Later-it was another time-I was allowed to join a survey flight. We'd headed out across the Pacific, west of Palmyra, south of Kauai, eventually dipping low to survey the huge Enterprise fish that regularly patrolled the Hawaiian Zone. It moved grandly through the flat gray sea, sliding and rolling like a force of nature; occasionally it disappeared beneath the surface of the sea for many long moments-we could see its great dark shadow groaning through the depths; then, just as suddenly, it would come breaking up through the waves, the water running in rivers off the landscape of its barnacled, encrusted back. Once it rolled sideways, and we saw one of its eyes, an enormous black protuberance the size of a swimming pool. I had the strangest feeling that it was looking up at us, and I knew that it was considering the physical impossibility of leaping to catch the tiny choppers that monitored its migration. One of the other planes fired a transponder harpoon into the behemoth's flesh. It carved away a great gout of pinkish-gray matter in an explosion that looked more like a geyser than a wound in a living thing. A long endless moment later, the beast reacted and dove. It took the longest time for it to disappear; first the head end dipped lower and lower, then the water began sweeping up over its flanks toward the raised ridge that ran down the center of the creature's back. It was an island disappearing beneath the waves. I thought of Atlantis. I thought of whales. I thought of submarines and aircraft carriers. I thought of all the things that were irretrievably lost to us. I realized it in a way that I had never known before: the oceans of the world would never again be safe. How did these things breed? How long did they live? How big did they get? Finally the last long part of its gigantic body tipped upward and disappeared like a sinking ship sliding downward toward the bottom of the sea.
I'd seen so many different pieces of the Chtorran ecology. I'd seen the steady process of its red encroachment across the blue-green Earth, and despite my absolute determination to resist it in every way I could, I still could not escape from the knowledge that the Chtorran ecology, whether considered in its myriad specific individual manifestations or viewed as a vast amazing process of dazzling complexity and intricacy, was a most glorious celebration of life. The diversity, the vitality, the fecundity of the many plant and animal species left me awestruck in wonder. It was beautiful, it was resplendent, it was overwhelming-and the single undeniable fact of the infestation was that human beings were so irrelevant to the incredible hunger and need and power of this process that if we survived at all, it would be only as an afterthought-and only if we could carve a niche of our own in the new world order.
For myself, the need to survive had long since vanished, killed by my participation in too many deaths and burned out by too many passages through the fires of my own rage. No, I didn't need to survive-a curious realization, that-but I did need to know. It was my curiosity that drove me now. I would not stop until I understood-if not the why, then certainly the how. And perhaps the knowledge of the how would point me toward the why. And maybe someday, even, the who.
The more I immersed myself in the Chtorran infestation, the more I experienced its incredible diversity, the more I began to sense an underlying logic of process. I couldn't put it into words yet, but I could feel a rightness about certain relationships and an uneasiness about others-as if some were precursors of the way things should be and others were only temporary accommodations to the feral quality of the immediate situation. More and more, as I considered the individual pieces of the ecology, I tried to sense how they must fit into the ultimate pattern that the infestation was growing toward. I saw the things I looked at not as individual manifestations, but as parts of a larger process. And always, now, I was looking for the feeling of rightness.
This nest-there had to be things down here that moved and crawled, because there had to be a way to get the seeds and eggs, and all the things that would come hatching out of them, up to the surface where they could begin their part of the process of devouring the Earth right down to the naked dirt.
These gray slugs-were they baby worms? Or just slugs? Yes? No? Maybe. Perhaps. I didn't know. I didn't know enough yet to have a feeling about them. Logically, it made sense-and just as logically, it didn't. There were pieces missing. This ecology was too complex, too interrelated. Too baroque. Nature's answers were always simple and elegant-but on Chtorr, nature seemed to have different definitions of both simplicity and elegance. Could a one-celled creature imagine a human being? There was the question.
Imagine yourself as an amoeba, flowing and stretching, always hungry, always searching, enveloping, ingesting, occasionally dividing-could you consider the possibility that you and another single-celled organism just like yourself could cooperate for mutual benefit? And if you could imagine that, could you extend the concept to imagine many individual cells forming conglomerate groups to increase the possibilities of survival and success for all of the members of the group? Could you, a mindless amoeba, conceive of the possibility of an organ? Could you make the leap from there to the concept of an organic being, a creature composed of many different conglomerate groups all working together, each structure providing a specialized function for the good of the whole? And if you could make that leap to imagine all the multiple interrelationships of all the millions of different special cells and processes and organs necessary to the survival and success of even so small a creature as a tiny white mouse, then could you imagine a human being? Could you imagine intelligence without first being intelligent yourself?
And if you, the one-celled being, could somehow, impossibly, imagine the existence of beings greater than yourself, could you then make the even more impossible leap to consider the interrelationships of such beings? If you can imagine a single being, can you imagine a family of beings? A tribe? A corporation? A city? Can you imagine a nation of cooperative processes? And finally, could you make the biggest leap of all, to consider the processes of an entire world? Could you?
Could an amoeba imagine a human being?
Could a human being imagine the nature of the Chtorr?
At least the amoeba had a good excuse-it couldn't even imagine. The failure of human beings was that we couldn't imagine big enough.
Sometimes, in my sleep, I felt glimpses-like something large and silent moving through the night, a great shape, larger than an Enterprise fish rising from the sea of dreams. I could sense it like a wall. A mountain. A tide of meaning. It lifted me upon its crest.
Sometimes, in my sleep, I heard it call-a lonely sound, deep and dreadful; a soft chorus of despair. It was a mournful note, like an enormous gong resonating at the bottom of the abyss of unconscious knowledge. The sadness was profound and inescapable.
I would try to turn and see it behind me. It felt almost like a face or a voice or a person that I knew, but wherever I turned, it was hidden in the veils of the dream.
Sometimes the feeling was sexual, a hot sliding wet embrace that enveloped me as if my whole body were plunging deep into the womb of home.
Sometimes I heard my name being called as if from very far away. Sometimes I knew-as if I had suddenly been expanded a millionfold-fireworks of understanding exploded in my mind-in that white-hot pinpoint moment, I not only understood the scale of the thought that held me, I also became the being capable of creating and holding such grandeur. I would reach for it, but before I could complete the action, before my fingers could close around it, I would awake, sweating, trembling-and the unnerving bottomless feeling would stay with me for days or weeks; my sleep patterns would remain disrupted and my body would ache with a desire that no physical act could satiate.
Sometimes I felt enveloped in a fog of my own mind, still enraptured in the aftermath of these mordant bright hallucinations.
Or perhaps it was just the sweats, a milder form of hallucinogenic fever. I didn't know.
Sometimes I felt as if I were a worm. Seeing and hearing and tasting with my entire body all at once. It made me twitchy. I itched in places I couldn't scratch. I was hungry for things I couldn't tast
e, things I didn't know; as desperate as the adolescent yearning for the mystery of mating, but so profound and far beyond that simpler urge that human beings still knew nothing of it.
Sometimes I sat alone and pondered this incredible driving need I felt for greater consummations than were previously dreamt. And sometimes I was certain that I was mad and that my madness had devoured me, left me plunging down a corridor of red obsession.
Sometimes I felt ripped open.
I wanted to tell someone exactly how I felt, and even as I felt the urge to speak, I felt the greater urge to hold my tongue. I was supposed to be an agent of discovery. But if what I was discovering was so disturbing that it called into question my ability to perform my task, I dared not report it. I couldn't let them stop me. Now now.
So I kept my silence and kept my strange dreams to myself. And wondered what it was that my subconscious mind was trying desperately to tell me.
-and were these mindless slugs baby worms or not? I couldn't complete the picture. I couldn't find the rightness. The thought gnawed at me that there was something terribly important to be discovered here. It annoyed me, because I was sure that I should see it, and I couldn't. I had another piece of the puzzle, but nothing to connect it to. As hard as I stared, I couldn't figure it out.
I became aware that Siegel was saying something. "Huh? What? Sorry."
"I asked, what are you thinking?" he repeated.
"Oh, uh-nothing important." I covered quickly. "Just considering that we're probably going to get one helluva bounty for this."
"And that isn't important?" Siegel asked.
"What are you going to spend it on?" I retorted.
"I'll think of something. I could buy myself a cup of coffee and just sit and sniff it for a whole afternoon."
"Coffee?" asked Willig. "What's coffee?"
"It's like brown stuff, only not as awful."
"I remember coffee," I said. And then I wished I hadn't. I remembered it too vividly; the hot black smell of it. "Oh, God-I'd kill for a cup of the real stuff. Even instant."
"Me too," agreed Siegel. From above, Reilly grunted something unintelligible; but it sounded like agreement.
"What's the lowest thing you'd do for a cup of coffee?" Willig asked.
"Are we fantasizing, or do you know someone?"
"Dannenfelser."
"You're kidding."
"Uh-uh. He manages General Wainright's private store."
"Offer me fresh strawberries and Nova Scotia smoked salmon and I might consider it-" I started to say, then caught myself with a shudder. "No, forget I said that. If I ever get that desperate, you're authorized to put a bullet through my brain. I'll be of no further use to humanity."
"Will you put that in writing?"
"Don't be so hasty."
"Hey, is that true about Dannenfelser? Whyizzit that scumbags like him always end up with the biggest slice of pie?"
"Because the good people of the world have too much self-respect to cheat their comrades," I said.
"Oh, yeah, I forgot. Thanks for reminding me."
"Anytime."
"Captain?"
"Yeah?"
"Is this nest really important?"
"I think so," I said. "I think this is how they got here."
For the record, the first wave of plagues wiped out at least 3 billion human beings. We will never have an exact count.
At this point, we should also note that secondary and tertiary waves of disease, coupled with the many ancillary effects of the mass dying, will probably result in an additional 2 billion deaths. The surviving human population may eventually stabilize at 3.5 billion. No reliable predictions about population rate can be made beyond that point.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 19
Seeds and Eggs
"The third eye does not need a contact dens."
-SOLOMON SHORT
There was silence for a moment. Finally, Siegel asked quietly, "'Splain me, Boss?"
"Not quite sure of the details," I said. "But I'll bet you Randy Dannenfelser's shriveled little testicles that this whole thing is some kind of incubation womb. We never found spaceships, no evidence of any kind; no sightings, no sites, no nothing. We couldn't figure out how they got here, right? So everybody's been crazy over that one question. How did the infestation get started?"
"They dropped seeds from space," said Siegel. "That's what Dr. Zymph says."
"Yes and no-the problem with that theory is that it doesn't work. We tried simulating a drop from space. If the package is too small, it burns up on reentry. If it's well padded, it still burns up, only it takes longer. If it's big enough to reach the ground intact, it's big enough to leave a crater. Out of hundreds of simulations, both real and virtual, only the simplest of seeds survived, none of the eggs; the exposures were too extreme, the impacts too severe. The Denver labs worked on it for three years before they gave up and turned to more immediate concerns.
"See, here's the problem. Assume that you're Chtorra-forming a planet. You can't worry about landing individual plants and animals; that's too slow. You have to think about your larger purpose. What you really want to do is get the genetic heritage of the ecology established, right?"
"Right. I guess."
"Okay. We're humans, so we think in terms of seeds and eggs. But Chtorrans don't necessarily have to think the same way. Let's just think about the genetic code alone. That's all you're really interested in. You can strip the naked code out of a cell and store it as a meta-viral chain. So now you've got the information for your critter; but how do you get the code down to the surface of the planet? You can drop an insulated package that can survive the heat of the drop and even the impact. But you still need something to grow it in-some environment in which the code can generate critters-so you're back to seeds and eggs again, aren't you?
"See, the problem with seeds and eggs, especially eggs, is that the more complex the adult creature, the more fragile the egg, and the more nurturing it needs to hatch. And that doesn't even get into the problem of nurturing the young. Anything you can come up with, organic or technological, that can hatch an egg and nurture the infants, is going to be even more complex and more fragile than the creature it's designed to support.
"Think about it. How do you send a millipede egg across ten or twenty light-years and guarantee its survival? How do you get it safely down to the surface of the planet? How do you guarantee that the egg will be nurtured and protected in the right kind,of nest long enough for it to hatch? How do you make certain that the right kind of food will be available for the millipede to eat so that it can live long enough to reach adulthood and reproduce and make more millipedes? And that's just one species. We've identified hundreds of Chtorran creatures. How do you provide for all of their separate and individual concerns? Bunnydogs and snufflers and gorps and Enterprise fish-what kind of machinery do you provide to nurture all those?"
Siegel shrugged. "I dunno. I never thought about it before."
"This is the answer," I said. "A big part of it, anyway. Dr. Zymph was right; the Chtorrans are seeding the planet from space. But not with ordinary seeds and eggs. They've been dropping mama-shambler seeds. Have you ever seen a shambler seed? They're big, they look like pineapples. You cut one open, and you see that the outer shell is layer upon layer upon layer of gauzy stuff; you can spend a lifetime unraveling it.
"The inner shell of the shambler seed is filled with even more layers of the same fibrous matting, only this stuff is thicker and more gritty. You look at it under the microscope and you see that it's really thousands and thousands of tiny little structures, not quite cells, but not quite anything else either; they don't grow, they don't do anything that we can recognize. We couldn't figure out whether the inner layers were intended as food or padding or insulation or what, but I bet I know now. Those little structures are the freeze-dried nuclei of all the other critters in the ecology.
"See, a shambler s
eed is one of the few things you can drop from space with a reasonable expectation of it surviving the impact. It sheds its outer skin, layer after layer, like a series of drogues. It slows the descent, it's like concentric parachutes. In fact, I'll bet that the seeds that fell from space had even thicker shells than Earth-grown shambler seeds. Anyway, the mama-seed impacts, right? If conditions are right, it grows into a shambler bush, later a tree. It spreads its seeds and grows more shambler trees; pretty soon, you have a herd of shamblers prowling around the countryside. What are they looking for? A place with the right combination of sunlight and water and soil and probably even prey animals for the tenants. The grove of shamblers takes up a position, the individual trees sink their roots, they link up and begin carving out or growing a large central underground chamber. There's got to be some mechanism, some creature or process or something." I realized that my enthusiasm for the subject must have been startling to my listeners, but I couldn't contain myself, I was so excited. Even as I spoke, the idea was becoming clearer in my mind.
"Okay, so pretty soon you have this womb nest here. That's when some of the organs within the shambler start maturing; or maybe they aren't shambler organs, but more like symbionts. I don't know. But whatever they are, they grow into this stuff, all these tunnels and pipes and tubes, all these big rubbery blobs and squids and slugs and things. Everything."
"I love it when you talk scientific," said Willig, but despite her interruption, she was as rapt as all the others. The entire crew-not just Willig, but Reilly, Siegel, Locke, Lopez, and Valada-were caught up in this extrapolation.
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