I stood up slowly. "Well…" I began. "The good news is that we seem to have found a terrific new way to kill worms-" Some of the people in the room responded with nervous laughter. That was okay, but I wasn't trying to be funny. "The bad news is that you need to gather them in crowds of a quarter million individuals first." I looked at Lizard. "Um, can we run the video on this?"
Instead, she invited me forward. "Here, why don't you take the podium-"
I went to the front of the room nervously. I knew that there were a lot of people here who didn't like me-some of them because they had been told not to-but most of them because I had earned their enmity fairly. Dr. Shreiber, for instance, was cleaning her fingernails with a cute little dagger.
I knew what Lizard was trying to do-she was trying to rehabilitate my reputation. She wanted me to handle this part of the briefing; I didn't want to. We'd argued about it last night. The argument was a short one. She outranked me. I lost.
I glanced over the podium controls. They were fairly straightforward. Six preview screens and a menu to the file-server. Quickly, I punched up, the videos I wanted. The sea of worms. From above. Waving and worshiping. "Okay, here-look at these pictures first. Wait a minute-" I punched up the color enhancement and decreased the granularity of the resolution. The resultant image displayed the pattern of color stripes across the surging worms while blurring out the individual creatures. "Now, watch this cycle-" I programmed the image as a repeating loop and let it play.
At first there was puzzlement-then the gasps of recognition began.
I waited until I was sure that everybody in the room had seen it, before I said anything. "Like a stone dropped in a pond, right? Concentric waves of color spreading outward from a common center. Violet. Orange. Red. What does it mean?
"Please notice here that the center itself is a confused whorl of color. It's only when you get out to here-a radius of at least ten meters, call it the event horizon-that the colors crystallize and spread outward in waves. Now, before I postulate anything here, let me remind you that these patterns are actually very subtle gradations of shade. They're almost invisible to the naked eye. We're doing some very heavy enhancement processing here. Let me also note that these waves are occurring in sync with the song of the nest." I brought up the sound and let them watch and listen for a few moments. There were more gasps in the room.
"What does all this mean?" I asked again. "To be honest, I'm not completely sure. I can think of several explanations, I'm not sure I would believe any of them. But the phenomenon is real. Very real." I punched up another image; this one from one of the ground-based cameras. It was a close-up of several worms all jammed together in the narrow space between two domes at the edge of the arena. "Watch this," I said. I enhanced the colors, but left the individual worms visible. We could see the colors sliding quickly across their bodies.
"All right," I said. "Here's what we know. We know that the gastropedes display patterns of stripes on their bodies. We know that the stripes change. There's a deep permanent patterning that changes very slowly, from month to month. Overlaid on that are the temporary patterns that change from day to day. Now we see here momentary patterns that flash and vanish. We know that the fur of the gastropede is actually a network of hundreds of thousands of neural symbionts, each one changing color to reflect the way it's being stimulated. The operative thesis is that the stripes represent what a worm is feeling. If a worm has emotions, its stripes are the way it expresses them so that other worms can see.
"These quick flickers of color that you're seeing are most likely the animal's moment-to-moment reactions to immediate events; the temporary stripes are the creature's emotional cycle; and the long-term patterns probably represent its general emotional state. But we have very little idea what any individual set of color patterns actually means, only some speculative guesses.
"If that thesis is correct, then the concentric waves of color spreading outward through this mass of worms represents a kind of collective emotional phenomenon that literally leaps from animal to animal. One gastropede experiences something and passes it directly to the next gastropede over. Possibly there's some kind of direct connection between the neural symbionts. When the creatures are pressed that close, it seems likely that a neural symbiont wouldn't be able to tell where, its neighbors were rooted.
"What I like about this thesis," I said, "is that it answers the question of Chtorran intelligence. There isn't any. There is no such thing as one Chtorr. If it exists, it exists only as a collective manifestation of individual behaviors-" Dr. Shreiber's hand went up. "Yes?"
She rose to her feet. "There's another interpretation possible," she said. There was an accusatory undertone in her voice.
I ignored the subtext and simply nodded politely to her. "Go ahead…"
"The gastropedes are evolved from insect-like creatures, correct?"
"That's one theory."
"Insects specialize. In a fire ant colony, for instance, you'll find workers, soldiers, and multiple queens. Maybe the gastropedes specialize too. We've seen some evidence of it. At the bottom of a nest, there's always a large central chamber where you'll find an immense-sometimes even bloated-animal. That's probably the queen. We know there are warrior worms. We've seen workers. Now we're even seeing miniature forms-maybe those are drones of some kind. I think the gastropedes have evolved themselves into specialized forms for specific tasks. Why not thinkers as well?"
I considered the thought. Maybe and maybe not. There wasn't a lot of evidence to either prove it or disprove it. "What's your validating evidence?" I asked.
She pointed at the repeating video loop on the screen behind me. "Look at the pictures." I looked. "Let's assume you're right, that the patterns of colors represent what the animals are feeling-or maybe even thinking. At the very center of the arena, there's a confused whorl of colors. It's chaotic. It's blurred. Maybe those are the thinkers." She stepped up to one of the side screens and pointed with her hand. "See, if there was a central thinker, then we'd see all the colors emanating from a single point, but they're not. I think that all the colors in that area are indistinct, because the thoughts or feelings that they represent are just churning around and around, with no single pattern taking precedence. Out here-what you call the event horizon-I think that's the border between thinkers and workers. That's where the feelings of the thinkers get crystallized and start spreading their ripples outward."
I scratched my chin while I thought about it. Something about her theory didn't feel right. It presupposed that the thinkers would go directly to the center of the arena. I looked at the wall-sized screens surrounding us. In that surging crowd of crimson horrors, there was no way that thinkers and workers could possibly have sorted themselves out as neatly as she postulated. Hm. What if workers and thinkers were the same class? No… that didn't make sense either.
"You don't buy it," she said coldly. "I can see it on your face."
I shrugged. "It's a good theory. I like the part about the gastropedes evolving specialized forms for specific tasks. I'm just not sure about the thinkers." I glanced over at Lizard. She was watching me with genuine interest, but she had no intention of interrupting the discussion. "I'll show you," I said.
I typed some commands into the keyboard, shifting the color enhancement. The same video loops; only now overlaid on the outward cycling colors was a new pattern. Drop a stone in the water. The ripples spread evenly outward until they hit an edge, then they bounce back toward the center again. The surging worms rippled like a pond. Orange waves flowed outward, bright and distinct. Deep purple waves ricocheted inward. Pink waves spread out from the center: Fainter red waves bounced back from the edges. Over and over and over again. It was hypnotic and it was beautiful. It was like staring into an organic kaleidoscope, it was like the greatest football stand card display ever assembled. All the separate patterns of shifting colors and shapes, all flowing inward and outward, all changing, all the time. It was a complex and fascinating mandala of time-phased responses, a biometric fantasy, a dream of hellish wonder.