A Season For Slaughter Part 48

-SOLOMON SHORT.

Horror upon horror.

There was one more set of pictures we still hadn't shown.

I looked to Lizard for support, and she came back up to the podium to stand beside me. "This next piece of footage-" she said, "-is very sensitive. We're not ready to put this out on the network. Not just yet. Not until we've had more chance to study it. For those of you partic.i.p.ating on-line, this part of the session will be coded and scrambled. You'll need a Q-card or above to access. I apologize in advance for the inconvenience this will cause many of you, but as most of you already know, the possibility that a situation might develop that would require a security clamp was always part of the planning of this mission."

She took her ID card and inserted it into the podium terminal. She tapped in a code word and activated her security program. "We are now Q-coded," she said.

"Please remember that. Now let me talk about the reason why.

"Some of you have already seen the material that I'm talking about. Others of you may have heard the rumors. Dr. Zymph has seen these pictures. So have the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We're all agreed that the potential for culture shock, possibly panic and hysteria, if this material were made public without adequate preparation, is significant. After you see these pictures, you'll understand why. Of all the threats that the Chtorran invasion has so far offered us, absolutely none of them presents the danger to humanity that these images demonstrate." She nodded to me grimly and went back to her seat.

I exhaled sharply. I didn't relish what I was about to do. I stared down at the podium terminal for a long moment, pretending to study its glowing display.

Reluctantly, I cleared all the screens in the room, leaving them a dim translucent gray.

I looked out over the audience. Some of the faces were solemn and anxious. Most of the rest were honestly curious; despite all that they had seen so far, they still didn't understand.

"This video is... sketchy," I began. "It's been a.s.sembled out of various bits and pieces. We dropped over a thousand probes on the Coari mandala, only a third of what we intended to. I'm sorry we weren't able to plant the rest; there's probably a lot we missed; but I think we've uncovered enough of the iceberg here to start getting an idea of its overall shape and size.

"As a matter of record, our probes were able to photograph more than a hundred thousand hours of raw video, detailing much of the moment-to-moment life within the Coari nest during the time period of our approach and overflight, so we have a near-holographic record of the events of the last three days. That's the source for almost all of these images that you're about to see.

"Please recognize that we have so much footage that most of it still hasn't been reviewed, at least not by human eyes. The LI's are doing the preliminary scanning, and I must say they're doing a very methodical job of it-" Appreciative chuckles.

"-But it's likely that there are a lot of things that they're not going to be able to a.n.a.lyze or identify, simply because they don't have enough information yet or patterning to know what they're seeing. So what we're going to show you is still very incomplete. These are just the things that the LI's have been able to flag as obviously anomalous. We're certain that there's still a lot more to be discovered."

I looked down to my notes. "Okay, this first shot-this was the first one that really caught our interest." I clicked the first screen to life, let it cycle through three video loops. "This is from the j.a.pura mandala. This came out of one of our preliminary flyovers. We dropped a hundred probes, just to get an idea of how our probes would be accepted in the, nest. A few of them were destroyed. Most of them were ignored. We got a lot of interesting shots, but nothing we didn't expect-until this showed up. Yes, that is a gastropede you're looking at. No, I have no idea why it's green or how it got that way. Is it a rare recessive trait? Is it an adaptation? Is it a mutation? Is it a genetic defect?" I shrugged. "We don't know. You might want to notice that the date line on this footage shows it was made on Saint Patrick's Day.

Dr. Mark Herlihy, operating out of the New York Inst.i.tute, says that this is obviously an Irish gastropede. And he's named it BORSTAL SWEENEY. At first, we thought this was an early April Fool's prank, but we double-checked the raw footage. There really is a green worm. We have three separate shots of it in March. It hasn't shown up in any of the videos broadcast since then. That's not conclusive. We don't have full coverage of the nest. We are hoping, though, once we get to j.a.pura, that we'll be able to pick up BORSTAL SWEENEY again and put a transmitter into it.

"By itself, a green worm is an interesting anomaly. Now I'm going to start showing you some other anomalies. At first, you're not going to see that there's any relationship, and you're probably going to wonder, what's the point of all this? Bear with me. It's worth the effort. But it won't make sense unless you follow all the intermediate steps along the way.

"All right, here-" I punched up the next cycle. "These shots were all made in Coari. These are Coari bunnydogs. They're short, they're squat, they're rubbery and cute. Okay-and these are Coari bunnymen. As you can see, the two most obvious differences between bunnydogs and bunnymen are fur and personality.

"Bunnydogs are usually fluffy pink, sometimes red or brown, and they're always very playful. Bunnymen look like cadaverous naked rats, and they have personalities to match. They're very nasty animals-and they're vicious. Here's the kicker-they're the same species. A bunnyman is a bunnydog without hair. Except it isn't hair-it's more of the neural symbionts, the same ones that live in the gastropedes.

"Now I'm going to put up the rest of the pictures. Please notice the wide discrepancy of sizes and shapes. Interesting, right? Does it mean anything? Well...

suppose we were to show you pictures of c.o.c.ker spaniels, Great Danes, collies, German shepherds, chihuahuas, bulldogs, poodles, English sheepdogs, Irish setters, and Chinese Shar-Peis; and suppose we were to tell you that they were all dogs and could all interbreed freely. If you'd never seen any dogs before, you might find this a little hard to believe. So we looked at these pictures of the bunnydogs and the bunnymen and a.s.sumed that perhaps, like dogs, they were capable of expressing a wide range of forms.

"Then we noticed something very interesting." I brought up the next set of pictures and put them side by side on the screens. "These bunnydog pictures were all made four to six years ago..." And waited for their reactions. It took a moment, but pretty soon they began to see it.

"Right," I said, "The bunnydogs we're seeing today are showing a much wider range of phenotypes than the ones we saw when they were first discovered. Why?

What's going on? Where are these new expressions coming from? No, not yet." I waved down some hands. "Just let me show the footage.

"These are libbits. I know they look like pigs, but they're not. For one thing, most of their weight is carried on their haunches. Their forelegs are really arms, used mostly for balance, and a little bit of picking up and carrying, and they're much thinner than the hind legs. Look at the thickness there. Here's one sitting down and using her hands to eat. If it weren't for her piglike snout, she'd look like a teddy bear.

Libbits are all female. As most of you know, they're actually the female form of the bunnydog. Looking at them, it's hard to believe, but we've actually bred them in captivity. Depending on how many fathers, you either get a litter of libbits or a litter of bunnydogs; you never get a mixed litter.

"Okay, these first shots are libbits living at the Oakland farm. We captured these specimens three years ago. In all that time, we've noticed no metamorphoses among any of them; but here-in these photos from Coari-these libbits are definitely different.

And these are differences that we've never seen anywhere before. Look at the thickness of the legs, the length of the torso, the roundness of the body, the shape of the head-these libbits are as fat and sluggish as jellypigs. Is it a difference in diet? Is this the effect of living in a mandala? Or is it a more profound change. We just don't know.

"All right. Let's move on. This next shot was actually taken inside one of the tunnels of the Coari nest. We sent a badger down one of the tunnels to see how far it could go. It ended up in one of those funny dead-end chambers. There was a baby gastropede at the bottom; it tried to eat the badger and the probe was destroyed.

However, on the way down, we did get this footage. Yes, some of you may recognize; this is a snuffler. No, this is not Voltaire's famous 'featherless biped.' To some people, though, it does kind of resemble a reporter at a press breakfast. A big mouth and no head.

"Here, let me show you some better shots taken from the Rocky Mountain mandala. The snufflers seem to be some kind of two-legged lizard. Essentially, what you have here is a fat snake, or maybe a leather-skinned slug, that walks on two bird-like legs. Instead of a head, the neck ends in a soft, snuffly-looking mouth, extremely well articulated. The eyes are on the ends of those little stalks that ring the neck. The brain is apparently in the thorax. The creatures are usually tan or gray, they almost always have patterns of red, orange, or purple markings along their backs and sides. We've seen them as small as chickens, and as large as ostriches.

"Okay, now let me go back to the Coari pictures. Do you see the difference? The legs on this creature are almost atrophied. It's longer and its mouth seems to be articulated differently. We've been seeing snufflers in nests almost as long as we've been seeing bunnydogs. We've never seen one like this before.

"This shot is a family of ghouls, popularly known as gorps. Notice the postures.

Notice the proportions. Okay-now this shot; this is the one we have at the special holding facility in Alameda. See the difference? Let me go back and forth between the two. The Alameda specimen is sloth-like, so are most of the ones we've seen prowling through Texas and Mexico. The Amazon ghouls, by comparison, look deformed. They're darker, bigger, and much more barrel-chested. Their heads are slung lower, their necks are thicker, their arms and upper-torso musculature are much more developed. Their features look... melted. Again, what's going on here?

Which is normal? Which is abnormal? Or are both types wrong?

"Now these pictures-these are millipedes. These three fellows are living at the Oakland farm; they're three of the oldest living millipedes we have in captivity. In fact-yes, they are. I collected these three specimens myself on one of my first missions with the Special Forces. Look at them, they look like pythons. They're almost beautiful. All right, now look at some of the millipedes we've photographed around the Coari mandala. Some of these have red bellies like the ones in Oakland.

Some have black bellies. Does it mean anything? We've seen a lot of black-bellied millipedes in areas where there are feral worms and a lot of red-bellied millipedes where there are socialized worms. Okay, now-look at these millipedes, photographed in a Coari corral. They're longer. They're thicker. Their mouth structures are different. And we've got both red-bellies-here-and black-bellies-as you see here in this other shot. Is this a new species? Or a variation on an existing form?

"All right. I think you're starting to see the pattern. Now, let's look at worms for a bit. This is important. Here are worms from all over North America. Pay attention to the mouths. Notice, we see mandibles, we see external teeth. Notice the antennae, notice the eyes, notice this structure that we call the brain-bulge, notice the arms.

Okay. Coari again. Here, some of these worms have no antennae. Some have no mandibles or external teeth. Here's one with no arms. Here's one with almost no brain-bulge. We know these are worms-they're big and red and furry. Or are they?

They all have the Coari pattern of striping. Or do they?

"Here are some worms with-" I stopped, turned, and stared at the screen far a moment, startled at my own realization. "-Excuse me. I'm sorry. I just realized something. Um. I was going to say-these worms you're seeing, they have a barely visible pattern of white stripes, which we've never seen before-except we have.

That's what I just realized." I shook my head in conscious embarra.s.sment, I ran a hand through my hair, I felt naked in front of the room. I looked to Lizard. She was looking at me puzzledly. There was nothing to do but explain.

"Um, if you've seen my report on last week's operation in Northern Mexico, then you'll see I drew a wrong conclusion. In that report, I said that three socialized worms had killed a feral one. I said that they recognized it was feral by its faint white stripes, which we'd never seen before. Now I'm looking at this footage, and I'm beginning to think that the white-striped worm was the socialized one, and the three worms that killed it were probably feral. Or were they? I don't know. I'm definitely going to have to file an addendum to that report." I glanced over to Lizard helplessly. "I'm not complaining, mind you, but we are definitely getting a tidal wave of information here; much faster than we can a.s.similate it. Anyway..." I turned back to the rest of the room. "At this point, we have no idea what the white stripes mean-except that we're seeing them in Coari and in j.a.pura, and I don't know where else. I have no idea if there are white-striped worms in Purus, we're checking into that.

"Okay. Now, let's get a little closer to the punch line. Take a look at this footage.

I'm not going to tell you where it's from or what these animals are. Not immediately.

See if you can figure it out for yourself. Yes, Dr. Shreiber?"

"This is a new Chtorran species, right?"

"Why do you think that?"

"The red fur. Only-" She stopped herself. "No. That's not right. There aren't any four-legged Chtorran species. Not shaped like this. You know what these things look like-?" Her face went suddenly pale.

"Go on," I urged.

She swallowed hard. "They can't be."

"They are," I said. There were too many puzzled looks still in the room. I was going to have to explain this. "Some of the natives living in the mandala apparently brought their cattle with them. Last year, the Coari mandala had two herds of sheep and a small herd of cattle. At that time, all the animals in the herds looked normal.

These pictures were taken last week. What you're looking at here is a cow and her calf. Notice the bright red fur-again, the neural symbionts. Also notice that the cow's legs seem shorter and thicker than normal; notice that the same deformity is even more p.r.o.nounced in the calf."

I moved to the next set of pictures. "These are the sheep," I said. The reaction in the room was a wave of honor and shock. Several people stood up, terribly frightened, looking around as if for an exit. I glanced over to Lizard. She lifted her palm off her lap and made a barely noticeable "be-patient" gesture. Wait, she was saying. Let them have their reactions. I nodded. I lowered my eyes for a bit. I felt like I was invading their privacy. Finally, I looked up again. I said, "Please-please take your seats. There's one more set of pictures."

They looked at me disbelievingly. I'd hit them, and then I'd hit them again-and now I'd just told them that I was going to hit them one more time. They looked betrayed. They looked terrified.

"Please sit down, all of you." I waited. There were disturbed murmurings in the room. I held up a hand for silence-and amazingly, they fell silent and resumed their seats. "This one's going to be the hardest of all," I said, and clicked right into it immediately. The picture came up on the screens like an accusation. "That's an Indian girl," I said. "And no, she does not have a glandular problem. That was our first thought too. Our second thought was that she was morbidly obese. But then we identified her from these photos taken in her home village. Her name is Maria Igo.

She's fourteen years old. And this is what she looked like last week in the Coari mandala.

"Last year, she was a normal child. This year-notice the thickness of her legs and b.u.t.tocks. See how short and splayed her legs have become. That isn't rickets. Look at her posture. She's almost libbit-shaped, and she leans forward like she's having trouble carrying her weight upright. And notice also that it looks like her arms are beginning to atrophy. The b.r.e.a.s.t.s-yes, she is pregnant, but that kind of swelling still isn't normal. Her chest measurement has got to be at least two hundred centimeters.

No, we don't know what those swirling patterns of lines on her arms and legs might be. We think they're tattoos, but they don't match any of the known Indian styles.

Here, in this shot, you can also see that some of the lines extend up onto the skin of her back and belly. If it's some kind of Chtorran thing, we don't know what it is or what causes it. We've never seen it before. And, of course, you can't miss the light coat of pinkish fur. She's just got a downy fringe, but in some of the other shots, you'll see more extreme growth. Neural symbionts? Probably. We're not sure.

"Some of you are thinking this is some kind of a bizarre fluke, aren't you?" I left the question hanging unanswered while the pictures of poor little Maria Igo span out across the screens. "That's what we were hoping too when this footage first popped up. Then the LIs started pulling up all the other anomalies. Here, judge for yourselves. These are the pictures we haven't put up on the network yet." I wished I could close my eyes as the new images began cycling up on the screens, but I forced myself to look, to partic.i.p.ate, to be part of the horror again. "Most of these are young women and children," I said. "The women all share the same pattern of deformities; so do the little girls. The little boys-here's one now-no, this is not a bunnydog. That is a six-year-old boy. He has bright red fur, and yes, he is s.e.xually mature. In this next set of pictures, you'll see that his p.e.n.i.s is shockingly huge-yes, here he is, copulating with one of the young women. At the risk of sounding salacious, it appears that they are both fairly experienced. This is obviously not the first time for either of them." I counted silently to three and then switched off all the screens and brought the lights up.

I took a breath. I looked out across the room at their devastated faces. "I am now going to tell you what I think we've just seen. Only General Tirelli, Dr. Zymph, and the President of the United States have seen these pictures. We are all agreed on the need for extreme secrecy here. I am now going to tell you what we think these pictures mean-and I hope to G.o.d I'm wrong. I hope that somebody in this room will come up with another explanation, a better one-so I can be wrong about this.

"What we're seeing here, all these metamorphoses of the various Chtorran species, is not mutation or adaptation or genetic defects or even natural variation within a species. No. What we're seeing here is the deliberate transformation of species into new forms. I said deliberate. That implies that there is some agency behind it. Yes, I think there is. Is it an intelligent agency, or is it some kind of phenomenon that only occurs when a mandala reaches a certain size and population density reaches a certain point? I don't know. But the evidence of these pictures is that the mandala somehow operates on its inhabitants to transform them according to its needs. There are no exceptions.

"Some of us have fallen into the habit of talking about the worms as if they're the real Chtorrans, the intelligence behind this infestation. If they are-and it hasn't been proven yet-then we're dealing with a species that isn't afraid to remodel itself according to its needs.

"What this footage demonstrates is that whatever Chtorran agency is causing these transformations, it is equally willing and able to effect major transformations in human biology as well." I looked into their terrified eyes and wished I could be anywhere else. "This is the real future of humanity in the mandala."

Perhaps, at this point, it would be appropriate to mention the psychological effect of the Chtorran infestation on those who have to deal directly and repeatedly with its most pernicious a.s.saults.

The condition is called Frustration Psychosis, also Red Queen's Syndrome, and we are beginning to see its occurrence in significant numbers of high-stress individuals. It is not simply battle fatigue. Affected individuals remain capable and willing; what shifts, however, is their perception of their own effectiveness.

The syndrome manifests itself as the feeling that the entire human race is running as hard as it can just to stay in the same place. Every time we escalate our effort, every time we expand our attack on the Chtorran infestation, it expands and adapts to include our latest responses. It feels as if there is nothing we can do that the Chtorr cannot a.s.similate. What this perception creates is an almost psychotic state of burnout and dread, mixed with an obsessive-compulsive need to drive oneself even harder and harder. The operative emotional frame is anger, intense and unrelieved.

The prognosis is not good; there is no treatment. The perception of futility may be entirely accurate. We have all been pushed beyond our limits. We cannot continue to drive ourselves at the same frantic pace. We cannot increase our efforts any more, and at the same time, we dare not stop. Sooner or later, the psychological balance of the war effort is going to break. If we as a species cannot perceive the opportunity for victory, then the only alternative is the manic hysteria of despair.

-The Red Book, (Release 22.19A)

Chapter 58.

Promises "A conclusion is the place where you stopped thinking. An answer is the place where you stopped asking the question."

-SOLOMON SHORT.

We didn't get to bed until late.

The conference lasted the rest of the day. Captain Harbaugh disappeared after a while, looking a little concerned about something, probably some procedural matter, probably with the Brazilian government. She came back later in the afternoon, but when it became apparent that the scientific team was going to a.n.a.lyze and inspect and rehash every minute detail of the operation, she slipped quietly out again; but she kept us liberally supplied with sandwiches, soft drinks, and beer, all night long, until the gathering finally petered out at two-thirty in the ayem. And not because everything had been said or discussed or resolved, but only because the partic.i.p.ants were too exhausted to continue.

We were exhilarated by the wealth of new information. We were emotionally drained by the cost of it. My head was buzzing with sounds and images and echoes of phrases and conversations that kept ricocheting around, refusing to lie down and be quiet.

I sat down on the edge of the bed, too numb to move.

"You okay?" Lizard asked.

"My brain hurts."

"Then it'll have to come out." She sat down next to me and put her arm around my shoulders. We sat quietly for a while, leaning one against the other, not talking, not doing anything.

"I'm tired-" I finally confessed. "I'm so tired, I don't even have the strength to die."

"I know what you mean."

"It isn't just the mission, sweetheart. It's everything." She stroked my hair, and I continued, "It's all this constant bickering. If we could just decide and do it, it wouldn't be so hard. Parts of it are even-" I remembered Willig abruptly. "-Parts of it are even fun. But it's all this stuff we don't know that keeps driving me crazy. When are we going to get some real answers?"

"I don't know."

"I do," I said. "I know exactly when we're going to get the answers we need-when someone goes down into the center of a mandala to live and stay and report back.

And I'm terribly afraid that it's going to be me, because n.o.body else can-" I looked at her intensely. "Please don't let that happen. Lizard, no matter what. Promise me that you'll never let them send me into a mandala nest. Never."

She didn't even have to think about it. "I promise you, I will never let that happen.

You can count on it."

Her words were soothing medicine. I let myself relax against her. "Let's get in bed," she said.

"Okay."

But neither of us moved.

"I keep thinking," I said softly. "Uncle Ira won again."

"Yep," she agreed.

"The Brazilian scientists are discredited. The Brazilian government is discredited.

And the Brazilian experiment-that one is definitely over. Uncle Ira couldn't have planned it better if he'd planned it."

"Oh, he planned it, all right," Lizard said. "Don't doubt that for a minute. He said to me before we launched, 'You gotta take McCarthy, if for no other reason than he'll sabotage the whole Brazilian experiment. I don't know how he'll do it, but you can depend on him to do it if it gets in his way."'

"He didn't say that."