A Season for Slaughter

Chapter 15 Discovery

Willig didn't say anything. She just shook her head to herself and kept on working.

"I'll thank you to keep your opinions to yourself," I said. "I didn't say a thing."

"You were thinking too loud."

"Sorry. I forgot. I'm not being paid to think." She swiveled back to her station and busied herself with some routine task.

I glowered at her back, but it wasn't Willig I was angry at. I was angry at myself. Of course… it would still be very easy to just reach out and flip the red switch over. I even let my fingers slide halfway toward it before I stopped myself. No. I couldn't.

I reached up sadly and pulled the VR helmet back down over my head; a moment later, I was back inside the alternate reality of cyber-space, peering out through the acute eyes of the prowler.

The machine had been waiting just inside the final valve-door. Even after my eyes focused, my mind still couldn't resolve what I was seeing. "What the hell's wrong with this thing-?"

"Nothing," whispered Siegel. "Wait. It takes a minute."

I superimposed a scale-grid over the display. That helped, but only a little. It wasn't that the chamber below was so big, as much as the fact that it was so full.

As the tunnel sloped down, it opened up completely. The walls of it fell away, widening outward to became a great bowl-shaped arena. The cables and tubes that lined the tunnels came bursting out in great spaghetti-like torrents, falling into the bowl and spreading out around it in a spiraling nest of arterial feed lines. Many of them were slowly but visibly pumping.

Spread throughout the cavern, on the walls, the ceiling, the Iloor, and even on the various structures that mushroomed up from below, we saw a dizzying spread of Chtorran life: all the different organs we had seen on the tunnel walls during our descent, plus inany more completely new to us. Most of them were enveloped in basket-like tangles of creeper-vines, or held in the grasp of Ktructures that looked like nets of blood vessels.

We moved forward into the chamber.

The prowler swung its head back and forth, scanning and rniffing and recording. We watched it all through cybernetic eyes. We were awestruck at the vision. There was too much to see. It was beyond our ability to visualize or identify or catalog. Everything was moving at once-pulsing, oozing, throbbing. It was madness, horror, fecundity, and virulence. All the various organs-long, fat, wet, floppy, sprawling, tangled, dripping-they clamored and scrambled. It was an organic nightmare. The great shallow space of the room was filled with living objects, a frenzy of shapes, sizes, and colors. For a moment, I thought I'd tumbled into a hallucinogenic nightmare. The intricacy and variety of life within this chamber had a staggering sudden impact.

The colors shining in the prowler's lights were dazzling-most predominant were the many shades of wet-looking scarlet; we panned our vision across the chamber and saw great clusters of swollen, blood-colored organs; they glistened with moisture. We moved closer and saw our insect-eyes distorted back at us, reflected in the surface of gelatinous egg-shaped berries; enormous, cancerous-looking things, redolent of fever-dreams and delusions.

Inside these sacs, there were tiny shapeless blots, held in suspension-things that hung in nebulae of thread-like veins. Spidery blue vessels pulsed throughout the shuddering wombberries. White fibrous nets of fragile-looking gauzy stuff were stretched around each cluster, holding them together; and thinner webs of silky strands reached out across every intervening space. All was held in slings and hammocks of spider-silk traceries.

Sher Khan lifted its head, swung it around, and surveyed the cavern again.

Umber fronds hung from the ceiling in many places, as well as from the walls. And there were more of the purple things that dripped, and stiff yellow fingers that looked a lot like coral.

Orange spongy structures squished underfoot, and brackish blue pools of congealed grease lurked in all the crevices and crannies, wherever something bumped or pressed against something else. Other things protruded, poked, or popped surprisingly from the tangles. The delicate pink ears and tongues that we had seen along the walls of the descending tunnel—or were they merely penises?-grew in profusion everywhere. But what purpose they served was just another Chtorran mystery.

And everywhere, all around, the pale veins and vessels twined and intertwined, curling in and out and underneath, embracing in a mad and twisted dance of alien life.

The prowler swung its gaze around. We moved deeper toward the center of the chamber now.

The maelstrom spiraled inward. The pallid purple roots of the guardian grove surrounded everything in a complex weave: the nesting chamber was held in an inescapable embrace. Shapd and structure and strength; the roots held up the ceiling; they defined the floors and outlined the walls like organic buttresses-but here, they also unraveled. The pillars of the trees came curling suddenly apart, fragmenting and transforming into twisted gargoyles, echoing the writhing shapes of their counterparts sprawled above the ground.

I wondered at the nature of those roots, what structures were within, functioning as nerves and veins and muscles. I puzzled over the intricacies of life, how all these different shapes and colors were all part of the same vast puzzle. I thought of twin fractal landscapes, designed by M. C. Escher and executed in Van Gogh's hasty brilliance. I thought of drugs ingested. I thought o chemical imbalances, insanity and madness and psychotic realm of blistering wonder. Worlds within worlds, whirling into world pools-I reached the limits of my ability to think and felt the processes of my brain come sliding to a dazed and humble startlement. Confusion reigned. For a while, I think, I even forgot how to speak.

There were sounds here too, gibberings and bubblings; the sickening hiss of air rasping over membranes; things sliding against other things. A wet blubbery scraping gave way to leathery rasp; a whistling exhalation; the flopping vibration of something thudding like a heartbeat; something else was sleeping. The room sank beneath a burbling cacophony of gasps and sighs and giggles; we could have been inside the lungs of some gigantic factory. It thumped wetly as it went about its ponderous and fleshy business.

The noise of it was as confusing as the sight. It was all around me. Everywhere I turned. I lost my footing, slipped and skidded downward between the greasy organs and bodies and lugubrious thumping pipes, down into the bubbling goo that puddled at the bottom of the chamber. I came up, gasping-

-pushed the helmet up and grabbed for air. "Are you all right, Captain?"

"No-" I reached for something; substance, reassurance, grabbed at Willig's hand. "Overload," I managed to gasp, still distorted, or perhaps numbed. Trembling in my chair, I shook violently like someone in the worst throes of withdrawal. I babbled meaningless syllables, trying to communicate some of what I'd seen. The beauty and the horror all together, wrapped around like lovers wrestling in a duel to the death, mating to oblivion, Psychotic overload. Willig shoved the nipple of the water bottle into my mouth. I sucked at it hungrily, a reflex action. The cool wetness startled me, and focused-focusing, I concentrated. Water, wetness, sip, and swallow. Drink. And blink. And follow. Open up and look at Willig, "Oh, my God-" And then, "See about Siegel!"

"I'm okay, Captain."

"You sure?" I gasped.

"I got out early," he admitted.

Willig wiped my face with a damp cloth. She wouldn't let me talk. "It's all right." she said. "Relax. You just went into overwhelm. It happens sometimes-"

"I know. But not to me!"

"Yes, even to you. It's nothing to be ashamed of."

My hands were still shaking. I could barely hold the water bottle. "But I don't know why. I didn't see anything scary in there-"

"You were trying to assimilate too much too fast. Your brain was full. It overheated." Laughing, she fanned me with her cap. "You'll be fine. Just wait a minute and regroup."

I flexed my hands, my fingers, nervously. "I don't know what happened-I just went mad for a minute." I took a breath, caught it, held it, and then released it explosively as something else occurred to me. "My God. Can you imagine what might have happened if we had been in real-time uplink? We'd have burned out brains all over the network." I didn't know if I was joking or serious.

Psychotic overwhelm. Too much, too fast. The information floods in and keeps on flooding. Sound and touch and sight; the operator tries to keep up with it; abruptly it overwhelms him-his ability to process overloads; he loses contact with reality, both the real and imagined; he goes into convulsions, seizures, epileptic frenzies. Sometimes Virtual Reality was also Virtual Insanity. Even death was not unknown. Intensity was fatal. I'd never seriously considered the possibility that it could happen to me. I'd always assumed that it only happened to people who were emotionally or mentally unstable…

And that was a thought to consider too.

"We have to go back in," I said. "We have to get samples. We have to bring the prowler out-"

"Siegel's already working on it. He's filtering the audio and simplified most of the video. He's only waiting for your go ahead."

I nodded. "Go ahead and start. I want to wash my face and then I'll peek in over his shoulder." I climbed out of my chair and went to the back of the vehicle. I locked myself in the head and splashed some cold water in my eyes. I still felt nervous and jittery. My heartbeat was racing and my breath was ragged. I felt like a caffeine tester. I felt like hell-and I wanted it to stop. I sat down on the toilet and put my head between my hands. I counted slowly to ten, then to thirty, and finally all the way to a hundred. It helped, but only a little. The aftershocks continued to resonate throughout my body.

After a while, I got up and washed my face again. I looked at myself in the mirror and wished I hadn't.

I came out of the head still feeling weak. I popped the rear exit of the vehicle and looked out at the bright surrounding afternoon. The sky was pink.