The Green Brain

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 in 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. Heat 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 onto 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 grillwork 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 onto 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 a 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 onto 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 onto 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 those 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 encomendero 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 came 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 in 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 dove 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!”