"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.

At last, I said, "If there were a thinker-class at the center of the crowd that was truly the source of each of those specific waves of color, then all the other animals-the worker-class-should only be echoing their thoughts, and the same colors should bounce back to the center unchanged. But look at this now-" Another kind of color enhancement. "This is very subtle, but some of the colors are changing even as they move across the mass of bodies. That suggests to me that"-the thought was chilling-"maybe it's the whole body of gastropedes… on some primary level, they're all thinkers."

Shreiber didn't dismiss the thought outright. But I could see that she preferred the elegance of her own theory. "Maybe the colors shift because the workers are limited in the way they echo the original thought. Maybe it's like a game of Russian telephone."

"I'm sure that transmission error is a large part of it," I agreed. "But… it doesn't explain everything. It certainly doesn't explain this." I punched up the next set of images. "No, wait a minute-let me show you something else first. Here-this is what the nest looked like when we started broadcasting the song of the nest back to them."

There were murmurs of appreciation as the new images came up on the wall-sized screens. Suddenly, the complex patterns of color simply faded away. Disappeared. Suddenly, the whole crowd was throbbing in sync, all showing the same colors, all at the exact same moment. They were a gigantic drumhead, pulsing all in unison. Singing all in unison. Violet impacts. Orange flashes. Scarlet furies. All the worms. Two hundred and fifty thousand of them, chirruping and drumming and focusing in absolute synchronization. Like robots. Like clones. Like perfect little monsters. All repeating the same precise movements flawlessly across the entire arena. They even blinked in unison. It was just as horrific in replay.

"They tuned themselves to us, " I said. "Once we started broadcasting, they stopped listening to themselves. They echoed our song as if it were their own. They echoed our colors-here's the synced image of what the airship was displaying, see how it matches perfectly what was happening in the sea of worms below?

"Whatever thought processes, or emotions, or whatever feelings the color waves represented, whatever it is the worms were actually doing, they stopped doing their own processes and started doing only what we told them to do. I believe-and this is something that we'll have to test somehow-that the presence of the airship simply overloaded their sensory circuits. We blasted them with a louder, brighter, more convincing identity. They couldn't feel their own thought processes any more clearly than you or I could while listening to the '1812 Overture' with synchronized earthquakes."

There was a shocked silence in the room. The images of all those synchronized worms pulsed disturbingly on the screens. Here was undeniable evidence of the devastating effect we had created in the miandala. Even Lizard was visibly startled. We had known that the worms had reacted to us-we hadn't known they had reated this strongly.

I looked to Dr. Shreiber. "Comment?"

She sat down slowly, shaking her head. "No, I don't think so."

"All right," I said. "Here's the rest of it. Watch. This is what happened when we tried to introduce a song recorded over the Rocky Mountain mandala. That nest was much smaller than this one at the time this recording was made, and the recording was taken off a much smaller gathering, perhaps only twenty or fifty individuals. We didn't use the actual recording, of course; we used it only as the starting point for a much more complex synthesis which was what we played back to the nest." I punched up the images and we watched in silence.

A great arena, nearly a kilometer across. A quarter of a million monsters are crowded into that arena. Each and every one of those monsters is in perfect tune with each and every other one of those monsters. They are mirrors of each other. They move and turn and twist and sing in identically repeated patterns. The effect is dizzying. They all turn red together. They all turn pink. They all turn orange. They all turn black. They sway in unison, they pray in unison. All of them, moving and singing in absolute and perfect monoclonal synchronicity, all echoing the exact same sound at once. "Chhhhtttttrrrrrrrrrrr!"

Now… Something happens. The song changes.

Pockets of discordant color appear. Confusion. Suddenly, the worms aren't synchronized anymore.

Here. On the edges-black. In the center-orange. Here, now, a sudden reversal: black turns orange, orange turns black. Flashes of confusion appear. Fringes of unsynchronized color begin to waver on the edges of the arena. But the center of the mass holds for a moment; it pulses strongly and the weight of its opinion flows visibly outward-but the edges of the crowd are too confused. They're hearing two different songs. One has the inertia of the crowd; it throbs with its own momentum. But the other song, the brighter one, comes blasting undeniably from the sky.

The center can hold for only so long. The crowded mass surrounding it has a vastly different song now. The two waves of song and color meet and crash against each other, sparking horrendously discordant sounds and colors throughout the entire mass. The center shrinks before the onslaught of the brighter song.

Then it recoils and rebounds and tries to expand again. The surrounding song grows stronger

Forget the songs now. Forget the colors. Everything turns black. The crowd of monsters fragments into a chaotic mass. Suddenly, everything is confusion.

Where the two songs conflict the brightest, the worms attack each other. The first assault is echoed. Simultaneity still rages, even in the middle of the horror. And now, all the worms are attacking each other. Even those who are surrounded by others who share the same song and set of colors suddenly scream and roar; they rear back, leap up, fling themselves high, and come down slashing. All the mouths, the knives, the teeth, the mandibles, the slicing claws-all the screams, the fury, the blood, the eyes, the terror, the panic, the fear, the cries-all of it played out again, this time larger than life, on the huge, glowing, wall-sized screens of the conference room of the Hieronymus Bosch.

The massacre was over quickly. It only seemed like it took forever.