The Engineer Reconditioned

SNAIRLS

The other passengers went to their cabins and cowered there like the limp city dwellers they were. The cabins were shell-walled dead stuff, braced by shock-absorbing muscle, and internally free of slime. Janer was no city man and there was so much more he wanted to see and experience. He had yet to walk Upper Shell and look from the Spire, and it was not in his nature to give up so easily. Besides, now might be his only chance before his freedom of movement was once again curtailed.

“It means a storm is coming or we are coming to a storm,” the CG told him before casually stripping off his uniform and sealing it in a plastic bag. Embarrassed by the man’s nakedness Janer looked around the CG’s cabin. The walls glistened. When he glanced back, the CG was watching him analytically. Janer tried to keep his eyes level with the man’s. Crew were different, he had known that, but seeing one naked was… disconcerting. On the front of the CG’s body was a diamond of white flesh extending from his white genitalia to the base of his throat. It was segmented like the body of some worm, each segment a couple of inches wide, and there were other differences he tried not to observe too closely.

“You’d best do the same,” said the CG, wryly noting his discomfiture. “Clothing becomes crusted and stiff if it dries, or takes on a heavy build up. Only skin sheds it well.”

“As you say.”

Janer left the Chief Geneticist in his cabin — a cyst in the body of the Graaf — and headed down the glistening artery of a corridor, half-lit by bioluminescent globes clinging to the fleshy walls and sucking their juice. Everywhere these things. Janer had not realised they were alive until he saw one detach its tick mouth and scuttle along the wall to a new feeding spot. For a day after that the skin on his back crawled whenever he walked underneath one. But in the end one must get used to the presence of life: it was everything around him.

Soon he saw that many of the crew of the Graaf had dispensed with their clothes. Eller, naked on a hyaline strut bone, rested her chin on her knee and grinned at him. She slowly and deliberately parted her other leg to one side as he slowed to make some passing greeting or wry comment. He found he had no words and quickened his pace, aware of the flush rising in his face. The diamond of white wormflesh on the front of her body included her hairless genitalia and ended at a narrow point by her anus. There was something incredibly erotic about it. Behind him he heard her chuckle. Damn. He would have to do something about her. There were stories about what went on inside a snairl when the walls slimed. The creators of holofiction became quite sweaty-palmed about the subject. Janer wanted to find out. He wanted to find out a lot of things — for himself for a change.

In his dry and civilized cabin Janer stripped off his clothing and pulled on the rubber trunks of his surfsuit. He didn’t want to wander about the Graaf with a permanent erection waving about in front of him. That kind of thing delimited serious conversation. Admittedly, he did intend to screw Eller at the first opportunity. Finally into his trunks and considering what else he might take out with him he turned to the sudden buzz from beside his compscreen. Jumpy today — very jumpy.

The hornet rose into the air above the antique plastic keyboard — a blur of wings suspending a severed-thumb body and dangly mosquito legs. Faceted eyes glittering. All over its body the hornet was painted with intricate designs in red and yellow-green fluorescent paint.

“I thought you were exploring,” said Janer. The hivelink behind his ear buzzed for a moment before the mind replied.

“The slime could kill this unit and I only have five on the Graaf.”

“Where are the others?”

“They are in Upper Shell, but even there the conditions are inimical.”

“How come? There’s no slime there.”

“No, but there are rooks.”

“How inconvenient.”

“They require instruction.”

“Are they intelligent enough to learn?”

“You were.”

Janer sighed. The ‘you’ in this case was the human race. It wasn’t having another dig at him, for a change. It had come as one shock in many when arrogant humanity had discovered it wasn’t the only sentient race on Earth. It was just the loudest and most destructive. Dolphins and whales had always been candidates because of their aesthetic appeal and stories of rescued swimmers. Research in that area had soon cleared things up. Dolphins couldn’t tell the difference between a human swimmer and a sick fellow, and were substantially more stupid than the animal humans had been turning into pork on a regular basis. Whales had the intelligence of the average cow. When a hornet built its nest in a VR suit and lodged its protests on the Internet it had taken a long time for anyone to believe. They were stinging things, creepy crawlies, how could they possibly be intelligent? At ten thousand years of age the youngest hivemind showed them. People believed.

“You want to come out in the box, I take it?”

The buzzing of the hivemind seemed contemplative. Thoughts that once took the time of a hornet’s flight between nests flicked at the speed of light between hivelinks. Janer held out his hand and the hornet settled on it, vibrating, its legs pressing into his skin like blunt pins. His flesh rebelled but he controlled the urge to shudder and fling the insect away from him. He was getting better at it now: his payment, his service to this mind, for killing a hornet that had tried to settle on his shoulder in a crowded ringball stadium. It had been tired that hornet; searching for somewhere to land and rest, tempted by the beaker of coke Janer had been drinking. His reaction had been instinctive; the phobic horror of insects had risen up inside him and he had knocked the hornet to the ground and stamped on it. The police had come for him the next day. Killing a hornet was not precisely murder, as each creature was just one very small part of the mind. There were stiff penalties, though.

“It would be interesting to observe the interior during the storm. Yes, the box,” the mind eventually told him. The hornet launched itself from his hand and hovered above his bed. The box was there: a shaped perspex container with one skinstick surface. It landed by this and crawled inside. Janer picked the box up and pressed it against his shoulder where it stuck.

“There are no phobes on this ship,” the mind observed, as if picking up on what Janer had been thinking. He wasn’t the only one who had trouble with the idea of allowing huge stinging insects to fly around them unmolested. There were others whose service to a mind had to be without contact with its hornets, who became hysterical in their presence, some who just paid over a large amount of money, and some who required… adjustments.

“Not surprising,” Janer replied casually. “Spend your life inside a floating mollusc and you’re sure to lose some of your aversions.”

The mind replied to this with something like a snort as its hornet rattled around in the box and settled itself down in the shaped pedestal provided for it. Like this was better for Janer. Now the hornet was no more to him than a camera for the remote and disperse mind, and the voice a disembodied thing. If he didn’t look at it he could convince himself that there was only a machine perched on his shoulder. That anus-clenching shudder left him and he could concentrate on other matters. He stooped and picked up a pair of grip shoes, then discarded them. The crew did not wear them so he would try to do without as well. He stepped out of his cabin into a slime-coated artery.

“Why does it produce it?” he wondered loudly.

“A defensive measure for molluscs. It senses the storm and prepares itself.”

“How does the slime help?”

“Retroactive reaction. It would have helped if it was being attacked by a predator.”

“So the Geneticists didn’t straighten every kink in the helix.”

“Never say that here,” the link hornet warned.

“Would I be so foolish,” said Janer dryly.

There was no reply but Janer seemed to get the impression of a feeling something akin to a raised eyebrow. Yes, so I stepped on a hornet in a moment of panic. It won’t happen again. In ten years when my service contract is finished I should be well inured to them. Cunning bastards those minds. Under his bare feet the floor was rough and sticky, not at all slippery as he had expected. When he lifted his foot it was still attached by a thousand hair-thin strands.

“They got part of the way there… the Geneticists,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

Janer bowed his shoulder down so the link hornet could see his feet and the tacky mess on the scaled floor.

The hornet said, “Partial adaptation. Unable to get rid of the slime they convert it into a more acceptable form.”

“On the floors anyway,” said Janer. “Elsewhere it’s just as thick and slippery as your usual mucous.

“Of course, they may have made the floors the slime absorption points and what you are encountering here is the residue. The moisture would go first.”

“Yes,” said Janer, without much interest. Ten paces from his door and he turned to study what was revealed of his cabin between the ceiling and floor of flesh. It was an oblate bone-yellow sphere from which extended organic-looking struts to pierce the flesh, these in turn held by ropes of grey muscle. How like parasites were humans in the uterine living spaces of the Graaf snairl — squirming endoparasites, gall wasps. A little way further along he could see some of the next cabin and a face at a plastiglass portal. That would be Asharn the merchant. Somewhere in this snairl was stored his cargo of exotic organics — synaptic chips, non-specific human augmentations like eyes to see in the dark, guaranteed multiple orgasm vaginas, cetacean capacity lungs, and other things the merchant had hinted at with nods and winks and meaningful looks at the hornet. Crime, if it was to be committed successfully, had to be done so away from prying eyes, especially if they were faceted. Janer had displayed his lack of interest in anything the merchant might have, well aware of a feeling of huge amusement coming through the hivelink.

“The storm closes,” the link hornet told him. “I see it now, an anvil of cloud walking on legs of lightning.” Janer closed his eyes. He really wanted to go there, where the other hornets and the rooks were. Would the mind let him, as its eyes were already there? He asked.

“Later,” the mind told him. “First I want to see the inside of this snairl during storm.” Janer wondered exactly what it was the mind wanted to see. Did it want to observe the orgy purported to take place? What possible interest could it have in human sex? Or was he just missing something? Had he not been told something? He walked aimlessly then in the body of the snairl and thought about his first sight of it. It had drifted through the sky, a faerie castle in the clouds, only the flicker of rotors on the Lower Shell betraying its motive force. Sunlight refracted through the spiral of nacre helium chambers revealing them like the internals of some diatom. The living body of the snairl clung chancrous below, its tail thrashing the air as angry as a cat, grey and silver tendrils treeing up into the shell and fading. One creature: ugliness clinging to beauty, tenaciously.

Crew ceased working at their tasks, as Janer walked by, and watched him with evident surprise. The slime on the walls thickened and some arteries were hung with glistening ropes of it. In one such place he saw two crew members coupling ferociously and stopped to watch. They were oblivious to him; tightly wrapped in an embrace and foaming the slime with their frenetic movements. Damn the mind, he thought. He was going to find Eller. Ever since he had come onboard she had been dropping broad hints. The last hint had been too broad to ignore. He headed in the direction of the cyst-cabins of the crew, hoping to find her there.

“The storm is around us,” said the mind, “and now the snairl holds its position. It will not move on now.”

“What do you mean?”

He was definitely not being told something. There was no reply and he was about to ask again when Eller stepped out into the artery before him and beckoned. He hurried towards her and stood in front of her. There was a thin layer of slime on her body and her black hair was slick against her head. Nictitating membranes blinked over her eyes and when she opened her mouth he noted her tongue was pure white, like the lips of her vagina. She reached down and inserted her fingers in the top of his trunks.

“Why these?”

“I’m not used to nakedness,” he told her.

“You’ll get used to it.”

She tugged him through the cervix in a fleshy wall and into her cabin.

Once within the narrow confines Janer looked around. Slime coated the floor and walls and no personal objects were visible. The floor was soft under his feet. He sensed the curiosity of the mind and it voiced no objections when he removed the box from his shoulder and placed it on ridge of hard flesh protruding from the wall. Eller stood at the middle of the cyst for a moment inspecting him from head to foot.

“I was to be with Ableman,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I like the exotic.”

This was hardly how Janer classified himself, but at that moment he was almost without thought. She stepped forward, took hold of his trunks, and pulled them down to his ankles.

“Ah,” she said, rubbing her cheek against his penis, then scraped her nails down his thighs. He grabbed for her and she slid away. He grabbed again and she allowed it, then tripped him to the floor. The slime was warm. She sat astride his chest, slid back, then reached between her legs and slid his penis inside herself. Janer did not last very long and was immediately aware that something else was operating here. He had never reacted like this before. That he had come did not seem to affect her as she rode him, her eyes rolled up in her head. He was hard again in a moment, but not inside her. She didn’t stop. He got hold of her and threw her down on the floor, mounted her, her legs locking behind him and her ankle spurs scraping his skin. His mind was a white blur of pleasure into which the hivemind spoke a few unheeded words.

“Aphrodisiac in the slime. How interesting.”

The hornet scuttled back into its box and fastidiously cleaned itself. The substance had no effect on a creature without gender.

They rested in an oozing tangle, foamed slime all about them. At last able to think Janer reacted to the hornet’s words.

“Why? Why is it in the slime?”

Eller sat upright, glanced from him to the box, then lay back with a squelch, a dreamy smile on her face.

“It is not normally there,” the mind replied. “Rumours of increased sexual activity during storms are greatly exaggerated. This activity does come during a time of slime production, this production being for other reasons.”

“And what are they?”

The mind was silent. Janer looked to Eller for an explanation, but she was looking at him in a particular way and he quickly lost interest in the subject. He reached for her but she caught his wrists in her rough palms.

“Slowly now,” she said.

Janer nodded mutely then glanced around as he felt the cabin shift. The storm; it was buffeting the snairl. He hoped it wasn’t just a squall as Eller took hold of his head and pressed it down between her legs. The slime didn’t matter. But for a faint peppery taste he hardly noticed it. He hardly noticed anything but what he was doing. Eller moaned and dug her nails in his head, hooked her leg over his shoulder and dug her spur in his back. Abruptly she pushed him away and it was her turn to sink down and take his penis in her mouth. She worked on him with her lips and white tongue, brought him near to coming then stopped and backed away. They were both panting harshly. She slid away from him and lay back with her legs widely parted, rubbing at herself with both hands, her moans louder. Janer saw that slime was actually being generated by the segmented flesh on the front of her torso. It didn’t matter. He pulled himself over her, entered her yet again, his fists against the floor either side of her hips. As he started to move he lifted one hand from the floor and ran it over that ribbed flesh. She went wild, writhing and yelling underneath him. Hardly in control himself he used both hands, pressing and caressing, and something gave. She yelled with ecstacy. Janer came unendingly. He felt as if she were draining him, as if his head would burst, as if his guts were spurting out of his penis.

As the wave subsided Janer looked down and saw with growing horror that his hands had sunk between the segments of her torso. He felt a sudden panicky revulsion and pulled away. She lay limp on the floor, her eyes glazed. Was she dead? Oh no, no… He glanced to the hornet on its fleshy shelf, unmoving in its box, an ornate piece of jewellery, all-seeing.

“It’s all right,” said Eller, and he stared at her with relief. The segments of her torso were open, exposing organs under glassy slime. Janer swallowed bile and had just enough presence of mind to grab up the hornet box before fleeing through the fleshy door. In his cabin he used the small shower unit then viciously dried himself with a towel. Once clean and dry he felt suddenly exhausted and collapsed on his bed.

“The geneticists did more than create the snairls, they created the crews as well,” the hivelink told him.

“I didn’t realise how much… so much.”

“They are like us — all one,” it told him.

He heard it and slept, but he didn’t understand.

“We will go to Upper Shell now,” said the hivelink.

Still feeling bleary Janer glanced from the shirt he was holding to the hornet on the bedside stand. It was drinking from the dispenser Janer had placed there. The device contained a sickly sweet protein-laced syrup that was all the hornet needed to sustain it. Janer stared at it blankly for a moment then returned his attention to his clothes. He couldn’t put two thoughts together. Should he dress or shouldn’t he? He dropped the clothing he had been putting on then selected a monofilament overall from his wardrobe. It was guaranteed impervious to anything and its outer surface was frictionless — the slime wouldn’t stick to it. He found gloves and slip-on shoes of a similar material. In the neck pocket there was a hood and mask. He possessed no goggles and no respirator so would have to do without. Was he overreacting?

He thought not. Suitably attired he made coffee and checked through his food supplies. The hyperclam he ignored, as it was supposed to have aphrodisiac qualities, and instead chose a meatfruit, which somewhere in its ancestry had a pig and a peach tree. Real pigs were a protected species now. There were two of them outside his cabin. A young man was vigorously buggering another young man while a young girl lay on the floor to one side playing with herself and looking annoyed. As soon as she spotted Janer she became hopeful, but he shook his head and moved quickly away. He would have to watch that in case anyone grabbed him. The hornet box had not stuck to the monofilament overall, and the hornet was in his top pocket peeking out at everything. He could feel it moving against his chest occasionally, but was too drained in every way to find any reaction to that. Quickly he strode along the artery, then along another that spiralled up through snairl flesh. Whenever he saw crew he saw sexual activity or its aftermath. Most of them were oblivious to him. With almost clinical detachment now he observed bodies opened at the front and oozing, men thrusting into women or other men in any position from genitals upward. It was as if the white wormflesh was an extension of their sexual organs. He saw and he moved on, not unaffected, aware that the substance in the slime was also in the moist air taken into his lungs. At one point, when a woman slid across a floor to him, he had to grit his teeth and stride on. He really wanted to stay with her.

At length Janer came to drier areas where shell material stabbed the walls and ran in reefs along the floors. He peered through doors half organic and half manufactured, into cargo areas and beyond them saw translucent shell thrashed by rain and lit by flashes of lightning. Only seeing this did he realise how he had grown used to the halflight in the snairl — the muted blue glow of the bioluminescent globes pinned to every wall.

“The shafts are ahead,” the hivelink told him needlessly. He had studied a plan of the internal layout of the snairl before boarding. In a moment he came to open mouths of metal that curved up into darkness. He stepped into one, groped until he found a rung, climbed.

He was in the dark for only a short time before he reached a hatch that irised open as he reached the rung below it. The sudden light made his eyes ache momentarily as he climbed up into it. This is what he wanted to see. The floor was smooth and iridescent. To his right the curving wall of near transparent shell showed him the vastness of sky, welcoming after the confines of the snairl body. From a floor space three metres wide, he gazed out at thick strobe-lit cloud and down at the snairl body below, its huge glistening head swaying from side to side, horns probing the storm. To his left bulged the huge helium bags veined with snairlflesh. The floor sloped up following the spiral of the shell. He climbed, breathing easily air that gradually cleared of the taint of the living body below. Cold breezes gusted in at him from occasional splits in the ancient shell. He tasted rain and cloud, and thunder made the floor vibrate. The moisture here gathered in small droplets and ran away. He climbed spiral after spiral, each one tighter than the last. Higher up he noted the bird droppings on the floor, some kind of nest between helium bags, two dead rooks on the floor.

“Instruction?” he asked.

“They lack the intelligence to learn. It has been the same with their kind since the time they ruled the Earth.”

Birds — the direct descendants of the dinosaurs. There were hiveminds old enough to remember, but they were strange and did not communicate much with the younger minds, and not at all with the human race.

Eventually Janer reached the glassy cone of the spire and its level circular floor. He saw the other hornets clinging to the transparent wall, flaws in glass. He walked over to the opposite side of the chamber and gazed out.

“You are content now?” asked the hivemind.

“I feel an easing of certain tensions,” he replied.

“That’s good, because we’ll be spending the rest of the journey here.” Janer paused. “Why?”

“Look it the direction my companions are looking.”

Abruptly the hornet launched from his pocket and was buzzing in the air. He gazed across the chamber, past the hornets, stared intently through the wall at the tumble of cloud. Then he saw it, wreathed in lightning: another faerie castle, another snairl approaching.

“It is not the storm that causes the activity below, but the anticipation of this snairl. Every five hundred years they mate.”

“Esua!”

“Yes, this is why we are here. This is why we are interested.” Janer noted the royal we. The hivemind was completely at the link.

“Why such great interest?”

“This snairl is male,” the mind told him.

“I don’t understand.”

“Like their mollusc brethren, male snairls manufacture in their bodies a harpoon of calcite they use to spear the female and hold it close. Normal snails then mate and part. For a male snairl, the making of this harpoon is a killing effort. Such mate only once.”

“It will die?”

“Yes.”

“There is danger then. What of the crew, the passengers?”

“Look down.”

Janer peered down past the body of the snairl and saw egg-shaped objects being spewed out into the air, opening gliding wings, falling through the sky.

“They are safe.”

“The passengers, yes. For the crew there is never any escape.” Janer whirled around and faced the hovering hornet. “What! No warning! Just let them die!” He turned and ran back. Eller. He found that he did care what happened to her.

“Fool,” the link told him. “The geneticists made both: snairl and crew.” Again, Janer did not hear.

Janer was halfway down Upper Shell when the snairls met. The impact threw him back against the helium bags, and the shells clashed and rang. He saw fragments of shell fly glittering through the air. There was a giant sound: a bubbling groan, the sighing of caves. As the shells rocked and scraped he staggered to the wall and looked down in time to see the male snairl extrude a barbed spear of cloudy glass and thrust into the body of the female, and the bodies ooze together. Foamed slime spiralled up on the wind like spindrift. The towered shells closed throwing Janer back against the helium bags then parted high, ground at the base. Janer went head-first into the glassy wall, lost it all in a flash of black. Janer’s immediate reaction to consciousness was to vomit on the floor and clutch at his head. There was a weird buzzing from his hivelink, something he had never heard before. Perhaps he had broken it. He staggered upright and tried to blink the double images from his eyes. Unsteady on his feet, it was a moment before he realised the snairl was back on an even keel. At the wall he peered down. The sky was clearing and he could see everything in detail. The female was gone. The male snairl hung in an arc under its shell, flaccid, its connections to the shell stretched taut. The crew. Eller. Supporting himself against the wall Janer made his way down, wondering as he went, how long he had been out. Minutes?

Hours? As soon as he reached the down-tube into the snairl body he realised it must have been some time.

The floor was drying, tacky, as he stepped out of the tube, and he wondered about that until he heard the rustling of air pumps — something previously disguised by the living sounds of the snairl. They were not biotech and would run until clogged with decaying flesh. A biolight lay nearby, its legs waving weakly in the air, and its tick-mouth gaping and clicking hungrily. The air smelt of death. Janer carefully stepped around the biolight, but he need not have worried; it was too weak to get at him and would never have got through his monofilament clothing. He peered down the corridor artery at the other biolights there and one fell while he watched. They would all be hungry. He pulled the hood and mask from the neck-pocket of his overall, and put on the gloves. They would go for exposed body: his eyes and mouth. He would just have to be very careful.

Janer found the first of the crew shortly after crushing under his foot the third biolight to drop on him. As he crushed it, its juices spread in a glowing pool and Janer left bright footprints behind him. He noticed then a change in the quantity and spectrum of the lighting.

The man had crawled away from his partner with five biolights attached to his back. Their glow was reddish, their energy drawn from near to human blood. The man had left a thick slime trail that was now skinned over. The woman was curled in a corner with a biolight attached to the side of her head. As he turned to her the biolight fell away, leaving a bloody hole, and tried to drag itself towards him. He stood on it and it burst with a wet pop. The woman turned her head, opened her mouth with a dry click and tried to open her crusted eyes. He stooped down by her and caught hold of her.

“Dead,” she rasped, her last breath hissing out foul in his face. He let her go and ran, something of what the hivemind had said coming back to him — the geneticists made both. He remembered then that he had never seen crew eating, never seen much in the way of personal effects… They are like us — all one. They were dying now their host was dead, like the biolights. The door ripped like wet paper as he pulled it aside. Eller blinked at him from her place on the floor in the ropes of slime. A pot of water rested to one side of her. She had cleaned her face and her eyes, but her eyes were dull, drying out.

“Eller… this… ”

“Janer,” she said and smiled, shifted. Her body had grown long, gaps as wide as his arm between the segments, there her heart, beating slowly, there her intestine, drawn taut. He knelt beside her and she managed to get a hand up to his shoulder. She shifted again.

“Kiss me… just once more,” she said.

Janer was leaning forward when he heard the low buzzing. Distorted speech came through his link, but he could not make it out. He turned his head slightly as the hornet darted in. Eller made a horrible sound, somewhere between a groan and a hiss, jerked her hand away, her mouth opening wide at the pain as the hornet launched itself from her arm. It had stung her. Janer wanted to crush it at once, then he saw her mouth; her white tongue open at the end like a flower, rasping teeth wet inside it. More buzzing, more glittery shapes in the room. Five hornets hovered between him and Eller, darted at him, and because he could no longer hear their speech his fear returned and he stumbled back. Eller tried to crawl towards him and he realised, like the biolights, and shuddered in horror. The hornets drove him out into the corridor. The walls were cracking and liquefying now. The death stink had turned to something else, now. Stumbling ahead of the insects he was numb to thought. They drove him to the Upper Shell. The floor was cool against his cheek. The hornet, standing on the side of his neck and working with the cellular structure behind his ear, finished its task and flew from him.

“We were unaware of the danger,” the mind told him.

“It’s wrong, that they should die like that.”

“They all lived for as long as the snairl. Though they could feed on other things after its death they would not long survive it. The chemistry is too complex. They are one being, like ourselves.”

“Is all this what you came to learn?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“The shell does not decay. The body below will drop soon and the shell will need to be counterweighted. We came for the salvage. Here we can be safe.”

Janer, his shoulder against the crystal wall of the spire, could see them. The cloud was vast and grey, and moved with purpose. He could feel the presence of many minds — a million hives. The hornets were coming to their new home.