A Season For Slaughter Part 18

Sometimes I felt enveloped in a fog of my own mind, still enraptured in the aftermath of these mordant bright hallucinations.

Or perhaps it was just the sweats, a milder form of hallucinogenic fever. I didn't know.

Sometimes I felt as if I were a worm. Seeing and hearing and tasting with my entire body all at once. It made me twitchy. I itched in places I couldn't scratch. I was hungry for things I couldn't taste, things I didn't know; as desperate as the adolescent yearning for the mystery of mating, but so profound and far beyond that simpler urge that human beings still knew nothing of it.

Sometimes I sat alone and pondered this incredible driving need I felt for greater consummations than were previously dreamt. And sometimes I was certain that I was mad and that my madness had devoured me, left me plunging down a corridor of red obsession.

Sometimes I felt ripped open.

I wanted to tell someone exactly how I felt, and even as I felt the urge to speak, I felt the greater urge to hold my tongue. I was supposed to be an agent of discovery.

But if what I was discovering was so disturbing that it called into question my ability to perform my task, I dared not report it. I couldn't let them stop me. Now now.

So I kept my silence and kept my strange dreams to myself. And wondered what it was that my subconscious mind was trying desperately to tell me.

-and were these mindless slugs baby worms or not? I couldn't complete the picture. I couldn't find the rightness. The thought gnawed at me that there was something terribly important to be discovered here. It annoyed me, because I was sure that I should see it, and I couldn't. I had another piece of the puzzle, but nothing to connect it to. As hard as I stared, I couldn't figure it out.

I became aware that Siegel was saying something. "Huh? What? Sorry."

"I asked, what are you thinking?" he repeated.

"Oh, uh-nothing important." I covered quickly. "Just considering that we're probably going to get one h.e.l.luva bounty for this."

"And that isn't important?" Siegel asked.

"What are you going to spend it on?" I retorted.

"I'll think of something. I could buy myself a cup of coffee and just sit and sniff it for a whole afternoon."

"Coffee?" asked Willig. "What's coffee?"

"It's like brown stuff, only not as awful."

"I remember coffee," I said. And then I wished I hadn't. I remembered it too vividly; the hot black smell of it. "Oh, G.o.d-I'd kill for a cup of the real stuff. Even instant."

"Me too," agreed Siegel. From above, Reilly grunted something unintelligible; but it sounded like agreement.

"What's the lowest thing you'd do for a cup of coffee?" Willig asked.

"Are we fantasizing, or do you know someone?"

"Dannenfelser."

"You're kidding."

"Uh-uh. He manages General Wainright's private store."

"Offer me fresh strawberries and Nova Scotia smoked salmon and I might consider it-" I started to say, then caught myself with a shudder. "No, forget I said that. If I ever get that desperate, you're authorized to put a bullet through my brain.

I'll be of no further use to humanity."

"Will you put that in writing?"

"Don't be so hasty."

"Hey, is that true about Dannenfelser? Whyizzit that sc.u.mbags like him always end up with the biggest slice of pie?"

"Because the good people of the world have too much self-respect to cheat their comrades," I said.

"Oh, yeah, I forgot. Thanks for reminding me."

"Anytime."

"Captain?"

"Yeah?"

"Is this nest really important?"

"I think so," I said. "I think this is how they got here."

For the record, the first wave of plagues wiped out at least 3 billion human beings.

We will never have an exact count.

At this point, we should also note that secondary and tertiary waves of disease, coupled with the many ancillary effects of the ma.s.s dying, will probably result in an additional 2 billion deaths. The surviving human population may eventually stabilize at 3.5 billion. No reliable predictions about population rate can be made beyond that point.

-The Red Book, (Release 22.19A)

Chapter 19.

Seeds and Eggs "The third eye does not need a contact dens."

-SOLOMON SHORT.

There was silence for a moment. Finally, Siegel asked quietly, "'Splain me, Boss?"

"Not quite sure of the details," I said. "But I'll bet you Randy Dannenfelser's shriveled little t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es that this whole thing is some kind of incubation womb. We never found s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps, no evidence of any kind; no sightings, no sites, no nothing.

We couldn't figure out how they got here, right? So everybody's been crazy over that one question. How did the infestation get started?"

"They dropped seeds from s.p.a.ce," said Siegel. "That's what Dr. Zymph says."

"Yes and no-the problem with that theory is that it doesn't work. We tried simulating a drop from s.p.a.ce. If the package is too small, it burns up on reentry. If it's well padded, it still burns up, only it takes longer. If it's big enough to reach the ground intact, it's big enough to leave a crater. Out of hundreds of simulations, both real and virtual, only the simplest of seeds survived, none of the eggs; the exposures were too extreme, the impacts too severe. The Denver labs worked on it for three years before they gave up and turned to more immediate concerns.

"See, here's the problem. a.s.sume that you're Chtorra-forming a planet. You can't worry about landing individual plants and animals; that's too slow. You have to think about your larger purpose. What you really want to do is get the genetic heritage of the ecology established, right?"

"Right. I guess."

"Okay. We're humans, so we think in terms of seeds and eggs. But Chtorrans don't necessarily have to think the same way. Let's just think about the genetic code alone. That's all you're really interested in. You can strip the naked code out of a cell and store it as a meta-viral chain. So now you've got the information for your critter; but how do you get the code down to the surface of the planet? You can drop an insulated package that can survive the heat of the drop and even the impact. But you still need something to grow it in-some environment in which the code can generate critters-so you're back to seeds and eggs again, aren't you?

"See, the problem with seeds and eggs, especially eggs, is that the more complex the adult creature, the more fragile the egg, and the more nurturing it needs to hatch.

And that doesn't even get into the problem of nurturing the young. Anything you can come up with, organic or technological, that can hatch an egg and nurture the infants, is going to be even more complex and more fragile than the creature it's designed to support.

"Think about it. How do you send a millipede egg across ten or twenty light-years and guarantee its survival? How do you get it safely down to the surface of the planet? How do you guarantee that the egg will be nurtured and protected in the right kind,of nest long enough for it to hatch? How do you make certain that the right kind of food will be available for the millipede to eat so that it can live long enough to reach adulthood and reproduce and make more millipedes? And that's just one species. We've identified hundreds of Chtorran creatures. How do you provide for all of their separate and individual concerns? Bunnydogs and snufflers and gorps and Enterprise fish-what kind of machinery do you provide to nurture all those?"

Siegel shrugged. "I dunno. I never thought about it before."

"This is the answer," I said. "A big part of it, anyway. Dr. Zymph was right; the Chtorrans are seeding the planet from s.p.a.ce. But not with ordinary seeds and eggs.

They've been dropping mama-shambler seeds. Have you ever seen a shambler seed?

They're big, they look like pineapples. You cut one open, and you see that the outer sh.e.l.l is layer upon layer upon layer of gauzy stuff; you can spend a lifetime unraveling it.

"The inner sh.e.l.l of the shambler seed is filled with even more layers of the same fibrous matting, only this stuff is thicker and more gritty. You look at it under the microscope and you see that it's really thousands and thousands of tiny little structures, not quite cells, but not quite anything else either; they don't grow, they don't do anything that we can recognize. We couldn't figure out whether the inner layers were intended as food or padding or insulation or what, but I bet I know now.

Those little structures are the freeze-dried nuclei of all the other critters in the ecology.

"See, a shambler seed is one of the few things you can drop from s.p.a.ce with a reasonable expectation of it surviving the impact. It sheds its outer skin, layer after layer, like a series of drogues. It slows the descent, it's like concentric parachutes. In fact, I'll bet that the seeds that fell from s.p.a.ce had even thicker sh.e.l.ls than Earth-grown shambler seeds. Anyway, the mama-seed impacts, right? If conditions are right, it grows into a shambler bush, later a tree. It spreads its seeds and grows more shambler trees; pretty soon, you have a herd of shamblers prowling around the countryside. What are they looking for? A place with the right combination of sunlight and water and soil and probably even prey animals for the tenants. The grove of shamblers takes up a position, the individual trees sink their roots, they link up and begin carving out or growing a large central underground chamber. There's got to be some mechanism, some creature or process or something." I realized that my enthusiasm for the subject must have been startling to my listeners, but I couldn't contain myself, I was so excited. Even as I spoke, the idea was becoming clearer in my mind.

"Okay, so pretty soon you have this womb nest here. That's when some of the organs within the shambler start maturing; or maybe they aren't shambler organs, but more like symbionts. I don't know. But whatever they are, they grow into this stuff, all these tunnels and pipes and tubes, all these big rubbery blobs and squids and slugs and things. Everything."

"I love it when you talk scientific," said Willig, but despite her interruption, she was as rapt as all the others. The entire crew-not just Willig, but Reilly, Siegel, Locke, Lopez, and Valada-were caught up in this extrapolation.

"Go on," said Siegel, impatiently.

"The big red blubbers are egg-factories. All the other things are the support systems. The little flecks are the freeze-dried nuclei, duplicated by some kind of organic copying mechanism-and not just the simple nuclei alone; there also has to be the instructions included on what kind of egg to grow around each nucleus and what kind of nurturing that egg is going to need to hatch. I'll bet that some of these other organs are here to act as incubators to hatch the eggs and nurture whatever creatures pop out of them. That tunnel we came down-it isn't an entrance, it's an exit. That's the birth ca.n.a.l."

"Worms come out of it?"

"Everything comes out of it," I said, shuddering at the thought.

I sank back in my chair, stunned at the size of the realization. "This hole hasn't been here for six months; it's been here for six years at least. Probably longer. These groves-all over the world-this is how the infestation started. If we had known, if we had realized-" I felt suddenly helpless.

"We've gotta burn these things wherever we find them." Siegel spoke with determination. "Maybe we still have a chance-"

"It's too late," I said. "These womb-nests are only landing vehicles, the last part of the transportation process. You can grow Chtorran babies in it, but once they leave the nest, they'll grow their own babies." I realized how defeatist that sounded, and added perfunctorily, "You're right, though, we should burn these wombs, at least to slow down the infestation every way we can. But we should study them too.

There might still be things growing in the raspberry Jell-O that we haven't met yet."

"What about these little slugs?" Willig asked. "Are they baby worms or not?"

"I dunno. They're a little small, but that might not mean anything under these circ.u.mstances; we're at almost double atmosphere down here. And they don't have any fur either. Without its fur, a worm is both blind and catatonic; and these guys seem kind of lively. But-"I shrugged"-maybe there are things that need to be taken up to the surface, and these little fellas are the taxis. If that's all they are, then it doesn't matter if they live or die, does it?"

"Guess not."

"But... if they are worms, then this is our opportunity to study their breeding patterns. Dr. Zymph thinks that our best chance of defeating them is to find some agent, biological or chemical, that will interrupt their reproductive cycle. The problem is, n.o.body really knows how they breed. We know they hatch from some kind of large leathery eggs; but we've never actually seen a worm laying eggs. In fact, we still haven't been able to identify the worm s.e.xes. That's a.s.suming that they have different s.e.xes. We can't tell."

"As long as they can tell," said Siegel. "That's all that counts. Hey, Captain?"

"Yeah?"

"Not to change the subject, but how do you think worms f.u.c.k?"

"I don't know. When we get back, ask Dannenfelser if you can watch." I didn't add the other thing I was thinking. If we got back. We had some astonis.h.i.+ng recordings here; the virtual-reality playbacks were priceless. We had extensive evidence of a significant and previously unknown part of the Chtorran infestation.

We were monitoring manifestations and behaviors previously undreamt of. This would eventually help us target potential hotspots before the terrain maps turned pink. We'd be able to identify and neutralize mother-nests before they began spewing their cargo of hungry red children.

All we had to do was survive the pink storm and get back to base. I tried to rea.s.sure myself. How hard could that be? After all, this vehicle had been designed to withstand a.s.saults like this. On the other hand... I hadn't survived this long by underestimating the voraciousness of the enemy.

Only this time, it wasn't the Chtorrans I had to be most concerned about. The human enemy was proving to be the difficult one. What if somebody back in Houston didn't want us to get home?

"Hot Seat," April 3rd broadcast: (cont'd) ROBISON:... What's The Core Group, Dr. Foreman?

FOREMAN: The Core Group is that set of people who are committed to contextual s.h.i.+ft. Many of them are graduates of the Mode Training. Not all.

ROBISON: Ahh, Modies. I see. So now we have it. Your followers-people who you have personally brainwashedhave a secret plan for preempting the direction of the United States government. (holding up a sheaf of papers) I have here an article by a Dr. Dorothy Chin, one of your-failures, I guess. What do you call people who get up and walk out?

FOREMAN: People who got up and walked out.

ROBISON: Right. Well, Dorothy Chin is one of your disenrollments, a person who quit the Mode Training because, in her words, it was "political indoctrination masquerading as a motivational resource seminar, using various techniques of advanced brainwas.h.i.+ng to demonstrate, prove, and enforce a monstrous, mechanistic, monolithic, self-perpetuating, behaviorist view of human conduct; thus justifying in the minds of its pract.i.tioners the a.s.sumption of rights and powers. .h.i.therto reserved for G.o.d and governments." According to Ms. Chin, your secret goal is to supplant the purposes of the people's lawfully elected representatives with your own unauthorized agenda, and you're doing that by systematically enrolling key members of the administration, both houses of Congress-both political parties, various members of the media, and most dangerously, key members of the United States Armed Forces, all branches.

FOREMAN: Your paranoia is showing, John. I think it's time for you to have your medication checked again.

ROBISON: So you're denying that there's a Core Group?

FOREMAN: Not at all. But your interpretation of what it is and what it's meant to be is so deranged that I can't help but wonder if you're deliberately misconstruing the nature of the group so you can look like a crusader for truth, or if...

ROBISON: -or if what?

FOREMAN: Or if you're just stupid. Frankly, I have to give you the benefit of the doubt and a.s.sume the former. The Core Group isn't a group. It's an idea.

ROBISON: But there are people who are members of The Core Group, aren't there? And these people are some of the most important and well-respected people in the country. In the world. Correct? And isn't this all part of the Modie master plan?

FOREMAN: (sigh) The Mode Training has been part of the military's basic ethical instruction series since the time of the Moscow Treaties. Before the plagues, over six million people had partic.i.p.ated in one of the seven different forms of the training that were offered through the auspices of the federal government, including just about every single man and woman who ever put on a uniform, whether it be Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, s.p.a.ce Corps, or the United States Postal Service; and at least another twenty million civilians partic.i.p.ated in Mode-sponsored seminars.

ROBISON: And you got paid a royalty on every enrollment, didn't you?

FOREMAN: Sorry, the Mode Foundation collects the royalties, not me. I'm on salary from the Mode Foundation; that salary is determined by the Board of Governors. Nice try, but your information is wrong there too. The point is that there's nothing weird or unusual or bizarre or illegal or unethical about the training or anything connected with it, nor is there anything wrong or disgraceful about the fact that an educational foundation earns a profit. Why shouldn't we be capitalists? Our success demonstrates that the training works. People want to live powerfully, and they take the training to give themselves the tools they need. According to the Foundation's records, you did the basic training yourself while you were in college.

ROBISON: Yeah, I did a lot of stupid and crazy things then. I was even a Republican once. So what? I learned better.