The Green Brain

Chapter IX

They have such a talent for occupying themselves with inconsequentials, 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 billowings 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 the 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 onto 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 onto 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 onto 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 sprayrifle 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 onto 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 onto 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.