A Season for Slaughter watc-4

by David Gerrold

  "Worm lines? Tell me about the worm lines."

  He got childish. "You won't like it…" he sang. He said something else. Something purple and vermilion. I didn't understand the words, but I recognized the language.

  I watched him for a moment longer. I wished I had the time to study him at length, but there were other things that needed doing first. When we got back, I'd get myself assigned to Guyer's case. He knew.

  And I wanted to know too. More than anything.

  A sudden terrifying nightmare thought occurred to me-that the only read way to know what Guyer knew was to become like Guyer. Worm lines. Quills. Red fur. And probably a state of permanent Chtorran hallucination.

  I was crazy enough already. I had no great urge to get any crazier. If only there was some way to get Guyer to communicate in English. I remembered Fletcher and the herd. She might have some good ideas. If all else failed, we could break Guyer's arm and see if that made a difference.

  I straightened up, feeling my knees crack as I did so. Guyer opened his arms to me again, exposing his chest fur. "Shiny, shiny!" he laughed, as if he were basking in a radiant afternoon.

  I sighed sadly and left. This man had been brilliant once. Now he was fit only for a zoo.

  "Hot Seat," April 3rd broadcast: (cont'd)

  ROBISON:… Okay, so you're saying that when people disagree with you, it proves they don't know what they're talking about? You are arrogant-even more arrogant than I thought.

  FOREMAN: Obviously, you're having trouble with this, John. Where disagreement exists, there is information that remains unknown to one or the other or both of the parties involved. The presence of a disagreement, whatever else is going on, is a red flag that the knowledge in the domain is still incomplete. The disagreement is occurring because somebody's beliefs are being threatened. Here, in this discussion, your belief system is threatened by information and ideas that contradict it, so you become disagreeable, which is not quite the same as disagreement, but in your case it accomplishes the same results.

  ROBIS0N: Yeah, yeah, yeah-so what does all this have to do with democracy?

  FOREMAN: Everything. Democracy works only when the population is educated and informed. True alignment is possible only when a population is educated and informed. Believe it or not, we're on the same side.

  ROBISON: Educated and informed by whom? That's the question. Who controls this so-called domain of ideas?

  FOREMAN: Who controls the ecology of the Earth? Who controls any ecology? Nobody and everybody. You don't control an ecology, you live within it, either responsibly or irresponsibly. The same is true for the ecology of ideas. You are the carrier of an idea. You participate.

  ROBISON: Ecology of ideas?

  FOREMAN: Absolutely. An idea is an organic presence. It's big, it's small, it's new, it's old, it's toxic and dangerous, it's safe and bland; it has a lot of strength, it has no strength. Some of the lethetic intelligence engines have been modeling the idea ecology and having a lot of fum with it. Ideas that generate agreement are herbivores. They're mostly hannless. Ideas that generate disagreement are carnivorous-they leach strength from the herbivorous ideas. They create dissension, fear, panic. We're the carriers of the idea ecology. The idea ecology drives the action ecology. Ideas don't exist as singletons; they're the expressions of larger processes. Just as there's no such thing as one cow, there's no such thing as one idea. Everything is connected to everything else; that's why there are no secrets.

  ROBISON: So you say disagreement is like a pack of hyenas chasing down a herd of gazelles?

  FOREMAN: The way you practice it, it certainly seems like it.

  ROBISON: And I say that disagreement is one of the ways we establish the truth.

  FOREMAN: I agree with you. It is. In the ecology of ideas, new ideas are always appearing, all the time; we're continually testing them. Some of the new ideas aren't strong enough to survive and die out. Others adapt, grow, evolve, survive, and strengthen the entire ecology. The process of ideas rubbing up against each other is just like the process of people rubbing up against each other; that's how you make new people and new ideas.

  ROBISON: So let me get this straight. You haven't brainwashed the President and half the Congress and military. You don't have a secret plan, and there's no secret group. You're just a kindly old philosopher with a heart of gold who's doing all this out of his great love for humanity, right?

  FOREMAN: (grinning) I guess you could put it that way.

  ROBISON: Well, frankly, I don't trust you-I don't think you're worthy of the responsibility.

  FOREMAN: I agree with you. You're right. I'm not worthy of the responsibility. I don't know that any of us are. But the job still has to be done, and until someone better comes along, you're stuck with me. So let's get to work.

  In larger nests, jellypigs are often found in congestions containing thousands of members, eating their way downward through the hardest-packed soil and clay. They are persistent enough-or blind-headed enough-even to try gnawing their way through bedrock. Given enough time, a congestion of jellypigs might very well chew through stone; their teeth are as hard and as sharp as those found in millipedes. Jellypigs can be found in sizes as small as three centimeters and as large as three meters, though the usual size is one third of a meter.

  —The Red Book,

  (Release 22.19A)

  Chapter 69

  Last Call

  "Integrity is like a balloon. It doesn't matter how good the rubber is, the air still goes out the hole."

  -SOLOMON SHORT

  We almost made it.

  The choppers carne roaring south from Yuana Moloco, circling us at a distance like predatory dragons. They paced us. They rose above us and lowered great bundles of pressurized cylinders to the cargo platform on the roof of the airship. Emergency crews worked around the clock, desperately striving to repair the gasbags, keep them filled and firm-keep them sprayed with sealant, keep them tight and lifting. Keep us safely above the terrifying floor of the worm-infested jungle. The whole ship reeked of the chemicals in the sealant. The stingflies were - everywhere. We were all wearing netting now and catching catnaps on the floor wherever we could. There was panic in our faces.

  The crews couldn't move fast enough. One of the gasbags ripped-just came apart in shreds-and I thought I could feel the airship lurch beneath my feet, but maybe not. Sameshima and a work crew were moving a new mylar bag into place and already filling it. They hoped to replace all the bags, one at a time, before the rest of them shredded apart. The choppers were constantly roaring around us. A new chopper arrived on station every fifteen minutes, delivering tanks of helium and occasionally another new gasbag. The tanks and bags were offloaded onto the cargo platform aft of the skydeck and immediately brought below for immediate installation. Everybody was running.

  Siegel and his team were pressed into service. The aides whose terminals had been dumped overboard assisted. Even the Brazilians were working alongside the rest, pulling bags into place, pushing tanks of helium.

  We jettisoned the flyers, we sent them on ahead to Yuana Moloco, each one carrying one pilot and one infant child. We dropped spybirds continually. Siegel and Lopez disarmed the surplus ordnance, set it to self-destruct, and tipped it out the hatch. I hated seeing it go. If this ship went down, we might need that stuff.

  Shaun and I and two other stewards patrolled the ship, looking for other things to dump, things we might have missed. We rolled up the rubber deck from the jogging track. We knocked down the windows from the observation levels. We unbolted doors and cabinets. We jettisoned the sewage tanks. We tossed out two of the water-recycling units. We gutted the airship's kitchen-all the stoves, all the sinks, the refrigerators and freezers, all the various machineries of cuisine. Down and down into the leafy green sea. Everything. All of it. We'd eat fresh fruit and salads and peanut butter sandwiches for two days if we had to. We couldn't let this ship go down

  And still we sank.

  The land r
ose up to meet us, closer and closer by the hour. We were approaching the foothills north of Japura. We weren't going to get over them. And we were running out of things to lose.

  We sent people up to the skydecks, and the choppers lifted them away, six at a time. First the children from the camp, then the Brazilians, then the most valuable of the scientists. Lizard refused to go, so did I. Shreiber had to stay with Guyer. We ordered Dr. Meier aboard a chopper at gunpoint. She climbed out the other side and went right back to work.

  We took apart the med-bay, pulled down the operating theaters, rolled out all the various pieces of diagnostic equipment, pushed them out into the open air and watched them tumble away. We pulled up the floor panels wherever we could, pulled down ceiling panels and ventilation ducts. We unbolted the air-conditioning units and let them crash downward to the jungle. File cabinets. Security safes. Paper shredders. Encryptors. Conference tables. Desks. Draperies. Paintings. Glass partitions. Televisions. The ship's entire library. All the books. All the disks and tapes. A wealth of history, literature, and science. All the knowledge of the world. The backup computers. People were abandoning their personal belongings too. I pulled the backup memory out of my notebook and scaled the machine out the window too. One less kilogram to worry about.

  "This goddamn airship!" Shaun was swearing. "Everything is so lightweight, we're going to have to dismantle two thirds of it to stay aloft!"

  The ship's wine cellar. We had to restrain Feist, we had to sedate him. He wanted to leap out after his Montrachet and Mouton Cadet. We were tempted to let him. He massed a good ninety kilos. But Captain Harbaugh would never have forgiven us. We sent him out on the next chopper instead.

  The land kept rising. Achieving neutral buoyancy in the air wasn't going to be enough. The farther north we sailed, the higher the foothills rose. This airship was going to be a big pink drapery sprawled across the Brazilian hills.

  There were worms beneath us still. Every now and then, we'd see them rushing through the greenery, chirruping and singing, calling up to us, crying and trying to join us. If we hit the ground, they'd be all over us.

  My phone beeped. It was Lizard. Captain Harbaugh was ordering us off her ship. It was too late. We were to be on the next chopper out.

  "Meet me in the main lounge, I've got the last of the mission logs, including all the stuff we didn't send out. Help me carry it up to the skydeck."

  "I'm on my way-"

  And that's when the whole thing came down.

  Jellypigs extract most of their nutrients from the soil as it passes through their bodies; working together, a swarm of jellypigs can carve out several meters of tunnel per day. While individual members of the congestion may fall behind while they rest, sleep, or digest, the cluster itself is always active. The effect of the jellypig congestion is to pack the soil into a dense lining surrounding the tunnel; this lining is rich in nutrients for the Chtorran plant forms that inevitably follow the tunnel builders.

  —The Red Book,

  (Release 22.19A)

  Chapter 70

  Down

  "You always find teh one typo in print that you missed in galley proof."

  -SOLOMON SHORT

  It began with a sliding sensation, as if the Hieronymus Bosch were being pushed sideways through the air. Someone, somebody was screaming a desperate order; someone else was just screaming, "No, no, no!" as if denying the reality of the situation. As if sheer willpower and lung power alone would be enough to keep the vessel airborne.

  The floor lurched and we tilted-not a lot at first, but enough to be noticeable, and then it kept on tilting-and as everything and everyone came sliding sideways across the floor of the bay, the tilt became even more pronounced; our weight was pulling the ship over, and now we started to hear the sounds of heavy objects scraping and breaking, and then something large went bump somewhere aft. It wasn't a particularly loud sound, or even a jarring one, but it was a horribly deep note, felt in the bones more than the ears, as if someone had struck a single profound note on the world-gong, and the echo of it came reverberating up through our souls like an expanding bubble of dread; only the sound of it never stopped-instead, it grew and kept on growing; louder and louder, it rolled outward from its initial paralyzing impact, until eventually, it was submerged in the growing cacophony of other noises crunching up from below.

  The crash went on and on forever. My heart sank with the ship. I scrambled for something to hang on to

  The sounds-oh, the terrible sounds-at first, just the gentlest sensation of distant things crunching quietly into each other-but like the deceptively soft punch of the first impact, the crunching didn't stop. It just got bigger and bigger and closer and closer. We could feel it crashing forward through the body of the airship. It advanced on us like a great shuddering wave of destruction.

  The noise of it was composed of many different parts, all of them hideous-glass breaking, metal bending, metal screaming, great structures of support twisting and turning as the airship collapsed into the treetops like a crippled cloud, towering gasbags ripping and tearing open, mylar curtains falling in sheets and folding across the uneven terrain of the jungle canopy, everything rippling into rumpled, broken shapes. From below, we heard the sounds of the jungle screaming and protesting; the sound of branches breaking, being stripped and torn from the trees, the roaring havoc of a great forest slowly bending, resisting, crunching, ripping, toppling, crashing, smashing under the ponderous and inexorable weight of the giant airship easing itself down toward its horrible final resting place.

  We came down and down, and still we kept on coming down and dowrr. The metal shrieked as it bent. The trees shrieked as they died. Everything was being crushed. The floors creaked and cracked, and then they twisted and broke and exploded with a series of sudden loud bangs as the panels began shattering out of their frames. They cartwheeled across the intervening space-one of them caught Clayton Johns, slicing him nearly in half. His blood spurted like a flood.

  And then the airship really lurched. It tilted crazily on its side, and everything went sliding rapidly down into the port side of the bay, now the bottom; the last few chairs and tables, all the last remaining crates of equipment and supplies and devices we still needed. A writhing prowler scrabbled for purchase, leaping from the top of one box to the next, all the time screaming mechanically, sounding exactly like a wounded horse, clawing its way futilely upward. I grabbed a strut and hung on tightly, reached for Siegel-he lunged for me and missed and slid away in the madness. A crate came sliding after him, I didn't see him after that.

  And still, the airship kept on crashing!

  The roar of it was deafening. The tumultuous confusion flashed with shades of red and black and purple. Something below us exploded with a bang, and the terrible jagged spike of a treetop came thrusting rudely up through the open hatch, pushing people and machines aside like so much paperwork, puncturing all the way up through the ceiling, ripping it asunder and revealing a tiny patch of open sky beyond. A gasbag was escaping incongruously up into the blue serenity.

  The lower wall of the bay imploded, crunched inward by the pressure of the forest beneath it; it came collapsing upward toward me, pushing rubble and debris and furniture and machines in a mighty thrust before it. I pulled myself around, began climbing upward to escape

  Something slammed against me, yanking the strut from my grasp-I fell and hit the floor, which was now a wall. I slipped and skidded, sliding toward the gaping wound that was all that remained of the access hatch. I scrabbled for purchase, all knees and elbows, but the wall grew steeper and I fell sideways and outward-slammed against a concrete tree, bounced backward off of it, grabbed for a broken branch and missed, banged it with my face instead, there were vines and webs pulling at me; my leg caught, twisted, and popped, and then I fell again, toppling downward, banging through eternity

  Above me, the flashing pink glare of the Hieronymus Bosch still twinkled brightly as it fell away into the sky. It was still comin
g down relentlessly-all of it-still smashing, toward me, but I was crashing downward even faster.

  Except I wasn't-

  I was already on the ground, lying on my back and staring upward at the fluttering silk remnants of the skin of the Hieronymus Bosch and wondering why it was still so loud, why everything was still making so much noise everywhere around me. How long would this continue? Crunching and popping and breaking and falling and crying! And now I began to hear other sounds as well, new sounds, purple sounds, red sounds, growing louder-the sounds of voices screaming, cursing, yelling for help. If anyone was shouting orders, I didn't hear it yet. Things were roaring and exploding. People were running. Choppers clattered overhead. The ground thudded with the distant whumppp! of a daisy-cutter bomb clearing a space in the jungle for helicopters to land. And pieces of the twinkling circus canopy still kept drifting downward to blow across my face. They fluttered like pennants.

  I couldn't move. I couldn't feel anything. I just stared at the pretty pink sky and wondered why it was all so fucking bright.

  Considerable dirt removal remains necessary in the nest, and this function is performed by a bizarre partner/predator relationship with the millipedes who are invariably to be found living in any Chtorran settlement. The millipedes in the nest will prey on the various congestions of jellypigs found throughout the tunnels of the nest, usually devouring those that fall away from the main body of the cluster. Occasionally, the gastropedes in the nest will also seek out a congestion of jellypigs and dine at length, often decimating the pack in the process.

  Because most of the jellypig's mass at any given moment is the soil in its intestinal tract, the millipede ends up carrying the jellypig's burden; so does any gastropede that has gorged itself on jellypigs. In this way, most of the soil carried by the jellypigs finds its way out of the tunnel and ultimately to the surface of the mandala.