David Gerrold - Chtorr 4 - A Season For Slaughter

Color-- -1- -2- -3- -4- -5- -6- -7- -8- -9-

Text Size-- 10-- 11-- 12-- 13-- 14-- 15-- 16-- 17-- 18-- 19-- 20-- 21-- 22-- 23-- 24

The War Against the Chtorr Book 4

A Season for Slaughter

David Gerrold

For Ben and Barbara Bova

… with love.

THANK YOU:

Dennis Ahrens, Seth Breidbar, Jack Cohen, Richard Curtis, Diane Duane,

Raymond E. Feist, Richard Fontana, Bill Glass, Harvey and Johanna Glass, David

Hartwell, Robert and Ginny Heinlein, Karen Malcor, Lydia Marano, Susie Miller,

Tom Negrino, Jerry Pournelle, Alan Rodgers, Rick Sternbach, Amy Stout, Tom

Swale, Linda Wright, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Howard Zimmerman

SPECIAL THANKS TO:

Bill Aycock, Robert E. Bellus, William Benson, George S. Brickner, Dan

Corrigan, Randy Dannenfelser, Pamela and Randy Harbaugh, Mark E. Herlihy, Chris

Keavy, John Robison, Lee Ann Rucker, Harry Sameshima, Kurt C. Siegel, W.

Christopher Swett, The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), Kathryn Beth Willig,

and others.

For their generous donations to the AIDS Project of Los Angeles, characters in

this book have been named after these people or individuals of their choice. The

behavior and/or bad habits of the named characters are decisions made by the

author for the purposes of the story only, and should not be seen as a representation

of the actual person, nor interpreted to mean derogatory intent on the part of the

author.

Chtorr (ktôr), n. 1. The planet Chtorr, presumed to exist within 30 light-years of

Earth. 2. The star system in which the planet occurs, presently unidentified. 3. The

Chtorran ecology; the living system comprised of all the processes and particles of

the Chtorran ecology. 4. In formal usage, either one or many members of the ruling

species of the planet Chtorr. Obsolete. (See Chtor-ran) 5. The glottal chirruping cry

of a Chtorran gastropede.

Chtorran (ktôr in), adj.

1. Of or relating to either the planet or the star system, Chtorr. 2. Native to Chtorr.

n. 1. Any creature native to Chtorr. 2. In common usage, a member of the primary

species of Chtorr, the worm-like gastropede. (pl. Chtor-rans)

-The Random House Dictionary of the English Language Century 21 Edition,

expanded.

There are two facts you need to know about the Chtorran ecology:

1) It has grown beyond our ability to investigate and understand; it is therefore

also beyond our ability to contain or destroy.

2) It is unstable.

—The Red Book,

(Release 22.19A)

Chapter 1

The Stench

"Ninety percent of success is just growing up."

-SOLOMON SHORT

We smelled it long before we saw it.

The stench came rolling over the hills like a force of nature. I thought of great

billowing thunderclouds of microscopic particles. I thought of corrosive chemicals

attacking my bronchi, bizarre molecules bonding to enzyme sites in my bloodstream

and liver. I thought of tiny alien creatures setting up housekeeping in my lungs. I

thought of emigrating to the moon. Anything to be away from here.

The smell was almost a visible presence, and it was strong enough to knock down

a house. Even filtered through the hoods, it was intolerable. It smelled like everything

bad in the world, all in one place and distilled down to its most horrible essence. It

smelled like putrefaction in a perfume factory. It smelled like day-old vomit and

burning sulfur, swamp gas and rotten cheese. It smelled like worms and lawyers and

last year's politics.

"Hooa! Lordy! What is that?" hollered one of the Texas boys. "Did we hit a

skunk?"

"Smells more like lawyer."

"What's the difference?"

"Nobody wants to hit a skunk."

"Welcome to Mexico," said somebody in the back. "Land of a thousand exciting

adventures."

"Cap'n," asked one of the new kids. "You ever smelled anything like that before?"

Before I could speak, the same voice in the back replied nastily, "It's the barrio.

This is the largest one in the world. They all smell like that."

"Only until we flush the gringos out." I recognized Lopez's softly accented voice.

"It's the leftover mayonnaise and white bread you're smelling."

"Cool it," I said. "You've got more important things to worry about. A smell like

that is strong enough to attract every carrion eater from here to Waco. Pass the

word. Keep an eye out." My eyes were already starting to water, but I didn't dare lift

my contamination hood to wipe them.

We were in the leading rollagon. Behind us followed a convoy of four more. We

bounced across the denuded hills like a deranged herd of dinosaurs. The

deforestation here hadn't been recent, but it had been thorough. Nothing was going

to grow here again for a long, long time. Obviously, no Chtorran agency had been

responsible for this. What a stupid war this was turning out to be-we were supposed

to be defending the Terran ecology; instead we were burning it away, destroying it to

save it.

According to the original plan, Terran plants should have been reasserting

themselves by now. There should have been sprouts of green everywhere.

Instead-we had a barren moonscape; a rumpled ash-colored terrain of uncomfortable

hills and broken rock, all punctuated by blackened spikes, the remnants of a dead

forest. A faint pink haze lay across the land; it gathered itself in dark brown pools

and lurked in the deep gullies between the hills; and I wondered if this was the source

of the smell. The pervasive undercast hid the horizon behind a bleary gray veil;

distance just faded away into nothingness. Was this pale dry fog something Chtorran

or another one of the delights engineered in the Oakland labs? It couldn't be the

product of a living thing, could it? Nothing could live in this stench.

There was life here, of a sort; desperate, hungry, futile-and mostly Chtorran, of

course. There were black ropy vines stretched across the ground, pulling at it like

anchoring cables; and there were things growing on the vines, occasional bright

patches of pink or blue or white, not quite flowers, but not quite anything else either.

There were patches of dark ultraviolet fungus and occasional curtains of red gauze

hanging from dead tree limbs. Deep in the shadowed gullies we could see thick

rubbery scars of wormberry, and the occasional clump of leafy black basil. As we

rolled on, we started seeing purple coleus, midnight ivy, and the first bright patches

of scarlet kudzu.

The kudzu was turning out to be especially nasty. All it did was grow, but that

was enough. It looked like blood-colored ivy, and it grew even faster than its Terran

counterpart. It could blanket a house in weeks, a forest in months. You could cut it

back easily enough, but you could never quite eradicate it completely. It just kept

coming back. It had the tenacity of a bill collector-only quieter. In Georgia a small

army of civilians had burned back several hundred acres of it that was starting to get

too close to the edge of Atlanta and found the bones of cattle; dogs, cats, and more

than a few missing people. No one was quite sure of the killing mechanism yet—or

even if there was one. Maybe its danger was in its thickness; it was the perfect

ground cover for small Chtorran predators. Like all things Chtorran, the best advice

was still avoid it if you can.

Unless, of course, your job was to seek it out. Then you didn't have the luxury of

that option.

This particular expedition was here at the specific request of the provisional

governor of the Territory of North Mexico. We were one of three doing on-site

mapping of the northeastern wilderness, to determine the success of last year's

defoliation. I already knew the answer. I could have told them the answer before

we'd left, before we'd even planned this operation. But-there are people who don't

believe anything until they've sent somebody else to see-and even then, if it disagrees

with what they want to hear, they still won't believe it.

The Brazilian mission had been sent back for reconsideration or put on hold or

shifted to a back burner or ticketed for reevaluation or whatever you wanted to call it

for the ninth or eleventh or hundred and third time. None of it had anything to do

with the mission. All of it had everything to do with the political relationship of the

North American Authority and the remaining nations of South America, several of

which, including Brazil, had not reacted well to the Authority's recent annexation of

South Mexico after that country's army and government had both collapsed in

disarray. The relief operation was mounted from bases provided by the government

of North Mexico. Despite, or perhaps because of, that cooperation, serious charges

were being raised in many Latin capitals that the collapse of South Mexico had been

engineered north of the Rio Grande.

I had no personal knowledge of the incident. I'd been involved elsewhere at the

time, participating in an experiment in brainwashing, one of several then in practice.

But I wouldn't have been surprised to find an American presence in the matter.

South Mexico's not-so-secret-anymore cooperation with the Fourth World Majority

in the abortive Gulf Coast invasion had not exactly won them friends in the hallowed

halls of Congress. When it also turned out that they had allowed the invading forces

to establish clandestine staging areas in the eastern wilderness, sixteen bills to declare

war on South Mexico were introduced in the Senate. The President vowed to veto

every one. The war against the Chtorr, she said, was more important, and this

particular matter would be resolved in its own time and in its own way. She didn't

specify what she meant, but after that the discussions on Capitol Hill became much

more restrained.

Not too long after that, the United States and Canada created the North American

Operations Authority, and each nation ceded specific parts of its national

sovereignty to the new body; in particular the jurisdiction of all military and scientific

bodies immediately involved in combating the ecological infestation. Both Mexicos

had also been invited, but only the Republic of North Mexico had joined, and that

only in exchange for significant trade agreements.

The obvious advantage of the Authority was that it allowed the United States to

set the Moscow Treaties aside without specifically violating them. Giving control of

your military to another body, which you just happened to control, was about as

transparent as a lawyer's promise, but nevertheless legal. Not that anybody cared

anymore, but the whole of politics is to find a way to legalize your particular crime.

Politicians have different priorities from real people.

That the government of South Mexico had collapsed six months later was only a

coincidence: So I'm told. It takes longer than six months to deliberately topple a

government. If it can be toppled in six months, it was already on its way out anyway.

For the protection of the, people, the Authority annexed the territory and . : . here we

were, picking up the pieces of a project that somebody else had started.

And in the meantime, the Brazilians weren't speaking to us. They'd come around,

eventually, but who knew how long that would take?

Abruptly, the smell got worse. I wouldn't have believed it possible.

They say you get used to even the worst smells. Not true. What happens is that

your olfactory nerves shrivel into insensibility, refusing to come out again for two

years afterward, not even when tempted with the most alluring scents of all: steak,

buttered potatoes, chocolate ice cream, hot fudge, fresh strawberries, new car

smells, fresh money-nothing.

This smell, the new one, lay across the previous stench like chocolate icing on a

skunk. Neither smell was happy about it. The truly awful thing was that I recognized

the smell.

The screen in front of me showed our location on the contour-delineated terrain.

The depth was deliberately exaggerated to compensate for the limitations of human

senses. I touched a button and noted for the mission log that we had encountered

olfactory evidence of a fumble of gorps, also called gorths, gnorths, and glorbs,

depending on who you were talking to. The military designation was ghoul.

This was a very bad sign.

Gorps or ghouls were scavengers, garbage-eaters, carrionfeeders. Fully mature,

they stood three to four meters tall. A gorp was a sloth-shaped tower of hair. It had

a barrel chest, a flexible prognathous snout, numerous small nasty eyes, and an

attitude almost as bad as its smell. Its coat was a filth-ridden, flea-infested,

rust-colored, dirty mass of coarse stringy hair and age-hardened mats. Its arms were

disturbingly long, and the things it used for hands and feet were immense. Gorps

were Chtorran bag ladies.

They ranged in color from startling orange to glow-in-the-dark brown. Sometimes

they shambled along in a vaguely upright stance; most of the time they lumbered on

all fours. Because they moved in slow motion, like koala bears, some people made

the mistake of thinking they were gentle beings. It was not a mistake that anyone had

lived long enough to make twice. Gorps were about as gentle as rhinoceroses. Think

of a gorp as a giant, rabid, psychopathic, mutated, hydrocephalic orangutan with the

mother of all hangovers-and you were working in the right direction. But this was a

complimentary description; on a bad day, a gorp looked even worse.

It wasn't simply that a gorp could do you physical harm; it could, and it would, if

you annoyed it long enough; no, the real horror was that its bouquet alone could

raise blisters on a boulder. What a concentrated dose would do to human lungs was

presumed fatal.

A gorp knew only two words: "Gorp?" and "Gorth!" The former was a

questioning gulping sound, halfway between a yawn and a bark. The latter was a

low-pitched rumble, which was generally interpreted as a warning growl.

Gorps were the biggest slobs in the Chtorran ecology. They damaged everything

they came near. After a fumble of gorps wandered through a neighborhood, it

looked like the aftermath of a blood feud between tornadoes. It wasn't malicious;

they weren't angry creatures; it was simply the naked curiosity of a hungry scavenger

raised to a new low. Even those few things that gorps occasionally left undamaged

behind them carried their incredible reek for weeks afterward.

Gorps were always a bad sign. They weren't particularly wicked by themselves,

and they were easy enough to avoid; their far-reaching smell usually gave enough

advance warning that you could move to another state before they arrived in your

neighborhood. Even if you weren't that smart, their lack of speed made it easy for

you to keep out of their way; anyone who got caught by a gorp did it deliberately.

But the presence of gorps almost always meant that there was either a major

infestation of worms nearby-or a grove of shambler trees. Probably shamblers. Even

though Gorps preferred to live on the garbage of the worms, it was safer to trail the

shamblers and feed upon the leavings of their tenants. Their appetites were ghoulish;

hence the military designation.

My headset beeped abruptly-"McCarthy here," I answered.

"What is it, Captain?" The voice was Major Bellus. Major Robert E. Bellus,

officially just an observer. Unofficially, I didn't know; but I had my suspicions. I'd

met him only three days earlier. He was riding in the rear tank. The comfortable one.

"It's nothing, sir."

"But the smell-?"

"Gorps-or gorths. Or ghouls. But they could be miles from here. They might be

rutting. We know that there are certain times when their stench gets strong enough to

be detectable a hundred klicks away. The skyballs don't show anything within a

radius of five, but their visibility is down due to the haze."

"Go to the satellite view and scan-"

"I already have, sir," I said patiently. "There are no mandalas in this sector. No

clusters of huts, no single huts. No evidence of worms at,all. We're smelling either a

migratory fumble of gorps, which I doubt, or they're following a grove of shamblers,

which I consider much more likely. The skyballs are scanning for the herd now. Sir."

I added.

Bellus paused.

I knew what he was thinking. Three days ago he'd abruptly taken control of this

mission with the reassuring words, "I'm only here as an observer, you understand?"

I understood. He was taking control. My job was to make him look good. Now he

was considering whether or not to slap me down for being insubordinate or

compliment me on doing my job.

"Very well. Carry on," he said sourly.

Right.

Prior to our coming through with rollagons and tanks, we had sent thirty-six

spiders and over a hundred skyballs through this area. Neither worms nor humans

had been seen here as recently as three days ago. There were some broken roads to

be found, and the occasional abandoned ruin, but there was no evidence of any

postdefoliation survival.

The military spiders were now programmed to burn worms automatically, as well

as any humans in officially designated renegade-controlled areas, but they weren't yet

programmed to target shamblers. The software couldn't make all the necessary

discriminations yet, and Oakland was still playing it safe.

Unfortunately, the shamblers were turning out to be almost as dangerous as

worms and renegades. They were tall and ficuslike, with interwoven columnar trunks;

where the trunks split, the limbs stretched upward into tangles of thick ropy

branches and dark snakey looking vines; but the shamblers were always blanketed

with symbiotic partners, so no two individuals ever looked the same. Some were tall

and dark, burnished with large shiny leaves and gauzy lacelike nets; others were

slender and bony, but fluffed out with cottony pink tufts of nascent flowering; and

still others were horticultural ragamuffins, a patchwork of colors, dripping down off

the towering growth like a shower of banners and veils.

By themselves, the shamblers would have been obvious. But the landscape they

wandered through was no longer completely Terran; it was dotted here and there

with clusters of tenacious infestation; red kudzu and mottled creeper vines, cold blue

iceplant and cloying purple fungi, black vampire ivy and wandering wormberry, all of

them spreading as rapidly as a nasty rumor. The way the Chtorran infestation rolled

over everything-trees, buildings, signs, boulders, abandoned cars-everything looked

the same, differing only in the height and breadth of the lump it made in the

landscape. So how could you tell if any specific lump was a shambler-especially

when a shambler could look like anything?

The only sure way was to wait for it to move.

That was the other problem with shamblers. They didn't stay put.

If you spotted a shambler or a grove of shamblers, you had to be prepared to

take them down when you saw them. You couldn't note their location and come

back later. Three hours later, a shambler could be a half klick away-in any direction.

A day later, as much as two klicks. In rugged country like this, it made any kind of a

search difficult, if not impossible.

It didn't matter anyway. Even if we could cleanse an area, sweeping through it

totally and burning everything that moved or even looked like it was thinking of

moving, a week later there would be at least a dozen more shamblers moving

ponderously through the same sector.

Dr. Zymph had a theory that the shamblers were in the process of developing

migratory circuits and that if we could tag them, we'd see the whole pattern. General

Wainright, who was in charge of this district, didn't believe in allowing any Chtorran

creatures a chance to establish a biological foothold, and certainly not the chance to

develop a whole migratory circuit. Dr. Zymph and General Wainright had had some

glorious arguments. I'd witnessed two of them before I'd learned to stay close to an

exit.

The military was growing increasingly antagonistic to the science branch. And

vice versa. The military wanted to slash and burn. The science teams wanted to

study. Myself-I was getting very schizophrenic. I could see both sides of the

argument. I was a scientific advisor attached to the military, except when I was a

soldier sent out on a scientific mission.

I could also see something else that disturbed me.

Three years ago, everybody was terrified of the Chtonran infestation, everybody

was looking for ways to stop it; the essential priority was the development of

weapons that would destroy the worms. Every scientist I met was interested in

containment and control.

Now… the "domain of consciousness" had shifted. The worms had become

"incorporated into our perceptual environment"-we were accepting the fact that they

were here,, and with that acceptance, we were losing our commitment to resist, and

instead, talking about ways to survive the inevitable takeover. I didn't like the shift in

thinking that kind of talk represented. Next would be talk about ways for humans to

"cooperate with the Chtorran ecology."

I'd already seen once how that kind of "cooperation" worked. It wasn't something

I wanted to see again.

Absentmindedly, I checked my pulse. I was getting tense. I forced myself to sit

back in my seat and did a quick breathing exercise. One apple pie with ice cream.

Two banana splits with chocolate fudge. Three coconut cakes with pineapple

topping. Four date-nut shakes with walnut flakes. Five-what goes good with e?

Elephants. Five elephant burgers with rhinoceros relish… Six fragrant ferret farts.

Seven great galloping garbage dumps. Eight horrible heaps of-never mind.

We rode deeper into the smell. Air-conditioning didn't help; it just made the smell

colder. Oxygen hoods didn't help; they just enclosed you in a concentrated bag of it.

Air fresheners didn't work; they just laid a new scent on top of the old one; the

resulting mix was-incredible as it seemed-even worse than before. Someday,

somebody was going to win a Nobel prize for inventing an olfactory science that

could explain this mucus-blistering assault. That is, if anybody survived to hand out

the prizes.

The worst part was that you didn't get used to it.

Now we were starting to see big purple patches of wormplant spreading across

the crumpled slopes of the hills. They were fat with bright red wormberries,

clustered in thick juicy-looking globules. They were edible, just barely-tart and sweet

and sour all at the same time, kind of like cherries with sauerkraut; definitely an

acquired taste. Unfortunately, the berries also carried the eggs of the stingfly. When

they hatched in your belly-it had something to do with the exposure to stomach

acids-the result would be a very uncomfortable case of maggots on the stomach.

The stingfly larvae clutched the stomach lining with very strong pincers or

mandibles while they fed and grew. When they were large enough they'd let go, pass

through the lower intestinal tract, cocoon themselves upon being exposed to air, and

after a month or twelve, depending on the season, would hatch into a nasty little

mosquito-like parent, ready to lay more eggs in the next patch of ripe worrnberries.

Meanwhile, the wounds the maggots left in your stomach would very likely fester

into ulcers. You could die from these ulcers; many already had. It was a slower and

more painful death than being eaten by a full-size Chtorran, but every bit as effective.

If I had my druthers, I'd druther be eaten by only one worm at a time, and not from

the inside.

Meanwhile, there were agri-techs who were working on ways to make

wormberries safe for human consumption; they were a great source of vitamin C and

easier to cultivate than citrus trees. There were whole new industries being born in

the wake of the Chtorran infestation. The Japanese had even found a way to make

sushi out of the Chton-an gastropede-I'd heard it was as tasty as octopus, only a lot

more chewy. They had also found that Chtorran oil was a superior substitute for

whale oil; unfortunately there weren't enough Japanese to drive the Chtorrans into

extinction as fast as they had done the cetaceans.

In the meantime, I wouldn't want to go walking across these hills in anything less

than a tank. There would be millipedes in the underbrush; this time of year, they'd be

feeding on the wormberries. They were attracted by the smell. I'd discovered that the

hard way, five years ago at Camp Alpha Bravo in the Rocky Mountains. Apparently,

the millipedes didn't mind a chronic case of maggots on the stomach-or maybe,

considering the power of a millipede's stomach acids, the maggots didn't stand a

chance. Who knew? There were too many questions that needed to be answered and

not enough scientists.

Wherever there was a break in the sprawling wormplant cover, I could see the

overall barrenness of the ground; but already, here and there, the first spidery

patches of pink and blue iceplants were beginning to establish themselves. They

were rootless wonders, feeding on anything they could, garbage, other plants, even

industrial waste; whatever they happened to sprawl across. They lay flat against the

ground, creeping in around the edges of thicker growths, scabrous and ugly webs of

mottled ground.

Occasionally, Chtorran plants formed partnerships with the iceplant, but most

ignored it as if it weren't there. Terran plants succumbed. Where the iceplant found a

foothold, it grew and flourished, eventually becoming a fleshy mass of blue fingery

tentacles. Where it couldn't flourish, it died-sort of.

Iceplants didn't just die-they shriveled and dried and flaked and blew away.

Wherever a flake landed and found a profitable place to feed, a new iceplant began;

it would survive until it too died and flaked away. You could burn the stuff away, but

it always came back sooner or later.

The really bad news was that it was also a powerful hallucinogenic. Oh, hell, the

entire Chtorran ecology was hallucinogenic. It was the stuff of which nightmares are

made.

We rolled up and down, around and over. Mostly we tried to stay to the crests of

the ridges; occasionally we dipped between them. Here the kudzu filled the darker

hollows between the hills-filled and overflowed like a tide of blood. In some places,

the scarlet ivy was already creeping toward the tops. Soon it would be a terrible

glossy carpet, sprawling across everything, a bright stifling blanket, a plague of color

David Gerrold - Chtorr 4 - A Season For Slaughter

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: