A Season for Slaughter

Chapter 7 The Ecology of Thought

I didn't go home. I was too angry. And when I was angry, I was useless.

I remembered something Foreman had said to me once, in the Mode Training. "If you insist on being angry, that's okay-that's a way to be too. But at least if you're going to be angry, use your anger constructively. Get mad where it counts!"

Right.

I wasn't mad at Lizard. I was mad at being denied the chance to do something powerful, something that would hurt the worms. Okay. So I was clear on that much.

Once I figured that out, there was still something I could do. I went down to the mission coordinator's and had her set up another reconnaissance operation in the same area.

Something had killed that worm, and I wanted to know what and how and why. If something was going around killing worms, I wanted to make friends with it. I wanted to learn its moves. And if that wasn't possible, I still wanted its autograph.

I didn't want a whole convoy, I wanted to get in and get out. Two rollagons would suffice, a squad of six in each. If either vehicle broke down, the other would still have the capacity to carry the whole team out.

As soon as the orders rolled out of the printer, I headed for the barracks, looking for the blue team. As I expected, they were doing the smartest thing a soldier can do in wartime; they were sleeping. Even so, I hadn't gotten two steps into the room before Lopez was bellowing: "Ten-hut!"

They rolled out of their bunks like precision machines. "Marano, Lopez, Reilly, Siegel, Willig, Locke, Valada, Ditlow, Nawrocki, Bendat, Braverman-where's Walton?"

"On the phone again, sir."

"Never mind. I need twelve volunteers. It shouldn't be dangerous, but that's not a promise. I want to go back in and do the recon we should have been doing in the first place. And this time, with no goddamn baby-sitting. It's pros only. I want to find out what killed that worm."

"Oh, hell," said Siegel, waving one hairy paw. "I didn't want to live forever, anyway. Count me in."

"Yeah, me too," grumbled Reilly. Marano and Lopez followed, as did the others. They grunted their assents with their usual sullen good nature and started gathering their gear and ecosuits.

I put Lopez in charge of outfitting, Reilly to double-check her, Locke and Valada to ready the rollagons, Braverman to take care of logistics, Bendat in charge of weaponry, and Nawrocki to take care of supplies. I picked Willig for mission specialist, which meant she got to handle the datawork. She gave me a dirty look, but she was already booting up the checklist.

In the meantime, I had my own work to do. I snagged a stool, hooked it around beneath me, plopped my butt onto it, and rolled up to a terminal, already shouting commands at it. In less than fifteen minutes, I'd filed a mission plan, the same one as before, plugged in a standard support program (coupled with a set of safeguard macros I'd written myself), waited for LI (lethetic intelligence) analysis from Green Mountain, noted the projected risk margins with a skeptical snort, and signed off on the orders anyway.

Ninety minutes later, we were in the air-and ninety minutes after that, we were on the ground again in northeastern Mexico. The rollagons trundled down the ramps, the VTOLs lifted off with a whisper, and we were once more crunching through the red crust of the waxy Chtorran infestation. The ocher sun was still high overhead, and the day was overcast with brick-red dust. There wasn't enough wind to clear it away.

We had at least six hours of daylight, all day tomorrow, and most of the day after that. If I couldn't find my answer in three days-or at least some kind of clue-I probably wasn't going to find it at all. At least, not this trip. I climbed up into the forward turret and started studying the scenery.

The crumpled hills were spotted and streaked with pustules of rancid vegetation; an appalling sight. It made me think of virulent sores spreading across the feverish body of a dying plague victim. Some of these plants lived only to die; they mulched the ground for the next generation to come.

Even through the filters, we could smell it-the sweaty, overripe stench of cancerous growth and fruity decay. The sickly-sweet odor had a druglike quality; nothing seemed real anymore in this nightmare landscape.

Siegel's voice came quietly through the all-talk channel. "Hey, ah… what exactly are we looking for, Cap'n?"

I didn't answer immediately. The same question had been echoing through my own mind. Finally, I said, "Y'know, there used to be a theory that the worms were only the shock troops to soften us up. Slum clearance. When the worms got the human population under control, then we'd see the next step of the infestation. The theory was that whatever was going to come after the worms would be higher up on the food chain… "

"You mean we're looking for something mean enough to eat a full-grown worm? Uh-oh…"

"That's one theory. But a lot of other people think that if the purpose of the infestation is to establish a stable ecology, then it's got to have its own checks and balances. Therefore, the infestation has a built-in controlling mechanism for each and every species that we see, some kind of biological governor-so when the worms get to be too widespread, something else wakes up or kicks in. Maybe it's some kind of phenomenon like seventeen-year locusts; only when the conditions are right does it start munching worms. I'm just thinking; if we can find out what it is, whatever it is, it might be useful."

"Right. That's what I thought you said. We're looking for something mean enough to eat a full-grown worm."

After a while, the view from the turret became oppressive. I couldn't stand looking at the dreadful red hills anymore; I dropped down into the command bay, wiping my forehead. I realized I was sweating. Drops were rolling down the back of my neck. "Is there something wrong with the air-conditioning in here?" I demanded.

Willig shook her head. "It has that effect on everybody, remember?"

I didn't answer. She was right. I sank down into my command seat—the information cockpit-and began reviewing the satellite pictures again-for the umpteenth time. The thing about satellite surveillance was that there were so many different ways to analyze scans, so many various filters and enhancements, so many possible patterns, that it was as much an art as a craft. We didn't have the trained personnel that we needed, and as good as the lethetic intelligence engines were, they still lacked the ability to make intuitive leaps. LIs could give you statistical probabilities; they couldn't give you hunches-although the last I'd heard, they were working on adding that function too.

The resolution on this latest set of pictures was good. We could have been looking down from the top of a ten-story building. I had downloaded six months of aerial surveillance into the vehicle's memory; that should have been more than enough. I dialed up last week's pictures and watched from above as five rollagons approached the dead worm, scanned it, and then moved on.

Unfortunately, a backward scan from that moment revealed little else of use. A ragged streak of clouds, the southernmost tail of a Gulf storm that had never gotten big enough to be called a hurricane, slid across the coast of Mexico and obscured the view of the target area. Before the clouds came by, there was no dead worm on the ground. Afterward, there was.

The creature's death had most likely occurred sometime around dawn; the mission log showed that the interior temperature of the carcass, at the time we had scanned it, had still been several degrees warmer than the noonday air. Whatever had killed the worm could not have been more than six hours away.

Back to the satellite record

LI image restoration, including infra-red scanning and ultrawide spectrum enhancements, suggested that an event of some kind had occurred on the site just before dawn, confirming my hypothesis. There was a cluster of infra-red activity, plus that peculiar flurry of spiky electromagnetic radiation that worms sometimes gave off when they went into multiple communion; it sounded like a burst of whistling static on an AM radio.

So… the dead worm-John Doe-obviously had had a meeting with several other worms. Or had it? The evidence only demonstrated the possibility of communion. It didn't prove it.

Assume that there were other worms in the neighborhood. Where-were they now? Were they in danger too? And what was their relationship to John Doe? Great questions-all I needed was the trenchcoat, the hat, and a half-cigarette dangling from my lower lip.

Another question-how many worms had participated in the encounter?

The satellite scan wasn't precise enough. Less than six. More than two. Three large worms? Five small ones?

I hunched over the keyboard, mumbling and typing in commands. I watched the displays change on the screens. If there were worms, there had to be worm nests within-oh, figure ten klicks to start with. Look for circular structures or patterns. Look for anything that could be a mandala seed… Look for worms. Scan outward and backward for large movements

Bingo!

The record showed three worms. Not too large… following a fourth worm. Toward the direction of the event under the clouds that left one of them dead.

Hmm, so where did these worms come from? Are they all from the same nest? I typed another command. Backtrack the worms. This time the wait was longer. The worms had come from the northwest, but their origin was unclear. Okay. Try a different way. Move the center of the search, enlarge the radius, scan the surrounding terrain again. Look for a nest.

Tick, tick, tick. The LI engine considered probabilities. Sorry. No nests in the surrounding terrain; now checking for circular anomalies…

Huh? This was odd. A circular arrangement of shamblers only a few kilometers northwest of John Doe's death. A mandala seed? Could there be nests underneath-?

Son of a bitch!

It was the same grove of shamblers. The one I had used to scare the shit out of Major Bellus!

I should have recognized

No, from the ground, it wasn't obvious. From the air, it was unmistakable. Even so, I still felt like an idiot. I had to remind myself that I had been otherwise preoccupied at the time.

All right… I typed quickly. Scan the movement of these shamblers-

I waited while the LI engine sorted through six months of images. Nothing… These shamblers had been sitting in this exact spot for at least six months.

Huh? That wasn't normal.

But the unbelievable evidence glowed on the surface of the screen. These shamblers had taken root and stayed. The LI engine would have to wait until it could access the Green Mountain Archives before it could download and display any previous history of this region. Meanwhile, there were other things to correlate. It began overlaying transitory images-what else had moved through this terrain? It began to build an overlay of undeniable evidence.

Worms. Worm paths. Worm patterns.

Here was repeated evidence of a family of worms moving in and out of the shambler grove with impunity.

So that took care of my theory that the shambler tenants killed the John Doe worm.

Or did it?

The fact that these worms were moving in and out of the shambler grove didn't necessarily imply that any worm could safely enter the shambler radius. Maybe there was some kind of relationship-partnership ?-between these worms and these shamblers?

The patterns of movement were definitely consistent with those found around other worm nests

Worm nests underneath a shambler grove? Well, why not?

Damn!

This should have been discovered before the mission went in! And it would have been too, if there had been the skillage available. There were a lot of jobs not getting done these days because of the shortage of trained personnel.

One of the big LI engines in Atlanta or Florida would have spotted it, if anyone had thought to ask; except most of the H.A.R.L.I.E.[1] units' were so busy trying to model the larger patterns of the infestation that they probably hadn't put any attention on the way so many of the smaller pieces were fitting together.

I wondered if that might not be a mistake-if perhaps the real understanding of the Chtorran ecology might better be found down in the dirt, down among the bugs and beetles and wormberries. Maybe we were looking in the wrong place.

I didn't automatically assume anymore that someone somewhere was already considering these questions. I knew better. Yes, there were people on the job, but they were all like me-playing catch-up as fast as they could. You got promoted and you learned the job you were thrust into, or reinvented it, or just ran as hard as you could and hoped nobody would notice that you weren't producing any results. You crossed your fingers and hoped it wasn't another mistake. And everybody prayed like hell that the critical jobs were getting done. It was the ultimate in on-the-job training. If you survived, you were doing it right.

But nobody was really trained; not the way they needed to be. There wasn't the time anymore. Even the Modies were too little, too late. The core group wasn't enough. We needed to train the whole planet overnight. Hardly anybody had the right mind-set for the jobs they had been thrust into. It's not enough to be handed a responsibility; you have to be trained how to use it. You have to learn to think the work. Unfortunately, too many important positions were being filled with people like Major Bellus.

It was a disaster. The network of scientific minds that was really needed to tackle this problem had disintegrated during the first set of plagues, and it had never properly been rebuilt.

There was only so much you could do with ancillary intelligence. Someday, perhaps, an LI would have the creativity to invent instead of simply synthesize. Until then, human thinkers were still a necessary part of the process. I didn't know if there were enough of the right kind of thinkers anymore; I did know that damn few of them were where they needed to be.

Despite the application of larger and better LI engines, despite the near-planetwide coverage of remotes, despite the improved observational devices, the enhanced information-gathering networks, despite the massive amount of sheer brainpower applied to the problem… the brainpower was completely and totally ineffective unless somebody was there to ask the right questions.

That was the real skill that would win the war. Asking the right questions. Applying the intelligence where it would have the most effect.

We had assembled the world's most powerful network of LI engines for application to the problem of the Chtorran infestation. There were nearly seven hundred Harlie units now connected in a worldwide network of applied intelligence, and new machines were coming on-line at the rate of one a week. The scale of information that could now be processed was beyond human comprehension. But real-time analysis of macro-realities only worked when you had an accurate model of the problem to begin with.

Translation: the Intelligence Engines were still defining the problem. They asked more questions than they answered. Nevertheless, they were our last best hope. One day the critical piece of information would be found; that part of the puzzle which would let us begin unlocking all of the other secrets of the Chtorran mystery. Dr. Zymph called it "the first olive out of the bottle." The Harlie network was looking for the olives.

We had no idea what the alive would be, where it might be found, or even if we already had it in hand and didn't recognize that it was an olive because it had a pimento sticking out its ass.

The Harlie network was the only human agency capable of recognizing the olive when we found it, pimento or not.

The network was something entirely new in human experience, an environment of pure thought in which ideas could be born and raised, free of cultural or emotional prejudice.

Any notion, no matter how outrageous oi silly or bizarre, could be fairly considered before it had to venture out into the cold nastiness of reality. It could be simultaneously nurtured in the warm soup of possibility and bathed in the harsh acid of skepticism, and ultimately either weeded out as unfit for further consideration, or rewarded with teraflops and teraflops of processing time.

Human beings, on the other hand, couldn't seem to tell the difference between an idea and the person who espoused it. We punished the practitioners of unpopular concepts; anything that threatened us, we killed the bearer of the message. Conversely, we rewarded those who came before us speaking pretty phrases that validated our most deeply ingrained beliefs. People who said popular things found that money and power floated their way. Even if what they said was wrong, the money and power validated their position. Meanwhile, great truths often languished unnoticed in the shadows. New theories have to wait for old theorists to die. Sometimes the obvious sat before us, unnoticed and overlooked for years, before we realized the truth of it.

This was something else that Foreman had talked about in the training. The lethetic intelligence engine was the first environment of concepts-of symbol management-in which emotions, prejudice, and personal gain were not factors considered relevant to the validity of a position.

According to Foreman, and others, what passed for human thinking was the management of symbols in the domain of language-a slippery terrain in which the concept behind every Word was as elusive as the word was mutable; a looking-glass world where any idea constructed of these shape-changing bricks shifted like a hill of psychotic tapioca, first as the words were defined in the speaker's speaking, and second as they were redefined again in the listener's listening. None of us ever really heard another person's speaking, without first hearing our own way of hearing it. Here, meaning was pushed, pulled, bent, squeezed, and ultimately mangled to mean whatever we wanted or needed it to mean. Even people became the simplest of objects in this domain-one mote thing to be manipulated, pushed and pulled, by language.

The horror of it was that this domain of language was the only domain of thought available to human beings. Creatures of language, we could not think, we could not interact, we could not communicate without also trapping ourselves in a domain of subjective meaning that defeated rational and objective thought before it even had a chance.

What passed for human intelligence was little more than a primordial soup in which nascent thoughts struggled to survive and evolve, barely dreaming of someday fluttering out into the air or staggering up onto the land. What passed for human intelligence was a process so flawed it was pitiful-and yet, at the same time it was admirable when you considered all of what it had managed to accomplish in its comparatively brief history; in spite of the built-in prejudices of organic life. The accomplishment was even more astonishing when you realized that all of the separate engines of human intelligence were made out of meat.

The network of Harlie units, however, all interlinked together, was a different kind of symbology, not just a different world-a whole different paradigm, one without organic survival as an overriding concern; without the fear of death affecting judgment and vision, distorting and skewing all perceptions and results. It was an environment in which ideas could roam free and unbound, evolving, expanding, developing into grand and intricate structures of concept and detail; butterflies and dinosaurs of electric wonder; beings in the ecology of thought.

Only-who was there to start the process? Who was there to ask the initiating question: "Consider a butterfly. Or a dinosaur." Who was God?

Where was God in that universe?

I was terribly afraid that the new ecology of thought was empty. That would be the real disaster.

The computer beeped. The six months of patterns displayed on the screen had been made by only three worms.

Three worms?

Then where had the fourth worm come from?

The question gave me an uncomfortable chill. After a while, I remembered why.