A Season For Slaughter Part 38

-SOLOMON SHORT.

Later, when the worst of the buzzing in my head finally faded away, I found my way back to the cabin that Lizard and I shared. I went straight to my desk and clicked on the terminal. But instead of dictating my thoughts right away, I just stared at the silent empty screen and studied the thought echoing around the inside of my head.

Siegel and Lopez were right. What did it really mean?

The problem wasn't one of understanding-we already knew that the worms sang-it was one of experiencing: What were they doing when they sang? Somehow I felt sure that the constant tuning-fork buzz of the nest was an important part of the Chtorran puzzle.

Everything about the G.o.dd.a.m.n worms was a puzzle. Were they intelligent or weren't they? How did they reproduce? What were their family relationships? How many s.e.xes did they really have? Three? Four? A dozen? How did they communicate with their slaves? For that matter, how did they communicate with each other? Were the worms intelligent at all? Or were they just shock .

I roops for the real invaders still to come?

That last set of questions was the most troubling of all. We knew that the worms weren't intelligent because we'd captured individual specimens and studied them and tested them and run Ilu:m through all kinds of mazes and given them all kinds of hizarre problems and found that while an individual worm could he curious, experimentative, even clever, its rating on the Duntemann Intelligence scale remained somewhere between lawyer and coffeepot, with coffeepot being the high end of the range. They weren't stupid; they loved to solve puzzles, especially mechanical ones; but they were idiot savants of the weirdest sort. A worm could sit for days working through one of those d.a.m.n binary puzzles that required several hundred thousand repet.i.tive movements; but it was almost an autistic process-as if the creature's soul was completely disengaged from the activity, and the puzzle solving was merely an activity like twiddling one's mandibles.

In fact, one of the researchers had commented on this very phenomenon. His words had stayed in my mind. "The more you work with worms, the more you realize that n.o.body's home. It's like they're all machines. It's like they don't have minds. It's like they leave their souls at home when they go out."

I wasn't an expert on worm personalities. I'd only known three worms well enough to tell them one from the other. One was Orrie, short for Oroborous. The second was Falstaff. And the third was Orson. I'd a.s.sumed at the time that Orrie was capable of managing his own volition; but now that I thought back on it, a lot of what he did was patterned behavior. Had he gotten that behavior from Jason Delandro? Or had he invented it himself? The other two worms had never seemed as smart or as individual as Orrie.

But then I hadn't really been in the best shape at the time for observing the nuances of individual gastropedes from a scientific perspective. I was under Delandro's influence, and part of it, I suspected, was the narcotic influence of the various Chtorran substances in the daily diet of the tribe. How else could I justify or explain some of the things I had done while living with the renegades?

And yet, that was as close as I-or perhaps anyone-had ever come to living in a worm nest and reporting back what it felt like. Or was it?

Maybe not. I leaned back in my chair, stretching my hands back over my head and listening to my bones crack. The problem was communication. There didn't seem to be any mutually recognizable channel of communication between humans and worms.

Jason Delandro had said-claimed-that he and Orrie could talk as well as he and I could, but I had never fully believed that. When I had told him this, he had merely laughed, and said that it was a communication that was still beyond my limited experience, but not to worry, I would grow into it someday.

In my own mind, though, I never quite gave up the belief that on some level Delandro had simply trained Orrie, like a man with a very smart dog. Dogs could recognize combinations of words and phrases-"Go outside, get the ball, bring me the ball"-why couldn't a worm?

Maybe worms didn't think. Maybe they just remembered. Maybe they just ran programs, plugging in the appropriate set of behaviors for each and every situation they ran into. Except-where did the programs come from in the first place?

Our best guess was that the worms were sort of, somehow, probably evolved from the Chtorran equivalent of insects. Maybe. Insects didn't have brains. A smart one had maybe a thousand good neurons in its entire body, but it still managed to act as if it had some rudimentary intelligence; how was that managed?

Experiments with simple robots had demonstrated that coordinated behaviors can be learned very quickly. Intelligence wasn't a single high-level process; it was a collection of subprocesses, each of which was also divided into subprocesses, and so on, all the way down, with each process taking action according to its local priority. The process that activated the Jim McCarthy body when it was making love to the Lizard Tirelli body was clearly not the same process that activated the body when it was out torching a Chtorran village or kicking the c.r.a.p out of Randy Dannenfelser. At least, I hoped to G.o.d it wasn't.

This was part of what the Mode Training had been based on-about training your subprocesses, about activating the appropriate ones, about recognizing what processes are a.s.serting priority and taking control at any given moment, and noticing whether they were appropriate processes or not. The Training had been about the creation of new processes, designed to act as... what? Supervisors. Trainers.

Gurus. The goal was the creation of a modeless mode so that you could create new modes as you needed them. The result was supposed to be not only an increased ability to respond appropriately, but also an increased ability to produce results.

Did it work?

Sometimes. Sort of. Maybe. When I remembered to remind myself that I was one of the trained.

But... it didn't really make you think smarter. It only made you act smarter. The G.o.dd.a.m.n puzzle of the G.o.dd.a.m.n worms still frustrated me every time I looked at it.

There was something we were missing about these creatures because it was so alien to our experience that it didn't matter how many times it walked up to us and belched blue fire in our faces, we still wouldn't recognize it. We'd explain it away as something else.

The Chtorr was alien. Not alien as in different. Alien as in beyond our worldview and perhaps even as in completely beyond the possibility of human comprehension.

"Whoever or whatever they are," I explained to the terminal, "they don't eat like we do, they don't reproduce like we do, they don't think like we do, they don't feel like we do, they don't experience the world like we do. They aren't us, they aren't motivated like us, they don't desire like us, they don't fear like us, they don't share the same urges, the same drives, the same anything. We have no conception of what it is like to simply be a Chtorr, because we don't even know what a Chtorran is."

At the Virtual Reality Center in Ma.s.sachusetts, they were trying to simulate a Chtorran worldview. I'd seen and partic.i.p.ated in some of their earlier environments.

It had been, to put it mildly, a mind-f.u.c.k.

I'd climbed inside the artificial realities-become a bird, broken away from the two-dimensional maze of land-bound existence. I'd swum through the sea of air, hurtling, floating, lifting, climbing, diving. The blue sky envelops a distant wall of opportunities and dangers. Perceptions shift and flicker. A tree becomes a protecting village. A fence is a gathering and a launch point. The sky is a towering web of flavors. Here, the wind is a solid presence. Everything is bright and wild. The community soars together in the air-boundaries only exist below; the community shatters on the ground. All the voices chatter and roar at each other, barking territorial defiance. No, the air is freedom, heart beating hard, muscles pumping furiously. Everything is effort and joy and grace. Climbing and rising, if you get high enough, you can rest on the air just hold your wings outstretched and spiral gently in the updraft. Here, the colors are different-you can see the magnetic lines in the air.

The land is far away below, a place to visit, not to live. Flight is the natural state of being. The sky is home. The sky is life.

By comparison, a cow is a mountain.

The earth rumbles. All that meat, all those stomachs. A factory of flesh. A cow is glued to the ground by gravity. It lumbers through life. Everything is lunch. Life is a salad bar. A cow's sole purpose is digestion. It wanders through its days, eating and belching -ruminating, chewing, and farting incredible amounts of methane into the air.

The gra.s.s is both carpet and meal. Here, it is forever teatime, and we sprawl amidst the watercress and cuc.u.mber sandwiches, munching contentedly and percolating in all four stomachs. The sun is a warm blanket, sauce for the surrounding salad; the rain only freshens the flavor. To a cow, concrete is a crime, a fence is a sin. A cow doesn't have a life, it has lunch. It has to be this way; a cow must consume a lot of salad to support its ma.s.s. Life is one long meal.

Mice. A mouse. A thing so small, it exists unseen and everywhere. It scurries through mazes of narrow tunnels and close dark s.p.a.ces. Everything that moves in the world above is dangerous-hawks, cats, weasels, dogs, owls; the world closes in around you. Open s.p.a.ce is terrifying. Noises are terrifying. Even il'you escape, the shock to your system can be so intense that you die from fright. Mice don't live.

They panic. Brightness is a threat. Movement is a threat. Everything big is a threat.

And yet-mice are courageous. They have to be. Get into the mouse world and the colors change. Sounds become louder, higher, deeper. Explore, thrive, breed, challenge, grow-and do it quickly. Mice are the undermen of the world, first to die, first to repopulate. Mice are the little warriors.

Fly with the birds, munch with the cows, live in the mouse world, swim with the whales-discover all the different ways of seeing and smelling and hearing.

But the experience is incomplete.

The best you could get from the Virtual Reality Center would be the simulated realities of birds and cows and mice. The truth might he vastly different. Until we could put an implant into a mouse or a cow or a bird, we'd never really know for sure.

Nevertheless, the point was still made; the experience of other creatures is different because their worldview is differentbecause the way that every creature moves through the world, interacting with it, smelling it, tasting it, surviving it, and finally even reproducing in it, is a unique and special experience.

As flawed as the simulations were-flawed, vicarious, filtered through human equivalents, and finally experienced in human terms-as imperfect as it was, it still gave us an a.s.sertion, a place to start considering the problem. Sometimes it was about as effective as trying to b.u.t.ter a piece of bread underwater, but even so, it was still u way to get a sense of the gulf between one species and another.

If only we knew enough about the Chtorrans to begin putting together a simulated reality of the Chtorran experience. If onlyWe could model the tunnels and create a simulated environment. We could duplicate the omnipresent sounds of the nests. We could match the vision of the eyes and the frequency response of the hearing receptors so that the cybernaut partic.i.p.ants could move through the environment with the same senses as a Chtorran-but n was the other relationships that mattered.

The ones we still didn't know about.

"Sing," I said to myself, abruptly. "We have to learn how to sing like the Chtorr."

But... I already knew that. That was the problem.

I remembered- The first time I'd gone into a Chtorran nest and found four worms in communion... I'd dropped my weapons. I'd put my hands upon their warm flanks.

They had been purring. Humming. Vibrating with a note that went right through me.

Their fur had tingled. It felt softer than mink. I had leaned into the sound, pressing myself against it, trying to-I'd felt it again, in the herd, the Great San Francisco Herd. The herd sang. The human note-it wasn't the same song, but it felt like the same yearning to me. The need to be a part of some larger process. It was the submergence of self into a larger personality.

If the humming of the worms was an unconscious sound, then the worms were no more than bees or ants or termites. And their nests were as unconsciously organized as the honeycombs in beehives or the intricate tunnelwork of termite mounds, a product not of conscious processes, but just the way that a zillion little copies of the same program all interact with each other-the same way that an insect isn't smart enough to walk, but the subprocesses of its thousand neurons are smart enough to cooperate and create the larger process of locomotion.

But... if the worms were anything more than that as individuals-and as yet, there was still no real proof of that-then there had to be, on some level, some kind of conscious purpose or function or reason for the incessant humming of the nest, the collective vibration that resonated throughout every Chtorran settlement. And, if I was right, if there were, then it seemed to me that from the Chtorran point of view, it had to be very much the same phenomenon as experienced in the herds. Only more so. Everything with the worms was more so.

With the herd the humming produced a submergence of self. With the worms, I wondered if it didn't produce a transcendence of self. Did a worm even have a self?

Had Orrie truly been conscious, let alone sentient? I still wasn't sure. Was a dog conscious? Do dogs think? What about chimps? And while we're being so d.a.m.ned anthropomorphically arrogant, what makes you so sure that human beings are even conscious? Just because we think that we think, we think that means we really think.

What if our thinking is really just the illusion of thinking? What if we're programmed to think that we think? And if so, who wrote the program?

According to the Mode Training, human beings start programming themselves in the womb. And badly. Because we're none of us trained to program a human being.

We have to figure it out as we go. And most of the time, we make a.s.sumptions based on incomplete evidence and use that as justification for making iuaccurate connections.

Maybe the worms were smarter because they didn't need as much programming.

Maybe whatever programming an individual had wasn't the product of his own observations as much as it was Ihc collective vote of his entire settlement.

There. That was the thought.

The song was the way that the worms tuned themselves. To themselves. To each other. To the nest.

Yes.

Bees. Bees sing. The whale hive hums. The sound of all those vibrating wings fills the nest. A bee resonates with that sound every moment of its life within the nest. It doesn't exist. The hive prevails over all. There's no such thing as one bee.

And there's no such thing as one Chtorr. Yes. My G.o.d!

There are no Chtorran individuals.

I straightened up and looked around. The day had turned yellow, and the first shades of dusk were tinting the afternoon. We were halfway between nowhere and nowhere. I stared out the window. The wide Amazon panorama rolled in green waves out to the distant blue horizon. I was completely alone with this idea. I was staggered by the size of it. I couldn't even see what had triggered the realization just the pure Brownian movement of ideas b.u.mping randomly into each other inside an otherwise empty head.

We'd missed it. We'd known this all along, but we hadn't let ourselves experience the reality of it. We'd been seeing them as individual creatures-things that formed families and eventually tribes and maybe nations. But we'd overlooked the obvious truth of it. They had no individual ident.i.ties. They were a hive/nest/ colony thing.

"Stop thinking of worms as the enemy," I said. "The worm doesn't exist. Think of the mandala as the creature that we're up against-and see where that train of thought leads."

The words formed themselves on the screen in front of me. They were complete.

I didn't know what else to add. At least, not right now. But I was certain that if I let the idea percolate awhile, a lot more would occur to me. I had the wonderful feeling that I had opened a very large door today.

Contrary to popular belief, the most ubiquitous organism in the Chtorran ecology is not the stingfly. It is the neural symbiont.

The symbiont is able to infect and survive in the bodies of a wide variety of Chtorran life forms. Neural symbionts have been found in gastropedes; bunnydogs, ghouls (gorps), libbits, snufflers, and nest boas. Additionally, a related form of symbiont has been found growing in shambler nests, red kudzu, and some varieties of wormberries.

Quite simply, the creature is so well adapted, it will grow wherever it can find appropriate nutrients.

The creature is apparently capable of functioning as both a plant and an animal, depending on the circ.u.mstances of its environment. It obviously prefers the flesh of the gastropede, because it grows thickest inside gastropede bodies, but it is clearly not limited to a narrow spectrum of host environments.

-The Red Book, (Release 22.19A)

Chapter 45.

Intimacy "Intelligent life is a way for the universe to know itself. In other words, the universe is just as vain as the rest of us."

-SOLOMON SHORT.

I have never liked airplanes. I have never liked looking down out of a window.

Seeing that the only thing holding me up is the goodwill of the universe is not my idea of a good time. I've had loo much experience with the so-called "goodwill" of the universe.

The Hieronymus Bosch, on the other hand, wasn't an airplane. It was a cruise ship, drifting through a silent ocean of air. We vailed through shoals of purple-banded clouds. Soft and noiseless, we slid through the blazing tropical day and the brilliant equatorial night with equal grace. We were an Enterprise fish of the sky, bright, implacable, impa.s.sive. Our multiple spotlights probed, oxplored, revealed-the jungle beneath us was black.

I decided that I liked the gigantic airship. It was a great mothering whale in the sky, peaceful and serene. I actually felt relaxed here, out of reach of everything that had been pursuing me Ior so long. I felt comfortable again It was an illusory feeling, at best. There was no escaping the horror that we were heading into, but for this short while, I didn't have to deal with it. I floated above my nightmares in a peaceful, dreamlike reverie. If only we could have gone on like this forever, circling the world around and around again, never landing anywhere, like some fabulous legend in the sky...

Once, while we were still over the flat blue ocean, Captain Harbaugh had pointed out a school of dolphins racing along beneath us, flipping themselves up and out of the water, in and out of our tremendous shadow. For a moment, I had felt both innocence and joy-there was still goodness in the world. There were still creatures who could play in the spray of the sea. And then, the feeling faded into one of sorrow. How long did these creatures have left to live? Would they run into a patch of red sea sludge and sicken and die? Or would these fragile and beautiful souls be swallowed up by one of the five Enterprise fish known to be scouring the south Atlantic? Or would they simply beach themselves in confusion as so many thousands of others had already done? I wanted somehow to reach down and warn them. Or save them. Or somehow protect them. I felt futile and helpless and angry.

Now, as we moved deeper into the heart of the great Amazon basin, the feeling intensified. Captain Harbaugh was following the course of the Amazon, generally keeping the wide waters of the river beneath us or within sight. Our shadow had become a long looming menace, gliding steadily westward, an enormous blot that rolled across the feathery green surface of the jungle canopy. Sometimes the abrupt silent darkness would startle a colorful bird into flight; screeching and chattering its dismay. Several times we saw Indians in their canoes stop and stare upward. Once we saw children run screaming to their parents. Who could blame them? A giant pink Chtorran in the sky? Wouldn't you run?

The balcony was an unexpected luxury, a source of continual wonder. Over the ocean, we could stand at the railing and look straight down at the luminous foam dancing across the surface of the deep dark sea. The dirigible's shadow left no wake. We moved across the water and left it undisturbed. Later, over the jungle, we could see the shine of moonlight reflecting eerily off the lush and verdant foliage below. A million waxy leaves, their individual surfaces just shiny enough to gleam, not quite bright enough to sparkle, added their glimmers together, all of them voting a collective dazzle, flickering like grounded stars. They looked like moonbeams on a broken sea.

And then, sometimes, the jungle would break abruptly apart, revealing a sudden startling reflection of brightness like a piece of dark mirror peeking upward through the tangle to catch and bounce a flash of errant light-the moonlit clouds beyond us or the glare of our lights. It was only the river, or a tributary, winking h.e.l.lo, reminding us again of its brooding presence.

I was standing out there, staring into darkness, when Lizard came up silently behind me. She stood next to me without speaking, and together the two of us just breathed in the flavors of the wind. Below, the jungle must have been pungent. Up here, wlng with the clouds, it was a scent of greenery and blossoms. There were darker, unfamiliar odors too; some of them were the steady processes of growth and decay, out of which a jungle feeds itself-earthy textures, not unpleasant; but some of them were crimson too, and once I caught the faint waft of a gorp, but it was very far away, and the odor disappeared quickly behind us.

Lizard didn't speak. She laid her hand on mine, and after a while, she put her arm around my shoulders and let me lean on her, Iike a little boy leaning tiredly against his mommy. It was her turn to be strong.

"I read what you wrote," she said. After a while, she asked, "What does it mean?"

I chuckled softly. "That's the same question Siegel and Lopez asked me. I don't know yet. I just know it's true. It feels true." We didn't talk for a while. We just let ourselves be. We listened and breathed and tasted the smells in the air. I turned my head so I could smell the duskiness of her perfume. "You smell nice," I said.

"I need a shower," she said. "I feel hot and sweaty. Want to scrub my back?"

I put on a quizzical expression. "I dunno if I should. I mean, when I was just a mere captain, you could order me to perform personal maintenance duties; but now I'm a civilian, I think those kinds of ch.o.r.es should be voluntary-"

"Never mind," she said. "I'll ring for Shaun."

"You play dirty, lady."

"I am dirty. Now are you going to scrub my back or not?"

We continued our discussion in the shower. While I washed her, we talked of minor matters, procedural things. Did you take the cat to the vet? What do you want for dinner on Sunday? Did you remember to call your sister? The baby did what?

That kind of thing. The s.e.x play, for once, was forgotten, unnecessary. If anything, it would have been an interruption.

There is an intimacy that transcends the mechanics of intimacy, and Lizard and I had finally achieved that state. We had become so familiar with each other, so knowing of each other's bodies, that we didn't have to talk of bodies every time we took off our clothes; we didn't have to talk about s.e.x all the time.

At one time in my life, I would not have believed that such a relationship of intimacy could exist, that two people could be naked together and not be overwhelmed by the fact; and in fact, could actually be so unconscious of their s.e.xuality-whatever s.e.xuality they shared between them-that their nudity would be irrelevant. It not only would not dominate their interactions, it would not even be present; but now, having achieved such a state of peacefulness and grace, I understood the deeper connection that it represented. We really were partners.

As I washed her-thoroughly, appreciatively, and with the kind of respect that only intimacy can inspire-we talked about our work, and for once, we left behind all the pain connected to it, all the pressures, and all the frustrations. We quietly talked about the puzzles that we were struggling with as if they were simply interesting puzzles. We could appreciate the wonder of the challenge for itself. The anguish had been acknowledged, now we could work.