Agent to the Stars, John Scalzi [paper ebook reader .TXT] 📗

empty, had their curtains closed around them. I closed the door, and then went over to Michelle. She was unchanged: comatose and on a respirator. I felt a fresh wave of guilt.

“Tom,” Joshua said. “I can’t do anything from down here.”

“Do you want to get on the bed?” I asked.

“No, that’d be mighty uncomfortable,” Joshua said. “Grab me one of those visitor’s chairs and put it near the head of the bed, please.”

There was one near the bed on my side; I wheeled it around to Joshua’s side, to avoid him accidentally knocking over the IV. He asked me to turn it around so that the back faced the bed; when I had done so, he jumped up on the chair and propped himself up on the back of the chair, putting himself on a level with the bed.

“That’ll probably be close enough,” Joshua said.

“Are you going to be able to reach her?” I asked.

“Sure,” Joshua said. “Ralph’s body is totally gone now, you know. It’s all me. I can make tendrils now. It still helps to be close, of course. Now I have to figure out where to enter her head — she’s got so many tubes in her. I think I’ll go through the ears. This is going to take a couple of minutes, so don’t talk to me for a few. I’m going to have to concentrate.”

With that, Joshua made sure he was securely positioned, and closed his eyes. Then his face disappeared. His snout elongated and became the transparent goo that Yherajks were usually made of. It looked like a glass elephant trunk. The trunk waved in the air for a second, as if tasting the air, and then made its way to Michelle’s head. An inch above her face, the trunk split in two; each tendril wandered casually over to an ear, then covered it. Michelle looked like she was wearing headphones that were attached to a headless dog.

The scene was so surreal that I lapsed into mute gawking. It took Joshua to bring me out of it.

“Tom,” he said, “I think we have company.”

“What?” I said.

“Turn around.”

I did. Miranda stood there, a book in her hands. Behind her, the curtain was pulled back from one of the vacant beds. Miranda was looking past me, at the scene of Joshua and Michelle. Her eyes were wide and black, and she had the expression you get when you’re seeing something horrifying and you hope you’re dreaming.

“Miranda,” I said.

Miranda glanced over at me, not really seeing me at first. Then I could almost hear her brain click as to who I was, where she was, and that she, in fact, was not dreaming. She opened her mouth and took a sharp intake of breath. In one more second, I knew, it would come out as the loudest scream I had ever heard.

I leapt at her. I clamped my hand over her mouth and turned her around. Then I picked her up and sprinted to the bathroom with her, kicking, in my arms.

Behind me, I heard Joshua say, in a conversational tone of voice, “If she screams, we’re fucked, Tom. Calm her down.” The conversational tone of voice was simply so that it couldn’t be heard outside the room — Joshua’s voice was as tense as I’d ever heard it. As I shoved Miranda into the bathroom, I caught a whiff of something rotten and realized that Joshua was screaming — just in his own language. I closed the bathroom door behind me, locked it, and hit the light switch to start the fan.

In shoving her into the bathroom, I had accidentally pushed Miranda into the sink. Her aborted scream went out of her with a whuff; her book went flying. She reeled sideways, colliding with the tub. I reached for her to help her regain her balance; Miranda grabbed me, ducked her head down, and launched herself into my abdomen. It felt like I had been hit by a cannonball, and the impact slammed me up against the door — I felt myself bounce off of it. I couldn’t breathe and went down to the tiles.

Miranda was now pushing me away from the door, trying to unlock it. I lurched up from the floor, grabbed her around the waist, and pulled her to the floor with me. On her way down, Miranda cracked me in the eye with her elbow. There was a mushrooming sensation of pain behind my eyeball; I was pretty sure I was going to be blinded for life. But I held on, rolled over on top of Miranda, pinned her arms with my legs, and used my weight to pin her down. Miranda opened her mouth to scream again. I reached down to cover her mouth. Her head dodged sideways and then flicked back; she caught the side of my hand in her mouth and bit down, hard. I had to bite the side of my cheek to keep from screaming myself.

“Miranda,” I said, gritting my teeth. “This is really beginning to hurt.”

Miranda let go of my hand; I pulled it up and started shaking it in pain.

“Thank you.”

“Get off of me, now,” Miranda said.

“I will,” I said. “But you have to promise me not to scream.”

“Tom, I want to know what the fuck that thing was out there.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Because I want to tell you. Now I just need you to promise me you’re not going to run screaming. Okay?”

Miranda nodded her assent. I gladly collapsed off of her and leaned my back against the door, clutching my hand. I could feel the blood; I wasn’t yet mentally prepared to look at it and see the carnage. Miranda got up slowly, never taking her eyes off me, and perched on the tub; she was preparing to make a hole through me if she had to in order to escape. I had been lucky to catch her by surprise. In a real fight, she could have sent me to the hospital. Fortunately, we were already there.

“Explain,” she said.

“Remember Joshua?” I said.

“The dog?” she said.

“No, the other Joshua,” I said. “Well, actually, yes, the dog Joshua, too. They’re both the same person.”

Miranda looked at me very dangerously. I held my hand up.

“Start over,” I said, took a second and then started again. “You remember that secret project Carl has me doing.”

“Yes.”

“The project is about aliens. Space aliens. They had contacted Carl. He wanted me to find a way to introduce them to the world. That thing out there is one of them.”

“Joshua,” Miranda said.

“Yes,” I said. “He was an alien first, and then he took over the body of a dog named Ralph. Long story.”

“What is it doing to Michelle?” Miranda asked.

“He’s scanning her brain,” I said. “Trying to see if she’s ever coming out of the coma.”

Miranda shook her head violently. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

I laughed, weakly. “If you have a more rational explanation, Miranda, I’d love to hear it.” I finally got up enough courage to look at my hand. It was covered in blood; Miranda looked to have ripped out a fairly large chunk.

Miranda noticed it too. “My God, Tom, you’re bleeding,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I think I have a black eye, too. Our first fight. Remind me never to piss you off again.”

Miranda came off the tub, helped me up, and walked me over to the sink. She turned on the water and put my hand under it; I just about jumped out my skin from the pain.

“Sorry,” Miranda said. “Sorry about everything, Tom. I just didn’t know what was going on. I still don’t.”

“What were you doing here, Miranda?” I asked. “The officer at the front said no one was here.”

Miranda shrugged and started soaping the wound, which hurt like you wouldn’t believe. “Dr. Adams said that we should talk to her, that it might help bring her back out. I figured I would come read to her. I brought Alice in Wonderland, if you can believe it. I got here about eight. Around eleven I got tired. It was a long day. I didn’t think anyone would mind if I took a nap.”

The blood had been pretty much washed away; with it gone the wound appeared much less severe than it had seemed. Miranda grabbed a washcloth from the rack near the tub, folded it once, and pressed it over the wound.

“Hold it there for a while,” she said. “It doesn’t look that bad. I don’t think you’ll need stitches.”

“That’s a relief,” I said. “It would have been a little difficult to explain how it happened.” It was an attempt at humor, but Miranda wasn’t biting. So to speak.

“Tom,” she said. “You said that he was scanning her brain.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“What happens then?” she asked.

“Well, if it looks like she’ll come out of it, he’ll do what he can to help her. He’s got the experiences of thousands of his people, Miranda. One of them has to have been a doctor or a scientist that could make guesses on how to do that.”

“What if she has permanent damage, Tom? What if she’s never going to come out of the coma?”

I took a deep breath. “Then I’m going to ask Joshua to inhabit her body.”

Miranda drew back. “What?” she said, rather too loudly.

“Keep it down,” I said.

“Keep it down?” Miranda said. “We’re talking about Michelle’s life, and now that thing wants to take it so he can have the body? Don’t you have a problem with that?”

“Miranda,” I said. “If Michelle’s never coming out of the coma, she’s already dead. Brain dead, at least, with her body kept alive by a machine. She’s gone. And if that’s the case, then there’s an opportunity to make her death at least have some meaning, an opportunity for something historic.”

“It’s body snatching,” Miranda said.

“Not any more than organ donation,” I said. “Look, Miranda, the Yherajk —”

“The what?”

“The people who Joshua come from,” I said. “They’re called the Yherajk. In their natural form, they look like Jell-O globs. People will be terrified of them. But if they could see them in human form first, it would make it easier. We need a Trojan horse, Miranda. Something that will allow the Yherajk to make it through the door of human consciousness without terrifying humanity half out of its brain. Think how you just felt out there; now multiply that by six billion. We need a Trojan horse.”

“The Trojan horse wasn’t so great for the Trojans,” Miranda said.

“It’s just an analogy,” I said.

“How do you know Joshua won’t just say she’s not coming out the coma, so he can get control of the body?” Miranda asked.

“Because he doesn’t know I’m going to ask him to do it,” I said. “This isn’t his idea, Miranda. It’s mine.”

Miranda slumped back down onto the tub and pressed both hands against her head, as if to keep it from exploding. “I think I’m in shock,” she said. “I can’t feel anything. I don’t know what to make of what you’re saying to me.”

I knelt down until I was at her level and took her hand. “If you were in shock, you wouldn’t know you were in shock, Miranda,” I said. “I think you’re going to be just fine. Listen, I know how sudden this feels. When Carl introduced me to Joshua, it was the same thing — just threw me right into the deep end. He trusted me to be able to swim. I trust you to be able to swim, Miranda. And I’m going to need you to help me from here