My throat hurt. It was hard to speak. But I nodded. Yes. I have to continue. I have to finish this. I said it with a nod because I couldn't get all the words out.
"Okay," she whispered, and went back to her seat. Sometimes I wondered about other people. They made decisions about vital things-it never looked like it hurt. Uncle Ira, for instance. How did he handle his pain? If he didn't feel pain, then he wasn't human and he didn't deserve to be in a position of such responsibility. And if he did feel pain, then how in God's name did he keep it from showing in everything he did?
Then again, on the other hand, I had to remind myself… everybody's crazy. We've all been crazy since the infestation began with the first plague so many years ago. Crazy and getting crazier every single day.
"These pictures…" I began. "As horrifying as they are-" I stopped and tried again. I took a breath. "Let these pictures serve as the last necessary demonstration of the only way that worms and humans can coexist. Let every human being on this planet who thinks that peaceful accommodation is possible look at these pictures tonight. And let them shudder as we shudder now. Search your consciences tonight, long and hard, and ask, 'Is this the future I want to give my children?'
"As far as I'm concerned, this video ends that discussion once and for all."
If we accept the premise that every particle of the infestation is here to serve a larger purpose in the Chtorran ecology, then what is the purpose of the disease commonly known as "the slimy-sweats"?
The agent of infection is a viral body found in certain Chtorran edible plants. The agent causes minor changes in the body's lymphatic system, causing a pronounced change in body oils and odor.
The infected individual exudes an almost slimy sweat that gives the skin a slick, slippery, almost greasy feeling. Extra body fat burns off; most of the individual's chest, arm, and leg hair falls away, and in some cases, even most of the adult's pubic hair. The person's body odor takes on a sweet, almost fruity quality, and the general effect of the infection is to make the individual feel much more sensitive or "sensual." Additionally, the oily secretion also serves to minimize stingfly attacks on the infected individual.
As benign as these effects may seem, perhaps even desirable under certain circumstances, the infection is also accompanied by a chronic low-grade fever and a debilitating vagueness in one's mental processes. The ability to timebind, to connect one moment to the next, is significantly impaired, as are both short- and long-term memories. Mild hallucinations may also be experienced. Fatigue and general lassitude are common.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 57
The Green Worm
"The problem with the gene pool is that there's no lifeguard."
-SOLOMON SHORT
Horror upon horror.
There was one more set of pictures we still hadn't shown.
I looked to Lizard for support, and she came back up to the podium to stand beside me. "This next piece of footage-" she said, "-is very sensitive. We're not ready to put this out on the network. Not just yet. Not until we've had more chance to study it. For those of you participating on-line, this part of the session will be coded and scrambled. You'll need a Q-card or above to access. I apologize in advance for the inconvenience this will cause many of you, but as most of you already know, the possibility that a situation might develop that would require a security clamp was always part of the planning of this mission."
She took her ID card and inserted it into the podium terminal. She tapped in a code word and activated her security program. "We are now Q-coded," she said. "Please remember that. Now let me talk about the reason why.
"Some of you have already seen the material that I'm talking about. Others of you may have heard the rumors. Dr. Zymph has seen these pictures. So have the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We're all agreed that the potential for culture shock, possibly panic and hysteria, if this material were made public without adequate preparation, is significant. After you see these pictures, you'll understand why. Of all the threats that the Chtorran invasion has so far offered us, absolutely none of them presents the danger to humanity that these images demonstrate." She nodded to me grimly and went back to her seat.
I exhaled sharply. I didn't relish what I was about to do. I stared down at the podium terminal for a long moment, pretending to study its glowing display. Reluctantly, I cleared all the screens in the room, leaving them a dim translucent gray. I looked out over the audience. Some of the faces were solemn and anxious. Most of the rest were honestly curious; despite all that they had seen so far, they still didn't understand.
"This video is… sketchy," I began. "It's been assembled out of various bits and pieces. We dropped over a thousand probes on the Coari mandala, only a third of what we intended to. I'm sorry we weren't able to plant the rest; there's probably a lot we missed; but I think we've uncovered enough of the iceberg here to start getting an idea of its overall shape and size.
"As a matter of record, our probes were able to photograph more than a hundred thousand hours of raw video, detailing much of the moment-to-moment life within the Coari nest during the time period of our approach and overflight, so we have a near-holographic record of the events of the last three days. That's the source for almost all of these images that you're about to see.
"Please recognize that we have so much footage that most of it still hasn't been reviewed, at least not by human eyes. The LI's are doing the preliminary scanning, and I must say they're doing a very methodical job of it—" Appreciative chuckles. "-But it's likely that there are a lot of things that they're not going to be able to analyze or identify, simply because they don't have enough information yet or patterning to know what they're seeing. So what we're going to show you is still very incomplete. These are just the things that the LI's have been able to flag as obviously anomalous. We're certain that there's still a lot more to be discovered."
I looked down to my notes. "Okay, this first shot-this was the first one that really caught our interest." I clicked the first screen to life, let it cycle through three video loops. "This is from the Japura mandala. This came out of one of our preliminary flyovers. We dropped a hundred probes, just to get an idea of how our probes would be accepted in the, nest. A few of them were destroyed. Most of them were ignored. We got a lot of interesting shots, but nothing we didn't expect-until this showed up. Yes, that is a gastropede you're looking at. No, I have no idea why it's green or how it got that way. Is it a rare recessive trait? Is it an adaptation? Is it a mutation? Is it a genetic defect?" I shrugged. "We don't know. You might want to notice that the date line on this footage shows it was made on Saint Patrick's Day. Dr. Mark Herlihy, operating out of the New York Institute, says that this is obviously an Irish gastropede. And he's named it BORSTAL SWEENEY. At first, we thought this was an early April Fool's prank, but we double-checked the raw footage. There really is a green worm. We have three separate shots of it in March. It hasn't shown up in any of the videos broadcast since then. That's not conclusive. We don't have full coverage of the nest. We are hoping, though, once we get to Japura, that we'll be able to pick up BORSTAL SWEENEY again and put a transmitter into it.
"By itself, a green worm is an interesting anomaly. Now I'm going to start showing you some other anomalies. At first, you're not going to see that there's any relationship, and you're probably going to wonder, what's the point of all this? Bear with me. It's worth the effort. But it won't make sense unless you follow all the intermediate steps along the way.
"All right, here-" I punched up the next cycle. "These shots were all made in Coari. These are Coari bunnydogs. They're short, they're squat, they're rubbery and cute. Okay-and these are Coari bunnymen. As you can see, the two most obvious differences between bunnydogs and bunnymen are fur and personality.