"And that isn't important?" Siegel asked.
"What are you going to spend it on?" I retorted.
"I'll think of something. I could buy myself a cup of coffee and just sit and sniff it for a whole afternoon."
"Coffee?" asked Willig. "What's coffee?"
"It's like brown stuff, only not as awful."
"I remember coffee," I said. And then I wished I hadn't. I remembered it too vividly; the hot black smell of it. "Oh, God-I'd kill for a cup of the real stuff. Even instant."
"Me too," agreed Siegel. From above, Reilly grunted something unintelligible; but it sounded like agreement.
"What's the lowest thing you'd do for a cup of coffee?" Willig asked.
"Are we fantasizing, or do you know someone?"
"Dannenfelser."
"You're kidding."
"Uh-uh. He manages General Wainright's private store."
"Offer me fresh strawberries and Nova Scotia smoked salmon and I might consider it-" I started to say, then caught myself with a shudder. "No, forget I said that. If I ever get that desperate, you're authorized to put a bullet through my brain. I'll be of no further use to humanity."
"Will you put that in writing?"
"Don't be so hasty."
"Hey, is that true about Dannenfelser? Whyizzit that scumbags like him always end up with the biggest slice of pie?"
"Because the good people of the world have too much self-respect to cheat their comrades," I said.
"Oh, yeah, I forgot. Thanks for reminding me."
"Anytime."
"Captain?"
"Yeah?"
"Is this nest really important?"
"I think so," I said. "I think this is how they got here."
For the record, the first wave of plagues wiped out at least 3 billion human beings. We will never have an exact count.
At this point, we should also note that secondary and tertiary waves of disease, coupled with the many ancillary effects of the mass dying, will probably result in an additional 2 billion deaths. The surviving human population may eventually stabilize at 3.5 billion. No reliable predictions about population rate can be made beyond that point.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 19
Seeds and Eggs
"The third eye does not need a contact dens."
-SOLOMON SHORT
There was silence for a moment. Finally, Siegel asked quietly, "'Splain me, Boss?"
"Not quite sure of the details," I said. "But I'll bet you Randy Dannenfelser's shriveled little testicles that this whole thing is some kind of incubation womb. We never found spaceships, no evidence of any kind; no sightings, no sites, no nothing. We couldn't figure out how they got here, right? So everybody's been crazy over that one question. How did the infestation get started?"
"They dropped seeds from space," said Siegel. "That's what Dr. Zymph says."
"Yes and no-the problem with that theory is that it doesn't work. We tried simulating a drop from space. If the package is too small, it burns up on reentry. If it's well padded, it still burns up, only it takes longer. If it's big enough to reach the ground intact, it's big enough to leave a crater. Out of hundreds of simulations, both real and virtual, only the simplest of seeds survived, none of the eggs; the exposures were too extreme, the impacts too severe. The Denver labs worked on it for three years before they gave up and turned to more immediate concerns.
"See, here's the problem. Assume that you're Chtorra-forming a planet. You can't worry about landing individual plants and animals; that's too slow. You have to think about your larger purpose. What you really want to do is get the genetic heritage of the ecology established, right?"
"Right. I guess."
"Okay. We're humans, so we think in terms of seeds and eggs. But Chtorrans don't necessarily have to think the same way. Let's just think about the genetic code alone. That's all you're really interested in. You can strip the naked code out of a cell and store it as a meta-viral chain. So now you've got the information for your critter; but how do you get the code down to the surface of the planet? You can drop an insulated package that can survive the heat of the drop and even the impact. But you still need something to grow it in-some environment in which the code can generate critters-so you're back to seeds and eggs again, aren't you?
"See, the problem with seeds and eggs, especially eggs, is that the more complex the adult creature, the more fragile the egg, and the more nurturing it needs to hatch. And that doesn't even get into the problem of nurturing the young. Anything you can come up with, organic or technological, that can hatch an egg and nurture the infants, is going to be even more complex and more fragile than the creature it's designed to support.
"Think about it. How do you send a millipede egg across ten or twenty light-years and guarantee its survival? How do you get it safely down to the surface of the planet? How do you guarantee that the egg will be nurtured and protected in the right kind,of nest long enough for it to hatch? How do you make certain that the right kind of food will be available for the millipede to eat so that it can live long enough to reach adulthood and reproduce and make more millipedes? And that's just one species. We've identified hundreds of Chtorran creatures. How do you provide for all of their separate and individual concerns? Bunnydogs and snufflers and gorps and Enterprise fish-what kind of machinery do you provide to nurture all those?"
Siegel shrugged. "I dunno. I never thought about it before."
"This is the answer," I said. "A big part of it, anyway. Dr. Zymph was right; the Chtorrans are seeding the planet from space. But not with ordinary seeds and eggs. They've been dropping mama-shambler seeds. Have you ever seen a shambler seed? They're big, they look like pineapples. You cut one open, and you see that the outer shell is layer upon layer upon layer of gauzy stuff; you can spend a lifetime unraveling it.
"The inner shell of the shambler seed is filled with even more layers of the same fibrous matting, only this stuff is thicker and more gritty. You look at it under the microscope and you see that it's really thousands and thousands of tiny little structures, not quite cells, but not quite anything else either; they don't grow, they don't do anything that we can recognize. We couldn't figure out whether the inner layers were intended as food or padding or insulation or what, but I bet I know now. Those little structures are the freeze-dried nuclei of all the other critters in the ecology.
"See, a shambler seed is one of the few things you can drop from space with a reasonable expectation of it surviving the impact. It sheds its outer skin, layer after layer, like a series of drogues. It slows the descent, it's like concentric parachutes. In fact, I'll bet that the seeds that fell from space had even thicker shells than Earth-grown shambler seeds. Anyway, the mama-seed impacts, right? If conditions are right, it grows into a shambler bush, later a tree. It spreads its seeds and grows more shambler trees; pretty soon, you have a herd of shamblers prowling around the countryside. What are they looking for? A place with the right combination of sunlight and water and soil and probably even prey animals for the tenants. The grove of shamblers takes up a position, the individual trees sink their roots, they link up and begin carving out or growing a large central underground chamber. There's got to be some mechanism, some creature or process or something." I realized that my enthusiasm for the subject must have been startling to my listeners, but I couldn't contain myself, I was so excited. Even as I spoke, the idea was becoming clearer in my mind.
"Okay, so pretty soon you have this womb nest here. That's when some of the organs within the shambler start maturing; or maybe they aren't shambler organs, but more like symbionts. I don't know. But whatever they are, they grow into this stuff, all these tunnels and pipes and tubes, all these big rubbery blobs and squids and slugs and things. Everything."