“How about you keep your mouth and your eyes to yourself and you answer my questions?” she retorted flatly. “Otherwise, I’ll waft and you can play with yourself until the official interrogators land on you again. They won’t listen to your lunatic stories, either.”
His macho bravado instantly deflated, the prisoner looked away. Fingers working uneasily against one another as if he didn’t know what to do with them, he muttered a reply. “First you got to get me my personal belongings.”
Her dyed and striped brows drew together. “What personal belongings? The report on you said you were picked up out in the forest with only the clothes on your back.”
Leaning forward, he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “When I saw that the rangers had me referenced, I buried my pack. Without what’s in it you won’t believe a word I say.”
“I doubt I’ll believe a word you say anyway, so what’s the big deal? What’s in your miserable pack that you had to hide from the rangers? Illegal narcotics? Gemstones?”
He grinned, this time knowingly. “Proof. Of my story.”
Shaking her head sadly, she turned off the recorder. No point in wasting the cell. “There is no proof of your ‘story.’ Not in some mysterious buried backpack or anywhere else. Because your story’s crazy. It makes no sense.”
The smile tightened but did not disappear entirely. “Then why are you here?”
She shrugged diffidently. “Because it sounded different from the usual run-of-the mill rubbish we use for backscreen fillers. Because I thought you might be good for a new angle or two on how some miscreants try to mask themselves from the attentions of the legal process. So far I’m just annoyed, not enlightened.”
“Go dig up my pack and I’ll enlighten the hell out of you. The contents will enlighten you.”
She sighed heavily. “I skimmed the report. There are no thranx in the Reserva. There are no thranx in this hemisphere. Their presence on Earth, like that of all representatives of newly contacted sentient species, is restricted to the one orbital station that’s been equipped with proper diplomatic facilities. We have occasional closely supervised visits by especially important individuals holding the rank of eint or higher, but they are not allowed outside the official boundaries of Lombok or Geneva. Even if one somehow managed to end up here, it couldn’t survive.”
Inclining toward her again, he dropped his voice so low that she had to lean forward to make out the words. She did not relish the proximity. Despite the treatment accorded any incoming prisoner, he still stank strongly of his time spent in the Reserva and of his own disagreeable self.
“You’re right. ‘One’ couldn’t survive. But a properly prepared and equipped landing party could.”
She rolled her eyes and looked away. She’d had just about enough of this homicidal ninloco and his pathetic fantasies. “Now you’re trying to tell me that there’s not one, but a whole landing party of thranx bashing around undetected inside the Reserva? What kind of moron do you take me for, Montoya? If the rangers can run down one human like yourself who’s trying his damnedest to avoid them, don’t you think they’d find something as alien as a thranx? Much less a whole landing party?”
“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 madrino 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 José 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 s
een 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 t
o 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.
Phylogenesis Page 32
