The Guest
Notes on Kraw’s condition, and on the specimen. Private. He has read the early pages and says he does not mind. I mind, somewhat, on his behalf.
I have written the parasite four times and struck it out four times, because it is not one. Symbiote is closer and still wrong. I have settled on “the Guest”, which commits me to nothing.
He came here frightened, looking for an answer. I did not have one. What I had, in the end, was a fragment of the thing in a jar and some time alone with it while he and the others were away, and I have learned more from the jar than from the man, which I am not proud of and would not say to his face.
Part one: the host
Four months of examination before the extraction. Little to show for it.
- Wounds close. A cut he permitted me to make on the forearm, clean and shallow, three inches measured: closed within the hour, gone by morning. No scar, no fever, no fatigue. Draughts leave a man tired. He was not tired.
- Things near him keep. Bread in my kitchen went a week without staling. Cut stems held four days past their season. A control vase in the far room died on schedule.
- He works magic he was never taught. No formula, no components, no study, nothing belonging to any tradition I recognise. He reaches inward and a thing is done. I have spent thirty years learning to do less than that.
- There is no locus. I could locate no mass, no organ, no seat of it anywhere, and I looked for four months. Whatever it is, it is distributed: throughout him, and nowhere in particular. By every method I have he is an ordinary man in excellent health.
The one exception is not a locus but a thickening. A place where it gathers dense enough to be seen, and, I judged, dense enough to be taken from. A nodule the size of a barleycorn, adhered to nothing. Not attached. Not fed. Simply resident.
He consented, before he left, to my taking a portion of it. The excision took a quarter of an hour and he was walking that evening.
Let me be plain about what I did and did not do. I took a fragment. I would estimate a very small part of the whole, though I have no way to measure the whole and that estimate is worth what it is worth. The great mass of it remains in him and always did. He is not cured, he was never going to be cured, and he understood that before he agreed.
That he was unaffected is therefore no surprise and I record it only for completeness: the healing continues, the bread keeps, he works as he worked.
What is a surprise is on the third shelf, and I have given it its own pages.
Part two: the specimen
Everything below is repeated observation.
The finding that governs all the others, so I put it first. A fragment of a creature is a diminished thing. It has whichever parts it happened to be cut with, and it does not work, and shortly it is not a creature at all. This fragment is not diminished in any respect I can measure. Every property the man exhibits, the barleycorn in the jar exhibits, at its own scale and undiminished in kind.
It is not a piece of one. It is a smaller one.
I do not know of a living thing that can be divided so and remain entire in both halves. Not an animal, not a plant, not anything in the catalogues. I know of patterns that behave that way. A tune is entire whether hummed by one man or a hundred. A proof is not made less true by being copied out twice.
I would rather not have written that comparison down but it is the only one that fits.
- It does not die. No nutrient, no air exchange, no light. Sixteen weeks. No decay, no diminishment, no change in mass to the limit of my scales.
- It does not eat. Offered blood, tissue, broth, sugar-water, marrow. It declines all of it. I cannot find the thing it wants and I am no longer certain it wants.
- It is two tissues at once. Under the glass, one structure is plainly a simple deep-water organism, cold-adapted, slow, unremarkable, of the sort the dredgers turn up and nobody troubles to name. Interwoven with it is something I cannot call tissue at all. It has order but no anatomy. No organs, no vessels, no direction of growth. It is arranged, and arrangement is the only honest word I have.
- It rearranges itself. Not growth, the mass does not alter. But the internal order is different between one observation and the next, and different again on the third. It is not decaying into disorder. It is trying configurations, and abandoning them, and trying others.
- It rehearses. This is the observation I most dislike setting down. There is a sequence it attempts, I have watched it eleven times, which fails, is altered slightly, and is attempted again. It is not a spasm. A spasm does not vary. It is doing something the way a man does something he has half-forgotten how to do.
- It notices being observed. Diagnostic castings return a reading the first time and a flatter, emptier reading on repetition, as though the first enquiry were answered and the second declined. Varying the interval does not help. Something is deciding.
- It began something and stopped. In the second week it started to extend, the first true growth I recorded, and in the third it arrested and drew back to its original arrangement. Nothing I did caused either. I think it reached for something it did not have.
- I cannot age it. The deep-water half I could date roughly against dredged specimens; a few years, no more. The other half shows no wear, no accumulation, no ageing of any kind that I know how to look for. It might have been made last spring. It might have been made before the islands rose.
He came to me frightened and I have not made him less frightened. He has been away many weeks and I have thought about the jar more than I have thought about him, and I have several times caught myself hoping he does not get better before I understand it.
I am setting that down so that I have to look at it.