Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

“Why don’t they kill us?” Lesko said. All the emotions of the day had gone from him; now like Hubbs he felt that he was looking down a long, flat tunnel of possibility, gray on either side. Cool breezes in the shaftway.

“They roast us by day, dare us to come out at night… why play games with us? What do they want? What do they want?”

Hubbs ran Kendra’s towel across his face. He seemed to have lost twenty pounds since his delirium, but his face was lucid and clear. “I’ve been thinking about caste,” he said. “Specialization among special insects.”

“Enough,” Lesko said. He stood, looked through the window. Now and then a spurt of flame came off the desert, showing a suggestion of moving forms.

Otherwise, a stillness. He had a feeling of having arrived at some end.

“Take it easy and try to go to sleep. Maybe the helicopter will be here in the morning.”

“Never,” Hubbs said. “They hate us back there. As far as they’re concerned, we’re merely boondoggling a special grant for some kind of esoteric research, and God forgive me, James, I encouraged that feeling. I wanted it that way; I felt that the more contempt they felt, the less interference we would find… and you see how successful that plan has been. No, we’ve got to deal with this here. On our own. We will win or we will lose… but fate is being decided here.”

“Don’t be that dramatic,” Lesko said. “It’s only our deaths that are at issue here.”

“Do you believe that, James?” Hubbs said. He looked up at Lesko. “Do you really believe that at all?”

Lesko shook his head and looked away from the window. “No,” he said.

“I do not. But it felt better.”

“I understand. But look,” Hubbs said quietly. “In every ant colony, there are clear segments, divisions, a hierarchy if you will. There are workers, winged males who are also soldiers… and there is the queen.”

“Presumably.”

“Ants are organized around the queen,” Hubbs said quietly. “She is immobile, powerless, except for the terrific force that she exerts upon these workers. She controls them and that is her power. They keep her alive, maintain her, and she is their heart and soul.”

“All right.”

“The heart and soul of their lives,” Hubbs said. “And whatever we are dealing with, these are still ants just as you and I would always be men.

Somewhere,” he said flatly, “there must be a queen.”

Lesko stood quietly, saying nothing. Just barely conscious of the fact that he had been waiting for the sound; a door creaked and Kendra came in, holding a fresh glass of water. She sat by Hubbs and helped him drink in small, greedy gulps, looking at him with compassion. Lesko reached out and took her hand. She left it in his palm, unresisting.

“If she died,” Hubbs said, “discipline and organization would crumple.

Chaos would result. They would no longer be able to function, and we would prevail after all.”

Kendra fed him more water. Lesko felt her hand, the firm surfaces leaving an impression upon his palm. He decided that on balance he liked Hubbs after all; the man was reacting with rare courage, he had more spiritual reserves than anyone would have calculated… but it was academic. All of this was. “The war’s over,” he said.

“Is it?”

“It has to be. They have the power,” Lesko said. “The only hope left is if our message somehow registered on them.” He paused. “And if they decide in their infinite mercy that we’re worth keeping alive.”

“You’re projecting a human emotion upon the irrelevant and the inhumane,” Hubbs said calmly. He pushed Kendra’s hand away without repudiation, simply as if he were doing it for emphasis. “I think that I could locate this queen and kill her.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Kendra said suddenly. “You’re very sick.”

“I’m not so sick that I can’t move. If we can find her, get a location from the transmitter, then I can track her. I’m not asking you to do this.” He coughed spasmodically; Kendra gave him more water. “I’m going to die, anyway,” Hubbs said. “I’m sure that the infection I’ve received is fatal; it’s just a matter of going in and out of delirium now, of various spells of weakness. The next time I may not recover. I’m willing to take this on myself. I’m not asking anyone else to do it.”

“We can’t locate the queen,” Lesko said.

“I think we can,” said Hubbs. He stood, weaving, then walked toward the door. “I’m going to go to the laboratory,” he said. “Is anyone going to come with me?”

“No,” Kendra said. “It’s not worth it. You can live. You can go on. You don’t have to do this—”

“Live?” Hubbs said at the door. “Go on? How long do you think we have, unless we do something desperate?” He stood still, Lesko and Kendra looking at him silently. “It’s not only us,” he said quietly. “Don’t you see that now? The stakes have gone far, far beyond Paradise City and what is going on within this enclosure. They want the world. The only way is to kill their queen.” He walked away, leaving Lesko and Kendra standing there.

“He’s quite right, you know,” Lesko said. “We’re doomed.”

“We may be doomed,” she said. “In fact, I know we’re doomed, but he can’t go out there; he can’t attack them, he-”

“Yes, he can,” Lesko said quietly. “And he’s going to. I’ve got to help him.”

“I think you’re crazy,” Kendra said. She said it quietly, there was less accusation than simply knowledge in her voice. “I think that all of you scientists are crazy.”

“That may well be true,” said Lesko. “But it would have to be this way.

Products of individual evolution. Everybody’s crazy, you know.”

He walked from the room.

After a time she followed him.

Up the corridor swung the invasion force guided by signals from its queen, through the darker pits and lighter pits of the enclosure, through the dusky caves where small objects hung from the ceiling like rope, through the slick, smooth walls themselves, and into the river, up the river for a while, and then into that large, damp enclosure where it nestled in comfortably, looking through the tunnels of light before it. Within its antennae, it felt the sounds of contentment from the queen, and waves of longing and pleasure came back from it in response as it hooked its cilia into the overhang and waited there, poised, ready to die for its queen, ready to live for its queen….

Something joggled it momentarily, but it hung on and then the joggling stopped.

“What’s going on, Kendra?” a voice said.

“I had an itch,” another voice said. “It felt like something was inside me.

But now it’s stopped.”

The queen purred.

“They’re sending us a message,” Hubbs said.

Lesko walked over there. How many times had he walked through this laboratory to Hubbs’s side to see some horror? But this in its way was the worst of all. The printout was coming from the computer smoothly, evenly: over the printout a stylus was working, drawing a symbol on the empty paper, filling it with one repeated figure drawn over and over again. The stylus seemed to be gripped by some invisible but ritualistic hand, the figuring was neat, the movements precise and contained. It went on. A circle, then a shift of the stylus, and a dot. Circle and a dot. Circle and a dot. Lesko looked at it.

“They’ve found our channel,” Hubbs said. “Fair enough. We found theirs, so they found ours. She’s speaking to us.”

“Who?”

“Who?” Hubbs said and held his enlarged arm, which now could not move without support. “The queen,” he said.