A Season for Slaughter watc-4

by David Gerrold

  Despite the large body of photographic evidence that suggests that the gastropedes are capable of sentient behavior, there is little physiological basis to support this thesis. More than 120 autopsies have been conducted on gastropede specimens of varying sizes. In no case has any gastropede been found to have a brain large enough to support the intelligence that has been allegedly demonstrated. Clearly there is' a discrepancy between their documented behavior and our ability to understand the basis for it.

  It has been suggested by some researchers that we simply do not understand the workings of the organ that the gastropede uses as a brain, but this argument is insufficient in the face of the physiological evidence. It is not just that the brain of the gastropede is too small-it is so rudimentary that it probably should not be classified a brain at all. Even a mouse has more gray matter.

  Using Terran organisms as a preliminary standard for comparison, the Chtorran gastropede doesn't even have enough brain power to feed itself. However, as if to compensate, the animal has a large cluster of hyperdeveloped ganglia under its "brain bulge." This ganglionic structure appears to manage most of the autonomic and cortical functions of the gastropede. It is so well developed, it would be an appropriate organ for a creature many orders of magnitude more complex than this. The organ seems very much, out of place in the gastropede.

  —The Red Book,

  (Release 22.19A)

  Chapter 55

  Godhead Revisited

  "The difference between men and women is that no man ever won an argument with a woman."

  -SOLOMON SHORT

  When I looked back up front, my general looked a lot more relaxed. She was studying something on the screen in front of her. She looked up, saw that the room was waiting expectantly, and said, very conversationally, "Sometime this afternoon, we expect that the Brazilian government will terminate their participation in this operation and summarily order us out of their territory.

  "We are going to refuse." She held up a hand for silence, and the hubbub died down instantly.

  "Let me explain," she said. "We are now activating Contingency Plan Norma. What that means is that we are no longer an international scientific mission. We are no longer operating under the control of the North American Operations Authority. We are now a fully recognized agency of the United States government, and we are authorized to complete our assigned surveillance mission. The Brazilian government no longer has any authority over this operation, and their attempts to terminate it prematurely are illegal and will be ignored or resisted. By force, if necessary.

  "I can also tell you that our missing flyer went down somewhere near the Japuran mandala. We are therefore ordered to proceed on our present course and perform all necessary searchand-rescue operations-including any and all ancillary operations necessary to protect this airship.

  "The United States government will be launching around-the-clock military overflights to protect this vessel from harassment or attack by any units of the Brazilian armed services. Even as I speak, a note is being prepared for the president of Brazil, informing him of this action. In other words, ladies and gentlemen, our government is standing firmly behind us, and we have work to do."

  The applause in the room was loud and enthusiastic.

  She shook her head and held up her hand again. "I recognize that this course of action will be interpreted as aggressive and imperialistic by many nations in the Fourth World Alliance. I regret that, but we have no choice. Our planet is under assault. We need answers. History will record that we rode roughshod over the rights of our hosts. I hope that history will forgive us. At the very least, I'm sure that history will understand. What we do here is to help guarantee that humanity will survive to have a history."

  That said, she clicked to the next page in her agenda and flashed a new set of pictures on the screens surrounding us. "All right. Enough procedural business. Let's talk about what happened last night. This is a free-for-all brainstorming session, don't stand on protocol. I want to hear everything. Who's up first?" General Elizabeth Tirelli looked meaningfully in my direction, ignoring all other hands.

  I stood up slowly. "Well…" I began. "The good news is that we seem to have found a terrific new way to kill worms-" Some of the people in the room responded with nervous laughter. That was okay, but I wasn't trying to be funny. "The bad news is that you need to gather them in crowds of a quarter million individuals first." I looked at Lizard. "Um, can we run the video on this?"

  Instead, she invited me forward. "Here, why don't you take the podium-"

  I went to the front of the room nervously. I knew that there were a lot of people here who didn't like me-some of them because they had been told not to-but most of them because I had earned their enmity fairly. Dr. Shreiber, for instance, was cleaning her fingernails with a cute little dagger.

  I knew what Lizard was trying to do-she was trying to rehabilitate my reputation. She wanted me to handle this part of the briefing; I didn't want to. We'd argued about it last night. The argument was a short one. She outranked me. I lost.

  I glanced over the podium controls. They were fairly straightforward. Six preview screens and a menu to the file-server. Quickly, I punched up, the videos I wanted. The sea of worms. From above. Waving and worshiping. "Okay, here-look at these pictures first. Wait a minute-" I punched up the color enhancement and decreased the granularity of the resolution. The resultant image displayed the pattern of color stripes across the surging worms while blurring out the individual creatures. "Now, watch this cycle-" I programmed the image as a repeating loop and let it play.

  At first there was puzzlement-then the gasps of recognition began.

  I waited until I was sure that everybody in the room had seen it, before I said anything. "Like a stone dropped in a pond, right? Concentric waves of color spreading outward from a common center. Violet. Orange. Red. What does it mean?

  "Please notice here that the center itself is a confused whorl of color. It's only when you get out to here-a radius of at least ten meters, call it the event horizon-that the colors crystallize and spread outward in waves. Now, before I postulate anything here, let me remind you that these patterns are actually very subtle gradations of shade. They're almost invisible to the naked eye. We're doing some very heavy enhancement processing here. Let me also note that these waves are occurring in sync with the song of the nest." I brought up the sound and let them watch and listen for a few moments. There were more gasps in the room.

  "What does all this mean?" I asked again. "To be honest, I'm not completely sure. I can think of several explanations, I'm not sure I would believe any of them. But the phenomenon is real. Very real." I punched up another image; this one from one of the ground-based cameras. It was a close-up of several worms all jammed together in the narrow space between two domes at the edge of the arena. "Watch this," I said. I enhanced the colors, but left the individual worms visible. We could see the colors sliding quickly across their bodies.

  "All right," I said. "Here's what we know. We know that the gastropedes display patterns of stripes on their bodies. We know that the stripes change. There's a deep permanent patterning that changes very slowly, from month to month. Overlaid on that are the temporary patterns that change from day to day. Now we see here momentary patterns that flash and vanish. We know that the fur of the gastropede is actually a network of hundreds of thousands of neural symbionts, each one changing color to reflect the way it's being stimulated. The operative thesis is that the stripes represent what a worm is feeling. If a worm has emotions, its stripes are the way it expresses them so that other worms can see.

  "These quick flickers of color that you're seeing are most likely the animal's moment-to-moment reactions to immediate events; the temporary stripes are the creature's emotional cycle; and the long-term patterns probably represent its general emotional state. But we have very little idea what any individual set of color patterns actually means, only some speculative guesses.

  "If that
thesis is correct, then the concentric waves of color spreading outward through this mass of worms represents a kind of collective emotional phenomenon that literally leaps from animal to animal. One gastropede experiences something and passes it directly to the next gastropede over. Possibly there's some kind of direct connection between the neural symbionts. When the creatures are pressed that close, it seems likely that a neural symbiont wouldn't be able to tell where, its neighbors were rooted.

  "What I like about this thesis," I said, "is that it answers the question of Chtorran intelligence. There isn't any. There is no such thing as one Chtorr. If it exists, it exists only as a collective manifestation of individual behaviors-" Dr. Shreiber's hand went up. "Yes?"

  She rose to her feet. "There's another interpretation possible," she said. There was an accusatory undertone in her voice.

  I ignored the subtext and simply nodded politely to her. "Go ahead…"

  "The gastropedes are evolved from insect-like creatures, correct?"

  "That's one theory."

  "Insects specialize. In a fire ant colony, for instance, you'll find workers, soldiers, and multiple queens. Maybe the gastropedes specialize too. We've seen some evidence of it. At the bottom of a nest, there's always a large central chamber where you'll find an immense-sometimes even bloated-animal. That's probably the queen. We know there are warrior worms. We've seen workers. Now we're even seeing miniature forms-maybe those are drones of some kind. I think the gastropedes have evolved themselves into specialized forms for specific tasks. Why not thinkers as well?"

  I considered the thought. Maybe and maybe not. There wasn't a lot of evidence to either prove it or disprove it. "What's your validating evidence?" I asked.

  She pointed at the repeating video loop on the screen behind me. "Look at the pictures." I looked. "Let's assume you're right, that the patterns of colors represent what the animals are feeling-or maybe even thinking. At the very center of the arena, there's a confused whorl of colors. It's chaotic. It's blurred. Maybe those are the thinkers." She stepped up to one of the side screens and pointed with her hand. "See, if there was a central thinker, then we'd see all the colors emanating from a single point, but they're not. I think that all the colors in that area are indistinct, because the thoughts or feelings that they represent are just churning around and around, with no single pattern taking precedence. Out here-what you call the event horizon-I think that's the border between thinkers and workers. That's where the feelings of the thinkers get crystallized and start spreading their ripples outward."

  I scratched my chin while I thought about it. Something about her theory didn't feel right. It presupposed that the thinkers would go directly to the center of the arena. I looked at the wall-sized screens surrounding us. In that surging crowd of crimson horrors, there was no way that thinkers and workers could possibly have sorted themselves out as neatly as she postulated. Hm. What if workers and thinkers were the same class? No… that didn't make sense either.

  "You don't buy it," she said coldly. "I can see it on your face."

  I shrugged. "It's a good theory. I like the part about the gastropedes evolving specialized forms for specific tasks. I'm just not sure about the thinkers." I glanced over at Lizard. She was watching me with genuine interest, but she had no intention of interrupting the discussion. "I'll show you," I said.

  I typed some commands into the keyboard, shifting the color enhancement. The same video loops; only now overlaid on the outward cycling colors was a new pattern. Drop a stone in the water. The ripples spread evenly outward until they hit an edge, then they bounce back toward the center again. The surging worms rippled like a pond. Orange waves flowed outward, bright and distinct. Deep purple waves ricocheted inward. Pink waves spread out from the center: Fainter red waves bounced back from the edges. Over and over and over again. It was hypnotic and it was beautiful. It was like staring into an organic kaleidoscope, it was like the greatest football stand card display ever assembled. All the separate patterns of shifting colors and shapes, all flowing inward and outward, all changing, all the time. It was a complex and fascinating mandala of time-phased responses, a biometric fantasy, a dream of hellish wonder.

  At last, I said, "If there were a thinker-class at the center of the crowd that was truly the source of each of those specific waves of color, then all the other animals-the worker-class-should only be echoing their thoughts, and the same colors should bounce back to the center unchanged. But look at this now-" Another kind of color enhancement. "This is very subtle, but some of the colors are changing even as they move across the mass of bodies. That suggests to me that"-the thought was chilling-"maybe it's the whole body of gastropedes… on some primary level, they're all thinkers."

  Shreiber didn't dismiss the thought outright. But I could see that she preferred the elegance of her own theory. "Maybe the colors shift because the workers are limited in the way they echo the original thought. Maybe it's like a game of Russian telephone."

  "I'm sure that transmission error is a large part of it," I agreed. "But… it doesn't explain everything. It certainly doesn't explain this." I punched up the next set of images. "No, wait a minute-let me show you something else first. Here-this is what the nest looked like when we started broadcasting the song of the nest back to them."

  There were murmurs of appreciation as the new images came up on the wall-sized screens. Suddenly, the complex patterns of color simply faded away. Disappeared. Suddenly, the whole crowd was throbbing in sync, all showing the same colors, all at the exact same moment. They were a gigantic drumhead, pulsing all in unison. Singing all in unison. Violet impacts. Orange flashes. Scarlet furies. All the worms. Two hundred and fifty thousand of them, chirruping and drumming and focusing in absolute synchronization. Like robots. Like clones. Like perfect little monsters. All repeating the same precise movements flawlessly across the entire arena. They even blinked in unison. It was just as horrific in replay.

  "They tuned themselves to us, " I said. "Once we started broadcasting, they stopped listening to themselves. They echoed our song as if it were their own. They echoed our colors-here's the synced image of what the airship was displaying, see how it matches perfectly what was happening in the sea of worms below?

  "Whatever thought processes, or emotions, or whatever feelings the color waves represented, whatever it is the worms were actually doing, they stopped doing their own processes and started doing only what we told them to do. I believe-and this is something that we'll have to test somehow-that the presence of the airship simply overloaded their sensory circuits. We blasted them with a louder, brighter, more convincing identity. They couldn't feel their own thought processes any more clearly than you or I could while listening to the '1812 Overture' with synchronized earthquakes."

  There was a shocked silence in the room. The images of all those synchronized worms pulsed disturbingly on the screens. Here was undeniable evidence of the devastating effect we had created in the miandala. Even Lizard was visibly startled. We had known that the worms had reacted to us-we hadn't known they had reated this strongly.

  I looked to Dr. Shreiber. "Comment?"

  She sat down slowly, shaking her head. "No, I don't think so."

  "All right," I said. "Here's the rest of it. Watch. This is what happened when we tried to introduce a song recorded over the Rocky Mountain mandala. That nest was much smaller than this one at the time this recording was made, and the recording was taken off a much smaller gathering, perhaps only twenty or fifty individuals. We didn't use the actual recording, of course; we used it only as the starting point for a much more complex synthesis which was what we played back to the nest." I punched up the images and we watched in silence.

  A great arena, nearly a kilometer across. A quarter of a million monsters are crowded into that arena. Each and every one of those monsters is in perfect tune with each and every other one of those monsters. They are mirrors of each other. They move and turn and twist and sing in identically repeated
patterns. The effect is dizzying. They all turn red together. They all turn pink. They all turn orange. They all turn black. They sway in unison, they pray in unison. All of them, moving and singing in absolute and perfect monoclonal synchronicity, all echoing the exact same sound at once. "Chhhhtttttrrrrrrrrrrr!"

  Now… Something happens. The song changes.

  Pockets of discordant color appear. Confusion. Suddenly, the worms aren't synchronized anymore.

  Here. On the edges-black. In the center-orange. Here, now, a sudden reversal: black turns orange, orange turns black. Flashes of confusion appear. Fringes of unsynchronized color begin to waver on the edges of the arena. But the center of the mass holds for a moment; it pulses strongly and the weight of its opinion flows visibly outward-but the edges of the crowd are too confused. They're hearing two different songs. One has the inertia of the crowd; it throbs with its own momentum. But the other song, the brighter one, comes blasting undeniably from the sky.

  The center can hold for only so long. The crowded mass surrounding it has a vastly different song now. The two waves of song and color meet and crash against each other, sparking horrendously discordant sounds and colors throughout the entire mass. The center shrinks before the onslaught of the brighter song.

  Then it recoils and rebounds and tries to expand again. The surrounding song grows stronger

  Forget the songs now. Forget the colors. Everything turns black. The crowd of monsters fragments into a chaotic mass. Suddenly, everything is confusion.

  Where the two songs conflict the brightest, the worms attack each other. The first assault is echoed. Simultaneity still rages, even in the middle of the horror. And now, all the worms are attacking each other. Even those who are surrounded by others who share the same song and set of colors suddenly scream and roar; they rear back, leap up, fling themselves high, and come down slashing. All the mouths, the knives, the teeth, the mandibles, the slicing claws-all the screams, the fury, the blood, the eyes, the terror, the panic, the fear, the cries-all of it played out again, this time larger than life, on the huge, glowing, wall-sized screens of the conference room of the Hieronymus Bosch.