"I don't care how many megabytes and megahertz Ms. Grodin is packing upstairs; I've got something that she doesn't have; something that's a thousand times more valuable. I have field experience. I know the context of the infestation because I've lived it. I wish you luck in Brazil, sweetheart. You're going to need it. You're going to need a lot more than luck, because I won't be there to protect you. I love you, but I don't think any of you are coming back. I think General Wainright's little stunt is a death sentence."
Lizard had remained impassive throughout my entire monologue. Now, as my last angry words sank in, she looked stricken. "Jim, you can't mean that."
"I can and I do. I think General Wainright is willing to have the whole mission go down in flames rather than let you and me go unpunished. Well, that's okay. I think I'm going to stay home, so if I'm right and you don't come back; I can kill him."
She exhaled sharply, a sound of disgust. "I can see there's no talking to you when you're like this."
"That's right. It's the pain talking. The real person checked out. You'll come back when I can be molded and manipulated again. Do me a favor. Don't. Either accept me as a mean sonofabitch once in a while, or don't accept me at all. I won't have it halfway."
"Fair enough," she said with finality. She turned and walked back into the planning theater.
Shit.
It was going to take more than chocolate and roses to patch this up. And I couldn't afford either chocolate or roses anymore. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn.
I looked up. Dwan Grodin was standing in the doorway. Her eyes were full of tears. She'd heard the whole thing. "I-I thought you would b-be a n-nice m-man. G-general Tirelli's-said you w-were n-nice. B-but you're n-not. Y-you're a-a-a d-dirty,'s-stinky, d-d-dummy mat. Y-you c-can g-g-go f-f-fuck y-yourselfff." She turned away from me and stumped off after Lizard.
Oh great. What else could go wrong?
I turned around and there was Dannenfelser smirking at me. He began to applaud. Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap. The sound was slow and mocking.
The hell with everything. I let my distaste show. I shook my head scornfully and snorted. "And here's old Randy Dannenfelser again, with another case of the clap." I started to turn away in disgust.
"Don't come on so high and mighty with me, Miss Thing," he said archly. He stepped in close. His perfume was overpowering. "You're just another self-important sister."
He was referring to news so old, it was already history. And it was none of his business anyway. The hell with being enlightened. The hell with being responsible. The hell with being polite. I grabbed him by the lapels and yanked him up off his feet. It felt good to do something violent. We were uncomfortably close, nose to nose. Close enough to kiss. "Let me explain something to you," I said. I spit the words into his face. "You and I are not sisters. We will never be sisters."
"Thank God for that," Dannenfelser said. "Mother will be so relieved." He tried to remove my fists from his lapels; I tightened my grip; he gave up and lowered his hands again. He waited for me to get tired of this. His eyes were wide, but he didn't flinch; he didn't look away. After a moment of mutual hate-stares, I let him go, dropping him rudely to the floor.
Dannenfelser straightened his jacket, then gave me his iciest look. "The only difference between us," he sniffed, "is that I'm not ashamed of who I am. You can pretend all you want, Captain Closet, but poking the Lizard won't make you straight."
"The difference between you and me, Randy," I said icily, "is beyond your comprehension. We are light-years apart." And then I got nasty. "For one thing, my sex life isn't the definition of who I am."
He sniffed and looked unconvinced, but I wasn't through talking. "I have a relationship. You, however, are nothing more than a tacky tea-room queen, trolling the urinals and dropping to your knees at the sound of a zipper. And you have the colossal gall to think that your furtive sexual prowling gives us some kind of kinship! Not even in your wildest dreams! The difference between that kind of sex and a real relationship is so profound that you'd have to have a brain transplant before I could explain it to you. You and I have nothing in common and don't you ever forget that!"
Dannenfelser was momentarily unnerved by the raw blast of my anger, but he recovered quickly. He pursed his lips and replied in quick clipped words, "I'm so glad to see that the Mode Training works. It's made you so much more compassionate and enlightened. I mean, you used to be a real asshole." He straightened his jacket again; his hands were like naked pink spiders. He turned crisply and strode off down the corridor.
Was there anyone else I could offend? No.
I'd gotten my wish. I was alone.
The shambler tree is the answer to the question, can a plant walk?
The answer is yes, can, but only if it becomes an animal.
The amount of energy required for even simple animation demands a whole other scale of metabolic process. Plants, as we know them, are incapable of the kind of rapid energy production and utilization necessary for muscular movement. The chemical processes of plants are simply too slow.
For a plant to achieve motility, it must not only have the necessary musculature; it must also have the metabolism to support that musculature. It must be capable of taking in, storing, and managing the release of much greater energies than can be generated by simple photosynthesis. Accordingly, a plant capable of motion will have to have some mechanism for feeding on other plants, or even perhaps on any animals that it can capture. The more motion that a plantlike organism manifests, the more, in fact, it will need the equivalent of an animal-like metabolism and the processes necessary to maintain it.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 7
The Ecology of Thought
"You're only young once, but you can be immature forever."
-SOLOMON SHORT
I didn't go home. I was too angry. And when I was angry, I was useless.
I remembered something Foreman had said to me once, in the Mode Training. "If you insist on being angry, that's okay-that's a way to be too. But at least if you're going to be angry, use your anger constructively. Get mad where it counts!"
Right.
I wasn't mad at Lizard. I was mad at being denied the chance to do something powerful, something that would hurt the worms. Okay. So I was clear on that much.
Once I figured that out, there was still something I could do. I went down to the mission coordinator's and had her set up another reconnaissance operation in the same area.
Something had killed that worm, and I wanted to know what and how and why. If something was going around killing worms, I wanted to make friends with it. I wanted to learn its moves. And if that wasn't possible, I still wanted its autograph.
I didn't want a whole convoy, I wanted to get in and get out. Two rollagons would suffice, a squad of six in each. If either vehicle broke down, the other would still have the capacity to carry the whole team out.
As soon as the orders rolled out of the printer, I headed for the barracks, looking for the blue team. As I expected, they were doing the smartest thing a soldier can do in wartime; they were sleeping. Even so, I hadn't gotten two steps into the room before Lopez was bellowing: "Ten-hut!"
They rolled out of their bunks like precision machines. "Marano, Lopez, Reilly, Siegel, Willig, Locke, Valada, Ditlow, Nawrocki, Bendat, Braverman-where's Walton?"
"On the phone again, sir."
"Never mind. I need twelve volunteers. It shouldn't be dangerous, but that's not a promise. I want to go back in and do the recon we should have been doing in the first place. And this time, with no goddamn baby-sitting. It's pros only. I want to find out what killed that worm."