Chapter 7: The Autopsy
Phylomon lit torches and set them in the snow around him, then took his knife to dissect the creature that had called herself Allon Tech.
He started at the top, skinning its head, simply because he needed a place to start.
He found that the fat around her cheeks was only a thin layer, that where the sinus membranes should have been in the cheeks and temple, instead the creature had narrow tubes and air sacs.
Tiny gray pheromone glands were hidden next to the saliva ducts. He discovered the glands only when he touched some of the fluid they exuded and found his heart pounding with lust.
The creature’s brain was smaller than either a human’s or a Neanderthal’s.
After nearly an hour, Phylomon noticed something odd—in the torchlight the brunette’s hair changed to a soft red, and the skin faded to a dead white.
Phylomon took his torch around to the other corpses, found that they too had all reverted to a similar hue. With the air sacs and color-changing ability, he realized that the creatures were quite adaptable.
They could look male or female, possibly even look human or Neanderthal. He considered: they might even be able to doppelganger their victims, take their places.
He went back to Allon’s corpse and cut some more.
At the top of the pharynx he found a small passage that he imagined would lead to more air sacs, but instead it went down the throat to a second stomach, which was filled with blood.
He found the liver to be overlarge, the spleen almost nonexistent. He cracked a femur and found it to be hollow, lacking marrow, like the bones of a bird.
He quit dissecting at that point, for he had spent several hours with the creature, and it had grown dark, and he felt uncomfortable slicing it up alone in the night.
Phylomon washed his hands again and again, and could not feel clean.
He went and lay in the snow, looking up at the sky, at the thin layer of clouds hiding the Milky Way. One of the red drones beat its path across the sky.
Until that moment, Phylomon had believed the Creators intended to destroy mankind, wipe them out and start anew. Now he wasn’t sure. The Creators were introducing new breeds of predators, new horrors to thin the human population.
But it seemed to him that if the Creators meant to destroy mankind, a plague would have worked more thoroughly.
That was the problem. The Creators, with their crystalline brains, did not think the way that a human did. Their plans sometimes seemed overly simplistic, other times unfathomable and ingenious.
Phylomon lay for an hour, replaying memories of his youth from the days when he was still taking seritactates.
Phylomon had helped program the predator/prey equations that told the Creators when to introduce new predators into the ecosystems, or when populations of herbivores had overextended enough to endanger the local flora and fauna. The crystalline brains of the Creators could only hold so much information, and those brains were crammed with genetic codes, sophisticated equations dealing with the allowable flora and fauna populations, and recommendations for possible solutions to various problems.
Beyond this type of information, the Creators were actually quite simple-minded. Phylomon wondered if the Creators were refraining from wiping out mankind with a plague simply because they didn’t recognize that it was the best alternative, or if they had been programmed against it.
After great consideration, Phylomon surmised that they had been programmed to avoid it. He personally had entered many of the equations into their brains that offered how to control the populations of higher mammals such as dire wolves and Mastodon Men, but he had only given the Creators the options of using either parasites or other predators to control the populations.
Using biological warfare against large populations, he had felt, would have been impractical in such a vast and complex ecosystem.
Phylomon found it grimly humorous that the only reason that the Creators hadn’t destroyed mankind already was because they weren’t designed well enough.
Ah, with a bit more work, he thought, what might they accomplish yet!
Phylomon considered the blood eaters. They were well-designed. Mankind could flee other predators—might find ways to burrow underground or climb trees to escape, but these blood eaters could hunt men in their warrens, in their most desolate and well-protected shelters.
As a Dicton, Phylomon had been born with a genetically created dictionary of the ancient language of the Starfarers—English. He knew all of the words in the language, but he did not use them when speaking with ordinary humans.
His descendants, whose blood had mingled with that of the Neanderthals over the centuries, had forgotten so many of the words that some had faded from the group consciousness.
Only a few rare throwbacks who had been born with an internal dictionary could communicate with Phylomon on his own level. Certainly, even if he told Fava, Darrissea, and the Hukm what he had found, they would not have understood—a creature that cannot create its own blood and therefore must prey on others.
He calculated in his head, knowing that the walls of the red blood cells from their prey would erode after only four to six weeks of pounding through the blood-eaters’ veins. The creatures would have to feed at least once every three weeks, he suspected.
He imagined how they must be spreading, searching out every city in Craal, trying to infiltrate the communities.
With their pheromone glands, they would find it easy to infiltrate. Now all that they had to do was to wait until the time was right to attack the cities from within.
Phylomon mouthed the word for what the Creators had formed: vampire.
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