gaze returned to the bank of status displays and security screens ranged above his terminal.

With Mirelle out of the room for twenty minutes or so (he figured she'd work a bathroom break in there), Suuti sat forward and changed one screen to play one of the porn vids he had secreted into the system. He was starting to select a Ron Bistro classic when a loud burst of static on another screen drew his attention.

A pixilated blizzard filled the monitor. Suuti frowned and lowered his gaze to the tool bar at the bottom of the image. One of the sewage conduits not so far from here: Section D-16. Suuti lifted his eyes again to see a vague dark form shifting behind the veil of static. Then, most of the crackling blizzard cleared, and Suuti saw the form more distinctly.

It had been moving slowly across the screen from left to right, but now the hulking figure stopped in mid-frame. A head like the body of a mollusk turned. It faced Suuti, and he knew that despite its absence of eyes, the head was seeing him, too.

Mirelle reentered the monitoring station with a cup of thick, steaming mustard in one hand and a tea for herself in the other. And she almost dropped both cups as she stood transfixed just one step inside the room, staring at Suuti. He was curled like a fetus in the far corner, hugging his knees, rocking and mumbling. "Suuti, are you all right?"

His head lifted from behind his knees, his Choom grin huge. Suuti's eyes were swollen shut, pink and shiny, as if he had been badly beaten. Fat, silvery tears like mercury were beginning to leak out from their sealed lids.

"Outsider," he giggled, like a boy caught doing something naughty while Mirelle had been away. "Outsider."