Durrast grunted as he turned over one more rock. One more of ten thousand around him. The greenish sunlight filtered down through sandy haze blown up by a recent sandstorm, and grit was getting in his eyes. He wiped them tiredly, then wiped his hands clean on his budding horns.
Nothing under the rock this time, not even giant scuttlebeetles. Still squatting, he sighed, then squinted at the sun on the horizon. Too early to head back in, really. He set down his portable harvester and reached for the mesh bag clipped to his belt; hefted it thoughtfully; concluded he might barely have enough desert mushrooms in there to sell. He could make big eyes at the merchant, play up how he was just a little kid, maybe?
Ugh, embarrassing. One more rock, then. Maybe down in the ravine there, where shadows gathered and moisture might lurk.
He gingerly headed downslope. The terrain bore the typical signs of having been carved away by aggressive miners. He’d have to watch out for sudden holes. If he fell in, he might die, and that would be quite an inconvenience – he’d ReLife back at town, but all these mushrooms would be left behind.
There! Under an overhang and shielded from the sun, just what he was looking for. More than he could fit in his bag! He pointed the harvester at them, and let the beam of light carefully separate the mycelium from the rock, keeping the fungus as intact as possible. As usual, a tasty meat-like aroma rose from the mushrooms, and Durrast’s stomach growled.
A sudden streak, glaring whitegreen light, then a pressure wave knocked him off his feet. Then came the sound, and a shower of dirt and sand. He rolled out from under the overhang before it gave way, clutching the mesh bag of mushrooms.
It took him a moment to not feel dizzy as he stood. Then he climbed a rock and peered up over the edge of the shallow ravine.
Crashed ship. Not much left of it, honestly. Smoke was already rising to the greenish sky. And limping away, skin already crisping in the heat, was a pudgy fishlike human, not very tall, clearly a bit wounded. His huge aquatic eyes were frantically looking in every direction at once.
Lomeisen…! A Hansian! Durrest had never seen one before. This planet’s climate varied between hot and dry, and hotter and dryer, so Hansians tended not to visit. Mostly Terrans and Gertans like himself here.
Tentatively, Durrast tried to casually say Yo! “
Zobek!” It came out as a bit of a tentative croak. He cleared his throat and shouted it.
“Zobek!”The Hansian stopped and looked around, then fastened his huge eyes on him. “Oh, thank goodness. Where the waves go, young friend.” He was already gasping in the heat. “I think I need…”
Then he faceplanted into the sand.
A bit of water poured generously on both the head and down the gullet helped the fellow enormously. He explained his name was Plissashl, but to call him Pliss. He had a camp kit, so it wasn’t long before they had a small portable stove going, a few mushrooms on the griddle, and a bit of light as the sun started to dip low enough to make the ravine a bit draftier and darker.
“Feels almost like a beach party back home,” Pliss said. “Go with the flow, we always say. Sand around, a cookout, all we’re missing is some surfboards and waves.”
Durrest had no idea what a surfboard was, and didn’t say a word.
“Interesting,” Pliss said, taste-testing the mushroom patty with his tongue. He took a delicate bite, and swished it around in his mouth like it was wine. “Meaty, but sweet, somehow, with an aftertaste like pears. Have you ever had pears, boy?”
Durrest shook his head.
“So much for you to discover in this Galaxy, as you grow! Of course, there are many sorts of pears, tart ones, sweeter ones… Hmm.” Pliss chewed. “You don’t happen to know the species name for these do you?”
Durrest shook his head.
“Pity. And my equipment is burned up in the ship. Hmm, you have a harvester tool, surely that would sample… but wait, no genetic sample module?”
Durrest shook his head.
“Ah well.” Pliss swallowed noisily and reached for a second patty. Durrest could see his day’s earnings vanishing rapidly into the Hansian’s mouth. Pliss went on, mouth full, “I’m a baker, you see. Might make for an interesting ingredient. Don’t talk much do you?”
Durrest shook his head, then asked, “What happened? Why’d you crash?”
An evasive look came over the baker’s face. “Oh,” he said airily, “just a malfunction in the –”
Both their Newsnet comms pinged at once. Servitor override, planetary broadcast. An Interdiction.
PLEASE REMAIN CALM. WE ARE SEARCHING FOR INTERDICTED CONTRABAND. RESISTANCE MAY RESULT IN THE EXTERMINATION OF ALL LIFE ON YOUR PLANET. RUDENESS MAY ALSO RESULT IN THE EXTERMINATION OF ALL LIFE ON YOUR PLANET.Pliss froze as he listened, mushroom patty halfway to his wide mouth. There was a brief pause in the broadcast, then it resumed.
ALSO, DON’T SNEEZE ON US, ONE OF US IS SUSCEPTIBLE TO RUST.“Oh
crurf. Do you know anywhere to hide?”
“Town,” Durrest said briefly. He was curt, half scared and half excited. A Servitor Interdiction! Lomeisen! He’d seen patrols of course, and once a Seeder ship flew overhead. But the fact of that matter was this planet just didn’t have much life on it, so the Servitors just didn’t care. Then a thought occurred to him. Not much life also meant nothing much for them to care to save.
“Uh, they aren’t serious about exterminating all of us, are they?”
Pliss was frantically packing up his camp kit. “Of course they are, kid. What, never interacted much with them before?”
“N-no.”
Pliss paused, then tucked the kit away in his molecular compressor pack, where it dwindled down to miniature size. “Look, they try to keep species alive, but they don’t care very much about any one individual. We’re disposable. No matter how much our work matters.” He sounded bitter.
“Work?”
“Yeah, kid. Work, like preserving cultural heritage.” Pliss was ready to go, looking one direction and another. “Which way is town? We have to move.”
Durrest hefted the mushroom bag onto his back, and pointed silently. His knees were shaking a little, and it wasn’t the weight of the bag.
Extermination of all life on the planet.Pliss paused. Looked him up and down. Looked into his eyes. Closed his eyes. Took a deep breath. Exhaled it slowly.
“Sorry kid. You must be freakin’ out. Sipiss!” he cursed to himself. “Look, they’ll never suspect you. And it saves the work. I don’t matter, in the end. We’ll meet here in two days, at dawn, okay?”
Durrest had no idea what he was talking about, but he felt his eyes getting big. Maybe he wasn’t as grown up and tough as he thought. Maybe the galaxy was full of much scarier things than giant scuttlebeetles, or pears.
Pliss knelt before him, and handed him a folded piece of paper. “Here, take this. We’ll split up, you go to town and I’ll go the other way.” He put his long webbed hands on Durrest’s shoulders. “You’ll be fine.”
He stood, and began to run as best he could with his rolling waddle. Just before rounding a corner of the rockface, he said over his shoulder, “Even if they find it, they’ll know it’s not yours. You’re just a kid.”
But he sounded uncertain about it.
Durrest stood there for a bit, paper in his hand. Then he tucked it in a sock. Once he couldn’t hear Pliss’ heavy breath, he started trudging back to town with the heavy mushrooms on his back.
*
Shadows were getting longer as Durrest reached the outskirts of town. Suddenly, his eyes stung from bright light as the dusk was illuminated.
Two meteorites fell from the sky just off to the side, glowing hot and angry. As they got close to the ground, their rate of descent slowed, and a crater of sand formed around them. Two metallic balls, spinning rapidly end over end; then they slowed until they paused hovering, and then slowly unfolded into the shape of two Servitor hunter-killers.
One of them was rusty, while the other gleamed metallic and clean.
“Oh, this planet is great. Really great,” the rusty one said. He stretched his needle fingers out, cracked his neck with its ungainly head. “Really eases the rust spots to have low humidity. Just have to watch out for the grit in the gears, you know?”
“We are within standard operational parameters. The climatological environment is of no consequence. Standard issue lubrication can handle silica-based particulate matter,” the other said in a monotone.
“Just saying,” the rusty one said cheerfully. “It just feels good!” He did a flawless little dance move, toe pointed out, and the angle of the blades on his legs and arms perfect. “Like a holiday!”
The silver hunter-killer looked at the rusty one with its blank flat eye sensors. “This is not recreational time. We are seeking pernicious corruption. Once it infects a planet, it never dies. It is passed from host to host forever. It replicates, an infection that cannot be cleared.”
“It’s no pineapple upside-down cake, that’s for sure,” the rusty one said.
“I do not understand entity type ‘pineapple upside-down cake,’ and do not understand what this signifier means to your programming.”
Durrest, still standing there stock still, could swear he saw the rusty Servitor actually sigh. A small bit of steam even emerged from a neck joint.
“Dude,” the rusty one said. “You really need to get the sensory upgrades.”
“Degrading your assembly is a probable cause for your chassis developing rust.”
“Hey now!” The rusty one spun at his waist swivel point, and smacked the other Servitor with his metal arm. The force of the blow would have cut Durrest in two. The other Servitor was unmoved. The rusty one glared at him and said “That’s offensive. I was made this way.”
The clean Servitor said nothing in response.
“Fine.” The rusty one looked around, and spotted Durrest. “You. Come here.”
Durrest trudged towards him, no longer very excited to see a Servitor up close.
“What’s in the bag, kid?”
“Desert mushrooms.” He proffered the mesh bag to the Servitor. He had to hand it up – this was the largest sentient thing he had ever seen, bigger even than Grrogho, the Skwatchi who ran the tavern and spent all day complaining about the heat.
The rusty robot held the bag in fanblade serrated hands tipped with needles, while the clean robot ran arms covered in micropellet projectile vaporizers over the mesh bag, and played some sort of sensor beam over it.
“Gross,” the rusty robot pronounced. “Never did like mushrooms.”
“Local organic fungal species,” the clear Servitor pronounced. He spun his torso, and played the beam over Durrest, starting at the head and working downwards. It tickled, then started to burn. Durrest felt tears start in his eyes as the beam worked its way down his chest, then to his knees, and –
“Let’s go,” the rusty Servitor said. “There’s a whole town to check.”
The burning sensation stopped at the top of Durrest’s boots. He opened his eyes, and saw the two robots stalking towards town.
Not exterminated! he thought to himself. I stood up to deadly Servitors! Lomeisen! And they’re here looking for the Aberration! I wonder if Pliss had spores? He stopped suddenly, dropped to the ground, and pulled off his boots to check his feet, where the Servitor’s beams hadn’t. Frantic, he checked his skin all over where he could see, anywhere the paper had touched.
No little tentacles. No wriggling worm things. He even checked his eyeballs in the reflection in the shiny bits of his harvester.
I’m clean. Relieved, he put on his socks, tucked the paper in again, and put his boots back on.
He walked back to town, standing a little taller, feeling a little older, a little bit tougher. Like a survivor.
*
The next morning the town was roused and summoned to the central plaza by the fountain. The two Servitors were there, and between them, held in their crushing grip, was Plissashl the Hansian baker. He was battered and bloody, and where his arms were held crushed by the Servitor pincers, they bruised purple and green.
“Ahem!” said the rusty Servitor. “Announcement incoming!”
NewsNet pings sounded across the crowd watching. Durrest stayed behind larger adults, peeking through Grrogho’s legs only occasionally. Sometimes it helped, being small. He wanted to stay out of Pliss’ view, just in case.
ANNOUNCEMENT. OUR GENEROUS FORBEARANCE ALLOWS YOU TO LIVE. NO SIGNIFICANT INFESTION WAS FOUND. NO SUCCOR OR ASSISTANCE WAS PROVIDED TO THIS ENEMY OF THE OLD ONES. YOUR EXTERMINATION IS NO LONGER REQUIRED.Sobs of relief broke out across the gathered townsfolk.
“It wasn’t Cornucopia,” Pliss mumbled through swollen giant lips.
The rusty Servitor shook him harshly, and Pliss went limp. “It doesn’t matter! What were you thinking? You know it’s still a plague.”
“We are obligated to take you to molecular disassembly to ensure a lack of infestation,” the clean Servitor intoned.
Pliss sagged between them.
The rusty robot extended telescoping sensors from the vicinity of what might represent his nose. Then he sniffed at the nearly unconscious baker. “Can’t believe you’re throwing your life away on this. Not like it’s over strawberry shortcake, either. Ah, the ethyl butyrate levels when the berries are fresh!”
The clean Servitor hunter-killer momentarily froze, then rotated his head towards the rusty one. “I believe I comprehend. Relative esters provide sensory inputs you can assess via particulate analysis. This is what you call… smell and taste?”
“Yeah!” The rusty Servitor got enthusiastic. “It’s so fascinating. Like, the difference between ethyl butyrate versus ethyl methylphenylglycidate, it’s dramatic but somehow organics clump them both as strawberry…”
“My neural net might find these additional inputs of interest after all…” said the clean robot, as a whirlwind formed by his massive feet.
Pliss started to struggle as the two robots began to curl into hovering balls and glide away, but it was no use. As the three of them zoomed into the sky, Durrest heard his scream: “But it’s my grandmother’s recipeeeeeeeeee…”
Durrest felt very small and young again, at that moment. Like something soft caught in the gears of a very large whirling machine he only faintly understood.
In an alley later, the young Gertan unfolded the paper, and worked at deciphering the unfamiliar letter shapes.
[h2]
HOLIDAY FRUITCAKE
1 cup candied fruit…[/h2]
He wondered if he could substitute mushrooms.
