The sporelike structures in the oral cavity which definitely were not described in the autopsy report that Six Rainfall read with great and extremely specific attention before he came in here.
In his ears, the shatterharmonics are a glittering fall, and they do what they have always done for him: make him feel brilliant and fearless and serene in his curiosity.
It’s not exactly a bad idea, what he does next. It’s only a bad idea because he is so sure it was a good one, and because he moves so quickly. Of course he needs to take a sample of those spores—of course he needs to confirm that they are in fact fungal infiltrates, and if they are, immediately report them to his superior officer and from there on up to command, who need to know if the aliens-who-are-their-enemies are not mammals at all, but instead—and here Six Rainfall engages in a surprisingly accurate fantasy, though he will never know it—vessels of some sort of fungal intelligence.
His hand, appropriately gloved, in the maw of the enemy. His fingers encounter the spore-tendrils, and break them off. They’re friable. Easy to aerosolize. Fungal infiltrates are. Always have been. These especially, though Six Rainfall doesn’t know it. These hardly ever need to be as solid as they are now—to grow outward, questing unhappily for somewhere new to dwell within, for an end to silence and rot, for escape from the ruin of a home. Six Rainfall pulls his prize out of the alien’s mouth, thinking with a sick and excited worry that he is so very glad of his breathing mask, so very glad indeed, because these things are probably emitting spores all over the place now that he’s broken them off. He’s going to have to put the whole medbay under contaminant/containment protocol. Right after he gets this stuff under a microscope—
He doesn’t notice, pulling the spores out of the alien’s mouth, that the sharp cutting edge of its teeth—carnivore’s teeth, scavenger’s teeth—slices right through his glove, and right through the pad of flesh at the base of his thumb. It doesn’t hurt. It is too sharp to hurt—a tiny, perfect incision that Six Rainfall ignores entirely. He has a microscopic analysis to perform.
It is fungal, under microscopic analysis. Not a fungus Six Rainfall knows, but he’s hardly a mycologist. Mycologists are usually ixplanatlim, and what Fleet soldier has time for that kind of training? You have to write a thesis, and Six Rainfall would rather be patching up soldiers any day. But he thinks this is a fungus. It’s not anything else, at least, which means it is utterly worth transmitting up the command chain. He takes quick holoimages with his cloudhook connected to the microscopy scan, and composes a brief and breathless missive, the sort of thing that doesn’t even need an infofiche stick. It just says PRIORITY MEDICAL: ALIEN CORPSE IS GROWING ALIEN FUNGAL INFILTRATES, SEE ATTACHED and goes straight to the cloudhooks of everyone associated with medical on Weight for the Wheel, plus Twenty Cicada, who Six Rainfall thinks of only as the adjutant. Twenty Cicada has put himself on all of the ship’s priority message lists, which Six Rainfall does not know about but would find supremely annoying to imagine if he did: stars, so many interrupting messages all the time, it’d be distracting as anything.
Because Twenty Cicada is on all those message lists, he almost arrives to the medbay in time to change what happens next. Almost. But not quite.
Six Rainfall leans in to get a better look at the microscopy, spin the holo around, and see if he can get a more complex and clear idea of how the fungal spores grow; it looks like a fractal, like a neural net, and he’s really very curious. He lifts a hand to spin the holoimage in the air, and feels something hot and liquid drip down his wrist.
Red. Blood. His blood.
He stares at it. He thinks, I don’t remember being hurt.
It hurts now. His thumb. His wrist and fingers. A kind of burning. Like noticing the blood has made it hurt.
He pulls the glove off. It is full of blood. His hand is thickly coated with red. It looks wrong. The blood looks wrong. Blood shouldn’t be as—thick as it is, like all of his clotting factors have gone wild. He’s horrified. He is pretty sure he’s in shock. His breath comes in tight wheezing gasps.
He turns his hand around. The cut is below his thumb, and it gapes wide open, the lips of it spread with white fungal structures. Just like those that he has put under the microscope. They’re growing out of him.
They’re growing. More of them bloom from the wound, fast enough that he can watch. His skin splits at the edges of the cut to make room. That hurts, too, inside the larger hurt. The low strange burning. How he can’t get a breath. There’s a nest of infiltrates, inside his thumb—he lifts his other hand to try to tear it out, try to get it out of him—
They break easily. But they keep blooming. There’s more. They go deeper. They’re in his veins, his arteries—choking them with white along with the red. That’d explain the clotting factor problem, he thinks. He gasps. He wonders if they’re in his lungs or if he’s just having an anaphylactic exposure reaction, and then he is on the floor, and then there is—
(a chorus, like distant screaming, like the music still playing on his audioplants is echoed and made strange, full of voices that no shatterharmonicist had ever sung, some reaching noise, singing we—)
—absolutely nothing.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
If the traveler has the opportunity to stop in the Neltoc System and sample the cuisine of the Neltoctlim, this guide recommends it with enormous enthusiasm. While the flavors of Neltoc cuisine may be milder than those found in other culinary destinations or in the best restaurants on the Jewel of the World, that mildness is misleading: it reveals an opportunity for appreciation of the deep complexity of balancing salt and sweet, bitter and earthy, which each individual bite of the Neltoc specialty meal-style allows—one tiny composed dish at a time. Leave at least three hours for your restaurant experience, and think (as does this author!) that maybe those homeostat-cultists have a point about balance …
Please confirm that the shipment of fish cakes was in fact a shipment of fish cakes, and did not contain any other unauthorized imports besides one Teixcalaanlitzlim. And revoke that captain’s trade permit on the grounds of possibly bringing in contaminated items; it suits the situation.
IT was possible—just barely, for a woman of Nine Hibiscus’s size and easily recognizable distinction of rank, but possible—to surprise someone on Weight for the Wheel with the sudden presence of their commanding officer, in a place they had never intended to encounter her. The trick to it, really, was in the Shard programming she had long ago refused to have stripped out of her cloudhook: she could, if she was careful, slip into the collective vision of every Shard pilot on the flagship, and triangulate the location of the person she very much wanted to find through three hundred pairs of eyes. (If that many Shard pilots had their cloudhook programming operational at one time, and if she could handle the multiplicity of vision for long enough to make it useful.) It was like standing on the bridge and cycling through all of the camera-eyes, but—faster. More mobile.