A Season for Slaughter

Chapter 8 Badgers

Two hours later, we rolled up short of the shambler grove and stopped.

Every camera and scanner on both vehicles popped out and swung around to focus on the silent trees. They stood motionless in the dry summer afternoon. The distant horizon was clear and blue; the morning breezes had blown away most of the pink haze, and we could see all the way out to forever. Contrasted with the desolation of the blood- and rust-colored landscape, the ominous foreboding of the deep and empty sky was oppressive. I wondered what was hiding behind it.

Inside the vans, we studied our screens and sweated. The long-range lenses revealed only shimmering waves of heat coming off the ground; the images shivered like melting reflections, but nothing else moved out there. Even the wind had crawled off into a corner somewhere and died.

We sat. We waited. We considered the situation.

I popped the hatch long enough to sniff the air. Then I sealed it again, returned to my console, and stared at my screens one more time. I leaned back in my chair, stretching my arms up over my head and interlocking my fingers. My vertebrae cracked in an exquisite spinal knuckle-crunch that reverberated all the way up to my fingertips. Then I exhaled and leaned forward again, letting the air out of my lungs like a deflating balloon. The screens in front of me remained unchanged. They glared like little neon accusations.

Finally, Willig swung down from the overhead observation bubble and perched opposite me. She was a chubby little thing, all scrubbed and pink. In an earlier age, she would have been too short, too old, too fat, and too compassionate to be in the army. Now it didn't matter. There were jobs to be done. Anyone who wanted to work was welcome. But Willig's appearance was a lie; the woman was all business. She wore her gray hair in a severe crewcut, and underneath her uniform she was turning into a block of solid muscle; if you got between her and the result she was committed to, you were likely to discover that the single most deadly human being on the planet was a ninja grandmother.

"Coffee?" she asked.

"I'd love some coffee," I replied. "But what's in the thermos?"

"Greenish-brown stuff." She poured me a cup anyway.

I sipped. This blend of ersatz was the worst yet. I grimaced and shuddered.

"Awful?" She was waiting for my reaction before pouring a cup for herself.

"It tastes like elephant piss. And the elephant was either sick or promiscuous."

Willig, despite her grandmother-from-hell demeanor, didn't flinch. I had to give her credit for that. She just blinked and said sweetly, "I had no idea you were such an expert on the taste of elephant piss. Where did you study medicine?" She poured herself half a cup, sipped, considered. "I vote for promiscuity. If the elephant had been sick, there would have been more flavor."

"That's what I like about you, Willig. You never let a joke die a natural death. You badger it unmercifully until it waves a white flag and surrenders."

"Badgers? Badgers?" she said sweetly. "We don't need no stinking badgers."

"You know," I said slowly, as I wiped greenish-brown stuff off my shirt with a disintegrating napkin, "I could have you court-martialed for playing with a loaded pun like that."

She sniffed. "If you aren't going to court-martial me for the coffee, then you certainly aren't going to get me for an innocent little joke."

"Innocent little joke? That's three lies in as many words." I put the mug in the holder next to the console and leaned back in my chair to think; it squeaked warningly.

"Okay, Captain." Willig dropped into the empty chair at the second station, and her voice became serious. "What are we looking for?"

"I don't know," I said honestly. "I don't even know if it's important. I hope it is-because that would justify our being out here. But I also hope it isn't-because if there's something going on that we don't understand, then we're at greater risk than we know."

"But you do have an idea, don't you? A wild guess?" she prompted.

"Yes and no. I have suppositions. I have possibilities. I have a pimple on my ass that needs scratching. What I don't have is information. Whatever I do, I'm not going to rush into anything." To her look, I added, "I'm not going to make any guesses. It's too easy to be wrong. This damn infestation keeps changing so fast, we can't assume that something is impossible because we've never seen it before. I think we know just enough to know how much we don't know. So before we do anything, I want to squirt a report back to Green Mountain. Just in case."

"Just in case," she echoed.

"Right."

"We are sending in probes? Aren't we?"

"Maybe." I scratched my beard. I hadn't shaved in two weeks, and my beard was just getting to that itchy-scratchy stage I hated. "But a probe might trigger the tenants, and that's what we don't want. It's the worms I need to see."

"Want to call down a beam? Sterilize everything. Then we go in and look at the bodies." She swiveled and tapped at her console. "There's two satellites in position right now. We could call for triangulation, flash them twice at the same time; they'd never know what hit them."

"I've been considering that too. But beams do something weird to the worms' metabolism. Sometimes they blow up. They definitely lose their stripes. I'd like to see the pattern of stripes on these worms before we take them out."

"What's so important about the stripes?"

"I don't know. Nobody does. But almost everybody believes they must mean something."

"Do you?"

I shrugged. "The dead worm we saw. It had three little white stripes in its display. That's new. Green Mountain has nothing about white stripes. So maybe this is a clue. Maybe it isn't. I don't know. It's in the domain of I-don't-know that discoveries get made."

"I'm sorry," Willig admitted. "This is starting to get beyond me. The only stripes I know how to read are the ones on an officer's uniform."

"Don't worry. That's the only stripes you need to know." I held out my coffee mug for a refill.

"You are a masochist, aren't you?"

"I'm hoping if I die, I won't have to make the decision. You or Siegel will."

"Then you'd better tell me about the stripes," she prompted. I knew what Willig was doing. I didn't mind. Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to describe it to someone else. Even if that person doesn't understand what you're saying, the mere act of rephrasing the dilemma, explaining it in simpler terms, might trigger the insight necessary to break the mental logjam.

"You've never seen a living worm, have you?" I began. "Pictures don't do them justice. Their colors are so much brighter in person. The fur changes hue while you watch. Sometimes it's brilliant, sometimes it's very dark; but it's always intense. Most interesting of all, the patterns of the stripes shift and ripple like a display on a billboard-or like the side of a blimp. Usually, the stripes settle into semipermanent patterns, they don't move around a lot, but if a worm is agitated, the patterns start flashing like neon. If the worm is angry or attacking, all the stripes turn red. But it varies a lot. We don't know why."

Willig looked puzzled, so I explained, "You know that worm fur isn't fur, don't you? It's a very thick coat of neural symbionts. Well, now we know that the symbionts react to internal stimuli as well as external. One of the reactions is manifested as a change in color. Some people think that the colors of a worm's stripes are a guide to what the worm is thinking or feeling."

"Do you?"

I allowed myself a shrug. "When a worm turns red; I let it have the right of way." Then I added thoughtfully, "It is possible. But if there's a pattern, we haven't discovered it yet. But that's why Green Mountain keeps collecting pictures of worms and their patterns. The lethetic intelligence engines keep chugging away at them, looking to see if there's any correlations between patterns of stripes and patterns of behavior. So far, red means angry. I don't think that's enough yet to qualify for a Nobel prize."

"So we're sitting here and waiting because you want to see the stripes on the sides of the worms."

"Right."

"And you're hoping that the worms will oblige by coming out of their holes so you can take their pictures from the safety of the van."

"Right."

"And if they don't… ?"

"I don't know. I don't even know that any of this has anything at all to do with that dead worm we found." I shrugged in frustration. "But this is the weirdest thing in the neighborhood, so we start here."

"Uh-huh," Willig said. "What you're really doing is wondering whether you've protected yourself sufficiently."

"No, I'm wondering whether I've protected the rest of you. I'm not worried about myself."

"Oh?"

"Don't you know? I'm already dead. According to the law of averages, I died four years ago. At least six times over."

"For a dead man, you're still pretty lively."

"It only seems that way," I admitted. And then, after a moment, I added another thought. "Sometimes I think that as I get older, I get smarter. Then I realize, no-I'm not getting smarter, I'm just getting more careful. Then I realize I'm not even getting more careful. I'm just getting tired."

Willig nodded knowingly. "That's how you get to be my age."

"Mmph," I acknowledged. "I doubt very much that I am ever going to be your age. Not unless I seriously change my life-style." I frowned at the idea. "In fact, I don't think anyone is ever going to reach your age again. I think the infestation is going to keep us all permanently retarded at the age of sixteen-frightened, desperate, and lonely."

Willig shook her head. "I don't see it that way."

"I'm jealous of you," I said. "You're from a different world. You're old enough to remember what it was like before. I'm not. Not really. All I remember is school and TV and play-testing my father's games. And then it was all over-" I stared bitterly into the cup of ersatz; the stuff looked almost as bad as it tasted.

"You want to know the truth?" Willig laughed. "I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but being in the army and fighting this invasion is the most exciting thing I've ever done in my life. I finally feel like I'm making a difference in the world. I'm having fun. I'm getting to do things. I'm being trusted with responsibility. People don't tell me I'm not qualified anymore. I'm playing in the big game now. This war is the best thing that ever happened to me. I wouldn't have it last one day longer than necessary, but I will be sorry when it's over."

"Willig," I said. "Let me give you the bad news. Or, in your case, the good news. This war is never going to be over. The best we're ever going to achieve will be an armed stalemate. From the moment the first Chtorran seeds entered the atmosphere of this planet, we've been in a death-struggle. As long as there are Chtorran creatures on this planet-and I have to tell you, d can't conceive of any way that we can eradicate the Chtorran infestation-the death-struggle will be a daily fact of life."

Willig nodded. "I know that." Her tone became as serious as I'd ever heard her use. "Now let me tell you something. Before this war, ninety percent of the human race-no, make that ninety-five percent-were living like drones. Zombies. They ate, they slept, they made babies. Beyond that, they didn't have any goals. Goals? Most of them didn't think more than two meals ahead. Life wasn't about life; it was about food and money and the occasional fuck and not much more. At best, it was about getting to the next toy. At worst-well, we had ten billion professional consumers who were consuming the Earth. Not as fast as the Chtonans perhaps, but fast enough. You want to talk about the quality of life before the infestation? Okay, some of us had good food and clean water; we had dry beds and a warm place to shit. We had three hundred channels of entertainment and music. Our work was piped in too, so we never had to go out if we didn't want to. Do you think that was living? I don't. It was existence, about as empty and hollow as human life can be. For most of us, the challenges were too small. There was nothing to test us, there was nothing at stake, so there was nothing to live for either. We endured, we waited-and we ran to the television every time a really interesting crisis or plane crash occurred, because at least that gave us the vicarious thrill of participating in something meaningful.

"Yes, I know there's been a lot of dying," she said. "More than any one person can comprehend. Yes, I know that most of the survivors are so crazy with grief and guilt and loneliness that suicide is the leading cause of death on this planet. And yes, I know that the world is full of zombies who don't have the courage for suicide, and walking wounded who can't cope with the fact that survival isn't an assured right anymore.

"But if I could change it back with the wave of a magic wand, I'm not so sure I'd be too quick to lift it. Before the infestation, we were sheep, waiting to be gathered into a herd and led to the slaughterhouse. Now-? Well, some of us are learning how to be wolves. And you know something? It's not so bad being a wolf. I like it. And I think a lot of other people do too. It's not just the excitement, although that's a good fringe benefit; it's the feeling of being alive. We're finally part of something that matters. Yes, sometimes I'm overwhelmed at the size of the job in front of us, but at least this way, life is finally something you have to live to the fullest-or not at all. Considering the long-term prospects for the species, I think we're much better off learning how to be wolves."

Her eyes were shining brightly as she said this. She had an almost unholy intensity. She reached over and put her hand on mine; the pressure of it was a hot red force. "Listen to me. This infestation might yet prove to be one of the very best things that's ever happened to the human race. It's forcing us to care about our lives on such a grand scale that for the first time, millions of people are actually thinking about our ecology, our planet, our ultimate goals. Yes, you're right about that, Jim. Even if the Chtorrans were to disappear tomorrow, we will never be able to go back to the way it was before. We'll never be able to be complacent again. This infestation is going to transform the species, and I think it's going to be a transformation for the better. You and I-and all our children, unto the umpteenth generation-all of us are going to have to live our lives as if they really do matter."

For a long moment, there was silence in the van. I didn't know if I agreed with Willig or not. I hadn't realized that there might be people in the world who felt the way she did. It was an eye-opening surprise.

I had to think about this for a while.

Part of me was terribly afraid that she might be right.

In her own way, Kathryn Beth Willig, a grandmother of six, who had enlisted in the United States Army at an age when most women were starting to think about retirement, had crystallized the thought that had been bothering me since the day I'd seen my first worm.

This was exciting. This was fun. I was enjoying the war.

I got up from my chair then: I popped the hatch of the rollagon and dropped down onto the crunchy red kudzu. The fruity smell of it was almost strong enough to cover the horrible afterburn of last week's gorps. Traces of the deadly gorpish odor still hung faintly in the air, and probably would for weeks to come, but I barely noticed. The grove of shamblers looked taller and darker than I remembered.

The other van was waiting only a hundred meters away. I waved halfheartedly at them. Marano flashed her lights. Then I turned away and stared again at the distant shamblers. What was going on over there?

What Willig had said was disturbing.

You aren't supposed to enjoy a war. War is everything wrong justified and rationalized and wrapped up in the flag to make it barely palatable-but underneath the patriotic plans, the diagrams and maps, it's all insanity. It's the abandonment of morality in the hot adrenaline rush of hate and vengeance; it's the last word of the illiterate, the ultimate breakdown of communication.

I knew all the speeches. All the explanations. All the nice words. War is a cruel reptilian scream drowning out the last gasps of reason. It's the sacrifice of rationality on the altar of selfrighteousness. Goddammit-I knew the litany of pacifism as well as anybody. And I thought I hated war.

This was the most horrifying moment of the entire invasionthe realization that I loved what I was doing.

And rushing close behind that hideous truth came the flaming white rush of another mirror-shock of recognition, just as terrible. Everything I had been holding back came flooding in and hit me all at once-I nearly buckled under the impact.

In the days before this war had begun, I had been a fat and selfish teenager, angry and resentful and a pain in the ass to everyone around me. Now… well, I wasn't fat anymore, and I wasn't anywhere near as selfish. I had lost fifty pounds, and I had learned to watch out for others' needs. But-that was all I could be proud of. I had also become the kind of person I had once despised. I had grown the same cruel veneer of sullen nastiness that I used to fear in others.

I knew the truth. I just wouldn't admit it to myself.

Beauty is only skin deep; but ugly goes down to the bone-the same viciousness that I used on the worms, I had learned to use on the people around me, and I had learned the act so well that it wasn't an act anymore; it was me, all the way down to the little fascist at the core that actually enjoyed every hot flush of rage. I had turned into a vicious, dangerous man, unable to express compassion, affection, or tenderness without distrusting my own motives. I had become exactly like all the bullies who used to torment me in the school yards of my childhood; the only difference between what they had been and what I was now, was that my brutality had a much more horrifying vocabulary-I had overwhelming firepower. And I'd already demonstrated more than once that I wasn't afraid to use it-on human beings too, if necessary. I'd left my share of dead bodies behind, black and bleeding in the dirt.

Dannenfelser's nasty remark had been right. The Mode Training hadn't brought me to a state of enlightenment; the effect was precisely the opposite. It let me justify and rationalize and excuse all of my various perpetrations against other human beings. It hurt so bad I had to laugh. Did the Mode Training help? Yes, it did. I got to stop feeling uncertain about what I was doing.

I didn't stop doing the bad things; I just stopped beating myself up for doing them. Yes, Jim, you really are a self-righteous, inconsiderate, short-sighted asshole. Stop worrying about it and use your talents where they'll do the most good. Put on your jackboots and trample away. We have a planet to save.

Shit.

We were so busy saving the fucking planet, we were turning into bigger monsters than the Chtorrans.

No. Not we. Me.

I was a fucking monster. A killer, a pervert, a moral retard, and a deranged psychopath. And those were my good points.

I didn't know what anybody else was feeling, but I knew where I was. I was sitting in the middle of a Chtorran jungle feeling terribly alone and sorry for myself. My throat hurt from the pain of choking back the hot red anger. I didn't dare risk letting it out. If I did, I might start raging, and I didn't think I would be able to stop.

The part that hurt the worst was the knowledge that I had done it to myself. I had raged at everybody around me until I had chased them all away. The pain of my solitude was a vast echoing roar-a mocking silence. There was only the sound of my own thoughts to taunt me.

But Willig was wrong about one thing.

This war was not the single most important event that had ever happened to me.

Elizabeth Tirelli was.

And I had never told her so.

If it was possible for my mood to turn even darker, that one thought was the single thing that would have done it. I wanted to climb right back into the van and call for an immediate pickup. I wanted to head straight back to Houston, find her, wherever she was, pull her out of whatever meeting or briefing, grab her and tell her. And get down on my knees and beg her to forgive me. And help me get better.

I wouldn't, of course. I was too professional to do that. First, we had to finish this mission-this wild, reckless adventure that I had flown off on, that nobody had authorized, which would probably discover nothing at all, and would only end up adding more fuel to the emotional firestorms raging at home.

If I got killed here, she'd never know.

Best not to get killed then.

Almost immediately the mechanical part of my mind popped out an answer. I could put an Event-of-Death message into the network. That would do…

Right. But the thought of writing it made me queasy. I sat down on the bottom step of the van and put my head in my hands. Maybe Willig was right about the war. If it hadn't been for the Chtorrans, I'd still be a fat and selfish teenager-no matter how old I grew. But if it hadn't been for the war, I would never have met Lizard.

She meant so much to me, and all I had done was make her unhappy. I didn't deserve her. It would serve me right if she told me she never wanted to see me again.

Shit.