Symbiont Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg–four‑time Hugo Award‑winner, five‑time winner of the Nebula Award, SFWA Grand Master, SF Hall of Fame honoree–is the author of nearly five hundred short stories, nearly hundred‑and‑fifty novels, and is the editor of in the neighborhood of one hundred anthologies. Among his most famous works are Lord Valentine’s Castle, and the other books and stories in the Majipoor series, but all of his classic works are far too numerous to name.

The idea for “Symbiont”–which Silverberg described in The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg as a “somber tale of jungle adventure and diabolical revenge”–came from a young woman named Karen Haber that Silverberg met while on a book tour. She gave him the idea, and he worked his magic. Shortly after, the story was finished and appeared in Playboy. And shortly after that, Silverberg married Ms. Haber.

But you shouldn’t let that sweet story fool you; he wasn’t joking when he said this one is diabolical.

Ten years later, when I was long out of the Service and working the turnaround wheel at Betelgeuse Station, Fazio still haunted me. Not that he was dead. Other people get haunted by dead men; I was haunted by a live one. It would have been a lot better for both of us if he had been dead, but as far as I knew Fazio was still alive.

He’d been haunting me a long while. Three or four times a year his little dry thin voice would come out of nowhere and I’d hear him telling me again, “Before we go into that jungle, we got to come to an understanding. If a synsym nails me, Chollie, you kill me right away, hear? None of this shit of calling in the paramedics to clean me out. You just kill me right away. And I’ll do the same for you. Is that a deal?”

This was on a planet called Weinstein in the Servadac system, late in the Second Ovoid War. We were twenty years old and we were volunteers: two dumb kids playing hero. “You bet your ass” is what I told him, not hesitating a second. “Deal. Absolutely.” Then I gave him a big grin and a handclasp and we headed off together on spore‑spreading duty.

At the time, I really thought I meant it. Sometimes I still believe that I did.

• • •

Ten years. I could still see the two of us back there on Weinstein, going out to distribute latchenango spores in the enemy‑held zone. The planet had been grabbed by the Ovoids early in the war, but we were starting to drive them back from that whole system. Fazio and I were the entire patrol: you get spread pretty thin in galactic warfare. But there was plenty of support force behind us in the hills.

Weinstein was strategically important, God only knows why. Two small continents–both tropical, mostly thick jungle, air like green soup–surrounded by an enormous turbulent ocean: never colonized by Earth, and of no use that anyone had ever successfully explained to me. But the place had once been ours and they had taken it away, and we wanted it back.

The way you got a planet back was to catch a dozen or so Ovoids, fill them full of latchenango spores, and let them return to their base. There is no life‑form a latchenango likes better as its host than an Ovoid. The Ovoids, being Ovoids, would usually conceal what had happened to them from their pals, who would kill them instantly if they knew they were carrying deadly parasites. Of course, the carriers were going to die anyway–latchenango infestation is invariably fatal to Ovoids–but by the time they did, in about six standard weeks, the latchenangos had gone through three or four reproductive cycles and the whole army would be infested. All we needed to do was wait until all the Ovoids were dead and then come in, clean the place up, and raise the flag again. The latchenangos were generally dead, too, by then, since they rarely could find other suitable hosts. But even if they weren’t, we didn’t worry about it. Latchenangos don’t cause any serious problems for humans. About the worst of it is that you usually inhale some spores while you’re handling them, and it irritates your lungs for a couple of weeks so you do some pretty ugly coughing until you’re desporified.

In return for our latchenangos the Ovoids gave us synsyms.

Synsyms were the first things you heard about when you arrived in the war zone, and what you heard was horrendous. You didn’t know how much of it was myth and how much was mere bullshit and how much was truth, but even if you discounted seventy‑five percent of it the rest was scary enough. “If you get hit by one,” the old hands advised us, “kill yourself fast, while you have the chance.” Roving synsym vectors cruised the perimeter of every Ovoid camp, sniffing for humans. They were not parasites but synthetic symbionts: when they got into you, they stayed there, sharing your body with you indefinitely.

In school they teach you that symbiosis is a mutually beneficial state. Maybe so. But the word that passed through the ranks in the war zone was that it definitely did not improve the quality of your life to take a synsym into your body. And though the Service medics would spare no effort to see that you survived a synsym attack–they aren’t allowed to perform mercy killings, and wouldn’t anyway–everything we heard indicated that you didn’t really want to survive one.

The day Fazio and I entered the jungle was like all the others on Weinstein: dank, humid, rainy. We strapped on our spore tanks and started out, using hand‑held heat piles to burn our way through the curtains of tangled vines. The wet spongy soil had a purplish tinge, and the lakes were iridescent green from lightning algae.

“Here’s where we’ll put the hotel landing strip,” Fazio said lightly. “Over here, the pool and cabanas. The gravity‑tennis courts here, and on the far side of that–”

“Watch it,” I said, and skewered a low‑flying wingfinger with a beam of hot purple light. It fell in ashes at our feet. Another one came by, the mate, traveling at eye level with its razor‑sharp beak aimed at my throat, but Fazio took it out just as neatly. We thanked each other. Wingfingers are elegant things, all trajectory and hardly any body mass, with scaly silvery skins that shine like the finest grade of moonlight, and it is their habit to go straight for the jugular in the most literal sense. We killed twelve that day, and I hope it is my quota for this lifetime. As we advanced into the heart of the jungle we dealt just as efficiently with assorted hostile coilworms, eyeflies, dingleberries, leper bats, and other disagreeable local specialties. We were a great team: quick, smart, good at protecting each other.

We were admiring a giant carnivorous fungus a klick and a half deep in the woods when we came upon our first Ovoid. The fungus was a fleshy phallic red tower three meters high with orange gills, equipped with a dozen dangling whiplike arms that had green adhesive knobs at the tips. At the ends of most of the arms hung small forest creatures in various stages of digestion. As we watched, an unoccupied arm rose and shot forth, extended itself to three times its resting length, and by some neat homing tropism slapped its adhesive knob against a passing many‑legger about the size of a cat. The beast had no chance to struggle; a network of wiry structures sprouted at once from the killer arm and slipped into the victim’s flesh, and that was that. We almost applauded.

“Let’s plant three of them in the hotel garden,” I said, “and post a schedule of feeding times. It’ll be a great show for the guests.”

“Shh,” Fazio said. He pointed.

Maybe fifty meters away a solitary Ovoid was gliding serenely along a forest path, obviously unaware of us. I caught my breath. Everyone knows what Ovoids look like, but this was the first time I had seen a live one. I was surprised at how beautiful it was, a tapering cone of firm jelly, pale blue streaked with red and gold. Triple rows of short‑stalked eyes along its sides like brass buttons. Clusters of delicate tendrils sprouting like epaulets around the eating orifice at the top of its head. Turquoise ribbons of neural conduit winding round and round its equator, surrounding the dark heart‑shaped brain faintly visible within the cloudy depths. The enemy. I was conditioned to hate it, and I did; yet I couldn’t deny its strange beauty.

Fazio smiled and took aim and put a numb‑needle through the Ovoid’s middle. It froze instantly in mid‑glide; its color deepened to a dusky flush; the tiny mouth tendrils fluttered wildly, but there was no other motion. We jogged up to it and I slipped the tip of my spore distributor about five centimeters into its meaty middle. “Let him have it!” Fazio yelled. I pumped a couple of c.c.’s of latchenango spores into the paralyzed alien. Its soft quivering flesh turned blue‑black with fear and rage and God knows what other emotions that were strictly Ovoid. We nodded to each other and moved along. Already the latchenangos were spawning within their host; in half an hour the Ovoid, able once more to move, would limp off toward its camp to start infecting its comrades. It is a funny way to wage war.

The second Ovoid, an hour later, was trickier. It knew we had spotted it and took evasive action, zigzagging through a zone of streams and slender trees in a weird dignified way like someone trying to move very fast without having his hat blow off. Ovoids are not designed for quick movements, but this one was agile and determined, ducking behind this rock and that. More than once we lost sight of it altogether and were afraid it might double back and come down on us while we stood gaping and blinking.

Eventually we bottled it up between two swift little streams and closed in on it from both sides. I raised my needler and Fazio got ready with his spore distributor and just then something gray and slipper‑shaped and about fifteen centimeters long came leaping up out of the left‑hand stream and plastered itself over Fazio’s mouth and throat.

Down he went, snuffling and gurgling, trying desperately to peel it away. I thought it was some kind of killer fish. Pausing only long enough to shoot a needle through the Ovoid, I dropped my gear and jumped down beside him.

Fazio was rolling around, eyes wild, kicking at the ground in terror and agony. I put my elbow on his chest to hold him still and pried with both hands at the thing on his face. Getting it loose was like pulling a second skin off him, but somehow I managed to lift it away from his lips far enough for him to gasp, “Synsym–I think it’s synsym–”

“No, man, it’s just some nasty fish,” I told him. “Hang in there and I’ll rip the rest of it loose in half a minute–”

Fazio shook his head in anguish.

Then I saw the two thin strands of transparent stuff snaking up out of it and disappearing into his nostrils, and I knew he was right.

• • •

I didn’t hear anything from him or about him after the end of the war, and didn’t want to, but I assumed all along that Fazio was still alive. I don’t know why: my faith in the general perversity of the universe, I guess.

The last I had seen of him was our final day on Weinstein. We both were being invalided out. They were shipping me to the big hospital on Daemmerung for routine desporification treatment, but he was going to the quarantine station on Quixote; and as we lay side by side in the depot, me on an ordinary stretcher and Fazio inside an isolation bubble, he raised his head with what must have been a terrible effort and glared at me out of eyes that already were ringed with the red concentric synsym circles, and he whispered something to me. I wasn’t able to understand the words through the wall of his bubble, but I could feel them, the way you feel the light of a blue‑white sun from half a parsec out. His skin was glowing. The dreadful vitality of the symbiont within him was already apparent. I had a good notion of what he was trying to tell me. You bastard, he was most likely trying to say. Now I’m stuck with this thing for a thousand years. And I’m going to hate you every minute of the time, Chollie.

Then they took him away. They sent him floating up the ramp into that Quixote‑bound ship. When he was out of view I felt released, as though I was coming out from under a pull of six or seven gravs. It occurred to me that I wasn’t ever going to have to see Fazio again. I wouldn’t have to face those reddened eyes, that taut shining skin, that glare of infinite reproach. Or so I believed for the next ten years, until he turned up on Betelgeuse Station.

A bolt out of the blue: there he was, suddenly, standing next to me in the recreation room on North Spoke. It was just after my shift and I was balancing on the rim of the swimmer web, getting ready to dive. “Chollie?” he said calmly. The voice was Fazio’s voice: that was clear, when I stopped to think about it a little later. But I never for a moment considered that this weird gnomish man might be Fazio. I stared at him and didn’t even come close to recognizing him. He seemed about seven million years old, shrunken, fleshless, weightless, with thick coarse hair like white straw and strange soft gleaming translucent skin that looked like parchment worn thin by time. In the bright light of the rec room he kept his eyes hooded nearly shut; but then he turned away from the glowglobes and opened them wide enough to show me the fine red rings around his pupils. The hair began to rise along the back of my neck.

“Come on,” he said. “You know me. Yeah. Yeah.”

The voice, the cheekbones, the lips, the eyes–the eyes, the eyes, the eyes. Yes, I knew him. But it wasn’t possible. Fazio? Here? How? So long a time, so many light‑years away! And yet–yet–

He nodded. “You got it, Chollie. Come on. Who am I?”

My first attempt at saying something was a sputtering failure. But I managed to get his name out on the second try.

“Yeah,” he said. “Fazio. What a surprise.”

He didn’t look even slightly surprised. I think he must have been watching me for a few days before he approached me–casing me, checking me out, making certain it was really me, getting used to the idea that he had actually found me. Otherwise the amazement would surely have been showing on him now. Finding me–finding anybody along the starways–wasn’t remotely probable. This was a coincidence almost too big to swallow. I knew he couldn’t have deliberately come after me, because the galaxy is so damned big a place that the idea of setting out to search for someone in it is too silly even to think about. But somehow he had caught up with me anyway. If the universe is truly infinite, I suppose, then even the most wildly improbable things must occur in it a billion times a day.

I said shakily, “I can’t believe–”

“You can’t? Hey, you better! What a surprise, kid, hey? Hey?” He clapped his hand against my arm. “And you’re looking good, kid. Nice and healthy. You keep in shape, huh? How old are you now, thirty‑two?”

“Thirty.” I was numb with shock and fear.

“Thirty. Mmm. So am I. Nice age, ain’t it? Prime of life.”

“Fazio–”

His control was terrifying. “Come on, Chollie. You look like you’re about to crap in your pants. Aren’t you glad to see your old buddy? We had some good times together, didn’t we? Didn’t we? What was the name of that fuckin’ planet? Weinberg? Weinfeld? Hey, hey, don’t stare at me like that!”

I had to work hard to make any sound at all. Finally I said, “What the hell do you want me to do, Fazio? I feel like I’m looking at a ghost.”

He leaned close, and his eyes opened wider. I could practically count the concentric red rings, ten or fifteen of them, very fine lines. “I wish to Christ you were,” he said quietly. Such unfathomable depths of pain, such searing intensity of hatred. I wanted to squirm away from him. But there was no way. He gave me a long slow crucifying inspection. Then he eased back and some of the menacing intensity seemed to go out of him. Almost jauntily he said, “We got a lot to talk about, Chollie. You know some quiet place around here we can go?”

“There’s the gravity lounge–”

“Sure. The gravity lounge.”

• • •

We floated face‑to‑face, at half‑pull. “You promised you’d kill me if I got nailed,” Fazio murmured. “That was our deal. Why didn’t you do it, Chollie? Why the fuck didn’t you do it?”

I could hardly bear to look into his red‑ringed eyes.

“Things happened too fast, man. How was I to know paramedics would be on the scene in five minutes?”

“Five minutes is plenty of time to put a heat bolt through a guy’s chest.”

“Less than five minutes. Three. Two. The paramedic floater was right overhead, man! It was covering us the whole while. They came down on us like a bunch of fucking angels, Fazio!”

“You had time.”

“I thought they were going to be able to save you,” I said lamely. “They got there so quickly.”

Fazio laughed harshly. “They did try to save me,” he said. “I’ll give them credit for trying. Five minutes and I was on that floater and they were sending tracers all over me to clean the synsym goop out of my lungs and my heart and my liver.”

“Sure. That was just what I figured they’d do.”

“You promised to finish me off, Chollie, if I got nailed.”

“But the paramedics were right there!”

“They worked on me like sonsabitches,” he said. “They did everything. They can clean up the vital tissues, they can yank out your organs, synsym and all, and stick in transplants. But they can’t get the stuff out of your brain, did you know that? The synsym goes straight up your nose into your brain and it slips its tendrils into your meninges and your neural glia and right into your fucking corpus callosum. And from there it goes everywhere. The cerebellum, the medulla, you name it. They can’t send tracers into the brain that will clean out synsym and not damage brain tissue. And they can’t pull out your brain and give you a new one, either. Thirty seconds after the synsym gets into your nose it reaches your brain and it’s all over for you, no matter what kind of treatment you get. Didn’t you hear them tell you that when we first got to the war zone? Didn’t you hear all the horror stories?”

“I thought they were just horror stories,” I said faintly.

He rocked back and forth gently in his gravity cradle. He didn’t say anything.

“Do you want to tell me what it’s like?” I asked after a while.

Fazio shrugged. As though from a great distance he said, “What it’s like? Ah, it’s not all that goddamned bad, Chollie. It’s like having a roommate. Living with you in your head, forever, and you can’t break the lease. That’s all. Or like having an itch you can’t scratch. Having it there is like finding yourself trapped in a space that’s exactly one centimeter bigger than you are all around, and knowing that you’re going to stay walled up in it for a million years.” He looked off toward the great clear wall of the lounge, toward giant red Betelgeuse blazing outside far away. “Your synsym talks to you sometimes. So you’re never lonely, you know? Doesn’t speak any language you understand, just sits there and spouts gibberish. But at least it’s company. Sometimes it makes you spout gibberish, especially when you badly need to make sense. It grabs control of the upper brain centers now and then, you know. And as for the autonomous centers, it does any damned thing it likes with them. Keys into the pain zones and runs little simulations for you–an amputation without anesthetic, say. Just for fun. Its fun. Or you’re in bed with a woman and it disconnects your erection mechanism. Or it gives you an erection that won’t go down for six weeks. For fun. It can get playful with your toilet training, too. I wear a diaper, Chollie, isn’t that sweet? I have to. I get drunk sometimes without drinking. Or I drink myself sick without feeling a thing. And all the time I feel it there, tickling me. Like an ant crawling around within my skull. Like a worm up my nose. It’s just like the other guys told us, when we came out to the war zone. Remember? ‘Kill yourself fast, while you have the chance.’ I never had the chance. I had you, Chollie, and we had a deal, but you didn’t take our deal seriously. Why not, Chollie?”

I felt his eyes burning me. I looked away, halfway across the lounge, and caught sight of Elisandra’s long golden hair drifting in free‑float. She saw me at the same moment, and waved. We usually got together in here this time of night. I shook my head, trying to warn her off, but it was too late. She was already heading our way.

“Who’s that?” Fazio asked. “Your girlfriend?”

“A friend.”

“Nice,” he said. He was staring at her as though he had never seen a woman before. “I noticed her last night, too. You live together?”

“We work the same shift on the wheel.”

“Yeah. I saw you leave with her last night. And the night before.”

“How long have you been at the Station, Fazio?”

“Week. Ten days, maybe.”

“Came here looking for me?”

“Just wandering around,” he said. “Fat disability pension, plenty of time. I go to a lot of places. That’s a really nice woman, Chollie. You’re a lucky guy.” A tic was popping on his cheek and another was getting started on his lower lip. He said, “Why the fuck didn’t you kill me when that thing first jumped me?”

“I told you. I couldn’t. The paramedics were on the scene too fast.”

“Right. You needed to say some Hail Marys first, and they just didn’t give you enough time.”

He was implacable. I had to strike back at him somehow or the guilt and shame would drive me crazy. Angrily I said, “What the hell do you want me to tell you, Fazio? That I’m sorry I didn’t kill you ten years ago? Okay, I’m sorry. Does that do any good? Listen, if the synsym’s as bad as you say, how come you haven’t killed yourself? Why go on dragging yourself around with that thing inside your head?”

He shook his head and made a little muffled grunting sound. His face abruptly became gray, his lips were sagging. His eyeballs seemed to be spinning slowly in opposite directions. Just an illusion, I knew, but a scary one.

“Fazio?”

He said, “Chollallula lillalolla loolicholla. Billillolla.”

I stared. He looked frightening. He looked hideous.

“Jesus, Fazio!”

Spittle dribbled down his chin. Muscles jumped and writhed crazily all over his face. “You see? You see?” he managed to blurt. There was warfare inside him. I watched him trying to regain command. It was like a man wrestling himself to a fall. I thought he was going to have a stroke. But then, suddenly, he seemed to grow calm. His breath was ragged, his skin was mottled with fiery blotches. He collapsed down into himself, head drooping, arms dangling. He looked altogether spent. Another minute or two passed before he could speak. I didn’t know what to do for him. I floated there, watching. Finally, a little life seemed to return to him.

“Did you see? That’s what happens,” he gasped. “It takes control. How could I ever kill myself? It wouldn’t let me do it.”

“Wouldn’t let you?”

He looked up at me and sighed wearily. “Think, Chollie, think! It’s in symbiosis with me. We aren’t independent organisms.” Then the tremors began again, worse than before. Fazio made a desperate furious attempt to fight them off–arms and legs flung rigidly out, jaws working–but it was useless. “Illallomba!” he yelled. “Nullagribba!” He tossed his head from side to side as if trying to shake off something sticky that was clinging to it. “If I–then it–gillagilla! Holligoolla! I can’t–I can’t–oh–Jesus–Christ–!”

His voice died away into harsh sputters and clankings. He moaned and covered his face with his hands.

But now I understood.

For Fazio there could never be any escape. That was the most monstrous part of the whole thing, the ultimate horrifying twist. The symbiont knew that its destiny was linked to Fazio’s. If he died, the symbiont would also; and so it could not allow its host to damage himself. From its seat in Fazio’s brain it had ultimate control over his body. Whatever he tried–jump off a bridge, reach for a flask of poison, pick up a gun–the watchful thing in his mind would be a step ahead of him, always protecting him against harm.

A flood of compassion welled up in me and I started to put my hand comfortingly on Fazio’s shoulder. But then I yanked it back as though I were afraid the symbiont could jump from his mind into mine at the slightest touch. And then I scowled and forced myself to touch him after all. He pulled away. He looked burned out.

“Chollie?” Elisandra said, coining up beside us. She floated alongside, long‑limbed, beautiful, frowning. “Is this private, or can I join you?”

I hesitated, fumbling. I desperately wanted to keep Fazio and Elisandra in separate compartments of my life, but I saw that I had no way of doing that. “We were–well–just that–”

“Come on, Chollie,” Fazio said in a bleak hollow voice. “Introduce your old war buddy to the nice woman.”

Elisandra gave him an inquiring glance. She could not have failed to detect the strangeness in his tone.

I took a deep breath. “This is Fazio,” I said. “We were in the Servadac campaign together during the Second Ovoid War. Fazio–Elisandra. Elisandra’s a traffic‑polarity engineer on the turnaround wheel–you ought to see her at work, the coolest cookie you can imagine–”

“An honor to meet you,” said Fazio grandly. “A woman who combines such beauty and such technical skills–I have to say–I–I–” Suddenly he was faltering. His face turned blotchy. Fury blazed in his eyes. “No! Damn it, no! No more!” He clutched handfuls of air in some wild attempt at steadying himself. “Mullagalloola!” he cried, helpless. “Jillabongbong! Sampazozozo!” And he burst into wild choking sobs, while Elisandra stared at him in amazement and sorrow.

• • •

“Well, are you going to kill him?” she asked.

It was two hours later. We had put Fazio to bed in his little cubicle over at Transient House, and she and I were in her room. I had told her everything.

I looked at her as though she had begun to babble the way Fazio had. Elisandra and I had been together almost a year, but there were times I felt I didn’t know her at all.

“Well?” she said.

“Are you serious?”

“You owe it to him. You owe him a death, Chollie. He can’t come right out and say it, because the symbiont won’t allow him to. But that’s what he wants from you.”

I couldn’t deny any of that. I’d been thinking the same thing for at least the past hour. The reality of it was inescapable: I had muffed things on Weinstein and sent Fazio to hell for ten years. Now I had to set him free.

“If there was only some way to get the symbiont out of his brain–”

“But there isn’t.”

“No,” I said. “There isn’t.”

“You’ll do it for him, won’t you?”

“Quit it,” I said.

“I hate the way he’s suffering, Chollie.”

“You think I don’t?”

“And what about you? Suppose you fail him a second time. How will you live with that? Tell me how.”

“I was never much for killing, Ellie. Not even Ovoids.”

“We know that,” she said. “But you don’t have any choice this time.”

I went to the little fireglobe she had mounted above the sleeping platform, and hit the button and sent sparks through the thick coiling mists. A rustle of angry colors swept the mist, a wild aurora, green, purple, yellow. After a moment I said quietly, “You’re absolutely right.”

“Good. I was afraid for a moment you were going to crap out on him again.”

There was no malice in it, the way she said it. All the same, it hit me like a fist. I stood there nodding, letting the impact go rippling through me and away.

At last the reverberations seemed to die down within me. But then a great new uneasiness took hold of me and I said, “You know, it’s totally idiotic of us to be discussing this. I’m involving you in something that’s none of your business. What we’re doing is making you an accomplice before the fact.”

Elisandra ignored me. Something was in motion in her mind, and there was no swerving her now. “How would you go about it?” she asked. “You can’t just cut someone’s throat and dump him down a disposer chute.”

“Look,” I said, “do you understand that the penalty could be anything up to–”

She went on. “Any sort of direct physical assault is out. There’d be some sort of struggle for sure–the symbiont’s bound to defend the host body against attack–you’d come away with scratches, bruises, worse. Somebody would notice. Suppose you got so badly hurt you had to go to the medics. What would you tell them? A barroom brawl? And then nobody can find your old friend Fazio who you were seen with a few days before? No, much too risky.” Her tone was strangely businesslike, matter‑of‑fact. “And then, getting rid of the body–that’s even tougher, Chollie, getting fifty kilos of body mass off the Station without some kind of papers. No destination visa, no transshipment entry. Even a sack of potatoes would have an out‑invoice. But if someone just vanishes and there’s a fifty‑kilo short balance in the mass totals that day–”

“Quit it,” I said. “Okay?”

“You owe him a death. You agreed about that.”

“Maybe I do. But whatever I decide, I don’t want to drag you into it. It isn’t your mess, Ellie.”

“You don’t think so?” she shot right back at me.

Anger and love were all jumbled together in Elisandra’s tone. I didn’t feel like dealing with that just now. My head was pounding. I activated the pharmo arm by the sink and hastily ran a load of relaxants into myself with a subcute shot. Then I took her by the hand. Gently, trying hard to disengage, I said, “Can we just go to bed now? I’d rather not talk about this any more.”

Elisandra smiled and nodded. “Sure,” she replied, and her voice was much softer.

She started to pull off her clothes. But after a moment she turned to me, troubled. “I can’t drop it just like that, Chollie. It’s still buzzing inside me. That poor bastard.” She shuddered. “Never to be alone in his own head. Never to be sure he has control over his own body. Waking up in a puddle of piss, he said. Speaking in tongues. All that other crazy stuff. What did he say? Like feeling an ant wandering around inside his skull? An itch you can’t possibly scratch?”

“I didn’t know it would be that bad,” I said. “I think I would have killed him back then, if I had known.”

“Why didn’t you anyway?”

“He was Fazio. A human being. My friend. My buddy. I didn’t much want to kill Ovoids, even. How the hell was I going to kill him?”

“But you promised to, Chollie.”

“Let me be,” I said. “I didn’t do it, that’s all. Now I have to live with that.”

“So does he,” said Elisandra.

I climbed into her sleeptube and lay there without moving, waiting for her.

“So do I,” she added after a little while.

She wandered around the room for a time before joining me. Finally she lay down beside me, but at a slight distance. I didn’t move toward her. But eventually the distance lessened, and I put my hand lightly on her shoulder, and she turned to me.

An hour or so before dawn she said, “I think I see a way we can do it.”

• • •

We spent a week and a half working out the details. I was completely committed to it now, no hesitations, no reservations. As Elisandra said, I had no choice. This was what I owed Fazio; this was the only way I could settle accounts between us.

She was completely committed to it, too: even more so than I was, it sometimes seemed. I warned her that she was needlessly letting herself in for major trouble in case the Station authorities ever managed to reconstruct what had happened. It didn’t seem needless to her, she said.

I didn’t have a lot of contact with him while we were arranging things. It was important, I figured, not to give the symbiont any hints. I saw Fazio practically every day, of course–Betelgeuse Station isn’t all that big–off at a distance, staring, glaring, sometimes having one of his weird fits, climbing a wall or shouting incoherently or arguing with himself out loud; but generally I pretended not to see him. At times I couldn’t avoid him, and then we met for dinner or drinks or a workout in the rec room. But there wasn’t much of that.

“Okay,” Elisandra said finally. “I’ve done my part. Now you do yours, Chollie.”

Among the little services we run here is a sightseeing operation for tourists who feel like taking a close look at a red giant star. After the big stellar‑envelope research project shut down a few years ago we inherited a dozen or so solar sleds that had been used for skimming through the fringes of Betelgeuse’s mantle, and we began renting them out for three‑day excursions. The sleds are two‑passenger jobs without much in the way of luxury and nothing at all in the way of propulsion systems. The trip is strictly ballistic: we calculate your orbit and shoot you out of here on the big repellers, sending you on a dazzling swing across Betelgeuse’s outer fringes that gives you the complete light show and maybe a view of ten or twelve of the big star’s family of planets. When the sled reaches the end of its string, we catch you on the turnaround wheel and reel you in. It sounds spectacular, and it is; it sounds dangerous, and it isn’t. Not usually, anyhow.

I tracked Fazio down in the gravity lounge and said, “We’ve arranged a treat for you, man.”

The sled I had rented for him was called the Corona Queen. Elisandra routinely handled the dispatching job for these tours, and now and then I worked as wheelman for them, although ordinarily I wheeled the big interstellar liners that used Betelgeuse Station as their jumping‑off point for deeper space. We were both going to work Fazio’s sled. Unfortunately, this time there was going to be a disaster, because a regrettable little error had been made in calculating orbital polarity, and then there would be a one‑in‑a‑million failure of the redundancy circuits. Fazio’s sled wasn’t going to go on a tour of Betelgeuse’s far‑flung corona at all. It was going to plunge right into the heart of the giant red star.

I would have liked to tell him that, as we headed down the winding corridors to the dropdock. But I couldn’t, because telling Fazio meant telling Fazio’s symbiont also; and what was good news for Fazio was bad news for the symbiont. To catch the filthy thing by surprise: that was essential.

How much did Fazio suspect? God knows. In his place, I think I might have had an inkling. But maybe he was striving with all his strength to turn his mind away from any kind of speculation about the voyage he was about to take.

“You can’t possibly imagine what it’s like,” I said. “It’s unique. There’s just no way to simulate it. And the view of Betelgeuse that you get from the Station isn’t even remotely comparable.”

“The sled glides through the corona on a film of vaporized carbon,” said Elisandra. “The heat just rolls right off its surface.” We were chattering compulsively, trying to fill every moment with talk. “You’re completely shielded so that you can actually pass through the atmosphere of the star–”

“Of course,” I said, “Betelgeuse is so big and so violent that you’re more or less inside its atmosphere no matter where you are in its system–”

“And then there are the planets,” Elisandra said. “The way things are lined up this week, you may be able to see as many as a dozen of them–”

“–Otello, Falstaff, Siegfried, maybe Wotan–”

“–You’ll find a map on the ceiling of your cabin–”

“–Five gas giants twice the mass of Jupiter–keep your eye out for Wotan, that’s the one with rings–”

“–and Isolde, you can’t miss Isolde, she’s even redder than Betelgeuse, the damndest bloodshot planet imaginable–”

“–with eleven red moons, too, but you won’t be able to see them without filters–”

“–Otello and Falstaff for sure, and I think this week’s chart shows Aida out of occultation now, too–”

“–and then there’s the band of comets–”

“–the asteroids, that’s where we think a couple of the planets collided after gravitational perturbation of–”

“–and the Einsteinian curvature, it’s unmistakable–”

“–the big solar flares–”

“Here we are,” Elisandra said.

We had reached the dropdock. Before us rose a gleaming metal wall. Elisandra activated the hatch and it swung back to reveal the little sled, a sleek tapering frog‑nosed thing with a low hump in the middle. It sat on tracks; above it arched the coils of the repeller‑launcher, radiating at the moment the blue‑green glow that indicated a neutral charge. Everything was automatic. We had only to put Fazio on board and give the Station the signal for launch; the rest would be taken care of by the orbital‑polarity program Elisandra had previously keyed in.

“It’s going to be the trip of your life, man!” I said.

Fazio nodded. His eyes looked a little glazed, and his nostrils were flaring.

Elisandra hit the prelaunch control. The sled’s roof opened and a recorded voice out of a speaker in the dropdock ceiling began to explain to Fazio how to get inside and make himself secure for launching. My hands were cold, my throat was dry. Yet I was very calm, all things considered. This was murder, wasn’t it? Maybe so, technically speaking. But I was finding other names for it. A mercy killing; a balancing of the karmic accounts; a way of atoning for an ancient sin of omission. For him, release from hell after ten years; for me, release from a lesser but still acute kind of pain.

Fazio approached the sled’s narrow entry slot.

“Wait a second,” I said. I caught him by the arm. The account wasn’t quite in balance yet.

“Chollie–” Elisandra said.

I shook her off. To Fazio I said, “There’s one thing I need to tell you before you go.”

He gave me a peculiar look, but didn’t say anything.

I went on, “I’ve been claiming all along that I didn’t shoot you when the synsym got you because there wasn’t time, the medics landed too fast. That’s sort of true, but mainly it’s bullshit. I had time. What I didn’t have was the guts.”

“Chollie–” Elisandra said again. There was an edge on her voice.

“Just one more second,” I told her. I turned to Fazio again. “I looked at you, I looked at the heat gun, I thought about the synsym. But I just couldn’t do it. I stood there with the gun in my hand and I didn’t do a thing. And then the medics landed and it was too late–I felt like such a shit, Fazio, such a cowardly shit–”

Fazio’s face was turning blotchy. The red synsym lines blazed weirdly in his eyes.

“Get him into the sled!” Elisandra yelled. “It’s taking control of him, Chollie!”

“Oligabongaboo!” Fazio said. “Ungabanoo! Flizz! Thrapp!”

And he came at me like a wild man.

I had him by thirty kilos, at least, but he damned near knocked me over. Somehow I managed to stay upright. He bounced off me and went reeling around, and Elisandra grabbed his arm. He kicked her hard and sent her flying, but then I wrapped my forearm around the throat from behind, and Elisandra, crawling across the floor, got him around his legs so we could lift him and stuff him into the sled. Even then we had trouble holding him. Two of us against one skinny burned‑out ruined man, and he writhed and twisted and wriggled about like something diabolical. He scratched, he kicked, he elbowed, he spat. His eyes were fiery. Every time we forced him close to the entryway of the sled he dragged us back away from it. Elisandra and I were grunting and winded, and I didn’t think we could hang on much longer. This wasn’t Fazio we were doing battle with, it was a synthetic symbiont out of the Ovoid labs, furiously trying to save itself from a fiery death. God knows what alien hormones it was pumping into Fazio’s bloodstream. God knows how it had rebuilt his bones and heart and lungs for greater efficiency. If he ever managed to break free of my grip, I wondered which of us would get out of the dropdock alive.

But all the same, Fazio still needed to breathe. I tightened my hold on his throat and felt cartilage yielding. I didn’t care. I just wanted to get him on that sled, dead or alive, give him some peace at all. Him and me both. Tighter–tighter–

Fazio made rough sputtering noises, and then a thick nasty gargling sound.

“You’ve got him,” Elisandra said.

“Yeah. Yeah.”

I clamped down one notch tighter yet, and Fazio began to go limp, though his muscles still spasmed and jerked frantically. The creature within him was still full of fight; but there wasn’t much air getting into Fazio’s lungs now and his brain was starving for oxygen. Slowly Elisandra and I shoved him the last five meters toward the sled–lifted him, pushed him up to the edge of the slot, started to jam him into it–

A convulsion wilder than anything that had gone before ripped through Fazio’s body. He twisted half around in my grasp until he was face‑to‑face with Elisandra, and a bubble of something gray and shiny appeared on his lips. For an instant everything seemed frozen. It was like a slice across time, for just that instant. Then things began to move again. The bubble burst; some fragment of tissue leaped the short gap from Fazio’s lips to Elisandra’s. The symbiont, facing death, had cast forth a piece of its own life‑stuff to find another host. “ Chollie!” Elisandra wailed, and let go of Fazio and went reeling away as if someone had thrown acid in her eyes. She was clawing at her face. At the little flat gray slippery thing that had plastered itself over her mouth and was rapidly poking a couple of glistening pseudopods up into her nostrils. I hadn’t known it was possible for a symbiont to send out offshoots like that. I guess no one did, or people like Fazio wouldn’t be allowed to walk around loose.

I wanted to yell and scream and break things. I wanted to cry. But I didn’t do any of those things.

When I was four years old, growing up on Backgammon, my father bought me a shiny little vortex boat from a peddler on Maelstrom Bridge. It was just a toy, a bathtub boat, though it had all the stabilizer struts and outriggers in miniature. We were standing on the bridge and I wanted to see how well the boat worked, so I flipped it over the rail into the vortex. Of course, it was swept out of sight at once. Bewildered and upset because it didn’t come back to me, I looked toward my father for help. But he thought I had flung his gift into the whirlpool for the sheer hell of it, and he gave me a shriveling look of black anger and downright hatred that I will never forget. I cried half a day, but that didn’t bring back my vortex boat. I wanted to cry now. Sure. Something grotesquely unfair had happened, and I felt four years old all over again, and there was nobody to turn to for help. I was on my own.

I went to Elisandra and held her for a moment. She was sobbing and trying to speak, but the thing covered her lips. Her face was white with terror and her whole body was trembling and jerking crazily.

“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “This time I know what to do.”

• • •

How fast we act, when finally we move. I got Fazio out of the way first, tossing him or the husk of him into the entry slot of the Corona Queen as easily as though he had been an armload of straw. Then I picked up Elisandra and carried her to the sled. She didn’t really struggle, just twisted about a little. The symbiont didn’t have that much control yet. At the last moment I looked into her eyes, hoping I wasn’t going to see the red circles in them. No, not yet, not so soon. Her eyes were the eyes I remembered, the eyes I loved. They were steady, cold, clear. She knew what was happening. She couldn’t speak, but she was telling me with her eyes: Yes, yes, go ahead, for Christ’s sake go ahead, Chollie!

Unfair. Unfair. But nothing is ever fair, I thought. Or else if there is justice in the universe it exists only on levels we can’t perceive, in some chilly macrocosmic place where everything is evened out in the long run but the sin is not necessarily atoned by the sinner. I pushed her into the slot down next to Fazio and slammed the sled shut. And went to the dropdock’s wall console and keyed in the departure signal, and watched as the sled went sliding down the track toward the exit hatch on its one‑way journey to Betelgeuse. The red light of the activated repellers glared for a moment, and then the blue‑green returned. I turned away, wondering if the symbiont had managed to get a piece of itself into me, too, at the last moment. I waited to feel that tickle in the mind. But I didn’t. I guess there hadn’t been time for it to get us both.

And then, finally, I dropped down on the launching track and let myself cry. And went out of there, after a while, silent, numb, purged clean, thinking of nothing at all. At the inquest six weeks later I told them I didn’t have the slightest notion why Elisandra had chosen to get aboard that ship with Fazio. Was it a suicide pact, the inquest panel asked me? I shrugged. I don’t know, I said. I don’t have any goddamned idea what was going on in their minds that day, I said. Silent, numb, purged clean, thinking of nothing at all.

So Fazio rests at last in the blazing heart of Betelgeuse. My Elisandra is in there also. And I go on, day after day, still working the turnaround wheel here at the Station, reeling in the stargoing ships that come cruising past the fringes of the giant red sun. I still feel haunted, too. But it isn’t Fazio’s ghost that visits me now, or even Elisandra’s–not now, not after all this time. I think the ghost that haunts me is my own.