12
I n addition to broth, Fragment could eat meat ground into a fine paste, so long as he had plenty of water. This would have made me nervous again, except that apparently he couldn’t actually chew, because his teeth were made of the same substance as the rest of him.
TOO SOFT. NO BONES, he wrote. MUST USE STICKS.
Ingold, who had lost all fear in favor of fascination, asked him to demonstrate, and to my shock and horror, Fragment pushed up his sleeve, held out his arm, and it ... melted. The flesh simply dropped away in gummy strings that dangled below the arm, revealing a stick with bark still attached.
“You’ve got sticks for bones ?” Angus said.
Fragment nodded. CAN’T WALK WELL OTHERWISE. As I watched, the long strings hanging from his arm reversed themselves, crawling upward over one another and braiding themselves back into flesh. It was both amazing and dreadful to watch.
It also explained why, when I had seen Fragment flowing along the ground, he had had a human-shaped lump atop him. It had been the bone-sticks and enough flesh to hold them together, while the main body of the creature went slithering along the ground.
It’s true what they say, you can get used to anything. It was still deeply, viscerally alien, but my sheer horror was fading the longer that Fragment talked to us.
“So you don’t have any teeth either,” Ingold was saying, as Denton and Kent returned. Denton still looked tense. (Can’t imagine why.)
NO. TRIED ROCKS, BUT THEY JUST PUSH THROUGH JAW.
“He probably could drink blood,” said Ingold musingly, “though I doubt it would sustain him long. Organ meats processed into a fine slurry would likely work better.”
“Is it a coronary you’re trying to give me?” Angus demanded.
USED OTHER ROCKS TO GRIND FISH, Fragment offered.
“Fascinating as this is,” said Denton testily, “will you excuse us for a moment? I would like to confer with my colleagues in private.”
Fragment gave one of his exaggerated nods, and Denton hustled us all outside of the mouth of the mine. I looked over my shoulder and saw the creature standing by the table, hands dangling limply at his sides.
“Can he still hear us, do you think?” asked Denton in an undertone.
Ingold frowned. “I don’t think he can,” he said. “His hearing is not so good as ours. His ears aren’t real. Well, they’re real, but they’re not real ears. The sounds come in through his entire body.”
“I’d think that would make him able to hear better,” said Angus.
“Actually, no.” Ingold had that enthusiastic light blazing in his eyes again. “Human ears are quite marvelously complicated. They funnel sounds in onto membranes that vibrate against tiny little bones—really, if you took your ear apart, you’d be astonished!”
“No doubt,” Angus muttered.
“Fragment doesn’t have any of that. His skin can’t vibrate the same way because it’s busy being skin, and a few other things as well.
It’s amazing he can hear as well as he does.
Or walk, or anything else.” Ingold spread his hands.
“As far as I can tell, the most specialized cells he has are the chromatophores and the ones that produce the bioluminescent glow. His muscles have to be muscles and nerve cells and move food around and do all the things that our bodies have specialized cells to do. And that doesn’t even get into how they all seem to be some kind of gestalt consciousness, which of course is incredible by itself—”
Denton held up a hand before Ingold could tear off on another tangent. “Did he kill Oscar?”
Ingold blinked a few times. I could practically hear the squeal of brakes being applied to his train of thought.
“There’s no way to know,” he said finally.
“He was certainly in the mine. He clearly saw Oscar up close, although that could have been at any time. His eyes actually do work, interestingly enough; he says that he studied a dead possum’s eyes and figured out how they worked, although he’s using pond water in place of aqueous humor—”
This time I was the one who broke in. “Is he the one who’s been killing people over at the camp?”
Denton turned his head toward me sharply. I spread my hands. “It was the bit about organ meat turned to slurry. The corpse we saw had its organs pulled out like someone shucking an oyster.”
“I’d be very surprised if he was,” Ingold said. “He doesn’t have real bones.”
“You don’t use your bones to kill people,” Angus said dryly.
“You do, though.” Ingold’s eyes started to light up again and Angus threw me a look of exasperated amusement. “Most of your muscles have to have your bones to anchor them and to push against. Imagine ... oh ... trying to punch someone with your tongue. That’s what it’s like for Fragment.”
There was a pause while we gave this particularly vivid mental image the credit it deserved. I opened my mouth to mention a young lady of my acquaintance in Paris, but caught a glimpse of Denton’s expression and closed it again.
“Fragment’s using a makeshift wooden skeleton so that he can walk,” Ingold said, “but he’s significantly weaker and slower than a human. The only way that I can see him overpowering someone is if there was a lot more of him somewhere.”
Angus spoke for all us when he said, “Huh?”
Ingold glanced around at us. “Surely that occurred to you…?”
“I think it’s fairly safe to say that you’re ahead of us again,” said Denton wearily.
“Well, there’s no reason that he has to be the size of a human, is there?” asked Ingold. “We know that the wholeness itself is huge. How big was the chunk broken off? There could be a room filled with Fragment somewhere that he rejoins occasionally.”
I can’t swear to it, but I suspect that Denton and Angus and I were all forcibly reminded of the tarn and the fungal intelligence within it. It had sent out bits of itself to possess the bodies of hares and ... other things ... which then returned to the dark water to rejoin the larger body.
“We know he can use tools,” Ingold said blithely, “so if there was a lot more of him, he wouldn’t really need bones. He’d just need to engulf someone until they suffocated, then scrape the guts out with a sharp knife.”
There was a second pause while we contemplated this image. I did not like it. Judging by their expressions, neither did anyone else.
“How do we find out if there’s more of him?” Denton asked.
“You could ask him.” Ingold shrugged. “He’s been remarkably forthcoming so far.”
“If he’s telling the truth,” Denton said. “Hell, he’s not even a he, is he? He’s an it.”
Everyone looked at me for some reason. (Fine, I know the reason.
I’m just saying that Angus speaks Gallacian as well as I do.
They could look at him instead.) I rolled my eyes.
“Don’t ask me. Gallacian doesn’t have anything for .
.. I don’t know, intelligent land-jellyfish.
” (Granted, if any language would, it would be ours.
Still.) “He’s choosing to appear as male, so he ’s as good as anything. ”
Ingold rubbed the back of his neck. “Anyway, I don’t get the impression he’s lying about anything. I don’t think he understands lying very well.”
“He was pretending to be Oscar .” Denton’s voice sounded as if it had been chipped out of flint.
“Yes, but that wasn’t a lie , exactly.” Ingold frowned.
“It was mimicry. Imitating something isn’t the same.
His—err—species imitates things all the time, I think.
If a shark was coming toward them, they’d pretend to be another shark so that it wouldn’t try to eat them.
It’s more defensive. Even the telegram he sent was basically mimicking Oscar so that we wouldn’t come back. ”
Denton grimaced. Ingold hurried on. “I’m inclined to think he’s exactly what he says he is. If nothing else, it’s too weird to lie about.”
The doctor folded his arms. “Have you learned enough to know how to kill him?”
Ingold blinked. “What?”
“ If he killed Oscar and if he’s responsible for the killings over in the camp, we’re not just leaving him here to keep doing it. So how do we kill him?”
“But the loss to science—”
“Science be damned!” snarled Denton. “I’m not leaving a murderous—whatever that is—loose!”
“Why is everyone’s first response to a stranger to kill them?” Ingold shot back, his hands clenching into fists.
Now seemed like a good time to put my foot in it. If nothing else, I could give both of them someone else to be mad at. I held up both hands and stepped between them, in the pose colloquially known as “the first one to get punched.”
“Stand down, both of you,” I said. “Nobody’s killing anyone right this minute, alright? We don’t know that Fragment’s done anything to anybody. And even if we wanted to, we can’t get through that shell over the wholeness, unless somebody’s been smuggling dynamite in their trousers.”
The joke fell flat but I kept talking anyway. “Ingold, you yourself admitted Fragment could be dangerous. I’d like to know how we protect ourselves if he is. I don’t think that’s terribly unreasonable, eh?”
Ingold grimaced and looked over my shoulder at Angus. Angus said, “It’s a fair question, lad. Knowing how doesn’t mean we’ve got to do it.”
Oh sure, when I say it I get glared at, but if Angus says it, suddenly it’s sweet reason .
“Shooting him won’t do much,” said Ingold reluctantly, not looking at Denton. “It’d damage the tissues in the immediate area of the wound, that’s all. And there’d be even less point in stabbing him. He said fire would work.”
“If you believe him.”
“Fire works on nearly everything,” I pointed out.
Denton grunted. Ingold folded his arms. “I really don’t think he means us any harm.”
“Then what does he want?”
Ingold looked up with an awkward smile. “Actually, I think he needs our help.”
***
“He wants us to open up a hole to more of them?” I asked.