Lloyd's of London reports that over sixty other vessels have disappeared in the last two years, whose loss can almost certainly be attributed to the depradations of various Enterprise fish.
It is possible that these underwater behemoths are attracted to electrical or magnetic fields; experiments are currently underway to determine if this is so. Perhaps it is possible to lure Enterprise fish away from most human shipping lanes. Whatever the ultimate prognosis, at this point in time it is certain that our seas have become a very untenable environment for all forms of human endeavor.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 44
Adrift in the Head
"The shortest distance between two puns is a straight line."
-SOLOMON SHORT
Later, when the worst of the buzzing in my head finally faded away, I found my way back to the cabin that Lizard and I shared. I went straight to my desk and clicked on the terminal. But instead of dictating my thoughts right away, I just stared at the silent empty screen and studied the thought echoing around the inside of my head.
Siegel and Lopez were right. What did it really mean?
The problem wasn't one of understanding-we already knew that the worms sang-it was one of experiencing: What were they doing when they sang? Somehow I felt sure that the constant tuning-fork buzz of the nest was an important part of the Chtorran puzzle.
Everything about the goddamn worms was a puzzle. Were they intelligent or weren't they? How did they reproduce? What were their family relationships? How many sexes did they really have? Three? Four? A dozen? How did they communicate with their slaves? For that matter, how did they communicate with each other? Were the worms intelligent at all? Or were they just shock .
I roops for the real invaders still to come?
That last set of questions was the most troubling of all. We knew that the worms weren't intelligent because we'd captured individual specimens and studied them and tested them and run Ilu:m through all kinds of mazes and given them all kinds of hizarre problems and found that while an individual worm could he curious, experimentative, even clever, its rating on the Duntemann Intelligence scale remained somewhere between lawyer and coffeepot, with coffeepot being the high end of the range. They weren't stupid; they loved to solve puzzles, especially mechanical ones; but they were idiot savants of the weirdest sort. A worm could sit for days working through one of those damn binary puzzles that required several hundred thousand repetitive movements; but it was almost an autistic process-as if the creature's soul was completely disengaged from the activity, and the puzzle solving was merely an activity like twiddling one's mandibles.
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.