The hell with everything. I let my distaste show. I shook my head scornfully and snorted. "And here's old Randy Dannenfelser again, with another case of the clap." I started to turn away in disgust.
"Don't come on so high and mighty with me, Miss Thing," he said archly. He stepped in close. His perfume was overpowering. "You're just another self-important sister."
He was referring to news so old, it was already history. And it was none of his business anyway. The hell with being enlightened. The hell with being responsible. The hell with being polite. I grabbed him by the lapels and yanked him up off his feet. It felt good to do something violent. We were uncomfortably close, nose to nose. Close enough to kiss. "Let me explain something to you," I said. I spit the words into his face. "You and I are not sisters. We will never be sisters."
"Thank God for that," Dannenfelser said. "Mother will be so relieved." He tried to remove my fists from his lapels; I tightened my grip; he gave up and lowered his hands again. He waited for me to get tired of this. His eyes were wide, but he didn't flinch; he didn't look away. After a moment of mutual hate-stares, I let him go, dropping him rudely to the floor.
Dannenfelser straightened his jacket, then gave me his iciest look. "The only difference between us," he sniffed, "is that I'm not ashamed of who I am. You can pretend all you want, Captain Closet, but poking the Lizard won't make you straight."
"The difference between you and me, Randy," I said icily, "is beyond your comprehension. We are light-years apart." And then I got nasty. "For one thing, my sex life isn't the definition of who I am."
He sniffed and looked unconvinced, but I wasn't through talking. "I have a relationship. You, however, are nothing more than a tacky tea-room queen, trolling the urinals and dropping to your knees at the sound of a zipper. And you have the colossal gall to think that your furtive sexual prowling gives us some kind of kinship! Not even in your wildest dreams! The difference between that kind of sex and a real relationship is so profound that you'd have to have a brain transplant before I could explain it to you. You and I have nothing in common and don't you ever forget that!"
Dannenfelser was momentarily unnerved by the raw blast of my anger, but he recovered quickly. He pursed his lips and replied in quick clipped words, "I'm so glad to see that the Mode Training works. It's made you so much more compassionate and enlightened. I mean, you used to be a real asshole." He straightened his jacket again; his hands were like naked pink spiders. He turned crisply and strode off down the corridor.
Was there anyone else I could offend? No.
I'd gotten my wish. I was alone.
The shambler tree is the answer to the question, can a plant walk?
The answer is yes, can, but only if it becomes an animal.
The amount of energy required for even simple animation demands a whole other scale of metabolic process. Plants, as we know them, are incapable of the kind of rapid energy production and utilization necessary for muscular movement. The chemical processes of plants are simply too slow.
For a plant to achieve motility, it must not only have the necessary musculature; it must also have the metabolism to support that musculature. It must be capable of taking in, storing, and managing the release of much greater energies than can be generated by simple photosynthesis. Accordingly, a plant capable of motion will have to have some mechanism for feeding on other plants, or even perhaps on any animals that it can capture. The more motion that a plantlike organism manifests, the more, in fact, it will need the equivalent of an animal-like metabolism and the processes necessary to maintain it.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 7
The Ecology of Thought
"You're only young once, but you can be immature forever."
-SOLOMON SHORT
I didn't go home. I was too angry. And when I was angry, I was useless.
I remembered something Foreman had said to me once, in the Mode Training. "If you insist on being angry, that's okay-that's a way to be too. But at least if you're going to be angry, use your anger constructively. Get mad where it counts!"
Right.
I wasn't mad at Lizard. I was mad at being denied the chance to do something powerful, something that would hurt the worms. Okay. So I was clear on that much.
Once I figured that out, there was still something I could do. I went down to the mission coordinator's and had her set up another reconnaissance operation in the same area.
Something had killed that worm, and I wanted to know what and how and why. If something was going around killing worms, I wanted to make friends with it. I wanted to learn its moves. And if that wasn't possible, I still wanted its autograph.
I didn't want a whole convoy, I wanted to get in and get out. Two rollagons would suffice, a squad of six in each. If either vehicle broke down, the other would still have the capacity to carry the whole team out.
As soon as the orders rolled out of the printer, I headed for the barracks, looking for the blue team. As I expected, they were doing the smartest thing a soldier can do in wartime; they were sleeping. Even so, I hadn't gotten two steps into the room before Lopez was bellowing: "Ten-hut!"
They rolled out of their bunks like precision machines. "Marano, Lopez, Reilly, Siegel, Willig, Locke, Valada, Ditlow, Nawrocki, Bendat, Braverman-where's Walton?"
"On the phone again, sir."
"Never mind. I need twelve volunteers. It shouldn't be dangerous, but that's not a promise. I want to go back in and do the recon we should have been doing in the first place. And this time, with no goddamn baby-sitting. It's pros only. I want to find out what killed that worm."
"Oh, hell," said Siegel, waving one hairy paw. "I didn't want to live forever, anyway. Count me in."
"Yeah, me too," grumbled Reilly. Marano and Lopez followed, as did the others. They grunted their assents with their usual sullen good nature and started gathering their gear and ecosuits.
I put Lopez in charge of outfitting, Reilly to double-check her, Locke and Valada to ready the rollagons, Braverman to take care of logistics, Bendat in charge of weaponry, and Nawrocki to take care of supplies. I picked Willig for mission specialist, which meant she got to handle the datawork. She gave me a dirty look, but she was already booting up the checklist.
In the meantime, I had my own work to do. I snagged a stool, hooked it around beneath me, plopped my butt onto it, and rolled up to a terminal, already shouting commands at it. In less than fifteen minutes, I'd filed a mission plan, the same one as before, plugged in a standard support program (coupled with a set of safeguard macros I'd written myself), waited for LI (lethetic intelligence) analysis from Green Mountain, noted the projected risk margins with a skeptical snort, and signed off on the orders anyway.
Ninety minutes later, we were in the air-and ninety minutes after that, we were on the ground again in northeastern Mexico. The rollagons trundled down the ramps, the VTOLs lifted off with a whisper, and we were once more crunching through the red crust of the waxy Chtorran infestation. The ocher sun was still high overhead, and the day was overcast with brick-red dust. There wasn't enough wind to clear it away.
We had at least six hours of daylight, all day tomorrow, and most of the day after that. If I couldn't find my answer in three days-or at least some kind of clue-I probably wasn't going to find it at all. At least, not this trip. I climbed up into the forward turret and started studying the scenery.
The crumpled hills were spotted and streaked with pustules of rancid vegetation; an appalling sight. It made me think of virulent sores spreading across the feverish body of a dying plague victim. Some of these plants lived only to die; they mulched the ground for the next generation to come.
Even through the filters, we could smell it-the sweaty, overripe stench of cancerous growth and fruity decay. The sickly-sweet odor had a druglike quality; nothing seemed real anymore in this nightmare landscape.
Siegel's voice came quietly through the all-talk channel. "Hey,
ah… what exactly are we looking for, Cap'n?"
I didn't answer immediately. The same question had been echoing through my own mind. Finally, I said, "Y'know, there used to be a theory that the worms were only the shock troops to soften us up. Slum clearance. When the worms got the human population under control, then we'd see the next step of the infestation. The theory was that whatever was going to come after the worms would be higher up on the food chain… "
"You mean we're looking for something mean enough to eat a full-grown worm? Uh-oh…"
"That's one theory. But a lot of other people think that if the purpose of the infestation is to establish a stable ecology, then it's got to have its own checks and balances. Therefore, the infestation has a built-in controlling mechanism for each and every species that we see, some kind of biological governor-so when the worms get to be too widespread, something else wakes up or kicks in. Maybe it's some kind of phenomenon like seventeen-year locusts; only when the conditions are right does it start munching worms. I'm just thinking; if we can find out what it is, whatever it is, it might be useful."
"Right. That's what I thought you said. We're looking for something mean enough to eat a full-grown worm."
After a while, the view from the turret became oppressive. I couldn't stand looking at the dreadful red hills anymore; I dropped down into the command bay, wiping my forehead. I realized I was sweating. Drops were rolling down the back of my neck. "Is there something wrong with the air-conditioning in here?" I demanded.
Willig shook her head. "It has that effect on everybody, remember?"
I didn't answer. She was right. I sank down into my command seat—the information cockpit-and began reviewing the satellite pictures again-for the umpteenth time. The thing about satellite surveillance was that there were so many different ways to analyze scans, so many various filters and enhancements, so many possible patterns, that it was as much an art as a craft. We didn't have the trained personnel that we needed, and as good as the lethetic intelligence engines were, they still lacked the ability to make intuitive leaps. LIs could give you statistical probabilities; they couldn't give you hunches-although the last I'd heard, they were working on adding that function too.
The resolution on this latest set of pictures was good. We could have been looking down from the top of a ten-story building. I had downloaded six months of aerial surveillance into the vehicle's memory; that should have been more than enough. I dialed up last week's pictures and watched from above as five rollagons approached the dead worm, scanned it, and then moved on.
Unfortunately, a backward scan from that moment revealed little else of use. A ragged streak of clouds, the southernmost tail of a Gulf storm that had never gotten big enough to be called a hurricane, slid across the coast of Mexico and obscured the view of the target area. Before the clouds came by, there was no dead worm on the ground. Afterward, there was.
The creature's death had most likely occurred sometime around dawn; the mission log showed that the interior temperature of the carcass, at the time we had scanned it, had still been several degrees warmer than the noonday air. Whatever had killed the worm could not have been more than six hours away.
Back to the satellite record
LI image restoration, including infra-red scanning and ultrawide spectrum enhancements, suggested that an event of some kind had occurred on the site just before dawn, confirming my hypothesis. There was a cluster of infra-red activity, plus that peculiar flurry of spiky electromagnetic radiation that worms sometimes gave off when they went into multiple communion; it sounded like a burst of whistling static on an AM radio.
So… the dead worm-John Doe-obviously had had a meeting with several other worms. Or had it? The evidence only demonstrated the possibility of communion. It didn't prove it.
Assume that there were other worms in the neighborhood. Where-were they now? Were they in danger too? And what was their relationship to John Doe? Great questions-all I needed was the trenchcoat, the hat, and a half-cigarette dangling from my lower lip.
Another question-how many worms had participated in the encounter?
The satellite scan wasn't precise enough. Less than six. More than two. Three large worms? Five small ones?
I hunched over the keyboard, mumbling and typing in commands. I watched the displays change on the screens. If there were worms, there had to be worm nests within-oh, figure ten klicks to start with. Look for circular structures or patterns. Look for anything that could be a mandala seed… Look for worms. Scan outward and backward for large movements
Bingo!
The record showed three worms. Not too large… following a fourth worm. Toward the direction of the event under the clouds that left one of them dead.
Hmm, so where did these worms come from? Are they all from the same nest? I typed another command. Backtrack the worms. This time the wait was longer. The worms had come from the northwest, but their origin was unclear. Okay. Try a different way. Move the center of the search, enlarge the radius, scan the surrounding terrain again. Look for a nest.
Tick, tick, tick. The LI engine considered probabilities. Sorry. No nests in the surrounding terrain; now checking for circular anomalies…
Huh? This was odd. A circular arrangement of shamblers only a few kilometers northwest of John Doe's death. A mandala seed? Could there be nests underneath-?
Son of a bitch!
It was the same grove of shamblers. The one I had used to scare the shit out of Major Bellus!
I should have recognized
No, from the ground, it wasn't obvious. From the air, it was unmistakable. Even so, I still felt like an idiot. I had to remind myself that I had been otherwise preoccupied at the time.
All right… I typed quickly. Scan the movement of these shamblers-
I waited while the LI engine sorted through six months of images. Nothing… These shamblers had been sitting in this exact spot for at least six months.
Huh? That wasn't normal.
But the unbelievable evidence glowed on the surface of the screen. These shamblers had taken root and stayed. The LI engine would have to wait until it could access the Green Mountain Archives before it could download and display any previous history of this region. Meanwhile, there were other things to correlate. It began overlaying transitory images-what else had moved through this terrain? It began to build an overlay of undeniable evidence.
Worms. Worm paths. Worm patterns.
Here was repeated evidence of a family of worms moving in and out of the shambler grove with impunity.
So that took care of my theory that the shambler tenants killed the John Doe worm.
Or did it?
The fact that these worms were moving in and out of the shambler grove didn't necessarily imply that any worm could safely enter the shambler radius. Maybe there was some kind of relationship-partnership ?-between these worms and these shamblers?
The patterns of movement were definitely consistent with those found around other worm nests
Worm nests underneath a shambler grove? Well, why not?
Damn!
This should have been discovered before the mission went in! And it would have been too, if there had been the skillage available. There were a lot of jobs not getting done these days because of the shortage of trained personnel.
One of the big LI engines in Atlanta or Florida would have spotted it, if anyone had thought to ask; except most of the H.A.R.L.I.E.[1] units' were so busy trying to model the larger patterns of the infestation that they probably hadn't put any attention on the way so many of the smaller pieces were fitting together.
I wondered if that might not be a mistake-if perhaps the real understanding of the Chtorran ecology might better be found down in the dirt, down among the bugs and beetles and wormberries. Maybe we were looking in the wrong place.
I didn't automatically assume anymore that someone somewhere was already considering these questions. I knew better. Yes, there were people on the job, but they
were all like me-playing catch-up as fast as they could. You got promoted and you learned the job you were thrust into, or reinvented it, or just ran as hard as you could and hoped nobody would notice that you weren't producing any results. You crossed your fingers and hoped it wasn't another mistake. And everybody prayed like hell that the critical jobs were getting done. It was the ultimate in on-the-job training. If you survived, you were doing it right.
But nobody was really trained; not the way they needed to be. There wasn't the time anymore. Even the Modies were too little, too late. The core group wasn't enough. We needed to train the whole planet overnight. Hardly anybody had the right mind-set for the jobs they had been thrust into. It's not enough to be handed a responsibility; you have to be trained how to use it. You have to learn to think the work. Unfortunately, too many important positions were being filled with people like Major Bellus.
It was a disaster. The network of scientific minds that was really needed to tackle this problem had disintegrated during the first set of plagues, and it had never properly been rebuilt.
There was only so much you could do with ancillary intelligence. Someday, perhaps, an LI would have the creativity to invent instead of simply synthesize. Until then, human thinkers were still a necessary part of the process. I didn't know if there were enough of the right kind of thinkers anymore; I did know that damn few of them were where they needed to be.
Despite the application of larger and better LI engines, despite the near-planetwide coverage of remotes, despite the improved observational devices, the enhanced information-gathering networks, despite the massive amount of sheer brainpower applied to the problem… the brainpower was completely and totally ineffective unless somebody was there to ask the right questions.
That was the real skill that would win the war. Asking the right questions. Applying the intelligence where it would have the most effect.
We had assembled the world's most powerful network of LI engines for application to the problem of the Chtorran infestation. There were nearly seven hundred Harlie units now connected in a worldwide network of applied intelligence, and new machines were coming on-line at the rate of one a week. The scale of information that could now be processed was beyond human comprehension. But real-time analysis of macro-realities only worked when you had an accurate model of the problem to begin with.
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