floor, making gagging sounds deep in her throat. I caught her by the armpits before she landed on the floor, and dragged her up into a sitting position again. Tearing off her uniform sleeve at the shoulder, I fed the codeine insert into the syringe, and worked the handle of the syringe against her arm.
It took another five minutes, but Reba was finally able to sit up unassisted, and within ten minutes, I was able to walk her down the curving hallway, codeine inserts and pneumosyringe in hand, to where the others lay incapacitated....
Day 168:
It’s been a long time—
Just like before, the last long blackout. Thinking hurts so much now—bombs going off in my head. But I have to write. Helps me focus. Helps me—
Day 169:
Write about emotions. I can do that at least. Emotions. Write about the last days before the blackout. I can remember parts of those days, dimly glowing patterns of a campfire, like I remember instincts, like the way your eye holds the after-image of a campfire.
I remember the woods. No, further back. I remember loneliness, wishing, crying out for someone, anyone. Huoy. Jimmie. Reba!
Our lab held a collection of cobbled together genetic engineering equipment, from those days so long ago when Reba was trying so hard to find out what was hurting us. I began the tests again in those days of lucidity, searching madly for something, anything that would kill off the virus. Something that would stop the pain, stop the blackouts, anything. What happened next? The transition is hard to recall, like in a dream. You’re walking down the street one night in a dream when suddenly you realize the street is a river. It was like that. The next I recall, I was engaged in some project to create my own companion.
Somehow I was going to try and alter the chromosomes of my own tissue, changing my XY chromosomes, but I didn’t really know how. Could I split the chromosome into its autosomes and duplicate just the x-half? I didn’t know how.
In this dream of mine I thought, no, knew that I only had to get other chromosome samples. Would it matter that they weren’t human? Still hard to think, I’m not sure. Well, Jimmie and Reba had killed off the lab animals, so I had nothing with which to test out my theory. Catching a ’lope was beyond me; I never knew when a blackout would overtake me. But if I could somehow manage to get a hold of a sample of crusher flesh, just a tiny piece...
It was pure madness on my part to think that I could saunter up to a crusher and casually slice off a sample of living tissue; but living day after day with an A-bomb going off and off again in one’s skull doesn’t make for a healthy state of mind, or rational, coherent thinking. Hell, maybe I was trying to impress the ’lopes, show them who was the superior specimen on this planet. But I didn’t really need them, I’d make my own society...all I clearly remember is that the sun was looking like a moldy hard-boiled egg in the sky, all soft and mossy-green and luminescent, as the scummy pond waters scintillated underfoot, divided into sparkling waves by the limp-vines, and the crusher wasn’t all that big or awful-looking, why its horns were just tiny needles—
The sharp splash of something fast-thrown and heavy hitting the water brought me back to a semblance of painful reality. I’d waded out into the middle of the pond, up to my armpits, with my extended toes barely touching the muddy bottom—and there was a crusher no more than a foot away from me, head down, twin horns aimed for my skinny, pale-skinned chest, only when the second splash occurred, the crusher turned its head away from me, to stare at the ripples in the murky water.
Before the third splash, I heard a keening mewl, one I’d never heard a ’lope utter before, with the sound coming from behind me. I turned my head and upper body to look in that direction...and saw Penti, standing there on the limp-vines, making a gesture I’d seen before, in a slightly different social context:
Get over here, or near as dammit...
I went, dog-paddling through the turgid water, until her brown-toed feet were within arm’s reach, while she kept throwing stones into the water, until the crusher forgot about me and glided over to the opposite side of the pond, ripping up great mouthfuls of limp-vines with thunderous churnings of water.
Pulling myself weakly through the mud, I crawled to Penti’s feet. Without thinking, I wrapped my right arm around her ankles and slumped into the mud.
Grunting, I got to my feet and began shambling. I walked aimlessly, without thought, like a masterless puppet. The crazed notion of remaking the human race for my own benefit was gone. I don’t know how long I went, before my consciousness raised itself again, and I found myself on the ship. I looked around myself to get my bearings. Behind me stood Penti, in the hatch none of her kind had breached before, even when left open in invitation. I turned away, and she followed.
Penti let out a yelp when a dangling handgrip smacked her in the head (I avoided them almost unconsciously), but remained silent as I led her on a tour of the ship, jabbering all the while. I don’t recall what I said, and I rarely looked back to see if she still followed.
I do remember a feeling of foolish futility registering in my aching brain. Why was I talking to this animal, this alien who had no way of understanding my words? I stopped talking. And when I turned around, Penti-Lope-Lope had gone.
Day 171:
Yesterday I kept my consciousness, but I didn’t write. I didn’t think, I didn’t analyze, I didn’t plan. I simply was—a conscious was, like in battle or stress, where you simply do what you need to and you don’t know what you’re doing or know what you’re feeling. But you make no choices. But today I need to work; I must write while I can.
Yeah, I left off after the first attack, just about two weeks after we started eating the native food. The remembrance hurts. Oh, it hurts! Reba! As I think of the past, my head begins to ache again, like before. Wait a minute....
It’s beginning to recede. The vasoconstrictors I took are kicking in now. There aren’t many pills left these days. Where was I?
We were scrambling madly, to find what disease suddenly ailed us. Reba could only work the ’scope if she held her hand over her right eye, the one which hurt her the most, but I helped her prep the sample for the electron ’scope in the ship’s lab. I was the only person lucid enough to kill one of the lab rats, without trying to end the life of a phantom rat standing off to one side....
I half-suspected what Reba was looking for, but I didn’t ask her any questions; I simply did as she asked, following her terse, pain-punctuated orders:
“Tubers...husk fruits...fat fruits...sam-samples...flat-grass...limp-vines...’lope if you can find one...no, no, forget it...dirt, bring dirt. Anything...and samples. Of the crew...blood. Everyone, blood—”
I almost blacked out near the pond—one of the ’lopes, I was too sick to tell who it was, was watching me in my agonies—but I found Reba’s samples. And I stood behind her, exposing the sample slides to ever-increasing magnification in millimeters, until:
“Finally...thought it was a virus...wrong...so stupid,” and she tried to pull her reddish curls in anger before I stayed her trembling icy hand.
It was a prion. Pleated, sticky sheets of deviant protein that had managed to change the proteins of every damn thing on the planet-foodstuffs, dirt, water. Almost invulnerable to enzymes, unlike normal proteins. And, inevitably fatal to whatever cells it invaded.
When our lab animals were exposed to foodstuffs contaminated by the prions, they initially showed no symptoms,
