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.
Fly with the birds, munch with the cows, live in the mouse world, swim with the whales-discover all the different ways of seeing and smelling and hearing.
But the experience is incomplete.
The best you could get from the Virtual Reality Center would be the simulated realities of birds and cows and mice. The truth might he vastly different. Until we could put an implant into a mouse or a cow or a bird, we'd never really know for sure.
Nevertheless, the point was still made; the experience of other creatures is different because their worldview is differentbecause the way that every creature moves through the world, interacting with it, smelling it, tasting it, surviving it, and finally even reproducing in it, is a unique and special experience.
As flawed as the simulations were-flawed, vicarious, filtered through human equivalents, and finally experienced in human terms-as imperfect as it was, it still gave us an assertion, a place to start considering the problem. Sometimes it was about as effective as trying to butter a piece of bread underwater, but even so, it was still u way to get a sense of the gulf between one species and another.
If only we knew enough about the Chtorrans to begin putting together a simulated reality of the Chtorran experience. If onlyWe could model the tunnels and create a simulated environment. We could duplicate the omnipresent sounds of the nests. We could match the vision of the eyes and the frequency response of the hearing receptors so that the cybernaut participants could move through the environment with the same senses as a Chtorran-but n was the other relationships that mattered. The ones we still didn't know about.
"Sing," I said to myself, abruptly. "We have to learn how to sing like the Chtorr." But… I already knew that. That was the problem.
I remembered-
The first time I'd gone into a Chtorran nest and found four worms in communion… I'd dropped my weapons. I'd put my hands upon their warm flanks. They had been purring. Humming. Vibrating with a note that went right through me. Their fur had tingled. It felt softer than mink. I had leaned into the sound, pressing myself against it, trying to-
I'd felt it again, in the herd, the Great San Francisco Herd. The herd sang. The human note-it wasn't the same song, but it felt like the same yearning to me. The need to be a part of some larger process. It was the submergence of self into a larger personality.
If the humming of the worms was an unconscious sound, then the worms were no more than bees or ants or termites. And their nests were as unconsciously organized as the honeycombs in beehives or the intricate tunnelwork of termite mounds, a product not of conscious processes, but just the way that a zillion little copies of the same program all interact with each other-the same way that an insect isn't smart enough to walk, but the subprocesses of its thousand neurons are smart enough to cooperate and create the larger process of locomotion.
But… if the worms were anything more than that as individuals-and as yet, there was still no real proof of that-then there had to be, on some level, some kind of conscious purpose or function or reason for the incessant humming of the nest, the collective vibration that resonated throughout every Chtorran settlement. And, if I was right, if there were, then it seemed to me that from the Chtorran point of view, it had to be very much the same phenomenon as experienced in the herds. Only more so. Everything with the worms was more so.
With the herd the humming produced a submergence of self. With the worms, I wondered if it didn't produce a transcendence of self. Did a worm even have a self? Had Orrie truly been conscious, let alone sentient? I still wasn't sure. Was a dog conscious? Do dogs think? What about chimps? And while we're being so damned anthropomorphically arrogant, what makes you so sure that human beings are even conscious? Just because we think that we think, we think that means we really think. What if our thinking is really just the illusion of thinking? What if we're programmed to think that we think? And if so, who wrote the program?
According to the Mode Training, human beings start programming themselves in the womb. And badly. Because we're none of us trained to program a human being. We have to figure it out as we go. And most of the time, we make assumptions based on incomplete evidence and use that as justification for making iuaccurate connections.
Maybe the worms were smarter because they didn't need as much programming. Maybe whatever programming an individual had wasn't the product of his own observations as much as it was Ihc collective vote of his entire settlement.
There. That was the thought.
The song was the way that the worms tuned themselves. To themselves. To each other. To the nest.
Yes.
Bees. Bees sing. The whale hive hums. The sound of all those vibrating wings fills the nest. A bee resonates with that sound every moment of its life within the nest. It doesn't exist. The hive prevails over all. There's no such thing as one bee.
And there's no such thing as one Chtorr. Yes. My God!
There are no Chtorran individuals.
I straightened up and looked around. The day had turned yellow, and the first shades of dusk were tinting the afternoon. We were halfway between nowhere and nowhere. I stared out the window. The wide Amazon panorama rolled in green waves out to the distant blue horizon. I was completely alone with this idea. I was staggered by the size of it. I couldn't even see what had triggered the realization just the pure Brownian movement of ideas bumping randomly into each other inside an otherwise empty head.