Siegel looked underwhelmed. "But we already know that. The comparison between the herdsong and the nestsong was first made four years ago. No conclusions were made because we don't know enough about the worms. Are you saying now that it's the same process?"
"Um-no," I said. "I don't know if it's the same process. It might be. But this is my point, if it is the same process, then it has to be much more intense an experience for the worms. The herd only sings a little bit. Only two or three times a week. The worms sing all the time. They're totally immersed."
Lopez and Siegel exchanged a silent glance. Then they both looked back to me. "Okay, yes, but-what does it mean?"
"I don't know," I said. "I don't know that it means anything at all. I'm sure it must. I'm sorry that it doesn't make more sense to you. But that's my big realization. The worms sing. All the time."
Are the whales truly extinct?
Although we have not had any confirmed sightings of whales in the past fourteen months, we hesitate to state for certain that they are gone.
Some small hope remains. It is certain that the extensive damage to our information gathering network is keeping us from seeing a complete picture. Because of the needs of the North American Operations Authority, many key stations have been reassigned to other duties, and the resultant large holes in the Gaia Geophysical Monitor Network have made satellite tracking of the whales an uncertain business at best. Land- and sea-based observations also remain unreliable.
But even if any whales have managed to survive in our suddenly hostile seas, it is unlikely that they can persevere much longer. The key agent of their destruction is the massive Enterprise fish, which apparently dines not only on whales, but on its own smaller siblings whenever it catches them.
Almost everything we know about the Enterprise fish can be summed up in one sentence: it's very big and it's very hungry. The appetite of one of these animals is simply unimaginable. Whatever gets swept into that enormous maw is fuel for the beast's relentless hunger and unceasing growth.
Mostly gray in appearance, the beasts are very slow moving and apparently very stupid.
Slow to act, slower to react; the best current hypothesis has it that the very small brain of the fish and its primitive nervous system are simply insufficient to the task of managing the needs of the creature when its size grows beyond a certain point.
The creature is particularly hard to destroy not just because of its massive size, but because it is mostly fat. The outermost layers of its body are incredibly thick slabs of blubber and cartilaginous webwork. The creature's internal substance has a rubbery, gelatinous consistency; in effect, the Enterprise fish is a giant bag of pudding with some internal organs suspended in the mass.
Existing weaponry is not designed for this type of target; ordinary bullets are wasted; explosive bullets carve out visible chunks of the creature's skin, but do little real damage. Larger explosives may gouge out craters in the animal's thick hide, but the low density of nervous tissue makes it unlikely that the creature will even notice.
On those occasions where military attacks have met with some success, the efforts have required thirty to forty-five minutes of the most intense bombardment before the leviathan even seems to notice its injuries-at least enough to change course or move away from its attackers. Perhaps it takes the monster that long to realize that it is experiencing pain and has been hurt.
Because of the threat to shipping, the network maintains a constant posting on the positions of all known Enterprise fish.
We have harpoon-tagged six leviathans in the waters of the northern Atlantic, and five more in the southern reaches. The Pacific basin currently hosts nineteen that have been tagged, and there have been reliable sightings of at least four others. No specific migration patterns have yet been charted. In general, Enterprise fish follow the path of least resistance and stay within the major ocean currents. Two leviathans have been destroyed by experimental Navy torpedoes with low-yield nuclear warheads. Additionally, another is known to have died of unknown causes, beaching itself in Auckland harboi; the stench of its decomposition rendered large parts of the city untenable for several weeks.
To date, individual Enterprise fish have sunk or disabled three nuclear submarines; an additional specimen, the largest observed to date, managed to inflict severe damage on the U.S.S. Nimitz before it was driven off by repeated missile attacks. Computer enhancement of the aerial views of the battle suggest that the leviathan was at least twice the length of the aircraft carrier. If so, then the attack might have been motivated out of hunger and the creature's perception that the carrier was another, albeit smaller, fish like itself.
Another Enterprise fish destroyed two hydroturbines off Maui, seriously damaging the island's electrical generation capability. Repair of the damaged turbines, if possible at all, is expected to take eighteen months. The same individual may also be responsible for ripping apart and sinking the Pacific-equatorial solar farm, field III; over twenty square miles of solar film was lost in that attack.
Lloyd's of London reports that over sixty other vessels have disappeared in the last two years, whose loss can almost certainly be attributed to the depradations of various Enterprise fish.
It is possible that these underwater behemoths are attracted to electrical or magnetic fields; experiments are currently underway to determine if this is so. Perhaps it is possible to lure Enterprise fish away from most human shipping lanes. Whatever the ultimate prognosis, at this point in time it is certain that our seas have become a very untenable environment for all forms of human endeavor.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 44
Adrift in the Head
"The shortest distance between two puns is a straight line."
-SOLOMON SHORT
Later, when the worst of the buzzing in my head finally faded away, I found my way back to the cabin that Lizard and I shared. I went straight to my desk and clicked on the terminal. But instead of dictating my thoughts right away, I just stared at the silent empty screen and studied the thought echoing around the inside of my head.
Siegel and Lopez were right. What did it really mean?
The problem wasn't one of understanding-we already knew that the worms sang-it was one of experiencing: What were they doing when they sang? Somehow I felt sure that the constant tuning-fork buzz of the nest was an important part of the Chtorran puzzle.
Everything about the goddamn worms was a puzzle. Were they intelligent or weren't they? How did they reproduce? What were their family relationships? How many sexes did they really have? Three? Four? A dozen? How did they communicate with their slaves? For that matter, how did they communicate with each other? Were the worms intelligent at all? Or were they just shock .
I roops for the real invaders still to come?
That last set of questions was the most troubling of all. We knew that the worms weren't intelligent because we'd captured individual specimens and studied them and tested them and run Ilu:m through all kinds of mazes and given them all kinds of hizarre problems and found that while an individual worm could he curious, experimentative, even clever, its rating on the Duntemann Intelligence scale remained somewhere between lawyer and coffeepot, with coffeepot being the high end of the range. They weren't stupid; they loved to solve puzzles, especially mechanical ones; but they were idiot savants of the weirdest sort. A worm could sit for days working through one of those damn binary puzzles that required several hundred thousand repetitive movements; but it was almost an autistic process-as if the creature's soul was completely disengaged from the activity, and the puzzle solving was merely an activity like twiddling one's mandibles.
In fact, one of the researchers had commented on this very phenomenon. His words had stayed in my mind. "The more you work with worms, the more you realize that nobody's home. It's like they're all machines. It's like they don't have minds. It's like they leave their souls at home when they go out."
I wasn't an expert on worm personalities. I'd only known three worms well enough to tell them one from the other. One was Orrie, short for Oroborous. The second was Falstaff. And the third was Orson. I'd assumed at the time that Orrie was capable of managing his own volition; but now that I thought back on it, a lot of what he did was patterned behavior. Had he gotten that behavior from Jason Delandro? Or had he invented it himself? The other two worms had never seemed as smart or as individual as Orrie.
But then I hadn't really been in the best shape at the time for observing the nuances of individual gastropedes from a scientific perspective. I was under Delandro's influence, and part of it, I suspected, was the narcotic influence of the various Chtorran substances in the daily diet of the tribe. How else could I justify or explain some of the things I had done while living with the renegades?
And yet, that was as close as I-or perhaps anyone-had ever come to living in a worm nest and reporting back what it felt like. Or was it?
Maybe not. I leaned back in my chair, stretching my hands back over my head and listening to my bones crack. The problem was communication. There didn't seem to be any mutually recognizable channel of communication between humans and worms.
Jason Delandro had said—claimed-that he and Orrie could talk as well as he and I could, but I had never fully believed that. When I had told him this, he had merely laughed, and said that it was a communication that was still beyond my limited experience, but not to worry, I would grow into it someday.
In my own mind, though, I never quite gave up the belief that on some level Delandro had simply trained Orrie, like a man with a very smart dog. Dogs could recognize combinations of words and phrases-"Go outside, get the ball, bring me the ball"-why couldn't a worm?
Maybe worms didn't think. Maybe they just remembered. Maybe they just ran programs, plugging in the appropriate set of behaviors for each and every situation they ran into. Except-where did the programs come from in the first place?
Our best guess was that the worms were sort of, somehow, probably evolved from the Chtorran equivalent of insects. Maybe. Insects didn't have brains. A smart one had maybe a thousand good neurons in its entire body, but it still managed to act as if it had some rudimentary intelligence; how was that managed?
Experiments with simple robots had demonstrated that coordinated behaviors can be learned very quickly. Intelligence wasn't a single high-level process; it was a collection of subprocesses, each of which was also divided into subprocesses, and so on, all the way down, with each process taking action according to its local priority. The process that activated the Jim McCarthy body when it was making love to the Lizard Tirelli body was clearly not the same process that activated the body when it was out torching a Chtorran village or kicking the crap out of Randy Dannenfelser. At least, I hoped to God it wasn't.
This was part of what the Mode Training had been based on-about training your subprocesses, about activating the appropriate ones, about recognizing what processes are asserting priority and taking control at any given moment, and noticing whether they were appropriate processes or not. The Training had been about the creation of new processes, designed to act as… what? Supervisors. Trainers. Gurus. The goal was the creation of a modeless mode so that you could create new modes as you needed them. The result was supposed to be not only an increased ability to respond appropriately, but also an increased ability to produce results.
Did it work?
Sometimes. Sort of. Maybe. When I remembered to remind myself that I was one of the trained.
But… it didn't really make you think smarter. It only made you act smarter. The goddamn puzzle of the goddamn worms still frustrated me every time I looked at it. There was something we were missing about these creatures because it was so alien to our experience that it didn't matter how many times it walked up to us and belched blue fire in our faces, we still wouldn't recognize it. We'd explain it away as something else.
The Chtorr was alien. Not alien as in different. Alien as in beyond our worldview and perhaps even as in completely beyond the possibility of human comprehension.
"Whoever or whatever they are," I explained to the terminal, "they don't eat like we do, they don't reproduce like we do, they don't think like we do, they don't feel like we do, they don't experience the world like we do. They aren't us, they aren't motivated like us, they don't desire like us, they don't fear like us, they don't share the same urges, the same drives, the same anything. We have no conception of what it is like to simply be a Chtorr, because we don't even know what a Chtorran is."
At the Virtual Reality Center in Massachusetts, they were trying to simulate a Chtorran worldview. I'd seen and participated in some of their earlier environments. It had been, to put it mildly, a mind-fuck.
I'd climbed inside the artificial realities-become a bird, broken away from the two-dimensional maze of land-bound existence. I'd swum through the sea of air, hurtling, floating, lifting, climbing, diving. The blue sky envelops a distant wall of opportunities and dangers. Perceptions shift and flicker. A tree becomes a protecting village. A fence is a gathering and a launch point. The sky is a towering web of flavors. Here, the wind is a solid presence. Everything is bright and wild. The community soars together in the air-boundaries only exist below; the community shatters on the ground. All the voices chatter and roar at each other, barking territorial defiance. No, the air is freedom, heart beating hard, muscles pumping furiously. Everything is effort and joy and grace. Climbing and rising, if you get high enough, you can rest on the air just hold your wings outstretched and spiral gently in the updraft. Here, the colors are different-you can see the magnetic lines in the air. The land is far away below, a place to visit, not to live. Flight is the natural state of being. The sky is home. The sky is life.
By comparison, a cow is a mountain.
The earth rumbles. All that meat, all those stomachs. A factory of flesh. A cow is glued to the ground by gravity. It lumbers through life. Everything is lunch. Life is a salad bar. A cow's sole purpose is digestion. It wanders through its days, eating and belching -ruminating, chewing, and farting incredible amounts of methane into the air. The grass is both carpet and meal. Here, it is forever teatime, and we sprawl amidst the watercress and cucumber sandwiches, munching contentedly and percolating in all four stomachs. The sun is a warm blanket, sauce for the surrounding salad; the rain only freshens the flavor. To a cow, concrete is a crime, a fence is a sin. A cow doesn't have a life, it has lunch. It has to be this way; a cow must consume a lot of salad to support its mass. Life is one long meal.
Mice. A mouse. A thing so small, it exists unseen and everywhere. It scurries through mazes of narrow tunnels and close dark spaces. Everything that moves in the world above is dangerous-hawks, cats, weasels, dogs, owls; the world closes in around you. Open space is terrifying. Noises are terrifying. Even il'you escape, the shock to your system can be so intense that you die from fright. Mice don't live. They panic. Brightness is a threat. Movement is a threat. Everything big is a threat. And yet-mice are courageous. They have to be. Get into the mouse world and the colors change. Sounds become louder, higher, deeper. Explore, thrive, breed, challenge, grow-and do it quickly. Mice are the undermen of the world, first to die, first to repopulate. Mice are the little warriors.
Fly with the birds, munch with the cows, live in the mouse world, swim with the whales-discover all the different ways of seeing and smelling and hearing.
But the experience is incomplete.
The best you could get from the Virtual Reality Center would be the simulated realities of birds and cows and mice. The truth might he vastly different. Until we could put an implant into a mouse or a cow or a bird, we'd never really know for sure.
Nevertheless, the point was still made; the experience of other creatures is different because their worldview is differentbecause the way that every creature moves through the world, interacting with it, smelling it, tasting it, surviving it, and finally even reproducing in it, is a uniqu
e and special experience.
As flawed as the simulations were-flawed, vicarious, filtered through human equivalents, and finally experienced in human terms-as imperfect as it was, it still gave us an assertion, a place to start considering the problem. Sometimes it was about as effective as trying to butter a piece of bread underwater, but even so, it was still u way to get a sense of the gulf between one species and another.
If only we knew enough about the Chtorrans to begin putting together a simulated reality of the Chtorran experience. If onlyWe could model the tunnels and create a simulated environment. We could duplicate the omnipresent sounds of the nests. We could match the vision of the eyes and the frequency response of the hearing receptors so that the cybernaut participants could move through the environment with the same senses as a Chtorran-but n was the other relationships that mattered. The ones we still didn't know about.
"Sing," I said to myself, abruptly. "We have to learn how to sing like the Chtorr." But… I already knew that. That was the problem.
I remembered-
The first time I'd gone into a Chtorran nest and found four worms in communion… I'd dropped my weapons. I'd put my hands upon their warm flanks. They had been purring. Humming. Vibrating with a note that went right through me. Their fur had tingled. It felt softer than mink. I had leaned into the sound, pressing myself against it, trying to-
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