A Season for Slaughter watc-4

by David Gerrold

  I'd felt it again, in the herd, the Great San Francisco Herd. The herd sang. The human note-it wasn't the same song, but it felt like the same yearning to me. The need to be a part of some larger process. It was the submergence of self into a larger personality.

  If the humming of the worms was an unconscious sound, then the worms were no more than bees or ants or termites. And their nests were as unconsciously organized as the honeycombs in beehives or the intricate tunnelwork of termite mounds, a product not of conscious processes, but just the way that a zillion little copies of the same program all interact with each other-the same way that an insect isn't smart enough to walk, but the subprocesses of its thousand neurons are smart enough to cooperate and create the larger process of locomotion.

  But… if the worms were anything more than that as individuals-and as yet, there was still no real proof of that-then there had to be, on some level, some kind of conscious purpose or function or reason for the incessant humming of the nest, the collective vibration that resonated throughout every Chtorran settlement. And, if I was right, if there were, then it seemed to me that from the Chtorran point of view, it had to be very much the same phenomenon as experienced in the herds. Only more so. Everything with the worms was more so.

  With the herd the humming produced a submergence of self. With the worms, I wondered if it didn't produce a transcendence of self. Did a worm even have a self? Had Orrie truly been conscious, let alone sentient? I still wasn't sure. Was a dog conscious? Do dogs think? What about chimps? And while we're being so damned anthropomorphically arrogant, what makes you so sure that human beings are even conscious? Just because we think that we think, we think that means we really think. What if our thinking is really just the illusion of thinking? What if we're programmed to think that we think? And if so, who wrote the program?

  According to the Mode Training, human beings start programming themselves in the womb. And badly. Because we're none of us trained to program a human being. We have to figure it out as we go. And most of the time, we make assumptions based on incomplete evidence and use that as justification for making iuaccurate connections.

  Maybe the worms were smarter because they didn't need as much programming. Maybe whatever programming an individual had wasn't the product of his own observations as much as it was Ihc collective vote of his entire settlement.

  There. That was the thought.

  The song was the way that the worms tuned themselves. To themselves. To each other. To the nest.

  Yes.

  Bees. Bees sing. The whale hive hums. The sound of all those vibrating wings fills the nest. A bee resonates with that sound every moment of its life within the nest. It doesn't exist. The hive prevails over all. There's no such thing as one bee.

  And there's no such thing as one Chtorr. Yes. My God!

  There are no Chtorran individuals.

  I straightened up and looked around. The day had turned yellow, and the first shades of dusk were tinting the afternoon. We were halfway between nowhere and nowhere. I stared out the window. The wide Amazon panorama rolled in green waves out to the distant blue horizon. I was completely alone with this idea. I was staggered by the size of it. I couldn't even see what had triggered the realization just the pure Brownian movement of ideas bumping randomly into each other inside an otherwise empty head.

  We'd missed it. We'd known this all along, but we hadn't let ourselves experience the reality of it. We'd been seeing them as individual creatures-things that formed families and eventually tribes and maybe nations. But we'd overlooked the obvious truth of it. They had no individual identities. They were a hive/nest/ colony thing.

  "Stop thinking of worms as the enemy," I said. "The worm doesn't exist. Think of the mandala as the creature that we're up against-and see where that train of thought leads."

  The words formed themselves on the screen in front of me. They were complete. I didn't know what else to add. At least, not right now. But I was certain that if I let the idea percolate awhile, a lot more would occur to me. I had the wonderful feeling that I had opened a very large door today.

  Contrary to popular belief, the most ubiquitous organism in the Chtorran ecology is not the stingfly. It is the neural symbiont.

  The symbiont is able to infect and survive in the bodies of a wide variety of Chtorran life forms. Neural symbionts have been found in gastropedes; bunnydogs, ghouls (gorps), libbits, snufflers, and nest boas. Additionally, a related form of symbiont has been found growing in shambler nests, red kudzu, and some varieties of wormberries.

  Quite simply, the creature is so well adapted, it will grow wherever it can find appropriate nutrients.

  The creature is apparently capable of functioning as both a plant and an animal, depending on the circumstances of its environment. It obviously prefers the flesh of the gastropede, because it grows thickest inside gastropede bodies, but it is clearly not limited to a narrow spectrum of host environments.

  —The Red Book,

  (Release 22.19A)

  Chapter 45

  Intimacy

  "Intelligent life is a way for the universe to know itself. In other words, the universe is just as vain as the rest of us."

  -SOLOMON SHORT

  I have never liked airplanes. I have never liked looking down out of a window. Seeing that the only thing holding me up is the goodwill of the universe is not my idea of a good time. I've had loo much experience with the so-called "goodwill" of the universe.

  The Hieronymus Bosch, on the other hand, wasn't an airplane. It was a cruise ship, drifting through a silent ocean of air. We vailed through shoals of purple-banded clouds. Soft and noiseless, we slid through the blazing tropical day and the brilliant equatorial night with equal grace. We were an Enterprise fish of the sky, bright, implacable, impassive. Our multiple spotlights probed, oxplored, revealed-the jungle beneath us was black.

  I decided that I liked the gigantic airship. It was a great mothering whale in the sky, peaceful and serene. I actually felt relaxed here, out of reach of everything that had been pursuing me Ior so long. I felt comfortable again

  It was an illusory feeling, at best. There was no escaping the horror that we were heading into, but for this short while, I didn't have to deal with it. I floated above my nightmares in a peaceful, dreamlike reverie. If only we could have gone on like this forever, circling the world around and around again, never landing anywhere, like some fabulous legend in the sky…

  Once, while we were still over the flat blue ocean, Captain Harbaugh had pointed out a school of dolphins racing along beneath us, flipping themselves up and out of the water, in and out of our tremendous shadow. For a moment, I had felt both innocence and joy-there was still goodness in the world. There were still creatures who could play in the spray of the sea. And then, the feeling faded into one of sorrow. How long did these creatures have left to live? Would they run into a patch of red sea sludge and sicken and die? Or would these fragile and beautiful souls be swallowed up by one of the five Enterprise fish known to be scouring the south Atlantic? Or would they simply beach themselves in confusion as so many thousands of others had already done? I wanted somehow to reach down and warn them. Or save them. Or somehow protect them. I felt futile and helpless and angry.

  Now, as we moved deeper into the heart of the great Amazon basin, the feeling intensified. Captain Harbaugh was following the course of the Amazon, generally keeping the wide waters of the river beneath us or within sight. Our shadow had become a long looming menace, gliding steadily westward, an enormous blot that rolled across the feathery green surface of the jungle canopy. Sometimes the abrupt silent darkness would startle a colorful bird into flight; screeching and chattering its dismay. Several times we saw Indians in their canoes stop and stare upward. Once we saw children run screaming to their parents. Who could blame them? A giant pink Chtorran in the sky? Wouldn't you run?

  The balcony was an unexpected luxury, a source of continual wonder. Over the ocean, we could stand at
the railing and look straight down at the luminous foam dancing across the surface of the deep dark sea. The dirigible's shadow left no wake. We moved across the water and left it undisturbed. Later, over the jungle, we could see the shine of moonlight reflecting eerily off the lush and verdant foliage below. A million waxy leaves, their individual surfaces just shiny enough to gleam, not quite bright enough to sparkle, added their glimmers together, all of them voting a collective dazzle, flickering like grounded stars. They looked like moonbeams on a broken sea.

  And then, sometimes, the jungle would break abruptly apart, revealing a sudden startling reflection of brightness like a piece of dark mirror peeking upward through the tangle to catch and bounce a flash of errant light-the moonlit clouds beyond us or the glare of our lights. It was only the river, or a tributary, winking hello, reminding us again of its brooding presence.

  I was standing out there, staring into darkness, when Lizard came up silently behind me. She stood next to me without speaking, and together the two of us just breathed in the flavors of the wind. Below, the jungle must have been pungent. Up here, wlng with the clouds, it was a scent of greenery and blossoms. There were darker, unfamiliar odors too; some of them were the steady processes of growth and decay, out of which a jungle feeds itself-earthy textures, not unpleasant; but some of them were crimson too, and once I caught the faint waft of a gorp, but it was very far away, and the odor disappeared quickly behind us.

  Lizard didn't speak. She laid her hand on mine, and after a while, she put her arm around my shoulders and let me lean on her, Iike a little boy leaning tiredly against his mommy. It was her turn to be strong.

  "I read what you wrote," she said. After a while, she asked, "What does it mean?"

  I chuckled softly. "That's the same question Siegel and Lopez asked me. I don't know yet. I just know it's true. It feels true." We didn't talk for a while. We just let ourselves be. We listened and breathed and tasted the smells in the air. I turned my head so I could smell the duskiness of her perfume. "You smell nice," I said.

  "I need a shower," she said. "I feel hot and sweaty. Want to scrub my back?"

  I put on a quizzical expression. "I dunno if I should. I mean, when I was just a mere captain, you could order me to perform personal maintenance duties; but now I'm a civilian, I think those kinds of chores should be voluntary-"

  "Never mind," she said. "I'll ring for Shaun."

  "You play dirty, lady."

  "I am dirty. Now are you going to scrub my back or not?"

  We continued our discussion in the shower. While I washed her, we talked of minor matters, procedural things. Did you take the cat to the vet? What do you want for dinner on Sunday? Did you remember to call your sister? The baby did what? That kind of thing. The sex play, for once, was forgotten, unnecessary. If anything, it would have been an interruption.

  There is an intimacy that transcends the mechanics of intimacy, and Lizard and I had finally achieved that state. We had become so familiar with each other, so knowing of each other's bodies, that we didn't have to talk of bodies every time we took off our clothes; we didn't have to talk about sex all the time.

  At one time in my life, I would not have believed that such a relationship of intimacy could exist, that two people could be naked together and not be overwhelmed by the fact; and in fact, could actually be so unconscious of their sexuality-whatever sexuality they shared between them-that their nudity would be irrelevant. It not only would not dominate their interactions, it would not even be present; but now, having achieved such a state of peacefulness and grace, I understood the deeper connection that it represented. We really were partners.

  As I washed her-thoroughly, appreciatively, and with the kind of respect that only intimacy can inspire-we talked about our work, and for once, we left behind all the pain connected to it, all the pressures, and all the frustrations. We quietly talked about the puzzles that we were struggling with as if they were simply interesting puzzles. We could appreciate the wonder of the challenge for itself. The anguish had been acknowledged, now we could work.

  I told her what I was thinking about, unformed and half-realized as the notions still were. Talking about the ideas might help clarify them. Lizard listened without comment, only occasionally interjecting little sounds of encouragement, sometimes about what I was saying, sometimes about where I was washing. After the third or fourth time I had worked my way methodically up and down again, she took the washcloth from me and began returning my attentions.

  "I think there's a transformation happening," I said. "Several transformations. Many transformations. But most important, I think there's a transformation possible in the way we perceive the infestation. I think my little piece of it in the computer is only a tiny fragment of the whole thing, but I think it's a place to start."

  Lizard turned me around so she could scrub my front. I lifted my arms for her. She asked, "What kind of a transformation do you think it will be?"

  "If I knew, then we would have already had the transformation, and we wouldn't be waiting for it, would we?"

  She smiled at the unsatisfactoriness of the answer. We all had too many more questions than answers.

  "It's like a jigsaw puzzle," I said. "One of those very big ones with fifty thousand pieces that takes a lifetime to complete. We can look at individual pieces and know that this one is a piece of sky and that one is a piece of forest and this other one over here is a piece of worm, but we still can't put them all together to get a sense of the whole picture. We're starting to get parts of it, sections here and there, but even that isn't enough. We still don't know how the sections fit together. But there are so many of us working on it, we're so close, and we're putting so many pieces together now that I think-I feel it-that any moment now, the cosmic aha! is going to happen, and suddenly everything that we're looking at, without any change at all, will stop being a collection of disjointed sections. We'll take a step back, or we'll look at it upside down or sideways, or we'll just wake up in the morning and there it'll be in front of us, the shape of the whole thing like a great big outline just waiting to be filled in, and we'll start pushing sections of sky and forest and worm into place, and then even though there'll be a lot of little bits that we still don't know, the process will have shifted from one of trying to fit a zillion separate pieces together, to one of trying to fill the holes in the big picture. I think the mandalas are key to it. I think we have to think about mandalas, not worms. Like we think about beehives and ant colonies instead of bees and ants."

  "I always hated jigsaw puzzles," Lizard said. We were toweling each other off. "They always required so much work. And then when you were done, what did you have? Just this big picture that filled your dining room table. After a couple of days, you had to break it all up and put it back in the box. I could never see the sense in that."

  "Well, if we don't solve this jigsaw puzzle, it's us who are going to be broken up and put back in the box," I said grimly.

  "Shhh, sweetheart." She put her arms around me and rested her head on mine. "Not tonight. Tonight is for us."

  We stood there, just holding on to each other for a long, quiet moment. At last, however, Lizard reached around me to glance at her ringwatch. "We're going to have to hurry. Come on-get dressed. You'll find a new dinner jacket in your closet. I had the tailor shop make it up for you this afternoon."

  "Oh-" I must have looked crestfallen. "I didn't get anything for you."

  "You got me a baby," she said. "That's enough. Now get dressed before we both get distracted. We mustn't keep the captain waiting. What do you think of my dress? I decided on white, after all-"

  Whether the neural symbiont is actually a symbiotic partner or merely a parasite depends on the specific organism infected. While it is clearly symbiotic in its Chtorran manifestation, in Terran organisms the same creature is unable to contribute to its host and can function only as a parasite.

  The pattern of neural symbiondparasite infection roughly parallels that of
stingfly grubscattle, horses, donkeys, sheep, goats, llamas, ostriches, pigs, dogs, cats, and humanssuggesting that the stingfly is also the method of transmission for the neural animal.

  —The Red Book,

  (Release 22.19A)

  Chapter 46

  The Garden of Heavenly Delights

  "The existence of life on Earth proves that Murphy's Law is universal. If anything can go wrong, it will."

  -SOLOMON SHORT

  Captain Harbaugh's idea of a private little dinner made me think of Alexandre Gustave Eiffel. In 1889 this French engineer built a tower on the left bank of the river Seine, overlooking the heart of Paris. At the very topmost level of the tower, he installed a private suite for himself, exquisitely suitable for entertaining. It included a dining room, a parlor, and even a bedroom. Monsieur Eiffel must have clearly appreciated the romantic possibilities of his… uh, erection. Pun intended.

  Captain Harbaugh's private lounge was astonishing. It was a garden. Gold light filtered from unseen sources, illuminating a space that was filled with verdant greenery. A walkway of polished wood wound through a small park, then leapt gracefully across a series of glowing ponds filled with red and ivory koi so large they looked threatening. Even Lizard gasped in surprise and delight. "I had no idea-"

  Harry Sameshima, one of the two stewards who had escorted us forward, beamed proudly at our reaction and began pointing out sprays of orchids and bougainvillea, birds of paradise and cascades of something with a long Latin name. On my own, I was able to identify a hibiscus and a crimson amaranth. Patiently, Sameshima explained the spiritual meaning of the entire airborne garden; something about this being a representation of the garden of heaven and the twelve bridges representing the twelve steps to enlightenment. I wasn't paying close attention, I was trying to calculate the weight penalty this garden in the sky must represent. lt didn't make a lot of sense to me-on the other hand, it definitely made dinner with the captain the event of a lifetime. Considering whom this airship had originally been built for, I could understand the logic of the expense.