"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."