For myself, the need to survive had long since vanished, killed by my participation in too many deaths and burned out by too many passages through the fires of my own rage. No, I didn't need to survive-a curious realization, that-but I did need to know. It was my curiosity that drove me now. I would not stop until I understood-if not the why, then certainly the how. And perhaps the knowledge of the how would point me toward the why. And maybe someday, even, the who.
The more I immersed myself in the Chtorran infestation, the more I experienced its incredible diversity, the more I began to sense an underlying logic of process. I couldn't put it into words yet, but I could feel a rightness about certain relationships and an uneasiness about others-as if some were precursors of the way things should be and others were only temporary accommodations to the feral quality of the immediate situation. More and more, as I considered the individual pieces of the ecology, I tried to sense how they must fit into the ultimate pattern that the infestation was growing toward. I saw the things I looked at not as individual manifestations, but as parts of a larger process. And always, now, I was looking for the feeling of rightness.
This nest-there had to be things down here that moved and crawled, because there had to be a way to get the seeds and eggs, and all the things that would come hatching out of them, up to the surface where they could begin their part of the process of devouring the Earth right down to the naked dirt.
These gray slugs-were they baby worms? Or just slugs? Yes? No? Maybe. Perhaps. I didn't know. I didn't know enough yet to have a feeling about them. Logically, it made sense-and just as logically, it didn't. There were pieces missing. This ecology was too complex, too interrelated. Too baroque. Nature's answers were always simple and elegant-but on Chtorr, nature seemed to have different definitions of both simplicity and elegance. Could a one-celled creature imagine a human being? There was the question.
Imagine yourself as an amoeba, flowing and stretching, always hungry, always searching, enveloping, ingesting, occasionally dividing-could you consider the possibility that you and another single-celled organism just like yourself could cooperate for mutual benefit? And if you could imagine that, could you extend the concept to imagine many individual cells forming conglomerate groups to increase the possibilities of survival and success for all of the members of the group? Could you, a mindless amoeba, conceive of the possibility of an organ? Could you make the leap from there to the concept of an organic being, a creature composed of many different conglomerate groups all working together, each structure providing a specialized function for the good of the whole? And if you could make that leap to imagine all the multiple interrelationships of all the millions of different special cells and processes and organs necessary to the survival and success of even so small a creature as a tiny white mouse, then could you imagine a human being? Could you imagine intelligence without first being intelligent yourself?
And if you, the one-celled being, could somehow, impossibly, imagine the existence of beings greater than yourself, could you then make the even more impossible leap to consider the interrelationships of such beings? If you can imagine a single being, can you imagine a family of beings? A tribe? A corporation? A city? Can you imagine a nation of cooperative processes? And finally, could you make the biggest leap of all, to consider the processes of an entire world? Could you?
Could an amoeba imagine a human being?
Could a human being imagine the nature of the Chtorr?
At least the amoeba had a good excuse-it couldn't even imagine. The failure of human beings was that we couldn't imagine big enough.
Sometimes, in my sleep, I felt glimpses-like something large and silent moving through the night, a great shape, larger than an Enterprise fish rising from the sea of dreams. I could sense it like a wall. A mountain. A tide of meaning. It lifted me upon its crest.
Sometimes, in my sleep, I heard it call-a lonely sound, deep and dreadful; a soft chorus of despair. It was a mournful note, like an enormous gong resonating at the bottom of the abyss of unconscious knowledge. The sadness was profound and inescapable.
I would try to turn and see it behind me. It felt almost like a face or a voice or a person that I knew, but wherever I turned, it was hidden in the veils of the dream.
Sometimes the feeling was sexual, a hot sliding wet embrace that enveloped me as if my whole body were plunging deep into the womb of home.
Sometimes I heard my name being called as if from very far away. Sometimes I knew-as if I had suddenly been expanded a millionfold-fireworks of understanding exploded in my mind-in that white-hot pinpoint moment, I not only understood the scale of the thought that held me, I also became the being capable of creating and holding such grandeur. I would reach for it, but before I could complete the action, before my fingers could close around it, I would awake, sweating, trembling-and the unnerving bottomless feeling would stay with me for days or weeks; my sleep patterns would remain disrupted and my body would ache with a desire that no physical act could satiate.
Sometimes I felt enveloped in a fog of my own mind, still enraptured in the aftermath of these mordant bright hallucinations.
Or perhaps it was just the sweats, a milder form of hallucinogenic fever. I didn't know.
Sometimes I felt as if I were a worm. Seeing and hearing and tasting with my entire body all at once. It made me twitchy. I itched in places I couldn't scratch. I was hungry for things I couldn't taste, things I didn't know; as desperate as the adolescent yearning for the mystery of mating, but so profound and far beyond that simpler urge that human beings still knew nothing of it.
Sometimes I sat alone and pondered this incredible driving need I felt for greater consummations than were previously dreamt. And sometimes I was certain that I was mad and that my madness had devoured me, left me plunging down a corridor of red obsession.
Sometimes I felt ripped open.
I wanted to tell someone exactly how I felt, and even as I felt the urge to speak, I felt the greater urge to hold my tongue. I was supposed to be an agent of discovery. But if what I was discovering was so disturbing that it called into question my ability to perform my task, I dared not report it. I couldn't let them stop me. Now now.
So I kept my silence and kept my strange dreams to myself. And wondered what it was that my subconscious mind was trying desperately to tell me.
-and were these mindless slugs baby worms or not? I couldn't complete the picture. I couldn't find the rightness. The thought gnawed at me that there was something terribly important to be discovered here. It annoyed me, because I was sure that I should see it, and I couldn't. I had another piece of the puzzle, but nothing to connect it to. As hard as I stared, I couldn't figure it out.
I became aware that Siegel was saying something. "Huh? What? Sorry."
"I asked, what are you thinking?" he repeated.
"Oh, uh-nothing important." I covered quickly. "Just considering that we're probably going to get one helluva bounty for this."