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The Secretary of Scription opened the grey door and went inside, beckoning for Lim to follow. Lim took one step into the room and yelped. There was something at the center of the room she couldn't bear to look at. She covered her mouth. Her stomach was twisting.
"That was my first reaction too, if that helps," said the Secretary of Scription, watching her.
Lim looked down at her shoes, shrinking her field of view enough not to see the monstrosity.
"I do feel sorry for the poor Kehrli," said the Secretary. "This was probably the first Kehrli to visit our planet. No, our entire solar system. And to think it ended this way."
So that's a Kehrli, Lim realized. Was a Kehrli. She vaguely remembered this species from the brief xenobiology unit in her eight grade biology class. Since the first contact thirty years ago the Kehrli had yet to develop diplomatic relations with humans. Very few people had seen them live. Now she was among them, except the first "live" one she saw was definitely not.
Then she forced herself to raise her eyes and look at it - no, as a living being it could not have been an it; surely it had a proper pronoun. But no other pronoun would fit the mutilated body on the floor.
"What do you think of zir?" the Secretary asked.
Lim forced herself to take a longer look. "It - zie? - is twisted up like a corkscrew," she said.
That was a bit of an exaggeration. The body of the Kehrli was more like one elongated twist of a corkscrew. That didn't matter: it wasn't supposed to be. No creature, alien or not, could survive this. In the path of the twist, zir skin (if that was skin) bulged with blisters. They had ruptured in some places and were oozing red fluid, and in some other places a thicker substance was pushing through: darker red, iridescent, pearly clumps, probably zir tissues. Lim absurdly thought of a cream-filled eclair, of what it would look like if you grabbed its two ends and turned them in the opposite directions. The cream would ooze out just like that. She retched and clamped a hand over her mouth again.
"There is some semblance," the Secretary concurred. "What else?"
"I don't understand what you expect me to see," she said sharply. "First of all, what happened here?"
The queasiness hit her again, and now she knew it wasn't just her revulsion at the grotesquely mangled flesh. This creature died the way she herself could die if... if only... if not for...
She could not articulate it, not even to herself. A horror stirring deep in her belly linked her innate deficiency - the one that she and her parents alone knew about - with the death of the Kehrli. It did not operate at the verbal level. Its only words were twinges of nausea.
She wondered if the Secretary of Scription suspected this, though it was unfathomable that he would know about a link that she could not articulate even to herself. But he brought her here. Why?
"So far we know only one thing," said the Secretary. "The Kehrli attempted to cast a vector."
Lim gasped.
"We found a stratapen by zir body," the Secretary explained.
"You did?" Lim could not imagine with what body part did the Kehrli grasp a stratapen. She tried to remember if the appendages she had seen in xenobiology textbooks could work as hands. Nor could she identify any of those appendages in the pile of twisted biomatter.
"And you worked at the stratapen factory, didn't you, Lim? Until last month?"
She stared at him in horror. "I... do you actually... I was just a janitor there!"
"Of course, Lim," he said with a reassuring smile. "I would never suggest that it was you that helped zir obtain a stratapen. That's a separate line of investigation that we have already started. I brought you here as a potentially valuable consultant in this case. Do you know why?"
"No. I have not the slightest."
The secretary tilted his head, as if not entirely believing it. "Some auxiliary personnel at the stratapen factory - that is to say, anyone who is not a designer, engineer or tester - are of interest to us. Some of them are what we unofficially call parascriptional. I think you have an idea what it means, Lim, even though you are giving me this quizzical look. Parascriptional means having some abilities resembling scription, but at odds with it."
He was speaking about her and her deficiency. Lim's knees trembled. She leaned against the wall.
"You are one of them, aren't you?" the Secretary said. She did not respond, but that wasn't necessary. "And the Kehrli might have had a similar parascriptional ability. Otherwise the stratapen would not have killed it. It would simply not work for zir at all. So now do you see why I brought you here?"
No, she wanted to say, but I see a very blurry outline of it. She didn't like speaking vaguely, so she stayed silent. The Kehrli didn't disgust her anymore. What they had in common has just been given a name, and the name was clawing its way out of her belly.