The Moldy Dead by Sara King Read Free Book Online Page B

it already.”
    “Wait.”  Coldness continued to
pound at him, icing down his sivvet , making his whole body tremble.
    Nirle paused on the flat,
wind-lapped stones.  “Wanna give it a few more tics?  Don’t blame you.  Truly,
Jahul, I’d shoot myself if I had to have the Huouyt in my head.”
    Esteei frowned out over the waves
of mold, feeling the anxiety growing to something bigger.  “There’s something
out there.”
    Nirle’s face hardened with
seriousness.  “Where?”
    Esteei scanned the glistening mass,
but saw no break in its rolling perfection.  “I don’t know.  Maybe
underground.”
    “What’d you feel?” Nirle asked,
coming to stand beside him.
    “Shock,” Esteei said.  “Fear.”
    “So we’ve been sighted.”  At his
words, every Ooreiki in the group took a fighting position around Esteei,
protecting him with their bodies.
    They waited.
    Nothing.
    There was one rock that kept
drawing Esteei’s attention.  It was shaped like an upside-down teardrop,
weather-beaten to near oblivion.  The sticky black mold had crested the top,
gleaming in the sun like a glossy black raindrop.
    As Esteei watched, the mold moved.
    Like wind over a field of grass, it rolled.   The rolling spread outward from the inverted tear-shaped rock,
until every glistening black surface was moving.
    “You see that?”  Nirle whispered.
    Esteei felt sick.  “Take me back to
the ship.”
     
    #
     
    Never in his life had Crown been so
impatient.  He heard reports that the tripod aquatic alien had turned back,
some sort of dispute, and that one of the guardian aliens had aimed his weapon
at the aquatic one’s back.
    Please, Crown thought, Just
let me see you.
    As if the universe was answering
his prayer, the seven remaining aliens stopped on the beach in front of him. 
    When Crown saw the hexapod’s face,
he flinched back in shock.  It was the same face that had haunted his
subconscious for thousands of turns, the face that Crown had always thought to
be a construct of his own boredom.
    But here he was, and it boded
poorly for the Philosophers.
    Replaying in a tiny corner of his
mind for a thousand years, the face had always watched them die.
    They’re going to kill us.  
Crown sent his message out, and immediately the other Philosophers responded. 
Their fear was increasing, not because of what Crown had said, but because the
aquatic alien had changed form.
    It had changed form.   It had
placed a tiny piece of material into a receptacle in its head, swallowing it
with squirming red appendages, and then its entire body shifted to something
else.
    Something that could move unseen
under the Philosophers.
    And now it was spying on its
fellows.
     
    #
     
    It was a young Ooreiki who finally
named the mold.
    Wiping it off his boots after another
slogging adventure through the glistening black terrain, he wrinkled his meaty
Ooreiki face.
    “Man, this stuff’s as nasty as
geuji.”
    Geuji.
    Or, in Old Poen, ‘Draak shit.’
    The name stuck.  It became so
colloquial that Esteei even used it in his reports to Congress by accident. 
    Outraged, the Botanical Committee
immediately came up with a new name—something in ancient Ueshi meaning ‘great
black sleeper’—but to everyone actually living with it, the mold was known as
the Geuji.  Fondly capitalized, since it was a lot of geuji.
    The Geuji resisted every attempt to
control it.  With the high tides threatening to invade the ship, Nirle led
patrol after patrol out over the glistening landscape, attempting to carve a
landing clearing into it with fire and shovels.  It was pointless—the Geuji
healed in hours, leaving unblemished, glistening terrain behind.
    Esteei caught Nirle on his way back
from another failed attempt.  Frustration emanated from the Ooreiki in an
emotional barrage on Esteei’s sivvet .
    “Still doesn’t work?” Esteei asked,
nodding at the slime-covered shovel the Ooreiki carried with him.
    “If you look hard, you can see it