Hive

He was not a bundle of nervous energy and inexhaustible drive and ambition. He was no longer a perpetual motion machine that seemed to move in all directions simultaneously, constantly thinking and emoting and reacting. No, now he was a worn, weathered man in his mid-sixties whose blood ran cold and who felt the weight and pull of each of those years dragging him down, compressing him, squashing him flat. His mind was like some incredibly rare and tragic orchid whose petals no longer sought tropical mists and the heat of the sun, but had folded up and withered, pulled into itself and sought the dark, dank depths of cellars and crawlspaces. Cobwebbed, moist, rotting places where the soul could go to mulch and fungus in secret. There were such places in Gundry, crevices and mildewed corners where he could lose himself.

Away from prying eyes and questioning tongues, a man could face the truth of who and what he was, the ultimate destiny of his race. For these were weighty, soul-scarring issues that would crush any man just as they were crushing Gundry.

Gundry was a Southerner.

He was from the Bible Belt and his old man had been something of a lay-preacher. When he wasn’t raising sugar beets, melons, and sweet corn, the elder Gundry did his share of preaching at county fairs and carnival booths. He had no earthly patience with such higher realms of thought as organic evolution and cosmic generation. He believed what the Bible taught and was happy within those narrow confines.

Gundry had always thought his father ignorant and parochial, a fly trapped in amber, a man in a constant state of denial as science and technology slowly ate away the foundations of conservative belief and tradition. The way Gundry saw it, science and enlightenment were the only true cure for dim centuries of religious bigotry and hypocrisy.

But now, all these many years later, Gundry finally understood his father.

Though he could not honestly believe in some invisible, mythical god, he could understand religion now. He could understand that it was a security blanket men wrapped around themselves. Maybe it was dark and close under that blanket and you couldn’t see more than a few inches in any direction, but it was safe. God created Heaven and Earth and there was a serenity to that, now wasn’t there? It was simple and reassuring. And if religion was indeed a sheltering blanket, then science was the cold hand which yanked it away, showing man his ultimate insignificance in the greater scheme of things, the truth about his origins and destiny. The very things man had tried for so many millennia to walk away from, to forget. A cage he had liberated himself from slowly and, even if a candle of truth still burned in the depths of his being, if he did not look at it, then it did not exist. But now man had been thrown back into that cage, had the door slammed shut in his face. And the truth, the real truth of who and what man was and where he’d come from, was staring him dead in the eye.

And, with that in mind, Gundry knew now that enlightenment was the lamp that would burn mens’ souls to cinders and the truth was the beast that would devour him and swallow him alive.

For if those things down in the lake had their way, men would never be men again, but just appendages of a cold and cosmic hive-intelligence as it had been intended from the very beginning.

The idea of that terrified Gundry.

It shook him to his roots and filled his soul with venom. All these years, all these thousands upon thousands of years, man had been running from his origins. And now the world was poised on an event that would throw him right back into those very arms. Culture, society, philosophy, religion, poetry, art, music . . . it would all be rendered meaningless beneath the burning, dominating eye of that dire alien intellect.

There was something very offensive and even obscene about that.

So very late in life, Gundry finally, ultimately embraced the insular teachings of organized religion and came to accept that, yes, there indeed was a serpent in Eden . . . and it had come from another star.

Gundry was sitting in the old core sampling room, his head in his hands, whimpering, mourning at the grave of humanity.

Jesus, oh Lord, if you exist, stop this, stop Them before it’s too late. Before everything we are is lost to Their memory, swallowed by it.

Nobody had been to the drilling tower in several days now.

Oh, they knew what had been found in the lake and mainly because Hayes had been blabbing about it, but they preferred to leave it alone. Even the scientists themselves had not asked to see the video feed. And wasn’t that interesting? Yes, but not surprising with what was going on. Mankind was going full circle and they all felt it and it scared the shit out of them.