"The thing is, sir, that I have no other way of sending a message out. We've been cut off from the network. I believe it's on the direct orders of General Wainright or somebody on his staff. Our backup vehicle has been recalled, and we've been abandoned out here. This isn't right, sir. We've got a very delicate situation. We've got a major-I repeat, major-ecological discovery working. And people are playing politics with us. My team needs your help. I'm not asking for me. I'm asking for them. Please check with General Tirelli. She can background you. This is a life-threatening emergency. Help us, please. Over and out."
I logged off and disconnected. I hoped the messages had gotten onto the network without the location of their origin being tagged.
Willig had been waiting for me to finish transmitting. Now she said, "We'll be under the first edge of it in five minutes. The prowler is on low-energy standby, the spybirds are both back aboard, both are in decontamination, the vehicle is anchored and spiked, lookouts have been set, overhead scanners are active, we're on low-power mode, and confidence is so high, it's giddy." Then she added, in a darker tone, "You've been through this before, haven't you? What can we expect?"
"Boredom, mostly." The look on Willig's face suggested that she didn't believe me. I shrugged and added, "If we're lucky."
"Go ahead," Willig said. "Scare me."
I shook my head honestly. "I don't know. I expect we'll see a feeding frenzy that ripples up and down the whole food chain, but whatever else is going to happen here, I have no idea. I don't know how shamblers or shambler tenants react to cotton-candy storms, and I have even less idea about what might happen down where the prowler is."
"So what do we do?"
I considered it for half a moment. There wasn't much left that needed doing. Rule number one (this week): when in doubt, do nothing. Check your weapon. Eat. Sleep.
We'd already checked our weapons, and the sleep schedule was posted- "Let's have supper."
Most people believe that the process of colonization/invasion began with the plagues, but a little consideration of the matter will show that this represents a serious misreading of the events in the process.
Certainly, the plagues that swept across the globe were the most dramatic and devastating effect of the initial Chtorran presence on this planet, but in actuality, the first Chtorran species would have had to have been here on Earth, spreading and establishing themselves for at least five to ten years prior to the advent of the first of the plagues.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 17
A Discovery
The most effective spice in the world is hunger."
-SOLOMON SHORT
Supper was some of that same yellow, buttery, bread-like stuff that they fed to the herds that roamed the California coast-though without the tranquilizing additives. At this point, I almost would have preferred the tranks. But the government, in its infinite wisdom, acknowledged our humanity by granting us the luxuries of anxiety, fear, anger, and depression. I wondered about the people in the herds. Did they know? Did they care? Were they happy—0r just unconscious? Did it even matter? Did any of us have a choice? In a Chtorran-dominated world, sooner or later we might all end up in a herd of some kind.
I wondered if I would remember what it was like to love and to care. Probably not. I probably wouldn't feel anything at all. The thought of what it might be like left me so depressed, I couldn't eat. I left the remainder of my meal forgotten in its plastic tray. The great southwestern herds were both a warning and a preview. They grew larger during the warm summer months, but during the winters, they shrank-partly because the sick and elderly died off, and partly because the discomfort of the colder weather actually triggered the partial rehabilitation of some individuals; but the wandering herds had pretty much become a permanent phenomenon.
We'd seen pictures of larger herds in India, but that had been a transitory phenomenon; the monsoon season had broken up the great Indian migration. There had also been rumors of a herd numbering more than a million individuals roaming through central China, but the reconstituted Chinese Republic refused to acknowledge any requests for information on the subject. Satellite scans had been inconclusive. How do you tell the difference between a crowd of mindless Chinese ambivalents and a crowd of Chinese prisoners of war? Both were herded by tanks.
And that made me think about freedom. That was another casualty of the war.
Even those of us who thought we were free were only living an illusion. You can have freedom only where you have choice. Eliminate choice and freedom disappears. And the human race didn't have any choices anymore; we had to fight this war. The only courses of action left to us were reactive ones, determined by the actions of the Chtorran. We were locked in a dance of death with the worms, and they were just as enslaved by the music as we were. Maybe even more so. But that wasn't a new thought. The Chtorrans were enslaved by their biology, just as we were enslaved by ours. If only we could know the nature of that enslavement. Ours, as well as theirs.
I remembered something that Foreman had said in the Mode Training. "Everything is enslavement. You just pretend that it isn't." Now, again, I understood what he meant. We were enslaved by the circumstance. We were sitting in the van, waiting for the storm to pass. There wasn't anything else. We were free to do only what the universe would allow us to do.
The cotton candy would pile up around us, we couldn't even guess how deep it would get; and then we'd have to wait until the pink sugary dust was devoured by whatever hordes of frenzied Chtorran insects came hatching up out of the ground.
What didn't get eaten while it was still fluffy would collapse into a sticky sludge that would blanket the landscape for days, killing even more Terran life forms-plants, small animals, bugs, anything that couldn't clean itself. If the cotton candy came down thick enough, a week from now all this rumpled terrain would be a brown molasses desert. And a month or so after that, it would be a crimson Chtorran meadow. And a year after that, it would be a towering scarlet forest; a pastel wonderland of frolicking bunnydogs and giant red man-eating caterpillars, all singing songs of love and wonder and lunch.
I felt the despair like a ceiling crushing down on me. No matter how hard I pressed back, it was always there; it just kept coming back, each time pushing closer than before. I couldn't make it go away. If I kept busy, I could pretend I didn't feel it. If I kept busy, I could distract myself. If I kept busy, I wouldn't have to deal with that thing I didn't want to admit. But there wasn't anything to do, and the desperate pressure came rolling in again, like a big rosy, smothering wall.
I suppressed a shudder; it didn't work. I covered by pretending to stretch. I leaned back in my chair; it creaked alarmingly, but it held. I put my arms behind my head and stretched-but no, I couldn't quite get the vertebrae in my back to give one of those long, satisfying knuckle-crunching cracks. Damn. Everything today was almost, but not-quite.
Willig was watching me carefully. I glanced over at her. "You know what?" I said.
"What?" she asked.
"You remind me of a dog I had once."
"Oh?"
I nodded. "She'd lie on the floor at my feet, content to wait patiently for whatever I might decide to do-a cookie, a walk, a ball-but the giveaway was that she never took her eyes off me. She even slept with her ears open. I swear she even counted the sounds of pages turning. Whenever I finished whatever I was reading, she'd sit up and look at me. She never asked for anything outright, but she was always there. Always. She was totally tuned to my every move." I gave Willig a speculative look. "Does that sound like anybody we know?"
Willig was pouring out a fresh cup of brown stuff. She put it into the holder on my work station and looked at me with her big soft brown eyes. "Try throwing a ball and find out."