A little boy exploded into Father Luigi’s office, holding up a jar as if it was a trophy.
“What is it?” Luigi asked, peering into it. Though his job should have been to bring spiritual solace to those living on the remote mining planet of Odin III, people often brought him problems that had little to do with spirituality. The thing wriggling inside the jar was gray, about twice the width of his thumb, and topped with wispy frond-like tentacles.
“I don’t know,” Kurt replied. He hadn’t even attempted to comb his hair that day, and it stuck out every which way. “Huckleberry brought it for me.”
“For you?” Luigi asked. “And who is Huckleberry?”
“Huckleberry is my cat. He brings me things all the time. Mostly mice. Well, pieces of mice. Sometimes he leaves insects. Yuck.” He made a face. “But this… I never saw anything like this before, so I thought you might want to see it.”
Luigi studied the sluglike form. It had no feet, yet seemed to be able to move around within the glass enclosure at will. He was about to ask the boy why he’d brought it, but the question died on his lips. If it was weird, people brought it to the church. Generally, what they wanted was to hear that it would be okay. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said.
“I’m not worried. But since it’s magic, I thought you might want to see it,” Kurt said.
“Why do you think it’s magic?” Luigi asked.
He hoped this didn’t turn out to be yet another complicated creature that broke every law of physics and biology. He’d lost his appetite for that kind of thing a long time ago.
The boy solemnly shook the jar. Not violently, but enough to agitate the thing inside. Luigi saw it shake its fronds, which turned greenish, making it look like a carrot with the leaves still attached.
Then, with an audible squeal, it split in half lengthwise, leaving two creatures identical to the first—and the same size.
Since that was clearly impossible, Luigi sighed. It was, apparently, going to be one of those days. He turned to check if he had anything important to do, and was relieved to see there was nothing he had to put off. They would need to consult an expert, and that would mean going through the Galactic Mining bureaucracy. He groaned inwardly.
When Luigi turned back to the jar, there was only one slug inside, and no sign another had even existed. “Where did it go?” he asked.
“That’s the magic,” Kurt replied. “They just disappear.”
“What? No way. The other one must have eaten it or something.”
But when the boy did it again, Luigi knew he had to report this find.
Yep, one of those days, he thought.
§
Nina had cleared a space on a table. Luigi could see where the dust had been disturbed and equipment pushed aside. That space held the jar with the slug in it.
“I don’t know why everyone keeps bringing me creatures to study with so much else going on,” Nina snapped. “I’m a geologist! I don’t have the equipment or the knowledge to really make a professional assessment. Hell, half of what I looked up about this thing you could have found with a quick online search.” She grunted. “But I’ve had a look at this one. Their biology, as far as I can tell without consulting with an actual biologist, appears normal. But they’re going somewhere, which means they’re either being transmitted by waves or by gravitation… or something.”
Luigi saw rings under Nina’s eyes, her face was pale and drawn.
“Maybe we can learn something from these,” she said.
“What makes you think you’ll be able to get any information?” Luigi said.
“Ah, an intelligent question. From a priest, no less. Will the wonders never cease?” Nina barked. “The problem with other anomalies we’ve seen is that their occurrence is random.”
Luigi nodded. “Yes, that appears to be the nature of unexpected events.”
Nina rolled her eyes at his irony. “That’s the beauty of this creature. You shake the jar, it produces a new version of itself, and then, between ten and ninety seconds later, it disappears. Repeatable and predictable. Perfect for doing experiments, then I can get back to my important work.”
She picked up the jar. “First, we’ll give this little fellow a shake. And wait until it disappears.”
The slug disappeared. Nina stared into a handheld monitor.
Luigi waited, but curiosity struck. “What are you looking at?”
Nina sighed. “If you must know, I’m scanning for weird stuff: electromagnetic waves, gravitational changes, magnetic fields, neutrino traces and all kinds of particle radiation. And there’s nothing. I was pretty much expecting this, because nothing is ever easy in this place. So I’ve got a second experiment we can try.”
She shook the jar, unscrewed the top and, as soon as the new slug appeared, injected something into it. Seconds later, it disappeared. “Radio locator chip. If it’s inside the barrier, we can track where it ended up.” She grimaced. “I wanted to use these to map the mine tunnel anomalies. You know, something important. But here we are.”
Nina looked at her screen again. “I can’t believe this. We’ve actually got a signal.”
“Where?” Luigi asked.
“Follow me.”
They skidded around the corner into the alley behind Weber’s bar which smelled like… well, it smelled like an alley behind a bar. A large pile of old packing cases leaned against the wall.
“So much for personal hygiene,” Nina grumbled. She began to pull away the cases to reveal a pile of decomposing vegetables.
Upon this old food, the gray slug-like creature munched contentedly.
Nina stared at it for some moments. “They can’t all have come here.” She pulled out her comm device and called the lab, where they’d left a startled office worker with a stern set of instructions and a jar containing one mysterious slug: “Please do what we agreed,” she said.
“Are you sure about this?” a tinny voice asked.
“It’s perfectly safe,” she said.
“I’ve got so many better things to do. Whatever. Shaking the jar, now.”
“Now we’ll see where the next one goes. Then we can…” Nina said.
Luigi laughed. Nina’s eyes grew wide as she looked where the little critter had been.
It vanished, then reappeared.
She looked down at her device. “It says it’s back at the lab.”
“No it isn’t,” Luigi replied. “It’s right there.”
Nina looked down. “No. The chip says it’s in the lab.”
“Well, there’s one there.”
It was true. The slug appeared content to munch on the refuse in the alley.
“How can this be?” Nina said rubbing her face with one hand. “Is this the one we didn’t send the first time? Does it even matter?”
Father Luigi put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re relatively new here, so all I can really say is welcome to Odin III. This is the kind of thing that is going to happen all the time, I’m afraid. I’d be happy to help you make sense of things if you need to talk to someone. More than happy, in fact. I enjoy my job.”
“You mean you can explain this?”
Luigi shook his head. “Probably not. But maybe I can help you make peace with it.” He gave her a long look. “It seems like you’ve been working harder than you should. Maybe I can give you some preliminary spiritual guidance on the other side of this wall.” He tapped the bricks.
“That’s Weber’s place,” she said.
Luigi nodded. “I find that a glass of wine—or a few—often helps when discussing the mysteries of the Odin III.”
Nina nodded and smiled for the first time. It was a tired smile, but it was a smile. “Yeah. I can see how it would.”
New to Odin III? Find out what you’ve been missing!
Check out The Complete Episode Guide.
Coming Saturday: Episode 47, “A Spark in the Dark,” by Travis Burnham
Gustavo Bondoni is
novelist and short story writer with over three hundred stories
published in fifteen countries, in seven languages. He is a member of
Codex and an Active Member of SFWA.His latest novel is a dark historic fantasy entitled The Swords of Rasna (2022). He has also published five science fiction novels, four monster books and a thriller entitled Timeless. His short fiction is collected in Pale Reflection (2020), Off the Beaten Path (2019), Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010) and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011).
In
2019, Gustavo was awarded second place in the Jim Baen Memorial Contest
and in 2018 he received a Judges Commendation (and second place) in The
James White Award. He was also a 2019 finalist in the Writers of the
Future Contest.
His website is at www.gustavobondoni.com
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