The Druid Gene Read online

  What was happening to her?

  Gradually the panic subsided and she was able to perceive more input from her body. There was a sharp, heavy pressure building in her forehead. Periodically she felt hot little scrambling jolts shooting through her cranium, short-circuiting her thoughts. Each incipient shock created a disquieting sense of deja vu as she re-experienced the trauma of regaining consciousness again and again.

  Oh, God, what could they be doing inside her head?

  Something smooth and cool lay over her cheeks and the air smelled stale and medicinal. Intermittently she’d catch a whiff of something damp and rich, like compost tinged with cinnamon. It was foreign, strange. She didn’t like it.

  There was also a soft shushing sound. It was more than that, actually. It was a constant, whisper-soft breath, tickling the curled tendrils of hair around her ear. She focused on that. It was the most calming thing she could perceive. She pretended it was her mother’s soothing hush when she was small and hurt or fearful.

  In the background, there was something clacking in a mesmerizing way. She had the odd sensation that a translation of the clacking was just there, on the tip of her brain. She could almost understand its message. It made her uneasy for some reason, but she couldn’t determine why, so she tried to ignore it, tried to stay calm, tried to hold on to sanity.

  “Click-click-clack…regaining consciousness, mistress…clackity-click-clack-click.”

  “Shush-hush-hish-hisssssssssss…delicate…shish…here…ssssss…more precisely, this time…hishshshshsh…didn’t kill this one…praise the Cunabula.”

  Darcy drifted away and began to dream of giant bugs flamenco dancing in a grove of frolicking trees, sending her secret messages in Morse code with castanets.

  Darcy opened her eyes to a dim room. She felt heavy and weak. Her head ached ferociously.

  Something shiny and green was waving around in front of her face. It felt like an invasion. She raised a limp hand to bat it away.

  There was a chittering sound. It sounded like an indignant warning. It also sounded like…speech.

  She blinked. Her eyes could barely open and were pointing in two different directions. With effort, she focused them.

  Looming in her field of vision was an inexpressive insect face, its double-jointed antennae hovering over her, twitching.

  She screamed uncontrollably, coming up off the platform she lay on despite bone-deep fatigue.

  It slipped down and backed away from her on four hind legs, gleaming emerald thorax and head still upright. Its forelegs folded in a pose that looked astonishingly like human disapproval.

  She was so shocked, she went silent.

  The insect emitted more clacking sounds. As they registered, some aspect of her brain began to tumble them around, replaying them over and over again like echoes. Words formed out of the disordered noise: “Too loud. Foolish, half-witted anthropoid.”

  She gasped. Her eyes bulged. “You just…spoke…” But she stopped herself, because that wasn’t what she’d actually said. She’d said, “Vuas itust…loquestas…”

  Everything was spinning, rotating wildly around this insect that had her full attention. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

  Its head inclined in something like acknowledgement. More clacking followed.

  She watched, fascinated. Her eye was drawn to small sections of its shell just above the joints of its forelimbs—it was doing something akin to shrugging to make the sounds—and those sounds were consonants somehow.

  She reeled, sure she must be dreaming.

  Consonants. But there were vowels too, very subtle, between the clacks. She narrowed her eyes, trying to see how it was producing those softer sounds. The mandible, a sort of sideways beak, remained stationary. It did not appear to be producing any sound from its mouth whatsoever. The vowel sounds came from elsewhere.

  “The implant is functioning well,” it said.

  “Didn’t anyone ever teach you that it’s impolite to stare?” a breathy voice said from the other side of Darcy’s bed.

  Darcy jumped and whipped around. Then she groaned and clutched her head. Her vision went black for a second. The sudden movement made her brain throb. She didn’t have a choice. She had to lie back down.

  “Caution. I wouldn’t do that if I were you. We probably should have kept you tied down.” The owner of this newest voice came into her field of view.

  “Oh…” That was all Darcy could say. A person unlike any other she’d ever witnessed stood before her. She instantly made a connection with a small sculpture of a face shrouded in leaves that had hung in her childhood home: the Green Man. It was a symbol of rebirth and renewal that her mother loved.

  “Lights.”

  The lights came up, harsh and bright, making Darcy squint painfully.

  The intense white light revealed a willowy, feminine form standing at Darcy’s feet. This person swayed slightly and turned her face up to the lights in the ceiling. Her voice came out a breathy monotone, but vibrated somehow with pleasure when she said, “That’s better. I am called Hain.”

  Very little of Hain’s skin showed, and what did was a muted yellow-chartreuse. She wasn’t wearing clothing. Rather, her trunk was encrusted with coral-colored, striated medallions of varying size that seemed to grow into each other, in an almost crystalline way, over her skin. Her arms and legs were covered with something organic that looked like aged, golden-yellow paint that had developed a network of fine cracks, like crazing. Even her fingers and toes were covered, those digits being long and fragile looking.

  Around her neck sprouted a lush wreath of undulating leafy growth in various shades of waxy greens, some scalloped, others fernlike. Loops of fuzzy, mossy filaments draped over her shoulders and around her hips, flowing with her movements. Atop her head was an airy crown of soft, green branching strands, burgeoning in all directions. Even her face and neck were covered with frilly clusters of green plaques, like lichen, creeping over her features. Her deep, sea-green eyes were incredibly large, expressive, and knowing, but she had the barest suggestion of a nose and just a slit for a mouth. She was otherworldly.

  Hain turned to the insect. “They all have so much to say when they speak their insular gibberish, but put a civilized tongue in their mouth and they are reduced to mutes.”

  The insect chattered a bit. Something told Darcy that sound was laughter. She didn’t like it. She didn’t like anything that was happening here.

  She looked down and was shocked to discover that she was naked, covered only by a gossamer-thin sheet. She scrambled to grab the transparent covering, pulling it up to pool over her more private areas.

  With growing horror she realized that all of her skin was reddish and ashy. It felt hot to the touch, stripped of all moisture, painful, as though she’d been burned. What were they doing? Experimenting on her?

  In addition, there were thin tubes attached to her body. She groped with clumsy, fumbling fingers along them and found they were inserted directly into her left carotid artery.

  Hain had gotten close, was peering at her with intense curiosity. Her monotone voice came out slow and deliberate, like she was speaking to someone with diminished mental faculties. “Do you have a name?”

  Darcy ground her teeth before answering. Somewhere between her brain and her tongue, the signals she sent were transformed from English into this other language. She was hearing it for the first time from her own lips, but still understood it. “What have you done to me? Why did you take us? Where am I? Where’s Adam?”

  Hain’s voice continued with little change in pitch or intonation. “Aha! Did you hear this, Chitin47? I had begun to think the Lovek’s legends were some kind of ancient galactic joke, mayhap as old as the Cunabula themselves. These anthropoids have been all but reticent until now, but this one has expressed understanding of its past, its current situation, and that of its companion. And umbrage too, a complex emotion. Oh, well done!”

  Darcy felt the urge to tug out the t
ubes and try to fight them somehow. But that would be suicide. If she pulled something that big out of her carotid, she would bleed out in minutes, not to mention that she felt weak as a kitten. “What do you want?”

  “I have already requested your name.”

  Darcy stayed silent.

  “You have much to learn about the universe, my provincial little friend. But no matter. You’ve demonstrated that the device implanted in your brain is functioning properly. That, for now, is all that’s needed.” Hain turned toward the insect and intoned, “My research shows the closest anatomic analog to be nieblic. Use those protocols for sedation and immune-system stimulation henceforth. Let’s get this one healed up and in with the general population. She’ll get her answers there. We needn’t waste valuable time on explication now.”

  The insect inclined its head and turned to a console where it began to press buttons and use a touchscreen computer. Hain swept out of the room.

  “Wait!” Darcy called weakly, but her eyes were already closing.

  7

  Darcy had come a long way since the uncontrollable shrieking of her initial waking. She’d worked through several emotional stages since Hain and friends had picked her up in the desert. First, there’d been sheer terror. Next came a period of disbelief and intense feelings of isolation and hopelessness, which had been quickly followed up with outrage, and that was where she’d stayed.

  Anger was going to get her and Adam out of here.

  She’d arrived at a point where she accepted her current situation but was unwilling to give up hope of escape. She’d been kidnapped for a purpose that wasn’t readily apparent. They’d surgically implanted a language chip in her brain, which the insects called a dummy chip whenever Hain wasn’t within earshot. It enabled her to communicate with them, which for some reason they found hilarious, and they’d kept her isolated in a recovery room with no contact aside from the insects themselves.

  She let out an exasperated sigh and looked down at her itchy, ashy skin. They’d explained that it was standard procedure to strip the topmost layer of epidermis to minimize virulent outbreaks on the ship. That made sense, she supposed, given the history of devastating germs decimating unsuspecting, unexposed populations on Earth. Those kinds of problems would have to be worse within the confines of a ship that kidnapped people regularly from various worlds.

  Unfortunately, with that layer of skin went all of her natural bacterial flora as well as her comfort. Her skin had been an itchy, flakey, uncomfortable mess since then, despite the probiotic lotion they’d given her. At least the clothing they gave her to wear wasn’t irritating. The fabric skimmed her skin, warming or cooling depending on need, without any weight at all. A shimmery-white jumpsuit, it was made of the most amazing self-healing fabric.

  It had been a strange experience to put it on for the first time. One of the insects had stood her up and another held her there. As her head spun, another one of them had poked a hole in a shapeless blob of fabric with a pincer, then pulled that over her head. He’d created holes for Darcy’s arms and yanked on the fabric until it covered her. This tugging-and-fitting process had only taken a few minutes before Darcy was dressed in what appeared to be a soft, seamless, form-fitting garment. She had no idea what it was made of, but it was extraordinary.

  With nothing much to do during her recovery besides sleep, eavesdrop on the insects, and fret about where Adam was and how to escape, she fiddled with the clothing until she figured it out. She found she could adjust it herself into infinite configurations by clicking a small button imbedded in the fabric of the sleeve. It released the tension in the weave allowing her to manipulate the garment until she was satisfied with the fit. Then she clicked it again to save the setting.

  If she kept the sleeves and legs shorter, or the neckline pulled lower, the fabric became denser. Alternately, she could opt to cover more surface area by pulling the fabric up high like a turtleneck or even farther, into a hood over her hair, which made the fabric become more sheer. She just wished they had let her keep her shoes. It felt weird to be barefoot.

  Ultimately, she opted for capri-length pants, three-quarter sleeves, and a scoop neck so that the fabric remained opaque. That was a nod toward modesty. While it wasn’t transparent enough to titillate her insect friends with views of her areola and pubic hair, it left little to the imagination, clinging to her like a second skin. She sighed. Who cared if she had back fat or how big her ass was if she was kidnapped on an alien ship in space? As long as the insects didn’t mistake her for a grub, she figured she was probably okay.

  But she wasn’t okay.

  She had lots of questions and, so far, very few answers.

  Neither Hain nor the insects knew or cared what they’d just done to her medical career, which might very well be over now. No one told her anything about Adam though she asked them about him constantly. She hated that her last night with him had been so strange and volatile. She’d jumped to conclusions about his reaction to the blue light and that hadn’t been fair. He deserved better than that. She should have given him more time, a little benefit of the doubt. She’d just been so upset and reacted badly. And now none of that even mattered. She might never know what the hell had happened when she touched those stones.

  Hain’s offhand commandment had been followed to a T—no one had explained anything to her. They ignored her except to monitor her convalescence from the surgery and ask her general health questions.

  But she’d ascertained a few things, just by keeping her eyes and ears open. First of all, she was on a spaceship called the Vermachten. It boggled her mind. She’d gone from being someone who didn’t believe that such things existed, to having a bizarre experience in the desert, to being abducted and experimented on by aliens. The paradigm shift was too great. It was enough to make her think she might have had a psychotic break.

  But she’d been treated relatively well. She’d been fed, kept warm. Physically, she felt great. From what she gathered from overhearing snatches of conversation, they now considered her recovery to be complete and were about to put her in some kind of cell.

  She dragged her bare feet, trying to take in every detail that she could manage without annoying her escorts so much that they would be tempted to use the knock-out sticks they held. If she and Adam had any hope in hell of escaping this place, she needed to gather as much information about it as possible.

  So much of it looked the same. It was a rabbit warren of cramped, dimly lit hallways, coated with a varnish of grime. There was little to differentiate one section of the ship from another, once they left the small infirmary where she’d been kept. She had no idea where Adam was, but now that she was out of the infirmary, she was determined to find him and a way out of this mess.

  One of the insects prodded her from behind with the same kind of weapon that had been used to capture her. “Move along, little bigot.”

  She glanced back, trying to figure out which one of them had made that comment. She’d been cared for by the iridescent green insects throughout her recovery, but she honestly couldn’t say if it had been by the same two that were escorting her now or thirty different individuals. They all looked and sounded the same to her. That thought made her uncomfortable. She didn’t want him to be right. She’d been trying to pick out some unique characteristic to distinguish between them, but thus far, she hadn’t been successful.

  She’d become habituated to the sight of their gleaming, oily shells. She no longer shrank from the touch of their pincers or the brush of the hair bristling from their forelegs as they nursed her through the postsurgical recovery.

  She’d observed their behavior scrupulously. Yes, they were aliens. And they were giant bugs. They clearly operated under a different set of cultural conventions, but it was equally clear that they had roughly the same set of hierarchical needs that Abraham Maslow had described in his theory of human motivation. So, she could relate to them on a fundamental level. That was a starting point, anyway.
r />   She sensed that this ship had already put a lot of distance between her and her home. She and Adam would need to find an ally on the inside if they were going to escape. Logic dictated that it was more likely they would sneak out, rather than fight their way out, since neither of them had any experience fighting and she doubted that Adam’s tai-chi lessons counted. So she kept trying to break through the cultural barriers, to cozy up to her jailers, in hopes of finding someone sympathetic enough to assist an escape attempt.

  It was a long shot, but she didn’t have a lot of options.

  However, her attempts at communicating with her captors were hampered by a few issues. She didn’t even bother to try with Hain, who treated her more like a fascinating science project than a person. There was no empathy to be found there.

  The insects were taciturn by nature. They seemed to be irritable and quick to take offense. They were focused on their work and disgruntled by distractions. They were annoyed by her naiveté of the universe at large.

  And then there was her lifelong aversion to insects. They’d picked up on that early on, before she’d mastered herself. That hadn’t endeared her to them.

  But being called a bigot? That was just so damn messed up.

  She planted her feet and stopped. She couldn’t go another step without being heard. “Look, I’m not a bigot, okay?”

  One of them twitched an antenna.

  She interpreted that to mean he was annoyed, based on prior experience.

  “Really? What’s my name?”

  She wracked her brain, but had no idea. She’d overheard a few names, but couldn’t be sure which name went with which individual. Whatever differences there were between them, she just hadn’t figured out yet.

  But she would eventually, she was sure.

  He folded his forelegs. “I didn’t think so.”