Regardless of whether the main channels circle clockwise or counterclockwise, branching corridors always spiral off in opposite directions, so the structure of the underground colony resembles a set of bedsprings.
Centered within each set of bedsprings may be found a wide variety of chambers and apartments, each with its own specific use. Many of the rooms are used for storage; others function as reservoirs for various fluids within the nest: water, waste, and a honey-like secretion; some of the rooms are obviously meant to be used as living quarters or nesting zones, while other chambers appear to be either incubation chambers or feeding areas-or both.
Some of the rooms have unusual structures, and their purposes are not yet clear; for example, what is the purpose of the small chamber at the bottom of a vertical tunnel? Should a gastropede crawl into such a room, it would be unable to get out again-and in fact, the desiccated bodies of small worms have been found in several of these chambers.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 65
Commitments
"Show me a moral victory, I'll show you a loser with a self-esteem problem."
-SOLOMON SHORT
And suddenly, everybody was talking at once.
Siegel pushed out into the lobby demanding that we go after the children immediately; Lopez, right behind him, already barking orders into her headset. Shreiber and Johns-were they lovers, or just Siamese twins joined at the opinion?-started hollering about aborting the operation now. Dwan Grodin was stuttering something unintelligible, tears streaming down her face, babbling in bizarre syllables; her brain must have jammed. Sameshima was standing to one side, quietly speaking into his own headset. Captain Harbaugh and General Tirelli were both talking at once. Nobody was listening-except me. And I couldn't understand a word that anyone was saying.
"Shit," I said. I gave up and walked back into the conference room. General Tirelli and Captain Harbaugh followed me-and then so did everybody else. Babbling and hectoring, like a roomful of chickens.
Abruptly, silence in the room.
They were all looking to me for the answer. I didn't have one. I looked to Lizard. She nodded me toward the podium. If you have something to say
I shrugged. What the hell? And took the dais. General Tirelli and Captain Harbaugh followed me to the front of the room. Everybody else headed back to their chairs.
"First of all," I said very quietly. "Everybody shut the fuck up and stay shut the fucked up. This is an emergency. Democracy is suspended until further notice. Priority one-" I pointed to Sameshima. "How long can you keep us aloft?"
Harry shook his head. "I don't know. I have no valid numbers. I can't predict. I can't run a simulation."
"Okay, let me ask it another way. What can you do?"
"I'm already doing," he said. He started ticking points off on his fingers. "I've called in an emergency helium drop. Reserve supplies are on their way. I've mobilized the entire crew. They're spraying the gasbags with sealant. We'll do two coats at first. We'll spray continually. I've ordered more tanks of sealant and pesticide. We could have them tomorrow. I've got another team on the skydeck, spraying sealant up there as well. And-I've got the ship's computer printing out jettison schedules. You'll have to put your people to work on that. Every chair, every bed, every table, everything that isn't nailed down can be thrown out the nearest window. But not all at once. We'll do it as we need the lift. If we drop the flyers and all the probes in the cargo bays and even most of our ballast-" He shrugged. "I won't know until I can get some new lift projections. An hour. Maybe two. It'll be a continual thing. My gut feeling-?" He shook his head grimly.
"How far can we get?"
"If we lift anchor now and fly straight-we might make Yuana Moloco. In Colombia. It's been prepared as an emergency landing site. Most of our emergency supplies are coming through there. They can meet us en route. That'll help."
Beside me, General Tirelli and Captain Harbaugh were whispering to each other. They both looked up at the same time. Almost in unison, they said, "Do it." Captain Harbaugh added, "Now!" And Sameshima was heading for the back of the room.
"Wait a minute!" Siegel was on his feet shouting. "No, goddammit! We've gotta go after the children!"
"Sit down, Lieutenant! I'm not through. Harry, wait-" Siegel remained standing, but he shut. Sameshima paused at the door, frowning in puzzlement.
"The SLAM team has aerogel," I said. "Have them spray it all over the skydeck and down over the sides of the vessel. It might help. If it works, spray the interior of the gasbags too. It might prevent further erosion."
Harry looked to Harbaugh. She nodded. He ducked out the door, grinning with ferocious resolve. He stood in the lobby, giving quick, curt orders to his headset.
"Now," I said to Siegel. "How determined are you to go after those kids?"
"Huh?" He didn't understand the question.
"Determined?" I asked. "Or stupidly determined?"
"Oh." He got it. "Uh…" He grinned. "I'm afraid I'm stupidly determined."
"Me too," chimed in Lopez.
"I thought so. Okay-" I looked to the captain and the general. Harbaugh was expectant. Lizard was genuinely curious. "Let's hear it."
I quick-nodded acknowledgment and plowed ahead. "Here's my idea," I said. "We go straight across the center of the mandala, blazing like a billboard. We anchor so that only the bow of the ship is over the arena. And we light it up like a rock concert. We stay dark at the tail, we run moving arrows toward the bow, brighter and brighter all the way; we do visual dazzles, patterns and stripes and everything else they reacted strongly to in Coari. And as soon as they start singing, we broadcast their own song back to them as loud as we can. We know it'll paralyze them. Meanwhile, we have the tail of the ship over the corral and we winch down as many baskets as necessary to pull up the children. One member of the team for each basket. We load, we lift, and we go. And wait a minute-there's another advantage too. While we're grabbing the children, we can drop all the rest of our probes and monitors. They get planted. We gain lift. The kids get out. We get out." I spread my hands wide in a there-you-have-it gesture.
Nobody spoke for a moment. I looked at my ringwatch. "If we're going to do it, we have to make the decision in fifteen minutes." I looked to Lizard.
She put her hands to her face, as if hiding behind them to think. When she lowered them again, her eyes looked bleary, but determined. "Brief your team, Lieutenant. Have them stand by."
"It's a go?"
"I don't know. We're going to have to play this one by ear."
"You can't do this," Shreiber interrupted angrily. "It's a lousy idea."
"It may be, but it's the only one we've got," Lizard replied. "Do you want those children on your conscience?"
Shreiber refused to be intimidated by morality. "We can't save them all. Those kids are probably already infected with-with whatever it is. We can't run the risk of bringing that infection aboard this ship."
"We'll use standard detox procedures. We'll quarantine the children as we bring them aboard."
"It's too dangerous. You're risking our safety."
"We're risking your safety, you mean." General Tirelli shook her head in exasperation. "I want those children out of there. I want to know we did something right." She looked across the table at Shreiber. "I don't know about you, but I want to feel good about myself again."
"It's not that easy, General!" Shreiber's face was contorted. "You can't buy your way into heaven like this."
"You're probably right, Doctor. But I'd rather go to hell my way than yours."
"Well then, I hope I get the chance to send you on your way." Shreiber stormed out.
Lizard just shrugged and shook her head. "Go to work, guys," she said.
A surprising number of storage rooms within the nest seem to be filled with eggs and nests of various partner species, many of which have still not been fully identified.
We have, however, recognized milliped
e eggs, snuffler eggs, jellypig incubants, and external wombs containing embryonic gorps.
A number of large leathery pods resembling chrysalises have been found in various nesting chambers, and we suspect that these may in fact be gastropede eggs; but no viable specimens are in hand to confirm this assessment.
Complicating the identification process is the fact that the gastropedes appear to make no distinction between eggs stored for food and eggs of symbiotic partners.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 66
Cyrano in the Sky
"The Greeks called it Deus ex Machina. The God in the Machine drops from the sky and saves you from yourself. We call it therapy and leave out God."
-SOLOMON SHORT
Once more, the singing of the worms filled the cargo bay.
It was a smothering purple sound. Even here, at the aft end of the vessel, the intensity of it was overwhelming. It was a physical presence in the hot wet air of the Japuran afternoon. The unnerving harmonics made all of us in the cargo bay uneasy and irritable.
The last few preparations for the drop were almost finished. Lopez positioned the cyrano-band on Siegel's head and gave me a thumbs-up signal.
The cyrano-transceiver was a standard military model, a lightweight tiara, with lenses mounted at the temples and microphone cups around the ears. The wider-than-normal positioning of the lenses would exaggerate the stereo effect and make objects seem a little bit smaller than they actually were, but it helped the range-finding functions of the image-processing computers.
I pulled my headphones down around my ears and flashed a thumbs-up back to Lopez. She walked around Siegel, quietly whispering a dirty limerick.
"There was a young lady from Venus,
Whose body was shaped like Athena's.
She was eighteen feet tall,
Which made humans seem small,
So she giggled and laughed at their wee-ness."
With my eyes closed, it sounded exactly as if Lopez were walking around me. "All right," I said, opening my eyes again. "Audio's okay. Let's try the cameras." I flipped my eyepieces down, spent a moment- fiddling with the focus, let myself look forward, and found myself abruptly standing three meters closer to the open cargo hatch. Lopez walked around in front of me, suddenly wheeled and feinted a punch that almost hit right between my eyes. I flinched involuntarily. She laughed wickedly.
"The video's okay," I said. "Anytime you're ready, Lieutenant, let's go for a ride."
Siegel's voice seemed to come from just below my chin. "Right. Uh, Cap'n-?"
"What?"
"What?"
"Could you, uh, not talk, unless it's really important? I mean, I find this, really distracting."
I laughed. "No problem." I thumbed my microphone off, so I wouldn't accidentally distract Siegel. I leaned back in my chair and made myself comfortable. Somebody patted me affectionately on the shoulder. She left her hand in place. I patted her hand, recognized the ring on her finger, and knew it was Lizard.
A moment later, we were dropping Lopez and Siegel down out of the airship. The image in front of me shifted uneasily with the bobbing of the basket. The sounds of the nest rose up around us, rhe endless purple singing of the worms.
We looked up. We were under the dark stern of the airship. It was an oppressive overhead presence. The great shadowy bulk of the Bosch blotted out the sky like an enormous roof. We were hanging exposed under a vast umbrella of twilight.
"Hold here for a moment," Siegel said. "Let's see how the worms react."
I thumbed the microphone on and whispered, "Look forward please."
The image jerked around, refused to steady
"Hold your head still, dammit!" The image froze. "Sorry, I didn't mean to yell."
"No. My fault. My harness was caught on the cable. I was trying to free it."
All the way forward, we could see the bright lights of the Vegas-like display that the captain had arranged for the benefit of he worms. Even at this-distance, we could see them climbing over each other. The bow of the airship was nowhere near the central clearing of the mandala; this corral was in an outlying tendril of he settlement; so there was no large open area for the worms to gather. Instead, they climbed over corral walls, clambered up on top of nests, trampled gardens, splashed through watering ponds, filled up the canals, piled up in the avenues, formed mountains of glutinous red flesh. I couldn't help myself, I shuddered at the sight.
Just ahead, we could see three other cargo bays open in the belly of the ship; pods and probes, spybirds and mechanimals were dropping out of the hatches in a steady stream and buzzing off across the mandala.
"I'm gonna look down now, Cap'n."
"Ten-four."
Below us, the corral was strangely quiet. Several of the children were standing and staring up at us. They were dumbfounded. One or two were pointing. Several were stretching out both hands as if trying to reach up to us. There were a few worms clustered outside of the corral, but most of them were moving northward to be under the loud bright nose of the airship.
"I don't see any adults," Siegel said.
"Neither do I," Lopez replied.
"Wait a minute. I think I do. Four o'clock. In the shadow. He's on his knees with a little girl. The one who's crying."
"I got her," Siegel said. "Is that human?"
"I think so," I answered. Lizard patted my shoulder in a confirming gesture. "Analysis says yes." I zoomed in on the man. He was naked. He was thin. He had those strange swirling lines all over his body, all over his face as well. He had a light coat of pink fur. And he had a wild, deranged look in his eyes. "He doesn't look hostile to me," I said, "but don't take any chances."
"Go down?"
Lizard patted my shoulder again. "Go down," I confirmed.
"Here come the spiders," said Lopez. The view shifted upward with Siegel's glance. The baskets with the defensive robots came dropping rapidly down. We dropped down with them. I readjusted my display to wide angle again.
Several remote units had already been dropped and were now spraying a thick haze of polymer-aerogel around the outside of the circular corral. The little machines whizzed and whirred and puffed out smoky clouds of the stuff. One or two worms were already tangled in it. Because aerogel,was the least-dense substance ever created, a single barrel of it was enough to cover an acre. The remote units had enough to blanket the mandala, if necessary, and they'd keep replenishing the soft hazy barrier around the corral until they ran out.
The corral itself was identical in construction to the one at the first Chtorran nest I'd ever seen. The walls were made of some kind of hardened pulp. We had lots of pictures of worms chewing up trees to make this Chtorran papier-mache. They worked like bees, building up the domes of their nest entrances one layer at a time. Their corrals were domes without roofs.
The children moved out of the way fearfully as Siegel and Lopez winched down into the center of the corral. The baskets humped hard against the ground; the image jarred; the spiders around us unfolded their legs and rose to their full height, moving out to form a tall defensive perimeter. Their ominous bodies towered up over the top of the corral walls; their torches unslung, their cameras focused, their range finders locked onto possible targets, their sighting lasers armed; their readiness signals beeped in my ears, one after the other.
"Spiders are green," I reported.
Siegel and Lopez didn't acknowledge. They were already scooping up children and putting them into the baskets.
Some of the children were backing away, cowering in fear against each other, or against the corral walls. The baskets were broadcasting a prerecorded message in several languages, one of which we hoped would match the dialect of the home village of these Indian children. Lopez was making cooing sounds at the babies as she locked them into safety harnesses. Some of the babies were crying.
Four more team members came sliding down. the ropes to help them. They grabbed the toddlers next.
A couple tried to fight, but some of them were beginning to realize that this was a rescue operation, and they began trying to climb into the baskets by themselves. They even tried to help the team members fasten their harnesses. The harnesses were as much to keep the children from climbing out as they were to keep them from falling out.
Some of the children resisted. They ran from the giant white strangers who dropped from the sky-whale. The soldiers sprayed them, caught them as they collapsed, carried them back to the baskets.
A wild laugh behind me like a cold hand on my neck-a hand on Siegel's shoulder jerked us around. A man's voice. English accented. "Are you feeding the sky? Where are you taking the Irrrtttt?" The image focused. A tattooed brown face. Vertical quills rising up out of his head like a topknot. I thought of Queequeg, Melville's mysterious alien in our midst. The image cleared. The lines on the face were ridges under the skin. As if it had been plowed or burrowed or chewed. The face tilted sideways, curiously, as if the being behind it couldn't focus perpendicularly. It cackled. It pointed upward. "Who is your rrrlllnncctt?"
The first of the baskets was already rising up into the looming airship. Two more were dropping down. I couldn't see it, I could only feel it, but Siegel made a hand signal to the rest of the team to keep loading. "Who are you?" he demanded of the apparition that stood before him.
"Guyer, I be. John, Dr. Harvard tribe. Research nest." More wild laughter. The thing slapped its knee several times, as if this were the most amusing joke it had ever heard. "Research! Research!" it shouted. "I be research."
"Background!" I shouted, mike off. "Dr. John Guyer. Harvard Research."
"It's already working," Lizard said. "Stand by-"
The metal voice of the LI cut her off. "Dr. John Guyer, Harvard Research Mission. Disappeared ten months ago. Amazon exploration. Body and voice characteristics, seventy percent match."
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