The Green Brain

by Frank Herbert

  “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, staggered 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 muscles of the left arm. He wore a breech clout with monkeyskin 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 kidnaped 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.

  10

  There was a dream of being carried, a dream of tears and shouting, a dream of violent protests and defiance and rejection.

  Joao awoke to yellow-orange light and the figure that could not be his father bending over him, thrusting a hand out, saying, “Then examine my hand if you don’t believe!”

  It cannot be my father, Joao thought. I am dead … he is dead. They’ve copied him … mimicry, nothing more.

  Numbing shock invaded Joao’s awareness then.

  How am I here? he wondered. His mind searched back through memories and he saw himself killing Rhin with Vierho’s old blunderbuss, then turning the weapon on himself.

  Something moved behind the figure that couldn’t be his father. Joao’s attention jerked that way, saw a giant face at least two meters tall. It was a baleful face in the strange light, eyes brilliant and glaring … . enormous eyes with pupils within pupils. The face turned and Joao saw that it could be no more than two centimeters
thick. Again, the face turned. The strange eyes focused toward Joao’s feet.

  Joao forced himself to look down, lifting his head, then falling back with a violent trembling. Where his feet should have been he’d seen a foaming green cocoon. Joao lifted his left hand, remembering that it had been broken, but the arm came up without pain and he saw that his skin shared the green tones of that repellent cocoon.

  “Examine my hand!” ordered the old-man figure beside him. “I command it!”

  “He is not quite awake.”

  It was a booming voice, resonant, shaking the air all around them, and it seemed to Joao that the voice came from somewhere beneath that giant face.

  What nightmare is this? Joao asked himself. Am I in hell?

  With an abrupt, violent motion, Joao reached up, clutched the proffered hand.

  It felt warm … human.

  Tears flooded Joao’s eyes. He shook his head to clear them, remembered … somewhere … doing that same thing. But there were more pressing matters than memories. The hand felt real … his tears felt real.

  “How can this be?” he whispered.

  “Joao, my son,” said his father’s voice.

  Joao peered up at the familiar face. It was his father and no mistaking, down to the very last feature. “But … your heart,” Joao said.

  “My pump,” the old man said. “Look.” He pulled his hand away, turned to display where the back of his suit had been cut away. Its edges appeared to be held by some gummy substance. An oily yellow surface pulsed between those fabric edges.

  Joao saw the hair-fine scale lines, the multiple shapes. He recoiled.

  So it was a copy, another of their tricks.

  The old man turned back to face him, and Joao couldn’t avoid the youthful look of glee in the eyes. They weren’t faceted, those eyes.

  “The old pump failed and they gave me a new one,” his father said. “It shares my blood and lives off me. It’ll give me a few more useful years. What do you think our medical men will say about that?”

  “It’s really you,” Joao gasped.

  “All except the pump,” the old man said. “But you, you stupid fool! What a mess you made of yourself and that poor woman.”

  “Rhin,” Joao whispered.

  “Blew out your hearts and parts of your lungs,” his father said. “And you fell right into the middle of all that corrosive poison you’d sprayed all over the landscape. They not only had to give the two of you new hearts, but whole new blood systems!”

  Joao lifted his hands, stared at the green skin. He felt dazzled by it and unable to escape a dream quality in his surroundings.

  “They know medical tricks we haven’t even imagined,” his father said. “I haven’t been this excited since I was a boy. I can hardly wait to get back and … Joao! What is it?”

  Joao thrust himself up, glared at the old man. “We’re not human anymore! We’re not human if … We’re not human!”

  “Oh, be still,” his father ordered.

  “If this is … They’re in control!” Joao protested. He forced his gaze onto the giant face behind his father. “They’ll rule us!”

  He sank back, gasping.

  “We’ll be their slaves,” Joao whispered.

  “Such foolishness,” the drum-voice rumbled.

  “He always was melodramatic,” the elder Martinho said. “Look at the mess he made of things out there on the river. Of course, you had a hand in that. If you’d only listened to me, trusted me.”

  “Now we have a hostage,” the Brain rumbled. “Now we can afford to trust you.”

  “You’ve had a hostage ever since you put this pump in me,” the old man said.

  “I didn’t understand the price you put on the individual unit,” the Brain said. “After all, we’ll spend almost any unit to save the hive.”

  “Not a queen,” the old man said. “You won’t spend a queen. And how about yourself? Would you spend yourself?”

  “Unthinkable,” the Brain muttered.

  Slowly, Joao turned his head, looked beneath the giant face to where the voice originated. He saw a white mass about four meters across, a pulsing yellow sac protruding from it. Wingless insects crawled over it, into fissures along its surface and along the stone floor of the cave underneath. The face reared up from that mass supported by dozens of round stalks. Their scaled surfaces betrayed their nature.

  The reality of the situation began to penetrate Joao’s shock.

  “Rhin?” he whispered.

  “Your mate is safe,” the Brain rumbled. “Changed like yourself, but safe.”

  Joao continued to stare at the white mass on the cave floor. He saw that the voice issued from the pulsing yellow sac.

  “Your attention is drawn to our way of answering your threat to us,” the Brain said. “This is our brain. It is vulnerable, yet strong … just as your brain.”

  Joao fought down a shiver of revulsion.

  “Tell me,” the Brain said, “how you define slave.”

  “I’m a slave now,” Joao whispered. “I’m in bondage to you. I must obey you or you can kill me.”

  “But you tried to kill yourself,” the Brain said.

  The thought unfolded and unfolded in Joao’s awareness.

  “A slave is one who must produce wealth for another,” the Brain said. “There is only one true wealth in all the universe. I have given you some of it. I have given your father and your mate some of it. And your friends. This wealth is living time. Time. Are we slaves because we have given you more time to live?”

  Joao looked up from the voice sac to the giant, glittering eyes. He thought he detected amusement there.

  “We’ve spared and extended the lives of all those who were with you,” the voice drummed. “That makes us your slaves, does it not?”

  “What do you take in return?” Joao demanded.

  “Ah, hah!” the voice fairly barked. “Quid pro quo! That’s this thing called business which I didn’t understand. Your father will leave soon to speak with the men of his government. He is our messenger. He trades us his time. He is our slave as well, is it not so? We are tied to each other by the bond of mutual slavery that cannot be broken. It never could be broken … no matter how hard you tried.”

  “It’s very simple once you understand the interdependence,” Joao’s father said.

  “Understand what?”

  “Some of our kind lived once in greenhouses,” the voice rumbled. “Their cells remembered the experience. You know about greenhouses, of course.”

  The giant face turned to look out at the cavemouth, where dawn was beginning to touch the world with gray. “That out there, that, too, is a greenhouse.” Again, it peered down at Joao, the giant eyes glittering. “To sustain life, a greenhouse must be maintained in a delicate state of balance by the life within it—enough of this chemical, enough of that one, another substance available when required. That which is poison one day can be the sweetest food the next day.”

  “What’s all this to do with slavery?” Joao demanded, and he heard the petulance in his own voice.

  “Life has developed through millions of years on greenhouse Earth,” the Brain rumbled. “Sometimes it developed in the poison excrement of other life … and then that poison became necessary to it. Without a substance produced by wireworms, that savannah grass out there would die … in time.”

  Joao stared up at the rock ceiling, his thoughts turning over like cards in a file. “China’s barren earth!” he said.

  “Precisely,” the Brain said. “Without substances produced by … insects, and other forms of life, your kind of life would perish. Sometimes just a faint trace of the substance is needed, such as the special copper produced by arachnids. Sometimes the substance must pass through many valences, subtly changed each time, before it can be used by a life form at the end of the chain. Break the chain and all die. The more different forms of life there are, the more life the greenhouse can support. The successful greenhouse must enclose many
forms of life—the more forms of life, the healthier for all.”

  “Chen-Lhu,” Joao said. “He could be made to help. He could go with my father, tell them … Did you save Chen-Lhu?”

  “The Chinese,” the Brain said. “He can be said to live, although you abused him cruelly. The essential structures of the brain are alive, thanks to our prompt action.”

  Joao looked down at the bulging, fissured mass on the floor of the cave. He turned away.

  “They have given me proof to take back with me,” Joao’s father said. “There can be no doubt. No one will doubt. We must stop killing and changing insects.”

  “And let them take over,” Joao whispered.

  “We say you must stop killing yourselves,” the voice rumbled. “Already the people of your Chen-Lhu are … I believe you would call it reinfesting their land. Perhaps they will be in time, perhaps not. Here, it is not too late. In China, they were efficient and thorough … and they may need our help.”

  “But you’ll be our masters,” Joao said. And he thought: Rhin … Rhin, where are you?

  “We’ll merely achieve a new balance,” the Brain said. “It will be interesting to see. But there will be time to discuss this later. You are quite free to move … and capable of it. Just do not come too close to me: my nurses will not permit that. But for now, feel free to join your mate outside. There is sunshine this morning. Let the sun work on your skin and on the chlorophyll in your blood. And when you come back here, tell me if the sun is your slave.”

  Tor Books by Frank Herbert

  The Dosadi Experiment

  The Eyes of Heisenberg

  The Green Brain

  The Santaroga Barrier

  In the desert, the line between life and death is sharp and quick.

  —Zensunni fire poetry from Arrakis

  Far from thinking machines and the League of Nobles, the desert never changed. The Zensunni descendants who had fled to Arrakis scraped out squalid lives in isolated cave communities, barely subsisting in a harsh environment. They experienced little enjoyment, yet fought fiercely to remain alive for just another day.

  Sunlight poured across the ocean of sand, warming dunes that rippled like waves breaking upon an imagined shore. A few black rocks poked out of the dust like islands, but offered no shelter from the heat or the demon worms.