FSF, January-February 2010 (8 page)

He had hatched a number of subcutaneous eggs, and some of the babies were affectionate before they flew or ran or slithered off. Others wanted to eat their way out of him, and he wasn't as sanguine about that. In those cases, he told Mom, and she took him to the Parasite Removal Clinic.

Now he tried to marshal his magical power, which he used primarily for lock charms to keep Spike out of his room (most of them snapped open when she focused on them) and invisible charms to keep anyone from noticing him when he wanted to sneak out of the house or get a head start. He built power between his hands, a faint blue ball of force, spinning as he added everything he could muster to it. “Evict,” he said to it, and pressed it against the warm, sleek-furred lump on his back.

The thing squalled, but didn't release its hold on his back. Its feet scrabbled, its claws digging deeper into his flesh.

He muffled his own cries in his pillow as the pain intensified. They both lay quiet, the thing unmoving, Navin waiting until the pain dropped to a bearable level.

He mustered power a second time. The ball was smaller and dimmer this time, though he worked longer to call it. This time when he lifted it to his lips, he whispered, “Sleep it."

When he pressed it to the animal, the animal squirmed once—pain!—and lay still. It relaxed under his hand, and its almost unheard breathing slowed. Navin waited, then tried to pull the animal off him. The claws came loose of his flesh, but the mouth remained fixed. Fused with his spine, his mother had said. Could he slice it off? No, or Mom would have said. He tugged until the pain was so intense all his muscles locked and wouldn't allow him to move.

He called once more for magic. Only flickers came. He closed his eyes and reached into the deepest well of himself, asking for everything he had, and finally the glow strengthened. When he had gathered every shred of power he could find, he whispered, “Change us into something nicer.” He pressed the power against the sleeping parasite, now part of him. The animal did not struggle against this enchantment; he felt it spread from the animal into himself, and it felt comforting and good.

Navin slept for a while, then woke to strange pressures in his head, hands, legs, spine. In the dim light of the fairy repellent, he saw that his skin had changed: it was faintly furred, striped with shadows. His upper teeth pressed against his lower lip in a new way. He touched a tooth, and his finger came away bloody—he hadn't felt the cut! And what was with his fingers? Instead of fingernails, he had hard points on the ends of his fingers. He clenched his fingers and claws sprang from sheaths.

His body below the waist had changed completely. He had haunches now, strange braidings of muscles under heavier fur, and his feet had elongated, heels high off the ground, toes longer, clawed now. His knees bent wrong. He took a couple steps, and aside from a tendency to fall forward, he managed.

Everything smelled loudly. He was way aware of the seasoning carcasses of Spike's and Dad's kills, the blood-soaked ground below them, the many scavengers thronged there to take advantage of the feast; his mother and father smelled of campfire smoke, roasted meat, and sex in their double sleeping bag in the next tent. Navin smelled the camping gear, the different woods still smoldering under a layer of ash in the campfire, the scents of trees, night-blooming carnivorous flowers, the massed and active life in the forest all around him, one thing preying on another.

He heard rustles in the underbrush, the beat of many different sizes of wings, the squeaks and cries of mating or hunting, and he almost knew what each creature was just by the sound.

I know
, whispered something inside him.
I know which ones are good to eat. The best one is—

That smell from Spike's tent. The sour sister scent, a blend of other creatures’ blood, her own sweat, the girl, her youth, and her boyfriend, curled with her, also tasty, tender, sour and sweet. His mouth watered thinking about their muscles and blood and organs.

He blinked, trying to steer his thoughts away. He glanced around his tent, found his pack, with its old games. It was hard to work the zippers with his new claws, but he taught himself. Should he leave the games behind? No. He could always toss them later. He snuck out of the tent, much more quietly than he'd been able to manage before, and ghosted through the camp, taking two of Spike's best knives, some smoked meat his mother had prepared (though it smelled rancid and greasy to him now), and one of his dad's firestarters. Would he need clothes? His fur wasn't very long, but he wasn't cold. It was spring. He didn't know who he was becoming or where he'd be by winter. He found a microfleece blanket and shoved it into his pack.

He told himself to run before anyone else woke up, but he couldn't resist parting the tentflap and peering in at Spike and her boyfriend. They were both speckled with the musty-scented blood of their kills, and Spike's fingernails were caked with it. Spike and the boy smelled almost too old to Navin's new senses, not as succulent and inviting as younger kids would smell, yet better than anything else in camp. He stared down at his sister's hands that had hurt him so often, and thought how incapacitated she would be if he ate just one of them. He imagined the little bones crunching between his molars, and saliva dripped from his mouth.

Spike stirred. Her eyes opened. She stared straight at him.

She was unarmed, tangled with her boyfriend, naked, and she smelled tastier than anything else within a mile. He took an involuntary step toward her.

Her hand darted out, came up with a gun. Of course, she wouldn't sleep without a weapon near, especially while she was on a hunt. “Navin?” she said. Her idiot boyfriend finally woke at the word and turned to stare up at him.

Navin licked his lips—his new tongue was longer than the old one, and seemed able to work around his new teeth without cutting itself—and stared at his sister. Bite her, let her shoot him, what?

Not let her shoot him. He'd sat still for too much of that.

His stomach growled. She'd shoot him if he went for her. Anyway, he didn't want to be what she was, a hunter. Did he?

Claws, sharp teeth, drooling at the thought of fresh meat. He didn't really have much choice. He turned away from Spike and dropped the tent flap, and then, before she could rise, he ran into the forest, his feet quiet, his breathing smooth. He could see well enough to avoid branches, traps, the snares of those who hunted with their own body parts and those who had come here from the city. He climbed a loquat tree, displacing a hive of hornet fairies and three nests of meat-eating crows, and made a place for himself as high up as there were branches to hold him.

From here he could see stars. Even if we can't eat Spike, he thought, we'll be able to find enough to eat, won't we?

One of his hands darted out, returned with a small naked baby tree gnome. Before he knew what had happened, it was in his mouth, and oh, it tasted delicious!

Sure
, thought his new other half.
We can find what we need. We can find what we want, but you have to let us get it
. An image of Spike, looking plump and tender and helpless, flashed through his mind. What happened to my niceness spell? Navin wondered.

Without that curst spell you hobbled us with, we could have had the fingers off that tricksy sister before she woke, and the toes off her boyfriend, too. That spell worries us.

His hand snatched two more baby tree gnomes from the nearby nest. So small and rounded, soft-skinned and squirmy. They smelled like ambrosia.

Babies, he thought. Babies had never hurt him.

They squalled until he bit their heads off.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Charles Oberndorf is the author of three novels:
Sheltered Lives, Testing,
and
Foragers,
and he is working on two more. He teaches at the University School in Cleveland, where he has taught seventh graders for more than twenty-five years. His new story, like his last ("Another Life” in our Oct./Nov. 2009 issue), is set in the far future, but unlike the last one, this tale would get a PG-13 rating if it were a movie.

Once there had been a thousand worlds. Ten million remaining flesh and blood souls: all this humanity divided amongst spheres, wheels, and cylinders, all these worlds orbiting the path Mars once followed.

And there were the Minds, that silver-yellow halo circling the sun where Earth once flew its steady course. The Minds had converted the rest of the solar system to their own purposes, and nothing else remained but possibility. One day we might overwhelm the Minds and limit their omnipresence. One day we might build starships and seek other worlds where humanity might start over.

Now a hundred worlds orbit the path Mars once followed, at most one million remaining flesh and blood souls. We live the Old Age of mankind. Today's entropic sadness is to be newborn, or ten, or twenty, to be full of youth and to not feel old at all.

—Magnus Esner

When I was an adolescent, Magnus Esner was my favorite writer. You had to wait a year, a whole 687 days, for a new novel to come out, and you had to join a queue to read it. In those days, a book by Esner could only handle a hundred readers at a time. I still remember when it came my turn to read
Suicide Missions
, the anticipation I felt while putting the gear on. I was in my reading chair, head back, hands draped on armrests, legs outstretched, and I was no longer living in my world, but instead I was living in another world, in Haynlayn. I was in my tiny bachelor's quarters with a bed that folded into one wall and clothing hampers that pulled out from the other. I was Rahul Valentine in my tiny room, watching my hands pick up items for cleaning teeth, washing skin, placing them in my kit while Esner's voice, the perfect storytelling voice that probably wasn't his voice at all, said, “He was getting ready to depart in his one-man fighter. He would fly sixty-five million kilometers until he reached the Minds. He knew he wasn't coming back. He knew he would never see Nina again, never again feel her warm kisses. He would never push off in the free-fall gym, never play wallball again, never again rage against his father's expectations or his mother's absence from his life."

Here I was, eight years old, a mere adolescent, a reader, and I was Rahul Valentine, who would have been alive hundreds of years ago, if he'd really existed, and I was preparing to die for the future of mankind. This was back when there were more than a thousand worlds, when Haynlayn waged its singular war against the Minds. The reader me, the real person in the reading chair, would be so tempted to cop out, to find a different way to attack the Minds. Maybe I'd think of a way to plant a bomb before getting caught and thus escape with my ship and my life intact. Or maybe I'd come up with a special impossible plan that would lead to harmony between the Thousand Worlds and the Minds, but Esner had me believing that Valentine wouldn't do any of those things. Rahul Valentine would fly sixty-five million kilometers and dive right into the heart of the enemy, perhaps destroying just a few million tons of memory before his ship was obliterated, and that would be a worthy statement that humans would not live benignly before the omnipresence of the Minds, circling the sun like a silver-yellow halo where once our Earth used to orbit. How I loved the way Esner wrote!

The next chapter: I was no longer Rahul Valentine, a solitary fighter pilot. I was Nina, his lover. I stood by Rahul as he packed his kit, and I tried to talk him out of going. The reader me yearned to have such a lover, because girls didn't seem to take an interest in anything I did. But in this case, while Rahul made his final preparations, while his ship was being readied, while he was given his final briefing, Nina secretly investigated the purpose of the mission. In chapter four, she discovered the mission was a ruse, that Rahul has been set up to die. I knew immediately who had arranged this. It was Alexander Sober, and that's who she now confronted. I knew it was a mistake to confront Sober, but I could feel her passionate stubbornness carry us down the corridor to that office door.

My friend Henry had also loved
Suicide Missions
. He couldn't believe that Nina would confront Sober like that. Why alert the bad guy before you had any proof to use against him? Henry was appalled. And in Henry's reading, Nina stopped right in her tracks, just outside Sober's door. She so badly wanted to pound her fist, so badly wanted to confront him, but this didn't convince Henry at all. And Nina realized that deep down it was the wrong move to make. She had four weeks until Rahul's ship reached the Minds, four weeks in which to warn him. She would keep an eye on everyone.

This is what made Esner such a great writer. He knew the points where a reader might want to let things go differently, and he plotted for them. In some books, if you disagreed, the book just went blank. Other books were powerful enough that you could invent the rest, but often then the novel would have this odd, dreamlike feel, as if reading the ghost of a book that might one day exist.