Page 32 of Phylogenesis

  "Not if it stayed underground and had human help," he shot back. "And I wasn't trying to avoid the rangers. Not any­more. I wanted to be picked up."

  She frowned uncertainly, her irritation diminishing just enough for her to sustain a modicum of interest. "Under­ground? You're trying to tell me that there's an illegal thranx landing party operating inside the Reserva and underground?"

  His countenance subsided into a complacent smirk. "Not a landing party. A hive. A colony." His tone had become inso­lent. "There aren't a dozen or so thranx in the Reserva-there are hundreds. And they're not peeking at plants or collecting butterflies-they're living there. And breeding."

  She stared hard at him, at this slender, vainglorious _ma drino_ who sat with arms crossed and smile smug. He did not look away. She wanted to, but could not. Not quite yet.

  "So what's in this pack of yours that would prove a claim as outrageous as that?"

  "Then my 'crazy' story might be a little newsworthy?" He was taunting her now. She wouldn't let him get away with it.

  "Give me the coordinates for this pack of yours and we'll see what's in it. If anything. If it exists."

  "Oh, it exists all right." He glanced briefly toward the door­way. "But first we need to come to some kind of agreement. Officially recorded and witnessed."

  "Agreement?" Shannon was not pleased. Her bureau's dis­cretionary expense file was in proportion to her assignment. Iquitos wasn't Paris. "What kind of agreement?"

  For the first time since she had entered the interview room he appeared to relax. "You don't think I'm going to give away the story of the century out of the goodness of my heart, do you?" For a moment, his eyes took on a faraway look and his voice fell to a whisper. "I _have_ to get something back, be­cause I've already missed my appointment. I forfeited the franchise. For this." He shook his head slowly, his tone dis­believing. "I _must_ be crazy. One other thing: We tell it my way. I want editorial input."

  She started to laugh, but then she saw that he was serious. "So now in addition to being a murderer you want to be a journalist?"

  His eyes lowered. "That killing up in San Jose was unfortu­nate. An accident. It'll all come out at my hearing." The smile returned, sly and knowing. "It'll be a sealed hearing, you'll see. I know too much, and the government doesn't like people who know too much to run around loose babbling what they know. But it'll be worth it to you. I promise."

  She sat up straight and turned her recorder back on. "Never mind all that other nonsense: What makes you think you know anything about telling a story?"

  Pursing his lips, he blew her a kiss. She recoiled distaste­fully. "You just bought mine, didn't you?"

  The pack was there, surprisingly far to the south, buried in a shallow pit between two gnarled strangler figs. Right where he'd said it would be. That in itself meant nothing. The presence of an identifiable, functioning thranx device inside was likewise conclusive of nothing except the owner's ability to obtain con­traband through channels with which he was clearly familiar. The section of thranx arm, however, was another matter. It was sufficiently fresh and well-enough wrapped so that it had not yet begun to decompose, even under the relentless assault of the opportunistic rain forest. Taken together, they lent veracity if not proof to the prisoner's story.

  The next time Shannon visited Montoya, she had com­pany. Not rangers, but a pair of commentators from her com­pany and one wizened, white-haired senior editor.

  The prisoner eyed them with an amiable wariness. On the table between them lay the section of alien limb and the de­vice that had been removed from the buried backpack. Nei­ther appeared to have been touched, though in fact both had been carefully examined with a view toward verifying their authenticity. This had been done. Now it remained for the ex­ceedingly curious media representatives to find out how these unlikely objects had come to be in the possession of a minor criminal whose erstwhile home lay far to the north on the American isthmus.

  One of the reporters pushed the device across the table in Cheelo's direction. "We know that this is of alien manufac­ture, but we don't know what it does."

  "I do. It's a scri!ber. I told you-Des was a poet. That means he did more than just put words together. Among the thranx, poetry is a performance art. I know: He performed a couple of times for me." A gaunt, regretful smile split his features. "I didn't get much out of it. Didn't understand the words or the gestures. There was a lot of clicking and whistling, too. But God, it was beautiful."

  The reporter who had asked the question was about to laugh, but her companion put a restraining hand on her arm. Leaning forward, he spoke understandingly. "I'm Rodrigo Monteverde, from the parliament district. I haven't seen the kind of performance you're referring to myself, but I've talked to those who have. Your description fits."

  "These thranx have performed for ranking officials. A couple have been on the tridee." The senior editor did not stir as he spoke. "He could have seen a recording."

  Shannon gingerly pushed the length of amputated limb toward the prisoner. "What about this? What's this?"

  Montoya lowered his gaze to the blue-green fingers. His insides knotted and a sharp pain shot through his gut, but to all outward appearances he was unaffected. "That? That was my friend." He looked up, smiling at Shannon before shifting his attention to the gray-hair who obviously called the shots.

  "I'm offering you the biggest story of the last hundred years. You want it, or should I put out the word that I'm ready to talk to another media conglomerate?"

  The senior editor retained his unshakable composure, but a hint of a smile toyed with one corner of his mouth. "We want it-if there's anything more to it. The question is, what do _you_ want?" He nodded in the reporter's direction. "Ms. Shannon here has apprised me of your petition but did not supply any details."

  All eyes were on him, components of expectant expres­sions. He reveled in the attention. It made him feel... big. "That's better! First, I want all charges pending or planning to be filed against me dropped."

  "I understand you committed a murder." Shannon's tone was dry as dust. She didn't like him, Cheelo knew. That did not matter. What was vital was that she saw the opportunity to work on a big story. He was not the only one to whom the word was important. Much of the world still worked that way. "It was accidental, like I told you. The idiot had to go macho and grab the gun and there was a struggle. Nobody could prove premeditation. Scan the wife and you'll see that I'm telling the truth."

  "Nevertheless," declared the senior editor inexorably, "you left an innocent man for dead."

  "Fix it." Cheelo's tone was harsh and uncompromising. "I know what the media can do. After all charges are dropped, I want my permanent record expunged. I'd like to start over, clean."

  "So you can fill it up again?" The editor sighed. "What you ask is doable. Expensive and awkward, but doable. Especially if what you say about scanning the wife holds up. What else?"

  "Some credit in my account. I haven't settled on a sum yet. We can work that out together." His tone turned wistful. "You probably won't believe me, but by letting myself get picked up I sacrificed a lot more money than you can imagine. More than that, I gave up a career."

  "How noble of you." As the editor spoke, all three reporters were taking notes. _Notes,_ Cheelo thought silently. That's all any of us are: a bundle of somebody else's notes. When we die, we're all dependent on the notes made by others. Unless we take the time to make some ourselves.

  "One more thing." He pushed the alien scri!ber toward Shannon. "I want everything that's on here published. I don't know what that means in this case, or how you'd go about doing it, because it's not like human poetry. But I want it _done._ I want it all published and disseminated. Among the thranx as well as here on Earth."

  " 'Disseminated'?" Shannon eyed him archly.

  "Hey, I'm poor, not stupid. I want Des's art-out there. For everybody to see."

  "It won't mean anything to us, to humans," the second re­porter pointed out.
>
  "Maybe not, but the thranx are going to be exposed to it whether they like it or not. Once disclosed, they won't be able to ignore it. It's great stuff, important work. _Big_ work." He squeezed his eyelids together. Hard. "Bigger than anything _I'll_ ever do."

  For the first time, the open hostility and contempt Shannon had been feeling began to give way to incertitude. "How do you know that, if you couldn't understand any of it?"

  "I know because of the way Des believed in it, the way he talked about it, the way he showed it to me-even if I didn't understand much of it. I know because he gave up everything to try and achieve something important. I'm no artist-I can't sculpt, or paint, or weave light, or write real well. But I know passion when I see it." He brightened. "Yeah, that's what it was about Des. He was passionate." He tapped the scri!ber's protective casing. "This gadget is full of passion, and I want it splashed out there for everybody to see."

  For the first time, the senior editor showed some anima­tion. "Why? Why should you care what happens to the work of some obscure alien artist? The art means nothing to you. _He_ meant nothing to you."

  "I'm not sure. Maybe-maybe it's because I've always felt that everybody should stand for something, even if the rest of society doesn't agree on what that is, and that nobody should die for nothing. I've seen too many people die for nothing. I don't want it to happen to me, and I don't want it to happen to Des." With a shrug, he looked away, toward the single window that was too small for a prisoner to crawl through. Outside lay the city and beyond, the rain forest.

  "It'll probably happen to me anyway. I'm not anything spe­cial. Never was and probably never will be. But I'm going to see to it that it doesn't happen to him."

  While the reporters waited respectfully, the editor consid­ered the prisoner's words. Eventually he looked back up at Cheelo. "All right. We agree to your terms. All of them. _Provided_ there's something significant and real at the end of this alien rainbow of yours."

  A mollified Cheelo leaned back in his chair. Despite the backpack, despite its unarguably alien contents, he was not sure until the very end that the media people would go for it. Unless he was very much mistaken, he would soon be walking the streets again. A dead thranx poet had cost him a career but bought him his freedom.

  What the consequences of that freedom would be he could not have foreseen. He expected to be free. He did not expect to be famous.

  Searching only within the section of rain forest specified by the thief allowed the reporters and their staff to locate the hive within a few weeks of Cheelo supplying them with coor­dinates. Worldwide revelation followed and outrage ensued. Exposed and confronted, the representatives of the colony and their covert human allies pleaded a case which for them could have only one outcome.

  Their careful, cautious diplomacy undone, human and thranx emissaries scrambled to salvage what they could of a shattered process of prudent negotiation. Forced to ad­vance all interspecies colloquy and bring forward proposals that were barely in the preliminary stages of synthesis, they hastened to compose and then sign the first formal treaties between humans and thranx some twenty to forty years be­fore they were ready. Both species would simply have to deal with the unpredictable consequences. The alternative was a formal break in relations coupled with the possibility of open hostilities.

  As for the Amazonian colony, it was allowed to remain only because humans were hastily granted reciprocal coloni­zation privileges on the thranx homeworld of Hivehom in ad­dition to the much smaller installation on Willow-Wane. A site was selected on what the bipeds soon came to call the Mediterranea Plateau, a dominion too bleak and cold and dry for the thranx to settle. Forced together by the circumstance of revelation, human and thranx rapidly discovered that they complemented one another in ways that could not have been predicted by formal diplomacy. The first tentative steps were taken to overcome each species' abhorrence of the hideous appearance of the other.

  As for Cheelo Montoya, who only wanted to sink back into the backstreet society in which he had grown up, albeit with a bit more money, he found himself transformed from petty, re­morseless street hustler into a paragon of interspecies first contact. It was a celebrity he did not seek and did not want, but once his part in the business was revealed he no longer had any choice in the matter. Eagerly sought out for inter­views, thrust beneath world-spanning tridee pickups, he was repeatedly reminded of his personal inadequacies by ques­tions he could not answer and requests for opinions that were beneath his ability to formulate. With his face thrust relent­lessly before an inquisitive world, he lost any semblance of personal privacy. Poked, prodded, queried, challenged, the object of rumor and the subject of speculation, before long he found himself regretting that he had ever tried to make a single credit off his unsought relationship with the dead alien poet. Harried and harassed by a pitiless media and a bastard-loving populace, he died sooner than he should have, en­nobled by a public whose historical appetite for falsely inculcated minor deities verged on the unbounded. His fu­neral was a sumptuous, splendid affair, trideed all over the planet as well as to all human and thranx-settled worlds. He would have decried the waste of money.

  The monument they placed above his coffin, at least, was something big.

  The thranx were less ingenuous. Forced by its exposure to accept on its merits the work of a monstrously antisocial artist who normally would have been resolutely ignored, the highly conservative thranx performance establishment proved unable to repudiate its worth. The power and passion with which the deceased Desvendapur had endowed his com­positions would not be denied.

  So it was that Cheelo Montoya, who did not want it, was forced to endure the fame that the renegade poet Desvendapur had sought. Offered a shocking amount for his mem­oirs, he had laboriously transcribed them for the media with the help of a small army of ghost writers. As he told it, the tale of his encounter and relationship with the renegade thranx artist took on a glamorous, heroic mien. Poetic, even, so that while later generations knew that a murderer and a poet were responsible for the forced, accelerated pace of human-thranx contact, the line became blurred as to who was which.

  With tentative, cultivated, ceremonial contact shattered by the unscheduled revelations, relations between the species were advanced by perhaps half a century in spite of, and not because of, the exertions of well-meaning, hard-working, professional emissaries. There was precedent. History is often fashioned by insignificant individuals intent on matters of petty personal concern who have motives entirely irrelevant to carefully planned posterity. It was just as well.

  Had humankind contacted the next intelligent race they encountered prior to formalizing relations with the thranx, the Commonwealth might very well never have come into ex­istence. As for the duplicitous AAnn, their upset verged on outrage as they saw their traditional competitors for habitable worlds forge an ever-deepening relationship with the mili­tarily strong but mentally unpredictable humans. Bereft of stratagems for countering the seemingly inevitable alliance, the government of the emperor sought the advice of any who might have an efficacious solution to propound.

  As it happened, Lord Huudra Ap and Baron Keekil YN stood ready to supply one.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

  CLASSIFICATION OF PLANETS

  This is the Commonwealth-standard system devised by the United Church Bureau of Supra-Commonwealth Registry for the protection of less-developed worlds that may not be ready to join galactic civilization, to give them an opportunity to develop on their own, and for regulation of commercial purposes.

  Class I: Full Commonwealth membership with all rights, privileges, and responsibilities, including a voice on the Commonwealth Council, unrestricted commerce and cultural exchange, and transfer of information. This class is comprised of planets with native or imported population having high technology, and colony worlds that have achieved a specified level of development.

  Class II: Associate Commonw
ealth membership. Population must have achieved a world government and an atomic or better level of technology. Population has some voice on the Council, and may send observers off-planet. Exchange of goods and transfer of technology is regulated.

  Class III: Wardship planet is under Commonwealth and United Church protection. Status similar to Class II, but a world government as such is not required.

  Class IVa: Dominant native sentients live at pre-atomic level of technology. Trade and exchange of information is restricted.

  Class IVb: Dominant native sentients live at a pre-steam level of technology, or lower. Trade and exchange of information highly restricted. Feudal states often found at this level.

  Class V: Pre-state culture(s). Clan to tribal society. Inhabited worlds not aligned with the Commonwealth, and newly-contact inhabited planets of which little is known.

  Class VI: Hardship planetary conditions restrict native development to the point where Commonwealth assistance is necessary for the species to survive.

  Class VIIa: Potential colony. Registered and surveyed worlds about to be colonized.

  Class VIIb:Potential colony. Registered but not surveyed.

  Class VIII: Frontier colony planet not developed enough in resources or population to qualify for Class I or II.

  Class IXa: General colony planetary conditions and/or political situations make it unlikely higher status is likely to be granted. Commonwealth citizens on such worlds are represented via their respective home worlds.

  Class IXb: As above, only with an appointed Resident Commissioner.

  Class X: Commercial interests. In this class are worlds, moons, asteroids, and other bodies considered unsuitable for colonization, but presenting sufficient worth or characteristics deemed necessary for formal registry.

  UNDER EDICT : Stellar bodies on which a general or specific threat has been determined, or for other reasons that warrant a strict "hands off" policy. No communication made be made with any resident native species, and no landing may be made. Under guard by automated or manned vessels.