Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

Hubbs at least could now be leaned upon. He was still in pain, but had somehow internalized it, and although his cheeks were bright with fever, his eyes were calm. He helped me feed a simple binary figure into the computer. Mathematics, the universal language. We would alternate 1 and 2 in rhythmic and irrhythmic powers, working on the channel of sound that seemed to be their belt; then we would clear channels for receptivity.

Hubbs was pretty sure that if communication was established and the ants willing to meet us, they would hurl back our own signal at us 1 and 2

exactly as we had sent it. “I’m going to believe that the sons of bitches are reasonable and that they want to work with us,” Hubbs said, working over the charts. “We may have a malevolent intelligence here, but I am going to assume for our immediate purposes that they have merely been trying to call our attention to them in order to establish communication, and when we do this, our purposes will have met theirs and the siege will stop. I will assume this because if it is not so, our problems are probably insuperable.

Do you see what I mean, James?” I saw what he meant. I had made the same set of assumptions myself. We sent them our message in binary code.

And we waited.

The queens accepted the signal. Glucose balances shifted; something happened in an almost electrical fashion, and a series of impulses were transferred from the queens to the soldiers. The soldiers had been burying their dead, thousands of them, in little depressions carved by the grenade near the towers. Now they stopped.

They picked up the signal from the queens.

And then, responsive, their cilia quivering, they advanced.

Lesko: NO CORRELATION

NO CORRELATION

NO CORRELATION

“What do they want?” he said. “What do they want?”

“They won’t tell us,” Hubbs said.

NO CORRELATION

“I know they’re receiving,” he said. “Activity is indicated. They’re lying to us! They know we’re communicating!”

NO CORRELATION

“Don’t take this personally, James,” Hubbs said. He was bent over the printout. Lesko could see the smooth slick spot at the back of his skull. “If they don’t want to respond, it must be for other reasons.”

NO CORRELATION

NO CORRELATION

“I’ll kill them,” Lesko said. He felt insanity working within his veins like blood, and it was a good feeling. Smash, injure, kill, he thought: it might be the only thing we know, but we know it well. “I think we should burn them,” he said. “Go after them with the blue.”

“It won’t work, James,” Hubbs said. He stood wearily, turned toward Lesko, his face as impenetrable as steel. Now he was the calmer one; the roles were shifting back and forth almost in a binary way themselves, Lesko thought. “We know that they are receiving, which is something.

They can be reached. So if we can reach them now with something that can hurt—”

“No,” Lesko said. “We tried that before.”

“We’ll have to try it again.”

Kendra came into the room. “If you want something to eat, you can have it,” she said. “You can—” and then, she looked over at the monitor.

The two men had ignored it, absorbed in the printout. Her eyes bulged.

She screamed.

Lesko turned, lunged toward her, and she fell into his grasp, her finger pointing at the monitor. “Look,” she said. “Just look—” and he looked then as Hubbs also turned to look, Kendra falling back in his arms. He felt her full weight and thought for a moment that she had fainted, but then her feet scrambled for balance on the floor, and she righted herself. Strong.

She was strong. There was a deer mouse on the monitor—

—A deer mouse lying on the desert, tongue hanging out of its mouth, twitching in final death agonies. From its ears, mouth, nose hung clusters of ants like little bouquets, and as Lesko watched, the mouse made one last frantic attempt to find purchase and then collapsed, writhed, died.

The monitor tracked in to show the green and gold clusters of death.

Kendra breathed against his neck. “It’s horrible,” she said. “They killed—”

She could not go on.

NO CORRELATION

NO CORRELATION

“They don’t want to listen to us,” Hubbs said flatly. “They don’t want any part of us at all. All that they want to do is to kill.”

“I can’t stand it,” Kendra said quietly. “I can’t—”

NO CORRELATION

NO CORRELATION

The deer mouse began to move.

It writhed again on the ground, but in a different fashion. The limbs did not seem coordinated; they worked against one another, off-balance, painfully. But even as they watched, the motions seemed to acquire smoothness and flow. To take on the appearance of efficiency. The green and gold of the body had now become a deep red as burst blood vessels carried their contents near the surface.

The mouse rolled and began to walk.

It walked across the desert, parading for the monitor in a way that no mouse had ever walked before, all limbs stiff, head forward, dead eyes glazed with the light of the sun. It headed toward one of the broken towers. It moved quite rapidly. The new mode of locomotion might be unmouselike, but you had to give the ants credit: they knew the locomotor facilities.

The mouse went rapidly, proudly, into the nearest of the towers and disappeared from the monitor. The monitor, disengaged, tracked back, and showed another deer mouse writhing on the sand.

“Mother of God,” Hubbs said. “Mother of God.” He sounded quite reverent.

Holding Kendra, Lesko walked her quietly from the laboratory and into the bedroom where he lay her on the cot.

When he returned to the laboratory, Hubbs had collapsed or, more likely, fallen asleep against one of the shelves, a strange, broken grin on his face.

Lesko turned off the monitor and went out of there.

Lesko’s Diary: When I awakened from a tortured nap, it could not have been more than an hour later, Hubbs himself was awake, suffering, and delirious. While I had been sleeping, Kendra had moved him from the laboratory to the cot we had given her and was attending him with a cold towel and a glass of water, while he thrashed and moaned on the sheets. I felt his forehead. It seemed to be a fever of a hundred and three, a hundred and four. There was just nothing to do.

“Take some water,” Kendra said to Hubbs and looked at me pleading, desperate. Hubbs pushed the water away. She put the cloth into the glass and gently wiped his forehead, and his eyes cleared a little. “Sick,” she said. “He’s awfully—”

“I know,” I said.

“We’ve got to get him out of here.”

“We’ve all got to get out of here,” I said. “I just don’t know how.” I was in a peculiar numb state where one can respond intelligently enough to all queries without being able to initiate anything. Now I looked at Kendra, unspeaking. “He is awfully sick,” I said, going back to that.

“Analysis,” Hubbs said in a thin voice, moving his head back and forth.

“What?” Kendra said, leaning over, mopping his brow again.

“It’s clear they have failed,” Hubbs said and stopped, took in a gasping breath, went on then. “They have failed to achieve—”

“Is there something you want?” she said. I touched her wrist gently, and she brought it back.

“Let him talk,” I said. I leaned over. “What have they failed to achieve?”

I said. “They have taken—”

“No,” he said, and the shaking and twitching of his head began again.