“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?