A Season For Slaughter Part 44

"Right."

"So... to them, the song would be the experience of G.o.d."

"Yes, that's exactly it. To a worm, the nest-song is G.o.d. And each and every worm knows that he or she or it, or whatever, is part of that G.o.d. And each and every worm knows that each and every other worm in the nest is also part of that same G.o.d. So when they look up in the sky and see us..." I left the sentence unfinished.

"I think I'm beginning to get it," said Lizard.

Captain Harbaugh looked back and forth between the two of us. "You're going too fast for me. Can I have the annotated version?"

"Sorry," I said. "Let me recap. See, here's the mistake we've been making. We've been thinking that when the worms look up and see a big purple airship in the sky, they're reacting to it as a vision of G.o.d, like it's an angel or visitation, and that therefore the songs are some kind of prayer. But that's a human perception. It could only be true if the worms were like humans and had minds of their own. But they don't. The worms don't have minds. So the question isn't simply what are they reacting to. They're reacting to a big worm, yes-but what do they intend? What could they possibly want from the sky-worm?"

"Amplification," said Dwan. Everybody turned to look at her. "More's-singing,"

she said. "Th-they w-want our super sky voice added to th-their song. They w-want enlargement."

"Right," I said. I licked my finger, drew a brownie point in the air for Dwan, then pointed at her, clicked my tongue, and winked in a you-got-it gesture. She nearly wet her pants with happiness.

I looked to Lizard and Captain Harbaugh. "That's my thought exactly. I think we should sing with the worms. I think we should take their song, digitize it, sample it, do a real-time a.n.a.lysis, expand it, synthesize a bigger voice, and feed it right back to them. At this height, if we want them to hear the song in sync, we'll have to do some forward projection to allow for the time delay. But that's part of the program."

"How long will it take to set up?" asked Lizard. She had ajr expectant look in her eyes.

"Well, actually, I wasn't planning to suggest it until after we saw what happened here. I was hoping to test it, but I was really thinking in terms of the j.a.puran mandala-"

"Yes, I know," said Lizard. She repeated her question. "How long will it take to set up?"

"It's all ready to go," I said modestly. "I spent most of the afternoon working out the algorithms with the Houston LI. The program is on-line and ready to run. All we have to do is activate it."

"I thought so," she smiled.

"And then what?" asked Captain Harbaugh. "What will that prove?"

I spread my hands wide. "In itself, nothing. But here's the second part of the experiment. We've got thousands of hours of worm songs stored and sampled and collated. The LI engines have extracted a lot of different patterns. There seem to be certain connections of harmony and rhythm and flavor, and we've tentatively a.s.signed cmotional meanings to some of them. I was thinking-" I glanced around the table. Everybody was looking at me. Everybody was listening. "I was thinking that maybe this is how we can establish some kind of communication with them. We can start by echoing, but let's go beyond that. Let's broadcast other songs back to them.

Let's see how they react to the sounds of different nests. Let's see what kinds of responses we can get from them. Maybe we might even find some song or set of songs that turns the worms peaceful-or that we can use against them. I don't know what we'll find. But it's certainly worth trying, isn't it?"

Lizard and Captain Harbaugh exchanged a glance. Each in her own way was thinking about the possibility. They moved away from the video table to discuss it in private. Lizard nodded at me to follow.

"Heisenberg?" said Captain Harbaugh. There was a whole conversation in that single word.? *

Lizard shrugged. "We already knew that our presence was going to disturb the worms. There was no way we were ever going to get a neutral observation of a pure nest."

And I added the second half of that thought: "So if we're going in disturb them anyway, why not really disturb them? Why not do it for a purpose?"

Captain Harbaugh thought about it. "What about the Brazilians?" she asked.

We all looked at each other. Good question.

"We're supposed to consult with them," Lizard said.

"If we do..." I said reluctantly, "they'll veto the exercise. Remember the mandate of the mission. We're not supposed to interfere with the mandalas in any way."

"Mm," said Lizard. "There's that."

We all looked at each other some more. Frustration.

"Well-" I suggested, "maybe we could fudge it a little."

"How?"

"Suppose we tell them that we're concerned about the possibility that the gastropedes are, uh, reacting badly to our presence-I mean, just look down-and that we're afraid that they'll panic or something. And, uh, hurt themselves. Or the nest.

And that, uh, we're prepared to broadcast their own songs back to them, because, uh, we think it'll have a calming effect."

Captain Harbaugh and General Tirelu looked at each other thoughtfully. "What the h.e.l.l. It might work," said Lizard. Captain Harbaugh thought about it some more, then nodded her agreement. "It's your call," she said.

Lizard turned to me. "If we do this, my a.s.s is on the line. What's the worst that could happen?"

I shook my head. "I have no idea. Define worst." And then I added, "Nothing we do is going to hurt us. The worst that can happen is that we'll hurt the worms."

"Hm," she said, smiling gently. "There is that." I knew that was Uncle Ira talking.

"Hmm," she said again-and I relaxed. From the tone of her hmm, I knew she was going to talk herself into it. Sure enough, she said, "I think we have to take the risk. I think you're on to something, Jim. And this may be our only chance to find out. Set it up. I'll go talk to the Brazilians."

Very child-like, the bunnydogs are like creatures from a fairy-tale fantasy world.

They are as playful and as intelligent as monkeys. They have opposable thumbs, and their hands are capable of grasping and manipulating small objects.

The bunnydog's snout is stubby, giving the creature a "cute" appearance. Its eyes are large and round, and usually very dark. Instead of eyelids, the animals have sphincter-like muscles surrounding each orb, very much like those found on gastropedes' eyes.

Albino specimens have also been observed.

-The Red Book, (Release 22.19A)

Chapter 52.

The Cacophony and the Ecstasy "Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which you can die."

-SOLOMON SHORT.

We hung mikes down to fifteen meters to pick up individual voices and threads of melody. The mikes higher up were for texture, flavor, and harmony. We let the LI engines chug away on the nest-song for nearly twenty minutes before we started feeding it back to the worms. By that time, the central plaza of the mandala nest was so filled with crimson horrors that there was no room for any more to crowd in. But even so, they kept arriving.

It was a sea of fat red bodies beneath us. The worms cl.u.s.tered and clumped and eddied in pools of nervous activity. Dwan Grodin estimated-she was plugged into the LI network-that there were over a hundred thousand of the monsters just in the central arena alone, and at least half that many more still trying to push their way in.

At the edges of the crowd, where the avenues led into the arena, they were climbing over each other. The pace of movement was increasing throughout the crowd. Soon they would be frenzied. And after that-We had no idea what would happen.

The singing was louder now. Almost painful to listen to. It plused. It throbbed.

The probes we'd planted earlier were relaying horrifying ground-level pictures. If the worms had noticed the funny little spider-like objects that had attached themselves to the walls and sides of their nests, they hadn't reacted in any way we could see.

The images that came back to us were bizarre and unbelievable. They glowed on our terminals and on our wall-sized screens. They surrounded us with close-up stereo views of the floor of h.e.l.l. Indescribable images. Fragments of eyes, mouths, claws, mandibles, antennae-and always the horrible red fur. The color streaked past the cameras; again that frightening strident orange the shocking crimson, the brooding purple, the cancerous pink; and all the shades between. We looked across the sea of hunger. All courage fled.

The expressions around the observation deck-where we could see them in the darkness-were pinched and strained. Lizard and Captain Harbaugh withdrew to the upper deck, where they sat talking quietly. My guess was that Lizard was trying to ease the captain's concerns. This airship was in a terrifyingly precarious position, and every single one of us knew it.

I saw Dwan Grodin trembling on the other side of the video display. She looked ghastly in the gloom, with the light of the table shining up and giving her face a sickly green reverse illumination, she was shadowed where she should have been lit, and illuminated where she should have been dark. She looked like some kind of ghoul.

Her lower lip was trembling, but to give her credit where credit was due, she was totally focused on the display in front of her. She was doing her job.

The rest of the observation team looked a lot less certain-they were almost on the edge of panic. They were so disturbed by the surging sea of crimson fur and lidless black eyes below us that several of them were close to hysteria. They looked like the relatives of the guest of honor at a hanging. I took particular joy in watching the blood draining out of Clayton Johns's face. As I walked by him, I patted him gently on the shoulder and whispered. "Relax." He flinched and looked like he wanted to kill me-but to give him his due, he managed a nod and even a vaguely disgruntled "Thanks."

Finally, the LI engine said it was ready to go.

I touched my headset and whispered the information to Lizard; I looked up to where they sat on the upper deck. Lizard spoke the captain, the captain nodded, Lizard's voice came back to me: Go ahead.

It began slowly. We seeped in the sound so softly at first that even we could barely hear it, and there were speakers all around us. We brought up the gain in imperceptible notches and watched the roiling worms with trepidation. The external display had been synchronized to the ship song. As the sound rose toward audibility, so did the lights along the sides and the belly of the Bosch come glimmering up in Chtorran colors.

The worms sighed.

We could hear it rising up through the open cargo access, a sound like desperate wind.

Dwan Grodin stared across the video display at me. She looked frightened. "Are th-they supposed't-to d-do th-that?" Her rubbery face was starting to constrict. Her eyes were white.

I nodded. I felt abruptly compa.s.sionate toward her. This was beyond her experience. "Don't worry. They're doing exactly what they're supposed to do. We just haven't seen this before. It's okay, Dwan," I said. "You're doing fine. Just keep monitoring." And then I turned away from the table, wondering if my own fear was showing. We were hovering in place only twenty-five meters above the largest concentration of alien life forms that had ever gathered in one place on the planet Earth. All that held us away from certain death was a million cubic meters of helium.

Below... the worms were singing to us.

Was it a love song? A song of worship? A song of greeting? Or maybe just some mindless humming that the creatures did before suppertime.

Don't think about that.

We kicked the sound up a notch, the lights as well-we were audible now, visible too-and the sound of the worms swelled enormously.

Above the nest, the great sky-worm finally revealed itself. It joined the song. It sang.

And the worms went crazy.

They amplified themselves-all their sounds, all their movements. They surged back and forth in waves that spread and spiraled outward through the crowd. We watched in horror as the whole mandala squirmed. It pulsed like a malignant heart.

And then- The song of the nest began to change.

It rose in pitch. It expanded like a slow explosion. The throbbing rhythm of it sped up alarmingly and twisted into patterns too complex for the human ear to follow. Strange harmonies arose, forming bizarre patterns that swirled, wove around, and turned back in upon themselves. I'd never heard anything like it before.

Any specific moment of it sounded exactly like every other moment. Except, it wasn't. As we listened, we heard mysterious internal chord progressions. We heard a precession of beats as different parts of the sea of worms shifted their rhythms. We heard a moaning background chorus that seemed somehow detached from the main voice. Each part of the nest was responding to every other part, and even though the song remained unchanged, it was never twice the same. No orchestra on Earth could ever have matched either the beauty or the horror of that cacophony.

We all stood entranced. The music of the nest. Alien. Ethereal. Hypnotic.

Compelling. Unearthly.

The ecstasy rose around us. A hundred and fifty thousand alien instruments resonated. The music was sublime.

We hovered in the darkness and the sound submerged us all. It filled us and thrilled us and before it was through, it would probably kill us as well.

I remembered that first time in the very first nest I'd entered-and all the other times I'd heard the song as well A longing.

The feeling came swelling up inside me. Intoxicating. Hallucinogenic. I wanted to... drop everything and go run naked to meet my...

-shook my head to clear it.

Oh, my dear G.o.d. We're not immune to its effects.

The gastropedes apparently live in partnership with the bunnydogs, using them in a wide variety of roles. Probes have shown the bunnydogs performing various housekeeping tasks within the nests. Bunnydogs have been observed cleaning the nest, grooming the gastropedes, planting symbiotic organisms within the nest or rearranging their locations, carrying and moving small objects, and even tending eggs.

Gastropedes have also been observed using bunnydogs as pets and possibly as s.e.xual partners. This latter behavior is still being a.n.a.lyzed, and discussions of what the behavior may actually represent remain inconclusive.

In addition, gastropedes also regard bunnydogs as food. In every nest observed to date, gastropedes have been observed occasionally eating bunnydogs. This behavior usually occurs during times of high excitement and agitation, but not necessarily so.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect to the bunnydogs' status as a domestic food animal is that despite their apparent intelligence in every other facet of their daily lives, the bunnydogs seem to have neither awareness nor fear of the gastropedes'

predaceous appet.i.tes.

-The Red Book, (Release 22.19A)

Chapter 53.

G.o.dhead "Even entropy isn't what it used to be."

-SOLOMON SHORT.

Lizard and Captain Harbaugh came back down from the upper deck, startling me from my reverie.

They both looked rattled. I didn't blame them. I must have looked like some kind of petrified horror myself.

"If I had a few nukes here," Lizard said very quietly, "I don't think I'd be able to keep myself from using them-" She put her hand in mine and squeezed. I squeezed back. Don't worry, sweetheart, I'm here for you.

"The Brazilians might not like that," I said, only half-jokingly. We all knew too well what the Brazilians wanted.

Captain Harbaugh replied-in a very uncaptainlike tone. She said, "To h.e.l.l with what the G.o.dd.a.m.n Brazilians want. This is monstrous. This should never have been allowed to get this far." And then she glanced around, as if to make sure she hadn't been overheard by any of the Brazilian team members.