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The Cuteness That Came To Asgarth
The Cuteness That Came To Asgarth
The Cuteness That Came To Asgarth
I met her again a few days later - It must have been Wednesday,
because it was Exotics on the menu again. I shuddered as I grabbed a
tray. Though the native fast-food dishes of the Japanese East Coast
colonies are pretty bad when served as takeaway - given a determined
cook and several hours alone with helpless ingredients, the results can
be little short of lethal. Selecting instead a stainless steel bowl of
Tripe Tindaloo, I turned round to look for a table - and there she was.
"Hidy !" She waved, her eyes open wide. She must have Manga genes
in one side of her family, I thought fleetingly. She beckoned, and I
came.
"Is the - hand, working properly, still ?" I prompted.
She giggled. "Thank you - it's fine." I felt a metal-cased foot
reach out and slyly caress my leg. "I am, you say, grateful. " Then she
sniffed delicately, and her gaze locked on my bowl in delighted
surprise. "What is zat - it smells Delicious !" She exclaimed, her ears
going rigidly erect.
"Ahem." I heard Aelfric's voice by my side. The otter had wisely
stuck to one of the standard fish dishes: our biolabs breed Combat
Halibut for the Albanian Navy, and nothing goes to waste. "You don't
want that, mam'zelle - it'll burn your fur clean off."
Fuzzelle cast me a bashful look. "I am, only a little bunny," she
looked up at us, two solidly built carnivores. "But I think I will try
eet." I offered her a helping of the delicious honeycomb tripe, swimming
in red-golden sauce, and she tossed it down her throat like fuel down a
scramjet.
We waited for her to start choking, or at least for to start
panting. The cooks here are specially licensed, Bradford's finest - and
we are one of the few places insured to serve full Tindaloo dishes. But
she smiled, her tiny pink tongue slowly moving from one side of her
muzzle to the other.
"Ah - I am made of sterner stuff than you think, eh ? Some, they
can take it hot. You would be amazed - how hot." Her gaze was suddenly
direct and piercing: for no rational reason I felt a hot rush of sheer
elemental panic. Then she shrugged daintily.
"Delicious. But my digestion is - you say, Delicate ? My people say
I must eat everything fresh, to get my strength back. And the more alive
the better, to put new Life inside."
We noticed the freshly picked fishbones on her plate: from the
colour of the tiny scraps of flesh remaining, she had eaten it not just
rare, but raw.
Aelfric gave an embarrassed cough. "Right. I'll leave you to it,
then." He winked at me as he passed, and I heard him murmur "In your
room." as he left.
Fuzzelle's lop ears swung engagingly as she turned to face me. "I
am - settling in, you say ? But I wondered - would you show me around ?
It is very unfamiliar, not like - " she hesitated "not at all like,
where I come from."
I nodded, my heart racing. "How's your suit holding up ? Those
power packs need a lot of recharging."
For a second she looked startled. Then smiled, her shoulder-width
whiskers twitching engagingly. "Oh. It ees holding up. Zat is not really
a problem - not for me."
From then on, I saw her every day: when classes were done, we would
go up together on the wide, rolling moors - a fine and wild place to
walk, to talk, and indeed to fall in love. She would say little of her
past; half the time she would talk with wild enthusiasm about her
Biology classes, with the fanatical concentration of an explorer mapping
new territory.
"Eeet will be a big help to me," She claimed proudly, one clear
evening when I had heard more than I really cared to know about protein
breakdown and synthesis. "My digestion, eet is not parfait. But - I am
working on it. And much else." She cast me a long, smouldering look from
beneath those improbable lashes. "One day, I will be well again. And
then - I will go back, and 'elp my people." She rolled over on her back,
her rounded form sparkling like a stainless steel statue fallen into the
deep brown heather.
I felt my breath hastening as she looked up at me. Aelfric had been
quite right - he HAD recognised that suit design. But it was neither a
medical prosthetic, nor yet a military hardsuit - though it was famous
enough to anyone who subscribed to "Cyberphile" magazine, with its range
of fascinatingly multi-function androids (special custom jobs available
extra.). The suit must fit her like a glove - for a second, I had a
bizarre image of her being poured into it.
"What actually - happened, to you ?" I asked gently.
There was a long silence, as she stared down the coastline, roughly
South-East towards Europe.
"Eet was in the war, at the end," she said softly. "The night
Belgium ended - when 'zo much was destroyed. We 'ad been hiding, and we
were just coming up - when the bombs fell. The place - " she shrugged.
"Ze place burned, where we were. Many of us were trapped - I escaped,
but hurt zo bad, I barely stayed on Earth." She patted her smooth steel
carapace. "This ees for support, and protection, till I recover. You
would not like to see me, inside it now."
I protested, and she flung her short arms around me with incredible
vigour for someone so badly injured. The fresh air and raw food must be
doing her good, I decided.
"You're not the only one a long way from home," I tried to reassure
her. "Come round and meet Tick-Lee, some time . He's not even FROM this
dimension. You'll get along fine."
She froze like the sexy statue her suit resembled. "Ah, no. I am -
shy, of 'zose so exalted." A smile crept back to her face. "You might
say, my family, zey 'ave come up in the world, but recently."
The next day being a Saturday, I sat behind the counter of the
Quantum Mechanics Shop, daydreaming. My marker pen doodled bunnies
nanometers wide on germanium wafers, as my mind wandered. Just then, Mr.
Grimesthorpe, the proprietor, strolled in carrying a new delivery of
Write-Only memory chips.
He was a tall, slender greyhound, much like myself in outline - but
I hoped never to look too much like him. He twitched and jerked
spasmodically: every sound had his ears flinching up in terror, and he
spent his days with a permanently terrified expression on his face. I
remembered what someone had told me, of how he got that way.
"Mr. Grimesthorpe," I asked politely. "You were in Belgium, weren't
you ? I've a friend who got out, like you did. What was it LIKE ?"
At the first syllable of that dread name, his face froze in a mask
of terror, and I thought his already bulging eyes were going to pop out
of his head.
"That. Place." He said hollowly, pressing his back against the
wall, and looking round wildly. He fumbled in his pocket, brought out a
bottle of pills, and swallowed a handful.
I winced. I had also heard that like most of the few survivors of
the final campaign, he had tried to drown his sorrows. It had reached
the stage when his body became literally immune to alcohol, and he was
forced to drink paraldehyde instead. Most people would have been dead
long ago - but then, most people who had gone into Belgium already were.
His eyes cleared slightly as the drugs took effect. Sidling over to
the door, he slipped the sign to "Closed", and fixed me with a stare
that seemed focussed on the furthest quasar behind me. Then he slumped
into a chair, and began to talk in a low, drained monotone.
"You want to know what it was - LIKE ?" There came a dry humourless
laugh like the crackling of breaking bones. "Oh. It wasn't like anything
before or since. I tell you that. I'd thought I'd seen it all: it was at
the end, when we'd thrown the EC out, we'd linked up with the Albanian
756th Shock Army on the Marne. I'd been with the Regiment since we'd got
re-nationalised, three years fighting, it was time to end it. Everybody
who was left, all came in together. The flank of our group was a block
of Maus 19's, we'd only found out about the Thulians from under Mount
Erebus when they'd driven ashore in Spain, they'd forded the Antarctic
and South Atlantic oceans just to get here."
He drew in a deep, sobbing breath. "Nobody'd understood how the
EC'd done it, you see, not till we actually got into the Heartland, and
- found out, the hard way. Under Brussels was the place - we all knew
that. But we didn't know how far down it really went - or that some of
the tunnels were dug COMING UP FROM BELOW ! They'd made a deal, for the
power they had. With the - Others, you see. The EC were going to rewrite
the Regulations to suit themselves - and I don't mean the trading laws,
but the LAWS. Physics, you know ? And they'd found some - forces, that
were going to let them do it."
His eyes seemed to go very distant. "We knew there wasn't much time
left. If THEY got out, it'd sort of snowball - they bring their reality
with them, it all gets easier and easier. As they blend with us - they
get harder and harder to spot. But still - we only had to face the least
of them, the things that'd been people once. You could just about kill
those ones."
Mr.Grimesthorpe slumped, his ears dangling over his eyes as if to
shut out some intolerable vision. "We were thirty miles into the border,
and it'd been too quiet. We'd got a skirmishing line, spread out half a
mile in front of our "tank fist" - they were convicted skateboarders,
they knew it was this or the bulldog ants, and this way was quicker.
They were wired up for sound, and they'd all got this gyro-compass
device, so we'd know which way they were looking. "
"Ordinary sensors don't detect what we knew would be out there.
When the first of our picket line started screaming, we had one
directional fix, the others turned to look - and it was a triangulation
fix, as long as they lasted. So we slammed in the ground spades till
they hit bedrock and stoked those 410 mils' for all they were worth -
half a minute and we'd burned off a tonne and a half of ammo, mostly
phosphorus and binary cryogenic hydrogen/fluorine shells. We'd a pretty
good idea what it took to stop them, even then."
He gave a choking sob. "It wasn't enough . One of them got over the
crest line - Cthulhu save us, but it looked right at us ! The Smurf
Destroyer on my left blew up when the Cuteness smashed straight through
their frontal armour - the crew just had time to set the self-destruct
device, you see. But we ..." he began shaking violently.
"Of course, it was only one of the lesser ones - and of course I
didn't actually SEE it, eye contact. The muzzle flash of our 410 on full
auto had set everything on fire, that was what saved us - the smoke, and
the heat haze, I just caught a glimpse, of the shape...... before a
lucky burst from one of the Maus 19's main guns managed to chew through
its side seam. " He was now literally gasping for breath.
"And we all knew, you see, that wasn't the worst. The native-built
stuffies, they had to take on with TV-guided negamass bombs. It's not
the material damage, that hurts them - because they aren't really here,
tied to this space and time - they're just squeezing in, from the place
they come from, and it takes that much spatial distortion to send them
back. If we'd met one of THOSE ..." his eyes glazed over, and with a
terrifying howl, tore across the room and out, up towards the hallowed
protection of the moortop temples.
What was in the envelope ? What did I see ? I can only tell you the
story that she wrote on paper, and for what I saw - the mind has a
saving grace of blanking out what would otherwise linger and eat its way
through sanity like so much hot acid.
It was all there. Why she had to wear the armour, not to protect
herself, but to prevent it being - obvious, what she was. Much of the
shape that she had originally possessed had been destroyed, and she had
taken long to regain it.
I had wondered about her liking for raw, preferably living meats,
even while wondering how she afforded to treat me to oysters, down at
the quayside. And I had thought it odd, her obsession with digestive
systems - and her joking asides about having to absorb life - the RIGHT
KIND OF LIFE. For she needed to - replace things, you see - and I
believe that she left here with as efficient a digestive system as any
of us - and possibly other systems as well, for she had been here long
before her interest in me could become physical. But how much of that
did she have, at the start of term, I wondered ?
Tick-Lee had to go, I understood that as I read the letter. She had
claimed to be fathered by one of the Outer ones such as he - and with
his unearthly set of senses, he would soon have found out her deception.
She was neither half-eldritch, nor even half French.
"Eet was the time," I read the last page of her note "the time I
and my, sisters, were ready to come up. I did not lie to you - about the
fire, and the building collapsing. In my room - you have seen."
It was then that my nerve broke, and without waiting to read more,
I ran back to the attic room as fast as I could. The clues were there. I
had seen them, and now I understood, far too late. For Fuzzelle had gone
back to the place she came from - back to Belgium.
It had been the Night Of The War, she had told that truthfully. My
Fuzzelle had come to Earth with her relatives, and those deep pits
beneath Brussels had echoed to a daemonic squeaks of squeaks and
chirping, as the corridors flowed with an upswelling tide of ghastly
plush. And my Fuzzelle - possibly she had been a minute ahead of the
crowd, who can tell ? She had been almost at the surface, striding up,
when the thirty-five megatonnes of a more mundane brand of Hell had
punched through the paving stones of Unification Plaza, burrowing deep
through the rottenness of tunnels and pits before burning the heart out
of that accursed place with the cleansing flame of a thousand suns !
"Some can take it hot," Fuzzelle had said mockingly - and still I
could almost hear the peculiar mocking note in her voice, as she said
it. She did not die, since the thing she is, is almost deathless on
Earth - but what part of her was matter as we know it, was destroyed or
irradiated with the very heart-blood of the warhead's fury.
Goddess, but she must have been right inside the fireball ! The
picture on the wall stared at me, and I understood it. The tiny figure
struggling out of the crater minutes later, wading through the molten
rock like a castaway struggling up a muddy beach, dreadfully burned but
still able to crawl to shelter before the revealing tracks in the
flowing tritinite proved there had been a survivor.
And what of the second statue ? I looked at it, and my heart
lurched within me. Hands clawing up out of green glass. What had she
said of her relatives who did not escape in time ? Why did I assume that
she was so much tougher than they, when she might only have been nearer
the surface ? For though we knew from the rest of the Belgian campaign,
that their toughness was almost infinite, their strength was not - and
that horde who had been minutes away from spilling out into the mortal
world WERE STILL THERE, ALIVE, trapped in the congealing glass like
flies in amber.
Was she the only one who walked among us ? I knew that much of what
she had said was truth. What of her relatives, who had sent her here -
and who she was returning to, now that her body had merged with mortal
flesh in a blend like the lichens she had studied so avidly ? I do not
know.
They found her power-armour empty and irradiated, outside the
medical building that morning. I begged them not to destroy it, for it
is all I have left to remind me, that and three hundred Rads whole-body
exposure. The suit was a fake in some ways - the main power lines had
never been connected, and the rest were only used for "special
occasions" to establish her credentials.
I say the suit was empty. I do not mean they found it disassembled,
as you or I would take it off - it was intact, like a headless steel
statue. I remember how they all puzzled how she got it off, or why she
rebuilt it afterwards.
But I know, or think that I know, unless it was all nightmare. She
had entered the building, despite the locked doors and window grids, all
of which were undisturbed. And despite everything, I cannot think that
she was wholly evil, even if it was a mere consequence of assimilating
mortal flesh and living amongst us. She came to kiss me goodbye, and
there was nothing mocking about that. But then - as I watched, I saw the
reality behind the armour. She had said she was resting, and getting "in
shape". Indeed, those were her words, and well-chosen.
For as she waved goodbye, I saw the TRANSFORMATION into what was
her native form. Putty - a cascade of liquid fluff like a tumbling roll
of fur fabric spilling onto the floor - formless, boiling, seething,
primordial stuffing ! How she had laughed and smiled as she had ripped
the cushions open in her room and spilled their contents in tribute to
some dark and nameless God of Plush ! The shape - that slick of
unnameable Cuteness spreading out over the floor towards the ventilator
leading outside, before it ALL CAME TOGETHER AGAIN !
But the mind is a wonderfully healing thing. I have not told the
authorities of that last sight I had of her, for they would believe me.
They say that nothing moved out of Brussels, that that part of her tale
must have been a lie.
I do not think so. I would go to that blasted green bowl where
stood Unification Plaza, but I fear what I would find there.