"How?"
"Well, you can always apply for active Teep training. But that doesn't really guarantee that you'll be able to switch them off either. The monitor is a twenty-four-hour device. The only sure-fire way is to wear an iron cap."
Willig scratched her head nervously. She looked uncomfortable.
"Have you ever been operated on?" I asked. "Do you think you might be bugged?"
"No. I'm just wondering what I could do that would be worth the attention of a hundred thousand Peeping Toms."
"How about dying?"
"Huh?" She looked startled.
"Consider this possibility. Suppose you're monitored. And suppose you get caught in a life-threatening situation. In fact, suppose your death is absolutely certain-and suppose you don't know it, but the Teep Corps is monitoring you. They know where you are; in fact, they're the only ones who know where you are. They could send in a rescue mission to pull you out, but instead they don't-instead, they monitor your death as pure horror show. How would you feel about that?"
Willig's expression showed her distaste for the idea. "Do they really do that?"
I nodded.
She shrugged and said, "I suppose if I didn't know I was being monitored, it wouldn't make any difference." But she didn't like the idea.
"It's the amorality of the whole thing," I said.
"It's pretty heartless," Willig agreed
"It's not just heartless," I corrected. "It's inhuman. The Teep Corps is turning into a massmind. Its primary members don't exist as individuals anymore. They spend all their waking moments linked up with each other, and they don't think like separate beings anymore; they're all just bugs in a giant hive-mind. The only identity they have is the massmind-so the death of any individual cell, especially one that's only a sensory cell, and not a participatory brain cell, is meaningless to the corps. Do you see what I'm saying? If they don't care about their own lives, why should they care about yours? They're more interested in the information they gain about the way people die than they are in preventing the death in the first place. They don't have the same commitment to human life that you and I do. In some ways, their thinking is even more alien than the Chtorran's. We're sure they have people in other camps; but they're not saying what they know. They're not telling us much; they say we wouldn't understand, couldn't assimilate. There's a lot of frustration in Houston. The Teep Corps is very hard to control. It may be out of control. I don't know.
"Anyway-" I shook my head in resignation. "The point is, nobody should have to be an unwilling transmitter of his own death. If the corps can peep, they can make the effort to rescue. If they won't make the effort to rescue, they're not entitled to peep. The Supreme Court said that if a military officer abandons the support of a mission, then the person in charge of the mission is free to act on his own recognizance and take whatever steps he considers appropriate, including the disconnection of communications. You're legally entitled to lock them out."
"I'm beginning to get the picture," Willig said.
"That's right. Shreiber's refusal to give us guidance on this makes it legal for me to break the uplink. I'm acting under the authority granted me by Article Twenty, Section Twenty. It's not quite the same as an iron cap, but it'll do. Goddamn! They're so stupid. This could be the biggest and most important find of the year, and they're pissing it away for politics!" I flung myself back in my chair and glared at nothing in particular.
Willig didn't reply. She waited patiently, and without further comment.
"So, yes-" I admitted, after a long uncomfortable silence. "In answer to the question you didn't ask, breaking the link is a spiteful act. But at least this time I have the rules on my side." I reached up and grabbed the VR helmet, pulled it down, and pushed my head angrily into it. "Siegel, I'm taking back control. Let's go see what's at the bottom of this hole."
Shambler colonies are known to be a primary vector for the spread of the red kudzu; the red kudzu in return provides the covering shelter of its own foliage to the shambler colony. But this is a particularly uneasy partnership, and one that must be precisely balanced, or it will prove fatal to one associate or the other.
Generally, the kudzu vines envelop a shambler colony like a cloak; the large red leaves help to protect the tree and its tenants from the direct rays of the sun and from the harsher attacks of wind and dust-but the red kudzu is beneficial only to shamblers large enough to support it; otherwise, it is so voracious a species that, given the time to become sufficiently established, it will overpower and destroy any shambler too small or too weak to resist its inexorable advance. It can overwhelm a young colony so completely that it cannot move, cannot feed, cannot survive. Eventually, the kudzu will even topple the shambler.
But the young colony is not totally helpless. Several of the shambler's tenants, the carrion bees for example, will-if hungry enougheat the leaves of the red kudzu faster than it can grow. Millipedes traveling with the shambler colony also like to chew on the roots of the red kudzu. The combined efforts of the shambler tenants can keep the red kudzu enough in check that a young colony will not be immobilized or overpowered by it.
What is particularly interesting about this relationship is that it is not completely beneficial to either member, suggesting that it is not so much a partnership as it is an armed stalemate, occasionally degenerating into allout warfare should either side demonstrate sufficient weakness.
Is it possible that this condition is common in other Chtorran symbioses, and if so, what can we do to exploit the precarious balance between members? What can we do to permanently topple this and other Chtorran relationships? Additional research in this area is urgently recommended, as it could offer the most profound results in proportion to the effort expended.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 13
Descending
"By all means, take the moral high ground-all that heavenly backlighting makes you a much easier target."
—-SOLOMON SHORT
The deeper we went, the thicker the walls became, and the sturdier the valve-doors; probably a response to the atmospheric changes down here, as well as additional protection for the greater pressures we were experiencing.
I wished I could cut through the surrounding walls of the channel to see how they were constructed. My best guess was that the walls were as multiply redundant as the doors, and that the fleshy shaft we were in was only the innermost layer of a whole set of nested organic pipes.
The repeating valve-doors allowed a step-by-step shift to a drastically different environment. The beauty of the design was its overall simplicity. No single door had to maintain the integrity o the entire system, and the progression of atmospheric changes was so gradual as to be almost imperceptible, but the cumulative effect of moving through all those valve-doors was to step into a world vastly changed from the one we had left.
There were other things growing on the walls now, unidentifiable objects, manifestations of the Chtorran ecology that even H. P. Lovecraft would have had trouble describing. Some of them were shapeless purple masses, looking like homeless goiters. Others were tangles of pallid noodles, limp as dead spagheva and dripping with bluish goo. Here and there, thick nets of creepers hung from the ceiling of the tunnel; if they were there to stop intrusions, they weren't effective against the sliding advance of Sher Khan. The prowler moved steadily forward and down, through the next door and the next and the next.