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.
9
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.
Messengers 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 som
ething,” 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 hammerstroke.
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 i
nto 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 fenceline 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.