“So, what kept you?”
She rolled her head on her neck as though it hurt. “We just…I guess we lay down for a while. Must have fallen asleep. We’re really tired.” She yawned, her eyes rolling away from me in the torchlight, whites showing all around like a frightened animal.
“Kath?” I said urgently. “You all right.”
“Oh, sure, Captain. Sure. Just tired. See you in the morning.”
I, we, the captain, glanced once more at the thing in our hands. A mere thread, like a bit of string, with half a dozen beads on it. Now who in heaven’s name…Well, it didn’t matter. Let it go. We could talk about it in the morning…
We felt only a few moments of what followed before someone, blessedly, shut off the viewer. There were exclamations, cries of distress, a general murmur that slowly quieted.
Sister Lorpa was still on her feet. “The beads were actually a ghyrm, perhaps more than one. We have established that the ghyrm take over the minds of the persons who carry it or them. We infer the ghyrm are directed by a reasoning force that may be a part of the ghyrm race or something quite outside it. This is pure speculation. We don’t know.”
Someone asked how the Cranesroost infestation had been discovered.
“In settlement Six, the last person infested woke to find everyone dead and the thing around her throat. Though close to death, she was able to com the neighboring village, to describe the thing, to say she could not get it off her and that it was killing her. The person she reached followed standard emergency procedure: That is, he made no effort at rescue and informed Dominion immediately. Dominion personnel in noncontact suits found everyone in the three villages dead. They scouted the areas around the surviving villages and found nothing like the necklace of small beads mentioned in the com. From the captains of the destroyed villages, they retrieved the sensory recorders, one of which you have just experienced.”
Someone said indignantly, “Cranesroost was off the wormtrails! Its location was known only to the settlers and to Dominion! How did the ghyrm find it?”
This led to charges and countercharges, back and forth, much heat, little light, and the Chairman put an end to the discussion.
Sister Lorpa concluded, “We have had some breakthroughs. We have succeeded in capturing ghyrm, caging them so they cannot escape, and habituating some of our members to their presence. These captive ghyrm are infallible locators of others of their kind. Certain members of the Siblinghood have been trained to hunt ghyrm, using a captive ghyrm as ‘finders.’ They are very successful on a planetary surface, though all efforts to use them in space have failed.”
That item disposed of, the Chairman introduced an elderly woman as “a member of the Siblinghood, Lady Badness.” I saw one of my fellow students silently convulsed at this introduction, though from the look of the lady’s face, amusement was not appropriate.
She introduced herself as the chairman of a biracial committee of Gentherans and Humans that had spent some forty-odd Earth-years trying to devise a nontraumatic method of depopulating Earth in order to prevent the final collapse of the biome on the one hand and a visit by ISTO slaughterers on the other. She spoke of the colonies as “emergency, last-ditch attempts to guarantee human survival and the survival of thousands of species of Earth organisms in case the slaughterers could not be forestalled.”
She said she had several points to make. I set myself to remember them.
Firstly, she said Earth’s governments had been warned that depopulation was an absolute necessity for Earth’s survival. Secondly, she said the government had justified its inaction by quoting the standard statistical projections indicating that population growth was slowing, that as soon as all parts of the world had equal economic opportunities, population growth would stop, and total population might even drop. Thirdly, she admitted the standard projections were irrefutable but totally irrelevant, as human population had exceeded the number Earth could support over a century ago. Even while ice caps melted, while prehistoric aquifers dried up and the lands over those aquifers began to subside, governments had refused to acknowledge that humans were responsible. Only when aliens arrived in starships to tell them the end had come did governments try to deal with the situation, and by then, it was too late.
She said, “Outshipment, as you know, has slightly slowed but failed to stop the process.”
Several people around the table uttered angry variations on “We know all that,” rather loudly and, I thought, rudely.
Lady Badness merely stared at them until they subsided. “Of course you do. So do I, but we’re putting it into the record one more time, just in case at some future time someone questions what we’ve said and thought and decided. This brings us to the fourth and final point. We must choose between two repellent futures:
“A, we do nothing, and the ISTO slaughterers will kill over ninety percent of all of the people now alive on Earth. I have seen records of that process. The best one can say for it is that it doesn’t take long. It is both quicker and bloodier than the demise of Cranesroost. It is not a process I wish on any population, however, no matter how pigheaded that population may be.
“B, we impose the solution Dominion and the Siblinghood have been working on since Dominion was formed: the sterilization of ninety-nine point something-or-other percent of Earth’s population.”
I happened to be looking across the table at Chili. I saw her shoulders heave as she took a deep breath. I glanced at my fellow students. They looked outraged. I had been numb since the Cranesroost experience, and I stayed that way.
Lady Badness went on:
“Gentheran Research Laboratories has completed testing of
