Frank Herbert
The Green Brain
1/1/1966
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Science Fiction
Ace Books
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The Green Brain

Frank Herbert

Copyright © 1966

THE MILLION-IN-ONE MAN

The extermination engineers had erected
barriers between the Red and the Green zones. In the Green, the men
had done their work well – no useless insects survived. But
they still had to clear the way in the Red zone, to destroy insect
life there – a lower form of life which was presenting a
threat to mankind.

The Indian waited at the barrier to be
let into the Green zone; he simulated the servility which would
identify him as a primitive from the deep Brazilian interior
– from the Red zone.

At the barrier he was almost overcome
with the repellants sprayed at him. But the brilliant facets of his
eyes, the tiny scales of his skin were not detected. The weave of
furry separate cells did not become unraveled.

The million-in-one man penetrated the
uninfested Green.

FRANK HERBERT, whose work has been compared to such widely
varied writers as Aldous Huxley and Edgar Rice Burroughs, has been
a newspaperman on the West Coast for many years. Both a writer and
a professional photographer, he is also a student of subjects
ranging from oriental religions to jungle botany and undersea
geology. His rich background of experience includes work as a TV
cameraman, radio news commentator, oyster diver, jungle survival
instructor, lay analyst, and teacher of creative writing.

THE

GREEN BRAIN

by

FRANK HERBERT

ace books

A Division of Charter Communications Inc.

1120 Avenue of the Americas

New York, N.Y. 10036

THE GREEN BRAIN

Copyright ©, 1966, by Frank Herbert

Part of this novel has appeared in Amazing Stories as a
novelette entitled Greenslaves and is copyright, ©,
1965, by Ziff-Davis Publications, Inc.

All Rights Reserved

AN ACE BOOK

Printed in U.S.A.

Table Of Contents

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter I

HE LOOKED pretty much like the bastard
offspring of a Guarani Indio and some backwoods farmer’s
daughter, some sertanista who’d tried to forget her
enslavement to the encomendero system by “eating the
iron” – which is what they call lovemaking through the
grill of a consel gate.

The type-look was almost perfect except
when he forgot himself while passing through one of the deeper
jungle glades.

His skin tended to shade down to green
then, fading him into the background of leaves and vines, giving a
ghostly disembodiment to the mud-gray shirt and ragged trousers,
the inevitable frayed straw hat and rawhide sandals soled with
pieces cut from worn tires.

Such lapses grew less and less frequent
the farther he emerged from the Parana headwaters, the
sertao hinterland of Goyaz where men with his bang-cut black
hair and glittering dark eyes were common.

By the time he reached
bandeirantes country, he had achieved almost perfect control
over the chameleon effect.

Now, he was out of the wilder jungle
growth and into the brown dirt tracks that separated the parceled
farms of the resettlement plan. In his own way, he knew he was
approaching one of the bandeirante checkpoints, and with an almost
human gesture he fingered the cedula de graicias al sacar,
the certificate of white blood, tucked safely beneath his shirt.
Now and again, when humans were not near, he practiced aloud the
name that had been chosen for him – “Antonio Raposo
Tavares.”

The sound emerged a bit strident, harsh
on the edges, but he knew it would pass. It already had. Goyaz
Indios were notorious for the strange inflections of their speech.
The farm folk who’d given him a roof and food the previous
night had said as much.

When the questions had become pressing,
he’d squatted on their doorstep and played his flute, the
qena of the Andes Indian, which he carried in a leather
purse hung from his shoulder. The gesture of the flute was a symbol
of the region. When a Guarani put flute to nose and began playing,
that said words were ended.

The farm folk had shrugged and
retired.

His trudging progress, the difficult
and carefully mastered articulation of legs, had brought him now
into an area of many humans. He could see red-brown rooftops ahead
and the white crystal shimmering of a bandeirante tower with its
aircars alighting and departing. The scene held an odd
hive-look.

Momentarily, he found himself overcome
by the touch of instincts that he knew he must master. These
instincts could make him fail the ordeal to come. He stepped off
the dirt track, out of the path of passing humans, and went through
the regimen that united his mental identity. The resultant thought
penetrated to the smallest and most remote units of his person:
We are greenslaves subservient to the greater whole.

He resumed his way toward the
bandeirante checkpoint. The unifying thought lent him an air of
servility that was like a shield against the stares of humans
trudging past all around. His kind knew many human mannerisms. They
had learned early that servility was a form of concealment.

Presently, the dirt track gave way to a
two-lane paved market road with footpaths in the ditches on both
sides. This, in turn, curved alongside a four-deck commercial
transport highway where even the footpaths were paved. Now there
were ground-cars and aircars in greater numbers, and the flow of
foot traffic increased.

Thus far he’d attracted no
dangerous attention. The occasional snickering side-glance from
natives of the area could be safely ignored. He watched for probing
stares. These could hold peril, but he detected none.

Servility shielded him.

The sun stood well along toward
mid-morning and the day’s heat had begun to press down on the
earth, raising a moist hothouse stink from the dirt beside the
pathway, mingling it with the perspiration odors of humanity around
him. There was a sourness to the smell that made every part of him
long for the sweetly familiar odors of the hinterland. And the
lowland smells carried another harmonic that filled him with an
inaudible humming of unease. Here were greater and greater
concentrations of insect poisons.

Humans were all around him now, close
and pressing, moving slower and slower as they approached the
checkpoint bottleneck.

The forward motion stopped.

Progress resolved itself into shuffle
and stop, shuffle and stop…

Here was the critical test and no
avoiding it. He waited with something akin to an Indian’s
stoic patience. His breathing had grown deeper to compensate for
the heat. He adjusted it to match that of the humans around him,
suffering the temperature rise for the sake of blending into his
surroundings. Andes Indians didn’t breathe deeply here in the
lowlands.

Shuffle and stop.

Shuffle and stop.

Now he could see the checkpoint.

Fastidious bandeirantes in sealed white
cloaks with plastic helmets, gloves and boots stood in a double row
within a shaded brick corridor leading into the town. He could see
sunlight hot on the street beyond the corridor, people hurrying
away there after passing this gauntlet.

The sight of that free area beyond the
corridor sent an ache of longing through all the parts of him. The
suppression warning flashed out instantly on the heels of that
instinctive reaching-emotion.

No distraction could be permitted here.
Every element of him had to be alert to withstand the pain.

Shuffle and… he was into the
hands of the first bandeirante, a hulking blond fellow with pink
skin and blue eyes.

“Step along now! Lively
now!” the fellow said.

A gloved hand propelled him toward two
bandeirantes standing on the right side of the line.

“Name?” That was a voice
behind him.

“Antonio Raposo Tavares,”
he rasped.

“District?”

“Goyaz.”

“Give that one an extra
treatment,” the blond giant called. “He’s from
the upcountry for certain.”

The two waiting bandeirantes had him
now, one jamming a breather mask over his face, the other dropping
a plastic bag over him. A tube trailed from the bag and out toward
the sound of machinery somewhere in the street beyond the
corridor.

“Double shot!” one of the
bandeirantes called.

Fuming blue gas puffed out the bag
around him, and he inhaled a sharp, gasping breath through the
mask, astonished at that unanimous demand for poison-free air.

Agony!

The gas drove through every multiple
linkage of his being with needles of pain.

We must not weaken, he thought.
Hold fast.

But it was a deadly pain, killing.
Linkages began to weaken.

“Okay on this one,” the
bag handler called.

The bag was slipped off, breather mask
pulled away. Hands propelled him down the corridor toward the
sunlight.

“Lively now! Don’t hold up
the line.”

The stink of the poison gas lay all
around him. It was a new one – a dissembler. They
hadn’t prepared him for this poison. He’d been ready
for the radiations and the sonics and the old chemicals… but
not for this.

Sunlight beat down on him as he emerged
from the corridor into a street. He veered left through a passage
lined by fruit stalls, merchants bartering with customers or
standing fat and watchful behind their displays.

In his extremity, the fruit beckoned
with the promise of sanctuary for a few parts of him, but the
integrating totality of him knew the emptiness of that thought. He
fought off the lure, shuffled fast as he dared, dodging past
customers, through the knots of idlers.

“You like to buy fresh
oranges?”

An oily dark hand thrust two oranges
into his face.

“Fresh oranges from the green
country. Never been a bug near these.”

He avoided the hand, but the odor of
the oranges came near to overpowering him.

Now he was clear of the stalls, around
a corner down a narrow side street. Another corner and he saw far
away to his left the lure of greenery in open country, the free
area beyond the town.

He turned toward the green, increased
his speed, measuring out the time still available to him. He knew
it would be a near thing. Poison clung to his clothing, but clean
air filtered through the fabric – and the thought of possible
victory was like an antidote.

We can make it yet!

The green drew closer and closer
– trees and ferns beside a riverbank. He heard running water,
smelled wet soil. There was a bridge thronging with foot traffic
from converging streets.

No help for it – he joined the
throng, avoided contact where possible. His leg and back linkages
were beginning to slip, and he knew the wrong kind of blow, a
chance collision could dislodge whole segments.

The bridge ordeal ended and he saw a
dirt track leading off the path to the right and down toward the
river. He turned toward it, stumbled against one of two men
carrying a pig in a net slung between them. Part of the skin
simulation on his right upper leg gave way. He could feel it begin
to slip down inside his trousers.

The man he’d hit took two
backward steps, almost dropped the pig.

“Careful!” the man
shouted.

The man’s companion said,
“Damn drunks.”

The pig set up a squirming, squealing
distraction.

In this moment, he slipped past the men
on to the dirt track, shuffled toward the river. He could see water
down there now boiling with aeration from the barrier niters, the
foam of sonic disruption on its surface.

Behind him, one of the pig carriers
said, “I don’t think he was drunk, Carlos. His skin
felt dry and hot. Maybe he was sick.”

He heard and understood, tried to
increase his speed. The lost segment of skin simulation had slipped
halfway down his leg. A disruptive loosening of shoulder and back
muscles threatened his balance.

The track turned around an embankment
of raw dirt dark brown with dampness and dipped into a tunnel
through ferns and bushes. The men with the pig no longer could see
him, he knew. He grabbed at his trousers where the leg surface was
slipping, scurried through the green tunnel.

Where the tunnel ended he caught sight
of his first mutated bee. It was dead, having entered this barrier
vibration area without any protection against that deadliness. The
bee was one of the butterfly type with iridescent yellow and orange
wings. It lay in the cup of a green leaf at the center of a shaft
of sunlight.

He shuffled past, having recorded the
bee’s shape and color. His kind had considered the bees as a
possible way, but there were serious drawbacks. A bee could not
reason with humans. And humans had to listen to reason soon, else
all life would end.

There came the sound of someone
hurrying down the path behind him. Heavy footsteps pounded the
earth.

Pursuit?

Why would they pursue? Have I been
discovered?

A sensation akin to panic fluttered
through him, lent his parts a burst of energy. But he was reduced
to slow shuffling and soon it would be only a crawling progress.
Every eye he could use searched the greenery for a place of
concealment.

A thin break darkened the fern wall on
his left. Tiny human footprints led into it – children. He
forced his way through the ferns there, found himself on a low
narrow path along the embankment. Two toy aircars, red and blue,
lay abandoned on the path. His staggering foot pressed into the
dirt.

The low path led close to a wall of
black dirt festooned with creepers. It turned sharply as the dirt
wall turned and emerged on to the lip of a shallow cave. More toys
lay in the green gloom at the cave’s mouth.

He knelt, crawled over the toys into
the blessed dankness, lay there waiting.

Presently, the pounding footsteps
hurried past a few meters below. Voices reached up to him.

“He was headed for the river.
Think he was going to jump in?”

“Who knows? But I think for sure
he was sick.”

“Here! Down this way;
somebody’s been down this way.”

The voices grew indistinct, blended
with the bubbling sound of water.

The men were going on down the path.
They had missed his hiding place. But why had they pursued? He
hadn’t seriously injured that man. Surely they didn’t
suspect.

But speculation had to wait.

Slowly, he steeled himself for what had
to be done, brought his specialized parts into play and began
burrowing into the earth of the cave. Deeper and deeper he
burrowed, thrusting the excess dirt behind and out to make it
appear the cave had collapsed.

Ten meters in he went before stopping.
His store of energy contained just enough reserve for the next
stage. He turned on to his back, scattering the dead parts of legs
and back, exposing the queen and her guard cluster to the dirt
beneath his chitinous spine. Orifices opened at his thigh, exuded
the cocoon foam, the soothing green cover that would harden into a
protective shell.

This was victory; the essential parts
had survived.

Time was the thing now – some
twenty days to gather new energy, go through the metamorphosis and
disperse. Soon there’d be thousands of him – each with
its carefully mimicked clothing and identification papers, each
with this appearance of humanity.

Identical – each of them.

There’d be other checkpoints, but
not as severe; other barriers – lesser ones.

This human copy had proved to be a good
one. The supreme integration of his kind had chosen well.
They’d learned much from study of scattered captives in the
sertao. But it was so difficult to understand the human
creature. Even when they were permitted a limited freedom, it was
almost impossible to reason with them. Their supreme integration
eluded all attempts at contact.

And always the primary question
remained: How could any supreme integration permit the disaster
that was overtaking this entire planet?

Difficult humans – their slavery
to the planet would have to be proved to them… dramatically,
perhaps.

The queen stirred near the cool dirt,
prodded into action by her guards. Unifying communication went out
to all the body parts, seeking the survivors, assessing strengths.
They’d learned new things this time about escaping notice
from humans. All the subsequent colony clusters would share that
knowledge. One of them at least would get through to the city by
the Amazon “River Sea” where the death-for-all appeared
to originate.

One of them had to get through.

Chapter II

PASTEL SMOKES drifted on the
cabaret’s air. Each smoke, the signature of a table, wafted
upwards from a table’s central vent – here a pale
mauve, across the way a pink as delicate as baby skin, there a
green that brought to mind Indian gauze woven of pampas grass. It
had just turned 9:00 p.m. and the Cabaret A’Chigua,
Bahia’s finest, had begun its nightly entertainment. Tinkling
bell music set a sensuous rhythm for a troupe of dancers posturing
in stylized ant costumes. Their fake antennae and mandibles waved
through the smokes.

A’Chigua’s patrons
occupied low divans. The women were a sprinkling of tropical color
as rich as jungle flowers arranged against men in white linen and,
here and there like punctuation marks, the glistening white smocks
of bandeirantes. This was the Green area, where bandeirantes could
relax and play after duty in the Red jungle or at the barriers.

Shoptalk and smalltalk in a dozen
languages flowed through the room…

“Tonight I take a pink table for
luck. It is the color of a woman’s breast, no?”
“So I laid down a blanket of foamal and we went in and
cleaned out the whole nest – mutated ants like they had in
the Piratininga. Must’ve been ten, twenty billion of them
right there.”

Dr. Rhin Kelly had listened to the room
for twenty minutes, her attention drawn more and more to the
tension undercurrents here.

“The new poisons work –
yes.” That was a bandeirante at the table behind her
answering the problem of survivors – resistant strains.
“The mop-up is going to be brutal handwork, just like China.
They had to get down there and kill the last bugs by
hand.”

Rhin sensed her companion stirring, and
thought: He heard. She glanced up from their table’s
amber smoke, met her escort’s almond eyes. He smiled, and she
thought as she had many times before, what a distinguished
personage was this Dr. Travis Huntington Chen-Lhu. He was
tall with the deep, square face of North China topped by
close-cropped hair that was still jet-black at sixty. He leaned
toward her and whispered, “Nowhere do we escape rumors,
eh?”

She shook her head, wondering for
perhaps the tenth time why the distinguished Dr. Chen-Lhu, district
director for the International Ecological Organization, had
insisted she come here tonight, her first night in Bahia. She had
no illusions at all about why he’d ordered her to come down
from Dublin: he obviously had a problem which required action by
the IEO’s espionage arm. As usual, the problem would turn out
to involve a man who must be manipulated. Chen-Lhu had hinted as
much during the day’s “general briefing.” But he
had yet to name the man upon whom she must ply her wiles.

“They say certain plants are
dying out from lack of pollenization.” That was a woman at
the table behind her, and Rhin stiffened. Dangerous conversation,
that.

But the bandeirante directly behind her
said, “Back off, doll. You sound like that dame they picked
up in Itabuna.”

“What dame?”

“She was distributing Carsonite
literature right there in the village behind the barrier. Police
grabbed her before she’d gotten rid of twenty pieces. They
got most of it back, but you know how that stuff is, especially up
there near the Red.”

A disturbance erupted at
A’Chigua’s entrance, cries of “Johnny!
You, Johnny! You lucky dog, Joao!”

Rhin joined the rest of
A’Chigua’s patrons in turning to stare toward
the sound, noting that Chen-Lhu pretended indifference. She saw
that seven bandeirantes had stopped just inside the room as though
blocked by the barrage of words.

At their head stood a bandeirante with
a group leader’s golden butterfly insignia at his lapel. Rhin
studied him with sudden suspicion, seeing a man of medium height,
swarthy skin, wavy black hair; stocky, but when he moved there was
grace. His body radiated strength. The face was a contrast, narrow
and patrician, dominated by a slim nose with pronounced hook. There
were senhores de engenho in his ancestry –
obviously.

Rhin described him to herself as
“brutally handsome.” Again, she noted Chen-Lhu’s
pose of disinterest, and thought: So this is why we’re
here.

The thought made her oddly aware of her
own body. She underwent a momentary revulsion at her role,
thinking: I’ve done many things and sold many bits of
myself to be here in this moment. And what is there left for
myself? No one wanted the services of Dr. Rhin Kelly,
entomologist. But Rhin Kelly, Irish beauty, a woman who took
pleasure in her other duties – this Rhin Kelly was
much in demand.

If I didn’t enjoy the work,
perhaps then I wouldn’t hate it, she thought.

She knew how she must appear in this
room of lush, dark-skinned women. She was red-haired, green-eyed,
delicate complexion – freckles at shoulders, forehead and
bridge of nose. In this room – wearing a low gown to match
her eyes, a small golden IEO badge at her breast – in this
room, she was the exotic one.

“Who is that man at the
door?” she asked.

A smile like the ripple from a faint
breeze washed over Chen-Lhu’s chiseled features. He glanced
toward the entrance.

“Which man, my dear? There appear
to be… seven there.”

“Drop the pose,
Travis.”

Almond eyes probed at her, swung back
to the group at the entrance. “That is Joao Martinho,
jefe of the Irmandades and son of Gabriel
Martinho.”

“Joao Martinho,” she said.
“He’s the one you said should’ve had full credit
for clearing the Piratininga.”

“He got the cash, my dear. For
Johnny Martinho, that’s quite enough.”

“How much?”

“Ah, the practical woman,”
he said. “They shared five hundred thousand cruzados.”
Chen-Lhu settled back on the divan, sniffed the pungent incense
arising with the smoke from their table’s vent. And he
thought: Five hundred thousand! That’ll be enough to
destroy Johnny Martinho – if I can make my case against
him. And with Rhin, how can I fail? This branco de Bahia
will be only too happy to accept a woman as fair as Rhin. Yes.
We’ll have our scapegoat soon: Johnny Martinho, the
capitalisto, the gran senhor who was trained by the
Yankees.

“The grapevine in Dublin mentions
Joao Martinho,” Rhin said.

“Ahh, the grapevine,” he
said. “What has it said?”

“The trouble in the Piratininga
– his name and that of his father are mentioned.”

“Ahhh, I see.”

“There are strange rumors,”
she said.

“And you find them
sinister.”

“No – just odd.”

Odd, he thought. The word struck
him with a momentary sinking sensation because it echoed the
courier message from his homeland that had moved him to send for
Rhin. “Your odd slowness in solving our problem is causing
very disturbing questions to be raised.” The sentence and
the word had leaped out of the message. Chen-Lhu understood the
impatience that framed those words: discovery of the looming
catastrophe in China could come at any moment. And he knew there
were those who didn’t trust him because of the cursed white
men in his ancestry.

He lowered his voice, said, “Odd
is not quite the word to describe bandeirantes reinfesting the
Green areas.”

“I heard some rather wild
stories,” she murmured. “Secret bandeirante
laboratories – illegal mutation
experiments…”

“You’ll note, Rhin, that
most reports of strange, giant insects come from the bandeirantes.
There’s your only oddity.”

“Logical,” she said.
“Bandeirantes’re out in the front line where such
things might occur.”

“Surely you, an entomologist,
don’t believe such wild stories,” he said.

She shrugged, feeling oddly perverse.
He was right, of course; had to be.

“Logic,” Chen-Lhu said.
“The use of wild rumors to foment superstitious fear among
the yokel tabareus, this is the only logic I see.”

“So you wish me to work on this
bandeirante chief,” she said. “What am I supposed to
find?”

You’re supposed to find what I
tell you to find, Chen-Lhu thought. But he said,
“Why’re you so certain this Martinho is your target? Is
that what the grapevine said?”

“Ohhh,” she said, wondering
at the anger that lurked within her. “You had no special
purpose in sending for me. My own charming self was reason
enough!”

“I couldn’t have said it
better,” he said. He turned, beckoned a waiter who
approached, bent to listen. Presently, the waiter wove a path to
the group at the entrance, spoke to Joao Martinho.

The bandeirante studied Rhin with a
brief flicker, shifted to meet Chen-Lhu’s eyes. Chen-Lhu
nodded.

Several women like gauze butterflies
had joined Martinho’s group. Eye makeup made them appear to
be staring from faceted pits. Martinho disengaged himself, headed
for the table of amber smoke. He stopped across from Rhin, bowed to
Chen-Lhu. “Dr. Chen-Lhu, I presume,” he said.
“What a delight. How can the IEO spare its district director
for such dalliance?” The wave of an arm encompassed
A’Chigua’s frenetic tensions.

And Martinho thought: There –
I’ve spoken my thoughts in a way this devious man will
understand.

“I indulge myself,”
Chen-Lhu said. “A small bit of relaxation to welcome a
newcomer to our staff.” He arose from the divan, looked down
at Rhin. “Rhin, I’d like you to meet Senhor Joao
Martinho. Johnny, this is Dr. Rhin Kelly, late of Dublin, a new
entomologist in our office.”

And Chen-Lhu thought: This is the
enemy. Make no mistake. This is the enemy. This is the enemy. This
is the enemy.

Martinho bowed from the hips.
“Charmed.”

“It’s an honor to meet you,
Senhor Martinho,” she said. “I’ve heard of your
exploits… even in Dublin.”

“Even in Dublin,” he
murmured. “I was favored, but never so much favored as in
this instant.” He stared at her with disconcerting intensity,
wondering what special duties this woman might have. Was she
Chen-Lhu’s mistress?

Into the sudden silence came the voice
of a woman at the table behind Rhin: “Snakes and rodents
are increasing their pressures on civilization. It says so
in the…”

Someone shushed her.

Martinho said, “Travis, I do not
understand it. How can one call such a beautiful woman
Doctor?”

Chen-Lhu forced a chuckle.
“Careful, Johnny. Dr. Kelly is my new field
director.”

“A roving director, I
hope,” Martinho said.

Rhin stared at him coolly, but it was
an assumed coolness. She found his directness exciting and
frightening. “I’ve been warned about Latin
blandishments,” she said. “You’ve all hidden a
piece of the blarney stone in your family trees, so I’ve been
told.”

Her voice had taken on a rich
throatiness which made Chen-Lhu smile to himself. Remember
– this is the enemy, he thought. “Will you join us,
Johnny?” he asked.

“You save me from forcing myself
upon you,” Martinho said. “But you know I’ve some
of my Irmandades with me?”

“They appear to be
occupied,” Chen-Lhu said. He nodded toward the entrance,
where a cluster of the gauzy women had enfolded all but one of
Martinho’s companions. Women and bandeirantes were finding
seats at a large blue-vent table in a corner.

The lone holdout shifted his attention
from Martinho to his companions at the table, back to Martinho.

Rhin studied the man: ash-gray hair, a
long young-old face marred by an acid scar on the left cheek. He
reminded her of the sexton in her Wexford church.

“Ah, that is Vierho,”
Martinho said. “We call him the Padre. At the moment, he is
undecided who to protect – our brothers of the Irmandades
over there or myself. Me, I think I need him most.” He
beckoned to Vierho, turned, sat down beside Rhin.

A waiter appeared, slipped a
translucent bulb containing a golden drink on to the table in front
of him. A glass tube protruded from the bulb. He ignored it, stared
at Rhin.

“Are the Irish ready to join
us?” he asked.

“Join you?”

“In realignment of the
world’s insects.”

She glanced at Chen-Lhu, whose face
betrayed no reaction to the question, returned her attention to
Martinho. “The Irish share the reluctance of the Canadians
and the North Americans of the United States. The Irish will wait a
bit yet.”

The answer appeared to annoy him.
“But… I mean Ireland surely understands the
advantages,” he said. “You’ve no snakes. That
must…”

“That’s something God did
by the hand of St. Patrick,” she said. “I don’t
fancy the bandeirantes as cast in the same mold.” She’d
spoken in quick anger and regretted it immediately.

“I should’ve warned you,
Johnny,” Chen-Lhu said. “She has an Irish
temper.” And he thought: He’s putting on an act for
my benefit – devious little man.

“I see,” Martinho said.
“If God didn’t see fit to rid us of insects, perhaps
we’re wrong in trying to do this for ourselves.”

Rhin glared at him in dismay.

Chen-Lhu suppressed a surge of pure
rage. That devious Latin maneuvered Rhin into this position!
Deliberately!

“My government doesn’t
recognize the existence of God,” Chen-Lhu said.
“Perhaps if God were to initiate an exchange of
embassies…” He patted Rhin’s arm, noted that she
was trembling. “However, the IEO believes we’ll be
extending the fight north of the Rio Grande Line within ten
years.”

“The IEO believes this? Or is it
China’s belief?”

“Both,” Chen-Lhu said.

“Even if the North Americans
object?”

“They are expected to see the
light of reason.”

“And the Irish?”

Rhin managed a smile. “The
Irish,” she said, “have always been notoriously
unreasonable.” She reached for her drink, hesitated as her
attention was caught by a white-clad bandeirante standing across
the table – Vierho.

Martinho bounced to his feet, bowed
once more to Rhin. “Doctor Kelly, allow me to
introduce one of my brothers of the Irmandades, Padre
Vierho.” He turned back to Rhin. “This lovely one, my
esteemed Padre, is a field director of the IEO.”

Vierho gave her a tight little nod, sat
down stiffly at the limit of the divan beyond Chen-Lhu.
“Charmed,” he murmured.

“My Irmandades, they are
shy,” Martinho said. He resumed his seat beside Rhin.
“They’d rather be out killing ants.”

“Johnny, how is your
father?” Chen-Lhu asked.

Martinho spoke without looking away
from Rhin. “The affairs of the Mato Grosso keep him much
occupied.” He paused. “You have lovely eyes.”

Again, Rhin found herself disconcerted
by his directness. She picked up the golden bulb of his drink,
said, “What is this?”

“Ah, that is flierce, the
Brazilian mead. Take it for yourself. There are little points of
light in your eyes to match the gold of the drink.”

She suppressed a quick retort, lifted
the drink to sip it, genuinely curious. She stopped with the glass
tube almost at her lips as she caught Vierho staring at her
hair.

“Is it really that color?”
he asked.

Martinho laughed, a surprised and oddly
affectionate sound. “Ahh, Padre,” he said.

Rhin sipped the drink to cover a
feeling of confusion, found the liquid softly sweet, filled with
the memory of many flowers, and with a sharp bite beneath the
sugar.

“But is it that color?”
Vierho insisted.

Chen-Lhu leaned forward. “Many
Irish colleens have such red hair, Vierho. It’s supposed to
signify a wild temper.”

Rhin returned the drink to the table,
wondering at her own emotions. She sensed a camaraderie between
Vierho and his chief and resented the fact that she couldn’t
share it.

“Where next, Johnny?”
Chen-Lhu asked.

Martinho darted a glance at his brother
Irmandade, returned a hard stare to Chen-Lhu. Why does this
official of the IEO ask such a question here and now? he
wondered. Chen-Lhu must know where next. It could not be
otherwise.

“I’m surprised you
hadn’t heard,” Martinho said. “This afternoon I
bid-in the Serra Dos Parecis.”

“By the great bug of the
Mambuca,” Vierho muttered.

Anger showed in the sudden darkening of
Martinho’s face. “Vierho!” he snapped.

Rhin stared from one to the other. A
strange silence had settled over the table. She felt it as a
tingling along her arms and shoulders. There was something about it
that was fearful, even sexual… and profoundly disturbing.
She recognized the reaction of her body, hated it, knew she could
not place its source with any precision this time. All she could
say to herself was: This is why Chen-Lhu sent for me – to
attract this Joao Martinho and manipulate him. I’ll do it,
but what I’ll hate most is the fact that I’ll enjoy
it.

“But, Jefe,” Vierho said.
“You know yourself what was said about…”

“I know!” Martinho barked.
“Yes!”

Vierho nodded, a look of pain on his
face. “They said it was…”

“There are mutants, we know
that,” Martinho said. And he thought: Why did Chen-Lhu
force this disclosure now? To see me argue with one of my
men?

“Mutants?” Chen-Lhu
asked.

“We have seen what we have
seen,” Vierho said.

“But the description of this
thing is a physical impossibility,” Martinho said.
“It has to be a product of someone’s superstition.
That I know.”

“Do you, Jefe?”

“Anything that’s there we
can face,” Martinho said.

“What are you talking
about?” Rhin asked.

Chen-Lhu cleared his throat. Let her
see now the extremes to which our enemy will go, he thought.
Let her see the perfidy of these bandeirantes. Then, when I tell
her what she must do, she’ll do it willingly.

“There is a story, Rhin,”
Chen-Lhu said.

“Story!” Martinho
sneered.

“Rumor, then,” Chen-Lhu
said. “Some of the bandeirantes of Diego Alvarez say they saw
a mantidae three meters tall in the Serra Dos Parcels.”

Vierho leaned toward Chen-Lhu, face
tense. The acid scar was pale on the bandeirante’s cheek.
“Alvarez lost six men before he gave up the Serra. You know
that, Senhor? Six men! And he…”

Vierho broke off at the arrival of a
squat, dark-skinned man in a stained bandeirante working smock. The
man was round faced, with Indian eyes. He stopped almost behind
Martinho, stood there waiting.

The newcomer bent close to Martinho,
whispered.

Rhin could catch only a few of his
words – they were very low and in some barbarous interlands
dialect – something about the Plaza, the central
square… crowds.

Martinho pursed his lips, said,
“When?”

Ramon straightened, spoke somewhat
louder. “Just now, Jefe.”

“In the Plaza?”

“Yes – less than a block
from here.”

“What is it?” Chen-Lhu
asked.

“A namesake of this
cabaret,” Martinho said.

“A chigger?”

“So they say.”

“But this area’s
Green,” Rhin said. And she wondered at her sudden feelings of
dismay.

Martinho pushed himself up and away
from the divan.

Chen-Lhu’s face betrayed a
strange watchfulness as he looked up at the bandeirante jefe.

“You will excuse me, please, Rhin
Kelly?” Martinho asked.

“Where are you going?” she
asked.

“There is work.”

“One chigger?” Chen-Lhu
asked. “Are you sure it isn’t a mistake?”

“No mistake, senhor,” Ramon
said.

“Is there no facility for taking
care of such accidents, then?” Rhin asked. “Obviously
we’ve a stowaway that’s come into the Green on some
sort of cargo or…”

“Perhaps not,” Martinho
said. He nodded to Vierho. “Get the men. I will need
especially Thome for the truck and Lon to manage the
lights.”

“At once, Jefe.” Vierho
bounced up and headed across the room towards the other
Irmandades.

“What do you mean –
perhaps not?” Chen-Lhu asked.

“This is one of the new ones
about which you refuse to believe,” Martinho said. He turned
to Ramon. “Go with Vierho, please.”

“Yes, Jefe.”

Ramon turned with an almost military
precision, strode in Vierho’s wake.

“You will explain, please?”
Chen-Lhu said.

“This is described as an
acid-shooter and almost a half meter long,” Martinho
said.

“Impossible!” Chen-Lhu
snorted.

Rhin shook her head. “No chigger
could possibly…”

“This is a bandeirante
joke,” Chen-Lhu said.

“As you wish, senhor,”
Martinho said. “You have seen the acid scar on Vierho’s
cheek? This too was produced by such a joke.” He turned,
bowed to Rhin. “Your forgiveness, Senhorita?”

Rhin stood up. A chigger almost half
a meter long!

The odd rumors she’d heard half a
world away reached out and touched her now, filling her with a
sense of unreality. There were physical limits. Such a thing could
not be. Or could it? She was all entomologist now. Logic and
training took over. This was a matter which might be proved or
disproved in just a few minutes. Less than a block away, the man
had said. In the Plaza. And certainly Chen-Lhu wouldn’t want
her to disengage herself from Joao Martinho quite this early.

“We are going with you, of
course,” she said.

“Of course,” Chen-Lhu said,
rising.

Rhin slipped an arm beneath
Martinho’s. “Show me this fantastic chigger, if you
please, Senhor Martinho.”

Martinho placed a hand over hers, felt
an electric sensation of warmth. What a disturbing woman!
“Please,” he said. “You are so lovely, and the
thought of what the acid of this…”

“I’m certain we’ll be
quite safe from a rumor,” Chen-Lhu said. “Will you lead
the way, please, Johnny?”

Martinho sighed. The unbelievers were
so stubborn – but this was a chance to reach into a high
place with inescapable evidence of what most bandeirantes already
knew. Yes, District Director Chen-Lhu should come. Indeed, he must
come. Reluctantly, Martinho transferred Rhin’s arm to
Chen-Lhu. “Of course you will come,” he said.
“But please keep the lovely Rhin Kelly well to the rear,
senhor. Rumors sometimes develop a terrible sting.”

“We will take every necessary
precaution,” Chen-Lhu said. The jibe in his voice was quite
apparent.

Martinho’s men already were
headed for the door. He turned, strode after them, ignoring the
abrupt hush of the room as attention followed him.

Rhin, accompanying Chen-Lhu toward the
street, was struck by the purposeful set to the bandeirantes’
shoulders. They did not appear like men bent on deception –
but that was what it must be. It couldn’t be anything
else.

Chapter III

THE NIGHT was a blue-white glare from
slave lights hanging in their carrier beams above the street.
People in the costumes of many nations and many regions, a
multi-colored river of people, flowed past the
A’Chigua toward the Plaza.

Martinho sped up, led his men into the
stream. People made way, words of recognition followed.

“It’s Joao Martinho and
some of his Irmandades.”

“… the Piratininga with
Benito Alvarez.”

“Joao Martinho…”

At the Plaza, a white truck of the
Hermosillo Bandeirantes played its searchlights on the fountain.
There were other trucks and official vehicles across the way. The
Hermosillo truck was a working rig recently returned from the
interlands, by the look of it. The interleavings of its extensile
wings were still streaked with dirt. The break-line of its forward
pod could be distinguished clearly – a distinct crack that
ran completely around the vehicle. Two of its ground-lift pods
didn’t quite match the white of the others, evidence of a
field repair job.

Martinho followed the pointing fingers
of the searchlights. He moved forward to a line of police and
bandeirantes holding back the crowd, was passed through on
recognition, his men following.

“Where’s Ramon?”
Martinho asked.

Vierho pressed up close beside him,
said, “Ramon went for the truck with Thome and Lon. I
don’t see a’Chigua.”

“But look you,” Martinho
said, pointing.

The crowd was being held back all
around the Plaza at a distance of about fifty meters from the
central fountain which rose in spooling, glistening arcs. In front
of the crowd lay a tiled circle, its mosaic surface decorated with
figures of the birds of Brazil. Inside this tiled ring, a
ten-centimeter lip lifted to a circle of green lawn about twenty
meters in diameter with the fluted cup of the fountain in the
center. Between tile and fountain the lawn showed yellow splotches
of dead grass. Martinho’s pointing finger picked out these
patches one by one.

“Acid,” Vierho
whispered.

The searchlights centered abruptly on a
shifting movement within the spray at the fountain’s rim. A
hissing passed through the crowd like a sudden wind.

“And there it is,” Martinho
said. “Now, will the so suspicious official of the IEO
believe?”

As he spoke, a scintillant spray arched
from the creature at the fountain and out on to the lawn.

“Eeee-ahhhh,” the
crowd said.

Martinho grew conscious of a low
moaning off to his left, turned to see a doctor being directed
there along the inner rim of the crowd. The doctor turned into the
crowd on the other side of the Hermosillo truck, lifting his bag
over his head as he entered the press of people.

“Who was hurt?” Martinho
asked.

One of the police behind him said,
“It is Alvarez. He tried to get that… thing, but he
took only a handshield and a sprayrifle. The shield was not proof
against a’chigua’s quickness. It got Alvarez in the
arm.”

Vierho tugged at Martinho’s
sleeve, pointed into the crowd behind the policeman. Rhin Kelly and
Chen-Lhu were being passed through the onlookers there, space being
made for them as people recognized the IEO insignia.

Rhin waved, called, “Senhor
Martinho – that thing is impossible! It’s at least
seventy-five centimeters long. It must weigh three or four
kilos.”

“Do they not believe their own
eyes?” Vierho asked.

Chen-Lhu came up to the policeman
who’d described the injury to Alvarez, said, “Let us
through, please.”

“Eh? Oh… yes, sir.”
The line of guards parted.

Chen-Lhu stopped beside the bandeirante
leader, glanced down at Rhin, back to Martinho. “I
don’t believe it, either. I’d give a pretty to get my
hands on that… thing.”

“What is it you don’t
believe?” Martinho asked.

“I think it’s some kind of
automaton. Not so, Rhin?”

“It has to be,” she
said.

“How much of a pretty would you
give?” Martinho asked.

“Ten thousand
cruzados.”

“Please keep the lovely Doctor
Kelly back here out of range,” Martinho said. He turned
to Vierho. “What’s keeping Ramon and that truck? Find
them. I want our magna-glass shield and a modified
sprayrifle.”

“Jefe!”

“At once. Oh, yes – and get
a large specimen bottle.”

Vierho sighed, turned away to obey.

“What do you say that thing
is?” Chen-Lhu asked.

“I don’t have to
say.”

“Do you imply it’s one of
the things which none but bandeirantes appear to see in the
interlands?”

“I don’t deny what my own
eyes see.”

“Why have we never seen
specimens, I wonder?” Chen-Lhu mused.

Martinho swallowed to suppress an angry
outburst. This fool safe back here in the Green! He dared to
question what the bandeirantes knew for fact!

“Isn’t that an interesting
question?” Chen-Lhu asked.

“We’ve been lucky to get
out with just our lives,” Martinho growled.

“Any entomologist will tell you
that thing’s a physical impossibility,” Rhin said.

“The material won’t support
such structure through that sort of activity,” Chen-Lhu
said.

“I can see the entomologists
must be correct,” Martinho said.

Rhin stared up at him. The angry
cynicism surprised her. He attacked and did not remain on the
defensive. He acted like a man who believed that
impossibility out there at the fountain actually was a giant
insect. But in the nightclub he’d argued the other side.

“You’ve seen such things in
the jungle?” Chen-Lhu asked.

“Did you not see the scar on
Vierho’s face?”

“What does a scar
prove?”

“We have seen… what we
have seen.”

“But an insect cannot grow that
large!” Rhin protested. She turned her attention to the dark
creature dancing along the fountain’s rim behind the curtain
of water.

“So I’ve been told,”
Martinho said. He wondered then about the reports from the Serra
Dos Parecis. Mantidae three meters tall – eighteen feet. He
knew the argument against such a thing. Rhin – all the
entomologists were correct. Insects couldn’t produce living
structure that large. Was it possible the things were automata?
Who’d build such things? Why?

“It has to be a mechanical
simulation of some kind,” Rhin said.

“The acid’s real,
though,” Chen-Lhu said. “Look at the yellow spots on
the lawn.”

Martinho reminded himself then that his
own basic training forced him to agree with Rhin and Chen-Lhu.
He’d even denied to Vierho that giant mantidae could exist.
He knew how rumors pyramided. There were so few people other than
bandeirantes in the Red areas these days. The Resettlement Plan had
been most efficient. And there was no denying that many
bandeirantes were semi-ignorant, superstitious men attracted only
by the romance and money.

Martinho shook his head. He’d
been there on the Goyaz track the day Vierho had suffered the acid
burn. He’d seen… what he had seen. And now, this
creature at the fountain.

The high-pitched roaring hiss of truck
motors intruded on his awareness. The sound grew louder. The crowd
parted giving a wide berth to the ground blast as Ramon backed the
Irmandades truck into position beside the Hermosillo vehicle. The
rear doors opened and Vierho jumped down as the motors were
silenced.

“Jefe,” he called.
“Why do we not use the truck? Ramon could put it almost up to
the…”

Martinho waved him to silence, spoke to
Chen-Lhu: “The truck does not have enough maneuverability.
You saw how fast that thing is.”

“You haven’t said what you
think it is,” Chen-Lhu said.

“I’ll say when I see it in
a specimen bottle,” Martinho said.

Vierho came up beside him, said,
“But the truck would give us…”

“No! Dr. Chen-Lhu desires an
undamaged specimen. Get us some foam bombs. We go in with our
hands.”

Vierho sighed, shrugged, returned to
the rear of the truck, spoke briefly to someone inside. A
bandeirante in the truck began passing out equipment.

Martinho turned to the policeman
helping hold back the crowd, said, “Can you get a message to
the vehicles across the way?”

“Of course, honorable
sir.”

“I want their lights turned off.
I don’t want to risk being blinded by lights in front of me.
You understand?”

“They will be told at
once.” He turned, relayed the message to an officer down the
line.

Martinho strode to the rear of his
truck, took a sprayrifle, examined the charge cylinder, extracted
it, took another from a door rack. He locked in the charge, and
again checked the rifle.

“Keep the specimen bottle here
until we’ve immobilized that… thing,” he said.
“I’ll call for it.”

Vierho rolled out the shield, a
two-centimeter thickness of acid-resistant, tempered magna-glass,
mounted on a two-wheeled handtruck. A narrow slot at the right
accepted the rifle.

A bandeirante in the truck handed out
two protective suits – silver-gray fiberglass sandwiches
encased in slick acid-resistant synthetic fabric.

Martinho slipped into one, examined the
seals.

Vierho donned the other.

“I could use Thome on the
shield,” Martinho said.

“Thome has not as much
experience, Jefe.”

Martinho nodded, began examining the
foamal bombs and auxiliary equipment. He hung extra charge
cylinders in a rack on the shield. It was all done quickly and
silently, with the ease of long experience. The crowd behind the
truck took on some of their silence – a charged waiting. Only
the faintest murmuring of conversation surrounded the truck.

“It is still there on the
fountain, Jefe,” Vierho said.

He took the control handle of the
shield, moved it out on to the mosaic tiles. The right wheel
stopped on the patterned blue-scale neck of a condor worked into
the tiles. Martinho rested his sprayrifle in its slot, said,
“This’d be easier if we only had to kill it.”

“Those things are quick as el
Diablo,” Vierho said. “I do not like this, Jefe. If
that thing should get around our shield…” He fingered
the sleeve of his protective suit. “This would be like a
piece of gauze trying to stop the river.”

“So don’t let it get around
the shield.”

“I will do my best,
Jefe.”

Martinho studied the creature waiting
behind the water curtain at the rim of the fountain, said,
“Bring a handlight. Perhaps we can dazzle it.”

Vierho set the shield stand, returned
to the truck. He was back in a moment with the light hanging from
his belt.

“Let’s go,” Martinho
said.

Vierho released the handtruck stand,
activated its motors. A faint humming issued from it. He turned the
driver handle two notches. The shield crept forward, levered its
way over the raised ring of the Plaza on to the lawn.

A stream of acid arched outward from
the creature at the fountain, splashed on to the grass ten meters
in front of them. Oily white smoke boiled from the lawn, was
dispersed to their left by a light breeze. Martinho noted the
direction of the breeze, signaled for the shield to be turned
upwind. They circled right.

Another stream of acid arched toward
them, fell short about the same distance.

“It is trying to tell us
something, Jefe,” Vierho joked.

Slowly they approached it, crossed one
of the yellowed patches of grass.

Again the stream lifted from the
fountain rim. Vierho leaned the shield backward. Acid splashed on
to the glass, ran down the front. A biting smell filled their
nostrils.

A murmurous
“Ahhhhhhhh” lifted from the crowd around the
Plaza.

“They are fools to stand that
close, you know,” Vierho said. “If that thing should
charge…”

“Someone would shoot it with a
hard-pellet,” Martinho said. “Fini
a’Chigua.”

“Fini Dr. Chen-Lhu’s
specimen,” Vierho said. “Fini ten thousand
cruzados.”

“Yes,” Martinho said.
“We must not forget why we run this risk.”

“I hope you don’t believe
I’d do this for love,” Vierho said. He inched the
shield forward another meter.

A foggy area began to form where the
acid had hit.

“Etched the magna-glass!”
Vierho said, astonishment filling his voice.

“Smelled something like
Oxalic,” Martinho said. “Must be stronger, though. Take
it slow now. I want a sure shot.”

“Why don’t you try a foam
bomb?”

“Vierho!”

“Ahhh, yes: the water.”

The creature began sliding to their
right along the fountain. Vierho turned the shield to cover this
new approach. The creature stopped, retraced its steps.

“Wait a bit,” Martinho
said. He found a clear place in the glass, studied the thing.

The creature shifted back and forth,
plainly visible on the fountain rim. It resembled its tiny namesake
the way a caricature might. Its sectioned body appeared to be
supported on ribbed legs that bowed outward to terminate in strong,
gripping hairs. The antennae were stubby and glistened wetly at the
ends.

Abruptly, it lifted a tubular nose,
squirted a hard stream directly at the shield.

Martinho ducked involuntarily.
“We must get closer,” he said. “It must not have
time to recover after I stun it.”

“With what have you charged the
rifle, Jefe?”

“Our special mix – dilute
sulphur and corrosive sublimate in air-coagulating butyl carrier. I
want to tangle its legs.”

“I wish you had also brought
something to plug its nose.”

“Come along, old gray
head,” Joao said.

Vierho urged the shield closer, bent to
peer past the acid fogging.

The giant chigger danced sideways,
turned, darted off to the right along the fountain rim. Abruptly,
it whirled, arched a stream of acid at them. The liquid glistened
under the searchlights like a high curve of jewels. Vierho barely
had time to swerve the shield into the new attack.

“By the blood of ten thousand
saints,” Vierho muttered. “I do not like working in
this close to such a thing, Jefe. We are not fighters of
bulls.”

“This is no bull, my brother. It
hasn’t the horns.”

“I think I would prefer the
horns.”

“We talk too much,”
Martinho said. “Closer, eh?”

Vierho urged the shield ahead until a
bare two meters separated them from the creature on the fountain.
“Shoot it,” he hissed.

“We will get only one
shot,” Martinho said. “I must not damage the specimen.
The Doctor wishes a whole specimen.”

And he thought: So do I.

He swung the rifle toward the creature,
but the chigger leaped to the lawn, back to the fountain rim. A
scream lifted from the crowd.

Martinho and Vierho crouched, waiting
as their prey danced back and forth.

“Why doesn’t it stand still
for just a second?” Martinho asked.

“Jefe, if it comes under the
shield, we are cooked. Why do you wait? Pick it off.”

“I must be certain of it,”
Martinho said.

He swung the sprayrifle back and forth
with the motions of the darting, dancing insect. It dodged away
from the line of sight each time, moving farther and farther to the
right. Suddenly, it turned, scuttled on around the fountain’s
rim to the opposite side. Now the entire water curtain separated
them from it, but the searchlights had followed the retreat and
they could still see it there.

Martinho entertained the odd suspicion
then that the thing was trying to maneuver them into some special
position. He lifted his suit’s face shield, wiped his
forehead with his left hand. He was perspiring heavily. It was a
hot night, but here by the fountain there was cool mist in the air
– and the bitter smell of the acid.

“I think we are in
trouble,” Vierho said. “If it keeps the fountain
between us, how will we capture it?”

“Come along,” Martinho
said. “If it stays across the fountain from us, I’ll
order out another team. It cannot dodge two teams.”

Vierho began maneuvering the shield
sideways around the fountain. “I still think we
should’ve used the truck,” he said.

“Too big and clumsy,”
Martinho said. “Besides, I think the truck might frighten it
into attempting a break through the crowd. This way, it may feel it
has a chance against us.”

“Me, I feel the same
thing.”

The giant chigger took this moment to
dart toward them, stop and crawl backwards. It kept its nose aimed
at the shield and presented a steady target, but too much of the
water curtain fell between it and Martinho for a safe shot.

“The wind is at our backs,
Jefe,” Vierho said.

“I know. Let’s hope that
thing hasn’t the wit to shoot over our heads. The
wind’d drop acid on to our backs.”

The chigger backed into an area where
the fountain’s upper structure shadowed it from the
searchlight. It shifted back and forth in the shadow area, a dark
wet movement.

“Jefe, that thing is not going to
stay there for long. I can feel it.”

“Hold the shield here a
moment,” Martinho said. “I think you’re right. We
ought to clear the Plaza. If it took it into its mind to rush the
crowd, people would be hurt.”

“You say a true thing,
Jefe.”

“Vierho, use the handlight. Try
to dazzle its eyes. I’ll break away from the shield to our
right and try a long shot.”

“Jefe!”

“You have a better
idea?”

“At least let us pull the shield
farther out there into the lawn. You would not be so close
if…”

Still in the shadows, the chigger
hopped sideways off the fountain rim on to the lawn. Vierho jerked
up the handlight.

“O, Dios, Jefe! Shoot
it!”

Martinho swung the spray rifle around
to bear on the new position, but the shield slot prevented a full
swing. He cursed, grabbed for the control handle, but before he
could swing the shield, a section of lawn the size of a street
manhole lifted like a trapdoor behind the chigger and in the full
glare of the hand-light. A black shape with what appeared to be a
triple-horned head emerged partly from the hole, sounded a rasping
call.

The chigger darted past the shape and
into the hole.

The crowd was screaming now, a noise
compounded of rage, fear and feral excitement that filled the air
of the plaza. Through it all, Martinho could hear Vierho praying in
a low voice – almost a chant: “Holy Mary, Mother of
God…”

Martinho tried to push the shield
around toward the creature in the hole, was stalled by Vierho
trying to pull the structure backward. The shield twisted around on
its wheels, exposing them to the black shape there as the thing
lifted another half meter on to the lawn. Martinho had a full,
clear look at it there bathed in the beam of the handlight. The
thing looked like a gigantic stag beetle – taller than a man
and with triple horns.

Desperately, Martinho wrestled the
sprayrifle from its shield slot, swung it toward the horned
monster.

“Jefe, Jefe, Jefe!” Vierho
pleaded.

Martinho brought his weapon to bear,
squeezed off a two-second charge, counting to himself: “One
butterfly, two butterfly.”

The poison-butyl mixture slammed into
the creature, enveloped it.

The creature, its shape distorted by
the spray-mix, hesitated, then lifted farther out of the hole with
a rasping, grunting sound heard clearly above the crowd
screams.

The crowd fell abruptly silent as the
thing towered there, a shell-backed monster – green, black,
glistening – at least a meter taller than a man.

Martinho could hear a sucking, rasping
sound from it, an odd wet noise like the sound of the fountain with
which it competed.

Carefully, he again aimed the
sprayrifle at the horned head – point blank range – and
emptied the charge cylinder: ten seconds. The creature appeared to
dissolve backward into its hole with eerie extensions and
protrusions fighting the sticky butyl.

“Jefe, let us go away from
here,” Vierho pleaded. “Please, Jefe.” He
swung the shield around until it again stood between them and the
giant insect. “Please,” Vierho said. He began forcing
Martinho back with the shield.

Martinho grabbed another charge
cylinder, slammed it into rifle, took a foamal bomb in his left
hand. He felt emptied of every emotion except the need to attack
that monster and kill it. But before he could draw his arm back to
throw the bomb, he felt the shield buck. He looked up to a solid
stream of liquid driving down on the shield from the black creature
in the hole.

He needed no urging as Vierho screamed,
“Run!”

They fled backward, dragging the
shield.

The attack stopped as they drew out of
range. Martinho stopped, looked back. He felt Vierho trembling
beside him. The dark thing in the hole sank slowly backward. It was
the most menacing retreat Martinho had ever seen. The movement
radiated a willingness to return to the attack. It sank from sight.
The section of lawn closed behind it.

As though that were the signal, the
crowd sounds picked up all around the Plaza, but Martinho could
hear the fear in the voices even when he couldn’t make out
the words.

He threw back his face shield,
listening to the words like sharp cries, the snatches of sentences
– “Like a monster beetle!” “Have you heard
the report from the waterfront?” “The whole region
could be infested!” “…at the Monte Ochoa
Convent… orphanage…”

Through it all came the same question
repeated from all sides of the Plaza: “What was it?”
“What was it?” “What was it?”

Martinho felt someone at his right,
jerked around to see Chen-Lhu standing there, eyes intent on the
place where the beetle shape had disappeared. There was no sign of
Rhin Kelly.

“Yes, Johnny,” Chen-Lhu
said. “What was it?”

“It looked like a giant stag
beetle,” Martinho said, and he was surprised at how calm his
voice sounded.

“It was taller than a man by
half,” Vierho muttered. “Jefe… those stories
about the Serra dos Paresis…”

“I heard the crowd talking about
Monte Ochoa and the waterfront, something about an
orphanage,” Martinho said. “What was that?”

“Rhin has gone to
investigate,” Chen-Lhu said. “There are some disturbing
reports. I’m having the crowds cleared out of the Plaza.
People are being ordered to disperse and go to their
homes.”

“What are the disturbing
reports?”

“That there has been some sort of
tragedy at the waterfront and again at the Monte Ochoa Convent and
orphanage.”

“What sort of tragedy?”

“That is what Rhin’s
investigating.”

“You saw that out there on the
lawn,” Martinho said. “Now will you believe what
we’ve been reporting to you these many months?”

“I saw an acid-shooting automaton
and a man in the costume of a stag beetle,” Chen-Lhu said.
“I’m curious to know if you were party to this
deception.”

Vierho cursed under his breath.

Martinho took a moment to put down his
sudden anger, said only, “It didn’t look to me like a
man in costume.” He shook his head. This was no time to let
emotion cloud reason. Insects could not possibly grow that
large. The forces of gravity… Again, he shook his head.
Then what was it?

“We should at least get samples
of the acid off the lawn there,” Martinho said. “And
that hole will have to be investigated.”

“I’ve sent for our Security
Section,” Chen-Lhu said. He turned away, thinking of how he
would have to compose the reports on this – the one for his
superiors in the IEO and the special report for his own
government.

“Did you see how it appeared to
dissolve downward into the hole when I hit it with the
spray?” Martinho asked. “That poison can be painful,
Travis. A man would’ve screamed.”

“A man in protective
clothing,” Chen-Lhu, speaking without turning. But he began
to wonder about Martinho. The man seemed genuinely puzzled. No
matter. This whole incident was going to be useful. Chen-Lhu saw
that now.

“But it came back out of the
hole,” Vierho said. “You saw that. It came
back.”

An abrupt growling sound came from the
people being pushed out of the Plaza. It passed through them like a
wind – voice to voice to voice.

Martinho turned, studied them.
“Vierho,” he said.

“Jefe?”

“Get blast-pellet carbines from
the truck.”

“At once, Jefe.”

Vierho trotted across the lawn toward
the truck which stood now in an open area with only a scattering of
bandeirantes around it. Martinho recognized some of the men –
those of Alvarez seemed most numerous, but there were bandeirantes
also of the Hermosillo and Junitza.

“What do you want with
blast-pellet weapons?” Chen-Lhu asked.

“I am going to look in that
hole.”

“My Security men will be here
soon. We’ll wait for them.”

“I am going now.”

“Martinho, I’m telling you
that…”

“You are not the government of
Brazil, Doctor. I am licensed by my government for a specific task.
I am pledged to carry out that task wherever…”

“Martinho, if you destroy
evidence of…”

“You were not out here facing
those things, Doctor. You were safe back there at the Plaza’s
edge while I was earning the right to look in that hole.”

Chen-Lhu’s face grew rigid with
anger, but he held himself silent until he knew he could control
his voice, then said, “In that case, I will go with you
now.”

“As you wish.”

Martinho turned away, stared across the
Plaza to where the carbines were being handed out of the rear of
his truck. Vierho collected them, headed back across the lawn. A
tall, bald-headed Negro with right arm in a sling fell into step
beside Vierho. The Negro wore a uniform of plain bandeirante white
with the golden spray emblem of a band leader at his left shoulder.
His craggy, Moorish features were drawn into a scowl of pain.
“There’s Alvarez,” Chen-Lhu said. “I see
him.”

Chen-Lhu faced Martinho, assumed a
rueful smile to match his tone. “Johnny – let us not
fight. You know why the IEO assigned me to Brazil.”

“I know. China’s already
completed the realignment of its insects. You’re a big
success.”

“We’ve nothing but the
mutated bees now, Johnny – not a single creature to spread
disease or eat food intended for humans.”

“I know, Travis. And you’re
here to make our job easier.”

Chen-Lhu frowned at the tone of patient
disbelief in Martinho’s voice. He said,
“Exactly.”

“Then why won’t you let our
observers or those from the U.N. go in and see for themselves,
Doctor?”

“Johnny! You certainly must know
how long my country suffered under the white imperialists. Some of
our people believe the danger’s still there. They see spies
everywhere.”

“But you’re more a man of
the world, more understanding, eh, Travis?”

“Of course! My great grandmother
was English, one of the Travis-Huntingtons. We have a
tradition of broader understanding in my family.”

“It’s a wonder your country
trusts you,” Martinho said. “You’re part white
imperialist.” He turned to greet Alvarez as the Negro stopped
in front of them. “Hi, Benito. Sorry about your
arm.”

“Hullo, Johnny.”
Alvarez’s voice was deep and rumbling. “God protected
me. I will recover.” He glanced down at the carbines in
Vierho’s hands, returned his attention to Martinho. “I
heard the Padre here asking for blast-pellets. You could only want
them for one reason.”

“I have to look in that hole,
Benito.”

Alvarez turned, gave a stiff little bow
to Chen-Lhu. “And you have no objections, Doctor?”

“I’ve objections, but no
authority,” Chen-Lhu said. “Is the arm severely
injured? I will have my own physicians see to it.”

“The arm will recover,”
Alvarez mumbled.

“He really wants to know if it
was actually injured,” Martinho said.

Chen-Lhu turned a startled look at
Martinho, masked it quickly.

Vierho handed one of the carbines to
his chief, said, “Jefe, we have to do this?”

“Why would the good Doctor doubt
that my arm was injured?” Alvarez asked.

“He has heard stories,”
Martinho said.

“What stories?”

“That we bandeirantes don’t
want to see a good thing end, that we’re reinfesting the
Green, breeding new insects in secret laboratories.”

“That rot!” Alvarez
growled.

“Which bandeirantes are supposed
to be doing this?” Vierho demanded. He scowled at Chen-Lhu,
gripped the carbine as though ready to turn it on the IEO
official.

“Easy, Padre,” Alvarez
said. “The stories never say. It’s always they
or them – never names.”

Martinho looked toward the place in the
lawn where the giant figure of a beetle had disappeared. He found
this dalliance with talk far more alluring than the walk across the
lawn to that place. The night air carried a sense of lowering
menace and.., hysteria. And the oddest thing of all was the
reluctance to take action that could be seen all around him. It was
like the lull after a terrible battle in a war.

Well, it is a kind of war, he
told himself.

Eight years they’d been fighting
this war here in Brazil. The Chinese had taken twenty-two years,
but they’d said it could be done here in ten. The thought
that it might take twenty-two years here – fourteen more
years – momentarily threatened to overwhelm Martinho. He felt
a monstrous fatigue.

“You must admit odd things are
happening,” Chen-Lhu said.

“That we admit,” Alvarez
said.

“Why does no one suspect the
Carsonites?” Vierho asked.

“A good question, Padre,”
Alvarez said. “They have big support, the Carsonites –
all the holdout nations: the U.S. of A., Canada, the United
Kingdom, Common Europe.”

“All the places where
they’ve never had any real trouble with the insects,”
Vierho said.

Oddly, it was Chen-Lhu who protested.
“No,” he said. “The holdout nations don’t
really care – except that they’re happy to see us
occupied with this fight.”

Martinho nodded. Yes – that was
what all the companions of his schooldays in North America had
said. They couldn’t care less.

“I am going over now and look in
that hole,” Martinho said.

Alvarez reached out, took
Vierho’s carbine. He hung it on his good shoulder by the
sling, took the control handle of the shield. “I will go with
you, Johnny.”

Martinho glanced at Vierho, saw the
look of terrified relief in the man’s face, returned his
attention to Alvarez. “Your arm?”

“I still have one good arm. What
more do I need?”

“Travis, you stay close behind
us,” Martinho said.

“My Security men have just
arrived,” Chen-Lhu said. “Delay a moment and
we’ll ring that place. I will tell them to bring
shields.”

“It is wise, Johnny,”
Alvarez said.

“We will go slowly,”
Martinho said. “Padre, return to the truck. Tell Ramon to
bring it around the Plaza and up on to the edge of the lawn over
there. Have the Hermosillo truck direct all its lights on to that
place.” He nodded ahead of him.

“At once, Jefe.”

Vierho headed back for the truck.

“You will not disturb anything
there?” Chen-Lhu asked.

“We’re as anxious as you to
find out what that is,” Alvarez said.

“Let’s go,” Martinho
said.

Chen-Lhu trotted off to the right where
an IEO field truck could be seen making its way through a side
street. The crowd appeared to be giving trouble there, resisting
efforts to expel them from the Plaza area.

Alvarez turned the control handle and
the shield began crawling across the lawn.

In a low voice, Alvarez said,
“Johnny, why doesn’t the doctor suspect the
Carsonites?”

“He has a spy system as good as
anything in the world,” Martinho said. “He must
know.” He kept his gaze on the disturbed patch of lawn ahead
of them, that mysterious place beside the fountain.

“But what better way to sabotage
us than to discredit the bandeirantes?”

“True, but I don’t think
Travis Huntington Chen-Lhu would make such a mistake.” And he
thought: It is strange how that patch of lawn both attracts and
repels.

“You and I have been rivals at
the bid many times, Johnny. Perhaps we forget sometimes that we
have a common enemy.”

“Do you name that
enemy?”

“It’s the enemy in the
jungles, in the grass of the savannahs and under the ground. The
Chinese took twenty-two years…”

“Do you suspect them?”
Martinho glanced at his companion, noting the glower of
concentration of Alvarez’s face. “They will not let us
inspect their results.”

“The Chinese are paranoid. They
leaned that way before they ever collided with the Western world
and the Western world merely confirmed them in this sickness.
Suspect the Chinese? I don’t think so.”

“I do,” Martinho said.
“I suspect everyone.”

A feeling of gloom overtook him at the
sound of his own words. It was true – he suspected everyone,
even Benito here, and Chen-Lhu… and the lovely Rhin Kelly.
He said, “I think often of the ancient insecticides, how the
insects grew ever stronger in spite of – or because of
– the insect poisons.”

A sound behind them caught
Martinho’s attention. He put a hand on Alvarez’s arm,
stopped the shield, turned.

It was Vierho followed by a slave-cart
piled with gear. Martinho identified a long, pry bar there, a large
body hood that must have been intended for Alvarez, packages of
plastic explosive.

“Jefe… I thought you would
need these things.” Vierho said.

A feeling of affection for the Padre
swept through Martinho and he spoke bruskly: “Stay close
behind and out of the way, you hear?”

“Of course, Jefe. Don’t I
always?” He held the body hood towards Alvarez. “This I
brought for you, Jefe Alvarez, that you might not suffer another
hurt.”

“I thank you, Padre,”
Alvarez said, “but I prefer freedom of movement. Besides,
this old body has so many scars, one more will make little
difference.”

Martinho glanced around him, noted that
other shields were advancing across the lawn.
“Quickly,” he said, “we must be the first
there.”

Alvarez rotated the control handle.
Again their shield ground its way toward the fountain.

Vierho came up close beside his chief,
spoke in a low voice: “Jefe, there are stories back there at
the truck. It is said that some creature ate the pilings from under
a warehouse at the waterfront. The warehouse collapsed. People were
killed. There is much upset.”

“Chen-Lhu hinted at this,”
Martinho said.

“Is this not the place?”
Alvarez asked.

“Stop the shield,” Martinho
said. He stared at the grass ahead of them, searching out the place
– the relationship to the fountain, the grass marked by the
previous passage of their shield.

“This is the place,” he
said. He passed his carbine to Vierho, said, “Give me that
prybar… and a stun charge.”

Vierho handed him a small packet of
plastic explosive with detonator, the kind of charge they used in
the Red areas to break up an insect nest in the ground. Martinho
pulled his head shield down tight, took the prybar. “Vierho,
cover me from here. Benito – can you use a
handlight?”

“Of course, Johnny.”

“Jefe… you are not going
to use the shield?”

“There isn’t time.”
He stepped around the shield before Vierho could answer. The beam
of a handlight stabbed down at the ground ahead of him. He
crouched, slid the tip of the prybar along the grass, digging,
pushing. The bar caught, then slipped down into emptiness.
Something touched it down there, and an electric tingle shot all
through Martinho.

“Padre, down here,” he
whispered.

Vierho leaned over him with the
carbine. “Jefe?”

“Just ahead of the bar –
into the ground.”

Vierho aimed, squeezed off two
shots.

A violent scrabbling noise erupted
under the lawn ahead of them. Something splashed there.

Again, Vierho fired. The blast pellets
made a curious thumping sound as they exploded under the
ground.

There came the liquid sound of furious
activity down there – as though there were a school of fish
feeding at the surface.

Silence.

More handlights glared on to the lawn
ahead of him. Martinho looked up to see a ring of shields around
them – IEO and bandeirante uniforms.

Again he focused on the patch of
lawn.

“Padre, I’m going to pry it
up. Be ready.”

“Of course, Jefe.”

Martinho put a foot under the bar as
fulcrum, leaned on his end. The trapdoor lifted slowly. It appeared
to be sealed with a gummy mixture that came up in trailing sheets.
A whiff of sulphur and corrosive sublimate told Martinho what the
sealant must be – the butyl carrier he’d fired from the
sprayrifle. With a sudden giving, the door swung up, flopped back
on to the lawn.

Handlights were beside Martinho now,
probing downward to reveal oily black water. It had the smell of
the river.

“They came in from the
river,” Alvarez said.

Chen-Lhu came up beside Martinho, said,
“The masqueraders appear to have escaped. How
convenient.” And he thought: I was correct to give Rhin
her orders when I did. We must get a line into their organization.
This is the enemy: this bandeirante leader who was educated among
the Yankee imperialists. He is one of those who’re trying to
destroy us; there can be no other answer.

Martinho ignored Chen-Lhu’s jibe;
he was too weary even to be angry with the fool. He stood up,
looked around the Plaza. The air held a stillness as though the
entire sky awaited some calamity. A few watchers remained beyond
the expanded ring of guards – privileged officials, probably
– but the mob had been cleared back into adjoining
streets.

A small red groundcar could be seen
coming down an avenue from the left, its windows glittering under
the slavelights as it scuttled toward the Plaza. Its three
headlights darted in and out as it skirted people and vehicles.
Guards opened a way for it. Martinho recognized the IEO insignia on
its tonneau as it neared. The car jerked to a fast stop at the edge
of the lawn and Rhin Kelly jumped out.

She had changed to coveralls of IEO
working green. They looked almost like sun-bleached grass under the
yellow lights of the Plaza.

She strode across the lawn, her
attention fixed on Martinho, thinking: He must be used and
discarded. He’s the enemy. That’s obvious now.

Martinho watched her approach, admiring
the grace and femininity which the simple uniform only
accented.

She stopped in front of him, spoke in a
husky, urgent voice: “Senhor Martinho, I’ve come to
save your life.”

He shook his head, not quite believing
he’d heard her correctly. “What…”

“All hell is about to break
loose,” she said.

Martinho grew aware of distant
shouting.

“A mob,” she said.
“Armed.”

“What the devil’s going
on?” he demanded.

“There’ve been some deaths
tonight,” she said. “Women and children among them. A
section of the hill collapsed behind Monte Ochoa. There’re
burrows all through that hill.”

Vierho said, “The
orphanage…”

“Yes,” she said. “The
orphanage and convent on Monte Ochoa were buried. Bandeirantes are
blamed. You know what is being said about…”

“I’ll talk to these
people,” Martinho said. He felt outrage at the thought of
being threatened by those he served. “This is nonsense!
We’ve done nothing to…”

“Jefe,” Vierho said,
“you do not reason with a mob.”

“Two men of the Lifcado band
already have been lynched,” Rhin said. “You have a
chance if you run now. Your trucks are here, enough for all of
you.”

Vierho took his arm. “Jefe, we
must do as he says.”

Martinho stood silently, hearing the
information being passed among the bandeirantes around them –
“A mob… the blame on us…
orphanage…”

“Where could we go?” he
asked.

“This violence appears to be
local,” Chen-Lhu said. He paused, listening: the mob sounds
had grown louder. “Go to your father’s place in Cuiaba.
Take your band with you. The others can go to your bases in the
Red.”

“Why must I…”

“I will send Rhin to you when
we’ve devised a plan of action.”

“I must know where to find
you,” Rhin said, picking up her cue. And she thought: The
father’s place, yes. That must be the center of it…
there or the Goyaz as Travis suspects.

“But we’ve done
nothing,” Martinho said.

“Please,” she said.

Vierho tugged his arm.

Martinho took a deep breath.
“Padre, go with the men. It’ll be safer out there in
the Red. I’ll take the small truck and go to Cuiaba. I must
discuss this with my father, the Prefect. Someone must get to the
seat of government and make the people there listen.”

“Listen to what?” Alvarez
asked.

“The… work must be
halted… temporarily,” Martinho said. “There must
be an investigation.”

“That is foolish!” Alvarez
barked. “Who will listen to such talk as that?”

Martinho tried to swallow in a dry
throat. The night around him felt cold, oppressive… and the
mob sounds had grown louder. Police and military guards
wouldn’t be able to hold back that angered, many-celled
monster much longer.

“They cannot afford to
listen,” Alvarez muttered. “Even if you’re
right.”

The mob sounds punctuated the truth in
those words, Martinho knew. The men in power couldn’t admit
failure. They were in power because of certain promises. If those
promises weren’t kept, someone would have to be found to take
the blame.

Perhaps someone’s already been
found, he thought.

He allowed Vierho to lead them toward
the trucks.

Chapter IV

IT WAS a cave high above wet black
rocks of a Goyaz river gorge. In the cave, thoughts pulsed through
a brain as it listened to a radio on which a human announcer
related the day’s news: riots in Bahia, bandeirantes lynched,
paratroopers landed to restore order…

The radio, a small battery-powered
portable, made a tinny racket in the cave that irritated the
brain’s sensors, but human news had to be monitored…
as long as the batteries held out. Perhaps biochemical cells could
be used after that, but the brain’s mechanical knowledge was
limited. Theory it had in abundance from filmbook libraries
abandoned in the Red, but practical knowledge was another
matter.

There’d been a portable
television for a while, but its range had been limited and now it
no longer worked.

News ended and music blared from the
speaker. The brain signaled for the instrument to be silenced. The
brain lay there then in the welcome silence, thinking, pulsing.

It was a mass about four meters in
diameter and half a meter deep, knowing itself as a “Supreme
Integration,” filled with passive alertness, yet always more
than a little irritated by the necessities which kept it anchored
to this cave sanctuary.

A mobile sensory mask which it could
shift and flex at will – forming now a disc, then a
membranous funnel, and even the simulation of a giant human face
– lay like a cap across the brain’s surface, its
sensors directed toward gray dawnlight at the cave mouth.

The rhythmic pulsing of a yellow sac at
one side pumped a dark viscous fluid into the brain. Wingless
insects crawled over its surface membranes – inspecting,
repairing, giving special foods where needed.

Specialist hives of winged insects
clustered in fissures of the cave, some producing acids, some
breaking down the acids for their oxygen, some digesting, some
providing the muscles for pumping.

A bitter-clean acid smell permeated the
cave.

Insects flew in and out of the
dawnlight. Some paused to dance and sway and hum for the
brain’s sensors; some used modulated stridulations to report;
some appeared in special groups aligned a special way; some formed
complex patterns with changes on coloration; some waved antennae in
intricate ways.

Now came the relay from Bahia:
“Much rain – wet ground; the burrows of our listening
post collapsed. An observer was seen and attacked, but a monitor
brought it to safety by tunneling from the river. The river tunnels
brought collapse of a structure there. We left no evidence except
what was seen of us by the humans. Those of us who could not escape
were destroyed.”

“There were deaths among the
humans.”

Deaths among the humans, the
brain reflected. Then the radio reports were correct.

This was disaster.

The brain’s oxygen demand
increased; attendant insects sped over it; the pumping rhythm
increased its pace.

The humans will believe themselves
attacked, the brain thought. The complex defense posture of
humankind will be activated. To penetrate that posture with calm
reasoning will be most difficult if not impossible.

Who can reason with
unreason?

The humans were very difficult to
understand with their gods and their accumulation patterns.

“Business” was what the
books called their accumulation pattern, but the sense of it eluded
the brain. Money could not be eaten, it stored no apparent energy,
and was a poor building material. Wattle and daub taipa
houses of the poorest humans had more substance.

Still, the humans grubbed for it. The
stuff had to be important. It had to be every bit as important as
their god-concept, which appeared to be something like a supreme
integration whose substance and location could not be defined. Most
disturbing.

Somewhere, the brain felt, there must
be a thought-mode to make these matters understandable, but the
pattern escaped it.

The brain thought then how strange it
was, this thought-mode of existence, this transference of
internal energy to create imaginary visions that were in fact plans
and schemes and that sometimes must move for a way along
non-survival paths. How curious, how subtle, yet how beautiful was
this human discovery which had now been copied and adapted to the
uses of other creatures. How admirable and elevated it was, this
manipulation of the universe that existed only within the passive
confines of imagination.

For a moment, the brain tested itself,
attempting to simulate human emotions. Fear and the hive-oneness
– these it could understand. But the permutations, the
variance of fear called hate, the blister-sided reflexes
– these were more difficult.

Never once did the brain consider that
it once had been part of a human and subject to such emotions.
Intrusion of those thoughts had been found irritating. They had
been excised at its own direction. Now the brain was only vaguely
like its human counterpart, larger, more complex. No human
circulatory system could support its needs for nourishment. No
merely human sensory system could supply its voracious appetite for
information.

It was simply Brain, a
functional part of the superhive system – more important now
than even the queens.

“Which class of humans was
killed?” it asked.

The answer came in low stridulations:
“Workers, females, immature humans and some barren
queens.”

Females and immature humans, the
brain thought. It formed on the screen of its awareness an Indian
curse whose source had been excised. With such deaths, the human
reaction would be most violent. Quick action was imperative.

“What word from our messengers
who penetrated the barrier?” the brain asked.

The answer came: “Hiding place of
the messenger group unknown.”

“The messengers must be found.
They must stay in hiding until a more opportune moment. Communicate
that order at once.”

Specialist workers departed at once to
obey the order.

“We must capture a more varied
sample of humans,” the brain commanded. “We must find a
vulnerable leader among them. Send out observers and messengers and
action units. Report as soon as possible.”

The brain listened then, hearing its
orders being obeyed, thinking of the messages being carried off
across the distances. Vague frustrations stirred in the brain,
needs for which it had no answers. It raised its sensory mask on
supporting stalks, formed eyes and focused them upon the cave
mouth.

Full daylight.

Now it could only wait.

Waiting was the most difficult part of
existence.

The brain began examining this thought,
forming corollaries and interweavings of possible alternatives to
the waiting process, imagining projections of physical growth that
might obviate waiting.

The thoughts produced a form of
intellectual indigestion that alarmed the supporting hives. They
buzzed furiously around the brain, shielding it, feeding it,
forming phalanxes of warriors in the cave mouth.

This action brought worry to the
brain.

The brain knew what had set its cohorts
into motion: guarding the precious-core of the hive was an
instinct rooted in species survival. Primitive hive units could not
change that pattern, the brain realized. They had to change,
though. They had to learn mobility of need, mobility of judgment,
taking each situation as a unique thing.

I must go on teaching and
learning, the brain thought.

It wished then for reports from the
tiny observers it had sent eastward. The need for information from
that area was enormous – something to fill out the bits and
scraps garnered from the listening posts. Vital proof might come
from there to sway humankind from its headlong plunge into the
death-for-all.

Slowly, the hive reduced its activity
as the brain withdrew from the painful edges of thought.

Meanwhile, we wait, the brain
told itself.

And it set itself the problem of a
slight gene alteration in a wingless wasp to improve on the oxygen
generation system.

Senhor Gabriel Martinho, prefect of the
Mato Grosso Barrier Compact, paced his study, muttering to himself
as he passed a tall, narrow window that admitted evening sunlight.
Occasionally he paused to glare down at his son, Joao, who sat on a
tapir-leather sofa beneath one of the bookcases that lined the
room.

The elder Martinho was a dark wisp of a
man, limb thin, with gray hair and cavernous brown eyes above an
eagle nose, slit mouth and boot-toe chin. He wore old style black
clothing as befitted his position. His linen gleamed white against
the black. Golden cuffstuds glittered as he waved his arms.

“I am an object of
ridicule,” he snarled.

Joao absorbed the statement in silence.
After a full week of listening to his father’s outbursts,
Joao had learned the value of silence. He looked down at his
bandeirante dress whites, the trousers tucked into calf-high jungle
boots – everything crisp and glistening and clean while his
men sweated out the preliminary survey on the Serra dos
Parcecis.

It began to grow dark in the room,
quick tropic darkness hurried by thunderheads piled along the
horizon. The waning daylight carried a hazed blue cast. Head
lightning spattered the patch of sky visible through the tall
window, and sent dazzling electric radiance into the study.
Drumming thunder followed. As though that were the signal, the
house sensors turned on lights wherever there were humans. Yellow
illumination filled the study.

The Prefect stopped in front of his
son. “Why does my own son, the renowned Jefe of the
Irmandades, spout such Carsonite stupidities?”

Joao looked at the floor between his
boots. The fight in the Bahia Plaza, the flight from the mob
– all that just a week away – seemed an eternity
distant, part of someone else’s past. This day had seen a
succession of important political people through his father’s
study – polite greetings for the renowned Joao Martinho and
low-voiced conferences with his father.

The old man was fighting for his son
– Joao knew this. But the elder Martinho could only fight in
the way he knew best: through the ritual kin system, with pistolao
“pull” – maneuvering behind the scenes,
exchanging power-promises, assembling political strength where it
counted. Not once would he consider Joao’s suspicions and
doubts. The Irmandades, Alvarez and his Hermosillos – anyone
who’d had anything to do with the Piratininga – were in
bad odor right now. Fences must be mended.

“Stop the realignment?” the
old man muttered. “Delay the Marcha para Oeste? Are you mad?
How do you think I hold my office? Me! A descendant of fidalgoes
whose ancestors ruled one of the original capitanias! We are not
bugres whose ancestors were hidden by Rui Barbosa, yet the
caboclos call me “Father of the Poor.” I did not
gain that name through stupidity.”

“Father, if you’d
only…”

“Be silent! I have our
panelinha, our little pot, boiling merrily. All will be
well.”

Joao sighed. He felt both resentment
and shame at his position here. The Prefect had been semi-retired
until this emergency – a very weak heart. Now, to
disturb the old man this way… but he persisted in being so
blind!

“Investigate, you say,” the
old man mocked him. “Investigate what? Right now we
don’t want investigation and suspicions. The Government,
thanks to a week of work by my friends, takes the attitude that
everything’s normal. They’re almost ready to blame the
Carsonites for the Bahia tragedy.”

“But they have no
evidence,” Joao said. “You admitted that
yourself.”

“Evidence is of no importance in
such a time,” his father said. “All that counts is that
we move suspicion far away from ourselves. We must gain time.
Besides, this is the very sort of thing the Carsonites
might’ve done.”

“But might not’ve
done,” Joao said.

It was as though the old man had not
heard. “Just last week,” he said, gesturing with arm
swinging wide, “the day before you arrived here like an
insane whirlwind – that very day, I spoke to the Lacuia
farmers at the request of my friend the Minister of Agriculture.
And do you know that rabble laughed at me! I said we’d
increase the Green by ten thousand hectares this month. They
laughed. They said: “Your own son doesn’t even believe
this!” I see now why they say such things. Stop the march to
the west, indeed.”

“You’ve seen the reports
from Bahia,” Joao said. “The IEO’s own
investigators…”

“The IEO! That sly Chinese
whose face tells you nothing. He is more bahiano than the bahianos
themselves, that sly one. And this new female Doutor he
sends everywhere to snoop and pry. His mae de santo, his
sidaga – the stories you hear about that one, I can
tell you. Only yesterday, it was said…”

“I don’t want to
hear!”

The old man fell silent, stared down at
him. “Ahhhh?”

“Ahhhh!” Joao said.
“What does that mean?”

“That means Ahhhh!”
the old man said.

“She’s a very beautiful
woman,” Joao said.

“So I have heard it reported. And
many men have sampled that beauty… so it is said.”

“I don’t believe
it!”

“Joao,” the Prefect said,
“listen to an old man whose experience has given him wisdom.
That is a dangerous woman. She is owned body and soul by the
IEO, which is an organization that often interferes with our
business. You, you are an empreiteiro, a contractor of
renown, whose abilities and successes are sure to have aroused envy
in some quarters. That woman is supposed to be a Doutor of
the insects, but her actions say she has a cabide de
empregos. She has a hatstand of jobs. And some of those jobs,
ahh, some of those jobs…”

“That’s enough,
Father!”

“As you wish.”

“She is supposed to come here
soon,” Joao said. “I don’t want your present
attitude to…”

“There may be a delay in her
visit,” the Prefect said.

Joao studied him.
“Why?”

“Tuesday last, the day after your
little Bahia episode, she was sent to the Goyaz. That very
night or the next morning; it is not important,”

“Oh?”

“You know what she does in the
Goyaz, of course – those stories about a secret bandeirante
base there. She is prying into that… if she still
lives.”

Joao’s head snapped up.
“What?”

“There is a story in the Bahia
headquarters of the IEO that she is… overdue. An accident,
perhaps. It is said that tomorrow the great Travis-Huntington
Chen-Lhu himself goes to seek his female Doutor. What do you
think of that?”

“He seemed fond of her, when I
saw them in Bahia, but this story about…”

“Fond? Oh, yes,
indeed.”

“You have an evil mind,
Father.” He took a deep breath. The thought of that lovely
woman down somewhere in the deep interland where only jungle
creatures now lived, dead or maimed – all that beauty –
it left Joao with a feeling of sick emptiness.

“Perhaps you’ll wish to
march to the west to seek her?”

Joao ignored the jibe, said,
“Father, this whole crusade needs a rest period while we find
out what’s gone wrong.”

“If you talked that way in Bahia,
I don’t blame them for turning on you,” the Prefect
said. “Perhaps that mob…”

“You know what we saw in
that Plaza!”

“Nonsense, but yesterday’s
nonsense. This must stop now. You must do nothing to disturb the
equilibrium. I command you!”

“People no longer suspect the
bandeirantes,” Joao said, bitterness in his voice.

“Some still suspect you, yes. And
why not, if what I’ve heard from your own lips is any sample
of the way you talk?”

Joao studied the toes of his boots, the
polish glittering black. He found their unmarked surfaces somehow
symbolic of his father’s life. “I’m sorry
I’ve distressed you, Father,” he said. “Sometimes
I regret that I’m a bandeirante, but” – he
shrugged – “without that, how could I have learned the
things I’ve told you? The truth is…”

“Joao!” His father’s
voice quavered. “Do you sit there and tell me you besmirched
our honor? Did you swear a false oath when you formed your
Irmandades?”

“That’s not the way it was,
Father.”

“Oh? Then how was it?”

Joao pulled a sprayman’s emblem
from his breast pocket, fingered it. “I believed it…
then. We could shape mutated bees to fill every gap in the insect
ecology. It was a… Great Crusade. This I believed. Like the
people of China, I said: ‘Only the useful shall live!’
And I meant it. But that was quite a few years ago, Father.
I’ve come to realize since then that we don’t have
complete understanding of what’s useful.”

“It was a mistake to have you
educated in North America,” his father said. “I blame
myself for that. Yes – I am the one to blame for that.
There’s where you absorbed this Carsonite heresy.
It’s all well and good for them to refuse to join us
in the Ecological Realignment; they don’t have as many
millions of mouths to feed. But my own son!”

Joao spoke defensively: “Out in
the Red you see things, Father. These things are difficult to
explain. Plants look healthier out there. The fruit
is…”

“A purely temporary
condition,” his father said. “We’ll shape bees to
meet whatever need we find. The destroyers take food from our
mouths. It’s very simple. They must die and be replaced by
creatures which serve a function useful to man.”

“The birds are dying,
Father.”

“We’re saving the birds!
We’ve specimens of every kind in our sanctuaries. We’ll
provide new foods for them to…”

“Some plants already have
disappeared from lack of natural pollination.”

“No useful plant has been
lost!”

“And what happens,” Joao
asked, “if our barriers are breached by the insects before
we’ve replaced the population of natural predators? What
happens then?”

The elder Martinho shook a thin finger
under his son’s nose. “This nonsense must stop!
I’ll hear no more of it! Do you hear?”

“Please calm yourself,
Father.”

“Calm myself? How can I calm
myself in the face of… of… this? You here
hiding like a common criminal! Riots in Bahia and Santarem
and…”

“Father, stop
it!”

“I will not stop it. Do you know
what else those mameluco farmers in Lacuia said to me? They said
bandeirantes have been seen reinfesting the Green to prolong their
jobs! That is what they said.”

“That’s nonsense,
Father!”

“Of course it’s nonsense!
But it’s a natural consequence of defeatist talk just such as
I’ve heard from you here today. And all the setbacks we
suffer add strength to such charges.”

“Setbacks, Father?”

“I have said it:
setbacks!”

Senhor Prefect Martinho turned, paced
to his desk and back. Again, he stopped in front of his son, placed
hands on hips. “You refer, of course, to the
Piratininga.”

“Among others.”

“Your Irmandades were on that
line.”

“Not so much as a flea got
through us!”

“Yet a week ago the Piratininga
was Green. Today…” He pointed to his desk. “You
saw the report. It’s crawling. Crawling!”

“I cannot watch every bandeirante
in the Mato Grosso,” Joao said. “If
they…”

“The IEO gives us only six months
to clean up,” the elder Martinho said. He raised his hands,
palms up; his face was flushed. “Six
months!”

“If you’d only go to your
friends in the government and convince them of
what…”

“Convince them? Walk in and tell
them to commit political suicide? My friends? Do you know the IEO
is threatening to throw an embargo around all Brazil – the
way they’ve done with North America?” He lowered his
hands. “Can you imagine the pressures on us? Can you imagine
the things that I must listen to about the bandeirantes and
especially about my own son?”

Joao gripped the sprayman’s
emblem until it dug into his palm. A week of this was almost more
than he could bear. He longed to be out with his men, preparing for
the fight in the Serra dos Parecis. His father had been too long in
politics to change – and Joao realized this with a feeling of
sickness. He looked up at his father. If only the old man
weren’t so excitable – the concern about his heart.
“You excite yourself needlessly,” he said.

“Excite myself!”

The Prefect’s nostrils dilated;
he bent toward his son. “Already we’ve gone past two
deadlines – the Piratininga and the Tefe. That is land in
there, don’t you understand? And there are no men on that
land, farming it, making it produce!”

“The Piratininga was not a full
barrier, Father. We’d just cleared the…”

“Yes! And we gained an extension
of deadline when I announced that my son and the redoubtable Benito
Alvarez had cleared the Piratininga. How do you explain now that it
is reinfested, that we have the work to do over?”

“I don’t explain
it.”

Joao returned the sprayman’s
emblem to his pocket. It was obvious he wouldn’t be able to
reason with his father. It had been growing increasingly obvious
throughout the week. Frustration sent a nerve quivering along
Joao’s jaw. The old man had to be convinced, though! Someone
had to be convinced. Someone of his father’s political
stature had to get back to the Bureau, shake them up there and make
them listen.

The Prefect returned to his desk, sat
down. He picked up an antique crucifix, one that the great
Aleihadinho had carved in ivory. He lifted it, obviously seeking to
restore his serenity, but his eyes went wide and glaring. Slowly,
he returned the crucifix to his desk, keeping his attention on
it.

“Joao,” he whispered.

It’s his heart! Joao
thought.

He leaped to his feet, rushed to his
father’s side. “Father! What is it?”

The elder Martinho pointed, hand
trembling.

Through the spiked crown of thorns,
across the agonized ivory face, over the straining muscles, of the
Christ figure crawled an insect. It was the color of the ivory,
shaped faintly like a beetle but with a multi-clawed fringe along
wings and thorax, and with furry edgings to its abnormally long
antennae.

The elder Martinho reached for a roll
of papers to smash the insect, but Joao restrained him with a hand.
“Wait. This is a new one. I’ve never seen anything like
it. Give me a handlight. We must follow it, find where it
nests.”

The Prefect muttered under his breath,
withdrew a small permalight from a desk drawer, handed the light to
his son.

Joao held the light without using it,
peered at the insect. “How strange it is,” he said.
“See how it exactly matches the tones of ivory.”

The insect stopped, pointed its
antennae toward the men.

“Things have been seen,”
Joao said. “There are stories. Something like this was found
near one of the barrier villages last month. It was inside the
Green… on a path beside a river. Remember the report? Two
farmers found it while searching for a sick man.” Joao looked
at his father. “They’re very watchful for sickness in
the newly Green, you know. There’ve been epidemics…
and that’s another thing.”

“There’s no
relationship,” his father snapped. “Without insects to
carry diseases, we’ll have less illness.”

“Perhaps,” Joao said, but
his tone said he didn’t believe it.

Joao returned his attention to the
insect on the crucifix. “I don’t think our ecologists
know all they say they do. And I mistrust our Chinese advisors.
They speak in such flowery terms of the benefits from eliminating
insect pests, but they won’t let us inspect their
Green. Excuses. Always excuses. I think they’re
having troubles they don’t wish us to discover.”

“That’s foolishness,”
the elder Martinho growled, but his tone said that wasn’t a
position he cared to defend. “They are honorable men –
with a few exceptions I could name. And their way of life is closer
to our socialism than it is to the decadent capitalism of North
America. Your trouble is you see them too much through the eyes of
those who educated you.”

“I’ll wager this
insect’s one of the spontaneous mutations,” Joao said.
“It’s almost as though they appeared by some
plan… Find me something in which to capture this creature
and take it to the lab.”

The elder Martinho remained standing
beside his chair. “Where’ll you say it was
found?”

“Right here.”

“You would not hesitate to expose
us to more ridicule, is that it?”

“But Father…”

“Can’t you hear what
they’ll say? In his own home this insect is found. It’s
a strange new kind. Perhaps he breeds them there to reinfest the
Green.”

“Now, you’re talking
nonsense, Father. Mutations are common in a threatened species. And
we can’t deny there’s threat to these insects –
the poisons, the barrier vibrations, the traps. Get me that
container, Father. I can’t leave this creature, or I’d
get the container myself.”

“And you will tell where it was
found?”

“I can do nothing else! We must
cordon off this entire area, search out the nests. This could
be… an accident, of course, but…”

“Or a deliberate attempt to
embarrass me.”

Joao looked up, studied his father.
That was a possibility, of course. His father did have
enemies. And the Carsonites were always there to be considered.
They had friends in many places ,.. and some were fanatics
who’d stoop to any scheme. Still…

Decision came to Joao. He returned his
attention to the motionless insect. His father had to be convinced,
and here was the perfect lever for the argument.

“Look at this creature,
Father,” he said.

The Prefect turned a reluctant gaze on
the insect.

“Our earliest poisons,”
Joao said, “killed off the weak and selected out those immune
to this threat from humans. Only the immune remained to breed. The
poisons we use now – some of them – don’t leave
such loopholes… and the deadly vibrations at the
barriers…” He shrugged. “Still, this is a form
of beetle, Father, and somehow it got through the barriers.
I’ll show you a thing.”

Joao drew a long, thin whistle of shiny
metal from his breast pocket. “There was a time when this
called countless beetles to their deaths. I merely had to tune it
across their attraction spectrum.” He put the whistle to his
lips, blew into it, all the while turning the end of it.

No sound audible to human ears emerged
from the instrument, but the beetle’s antennae writhed.

Joao removed the whistle from his
mouth.

The antennae stopped writhing.

“It stayed put, you see,”
Joao said. “It’s a beetle and should be attracted by
this whistle, but it did not move. And I think, Father, that
there’re indications of malignant intelligence among these
creatures. They’re far from extinction, Father… and I
believe they’re beginning to strike back.”

“Malignant intelligence,
pah!” his father said.

“You must believe me,
Father,” Joao said. “No one listens when we
bandeirantes report what we’ve seen. They laugh and say we
are too long in the jungle. And where’s our evidence? They
say such stories could be expected from ignorant farmers…
then they begin to doubt and suspect us.”

“With good reason, I
say.”

“You will not believe your own
son?”

“What has my son said that I can
believe?” The elder Martinho was totally the Prefect now,
standing erect, glaring coldly at Joao.

“In the Goyaz last month,”
Joao said, “Antonil Lisboa’s bandeirante lost three men
who…”

“Accidents.”

“They were killed with formic
acid and oil of copahu.”

“They were careless with their
poisons. Men grow careless when they…”

“No! The formic acid was
particularly strong, a heavy concentrate, and identical to that of
insect origin. The men were drenched with it.”

“You imply that insects such as
this…” The Prefect pointed to the motionless creature
on the crucifix. “That blind creatures such as
this…”

“They’re not
blind.”

“I did not mean literally blind,
but without intelligence,” the Prefect said. “You
cannot seriously imply that such creatures attacked humans and
killed them.”

“We’ve yet to determine
precisely how the men were slain,” Joao said.
“We’ve only the bodies and physical evidence at the
scene. But there’ve been other deaths, Father, and men
missing, and reports of strange creatures that attack bandeirantes.
We grow more certain with each day that…”

He fell silent as the beetle crawled
off the crucifix on to the desk. Immediately it darkened to brown,
blended with the wood surface.

“Please, Father – get me a
container.”

The beetle reached the edge of the
desk, hesitated. Its antennae curled back, then forward.

“I’ll get your container
only if you promise to use discretion in your report of where this
creature was found,” the Prefect said.

“Father!…”

The beetle leaped off the desk far out
into the middle of the room, scurried toward the wall, up the wall
and into a crack beside the window.

Joao pressed the handlight’s
switch, directed the beam into the hole which had swallowed the
insect. He crossed the room, examined the hole.

“How long has this hole been
here, Father?”

“For years. It was a flaw in the
masonry… an earthquake several years before your mother
died, I believe.”

Joao crossed to the door in four
strides, went through an arched hallway, down a flight of stone
steps, through another door and short hall, through a grillework
gate and into the outside garden. He set the handlight at full
intensity, washed its blue glare over the wall beneath the study
window. “Joao, what are you doing?”

“My job, Father.” Joao
glanced back, saw that the Prefect had followed and stopped just
outside the garden gate.

Joao returned his attention to the
study wall, washed the glare of light on to the stones beneath the
window. He crouched low, running the light along the ground, peered
behind each clod, erased all shadows.

The searching scrutiny passed over the
raw earth, turned to the bushes, then the lawn. Joao heard his
father come up behind.

“Do you see it?”

“No.”

“You should’ve allowed me
to crush it.”

Joao stood up, stared upward toward the
tiled roof and the eaves. It was full dark all around now, with
only the light from the study plus his handlight to reveal
details.

A piercing stridulation, almost painful
to the ears, filled the air all around them. It came from the outer
garden that bordered the road and the stone fence. Even after it
was gone, the sound seemed to hang all around them. It made Joao
think of the hunting cry of jungle predators. A shiver moved up his
spine. He turned toward the driveway where he had parked his
airtruck, sent the handlight stabbing there.

“What a strange sound,” his
father said, “I…” He broke off, stared at the
lawn. “What is that?”

The lawn appeared to be in motion,
reaching out toward them like a wave curling on a beach. Already
the wave had cut them off from the entrance to the house. It still
was some ten paces away, but moving in rapidly.

Joao clutched his father’s arm.
He spoke quietly, hoping not to alarm the old man further, mindful
of the weak heart. “We must get to my truck, Father. We must
run across them.”

“Them?”

“Those are like the insect we saw
inside, Father – millions of them. They are attacking.
Perhaps they’re not beetles after all. Perhaps they’re
like army ants. We must make it to the truck. I have equipment and
supplies there to fight them off. We’ll be safe in the truck.
It’s a bandeirante truck, Father. You must run with me, do
you understand? I’ll help you, but you must not stumble
and fall into them.”

“I understand.”

They began to run, Joao holding his
father’s arm, pointing the way with the light.

Let his heart be strong enough,
Joao prayed.

They were into the wave of insects
then, but the creatures leaped aside, opening a path which closed
behind the running men.

The white form of the airtruck loomed
out of the shadows at the far curve of the driveway about fifteen
meters ahead.

“Joao… my heart,”
the elder Martinho gasped.

“You can make it,” Joao
panted. “Faster!” He almost lifted his father from the
ground for the last few paces.

They were at the wide rear doors into
the truck’s lab compartment now. Joao yanked open the doors,
slapped the light switch on the left wall, reached for a hood and
sprayrifle. He stopped, stared into the yellow-lighted
interior.

Two men sat there – sertao
Indians, by the look of them, with bright glaring eyes and bang-cut
black hair beneath straw hats. They looked to be identical twins,
even to the same mud-gray clothing and sandals, leather shoulder
bags. The beetle-like insects crawled around them, up the lab
walls, over the instruments and vials.

“What the devil?” Joao
blurted.

One of the pair lifted a qena
flute, gestured with it. He spoke in a rasping, oddly inflected
voice: “Enter. You will not be harmed if you obey.”

Joao felt his father sag, caught the
old man in his arms. How light he felt. The old man breathed in
short, painful gasps. His face was pale blue. Sweat stood out on
his forehead.

“Joao,” the Prefect
whispered. “Pain… my chest.”

“The medicine,” Joao said.
“Where is your medicine?”

“House,” the old man said.
“Desk.”

“It appears to be dying,”
one of the Indians rasped.

Still holding his father in his arms,
Joao whirled toward the pair, blazed: “I don’t know who
you are or why you loosed those bugs here, but my father’s
dying and needs help. Get out of my way!”

“Obey or both die,” said
the Indian with the flute. “Enter.”

“He needs his medicine and a
doctor,” Joao pleaded. He didn’t like the way the
Indian pointed that flute. The motion suggested the instrument was
actually a weapon.

“What part has failed?”
asked the other Indian. He stared curiously at Joao’s father.
The old man’s breathing had become shallow and rapid.

“It’s his heart,”
Joao said. “I know you farmers don’t think he’s
acted fast enough for…”

“Not farmers,” said the one
with the flute. “Heart?”

“Pump,” said the
other.

“Pump,” said the Indian
with the flute. He stood up from the bench at the front of the lab,
gestured down, “Put… father here.”

The other one got off the bench, stood
aside.

In spite of fear for his father, Joao
was caught by the strange appearance of this pair, the fine,
scale-like lines in their skin, the glittering brilliance of their
eyes. Were they hopped up on some jungle narcotic?

“Put father here,” repeated
the one with the flute. Again, he pointed at the bench. “Help
can be…”

“Attained,” said the other
one.

“Attained,” said the one
with the flute.

Joao focused now, the masses of insects
around the walls, the waiting quietude in their ranks. They were
like the one in the study. Identical.

The old man’s breathing now was
very shallow, very rapid. Joao felt the fluttering of each breath
in his arms and against his chest.

He’s dying, Joao thought
in desperation.

“Help can be attained,”
repeated the Indian with the flute. “If you obey, we will not
harm.”

The Indian lifted his flute, pointed it
at Joao. “Obey.”

There was no mistaking the gesture. The
thing was a weapon.

Slowly, Joao stepped up into the truck,
crossed to the bench, lowered his father gently on to the padded
surface.

The Indian with the flute motioned him
to step back and he obeyed.

The other Indian bent over the elder
Martinho’s head, raised an eyelid. There was a professional
directness about the gesture that startled Joao. The Indian pushed
gently on the dying man’s diaphragm, removed the
Prefect’s belt, loosened his collar. A stubby brown finger
was placed against the artery in the old man’s neck.

“Very weak,” the Indian
rasped.

Joao took another look at the Indian,
wondering at a sertao backwoodsman who behaved like a
doctor.

“Hospital,” the Indian
agreed.

“Hospital?” asked the one
with the flute.

A low, stridulant hissing came from the
other Indian.

“Hospital,” said the one
with the flute.

That stridulant hissing! Joao stared at
the Indian beside the Prefect. That sound had been reminiscent of
the call that had echoed across the lawn.

The one with the flute poked him, said,
“You. Go into front and maneuver this…”

“Vehicle,” said the one
beside Joao’s father.

“Vehicle,” said the one
with the flute.

“Hospital?” Joao
pleaded.

“Hospital,” agreed the one
with the flute.

Once more, Joao looked at his father.
The old man was so still. The other Indian already was strapping
the elder Martinho to the bench in preparation for flight. How
competent the man appeared in spite of his backwoods look.

“Obey,” said the one with
the flute.

Joao opened the hatch into the front
compartment, slipped through, felt the armed Indian follow. A few
drops of rain spattered darkly against the curved windshield. Joao
squeezed into the operator’s seat. The compartment went dark
as the hatch was closed. Solenoids threw the automatic hatch dogs
with a dull thump. Joao turned on the dash standby lights, noted
how the Indian crouched behind him, flute pointed and ready.

A dart gun of some kind, Joao
guessed. Probably poison.

He punched the igniter button on the
dash, strapped himself in while waiting for the turbines to build
up speed. The Indian still crouched behind him without safety
harness – vulnerable now if the airtruck were spun
sharply.

Joao flicked the communications switch
on the lower left corner of the dash, looked into the tiny screen
there giving him a view of the lab compartment. The rear doors were
open. He closed them by hydraulic remote. His father lay securely
strapped to the bench, the other Indian seated at his head.

The turbines reached their whining
peak.

Joao switched on the lights, engaged
hydrostatic drive. The truck lifted about ten centimeters, angled
upward as Joao increased pump displacement. He turned left on to
the street, lifted another two meters to increase speed, headed
toward the lights of a boulevard.

The Indian spoke beside his ear:
“Turn toward the mountain over there.” A hand came
forward, pointed to the right.

The Alejandro Clinic is in the
foothills, Joao thought. Yes, that’s the correct
direction.

Joao made the indicated turn down a
cross street that angled toward the boulevard.

Casually, he gave pump displacement
another boost, lifted another meter and increased speed once more.
In the same motion, he switched on the intercom to the rear
compartment, keyed it for the amplifier and pickup beneath the
bench where his father lay.

The pickup, capable of making a dropped
pin sound like a cannon, emitted only a distant hissing and
rasping. Joao increased amplification. The instrument should have
been transmitting the old man’s heartbeats now, sending a
noticeable drum-thump into the forward cabin.

There was no sound but that hissing,
rasping.

Tears blurred Joao’s eyes. He
shook his head to clear them.

My father’s dead, he
thought. Killed by these crazy backwoodsmen.

He noted in the dash screen that the
Indian back there had a hand under the elder Martinho’s back.
The Indian appeared to be massaging the dead man’s back. The
rhythmic rasping matched the motion.

Anger filled Joao. He felt like diving
the airtruck into an abutment, dying himself to kill these crazy
men.

The truck was approaching the
city’s outskirts. Ring-girders circled off to the left,
giving access to the boulevard. This was an area of small gardens
and cottages protected by overfly canopies.

Joao lifted the airtruck over the
canopies, headed toward the boulevard. To the clinic, yes,
he thought. But it’s too late.

In that instant, he realized there were
no heartbeats at all coming from the rear compartment – only
that slow, rhythmic grating plus, now that his ears searched for
it, a cicada-like hum up and down the scale.

“To the mountains, there,”
said the Indian behind him. Again that hand came forward to point
off to the right.

Joao, with the hand close to his eyes
illuminated by the dash lights, saw the scale-like parts of a
finger shift position. In that shift, he recognized the scale
shapes by their claw fringes.

The beetles!

The finger was composed of linked
beetles working in unison!

Joao turned, stared into the
Indian’s eyes, saw then why they glistened so brightly: they
were composed of thousands of tiny facets.

“Hospital, there,” the
creature beside him said, pointing.

Joao turned back to the controls,
fought to keep from losing composure. They weren’t
Indians… they weren’t even humans. They were
insects – some kind of hive-cluster shaped and organized to
mimic a man.

The implications of this discovery
raced through his mind. How did they support their weight? How did
they feed and breathe?

How did they speak?

Every personal concern had to be
subordinated to the urgent need for getting this information and
proof of it back to one of the big government labs where the facts
could be explored.

Even the death of his father could not
be considered now. Joao knew he had to capture one of these things,
get out with it. He reached overhead, flicked on the command
transmitter, set its beacon for a homing call. Let some of my
Irmaos be awake and monitoring their sets, he prayed.

“More to the right,” rasped
the creature behind him.

Again Joao corrected course.

The voice – that rasping,
stridulant sound. Again, Joao asked himself how the creature
could produce that simulation of human speech. The coordination
required for that action had profound implications.

Joao looked out to his left. The moon
was high overhead now, illuminating the line of bandeirante towers
off there. The first barrier.

The truck would be out of the Green
soon and into the Gray of the poorest Resettlement Plan farms
– then, beyond that, another barrier and the Great Red that
stretched in reaching fingers through the Goyaz and the inner Mato
Grosso, far out to the Andes where teams were coming down from
Ecuador. Joao could see scattered lights of Resettlement Plan farms
ahead, darkness beyond.

The airtruck was going faster than he
wanted, but Joao knew he dared not slow it. They might become
suspicious.

“You must go higher,” said
the creature behind him.

Joao increased pump displacement,
raised the nose. He leveled off at three hundred meters.

More bandeirante towers loomed ahead,
spaced at closer intervals. Joao picked up the barrier signals on
his dash meters, looked back at his guard. The dissembler
vibrations of the barrier seemed to have no effect on the
creature.

Joao looked out his side window and
down as they passed over the barrier. No one down there would
challenge him, he knew. This was a bandeirante airtruck headed into
the Red… and with its transmitter sending out a homing call.
The men down there would assume he was a band leader headed out on
contract after a successful bid, calling his men to him for the
job. If the barrier guards recognized his call wave, that would
only confirm the thought.

Joao Martinho had just completed a
successful bid on the Serra dos Parecis. All the bandeirantes knew
that.

Joao sighed. He could see the
moon-silvered snake of the Sao Francisco winding off to his left,
and the lesser waterways like threads raveled out of the
foothills.

I must find the nest –
wherever we’re headed, Joao thought.

He wondered if he dared turn on his
receiver – but if his men started reporting in… No.
That would make the creatures suspect; they might take violent
counter-action.

My men will realize
something’s wrong when I don’t answer, he thought.
They’ll follow.

If any of them hear my call.

“How far are we going?”
Joao asked.

“Very far,” the guard
said.

Joao settled himself for a long trip.
I must be patient, he thought. I must be as patient as a
spider waiting beside her web.

Hours droned past: two, three…
four.

Nothing but moonlighted jungle sped
beneath the truck, and the moon lay low on the horizon, near
setting. This was the deep Red where broadcast poisons had been
used at first with near disastrous results. This was where the
first wild mutations had been discovered.

The Goyaz.

This is where my father said Rhin
Kelly went, Joao thought. Is she down there now?

The moon-frosted jungle told him
nothing.

The Goyaz: this was the region being
saved for the final assault, using mobile barrier lines when the
circle was short enough.

“How much farther?” Joao
asked.

“Soon.”

Joao armed the emergency charge that
would separate the front and rear compartments of the truck when he
fired it. The stub wings of the front pod and its emergency rocket
motors would get him back into bandeirante country.

With the specimen behind him
safely subdued, Joao hoped.

He looked up through the canopy,
scanned the horizon as far as he could. Was that moonlight
glistening on a truck far back to the right? He couldn’t be
certain… but it seemed to be.

“Soon?” Joao asked.

“Ahead,” the creature
rasped.

The modulated stridulation beneath that
voice sent a shiver along Joao’s spine. Joao said, “My
father…”

“Hospital for… the
father… ahead,” the creature said.

It would be dawn soon, Joao realized.
He could see the first false line of light along the horizon
behind. This night had passed so swiftly. Joao wondered if his
guard had injected some time-distorting drug into him without his
knowledge. He thought not. He felt alert, maintaining himself in
the necessities of each moment. There wasn’t time for fatigue
or boredom when he had to record every landmark half-visible in the
night, sense everything he could about these creatures around him.
The bitter-clean smell of oxalic acid hinted at acid-to-oxygen
chemistry.

But how did they coordinate all these
separate insect units?

They appeared conscious. Was that more
mimicry? What did they use for a brain?

Dawn came, revealing the plateau of the
Mato Grosso: a caldron of liquid green boiling over the edge of the
world. Joao looked out his side windows in time to see the
truck’s long shadow bounce across a clearing: stark
galvanized metal roofs against the green – a sitiante
abandoned in the Resettlement, or perhaps the barracao of a
fazenda on the coffee frontier. It had been a likely place
for a warehouse, standing as it had beside a small stream with the
land around it bearing signs of riverbank agriculture.

Joao knew this region; he could put the
bandeirante grid map over it in his imagination – five
degrees of latitude and six degrees of longitude it covered. Once
it had been a place of isolated fazendas farmed by independent
browns and blacks and branco sertanistos chained to the
encornendero plantation system. The parents of Benito Alvarez had
come from here. It was hardwood jungles, narrow rivers with banks
overgrown by lush trees and ferns, savannahs and tangled life.

Here and there along the higher reaches
of the rivers lay the remains of hydroelectric plants long since
abandoned, like the one at Paulo Afonso Falls – all replaced
by sun power and atomics.

This was it: the sertao of the
Goyaz. Even in this age it remained primitive, a fact blamed on the
insects and disease. It lay there, the last stronghold of teeming
insect life in the Western Hemisphere, waiting for a modern
tropical technology to lift it into the Twenty-first Century.

Supplies for the bandeirante assault
would come by way of Sao Paulo, by air and by transport on the
multi-decked highways, then on antique diesel trains to Itapira, by
aviadores river runners to Bahus and by airtruck to Registo and
Leopoldina on the Araguaya.

And when it was done – the people
would return, coming back from the Resettlement Plan areas and the
metropolitan shantytowns.

A passage of turbulent air shook the
truck, breaking Joao from his reverie, forcing him into an acute
consciousness of his situation.

A glance at his guard showed the
creature still crouched there, watchful… as patient as the
Indio it mimicked. The presence of the thing behind him had become
cumulative, and Joao found himself required to combat a growing
sense of revulsion.

The gleaming mechanical pragmatism of
the truck pod around him felt as though it were at war with the
insect creature. It had no business here in this cabin flying
smoothly above the area where its kind ruled supreme.

Joao looked out and down at the green
flow of forest, the zona da mata. He knew the area beneath
him crawled with insects: wire worms in the roots of savannahs,
grubs digging in the moist black earth, hopping beetles, dart-like
angita wasps, chalcis flies sacred to the still thriving backwoods
Xango cult, chiggers, sphecidae, braconidae, fierce hornets, white
termites, hemipteric crawlers, blood roaches, thrips, ants, lice,
mosquitoes, mites, moths, exotic butterflies, mantidae – and
countless unnatural mutations of them all.

That, for sure.

This would be an expensive flight
– unless it had already been lost.

I mustn’t think that way,
Joao told himself. Out of respect for my father. I
mustn’t think that way… not yet.

IEO maps showed this region in varied
intensities of red. Around the red ran a ring of gray with pink
shading where one or two persistent forms of insect life resisted
man’s poisons, jelly flames, astringents, sonitoxics –
the combination of flamant couroq and supersonics that drove
insects from their hiding places into waiting death – and all
the mechanical, traps and luring baits in the bandeirante
arsenal.

A grid map would be placed over this
area and each thousand-hectare square offered for bid to the
independent bands to deinfest.

We bandeirantes are a kind of
ultimate predator, Joao thought. It’s no wonder these
creatures mimic us.

But how good, really, was this mimicry
he asked himself. And how deadly to the predators? How far had this
gone?

“There,” said the creature
behind him. The multi-part hand carne forward to point toward a
black scarp visible ahead of them in the gray light of morning.
Heavy mist against the scarp told of a river nearby hidden by the
jungle.

This is all I need, Joao
thought. I can find this place again easily.

His foot kicked the trigger on the
floor, releasing a great cloud of orange dye-fog beneath the truck
to mark the ground and forest for more than a kilometer around. As
he kicked the trigger, Joao began counting down silently the
five-second delay to the automatic firing of the separation
charge.

It came in a roaring blast that Joao
knew would smear the creature behind against the rear bulkhead. He
sent the stub wings out, fed power to the rocket motors and banked
hard left. Now he could see the detached rear compartment settling
slowly earthward above the dye cloud, its fall cushioned as the
pumps of the hydrostatic drive automatically compensated.

I will come back, Father, Joao
thought. You will be buried among family and friends.

He locked his pod controls, turned to
deal with his guard.

A gasp escaped Joao’s lips.

The rear bulkhead crawled with insects
clustered around something yellow-white and pulsing. The mud-gray
shirt and trousers were torn, but insects already were repairing
it, spinning out fibers that meshed and sealed on contact. There
was a dark yellow sac-like object extruding near the pulsing
surface and glimpses through the insects of a brown skeleton with
familiar articulation.

It looked like a human skeleton –
but dark and chitinous.

Before his eyes, the thing was
reassembling itself – long furry antennae burrowing inward
and interlocking, one insect to another, claw fringes weaving
together.

The flute weapon wasn’t visible,
and the thing’s leather pouch had been hurled into a rear
corner by the blast, but its eyes were in place in their brown
sockets, staring at him. The mouth was reforming.

The dark yellow sac contracted, and a
voice issued from the half-formed mouth.

“You must listen,” it
rasped.

Joao gulped, whirled back to the
controls, unlocked them and sent the pod into a wild, spinning
turn.

A high-pitched rattling buzz sounded
behind him. The noise seemed to pick up every bone in his body and
shake it. Something crawled on his neck. He slapped it, felt it
squash.

All Joao could think of then was
escape. He stared out frantically at the earth beneath, glimpsing a
blotch of white in a Savannah off to his right and in the same
instant recognizing another airtruck banking beside him, the
insignia of his own Irmandades bright on its side.

The white blotch of the savannah
resolved itself into a cluster of tents with an IEO orange and
green banner flying beside them. Beyond the flat grass could be
seen the curve of a river.

Joao drove for the tents.

Something stung his cheek. Crawling
things were in his hair – biting, stinging. He kicked on the
braking rockets, aimed for open ground beside the tents. Insects
were all over the inside of the pod’s glass now, blocking his
vision, Joao said a silent prayer, hauled back on the control arm,
felt the pod mush out, touch ground, skidding and slewing. He
kicked the canopy release before the motion stopped, broke the seal
on his safety harness and launched himself up and out to land
sprawling on hard ground.

He rolled over and over, eyes tightly
closed, feeling the insect bites like fire needles over every
exposed part of his body. Hands grabbed him and he felt a jelly
hood splash across his face to protect it. Hard spray slammed
against him from all sides.

Somewhere in a hood-blurred distance he
heard a voice that sounded like Vierho’s shout, “Run!
This way – run!”

He heard a spraygun fire:
Whoosh!

And again.

And again.

Hands rolled him over. Spray hit his
back. A wash that smelled like neutralizer splashed over him.

An odd thudding sound shook the ground
and a voice said, “Mother of God! Would you look at
that!”

Chapter V

JOAO SAT up, clawed the jelly hood from
his face, stared across, the savannah. The grass there seethed and
boiled with insects around an Irmandades airtruck.

A voice said, “Did you kill
everything inside the pod?”

“Everything that moved.”
The reply was husky, halting, as though overcoming pain.

“Is there anything in it we can
use?”

“The radio’s
destroyed.”

“Of course. That’s the
first thing they go for.”

Joao looked around him, counted seven
of his Irmandades – Vierho, Thome, Ramon, Pietr,
Lon…

His eye was caught by the group
clustered beyond his men – Rhin Kelly among them. Her red
hair was awry. Dirt streaked her face. There was a wild, glazed
look in her green eyes. She was glaring at him.

He saw his pod then, to the right, on
its side and just within what appeared to be a perimeter ditch.
Foam and spray residue were all over it. His eye traversed the line
of the ditch, saw that it ringed a hard-packed dirt area with the
tents in the center and savannah beyond. Two men in green IEO
uniforms stood beside him holding sprayer handtanks.

Joao returned his attention to Rhin,
remembering her as he’d seen her in Bahia’s
A’Chigua. Now she wore a plain IEO field uniform, its
green blotched by red-brown dirt. Her eyes held no invitation at
all.

“I see poetic justice in this
– traitors,” she said.

Her hysterical tone of voice caught
Joao’s ear and it took a second for her words to filter
through. Traitors?

He grew aware of the bedraggled, worn
look of the IEO people.

Vierho approached, helped Joao to his
feet, proffered a cloth to wipe off the jelly.

“Jefe, what is happening?”
Vierho asked. “We picked up your signal, but you didn’t
answer.”

“Later,” Joao rasped as he
recognized the anger in Rhin and her companions. Rhin appeared
feverish and ill.

Hands brushed Joao, clearing dead
insects off him. The pain from the stings and bites receded under
the medicant neutralizer.

“Whose skeleton is that in your
pod?” one of the IEO people asked.

Before Joao could answer, Rhin said,
“Death and skeletons should be nothing new for Joao Martinho,
traitor of the Piratininga!”

“They are crazy, that is the only
thing, I think,” Vierho said.

“Your pets turned on you,
didn’t they?” Rhin demanded. “The skeleton,
that’s all that’s left of one of you, eh?”

“What is this talk of
skeletons?” Vierho asked.

“Your jefe knows,” Rhin
said.

“Would you be so kind as to
explain?” Joao asked.

“I don’t need to
explain,” she said. “Let your friends out there
explain.” She pointed toward the rim of jungle beyond the
savannah.

Joao looked there, saw a line of men in
bandeirante white standing untouched amidst the leaping, boiling
insects in the jungle shadow. He took a pair of binoculars from
around the neck of one of his men, focused on the figures.

Knowing what to look for made the
identification easy.

“Padre,” Joao said.

Vierho bent close, rubbing at an insect
sting beneath the acid scar on his cheek.

In a low voice, Joao explained about
the figures at the jungle edge, handed over the glasses so that
Vierho could see for himself the fine lines in the skin, the
facet-glitter of the eyes.

“Aiee,” Vierho
said.

“Do you recognize your
friends?” Rhin demanded.

Joao ignored her.

Vierho passed along the glasses with an
explanation to another of the Irmandades. The two IEO men who had
sprayed Joao came close, listening, turned their attention to the
figures in the jungle shadows.

One of the IEO men crossed himself.

“That perimeter ditch,”
Joao said, “What’s in it?”

“Couroq jelly,” said the
IEO man who’d crossed himself. “It’s all we had
left for an insect barrier.”

“That won’t stop
them,” Joao said.

“But it has stopped
them,” the man said.

Joao nodded. He was having unpleasant
suspicions about their position here. He looked at Rhin. “Dr.
Kelly, where are the rest of your people?” Joao passed his
gaze around the IEO personnel, counting. “Surely
there’s more than six in an IEO field crew.”

Her lips compressed, but she remained
silent.

The more Joao looked at her, the more
ill she appeared.

“So?” Joao said. He glanced
around at the tents, seeing their weathered condition. “And
where is your equipment, your trucks, lab hut, jitneys?”

“Funny thing you should
ask,” she said, but there was uncertainty in the sneering
quality of her voice – and that definite hysterical
undertone. “About a kilometer into the trees over
there” – she nodded to her left – “is a
wrecked jungle truck containing most of our… equipment, as
you call it. The track spools of our truck were eaten away by acid
before we knew anything was wrong. The lift rotors were destroyed
the same way – everything.”

“Acid?”

“It smelled like oxalic, but
acted more like hydrochloric,” said one of her companions, a
blond Nordic with a recent acid burn beneath his right eye.

“Start from the beginning,”
Joao said.

“We were cut off
here…” He broke off, glanced around.

“Eight days ago,” Rhin
said.

“Yes,” the blond man said.
“They got our radio, our truck – they looked like giant
chiggers. They can shoot an acid spray about fifteen
meters.”

“Like the one we saw in the Bahia
Plaza?” Joao asked.

“There’re three dead
specimens in containers in my lab tent,” Rhin said.
“They’re cooperative organization, hive-clusters. See
for yourself.”

Joao pursed his lips, thinking.

“I heard part of what you told
your men there,” she said. “Do you expect us to believe
that?”

“It’s of no importance to
me what you believe.” Joao said. “How’d you get
here?”

“We fought our way in here from
the truck using caramuru cold-fire spray,” said the
blond man. “That stalled them a bit. We dragged along what
supplies we could, dug a trench around our perimeter, poured in the
couroq powder, added the jell and topped it off with all our
copahu oil… and here we sat.”

“How many of you?” Joao
asked.

“There were fourteen of us in the
truck,” Rhin said. She stared at Joao, studying him. His
manner, his questions – everything consistent with innocence.
She tried to reason from this assumption, but her mind bogged down.
She wasn’t thinking clearly, and knew it. Ever since the
first attack; there’d been something, a drug very likely, in
the stings of the insects that had got through the caramuru.
But her lab wasn’t equipped to determine what the drug
was.

Joao rubbed the back of his neck where
the insect stings were beginning to burn. He glanced around at his
men, assessing their condition and equipment, counted four
sprayrifles, saw that the men carried spare charge cylinders on
slings around their necks.

And there was his truck pod safe inside
the perimeter. The spray they’d poured into it probably had
played hob with the control circuits, though. But there still
remained the big truck out in the savannah.

“We’d better try to fight
our way out to the truck,” he said.

“Your truck?” Rhin asked.
She looked out to the savannah. “I think it’s been too
late for that since a few seconds after it landed,
bandeirante.” She laughed, and the hysteria was close to the
surface. “I think in a day or so there’ll be a few less
traitors. You’re caught in your own trap.”

Joao whirled to stare at the Irmandade
airtruck. It was beginning to tip crazily over on to its left side.
“Padre!” he barked. “Tommy! Vince!
Get…” He broke off as the truck sagged over even
farther.

“It’s only fair to warn
you,” Rhin said, “to stay away from the edge of the
ditch unless you first spray the opposite side. They can shoot that
acid stream at least fifteen meters… and as you can
see” – she nodded toward the airtruck –
“the acid eats metal and even plastic.”

“You’re insane,” Joao
said. “Why didn’t you warn us immediately? We
could’ve…”

“Warn you?”

Her blond companion said, “Dr.
Kelly, perhaps we’d…”

“Be quiet, Hogar,” she
said. She glared at the man. “Isn’t it time you looked
in on Doctor Chen-Lhu?”

“Travis? Is he here?” Joao
asked.

“He arrived yesterday with one
companion, since deceased,” she said. “They were
searching for us. Unluckily, they found us. Dr. Chen-Lhu probably
will not live through this night.” She glared at her Nordic
companion. “Hogar!”

“Yes, ma’am,” the man
said. He shrugged, headed for the tents.

“We lost eight men to your
playmates, bandeirante,” Rhin said. She looked at the small
group of Irmandades. “Our lives are little enough to pay now
for the extinction of eight of you traitors!”

“You are insane,” Joao
said, and he felt the beginnings of a crazy anger in himself.
Chen-Lhu here… dying? That could wait. First there was work
to do.

“Stop playing innocent,
bandeirante,” Rhin said. “We’ve seen your
companions out there. We’ve seen the new playmates you
bred… and we understand that you were too greedy; your game
has gotten out of hand.”

“You’ve not seen my Irmaos
doing these things,” Joao said. He looked at Thome.
“Tommy, keep an eye on these insane ones. Don’t permit
them to interfere with us.” He lifted a spray-rifle and spare
charges from one of his men, indicated the other three armed men.
“You – come with me.”

“Jefe, what do you do?”
Vierho asked.

“Salvage what we can from the
truck,” Joao said.

Vierho sighed, took one of the
sprayrifles and charges, motioned their owner to stay with
Thome.

“Sure, go get yourselves
killed,” Rhin said. “Don’t think we’ll
interfere with that!”

Joao stopped himself from turning on
her with a burst of outraged curses. His head ached with the anger
and the need to suppress it. Presently he walked toward the ditch
nearest the stranded airtruck, laid down a hard mist of foamal in
the grass beyond, beckoned the others to follow and leaped the
ditch.

Later, Joao did not like to think about
that time in the savannah. They were out little more than twenty
minutes before retreating to the island of tents. Joao and his
three companions were acid burned, Vierho and Lon seriously. And
they’d salvaged less than an eighth of the material in the
truck – mostly food. The salvage did not include a
transmitter.

The attack came from all sides, from
creatures hidden in the tall grass. Foamal immobilized them
temporarily. None of the sprayrifle poisons seemed to do more than
slow the creatures. The attack stopped only when the men were
safely back behind the ditch.

“It’s evident the devils
went first for our communications equipment,” Vierho gasped.
“How could they know?”

“I don’t want to
guess,” Joao said. “Stand still while I treat those
burns.” Vierho’s cheek and shoulder were badly splashed
with acid, his clothing peeling away in smoking tatters.

Joao spread neutralizer salve over the
area, turned to Lon. The man already was losing flesh off his back,
but he stood there panting, waiting.

Rhin came up to help with the treatment
and bandaging, but refused to speak, even to answering the simplest
questions.

“Do you have any more of this
salve?”

Silence.

“Have you taken any samples of
the acids?”

Silence.

“How was Chen-Lhu
injured?”

Silence.

Presently, Joao touched up three splash
burns on his left arm, neutralized the acid and covered the
injuries with flesh-tape. He gritted his teeth against the pain,
stared at Rhin. “Where are these chigua specimens you
killed?”

Silence.

“You are a blind, unprincipled
megalomaniac,” Joao said, speaking in an even tone.
“Don’t push me too far.”

Her face went pale, and the green eyes
blazed, but her lips remained closed.

Joao’s arm throbbed, his head
ached and he felt there was something vaguely wrong with every
color he saw. The woman’s silence enraged him, but the rage
was like something happening to another person. The odd feeling of
detachment persisted even after he recognized it.

“You act like a woman who needs
violence,” Joao said. “Would you like to be turned over
to my men? They’re a little tired of you.”

He found the words strange even as he
spoke them – as though he’d wanted to say something
else and these words had forced themselves out.

Rhin’s face flamed. “You
wouldn’t dare!” she grated.

“Ah, we can speak,”
he said. “Don’t be melodramatic, though. I
wouldn’t give you the pleasure.”

Joao shook his head; that wasn’t
what he’d wanted to say at all.

Rhin glared at him. “You…
insolent…”

Joao found himself producing a wolfish
grin, saying, “Nothing you say will make me turn you over to
my men.”

The silence that followed was filled
with sense of drawing apart – farther, farther. Joao felt
that Rhin actually was growing smaller. He grew aware of a distant
roaring, wondered if it was a sound in his own ears.

“That roaring,” he
said.

“Jefe?”

It was Vierho directly behind him.

“What is that roaring?”
Joao asked.

“It’s the river, Jefe; a
chasm.” Vierho pointed to a black rock escarpment rising
distantly above the jungle. “When the wind is right we hear
it. Jefe?”

“What is it?” Joao felt a
surge of anger at Vierho. Why couldn’t the man speak right
out?

“A word with you, Jefe.”
Vierho drew him toward the blond Nordic who was standing outside
one of the tents. The man’s face looked gray except around
the acid burn on his cheek.

Joao looked back at Rhin. She had
turned away from him, stood with her arms folded. The stiffness of
her back, the pose, all of it struck Joao as almost humorous. He
suppressed laughter, allowed himself to be led up to the blond
fellow. What had she called him? Ahh, Hogar. Yes, Hogar.

“The gentleman here”
– Vierho indicated Hogar – “says the female
doctor was bitten by insects that got past their
barriers.”

“The first night,” Hogar
whispered.

“She has not been the same
since,” Vierho said. “In the head, you understand? We
humor her, Jefe, no?”

Joao wet his lips with his tongue. He
felt dizzy and warm.

“The insects that bit her were
similar to the ones that were on you,” Hogar said. His voice
sounded apologetic.

He’s making fun of me!
Joao thought.

“I wish to see Chen-Lhu,”
Joao said. “At once.”

“He is very badly poisoned and
burned,” Hogar said. “We think he is dying.”

“Where is he?”

“In the tent here, but
I…”

“Is he conscious?”

“Senhor Martinho, he is conscious
but not in condition for any prolonged…”

“I give the orders here!”
Joao snapped.

An odd look passed between Hogar and
Vierho.

Vierho said, “Jefe,
perhaps…”

“I will see Doctor Chen-Lhu
now!” Joao said.

He brushed past Hogar and into the
tent.

The place was a gloomy hole after the
morning sunlight outside. It took an instant for Joao’s eyes
to adjust themselves. In that instant, Hogar and Vierho joined him
in the tent.

“Please, Senhor Martinho,”
Hogar said.

Vierho said, “Jefe, perhaps
later.”

“Who is there?”

The voice was low, but controlled, and
came from a cot at the far end of the tent. Joao made out the form
of a human figure stretched on the cot, the white marks of
bandages, recognized Chen-Lhu’s face in the half-light.

“It is Joao Martinho,” Joao
said.

“Ahh, Johnny,” Chen-Lhu
said, and his voice sounded stronger.

Hogar passed Joao, knelt beside the
cot, said, “Please, Doctor, do not excite
yourself.”

The words held an odd ring of
familiarity for Joao, but he couldn’t place the association.
He crossed to the cot, looked down at Chen-Lhu. The man’s
cheeks were sunken as though after a long famine. His eyes appeared
immersed in two black pits.

“Johnny,” Chen-Lhu said,
his voice a whisper. “We are rescued, then.”

“We are not
rescued,” Joao said. And he wondered why the fool prattled
so.

“Ahhh, too bad,” Chen-Lhu
said. “Then we’ll all go together, eh?” Chen-Lhu
asked. And he thought: What irony! My scapegoat caught in the
same trap. What futility!

“There’s still hope,”
Hogar said.

Joao saw Vierho cross himself, thought:
Silly fool!

“While there’s life,
eh?” Chen-Lhu asked. He stared up at Joao. “I’m
dying, Johnny, but most of my past eludes me.” And he
thought: We’ll all die here. And in my homeland –
they’ll all die there, too. Starvation or poison,
what’s the difference?

Hogar looked at Joao, said,
“Senhor, please go.”

“No,” Chen-Lhu said.
“Stay. I’ve things to tell you.”

“You mustn’t tire yourself,
sir,” Hogar said.

“What difference?” Chen-Lhu
asked. “We’ve marched to the West, eh, Johnny? I wish I
could laugh!”

Joao shook his head. His back ached and
tingling sensations ran along the skin of both arms. The interior
of the tent seemed suddenly brighter.

“Laugh?” Vierho whispered.
“Mother of God!”

“You want to know why my
government won’t let in your observers?” Chen-Lhu
asked. “Such a joke! The Great Crusade has backfired
in my land. The earth goes barren. Nothing helps it –
fertilizers, chemicals, nothing.”

Joao experienced difficulty assembling
the words into meaningful form. Barren? Barren?

“We face such a famine as history
has never seen,” Chen-Lhu rasped.

“Is it the lack of
insects?” Vierho whispered.

“Of course!” Chen-Lhu said.
“What else has changed? We’ve broken key links in the
ecological chain. Of course. We even know what links… now
that it’s too late.”

Barren earth, Joao thought. It
was a very interesting idea, but his head felt too hot to explore
the thought.

Vierho, dismayed by Joao’s
silence, bent over Chen-Lhu, said, “Why don’t your
people admit this thing and warn the rest of us before it’s
too late?”

“Don’t be a
fool!” Chen-Lhu said, and there was some of the old,
harsh command in his voice. “We’d lose all before
we’d lose that much face. I tell it here now because
I’m dying and because none of you will survive me for
long.”

Hogar stood up and stepped back from
the cot as though fearful of contamination.

“We need a scapegoat, you
see?” Chen-Lhu said. “That’s why I was sent here
– to find us a scapegoat. We’re fighting for more than
our lives.”

“You could always blame the North
Americans,” Hogar said, his tone bitter.

“I fear we’ve worn that one
out, even with our people,” Chen-Lhu said. “We did the
thing ourselves, you see? There’s no escaping that.
No… all we could hope for was to find here a way of blaming
someone else. The British and French provided some of our poisons.
We explored that with no success. Some Russian teams helped
us… but the Russians haven’t realigned their entire
country – only to the Ural Line. They could show the same
problems we have and… you see? They’d make us appear
foolish.”

“Why haven’t the Russians
said anything?” Hogar asked.

Joao looked at Hogar, thinking:
Senseless words, senseless words.

“The Russians are quietly rolling
back their Ural line into the Green,” Chen-Lhu said.
“Re-infesting, you see? No… my last orders were to
find a new insect, typically Brazilian, that would destroy many of
our crops… and for whose presence we could blame…
who? Perhaps some bandeirantes.”

Blame bandeirantes, Joao
thought. Yes, everyone is blaming the bandeirantes.

“The really amusing thing,”
Chen-Lhu said, “is what I see in your Green. Do you know what
I see?”

“You’re a devil!”
Vierho grated.

“No, just a patriot,”
Chen-Lhu said. “Are you not curious as to what I see in your
Green?”

“Speak and be damned!”
Vierho said.

That’s telling him, Joao
thought.

“I see the signs in your Green of
the same blight that has struck my poor nation,” Chen-Lhu
said. “Smaller fruit, smaller crops – smaller leaves,
paler plants. It’s slow at first, but everyone will see it
soon.”

“Then maybe they’ll stop
before it’s too late,” Vierho said.

That’s foolishness, Joao
thought. Who ever stops before it’s too
late?

“Such a simple fellow you
are,” Chen-Lhu said. “Your rulers are the same as mine:
they see nothing but their own survival. They will see nothing else
until it’s too late. This is always the way with
governments.”

Joao wondered why the tent was growing
so dark after being so bright. He felt hot and his head whirled as
though he’d had too much alcohol. A hand touched his
shoulder. He looked down at it, followed the hand up to an
arm… a face: Rhin. There were tears in her eyes.

“Joao… Senhor Martinho,
I’ve been such a fool,” she said.

“You heard?” Chen-Lhu
asked.

“I heard,” she said.

“A pity,” Chen-Lhu said.
“I’d hoped to preserve some of your illusions…
for a little while, anyway.”

What an odd conversation, Joao
thought. What an odd person, this Rhin. What an odd place, this
tent with its ridgepole coming around to face me.

Something thudded against his back and
his head.

I’ve fallen, he thought.
Isn’t that odd?

The last thing he heard before
unconsciousness flooded his mind with black ink was Vierho’s
startled voice:

“Jefe!”

There was a dream in which Rhin hovered
over him saying, “What difference does it make who gives the
orders?” And in the dream, he could only turn a baleful stare
on her and think how hateful she looked – in spite of her
beauty.

Someone said, “What’s the
difference? We’ll all be dead soon anyway.”

And another voice said, “Look,
there’s a new one. That one looks like Gabriel Martinho, the
Prefect.”

Joao felt himself sinking into a void
where his face was held by clamps that forced him to stare into the
monitor screen on the dash of his airtruck’s pod. The screen
showed a giant stag beetle with the face of his father. And the
sound was a cicada hum up and down the scale with a voice inside
the hum: “Don’t excite yourself. Don’t excite
yourself…”

He awoke screaming to realize there was
no sound in his throat – only the memory of screams. His body
was bathed in perspiration. Rhin sat beside him wiping his
forehead. She looked pale and thin, her eyes sunken. For a moment
he wondered if this emaciated Rhin Kelly were part of a dream; she
seemed to give no notice to the fact that his eyes were open
although she looked right at him.

He tried to speak, but his throat was
too dry.

The movement attracted Rhin, though.
She bent over him, peered into his eyes. Presently she reached
behind her, brought up a canteen, trickled a few drops of water
down his throat.

“What…” he
croaked.

“You had the same thing that hit
me, but more of it,” she said. “A nerve drug in the
insect venom. Don’t try to exert yourself.”

“Where?” he asked.

She looked at him, sensing the broader
question “We’re still in the same old trap,” she
said, “but now we have a chance of getting out.”

His eyes spoke the question that his
lips couldn’t form.

“Your truck pod,” she said.
“Some of its circuits were badly damaged, but Vierho rigged
substitutes. Now be quiet a moment.”

She checked his pulse, put a
blood-gauge thermometer against his neck, read it.
“Fever’s down,” she said. “Have you ever
had heart trouble of any kind?”

Instantly he thought of his father; but
this question wasn’t directed to his father.

“No,” he whispered.

“I have a very few energy
packs,” she said. “Direct feed. I can give you one if
you don’t have a weak heart.”

“Do it,” he said.

“I’ll use a vein in your
leg,” she said. “They gave it to me on the left arm and
I saw blue and red lights for an hour.” She bent to a case
beside the cot, took a flat black cartridge from it, pulled the
blanket off his feet and began applying the energy pack to his left
leg.

He could feel her working there, but it
was so far away and he was so drowsy.

“This is how we brought Dr.
Chen-Lhu around,” she said, pulling the blanket back over his
feet.

Travis didn’t die, he
thought He felt that this was an extremely important fact, but
couldn’t place the reason.

“It was more than the nerve drug,
of course,” she said. “With Dr. Chen-Lhu and with me,
that is. Vierho spotted it in the water.”

“Water?”

She took the word as a request,
dribbled more water down his throat from the canteen.

“Our second night here we dug a
well in one of the tents,” she said. “River seepage,
naturally. Water’s loaded with poisons, some of them ours.
That’s what Vierho tasted: the bitterness. But my test shows
there’s something else in that water: a hallucinogenic that
produces a reaction very like schizophrenia. It isn’t
anything humans put there.”

Joao could feel energy pumping into him
from the pack on his leg. A cramp like acute hunger knotted his
stomach. When it passed, he said, “Something from…
them.”

“Very likely,” she said.
“We’ve rigged a crude still. There’s a variable
resistance to this hallucinogenic. Hogar appears to be completely
immune, but he didn’t get any of the venom drug. That
seems to leave you wide open.”

Again she checked his pulse.

“Are you feeling
stronger?”

“Yes.”

The cramps were in the muscles of his
thighs now – rhythmic and painful. They receded.

“We’ve analyzed that
skeleton in your pod,” she said. “An amazing thing.
Remarkably like a human skeleton except for ridges and tiny holes
– presumably where the insects attach themselves and
articulate it. It’s bird-light but very strong. The kinship
to chitin is quite apparent.”

Joao thought about this, letting the
energy from the pack on his leg accumulate. He was feeling stronger
by the second. So much seemed to have happened, though: the pod
repaired, that skeleton analyzed.

“How long have I been
here?” he asked.

“Four days,” she said. She
glanced at her wristwatch. “Almost to the hour. It’s
still fairly early.”

Joao grew aware then of the forced
cheerfulness in her tone. What was she hiding? Before he could
explore the question, a hiss of fabric and brief flash of sunlight
told of someone entering the tent.

Chen-Lhu appeared behind Rhin. The
Chinese seemed to have aged fifty years since Joao had last seen
him. Skin sagged and wrinkled at his jawline. The cheeks were
concave pockets. He walked with a fragile caution.

“I see the patient is
awake,” he said.

The voice surprised Joao by its
strength – as though all the man’s physical energy had
been channeled into this one aspect of him.

“He’s under pack right
now,” she said.

“Wise,” Chen-Lhu said.
“There isn’t much time. Have you told him?”

“Only that we’ve repaired
his truck pod.”

This must be phrased very
delicately, Chen-Lhu thought. Very delicately. Latin honor
can shoot off at strange tangents.

“We are going to attempt escaping
in your pod,” Chen-Lhu said.

“How can we?” Joao asked.
“That pod won’t lift more than three people at the
most.-”

“Three people is all it’ll
carry, that is correct,” Chen-Lhu said. “But it
won’t be required to lift them; in fact, it cannot lift
them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your landing was rather rough:
one of your float-skids is damaged and you ruptured the belly tank.
Most of the fuel was gone before we discovered the damage.
There’s also the matter of controls: they’re not of the
best, even after the Padre’s most ingenious
ministrations.”

“That still means only three
people in it,” Joao said.

“If we can’t transmit a
message, we can carry it,” Rhin said.

Good girl, Chen-Lhu thought. He
waited for Joao to absorb this.

“Who?” Joao asked.

“Myself,” Chen-Lhu said.
“Only for the reason that I can testify to the debacle in my
nation, warn your people before it’s too late.”

Chen-Lhu’s words brought an
entire conversation flooding back into Joao’s awareness
– in the tent: Hogar, Vierho… Chen-Lhu babbling
about… about…

“Barren earth,” Joao
said.

“Your people must learn before
it’s too late,” Chen-Lhu said. “So I will be one
of the passengers. And Rhin here because…” He managed
a weak shrug. “…because of chivalry, I would say, but
also because she’s resourceful.”

“That’s two,” Joao
said.

“And you will make three,”
Chen-Lhu said, and he waited for the outburst.

But Joao merely said, “That
doesn’t make sense.” He lifted his head, stared down
along the length of his body on the cot “Four days here
and…”

“But you’re the one with
pistolao – political connections,” Rhin said.
“You can make people listen.”

Joao dropped his head back on to the
cot.

“My own father wouldn’t
even listen to me!”

The statement evoked a surprising
silence. Rhin looked up at Chen-Lhu, back to Joao.

“You have your own political
pipelines, Travis,” Joao said. “Probably better than
mine.”

“And perhaps not,” Chen-Lhu
said. “Besides, you’re the one who saw this creature
close up, the one whose skeleton we will take back with us. You are
the eye-witness.”

“We’re all
eye-witnesses.”

“It was put to a vote,”
Rhin said. “Your men insist.”

Joao looked from Rhin to Chen-Lhu, back
to Rhin. “That still leaves twelve men here. What happens to
them?”

“Only eight now,” Rhin
whispered.

“Who?” Joao managed.

“Hogar,” she said.
“Thorne of your crew; two of my field aides: Cardin and
Lewis.”

“How?”

“There is a thing that looks
like a qena flute,” Chen-Lhu said. “The creature
in your truck pod carried one.”

“Dart gun,” Joao said.

“No,” Chen-Lhu said.
“They mimic us better than that. It’s a generator of a
sonic-disruption pattern. What it disrupts is human red blood
cells. They must get fairly close with it, though, and we’ve
been keeping them back since we discovered it.”

“You can see we have to get this
information out,” Rhin said.

No doubt of that, Joao
thought.

“Surely there must be someone
stronger, better able to insure the success of this,” Joao
said.

“You’ll be as strong as any
of us in a couple of hours,” Rhin said. “We are not in
the best condition, none of us.”

Joao stared up at the gray light of the
tent ceiling. Very little rocket fuel, damaged controls. They
mean to make for the river, of course: float out in the pod.
It’ll afford some protection from those…
things.

Rhin stood up. “You rest and
build up your strength,” she said. “I’ll bring
you some food in a little while. We have nothing but field rations,
but at least they’re loaded with energy.”

What river is that? Joao
wondered. The Itapura, very likely. He made a rough estimate
based on his knowledge of the region and the length of his flight
over it before the crash landing here. It’ll be seven or
eight hundred kilometers by river! And we’re right on top of
the rainy season. We don’t stand a chance!

Chapter VI

THE DANCING PATTERN of insects on the
cave ceiling appeared as a lovely thing to the Brain. It admired
the interplay of color and motion while it read the patterned
message:

“Report from listeners in the
savannah; acknowledge.”

The Brain signaled for the dance to
proceed.

“Three humans prepare to flee in
the small vehicle,” danced the insects. “The vehicle
will not fly. They will try to escape by floating away on the
river. What do we do?”

The Brain paused to assess data. The
trapped humans had been under observation twelve days. They’d
provided much information about their reactions under stress. The
information expanded data obtained from captives under more direct
control. Ways to immobilize and kill humans became more obvious
daily. But the problem wasn’t how to kill them. It was how to
communicate with them in the absence of fear or stress on either
side.

Some of the humans – like the old
one with the grand manner – made offers and suggestions and
appeared to display reason… but could they be trusted? That
was the key question.

The Brain felt a desperate need for
observational data on humans under conditions it could control
without that control being noticed. Discovery of the listening
posts in the Green had aroused a frenzy of human activity. They
used new sonotoxics, deepened their barriers, renewed their attacks
on the Red.

Another worry compounded all this
– the unknown fate of four units which had penetrated the
barriers before the Bahia catastrophe. Only one had returned; its
report: “We became twelve. Six gave up unit-identity to
envelop the area where we captured the two human leaders. Their
fate is unknown. One unit was destroyed. Four dispersed to produce
more of us.”

Discovery of those four units at this
time would be catastrophe, the Brain realized.

When would the simulacra emerge? That
depended on local conditions – temperature, available foods,
chemicals, moisture. The lone unit that had returned had no
knowledge of where the four had gone.

We must find them! the Brain
thought.

The problems of individually-directed
action dismayed the Brain then. The simulacra were a mistake. Many
identical units would only attract disastrous attention.

That the simulacra meant no great harm
and were conditioned only to limited violence had no meaning under
present conditions. That they wanted only to be allowed to speak
and to reason with human leaders – this plan carried only
pathos and irony now.

The reported words of the human called
Chen-Lhu came back to plague the Brain: “Debacle…
barren earth.” This Chen-Lhu offered a way to solve their
mutual problem, but what were his true intentions? Could he be
trusted?

The Brain suspended decision, directed
a question at its minions: “Which humans will try to
escape?”

Attention must be paid to such details,
the Brain knew. Hive orientation tended to ignore individuals. The
error with the simulacra had originated in this tendency.

On the surface, the Brain knew its
problem appeared deceptively simple. But just under the surface lay
the hellish complications of emotional triggers. Emotions!
Emotions! Reason had so many barriers to hurdle.

The messengers had consulted their
listening-post data. Now they danced out the name sounds:
“The latent queen, Rhin Kelly, and the ones called Chen-Lhu
and Joao Martinho.”

Martinho, the Brain thought.
That was the human from the other half of the airtruck. In this
fact lay an indication of the humans’ complicated quasi-hive
kinship. There could be value in that relationship. And Chen-Lhu
would be in the vehicle, as well.

The insects on the ceiling, having been
bred with a repeat factor to insure communication, repeated their
previous question:

“What counter action is
required?”

“Message to all units,” the
Brain said. “The three in the vehicle will be allowed to
escape to the river. Offer just enough resistance to make it appear
we oppose the escape. They are to be followed by action groups
capable of disposing of them whenever necessary. As soon as the
three have reached the river, overwhelm the ones who
remain.”

Messenger units began assembling
overhead, dancing the pattern to imprint it. They took off in
compact groups, darting out of the cave-mouth into the
sunlight.

The Brain admired the color and motion
for a few minutes, then lowered its sensors, set itself to the
problem of overcoming protein incompatibility.

We must produce immediate and
consequential benefits that the humans cannot fail to
recognize, the Brain thought. If we can demonstrate dramatic
usefulness, they may yet be brought to understand that
inter-dependence is circular, inextricably entangled and a matter
of life and death.

They need us and we need
them… but the burden of proof has fallen on us. And if we
fail to prove it, this will be truly barren earth.

“It will be dark soon,
Jefe,” Vierho said. “You will go then.” Vierho
swung the pod’s canopy forward, leaned into it.

Joao stood one step behind him, still
feeling weak and plagued by occasional flash-cramps in his left leg
above the energy pack. The direct feed and specialized hormones
could only approximate the needs of a specific body, and Joao could
feel himself half poised against strange tensions because of this
treatment.

“I have put the food and other
emergency supplies here under the seat,” Vierho said.
“There’s more food in the gig-box there in the back.
You have two sprayrifles with twenty spare charges, one hard-pellet
carbine. I’m sorry we have so little ammo for it.
There’re a dozen foamal bombs under the other seat, and
I’ve tied a handspray rig into the corner back there.
It’s fully charged.”

Vierho straightened, glanced back at
the tents. His voice fell to a conspiratorial whisper. “Jefe,
I do not trust the Doctor Chen-Lhu. I heard him when he thought he
was dying. This new face is not like him.”

“It’s a chance we have to
take,” Joao said. “I still think you or one of the
others who weren’t as sick should go in place of
me.”

“No more talk of that, Jefe,
please.”

Again Vierho’s voice fell to the
conspiratorial whisper: “Jefe, step close to me as though we
are saying goodbye.”

Joao hesitated, then obeyed. He felt
something metallic and heavy pushed into the belt pocket of his
uniform. The pocket sagged with it. Joao pulled his jungle jacket
around to cover the sag, whispered, “What’s
that?”

“It belonged to my great
grandfather,” Vierho said. “It is a pistol called the
.475 Magnum. It has five bullets and here are two dozen
more.” Another packet was slipped into the side pocket of
Joao’s jacket “It’s not much good except against
men,” Vierho said.

Joao swallowed, felt tears dampen his
eyes. All the Irmandades knew the Padre carried that old
blunderbuss and wouldn’t part with it. The fact that he
parted with it now meant he expected to die here – likely
true.

“God go with you, Jefe,”
Vierho said.

Joao turned, looked to the river about
five hundred meters away across the savannah. He could just glimpse
the beach of the opposite shore, the wild growth there illuminated
by the afternoon sun. The jungle lifted there in steady waves of
color, its bold lines standing out in the flat light. The growth
was a deep blue-green at the bottom, a sun-bleached sage at the
top, and with flecks of yellow, red and ochre between. Above the
green towered a candello tree with bat-falcon nests cluttering the
forks of its branches. A twisted screen of lianas partly obscured a
wall of mata-polo trees to the left.

“Fifteen minutes of fuel in the
pod and that’s all?” Joao asked.

“Maybe a minute more,
Jefe.”

We’ll never make it with
nothing but that river’s current to move us, Joao
thought.

“Jefe, sometimes there’s a
wind on the river,” Vierho said.

Christ, he doesn’t expect us
to sail that thing, does he? Joao wondered. He looked at
Vierho, saw the deep weariness in the man’s face, the
scarecrow emaciation.

“That wind could cause trouble,
Jefe,” Vierho said. “I have used one of the pod’s
grapnel anchors to make a thing that will float just under the
surface and provide some drag. It is called a sea anchor.
It’ll keep the nose of the pod into the wind.”

“That’s a clever idea,
Padre,” Joao said.

And he wondered: Why do we play out
this farce? We’re going to die here, all of us… either
here or somewhere down that river. There were seven or eight
hundred kilometers of that river – rapids, chasms, waterfalls
– and the rainy season was almost on them. The river would
become a torrential hell. And if it didn’t get them, there
were always the new insects, the creatures of acid and
sophisticated poisons.

“You better inspect it one more
time yourself, Jefe,” Vierho said. He gestured at the
pod.

Yes, anything to keep busy, to keep
from thinking, Joao thought. He’d already been over it
once, but another look wouldn’t hurt anything. After all,
their lives would depend on it… for awhile.

Our lives!

Joao allowed himself to wonder then if
escape were possible, if there were any hope at all. This was,
after all, the pod of a jungle airtruck. It could be sealed against
most insects. It was designed to take abuse.

I mustn’t allow myself to
hope, he thought.

But he set himself to another
inspection of the pod… just in case.

The white bandeirante paint of its
exterior had been washed away in patches, streaked and etched by
acid. The float skids, normally long and faired extrusions of the
pod’s bottom curve, had been cranked out manually and locked
in position. They formed a flat step up to the stub wings and into
the cabin. The entire pod was just short of five and a half meters
long with two meters at the rear taken up by the rocket motors. The
motor complex which had nested into the discarded rear truck
section was cut off flat on both sides. The pod itself was roughly
oval in cross section. This left two flat half-moon surfaces which
opened into the rear bulkhead of the pod’s cabin. The
left-side half-moon was a maze of male and female connectors which
once had linked the pod to the truck section. The right side was
sealed by a hatch which now opened from the cabin and down to one
of the float skids.

Joao inspected the hatch, made certain
the connectors had all been sealed off, looked at the right-side
float skid. A jagged rent in the side of the float had been patched
with butyl and fabric.

He could smell rocket fuel, and he
knelt to peer up at the belly tank section. Vierho had siphoned out
the fuel, applied a chemical hotpatch on the outside and spraytank
sealant inside, then replaced the fuel.

“It should hold all right if you
don’t hit anything,” Vierho said.

Joao nodded, worked his way around,
climbed up on the left stub wing and looked down into the cabin.
Dual control seats forward and the padded gig-box in the rear.
Spray stains were all over the interior. The interior formed a
space about two meters square and two and a half meters deep.
Windows in front looked down over the rounded nose. Side windows
stopped at the wings forward, dipped deeper in the rear. A single
transparent panel of polarizing plastic ran over the top to the
rear bulkhead.

Joao let himself down into the command
seat on the left, checked the manual controls. They felt loose and
sluggish. New fuel-monitoring and firing controls had been
installed with crude, hand-lettered labels. Vierho spoke at his
shoulder.

“I had to use whatever was
available, Jefe. There was not much. I’m glad these IEO
people were such fools.”

“Hmmm?” Joao spoke absently
as he continued his examination.

“When they left their truck, they
took tents. I would’ve taken more weapons. But the tents gave
me the new guy cables and fabric for patches.”

Joao finished tracing the fuel
controls. “No automatic demand valves on the fuel
lines,” he said.

“They couldn’t be repaired,
Jefe – but you don’t have much fuel anyway.”

“Enough to blow us all to
hell… or run away with us if it gets out of hand.”

“That’s why I put the big
knob there, Jefe; I told you about that. On and off in short bursts
– no problem.”

“Unless I accidentally give it
too big a drink.”

“Underneath there, Jefe: the
piece of wood, that’s the stop I put in. I tested it with
containers under the fuel injectors. You won’t have a very
fast ship… but it’s enough.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Joao
mused.

“That’s just a guess,
Jefe.”

“I know – maybe a hundred
and fifty kilometers if everything works as it’s supposed to;
a hundred and fifty meters with us spread all over if it
doesn’t.”

“A hundred and fifty
kilometers,” Vierho said. “You wouldn’t even be
halfway to civilization.”

“No argument,” Joao said.
“I was just thinking out loud.”

“Well, is everything ready to
go?” Chen-Lhu’s voice boomed up at them full of false
heartiness. Joao looked down to see the man standing near the tip
of the left wing, his body bent over with the appearance of
weakness. Joao had just about decided Chen-Lhu’s weakness was
appearance only.

He was the first to recover,
Joao thought. He’s had more time to regain his strength.
But… he was closer to death. Maybe I’m just imagining
things.

“Is it ready or isn’t
it?” Chen-Lhu asked.

“I hope so,” Joao said.

“There’s danger?”

“It’ll be like a Sunday
ride in the park,” Joao said.

“Is it time to come
aboard?”

Joao looked at the shadows stretching
out from the tents, the orange cast of the sunlight. He found he
was having difficulty breathing, knew this for tension. Joao took a
deep breath, found a level of hesitant calm within himself; not
relaxed, certainly, but with fear held at bay.

Vierho answered for Joao: “Twenty
minutes, more or less, Senhor Doctor.” He patted Joao’s
shoulder, “Jefe, my prayers go with you.”

“You sure you wouldn’t
rather take my place, Padre?”

“We will not discuss it,
Jefe.” Vierho stepped down off the float skid.

Rhin Kelly emerged from her lab tent
with a small bag in her left hand, crossed to stand beside
Chen-Lhu.

“About twenty minutes, my
dear,” Chen-Lhu said.

“I’m not at all sure I
should have a place in that thing,” she said. “One of
the others might give you a…”

“It has been decided,”
Chen-Lhu said, and he put angry sharpness in his voice. The fool
woman! Why can’t she let well enough alone? “No one
will permit you to stay,” he said. Besides, my dear Rhin,
I may need you to sway that Brazilian. This Joao Martinho will have
to be played very carefully. A woman sometimes can do that better
than a man.

“I’m still not sure,”
she said.

Chen-Lhu looked up at Joao.
“Perhaps you should speak to her, Johnny. Surely you
don’t want to leave her here.”

Here or there – not much
difference, Joao thought. But he said, “As you say: the
decision already has been made. You’d better get aboard and
fasten your safety harness.”

“Where do you want us?”
Chen-Lhu asked.

“You in back; you’re
heavier,” Joao said. “I don’t think we’ll
get off the ground before we hit the river, but we might. I want us
nose high.”

“Do you want us both in
back?” Rhin asked. And she realized then that she had agreed
with their decision. Why not? she asked herself, not
realizing she shared Joao’s pessimism.

“Jefe?”

Joao looked down at Vierho, who’d
just completed a final examination of the undercarriage.

Rhin and Chen-Lhu went around to the
right side, began climbing in.

“How does it look?” Joao
asked.

“Try to hold it up on that left
skid a little, Jefe,” Vierho said. “That might
help.”

“Right.”

Rhin began strapping herself into the
bucket seat beside him.

“We’ll send help as soon as
we can,” Joao said, sensing how empty and useless the words
were as soon as he spoke them.

“Of course, Jefe.”

Vierho stepped back, readied a bomb
thrower.

Thome and the others came out of the
tents, loaded with weapons, began setting them up on the side
facing the river.

No goodbyes, Joao thought.
Yes, that’s best. Treat this as routine, just another
flight.

“Rhin, what’s in that
little overnight bag you brought?” Chen-Lhu asked.

“Personal things…
and…” She swallowed. “Some of the men gave me
some letters to take.”

“Ahhh,” Chen-Lhu said,
“an appropriate and touching bit of
sentimentality.”

“What’s wrong with
it?” Joao growled.

“Nothing,” Chen-Lhu said.
“That’s just it: nothing is wrong with it.”

Vierho returned to the wingtip, said,
“Just as we planned, Jefe – when you give the signal
that you’re ready, we’ll lay down a foamal barrage
along your path. That should stall them long enough for you to make
it on to the river, and it’ll make the grass out there more
slippery.”

Joao nodded, began rehearsing the
flight routine in his mind. None of the switches were exactly where
they should be.

Igniter to the left now; throttle knob
jutting from the dash instead of on the floor between the seats. He
set the trim tabs, adjusted the feather-slots in the ailerons.

A pre-dark hush had fallen over the
savannah. The grass stretched out ahead of them like a green sea.
The river out there was only about fifty meters across: a narrow
path for him to hit if the pod got up too much speed. There’d
be no dusk at this latitude and altitude, Joao knew. He’d
have to gauge his moment carefully, using the last of the light for
the dash across the savannah – and darkness to shield them
once they hit the river.

A fifteen-meter range for those
acid-shooting insects, Joao thought. That only leaves us a
narrow strip down the middle if they attack from shore. And God
alone knows what other forms they may be able to hit us with
– flying creatures, water skaters…

“Stand by with sprayrifles as
soon as we’re safely on the river,” he said.
“They may mount an all-out attack once they see us trying to
escape.”

“Well be ready,” Chen-Lhu
said. “The rifles are in this gig-box under me, not
so?”

“Right.”

Joao lowered the canopy, sealed it.
“This model has self-sealing rifle ports on both sides where
the windows dip just behind the wings,” he said. “See
them?”

“Clever design,” Chen-Lhu
said.

“Vierho’s idea,” Joao
said. “It’s in all our pods.” He waved to Vierho,
who returned to the bomb thrower.

Joao turned on the pod’s landing
lights.

All the men saw the signal; a shower of
rifle spray arched out toward the river. Foamal bombs began landing
along the track they’d take.

Joao punched the igniter, saw the
safety light go on. He waited, counting three seconds before the
light dimmed and went out. Not too bad, he thought, and he
eased the throttle knob ahead.

The rocket motors came on with a
jarring blast that had them over the perimeter ditch and roaring
toward the river before Joao could ease off the feed. With a sense
of breathless shock, he realized they were airborne. The pod felt
sluggish, though, and with a tendency to fishtail – too much
drag from the floats. They weren’t meant to be left out there
in flight.

There was no time for flying niceties,
though. Joao wrenched the nose around, aimed for a stretch of river
where the savannah blended into jungle on both sides. The river was
a long pool there, wider, pointing toward blue hills in the
background. There came a moment of gliding suspense. Floats touched
the river in a cushioned bounce… up, down… spray on
both sides… slower, slower.

The nose came down.

It was only then that Joao remembered
he had to favor the right side float.

The pod was still making forward speed,
but coasting slower and slower.

Joao held his breath, wondering if the
patch had been torn off, waiting for the right side to start its
tipping plunge into the river.

The pod remained level.

“Have we made it?” Rhin
asked. “Are we really out of there?”

“I think so,” Joao said,
and he cursed the surge of hope that had accompanied that brief
flight.

Chen-Lhu passed sprayrifles forward,
said, “We seem to’ve caught them by surprise. Ah, ah!
Look back!”

Joao whirled as far as his safety
harness would permit, looked back across the savannah. Where the
distant cluster of tents had been there now rolled a gray mound
that heaved and extruded odd protuberances which flailed and
subsided.

With a deep shudder, Joao realized the
mound was composed of billions of insects overwhelming the
camp.

An eddy caught the pod, turned it away
from the scene as though some instinct within Joao controlled the
motion to remove from view a thing he no longer could bear to see.
For a moment the river shimmered ahead of him with a glassy orange
haze. Then night blotted the view. The sky became a luminous silver
with a thin slice of moon.

Vierho, Joao thought.
Thome… Ramon…

Tears blurred his eyes.

“Oh, God!” Rhin said.

“God, hah!” Chen-Lhu
barked. “Another name for the movement of fate!”

Rhin buried her face in her hands. She
felt that she was up for try-out in some cosmic drama, without
script or rehearsal, without words or music, without knowing her
role.

God is a Brazilian, Joao
thought, calling to mind his nation’s old expression of self
confidence touched by fear. At night, God corrects the errors
Brazilians make during the day.

What was it Vierho had always said?
“Believe in the Virgin and run.”

Joao felt a sprayrifle across his lap,
the metal cold against his hands.

I couldn’t have helped
them, he thought. The range was too great.

Chapter VII

“YOU SAID the vehicle would not
fly!” the Brain accused.

Its sensors probed the messenger
pattern on the cave ceiling, listened for the afferent hum that
might expand the meaning. But the configuration revealed on the
ceiling by the phosphor-light of servant insects remained firm, as
steady as the patch of stars standing in the cave-mouth beyond the
messengers.

Chemical demands pulsed through the
Brain, sending its servant nurses into a frenzy of ministrations.
This was the closest to consternation the Brain had ever
experienced. Its logical awareness labeled the experience as an
emotion and sought parallel references even while it worked on the
substance of the report.

The vehicle flew only a short
distance and landed on the river. It remains on the river with its
thrusting force dormant.

But it can fly!

The first serious doubt of its
information entered the Brain’s computations then. The
experience was a form of alienation from the creations which had
created it.

“The claim that the vehicle would
not fly came directly from the humans,” the messengers
danced. “Their assessment was reported.”

It was a pragmatic statement, more to
fill out the report predicting the escape try than to defend
against the Brain’s accusation.

That fact should have been part of
the original report, the Brain thought. The messengers must
be taught not to intervene, but report all details complete with
weight-by-source. But how can this be done? They’re creatures
of firm reflex and tied to a self-limiting system.

Obviously new messengers would have to
be designed and bred.

With this thought, the Brain moved
even further from its creators. It understood then how an
action-of-mimicry, a pure reflex, gave birth to itself, but
the Brain, the thing-produced-by-reflex, was having an
inevitable feedback effect, changing the original reflexes which
had created it.

“What must be done about the
vehicle on the river?” the messengers asked.

With its new insight, the Brain saw how
this question had been produced – out of survival reflex.

Survival must be served, it
thought.

“The vehicle will be allowed to
proceed temporarily,” the Brain ordered. “There must be
no visible sign of molestation for the time being, but we must
prepare safeguards. A cluster of the new little-deadlies
will be conveyed to the vehicle under the cover of night. They must
be instructed to infiltrate every available hole on the vehicle and
remain in hiding. They must not take action against the occupants
of the vehicle without orders! But they must stand ready to destroy
the occupants whenever necessary.”

The Brain fell silent then, secure in
the knowledge that its orders would be carried out. And it took up
its new understanding to examine as though this were an autonomous
fragment. The experience was both fascinating and terrifying
because here, living within its single-self, was an element capable
of debate and separate action.

Decisions – conscious
decisions, the Brain thought, these are a punishment
inflicted upon the single-self by consciousness. There are
conscious decisions that can fragment the single-self. How can
humans stand up under such a load of decisions?

Chen-Lhu tipped his head back, resting
in the corner between the window and rear bulkhead, stared up at
the melon-curve of moon lifting across the sky. The moon was the
color of molten copper.

An acid-etched frost line ran
diagonally down the window to the faired curve of exterior skin.
Chen-Lhu’s eyes followed the line and, for a moment as he
stared at the place where the window ended beside him, he thought
he saw a row of tiny dots, like barely visible gnats marching
across the window.

In an eyeblink, they vanished.

Did I imagine them? he
wondered.

He thought of alerting the others, but
Rhin had been near hysteria for almost an hour now since witnessing
the death of their camp. She’d have to be nursed back to
usefulness.

I could’ve imagined them,
Chen-Lhu thought. Only the moon for illumination – spots
in front of my eyes; nothing unusual about that.

The river had narrowed here to no more
than six or seven times the pod’s wingspan. A shadowy wall of
overhanging trees hemmed in the track of water.

“Johnny, turn on the wing lights
for a few minutes,” Chen-Lhu said.

“Why?”

“They’ll see us if we
do,” Rhin said.

She heard the almost-hysteria in her
own voice and was shocked by it. I’m an entomologist,
she told herself. Whatever’s out there, it’s just a
variation on something familiar.

But this reasoning lacked comfort. She
realized that some primal fear had touched her, arousing instincts
with which reason could not contend.

“Make no mistake,” Chen-Lhu
said, and he tried to speak softly, reasonably. “Whatever
overwhelmed our friends… it knows where we are. I merely
wish the light to confirm a suspicion.”

“Are we being followed,
eh,” Joao asked.

He snapped on the wing lights. The
sudden glare picked out two caverns of brilliance that filled with
fluttering, darting insects – a white-winged mob.

The current swung the pod around a
bend. Their lights touched the river bank, outlined twisting medusa
roots that clutched dark red clay, then swung with the vagaries of
an eddy to pick out a narrow island – tall reeds and grass
bending to the current, and the cold green reflections of eyes just
above the water.

Joao snapped off the lights.

In the abrupt darkness, they heard the
whining hum of insects and the metallic chime calls of river
frogs… then, like a delayed comment, the coughing barks of a
troop of red monkeys somewhere on the right shore.

The presence of the frogs and monkeys,
Joao felt, carried a significance that he should understand. The
significance eluded him.

Ahead, he could see bats flicker across
the moonlit river, skimming the water to drink.

“They’re following
us… watching, waiting,” Rhin said.

Bats, monkeys, frogs, all living
intimately with the river, Joao thought. But Rhin said the
river carried poisons. Was there reason to lie about that?

He tried to study her face in the dim
reflections of moonlight that penetrated the cabin, but received
only the impression of gaunt, withdrawn shadows.

“I think we are safe,”
Chen-Lhu said, “as long as we keep the cabin sealed and get
our air through the vent filters.”

“Open only in daylight,”
Joao said. “We can see what’s around us then and use
our rifles if we need to.”

Rhin pressed her lips together to
prevent them from trembling. She tipped her head back, looked up
through the transparent strip across the roof of the cabin. A
wilderness of stars flooded the sky, and when she lowered her gaze
she could still see the stars – a shimmer of points,
tremulous on the river surface. Quite suddenly the night filled her
with a sensation of immense loneliness that was at the same time
oppressive, holding her locked between the river’s jungle
walls.

The night was odorous with jungle
smells that the vent filters could not remove. Every breath was
thick with baited and repelling perfumes.

The jungle took on a form of conscious
malignancy in her imagination. She sensed something out there in
the night – a thinking entity which could swallow her without
a moment’s hesitation. The sense of reality with which her
mind invested this image flowed over her and through her. She could
give it no shape except immensity… but it was there.

“Johnny, how fast is the current
along here?” Chen-Lhu asked.

Good question, Joao thought.

He bent forward to peer at the luminous
dial of the altimeter. “Elevation here’s eight hundred
and thirty meters,” he said. “If I’ve located us
correctly on the right river, the channel drops about seventy
meters in the next thirty kilometers.” He worked the equation
in his head. “I can only approximate, of course, but
it’ll be a six to eight knot current.”

“Won’t there be a search
for us?” Rhin asked. “I keep
thinking…”

“Don’t think that
way,” Chen-Lhu said. “Any search, if it comes at all,
will be for me – and not for several weeks. I knew where to
look for you, Rhin.” He hesitated, wondering if he was saying
too much, giving Joao too many clues. “Only a few of my aides
knew where I was going, and why.”

Chen-Lhu hoped she’d hear the
secrecy in his voice, get off this subject.

“You know how I got in
here,” Joao said. “If anybody thought to look for
me… where’d they look?”

“But there’s a chance,
isn’t there?” Rhin asked. Her voice revealed how
desperately she wanted to believe in that chance.

“There is always a chance,”
Chen-Lhu said. And he thought: You must calm yourself, Rhin.
When I need you, there must be no problems of fear and
hysteria.

He set his mind then to the way Joao
Martinho must be discredited if they reached civilization.
Rhin’s help would have to be enlisted in this enterprise, of
course. Joao was the perfect scapegoat and this situation was made
to order – if Rhin could be persuaded to help. Naturally, if
she proved obstinate, she could be eliminated.

Midnight came to the cave above the
river chasm before the Brain received its next report on the three
humans and their floating vehicle.

Most of the conversation reported by
the dancing messengers revealed only the tensions and pressures of
the human’s circumstances. The humans realized, at least
unconsciously, that they were in a loose trap. Most of this
conversation could be set aside for later evaluation, but there was
one matter for the Brain’s immediate attention. The Brain
felt something approaching chagrin that it had not anticipated this
problem with its own logic.

“Enough action groups must be
dispatched at once,” the Brain ordered, “to accompany
the vehicle but stay out of sight in the adjoining growth. These
action groups must be ready to fly over the river whenever needed
and hide the vehicle from any searchers or chance passersby in the
sky above them.”

One of the pod’s stub wings
brushed vines along the shore, awakening Joao from a light doze. He
glanced back through the gloom to see Chen-Lhu alert and
staring.

“It is time for you to awake and
take your watch,” Chen-Lhu said. “Rhin still
sleeps.”

“Have we been touching the shore
very much like that?” Joao whispered.

“Not much.”

“I should put out that sea
anchor… Vierho made.”

“That would not prevent us
touching the shores. And it might snag on something and delay
us.”

“Padre covered the hooks on the
grapnel. I don’t think it’ll snag. Wind’s upriver
right now, will be until morning. A drag in the water like that
could speed us up.”

“But how will you put it out
there?”

“Yeah…” Joao
nodded. “Better wait until morning.”

“It would be best,
Johnny.”

Rhin stirred restlessly.

Joao snapped on the winglights. Twin
shafts of illumination leaped out to the jungle wall, revealed a
cluster of sago palms in front of a screen of caña brava.
The lights began to siphon in two flows of fluttering, darting
insects.

“Our friends are still with
us,” Chen-Lhu whispered.

Joao turned off the lights.

Rhin began breathing in ragged gasps as
though she were choking. Joao gripped her arm, spoke softly:
“Are you all right?”

Without coming fully awake, Rhin felt
his presence beside her, experienced a primitive demand for his
protective masculinity. She nestled against him, murmured,
“It’s so hot. Doesn’t it ever cool
off?”

“She dreams,” Chen-Lhu
whispered.

“But it is hot,” Joao said.
He felt embarrassed by Rhin’s obvious need for him, sensing
that this amused and pleased Chen-Lhu.

“Towards morning we should get a
little relief from the heat,” Joao said. “Why
don’t you sleep for awhile, Travis?”

“Yes, I’ll sleep
now,” Chen-Lhu said. He stretched out on the narrow gig-box,
wondering: Will I have to kill them? They are such fools, Rhin
and Johnny… so obviously attracted to each other, but
fighting it.

The night breeze rocked the pod, Rhin
nestled closer to Joao, breathing deeply, peacefully. Joao stared
out the windows.

The moon had gone down behind the
hills, leaving only starlight to block out dark shadows along both
shores. The hypnotic flow of dim shapes filled Joao with
drowsiness. He concentrated on staying awake, peered through the
black, his senses strained to the limit.

There was only the movement of the
river and a hesitant rocking motion from the breeze.

The night awakened in Joao a sense of
mystery. This river was haunted, peopled by the ghosts of every
passenger it had ever carried, and now… by another presence.
He could feel this other presence. The night was hushed with it.
Even the frogs were silent.

Something barked in the jungle to the
left. And Joao suddenly thought he heard a nerve beat of log drums.
Distant… very distant: a still-vibration more felt than
heard. It was gone before he could be sure.

The Indians were all cleared out of
the Red, he thought. Who could be using drums? I
must’ve imagined it; my own pulse, that’s what I
heard.

He held himself still, listening, but
there was only Chen-Lhu’s breathing, deep and even, and a
small sigh from Rhin.

The river widened and its current
slowed.

An hour passed… another. Time
seemed dragged out by the current. A weary loneliness filled Joao.
The pod around them felt fragile, inadequate: a corrupt and
impermanent thing. He wondered how he had trusted his life to this
machine high above the jungle when it was so vulnerable.

We’ll never make it! he
thought.

Chen-Lhu’s voice, a low rumble,
broke the silence: “This river, it is the Itacoasa, for sure,
Johnny?”

“I’m reasonably certain of
that,” Joao whispered.

“What is the nearest
civilization?”

“The bandeirante staging area at
Santa Maria de Crao Cuyaba.”

“Seven or eight hundred
kilometers, eh?”

“More or less.”

Rhin stirred in Joao’s arms, and
he felt himself responding to her femininity. He forced his mind to
veer away from such thoughts, concentrated instead on the river
ahead of them: a winding, twisting course with rapids and sunken
limbs. It was a track menaced for its full length by that deadly
presence which he sensed all around them. And there was one more
peril he had not mentioned to the others: these waters abounded
with cannibal fish, piranha.

“How many rapids ahead of
us?” Chen-Lhu asked.

“I’m not sure,” Joao
said. “Eight or nine – maybe more. It depends on the
season and height of water.”

“We will have to use the fuel,
fly across the rapids.”

“This thing won’t stand
many takeoffs and landings,” Joao said. “That right
hand float…”

“Vierho did a good job;
it’ll suffice.”

“We hope.”

“You have sad thoughts, Johnny.
That is no way to face this venture. How long to this Santa
Maria?”

“Six weeks, with luck. Are you
thirsty?”

“Yes. How much water do we
have?”

“Ten liters… and we have
the little pot still if we need more.”

Joao accepted a canteen from Chen-Lhu,
drank deeply. The water was warm and flat. He returned the
canteen.

Far off, a night bird called,
“Tuta! Tuta!” with a fluting voice.

“What was that?” Chen-Lhu
hissed.

“A bird… nothing but a
bird.”

Joao sighed. The bird cry had filled
him with foreboding, like an evil omen out of his superstitious
past. A flux of night sounds pulsed in his temples. He stared out
into darkness, saw a sudden witch light of fireflies along the
right shore, smelled the wind from the jungle like an exhalation of
evil breath.

The near hopelessness of their position
pressed in upon him. They stood at the edge of the rainy season,
separated from any sanctuary by hundreds of kilometers of
whirlpools and chasms. And they were the target of a cruel
intelligence which used the jungle as a weapon.

A musk perfume lifted into his nostrils
from Rhin. It left him with a profound awareness that she was
female… and desirable.

The river tugged at the pod.

Joao felt then their alliance with the
current dragging itself down to the sea like a black chord.

Another hour passed… and
another.

Joao grew conscious of a red fireglow
off to the right – dawn.

The hoots and cries of howler monkeys
greeted the light. Their uproar aroused birds to morning talk in
the sheltered blackness of the forest: staccato peepings, chirrings
up and down the scale, intermittent screeches.

Pearl luster crept across the sky,
became milk-silver light that gave definition to the world around
the drifting pod. Joao looked out to the west, seeing foothills
– one after another, piled waves of hills pounding against
the Andean escarpment. He realized then that they had come down out
of the first steep descent of the river to the high plateau.

The pod floated quietly like a great
water bug against a backdrop of trees laced with the dancing flames
of forest flowers. A sluggish current twisted into whorls against
the floats. Curls of mist hung on the water like puffs of
gauze.

Rhin awoke, straightened out of
Joao’s arms, stared downstream. The river was like a
cathedral aisle between the tall trees.

Joao massaged his arm where
Rhin’s head had slowed the circulation. All the while, he
studied the woman beside him. There was a small-child look about
her: the red hair disarrayed, an unlined expression of innocence on
her face.

She yawned, smiled at him… and
abruptly frowned, coming fully awake to their situation. She shook
her head, turned to look at Chen-Lhu.

The Chinese slept with his head thrown
back into the corner. She had the sudden feeling that Chen-Lhu
embodied fallen greatness, as though he were an idol out of his
country’s past. He breathed with a low, burred rasp. Heavy
pores indented his skin and there was a burnt leather harshness to
his complexion that she had never before noticed. A graying wheat
stubble of hair stood out along his upper lip. She realized
suddenly that Chen-Lhu dyed his hair. It was a touch of vanity that
she had not suspected.

“There’s not a breath of
wind,” Joao said.

“But it’s cooler,”
she said.

She looked out the window on her side,
saw wisps of reedy grass trailing from the float. The pod was
twisting at the push of every random current. The movement carried
a certain majesty; slow sweeping turns like a formal dance to the
river’s rhythm.

“What do I smell?” she
asked.

Joao sniffed: rocket fuel… very
faint, the musk of human sweat… mildew. He knew without
exploring it that mildew was the odor that had aroused her
question.

“It’s mildew,” he
said.

“Mildew?”

She looked around her at the interior
of the cabin, seeing the smooth tan fabric of the ceiling edges,
chrome on the instrument panel. She put her hands on the dual wheel
of her side, moved it.

Mildew, she thought.

The jungle already had a beachhead
inside here.

“We’re almost into the
rainy season, aren’t we?” she said.
“What’ll that mean?”

“Trouble,” he said.
“High water… rapids.”

Chen-Lhu’s voice intruded:
“Why look at the worst side?”

“Because we have to,” she
said.

Hunger awoke suddenly in Joao. His
hands trembled; his mouth burned with thirst.

“Let’s have a
canteen,” he said.

Chen-Lhu passed a canteen forward. It
sloshed as Joao took it. He offered it to Rhin, but she shook her
head, overcome by a strange sensation of nausea.

Poison in water conditioned me to a
temporary rejection pattern, she thought. The sound of Joao
drinking made her feel ill. How greedily he drank! She turned away,
unable to look at him.

Joao returned the canteen to Chen-Lhu,
thinking how secretively the man awoke. The first you knew about it
was his voice, alert and intrusive. Chen-Lhu probably lay there
pretending sleep, but awake and listening.

“I… I think I’m
hungry,” Rhin said.

Chen-Lhu produced ration packets and
they ate in silence.

Now she felt thirst… and was
surprised to have Chen-Lhu produce the canteen before she asked. He
handed it to her. She knew then that he studied her and was aware
of her emotions, saw many of her thoughts. It was a disquieting
discovery. She drank in anger, thrust the canteen back at
Chen-Lhu.

He smiled.

“Unless they’re on the roof
where we can’t see them, or under the wings, our friends have
left us,” Joao said.

“So I’ve noticed,”
Chen-Lhu said.

Joao allowed his gaze to traverse both
shores as far as he could see.

Not a movement of life.

Not a sound.

The sun had mounted high enough now to
burn the mist off the river.

“It’s going to be a hellish
hot day in here,” Rhin said.

Joao nodded.

The warmth had a definite moment of
beginning, he thought. One instant it wasn’t there, then it
forced itself upon the senses. He released his safety harness,
tipped his seat aside and slid into the rear of the cabin, put his
hands on the dogs that sealed the rear hatch.

“Where’re you going?”
Rhin demanded. She blushed as she heard her own question.

Chen-Lhu chuckled.

She felt herself hating
Chen-Lhu’s callousness then, even when he tried to soften the
effect of his reaction by saying, “We must learn certain
blind spots of western conventionality, Rhin.”

The derision was still there in his
voice, and she heard it, whirled away.

Joao cracked open the hatch, examined
the edges of it, inside and out. No obvious sign of insects. He
looked down at the flat surface of the float extending to the rear
beside the rocket motors – two and a half meters of low
platform almost a meter wide. No sign of insects there.

He dropped down, closed the hatch.

As soon as the hatch closed, Rhin
turned on Chen-Lhu.

“You are insufferable!” she
blazed.

“Now, Doctor
Kelly.”

“Don’t pull that
we-professionals-together bit,” she said. “You’re
still insufferable.”

Chen-Lhu lowered his voice, said,
“Before he comes back, we’ve a few things to discuss.
There’s no time for personalities. This is IEO
business.”

“The only IEO business we have is
to carry your story to headquarters,” she said.

He stared at her. This reaction had
been predictable, of course, but a way had to be found to move her.
The Brazilians have a saying, he thought, and said,
“When you talk of duty, speak also of money.”

“A conta foi paga por mim,”
she said. “I paid that account.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that
you pay anything,” he said.

“Are you offering to buy
me?” she snapped.

“Others have,” he said.

She glared at him. Was he threatening
to tell Joao about her past in the IEO’s
investigative/espionage branch? Let him! But she’d learned a
few things in the line of duty, and she assumed a look of
uncertainty now. What did Chen-Lhu have in mind?

Chen-Lhu smiled. Westerners were always
so susceptible to cupidity. “You wish to hear more?” he
asked.

Her silence was acquiescence.

“For now,” Chen-Lhu said,
“you will ply your wiles upon Johnny Martinho, make him a
slave of love. He must be reduced to a creature who’ll do
anything for you. For you, that should be fairly easy.”

I’ve done it before, eh?
she thought.

She turned away. Well… I have
done it before: in the name of duty.

Chen-Lhu nodded to himself behind her.
The patterns of life were unshakable. She’d come around
– almost out of habit. The hatch beside him opened and Joao
climbed up into the cabin.

“Not a sign of anything,”
he said, slipping back into his seat. “I left the hatch on
half-lock in case anyone else wants to go out now.”

“Rhin?” Chen-Lhu said.

She shook her head, took a shivering
breath. “No.”

“Then I’ll avail myself of
the opportunity,” Chen-Lhu said. He opened the hatch, climbed
down to the float, closed the hatch.

Without turning, Rhin knew the hatch
only appeared to be closed, that Chen-Lhu had left open a crack and
had his ear to the opening. She stared straight ahead at the
river’s quicksilver track. The pod lay suspended in a blue
vault of motionless air that slowly inflated with heat until she
knew it must explode.

Joao looked at her. “You are all
right?”

There’s a laugh! she
thought.

A minute passed in silence.

“Something’s wrong,”
Joao said. “You and Travis were whispering while I was out
there. I couldn’t make out what you said, but there was anger
in your tone.”

She tried to swallow in a dry throat.
Chen-Lhu was listening to this, sure as hell. “I… he
was teasing me.”

“Teasing you?”

“Yes.”

“About what?”

She turned away, studied the feathered
softness of hills lifting to the right, and glimpsed far away there
the snow cone of a mountain with a black tonsure of volcanic ash.
Some of the mountain’s serenity invaded her senses.

“About you,” she said.

Joao looked at his hands, wondering why
her admission embarrassed him.

In this silence, Rhin began to hum. She
had a good voice and knew it: throaty, intimate. The voice was one
of her best tools.

But Joao recognized the song and
wondered at her choice. Even after she fell silent, the melody hung
around him like a vapor. It was a native lament, a Lorca tragedy
arranged for guitar:

“Stay your whip. Old Death –

It is not I who seeks your dark sea.

I would not whine, nor beg –

But ask it as one who has done your work.

This river which is my life,

Let it flow yet awhile in tranquility;

For my love has gray smoke in her eyes…

And farewells are difficult.”

She’d only hummed the song, but
the words were there, all the same.

Joao looked out to the left.

The river was lined here with mango
trees, dense green foliage broken by the lighter sage of tropical
mistletoe and occasional fur-coated chonta palms. Above the
jungle’s near reaches hovered two black and white
urubu vultures. They hung in the burned-out steel blue sky
as though painted there on a false backdrop.

The apparent tranquility of the scene
held no illusions for Joao. And he wondered if this were the
tranquility referred to in the song.

A flock of tanagers caught his
attention. They swept overhead, glistening turquoise, dived into
the jungle wall and were swallowed by it as though they’d
never been.

The mango shore on the left gave way to
a narrow strip of grass on a medium embankment, red-brown earth
pitted with holes.

The hatch opened, and Joao heard
Chen-Lhu clamber into the cabin. There came the sound of the hatch
being closed and dogged.

“Johnny, do I see something
moving in the trees behind that grass?” Chen-Lhu asked.

Joao focused his attention on the
scene. Yes! Something just inside the tree shadows –
many figures that moved like a flitting current to keep pace with
the pod.

Joao lifted the sprayrifle which he had
wedged to the left of his seat.

“That’s a long shot,”
Rhin said.

“I know. I just want to put them
on notice – keep them at a distance.”

He fumbled with the seal on the
gunport, but before he could open it, the figures stepped out of
the shadows into the full sunlight of the grassy bench.

Joao gasped.

“Mother of God, Mother of
God…” Rhin whispered.

It was a mixed group standing as though
on review along the shore. They were mostly human in shape,
although there were a few giant copies of insect forms –
mantidae, beetles, something with a whip-like proboscis. The humans
were mainly in the form of Indians and most of those like the ones
who’d kidnapped Joao and his father.

Interspersed along the line, though,
stood single editions, individuals: there, one identical in
appearance to the Prefect, Joao’s father; beside him…
Vierho! and all the men from the camp.

Joao pushed the sprayrifle through the
port.

“No!” Rhin said.
“Wait. See their eyes, how glassy they look. Those could be
our friends… drugged or…” She broke off.

Or worse, Joao thought.

“It’s possible
they’re hostages,” Chen-Lhu said. “One sure way
to find out – shoot one of them.” He stood up, opened
the gig-box. “Here’s a hard-pellet…”

“Stuff that!” Joao snarled.
He withdrew his sprayrifle, sealed the port.

Chen-Lhu pursed his lips in thought.
These Latins! So unrealistic. He returned the hard-pellet
rifle to the box, sat down. One of the lesser individuals could
have been chosen as target. Valuable information could have been
gained. Pressing the issue now would gain nothing, though. Not
now.

“I don’t know about you
two,” Rhin said, “but in my school we were taught not
to kill our friends.”

“Of course, Rhin, of
course,” Chen-Lhu said. “But are those our
friends?”

She said, “Until I know for
sure…”

“Exactly!” Chen-Lhu said.
“And how will you know for sure?” He pointed toward the
figures standing now behind them as the shore once more drifted
into a line of overhanging trees and vines. “That is a
school, too, Rhin – that jungle over there. You should learn
its lesson, too.”

Double meaning, double meaning,
she thought.

“The jungle is a school of
pragmatism,” Chen-Lhu said. “Absolute judgments. Ask it
about good and evil? The jungle has one answer: ‘That
which succeeds is good.’”

He’s telling me to get on with
the seduction of Senhor Johnny Martinho while the poor fool’s
still wide open from shock, she thought. True enough –
danger, shock and horror, they all create their own
rebound.

She nodded to herself. But where do
I bounce?

“If those were Indians, I’d
know why they put on that show,” Joao said. “But those
are not really Indians. We cannot tell how these creatures think.
Indians would do that sort of thing to taunt us, saying:
“You’re next.” But these creatures…”
He shook his head.

Silence invaded the pod: an impressive
solitude magnified by heat and the hypnotic flow of shoreline.

Chen-Lhu lay back, drowsing, thought:
I will let the heat and idleness do my work for me.

Joao stared at his hands.

He’d never before been trapped in
a situation where both fear and idleness forced him to look inward.
The experience terrified and fascinated him.

Fear is the penalty of consciousness
forced to stare at itself, Joao thought. I should be busy
with something. With what? Sleep, then.

But he feared sleep because he sensed
dreams poised there.

Emptiness… what a prize that
would be: emptiness, he thought.

He felt that somewhere in his past he
had reached a glowing summit devoid of before-and-after
complications, a place of no doubts. Action… play…
reflex motion – that had been the life. Now, it all lay
there, open to introspection, open to study and re-examination.

But he sensed there might be a tip-over
point with introspection, that somewhere within him lurked memories
which could engulf him.

Rhin rested her head against the back
of the seat, looked up at the sky. Someone’ll start
looking for us soon, she thought. They must… they
must… they must.

Must rhymes with lust, she
thought. And she swallowed, wondering where that thought had
originated. She forced her attention to the sky – so
blue… blue… blue: a blank surface upon which anything
could be written.

Searchers could come over us at any
minute now.

Her gaze wavered, went to the mountains
along the western horizon. Mountains grew and diminished there as
the river carried her through its blue furrow.

It’s the things we must not
think about because they’d overpower us with emotion, she
thought. These things are the terrible burden. Her hands
crept out, clasped Joao’s. He didn’t look at her, but
the pressure of his response was more than a hand enfolding
hers.

Chen-Lhu saw the motion and smiled.

Joao stared out at the passing shore.
The pod drifted on an enchanted current between drooping curtains
of lianas. The current carried them around a bend, exposing the
towered brilliance of three Fernan Sanchez trees: imperative
red against the green. But Joao’s eye went to the water where
the river was at work, slowly undercutting clawed roots in the
muddy bank.

Her hand in mine, he thought.
Her hand in mine.

Her palm was moist, intimate,
possessive.

Rising waves of heat encased the pod in
dead air. The sun grew to a throbbing inferno that drifted over
them… slowly, slowly settling toward the western peaks.

Hands together… hands
together, Joao thought.

He began to pray for the night.

Evening shadows began to quilt the
river’s edges. Night swept upward from the trench of slow
current towards the blazing peaks.

Chen-Lhu stirred, sat up as the sun
dipped behind the mountains. Amethyst vapors from the sunset
produced a space of polished ruby water ahead of the pod –
like flowing blood. There came a moment at the dark when the river
appeared to cease all movement. Then they entered the damply
cushioned night.

This is the time of the timid and
the terrible, Chen-Lhu thought. The night is my time –
and I am not timid.

And he smiled at the way the two
shadows in the front seats had become one shadow.

The animal with two backs, he
thought. It was such an amusing thought that he put a hand to his
mouth to suppress laughter.

Presently, Chen-Lhu spoke: “I
will sleep now, Johnny. You take the first watch. Wake me at
midnight.”

The small stirring noises from the
front of the cabin ceased momentarily, then resumed.

“Right,” Joao said, and his
voice was husky.

Ahh, that Rhin, Chen-Lhu
thought. Such a good tool even when she does not want to
be.

Chapter VIII

THE REPORT, although interesting for
its variations, added little to the Brain’s general
information about humans. They reacted with shock and fear to the
display along the riverbank. That was to be expected. The Chinese
had demonstrated practicality not shared by the other two. This
fact, added to the apparent attempts of the Chinese to get the
other two to mate – that might be significant. Time would
tell.

Meanwhile, the Brain experienced
something akin to another human emotion – worry.

The trio in the vehicle were drifting
farther and farther away from the chamber above the river chasm. A
significant delay factor was entering the system of
report-computation-decision-action.

The Brain’s sensors reviewed once
more the messenger pattern being repeated on the cavern
ceiling.

The vehicle was approaching a series of
rapids. Its occupants could be killed there and irrevocably lost.
Or they might renew their efforts to fly away in the craft. There
lay a worry-element requiring a heavy weighing factor.

The vehicle had flown once.

Computation-decision.

“You report to the action
groups,” the Brain commanded. “Tell them to capture the
vehicle and occupants before they reach the rapids. Capture the
humans alive, if possible. Order of importance if some of them must
be sacrificed: first the Chinese is to be taken, then the dormant
queen, and finally the other male.”

The insects on the ceiling danced their
message pattern and hummed the modulation elements to fix them,
then took off into the dawn light at the cave mouth.

Action.

Chen-Lhu stared downriver across the
front seats, watching the moon-path crawl beneath the pod. The path
rippled with spider lines in the eddies, flowed like painted silk
in the broad reaches.

The breathing sounds of deep, satiated
sleep came from the front of the cabin.

Now I probably will not have to kill
that fool, Johnny, Chen-Lhu thought.

He looked out the side windows at the
moon, low and near to setting. Bronze earthlight filled out the
middle circle. Within this darker area there appeared the likeness
of a face: Vierho.

He is dead, Johnny’s
companion, Chen-Lhu thought. That was a simulation we saw
beside the river. Nothing could’ve survived that attack on
the camp. Our friends out there have copied dear Padre.

Chen-Lhu asked himself then: I
wonder how Vierho encountered death – as an illusion or as a
cataclysm?

A bootless question.

Rhin turned in her sleep, pressed close
to Joao. “Mmmmm,” she murmured.

Our friends will not hold off the
attack much longer, Chen-Lhu thought. It’s obvious
they’ve just been awaiting the proper time and place. Where
will it come – in a rock-filled gorge, at a narrow place?
Where?

The thought turned every shadow outside
into a source of peril, and Chen-Lhu wondered at himself that he
could have allowed his mind to play such a fear-inspiring
trick.

Still, he strained his senses against
the night.

There was a waiting-silence outside, a
feeling of presence in the jungle.

This is nonsense! Chen-Lhu told
himself.

He cleared his throat.

Joao turned against the seat, felt
Rhin’s head cradled against him. How quietly she
breathed.

“Travis,” he whispered.

“Yes?”

“Time’s it?”

“Go back to sleep, Johnny.
You’ve a couple more hours.”

Joao closed his eyes, lay back into his
seat, but deep sleep evaded him. Something about the cabin…
something. There was something here demanding his recognition. His
awareness came farther and farther out of sleep.

Mildew.

It was stronger in the cabin than it
had been – and there was the acrid tang of rust.

The smells filled Joao with melancholy.
He could feel the pod deteriorating around him, and the pod was a
symbol of civilization. These imperative odors represented all
human decay and mortality.

He stroked Rhin’s hair, thought:
Why shouldn’t we grab a little happiness here, now?
Tomorrow we could be dead… or worse.

Slowly, he sank back into sleep.

A flock of parakeets announced the
dawn. They chattered and gossiped in the jungle beside the river.
Smaller birds joined the chorus – flutterings, chirps,
twitters.

Joao heard the birds as though from an
enormous distance pulling him upward to wakefulness. He awoke,
sweating, feeling oddly weak.

Rhin had moved away from him in the
night. She slept curled against her side of the cabin.

Joao stared out at blue-white light.
Smoky mist hid the river upstream and downstream. There was a
feeling of moist, unhealthy warmth in the closed cabin’s air.
His mouth tasted dry and bitter.

He sat up straight, leaned forward to
look through the overhead curve of windshield. His back ached from
sleeping in a cramped position.

“Don’t look up for
searchers, Johnny,” Chen-Lhu said.

Joao coughed, said, “I was just
looking at the weather. We’re going to get rain
soon.”

“Perhaps.”

So gray, that sky, Joao thought.
It was an empty slate prepared as a setting for one vulture that
sailed into view across the treetops, wings motionless. The vulture
tipped majestically, beat its wings once… twice… and
flew upstream.

Joao lowered his gaze, noted that the
pod had become part of a drifting island of logs and brush during
the night. He could see parasite moss on the logs. It was an old
island – at least one season old… no, older.
The moss was thick.

As he watched, an eddy came between the
pod and the logs. They parted company.

“Where are we?” Rhin
asked.

Joao turned to see her sitting up,
awake. She avoided his eyes.

What the hell? he thought. Is
she ashamed?

“We are where we’ve always
been, my dear Rhin,” Chen-Lhu said. “We’re on the
river. Are you hungry?”

She considered the question, found that
she was ravenous.

“Yes, I’m
hungry.”

They ate in quick silence with Joao
growing more and more convinced that Rhin was avoiding him. She was
first out the hatch to the float and stayed a long time. When she
returned, she lay back in the seat, pretending sleep.

To hell with her, Joao thought.
He went out the hatch, slammed it after him.

Chen-Lhu leaned forward, whispered
close to Rhin’s ear, “You were very good last night, my
dear.”

She spoke without opening her eyes:
“To hell with you.”

“But I don’t believe in
hell.”

“And I do?” She opened her
eyes, stared at him.

“Of course.”

“Each in his own way,” she
said, and she closed her eyes.

For some reason he couldn’t
explain, her words and action angered him, and he tried to goad her
with what he knew of her beliefs: “You are a terrible
aboriginal calamity!”

Again, she spoke without opening her
eyes: “That’s Cardinal Newman. Stuff Cardinal
Newman.”

“You don’t believe in
original sin?” he jeered.

“I only believe in certain kinds
of hell,” she said, and again she was looking at him, the
green eyes steady.

“To each his own, eh?”

“You said it; I
didn’t.”

“But you did say it.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes! You said it!”

“You’re shouting,”
she said.

He took a moment to calm himself, then,
in a whisper, “And Johnny, was he good?”

“Better than you could ever
be.”

Joao opened the hatch and entered the
cabin before Chen-Lhu could answer, found Rhin staring up at
him.

“Howdy, Jefe,” she said.
And she smiled, a warm, intimate, sharing smile.

Joao answered the smile, slipped into
his seat. “We’re going to hit rapids today,” he
said. “I can feel it. What were you shouting about,
Travis?”

“It was nothing,” Chen-Lhu
said, but his voice still grated with anger.

“It was an ideological
issue,” Rhin said. “Travis remains a militant atheist
to the end. Me, I believe in heaven.” She stroked
Joao’s cheek.

“Why do you think we are near
rapids?” Chen-Lhu asked. And he thought: I must divert
this conversation! This is a dangerous game you play with me,
Rhin.

“Current’s faster, for one
thing,” Joao said. He stared out the front windows. A new,
surging character definitely had come over the river. Hills had
drawn closer to the channel. More eddies trailed their lines from
the shores.

A band of long-tailed monkeys began
pacing the pod. They roared and chittered through the trees along
the left bank, only to abandon the game at a river bend.

“Every creature I see out there,
I have to ask myself: Is that really what it seems?” Rhin
said.

“Those are really monkeys,”
Joao said. “I think there are some things our friends cannot
imitate.”

The river straightened now, and the
hills pressed closer. Thick twistings of hardwood trees along both
shores gave way to lines of sago palms backed by rising waves of
the jungle’s omnipresent greens. Only infrequently was the
green broken by smooth red-skinned trunks of guayavilla
leaning over the water.

Around another bend, and they surprised
a long-legged pink bird feeding in the shallows. It lifted on heavy
pinions, flew downstream.

“Fasten your seatbelts,”
Joao said.

“Are you that certain,”
Chen-Lhu asked.

“Yes.”

Joao heard buckles snapping, fastened
his own harness, looked at the dash to review Vierho’s
changes in controls. Igniter… firing light… throttle.
He moved the wheel; how sluggish it felt. One silent prayer for the
patch of the right hand float, and he set himself in readiness.

The sound came as a faint roaring like
wind through trees. They felt another quickening of the current
that swept the pod around a wide bend, turning in an eddy until it
faced directly downstream, and there, no more than a kilometer
away, they saw the snarled boiling of white water. Foam and misting
spume hurled itself into the air. The sound was a crashing drum
roar growing louder by the second.

Joao weighed the circumstances –
high walls of trees on both sides, narrowing channel, high black
walls of wet rock on both sides of the rapids. There was only one
way to go: through it.

Current and distance required careful
judgment: the pod’s floats had to hit the crosscurrent waves
above the rapids at just the right moment for those waves to help
break the river’s grip on the floats.

This’ll be the place,
Chen-Lhu thought. Our friends’ll be here… waiting
for us. He gripped a sprayrifle, tried to see both shores at
once.

Rhin gripped the sides of her seat,
pressed herself backward against the cushions. She felt that they
were hurtling without hope toward the maelstrom.

“Something in the trees on our
right,” Chen-Lhu said. “Something overhead.”

A shadow darkened the water all around
them. Fluttering white shapes began to obscure the view ahead.

Joao punched the igniter, counted
– one, two, three. Light off – throttle.

The motors caught with a great banging,
spitting roar that drowned the sound of the rapids. The pod surged
through the screen of insects, out of the shadow. Joao swerved them
to avoid a line of foaming rocks in the upper pool. He nursed the
throttle by the feeling of G-pressure against his back.

Don’t blow, baby, he
prayed. Don’t blow.

“A net!” Rhin screamed.
“They have a net across the river!”

It lifted from the water above the
rapids like a dripping snake.

Reflex moved Joao’s hand on the
throttle, sent the knob slamming against the dash.

The pod leaped, skimmed across a glossy
pool. Slithering current tugged them sideways toward smooth black
walls of rock. The net stood out directly ahead when the pod
lifted, floats breaking from the water.

Up… up.

Joao could see the river plunge off
beyond the net, water leaping in crazy violence there as though
trying to escape the glassy black walls of rock.

Something slapped the floats with a
screech and sound of tearing. The pod’s nose dipped, bounced
up as Joao hauled on the wheel. A staccato rattling shook the
craft. Spray filled the air all around.

In one flickering moment, Joao saw
motion along the chasm’s rim. A line of boulders thundered
down there, fell behind.

Then they were out of it, airborne and
climbing – lurching, twisting… but climbing. Joao
eased the throttle back.

The pod thundered over a line of trees,
back across the river. Another tree-spiked hill hot beneath them. A
long straight avenue of water opened up ahead of them like
turbulent brown grease.

Joao grew conscious of Rhin’s
voice: “Look at us go! Look at us go!”

“That was inspired flying,”
Chen-Lhu said.

Joao tried to swallow in a dry throat.
The controls felt heavy under his hands. He saw downstream a great
bend in the river, and beyond that a wide island-broken lake of
flooded land.

Brown river… flooded
land, he thought.

He fishtailed the pod, shot a look back
to the west. Brown clouds were piled there, with black beneath
them: thunderheads! Rain in the hills behind us, he thought.
Flood here. It must’ve happened during the night.

And he cursed himself for not noticing
the change in water color earlier.

“What’s wrong,
Johnny?” Chen-Lhu asked.

“Nothing we can do anything
about.”

Joao eased the throttle back another
notch, another. The motors sputtered, died. He shut off all
fuel.

Wind whistled around them as Joao eased
back on the wheel, trying to gain as much distance as possible. The
pod began to stagger at the edge of stalling. He tipped the nose
down, still nursing it for distance. But the pod flew like all pods
– gliding like a rock.

The wind of their passage was an eerie
whistling that filled the cabin.

The river curved off to the left
through more drowned land. A thin furrow of turbulent water marked
the main channel. Gently, Joao banked the pod, turned to follow
that furrow. The water rushed up to meet them. The pod began to yaw
and Joao fought the controls.

Floats touched in a splashing, rocking
motion with too much drag. An eddy turned the pod. The right wing
began to drop – lower, lower.

Joao aimed for a brown sand beach on
their left.

“We’re sinking,” Rhin
said, and her voice conveyed both surprise and horror in a flat
tone of understatement.

“That right float,”
Chen-Lhu said. “I felt it hit the net.”

The left float grated on sand, stopped,
spun the sinking float in a short arc until it, too, touched.
Something gurgled under the water to the right and a burst of
bubbles lifted to the surface. Less than six millimeters of air
remained between the right wing tip and the water.

Rhin buried her head in her hands and
shuddered.

“Now what?” Chen-Lhu asked.
And he felt shocked amusement as he heard the dismay in his own
voice.

Now it is the end, he thought.
Our friends will find us here. It is the end for sure.

“Now we repair the float,”
Joao said.

Rhin lifted her face from her hands,
stared at him.

“Out here?” Chen-Lhu asked.
“Ahhh, Johnny.”

Rhin pressed the back of her left hand
against her mouth, thought: Joao – he just said that to
keep me from despair.

“Certainly, out here!” Joao
snapped. “Now shut up while I think.”

Rhin lowered her hand, said, “Is
it possible?”

“If they give us enough
time,” Joao said.

He broke the canopy seals, folded it
forward. The sound of brawling water impressed itself on his
senses. He unfastened his safety harness, all the while looking
around, studying the air, the jungle, the river.

No insects.

Joao climbed out, slipped down to the
slanted surface of the left float, studied the jungle beyond the
beach: a confusion of interlaced branches, vines, creepers and tree
ferns.

“There could be an army just
inside that jungle and we couldn’t see them,” Chen-Lhu
whispered.

Joao looked up. The Chinese stood at
the inner edge of the cabin.

“How do you propose to repair the
float?” Chen-Lhu asked.

Rhin appeared beside him, waited for
the answer.

“I don’t know yet,”
Joao said. He turned, looked downstream. A line of ripples moved up
the river there, pushed by a wind out of a furnace. The ripples
fanned out before the wind and grew as the wind grew. Then the wind
died. Air and water wavered in the damp heat. A pressure of heat
radiated from the pod’s metal and from the beach.

Joao slid off into the water. It felt
warm and thick.

“What about the cannibal
fish?” Rhin asked.

“They can’t see me; I
can’t see them,” Joao said. “A fair
exchange.”

He splashed around beneath the rocket
motors. The smell of unburned fuel was strong there and an oily
glaze of it was beginning to trail off downstream. Joao shrugged,
bent and ran a hand gently along the outer edge of the right float,
wading forward as he explored the hidden surface.

Just back of the leading edge, his
fingers encountered a jagged rip in the metal and trailing remnants
of Vierho’s patch. Joao explored the hole. It was a
dismayingly big one.

Metal scraped as Chen-Lhu dropped down
to the left float, a sprayrifle in his hand. “How bad is
it?” he asked.

Joao straightened, waded out to the
beach. “Bad enough.”

“Well, can it be fixed?”
Chen-Lhu demanded.

Joao turned, looked at the man,
surprised by the grating quality in Chen-Lhu’s voice.

He’s frightened silly!
Joao thought.

“We’ll have to get that
float out of the water before I can be sure,” Joao said.
“But I think we can patch it.”

“How’ll you get it out of
the water?”

“Vines… a Spanish
windlass, limbs for rollers.”

Rhin spoke from the cabin: “How
long?”

“By tonight, if we’re
lucky,” Joao said.

“They won’t give us that
long,” Chen-Lhu said.

“We gained thirty or forty
kilometers on them,” Joao said.

“But they, too, can fly,”
Chen-Lhu said. He raised the spray-rifle, aiming upstream.
“And here they come.”

Joao whirled as Chen-Lhu fired, was in
time to see a broad front of spray-bursts knock down a fluttering
line of white, red and gold insects, each as long as a man’s
thumb. But more came behind… and more… and
more…

“And again it flew,” the
Brain accused.

The messengers on the ceiling danced
and hummed their report, made way for a new group flitting in like
bits of golden mica through the sunlight at the cave mouth.

“The vehicle is down and badly
damaged,” the newcomers reported. “It no longer floats
on the water, but lies partly beneath the water. The humans do not
appear to be damaged. We already are leading the action groups to
the place, but the humans are shooting their poisons at everything
that moves. What are your instructions?”

The Brain worked to quiet itself for
computation and decision. Emotions… emotions, it
thought. Emotions are the curse of logic.

Data-data-data – it was loaded
with data. But always there was that shading-off factor. New events
modified old facts. The Brain knew many facts about humans –
observational facts, some achieved deductively and inductively,
some garnered from microfilms libraries the humans had stored in
the Red against the time of their return.

So many gaps in the data.

The Brain longed then for the ability
to move about by itself, to observe with its own sensors what it
could only gather from messengers now. The wish brought a rash of
fuzzy signals from the dormant and almost atrophied muscle-control
centers. Nurse insects scurried over the Brain’s surface,
feeding where these unusual demands arose, countering with hormonal
additives the frustration blockages that for a moment threatened
the entire structure.

Atheism, the Brain thought, as
chemical serenity returned. They spoke of atheism and heaven
(religion-subtended). These matters puzzled the Brain. The
conversation, reportedly, had come out of an argument and pertained
somehow to the human mating pattern… at least among the
humans in the vehicle.

The insects on the ceiling jittered
through a repetition of their message. “What are your
instructions?”

What are my instructions?

My instructions.

I… me… my.

Again, the nurse insects scurried.

Calmness returned to the Brain, and it
wondered at the fact that thoughts – mere thoughts –
could bring such upset. The same thing appeared to occur with
humans.

“The humans in the vehicle must
be captured alive,” the Brain commanded. (And it realized the
command was a selfish one. It had so many questions for this trio.)
“Take in all available action groups. Locate a suitable place
downriver, better than the last one, and post half the action
groups there. The other half must attack as soon as
possible.”

The Brain subsided without releasing
its messengers, then, almost as an afterthought: “If all else
fails, kill everything except their heads. Save and maintain their
heads.”

Now, the messengers were released. They
had their instructions, and they fluttered out of the cave into the
bright sunlight above the roar of water.

In the west, a cloud passed over the
sun.

And the Brain marked this fact, noting
that the sound of the river was louder today.

Rains in the highlands, it
thought. This thought elicited images within its memory: wet
leaves, rivulets on the forest floor, damp cold air, feet splashing
on gray clay.

The feet of the image appeared to be
its own, and the Brain found this an odd fact. But the nurse
insects had the chemical serenity of their charge well in hand now,
and the Brain went on to consider every datum it possessed about
Cardinal Newman. Nowhere could it discover reference to a
stuffed Cardinal Newman.

The patch consisted of leaves bound
with tent lines and vines on the outside and spray coagulants from
a doctored foamal bomb which Joao had exploded inside the float.
The pod floated upright on the river beside the beach now while he
stood waist deep beside it, checking their work.

The charged hiss and cork-popping of
sprayrifles and foamal bombs went on intermittently above him. The
air was thick with the bitter smell of the poisons. Black and
orange scum floated past him down the river and lay in puff mounds
on the beach around the remains of their vine-powered windlass.
Each bit of scum carried its imbedded collection of dead and dying
insects.

Rhin leaned over during a lull in the
attack, said, “For the love of God, how much
longer?”

“It seems to be holding,”
Joao rasped.

He rubbed at his neck and arms. Not all
the insects were being caught by the sprayrifles and bombs. His
skin felt like fire from the accumulation of stings and bites. When
he looked up at Rhin, he saw that her forehead was welted.

“If it’s holding, shove us
off,” Chen-Lhu said. He appeared above Joao, standing beside
Rhin, glanced down and returned his attention to the sky.

Joao staggered with a sudden dizziness,
almost fell. His body ached with weariness. It required a distinct
effort to lift his head and scan the sky around them. Distant sky.
They had perhaps an hour of daylight left.

“For God’s sake, shove
off!” Rhin shouted.

Joao grew aware that the firing had
resumed. He pulled himself along the float toward the beach, and
the action sent the pod outward. It swung over him and he stared
stupidly upward at the patched belly tank wondering who had done
that work.

Oh, yes – Vierho.

The pod continued to drift outward,
caught now by the current. It was at least two meters from Joao
when he realized he was supposed to be aboard it. He lunged for the
right float, caught its rear edge and hauled himself sprawling on
to it with almost the last of his strength.

A hand reached down from the open
hatch, grabbed his collar. With the help of the hand, he clambered
to his knees, crawled up into the cabin. Only when he was inside
did he see that it was Rhin’s hand.

They had the canopy down and sealed, he
noted.

Chen-Lhu was darting around the
interior smashing insects with a roll of charts.

Joao felt something sting his right
leg, looked down to see Rhin kneeling there and applying a fresh
energy-pack.

Why is she doing that? he
wondered. Then he remembered: Oh, yes – the stings, the
poisons.

“Won’t we have some
immunity from the last bout?” he asked and was surprised when
his voice came out a whisper.

“Maybe,” she said.
“Unless they hit us with something new.”

“I think I have most of
them,” Chen-Lhu said. “Rhin, did you seal the
hatch?”

“Yes.”

“I sprayed with the hand unit
under the seats and dash.” Chen-Lhu reached down, put a hand
under Joao’s arm. “Here we go, Johnny. Into your seat,
eh?”

“Yes.” Joao staggered
forward, sank into the seat. His head felt as though it rested on
slack rubber. “Are we in the current?” he gasped.

“We seem to be,” Chen-Lhu
said.

Joao sat there panting. He could feel
the energy-pack like a distant army working inward against his
weariness. Perspiration flooded his skin, but his mouth felt dry
and hot. The windshield ahead of him was dappled with the orange
and black spray and foam residue.

“They’re still with
us,” Chen-Lhu said. “Along the shore over there and
some kind of group overhead.”

Joao peered around him. Rhin had
returned to her seat. She sat with a sprayrifle across her lap, her
head thrown back, eyes closed. Chen-Lhu knelt on the gig-box and
peered at the left-hand shore.

The interior of the cabin appeared to
Joao to be filled with dappled gray-green shadows. His mind told
him there must be other colors present, but he saw only the
gray-greens – even Chen-Lhu’s skin… and
Rhin’s.

“Something’s…
wrong… with… color,” he whispered.

“Color aberration,”
Chen-Lhu said. “That was one of the symptoms.”

Joao looked out a clear place in the
right windows, saw through the trees a scattering of dun peaks and
a gray-green sun low above them.

“Close your eyes, lean back and
relax,” Rhin said.

Joao rolled his head on the seat back,
saw that she had put aside her sprayrifle and was bending over him.
She began massaging his forehead.

She spoke to Chen-Lhu: “His skin
feels hot.”

Joao closed his eyes. Her hands felt so
peaceful and cool. The blackness of utter fatigue hovered around
him… and far off on his right leg he felt a drumbeat: the
energy-pack.

“Try to sleep,” Rhin
whispered.

“Rhin, how do you feel?”
Chen-Lhu asked.

“I put a pack on my leg during
that first lull,” she said. “I think it’s the
A.C.T.H. fractions – they seem to give immediate relief if
you haven’t been hit too hard.”

“And Johnny got much more than we
did from our friends.”

“Out there? Of course he
did.”

The word sounds were a distant
fuzziness to Joao, but the meanings rang through with a startling
clarity, and he found himself fascinated by voice overtones.
Chen-Lhu’s voice was loaded with concealment. Rhin’s
carried suppressed fear and genuine concern for himself.

Rhin gave his forehead one last
soothing caress, sank back into her seat. She pushed her hair back,
looked out to the west. Movement there, yes: white flutterings and
things that were larger. She moved her gaze upward. Alto cirrus
clouds hung in the distance above the trees. Sunset poured color
through them as she watched and the clouds became waves as red as
blood.

She averted her eyes, looked
downstream.

The current swept the pod around a
sickle-shaped bend and they drifted almost due north in a widening
channel. Along the eastern shore the water flowed with mauve-tinted
silver, metallic and luminous.

A deep booming of jungle doves sounded
from the right bank – or was it doves. Rhin looked around
her, feeling the hushed stillness.

The sun dipped behind distant peaks and
the nightly patrol of bats flickered overhead, swooping and
soaring. Noises of evening birds lifted, stilled and were replaced
by night sounds – the far off coughing growl of a jaguar,
rustlings and quiverings and a nearby splash.

And again that hushed stillness.

Something out there that everything
in the jungle fears, Rhin thought.

An amber moon began to climb over them.
The pod drifted down the moon-path like a giant dragonfly poised on
the water. A skeleton butterfly fluttered into view through the
pale light, waved the filigree of its transparent wings on the
pod’s windshield, departed.

“They’re keeping a close
watch on us,” Chen-Lhu said.

Joao could feel warmth coursing upward
from the energy-pack as the A.T.P., the calcium and the
acetylcholine, the A.C.T.H. factions diffused in his body. But a
sensation of dizziness remained, as though he were many persons at
once. He opened his eyes, looked out to the fuzzy spread of moonlit
hills. He realized he actually saw this, but part of him felt as
though it clung to the fabric ceiling of the cabin behind the
canopy, crouching there, really. And the moon was an alien moon,
like none he had ever known, its earth-lighted circle far too big,
its melon-curve of sun reflection far too bright. It was a false
moon on a painted backdrop and it made him feel small, dwindling
away to a tiny spark lost in the infinity of the universe.

He pressed his eyes tightly closed,
berating himself: I mustn’t think like that or I’ll
go crazy! God! What’s wrong with me?

Joao felt that a pressure of silence
filled the cabin. He strained to hear tiny sounds –
Rhin’s controlled breathing, Chen-Lhu clearing his
throat.

Good and evil are man-made
opposites: there is only honor. Joao heard the thought as words
echoing in his mind and recognized them. Those were his
father’s words… his father, now dead and become a
simulacrum to haunt him by standing beside the river.

Men anchor their lives at a station
between good and evil.

“You know, Rhin, this is a
Marxian river,” Chen-Lhu said. “Everything in the
universe flows like this river. Everything changes constantly from
one form to another. Dialectic. Nothing can stop this; nothing
should stop this. Nothing’s static, nothing ever twice
the same.”

“Oh, shut up,” Rhin
muttered.

“You western women,”
Chen-Lhu said. “You don’t understand dialectical
reality.”

“Tell it to the bugs,” she
said.

“How rich this land is,”
Chen-Lhu murmured. “How very rich. Do you have any idea of
how many of my people this land could support. With only the
slightest alteration – clearings, terraces… In China,
we’ve learned how to make such land support millions of
people.”

Rhin sat up, stared across the seat
back at Chen-Lhu. “How’s that again?”

“These stupid Brazilians, they
never learned how to use this land. But my
people…”

“I see. Your people come in here
and show them how, is that it?”

“It is a possibility,”
Chen-Lhu said, and he thought: Digest that for a bit, my dear
Rhin. When you see how great the prize, you will understand the
price that might be paid.

“And what about the Brazilians
– quite a few million of them – who’re crowded
into the cities and the farm plots of the Resettlement Plan while
their Ecological Realignment is progressing?”

“They are becoming used to their
present condition.”

“They can stand it only because
they have hopes for something better!”

“Ah, no, my dear Rhin, you
don’t understand people very well. Governments can manipulate
people to gain anything that’s found necessary.”

“And what about the
insects?” she asked. “What about the Great
Crusade?”

Chen-Lhu shrugged. “We lived with
them for thousands of years… before.”

“And the mutations, the new
species?”

“Yes, the creations of your
bandeirante friends – those we very likely will have to
destroy.”

“I’m not so sure the
bandeirantes created those… things out there,” she
said. “I’m sure Joao had nothing to do with
it.”

“Ah… then who
did?”

“Perhaps the same people who
don’t want to admit their own Great Crusade’s a
failure!”

Chen-Lhu put down anger, said, “I
tell you it is not true.”

She looked down at Joao breathing so
deeply, obviously asleep. Was it possible? No!

Chen-Lhu sat back, thinking: Let her
consider these things. Doubt is all I need and she will serve me
most usefully, my lovely little tool. And Johnny Martinho –
what a lovely scapegoat: trained in North America, an unprincipled
tool of the imperialists! A man of no shame, who made love to one
of my own people right in front of me. His fellows will believe
such a man capable of anything!

A quiet smile moved Chen-Lhu’s
lips.

Rhin, looking into the rear of the
cabin, could see only the harsh angular features of the IEO chief.
He’s so strong, she thought. And I’m so
tired.

She lowered her head on to Joao’s
lap like a child seeking comfort, burrowed her left hand behind his
back. How feverishly warm he felt. Her burrowing hand encountered a
bulky metallic shape in Joao’s jacket. She explored the
outline with her fingers, recognized it as a gun… a hand
weapon.

Rhin withdrew her hand, sat up. Why
does he carry a weapon which he conceals from us?

Joao continued to breath deeply,
feigning sleep. Chen-Lhu’s words screamed through his mind,
warning him, urging him to action. But caution intervened.

Rhin stared downstream
wondering… doubting. The pod floated down a lane of moon
glitter. Cold glows like fireflies danced in the forest darkness on
both sides. A feeling of corruption came to her from that
darkness.

Joao, reflecting on Chen-Lhu’s
words, thought: “Everything in the universe flows like a
river.” Why do I hesitate? I could turn and kill the
bastard… or force him to tell the truth about himself. What
part does Rhin play in this? She sounded angry with him.
“Everything in the universe flows like a
river.”

Introspection came hard to Joao,
bringing dread, inner trembling that moved toward terror. Those
creatures out there, he thought, time is on their side. My
life is like a river, I flow – moments, memories…
nothing eternal, no absolutes.

He felt feverish, dizzy and his own
heartbeat intruded on his awareness.

Like a river.

He’s not going to warn anyone
about the debacle in China. He has a plan… something in
which he wants to use me.

The night wind had grown stronger and
now it imparted an uneasy shifting motion to the pod, catching
first one stub-wing and then the other. As it came through the vent
filters, a damp nutrient in the wind fed Joao’s awareness. He
moaned as though awakening, sat up.

Rhin touched his arm. “How are
you?” There was concern in her voice, and something else Joao
could not recognize. Withdrawal? Shame?

“I… so warm,” he
whispered.

“Water,” she said, and
lifted a canteen to his lips.

The water felt cool, although he knew
it must be warm. Part of it ran down his jaw and he realized then
how weak he was in spite of the energy-pack. The effort of
swallowing required a terrible energy drain.

I’m sick, he thought.
I’m really sick… very sick.

He allowed his head to fall against the
back of the seat, stared up through the canopy’s transparent
strip. The stars intruded on his awareness – sharp specks of
light that stabbed through rushing clouds. The fitful wind-swayed
motion of the pod sent stars and clouds tipping across his field of
vision. The sensation began to make him feel nauseated, and he
lowered his gaze, saw the flitting lights on the right shore.

“Travis,” he whispered.

“Heh?” And Chen-Lhu
wondered how long Joao had been awake. Was I fooled by his
breathing? Did I say too much?

“Lights,” Joao said.
“Over there… lights.”

“Oh. Those. They’ve been
with us for quite awhile. Our friends out there are keeping track
of us.”

“How wide’s the river
here?” Rhin asked.

“A hundred meters or so,”
Chen-Lhu said.

“How can they see us?”

“How can they not in this
moonlight?”

“Shouldn’t I give them a
shot just to…”

“Save the ammunition,”
Chen-Lhu said. “After that mess today… well, we
couldn’t stand off another such day.”

“I hear something,” Rhin
said. “Is it rapids?”

Joao pushed himself upright. The effort
it required terrified him. I couldn’t handle the controls
like this, he thought. And I doubt if Rhin or Travis know
how.

He grew aware of a hissing sound.

“What is that?” Chen-Lhu
asked.

Joao sighed, sank back.
“Shallows, something in the river. Off there to the
left.” The sound grew louder; the rhythmic lament of water
against a stranded limb – and faded behind them.

“What’d happen if that
right float hit something like that?” Rhin asked.

“End of the ride,” Joao
said.

An eddy turned the pod, began swaying
it back and forth in a slow, persistent pendulum – around,
back, around… The floats danced across ripples and the
pendulum stopped.

The darkly flowing jungle, the lights
sent waves of drowsiness through Joao. He knew he could not stay
awake if his life depended on it.

“I’ll stand watch tonight,
Travis,” Rhin said.

“I wonder why our friends out
there don’t bother us much at night?” Chen-Lhu said.
“It’s very curious.”

“They’re not losing sight
of us, though,” Rhin said. “Go to sleep. I’ll
take the first watch.”

“Watch and nothing else,”
Chen-Lhu said.

“What’s that supposed to
mean?”

“Just don’t go to sleep, my
dear Rhin.”

“Go to hell,” she said.

“You forget: I don’t
believe in hell.”

Joao awoke to the sound of rain and
darkness that slowly crept into gray dawn. The light increased
until he could see steel lines of downpour slanting against pale
green jungle on his left. The other shore was a distant gray. It
was a rain of monotonous violence that drummed against the canopy
and pocked the river with countless tiny craters.

“Are you awake?” Rhin
asked.

Joao sat up, found he felt refreshed
and curiously clear headed. “How long’s it been raining
like this?”

“Since about midnight.”

Chen-Lhu cleared his throat, leaned
forward close to Joao. “I’ve seen no sign of our
friends for hours. Could it be they don’t like
rain?”

“I don’t like
rain,” Joao said.

“What do you mean?” Rhin
asked.

“This river’s going to
become a raging hell.”

Joao looked up to his left and clouds
hovering low above the trees. “And if there ever were going
to be searchers, they sure as hell couldn’t see us
now.”

Rhin wet her lips with her tongue. She
felt suddenly emptied of emotion, realized then how much she had
counted on being found. “How… how long does the rain
last?” she asked.

“Four or five months,” Joao
said.

An eddy turned the pod. Shoreline
twisted across Joao’s vision: greenery dimmed to pastel by
the torrent. “Anybody been outside?” he asked.

“I have,” Chen-Lhu
said.

Joao turned, saw dark patches of
wetness on the IEO fatigues.

“Nothing out there except
rain,” Chen-Lhu said.

Joao’s right leg began to itch.
He reached down, was surprised to find the energy-pack gone.

“You began showing muscle spasms
during the night,” Rhin said. “I took it
off.”

“I must’ve really been
asleep.” He touched her hand. “Thanks,
nurse.”

She pulled her hand away.

Joao looked up, puzzled, but she
turned, stared out her window.

“I’m… going
outside,” Joao said.

“Do you feel strong
enough?” she asked. “You were pretty weak.”

“I’m all right.”

He stood up, made his way back to the
hatch and down to the pontoon. The rain felt warm and fresh against
his face. He stood on the end of the float, enjoying the
freshness.

In the cabin, Chen-Lhu said, “Why
didn’t you go out and hold his hand, Rhin?”

“You’re an utter bastard,
Travis,” she said.

“Do you love him a
little?”

She turned, glared at him. “What
do you want from me?”

“Your cooperation, my
dear.”

“In what?”

“How would you like to have an
emerald mine all your very own? Or perhaps diamonds? More wealth
than you could possibly imagine?”

“In payment for what?”

“When the moment comes, Rhin,
you’ll know what to do. And meanwhile, you make a pliant blob
of putty out of our bandeirante.”

She silenced an angry outburst, whirled
away. And she thought: Our bodies betray us. The Chen-Lhus of
the world come along, push buttons, bend us and twist us… I
won’t do it! I won’t! This Joao is too nice a guy. But
why does he carry that weapon in his pocket?

I could kill her now and push Johnny
off the float, Chen-Lhu thought. But this is a difficult
craft to manage… and I’m not experienced in such
matters.

Rhin turned a molten look on him.

Perhaps she’ll come
around, Chen-Lhu thought. I know her weaknesses, certainly
– but I must be sure.

Joao returned, slipped into his seat.
He brought a fresh smell of wetness into the cabin, but the odor of
mildew remained and it was growing stronger.

As the morning wore on, the rain
slackened. A warm, misty feeling permeated the cabin’s air.
Clouds of gunmetal cotton lifted to brush the hilltops above the
river and a beaded drapery of raindrops hung on every visible
tree.

The pod bobbed and twisted along a
swift mud-brown flow accompanied by more and more flotsam –
trees, brush, root islands as large as the pod, whole floes of
grass and reeds.

Joao drowsed, wondering at the change
in Rhin. In their world of the casual liaison, he knew he should
merely shrug and make some witty remark. But he didn’t feel
casual or witty about Rhin. She had touched some chord in him that
the pleasures of flesh had never before reached.

Love? he wondered.

But their world had fallen out of the
notion of romantic love. There was only family and honor where
those things counted and all else involved doing-the-right-thing,
which usually meant salvaging the least messy aspects from any
situation that happened to fall apart.

No clear way of approaching his problem
presented itself. Joao knew only that he was being nudged and
pushed from within, that physical weakness contributed to the
fuzziness of his thinking… and besides, their whole
situation was hopeless.

I’m sick, he thought.
The whole world’s sick.

In more ways than one.

A buzzing sound invaded Joao’s
torpor. He snapped upright, wide awake.

“What’s wrong?” Rhin
asked.

“Be quiet.” He held up a
hand to silence her, cocked his head to one side.

Chen-Lhu leaned forward over the back
of Joao’s seat. “A truck?”

“Yes, by God!” Joao said.
“And it’s low.” He glanced at the sky around
them, started to release the canopy, was restrained by Chen-Lhu,
who put a hand on his arm.

“Johnny, look there,”
Chen-Lhu said. He pointed to the left.

Joao turned.

From the shore came what appeared at
first to be an odd cloud – wide, thick, moving with a
purposeful directness. The cloud resolved itself into a mob of
fluttering white, gray and gold insects. They came in at about
fifty meters above the pod and the water darkened with their
shadow.

The shadow reached out all around the
pod and paced it, a moving cover to hide them from anything in the
sky.

As the import of the maneuver
penetrated Joao’s awareness, he turned, stared at Chen-Lhu.
The man’s face appeared gray with shock.

“That’s…
deliberate,” Rhin whispered.

“How can it be?” Chen-Lhu
asked. “How can it be? How can it be?”

In the same moment, Chen-Lhu saw how
Joao studied him, realized his own emotions. Anger at himself
filled Chen-Lhu. I must not show fear to these savages! he
thought. He forced himself to sit back, to smile and shake his
head.

“To train insects,”
Chen-Lhu said. “It is almost unbelievable… but someone
obviously has done it. We see the evidence.”

“Please, God,” Rhin
whispered. “Please.”

“Oh, stop your silly prattle,
woman,” Chen-Lhu said. And even as he spoke, he knew that was
the wrong tack to take with Rhin, and he said, “You must
remain calm, Rhin. Hysterics serve no purpose.”

The rocket sound grew louder.

“Are you sure it’s a
truck?” Rhin asked. “Perhaps…”

“Bandeirante truck,” Joao
said. “They’ve rigged it to fire alternate pairs and
save fuel. Hear that? That’s a bandeirante trick.”

“Could they be searching for
us?”

“Who knows? Anyway, they’re
above the clouds.”

“And above our friends,
too,” Chen-Lhu said.

The pulsating counterpoint of rocket
motors echoed along the hills. Joao turned his head to follow the
sound. It grew fainter upstream, blended with the
lapping-swishing-tumbling of the river.

“Won’t they come down and
look for us?” Rhin pleaded.

“They weren’t looking for
anyone,” Joao said. “They were just going from
someplace to someplace.”

Rhin looked up at the covering blanket
of insects. From this angle and distance, the individuals blended
one into another and the whole cloud of them appeared to be one
organism.

“We could shoot them down!”
she said. She reached for a sprayrifle, but Joao grabbed her arm,
stopped her.

“There’re still the
clouds,” he said.

“And our friends have more
reinforcements than we have spray charges,” Chen-Lhu said.
“That I’ll wager.”

“But if the clouds weren’t
there,” she said. “Won’t the clouds ever…
go away?”

“They may burn off this
afternoon,” Joao said, and he tried to speak soothingly.
“This time of year they do that quite often.”

“They’re going!” Rhin
said. She pointed at the insect cover. “Look! They’re
going.”

Joao looked up to see the fluttering
mass start to move back toward the left shore. The shadow
accompanied them until they went into the trees and were lost from
sight.

“They’re gone,” Rhin
said.

“That only means the truck is no
longer with us,” Joao said.

Rhin buried her face in her hands,
fought down shuddering sobs.

Joao started to caress her neck, to
comfort her, but she shook off his hand.

And Chen-Lhu thought: You must
attract him, Rhin, not repel him.

“We must remember why we are
here,” Chen-Lhu said. “We must remember what it is we
must do.”

Rhin sat up, lowering her hands, took a
deep breath that hurt the muscles of her chest.

“We must keep ourselves
occupied,” Chen-Lhu said. “With trivia if necessary. It
is a way to prevent… fear, boredom, angers. I tell you
– I will describe for you an orgy I once attended in
Cambodia. There were eight of us, not counting the women – a
former prince, the minister of culture…”

“We don’t want to hear
about your damned orgy!” Rhin snapped.

The flesh, Chen-Lhu thought.
She dares not listen to anything that reminds her of her own
flesh. That is her weakness, for sure. It is good that I know
this.

“So?” Chen-Lhu said.
“Very well. Tell us then about the fine life in Dublin, my
dear Rhin. I love to hear of the people who trade wives and
mistresses and ride horses and pretend the past has never
died.”

“You’re really a terrible
man,” Rhin said.

“Excellent!” Chen-Lhu said.
“You may hate me, Rhin; I permit it. Hate keeps one occupied,
too. One may indulge hate while one thinks about such things as
wealth and pleasures. There are times when hate is a much more
profitable occupation than making love.”

Joao turned, studied Chen-Lhu, hearing
the words, seeing the harsh control on the man’s face. He
uses words as weapons, Joao thought. He maneuvers people and
pushes them with words. Doesn’t Rhin see this? But of course
she doesn’t… because he’s using her for
something, wielding her. For a moment, Joao sat stupefied with
discovery.

“You watch me, Johnny,”
Chen-Lhu said. “What do you think you see?”

Two can play that game, Joao
thought. And he said, “I watch a man at work.”

Chen-Lhu stared. It wasn’t the
kind of answer he’d expected – too subtly penetrating
and leaving too much uncommitted. He reminded himself that it was
difficult to control uncommitted people. Once a man had invested
his energies, he could be twisted and turned at will… but if
the man held back, conserved those energies…

“Do you think you understand me,
Johnny?” Chen-Lhu asked.

“No, I don’t understand
you.”

“Really, I’m quite
uncomplicated; it’s not difficult to understand me,”
Chen-Lhu said.

“That’s one of the most
complicated statements any man ever made,” Joao said.

“Do you mock me?” Chen-Lhu
asked, and he put down an upsurge of dismay and anger. Johnny was
acting most out of character.

“How could I mock if I
don’t understand?” Joao asked.

“Something has come over
you,” Chen-Lhu said. “What is it? You are behaving most
strangely.”

“Now we understand each
other,” Joao said.

He goads me, Chen-Lhu thought.
HE goads ME! And he asked himself: Will I have to kill
this fool?

“See how easy it is to keep busy
and forget our troubles,” Joao said.

Rhin glanced back at Chen-Lhu, saw a
smile spread across his face. He was speaking mostly for my
benefit, she thought. Wealth and pleasures –
that’s the price. But what do I pay? She looked at Joao.
Yes, I hand him a bandeirante on a platter! I give him Joao to
use as he sees fit.

The pod floated backward down the river
now, and Rhin stared upstream at hills that disappeared into
drifting clouds. Why do I bother with such questions? she
wondered. We don’t stand a chance. There are only these
moments and the opportunity to take whatever pleasure we can from
them.

“Are we down a little on the
right side?” Joao asked.

“Perhaps a little,”
Chen-Lhu said. “Do you think your patch is
leaking?”

“It could be.”

“Do you have a pump in this
stuff?”

“We could use a sprayhead from
one of the hand units,” Joao said.

Rhin’s mind focused now on the
weapon in Joao’s pocket, and she said, “Joao,
don’t let them capture me alive.”

“Ahh, melodrama,” Chen-Lhu
said.

“Leave her alone!” Joao
snapped. He patted Rhin’s hand, looked out and around the pod
on all sides. “Why do they leave us alone like
this?”

“They’ve found a new place
to wait,” Rhin said.

“Always look on the black
side,” Chen-Lhu said. “What is the worst that could
happen, eh? Perhaps they want our heads in the fashion of the
aborigines who lived here once.”

“You’re a great
help,” Joao said. “Hand me the sprayhead off one of
those hand units.”

“At once, Jefe,” Chen-Lhu
said, his voice mocking.

Joao accepted the metal and plastic
hand pump unit, slipped back to the rear hatch and down to the
float. He paused there a moment to study their surroundings. Not a
sign of the creatures he knew were watching them. Downstream at a
bend in the river, a rock escarpment loomed high over the trees
– distance perhaps five or six kilometers.

Lava rock, Joao thought. And
the river may have to get through that rock some way.

He bent to the float, unlocked the
inspection plate and probed with the pump. A hollow sloshing echoed
from the interior of the pontoon. He braced the pump against the
side of the inspection hole, worked the toggle handle. A thin
stream of water arched into the river, smelling of poisons from the
sprayhead.

The yelping cry of a toucan sounded
from the jungle on his right and he could hear the murmur of
Chen-Lhu’s voice from the cabin.

What is it he talks about when
I’m not there? Joao wondered.

He looked up in time to see that the
bend in the river was wider than he’d expected. The current
carried the pod now away from the rock escarpment. The fact gave
Joao no elation. The river could meander a hundred kilometers
through here in this season and return to within a kilometer of
where we are now, he thought.

Rhin’s voice lifted suddenly, her
words distinct in the damp air: “You son of a
bitch!”

And Chen-Lhu answered, “Ancestry
is no longer important in my land, Rhin.”

The pump sucked air with a wet
gurgling, the sound drowning Rhin’s reply. Joao replaced the
cap on the inspection hole, returned to the cabin.

Rhin sat with arms folded, face
forward. A red blush of anger colored her neck.

Joao wedged the pump into the corner
beside the hatch, looked at Chen-Lhu.

“There was water in the
float,” Chen-Lhu said, his voice smooth. “I heard
it.”

Yes, I’ll bet you did,
Joao thought. What’s your game, Dr. Travis Huntington
Chen-Lhu? Is it idle sport? Do you goad people for your own
amusement, or is it something deeper?

Joao slipped into his seat.

The pod danced across a pattern of eddy
ripples, turned and faced downstream toward a shaft of sunlight
that stabbed through the clouds. Slowly, great patches of blue
opened in the clouds.

“There’s the sun, the good
old sun,” Rhin said, “now that we don’t need
it.”

A need for male protection came over
Rhin, and she leaned her head against Joao’s shoulder.
“It’s going to be sticky hot,” she whispered.

“If you’d like to be alone,
I could step out on the float,” Chen-Lhu mocked.

“Ignore the bastard,” Rhin
said.

Do I dare ignore him? Joao
wondered. Is that her purpose – to make me ignore him? Do
I dare?

Her hair gave off a scent of musk that
threatened to clog Joao’s reason. He took a deep breath,
shook his head. What is it with this woman… this
changeable, mercuric… female?

“You’ve had lots of girls,
haven’t you?” Rhin asked.

Her words elicited memory images that
flashed through Joao’s mind – doe-brown eyes with a
distant look of cunning: eyes, eyes, eyes… all alike. And
lush figures in tight bodices or mounding white sheets… warm
beneath his hands.

“Any special girl?” Rhin
asked.

And Chen-Lhu wondered: Why does she
do this? Is she seeking self-justification, reasons to treat him as
I wish her to treat him?

“I’ve been very
busy,” Joao said.

“I’ll bet you have,”
she said.

“What’s that
mean?”

“There’s some girl back
there in the Green… ripe as a mango. What’s she
like?”

He shrugged, moving her head, but she
remained pressed close to him, looking up at his jawline where no
beard grew. He has Indian blood, she thought. No beard:
Indian blood.

“Is she beautiful?” Rhin
persisted.

“Many women are beautiful,”
he said.

“One of those dark, full-breasted
types, I’ll bet,” she said. “Have you had her to
bed?”

And Joao thought: What does this
mean? That we’re all bohemian types together?

“A gentleman,” Rhin said.
“He refused to answer.”

She pushed herself up, sat back in her
own corner, angry and wondering why she had done that. Do I
torture myself? Do I want this Joao Martinho for my own, to have
and to hold? To hell with it!

“Many families are strict with
their women down here,” Chen-Lhu said. “Very
Victorian.”

“Weren’t you ever human,
Travis?” Rhin asked. “Even for just a day or
so?”

“Shut up!” Chen-Lhu barked,
and he sat back, astonished at himself. The bitch! How did she
get through to me like that?

Ahhh, Joao thought, she
touched a nerve.

“What made an animal out of you,
Travis?” Rhin asked.

He had himself under control, though,
and all he said was, “You have a sharp tongue, my dear. Too
bad your mind doesn’t match it.”

“That’s not up to your
usual standards, Travis,” she said, and she smiled at
Joao.

But Joao had heard the crying-out in
their voices and he remembered Vierho, the Padre, so solemn,
saying, “A person cries out against life because
it’s lonely, and because life’s broken off from
whatever created it. But no matter how much you hate life, you love
it, too. It’s like a caldron boiling with everything you have
to have – but very painful to the lips.”

Abruptly Joao reached out, pulled Rhin
to him and kissed her, pressing her against him, digging his hands
into her back. Her lips responded after only the briefest
hesitation – warm, tingling.

Presently he pulled away, pressed her
firmly into her seat and leaned back on his own side.

When she could catch her breath, Rhin
said, “Now, what was that all about?”

“There’s a little animal in
all of us,” Joao said.

Does he defend me? Chen-Lhu
asked himself, sitting bolt upright. I don’t need defense
from such as that!

But Rhin laughed, shattering his anger,
and reached out to caress Joao’s cheek. “Isn’t
there just,” she said.

And Chen-Lhu thought: She is only
doing her job. How beautifully she works. Such consummate artistry.
It would be a shame to have to kill her.

Chapter IX

They have such a talent for
occupying themselves with inconsequential, these humans, the
Brain thought. Even in the face of terrible pressures, they
argue and make love and throw trivialities into the air.

Messenger relays came and went through
the rain and sunshine that alternated outside the cave mouth. There
was little hesitation over commands now; the essential decision had
been made: “Capture or kill the three humans at the chasm;
save their heads in vivo if you can.”

Still, the reports came because the
Brain had ordered: “Report to me everything they
say.”

So much talk of God, the Brain
thought. Is it possible such a Being exists?

And the Brain reflected that certainly
the humans’ accomplishments carried an air of grandeur that
belied the triviality of their reported actions.

Is it possible this triviality is a
code of some sort? the Brain wondered. But how could it
be… unless there’s more to these emotional
inconsequentials and this talk of a God than appears on the
surface?

The Brain had begun its career in
logics as a pragmatic atheist. Now doubts began to creep into its
computations, and it classified doubt as an emotion.

Still, they must be stopped, the
Brain thought. No matter the cost, they must be stopped. The
issue is too important… even for this fascinating trio. If
they are lost, I shall try to mourn them.

Rhin felt that they floated in a bowl
of burning sunlight with the crippled pod at its center. The cabin
was a moist hell pressing in upon her. The drip-drip feeling of
perspiration and the smell of bodily closeness, the omnipresent
tang of mildew, all of it gnawed at her awareness. Not an animal
stirred or cried from either passing shore.

Only an occasional insect flitting
across their path reminded her of the watchers in the jungle
shadows.

If it wasn’t for the bugs,
she thought. The goddamn bugs! And the heat – the goddamn
heat.

An abrupt hysteria seized her and she
cried out, “Can’t we do anything?”

She began to laugh crazily.

Joao grabbed her shoulders, shook her
until she subsided into dry sobs.

“Oh, please, please do
something,” she begged.

Joao forced all pity out of his voice
in the effort to calm her. “Get hold of yourself,
Rhin.”

“Those goddamn bugs,” she
said.

Chen-Lhu’s voice rumbled at her
from the rear of the cabin: “You will please keep in mind,
Doctor Kelly, that you’re an entomologist.”

“And I’m going bugs,”
she said. This struck her as amusing and again she started to
laugh. One shake from Joao’s arms stopped her. She reached
up, took his hands, said, “I’m all right; really I am.
It’s the heat.”

Joao looked into her eyes. “Are
you sure?”

“Yes.”

She disengaged herself, sat back in her
corner, stared out the window. The sweeping passage of shoreline
caught her eyes hypnotically: fused movement. It was like time
– the immediate past never quite discarded, no fixed starting
point for the future – all one, all melted into one gliding,
stretched-out forever…

What ever made me choose this
career? she wondered.

As though in answer, she found
projected upon her memory the full sequence of an event she’d
left buried in her childhood. She’d been six and it was the
year her father spent in the American West doing his book about
Johannes Kelpius. They’d lived in an old adobe house and
flying ants had made a nest against the wall. Her father had sent a
handyman to burn out the nest and she had crouched to watch.
There’d been the smell of kerosene, a sudden burst of yellow
flame in sunlight, black smoke and a cloud of whirling insects with
pale amber wings enveloping her in their frenzy.

She’d run screaming into the
house, winged creatures crawling over her, clinging to her. And in
the house: adult anger, hands thrusting her into a bathroom, a
voice commanding, “Clean those bugs off you! The very idea,
bringing them into the house. See you don’t leave a one on
the floor. Kill them and flush them down the toilet.”

For a time that had seemed forever,
she’d screamed and pounded and kicked against the locked
door. “They won’t die! They won’t
die!”

Rhin shook her head to drive out the
memory. “They won’t die,” she whispered.

“What?” Joao asked.

“Nothing,” she said.
“What time is it?”

“It’ll be dark
soon.”

She kept her attention on the passing
shore – tree ferns and cabbage palms here, with rising water
beginning to pour off around their trunks. But the river was wide
and its central current still swift. In the spotted sunlight beyond
the trees she thought she saw flitting movements of color.

Birds, she hoped.

Whatever they were, the things moved so
fast she felt she saw them only after they were gone.

Thick bellowings of clouds began
filling the eastern horizon with a look of depth and weight and
blackness. Lightning flickered soundlessly beneath them. A long
interval afterward, the thunder came, a low, sodden hammer
stroke.

The heaviness of waiting hung over the
river and the jungle. Currents crawled around the pod like writhing
serpents – a muddy brown velvet oozing motion that harried
the floats: push and turn… push, twist and turn.

It’s the waiting, Rhin
thought.

Tears slipped down her cheeks and she
wiped them away.

“Is something wrong, my
dear?” Chen-Lhu asked.

She wanted to laugh, but knew laughter
would drag her back into hysteria. “If you aren’t the
banal son of a bitch!” she said, “Something
wrong!”

“Ahhh, we still have our fighting
spirit,” Chen-Lhu said.

Luminous gray darkness of a cloud
shadow flowed across the pod, flattened all contrast.

Joao watched a line of rain surge
across the water whipped toward him by bursts of wind. Again,
lightning flickered. The growl of thunder came faster, sharper. The
sound set off a band of howler monkeys on the left shore. Their
cries echoed across the water.

Darkness built up its hold on the
river. Briefly, the clouds parted in the west and presented a sky
like a sheet of burnished turquoise that drifted swiftly from
yellow into a deep wine as red as a bishop’s cloak. The river
looked black and oily. Clouds dropped across the sunset and once
more a jagged fire-plume of lightning etched itself against the
distance.

The rain took up its endless stammering
on the canopy, washing the shorelines into dove-gray mist. Night
covered the scene.

“Oh, God, I’m
scared,” Rhin whispered, “Oh, God, I’m scared.
Oh, God, I’m scared.”

Joao found he had no words to comfort
her. Their world and everything it demanded of them had gone beyond
words, all transformed into an elemental flowing indistinguishable
from the river itself.

A din of frogs came out of the night
and they heard water hissing through reeds. Not even the faintest
glow of moonlight penetrated her clouded darkness. Frogs and
hissing reeds faded. The pod and its three occupants returned to a
world of beating rain suspended above a faint wash of river against
floats.

“It’s very strange, this
being hunted,” Chen-Lhu whispered.

The words fell on Joao as though they
came from some disembodied source. He tried to recall
Chen-Lhu’s appearance and was astonished when no image came
into his mind. He searched for something to say and all he could
find was: “We’re not dead yet.”

Thank you, Johnny, Chen-Lhu
thought. I needed some such nonsense from you to put things into
perspective. He chuckled silently to himself, thinking: Fear
is the penalty of consciousness. There’s no weakness in
fear… only in showing it. Good, evil – it’s all
a matter of how you view it, with a god or without one.

“I think we should anchor,”
Rhin said. “What if we came on rapids in the night, before we
could hear them? Who could hear anything in this rain?”

“She’s right,”
Chen-Lhu said.

“D’you want to go out there
and drop the grapnel, Travis?” Joao asked.

Chen-Lhu felt his mouth go dry.

“Go ahead if you want,”
Joao said.

No weakness in fear, only in showing
it, Chen-Lhu thought. He pictured what might be out there
waiting in the darkness – perhaps one of the creatures
they’d seen on the shore. Each second’s delay, Chen-Lhu
realized, betrayed him.

“I think,” Joao said,
“that it’s more dangerous to open the hatch at night
than it is to drift… and listen.”

“We do have the
winglights,” Chen-Lhu said. “That is, if we hear
something.” Even as he spoke, he sensed how weak and empty
his words were.

Chen-Lhu felt fluid heat ripple through
his veins, anger like a series of velvet explosions. Still, the
unknown remained out there, a place of ravenous tranquility, full
of furiously remembered brilliance even in this blackness.

Fear strips away all pretense,
Chen-Lhu thought. I’ve been dishonest with myself.

It was as though the thought thrust him
suddenly around a corner, there to confront himself like a
reflection in a mirror. And he was both substance and reflection.
The abruptly awakening clarity sent memories streaking through his
mind until he felt his entire past dancing and weaving like fabric
rolling off a loom – reality and illusion in the same
cloth.

The sensation passed, leaving him
feverish with an inner trembling and a sense of terrible loss.

I’m having a delayed reaction
to the insect poisons, he thought.

“Oscar Wilde was a pretentious
ass,” Rhin said. “Any number of lives are worth any
number of deaths. Bravery has nothing to do with that.”

Even Rhin defends me, Chen-Lhu
thought.

The thought enraged him.

“You God-fearing fools,” he
snarled. “All of you chanting: ‘Thou hast being,
God!’ There couldn’t be a god without man! A god
wouldn’t know he existed if it weren’t for man! If
there ever was a god… this universe is his
mistake!”

Chen-Lhu fell silent, surprised to find
himself panting as though after great exertion.

A burst of rain hammered against the
canopy as though in some celestial answer, then faded into wet
muttering.

“Well… would you listen to
the atheist,” Rhin said.

Joao peered into the darkness where her
voice had originated, suddenly angry with her, feeling shame in her
words. Chen-Lhu’s outburst had been like seeing the man naked
and defenseless. The thing should’ve been ignored, not given
substance by comment. Joao felt that Rhin’s words had served
only to drive Chen-Lhu into a corner.

The thought made him recall a scene out
of his days in North America, a vacation with a classmate in
eastern Oregon. He’d been hunting quail along a fence line
when two of his host’s mismatched brindle hounds had burst
over a rise in pursuit of a scrawny bitch coyote. The coyote had
seen the hunter and had swerved left, only to be trapped in a fence
corner.

In that corner, the coyote, a symbol of
cowardice, had whirled and slashed the two dogs into bloody cravens
that had fled with tails between legs. Joao, awed, had watched and
allowed the coyote to escape.

Remembering that scene, Joao sensed
that it encapsulated the problem of Chen-Lhu. Something or
someone has trapped that man in a corner.

“I am going to sleep now,”
Chen-Lhu said. “Awaken me at midnight. And please – do
not become so distracted that you fail to peer ahead with your
ears.”

To hell with you! Rhin thought.
And she made no attempt at silence as she pushed herself across the
seat into Joao’s arms.

“We must place part of our force
below the rapids,” the Brain commanded, “in case the
humans escape the net as they did before. They must not escape this
time.” And the Brain added here the
overhive-survival-fear-threat symbol to produce the greatest degree
of angry alertness among messengers and action groups.

“Give the little-deadlies
careful instructions,” the Brain ordered. “If the
vehicle eludes our net and passes the rapids safely, all
three humans must be killed.”

Golden winged messengers danced their
confirmation on the ceiling, fluttered out of the cave into the
gray light that soon would be night.

These three humans have been
interesting, even informative, the Brain thought, but now it
must end. We have other humans, after all… and emotion must
not figure in the logical necessities.

But these thoughts only aroused more of
the Brain’s newly learned emotions and brought the nurse
insects scurrying to adjust their charge’s unusual
demands.

Presently the Brain put aside the
subject of the three humans on the river and began to worry about
the fate of its simulacra somewhere beyond the barriers.

Human radio carried no reports that the
simulacra had been discovered… but this meant nothing
really. Such reports might be suppressed. Unless they could be
located by their own kind and warned (and that soon), the simulacra
would come out. The danger was great and the time short.

The Brain’s agitation brought its
attendants to a step they seldom took. Narcotics were brought up
and administered. The Brain sank into a lethargic, drowsing
half-sleep where its dreams transformed it into a creature like the
humans, and it stalked a dream trail with a rifle in its hands.

Even in its dream, the Brain worried
lest the game elude it. And here the nurse insects could not reach
and minister. The worry continued.

Joao awoke at dawn to find the river
cloaked by a restless drapery of fog. He felt stiff and cramped,
his thoughts confused by a feverish sensation as fuzzy as the fog
on the river. The sky held the color of platinum.

An island shrouded by the fog’s
ghost-smoke loomed ahead. The current moved the pod to the right
past matchstick piles of logs and flooded remnants of bushes and
grass that bent downstream and vibrated with the current.

The pod floated definitely low on the
right. Joao knew he should go out and pump the float. He knew he
had the energy to do the job, but he couldn’t find energy to
set himself into motion.

Rhin’s voice intruded:
“When did the rain stop?”

Chen-Lhu answered from the rear,
“Just before dawn.” He began to cough, then:
“Still no sign of our friends.”

“We’re floating low on the
right,” Rhin said.

“I was about to see to
that,” Chen-Lhu said. “Johnny, I presume I just put the
sprayhead tube into the float and work the toggle?”

Joao swallowed, astonished at how
grateful he felt that Chen-Lhu had volunteered for this job.

“Johnny?”

“Yes… that’s all you
do,” Joao said. “The inspection hole in the float has a
simple snap-lock.”

Joao lay back, closed his eyes. He
heard Chen-Lhu go out the hatch.

Rhin looked at Joao, noting how tired
he appeared. His closed eyes were death’s-head sockets rimmed
with shadow.

My latest lover, she thought.
Death.

The thought confused her and she
wondered at herself that she could find no warmth of feeling this
morning toward the man who had drugged her with passion during the
night. A tristia post coitum had seized her, and now Joao
seemed merely another mote of awareness that had, touched her quite
by accident and paused to share a moment of explosive
brilliance.

There was no love in that thought.

Nor hate.

Her feelings now were as nearly sexless
and clinical as they’d ever been. The coupling in the night
had been a mutual experience, but morning had reduced it to
something without savor.

She turned away, looked downstream.

The fog mist had thinned. Through it
she glimpsed a black face of lava rock perhaps two kilometers
distant. It was difficult to judge the distance, but it towered
above the jungle like a ghost ship.

She heard air sucking in the pump then
and noted how the pod had returned to an almost level position.

Presently, Chen-Lhu returned. He
brought a brief air of cold dampness that stopped when he sealed
the hatch.

“It’s almost cold out
there,” he said. “What’s the altimeter reading,
Johnny?”

Joao aroused himself, peered at the
dash. “Six hundred and eight meters.”

“How far do you think we’ve
come?”

Joao shrugged, remained silent.

“As much as a hundred and fifty
kilometers?” Chen-Lhu asked.

Joao looked out at the flooded banks
rushing past, at the current sucking gnarled, obscene roots.
“Perhaps.”

Perhaps, Chen-Lhu thought. And
he wondered why he felt so exhilarated and full of energy. He was
actually hungry! He dug for the ration packets, distributed them,
then ate in wolfing gulps.

A barrage of rain whipped against the
windshield. The pod turned and dipped. Another blast of wind shook
them. The pod skittered in it across lines of slapping wavelets.
The wind diminished, but the rain continued in sheets that blotted
all color from the passing shores. The wind died entirely, but
still the rain fell, its drops so thick they appeared to jiggle and
dance horizontally.

Joao stared out at a mottled granite
shore that passed like a surrealist backdrop. The river appeared at
least a kilometer wide here, its dirty brown surface turgid and
rolling and spotted by clumps of trees, floating sedge islands,
drifting logs.

Abruptly, the pod lurched. Something
bumped and scraped beneath the floats. Joao held his breath in fear
the patched float would be opened to the torrent.

“Shallows?” Chen-Lhu
asked.

A water-logged snag lifted out of the
river on their left, rolled and dived like a live thing.

Rhin whispered, “The
float…”

“It seems to be holding,”
Joao said.

A green beetle darted in over the snag,
landed on the windshield, waved its antennae at them and
departed.

“Anything that happens to us,
they’re interested,” Chen-Lhu said.

Rhin said, “That snag – you
don’t think…”

“I’m ready to believe
anything,” Chen-Lhu said.

Rhin closed her eyes, muttered,
“I hate them! I hate them!”

The rain slackened, fell off to
occasional drops that spattered the river or thudded against the
canopy. Rhin opened her eyes to see pale avenues of blue opening
and closing in the clouds.

“Is it clearing?” she
asked.

“What’s the
difference?” Chen-Lhu asked.

Joao stared out across the
rain-flattened grass of a savannah that appeared on their left. The
grass ended at an oily green jungle wall some two hundred meters
back.

As he looked, a figure emerged from the
jungle and waved and beckoned until they drifted out of sight.

“What was that?” Rhin
asked, and there was hysteria in her voice.

The distance was too great for
certainty, but the figure had looked to Joao like the Padre.

“Vierho?” he whispered.

“It had his appearance, I
thought,” Chen-Lhu said. “You don’t
suppose…”

“I suppose nothing!”

Ahh, Chen-Lhu thought. The
bandeirante is beginning to break down.

“I hear something,” Rhin
said. “It sounds like rapids.”

Joao straightened, listened. A faint
roaring came to him. “Probably just wind in the trees,”
he said. But even as he spoke he knew it was not the wind.

“It is rapids,” Chen-Lhu
said. “See that cliff ahead?”

They stared downstream until gusts of
wind pushed a black line up the river toward them and pulled a rain
veil over the cliff. The downpour whipped around the pod, thudded
on to the canopy. As quickly as it had come, the wind passed, and
the current slid them forward through a hiss of rain. Presently
even the rain faded, and the river with its slick appearance of
secret turbulence stretched out like a tabletop display composed on
a mirror.

The pod became for Chen-Lhu a toy
miniature shrunken by witchery and lost in an immensity of
flood.

Over it all stood the black face of the
cliff, growing more and more solid with each second.

Chen-Lhu moved his head slowly from
side to side, wondering how he knew what they must face beneath
that cliff. He felt that he drifted in a moist pocket of air that
drained his life from him. The air carried a smell of physical
substance, the dank piling of life and death on the forest floor
around the river. Rotting and festering odors came over him. Each
carried its message: “They are there ahead…
waiting.”

“The pod… it won’t
fly now, will it?” Chen-Lhu asked.

“I don’t think I can get
that float off the river,” Joao said. He wiped perspiration
from his forehead, closed his eyes and experienced the nightmare
sensation of dreaming through the entire trip to this point. His
eyes snapped open.

Stagnant silence settled over the
cabin.

The roar of rapids grew louder, but
there was still no view of the white water.

A flock of golden-beaked toucans lifted
from a stand of palms at a downstream bend. They climbed in a
frenzied cloud, filling the air with their dog-pack yelps. Then
they were gone and the sound of the rapids remained. The cliff
loomed above the palms just around the bend.

“We have five or six minutes of
fuel… maybe,” Joao said. “I think we should go
around that bend under power.”

“Agreed,” Chen-Lhu said. He
fastened his safety harness.

Rhin heard the sound, buckled her own
harness.

Joao found the cold buckles of his
harness beside him, snapped them in place as he studied the dash.
His hands began to tremble as he thought of the delicacy required
in manipulating the throttle. I’ve done it twice, he told
himself.

But there was no comfort in that. He
knew he was at the edge of his energy… and his reason.

A curving ripple of current fanned away
from the left shore where the river turned downstream. The water
there began to glisten and sparkle. Joao looked up to see cracks of
blue striking through the clouds. He took a deep breath, pressed
the igniter, counted.

The warning light blinked out.

Joao eased the throttle ahead. The
motors banged, then mounted to a steady roar. The pod began to pick
up speed, danced through the ripple track. She was right-side heavy
and a dull sloshing could be heard from the float there.

It’ll never lift. Joao
thought. He felt feverish and only loosely connected to his
senses.

The pod made its racketing, sluggish
way around the bend… and there it stood, the lava wall, no
more than a kilometer downstream. The river ran through the wall in
a notch that rose like something split out by a giant axe. Sheer
black heights of rock compressed the water at their base into a
tumbling agony.

“Jeeeesus,” Joao
whispered.

Rhin clutched his arm. “Turn
back! You’ve got to turn back.”

“We can’t,” Joao
said. “There’s no other way.”

Still, his hand hesitated on the
throttle. Press forward on that knob and risk explosion? There was
no alternative. He could see waves in the chasm now cresting over
unseen rocks, shooting milk-and-amber mist upward.

With a convulsive movement, Joao
slammed the throttle ahead. The roar of the rockets drowned out the
water’s sound.

Joao prayed to the float: “Hold
together… please… hold together.”

Abruptly, the pod lifted on to its
steps, began skimming faster and faster. In that instant, Joao saw
movement on both shores beside the chasm. Something lifted dripping
and snake-like across the entrance to the gorge.

“Another net!” Rhin
screamed.

Joao saw the net with a dreamlike
detachment, knew he couldn’t avoid it. The pod skidded over a
cross-eddy and on to a glossy black pool inhabited by that dripping
barrier. He saw the dark pattern of net squares and, through them,
water creased into steeper and steeper furrows that flashed outward
and down into the chasm.

The pod slammed into the net, pulled
it, stretching it, tearing it. Joao was thrown forward against his
harness as the pod tipped down by the nose. He felt the back of the
seat slam his ribs. There came a thunderous
tearing-grinding-bubbling sound and a sudden giving away.

The motors stopped short –
flooded out or unable to suck fuel. The roaring of the water filled
the cabin.

Joao pulled himself up by the wheel,
looked around. The pod floated almost level, turning. But his eyes
interpreted the motion as the world turning around him –
black wall, green line of jungle, white water.

The pod slid down a sloping current to
the right, crunched against the first obsidian buttress above the
torrent. A scraping, wrenching of metal competed with the
chasm’s roar.

Rhin screamed something that was lost
in the avalanche sound of water.

The pod bounced outward from the rock
wall, whirled, pounded across two infolding steps of explosive
current. Metal creaked and groaned. The spiral cone of a whirlpool
sucked at the floats, shot them sideways into a lifting, tipping,
pounding delirium of motion.

A vast pulsing-rumbling like ocean
waves on rocks deafened Joao. He saw a glistening ledge of black
rock, its face carved by the current, loom directly ahead. The pod
smashed into it, recoiled. And Joao found himself torn from his
harness, on the floor, tangled with Rhin. He grabbed the base of
the wheel with his right hand.

Above him the canopy buckled. He
watched in unbelieving shock as the canopy tipped forward and
disappeared. He saw the left wing crumple upward against rock. The
pod whipped around to the right, presenting a blurred arc of sky
and another black wall.

A crazy rumbling from the shattered
wing added to the din.

Joao thought: We aren’t going
to make it. Nothing can survive this.

He felt Rhin with both arms around his
waist clinging in terror, her voice in his left ear: “Please
make it stop; please make it stop.”

Joao saw the pod’s nose lift,
slam down, saw white water and spume boil past where the canopy had
been. He saw a spray-rifle jerk out that opening into the river,
and he wedged himself more tightly between the seats and the dash.
His fingers ached where he clutched the wheel. A wrenching motion
of the pod turned his head and he saw Chen-Lhu’s arms wrapped
around the seat back directly above him.

Chen-Lhu felt the sound like a direct
contact on his nerves magnified almost beyond endurance. It grated
through him in an unchecked rhythm, dominated his world: a
deafening cymbal dissonance gone wild in counterpoint, a rasping,
crunching, maelstrom grating. He felt that he had become a
seeing-hearing-feeling receptor without any other function.

Rhin pressed her face against Joao.
Everything was the hot smell of Joao’s body and insane
motion. She felt the pod lift… lift… lift and slam
down, twisting, turning. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down. It was like
some crazy kind of sex. A staccato punching motion shook her as the
pod shot down a washboard of rapids.

Joao felt all his consciousness
concentrated into the terrible intensity of sight. He saw directly
out an opening in the cabin side where no opening should be –
a millrace chute, a black cavity of water, solid spray, damp green
shade along a scarred cliff. He looked directly down into a frothed
spiral of current as the pod tipped. His hand was numb where he
clutched the wheel. His shoulder ached.

A brown turtleback of current rolled
over directly in front of the opening. Joao felt the pod slide up
on to that smoothness with a deceptively gentle gliding motion, saw
the river drop away beyond.

She can’t take any more,
he told himself.

The pod nosed down, faster and faster.
Joao braced himself against the dash. He saw a green-brown wave
curl upward past a shattered wing stump – up…
up… up…

The pod smashed through it.

Green darkness and water cascaded into
the cabin. There came a screech of metal. Joao felt the tail slam
down, lifting him into washed twilight. He clawed his way toward
the seat, dragging Rhin with him, saw Chen-Lhu’s arms still
wrapped there, water pouring from the torn side of the cabin. He
felt the tail section rip across rocks as the pod shot across
another boiling mound of water.

Glaring sunlight!

Joao twisted around, half blinded by
the brilliance. He stared past a torn hole where the motors had
been, looked back up the gorge. The roaring noise of the place
blasted at him. He saw the insane waves, the violence, and he
thought: Did we really come through that?

He felt water around his ankles,
turned, expecting to see another crazy descent of rapids. But there
was only a broad pool – dark water all around. It absorbed
the turbulence of the gorge and for all that violence showed only
glistening bubbles and the swift spreading and converging of
current runnels.

The pod lurched under him. Joao
staggered in the water, clutched the right lip of the cabin, looked
down at the remaining wing which appeared to float just on the
surface of the river.

Rhin’s voice broke across the
moment with a shocking tone of normality: “Hadn’t we
better get out? We’re sinking.”

Joao tried to shake off his feeling of
detachment, looked down to see her seated in her seat. He heard
Chen-Lhu struggle upright behind her, coughing, saw the man loom
there.

There came a metallic gurgling and the
right wing dipped beneath the surface.

It occurred to Joao then with a twisted
sense of elation that they were still alive… but the pod was
dead. Elation drained from him.

“We gave them a good run for
their money,” Chen-Lhu said, “but I think this is the
end of the line.”

“Is it?” Joao growled. He
felt anger boil in him, touched the bulge of Vierho’s big
blunderbuss pistol in his pocket. The reflex motion, the foolish
emptiness of it, brought a wave of crazy amusement into his
mind.

Imagine trying to kill those things
with this gun, he thought.

“Joao?” Rhin said.

“Yes.” He nodded to her,
turned, climbed out on to the edge of the cabin, straightened,
balancing there to study their surroundings. A damp spray mist from
the gorge blew across him.

“This thing’s not going to
stay afloat much longer,” Chen-Lhu said. He looked back up
the chasm, his mind suddenly refusing to accept what had happened
to them.

“I could swim to that point down
there,” Rhin said. “How about the rest of
you?”

Chen-Lhu turned, saw a treeless finger
of land jutting into their pool about a hundred meters downstream.
It was a fragile tentacle of reeds and dirt poised on the water and
backed by a high wall of trees. Long dragging marks slanted along
the mud below the reeds into the river.

Alligator sign, Chen-Lhu
thought.

“I see ’gator sign,”
Joao said. “Best stick with the pod as long as we
can.”

Rhin felt terror rise in her throat,
whispered, “Will it float much longer?”

“If we hold very still,”
Joao said. “We seem to’ve trapped some air under us
somewhere – maybe in the wing and that left float.”

“No sign of… them
here,” Rhin said.

“They’ll be along
presently,” Chen-Lhu said, and he was surprised at the casual
tone of his own voice.

Joao studied the little peninsula.

The pod drifted away, then returned in
a back eddy until only a few meters separated the partly submerged
wing’s tip from the muddy shore.

Where’re those damned
alligators? he wondered.

“We’re not going to get any
closer,” Chen-Lhu said.

Joao nodded agreement, said, “You
first, Rhin. Stay on the wing as long as you can. We’ll be
right with you.” He put his hand on the pistol in his pocket,
helped her up with the other hand. She slid down to the wing and it
tipped farther under until stopped by the mud below the shore.

Chen-Lhu slid down behind her, said,
“Let’s go!”

They splashed ashore, their feet
sinking in mud when they left the wing. Joao smelled rocket fuel,
saw its painted whorls on the river. The reed embankment lifted
ahead of him with the tracks of Rhin and Chen-Lhu in it. He climbed
up beside them, stared toward the jungle.

“Would it be possible to reason
with them?” Chen-Lhu asked.

Joao lifted the sprayrifle, said,
“I think this is the only argument we have.” He looked
at the rifle’s charge, saw it was full, turned back to study
the remains of the pod. It lay almost submerged, its wing anchored
in the mud, brown current lapping around and through the torn holes
in the cabin.

“You think we should try to get
more weapons out of the pod?” Chen-Lhu asked. “To what
purpose? We are going nowhere from here.”

He’s right, of course,
Joao thought. He saw that Chen-Lhu’s words had set Rhin to
shivering uncontrollably, and he put an arm around her until the
shivering stopped.

“Such a lovely little domestic
scene,” Chen-Lhu said, staring at them. And he thought:
They’re the only coin I have. Perhaps our friends will
bargain – two without a fight for one to go free.

Rhin felt calmness return. Joao’s
arm around her, his silence, had shaken her more than anything she
cared to remember. Such a little thing, she thought. Just
a brotherly-fatherly hug.

Chen-Lhu coughed. She looked at
him.

“Johnny,” Chen-Lhu said.
“Give me the sprayrifle. I’ll cover you while you try
to get more weapons from the pod.”

“You said it yourself,”
Joao said. “To what purpose?”

Rhin pulled out of Joao’s
embrace, suddenly terrified by the look in Chen-Lhu’s
eyes.

“Give me the rifle,”
Chen-Lhu said, his voice flat.

What’s the difference?
Joao asked himself. He looked up into Chen-Lhu’s eyes, saw
the unblinking savagery there. Good God! What’s come over
him? He found himself obsessed by the man’s eyes, their
glaring impact, the almond frames for rage.

Chen-Lhu’s left foot shot out,
caught Joao’s left arm, sent the rifle pitching skyward. Joao
felt his arm go numb, but fell back instinctively into the stance
of the capoeira, the Brazilian judo. Almost blind with pain,
he dodged another kick, leaped to one side.

“Rhin, the rifle!” Chen-Lhu
shouted. And he stalked after Joao.

Rhin’s mind refused to function
for a moment. She shook her head, looked to where the rifle had
fallen butt first into the reeds. It pointed skyward, its stock in
the mud. The rifle? she asked herself. Well, yes, it would
stop a man at this range. She retrieved the rifle, brought it up
with mud and torn reeds clinging to its stock, aimed it toward the
two men dodging and posturing as though in some weird dance.

Chen-Lhu saw her, leaped backward,
crouched.

Joao straightened, clutching his
injured arm.

“All right, Rhin,” Chen-Lhu
said, “Pick him off.”

With a feeling of horror at herself,
Rhin found the muzzle of the rifle swinging toward Joao.

Joao started to reach for the weapon in
his pocket, stopped. He felt only a sick emptiness coupled with
despair. Let her kill me if she’s going to, he
thought.

Rhin gritted her teeth, brought the
rifle back to bear on Chen-Lhu.

“Rhin!” he said, and
started toward her.

You son of a bitch! she thought,
and squeezed the trigger.

A hard stream of poison and butyl
carrier leaped from the muzzle, slammed into Chen-Lhu, staggering
him. He tried to fight his way through it, but the stream caught
him in the face, knocked him down. He rolled and writhed, fighting
an increasing entanglement as the carrier coagulated. His movements
became slower – jerking, stopping, jerking.

Rhin stood with the rifle pointed at
Chen-Lhu until its charge ran dry, then hurled the weapon from
her.

Chen-Lhu gave one last jerking,
convulsive movement, lay still. No feature of the man remained
exposed; he was merely a sticky gray-black-orange mass in the
reeds.

Rhin found she was panting, swallowed,
tried to take a deep breath, but couldn’t.

Joao crossed to her side and she saw
that he had the pistol in his hand. His left hand dangled uselessly
at his side.

“Your arm,” she said.

“Broken,” he said.
“Look at the trees.”

She turned as directed, saw flitting
movements in the shadows. A puff of wind troubled the leaves there,
and an Indian shape appeared in front of the jungle. It was as
though he had been flung there by sorcery that produced his image
in one movement. Ebony eyes glittered with that faceted sparkle
beneath a straight slash of bangs. Red whorls of achiote streaked
the face. Scarlet macaw feathers protruded from a string binding
the deltoid muscle of the left arm. He wore a breechclout with
monkey-skin bag dangling from the waist.

The remarkable accuracy of the
simulacrum struck through her terror, then Rhin remembered the
flying ants of her childhood and the gray fluttering wave that had
engulfed the IEO camp. She turned toward Joao, pleading,
“Joao… Johnny: please, please shoot me.
Don’t let them take me.”

He wanted to turn and run, but muscles
refused to obey.

“If you love me,” she
pleaded. “Please.”

He couldn’t avoid the pleading in
her voice. The gun came up as though of its own volition, point
blank.

“I love you, Joao,” she
whispered, and closed her eyes.

Joao found himself blinded by tears. He
saw her face through a mist. I must, he thought, God help
me – I must. Convulsively, he jerked the trigger.

The gun roared, bucking in his
hand.

Rhin jerked backward as though pushed
by a giant hand. She half turned and pitched face down into the
reeds.

Joao whirled away, unable to look,
stared down at the pistol in his hand. Movement by the trees
attracted him. He shook away the tears, stared at the line of
creatures trailing out of the forest. There were the ones like the
sertao Indians who had kidnapped him with his father… more
forest Indians… the figure of Thome from his own
band… another man, thin and in a black suit, hair shiny
silver.

Even my father! Joao thought.
They copy even my father!

He brought the pistol up, its muzzle
pointing at his heart. He felt no rage, only an enormous sorrow as
he pulled the trigger.

Darkness slammed him.

Chapter X

THERE WAS a dream of being carried, a
dream of tears and shouting, a dream of violent protests and
defiance and rejection.

Joao awoke to yellow-orange light and
the figure that could not be his father bending over him, thrusting
a hand out, saying, “Then examine my hand if you don’t
believe!”

It cannot be my father, Joao
thought. I am dead… he is dead. They’ve copied
him… mimicry, nothing more.

Numbing shock invaded Joao’s
awareness then.

How am I here? he wondered. His
mind searched back through memories and he saw himself killing Rhin
with Vierho’s old blunderbuss, then turning the weapon on
himself.

Something moved behind the figure that
couldn’t be his father. Joao’s attention jerked that
way, saw a giant face at least two meters tall. It was a baleful
face in the strange light, eyes brilliant and glaring…
enormous eyes with pupils within pupils. The face turned and Joao
saw that it could be no more than two centimeters thick. Again, the
face turned. The strange eyes focused toward Joao’s feet.

Joao forced himself to look down,
lifting his head, then falling back with a violent trembling. Where
his feet should have been he’d seen a foaming green cocoon.
Joao lifted his left hand, remembering that it had been broken, but
the arm came up without pain and he saw that his skin shared the
green tones of that repellent cocoon.

“Examine my hand!” ordered
the old-man figure beside him. “I command it!”

“He is not quite
awake.”

It was a booming voice, resonant,
shaking the air all around them, and it seemed to Joao that the
voice came from somewhere beneath that giant face.

What nightmare is this? Joao
asked himself. Am I in hell?

With an abrupt, violent motion, Joao
reached up, clutched the proffered hand.

It felt warm… human.

Tears flooded Joao’s eyes. He
shook his head to clear them, remembered… somewhere…
doing that same thing. But there were more pressing matters than
memories. The hand felt real… his tears felt real.

“How can this be?” he
whispered.

“Joao, my son,” said his
father’s voice.

Joao peered up at the familiar face.
It was his father and no mistaking, down to the very last
feature. “But… your heart,” Joao said.

“My pump,” the old man
said. “Look.” He pulled his hand away, turned to
display where the back of his suit had been cut away. Its edges
appeared to be held by some gummy substance. An oily yellow surface
pulsed between those fabric edges.

Joao saw the hair-fine scale lines, the
multiple shapes. He recoiled.

So it was a copy, another of their
tricks.

The old man turned back to face him,
and Joao couldn’t avoid the youthful look of glee in the
eyes. They weren’t faceted, those eyes.

“The old pump failed and they
gave me a new one,” his father said. “It shares my
blood and lives off me. It’ll give me a few more useful
years. What do you think our medical men will say about
that?”

“It’s really you,”
Joao gasped.

“All except the pump,” the
old man said. “But you, you stupid fool! What a mess you made
of yourself and that poor woman.”

“Rhin,” Joao whispered.

“Blew out your hearts and parts
of your lungs,” his father said. “And you fell right
into the middle of all that corrosive poison you’d sprayed
all over the landscape. They not only have to give the two of you
new hearts, but whole new blood systems!”

Joao lifted his hands, stared at the
green skin. He felt dazzled by it and unable to escape a dream
quality in his surroundings.

“They know medical tricks we
haven’t even imagined,” his father said. “I
haven’t been this excited since I was a boy. I can hardly
wait to get back and… Joao! What is it?”

Joao thrust himself up, glared at the
old man. “We’re not human anymore! We’re not
human if… We’re not human!”

“Oh, be still,” his father
ordered.

“If this is… They’re
in control!” Joao protested. He forced his gaze on to the
giant face behind his father. “They’ll rule
us!”

He sank back, gasping.

“We’ll be their
slaves,” Joao whispered.

“Such foolishness,” the
drum-voice rumbled.

“He always was
melodramatic,” the elder Martinho said. “Look at the
mess he made of things out there on the river. Of course,
you had a hand in that. If you’d only listened to me,
trusted me.”

“Now we have a hostage,”
the Brain rumbled. “Now we can afford to trust
you.”

“You’ve had a hostage ever
since you put this pump in me,” the old man said.

“I didn’t understand the
price you put on the individual unit,” the Brain said.
“After all, we’ll spend almost any unit to save
the hive.”

“Not a queen,” the old man
said. “You won’t spend a queen. And how about yourself?
Would you spend yourself?”

“Unthinkable,” the Brain
muttered.

Slowly, Joao turned his head, looked
beneath the giant face to where the voice originated. He saw a
white mass about four meters across, a pulsing yellow sac
protruding from it. Wingless insects crawled over it, into fissures
along its surface and along the stone floor of the cave underneath.
The face reared up from that mass supported by dozens of round
stalks. Their scaled surfaces betrayed their nature.

The reality of the situation began to
penetrate Joao’s shock.

“Rhin?” he whispered.

“Your mate is safe,” the
Brain rumbled. “Changed like yourself, but safe.”

Joao continued to stare at the white
mass on the cave floor. He saw that the voice issued from the
pulsing yellow sac.

“Your attention is drawn to our
way of answering your threat to us,” the Brain said.
“This is our brain. It is vulnerable, yet strong… just
as your brain.”

Joao fought down a shiver of
revulsion.

“Tell me,” the Brain said,
“how you define slave.”

“I’m a slave now,”
Joao whispered. “I’m in bondage to you. I must obey you
or you can kill me.”

“But you tried to kill
yourself,” the Brain said.

The thought unfolded and unfolded in
Joao’s awareness.

“A slave is one who must produce
wealth for another,” the Brain said. “There is only one
true wealth in all the universe. I have given you some of it. I
have given your father and your mate some of it. And your friends.
This wealth is living time. Time. Are we slaves because we have
given you more time to live?”

Joao looked up from the voice sac to
the giant, glittering eyes. He thought he detected amusement
there.

“We’ve spared and extended
the lives of all those who were with you,” the voice drummed.
“That makes us your slaves, does it not?”

“What do you take in
return?” Joao demanded.

“Ah, hah!” the voice fairly
barked. “Quid pro quo! That’s this thing called
business which I didn’t understand. Your father will leave
soon to speak with the men of his government. He is our messenger.
He trades us his time. He is our slave as well, is it not so? We
are tied to each other by the bond of mutual slavery that cannot be
broken. It never could be broken… no matter how hard you
tried.”

“It’s very simple once you
understand the interdependence,” Joao’s father
said.

“Understand what?”

“Some of our kind lived once in
greenhouses,” the voice rumbled. “Their cells
remembered the experience. You know about greenhouses, of
course.”

The giant face turned to look out at
the cave mouth, where dawn was beginning to touch the world with
gray. “That out there, that, too, is a greenhouse.”
Again, it peered down at Joao, the giant eyes glittering. “To
sustain life, a greenhouse must be maintained in a delicate state
of balance by the life within it – enough of this chemical,
enough of that one, another substance available when required. That
which is poison one day can be the sweetest food the next
day.”

“What’s all this to do with
slavery?” Joao demanded, and he heard the petulance in his
own voice.

“Life has developed through
millions of years on greenhouse Earth,” the Brain rumbled.
“Sometimes it developed in the poison excrement of other
life… and then that poison became necessary to it. Without a
substance produced by wireworms, that savannah grass out there
would die… in time.”

Joao stared up at the rock ceiling, his
thoughts turning over like cards in a file. “China’s
barren earth!” he said.

“Precisely,” the Brain
said, “Without substances produced by… insects,
and other forms of life, your kind of life would perish. Sometimes
just a faint trace of the substance is needed, such as the special
copper produced by arachnids. Sometimes the substance must pass
through many valences, subtly changed each time, before it can be
used by a life form at the end of the chain. Break the chain and
all die. The more different forms of life there are, the more life
the greenhouse can support. The successful greenhouse must enclose
many forms of life – the more forms of life, the healthier
for all.”

“Chen-Lhu,” Joao said.
“He could be made to help. He could go with my father, tell
them… Did you save Chen-Lhu?”

“The Chinese,” the Brain
said. “He can be said to live, although you abused him
cruelly. The essential structures of the brain are alive, thanks to
our prompt action.”

Joao looked down at the bulging,
fissured mass on the floor of the cave. He turned away.

“They have given me proof to take
back with me,” Joao’s father said. “There can be
no doubt. We must stop killing and changing insects.”

“And let them take over,”
Joao whispered.

“We say you must stop killing
yourselves,” the voice rumbled. “Already the people of
your Chen-Lhu are… I believe you would call it
reinfesting their land. Perhaps they will be in time,
perhaps not. Here, it is not too late. In China, they were
efficient and thorough… and they may need our
help.”

“But you’ll be our
masters,” Joao said. And he thought: Rhin… Rhin,
where are you?

“We’ll merely achieve a new
balance,” the Brain said. “It will be interesting to
see. But there will be time to discuss this later. You are quite
free to move… and capable of it. Just do not come too close
to me: my nurses will not permit that. But for now, feel free to
join your mate outside. There is sunshine this morning. Let the sun
work on your skin and on the chlorophyll in your blood. And when
you come back here, tell me if the sun is your slave.”

eBook Info

Creator:

Frank Herbert

Title:

The Green Brain

Date:

1/1/1966

Language:

en-us

Subject:

Science Fiction

Publisher:

Ace Books

Source:

Internet Scan, v1.2