Barry Malzberg - Phase IV

Doesn’t this count? Doesn’t it count in our behalf? Maybe we were the wrong inheritors of the planet and after a few million years the Creator has come around to restore the balance; even so we had our points. I find it necessary to believe this. Could the ants compose a fugue or write War and Peace? How would they make out in ballet? How would they choreograph or play the flute? Of course I am delirious, but these are legitimate questions. We cannot be shoveled off so cheaply.

But of course we can. Of course we can. That is exactly the point. There is no rational accommodation of interests; there is no agreement. We are an aberration to them, and there is no more possibility of dialogue than an exterminator would consider a dialogue with roaches before unleashing his spray can and paint. We do not even exist to them. And there is going to be no agreement of any sort. They may not even see us.

Sitting here over the last few hours—they have not overrun the station, they have all the time in the world, perhaps they are merely awaiting final instructions or then again they may relish this—I have made some calculations about their rate of expansion, using their intelligence, their powers of organization, their network of communications, and my general knowledge. Knowledge of their poisons, their ability to adapt genetically, and the control factors that underlie their activities; I believe that after this test run they will move rather quickly into other desert areas, taking over the countryside first and then laying siege to the towns and the cities.

I believe that they will learn as they advance, anticipating our moves and always staying a move ahead, and as best as I can calculate, we have—all of us, Siberians, Eskimos, housewives in Dayton, Ohio, all of us —perhaps two more months.

Or perhaps far less if this is merely a dry run for certain techniques that they will put into immediate production.

We have only one chance, which is no chance at all, and yet it would be to utterly give up not to take it… and that is the counterattack suggested by Hubbs and which he gave his life for… a direct assault on their queen. I know that they are going to do to me what has been done to him and that there cannot be more than ten minutes of life as I know it remaining to me… but I am writing these last lines with my boots on, my heavy gear, holding another grenade launcher and a rifle at the ready… and I am going to go out there and try it as well.

I wish that it weren’t me. I wish that none of this had ever happened. I wish that it were all a dream, just as our very presence on this planet has, to those cosmic forces, been a dream and that I could rectify it, just as they have rectified it, simply by waking up and setting the reverse gear in motion… but it is no dream. This is real. This is the world, what is left of it, and like Hubbs and Kendra I must die out on the desert in an attempt to hold it together. I could do no less for them. I could do no less for humanity.

Do I romanticize? Sentimentalize? What has humanity ever done for me that I should be so sacrificing for humanity? But that is the problem, the heart of the nightmare… we are humanity and ask ourselves such questions. Self-interest versus altruism; preservation versus sacrifice.

The ants do not even consider it.

I am going to go out there. I do not feel very much like dying, particularly since these last few days with Kendra have, however terrible, given me an understanding of what life might be like. But it must be done.

If I fail, and I do not see how I can succeed because there may be two queens out there under those mounds or thousands, I do not know what form the future may take… but I am sure that they have their plans.

I would really rather not think about their plans.

I am going to go out there now.

God help us all. But who is God?

Lesko stumbled through the desert in an abscess of red and green, shrugging off the bites, which he could barely feel through the heavy metal gear. That had been Hubbs’s mistake; he had been rubberized but Lesko was metallized. Metallic Lesko, clever, clever Lesko, he staggered through the desert for a hundred feet or a mile, it was all the same to him, and he came to the mounds and looked down upon them. And there in the slight crevice between them was a clear, black, hole pooled with liquid in which could only be the queen herself, and he raised the grenade—

—And the ground shifted beneath his feet.

—And Lesko fell into the opening.

It seemed to him incredible at first that he could fall because he was so much larger than this opening, surely it could not be more than a foot, a foot and a half across, but he entered very easily and then, slickly, he was sliding down. Green and gold on the sides, the fall effortless for all of its velocity, and Lesko did not feel fear so much as curiosity; where would he land? Into what rabbit hole had the ants plunged him? He landed on his feet with a small jolt before he could consider this further and found himself in an enclosure permeated by a hum; he turned then and saw the dead eyes of the queen. There was the queen. He had been falling toward her all the time. He lifted the grenade launcher and walked toward her.

The queen hummed.

He lifted the launcher and the humming decreased in pitch. He could bring it down and smash the queen. She was a dead, brown husk with a thousand holes for eyes. He could break her like ash. He did not. He stood there.

Kendra came from somewhere.

She was dressed in flowing white, and her eyes were filled with love. She raised her hands to him, then her arms, and Lesko dropped the grenade launcher. It fell without sound. She came against him and he felt her body, inhaled the gentle scent that came from her. He stroked her hair. She huddled against him. Under the queen’s eyes, he kissed her forehead.

Kendra looked at him. She could see his suffering, he knew. She could tell what it had cost him to come. To merge with her. To be both more and less than himself. She pointed toward the queen.

“Do they want us?” he said.

She held her hand level and in her eyes he saw words. Then it was as if he could see into her mind, and there was no need at all for words. There was communication on a different level. He was no longer Lesko; she was no longer Kendra. She was Kendralesko; he was Leskokendra; they were one creature.

He moved toward the queen.

The queen received him, and he saw—

The landscape: black trees with blue leaves against a yellow sky, the sky like a dome, plunging, billowing, becoming a red ocean, the foam yellow heaving on the violet rocks, the green sun splashing red spray in front of it; the birds, the dark birds, the purple birds, folding into the grayness and the rose, the bloody, full lips of the rose as it leaned forward to kiss the air as it came from a flower and then the landscape shifting, stripped, a bare tree like a face in the glow of something that was and was not the sun, rays protruding from that illumination like hands, the hands lifting—

—A huge granite rock suspending it over the floor that became an ocean, and the ocean flowing, flowing into a naked women, a kendraleskoleskokendra lying on a beach and from between her legs the sun bursting forth and the colony folded and flowing over them as—

They mounted a hill in another place open against the sky. Lesko saw the sun and it was in her hair, shining like a firmament through Kendra’s hair. The sun was inside her; she was the sun, his queen then, and he closed against her. Her voice was in his mind without words.

“We have a choice,” she was saying. “They’ve given us a choice.”