ROBISON: So, if I understand you correctly, you're about to advocate the elimination of opposing political points of view
FOREMAN: There you go again
ROBISON: Oh, not in so many words, of course, but isn't it true that your training sessions create a clique mentality? Here's this whole group of people who've shared a very intense experience. Of course the survivors are going to feel a special comradeship-the kind that you get when misery is shared.
FOREMAN: (prompting) And my point is… ?
ROBISON: And my point is that no matter how many wonderful speeches you , make about how committed you are to powerful results on the planet-see, I can do the jargon too-what you're really doing is creating an elite class of decision makers, locking out the rest of us from the process, creating separatism, abusiveness, resentment, and even more divisiveness that makes it harder than ever for us to win the war.
FOREMAN: The facts suggest otherwise.
ROBISON: Oh? You think we're actually winning this mess?
FOREMAN: We're surviving. And we're expanding our repertoire of survival. We're finally mobilized on a scale that we can start thinking of goals beyond our day-to-day survival. We're not running anymore. Now we're beginning to carve out defensive positions. And yes, that's a victory. A major victory…
The neural symbionts will connect to any functioning nervous system. Autopsies on gastropedes as well as infected Terran organisms have consistently demonstrated this.
Tests on living Terran organisms have demonstrated a remarkable increase in sensory activity. Individuals with the thickest coats of fur have experienced enhanced sensitivities to light, color, taste, smell, and sound.
In the San Francisco herd, as well as in other human herds where members have been infected with neural symbionts, we have begun to see a significant shift in individual behavior. We have observed increased sexuality in females, increased irritability and aggressiveness in males, and a heightened awareness of the smallest details of the environment.
Infected individuals have also demonstrated an increased ability to communicate with each other over much greater distances and with greatly reduced verbal and physical signals.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 49
TwiIight
"Of course, this is the best possible worlds. I'm in it."
-SOLOMON SHORT
Lizard's schedule was filled with briefings, planning meetings, and various pieces of procedural business.
I spent most of the day parked at a computer terminal, prowling through dataliths, searching for precedents in nature, scanning both raw and processed reports, looking for hypotheses, playing with simulations, brainstorming with the Harlie link, and finally just tinkering with the idea at the heart of the whole question. I couldn't stop thinking about the ideas of yesterday and the conversation of the night before. It all had to do with worm songs.
My new Uncle Ira clearance gave me access to a higher level of information than I'd ever tapped before; but it was a curiously unsatisfying experience. There was little here about the worms that I didn't already know. In fact, a great deal of it was material I'd gathered myself in the course of the last six years. What was new to me was the background material on the various political situations we had to contend with around the world. What was most startling to me were the reports on the growing evidence of a developing human symbiosis within the mandala nests. How had this information been gathered? A lot of it looked like Teep Corps material, but it wasn't annotated. I wondered-had the Uncle Ira group penetrated the Teep Corps? Or was it the other way around. Lizard had intimated that there was considerable tension between the two agencies.
Coming back to the question at hand… I realized that there had been a frustratingly small amount of attention given to the songs of the nests.
Oh, we'd recorded the songs. We'd done that to the death. Literally. We had thousands of hours of gastropede music. We'd digitized and sampled until our techniques were flawless. We'd charted and collated and analyzed the sounds until we could synthesize them perfectly. But nobody had really asked the W question. What is this? Why is this? Why are the mandala nests producing these songs?
The song of the nest.
Hm. That was an interesting phrase. I wondered…
Four hours later, the sunlight was slanting sideways through the room, and I had a pain in my back that reached all the way up to the front of my eyeballs, threatening to blind me if it didn't strike me stupid first. My ears ached and my brain was numb from listening to the songs of seven different mandala nests. There was a difference in flavor between the song of one nest and the next, but I had no idea what it meant-if anything.
Still… I had an idea for an experiment. I had no idea if it would work, or even what it might prove, but it was one of those things that you have to do just to see what happens when you do. I'd have to talk it over with Lizard, though. She'd have to approve it. I got up from the terminal painfully, stretched and groaned and listened to my back crackling like a bowl of angry Rice Krispies, then went searching for my busy general.
As it turned out, my busy general was even busier than I had estimated; she knew better than to micro-manage her teams, but a lot of last-minute decisions still required her personal attention. She gave me five preoccupied minutes, nodded a vague agreement, kissed me perfunctorily, and then turned her focus back to six other tasks.
Not a problem. We'd connect later. I stopped in at the ship's restaurant, where an all-day buffet had been installed, grabbed a sandwich and a Coke, then headed toward the forward lounge. And came face-to-face with the infestation. Suddenly, it was real.
The Amazon was dying. You didn't have to be a scientist to know that. The sheer scale of it was numbing. It stretched out toward the horizon, no end in sight.
People were clustering at the windows, frozen like witnesses to a plane crash, too horrified to look, too horrified to turn away. All of them-technicians, assistants, squad members, team leaders, analysts-were stunned.
These were people whose only prior experience with the Chtorran infestation had been with specimens in cases; all the individual creatures they had seen had been locked safely away in cages, separated, isolated, unable to demonstrate the harm they were truly capable of. If you didn't see it directly, you could somehow deny the reality of it in your mind. But here, denial was futile. Below us, in the shadow of the great airship, unmistakable, inexorably spreading, the color of the foliage was changing from green to brown to red.
The people at the windows were coming up hard against the brick-wall reality of the end of the world. You could see it in their collapsed postures. They leaned on the railings, they looked down at the devastated jungles, and their bodies slumped: It looked as if the life was being drained out of their souls.
We were nearing the Coari mandala. Below, the ground was rotting.
Where it wasn't rotting, it was broken and chewed. A series of deep scars cut through the foliage like claw marks. The worms had left slashes of barrenness that curved like scimitars. Broken trees lay across the ground'as if knocked down by a hurricane. There were huge mounds of chewed and regurgitated wood pulp, but there were no domes, no nests—only the mysterious gray hills. No one on the on-site team and no one on the remote network observation team knew what to make of these places. Biological factories? Perhaps. We just didn't know. We'd never seen anything like it before.
But even beyond the scars and mounds, the overall desolation of the red blight was unmistakable. At last we were seeing the direct effects of the smallest creatures of the Chtorran ecology on the Amazon basin: debilitating viruses, scourging bacteria, and hordes of insect-like things that ate the hearts out of the trees. The land was silent. The trees looked wilted. The decay stretched out forever. We were sailing into a wasteland. A blanket of death lay across the world.