A Season for Slaughter watc-4

by David Gerrold

  "Okay," I said. "Put them on automatic, circling high and wide. Tell them to watch their shadows. Let me have the prowler now."

  "Up and running," said Siegel. He pushed the helmet up off his head and tap-danced across his keyboard again. "Sher Khan is hot to trot. Tarkus is on standby."

  "Good." Sher Khan was the newer of the two beasts; a P-120, he was a sleek and graceful killing machine, a pleasure to use. Tarkus was an earlier model, a T-9, more tank than animal. He was loud and clunky, and a little too big to go casually diving into worm nests; but he was better armored than Sher Khan and had greater firepower, so we used him mostly for defensive operations. Unlike the towering spiders that stalked the countryside unattended far weeks at a time, the prowlers burned faster and hotter and required much more frequent tending; but operating under the direct control of a trainer, the mechanimals provided a brutal combination of mobility and firepower that significantly increased the kill-ratio per kilodollar.

  The P-120 had been originally designed for armed reconnaissance. Built for use against urban guerrillas, it was fast, silent, and deadly. Now, retrofitted for going down into worm nests, its unique capabilities were proving particularly well suited to subterranean missions. Low and pantherlike, Sher Khan had six slender legs and looked like the disjointed mating of an elongated cheetah and a titanium snake; but the uplifted head was larger and more sinister-its jowls were gun barrels.

  It also had the most advanced LI ever put into a cyber-beast. Sher Khan's optical nervous system contained enough processing power to handle the data flow of a small government, or a large corporation. The density of nerve endings throughout its bodyespecially in its metal musculature and polymoid-armor skinwas greater than that of a living creature. The P-120s weren't programmed; they were trained.

  The technology for the prowlers and the spybirds, and all the other hard animals—the spiders, the rhinos, the balrogs, the torpedo-fish—had been developed so secretly that not even the President had known the full range of the cyber-beast program until after the abortive invasion of the Gulf of Mexico. In less than twenty hours, a hundred years of national paranoia had suddenly paid for itself; the ground opened up and the cyber-beasts boiled out into the open air like all the furies of hell. The enemy never had a chance; the creatures hit their lines like a chainsaw.

  Now the secrecy was over, and the paranoid investment was paying for itself all over again. Lockheed's deadly predators were out roaming the wilds again, this time hungering for a different kind of prey. They slid silently through the smoldering night, all their eyes and ears and radars probing relentlessly for worms and gorps and all the other dreadful things that lurked in the darkness. Together, the gossamer spybirds and the dreadful prowlers searched the remotest areas of wilderness, all the hills and gullies too dangerous and inaccessible for human surveillance. They worked on their own or assisted recon teams wherever they were needed.

  It was a lethal partnership, forged in fire and fury. The spybirds soared aloft, spotting targets, sometimes even marking them with transmitter-darts; the cyber-beasts tracked, closed, and killed. Where it was safe, the prowlers flamed their targets; where it wasn't, they pumped hundreds, thousands, of exploding granules into the unlucky victim. Their confirmed-kill rating was over 90 percent. Target sighted, target destroyed.

  If attacked or overpowered, the beasts would self-destruct explosively. More than one nest of worms had been annihilated that way. The machines couldn't stop, couldn't slow down, couldn't retreat; they didn't know how to do anything but hunt and kill and return to the tender for maintenance and rearmament.

  And I wished the army hadn't kept them a secret for as long as they had. We could have used them in Wyoming and Virginia and Alaska-and especially in Colorado.

  Rumor had it that the next generation of prowlers would look and act just like worms. The micro-prowlers would be millipedes. I hoped it wasn't true. I didn't want humans working with worms of any kind, not even mechanimal ones. A mechanimal simulation of worms in metal form would be an intolerable horror.

  "Marano?" I said to the other van. "Have you got us covered?"

  "You're as safe as a baby in its mother's arms," she laughed.

  "Thanks, Mom," I said. I reached up and pulled my own virtual-reality helmet down and over my head. I fitted it comfortably over my eyes and ears, and abruptly, after the initial shock of reality adjustment, I was looking out through the glistening eyes of Sher Khan, listening through his precision ears.

  The outside world took on the familiar color-shifted, sound-shifted strangeness of A-weighted cyberspace. Because the cyberthings were capable of seeing and hearing way beyond the limited range of human eyes and ears, the sensory spectra had to be compressed, adjusted, and compensatorily translated to create a corresponding perception for the human partner. Now I could see everything from heat-shimmers to radio emissions; I could hear the groaning of the earth and the high-pitched squeals of stingflies and shrikes. Fortunately, the virtual-reality helmet made no attempt to emulate the chemical environment that would have assaulted my nose had I been outside. If it had, I doubted very much that anyone would ever have put one on a second time.

  "Coeurl?" asked the prowler, a soft questioning meow. It was a sound cue to let me know that the creature was armed and readyand scanning its surroundings with deliberate curiosity. "Coeurl?"

  I tilted my head up and Sher Khan leapt forward. We glided across the flank of the slope and up toward the waiting shambler grove.

  "Hot Seat," April 3rd broadcast:

  The Guest: Dr. Daniel Jeffrey Foreman. Creator of the Mode Training. Acting Chairman of "The Core Group." Author of thirty science fiction novels, several embarrassing tele vision scripts, six books on lethetic intelligence engines and the machine/human interface, and twelve volumes on "the technology of consciousness." Because of the mane of white hair that floats around his head, he is sometimes described as: "an elf doing an Einstein impersonation."

  The Host: Nasty John Robison, aka "The Mouth That Roared." In the words of his critics: "He is the ugliest man in the world." "His acne-scarred skin, flapping jowls, and gro tesquely squashed nose look like the worst possible cross between the uglier end of a bulldog and a vampire bat." "His gravelly voice has all the charm of a trash collection vehicle at three in the morning." "His manner is execrable and abusive; his interviews aren't conversations, they are calculated attacks." "Obsequious, dangerous, cunning, and vicious-and that's if he likes you." "An ugly and monstrous little boy who has finally achieved his lifelong dream; the opportunity to get even with everybody in the world who he thinks ever did it to him, and that's everybody in the world." "Only a fool or a messiah would risk an appearance on Nasty John's hot seat. So far, there haven't been any messiahs."

  ROBISON: The word on the street, Dr. Foreman, is that you're one of the leaders of a secret cabal that has seized control of the government.

  FOREMAN: (laughing) I've also been called a liberal. The political dialogue in this country can get pretty vicious:

  ROBISON: So you're saying it's not true? That you and your cronies aren't acting as a hidden cabinet to the President, secretly directing the course of the nation, as well as the North American Operations Authority?

  FOREMAN: (amused, annoyed) To the best of my knowledge, the President still runs the country.

  ROBISON: The word in the Capitol is that you control her mind.

  FOREMAN: The President controls her own mind, I'm sure. She has a number of advisers. To the best of my knowledge, she listens carefully to all of them, then she makes her own decisions.

  KOBISON: But she comes to you for something extra, doesn't she? Something she calls censensus building, something you call contextual transformations-isn't that correct?

  FOREMAN: I'm flattered, John. It sounds like you've actually done your research, for a change.

  ROBISON: I read your book, Domains and Discoveries, when I was in college. Don't flatter yourself, it was required. You took 875 page
s to say that the attitude of an organization determines the results it'll produce. Create the appropriate context, and the intended results are inevitable.

  FOREMAN: You should have read past chapter one, John. What I actually said was that the creation of context is like an act of magic. It looks like you're working a spell; it doesn't look like it's going to produce any immediate results; and when it's complete, the only thing that has shifted is the perception of the participants. But that's the whole purpose of contextual creation, to shift the perception of the participants from can't to can.

  ROBISON: And isn't that what you're attempting to do to the United States government? Work some of your mumbo jumbo voodoo on it?

  FOREMAN: Actually, no. We're not attempting to do anything to the United States government. Or any other institutional authority. A government is only a tool. What I'm interested in is the transformation of the people who use the tool.

  ROBISON: So you are involved in the mind control of our elected officials?

  FOREMAN: I want to shift the context in which the entire human race is currently operating, from one of futility and ineffectiveness to one of responsibility and empowerment. I fail to see anything subversive in wanting success for the entire human community.

  ROBISON: Ah, now I understand. You're not trying to take over the United States. You're trying to take over the world. You know, a lot of other people have tried the same thing and failed. Hitler, for one. What makes you so different-?

  FOREMAN: Don't be an ass. If I was trying to take over the world, do you honestly think I'd sit here on this show with you and let you play stupid word games with me? This isn't a political or a religious movement, John. In fact, it isn't even a movement. It's a contextual shift. We're letting people know that the world isn't flat. It's round. That's a contextual shift. Shift the philosophical foundation of a group-any size group-and you transform the results produced…

  Shamblers are usually not dangerous as individuals. Only immature shamblers travel alone, and only until they are able to link up with a herd.

  Whenever shamblers gather in herds, extreme caution is advised, as herds are usually host to a wide variety of tenant-swarms, most of whom are capable of voracious feeding behavior. This partnership benefits both the tree and the tenant. The herd provides a safe domain for the tenants, and the tenants provide waste and refuse for the shamblers to feed upon.

  The only way to stop a shambler is to burn it or topple it. Few shamblers are able to right themselves. However, toppled shamblers will usually break apart and spawn lots of little shamblers; the tenant-swarms will also split up to inhabit the new herd.

  If adequate protection against the tenantswarms is present, toppled shamblers should be torched immediately. Otherwise, shamblers should be avoided.

  —The Red Book,

  (Release 22.19A)

  Chapter 10

  Cyberspace

  "The worst kind of party to attend is the one where you are the only person in the room who understands all the in-jokes you've been telling all night."

  -SOLOMON SHORT

  On and on the prowler coeurled.

  Up the slope, around the sides, we circled restlessly through the red viney underbrush, sliding in and out of the shadows and the stippled ocher daylight, often pausing, listening, and sniffing the air. We approached the grove of shamblers circuitously and cautiously.

  The prowler wasn't just curious. It was obsessive. Chemical sensors tasted the flavors in the dry Mexican wind sixty times a second. Multiple video arrays scanned and memorized the colors and shapes of every object in the prowler's environment, storing them in a four-dimensional, time-sensitive matrix. Aural sensors measured the sounds of whispering insects and creaking trees. Summary correlations .were made first in the prowler's LI engine, then squirted back to the van for additional processing, and ultimate uploading to the red network where eventually the industrial LIs would chew over the material all over againsometimes even referring back to the raw-data records for confirmation.

  The display in the VR helmet was much more detailed than the ones usually found in home entertainment systems. Looking down, I could see a bank of controls and readouts that corresponded to the actual keyboards in front of me. Looking ahead, the view through the prowler's eyes could be projected as a photo graphic representation, as a symbolized terrain of simplified objects, as a military-coded tactical display, or as any interrelated combination of views.

  Sonically, I was in a large open space. Sound stimuli came from all around me. Those that seemed to occur inside my head were cues about the operation of the prowler. The voices of my crew seemed to come from inside a small quiet room just behind me, such a distinctly different sonic environment that there could be no mistaking the point of origin.

  I let the prowler move through its entire repertoire of search routines without interference. It circled in toward the center of the shambler grove, then started circling outward again. Its LI programming was current; it knew what to look for, it would spot and recognize any variance from the main sequence of known Chtorran behaviors, and it would correlate detectable differences against previously charted patterns. Where correlations occurred, warnings and appropriate predictions would be offered.

  "Tenants," said Siegel. There was no emotion in his voice.

  "A swarm?" I widened the prowler's scans.

  "No," Siegel reported. "Just a few scouts."

  "I got 'em. You're right." The screens showed bright speckles of light flickering around the machine, alighting and bouncing off. Candlebugs.

  "Why aren't they swarming?" asked Willig.

  "They're not drawing blood. Blood triggers the feeding pheromones. It's not cost-effective for a swarm of tenants to attack everything that moves, so the scouts go down and see if it's worth it for the rest to follow."

  "You didn't tell that to Bellus."

  "He didn't ask," I grunted.

  Ahead, the shambler grove was a gloomy arena described by more than a dozen towering nightmares; they surrounded and enclosed the space like a huddling together of leaf-encrusted giants. From the prowler's perspective, the shamblers were the great leafy columns of a demonic cathedral. Almost-solid beams of afternoon sunlight slanted downward through the leaves like yellow prisms.

  We moved slowly into the center of the grove. The dusty air seemed to echo with a malevolent shimmer; it glowed with dappled patterns of darkness and light, and everything here took on a mordant magical quality. Maybe it was cyberspace, maybe it was my subjective fantasy, but here the Chtorran colors were even more startling. Although the primary hue of the alien vegetation was an iridescent scarlet, it was offset by patches of neon purple, dazzling orange, and velvet black. And all around, everything seemed outlined with haloes of nascent pink, probably another effect of the prowler's sensory spectrum.

  Overhead, the trees were shrouded with decaying fronds. I was grateful that I couldn't smell the reek of them, some of these lank and cloying fragrances were maddeningly hallucinogenic. The vines and veils hung in thick gauzy curtains. We could hear insect-like noises and bird-like chirps; but the sounds weren't friendly. They were small and vicious.

  Now the prowler picked its way gently through the shaggy undergrowth, a sheltering kudzu so dark it was more ebony than crimson, so thick it was both a carpet and a blanket. The sleek machine threaded its way through the fat waxy leaves like a metallic python, coeurling as it went. It moved liquidly, sliding in and out of shadow, under and over the sprawling vines and twisted roots, pausing, peering, sniffing, and listening.

  Closer to the trees, the shambler roots became knottier and more difficult to traverse. They were a gnarled fibrous mat of clawing fingers, like something scrabbling for a foothold. They grabbed great fistfuls of the earth and held on in a death grip.

  Upward, the wrists of the roots grew thicker and more columnar, and then, from there, the bones of the tree leapt upward again in strengthening groups, clumping together to form the clustered black
pillars of each of the shambler trunks. They rose and rose into the overhanging gloom.

  High above, I could see how assemblieg of branches leaned gently away from the main bulk of the towers, spreading outward and linking up with the outstretched arms of the other trees to form a tall sheltering dome. The covering spans of the canopy were clothed in ragged webwork, draped with arterial vines, and veiled in misty curtains. Only the faintest orange tinge of light filtered through the fibrous ceiling.

  Showers of ancillary vegetation dripped from everything. Above were clumps of something long, horribly twisted, and black. And there were bright red veils, lined with white spidery strands. I saw free-swinging vines with ominous-looking bulges here and there along their lengths. Fiery pustule-like growths clustered high on the tree trunks. The riot of vegetation blurred, became a chaotic wall. This dark alien jungle seemed an impenetrable mass.

  The prowler moved through it dispassionately. Sher Khan's enhanced perspective made it possible to look up into the crimson-stippled blackness and see the underlying structure of the trees with incredible clarity. The ficus-like columns were actually constructions of many smaller bundles-as if there were really no tree here at all, merely a convention of fibers, vines, and roots. Like the pipes of some vast organ, they grew upward in vertical clusters of tubes. They rose in Gothic splendor, leaving great spaces described between slender black buttresses.

  I pointed the prowler forward and set it to explore the twisted spaces where the naked roots began curling up into the trunks. They looked like folds of a hard black curtain. There was room within these columns for a man to walk, to thread his way among the narrowing pillars. There were avenues here big enough to park a car-and I was suddenly overcome with awe and wonder at the audacity of the shambler's size and construction. If the grove was a cathedral, then these tall looming recesses around the sides were the corridors and arcades where pilgrims walked their silent meditations, where hooded monks flickered quietly about their business-or, if in a darker frame of mind, these shadowed nooks and crannies could equally have been hideouts for assassins bent on other unholy businesses.