The Voyage of The Van Leeuwenhoek
by John Medaille
We surface and the Van Leeuwenhoek shinnies itself out of subspace fires two torpedoes into the Venusian liner. Gourney and me watch the battle from the porthole in the engine room, but it’s not much of anything, no kind of action. Venusian ships ain’t like real ships, they’re just blobs of bacteria and fungus, they’re just diseased lungs. When the torpedoes hit it busts open and thousands of Maggots come tumbling out the holes.
The Van Leeuwenhoek, our ship, don’t look like no lung or no organ or bacteria, it looks like a knife that some mad dog sailor would take into a saloon for murdering with. It has a black saw edge and barbs on the end of it for puncturing soft parts and rivulets down it to let the juice flow out. That’s what we look like to the Maggots in their lung.
When the liner is bleeding out we sit and wait to see if it lives. The gunners man the ack-acks to see if there’s any more killing to be done but there isn’t, and me and Gourney just wait and see it all. When we’re waiting, a Maggot drifts by our porthole close enough to see what it’s got for a face. It’s dying and freezing and burning and suffocating out there but it don’t pop like a real human do, like I’ve seen them do myself in space. Venusians used to be people, that’s what they tell us, before the last war, before they mated up with mushrooms and protozoans and bees and ants and whatever else comes out from under rocks or clings to the insides of shitcans, and now they ain’t human and they don’t pop like we do. This Maggot don’t look like anything human when it drifts by, got no hair nor fingers nor nose. I try to count its eyes but I lose count at eight. It’s still alive so we watch it die. Gourney says it’s a woman and Gourney’s a lifer what’s been to Venus before there was a war on and knew some of the Maggots and knew how to patter a little Venusian so he’d be the one to know, but I don’t see any parts on this Maggot that would make it a man or a woman. The Maggot has little bug-legs near its mouth part that are flailing all about like it’s talking to us in space, saying Maggot things. Who knows what she got to say out there? Then she floats over the bulkhead and we can’t see her no more.
When they’re all dead and we know they’re dead and it’s over and the first mate’s fat, brass voice comes over the bitch box saying “Dive! Dive!” and then we go dark and under into subspace again and all that black space winks out and disappears and so do all the thousands of Maggots just bobbing there and their big lung ship just blasted up and scabbing over and they’re gone.
Me and Gourney get back to work swabbing the mung off the scuppers before the petty officer’s got a chance to come down here and chew us all to hell.
We been out here for five months, running silent. Subspace for all that, hunting the trans-solar corridors on the ultraquiet. We been sharking the Venusian liners dumb enough to take the crossing here and eating Maggots. We had a complement of one-hundred torpedoes in The Van Leeuwenhoek when we started. We fired sixteen so far. Sixteen torpedoes, twelve kills. We got eighty-four torpedoes left to go. When we’re out of torpedoes, we get to go home.
The worst part of being in the Navy is the roaches. Roaches is everywhere in the Van Leeuwenhoek. They’re in the water. They’re in the food. I don’t care so much about that. When I was a kid after the other war when everybody was starved, we used to eat them. I’ve ate some roaches. I had to. All the earthmen had to, so we don’t mind so much.
But there’s no roaches on the moon, and all the officers on the Van Leeuwenhoek is Looners and they hate them some roaches. Before I got in the Navy, I’d never seen a Looner in real life before and now they’re everywhere. Looners is big, you don’t know how big till you’re floating next to one of them. They’re tall and long and got all their hair and all their skin and all their teeth. They look like God’s supposed to look like. Like people in old pictures used to look like, antebellum people on earth. The officers is all Looners and the crew is all earthmen. We look like little dwarves next to them Looners. Little hobgoblins. That’s what we are. The crew’s malnourished; we ate roachpaste as boys. We got the burns we got as babies or else we got mutations, we got clubfoots or scales or flippers. We got birth cauls or plates on our heads where our skulls come out wrong. I got me an incision on my neck where the Navy took off the tumor I had when I joined up. I always had that tumor before. It had little eyelashes on it and sometimes I miss it being there. The little fella on my neck.
The Looners ain’t like that. The Looners got black, bronze, pretty skin and are giants. The Looners rule the world. The Looners hate roaches. The roaches come from earth with us, with the conscripts, their eggs in our hair and ears and guts, no matter how much they scrubbed us off. The earthmen and the roaches come from the earth and are dirty, so the Looners say, they say you get up there in those vents and those pipes and you get those roaches out. Those roaches are clogging the filters, you hop to, you eject them into space, you, or you get your blood stripes. The roaches get into the torpedo tubes and block them up and it’s me and Gourney’s job to mash them out of there. The Looners say y’all earthmen brought them roaches on you so you get rid of them or y’all’ll get lashed. That’s why the worst thing about the Navy is the roaches.
In zero gravity the roaches get big and bold. They kick off the walls and launch themselves everywhere. They scramble over you in the cocoon when you sleep. I’m used to their little feet and antennas on me and I sleep with my mouth closed, but they drive the Looners crazy. All the officers is roach-crazy.
When we’re under, and we’re all the time under, submerged in space waiting for Venusians to cross, space isn’t space. Space isn’t black outside the portholes like it’s supposed to be. Instead, space is a white-green haze with the black pinpricks of stars in it and the sun is a black eyeball that don’t blink. I try not to look out the portholes at it when we’re under because sometimes it feels good to look out but mostly it feels bad. You look out there and you sometimes see things.
We was two months into our deployment when one of the earthmen, this machinist’s mate named Seggers, he looks out the porthole and he says he sees him a dragon out there. Some kind of dragon out in subspace is what he says. He says it close by an officer who hears him so they bring the ship’s doctor down, a Looner name of Silus Thinking Machines. The doctor seems a swell guy and he’s a okay and a considerate officer. The doctor asks Seggers what he sees out there and Seggers says it’s a dragon circling the Van Leeuwenhoek and Seggers is scared of this dragon. And the doctor tells him it’s okay, Seggers, sometimes earthmen see things out the windows sometimes, it’s something that happens to the race and it’s not his fault and he takes Seggers by the arm and they drift out to the focsle of the ship where all the officers live and where earthmen ain’t supposed to go and we don’t see Seggers again.
Gourney, who knows things, says they killed Seggers. Says they killed him and ejected him out into subspace along with all the roaches we mashed up. Says that that’s what they do with the earthmen when they think their minds is gone and they’re no good no more. He says that sometimes you look out the hole you’ll see dragons or serpents or women with long, dark hair tapping at you at the glass and he says when you see them not to tell anybody, not even him and especially not an officer and you just keep it to yourself and shut up. And Gourney knows so when I see old lions or men with big beards just floating outside the ship I don’t tell it to anyone, not even him.
The officers say, they say to me and Gourney, they say you go down there to the ballast tanks, they’s infested with roaches. They say you get them out of there. So me and Gourney go down there and we mash them all up with poles, and there are no windows to look out of in the tanks so that’s good. One of the roaches we find down there is as big as Gourney’s forearm and it’s got this thing on the outside of its head what looks like somebody’s brain and I say what kind of roach is that I never seen a roach like that before, and Gourney says it’s a mutant just like us why look at that that roach looks like it could do some maths. When we were all done with killing them the bosun officer comes down and says it stinks in there with all them dead roaches. He says it stinks to hell and how can you stand it? But it doesn’t smell so bad to me. To me it smells like old earth and home and soup and the bosun says us earthmen will live and squalor and putrefaction and not think a thing about it and it’s just plain disgusting.
After that we vacuum up the roach bodies and swab out the tanks.
I woke up in my cocoon cause I was sleeping and there was something in my ear. It was a roach that was in my ear. I felt it. It was all cuddled up in there. I swatted at it and tried to dig it out with my finger, but it didn’t want to come out of there and I thought that I should get up and get me a screwdriver and scrape it out of my ear but earthmen aren’t supposed to get out of their cocoons when it’s lights out, so I simmered down and I just let it lie there. And as I lay there with the roach in my ear and me half-in and half-out of a sleep, I thought about a thing that my ma used to say to me, she used to say as snug as a bug in a rug. That’s what that roach was in my ear, snug as a bug in a rug. She also used to say as cute as a bug’s ear, she used to say that that’s as cute as I was sometimes. That roach. Snug as a bug in a bug’s ear.
I felt its little antennas tapping the inside parts of my ear. I bet that it was dreaming and that its taps were telling me all of its dreams. Tippy-tippy-tap. Tap-tap-tip. And it didn’t itch or anything.
I woke up for reals when the klaxon went off at oh dark thirty and the roach was gone. We spent all day at battle stations, deep in the deeps. One time they thought they saw a Venusian ship above us in space and we went on the ultrasilent and gave chase. We chased the echo for hours and hours, but it turned out to be nothing, just one of them echoes. There was nothing there at all. All of us in position for nothing. Nothing to speak of.
Today they lined us all up, each and every one of us earthmen in the galley. The captain himself comes and he gives us a talking-to. The captain is big, the biggest Looner I ever seen, a giant of giants. His skin is black, not brown-black like most of the Looners but outer space black-black and he’s got him a big, yellow beard.
So we float at attention for him and he drifts by and inspects us each. He tells us there’s trouble. He tells us there’s an epidemic on board the Van Leeuwenhoek. He tells us the epidemic is roaches and it’s not no longer tolerable. The captain tells us that us being in subspace for so long a stretch is doing things to the roaches, says it’s making them braver, making them cockier, making it so that they have more babies, more and more babies all the time.
He says that as that’s what the case, they’s all going to implement new hygiene regulations. What he says is that all the earthmen is to be inspected daily, fully and naked and everywhere by the doctor. He’s to look us all over for roaches and roach eggs and anything that might be hospitable to a roach. He says that henceforth any such evidence of unhygienic practices on our persons or any unsanitary conditions in our quarters will be a lashable offence, without no exception. That’s what he says.
And then, right there in the stuffy mess hall where there ain’t hardly no air, the officers have us earthmen line up and the doctor inspects us to a one, naked as anything. When I was floating in line I was happy not to have that bug in my ear no more. On three of us earthmen they find roaches under the clothes but not on Gourney and me, so those three get taken to the pillory and we watch them get lashed. And then all of us, still stripped and at company attention, is taken to the jakes and the Looners scrub us off all over with stiff-bristle brushes and a fiery hot soap that fizzed and is made to kill anything. That soap burns the eyes so that we couldn’t of seen right and it gets up the noses and mouths and tastes like hell-in-a-pill. And that soap made all of our hair fall off, even the hair on our eyebrows and privates and knuckles.
None of us earthmen like it a bit, not one little pinch. But we could see that all the Looner’s eyes was red, red as ours was from that rough soap so we know that they got theirs too, so that made it right.
But then Gourney says to me, he says if the Looners went through what we went through, then how come they still got their hair? And I say you’re right, how come they got their hair and eyebrows and moustaches still and we don’t got none?
What with the roaches and all that epidemic going on, they got me and Gourney working on the tripletime. We’s all assholes and elbows the way we working. It used to be it was just me and Gourney who did the roaching duty on the Van Leeuwenhoek, but now that there’s an epidemic on, they got all the earthmen at it, but Gourney and me get the worst of it. We’re bilge trolling today, down on the close crawlspace under the latrines, mashing at them roaches with rubber hoses. It’s like to kill us, Gourney says, we’re bound to suffocate and it feels like it, too. Down here the roaches gotten big, bigger than I ever seen earthside or in space. They the size of loaves of bread. When we drift on by, they pop out from their roach holes between the pipes and out from behind the rivets. They fling themselves away, their legs all a-ticking akimbo for the opposite wall to launch themselves again. Me and Gourney whack them in midair where they can’t change direction and they pop, just like we would out of doors. We do this all day, we haul off bags of them. Towards our third watch down here in the bilge we come across the roach the like of which we never seen before. This roach is sitting pretty betwixt two pistons as calm as anything like it had not a thing to be afeared of.
Well look there, says Gourney, another mutant boy. He says this because this roach has got himself a pair of wings and not like roach wings the kind that some of them got sometimes, but this roach’s wings are feathered like an earth-birds, back when earth had birds. I’ve seen the pictures and I saw a bird skeleton one time, but I never seen a feather before. I would of thought that a feather would have been all of one solid thing, like a piece of paper, but this roach’s feathers are made up of a multitude of little branches that make the feather up entire. This roach’s feathers are gray and dipped in blue.
I raise my truncheon to smack it one but Gourney stays my hand. He says it ain’t right to kill this cockroach. This one is a Roach Prince, him being a son of the Lord High Roach King, and that it would be a terrible sin to crush it. Gourney says these things that he’s never said before, not in my hearing leastaways. He says why we doing this for the Looners? He says the Looners ain’t like us, not like earthmen anymore. They went and changed their bodies that the good earth gave them. They abandoned old earth for the moon. They as alien and strange as the Venusians is now in the earth’s reckoning. But we, us and the roaches, we be earth folk. We be the chosen ones. So let this one live, Gourney says.
So that’s what we do, we let the Roach Prince live. But all the rest we went and killed.
They killed one of us today, an earthman. The earthman’s name was Goode. The captain had us all lined up at parade attention while they lashed Goode, then they took him to an airlock and opened it up with him in it and Goode went into all that whiteness of subspace. He boiled and popped out there. He danced hisself a groundless jig. The captain said if any earthman had anything to say he get him some fifty stripes too. The captain said that any man looks away from Goode’s dying get him a hundred stripes. So we was all looking at Goode when he popped. The captain said that on board of a ship there’s no worse crime then mutiny. It’s the worst offence there is and its wages is death and even to think it, one stray thought in the head and you’re good as dead. He said that as that’s what the maritime code done stated.
Goode was a gunner’s mate. He was an ordnance fella. He mutinied by saying he didn’t want to kill no more roaches. He didn’t want to mush them up or haul them out. He refused and he kept on refusing even when they clapped him in irons. He said he wasn’t going to do it no more, so he said. It ain’t his job.
So we lined up on the Texas deck and we watched Goode do his dying. And when he popped and went still and just drifted as limp as a rope against all them black stars out there, what happened was the roaches came bubbling off of him, out from where they were clinging from Goode’s boots and his pants and from his ears and even up from his nose. The roaches boiled and froze and popped just like Goode did. There must have been at least a hundred of them on Goode. They kept him company out there in subspace and all us earthmen seen it happen.
The Looners says the roaches is a plague. That’s what they say. An honest plague. No matter how much killing we do, there’s always more roaches. A mess of them vomits out the commode. They scuttle up the buttons and levers. They’s in the air filters and the Van Leeuwenhoek is thick with the stink of roach and home.
What do they eat? Is what the Looners say. What are they eating all the time that they gotten so many?
For every roach an earthman swats into glue a thousand more get borned somewheres. They got us working all the time now. Two hours sleep for eighteen hours roaching. The Van Leeuwenhoek’s roach-crazy.
We was in inspection today with the doctor examining us for uncleanly things and roachishness and it was my turn. I hung up in front of him and he had him a look-see. I wasn’t looking at the doctor, I was looking out behind him out the porthole at the sickly looking space. I was thinking how many roaches we ejected out there into all that, how many million waterbugs, dead ones and alive, did we leave out there along with Goode and Seggers and the lions and the dragons and mermaids. What do they do out there with them? How do they get along, the roaches and the gods and the gods of roaches and the gods of earthmen? That and is there any going home?
It was then that the doctor, he starts in on slapping and swearing. He’s clutching at his jaw like he’s been socked and I see some beads, a little necklace of purple Looner blood drift up from where he holds his face.
And I want to know what’s what and the doctor is saying He bit me! He bit me!
And I say no I didn’t do no biting of you Captain Doctor Sir. And the other Looners hear the commotion and they come and they put me in my restraints. And the doctor tells them there was a roach on this filthy earthman. It was tucked up in his armpit. He says that roach springed out and bit him on the cheek.
And this don’t make no sense to my way of thinking, for what’s a roach got to bite with that would go through a Looner’s skin? A roach ain’t got no teeth. That’s what I want to know and I make to ask it of the Captain Doctor Sir but he backhands me, he wallops me but good.
He says this earthman is harboring vermin in unhygienic conditions. Ya’ll take him to the pillory for a flogging. Fifty lashes.
And me, I didn’t harbor this biting roach, I didn’t even know it was there in my pit. And where’s it gone off to? And all the time with the doctor bleeding his purple moon blood in the air.
The Looners take me to the pillory just like all the others found keeping company with bugs. They strip off my coveralls and they start in on my whipping, there with all the earthmen and the Looners watching on.
This ain’t my first whipping, not in the Navy nor out of it, but with the skin grown back on, every whipping is the first and new. It hurts and I screamed when they counted off them lashes. But around the thirtieth one, when I start to drift away, as I do, that was when I saw some trouble in the onlookers, some kind of ruckus was blowing up, but I couldn’t of told what it was.
But then I see Gourney. I suppose I didn’t see him rightly, truth to tell, but I knew it was him from the type of his body and the stance that he took. Gourney was covered in roaches, every inch of him, they swarmed up over his limbs and out his mouth and eyes. He was an earthman with a roach skin, and he was attacking the Looners, I saw that too, he was grappling with them in the air, he was clawing with his roach hands for their eyes and throats with all the officers and the one that held the lash. And some was joining in on one side of the fight and some was joining in on the other.
And I recalled thinking how warm it must have been under there, under a blanket of roaches, and then I was out like a light.
Today there’s no roaching to be done. There’s no swabbing or KP or slop duty. No more of that no more.
Today we’s storming the focsle where the last of the Looners have locked themselves up in. We’re battering the gate with a piston casing and it’s all buckled in. I think it’ll go soon and that’ll be that. It’s Gourney who’s leading the charge with the ram. Roaches cling to him and the Roach King sits upon his back and the Roach King got many hands. Roaches are all clung about to me too and all the earthmen, like a jacket of them. Their little feet are in me and we’re allies in the war. The air is crawling with roaches and earthmen and there’s not so much of a difference no more. There is a host of Roach Queens and Princesses and Roach Dragons and Roach Vipers. It turns out I was wrong and they do have their little teeth. We haul and the ram clangs against the gate and soon it will be time to come to supper.
And as I do my hauling I ponder to myself, what will we do, the roaches and the men, when we take the Van Leeuwenhoek? Which side will we be on in the war, the maggots or the moons? Who will we kill and refrain from killing and what will become of the eighty-four torpedoes? Will we stay in the underspace where it ain’t so strangulating to be no more, where now it is pure pleasure to look out the portholes and to see the black haired ladies winking back at me, or will we surface into the real world? Will we land or will we drift? Will we be made fast or forever loose? Will we fly back to the Earth where our side is from old long since, or is earth all done for, like it always was?
These are the things I think of swinging that casing back and forth with my fellows, or sometimes that’s what I’m thinking of, but in between that, most of the time, I’m not thinking much of anything at all.
John Medaille has been published on Escape Pod, Pseudopod, Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine and The Three-Lobed Burning Eye and is working on a short story collection called: Hideous Tales of Doomed Spacemen, Demonic Cameras, Protoplasmic Flesh-Eaters, The Supernatural, U.F.O.’s, Interdimensional Beasts, Evil Children, Misunderstood Robots, Telephone Calls from Beyond the Grave, Mayhem, Murder AND THE MACABRE!
© 2011 All rights reserved John Medaille
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Like the creepy, surreal imagery. And the idea of people merging with mushrooms and fungus? Reminded me of the barnacle sailors from Pirates of the Caribbean. Anyway, nice.