A Season for Slaughter

Chapter 17 A Discovery

Supper was some of that same yellow, buttery, bread-like stuff that they fed to the herds that roamed the California coast-though without the tranquilizing additives. At this point, I almost would have preferred the tranks. But the government, in its infinite wisdom, acknowledged our humanity by granting us the luxuries of anxiety, fear, anger, and depression. I wondered about the people in the herds. Did they know? Did they care? Were they happy—0r just unconscious? Did it even matter? Did any of us have a choice? In a Chtorran-dominated world, sooner or later we might all end up in a herd of some kind.

I wondered if I would remember what it was like to love and to care. Probably not. I probably wouldn't feel anything at all. The thought of what it might be like left me so depressed, I couldn't eat. I left the remainder of my meal forgotten in its plastic tray. The great southwestern herds were both a warning and a preview. They grew larger during the warm summer months, but during the winters, they shrank-partly because the sick and elderly died off, and partly because the discomfort of the colder weather actually triggered the partial rehabilitation of some individuals; but the wandering herds had pretty much become a permanent phenomenon.

We'd seen pictures of larger herds in India, but that had been a transitory phenomenon; the monsoon season had broken up the great Indian migration. There had also been rumors of a herd numbering more than a million individuals roaming through central China, but the reconstituted Chinese Republic refused to acknowledge any requests for information on the subject. Satellite scans had been inconclusive. How do you tell the difference between a crowd of mindless Chinese ambivalents and a crowd of Chinese prisoners of war? Both were herded by tanks.

And that made me think about freedom. That was another casualty of the war.

Even those of us who thought we were free were only living an illusion. You can have freedom only where you have choice. Eliminate choice and freedom disappears. And the human race didn't have any choices anymore; we had to fight this war. The only courses of action left to us were reactive ones, determined by the actions of the Chtorran. We were locked in a dance of death with the worms, and they were just as enslaved by the music as we were. Maybe even more so. But that wasn't a new thought. The Chtorrans were enslaved by their biology, just as we were enslaved by ours. If only we could know the nature of that enslavement. Ours, as well as theirs.

I remembered something that Foreman had said in the Mode Training. "Everything is enslavement. You just pretend that it isn't." Now, again, I understood what he meant. We were enslaved by the circumstance. We were sitting in the van, waiting for the storm to pass. There wasn't anything else. We were free to do only what the universe would allow us to do.

The cotton candy would pile up around us, we couldn't even guess how deep it would get; and then we'd have to wait until the pink sugary dust was devoured by whatever hordes of frenzied Chtorran insects came hatching up out of the ground.

What didn't get eaten while it was still fluffy would collapse into a sticky sludge that would blanket the landscape for days, killing even more Terran life forms-plants, small animals, bugs, anything that couldn't clean itself. If the cotton candy came down thick enough, a week from now all this rumpled terrain would be a brown molasses desert. And a month or so after that, it would be a crimson Chtorran meadow. And a year after that, it would be a towering scarlet forest; a pastel wonderland of frolicking bunnydogs and giant red man-eating caterpillars, all singing songs of love and wonder and lunch.

I felt the despair like a ceiling crushing down on me. No matter how hard I pressed back, it was always there; it just kept coming back, each time pushing closer than before. I couldn't make it go away. If I kept busy, I could pretend I didn't feel it. If I kept busy, I could distract myself. If I kept busy, I wouldn't have to deal with that thing I didn't want to admit. But there wasn't anything to do, and the desperate pressure came rolling in again, like a big rosy, smothering wall.

I suppressed a shudder; it didn't work. I covered by pretending to stretch. I leaned back in my chair; it creaked alarmingly, but it held. I put my arms behind my head and stretched-but no, I couldn't quite get the vertebrae in my back to give one of those long, satisfying knuckle-crunching cracks. Damn. Everything today was almost, but not-quite.

Willig was watching me carefully. I glanced over at her. "You know what?" I said.

"What?" she asked.

"You remind me of a dog I had once."

"Oh?"

I nodded. "She'd lie on the floor at my feet, content to wait patiently for whatever I might decide to do-a cookie, a walk, a ball-but the giveaway was that she never took her eyes off me. She even slept with her ears open. I swear she even counted the sounds of pages turning. Whenever I finished whatever I was reading, she'd sit up and look at me. She never asked for anything outright, but she was always there. Always. She was totally tuned to my every move." I gave Willig a speculative look. "Does that sound like anybody we know?"

Willig was pouring out a fresh cup of brown stuff. She put it into the holder on my work station and looked at me with her big soft brown eyes. "Try throwing a ball and find out."

"Right. It'll have to be a masked ball, so no one will recognize you." I picked up the steaming cup and sipped at it cautiously. Ugh. Nobody liked the stuff, but we all drank it anyway. The fact that it was probably poisonous was an added benefit.

The most effective way to kill every dangerous bug swimming in a volume of water was to make brown stuff out of it. You could leave an uncovered container of brown stuff standing in a field full of Chtorran parasites for a year and come back to find that nothing, absolutely nothing, had grown in it. What brown stuff did to your internal plumbing was every bit as wonderful. The technology of antisepsis had advanced light-years.

Brown stuff was also good as rust preventative, transmission fluid, shark repellent, and sheep dip. Aside from that, it was delicious. "Ahhh," I said, appreciatively. I made a great show of licking my chops and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

"Yum."

Willig raised an eyebrow at me. "Oh, really?"

"All right," I lied. "Next time, you could put in a little more battery acid, okay?"

"We're out of battery acid. I had to substitute buffalo sweat."

"Ah, good choice." I swung around back to my station. The remains of my dinner sat forgotten to one side. I put the mug down next to it and realized that at some point between yellow stuff and brown stuff, I'd made a decision. "Siegel," I called.

"Jawohl, mein Kapitkn?"

"Heat up the prowler again."

"Huh?"

"As long as we're sitting here, let's get some work done. Let's find out what happens in that hole when the pink starts hitting the ground."

"You got it." A moment later. "We're alive again."

I pulled the helmet down over my head slowly, fitting myself back into the cyberspace reality as gently as I could. It didn't work. I shuddered into position, and I was struggling queasily to maintain my footing at the bottom of a giant wet stomach. Everything was slippery here, everything had an oily look. It made me squeamish and uncomfortable.

But Siegel had done something to the audio-video spectra, and nothing was quite as intense as it had been before. I could still sense the rhythmic pumping, the pulsing, the incessant industrial throbbing of this living factory; but it was no longer quite so overwhelming.

"Let's start by taking samples," I said.

"We have another problem," said Siegel. "We need to get Sher Khan out of this sludge at the bottom. It's rising. Not fast, but fast enough to worry me."

"Right," I agreed. Then I understood the problem. "It's too slippery to climb."

"Can I use the claws?" Siegel asked.

"Guess we're going to have to. But do it gently. Let's try to avoid any serious damage, and let's hope that this thing doesn't have enough of a nervous system to feel real pain."

Siegel took the controls of the prowler. Almost abruptly, the skidding sensation underfoot disappeared, replaced by a catlike plucking that accompanied every step. We began picking our way upward and out. I could feel the fleshy surface twitching beneath us. I wanted to pull my hands out of the responders and wipe them off. Already I felt sticky, dirty, and covered with slime. I suppressed the feelings and forced myself to focus on the job. "There-" I said. "See that big red jellyfish structure?"

"Got it."

"Let's get closer. I want to see what all those little flecks inside it are. I want samples of that first."

"Working," said Siegel.

I kept my mouth shut while Siegel concentrated on the task at hand. Most of the subtasks were preprogrammed, but someone still had to guide the software, telling it exactly what was wanted.

We slid in close to the huge blubbery mass and examined it carefully. Eyestalks extruded from the prowler's head and focused on the target from both above and below; then a pair of three-fingered pincers slid out from the place where mandibles would have been if Sher Khan had been a living creature. We grasped a section of the blood-colored blob and pulled on it; it stretched out as if it were made of some kind of rubber cement. There were responder pads on the fingers. We could feel the sticky wetness of the stuff as if we were touching it with our bare hands. It wasn't a pleasant sensation. It was warm and fleshy, and it twitched and pulsed like it was trying to wriggle out of our grasp.

"How do you want to do this?" asked Siegel. "Poke, drill, or cut?"

"Wait a minute-" I was studying the flecks suspended in the gelatinous mass. They were all different sizes and shapes. There was a very fine network of capillaries or nerves or something woven throughout the suspension, but I couldn't tell what its function was. "Backlight this," I muttered, and one of the eyestalks angled its bright beam directly through the mass I was studying.

"Expand the focus," I said, and reality exploded as if I were shrinking. The flecks grew suddenly into boulders, and then asteroids hanging in reddened space. The pale fibers became a branching net of gigantic cables floating in the distance.

"Siegel, look at this."

I heard his sharp intake of breath. And then, "Beautiful."

"Enhance," I whispered, and the spectrum shifted; the colors seemed to stretch and change within themselves; outlines intensified, and things that were previously unidentifiable became sharply etched structures.

Each of the myriad little flecks was a shining black node, surrounded by pale fibrous sheets that uncurled outward and faded into the distance. We moved in closer, and we could see that many of the black flecks were surrounded by the faintest hints of shells, outlines that intimated the existence of dividing membranes.

As we watched, the enveloping suspension pulsed. A wave of movement swept through the gelatinous mass. Fifteen seconds later, another wave passed through the ocean of tiny objects. What were we looking at here? Seeds? Eggs? What kind of horrors grew here? How long before these tiny flecks produced a host of new monsters, breaking free and rising open-eyed into the world, black and raw and hungry?

"Wow," said Siegel.

"Yeah," I agreed.

Siegel told the processing engine to try several other enhancement patterns, and we examined the minuscale structures through a series of shifted spectrum and false-color images. Their structures grew clearer and clearer.

"Do you think the whole blob is full of these things?" Siegel asked.

"Let's take a look-" I whispered another command, and suddenly our point of view was moving forward, flying steadily across an immense red seascape. Islands and mountains swam past us in schools. Bubbles the size of asteroids hung suspended in the scarlet air. Endless arterial nets, held it all together. The patterns repeated over and over, familiar in their essence, but different in the details. Every black fleck was the center of its own fragile universe, a gathering of materials in a delicate sac. A distinction was being made, an act of separation from the suspension was occurring within each. The structure was almost cellular, but not quite. Not yet.

"My God." The words fell out of my mouth simultaneous with the realization. A chill crawled slowly up my spine, causing the tiny hairs on the back of my neck to rise uncomfortably.

I checked the readouts at the bottom of my vision. The van's LI engine wasn't as powerful as the Harlie units in Atlanta and Houston, but it was still smart enough to recognize the patterns within this fractal landscape. But hell, I didn't need the van's opinion. It was obvious. I knew what these formations were, and what they were becoming. Even a lay person would have recognized it.

The black flecks were seeds. Or eggs. Or cells. Or even raw cellular material, caught in the process of becoming a seed or an egg or a cell. No question. Things were forming inside this red blubbery sap. Things were growing here. Not the things that we would meet outside, perhaps, but certainly the things that would eventually give birth to them.

I knew this was big. I hadn't known it was this big.

One of the most significant questions of the war was being answered here. All we had to do was get these pictures back to Houston Center. My throat was suddenly dry. I allowed myself a deep drink of water. "Siegel," I said abruptly. "Let's get our samples."

"Okay. How do you want to proceed with the red stuff?"

"Carefully."

"Can you be more specific than that?"

"Just a minute, I'm still looking." I was studying the recommendations of the LI engine. "Okay," I said at last. "Sher Khan's readouts suggest that it's pretty thick stuff. It's got the consistency of phlegm. It's also proto-cellular; lots of tiny little structures all bunched together like grapes inside a plastic bag-only more than that. I think we're seeing multiple redundancy here, the same kind of recursion we saw on the way down. It's lots of little bags of stuff, clustered inside middle-sized bags, and lots of middle-sized bags clustered inside even bigger bags, etcetera, etcetera, all the way up to the largest size. The same pattern of protection must hold throughout the whole nest. If Willig's map is correct, there are at least twenty more structures like this one spread around the edges of the chamber.

"All right-" I made a decision. "Pull out as large a chunk of it as you can, cut it, and bag it. I'm going to bet that this thing is self-healing and that you won't see a lot of bleeding."

Siegel grunted and went to work. I watched him for a moment, then popped out of the cyberspace reality and looked at Willig. "How's the weather?"

"Light to moderate candy, with flurries of spun sugar expected momentarily. Have a look yourself."

"I'm going to. Reilly, out of the bubble. Let me up."

Reilly lowered himself down from the turret and stood aside while I pulled myself up into the swiveled seat to look around. There was a light cover of dust already apparent on the top of the bubble, but I could still see clearly out the sides.

All across the roof of the van was a light frosting of pink. As I watched, delicate fluffballs of all sizes came bouncing across the panels. They looked like pale smudges in the air. Sometimes when they hit the surface of the van or the side of the bubble, they powdered into nothingness; most of the time they just bounced away.

The fluffballs were both amazingly strong and curiously fragile-they were dandelions with a hair trigger. They could sail across the countryside for hundreds of klicks without shattering; but then, abruptly, for almost no reason at all, the whole structure would just go brittle, and at the first disturbance the whole delicate structure would just come apart. Even a sudden breeze might do it, shattering the fluffballs into a bright powdery haze. The billions of minuscule pink particles could hang in the air for hours, a stifling sweet fog; or they could just as easily settle out, clumping into flakes like snow and piling up in enormous billowy drifts. The landscape around us was already turning into a frothy whipped meringue.

Without appropriate breathing gear, a human being would suffocate in that cloying miasma. Smaller animals would choke. Insects would be unable to move, their body parts clogged with tiny sticky particles. Plants would be unable to grow, their leaves frosted with residue. The dying would be enormous. A month from now, this land would stink with decay. A year from now, it would stink with Chtorrans.

Our more immediate concern, however, would be the events of the next few days. The pink snow would trigger a feeding frenzy of Chtorran life forms. They were probably hatching even now, eating their way out of their shells, eating as fast as they could in a frenzied desperate rush before the next link in the food chain arrived. There was no difference here between diner and dinner. It was the breakdown of order; eat and be eaten. The last time I had been caught in one of these storms, I had seen the whole thing from the underside, looking out of a bubble just like this one. I still had nightmares sometimes

Even as I watched, the pinkness in the air was thickening. The horizon disappeared into the haze, and the field of vision shrank visibly as the thickest part of the storm began rolling over us. Up the slope, the shambler grove stood tall and ominous; their black shaggy presence became softened in the feathery blur. While I watched, the looming shapes faded into the background of the bright pink sky. My imagination filled in the details. The whole intricate structure of each tree would be delicately iced; the grove would be etched in pink magic like a sweet winterland fantasy. What did the tenants do during a pink storm? Did they feed? Would they swarm? Could they function in this haze? It wasn't something I wanted to test personally.

I shuddered and dropped down out of the turret. Below again, the inside of the van was reassuringly dark and gray. Screens and panels glowed with readouts and projections. Even so, the bright pink gloom cast an eerie glow from above.

"Okay, Reilly, it's all yours again." I patted him on the back as he climbed back up. "Try not to go snowblind. Put your goggles on. If it gets too much for you, shutter the bubble and come on down."

"How bad is it?" Willig asked.

"There's no way to tell. It's all pink. You can't see how thick it is, you can't see how densely packed the dust is, you can't tell how hard it's coming down-it's just there. The stuff doesn't even show up on radar; it just soaks it up like a sponge. Satellite pictures can tell you how wide the storm is, but not how deep."

"In other words-?"

"We're here for the duration. A week probably. Did you bring a deck of cards?"

"You're kidding."

"No, I'm not. The First Annual Northeastern Mexico Dirty Limerick contest is now officially open. There once was a lady named Willig-"

"No way!" shouted Corporal Willig. "You have an unfair advantage. You have a dirty mind."

"Excuse me?" I said, giving her the official raised-eyebrow look. "Who are you, and what have you done with the real Kathryn Beth Willig?"

"Besides," she sniffed. "I'll bet you a steak dinner that you'll never find a rhyme for Willig."

"'Twas brillig,"' I replied. "Give me a half hour and I'll find the second rhyme I need. In the meantime, set up a sleep-and-watch schedule for everybody, have Lopez and Reilly start monitoring the public broadcasts on the wideband, let's see if we can get a sense of the weather from the public access-oh, and look-see if there's any more of that poisonous brown stuff left. I need to disinfect my socks."

"Sorry, I used your socks to make the last batch of it." She was already pouring.

I tasted. "It's weak. Next time use both socks."

"I'm trying to conserve."

A voice from up front, Siegel's. "Hey, Captain? Something funny down here. Can you come back on-line?"

"On my way." I dropped into my chair and swiveled crisply into position, grabbed the helmet, and fell back into cyberspace.