The Skinner

7

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.

‘Message for Sable Keech,’ it said.

‘What now?’ he asked.

‘Link requested from Hive transponder.’

Keech glanced back at the hexagonal box in the scooter’s luggage compartment. He’d almost forgotten about that.

‘Permission for link granted,’ he said.

First came the buzzing, and then the Hive mind came online.

‘Do you have the package?’

Keech replied, ‘I have the package, but I won’t be taking it to Janer just yet.’

The buzzing took on an angry tone. ‘We had an agreement,’ said the Hive mind.

Keech watched the last red light change to green, then detached the cleanser and carefully pushed the tubes back into place.

‘We had an agreement,’ the Hive mind repeated.

‘The agreement is off. I need to return to Coram and make use of the medical facilities there.’

‘You have a problem?’ the mind asked, injecting ersatz concern into its voice.

‘I have a problem,’ Keech said.

‘What kind of problem?’ asked the mind.

‘At a stretch, you could call it a medical one,’ replied Keech

‘Erlin Tazer Three Indomial is with Janer. Perhaps she could help you. I believe she travels nowhere without an extensive collection of medical and pathological research equipment.’

‘So nice of you to be thinking of me,’ said Keech, bracing his hand against the scooter and standing up.

‘Was that sarcasm or irony?’ asked the mind.

‘Probably both,’ said Keech, dropping the cleanser into the back of the scooter.

‘I’m never sure which is which,’ said the mind.

Keech stared at the scooter, trying to decide if he should risk flying to the Dome. His vision was still tunnelling and there were odd squares flicking up in the visual field fed from his aug. A hissing crack interrupted his decision-making process. Automatically he ducked down, only to stoop into a cloud of smoke that had gouted from his own kneecap.

‘You’re not going anywhere, reif!’ someone shouted.

For one long horrible moment Keech could not decide if this was reality or not. The two Batians who came striding out of the dingle at the head of the beach were like so many others he had seen and killed over the years. Then, to his horror he realized he had forgotten seeing these people earlier at the shuttle port. He tried to dispel anxieties about what this failing memory could mean, as he had more exigent concerns: two Batians here — with, no doubt, the other three not far behind.

‘You know, you’ve made our job so very easy,’ spat the man of this pair.

Keech said nothing. He gazed at the woman as she kept her laser carbine centred on him. The man holstered his weapon with a kind of casual contempt. It was the mistake they had always made. They were so very confident in their ability to kill. Weren’t they such good shots? But then it was like fire and ash: fire will not burn something that has already been burned.

‘Who sent you?’ Keech asked, as he had asked many times before.

The man smiled nastily and gave no answer — as before. Keech nodded and drew his pulse-gun from his belt holster.

‘Drop it!’ shouted the woman with the carbine.

Keech raised his weapon and carefully aimed it. Laser shots punched smoking holes through his chest and through his stomach, but did not spoil his aim. He fired once: a black hole appeared in the woman’s forehead, and the back of her skull turned into a blooming cloud behind her. As she staggered back and went over, Keech turned and mounted his scooter. The man just watched this in stunned horror, before thinking to reach again for his own weapon.

‘You forget, I’m already dead,’ said Keech, before slamming his scooter up into the sky.

A wind was blasting the ship along at a good rate of knots, and spray was coming up over the bow. Erlin watched Janer come up on to the deck and gaze about in surprise.

‘Got his sea legs, then,’ said Captain Ron.

Erlin turned and searched for a trace of irony in Ron’s expression, and found none. She returned her attention to Janer as he walked to the rail and tossed something silvery over the side. The silvery object fell in an arc but, before it hit the waves, it corrected and shot off under its own power. Captain Ron grunted in surprise and, when Erlin turned to him, he seemed embarrassed.

‘Message carrier,’ he said, nodding toward the receding object. ‘Used to send ‘em in the war.’

‘What war?’ Erlin asked.

‘Prador,’ explained Ron tersely.

‘Oh.’

Erlin looked away from him as she absorbed that. Ron was nearly as old as Ambel, and it was well to be reminded of this fact. It became too easy to view the likes of Ron and Ambel as relatively normal. Their apparent simplicity was deceptive, as the Old Captains had centuries of experience, and probably had forgotten more than she had learnt in her mere span of two hundred and forty years. She had actually forgotten that most Old Captains fell into an age range in the upper half of a thousand years. Senior seamen came in at the lower half. Herself?… she qualified as a senior, but only that. How easy it was to forget the way things were here. Those of the crew classified as juniors, and whom the likes of Ambel referred to as ‘lads’, were often over a century old. She wondered then how Ambel viewed her. Was she a child to him? Had the anger she had felt at his seeming complacency been seen by him as a childish fit of pique? What — when she found him — would be his reaction to her? Stupid child, she told herself as she watched Janer approach.

‘What message?’ asked Ron.

‘No message,’ said Janer as he climbed up on to the cabin-deck. ‘Just a dead hornet going home.’

‘Told you the fibres clog ‘em,’ said Ron.

‘Apparently so,’ admitted Janer. ‘Where are we going?’

Erlin replied, ‘Captain Drum sighted the Treader heading out for the feeding grounds. We’re going after it.’

‘What feeds there?’

‘Leeches — big ones.’

Janer nodded his acknowledgement and grimaced at the scar on his hand.

Erlin turned to Ron again. ‘Ambel said he came here after the war. In all the time I was with him I never questioned that, but I do now wonder if he was telling the truth.’

‘Couldn’t say,’ he said. ‘I came here a century after it was all over, and didn’t meet him until a century after that.’

‘You came here a century after the war?’ Janer interjected.

Ron glanced at him. ‘I was getting old and the geriatric treatments in the Polity weren’t so good then. Seemed like a good idea at the time.’

Janer glanced at Erlin to see how she was responding to this — she with her opinion of people searching for ‘miracles’. Her expression gave nothing away so he returned his attention to Ron.

‘What did you do in the war?’ Janer asked, parodying himself at the gaucheness of the question, and then wishing he’d kept his mouth shut once he saw Ron’s expression.

‘I was in a unit fighting out of the Cheyne outer systems. War drones and cyber-boosted troopers. We ran sabotage missions into their shipyards and the barracks where they kept their human-blank troopers. It was all a long time ago.’

Janer was fascinated, but he could see that, as far as Ron was concerned, it was not long enough ago. He glanced at Erlin, hoping that she might have something to ask, but Erlin was gazing out to sea with a slightly lost expression on her face.

‘Do you mind saying anything more about it?’ Janer eventually asked.

‘I do mind,’ said Ron, ending the conversation.

Shib stared down at Nolan, and then abruptly holstered his gun. Why hadn’t he reacted faster? And why hadn’t Nolan’s shots brought that bastard down? Just then, Svan, Tors, and Dime came crashing out of the dingle, searching for someone to shoot.

‘You missed him,’ Svan stated.

Shib glared at her and gestured to Nolan.

‘She hit him four times. He simply shot her through the head and climbed on his scooter. He just wouldn’t go down,’ he said.

Svan stared at Tors. He shrugged — and, in reply to that, she shook her head slowly, then walked over to the prostrate Nolan. She stooped and picked up the laser carbine. After inspecting it for a moment, she threw it to Shib, who caught it with a snap of his hand. Svan then gazed around at all of them.

‘I would have thought,’ she said slowly, ‘that the repetition of events over the last seven centuries would have been enough to inform you about Sable Keech. Well, apparently not.’ She studied each of them. ‘Do you know how many Batians have died trying to complete the contract on him? No? Neither do I, but I do know that the total is more than fifty — and very probably for much the same reasons.’ She pointed at the carbine Shib held. ‘That was set on the basic kill level. Keech is a heavy-world reification. He may appear fragile, but you have to remember he has heavy-world bones internally strengthened to take cybermotors.’ She walked over to Shib and pulled a small black box from his belt and held it up.

As if she was lecturing idiots, Svan went on, ‘That’s how we followed him and that is precisely why he’s so dangerous. He was a man once, but that’s something he hasn’t been for a very long time. He’s biomech, he doesn’t feel pain, and you need nothing less than an explosive shell or full-power laser hit to take him down. Now do I have to engrave these facts on your foreheads?’

The reply was silence. Shib felt especially shamed, as the whole tirade had essentially been directed at him and Nolan. He gazed down at the corpse of the woman he had known only for a couple of days. It was the way of things.

‘Now,’ said Svan to Dime, ‘you and Tors inflate the dinghy, and you,’ she stabbed a finger at Shib, ‘bury Nolan where she is. I want nothing lying about for the Warden to pick up on.’

Shib gazed again at the corpse. It was not the Batian custom to bury the dead: when you were dead, that was it, and there was no point in giving respect to a lump of meat. However, in this case, he could see the point. Spatterjay was not a full Polity world, but it was on the edge of the Polity, and as such would be very closely watched by its Warden. There would be SMs out there somewhere, and they could be any shape at all. One of them could even be watching them now. He glanced at Svan as she went back to the edge of the dingle, to where she had dropped her pack. He watched her remove black crabskin armour and begin to don it, and then he went in search of something with which to dig a hole.

He had a real bad feeling about all this.

On the map on the screen, it was called ‘The Little Flint’ and, as is the way with such things, it was precisely as described when Keech was hoping for understatement. There were no sails on this sloping black surface poised less than a metre above the sea, which was fortunate, for had even one been there, he would have been unable to land the scooter. Keech brought the vehicle down with a crash and dismounted even as it slid and caught against a chalky rim of rock. He staggered, fell on his face, and after pulling himself up on to his knees left a wet smear of balm and other less salubrious substances on the glossy stone.

All out of options, and time to pay the ferryman.

Keech surveyed his little island of black stone and thought that there shouldn’t be room here for Frane, Rimsc, and the rest. He ignored their acid observations, got himself back on his feet and staggered to the back of his scooter. Once away from it again, now with the cleanser clutched to him like a valued child, he went down on his knees again, on the stone. If what he did next finished him here, then it seemed a dramatic enough place for him to exit. He pulled open his burned and soaking overalls to expose the four supposedly killing holes through his body. There was also a deep burn across the metal shell on his side, but luckily the two cleansing sockets were undamaged. He plugged the unit in and was totally unsurprised at the row of red lights that greeted him. Of course, now, they were irrelevant. He offered a half-hearted prayer to Anubis Arisen and pulled the lozenge of metal from the chain around his neck. After detaching the chain from the end of the lozenge, he stared for a long moment at this lump of golden metal.

‘Do I believe in miracles?’ he asked the watching crowd, his mind straying back to Erlin’s derisory comments on such things.

The replies were as varied as he could imagine, and he knew they would only be that — what he could imagine — as he still had enough faculties to distinguish hallucination from reality. Now he had to act quickly before he lost the ability to make that distinction. Now he had to act before he lost what remained of his organic brain. He reached down and affixed the lozenge into the recess made for it in the top of the unit. The lozenge clamped down, then immediately grew thin metal tubes from all round its rim, and these tubes mated with tiny sockets in the cleanser.

INITIATE CHANGER NANOFACTORY UNIT, he sent through his aug, then swayed back and watched the tubes. Black balm flooded out of him, and what came back was completely clear. It would not be empty though, definitely not that. He closed his eye, and waited. He could feel nothing as the cleanser pumped millions of microscopic factories around with the embalming fluid in his vascular system. Inside him he imagined them attaching themselves to the walls of his veins like little volcanoes, little volcanoes that in moments would each be spewing out millions of nanomachines, machines that might eventually enable him to live again.

The warning messages were coming up constantly, until he instructed his aug to turn them off. The system that had been monitoring his body was a system for monitoring the stasis of a dead thing. But now the changer factory program was taking over.

The factories were anchoring themselves and doing their work. The Spatterjay virus was in there doing its work as well. He should be in a tank at this moment, being watched over by one of the more sophisticated autodocs — not sitting here on a rock being watched by people he had killed long in the past. He opened his eye and saw that the hieroglyph lights on the cleanser were all flickering from amber to red and to blue. He’d never seen them blue before, and he made a croaking sound that might have been laughter. When he then surveyed his surroundings to see what his audience’s response might be to that, he saw that he was once again alone. He now croaked at the silence, then abruptly turned his head and stared down at his burnt knee. There was a sensation there. No, not possible — not yet. It had to be some sort of ghosting coming across from his organic brain to his aug. The stab of agony that came next, though, was undeniable. He tilted his head back and relished the pain. He knew there would be more of the same as the nano-machines repaired his decayed nervous system. But Keech also knew that, if he survived, he would remember this moment; this pain had been the first thing he had really felt in seven centuries.

The molly carp did three circuits of the bay at high speed, and then squatted in a deep trench where the bay opened to the sea. SM13 put this down to an intestinal complaint, and Sniper suggested that the little drone might like to act as a molly carp suppository. SM13 had then suggested it should go off to finish the whelk census and survey of the carp population. Sniper suggested the carp population might be better reduced by at least one.

‘You can’t do that,’ said Thirteen. ‘You’ll be guilty of killing class-three intelligence and I’ll be culpable.’

Sniper did an ultrasound scan of the inside of the carp, found the creature’s peanut-sized brain, and wondered just who had made that classification. Also, scanning the other contents of the stomach he rested in, he found the carp had already been guilty of the crime he wanted to commit.

‘This one’s been eating the others here,’ he informed Thirteen.

‘That’s the natural order of things. We aren’t allowed to intervene.’

‘Yeah, but how’s the Warden going to know this one hasn’t been eaten?’ Sniper asked.

‘If you probe to the back of its skull you’ll see why.’

Sniper did this and eventually found a micro transponder direct-linked into one of the carp’s main nerve ganglia. He swore yet again, then withdrew his scan to run a diagnostic on himself. Unbelievably, he found that the carp had managed to put dents in his armour. He restrained the urge to put a missile into the carp’s peanut, and wondered if by moving about he could make the creature sick.

‘Sniper… Sniper…’

‘Yes, I hear you.’

‘I’ll have to contact the Warden. He’ll have to know about this.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘I have to. This carp has a transmitter because it’s a prime and part of one of the Warden’s studies. If I don’t tell him, he might get suspicious later on. We don’t want that.’

‘Oh all right, creep, tell him.’

‘There’s no need to be like that. Is our deal still on?’

Sniper contemplated that and looked for an angle. ‘We didn’t actually sort out those percentages. Fifty-fifty, wasn’t it?’ When there was no reply the war drone was about to continue when he felt his antennae twitching and the invasive presence of the Warden at the periphery of his mind so he clammed up. For a moment the presence was blurred, low signal strength, then the Warden flicked to underspace transmission and included Thirteen in a trifold link.

‘So, you cannot even count whelks without getting into trouble,’ said the Warden.

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said Sniper.

‘You, Thirteen, neglected to warn Sniper of how partial molly carp are to large crustaceans. That was remiss of you.’

‘Sorry,’ said Thirteen.

‘Very well. You, submind, will now move on to the next sector to continue your survey. You can get going right now.’

Sniper felt the link with Thirteen break. The little drone shot away to the east, and in seconds was beyond the range of Sniper’s ultrasound scanning.

‘You, however,’ said the Warden, ‘will stay where you are until nature has taken its course. If this carp is in any way damaged by your incompetence I will get to know about it.’

‘I hear and obey,’ said Sniper.

Finally, almost reluctantly, the Warden’s presence withdrew.

‘And molly carp might fly,’ the war drone muttered.

The molly carp, its body making swimming motions and its tentacles groping for a bottom that was fast receding, rose to the surface of the sea. It then rose from that surface, and with nose tilted down, accelerated to the east faster than any of its kind had ever travelled before. Perhaps knowing how little control it had over its situation, it closed its eyes and curled its tentacles into knots. Sniper regretted that he could not use his fusion boosters too, but AG planing would have to do for now. After a hundred kilometres, he dunked the carp in the sea again and scanned its body while its skin rehydrated. The creature’s peristaltic heart arteries were fine and the micro transponder had emitted no signal. Other than this, it only seemed a little dazed. For the next jaunt Sniper took it two hundred kilometres — and substantially faster. Again, the carp seemed fine. When Sniper finally started to reach the limit of the creature’s endurance he was moving it very fast, and was impressed. These carp were tough. Sniper reckoned on them taking a solstan day or so to reach what was laughingly called civilization on Spatterjay.

Another evening was drawing in and Janer wondered at the steady roll and tranquility of this ocean life. He’d said something along those lines to Roach earlier on, and the ragged little man had stared at him as if he was a lunatic. After an uncomfortable silence Roach had finally said, ‘One the Cap’n always comes out with: “It’s like war — long periods of boredom broken by moments of sheer terror.” So I don’t think tranquil’s quite the word.’ And at that, Roach had gone off to trull for more boxies. Now leaning on the rail, Janer glanced to one side as Erlin came to stand with him. Unlike him, she did not wear a thermal suit. He wondered if he would be dispensing with his too when the virus took a firmer hold in his system. He studied her profile for a long moment and felt something like yearning under his breastbone. This woman was so interesting and, perhaps because of that, very attractive to him.

‘Was this how it was before?’ he asked.

She glanced at him before returning her attention to the sea. ‘Most of the time,’ she replied.

Janer looked thoughtful. ‘You know, from what you’ve said and from what I’ve learnt from some of the crew, things haven’t changed much here in a long time.’ He nodded towards Ron. ‘Makes you wonder if they might be the reason for it.’

‘What do you mean?’ Erlin asked.

‘Well, they’re the rulers here in all but name, so perhaps they just don’t want things to change. The intention might not even be conscious.’

‘You could be right,’ Erlin conceded.

‘I think I am,’ said Janer. The two of them now fell into a comfortable silence. Janer felt calm and relaxed. He hardly noticed the ratchettings and clonks of the ship’s mechanisms.

‘You were here for quite a while, weren’t you?’ he asked after a while.

‘Eighty years, give or take. I hardly remember a lot of those years. I guess you don’t when there’s not a lot happening.’

‘What about when you first came here and discovered the virus… the weird set-up here?’ he asked.

Erlin’s expression became troubled and she shot him an assessing look.

‘Some strange things happened then, but it’s been so long that I sometimes wonder if my memory played tricks on me.’ She shuddered as if the cold was now getting through to her.

‘Well, don’t just leave it there. Now you have to tell me,’ said Janer.

She stared at him with her expression suddenly hard. ‘Why should I tell you?’

Janer met her look. ‘Because we’re the same. We’re both coming to that time in our lives when we wonder why we should carry on. You should tell me because you may gain some insight, and because you lose nothing by telling me, but you do gain time.’

Erlin’s hard expression was broken by a smile. ‘You have an unbreakable arrogance, Janer Cord Anders,’ she said.

‘Yes, which is why I’ll live. Now tell me.’

Erlin’s expression became troubled again as she turned to lean on the rail, staring out to sea.

‘I was young when I came here — young, enthusiastic, curious, and sure I was going to do great things with my life.’

‘And you did,’ said Janer.

‘Debatable,’ said Erlin, then after a moment continued, ‘You know how seeing that fight between Domby and Forlam brought home to you what this world is really like?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, my moment of revelation was somewhat more… horrifying than that. I’d been on board the Treader only a few days. I’d been ferried out to it by AGC from the Dome — that was when the runcible was planet-based. At that point I hadn’t even seen one of the sails, as there wasn’t one aboard when I arrived. Anyway, Ambel, Peck and Anne went ashore on a little island to get some fresh meat to attract in another sail. While there, Peck got attacked by a leech and, of course, I was fascinated to discover that Ambel had hammered the leech on the ground until it released the plug of flesh it had taken, and that Peck just screwed the piece of flesh back into place.’

‘That was it?’ Janer asked.

Erlin glanced at him. ‘That just piqued my curiosity, and that’s when I really started to investigate. I took urine samples, recorded statements, and slowly began to piece together what the ecology of this place is all about: the leeches. I tried to take samples from Ambel… but I’ve told you about that.’

‘No blood in him,’ said Janer, ‘just fibres.’

‘Yes, I couldn’t even get a sample by opening his arm with a scalpel. Anyway, on we travelled with a sail hanging on the mast and frog whelks leaping on board, trying to take a chunk out of me, and even though I was truly beginning to understand it all, I didn’t realize what extremes it could all go to.’ She looked at Janer again. ‘Have you heard of the Skinner?’

‘Skinner’s Islands is what I heard. I assumed it was the name of whoever discovered them,’ he said.

‘No. It’s the name of the occupant and his occupation.’

Janer waited for her to continue, and after a long pause she did.

‘We lost the sail again because the stored meat had worms in it. Even they were extreme, and I had to hide in my cabin until they were all removed from the ship. Ambel towed the Treader to a nearby island and he, Peck and Anne went ashore again after meat — rhinoworms mostly live in coastal shallows. Anne and Ambel came back to the ship without Peck, and started to collect harpoons and other weapons… You know, even then most of the crew had a much bluer coloration because they hadn’t eaten Earth food for a while. I should have taken that as a clue.’

‘Keeps the virus in abeyance,’ said Janer.

‘Oh yes,’ said Erlin. ‘But what happens to a human who doesn’t get to eat Earth food at all? You know, ever since ECS drove Hoop and his crew away, there has always been Earth food available here. Hoopers could only grow a few adapted varieties that Hoop himself established here, but they were still enough. If such food had not been available there would have been no humans here when the Polity returned.’

‘They die without it?’ Janer asked.

Erlin gave a humourless laugh and gazed out to where the sun was sinking into a mantel of grey clouds which almost had the appearance of floating mud flats.

‘It would be better if they did. They do not: they just cease to be human — we know this because Hoopers have been stranded and unable to obtain Dome-grown food… Peck, it seems, had been taken by one of these creatures that had once been human — a creature they called the Skinner, because of its unpleasant habits. I, of course, wanted to see it for myself, and demanded that I go ashore with them in their attempt to rescue Peck. I think what finally persuaded them was the surgical laser I carried. I’d managed to remove its safety limiters and then had an effective weapon.’

‘So… you went ashore.’

‘Yes, we went ashore and we saw this Skinner.’ Erlin stared down at the water and proceeded to give a clinical description of the beast. Janer might not have believed her, had he not seen some strange and frightening things in his time. When she had finished her description she paused for a while before going on with, ‘When it came at us it was waving something in its right hand. Ambel put a hole in it with his blunderbuss and Anne and Pland got it with harpoons. When I saw what the creature was holding I joined in the fight. I cut it with my laser, and I tell you that was no easy task — then I crawled away to spew up my guts. The other three used my laser to finish the job on the thing.’

‘What did it have in its hand?’ Janer asked, getting right to the point, even though he thought he might already know the answer.

‘It was Peck’s entire skin.’

‘Jesu! The poor bastard.’

Erlin gazed at him now with a slightly crazy look in her eyes. ‘Yes, he was. When you meet him you’ll have to ask him all about it,’ she said.

‘What,’ said Janer, ‘he survived?’

‘Oh yes. Ambel picked up his skin and we went to find him. When we found him, skinless, writhing in a bowl-shaped rock, I tried to put him out of his misery. Ambel knocked the laser out of my hand, then he, Anne, and Pland proceeded to dress Peck again in his own skin.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Am I? You know what sticks in my mind the most?’

‘What?’

‘How they punched holes through his skin to let the air bubbles escape… so they could squeeze the air out through the punctures. They carried him back to the boat and out to the ship, but he managed to climb on board himself. There, you see, the raw extremes… those are what I saw.’

Janer watched her as she stared into the descending night. Perhaps she was a bit deranged. He did not want to openly call her a liar.