FleshFlowers

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

* * * *

Here in exile, I have learned how much it is possible to miss the Earth.

Oh, don't mistake my meaning. It's not as some repository of metaphysical meaning that I miss it. Birthplace of humanity, ancestral globe, big blue marble on a black cloth sprayed with diamond chips. What a load of bullshit. No, I miss only the luxurious life I had there, civilization and all its tinsel trappings. The money, the prestige, the women, the food and wine, sleek imported Brazilian cars and elegant Harlem apart-ments in the clouds.

I can hardly believe now that I used to pity myself then. Sure, I had had a few rough breaks. Failures of will and nerve that rankled, disappointed expectations, evaporated dreams. But my work had its rewards - when it was going good, and I could lose myself in it - and the material comforts more than compensated for the spiritual pangs. Compared to the lives of most people, mine was an easy lark.

Or so it appears now, from the vantage of another world. A world empty of everything I once coveted, a world where the glittering ranks of society consist of a few dozen men and women, preoccupied with science and survival.

When I can't stand their fatuous faces any more - and the face of one in parti-cular - I find I have to get outside the domes, and let the elements abrade some of the emotional callous from my soul.

I must start initiating the changes a couple of hours before I want to step out. If s a demanding process, and I can't do it that often - maybe once a month. (Of course, I could just suit up, but then I'd feel encapsulated, as if I were carrying the colony with me. And besides, it's more dramatic this way. I know it creeps the others out, to see me do it. They watch me through the transparent walls until I disappear from sight, disbelief plain on their silly faces. It reinforces my failing sense of superiority.)

Anyway, about three hours worth of self-tampering - much against my old instructor's advice - allows me, rather like certain seals, to supersaturate my bloodstream with enough oxygen to last for half an hour's expedition. A slight structural change in my hemoglobin suf-fices. I toughen my epidermis with a layer of expendable cells that will later messily slough off, stoke the metabolic fires, thicken my corneas, don a pair of insulated boots as my only concession to heat loss, and cycle through the lock.

Not breathing, I step lightly among the red grit and wind-fluted parched pebbles, kicking one now and then. Their motions are strange in the low gravity, they seem to take forever to fall. A frigid dry scentless breeze strokes my altered flesh like a straight-razor dipped in liquid hydrogen. Too much of this caress would be lethal even to me. In the lee-ward sides of the larger boulders, fine-grained brick-hued dust is piled high.

Fifteen miles away to either side of me rear the canyon walls: immense, pocked, riven, mile-long slopes whose steepness is obscured by great slumps of eroded rock clinging precariously to their faces. Crumbled talus litters the valley floor at their feet; side cuts open out onto dead-end tributary valleys.

When I am far enough from the base for solitude, around a slight bend, having used up half my stored oxygen, I stop.

I look up.

At dusk, like a man immured in a well on Earth, I am able to view the stars while the weak sun is still up. They stand out faintly in the slit of darkened Martian sky, occulted perhaps by a high lonely transient cloud, blurred slightly by my horned corneas. I try to find the blue-green star I have convinced myself is Earth.

For a few precious minutes, I dream of returning.

What I don't know yet is how reality will exceed my dreams.

As I turn to go back, I feel like the only person in the universe. No one can reach me here. Even if others were to arrive in suits, they would still be isolated from me. I am at once utterly exposed and totally shielded

Then I involuntarily recall what I have been trying to forget. There is one who could stand here unsuited beside me, as an equal. A woman at this moment also exiled to Mars. One bound to me by something different from, but no weaker than, love.

And stronger than hate.

* * * *

I was standing rapt among the cacti when the news first came.

One of the big linked geodesic domes that comprised the only human settle-ment on Mars was filled with giant saguaros, multi-armed, towering almost twenty-five feet high - as tall as speci-mens a century old, although they were only five years removed from biofabbed seeds. Their fantastic growth had been forced by the will of the Banneker psychokineticist who had preceded me.

Now the cacti were my charges, along with the humans. I and my fellow-exile were responsible for the health and con-tinued functioning of both.

I prefered tending to the cacti.

Now, fingertips in contact with the solid spined barrel trunk of one specimen, I had lost myself in their being.

I dived down, among the busy cell-factories of the cactus I touched, thrilled by a sense of repleteness that came from water-riches stored safely away. Further and further into the trunk my perception raced, assaulted by a distorted mix of sensory input it had taken me years to learn to untangle. Those tarragon-scented, fuzzy violet tangles were chloroplasts, these bloated electric sparkles were vacuoules. I revelled in a vegetative serenity somehow different from the same mechanisms when present in hu-mans ...

Deeper now, below the soil, down into the unnaturally thick and elongated filamented roots, probing, searching with blind tropisms for the water locked as ice beneath the Martian surface. Thirst-seek, thirst-seek, thirst-seek Someone was shaking my shoulder. As if from a great distance, I sensed it. Pulling my psychic feelers back in, I re-turned to my own body.

Joelle Fourier, the colony's areologist, removed her hand from my shoulder. My face must have expressed some of my annoyance, for she stepped back warily.

"Doctor Strode, I wouldn't have dis-turbed you if it wasn't important. The expedition is returning, and there's trouble."

English was the lingua franca of the colony. Fourier's was pleasantly accen-ted. She wore a white quilted coverall with an embroidered ESA patch showing an antique Ariane rocket above the breast. She was a veteran in her abstruse field, already an ancient eighteen. After three years' association with her, I knew nothing about her save this bare mini-mum of appearance, name and age, and didn't care to.

"What kind of trouble?" I asked.

"Why, medical, of course. The mess-ages have been vague, but that much is clear."

I turned away. "Let Sanjour handle it. Ifs her watch."

"I cannot make Doctor Sanjour answer. She is locked in her quarters."

"Shit. She's probably cellburning. Okay, let's go roust her before she smokes her entire cortex."

The cacti occupied circles of raw Mar-tian soil separated by sintered rock paths topped with a ceramic glaze that was micro-grooved for traction when wet by occasional spills made when tapping the saguaros. I followed Fourier toward the dome exit. I fantasized that the cacti all bent toward me, reluctant to let me go, wanting to clutch me in their friendly deadly arms.

The two domes containing the living quarters were subdivided into truncated pie-pieces that opened onto central plant-filled atriums scattered with chairs and cushions.

At Sanjour's door other colonists had gathered, sensing something was up. Their garments exhibited all the different patches of the many nations and organ-izations that made up the Comity. Their faces looked pale in the weak Martian sunlight that filtered down through the transparent dome top. The mostly young men and women shuffled nervously from foot to foot and whispered among themselves as I approached with Fourier. Make way for the pariah who holds your lives in his hands, folks ...

They cleared a path to the door for me. I tapped the Open button on the security keypad. The red Locked light lit up, there was a beep, and the door stayed shut.

"Who's got the override code?"

A boy I recognized as one of the astro-nomers stepped up.

"Holtzmann left the codes with me," he said. "But I don't know about breach-ing Doctor Sanjour's privacy -"

I saw as through a crimson curtain. "Listen, kid, we've got an incoming POGO full of sick citizens, and one of the two available medicos is locked in her room most assuredly burning her fuck-ing neurons up for kicks. I suggest that the situation amounts to enough of an emergency to violate anyone's privacy. But if you want to call it differently -"

I shrugged and made as if to walk away.

"No, no, you're right, of course. I just didn't realize - Look I'll open it right up."

He frantically keyed in the code. The door retreated into the wall.

I stepped inside.

The sight of a naked body I knew al-most more intimately than my own, both surface and interior, greeted me. Amy was sprawled slack-limbed across her bed. Her eyes were closed, and a rivulet of saliva drooled her chin. She might have been just a sloppy sleeper. But she wasn't. She was lost in a self-induced, self-sustaining bonfire of near-orgasmic pleasure, a pyre fed by the destruction of her own braincells, which continued too long, would result in her death.

Suddenly I felt overwhelmed by pity and loathing for the two of us. What a couple of pathetic feeble cripples! How had we come to this sorry state, myself lost continually in the no-thoughts of plants, Amy hooked on cell-burning? How-?

* * * *

The first time I saw Amy Sanjour naked was as a patient, back on Earth. She had waltzed into my biosculpt clinic, the perfect image of a flighty hypochondriac with the money to indulge herself in a general somatic toning under my capable - and, I admit now, eager - hands. I was utterly taken in by her.

What I didn't learn until much later - when she had successfully jiggered and boobytrapped all my PK talents, nearly resulting in my causing the permanent disfigurement of one of my other patients - was that she was as much a peeker as I. No lowly skintwister, she had had a flourishing practice in neuropathology, treating Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and the like.

This practice she had abandoned upon the death of her sister - a death I arguably could have prevented.

She had come after me for revenge.

When I confronted her with what I had learned, a fight ensued. More than a fight. A psychic battle fought on the alter-nating terrains of our two bodies, a war waged in veins and cells, organs and bones.

We had stopped short of killing each other - not out of compassion, but inability. Our skills were too evenly matched to allow either one to gain a permanent advantage.

So there we stood in Amy's private room at the clinic, out of our mental clinch, bleeding, contused, puffy-faced, with snapped bones. Already our capable bodies were automatically heal-ing themselves. That left only the intract-able problem of our relationship to solve.

I could sense that Amy shared some of the embarrassed remorse and uneasiness I felt. In the space of a few long minutes, we had probed each other so deeply, come to share such a perverse kind of physical intimacy, that there was almost nothing left to say.

But in the end, Amy did discover something that could be said.

"I don't forgive you - but maybe I can help."

I accepted that statement without quite knowing what it meant.

I soon found out.

That very night, when we were basi-cally recovered from our physical wounds, we became lovers, completing our intimacy on the same bed where we had nearly killed each other. Our fucking - I can use only that term to describe the animality of the impulsive act - was a transposed extension of that earlier en-counter.

At that time, I was already involved with another woman, a teacher named Jeanine. I had considered her the sexiest, most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

After that night, she came to mean nothing to me.

There was nothing to compare to sex with a fellow peeker. Throughout medi-cal school, I had avoided the experience, out of a certain nervous reluctance to allow PK access to my body, and out of a sense of my peers as competitors, not friends. Beyond school - well, peekers were not that common, and I simply didn't have many social contacts with others of my kind. And I had never guessed that the sensations of having a partner freely roaming inside me, while making more conventional love, would be so intense.

Imagine ghostly feelers opening the taps of lust, stoking biological fires And of course, it didn't hurt that Amy was outwardly beautiful, a tall, powerful woman, taut as a cable on the Bering Strait Bridge.

After that night, things moved too quickly to stop, impelled by strong emo-tions, bereft of logic.

I stopped seeing Jeanine. It was a messy parting. Amy became a partner in my clinic. She moved into my apartment. For a few months, she was satisfied per-forming facial and bodily makeovers with me, milking the vain rich of their unearned dollars. Then she got greedy, and revealed an unbelievable scheme. I listened warily. I remember thinking that the trauma of her sister's death and her aborted, transfigured schemes of revenge on me had completely erased any altruism or professional scruples she had once possessed.

And since I had never had any, and was hopelessly fixated on Amy, I went along with what she proposed.

We waited for the perfect mark to approach us on his own, to allay suspi-cions later. He turned up in the form of a billionaire with several patents on room-temperature superconductors. With the build of a flabby flyweight, he was in the market for a new physique. Over the course of a few months, we gave it to him. Along with a time-delayed embolism. But before that fatal attack, triggered weeks after he left the clinic, we had already insured our share of his fortune. From his bed he had sum-moned his lawyer and richly endowed a foundation in our names, for the entirely plausible reason of being impressed with our mission to bring beauty to the world. Eyes open, lips moving, he had been unconscious the whole time. Amy, one hand unobtrusively on his shoulder, had manipulated his vocal cords like a puppermaster. He was to have no mem-ory of the event when he awoke.

On the day of the billionaire's death, when he still hadn't learned of his in-voluntary donation and attempted to rescind it, we were congratulating ourselves at home when the cops arrived. Suspicious relatives had requested a peeker autopsy, the only way our tam-pering could ever have been detected.

The trial went fast. We couldn't mount much of a defense. The prosecutor demanded that both of us get two consecutive terms of ninety-nine years each which we probably could have served, given our superior homeostatic functioning.

It was at this point that the AMA stepped in. They couldn't stand the thought of two ex-peekers sitting out all that time in jail. Every five years a

"do-you-remember?" story in the media, continual bad publicity for the whole profession... So they arranged in behind-the-scenes negotiations a 'more clement’

sentence, one that would get us off the stage of public opinion, and make it appear as if we were intent on absolving ourselves.

The first Mars colony was established as a unilateral enterprise by the Russians in 1999, taking advantage of Earth's close orbital approach to that world. This was in the days before the Comity, the de facto alliance which - first deli-cately, tentatively, then more and more strongly - had grown out of glasnost, and the sloughing off of Eastern Europe from the USSR. In those heady early Comity days of fading militarism and joint ventures, all attention had been turned toward remaking the Earth into a better world. The Mars colony had somehow been neglected, struggling along for fifty years as an archaic rem-nant of Russian aloofness.

Then, in a freakish but ultimately pre-dictable cataclysm, the colony had been wiped out. A small vagrant asteroid had impacted nearly atop it.

Suddenly the world was unanimous in the need and desire to rebuild the base. What everyone had ignored became the only topic of conversation. Society could afford to turn its attention outward now, after half a century of peace and progress.

The Comity colony had been estab-lished for two years when our sentencing became an issue. Support for the base was still as strong as ever.

The colony's resident doctor had just died in a climbing accident on the slopes of the Tharsis Ridge. (Even a peeker can't recover from a crushed skull.)

We were nominated his successors. Transportees, exiles, penitent prisoners in the service of humanity.

They shot us up with anti-gee drugs and shot us off on the next supply mission. We had peeker-planted blocks on our powers that wouldn't dissolve until after a fixed number of metabolic reactions, equal to the length of the trip.

But once on Mars, there was no way they could really make us serve.

* * * *

I was down on my knees by the bed, the crowd clustered at the door behind me forgotten. My hands hovered above Amy's bare midriff, shaking a bit, hesitant. Her abdominal muscle tone was shot to shit. My nails were longish and dirty. Christ... Where was Amy's former superb tonus, where were the mani-cured hands of the self-important Doctor Strode, which had stroked and reshaped the bodies of wealthy socialites?

Ready to dive beneath Amy's skin, I was halted by an unusual compunction. Did I have any right to drag her back from her destructive pleasures? What else was left to us, the untouchables of the colony? We'd never fit in, the only coerced laborers among all these com-mitted, idealistic volunteers.

Well, hell - when you came down to it, what did rights count for? The only thing that mattered now was that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life alone among these fresh-faced zealots.

I slapped palms to flesh and went under, for a stroll down blood lane, through the gardens of organs and bone.

The stupid bitch had set up roadblocks for me, just like the last time. But she had been in a hurry to get burning and had been sloppy. Plus her talents were suffer-ing because of her addiction. She lacked some of the deftness now that had almost killed me during our first fight, so long ago.

I got past the buzzing lime-colored clots and the angry fibrillary nets, shot through the blood-brain barrier, and was in her hypothalamus before she could arouse herself to stop me.

She had that organ locked in total pro-duction of jazzed-up enkephalins and endorphins. These opiate-like substances were flooding the receptors in her brain and spine to produce a heavenly buzz, poppy-sweet. Trouble was, both the orig-inating and receiving cells were burning themselves out, all metabolic resources allocated to the output and uptake of the pleasure-juices. She was killing off these and adjacent cells at an alarming rate.

I intervened in her cortical jury rigging and got the cells back to normal. Then I inititated some hasty regenerative pro-cesses. Brain cells, of course, resisted re-generation more than any other part of the body, and I was hard-pressed to force them to obey. Someday Amy would overextend the natural resiliency of her cells, and suffer permanent brain dam-age. That day, I sensed, was not far off.

Then I pulled out.

I could have woken her up from inside.

But I wanted the pleasure of doing it the old-fashioned way.

Back in my own shell, I slapped her four or five times across the face with stinging force.

Suddenly she shot up in bed and grabbed my wrist. I braced for her to enter me with her talent, but she applied only physical pressure, strong enough at that. I had to give her credit for a quick recovery. But then again, she had had the best peeker on the planet inside her.

"Stop it," she hissed, her olive eyes large.

"Tell me you don't love it."

"You fucking bastard."

I broke her grip and stood up. "Time enough for sweet nothings later, dearest. We've got an audience, in case you've been too busy melting your skull to notice." The watching young faces red-dened and turned away. These kids were so easy to shock. "Put some clothes on - unless you consider yourself dressed and meet me by the lock. We've got incoming trouble of some sort."

I left her getting shakily out of bed.

The crowd dispersed uneasily, re-membering their duties. I was left with Fourier, who seemed to have been dele-gated my keeper. Her youthful innocence appeared untouched by the recent pitiful performance, and she seemed genuinely sorry for both Amy and me. Without meaning to be, I felt myself af-fected, softened, by her attitude. Then I realized that this was what someone undoubtedly Holtzmann - had wanted to happen. Ah, he was a sly boy, that one. I updated my mental note never to underestimate him.

We walked through several domes, toward the garage with its lock.

"Any more news?" I asked.

"No. There was just that one radio contact, then nothing."

"What's the ETA?"

"Half an hour from now."

"Nothing we can do but wait, I guess."

She lifted her shoulders slightly, as if to calmly say, One cannot act without information. Jesus, these kids might be easily embarrassed by emotional scenes, but they were cool as clams in a crisis. I tried to remember if I had ever been that young and self-assured. But I couldn't make any contact with that past self - the lines were down, the distance insuper-able - so I gave up.

Halfway through the wait, Amy joined us at the lock.

She emerged from between the parked crawlers, striding strongly, dressed in green. Her skin shone from a sonic cleansing. Disregarding regs, she had washed her short platinum hair with a week's personal allotment of cactus water, which always seemed to leave it thick and shining. Her features were alert, signs of her formidable intelligence written plain across them. I felt a sharp pang. She looked so right, so familiar, so lost

"What’s up?" she demanded.

I told her what I knew. She nodded sagely, all business. We went back to waiting.

Fourier saw the POGO appear first, and directed our attention to it. For a second it stood atop the northern rim like a Masai warrior on one leg or a sleeping stork. Then it bounced up and over, and begin to descend the long slope in puffs of dust.

The Comity base was situated in the middle of the bottom of the Valles Mari-neris, that wide, continent-long rift on the Martian equator. Partly, the decision to plant the colony there was psychological, a reaction to the destruction of the first base. The valley seemed somehow to offer more shelter than the barren plains - although another determined asteroid would have no trouble fitting into the thirty-seven-mile-wide cleft. Partly, the decision reflected long-range plans. The eventual goal was to roof over the entire valley, section by section, and establish a shirt-sleeve environment. Lots of living space for the bucks, and a damn sight cheaper than terraforming the whole world.

Other colonists had come to the garage to help, although no one knew precisely what would be required. The POGO bounced closer and closer, eventually stopping about fifty feet away from the dome. It was too big to enter through the crawler lock. Its passengers would have to disembark and walk. If they still could.

A hatch opened in the stilted pod. A ladder of plastic chains unfurled.

I didn't know what to expect. Victims of decompression or explosion or rock-fall, limbs torn or puffy or mangled, car-ried out by limping survivors The last thing I expected was to see five agile figures drop down the ladder, jumping off while still ten feet above the red soil, and begin trotting for the dome.

They entered the lock and were lost from our sight.

The speaker above the inner door came alive while the lock was cycling.

"Clear everyone out except the medi-cal personnel," said Holtzmann's offi-cious voice, a trace of nervousness underneath. "Have cots set up in the chip fab clean room. We're going to use it as an isolation chamber. We'll reach it by Alleys Eight and Twelve. After we've passed, have the whole route disinfected. We've just sterilized our suits, and won't be cracking them, but we can't take any chances."

I punched the intercom button. "Holtzmann, are you crazy? You're talking like you're infected. You know as well as I do that except for whatever imported terrestial organisms might have escaped and survived, Mars is dead."

There was silence for a long ten sec-onds. Then Holtzmann said, "Not any more. Doctor Strode. Not any more."

* * * *

Weddig Holtzmann was thir-teen years old. He had sharp Teutonic features and a blond brushcut. An East German, he was the product of their super-accelerated neurotropin educa-tion. I had never agreed with those who claimed those miracle catalysts allowed everything an adult needed in terms of sheer knowledge to be force-fed to some-one by the time he was only thirteen. I was relieved when Congress - despite the pressure from the Gerontocrats, who wanted plenty of young workers to sup-port them - killed the bill to lower the US's franchise to that age.

Fifteen was just right; those extra two years made a big difference. I know that I myself wouldn't have been ready for college at thirteen. As it was, by the time I emerged from Johns Hopkins and the Banneker Institute, at age twenty, I was hardly mature enough to handle my powers. As can be adduced by the way I've fucked my life up.

Now, at thirty-one, I felt practically ancient next to Holtzmann and his peers. I knew Amy shared these feelings, for we had spoken of it, in our more rational moments, as one of the causes of our sense of alienation.

Holtzmann, whether as a byproduct of his hothouse growth or due to con-genital tendencies, was a perfect little martinet. No doubt one of the reasons he had been chosen as leader. I always called him "Weegee," because it pissed him off.

Standing now in the makeshift isola-tion chamber with Holtzmann, Amy and the other expedition members, I con-sidered foregoing the jibe today.

There were no conventional hand-weapons on the base. They would have done little good against the one real threat of asteroids, and nations at peace had seen no need to arm their represen-tatives against each other. But Holtzmann had remembered the flare-pistol aboard the POGO, and he now had its ugly wide snout pointed squarely at my gut. Its self-propelled, oxy-fed load would punch a hole in me that no amount of peeker skills would be able to rebuild.

"You're going to find out what's wrong with us," said Holtzmann sternly, an almost imperceptible quaver under his words, "and fix it. And this time there'll be no tricks."

I had to smile then at the memory. He was referring to the last time everyone had come to us for a bone-toning. In the lower gravity of Mars, minor osteopo-rosis was a problem, and we had regular sessions were we dealt with it, as well as searching out incipient skin cancers due to Mars' high UV. This time, out of bore-dom and disgust with our roles as cap-tive shamans, Amy and I had added a little fillip to the treatment.

The morning after, all the colonists had woken up bald, their hair bestrewing their pillows. The uproar was wonderful. Things had taken months to get back to normal.

And the best part was, they couldn't even really discipline us, needing us as they did.

I carefully considered Holtzmann's emotional state, the muzzle aimed at me, and my integrity, then said, "Whatever you want - Weegee."

Holtzmann's finger tightened visibly on the trigger, I made ready to fling my-self aside - and Amy stepped between us.

"Listen, so far we're totally in the dark. What's wrong with the five of you?

You look okay. What happened?"

Holtzmann passed the back of his free hand across his sweaty brow and made a visible effort to calm down. "You're right, Doctor Sanjour. I've been remiss. I should have explained everything over the radio, and made the arrangements for the antiseptic precautions ahead of time. But we were all too preoccupied in run-ning what tests we could. You know that Kenner doubles as our biologist." Holtz-mann indicated a dark-haired seventeen-year-old sitting on a cot, hands folded morosely in his lap. "Well, he's been unable to learn anything about what's gotten into us."

Seeing our puzzlement, Holtzmann backtracked.

"You know we were making the first real survey of the ruins of the original base, at Pavonis Mons, to see if there could possibly be anything salvageable, or any surviving personal effects for the relatives of the colonists. Also, we wanted pieces of the asteroid that wiped out the base, since we seldom get a chance to study such objects uncontaminated by terrestial organisms.

"Well, the first part of our mission was fruitless. The base was entirely destroyed by the shock waves of the strike, which must have been measurable in megatons. The inhabitants, I'm sure, died almost instantly, as painlessly as possible. There were no artifacts left.

"However, we did succeed in finding portions of the asteroid itself. They're in the POGO now."

Holtzmann paused. "Oh, Christ, did I say not to let anyone near the POGO?" He walked to the wall and issued the order over the base's PA. My stomach muscles - which I hadn't even known were tight - relaxed.

Still slumped by the curving wall, Holtzmann turned back to us, raising the gun almost absentmindedly.

"We kept most of the samples in isola-tion, so as not to contaminate them. But one piece - one small piece - we handled with our bare hands, all of us marvelling, I think, at the distant origins of this inno-cuous rock, and how it was fated to wipe out so many lives. And now, God knows, it appears ready to do more destruction."

Amy said slowly, "You believe that you've been infected by an organism from the asteroid fragment - ?"

"If s not that implausible, Amy," I interrupted. "We know that interstellar clouds seem to contain free-floating amino acids. And those famous Antarctic meteorites on Earth appeared to have prebiotic molecules on them. There was even a theory - the guy's name was Doyle, Hoyle, something similar - that the late-twentieth century epidemics were caused by extraterrestial microbial agents."

Holtzmann jerked erect, gun quiver-ing. "There's no need to debate so coolly, people. We're compromised. Our bodies are hosts now to something unknown. There is no doubt, no doubt whatsoever."

"Well," I said, almost tauntingly, not quite willing to believe yet, "what are the symptoms, Weegee?"

Holtzmann's hand shot to the chest-seam of the coverall he had worn beneath his discarded pressure-suit. He ripped the fabric away from himself. Velcro peeled apart with an insulting noise.

There are colors, shades and hues, which human flesh does not normally wear - at least not on the surface. The yellow-brown of rotten bananas. The mottled purple of bruised plums. The green-tinged grey of wet sharkskin. Yet these were the colors visible in the intri-cate shiny folds and convolutions of the growths bursting from Holtzmann's chest and abdomen.

I was next to the man before I knew I had moved. Amy too. We didn't touch him at first, but only stared.

Each growth was only about as big as an infant's fist, and there were only seven of them, irregularly spaced. It was their startling incongruity that had made them at first appear to dominate his body, from across the room. They emerged subtly from his skin, the alien colors, textures, and shapes grading away into normal skin.

Their shapes - consider brain coral, roses, ranunculus, anything complexly infolded and recomplicated, gleaming slickly, throwing back highlights from the room's illuminants. They differed slightly, one from the other, like indivi-dual faces.

Holtzmann seemed a garden of exotic blooms, his body cultivated soil.

"There are more on the parts of me still covered," he said, "although their num-bers have stopped increasing. Luckily, we are still able to sit and walk, although lying on them is - uncomfortable."

Amy and I both raised our hands in unconscious synchronization, and made ready to enter him.

"No," warned Holtzmann, gesturing with the gun. "Treat the others first. I'll go last."

It was impossible to tell if he spoke from sense of duty, or fear. But it didn't matter, since we had to obey in either case.

The others had opened their coveralls down to their waists, after their comman-der’s example, as if to offer mute testi-mony to their common affliction. One of the two women had symmetrical flesh-flowers on both breasts, where her nip-ples had been. A man sprouted one from his armpit. I felt my own skin crawl.

Amy moved to delve into one of the women. I went to Kenner, sitting on the cot.

In and down, down, down, past his ephemeral agonized epidermis, into the arteries and cells and meat.

I had expected to spot signs of the infectious agent everywhere. I was dis-appointed. It had to be something like a virus, I was assuming, but the man's bright blood was clean of any such dead-ly packets. There weren't even any raised levels of antigens, no pockets of invaders hiding inside macrophages or T-cells. Kennel's psychic aura was one of utter health, tallying with his lack of debilita-ting symptoms.

Alien tropisms, alien lifecycles, meant alien patterns of conquest, I thought to myself.

I had been avoiding the obvious locales of the invaders, the fleshflowers themselves. Now, stymied elsewhere, I moved my perceptions cautiously toward them.

There were outriders to the colonized territory: sentry organisms, far from the main concentrations, whose like I had never before encountered. I tried to pin them down for examination, but they squirmed out of my mental pincers. Trapped in some Heisenbergian quandary, I could not both hold them and pick them apart.

I have used my PK talents on every-thing from mosquitos to man, microbes to elephants. The Mars colony's cacti presented no resistance to my skills. But all life on earth stems from a common ancestor, has a shared biochemistry. These things were the product of some completely alien course of evolution, with different mechanisms of life.

While I was planning my next move, the organisms counterpunched.

I never got anywhere near the main floweringbodies. Somehow, in an incon-ceivable manner, I was repelled, my advance thwarted. I got a fleeting im-pression of masses of single-celled viroids, alien genetic material coiled snakelike in their nuclei, massing, breed-ing, preparing to fission Kicked violently out of Kenner, I op-ened my eyes. Amy was reeling back from her patient, obviously dealt a simi-lar defeat.

"Are you done?" Holtzmann de-manded. "Did it work? Are they dead?"

I rubbed the stubble on my chin. I caught Amy's green eyes. I spoke.

"Uh, I think we've got them on the run..."

* * * *

That night Amy and I slept together for the first time in months. And I mean simply slept together, for our sex-ual encounters had always continued, even during our worst periods. We fell exhausted into her bed after a hasty meal and pointless discussion of what we had experienced.

Holtzmann had been reluctant to let us leave the clean room, after our expo-sure to their bodies. I convinced him of the truth, which was that we had not been infected. He had been forced to be-lieve us, and let us go. There was nothing any of us could do right then but get some rest.

As I held Amy's sleep-slackened body from behind, my mind drifting aimlessly for the few minutes I took to fall asleep, I thought of all we had been, all we had become

Then I dreamed.

Peekers don't dream.

As a side-effect of our training, we lose our dreamlife. A fully integrated subcon-scious both attends to superior autono-mic functioning, and dispenses with the necessity of sorting through experience and filing it away as dreams.

The last time I had dreamed, it had been a nightmare, a vision of my hands rotting indicative of my confusion at the time.

Tonight's started pleasant, but turned nightmare too.

Amy and I stood on Earth again, atop a high hill, covered with grass and tall multicolored flowers on waving stalks. There was a breeze, and sun on our faces. We held hands like children. We were happy again.

Then the flowers began to attack

They whipped around our ankles and calves, growing upward to strangle us. We pulled and twisted, Amy screaming, myself howling, to no avail.

Suddenly, a pair of scissors appeared in Amy's hands. She tried clipping the flowers, but they writhed away.

"Hold them, Jack, hold them!"

I grabbed a stalk, immobilizing it; Amy snipped off the bud; the thing with-ered and died.

In a few moments we had destroyed them all.

We fell down to the soil. Our clothes were gone. We made love.

I awoke in the middle of the night with an erection which, for a change, I hadn't willed into being. Which I soon con-vinced similarly awakened Amy, using more gentleness than I had employed in a while, to help me with.

But even better, I had an idea that might help us. An idea that needed no explaining, for I had been under Amy's skin during the whole dream and she had impossibly shared it all.

* * * *

The five infected colonists were miserable that morning, having hardly slept for fear and physical discomfort. Their eyes were pouched in shadows, their postures poor. They looked wilted - except for the glossy vitality of their fleshflowers.

Holtzmann glowered at us as we entered.

"Have you worked on the problem? Do you think you can rid us of this con-tagion?"

He was so anxious he forgot to threaten us with the flare-gun.

"Yes, we've got an approach we think might work But first, I want you to con-sider something. What if we had killed off all the organisms yesterday?"

"I don't understand -"

"Weegee, you surprise me. This is a long-awaited event, man's first contact with an alien lifeform. Microscopic, I'll admit, but still, non-terrestial life! Don't you think the scientific community on Earth might be mildly interested in such a thing?"

Holtzmann nodded. "Of course, we'll send them samples of the asteroid -"

I had to convince him that what I was about to propose was the only solution. "How do you know they'll be able to culture it again? What if your bodies hold the only viable members of the lifeform? Do you want to take a chance on extermi-nating them forever?"

Holtzmann paled. "You're not sug-gesting that we just let it continue to breed in us, as if we were lab animals..."

Amy broke in. "No, we'll take the bug. We should be able to keep it alive in ourselves, while holding the manifesta-tions down."

"On conditions," I added. "Return passage to Earth, of course. And a com-plete pardon. Or else we'll let you and the others just bloom until you can't move. And believe us, they're ready for a replicatory burst. We both saw it yesterday."

Holtzmann fingered the gun on the cot beside him, hesitating.

"C'mon, Weegee, face it, if s a great deal. You can kill us, but you can't force us to cure you. But if we get what we want, you all walk out healthy. And you'll have a legitimate reason to replace us with a peeker who's here because he believes in what you're doing."

Holtzmann sat rigid for a minute before speaking. "If you succeed -"

"Oh, we will," I answered with more confidence than I felt. "I take it we have a deal."

He was too mad to speak and could only shake his head.

"I assume you still want to be last," I told him, just to twist the knife a little. In front of the others, he couldn't deny it.

Amy and I moved to one of the women. We both placed our hands on her shoulders.

Then we were inside her, working as a team, merging our skills.

This time we shot straight to the stems of the fleshflowers.

For a moment, sharing this patient with Amy, I felt exposed, as I did stand-ing unsuited on the Martian surface. Amy could commit any treachery now, attack me through the channel of our mutual patient. Would our truce hold? Was it real?

It dawned upon me that she must be having the same doubts.

Then I didn't have time to worry any more.

The first sentries awaited.

Just as in my - our - dream, I pinned the first organism down immobile, and Amy lysed its cell-wall.

Novel organelles, unlike anything on Earth, spilled out, trailing rainbow sparks, dying without their cytoplasmic support. I could leave them for the body's macrophages. I dove into the free-float-ing nucleus and unspooled its genetic material. The bases were strange, strange, and it was coiled right-handed, the opposite of all earthly DN A. No won-der it had thrown us. Amy and I studied it for a timeless interval. This look was all we had needed.

Now we could kill. Alone, or together.

We shot through all the nodes of un-healthy, warped flesh, slaughtering invaders by the thousands. We left their carcasses behind us, peeking regenera-tive changes in the humans that would soon erase all traces of the fleshflowers.

When we were done with the first woman, we moved on to one of the men.

Despite being able to kill the virus separately now, we tackled him and the others together.

It just felt good.

Finally, we had only Holtzmann left.

In the heat of the crisis yesterday, if Holtzmann hadn't stopped us when we instinctively moved to probe him jointly, he probably would have been cured by now. But he had, and we had tackled the viroids separately, and we had failed. And had enough time to conceive our little blackmail scheme.

He seemed to realize this now, and the knowledge rankled. But he was at our mercy.

Amy and I laid our curative hands right atop four of his blossoms. It was the first time we had touched them. They felt cold and hard, like certain fungi.

"Let's do it," I said.

It took no time at all to exterminate Holtzmann's unwanted guests. All ex-cept for a few in the colonies beneath our hands.

At the proper moment we split our flesh, opened up bloodless wounds in our palms, and also in Holtzmann's fleshflowers. We drove the remaining alien viroids up into our stigmata, and closed the exit.

It was just like slaughtering Indians, and corralling the surviving few on a reservation. What man had always excelled at.

We came back to ourselves.

Holtzmann spoke.

"If s over," he said with relief.

"For you," said Amy.

"But for us," I said, "it seems to have just begun."