"Don"t worry," Lizard said. "Drs. Amador, Rodriguez, Hikaru, and their technical team are being kept busy in the number-three observation bay. You can talk freely here." She didn"t add that this was more Uncle Ira planning. Either Captain Harbaugh knew or she didn"t need to know.
Captain Harbaugh looked a little edgy. We all did. "What happens next?" she asked.
I glanced at the terminal in front of me. "We kick it up another notch."
"How long do we keep this up?"
I shrugged. "How long can they keep it up?" I nodded toward the open cargo hatch. I looked across the glowing table to Dwan standing in the gloom on the opposite side. "Go ahead," I said. "Bring it up two more clicks."
Then I turned and headed for the railing so I could look straight down into the mouths of h.e.l.l. I couldn"t put it off any longer. I had to see this firsthand. Lizard followed reluctantly. Captain Harbaugh hung back at first, then let herself join us both at the edge of the open hatch.
We looked down.
We knew they couldn"t see us. The cargo bay was dark. We believed they couldn"t see us. It didn"t help.
The worms were staring up, directly into our eyes. They trilled at us. They sang.
They waved their arms. They fluttered their mandibles. Their eyes weaved back and forth, as if they were trying to take in the wale of the whole airship in a single glance. Our spotlights swept across the ma.s.sed worms; they reached out for the light when it touched them and moaned when it pa.s.sed.
But always, there were some of them, no matter what, who were glaring directly up at us. As if they could see us. As if they wanted us.
There was a raw insect-like sentience in those eyes. Despite everything we had said, despite everything we believed, despite everything that all our tests and dissections and extrapolations had shown, I couldn"t help but think that somehow this was the final Chtorran intelligence after all. There was wonder in those eyes.
There was awe. There was beingness.
It made it all the more horrific.
"Hideous," whispered Captain Harbaugh. "They"re hideous." Lizard didn"t say anything. Even in the darkness of the cargo bay, I could see how pale she was.
"Are you all right?"
She put her hand over mine. "This is the most horrible thing I"ve ever seen in my life." She turned to me abruptly. "Promise me something "Anything."
"Promise me-that you"ll never let me be eaten by worms." She squeezed my hand so hard it hurt. "Promise me that you"ll kill me first."
"It"ll never happen, sweetheart."
""Promise me, Jim!"
I swallowed hard. "I promise you. I will never let you be captured by worms. I will never let you be eaten by worms. I promise you with all my heart and with all my soul."
She relaxed her grip then. I rubbed the circulation painfully back into my fingers.
The sound and the lights grew brighter. The worms grew more frenzied. Now they were climbing one on top of another. I knew that many of them were going to be killed in the crush, smothered and trampled in the hysteria. But it wasn"t like a human crowd. There was no panic, no fighting, no screaming-only the incredible feverish devotion that just went on and on.
At last we turned away from the railing and went back to the video tables. One of the displays was showing a projection of the Bosch"s light show. A miniature dirigible hovered above the table, patterns of lines and color flowing gracefully down its sides, throbbing in time with the song of the nest.
Clayton Johns was the technician at this table. He looked up as we approached.
Dwan came scuttling over to join us. I looked around the group. Clayton Johns, Dwan Grodin, General Tirelli, Captain Harbaugh, one or two ancillary aides.
"How"s your courage?" I asked.
For a moment, none of them reacted. Probably no one wanted to be first. Finally, curiosity outweighed manners, and Dwan asked, "Why?"
"I want to use the song from the Rocky Mountain mandala. The one that got nuked." In the darkness, I slid my hand over to Lizard"s and squeezed it. "It"s the most different from this nest-song. It"s the one that"s likely to trigger the most noticeable change in behavior." I glanced around the table. "Opinions, anyone?"
Dwan shook her head. "Th-this is already b-beyond m-my s-skills," she admitted unhappily.
"Johns?"
He looked surprised that I might be interested in what he thought. "Um-" He shrugged. "What would happen if we just turned out the lights, turned off the song, and went away?"
We all looked at each other, surprised. We hadn"t thought about that.
Dwan answered first. "I th-think th-that th-the w-worms w-would p-probably"t-try"t-to f-follow us."
"Across thousands of miles of jungle to j.a.pura?"
"If th-they c-could."
A terrifying thought. None of us knew what to say to that. "We have a"t-tiger b-by the"t-tail," said Dwan. "W-we have to d-do"s-something here."
"Okay," I agreed. "Let"s give them the Rocky Mountain song. Um-" I turned to Captain Harbaugh. "I think you should make an announcement of what we"re planning to do. Whatever the worms do, I don"t want to panic the crew."
"Good idea," she said. "It"s probably called for, in any case." She stepped off a few paces and began speaking quietly to her headset.
I glanced at Lizard. "Anything you want to add?"
She shook her head. "You"re doing fine. Keep on."
"Thank you," I said. Professional praise from my general meant almost as much as private praise from my wife. I waited until Captain Harbaugh finished her announcement, then turned to Dwan. "Are you ready?"
She looked up from her terminal. "Any"t-time."
"Do it."
She tapped the panel before her. For a moment, nothing happened.
The sound continued. It filled the cargo bay. It was both obscene and rapturous.
It penetrated our whole beings. We were all vibrating with it. There was no escape.
And then it changed.
Almost imperceptibly, at first-but somehow, something was different. A flavor?
Not a wrong note. Just a different one.
We all moved curiously to the railing and peered over again. The worms were falling silent in waves. They looked puzzled. They were ceasing their frenzied movement and staring upward at us curiously. The lights on the airship were shifting too-we could see the reflections in their eyes, a million pinpoints of shining color.
Our spotlights still swept across the crowd, but their reactions were visibly slowed.
They no longer reached for the light. Some of them were looking at each other now-curiously.
Some of the worms were trying to match the new song. They raised their voices.
The effect was jarring. Discordant. It didn"t mesh with the old song.
Others fell silent. They didn"t know the music. Or they didn"t know which song to sing.
The crowd was fragmenting. We could see it in the patterns of movement that coursed across the arena in waves. What had previously been smooth and graceful was becoming abruptly disjointed and confused. Chaotic.
And once again, I realized, there is no such thing as one Chtorr. They can"t exist as individuals.
While they had been singing, they had been one voice. One being.
Now, puzzled-uncertain-they were breaking apart into two hundred thousand separate creatures.
Two songs battled for control of the arena.
Oh my G.o.d.
The song of the airship grew louder. The lights grew brighter. The old song rose in volume and intensity. The new song rose to drown it out-from above and from around. I could see the patterns now.
In the center of the arena, the old song was strongest-as if the worms in the center were a reservoir. At the edges, where the density of the ma.s.s was much less, that was where the new song was picking up adherents. They pushed forward, crowding and climbing with renewed impetus-as if they absolutely had to convince the worms in the center of the arena to sing the new song instead of the old.
Oh my G.o.d.
By the time I realized what was going to happen, it was too late. It was already happening.
"Turn it off!" I shouted. "Turn it all off now!"
One curious note about the bunnydogs-their size, their intelligence, their metabolism, their rate of growth, their large brains, their ability to learn and process information, and all of the other factors in the Skotak-Alderson viability scale seem to indicate a creature with a life span of ten to thirty Earth-years. Observations of bunnydogs in Chtorran nests as well as in captivity, however, seem to suggest that even under the best of conditions, the bunnydogs are much shorter-lived.
Is this the normal life span of the creature? Or is it the result of an incomplete ability to adapt to Terran conditions? Without a more accurate knowledge of the home environment of the bunnydogs, we have no way to test this hypothesis.
-The Red Book, (Release 22.19A)
Chapter 54.
Stingflies "It"s impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious."
-SOLOMON SHORT.
Halfway to j.a.pura and the sun was high overhead. The stingflies buzzed around me so thick, I had to wear a plastic hood and air filter.
There was no escape.
I stood alone on the skydeck on top of the vessel; not because I wanted to admire the sky or warm myself in the sun, but because I wanted to be alone.
I leaned on the railing and stared out at the dying Amazon. I could still hear the screaming in my head. It wouldn"t stop.
I had made the worst mistake of my life, and the evidence was strewn across several hundred square kilometers of jungle.
It wasn"t the dead worms that bothered me-it was the mistake. I had embarra.s.sed myself. No problem there. I was used to it. But I had also embarra.s.sed the general, who had stood behind me. And that was intolerable.
The Mode Training hadn"t prepared me for this. I felt alone and miserable and totally without worth. I"d gotten overconfident. I"d made decisions without thinking about them long enough or hard enough. I hadn"t considered all the consequences. I hadn"t thought of all the possibilities. I"d just demonstrated to every person aboard this airship and every person with access to the worldwide network-and that meant just about everybody in the world-that the world"s foremost expert on worms was a blind, bullheaded idiot.
The consequences of my reckless experiment had probably not inspired much confidence in the future of this operation.
There had been an anonymous note in my mailbox this morning. "Too bad the government suspended the payment of bounties for this mission. You would have bankrupted the Federal Reserve."
Ha. Ha.
Only Dwan Grodin had said anything worthwhile. After it was over, after we were sailing safely into the darkness again, she had come up to me and said, "Y-you know, Sh-shim. Th-this m-might b-be useful as a w-weapon. W-we m-might be able to c-confuse th-the w-worms w-with th-their own s-songs."
An interesting thought, that.
I wondered if we could somehow suggest that had been the plan all along.
Probably not. The Brazilians were already mad enough as it was. Through our careless disregard for consequences-according to the most vocal of the right-wing politicos in Brasffia-we had destroyed a major Brazilian resource, the developing Chtorran agricultural industry. That was a nightmare statement in itself.
Anybody who thought that Chtorrans could be farmed... well, they were welcome to parachute down into the center of a mandala. I wouldn"t stop them.
My headset beeped. "Yeah?"
Corrigan. "General Tirelli"s respects. We"re ready to begin."
"Thank you," I replied. "I"ll be down shortly."
I turned around and took one last look at the endless expanse of skydeck. The top of the Bosch was a vast pink parking lot in the sky. You could land airplanes here. You could play three side-by-side football games and still have room for a dozen baseball games as well. You could build a neighborhood on top of this airship.
Best of all, you couldn"t see beyond it. You could almost forget the dying Earth below. Except for the ever-present haze of tiny gnat-like stingflies, we could have been sailing through the crisp blue sea of memory. But the d.a.m.n bugs were everywhere up here. I brushed them off the plastic front of my hood, I waved them away from my face. I had nightmares of them flying up my nose or into my ears.
I shuddered and headed for the elevator down. I had to pa.s.s through detox too-where jets of air and decontaminant blew into oblivion any stingflies that still clung to me. I shrugged out of my hood and protective coveralls and headed forward.
The debriefing, a.n.a.lysis, inquest, call it what you will, was held in the Bosch"s main conference room, a large meeting s.p.a.ce surrounded by immense display screens. Two meters into the room and I knew how deep it was going to get. Dr.
Shreiber was sitting on the left side of the table. Uh-oh.
General Tirelli caught the look on my face, but merely nodded me toward a seat.