A Season For Slaughter Part 47

"If that thesis is correct, then the concentric waves of color spreading outward through this ma.s.s of worms represents a kind of collective emotional phenomenon that literally leaps from animal to animal. One gastropede experiences something and pa.s.ses it directly to the next gastropede over. Possibly there's some kind of direct connection between the neural symbionts. When the creatures are pressed that close, it seems likely that a neural symbiont wouldn't be able to tell where, its neighbors were rooted.

"What I like about this thesis," I said, "is that it answers the question of Chtorran intelligence. There isn't any. There is no such thing as one Chtorr. If it exists, it exists only as a collective manifestation of individual behaviors-" Dr. Shreiber's hand went up. "Yes?"

She rose to her feet. "There's another interpretation possible," she said. There was an accusatory undertone in her voice.

I ignored the subtext and simply nodded politely to her. "Go ahead..."

"The gastropedes are evolved from insect-like creatures, correct?"

"That's one theory."

"Insects specialize. In a fire ant colony, for instance, you'll find workers, soldiers, and multiple queens. Maybe the gastropedes specialize too. We've seen some evidence of it. At the bottom of a nest, there's always a large central chamber where you'll find an immense-sometimes even bloated-animal. That's probably the queen.

We know there are warrior worms. We've seen workers. Now we're even seeing miniature forms-maybe those are drones of some kind. I think the gastropedes have evolved themselves into specialized forms for specific tasks. Why not thinkers as well?"

I considered the thought. Maybe and maybe not. There wasn't a lot of evidence to either prove it or disprove it. "What's your validating evidence?" I asked.

She pointed at the repeating video loop on the screen behind me. "Look at the pictures." I looked. "Let's a.s.sume you're right, that the patterns of colors represent what the animals are feeling-or maybe even thinking. At the very center of the arena, there's a confused whorl of colors. It's chaotic. It's blurred. Maybe those are the thinkers." She stepped up to one of the side screens and pointed with her hand.

"See, if there was a central thinker, then we'd see all the colors emanating from a single point, but they're not. I think that all the colors in that area are indistinct, because the thoughts or feelings that they represent are just churning around and around, with no single pattern taking precedence. Out here-what you call the event horizon-I think that's the border between thinkers and workers. That's where the feelings of the thinkers get crystallized and start spreading their ripples outward."

I scratched my chin while I thought about it. Something about her theory didn't feel right. It presupposed that the thinkers would go directly to the center of the arena. I looked at the wall-sized screens surrounding us. In that surging crowd of crimson horrors, there was no way that thinkers and workers could possibly have sorted themselves out as neatly as she postulated. Hm. What if workers and thinkers were the same cla.s.s? No... that didn't make sense either.

"You don't buy it," she said coldly. "I can see it on your face."

I shrugged. "It's a good theory. I like the part about the gastropedes evolving specialized forms for specific tasks. I'm just not sure about the thinkers." I glanced over at Lizard. She was watching me with genuine interest, but she had no intention of interrupting the discussion. "I'll show you," I said.

I typed some commands into the keyboard, s.h.i.+fting the color enhancement. The same video loops; only now overlaid on the outward cycling colors was a new pattern. Drop a stone in the water. The ripples spread evenly outward until they hit an edge, then they bounce back toward the center again. The surging worms rippled like a pond. Orange waves flowed outward, bright and distinct. Deep purple waves ricocheted inward. Pink waves spread out from the center: Fainter red waves bounced back from the edges. Over and over and over again. It was hypnotic and it was beautiful. It was like staring into an organic kaleidoscope, it was like the greatest football stand card display ever a.s.sembled. All the separate patterns of s.h.i.+fting colors and shapes, all flowing inward and outward, all changing, all the time. It was a complex and fascinating mandala of time-phased responses, a biometric fantasy, a dream of h.e.l.lish wonder.

At last, I said, "If there were a thinker-cla.s.s at the center of the crowd that was truly the source of each of those specific waves of color, then all the other animals-the worker-cla.s.s-should only be echoing their thoughts, and the same colors should bounce back to the center unchanged. But look at this now-" Another kind of color enhancement. "This is very subtle, but some of the colors are changing even as they move across the ma.s.s of bodies. That suggests to me that"-the thought was chilling-"maybe it's the whole body of gastropedes... on some primary level, they're all thinkers."

Shreiber didn't dismiss the thought outright. But I could see that she preferred the elegance of her own theory. "Maybe the colors s.h.i.+ft because the workers are limited in the way they echo the original thought. Maybe it's like a game of Russian telephone."

"I'm sure that transmission error is a large part of it," I agreed. "But... it doesn't explain everything. It certainly doesn't explain this." I punched up the next set of images. "No, wait a minute-let me show you something else first. Here-this is what the nest looked like when we started broadcasting the song of the nest back to them."

There were murmurs of appreciation as the new images came up on the wall-sized screens. Suddenly, the complex patterns of color simply faded away. Disappeared.

Suddenly, the whole crowd was throbbing in sync, all showing the same colors, all at the exact same moment. They were a gigantic drumhead, pulsing all in unison.

Singing all in unison. Violet impacts. Orange flashes. Scarlet furies. All the worms.

Two hundred and fifty thousand of them, chirruping and drumming and focusing in absolute synchronization. Like robots. Like clones. Like perfect little monsters. All repeating the same precise movements flawlessly across the entire arena. They even blinked in unison. It was just as horrific in replay.

"They tuned themselves to us, " I said. "Once we started broadcasting, they stopped listening to themselves. They echoed our song as if it were their own. They echoed our colors-here's the synced image of what the airs.h.i.+p was displaying, see how it matches perfectly what was happening in the sea of worms below?

"Whatever thought processes, or emotions, or whatever feelings the color waves represented, whatever it is the worms were actually doing, they stopped doing their own processes and started doing only what we told them to do. I believe-and this is something that we'll have to test somehow-that the presence of the airs.h.i.+p simply overloaded their sensory circuits. We blasted them with a louder, brighter, more convincing ident.i.ty. They couldn't feel their own thought processes any more clearly than you or I could while listening to the '1812 Overture' with synchronized earthquakes."

There was a shocked silence in the room. The images of all those synchronized worms pulsed disturbingly on the screens. Here was undeniable evidence of the devastating effect we had created in the miandala. Even Lizard was visibly startled.

We had known that the worms had reacted to us-we hadn't known they had reated this strongly.

I looked to Dr. Shreiber. "Comment?"

She sat down slowly, shaking her head. "No, I don't think so."

"All right," I said. "Here's the rest of it. Watch. This is what happened when we tried to introduce a song recorded over the Rocky Mountain mandala. That nest was much smaller than this one at the time this recording was made, and the recording was taken off a much smaller gathering, perhaps only twenty or fifty individuals. We didn't use the actual recording, of course; we used it only as the starting point for a much more complex synthesis which was what we played back to the nest." I punched up the images and we watched in silence.

A great arena, nearly a kilometer across. A quarter of a million monsters are crowded into that arena. Each and every one of those monsters is in perfect tune with each and every other one of those monsters. They are mirrors of each other.

They move and turn and twist and sing in identically repeated patterns. The effect is dizzying. They all turn red together. They all turn pink. They all turn orange. They all turn black. They sway in unison, they pray in unison. All of them, moving and singing in absolute and perfect monoclonal synchronicity, all echoing the exact same sound at once. "Chhhhtttttrrrrrrrrrrr!"

Now... Something happens. The song changes.

Pockets of discordant color appear. Confusion. Suddenly, the worms aren't synchronized anymore.

Here. On the edges-black. In the center-orange. Here, now, a sudden reversal: black turns orange, orange turns black. Flashes of confusion appear. Fringes of unsynchronized color begin to waver on the edges of the arena. But the center of the ma.s.s holds for a moment; it pulses strongly and the weight of its opinion flows visibly outward-but the edges of the crowd are too confused. They're hearing two different songs. One has the inertia of the crowd; it throbs with its own momentum.

But the other song, the brighter one, comes blasting undeniably from the sky.

The center can hold for only so long. The crowded ma.s.s surrounding it has a vastly different song now. The two waves of song and color meet and crash against each other, sparking horrendously discordant sounds and colors throughout the entire ma.s.s. The center shrinks before the onslaught of the brighter song.

Then it recoils and rebounds and tries to expand again. The surrounding song grows stronger Forget the songs now. Forget the colors. Everything turns black. The crowd of monsters fragments into a chaotic ma.s.s. Suddenly, everything is confusion.

Where the two songs conflict the brightest, the worms attack each other. The first a.s.sault is echoed. Simultaneity still rages, even in the middle of the horror. And now, all the worms are attacking each other. Even those who are surrounded by others who share the same song and set of colors suddenly scream and roar; they rear back, leap up, fling themselves high, and come down slas.h.i.+ng. All the mouths, the knives, the teeth, the mandibles, the slicing claws-all the screams, the fury, the blood, the eyes, the terror, the panic, the fear, the cries-all of it played out again, this time larger than life, on the huge, glowing, wall-sized screens of the conference room of the Hieronymus Bosch.

The ma.s.sacre was over quickly. It only seemed like it took forever.

The operative thesis for the disparity between the small size of the gastropede brain and the sophisticated repertoire of behaviors demonstrated by various specimens is that the gastropede uses its internal network of neural symbionts to augment its limited brain power.

It is believed that a fully developed internal network of neural symbionts will function as memory storage for complex behavioral programs. Given any known situation, the cortical ganglia react by automatically triggering the operative routine.

Thus, the creature doesn't need intelligence, it only needs programming.

This may explain why the creatures often go immobile, huddling together when confronted with a new or startling situation. It is clearly a defensive strategy. By huddling together, individual members of the communion are protected while they generate new responses to deal with an unknown situation.

-The Red Book, (Release 22.19A)

Chapter 56.

The Code of the Nest "If a fanatic is willing to give his life for a cause, he's probably just as willing to give yours as well."

-SOLOMON SHORT.

Finally, I switched off the video and all the screens went blank. I cleared my throat.

The audience focused their attention forward again.

"We played the wrong song," I said very quietly. I looked around the room. "It was my mistake," I admitted. "But-" I considered my next words very carefully, knowing that the mike in front of me was live. Everything I had said was going directly into the network; everything I was about to say as well.

"But," I continued, "if we had to make a mistake-if I had to make a mistake, then this was the right mistake to make. What happened in the Coari mandala taught us something that we wouldn't have known for sure any other way." I looked over to Lizard. She nodded supportively, and I went on. "I would hypothesize that every nest has its own distinct song. The havoc that broke out below was the purest demonstration of that. We introduced an alien song into this nest. Some of the worms accepted it as their own. Some of them did not. I think the video speaks for itself. The mechanics of the phenomenon are... going to have to be studied for a while. Uh-I have a couple other things to say about this, and then I'm going to sit down and let someone else present their information.

"First, if every mandala nest has its own distinct song, then it seems to me that the limit of the possible expansion of any mandala is that point where its territory begins to approach that of any other mandala. Based on what we've seen here, a war between neighboring nests would be..." I shook my head, "... unimaginable. Umm.

We still have a few working monitors on the ground at Coari. And we've got spybirds circling over what's left of the mandala. The, uh..." I hesitated uncomfortably. I really hated having to say this. "... The, uh, ma.s.sacre is still going on."

There were murmurs of disbelief. I nodded in reluctant confirmation and put the pictures up on the walls.

As much as each and every one of us hated the infestation for what it had done to us, our planet, and our civilization, we still had a profound respect for our enemy.

Maybe it had something to do with the inherent sanct.i.ty of all life, wherever it occurred. Maybe it was our curiosity, and maybe it was our anthropomorphic identification with all living creatures, and maybe on some level, it was even affection. Whatever it was, this wanton and possibly even needless destruction had had a devastating effect on us all.

As curious as it sounded, we actually respected the complexity and wonder of this fabulous ecology-this incredibly fecund and intricate construction of partners.h.i.+ps and symbioses that had swept across our planet. We would kill it any way we could, but we would not do so without regret. We knew our enemy well enough now to respect it. We killed it-and grieved for it simultaneously.

The pictures said it all, but for the benefit of those who were following these proceedings on the network, I added the briefest of annotations. "The surviving worms are destroying everything. Each other. The huts, the corrals, the gardens.

Everything in the tunnels underneath. They haven't stopped. They've been going at it all night, all morning. A human mob might have burned itself out in an hour or two.

The worms... just keep going. Everything in Coari is just... madness.

"I said yesterday that I thought the nest song was the way that the worms tuned and programmed themselves. Well... this may be the real proof of it. The Coari worms are acting as if they've all been simultaneously reprogrammed to be insane. I don't think that the killing and destruction will stop until the last Coari worm dies of exhaustion. I won't even try to guess what will happen to the Coati mandala after that, whether it can regenerate or not. We can't even guess what's going to be left.

Um-" Once again, I looked to Lizard. Once again, she nodded to me to continue.

"Um-this is the hard part, and I apologize in advance for..." I stopped. I forced myself to take a long cool drink of water. Lizard had taught me that trick. She'd learned it from Dr. Zymph. When in doubt, take a drink of water. But only if you can keep your legs crossed for four hours at a time. You never know how long a meeting is going to run.

I took a breath and faced the audience again. "What I'm about to show you is particularly gruesome. It involves human beings. If anybody can't handle this, I urge you to leave the room now. The same caution applies to anyone following these proceedings on the network. This is very disturbing footage." I waited. n.o.body moved. Of course not. They never did. I sighed and punched up the next set of images. And the sound as well.

There were gasps of horror and shock. There were cries of, "Oh, G.o.d, no-" and, "For G.o.d's sake, turn it off!" Somebody was crying. There were distraught moans throughout the room. I let it run. We had done this. We needed to see the consequences. I had done this. I had to confront it, here and now, in front of G.o.d and the world. People had died because of what I had ordered.

I might try to mitigate the deaths of all those worms by saying it was the right mistake to make. That was acceptable. Just barely. But there was no way I could justify this.

Lizard had detonated two nuclear devices over the Rocky Mountain mandala.

Knowing that there were humans living in the camp, knowing that they would be incinerated, she still flew that mission. She volunteered for that mission. It was an act of war. We believed that the people living in a Chtorran nest were renegades. We believed that they had renounced their humanity. We believed that they deserved to die.

But regardless of what we believed, all those deaths still hurt. And Lizard had cried in my arms for days afterward. She had nightmares for months. Sometimes she still did. Sometimes I still did.

But now, today, this minute, I was finally beginning to understand some of the pain she must have felt, must still be feeling now. She, at least, had been authorized by her government to destroy that nest. I had no such authorization. Yesterday, I had wanted to destroy this mandala. Would I have wanted to do it if I had known that there were people living in it? Would I have wanted to do it if I had known the destruction would occur like this? Would I make this same decision again-?

The worms came pouring into the corrals, all mouths and fury. They slashed and swallowed. The little brown people were helpless before them. The children screamed in terror. Their mothers tried to s.h.i.+eld them. The men tried to fight. All in vain. They all died. The furious worms engulfed them all. The flas.h.i.+ng blood. The gore-The pictures moved across the walls in silent condemnation.

I stood at the podium and hung my head in shame and disgrace.

I waited for the inevitable outcry, the pointing fingers, the hurled accusations and condemnations.

None came. The horror was too overwhelming.

Only Lizard stood. She came slowly to the front of the room. She approached me with such tenderness, I could have cried. She put one hand gently on my shoulder and whispered softly, "You couldn't have known, Jim."

"I should have known," I said. "I'm supposed to be the expert. Remember?"

She squeezed my arm; she left her hand resting on my shoulder. "I know what you're feeling," she said. "I can't tell you it's not your fault. I know you won't believe me. I can't tell you anything that will change anything at all. I can only tell you... that I share your hurt."

I let myself look at her finally. Her sea-green eyes were filling up with tears. The empathy of this woman for my pain was incredible. In the middle of this incredible hurt, I couldn't believe how lucky I was. She reached over with one gentle hand and wiped my cheek with her thumb. "Shh," she said. "It's all right. You're not alone."

I reached up to my shoulder and put my hand over hers. "I don't deserve you," I said.

She smiled at the memory. We'd had this conversation once before. "No, of course not. I'm a gift. So are you." She still remembered her lines too. After a minute, she asked, "Do you want to continue?"

My throat hurt. It was hard to speak. But I nodded. Yes. I have to continue. I have to finish this. I said it with a nod because I couldn't get all the words out.

"Okay," she whispered, and went back to her seat. Sometimes I wondered about other people. They made decisions about vital things-it never looked like it hurt.

Uncle Ira, for instance. How did he handle his pain? If he didn't feel pain, then he wasn't human and he didn't deserve to be in a position of such responsibility. And if he did feel pain, then how in G.o.d's name did he keep it from showing in everything he did?

Then again, on the other hand, I had to remind myself... everybody's crazy.

We've all been crazy since the infestation began with the first plague so many years ago. Crazy and getting crazier every single day.

"These pictures..." I began. "As horrifying as they are-" I stopped and tried again. I took a breath. "Let these pictures serve as the last necessary demonstration of the only way that worms and humans can coexist. Let every human being on this planet who thinks that peaceful accommodation is possible look at these pictures tonight. And let them shudder as we shudder now. Search your consciences tonight, long and hard, and ask, s this the future I want to give my children?'

"As far as I'm concerned, this video ends that discussion once and for all."

If we accept the premise that every particle of the infestation is here to serve a larger purpose in the Chtorran ecology, then what is the purpose of the disease commonly known as "the slimy-sweats"?

The agent of infection is a viral body found in certain Chtorran edible plants. The agent causes minor changes in the body's lymphatic system, causing a p.r.o.nounced change in body oils and odor.

The infected individual exudes an almost slimy sweat that gives the skin a slick, slippery, almost greasy feeling. Extra body fat burns off; most of the individual's chest, arm, and leg hair falls away, and in some cases, even most of the adult's pubic hair. The person's body odor takes on a sweet, almost fruity quality, and the general effect of the infection is to make the individual feel much more sensitive or "sensual." Additionally, the oily secretion also serves to minimize stingfly attacks on the infected individual.

As benign as these effects may seem, perhaps even desirable under certain circ.u.mstances, the infection is also accompanied by a chronic low-grade fever and a debilitating vagueness in one's mental processes. The ability to timebind, to connect one moment to the next, is significantly impaired, as are both short- and long-term memories. Mild hallucinations may also be experienced. Fatigue and general la.s.situde are common.

-The Red Book, (Release 22.19A)

Chapter 57.

The Green Worm "The problem with the gene pool is that there's no lifeguard."