A Season For Slaughter Part 17

I kept my mouth shut while Siegel concentrated on the task at hand. Most of the subtasks were preprogrammed, but someone still had to guide the software, telling it exactly what was wanted.

We slid in close to the huge blubbery ma.s.s and examined it carefully. Eyestalks extruded from the prowler's head and focused on the target from both above and below; then a pair of three-fingered pincers slid out from the place where mandibles would have been if Sher Khan had been a living creature. We grasped a section of the blood-colored blob and pulled on it; it stretched out as if it were made of some kind of rubber cement. There were responder pads on the fingers. We could feel the sticky wetness of the stuff as if we were touching it with our bare hands. It wasn't a pleasant sensation. It was warm and fleshy, and it twitched and pulsed like it was trying to wriggle out of our grasp.

"How do you want to do this?" asked Siegel. "Poke, drill, or cut?"

"Wait a minute-" I was studying the flecks suspended in the gelatinous ma.s.s.

They were all different sizes and shapes. There was a very fine network of capillaries or nerves or something woven throughout the suspension, but I couldn't tell what its function was. "Backlight this," I muttered, and one of the eyestalks angled its bright beam directly through the ma.s.s I was studying.

"Expand the focus," I said, and reality exploded as if I were shrinking. The flecks grew suddenly into boulders, and then asteroids hanging in reddened s.p.a.ce. The pale fibers became a branching net of gigantic cables floating in the distance.

"Siegel, look at this."

I heard his sharp intake of breath. And then, "Beautiful."

"Enhance," I whispered, and the spectrum shifted; the colors seemed to stretch and change within themselves; outlines intensified, and things that were previously unidentifiable became sharply etched structures.

Each of the myriad little flecks was a shining black node, surrounded by pale fibrous sheets that uncurled outward and faded into the distance. We moved in closer, and we could see that many of the black flecks were surrounded by the faintest hints of sh.e.l.ls, outlines that intimated the existence of dividing membranes.

As we watched, the enveloping suspension pulsed. A wave of movement swept through the gelatinous ma.s.s. Fifteen seconds later, another wave pa.s.sed through the ocean of tiny objects. What were we looking at here? Seeds? Eggs? What kind of horrors grew here? How long before these tiny flecks produced a host of new monsters, breaking free and rising open-eyed into the world, black and raw and hungry?

"Wow," said Siegel.

"Yeah," I agreed.

Siegel told the processing engine to try several other enhancement patterns, and we examined the minuscale structures through a series of shifted spectrum and false-color images. Their structures grew clearer and clearer.

"Do you think the whole blob is full of these things?" Siegel asked.

"Let's take a look-" I whispered another command, and suddenly our point of view was moving forward, flying steadily across an immense red seascape. Islands and mountains swam past us in schools. Bubbles the size of asteroids hung suspended in the scarlet air. Endless arterial nets, held it all together. The patterns repeated over and over, familiar in their essence, but different in the details. Every black fleck was the center of its own fragile universe, a gathering of materials in a delicate sac. A distinction was being made, an act of separation from the suspension was occurring within each. The structure was almost cellular, but not quite. Not yet.

"My G.o.d." The words fell out of my mouth simultaneous with the realization. A chill crawled slowly up my spine, causing the tiny hairs on the back of my neck to rise uncomfortably.

I checked the readouts at the bottom of my vision. The van's LI engine wasn't as powerful as the Harlie units in Atlanta and Houston, but it was still smart enough to recognize the patterns within this fractal landscape. But h.e.l.l, I didn't need the van's opinion. It was obvious. I knew what these formations were, and what they were becoming. Even a lay person would have recognized it.

The black flecks were seeds. Or eggs. Or cells. Or even raw cellular material, caught in the process of becoming a seed or an egg or a cell. No question. Things were forming inside this red blubbery sap. Things were growing here. Not the things that we would meet outside, perhaps, but certainly the things that would eventually give birth to them.

I knew this was big. I hadn't known it was this big.

One of the most significant questions of the war was being answered here. All we had to do was get these pictures back to Houston Center. My throat was suddenly dry. I allowed myself a deep drink of water. "Siegel," I said abruptly. "Let's get our samples."

"Okay. How do you want to proceed with the red stuff?"

"Carefully."

"Can you be more specific than that?"

"Just a minute, I'm still looking." I was studying the recommendations of the LI engine. "Okay," I said at last. "Sher Khan's readouts suggest that it's pretty thick stuff. It's got the consistency of phlegm. It's also proto-cellular; lots of tiny little structures all bunched together like grapes inside a plastic bag-only more than that. I think we're seeing multiple redundancy here, the same kind of recursion we saw on the way down. It's lots of little bags of stuff, cl.u.s.tered inside middle-sized bags, and lots of middle-sized bags cl.u.s.tered inside even bigger bags, etcetera, etcetera, all the way up to the largest size. The same pattern of protection must hold throughout the whole nest. If Willig's map is correct, there are at least twenty more structures like this one spread around the edges of the chamber.

"All right-" I made a decision. "Pull out as large a chunk of it as you can, cut it, and bag it. I'm going to bet that this thing is self-healing and that you won't see a lot of bleeding."

Siegel grunted and went to work. I watched him for a moment, then popped out of the cybers.p.a.ce reality and looked at Willig. "How's the weather?"

"Light to moderate candy, with flurries of spun sugar expected momentarily. Have a look yourself."

"I'm going to. Reilly, out of the bubble. Let me up."

Reilly lowered himself down from the turret and stood aside while I pulled myself up into the swiveled seat to look around. There was a light cover of dust already apparent on the top of the bubble, but I could still see clearly out the sides.

All across the roof of the van was a light frosting of pink. As I watched, delicate fluffb.a.l.l.s of all sizes came bouncing across the panels. They looked like pale smudges in the air. Sometimes when they hit the surface of the van or the side of the bubble, they powdered into nothingness; most of the time they just bounced away.

The fluffb.a.l.l.s were both amazingly strong and curiously fragile-they were dandelions with a hair trigger. They could sail across the countryside for hundreds of klicks without shattering; but then, abruptly, for almost no reason at all, the whole structure would just go brittle, and at the first disturbance the whole delicate structure would just come apart. Even a sudden breeze might do it, shattering the fluffb.a.l.l.s into a bright powdery haze. The billions of minuscule pink particles could hang in the air for hours, a stifling sweet fog; or they could just as easily settle out, clumping into flakes like snow and piling up in enormous billowy drifts. The landscape around us was already turning into a frothy whipped meringue.

Without appropriate breathing gear, a human being would suffocate in that cloying miasma. Smaller animals would choke. Insects would be unable to move, their body parts clogged with tiny sticky particles. Plants would be unable to grow, their leaves frosted with residue. The dying would be enormous. A month from now, this land would stink with decay. A year from now, it would stink with Chtorrans.

Our more immediate concern, however, would be the events of the next few days.

The pink snow would trigger a feeding frenzy of Chtorran life forms. They were probably hatching even now, eating their way out of their sh.e.l.ls, eating as fast as they could in a frenzied desperate rush before the next link in the food chain arrived.

There was no difference here between diner and dinner. It was the breakdown of order; eat and be eaten. The last time I had been caught in one of these storms, I had seen the whole thing from the underside, looking out of a bubble just like this one. I still had nightmares sometimes Even as I watched, the pinkness in the air was thickening. The horizon disappeared into the haze, and the field of vision shrank visibly as the thickest part of the storm began rolling over us. Up the slope, the shambler grove stood tall and ominous; their black s.h.a.ggy presence became softened in the feathery blur. While I watched, the looming shapes faded into the background of the bright pink sky. My imagination filled in the details. The whole intricate structure of each tree would be delicately iced; the grove would be etched in pink magic like a sweet winterland fantasy. What did the tenants do during a pink storm? Did they feed? Would they swarm? Could they function in this haze? It wasn't something I wanted to test personally.

I shuddered and dropped down out of the turret. Below again, the inside of the van was rea.s.suringly dark and gray. Screens and panels glowed with readouts and projections. Even so, the bright pink gloom cast an eerie glow from above.

"Okay, Reilly, it's all yours again." I patted him on the back as he climbed back up. "Try not to go s...o...b..ind. Put your goggles on. If it gets too much for you, shutter the bubble and come on down."

"How bad is it?" Willig asked.

"There's no way to tell. It's all pink. You can't see how thick it is, you can't see how densely packed the dust is, you can't tell how hard it's coming down-it's just there. The stuff doesn't even show up on radar; it just soaks it up like a sponge.

Satellite pictures can tell you how wide the storm is, but not how deep."

"In other words-?"

"We're here for the duration. A week probably. Did you bring a deck of cards?"

"You're kidding."

"No, I'm not. The First Annual Northeastern Mexico Dirty Limerick contest is now officially open. There once was a lady named Willig-"

"No way!" shouted Corporal Willig. "You have an unfair advantage. You have a dirty mind."

"Excuse me?" I said, giving her the official raised-eyebrow look. "Who are you, and what have you done with the real Kathryn Beth Willig?"

"Besides," she sniffed. "I'll bet you a steak dinner that you'll never find a rhyme for Willig."

"'Twas brillig,"' I replied. "Give me a half hour and I'll find the second rhyme I need. In the meantime, set up a sleep-and-watch schedule for everybody, have Lopez and Reilly start monitoring the public broadcasts on the wideband, let's see if we can get a sense of the weather from the public access-oh, and look-see if there's any more of that poisonous brown stuff left. I need to disinfect my socks."

"Sorry, I used your socks to make the last batch of it." She was already pouring.

I tasted. "It's weak. Next time use both socks."

"I'm trying to conserve."

A voice from up front, Siegel's. "Hey, Captain? Something funny down here. Can you come back on-line?"

"On my way." I dropped into my chair and swiveled crisply into position, grabbed the helmet, and fell back into cybers.p.a.ce.

Let us perform a thought experiment.

Let us backtrack from the initial onslaught of the plagues to see what had to have happened before the plagues could occur. A mechanism for inserting them into the human population had to be established. What was this mechanism?

This is not a casual question. If anything, it is deceptive in its simplicity and powerful in its implications. Consideration of the initial infection process will reveal some remarkable insights into the mechanisms of the Chtorran ecology, and may in fact also demonstrate some of its potential weaknesses.

-The Red Book, (Release 22.19A)

Chapter 18.

Slugs "Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious creature on Earth."

-SOLOMON SHORT.

"Let me guess," I said, even before the image focused. "Something's moving."

"Huh? You peeked," Siegel accused.

"Nope." I didn't explain. "Show me." Siegel had found a nest of- "Oh, G.o.d. That's disgusting."

-gray sluglike things. They looked like fat naked snails. Their skins reflected highlights of silver and pink and white. There must have been hundreds of them, all sliding wetly in and out, one against another, in a slow writhing tangle. Their tiny eyes glistened like black pearls studding their pallid bodies.

"Ugh," said Willig. She was monitoring the video. "I've been to parties like that."

"You've given parties like that," Siegel corrected her.

"Cool it," I said. "Did you get one of those things as a specimen?"

"Yeah, I got three. I don't know how long they'll live in the bags though."

"Don't worry about it. Freeze them."

"Done," he said. "What do you think these things are?" And then he offered a chilling suggestion. "Baby worms, maybe?"

"I don't know. Could be." It was a very interesting thought. "The worms gotta come from somewhere. Maybe these are baby worms before they grow their hair."

"They don't grow hair, they get infected with spores that grow into neural-symbionts. The symbionts that grow out of the body look like hair. The rest-I dunno, they just fill up the worm. That's how you can tell how old a worm is, by how much hair it has growing inside. They're just big fat hairbags." I said it in a preoccupied tone; I was considering the possibility that his wild guess had hit the bull's-eye. The worms had to come from somewhere. Why not here?

Yes? No? Maybe. Perhaps. I didn't know.

I'd been stumbling through the various manifestations of the Chtorran infestation for six years. I'd seen the obvious things like the worms and the bunnydogs and the shamblers. I'd seen the less obvious, but equally disturbing creatures, like nightstalkers and millipedes and finger-babies. I'd seen meadows covered with lush growths of mandala flowers, scarlet blazes of kudzu, fields of blue and pink iceplant-spotted with hallucinogenic fairy flakes. I'd seen the endless fields of lizard-gra.s.s reclaiming the nation's prairies; tall and brown and razor sharp when it dried; you could die in it. I'd seen the growing stands of black bamboo and the jungles of pillar-trees. I'd flown through the sky-blackening swarms of flutterbys and tracked the rolling herds of giant pink fluffb.a.l.l.s as they floated dreamily across the western plains like nightmare fantasy tumbleweeds. I'd seen it all-and I hadn't even seen the beginning yet.

I'd seen the diseases too; all of those that were still vectoring through the remaining human population. There was the mild flulike infection that left you sweating, dripping in your own slimy juices, and sent you roaming out into the street confused and restless. Even when you shook it off, the wild, feverish dream state continued; survivors usually ended up wandering in a herd, babbling like silly, demented loons. It was a walking death-the mind was numbed, the body shambled on its own. And even so, it still was preferable to the bubonic cysts that rose beneath the skin, scourging and burning, often killing within hours, but just as often prolonging the horror for days or even weeks; the victims writhed and moaned in agony and often killed themselves before the disease could run its final course. I'd pa.s.sed out L-pills once, because there was no other cure.

Later-it was another time-I was allowed to join a survey flight. We'd headed out across the Pacific, west of Palmyra, south of Kauai, eventually dipping low to survey the huge Enterprise fish that regularly patrolled the Hawaiian Zone. It moved grandly through the flat gray sea, sliding and rolling like a force of nature; occasionally it disappeared beneath the surface of the sea for many long moments-we could see its great dark shadow groaning through the depths; then, just as suddenly, it would come breaking up through the waves, the water running in rivers off the landscape of its barnacled, encrusted back. Once it rolled sideways, and we saw one of its eyes, an enormous black protuberance the size of a swimming pool. I had the strangest feeling that it was looking up at us, and I knew that it was considering the physical impossibility of leaping to catch the tiny choppers that monitored its migration. One of the other planes fired a transponder harpoon into the behemoth's flesh. It carved away a great gout of pinkish-gray matter in an explosion that looked more like a geyser than a wound in a living thing. A long endless moment later, the beast reacted and dove. It took the longest time for it to disappear; first the head end dipped lower and lower, then the water began sweeping up over its flanks toward the raised ridge that ran down the center of the creature's back. It was an island disappearing beneath the waves. I thought of Atlantis. I thought of whales. I thought of submarines and aircraft carriers. I thought of all the things that were irretrievably lost to us. I realized it in a way that I had never known before: the oceans of the world would never again be safe. How did these things breed? How long did they live? How big did they get?

Finally the last long part of its gigantic body tipped upward and disappeared like a sinking ship sliding downward toward the bottom of the sea.

I'd seen so many different pieces of the Chtorran ecology. I'd seen the steady process of its red encroachment across the blue-green Earth, and despite my absolute determination to resist it in every way I could, I still could not escape from the knowledge that the Chtorran ecology, whether considered in its myriad specific individual manifestations or viewed as a vast amazing process of dazzling complexity and intricacy, was a most glorious celebration of life. The diversity, the vitality, the fecundity of the many plant and animal species left me awestruck in wonder. It was beautiful, it was resplendent, it was overwhelming-and the single undeniable fact of the infestation was that human beings were so irrelevant to the incredible hunger and need and power of this process that if we survived at all, it would be only as an afterthought-and only if we could carve a niche of our own in the new world order.

For myself, the need to survive had long since vanished, killed by my partic.i.p.ation in too many deaths and burned out by too many pa.s.sages through the fires of my own rage. No, I didn't need to survive-a curious realization, that-but I did need to know. It was my curiosity that drove me now. I would not stop until I understood-if not the why, then certainly the how. And perhaps the knowledge of the how would point me toward the why. And maybe someday, even, the who.

The more I immersed myself in the Chtorran infestation, the more I experienced its incredible diversity, the more I began to sense an underlying logic of process. I couldn't put it into words yet, but I could feel a rightness about certain relationships and an uneasiness about others-as if some were precursors of the way things should be and others were only temporary accommodations to the feral quality of the immediate situation. More and more, as I considered the individual pieces of the ecology, I tried to sense how they must fit into the ultimate pattern that the infestation was growing toward. I saw the things I looked at not as individual manifestations, but as parts of a larger process. And always, now, I was looking for the feeling of rightness.

This nest-there had to be things down here that moved and crawled, because there had to be a way to get the seeds and eggs, and all the things that would come hatching out of them, up to the surface where they could begin their part of the process of devouring the Earth right down to the naked dirt.

These gray slugs-were they baby worms? Or just slugs? Yes? No? Maybe.

Perhaps. I didn't know. I didn't know enough yet to have a feeling about them.

Logically, it made sense-and just as logically, it didn't. There were pieces missing.

This ecology was too complex, too interrelated. Too baroque. Nature's answers were always simple and elegant-but on Chtorr, nature seemed to have different definitions of both simplicity and elegance. Could a one-celled creature imagine a human being? There was the question.

Imagine yourself as an amoeba, flowing and stretching, always hungry, always searching, enveloping, ingesting, occasionally dividing-could you consider the possibility that you and another single-celled organism just like yourself could cooperate for mutual benefit? And if you could imagine that, could you extend the concept to imagine many individual cells forming conglomerate groups to increase the possibilities of survival and success for all of the members of the group? Could you, a mindless amoeba, conceive of the possibility of an organ? Could you make the leap from there to the concept of an organic being, a creature composed of many different conglomerate groups all working together, each structure providing a specialized function for the good of the whole? And if you could make that leap to imagine all the multiple interrelationships of all the millions of different special cells and processes and organs necessary to the survival and success of even so small a creature as a tiny white mouse, then could you imagine a human being? Could you imagine intelligence without first being intelligent yourself?

And if you, the one-celled being, could somehow, impossibly, imagine the existence of beings greater than yourself, could you then make the even more impossible leap to consider the interrelationships of such beings? If you can imagine a single being, can you imagine a family of beings? A tribe? A corporation? A city?

Can you imagine a nation of cooperative processes? And finally, could you make the biggest leap of all, to consider the processes of an entire world? Could you?

Could an amoeba imagine a human being?

Could a human being imagine the nature of the Chtorr?

At least the amoeba had a good excuse-it couldn't even imagine. The failure of human beings was that we couldn't imagine big enough.

Sometimes, in my sleep, I felt glimpses-like something large and silent moving through the night, a great shape, larger than an Enterprise fish rising from the sea of dreams. I could sense it like a wall. A mountain. A tide of meaning. It lifted me upon its crest.

Sometimes, in my sleep, I heard it call-a lonely sound, deep and dreadful; a soft chorus of despair. It was a mournful note, like an enormous gong resonating at the bottom of the abyss of unconscious knowledge. The sadness was profound and inescapable.

I would try to turn and see it behind me. It felt almost like a face or a voice or a person that I knew, but wherever I turned, it was hidden in the veils of the dream.

Sometimes the feeling was s.e.xual, a hot sliding wet embrace that enveloped me as if my whole body were plunging deep into the womb of home.

Sometimes I heard my name being called as if from very far away. Sometimes I knew-as if I had suddenly been expanded a millionfold-fireworks of understanding exploded in my mind-in that white-hot pinpoint moment, I not only understood the scale of the thought that held me, I also became the being capable of creating and holding such grandeur. I would reach for it, but before I could complete the action, before my fingers could close around it, I would awake, sweating, trembling-and the unnerving bottomless feeling would stay with me for days or weeks; my sleep patterns would remain disrupted and my body would ache with a desire that no physical act could satiate.