In fact, one of the researchers had commented on this very phenomenon. His words had stayed in my mind. "The more you work with worms, the more you realize that nobody's home. It's like they're all machines. It's like they don't have minds. It's like they leave their souls at home when they go out."
I wasn't an expert on worm personalities. I'd only known three worms well enough to tell them one from the other. One was Orrie, short for Oroborous. The second was Falstaff. And the third was Orson. I'd assumed at the time that Orrie was capable of managing his own volition; but now that I thought back on it, a lot of what he did was patterned behavior. Had he gotten that behavior from Jason Delandro? Or had he invented it himself? The other two worms had never seemed as smart or as individual as Orrie.
But then I hadn't really been in the best shape at the time for observing the nuances of individual gastropedes from a scientific perspective. I was under Delandro's influence, and part of it, I suspected, was the narcotic influence of the various Chtorran substances in the daily diet of the tribe. How else could I justify or explain some of the things I had done while living with the renegades?
And yet, that was as close as I-or perhaps anyone-had ever come to living in a worm nest and reporting back what it felt like. Or was it?
Maybe not. I leaned back in my chair, stretching my hands back over my head and listening to my bones crack. The problem was communication. There didn't seem to be any mutually recognizable channel of communication between humans and worms.
Jason Delandro had said—claimed-that he and Orrie could talk as well as he and I could, but I had never fully believed that. When I had told him this, he had merely laughed, and said that it was a communication that was still beyond my limited experience, but not to worry, I would grow into it someday.
In my own mind, though, I never quite gave up the belief that on some level Delandro had simply trained Orrie, like a man with a very smart dog. Dogs could recognize combinations of words and phrases-"Go outside, get the ball, bring me the ball"-why couldn't a worm?
Maybe worms didn't think. Maybe they just remembered. Maybe they just ran programs, plugging in the appropriate set of behaviors for each and every situation they ran into. Except-where did the programs come from in the first place?
Our best guess was that the worms were sort of, somehow, probably evolved from the Chtorran equivalent of insects. Maybe. Insects didn't have brains. A smart one had maybe a thousand good neurons in its entire body, but it still managed to act as if it had some rudimentary intelligence; how was that managed?
Experiments with simple robots had demonstrated that coordinated behaviors can be learned very quickly. Intelligence wasn't a single high-level process; it was a collection of subprocesses, each of which was also divided into subprocesses, and so on, all the way down, with each process taking action according to its local priority. The process that activated the Jim McCarthy body when it was making love to the Lizard Tirelli body was clearly not the same process that activated the body when it was out torching a Chtorran village or kicking the crap out of Randy Dannenfelser. At least, I hoped to God it wasn't.
This was part of what the Mode Training had been based on-about training your subprocesses, about activating the appropriate ones, about recognizing what processes are asserting priority and taking control at any given moment, and noticing whether they were appropriate processes or not. The Training had been about the creation of new processes, designed to act as… what? Supervisors. Trainers. Gurus. The goal was the creation of a modeless mode so that you could create new modes as you needed them. The result was supposed to be not only an increased ability to respond appropriately, but also an increased ability to produce results.
Did it work?
Sometimes. Sort of. Maybe. When I remembered to remind myself that I was one of the trained.
But… it didn't really make you think smarter. It only made you act smarter. The goddamn puzzle of the goddamn worms still frustrated me every time I looked at it. There was something we were missing about these creatures because it was so alien to our experience that it didn't matter how many times it walked up to us and belched blue fire in our faces, we still wouldn't recognize it. We'd explain it away as something else.
The Chtorr was alien. Not alien as in different. Alien as in beyond our worldview and perhaps even as in completely beyond the possibility of human comprehension.
"Whoever or whatever they are," I explained to the terminal, "they don't eat like we do, they don't reproduce like we do, they don't think like we do, they don't feel like we do, they don't experience the world like we do. They aren't us, they aren't motivated like us, they don't desire like us, they don't fear like us, they don't share the same urges, the same drives, the same anything. We have no conception of what it is like to simply be a Chtorr, because we don't even know what a Chtorran is."
At the Virtual Reality Center in Massachusetts, they were trying to simulate a Chtorran worldview. I'd seen and participated in some of their earlier environments. It had been, to put it mildly, a mind-fuck.
I'd climbed inside the artificial realities-become a bird, broken away from the two-dimensional maze of land-bound existence. I'd swum through the sea of air, hurtling, floating, lifting, climbing, diving. The blue sky envelops a distant wall of opportunities and dangers. Perceptions shift and flicker. A tree becomes a protecting village. A fence is a gathering and a launch point. The sky is a towering web of flavors. Here, the wind is a solid presence. Everything is bright and wild. The community soars together in the air-boundaries only exist below; the community shatters on the ground. All the voices chatter and roar at each other, barking territorial defiance. No, the air is freedom, heart beating hard, muscles pumping furiously. Everything is effort and joy and grace. Climbing and rising, if you get high enough, you can rest on the air just hold your wings outstretched and spiral gently in the updraft. Here, the colors are different-you can see the magnetic lines in the air. The land is far away below, a place to visit, not to live. Flight is the natural state of being. The sky is home. The sky is life.
By comparison, a cow is a mountain.
The earth rumbles. All that meat, all those stomachs. A factory of flesh. A cow is glued to the ground by gravity. It lumbers through life. Everything is lunch. Life is a salad bar. A cow's sole purpose is digestion. It wanders through its days, eating and belching -ruminating, chewing, and farting incredible amounts of methane into the air. The grass is both carpet and meal. Here, it is forever teatime, and we sprawl amidst the watercress and cucumber sandwiches, munching contentedly and percolating in all four stomachs. The sun is a warm blanket, sauce for the surrounding salad; the rain only freshens the flavor. To a cow, concrete is a crime, a fence is a sin. A cow doesn't have a life, it has lunch. It has to be this way; a cow must consume a lot of salad to support its mass. Life is one long meal.
Mice. A mouse. A thing so small, it exists unseen and everywhere. It scurries through mazes of narrow tunnels and close dark spaces. Everything that moves in the world above is dangerous-hawks, cats, weasels, dogs, owls; the world closes in around you. Open space is terrifying. Noises are terrifying. Even il'you escape, the shock to your system can be so intense that you die from fright. Mice don't live. They panic. Brightness is a threat. Movement is a threat. Everything big is a threat. And yet-mice are courageous. They have to be. Get into the mouse world and the colors change. Sounds become louder, higher, deeper. Explore, thrive, breed, challenge, grow-and do it quickly. Mice are the undermen of the world, first to die, first to repopulate. Mice are the little warriors.