Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits by David Coy Page B

living entity and the most alien
of all alien things in the universe. It had waited patiently for her to come to
it, willingly—exactly like a fly to the scent of a carnivorous flower. The
lab-thing had waited to get her alone. It had been waiting, waiting to get to
her and only her. The tools were waiting for her to get a little bit closer;
and when she did, they would grab her and wrap her tight, the cords would strap
her down to a bench, and then the tools would converge on her like spiders,
clamoring toward her across the web. When they reached her, they would tear her
and cut her and her screams would go unanswered.
    By the
time she was halfway across, she had to stop to get her breath. She put her
invented fears behind her and leaned with both hands on one of the benches,
making physical contact with the thing she most feared. It was either that or
fall over. She was sure she was going to have a seizure at first and prepared
herself for it, but it never came. Where her hands made contact with the
surface, the stiff, rubbery texture gave just a little and revealed a hard
substrate underneath it, like bones under the flesh of something dead.
    Everything,
every shape, sound and texture of the lab was evil to her. Even the scent, a
thick and musky fog permeated everything and added its own brand of olfactory
malevolence to the air.
    This is
not a good day to be here, she thought. I should not have come alone.
    She went
ahead and tried her best to tune out the fear.
    Only when
she was through the lab’s hideous gauntlet, and the last of the grotesque
implements were behind her, did she sigh a deep sigh of relief.
    The
opening to the chamber was indeed darker than the others, and not just the
result of some trick of light as she’d hoped. She’d brought a lamp with her
just in case. She dug the lamp out of her pack, switched it on and proceeded
inside. The lamp cut a thick swath of brightness to see by, but seemed to
accentuate the darkness somehow.
    She
walked about twenty meters in before she saw the pit at the very end of the
tunnel. It formed a perfectly black hole where the tunnel terminated. She was
reluctant to approach it, and wished all the more that John, or even Eddie, had
come with her. In spite of her fear, her professional dignity kept her moving
slowly toward that black hollow.
    She moved
to the very edge and shined the light down into the pit.
    Bones.
Thousands of bones were there, clean and white as if the flesh had been eaten
from them by something—perhaps larva, worms or chemicals—and left spotless.
    Rachel
had studied thousands of life forms, dead and alive, on several planets. She
knew each nuance of form and how the fickle nature of evolution could modify
form for its own purpose, often at random or seemingly without intent. But a
reason—a vindication—for the form was always hiding within the design, and the
beauty that was the result of perfect function always came through eventually.
The remains in the pit were so tangled and intertwined that it took her a
moment to discern one thing, one part, from another. Trained in the anatomy of
living things, she soon had several of the objects separated from the others in
her mind’s eye. What she saw made her sick.
    There was
no evolution here. There was no natural beauty in that black hole. Here was
unnatural design crafted by the minds of beings, mad and twisted.
    She
witnessed things joined at every juncture, things with two or three heads, or
hand-like appendages protruding from thighbones or backbones. When she got
better at discerning the shapes, she could see complete aliens beings fused
together like Siamese twins, but in completely unnatural ways, as if the
designer had been motivated by whimsy at making the monstrous combinations.
Some of the unions seemed to be clearly sexual or erotic in nature.
    This was
the dumping ground for the experimentation in the lab, she was sure of it. This
is where the failures—or the successes for all she