Trying to guilt me again. Typical. I pivoted on my knuckles and loped into the bathroom, leaving him behind. Once there, I dropped another tab of prepaid calling acid, and after staring at the pretty colors that resulted, I found myself face-to-face again with Remsee.
“Good God,” he said, doing an exaggerated double take. “Xzchsthyl! Is that you?”
I screeched. The hallucination compensated, translating. “That’s right,” I said.
“My God. What happened?”
“I’ve been turned into a monkey.”
He nodded. “Parking violations,” he said knowingly.
“Not this time. But never mind that now.” I held up the manila folder.
“What the hell is that?” he said.
“Evidence. The human race produce a cure for chronic ullnik. We’ll have to protect them now, Remsee, intelligent or not.”
He grabbed our mutual hallucination of the manila folder and leafed through its contents. Then he looked relieved. “Thank God,” he said. “I was beginning to think I’d never get a crack at those hands. I was looking through your research this morning. I found—I think it’s called a television show. They called it
I was feeling dumber already. I cut him off before he could get into it. “I’ve got to go, Remsee. Just send backup, will you? I’ll have to bring in the Naag and his partner and I’m in no condition to do it alone.”
We disconnected. And it wasn’t that I didn’t trust Remsee… Okay, it was. Either way, I made a few more calls, and showed the evidence about the cure to other higher-ups within the government. Things were looking up, in other words. I sat down on my rented Earthling couch and waited for the cavalry. I picked at fleas to pass the time.
I had run out of fleas some hours later and I was starting to get nervous. Especially nerve-racking was the look on the Naag’s face. If he grinned any wider, he’d be in danger of an embolism.
“Anything seem strange to you?” he said.
I thought about it. Apart from my having been turned into a monkey, there was the lack of a patrol troop materializing in the living room.
“They’re not coming,” the Naag positively gushed. “And do you know why?”
I was starting to have my suspicions, to tell the truth.
“It’s because your friends know by now I’m on your side. By now, they’ve got a message from the Subluk-har. They know that I have every reason to protect the human race.”
I hopped up on the armrest, glaring at him.
“Oh, yes,” he said. He cocked his head. “The human race. Don’t they strike you as odd?” He tried to stand up, but the ropes jerked him back down. He went on talking anyway. “Think about it. After a billion years of competitive evolution, with organism after organism fighting for a niche here, a niche there, one species out of countless others wins the game in an evolutionary eyeblink.”
It did seem strange to me. But I’d been busy tracking down the Naag and hadn’t thought about it much.
“It was the Sublukhar’s idea. Her species, anyway. They paid a visit to this place a hundred thousand years ago, and saw that it was bad. Too cold. Too much ozone. Too little latent radioactivity. The oceans were too small, too salty, and didn’t have the right levels of PCBs or mercury. There were too many of the wrong kinds of plants and animals around. Too many mountains. Forests.”
I felt my heart leak out through the bottoms of my padded feet.
“So,” the Naag went on, “the Sublukhar said, hey! Why not tinker with the DNA of one of the existing species? Hardwire it to xenoform the planet? They did that thing, then told their creation: be fruitful. Multiply. Spread out and seek dominion over all the Earth. This was before the age of quick and easy xenoforming machinery, of course.”
I slumped back against the couch cushions. I’d been duped. Why hadn’t I seen this? The human race themselves, the perfect intra-biospheric xenoforming organism. No matter what they thought, no matter what they wanted to do or talked about doing, they’d been designed to do one thing: to turn their homeworld into a paradise which they could not inhabit.
“Simple. Elegant,” the Naag went on. “It takes a long time, I’ll admit, but the results speak for themselves. Another few hundred years and their work will be done. They’ll self-destruct in cataclysmic biological attacks, and the Sublukhar will have their paradise.” He chuckled. “Only one small problem. With all the scrutiny over xenoforming lately, the Sublukhar were worried someone would find them out and stop them. So they hired me to get the human race protected. Of course, it takes someone with pull inside the government to protect a species.” He did a little half-bow. “I thank you for your help.”
In that moment, centuries of guilt caught up with me. My own world, gone. My father, crushed (literally) by a roll of the dice. Hundreds of planets, xeno-formed right under my nose. And now I’d failed to save the Earth.
And in that moment, the Naag moved in.
“Hello, Xzchsthyl,” he said from inside my head. His Catholic slumped forward on the credenza. “You know, I’m sick of having you on my back all the time.
Sick of having to bribe judges because of you. Sick of you in general. I’m going to enjoy this. I’m going to devour you, Xzchsthyl, and when I’m through, I’ll use your empty husk to get offworld.”
He walked around, using my body like a puppet made of bone and meat. I didn’t try to fight him. I deserved it, after all. That was clear enough. It was my fault that the Earth was going to be xenoformed, and there was nothing I could do about that now.
But there were other, future worlds the Naag would xenoform, and anyway he had really pissed me off. So, even though I’d earned my guilt, I knew I had to ditch it.
“You’re off the hook,” I told myself.
Now, I’m no Xalian monk, and my forgiveness wasn’t much. But it was just enough for me to take back a small amount of motor control.
“What are you doing?” said the Naag.
For an answer, I reached out and grabbed the psychological injector, and I aimed it at my head.
After he recovered, the Naag was brought up on charges under article five million three hundred thousand eight hundred and thirty-one: conspiracy to use an officer of the law as interstellar transportation. He bribed the judge, of course, but I had had about enough of him by then. In other words, I bribed the jury. It took my life savings, but it was worth it to see him brought to justice. He was incarcerated on Earth, in California, Pismo, in the mind of a marijuana-smoking, ex-competition surfer whose favorite phrase was “Hey, man, ain’t nothin’ but a thing.”
Remsee came out to supervise the procedure and, after he was told the surfer also ran a puppet show at county carnivals, they fell in love and Remsee left the force.
The Sublukhar, meanwhile, was badly injured when, pursued from Breakneck Mountain by a pack of enraged monkeys, she was struck by a public works truck hauling fifty tons of road salt.
As for the Earth, well, by their very nature, the human race will turn it into a paradise they can’t inhabit, but even if they hadn’t been protected, what was I supposed to do? Have them destroyed? It’s just one of those things. And anyway, there’s always hope. Not much, I admit, but it does exist. I visited the planet a few years later, and by that time, Remsee’s consumption of ambient intelligence had mellowed out the population as far away as Idaho, and the environmental movement in that area had subsequently grown by leaps and boimds. He’d taken a particular toll on the Naag, who had become so idiotic that the last time I saw him, he actually apologized to me for being such a jerk.
I felt just the tiniest bit guilty,
THE SKEPTIC
by Jennifer Roberson
ODD CREATURES—
