Fly with the birds, munch with the cows, live in the mouse world, swim with the whales-discover all the different ways of seeing and smelling and hearing.

But the experience is incomplete.

The best you could get from the Virtual Reality Center would be the simulated realities of birds and cows and mice. The truth might he vastly different. Until we could put an implant into a mouse or a cow or a bird, we'd never really know for sure.

Nevertheless, the point was still made; the experience of other creatures is different because their worldview is differentbecause the way that every creature moves through the world, interacting with it, smelling it, tasting it, surviving it, and finally even reproducing in it, is a unique and special experience.

As flawed as the simulations were-flawed, vicarious, filtered through human equivalents, and finally experienced in human terms-as imperfect as it was, it still gave us an assertion, a place to start considering the problem. Sometimes it was about as effective as trying to butter a piece of bread underwater, but even so, it was still u way to get a sense of the gulf between one species and another.

If only we knew enough about the Chtorrans to begin putting together a simulated reality of the Chtorran experience. If onlyWe could model the tunnels and create a simulated environment. We could duplicate the omnipresent sounds of the nests. We could match the vision of the eyes and the frequency response of the hearing receptors so that the cybernaut participants could move through the environment with the same senses as a Chtorran-but n was the other relationships that mattered. The ones we still didn't know about.

"Sing," I said to myself, abruptly. "We have to learn how to sing like the Chtorr." But… I already knew that. That was the problem.

I remembered-

The first time I'd gone into a Chtorran nest and found four worms in communion… I'd dropped my weapons. I'd put my hands upon their warm flanks. They had been purring. Humming. Vibrating with a note that went right through me. Their fur had tingled. It felt softer than mink. I had leaned into the sound, pressing myself against it, trying to-

I'd felt it again, in the herd, the Great San Francisco Herd. The herd sang. The human note-it wasn't the same song, but it felt like the same yearning to me. The need to be a part of some larger process. It was the submergence of self into a larger personality.

If the humming of the worms was an unconscious sound, then the worms were no more than bees or ants or termites. And their nests were as unconsciously organized as the honeycombs in beehives or the intricate tunnelwork of termite mounds, a product not of conscious processes, but just the way that a zillion little copies of the same program all interact with each other-the same way that an insect isn't smart enough to walk, but the subprocesses of its thousand neurons are smart enough to cooperate and create the larger process of locomotion.

But… if the worms were anything more than that as individuals-and as yet, there was still no real proof of that-then there had to be, on some level, some kind of conscious purpose or function or reason for the incessant humming of the nest, the collective vibration that resonated throughout every Chtorran settlement. And, if I was right, if there were, then it seemed to me that from the Chtorran point of view, it had to be very much the same phenomenon as experienced in the herds. Only more so. Everything with the worms was more so.

With the herd the humming produced a submergence of self. With the worms, I wondered if it didn't produce a transcendence of self. Did a worm even have a self? Had Orrie truly been conscious, let alone sentient? I still wasn't sure. Was a dog conscious? Do dogs think? What about chimps? And while we're being so damned anthropomorphically arrogant, what makes you so sure that human beings are even conscious? Just because we think that we think, we think that means we really think. What if our thinking is really just the illusion of thinking? What if we're programmed to think that we think? And if so, who wrote the program?

According to the Mode Training, human beings start programming themselves in the womb. And badly. Because we're none of us trained to program a human being. We have to figure it out as we go. And most of the time, we make assumptions based on incomplete evidence and use that as justification for making iuaccurate connections.

Maybe the worms were smarter because they didn't need as much programming. Maybe whatever programming an individual had wasn't the product of his own observations as much as it was Ihc collective vote of his entire settlement.

There. That was the thought.

The song was the way that the worms tuned themselves. To themselves. To each other. To the nest.

Yes.

Bees. Bees sing. The whale hive hums. The sound of all those vibrating wings fills the nest. A bee resonates with that sound every moment of its life within the nest. It doesn't exist. The hive prevails over all. There's no such thing as one bee.

And there's no such thing as one Chtorr. Yes. My God!

There are no Chtorran individuals.

I straightened up and looked around. The day had turned yellow, and the first shades of dusk were tinting the afternoon. We were halfway between nowhere and nowhere. I stared out the window. The wide Amazon panorama rolled in green waves out to the distant blue horizon. I was completely alone with this idea. I was staggered by the size of it. I couldn't even see what had triggered the realization just the pure Brownian movement of ideas bumping randomly into each other inside an otherwise empty head.

We'd missed it. We'd known this all along, but we hadn't let ourselves experience the reality of it. We'd been seeing them as individual creatures-things that formed families and eventually tribes and maybe nations. But we'd overlooked the obvious truth of it. They had no individual identities. They were a hive/nest/ colony thing.

"Stop thinking of worms as the enemy," I said. "The worm doesn't exist. Think of the mandala as the creature that we're up against-and see where that train of thought leads."

The words formed themselves on the screen in front of me. They were complete. I didn't know what else to add. At least, not right now. But I was certain that if I let the idea percolate awhile, a lot more would occur to me. I had the wonderful feeling that I had opened a very large door today.