“Not exactly,” he said. “But decades ago I replaced the original Dr. Silo.”
“What do you want with me?” I asked. My head hurt now, the ants stomping and wailing, filling my skull with a dull pain. Usually if I stayed calm, they would go away. I tried, but my pulse was racing. For the first time since coming to the lab, I was afraid.
“I told you before that we wish to study you,” he said. “I was not lying.”
“I could tell the police your secret,” I said. “Everyone will know.”
My eyes glanced at the comm button on the nearby wall. I wondered if I could reach it before Dr. Silo could stop me.
“You might do that,” he said. His lips still hadn’t moved. “But your Lunar Police are not likely to believe a child who murdered his own mother. You have no proof.”
“I’ll tell them anyway,” I said.
“If you do so, I will destroy this colony and every last human life in it.”
“What do you want from me?”
My heart beat faster inside my chest. Pressure in my head continued to build.
“You will come with me,” Dr. Silo said. He stood up and began speaking with his mouth again. He stared out the window at the watery Earth. “There will be a special place for you in the Original City. A place of honor. We will study your brain and see how we can reproduce it in our lesser servitors. The shoggoths are much too dimwitted for interplanetary application. Once we have remade them with the ability to think and reason, to communicate via telepathy, and taught them the arts of telekinesis, we will be ready for the next Great Migration. As I said, you are the key to our future.”
“You want my brain,” I said.
“Correction,” said the doctor. “We already have it.”
The ants screamed then, louder than they had ever screamed.
Their screams poured out my eyes like invisible flames. Dr. Silo screamed too. His fingers fumbled with the device he was holding, and he dropped it to the floor where it shattered into pieces. His skin bubbled and bulged. Blood poured from his ears, mouth, and nose, just like Momma’s had done. But unlike Momma he didn’t die. He changed…
His bald head exploded, and a pink, star-shaped organ burst like a bloody flower from his neck. His arms withered and folded into the main substance of his body, which bloated and swelled until his clothing was torn to shreds. At last I stopped screaming, and I backed away from the gore-splattered table. The ants fell to silence in my mind again, but Silo’s transformation was not yet finished.
His body swelled into a barrel-like shape, and five segmented appendages burst from his lower portions, the meat of his legs dividing themselves and lengthening with the sound of cracking bones. Five major tentacles emerged in a ring about his midsection, each one topped by a mass of lesser tendrils. Five bloodshot eyeballs stared at me from his starfish-shaped head, and his fanged feeding tubes quivered in the air. There was nothing left of his false human shape, except for a single layer of shredded skin on the lab floor.
Silo stood more than twice my height now, and five fan-like wings raised from the vertical ridges of his bloated torso. I huddled in the corner of the lab, weeping and shivering. The ants in my head weren’t angry anymore. They were spent. I wondered if they would let this thing devour me now. I had no more anger left. Only paralyzing terror.
“Your power is impressive,” said the ET, speaking inside my head again. “You are a true prize.” He shambled closer on his five lower extremities, two upper tendrils reaching out to caress my face and body. In some horrible way the creature attempted to hug me like a human.
“Leave me alone,” I said. “Leave Luna City alone. You don’t belong here.”
“That depends on you,” he said. “Come with me willingly, Jarden. No more resistance. If you do this, I will spare your colony.”
I sensed the thought-forms streaming from his mind. They were louder than ever now. There was much I could not identify there, but I could tell he was telling the truth. Making me an honest offer. I stood up from my sanctuary in the corner of the lab. The tendrils waved expectantly. If he wanted to kill me, I would already be dead. I was too valuable to kill.
“If I go with you,” I said. “Will you keep your word?”
“Of course.”
“But how?” I said. “There are no more Earth shuttles. How can we get…down there?” I pointed to the blue Earth outside the window.
“My kind are nearly indestructible. We can pass through the void without need of metal shells or external technology. We engage in deep hibernation and soar like meteors toward our destination. It will take me less than three days to glide from Luna to the Earth.”
“What about me?” I asked. “I can’t survive a trip like that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the Silo-thing. His five sets of tendrils quivered. “All I require is your brain, which I will store and carry safely within my carapace.”
The meaning behind these words made me tremble.
“So you are going to kill me,” I said. The ants began to dance and buzz again. I touched my face and discovered that my eyes had been bleeding. I blinked and my vision blurred.
“No,” said the ET. “You misunderstand. I will preserve your prime organ inside a jar of specially treated nutrients. When we reach Earth I will transplant it into a fresh human body acquired from one of our island preserves. None will dare to eat your flesh, or to harm you in any way. You will be studied, honored, and revered. I will give you a new body, an older body, stronger and more fit. Haven’t you always wanted to visit Earth and see its glorious waters for yourself?”
So he had been reading my mind too. Every child of Luna dreamed of escaping into the past where the Earth was green and fertile and free of flesh-eating monsters. Every child of Earth wanted to go home. Even those of us who were born on the Moon.
I stepped closer to the waving tendrils.
“We have a deal,” I said. “Leave Luna City in peace. I will go with you.”
There was nothing left for me on Luna anyway. I had no parents, no family, no friends.
“Excellent,” said the ET. The creature’s tentacles reached across the room for a cylindrical jar with a pressurized lid. A clear fluid sloshed inside, but there was plenty of room there for a human brain. The ET asked me to lie on an operating table, and it dosed me with anesthetic. As the lab and the monster began to fade, I remembered my mother’s face.
“I don’t want to be a Martian,” I whispered. Sleep came fast and deep.
I did not think there would be any dreams then, but somehow there were. I saw my father, walking me through the public parks of Luna years before he died in a shuttle accident. He and my mother looked so happy together. They held my hands in each of their own. Together we looked up at the Earth, so blue and gorgeous against a backdrop of stars. The dream was also a memory.
“Someday we’ll get back home,” my father said. “Someday…”
I dreamed about many other things during the time my brain was separated from my body. Some were only memories, some were pure inventions, and others were indescribable visions that I would never be able to put into words. After some unknown interval of time, I opened my new eyes.
A council of Elder Things stood about me, wings fluttering, eyeballs and tendrils aquiver.
I looked down at my new body: A muscled brute, shaggy and naked except for a dirty loincloth. I flexed my new hands, which were calloused with the marks of spear, harpoon, and axe. I looked up, past the alien towers, and for the first time I saw what the Moon looked like from the surface of Earth. From this distance Luna City was only a small dot of light, sitting alone on a barren moonscape.
The Elder Things bleated and whistled and croaked in their excitement, wrapping curious tendrils about my stitched skull and bearded face. Strange machines rose behind them, and they conducted me into a maze of tubes and circuitry and alien contraptions. Here they would study my unique brain and learn how to recreate it in their cloning vats. For a while they tinkered and fussed over me, running tests with glowing rods, casting lights through my skull and out the other side, and indulging many other processes that I did not begin to understand.