The massacre was over quickly. It only seemed like it took forever.
The operative thesis for the disparity between the small size of the gastropede brain and the sophisticated repertoire of behaviors demonstrated by various specimens is that the gastropede uses its internal network of neural symbionts to augment its limited brain power.
It is believed that a fully developed internal network of neural symbionts will function as memory storage for complex behavioral programs. Given any known situation, the cortical ganglia react by automatically triggering the operative routine. Thus, the creature doesn't need intelligence, it only needs programming.
This may explain why the creatures often go immobile, huddling together when confronted with a new or startling situation. It is clearly a defensive strategy. By huddling together, individual members of the communion are protected while they generate new responses to deal with an unknown situation.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 56
The Code of the Nest
"If a fanatic is willing to give his life for a cause, he's probably just as willing to give yours as well."
-SOLOMON SHORT
Finally, I switched off the video and all the screens went blank. I cleared my throat.
The audience focused their attention forward again.
"We played the wrong song," I said very quietly. I looked around the room. "It was my mistake," I admitted. "But-" I considered my next words very carefully, knowing that the mike in front of me was live. Everything I had said was going directly into the network; everything I was about to say as well.
"But," I continued, "if we had to make a mistake-if I had to make a mistake, then this was the right mistake to make. What happened in the Coari mandala taught us something that we wouldn't have known for sure any other way." I looked over to Lizard. She nodded supportively, and I went on. "I would hypothesize that every nest has its own distinct song. The havoc that broke out below was the purest demonstration of that. We introduced an alien song into this nest. Some of the worms accepted it as their own. Some of them did not. I think the video speaks for itself. The mechanics of the phenomenon are… going to have to be studied for a while. Uh-I have a couple other things to say about this, and then I'm going to sit down and let someone else present their information.
"First, if every mandala nest has its own distinct song, then it seems to me that the limit of the possible expansion of any mandala is that point where its territory begins to approach that of any other mandala. Based on what we've seen here, a war between neighboring nests would be…" I shook my head, "… unimaginable. Umm. We still have a few working monitors on the ground at Coari. And we've got spybirds circling over what's left of the mandala. The, uh…" I hesitated uncomfortably. I really hated having to say this. "… The, uh, massacre is still going on."
There were murmurs of disbelief. I nodded in reluctant confirmation and put the pictures up on the walls.
As much as each and every one of us hated the infestation for what it had done to us, our planet, and our civilization, we still had a profound respect for our enemy. Maybe it had something to do with the inherent sanctity of all life, wherever it occurred. Maybe it was our curiosity, and maybe it was our anthropomorphic identification with all living creatures, and maybe on some level, it was even affection. Whatever it was, this wanton and possibly even needless destruction had had a devastating effect on us all.
As curious as it sounded, we actually respected the complexity and wonder of this fabulous ecology-this incredibly fecund and intricate construction of partnerships and symbioses that had swept across our planet. We would kill it any way we could, but we would not do so without regret. We knew our enemy well enough now to respect it. We killed it-and grieved for it simultaneously.
The pictures said it all, but for the benefit of those who were following these proceedings on the network, I added the briefest of annotations. "The surviving worms are destroying everything. Each other. The huts, the corrals, the gardens. Everything in the tunnels underneath. They haven't stopped. They've been going at it all night, all morning. A human mob might have burned itself out in an hour or two. The worms… just keep going. Everything in Coari is just… madness.
"I said yesterday that I thought the nest song was the way that the worms tuned and programmed themselves. Well… this may be the real proof of it. The Coari worms are acting as if they've all been simultaneously reprogrammed to be insane. I don't think that the killing and destruction will stop until the last Coari worm dies of exhaustion. I won't even try to guess what will happen to the Coati mandala after that, whether it can regenerate or not. We can't even guess what's going to be left. Um-" Once again, I looked to Lizard. Once again, she nodded to me to continue.
"Um-this is the hard part, and I apologize in advance for…" I stopped. I forced myself to take a long cool drink of water. Lizard had taught me that trick. She'd learned it from Dr. Zymph. When in doubt, take a drink of water. But only if you can keep your legs crossed for four hours at a time. You never know how long a meeting is going to run.
I took a breath and faced the audience again. "What I'm about to show you is particularly gruesome. It involves human beings. If anybody can't handle this, I urge you to leave the room now. The same caution applies to anyone following these proceedings on the network. This is very disturbing footage." I waited. Nobody moved. Of course not. They never did. I sighed and punched up the next set of images. And the sound as well.
There were gasps of horror and shock. There were cries of, "Oh, God, no-" and, "For God's sake, turn it off!" Somebody was crying. There were distraught moans throughout the room. I let it run. We had done this. We needed to see the consequences. I had done this. I had to confront it, here and now, in front of God and the world. People had died because of what I had ordered.
I might try to mitigate the deaths of all those worms by saying it was the right mistake to make. That was acceptable. Just barely. But there was no way I could justify this.
Lizard had detonated two nuclear devices over the Rocky Mountain mandala. Knowing that there were humans living in the camp, knowing that they would be incinerated, she still flew that mission. She volunteered for that mission. It was an act of war. We believed that the people living in a Chtorran nest were renegades. We believed that they had renounced their humanity. We believed that they deserved to die.
But regardless of what we believed, all those deaths still hurt. And Lizard had cried in my arms for days afterward. She had nightmares for months. Sometimes she still did. Sometimes I still did.
But now, today, this minute, I was finally beginning to understand some of the pain she must have felt, must still be feeling now. She, at least, had been authorized by her government to destroy that nest. I had no such authorization. Yesterday, I had wanted to destroy this mandala. Would I have wanted to do it if I had known that there were people living in it? Would I have wanted to do it if I had known the destruction would occur like this? Would I make this same decision again-?
The worms came pouring into the corrals, all mouths and fury. They slashed and swallowed. The little brown people were helpless before them. The children screamed in terror. Their mothers tried to shield them. The men tried to fight. All in vain. They all died. The furious worms engulfed them all. The flashing blood. The gore-
The pictures moved across the walls in silent condemnation.
I stood at the podium and hung my head in shame and disgrace.
I waited for the inevitable outcry, the pointing fingers, the hurled accusations and condemnations.
None came. The horror was too overwhelming.
Only Lizard stood. She came slowly to the front of the room. She approached me with such tenderness, I could have cried. She put one hand gently on my shoulder and whispered softly, "You couldn't have known, Jim."
"I should have known," I said. "I'm supposed to be the expert. Remember?"
She squeezed
my arm; she left her hand resting on my shoulder. "I know what you're feeling," she said. "I can't tell you it's not your fault. I know you won't believe me. I can't tell you anything that will change anything at all. I can only tell you… that I share your hurt."
I let myself look at her finally. Her sea-green eyes were filling up with tears. The empathy of this woman for my pain was incredible. In the middle of this incredible hurt, I couldn't believe how lucky I was. She reached over with one gentle hand and wiped my cheek with her thumb. "Shh," she said. "It's all right. You're not alone."
I reached up to my shoulder and put my hand over hers. "I don't deserve you," I said.
She smiled at the memory. We'd had this conversation once before. "No, of course not. I'm a gift. So are you." She still remembered her lines too. After a minute, she asked, "Do you want to continue?"
My throat hurt. It was hard to speak. But I nodded. Yes. I have to continue. I have to finish this. I said it with a nod because I couldn't get all the words out.
"Okay," she whispered, and went back to her seat. Sometimes I wondered about other people. They made decisions about vital things-it never looked like it hurt. Uncle Ira, for instance. How did he handle his pain? If he didn't feel pain, then he wasn't human and he didn't deserve to be in a position of such responsibility. And if he did feel pain, then how in God's name did he keep it from showing in everything he did?
Then again, on the other hand, I had to remind myself… everybody's crazy. We've all been crazy since the infestation began with the first plague so many years ago. Crazy and getting crazier every single day.
"These pictures…" I began. "As horrifying as they are-" I stopped and tried again. I took a breath. "Let these pictures serve as the last necessary demonstration of the only way that worms and humans can coexist. Let every human being on this planet who thinks that peaceful accommodation is possible look at these pictures tonight. And let them shudder as we shudder now. Search your consciences tonight, long and hard, and ask, 'Is this the future I want to give my children?'
"As far as I'm concerned, this video ends that discussion once and for all."
If we accept the premise that every particle of the infestation is here to serve a larger purpose in the Chtorran ecology, then what is the purpose of the disease commonly known as "the slimy-sweats"?
The agent of infection is a viral body found in certain Chtorran edible plants. The agent causes minor changes in the body's lymphatic system, causing a pronounced change in body oils and odor.
The infected individual exudes an almost slimy sweat that gives the skin a slick, slippery, almost greasy feeling. Extra body fat burns off; most of the individual's chest, arm, and leg hair falls away, and in some cases, even most of the adult's pubic hair. The person's body odor takes on a sweet, almost fruity quality, and the general effect of the infection is to make the individual feel much more sensitive or "sensual." Additionally, the oily secretion also serves to minimize stingfly attacks on the infected individual.
As benign as these effects may seem, perhaps even desirable under certain circumstances, the infection is also accompanied by a chronic low-grade fever and a debilitating vagueness in one's mental processes. The ability to timebind, to connect one moment to the next, is significantly impaired, as are both short- and long-term memories. Mild hallucinations may also be experienced. Fatigue and general lassitude are common.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 57
The Green Worm
"The problem with the gene pool is that there's no lifeguard."
-SOLOMON SHORT
Horror upon horror.
There was one more set of pictures we still hadn't shown.
I looked to Lizard for support, and she came back up to the podium to stand beside me. "This next piece of footage-" she said, "-is very sensitive. We're not ready to put this out on the network. Not just yet. Not until we've had more chance to study it. For those of you participating on-line, this part of the session will be coded and scrambled. You'll need a Q-card or above to access. I apologize in advance for the inconvenience this will cause many of you, but as most of you already know, the possibility that a situation might develop that would require a security clamp was always part of the planning of this mission."
She took her ID card and inserted it into the podium terminal. She tapped in a code word and activated her security program. "We are now Q-coded," she said. "Please remember that. Now let me talk about the reason why.
"Some of you have already seen the material that I'm talking about. Others of you may have heard the rumors. Dr. Zymph has seen these pictures. So have the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We're all agreed that the potential for culture shock, possibly panic and hysteria, if this material were made public without adequate preparation, is significant. After you see these pictures, you'll understand why. Of all the threats that the Chtorran invasion has so far offered us, absolutely none of them presents the danger to humanity that these images demonstrate." She nodded to me grimly and went back to her seat.
I exhaled sharply. I didn't relish what I was about to do. I stared down at the podium terminal for a long moment, pretending to study its glowing display. Reluctantly, I cleared all the screens in the room, leaving them a dim translucent gray. I looked out over the audience. Some of the faces were solemn and anxious. Most of the rest were honestly curious; despite all that they had seen so far, they still didn't understand.
"This video is… sketchy," I began. "It's been assembled out of various bits and pieces. We dropped over a thousand probes on the Coari mandala, only a third of what we intended to. I'm sorry we weren't able to plant the rest; there's probably a lot we missed; but I think we've uncovered enough of the iceberg here to start getting an idea of its overall shape and size.
"As a matter of record, our probes were able to photograph more than a hundred thousand hours of raw video, detailing much of the moment-to-moment life within the Coari nest during the time period of our approach and overflight, so we have a near-holographic record of the events of the last three days. That's the source for almost all of these images that you're about to see.
"Please recognize that we have so much footage that most of it still hasn't been reviewed, at least not by human eyes. The LI's are doing the preliminary scanning, and I must say they're doing a very methodical job of it—" Appreciative chuckles. "-But it's likely that there are a lot of things that they're not going to be able to analyze or identify, simply because they don't have enough information yet or patterning to know what they're seeing. So what we're going to show you is still very incomplete. These are just the things that the LI's have been able to flag as obviously anomalous. We're certain that there's still a lot more to be discovered."
I looked down to my notes. "Okay, this first shot-this was the first one that really caught our interest." I clicked the first screen to life, let it cycle through three video loops. "This is from the Japura mandala. This came out of one of our preliminary flyovers. We dropped a hundred probes, just to get an idea of how our probes would be accepted in the, nest. A few of them were destroyed. Most of them were ignored. We got a lot of interesting shots, but nothing we didn't expect-until this showed up. Yes, that is a gastropede you're looking at. No, I have no idea why it's green or how it got that way. Is it a rare recessive trait? Is it an adaptation? Is it a mutation? Is it a genetic defect?" I shrugged. "We don't know. You might want to notice that the date line on this footage shows it was made on Saint Patrick's Day. Dr. Mark Herlihy, operating out of the New York Institute, says that this is obviously an Irish gastropede. And he's named it BORSTAL SWEENEY. At first, we thought this was an early April Fool's prank, but we double-checked the raw footage. There really is a green worm. We have three separate shots of it in March. It hasn't shown up in any of the videos broadcast since then. That's not conclusive. We don't have full coverage of the nest. We are hoping, though, once we get to Japura, that we'll be able to pic
k up BORSTAL SWEENEY again and put a transmitter into it.
"By itself, a green worm is an interesting anomaly. Now I'm going to start showing you some other anomalies. At first, you're not going to see that there's any relationship, and you're probably going to wonder, what's the point of all this? Bear with me. It's worth the effort. But it won't make sense unless you follow all the intermediate steps along the way.
"All right, here-" I punched up the next cycle. "These shots were all made in Coari. These are Coari bunnydogs. They're short, they're squat, they're rubbery and cute. Okay-and these are Coari bunnymen. As you can see, the two most obvious differences between bunnydogs and bunnymen are fur and personality.
"Bunnydogs are usually fluffy pink, sometimes red or brown, and they're always very playful. Bunnymen look like cadaverous naked rats, and they have personalities to match. They're very nasty animals-and they're vicious. Here's the kicker-they're the same species. A bunnyman is a bunnydog without hair. Except it isn't hair-it's more of the neural symbionts, the same ones that live in the gastropedes.
"Now I'm going to put up the rest of the pictures. Please notice the wide discrepancy of sizes and shapes. Interesting, right? Does it mean anything? Well… suppose we were to show you pictures of cocker spaniels, Great Danes, collies, German shepherds, chihuahuas, bulldogs, poodles, English sheepdogs, Irish setters, and Chinese Shar-Peis; and suppose we were to tell you that they were all dogs and could all interbreed freely. If you'd never seen any dogs before, you might find this a little hard to believe. So we looked at these pictures of the bunnydogs and the bunnymen and assumed that perhaps, like dogs, they were capable of expressing a wide range of forms.
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