A Season For Slaughter Part 42

FOREMAN: That was a joke, John. You do remember jokes, don't you?

ROBISON: But you do have a secret plan, don't you?

FOREMAN: There's no secret. That's the plan.

ROBISON: Huh-?

FOREMAN: The secret plan is that there is no secret plan. The Core Group isn't about control. It's about the operating context. If I may allow myself a small pun, context is everything.

ROBISON: (skeptical look to the camera) Cut the c.r.a.pola, Doc. If you want to talk about ways to fight the worms, I'm right there with you. But when you start talking about your contextual domains, I just fall asleep again. All you're really saying is that we won't defeat the worms unless we have the right att.i.tude. And you're using that as an excuse to exert undue influence on the elected decision makers. Well, I want to know, who elected you?

FOREMAN: There! That skepticism is what's keeping you apart. You keep thinking that you're outside the domain. You don't recognize that you and your show and this discussion are all part of the process, so you don't act as if anything else in the domain is your responsibility.

ROBISON: Hold it, hold it right there-remember our agreement? If you're going to live on this planet, you have to speak our language. Now what did you just say?

Could you translate that into English?

FOREMAN: Sorry. I keep forgetting. I apologize for overestimating your intelligence. Let's take it a little slower. Imagine a circle, right? Here, I'll draw one in the air for you. The act of drawing a line is the act of making a distinction: You're separating one set of concepts from another set of concepts. Once you've drawn the line, then you can start sorting-this set of ideas goes on this side, the inside of the circle; this set of ideas goes on the outside of the circle.

Now, what we've done is we've made the distinction that everything in this domain is part of the process of defeating the Chtorran infestation and restoring the Earth, and everything outside is not. You keep reacting to this discussion as if you're outside of the circle; but you're not. You're in the same circle with the rest of us, because you want to defeat the Clatorrans and restore the Earth too-even if you do think I'm a charlatan and a phony. So this conversation isn't really about our differences, John; it's about the two of us looking for something we can align on.

ROBISON: Cute. All right, so you've got a circle full of ideas. What if I come into your circle with an idea that you think doesn't belong? I get "sorted out," like Dorothy Chin, right?

FOREMAN: It's not my circle. It's our circle. It belongs to all of us. I can't sort you out; you sort yourself out. Look, the circle-the context-is a distinction that we created when we agreed on the goal. We're aligned on context. Now, this is the hard part. People don't disagree on goals; not if the vision is large enough to include their personal agendas; people disagree on methods. A call to action almost always bogs down in debate. Instead of results, we get political parties.

ROBISON: So, if I understand you correctly, you're about to advocate the elimination of opposing political points of view FOREMAN: There you go again ROBISON: Oh, not in so many words, of course, but isn't it true that your training sessions create a clique mentality? Here's this whole group of people who've shared a very intense experience. Of course the survivors are going to feel a special comradeship-the kind that you get when misery is shared.

FOREMAN: (prompting) And my point is... ?

ROBISON: And my point is that no matter how many wonderful speeches you , make about how committed you are to powerful results on the planet-see, I can do the jargon too-what you're really doing is creating an elite cla.s.s of decision makers, locking out the rest of us from the process, creating separatism, abusiveness, resentment, and even more divisiveness that makes it harder than ever for us to win the war.

FOREMAN: The facts suggest otherwise.

ROBISON: Oh? You think we're actually winning this mess?

FOREMAN: We're surviving. And we're expanding our repertoire of survival.

We're finally mobilized on a scale that we can start thinking of goals beyond our day-to-day survival. We're not running anymore. Now we're beginning to carve out defensive positions. And yes, that's a victory. A major victory...

The neural symbionts will connect to any functioning nervous system. Autopsies on gastropedes as well as infected Terran organisms have consistently demonstrated this.

Tests on living Terran organisms have demonstrated a remarkable increase in sensory activity. Individuals with the thickest coats of fur have experienced enhanced sensitivities to light, color, taste, smell, and sound.

In the San Francisco herd, as well as in other human herds where members have been infected with neural symbionts, we have begun to see a significant shift in individual behavior. We have observed increased s.e.xuality in females, increased irritability and aggressiveness in males, and a heightened awareness of the smallest details of the environment.

Infected individuals have also demonstrated an increased ability to communicate with each other over much greater distances and with greatly reduced verbal and physical signals.

-The Red Book, (Release 22.19A)

Chapter 49.

TwiIight "Of course, this is the best possible worlds. I'm in it."

-SOLOMON SHORT.

Lizard's schedule was filled with briefings, planning meetings, and various pieces of procedural business.

I spent most of the day parked at a computer terminal, prowling through dataliths, searching for precedents in nature, scanning both raw and processed reports, looking for hypotheses, playing with simulations, brainstorming with the Harlie link, and finally just tinkering with the idea at the heart of the whole question. I couldn't stop thinking about the ideas of yesterday and the conversation of the night before.

It all had to do with worm songs.

My new Uncle Ira clearance gave me access to a higher level of information than I'd ever tapped before; but it was a curiously unsatisfying experience. There was little here about the worms that I didn't already know. In fact, a great deal of it was material I'd gathered myself in the course of the last six years. What was new to me was the background material on the various political situations we had to contend with around the world. What was most startling to me were the reports on the growing evidence of a developing human symbiosis within the mandala nests. How had this information been gathered? A lot of it looked like Teep Corps material, but it wasn't annotated. I wondered-had the Uncle Ira group penetrated the Teep Corps?

Or was it the other way around. Lizard had intimated that there was considerable tension between the two agencies.

Coming back to the question at hand... I realized that there had been a frustratingly small amount of attention given to the songs of the nests.

Oh, we'd recorded the songs. We'd done that to the death. Literally. We had thousands of hours of gastropede music. We'd digitized and sampled until our techniques were flawless. We'd charted and collated and a.n.a.lyzed the sounds until we could synthesize them perfectly. But n.o.body had really asked the W question.

What is this? Why is this? Why are the mandala nests producing these songs?

The song of the nest.

Hm. That was an interesting phrase. I wondered...

Four hours later, the sunlight was slanting sideways through the room, and I had a pain in my back that reached all the way up to the front of my eyeb.a.l.l.s, threatening to blind me if it didn't strike me stupid first. My ears ached and my brain was numb from listening to the songs of seven different mandala nests. There was a difference in flavor between the song of one nest and the next, but I had no idea what it meant-if anything.

Still... I had an idea for an experiment. I had no idea if it would work, or even what it might prove, but it was one of those things that you have to do just to see what happens when you do. I'd have to talk it over with Lizard, though. She'd have to approve it. I got up from the terminal painfully, stretched and groaned and listened to my back crackling like a bowl of angry Rice Krispies, then went searching for my busy general.

As it turned out, my busy general was even busier than I had estimated; she knew better than to micro-manage her teams, but a lot of last-minute decisions still required her personal attention. She gave me five preoccupied minutes, nodded a vague agreement, kissed me perfunctorily, and then turned her focus back to six other tasks.

Not a problem. We'd connect later. I stopped in at the ship's restaurant, where an all-day buffet had been installed, grabbed a sandwich and a c.o.ke, then headed toward the forward lounge. And came face-to-face with the infestation. Suddenly, it was real.

The Amazon was dying. You didn't have to be a scientist to know that. The sheer scale of it was numbing. It stretched out toward the horizon, no end in sight.

People were cl.u.s.tering at the windows, frozen like witnesses to a plane crash, too horrified to look, too horrified to turn away. All of them-technicians, a.s.sistants, squad members, team leaders, a.n.a.lysts-were stunned.

These were people whose only prior experience with the Chtorran infestation had been with specimens in cases; all the individual creatures they had seen had been locked safely away in cages, separated, isolated, unable to demonstrate the harm they were truly capable of. If you didn't see it directly, you could somehow deny the reality of it in your mind. But here, denial was futile. Below us, in the shadow of the great airship, unmistakable, inexorably spreading, the color of the foliage was changing from green to brown to red.

The people at the windows were coming up hard against the brick-wall reality of the end of the world. You could see it in their collapsed postures. They leaned on the railings, they looked down at the devastated jungles, and their bodies slumped: It looked as if the life was being drained out of their souls.

We were nearing the Coari mandala. Below, the ground was rotting.

Where it wasn't rotting, it was broken and chewed. A series of deep scars cut through the foliage like claw marks. The worms had left slashes of barrenness that curved like scimitars. Broken trees lay across the ground'as if knocked down by a hurricane. There were huge mounds of chewed and regurgitated wood pulp, but there were no domes, no nests-only the mysterious gray hills. No one on the on-site team and no one on the remote network observation team knew what to make of these places. Biological factories? Perhaps. We just didn't know. We'd never seen anything like it before.

But even beyond the scars and mounds, the overall desolation of the red blight was unmistakable. At last we were seeing the direct effects of the smallest creatures of the Chtorran ecology on the Amazon basin: debilitating viruses, scourging bacteria, and hordes of insect-like things that ate the hearts out of the trees. The land was silent. The trees looked wilted. The decay stretched out forever. We were sailing into a wasteland. A blanket of death lay across the world.

Someone I didn't know, one of the younger women, turned away from the window, crying. Another woman followed her out of the forward lounge-to help her?

Or because she too was overcome? It didn't matter. There was going to be a lot of crying today, and probably a lot of hysteria before the mission was over. We expected it. We'd allowed for it.

Ahead, the westering sun was turning swollen and red. It dipped into the blue-gray haze on the horizon like a bloated corpse sinking into a dank and gloomy swamp.

The fading light was brown and ugly. On the Bosch's observation balconies, we could feel the last hot breath of the jungle like a fetid presence. Below, the barren patches spread and expanded into long stretches of furrowed desert. There were bleak places that looked scorched and burned. The land had been stripped and scoured, left naked for the crimson invasion.

Here and there, the bones of the Earth broke through the desolate soil; hard knuckles of rock jutted up through the ground like the claws of something monstrous trying to scrabble its way out into the bloodstained twilight. Black shadows folded themselves along the lines of the land, leaving pockets of gloom at the bottom of each rill and valley.

Occasionally a worm became visible in that nightmare landscape. It would see us and stop what it was doing to gape upward in frozen astonishment. It would wave its arms and howl, or it would bolt in panic, or it would chase along beneath us, trying to keep up with our shadow.

Now only a few stands of trees stood empty and alone. What little Terran vegetation remained was sickly and weak. The patches of it became rarer and rarer, until at last there were no more to be seen. By contrast, the Chtorran vegetation grew ever more ripe and exultant. It was a lush presence, rich and startling, breaking out everywhere in riotous splashes of saturated color that spread joyously across the ground. We flew across a rumpled rainbow carpet-the naked jungle was striped now with moody purple groves of death, pink and blue fields of something that glowed like frozen cyanide, stripes of strident orange poison, and towering black shambler groves dripping with red and silver veils; they looked like brooding cancerous wh.o.r.es.

And then-at last-we came over the first outlying tendrils of the mandala. We were too low to get a sense of the larger pattern of the whole settlement, but there was a definite sense of order here. It was like looking at a Mandelbroi image. It suggested an infinite expansion, both outward and inward.

First, the domes. They bulged in circular pink groups, big domes swelled out of the ground, small domes gathered closely around them. The spires of marking posts, like upraised fingers, rose up between them in cl.u.s.ters; they looked like half-melted candles. Avenues of red and purple foliage snaked and curved among the nests, spiraling and twisting like snakes. Then the corrals, both empty and filled. Things moved in the corrals. Millipedes, bunnydogs, libbits, and creatures I'd never seen before, things that looked like smaller, brighter worms. And people. There were people down there too. They stared dumbly up at us. They didn't wave.

Now the first worms came pouring up out of the ground, hissing and roaring.

They gaped upward, waving their arms and blinking, trying to focus, trying to take in the magnitude of the vast shape above them, filling their sky. They began tracking with us, following us, trying to stay within our shadow.

Now, the mandala thickened. We saw gardens-they were placed as carefully as the nests-meticulously groomed circles of purple and red and blue. I could hardly wait to find out what was growing in them-and who or what depended on that produce. There were networks of ca.n.a.ls winding in and out between the nests, feeding the gardens and the wells in a complex pattern of irrigated cl.u.s.ters. Then even more corrals and nests, 'another centering of the pattern; more tendrils reaching outward toward more gardens, wells, and fields. The domes grew bigger, cl.u.s.tered closer, bulged upward, became more spherical. The avenues grew wider. The mandala ripened.

And the worms still flowed along beneath us, more and more now, shrilling and crying. Were they panicked or were they calling? We had no idea.

We moved silently over the scarlet floor of h.e.l.l. The airship was a great pink cloud sailing deeper into the center of all horror. The whirlpool expanded. It sucked us forward.

Below, the worms were howling. They sounded hungry.

Possibly because of the attendant heightening of sensory perceptions, one immediately observable result of the presence of neural symbionts in humans has been a reduction of the individual's language-processing abilities.

Our operative hypothesis is that the affected individual's brain is shutting down many of its higher functions; that the presence of the neural symbionts simply damps the ability of that organ to function.

An alternative, although unlikely, thesis suggests that the presence of the neural symbionts turns the person's entire skin into a much more effective sensory organ. It is suggested that the affected individual's brain is simply unable to handle the extreme band width of this enhanced perceptual information. To the affected individual, it would be like having 360-degree vision ranging from the ultra-violet to the infra-red, 360-degree hearing from 0 to 160 db, plus a 360-degree sense of smell, taste, touch, temperature, pressure, and responsiveness to any other stimuli that the neural symbionts are capable of receiving.

It has been suggested that the affected individual's brain may be so overwhelmed by the tidal wave of expanded perceptions that after a while, all language-processing abilities are overloaded, burned out, or swamped. Or maybe, by comparison with the white-hot bath of expanded vision, hearing, taste, etc., any language input is just so insignificant, the affected individual simply disregards it as unimportant. This hypothesis remains untested.

-The Red Book, (Release 22.19A)

Chapter 50.

The Observation Bay "The big problem with human beings is not that they don't come with an instruction book, but that no one ever reads the instructions they do have."

-SOLOMON SHORT.

We watched in silence. People clumped in uncertain groups. They cl.u.s.tered at the windows, unable to tear themselves away. Behind us, the monitors hummed and chirped, recording everything. The technicians murmured softly into their headsets, but their words were muted and their expressions were grim. There was no banter, no commentary; the normal buzz of chatter was missing.

n.o.body was prepared for this-not on this scale. There was no wiry to describe the depth of isolation and aloneness we were suddenly feeling, the profound sense of abandonment and futility. It infected the Bosch like a palpable stench. Suddenly, the last illusion of normalcy had been shattered. The world we thought we knew was truly dying. It was over. All of it.

I couldn't handle it. I left the forward lounge and headed downstairs to the s.p.a.cious cargo level. It was louder here. Things were busier. Mechanical things were happening. People moved with purpose and intensity; there was a lot to do and there wasn't u lot of time. They weren't looking out the windows and they weren't brooding about what they saw.

The huge access hatch of the number-one cargo bay was gaping wide open.

Launching racks hung down out of it like trailing fingers. Periodically, there came the sound of something thumping into position, followed shortly thereafter by a louder noise as it whooshed down and away.

The technical crew had begun dropping probes and launching spybirds to scout the fringes of the mandala. They'd be at it all night long. A whole spectrum of silent peepers was moving into place, all kinds of mechanimals: spiders of all sizes, insect-like creepers and crawlers, spybirds, bat-things, kites-even a slick mechanical snake. And of course, the usual a.s.sortment of prowlers, growlers, and bears.

All of these things had to be plugged in, warmed up, checked out, briefed, targeted, pointed, loaded, and launched into the darkening terrain below. n.o.body here would have a lot of time for anything until after the last machine was launched.

Later, after the data began flowing in, after it was collated and a.n.a.lyzed and displayed, after all the photographs began appearing on the giant display screens-then this crew might begin to feel the same impact. Right now, they worked.

In the aft-most cargo bay, the retrieval team was probably bringing in the last of the flyers now. The Batwings? * had been out all afternoon, soaring ahead, scouting, scanning...

All but one of them had returned safely. We'd lost contact with it and had no idea why. No rescue signal had been received. Captain Harbaugh and General Tirelli had discussed the matter and decided not to risk any more flights until daylight. We'd send out spybirds instead. If they found the pilot, we'd call for an immediate rescue mission. Otherwise, we'd wait until morning and send out three Batwings on an aerial search. If they found anything, we'd call in choppers. If not... we'd turn the search over to Rio de Janeiro and let them decide how to proceed.

It was a cold and heartless decision-but it was exactly this kind of decision that Lizard and I had been discussing yesterday morning. The mandate of this operation was more important than any individual life. The reconnaissance pilots knew what the mission orders were, they knew the risks. If they went down, we'd try to look for them. But we wouldn't-couldn't-delay the Bosch. The Brazilian government had given us just ten days to go in, take pictures, and get out. The airship would sail on whether a downed pilot was found or not.

The pilots were all volunteers.

Oh h.e.l.l. Everyone aboard this thing was a volunteer. The same orders that applied to the pilots applied to all of us. And we all knew it. At the time we'd been briefed, I don't think anyone had really believed in the possibility that the order would actually be applied. Other than the scouting flights, n.o.body was leaving the airship. The entire mission would be carried out by remotes. The only direct contact we would have with the mandala nest would be our observation posts set up in the cargo bays.

But now, with one pilot missing and presumed down, and the blighted Amazon rumpled beneath us; the reality of it all was starting to come home. I watched as three more spybirds were uncrated and mounted in the launching racks. Silently, I wished them G.o.dspeed and luck. I'd never met the pilot, I didn't even know her name. I just wanted her home safe. I hoped she had someone to welcome her return.

And I wondered how I would be feeling if it were Lizard out there in the fast-fading twilight.

I shuddered and headed aft, toward the number-two cargo bay where the primary observation team would be readying for the Coari flyover.

The bay had been especially refitted for this mission. A railing had been installed around the huge open access, so we could lean out over it and look straight down into the nightmare below. Captain Harbaugh was letting the airship descend as low as she could. She was going to bring us down to twenty meters, then if it appeared that nothing in the camp was going to reach up and grab us, we'd ease our way down to fifteen, and maybe even ten. We wanted to get as close as safely possible. This was going to be very intense.

As I entered, somebody gave an order, and the lights in the cargo bay were muted. Throughout the airship, the lights were going down. The plan was not to show any illuminated windows at all; just an enormous pink sky-whale. It was especially important that the observation and launch bays be dark. We didn't want to reveal a great open hatch in the belly of the vessel, blazing away like glory into the night and attracting the Chtorran equivalent of moths and G.o.d only knew what else.

I stopped at the railing and leaned over to peer down at the ground below. It slid by, looking exactly like one of the endless displays in the simulation tank. Here, closer to the actual mandala, the dark folded land was feathered with scarlet growths and near-luminous patches of blue iceplant that sprawled across the slopes of the hills like unmelted snowdrifts.

The airship was barely creeping along. We were slowing as we approached our target. By the time we reached the center of the mandala, it would be evening.

We pa.s.sed slowly over tendrils of the settlement. The domes looked more and more like cancerous growths. Shapeless and unidentifiable things moved darkly in one of the corrals. I had no idea what they were. Three gastropedes came pouring out of the undergrowth, twisting and turning as they tried to comprehend the giant shape sliding across their sky. It was almost too dark to see now, but the gastropedes had better eyes than we did. They knew we were here.

I lifted my head and looked across the railing toward the other observers. They were all dark shapes in the gloom. Only a few people were gathered here; the rest were cl.u.s.tered around the video tables, watching the views that were starting to come back from the probes. As each data-channel was established, it was linked through to one of three ganglion-repeaters, and from there to the satellite-net. Later, after all the channels were up and running, we'd drop the ganglion-repeaters somewhere in the jungle, probably on some convenient hill, and Houston, Atlanta, Denver, Oakland, Detroit, Montreal, Orlando, Honolulu, and all the other stations would then be able to maintain real-time monitoring of this nest directly.