A Season For Slaughter Part 46

She looked unhappy. Worse, she looked grim. We hadn't spoken much. We hadn't had much chance to. I really wanted to know what she was thinking. Corrigan handed me a printed agenda and I buried my attention in it, grateful for something to look at so I wouldn't have to talk to anybody. I needn't have worried. n.o.body wanted to talk to me. They were probably afraid it might rub off.

Dwan Grodin scuffed in, followed by Clayton Johns and a couple of other techs.

I noticed the Brazilians muttering among themselves. Drs. Amador, Rodriguez, and Hikaru-privately, I'd begun thinking of them as Larry, Moe, and Curly-looked absolutely mutinous. And with good reason. They should have been consulted, not just informed. A major breach of protocol. This wasn't going to go well.

Lieutenant Siegel and Sergeant Lopez, both wearing plain jumpsuits instead of their regular uniforms, slipped in silently and took seats at the back. There were maybe twenty people in the room. I had no idea how many more were listening over the network. Dr. Zymph for sure, Uncle Ira and Danny Anderson as well. Probably General Wainright. Dannenfelser. Bellus? Oh h.e.l.l, just a.s.sume the whole network is tuned in.

Captain Harbaugh came in last, sealing the door behind her. "Sorry to be late,"

she said. "Our flight engineer insisted on briefing me about helium replenishment. I think he's the only person here who outranks us all." She smiled gently to General Tirelli. "Let's get to work, shall we?"

Lizard went to the podium at the front of the room. She looked off above our heads for a moment as if composing herself. She looked down at the podium as if checking her agenda. She glanced up at me, her face unreadable, then looked to the room as a whole.

"I've been thinking," she said. "Not just about what happened last night. But about this mission. What we're really up to here. And before we do anything else, I want to share those thoughts with you." She took a drink of water. I remembered the beautiful crystal goblets of our wedding dinner and the way the condensation had beaded in icy droplets. That was already such a long, long time ago.

"Most of us in this room," Lizard said, "are old enough to remember what it was like before the Chtorrans came. But we've been living with the Chtorr for so long now that we're starting to forget. We're starting to act as if the Chtorr have always been here. We're starting to forget what we've lost, what we're still going to lose. For my part... I'm willing to lose anything, but my will to resist. I am here because I want to find a way to stop the Chtorr. I want to defeat them. I want them off this planet."

She took a deep breath. "I don't know if that's possible anymore, but that's what I want.

"There are scientists-some of them are in this room, many of them are watching and listening on the network-who believe that it is impossible to get the Chtorr off the Earth, that the best we are ever going to be able to accomplish is some kind of accommodation. Personally, I hate that thought. Professionally, I recognize that it may be much more realistic than all-out warfare."

Now she looked around the room carefully, specifically noticing the Brazilian contingent. "In the past year, serious discussions have begun about ways to live with the Chtorr or to accommodate the human species to a Chtorran-dominated ecology.

Some people view this as realistic policy planning. Others think it leads to a defeatist mentality. Myself-I see the truth of both sides of the argument. Those of us in positions of responsibility have to make decisions based on the best advice available to us. Believe me, these are heartbreaking decisions." She leaned forward across the podium. Her voice was intense. "Our resources are running out. We only get one chance to invest in our own future.

"War?" she asked. "Or accommodation. That's the debate.

"In the discussions about accommodation," Lizard continued, "we are beginning to hear two separate philosophies, and a host of variations. One position-and it is the position that our Brazilian hosts have adopted as a matter of national policy-is to let pockets of the Chtorran infestation develop unmolested. The rationale behind this is that once a pocket of infestation becomes stabilized, its further growth can be limited by natural and lethetic boundaries. The ultimate goal of the Brazilian experiment is the development of a Chtorran-based economy; one that exploits Chtorran plants and animals for human benefit.

"As attractive as this idea may seem at first hearing, there are a great many questions that need to be answered first, not the least of which is this: are there any Chtorran products of such utility to human beings that the value outweighs the environmental cost? Equally important, we have not seen any evidence that the Chtorran ecology has a threshold of stabilization; it may be that a mandala nest must be the size of Ohio before it starts to slow down appreciably. We just don't know.

We do know that the seemingly unchecked ferocity of many of the feral Chtorran species is definitely muted when they are integrated into the complex society of the mandala environment-and so, yes, there is same validity in the argument to let the mandalas exist, but under severe controls. What kind of controls might be applied is a whole other discussion, which I'm not going to get into here.

"There's a second opinion about accommodation with the Chtorr. And this one is shared by a number of scientists not directly involved in the Brazilian experiment. In this second scenario, each mandala represents a significant reservoir of infestation; so much so, that the potential threat that each one presents to us for sp.a.w.ning additional mandalas far outweighs any benefit conveyed by any civilizing effect that they may have on the Chtorran species operating out of the nests.

"In this scenario for accommodation," Lizard said grimly, our best hope will be to invest heavily in the construction of new robot-a.s.sembly plants, and put the cyber-animals on the front lines of the battle. The idea-please, let me finish-" Lizard said to Dr. Hikaru, who was rising angrily to his feet. "You'll get your chance to speak, I promise you." He sat down grumpily, and she rebooted her thought. "In this scenario, our attention would be focused on destroying mandala settlements as fast as we can identify them. By keeping the mandalas from establishing themselves, we think we should be able to prevent the Chtorran infestation from reaching a critical threshold long enough to discover the biological weapons we need to directly attack their ecology. The cyber-animals-the prowlers, the spiders, and all the others-functioning as semundependent ent.i.ties, would patrol their individual territories ruthlessly and relentlessly. In this way, a single human operator can have his effectiveness multiplied a thousandfold. We've already had some success with this technique in northern Mexico, Colorado-especially around Denver, and in Alaska. We expect to see additional progress next year, when the Atlanta and Orlando plants come on-line and begin producing. Those will be big. At the present rate of construction, we should be able to bring two new a.s.sembly plants on-line every six months for the next three years. We hope it will be enough." She took a breath. She allowed herself a sip of water. She referred to her notes. And then she went on.

"This hemisphere represents a test bed for both philosophies," Lizard continued.

"The South American continent is experimenting with the first course of action; the North American continent is pursuing the second. It's just a matter of time until we find out which is the right course of action. The problem is... either way, it's going to cost us a continent." She let that thought sink in. She shook her head, as if remarking to herself that it was an mnsatisfactory situation. One side or the other of this argument was going to pay a terrible price. It was obvious that she was holding herself back. It was equally obvious which side she felt was mistaken in this argument. I glanced over at the Brazilians. They were whispering angrily among themselves.

Lizard ignored them. She stopped to take a drink of water. "Now let's talk about the events of last night. Oh, one other thing first-" She indicated Dr. Shreiber. "At the request of Dr. Zymph, I have suspended yesterday's decision to relieve Dr.

Marietta Shreiber of her responsibilities." Dr. Shreiber looked smug. Lizard looked unhappy. It must have been one h.e.l.l of an argument. I couldn't imagine what Lizard and Dr. Zymph must have said to each other. Lizard represented the military arm, Dr. Zymph was the head of the scientific effort. Neither could have pulled rank on the other.

Uncle Ira must have made the decision. Right. So that explained that.

He probably sympathized with Lizard, more than she knewbut he was willing to let Dr. Shreiber have the appearance of a temporary reprieve. Which also meant that her career was probably going to mysteriously self-destruct very shortly after this mission concluded. Uncle Ira was good at removing obstacles. I remembered a conference in Denver so many years ago and how he'd handled some of the more obstreperous delegates there. There were political considerations. There were always political considerations. Uncle Ira had his own way of dealing with those considerations. He always let the other side think they had won.

Lizard was saying, "Dr. Shreiber is here on-site. She is qualified. Our enemy is the Chtorr. It would be a mistake to deprive ourselves of her talents and contributions.

Dr. Shreiber has a.s.sured me that we will have no more unprofessional disagreements and that she is prepared to concentrate on the job at hand. With that a.s.surance, I agree with Dr. Zymph that Dr. Shreiber's services are too valuable to waste." Nice. I liked the way Lizard slid that one in. It was obvious that General Tirelli had been ordered to do something that she didn't want to do, but the spin she put on it put all the muck back on Dr. Shreiber's end of the stick. I wished I'd had a camera to catch Dr. Shreiber's expression. Her smile was frozen so coldly on her face that it looked like her makeup had suddenly hardened.

"All right-now let's look at the pictures." She tapped the podium keyboard, and the big screens on either side of her lit up to display the overhead views of last night's gathering in the Coari mandala. As new images appeared, the older views moved sideways to the next screen, until shortly we were surrounded by images of the mandala we had destroyed.

"These first images were gathered by spybirds, without apparent disturbance to the nest. But here, in these later images, you can clearly see that even our silent presence in the Chtorran sky totally disrupted the life of the settlement. The gastropedes swarmed. Whatever biological imperatives were operative, they were unable to resist. They had to track with us. They followed us to the center of the mandala and gathered there.

"It's our belief that the effect of our appearance was so overwhelming that just about every gastropede that was able to get to the arena did so. The final count was over three hundred thousand specimens. In terms of sheer bioma.s.s, the Coari mandala is-was-a city the size of San Francisco.

"Here, you can see-even before we did anything-the crowding into the arena was already fairly ferocious. I'm not going to play back the singing that accompanied this gathering. I think everybody here is more than familiar enough with the unnerving effect it produces in its listeners. I just want to establish that the potential for violence was not only there before we did anything, but-if you'll look at these close-ups-you'll see that it was already expressing itself in isolated pockets. Here, here, and... yes, here."

Lizard referred to her notes, blinking thoughtfully as she scanned the screen of her clipboard. "The point I want to make..." She found her place. "... is that the potential for violent behavior was already present and already expressing itself from the first moment that this airship appeared over the mandala." She looked up, gazing directly across the room at the Brazilians. "The mandate of this mission was that this airship should do absolutely nothing to disturb the nest. That was mutually agreed upon by our respective governments, and everybody aboard this airship was thoroughly briefed as to the importance of following that guideline."

Dr. Hikaru looked like he wanted to leap to his feet again, but he stayed firmly in his seat. Drs. Amador and Rodriguez looked equally angry; their faces were very tight.

"Yes," Lizard admitted. "I know it looks like that agreement was broken last night.

I apologize-publicly and sincerely-for anything that might have created that impression. There was no intention to cut our Brazilian colleagues out of the loop.

Decisions had to be made, they had to be made quickly. As a result, Drs. Amador, Rodriguez, and Hikaru were not consulted as fully as they should have been. They were informed of decisions already in the works after those decisions were made.

This is a breach of protocol for which I accept full responsibility. However..."

I knew that tone. Lizard was conceding a breach of protocol only. She was not conceding anything else, least of all an error in judgment. She was protecting herself as well as me. I leaned back in my chair and relaxed, folding my hands loosely across my stomach.

"... However," she continued, "I fully endorse the actions that were taken. They were appropriate to the circ.u.mstances. And after we hear from Dr. Hikaru, I will explain why. Dr. Hikaru?"

Now he stood. "General Tirelli," he began in thickly accented English. "For two years, I have campaigned among my people, my government, and my colleagues for this mission. For two years, I have argued the case for the kind of detailed on-site inspection that only this mission could provide. During that two years, many objections were voiced and considered. There were warnings. There were dire predictions that precisely this sort of thing would happen-that the United States would use this mission as a cover operation for a ma.s.sive attack on the mandala nests. Nevertheless, I put my career on the line for you and your mission, General Tirelli, because I believed in you. I was wrong.

"You," he accused, "have betrayed a trust. You have embarra.s.sed me in front of the entire world."

He stood there, surrounded by glowing screens displaying the thousands and thousands of awestruck gastropedes of the Coari mandala. Their eyes blinked and focused. Their arms waved. Their red fur glowed brilliantly in the enhanced images.

Dr. Hikaru stood framed by his const.i.tuency.

"On behalf of myself and my colleagues," he said "and on behalf of the Brazilian government, I refuse to accept your apology. It is halfhearted at best, and it does not address the real issue here. I am speaking primarily of your failure to recognize the rights of the host government and in specific, the total domination of this allegedly international mission by the United States government. The events of last night prove that all the warnings and all the dire predictions of the most cynical pessimists were absolutely correct."

Lizard listened to him calmly. She displayed no emotion whatsoever. Her face was as carefully blank as if she were playing poker. Well, she was. I looked back to Dr. Hikaru.

"After much discussion with my colleagues, I am afraid that we must withdraw our support from this operation effective immediately. We resign from your team."

He gathered up his notebook and started for the door, followed by Drs. Amador and Rodriguez, and their a.s.sistants.

"Dr. Hikaru," General Tirelli said quietly.

He ignored her. He continued angrily toward the door. It refused to open for him.

"Dr. Hikaru," she repeated.

He turned around to face her. His face was red. "Open the door," he demanded.

"Now it's my turn," she said. She touched a b.u.t.ton on the podium. "The network has been disconnected. We are now off the record. Now that you have performed the mandatory dance of outraged national pride for your home const.i.tuency, there is still work to be done on this mission. Your contributions, as well as those of your colleagues, are still needed. May we depend on you to-"

"Our resignations," he interrupted, "are final. We shall do nothing that supports the nefarious goals of this operation. Open the door." He glared at her. "Or are we to be your prisoners?"

"It's your choice," she said. She met his furious glare with incredible grace. "I do not have flyers available to take you and your team back to Rio. I still haven't found yesterday's missing pilot, and her safety outweighs yours. This leaves you with two choices. We can let you off here, if you wish-" She tapped her keyboard, and a map of here appeared behind her. Here was literally a thousand miles from anywhere. "-or I will have you and your colleagues confined to your cabins for the duration of this voyage, without access to any of the usual tools of communication. This is to protect the rest of us against any misguided attempts to sabotage the rest of this operation. By the way, you'll find that certain items are missing from your cabins.

Specifically, your toothpaste, your shaving cream, the batteries from your portables... and the detonator b.u.t.tons."

Dr. Hikaru was outraged. He looked like he wanted to attack her. For the first time I noticed that the aides standing on either side of the doors weren't aides at all. They were members of Lieutenant Siegel's team, dressed as aides and technicians. Once again, I was impressed with the woman I married.

"I shall file a most vigorous protest at this invasion of personal privacy," Hikaru said darkly.

"I'd be disappointed in you if you didn't. As a matter of fact, the appropriate paperwork has already been delivered to your cabin. I've taken the liberty of even suggesting a rough outline for you to follow, so you don't leave out any of the good parts. In the meantime, my government is filing a most strenuous protest with your government about the instruments of espionage that you brought aboard this airship."

Dr. Hikaru did something strange then. As angry as he was, he bowed respectfully to General Tirelli. "I curse you," he said with quiet venom. "I curse your blindness.

You don't understand what is happening here, so you try to destroy it. I curse you for it today. History will curse you for it forever."

General Tirelli stood her ground rigidly. "No, Dr. Hikaru," she said. "I reject your curse. It's you-and the people who think like you-who have lost your vision. Look around at the rest of the people in this room. We haven't forgotten who the enemy is.

We haven't forgotten who killed five and a half billion human beings in six years. So you can take your self-righteous pretense of spiritual superiority and go straight to h.e.l.l." She nodded to Lieutenant Siegel. "Get them out of here before I lose my lunch." A cordon of "aides" and "technicians" immediately formed around the Brazilian contingent. Sergeant Lopez led the way, Lieutenant Siegel brought up the rear. He was grinning broadly. He was loving every minute of it.

After the door whooshed shut behind them, Lizard glanced around the rest of the room. She tapped the keyboard on the podium and we were live on the network again. "G.o.d, I hate this s.h.i.t," Lizard remarked candidly into an open mike, for the entire world to hear. "I just hate it. When a nest of mindless slugs becomes more important than human lives, there's something wrong somewhere. They told me that Dr. Hikaru was a brilliant man. Brilliant he may be, but..." She shook her head in sadness and resignation. "... oh, so G.o.dd.a.m.n stupid."

Despite the large body of photographic evidence that suggests that the gastropedes are capable of sentient behavior, there is little physiological basis to support this thesis. More than 120 autopsies have been conducted on gastropede specimens of varying sizes. In no case has any gastropede been found to have a brain large enough to support the intelligence that has been allegedly demonstrated.

Clearly there is' a discrepancy between their doc.u.mented behavior and our ability to understand the basis for it.

It has been suggested by some researchers that we simply do not understand the workings of the organ that the gastropede uses as a brain, but this argument is insufficient in the face of the physiological evidence. It is not just that the brain of the gastropede is too small-it is so rudimentary that it probably should not be cla.s.sified a brain at all. Even a mouse has more gray matter.

Using Terran organisms as a preliminary standard for comparison, the Chtorran gastropede doesn't even have enough brain power to feed itself. However, as if to compensate, the animal has a large cl.u.s.ter of hyperdeveloped ganglia under its "brain bulge." This ganglionic structure appears to manage most of the autonomic and cortical functions of the gastropede. It is so well developed, it would be an appropriate organ for a creature many orders of magnitude more complex than this.

The organ seems very much, out of place in the gastropede.

-The Red Book, (Release 22.19A)

Chapter 55.

G.o.dhead Revisited "The difference between men and women is that no man ever won an argument with a woman."

-SOLOMON SHORT.

When I looked back up front, my general looked a lot more relaxed. She was studying something on the screen in front of her. She looked up, saw that the room was waiting expectantly, and said, very conversationally, "Sometime this afternoon, we expect that the Brazilian government will terminate their partic.i.p.ation in this operation and summarily order us out of their territory.

"We are going to refuse." She held up a hand for silence, and the hubbub died down instantly.

"Let me explain," she said. "We are now activating Contingency Plan Norma.

What that means is that we are no longer an international scientific mission. We are no longer operating under the control of the North American Operations Authority.

We are now a fully recognized agency of the United States government, and we are authorized to complete our a.s.signed surveillance mission. The Brazilian government no longer has any authority over this operation, and their attempts to terminate it prematurely are illegal and will be ignored or resisted. By force, if necessary.

"I can also tell you that our missing flyer went down somewhere near the j.a.puran mandala. We are therefore ordered to proceed on our present course and perform all necessary searchand-rescue operations-including any and all ancillary operations necessary to protect this airship.

"The United States government will be launching around-the-clock military overflights to protect this vessel from hara.s.sment or attack by any units of the Brazilian armed services. Even as I speak, a note is being prepared for the president of Brazil, informing him of this action. In other words, ladies and gentlemen, our government is standing firmly behind us, and we have work to do."

The applause in the room was loud and enthusiastic.

She shook her head and held up her hand again. "I recognize that this course of action will be interpreted as aggressive and imperialistic by many nations in the Fourth World Alliance. I regret that, but we have no choice. Our planet is under a.s.sault. We need answers. History will record that we rode roughshod over the rights of our hosts. I hope that history will forgive us. At the very least, I'm sure that history will understand. What we do here is to help guarantee that humanity will survive to have a history."

That said, she clicked to the next page in her agenda and flashed a new set of pictures on the screens surrounding us. "All right. Enough procedural business. Let's talk about what happened last night. This is a free-for-all brainstorming session, don't stand on protocol. I want to hear everything. Who's up first?" General Elizabeth Tirelli looked meaningfully in my direction, ignoring all other hands.

I stood up slowly. "Well..." I began. "The good news is that we seem to have found a terrific new way to kill worms-" Some of the people in the room responded with nervous laughter. That was okay, but I wasn't trying to be funny. "The bad news is that you need to gather them in crowds of a quarter million individuals first."

I looked at Lizard. "Um, can we run the video on this?"

Instead, she invited me forward. "Here, why don't you take the podium-"

I went to the front of the room nervously. I knew that there were a lot of people here who didn't like me-some of them because they had been told not to-but most of them because I had earned their enmity fairly. Dr. Shreiber, for instance, was cleaning her fingernails with a cute little dagger.

I knew what Lizard was trying to do-she was trying to rehabilitate my reputation.

She wanted me to handle this part of the briefing; I didn't want to. We'd argued about it last night. The argument was a short one. She outranked me. I lost.

I glanced over the podium controls. They were fairly straightforward. Six preview screens and a menu to the file-server. Quickly, I punched up, the videos I wanted.

The sea of worms. From above. Waving and worshiping. "Okay, here-look at these pictures first. Wait a minute-" I punched up the color enhancement and decreased the granularity of the resolution. The resultant image displayed the pattern of color stripes across the surging worms while blurring out the individual creatures. "Now, watch this cycle-" I programmed the image as a repeating loop and let it play.

At first there was puzzlement-then the gasps of recognition began.

I waited until I was sure that everybody in the room had seen it, before I said anything. "Like a stone dropped in a pond, right? Concentric waves of color spreading outward from a common center. Violet. Orange. Red. What does it mean?

"Please notice here that the center itself is a confused whorl of color. It's only when you get out to here-a radius of at least ten meters, call it the event horizon-that the colors crystallize and spread outward in waves. Now, before I postulate anything here, let me remind you that these patterns are actually very subtle gradations of shade. They're almost invisible to the naked eye. We're doing some very heavy enhancement processing here. Let me also note that these waves are occurring in sync with the song of the nest." I brought up the sound and let them watch and listen for a few moments. There were more gasps in the room.

"What does all this mean?" I asked again. "To be honest, I'm not completely sure.

I can think of several explanations, I'm not sure I would believe any of them. But the phenomenon is real. Very real." I punched up another image; this one from one of the ground-based cameras. It was a close-up of several worms all jammed together in the narrow s.p.a.ce between two domes at the edge of the arena. "Watch this," I said. I enhanced the colors, but left the individual worms visible. We could see the colors sliding quickly across their bodies.

"All right," I said. "Here's what we know. We know that the gastropedes display patterns of stripes on their bodies. We know that the stripes change. There's a deep permanent patterning that changes very slowly, from month to month. Overlaid on that are the temporary patterns that change from day to day. Now we see here momentary patterns that flash and vanish. We know that the fur of the gastropede is actually a network of hundreds of thousands of neural symbionts, each one changing color to reflect the way it's being stimulated. The operative thesis is that the stripes represent what a worm is feeling. If a worm has emotions, its stripes are the way it expresses them so that other worms can see.

"These quick flickers of color that you're seeing are most likely the animal's moment-to-moment reactions to immediate events; the temporary stripes are the creature's emotional cycle; and the long-term patterns probably represent its general emotional state. But we have very little idea what any individual set of color patterns actually means, only some speculative guesses.