“Uh… no sir. I just want my freedom. Do you want to hear the name? Do you want to hear about a human who has committed crimes that make my misunderstandings look small in comparison?”
Nox stopped pacing around and took a step toward me. I could tell I’d intrigued her.
“Very well. Identify this monster.”
And so, I gave her the name, and told her where she could find proof of my accusations. An hour later, she agreed to free me.
“This creature you know as Claver will be found. To reward you for your compliance, I’ll have you returned to Earth. That harness can be recharged and—”
“Sir? Could you kindly see your way to teleporting me someplace else?”
“Where?”
“Zeta Herculis, I believe that’s what it’s called on the star charts. But we call it… Dust World.”
-60-
After meeting with the Mogwa queen, or governess, or whatever you might want to call her, I went back to Dust World.
During my absence, Floramel and the Investigator hadn’t been idle. Far from it. They now had a new body for Etta. She was growing and floating in a tank.
She was a blob of meat, really, mostly lifeless but a little bit twitchy. I couldn’t see her face, or much else, because of all the slime. The general outline and shape of her looked right… but that wasn’t too much to go on.
Days passed, and I could hardly sleep some nights for worrying about her.
In the meantime, Floramel and I rekindled. That wasn’t surprising, what with me hitting on her all the time and her resistance having been weakened. Raash had left her for his home planet, and she didn’t have anyone else. We were both feeling some grief over our recent losses, too. Most important of all, she’d decided I wasn’t responsible for her previous death. All these things served to put her into a more receptive mood.
We lived in the catacombs for a few weeks while the blob that would hopefully become Etta grew bigger.
We slept real close to the exit at night. Only the Investigator felt comfortable spending all his time deep in the abandoned warrens. He didn’t care at all about the haunted stone rooms or the gurgling labs. One weird thing was I never saw him sleep—not once the whole time I was there.
At last, the big morning came. The Investigator wheeled in his battery-jumping machine, which as it turned out was the device he used for inserting mental engrams into an otherwise vegetable-like corpse. He hooked up a bunch of thick wires to our new version of Etta, and I winced as each probe, clamp and needle was put in place.
“Are you hurting her?” I asked.
“That’s an interesting question,” the Investigator replied. He paused in his work and stared down into the tank. “Her nerves are being simulated in a negative way, it’s true—but she has no mind yet with which to interpret these signals. Is that pain? I suppose the answer must be philosophical in nature.”
I didn’t like his response, but I didn’t want any more details, so I squinched up my eyes and shut the hell up.
The zapping process soon began. It went much the same way as it had gone with Raash—meaning there was a lot of thrashing around and flopping in agony. Sometimes I put my hand into the tank to calm her, but after I got a solid shock or two, I stopped doing that.
“It’s done,” the Investigator said after a good ten minutes of torturing my little girl. “She is stable. We’ll soon see if all our efforts have been in vain.”
“Get the stuff out of her nostrils and her throat,” I urged Floramel. “I’ll hold her up.”
We disconnected her from some tubes and added others. We tried to sit her up. It was like sitting up a ragdoll. We hooked up oxygen and an IV.
Several long minutes passed as we worked. During that time, she seemed comatose, barely breathing—but then she took a sudden gasping breath.
A frown crossed my features during this time. “Etta looks… different. Her face is a little off.”
Floramel didn’t meet my eye. “She’s just swollen. Give her a minute.”
“Right, right… Hey! She’s awake! Look! She’s awake!”
“I see it, James.”
Floramel and I kept working on that girl without taking a break. It took us damn near an hour to get all the tarry mud off and get her onto a gurney. She shivered a bit, despite the heat of Dust World, and so we covered her with a light blanket.
Floramel ran instruments up and down over Etta. “She’s not regulating her body temperature yet.”
I nodded, and I saw my baby girl turn her head toward me. Her lips worked, and her face… it looked kind of puffy in places. It was almost like looking at a different person. I hoped that would pass in time.
Putting my ear down close to her head, I listened closely to her first words: “…I’m going to kill you guys,” she rasped out. “I’m going to kill you all…”
I laughed.
“What did she say?”
“She’s thanking us, and she’s feeling great!” I proclaimed, and I felt a great sense of relief. She was my baby girl, all right. Etta’s first instinct had always been to kill anyone who got in her way.
Always.
* * *
Her puffy face subsided, but the differences didn’t. As the hours rolled by, I realized she wasn’t going to look the same as she had before. They’d used genes they’d pulled from random places—and it showed.
Still, the overall effect wasn’t awful. Sure, she was a bit shorter than she had been and her face was different—but she was still a human girl. What’s more, she was younger than she had been,
