David Gerrold - A Season for Slaughter

For Ben and Barbara Bova

… with love.

Dennis Ahrens, Seth Breidbar, Jack Cohen, Richard Curtis, Diane Duane, Raymond E. Feist, Richard Fontana, Bill Glass, Harvey and Johanna Glass, David Hartwell, Robert and Ginny Heinlein, Karen Malcor, Lydia Marano, Susie Miller, Tom Negrino, Jerry Pournelle, Alan Rodgers, Rick Sternbach, Amy Stout, Tom Swale, Linda Wright, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Howard Zimmerman

Bill Aycock, Robert E. Bellus, William Benson, George S. Brickner, Dan Corrigan, Randy Dannenfelser, Pamela and Randy Harbaugh, Mark E. Herlihy, Chris Keavy, John Robison, Lee Ann Rucker, Harry Sameshima, Kurt C. Siegel, W. Christopher Swett, The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), Kathryn Beth Willig, and others.

For their generous donations to the AIDS Project of Los Angeles, characters in this book have been named after these people or individuals of their choice. The behavior and/or bad habits of the named characters are decisions made by the author for the purposes of the story only, and should not be seen as a representation of the actual person, nor interpreted to mean derogatory intent on the part of the author.

Chtorr (ktôr), n. 1. The planet Chtorr, presumed to exist within 30 light-years of Earth. 2. The star system in which the planet occurs, presently unidentified. 3. The Chtorran ecology; the living system comprised of all the processes and particles of the Chtorran ecology. 4. In formal usage, either one or many members of the ruling species of the planet Chtorr. Obsolete. (See Chtor-ran) 5. The glottal chirruping cry of a Chtorran gastropede.

Chtorran (ktôr in), adj.

1. Of or relating to either the planet or the star system, Chtorr. 2. Native to Chtorr. n. 1. Any creature native to Chtorr. 2. In common usage, a member of the primary species of Chtorr, the worm-like gastropede. (pl. Chtor-rans)

-The Random House Dictionary of the English Language Century 21 Edition, expanded.

There are two facts you need to know about the Chtorran ecology:

1) It has grown beyond our ability to investigate and understand; it is therefore also beyond our ability to contain or destroy.

2) It is unstable.

—The Red Book,

(Release 22.19A)

We smelled it long before we saw it.

The stench came rolling over the hills like a force of nature. I thought of great billowing thunderclouds of microscopic particles. I thought of corrosive chemicals attacking my bronchi, bizarre molecules bonding to enzyme sites in my bloodstream and liver. I thought of tiny alien creatures setting up housekeeping in my lungs. I thought of emigrating to the moon. Anything to be away from here.

The smell was almost a visible presence, and it was strong enough to knock down a house. Even filtered through the hoods, it was intolerable. It smelled like everything bad in the world, all in one place and distilled down to its most horrible essence. It smelled like putrefaction in a perfume factory. It smelled like day-old vomit and burning sulfur, swamp gas and rotten cheese. It smelled like worms and lawyers and last year's politics.

"Hooa! Lordy! What is that?" hollered one of the Texas boys. "Did we hit a skunk?"

"Smells more like lawyer."

"What's the difference?"

"Nobody wants to hit a skunk."

"Welcome to Mexico," said somebody in the back. "Land of a thousand exciting adventures."

"Cap'n," asked one of the new kids. "You ever smelled anything like that before?"

Before I could speak, the same voice in the back replied nastily, "It's the barrio. This is the largest one in the world. They all smell like that."

"Only until we flush the gringos out." I recognized Lopez's softly accented voice. "It's the leftover mayonnaise and white bread you're smelling."

"Cool it," I said. "You've got more important things to worry about. A smell like that is strong enough to attract every carrion eater from here to Waco. Pass the word. Keep an eye out." My eyes were already starting to water, but I didn't dare lift my contamination hood to wipe them.

We were in the leading rollagon. Behind us followed a convoy of four more. We bounced across the denuded hills like a deranged herd of dinosaurs. The deforestation here hadn't been recent, but it had been thorough. Nothing was going to grow here again for a long, long time. Obviously, no Chtorran agency had been responsible for this. What a stupid war this was turning out to be-we were supposed to be defending the Terran ecology; instead we were burning it away, destroying it to save it.

According to the original plan, Terran plants should have been reasserting themselves by now. There should have been sprouts of green everywhere. Instead-we had a barren moonscape; a rumpled ash-colored terrain of uncomfortable hills and broken rock, all punctuated by blackened spikes, the remnants of a dead forest. A faint pink haze lay across the land; it gathered itself in dark brown pools and lurked in the deep gullies between the hills; and I wondered if this was the source of the smell. The pervasive undercast hid the horizon behind a bleary gray veil; distance just faded away into nothingness. Was this pale dry fog something Chtorran or another one of the delights engineered in the Oakland labs? It couldn't be the product of a living thing, could it? Nothing could live in this stench.

There was life here, of a sort; desperate, hungry, futile-and mostly Chtorran, of course. There were black ropy vines stretched across the ground, pulling at it like anchoring cables; and there were things growing on the vines, occasional bright patches of pink or blue or white, not quite flowers, but not quite anything else either. There were patches of dark ultraviolet fungus and occasional curtains of red gauze hanging from dead tree limbs. Deep in the shadowed gullies we could see thick rubbery scars of wormberry, and the occasional clump of leafy black basil. As we rolled on, we started seeing purple coleus, midnight ivy, and the first bright patches of scarlet kudzu.

The kudzu was turning out to be especially nasty. All it did was grow, but that was enough. It looked like blood-colored ivy, and it grew even faster than its Terran counterpart. It could blanket a house in weeks, a forest in months. You could cut it back easily enough, but you could never quite eradicate it completely. It just kept coming back. It had the tenacity of a bill collector-only quieter. In Georgia a small army of civilians had burned back several hundred acres of it that was starting to get too close to the edge of Atlanta and found the bones of cattle; dogs, cats, and more than a few missing people. No one was quite sure of the killing mechanism yet—or even if there was one. Maybe its danger was in its thickness; it was the perfect ground cover for small Chtorran predators. Like all things Chtorran, the best advice was still avoid it if you can.

Unless, of course, your job was to seek it out. Then you didn't have the luxury of that option.

This particular expedition was here at the specific request of the provisional governor of the Territory of North Mexico. We were one of three doing on-site mapping of the northeastern wilderness, to determine the success of last year's defoliation. I already knew the answer. I could have told them the answer before we'd left, before we'd even planned this operation. But-there are people who don't believe anything until they've sent somebody else to see-and even then, if it disagrees with what they want to hear, they still won't believe it.