Captain Harbaugh thought about it. "What about the Brazilians?" she asked.
We all looked at each other. Good question.
"We're supposed to consult with them," Lizard said.
"If we do…" I said reluctantly, "they'll veto the exercise. Remember the mandate of the mission. We're not supposed to interfere with the mandalas in any way."
"Mm," said Lizard. "There's that."
We all looked at each other some more. Frustration.
"Well-" I suggested, "maybe we could fudge it a little."
"How?"
"Suppose we tell them that we're concerned about the possibility that the gastropedes are, uh, reacting badly to our presence-I mean, just look down-and that we're afraid that they'll panic or something. And, uh, hurt themselves. Or the nest. And that, uh, we're prepared to broadcast their own songs back to them, because, uh, we think it'll have a calming effect."
Captain Harbaugh and General Tirelü looked at each other thoughtfully. "What the hell. It might work," said Lizard. Captain Harbaugh thought about it some more, then nodded her agreement. "It's your call," she said.
Lizard turned to me. "If we do this, my ass is on the line. What's the worst that could happen?"
I shook my head. "I have no idea. Define worst." And then I added, "Nothing we do is going to hurt us. The worst that can happen is that we'll hurt the worms."
"Hm," she said, smiling gently. "There is that." I knew that was Uncle Ira talking. "Hmm," she said again-and I relaxed. From the tone of her hmm, I knew she was going to talk herself into it. Sure enough, she said, "I think we have to take the risk. I think you're on to something, Jim. And this may be our only chance to find out. Set it up. I'll go talk to the Brazilians."
Very child-like, the bunnydogs are like creatures from a fairy-tale fantasy world. They are as playful and as intelligent as monkeys. They have opposable thumbs, and their hands are capable of grasping and manipulating small objects.
The bunnydog's snout is stubby, giving the creature a "cute" appearance. Its eyes are large and round, and usually very dark. Instead of eyelids, the animals have sphincter-like muscles surrounding each orb, very much like those found on gastropedes' eyes.
Albino specimens have also been observed.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 52
The Cacophony and the Ecstasy
"Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which you can die."
-SOLOMON SHORT
We hung mikes down to fifteen meters to pick up individual voices and threads of melody. The mikes higher up were for texture, flavor, and harmony. We let the LI engines chug away on the nest-song for nearly twenty minutes before we started feeding it back to the worms. By that time, the central plaza of the mandala nest was so filled with crimson horrors that there was no room for any more to crowd in. But even so, they kept arriving.
It was a sea of fat red bodies beneath us. The worms clustered and clumped and eddied in pools of nervous activity. Dwan Grodin estimated-she was plugged into the LI network-that there were over a hundred thousand of the monsters just in the central arena alone, and at least half that many more still trying to push their way in. At the edges of the crowd, where the avenues led into the arena, they were climbing over each other. The pace of movement was increasing throughout the crowd. Soon they would be frenzied. And after that-
We had no idea what would happen.
The singing was louder now. Almost painful to listen to. It plused. It throbbed.
The probes we'd planted earlier were relaying horrifying ground-level pictures. If the worms had noticed the funny little spider-like objects that had attached themselves to the walls and sides of their nests, they hadn't reacted in any way we could see.
The images that came back to us were bizarre and unbelievable. They glowed on our terminals and on our wall-sized screens. They surrounded us with close-up stereo views of the floor of hell. Indescribable images. Fragments of eyes, mouths, claws, mandibles, antennae-and always the horrible red fur. The color streaked past the cameras; again that frightening strident orange the shocking crimson, the brooding purple, the cancerous pink; and all the shades between. We looked across the sea of hunger. All courage fled.
The expressions around the observation deck-where we could see them in the darkness-were pinched and strained. Lizard and Captain Harbaugh withdrew to the upper deck, where they sat talking quietly. My guess was that Lizard was trying to ease the captain's concerns. This airship was in a terrifyingly precarious position, and every single one of us knew it.
I saw Dwan Grodin trembling on the other side of the video display. She looked ghastly in the gloom, with the light of the table shining up and giving her face a sickly green reverse illumination, she was shadowed where she should have been lit, and illuminated where she should have been dark. She looked like some kind of ghoul. Her lower lip was trembling, but to give her credit where credit was due, she was totally focused on the display in front of her. She was doing her job.
The rest of the observation team looked a lot less certain-they were almost on the edge of panic. They were so disturbed by the surging sea of crimson fur and lidless black eyes below us that several of them were close to hysteria. They looked like the relatives of the guest of honor at a hanging. I took particular joy in watching the blood draining out of Clayton Johns's face. As I walked by him, I patted him gently on the shoulder and whispered. "Relax." He flinched and looked like he wanted to kill me-but to give him his due, he managed a nod and even a vaguely disgruntled "Thanks."
Finally, the LI engine said it was ready to go.
I touched my headset and whispered the information to Lizard; I looked up to where they sat on the upper deck. Lizard spoke the captain, the captain nodded, Lizard's voice came back to me: Go ahead.
It began slowly. We seeped in the sound so softly at first that even we could barely hear it, and there were speakers all around us. We brought up the gain in imperceptible notches and watched the roiling worms with trepidation. The external display had been synchronized to the ship song. As the sound rose toward audibility, so did the lights along the sides and the belly of the Bosch come glimmering up in Chtorran colors.
The worms sighed.
We could hear it rising up through the open cargo access, a sound like desperate wind.
Dwan Grodin stared across the video display at me. She looked frightened. "Are th-they supposed't-to d-do th-that?" Her rubbery face was starting to constrict. Her eyes were white.
I nodded. I felt abruptly compassionate toward her. This was beyond her experience. "Don't worry. They're doing exactly what they're supposed to do. We just haven't seen this before. It's okay, Dwan," I said. "You're doing fine. Just keep monitoring." And then I turned away from the table, wondering if my own fear was showing. We were hovering in place only twenty-five meters above the largest concentration of alien life forms that had ever gathered in one place on the planet Earth. All that held us away from certain death was a million cubic meters of helium.
Below… the worms were singing to us.
Was it a love song? A song of worship? A song of greeting? Or maybe just some mindless humming that the creatures did before suppertime.
Don't think about that.
We kicked the sound up a notch, the lights as well-we were audible now, visible too-and the sound of the worms swelled enormously.
Above the nest, the great sky-worm finally revealed itself. It joined the song. It sang.
And the worms went crazy.
They amplified themselves-all their sounds, all their movements. They surged back and forth in waves that spread and spiraled outward through the crowd. We watched in horror as the whole mandala squirmed. It pulsed like a malignant heart.