"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.
Let us perform a thought experiment.
Let us backtrack from the initial onslaught of the plagues to see what had to have happened before the plagues could occur. A mechanism for inserting them into the human population had to be established. What was this mechanism?
This is not a casual question. If anything, it is deceptive in its simplicity and powerful in its implications. Consideration of the initial infection process will reveal some remarkable insights into the mechanisms of the Chtorran ecology, and may in fact also demonstrate some of its potential weaknesses.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 18
Slugs
"Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious creature on Earth."
-SOLOMON SHORT
"Let me guess," I said, even before the image focused. "Something's moving."
"Huh? You peeked," Siegel accused.
"Nope." I didn't explain. "Show me." Siegel had found a nest of-
"Oh, God. That's disgusting."
-gray sluglike things. They looked like fat naked snails. Their skins reflected highlights of silver and pink and white. There must have been hundreds of them, all sliding wetly in and out, one against another, in a slow writhing tangle. Their tiny eyes glistened like black pearls studding their pallid bodies.
"Ugh," said Willig. She was monitoring the video. "I've been to parties like that."
"You've given parties like that," Siegel corrected her.
"Cool it," I said. "Did you get one of those things as a specimen?"
"Yeah, I got three. I don't know how long they'll live in the bags though."
"Don't worry about it. Freeze them."
"Done," he said. "What do you think these things are?" And then he offered a chilling suggestion. "Baby worms, maybe?"
"I don't know. Could be." It was a very interesting thought. "The worms gotta come from somewhere. Maybe these are baby worms before they grow their hair."
"They don't grow hair, they get infected with spores that grow into neural-symbionts. The symbionts that grow out of the body look like hair. The rest-I dunno, they just fill up the worm. That's how you can tell how old a worm is, by how much hair it has growing inside. They're just big fat hairbags." I said it in a preoccupied tone; I was considering the possibility that his wild guess had hit the bull's-eye. The worms had to come from somewhere. Why not here?
Yes? No? Maybe. Perhaps. I didn't know.
I'd been stumbling through the various manifestations of the Chtorran infestation for six years. I'd seen the obvious things like the worms and the bunnydogs and the shamblers. I'd seen the less obvious, but equally disturbing creatures, like nightstalkers and millipedes and finger-babies. I'd seen meadows covered with lush growths of mandala flowers, scarlet blazes of kudzu, fields of blue and pink iceplant-spotted with hallucinogenic fairy flakes. I'd seen the endless fields of lizard-grass reclaiming the nation's prairies; tall and brown and razor sharp when it dried; you could die in it. I'd seen the growing stands of black bamboo and the jungles of pillar-trees. I'd flown through the sky-blackening swarms of flutterbys and tracked the rolling herds of giant pink fluffballs as they floated dreamily across the western plains like nightmare fantasy tumbleweeds. I'd seen it all-and I hadn't even seen the beginning yet.
I'd seen the diseases too; all of those that were still vectoring through the remaining human population. There was the mild flulike infection that left you sweating, dripping in your own slimy juices, and sent you roaming out into the street confused and restless. Even when you shook it off, the wild, feverish dream state continued; survivors usually ended up wandering in a herd, babbling like silly, demented loons. It was a walking death-the mind was numbed, the body shambled on its own. And even so, it still was preferable to the bubonic cysts that rose beneath the skin, scourging and burning, often killing within hours, but just as often prolonging the horror for days or even weeks; the victims writhed and moaned in agony and often killed themselves before the disease could run its final course. I'd passed out L-pills once, because there was no other cure.
Later-it was another time-I was allowed to join a survey flight. We'd headed out across the Pacific, west of Palmyra, south of Kauai, eventually dipping low to survey the huge Enterprise fish that regularly patrolled the Hawaiian Zone. It moved grandly through the flat gray sea, sliding and rolling like a force of nature; occasionally it disappeared beneath the surface of the sea for many long moments-we could see its great dark shadow groaning through the depths; then, just as suddenly, it would come breaking up through the waves, the water running in rivers off the landscape of its barnacled, encrusted back. Once it rolled sideways, and we saw one of its eyes, an enormous black protuberance the size of a swimming pool. I had the strangest feeling that it was looking up at us, and I knew that it was considering the physical impossibility of leaping to catch the tiny choppers that monitored its migration. One of the other planes fired a transponder harpoon into the behemoth's flesh. It carved away a great gout of pinkish-gray matter in an explosion that looked more like a geyser than a wound in a living thing. A long endless moment later, the beast reacted and dove. It took the longest time for it to disappear; first the head end dipped lower and lower, then the water began sweeping up over its flanks toward the raised ridge that ran down the center of the creature's back. It was an island disappearing beneath the waves. I thought of Atlantis. I thought of whales. I thought of submarines and aircraft carriers. I thought of all the things that were irretrievably lost to us. I realized it in a way that I had never known before: the oceans of the world would never again be safe. How did these things breed? How long did they live? How big did they get? Finally the last long part of its gigantic body tipped upward and disappeared like a sinking ship sliding downward toward the bottom of the sea.
I'd seen so many different pieces of the Chtorran ecology. I'd seen the steady process of its red encroachment across the blue-green Earth, and despite my absolute determination to resist it in every way I could, I still could not escape from the knowledge that the Chtorran ecology, whether considered in its myriad specific individual manifestations or viewed as a vast amazing process of dazzling complexity and intricacy, was a most glorious celebration of life. The diversity, the vitality, the fecundity of the many plant and animal species left me awestruck in wonder. It was beautiful, it was resplendent, it was overwhelming-and the single undeniable fact of the infestation was that human beings were so irrelevant to the incredible hunger and need and power of this process that if we survived at all, it would be only as an afterthought-and only if we could carve a niche of our own in the new world order.