ANTHROPIC
ERROR
As the summer dry
season grinds on, Maddy finds herself spending more time at John’s
home-cum-laboratory, doing the cleaning and cooking for herself in
addition to maintaining the lab books and feeding the live
specimens. During her afternoons visiting in the hospital she helps
him write up his reports. Losing his right hand has hit John hard:
he’s teaching himself to write again, but his handwriting is slow
and childish.
She finds putting in
extra hours at the lab preferable to the empty and uncomfortable
silences back in the two-bedroom prefab she shares with Bob. Bob is
away on field trips to outlying ranches and quarries half the time
and working late the other half. At least, he says he’s working
late. Maddy has her suspicions. He gets angry if she isn’t around
to cook, and she gets angry right back at him when he expects her
to clean, and they’ve stopped having sex. Their relationship is in
fact going downhill rapidly, drying up and withering away in the
arid continental heat, until going to work in John’s living room
among the cages and glass vivaria and books feels like taking
refuge. She has taken to spending more time there, working late for
real, and when Bob is away she sleeps on the wicker settee in the
dining room.
One day, more than a
month later than expected, Dr. Smythe finally decides that John is
well enough to go home. Embarrass ingly, she’s not there on the
afternoon when he’s finally discharged. Instead, she’s in the
living room, typing up a report on a subspecies of the turtle tree
and its known parasites, when the screen door bangs and the front
door opens. “Maddy?”
She squeaks before
she can stop herself. “John?” She’s out of the chair to help him
with the battered suitcase the cabbie half-helpfully left on the
front stoop.
“Maddy.” He smiles
tiredly. “I’ve missed being home.”
“Come on in.” She
closes the screen door and carries the suitcase over to the stairs.
He’s painfully thin now, a far cry from the slightly-too-plump
entomologist she’d met on the colony liner. “I’ve got lots of stuff
for you to read—but not until you’re stronger. I don’t want you
overworking and putting yourself back in hospital!”
“You’re an angel.” He
stands uncertainly in his own living room, looking around as if he
hadn’t quite expected to see it again. “I’m looking forward to
seeing the termites.”
She shivers abruptly.
“I’m not. Come on.” She climbs the stairs with the suitcase, not
looking back. She pushes through the door into the one bedroom
that’s habitable—he’s been using the other one to store samples—and
dumps the case on the rough dressing table. She’s been up here
before, first to collect his clothing while he was in hospital and
later to clean and make sure there are no poisonous spiders lurking
in the corners. It smells of camphor and dusty memories. She turns
to face him. “Welcome home.” She smiles
experimentally.
He looks around.
“You’ve been cleaning.”
“Not much.” She feels
her face heat.
He shakes his head.
“Thank you.”
She can’t decide what
to say. “No, no, it’s not like that. If I wasn’t here I’d be . .
.”
John shuffles. She
blinks at him, feeling stupid and foolish. “Do you have room for a
lodger?” she asks.
He looks at her, and
she can’t maintain eye contact. It’s all going wrong, not what she
wanted.
“Things going badly?”
he asks, cocking his head on one side and staring at her. “Forgive
me, I don’t mean to pry—”
“No, no, it’s quite
all right.” She sniffs. Takes a breath. “This continent breaks
things. Bob hasn’t been the same since we arrived, or I, I haven’t.
I need to put some space between us, for a bit.”
“Oh.”
“Oh.” She’s silent
for a while. “I can pay rent—”
This is an excuse, a
transparent rationalization, and not entirely true, but she’s saved
from digging herself deeper into a lie because John manages to
stumble and reaches out to steady himself with his right arm, which
is still not entirely healed, and Maddy finds herself with his
weight on her shoulder as he hisses in pain. “Ow! Ow!”
“I’m sorry! I’m
sorry!”
“It wasn’t you—” They
make it to the bed, and she sits him down beside her. “I nearly
blacked out then. I feel useless. I’m not half the man I
was.”
“I don’t know about
that,” she says absently, not quite registering his meaning. She
strokes his cheek, feeling it slick with sweat. The pulse in his
neck is strong. “You’re still recovering. I think they sent you
home too early. Let’s get you into bed and rest up for a couple of
hours, then see about something to eat. What do you say to
that?”
“I shouldn’t need
nursing,” he protests faintly, as she bends down and unties his
shoelaces. “I don’t need . . . nursing.” He runs his fingers
through her hair.
“This isn’t about
nursing.”
Two hours later, the
patient is drifting on the edge of sleep, clearly tired out by his
physical therapy and the strain of homecom ing. Maddy lies curled
up against his shoulder, staring at the ceiling. She feels calm and
at peace for the first time since she arrived here. It’s not about Bob anymore, is it? she asks
herself. It’s not about what anybody expects
of me. It’s about what I want, about finding my place in the
universe. She feels her face relaxing into a smile. Truly,
for a moment, it feels as if the entire universe is revolving
around her in stately synchrony.
John snuffles
slightly, then startles and tenses. She can tell he’s come to
wakefulness. “Funny,” he says quietly, then clears his
throat.
“What is?”
Please don’t spoil this, she
prays.
“I wasn’t expecting
this.” He moves beside her. “Wasn’t expecting much of
anything.”
“Was it good?” She
tenses.
“Do you still want to
stay?” he asks hesitantly. “Damn, I didn’t mean to sound as
if—”
“No, I don’t mind—”
She rolls toward him, then is brought up short by a quiet,
insistent tapping that travels up through the inner wall of the
house. “Damn,” she says quietly.
“What’s that?” He
begins to sit up.
“It’s the
termites.”
John listens
intently. The tapping continues erratically, on-again, off-again
bursts of clattering noise. “What is she doing?”
“They do it about
twice a day,” Maddy confesses. “I put her in the number two
aquarium with a load of soil and leaves and a mesh lid on top. When
they start making a racket I feed them.”
He looks surprised.
“This I’ve got to see.”
The walls are coming
back up again. Maddy stifles a sigh: it’s not about her anymore,
it’s about the goddamn mock-termites. Anyone would think they were
the center of the universe, and she was just here to feed them.
“Let’s go look, then.” John is already standing up, trying to pick
up his discarded shirt with his prosthesis. “Don’t bother,” she
tells him. “Who’s going to notice, the insects?”
“I thought—” He
glances at her, taken aback. “Sorry, forget it.”
She pads downstairs,
pausing momentarily to make sure he’s following her safely. The
tapping continues, startlingly loud. She opens the door to the
utility room in the back and turns on the light. “Look,” she
says.
The big glass-walled
aquarium sits on the worktop. It’s lined with rough-tamped earth
and on top, there are piles of denuded branches and wood shavings.
It’s near dusk, and by the light filtering through the windows she
can see mock-termites moving across the surface of the muddy dome
that bulges above the queen’s chamber. A group of them have
gathered around a curiously straight branch: as she watches, they
throw it against the glass like a battering ram against a castle
wall. A pause, then they pick it up and pull back, and throw it
again. They’re huge for insects, almost two inches long: much
bigger than the ones thronging the mounds in the outback. “That’s
odd.” Maddy peers at them. “They’ve grown since
yesterday.”
“They? Hang on, did
you take workers, or . . . ?”
“No, just the queen.
None of these bugs is more than a month old.”
The termites have
stopped banging on the glass. They form two rows on either side of
the stick, pointing their heads up at the huge, monadic mammals
beyond the alien barrier. Looking at them closely Maddy notices
other signs of morphological change: the increasing complexity of
their digits, the bulges at the backs of their heads. Is the queen changing, too? she asks herself,
briefly troubled by visions of a malignant intelligence rapidly
swelling beneath the surface of the vivarium, plotting its escape
by moonlight.
John stands behind
Maddy and folds his arms around her. She shivers. “I feel as if
they’re watching us.”
“But to them it’s not
about us, is it?” he whispers in her ear. “Come on. All that’s
happening is you’ve trained them to ring a bell so the
experimenters give them a snack. They think the universe was made
for their convenience. Dumb insects, just a bundle of reflexes
really. Let’s feed them and go back to bed.”
The two humans leave
and climb the stairs together, arm in arm, leaving the angry
aboriginal hive to plot its escape unnoticed.