ROBISON: So you're saying it's not true? That you and your cronies aren't acting as a hidden cabinet to the President, secretly directing the course of the nation, as well as the North American Operations Authority?
FOREMAN: (amused, annoyed) To the best of my knowledge, the President still runs the country.
ROBISON: The word in the Capitol is that you control her mind.
FOREMAN: The President controls her own mind, I'm sure. She has a number of advisers. To the best of my knowledge, she listens carefully to all of them, then she makes her own decisions.
KOBISON: But she comes to you for something extra, doesn't she? Something she calls censensus building, something you call contextual transformations-isn't that correct?
FOREMAN: I'm flattered, John. It sounds like you've actually done your research, for a change.
ROBISON: I read your book, Domains and Discoveries, when I was in college. Don't flatter yourself, it was required. You took 875 pages to say that the attitude of an organization determines the results it'll produce. Create the appropriate context, and the intended results are inevitable.
FOREMAN: You should have read past chapter one, John. What I actually said was that the creation of context is like an act of magic. It looks like you're working a spell; it doesn't look like it's going to produce any immediate results; and when it's complete, the only thing that has shifted is the perception of the participants. But that's the whole purpose of contextual creation, to shift the perception of the participants from can't to can.
ROBISON: And isn't that what you're attempting to do to the United States government? Work some of your mumbo jumbo voodoo on it?
FOREMAN: Actually, no. We're not attempting to do anything to the United States government. Or any other institutional authority. A government is only a tool. What I'm interested in is the transformation of the people who use the tool.
ROBISON: So you are involved in the mind control of our elected officials?
FOREMAN: I want to shift the context in which the entire human race is currently operating, from one of futility and ineffectiveness to one of responsibility and empowerment. I fail to see anything subversive in wanting success for the entire human community.
ROBISON: Ah, now I understand. You're not trying to take over the United States. You're trying to take over the world. You know, a lot of other people have tried the same thing and failed. Hitler, for one. What makes you so different-?
FOREMAN: Don't be an ass. If I was trying to take over the world, do you honestly think I'd sit here on this show with you and let you play stupid word games with me? This isn't a political or a religious movement, John. In fact, it isn't even a movement. It's a contextual shift. We're letting people know that the world isn't flat. It's round. That's a contextual shift. Shift the philosophical foundation of a group-any size group-and you transform the results produced…
Shamblers are usually not dangerous as individuals. Only immature shamblers travel alone, and only until they are able to link up with a herd.
Whenever shamblers gather in herds, extreme caution is advised, as herds are usually host to a wide variety of tenant-swarms, most of whom are capable of voracious feeding behavior. This partnership benefits both the tree and the tenant. The herd provides a safe domain for the tenants, and the tenants provide waste and refuse for the shamblers to feed upon.
The only way to stop a shambler is to burn it or topple it. Few shamblers are able to right themselves. However, toppled shamblers will usually break apart and spawn lots of little shamblers; the tenant-swarms will also split up to inhabit the new herd.
If adequate protection against the tenantswarms is present, toppled shamblers should be torched immediately. Otherwise, shamblers should be avoided.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 10
Cyberspace
"The worst kind of party to attend is the one where you are the only person in the room who understands all the in-jokes you've been telling all night."
-SOLOMON SHORT
On and on the prowler coeurled.
Up the slope, around the sides, we circled restlessly through the red viney underbrush, sliding in and out of the shadows and the stippled ocher daylight, often pausing, listening, and sniffing the air. We approached the grove of shamblers circuitously and cautiously.
The prowler wasn't just curious. It was obsessive. Chemical sensors tasted the flavors in the dry Mexican wind sixty times a second. Multiple video arrays scanned and memorized the colors and shapes of every object in the prowler's environment, storing them in a four-dimensional, time-sensitive matrix. Aural sensors measured the sounds of whispering insects and creaking trees. Summary correlations .were made first in the prowler's LI engine, then squirted back to the van for additional processing, and ultimate uploading to the red network where eventually the industrial LIs would chew over the material all over againsometimes even referring back to the raw-data records for confirmation.
The display in the VR helmet was much more detailed than the ones usually found in home entertainment systems. Looking down, I could see a bank of controls and readouts that corresponded to the actual keyboards in front of me. Looking ahead, the view through the prowler's eyes could be projected as a photo graphic representation, as a symbolized terrain of simplified objects, as a military-coded tactical display, or as any interrelated combination of views.
Sonically, I was in a large open space. Sound stimuli came from all around me. Those that seemed to occur inside my head were cues about the operation of the prowler. The voices of my crew seemed to come from inside a small quiet room just behind me, such a distinctly different sonic environment that there could be no mistaking the point of origin.
I let the prowler move through its entire repertoire of search routines without interference. It circled in toward the center of the shambler grove, then started circling outward again. Its LI programming was current; it knew what to look for, it would spot and recognize any variance from the main sequence of known Chtorran behaviors, and it would correlate detectable differences against previously charted patterns. Where correlations occurred, warnings and appropriate predictions would be offered.
"Tenants," said Siegel. There was no emotion in his voice.
"A swarm?" I widened the prowler's scans.
"No," Siegel reported. "Just a few scouts."
"I got 'em. You're right." The screens showed bright speckles of light flickering around the machine, alighting and bouncing off. Candlebugs.
"Why aren't they swarming?" asked Willig.
"They're not drawing blood. Blood triggers the feeding pheromones. It's not cost-effective for a swarm of tenants to attack everything that moves, so the scouts go down and see if it's worth it for the rest to follow."
"You didn't tell that to Bellus."
"He didn't ask," I grunted.
Ahead, the shambler grove was a gloomy arena described by more than a dozen towering nightmares; they surrounded and enclosed the space like a huddling together of leaf-encrusted giants. From the prowler's perspective, the shamblers were the great leafy columns of a demonic cathedral. Almost-solid beams of afternoon sunlight slanted downward through the leaves like yellow prisms.
We moved slowly into the center of the grove. The dusty air seemed to echo with a malevolent shimmer; it glowed with dappled patterns of darkness and light, and everything here took on a mordant magical quality. Maybe it was cyberspace, maybe it was my subjective fantasy, but here the Chtorran colors were even more startling. Although the primary hue of the alien vegetation was an iridescent scarlet, it was offset by patches of neon purple, dazzling orange, and velvet black. And all around, everything seemed outlined with haloes of nascent pink, probably another effect of the prowler's sensory spectrum.
Overhead, the trees were shrouded with decaying fronds. I was grateful that I couldn't smell the reek of them, some of these lank and cloying fragrances were maddeningly hallucinogenic. The vines and veils hung in thick gauzy curtains. We could hear insect-like noises and bird-like chirps; but the sounds weren't friendly. They were small and vicious.