Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest

by Frazier, Robert

  “To hell with fine differences. I’m interested in staying alive.”

  “Genna!” Mingus called out from ahead of them. “You should take pictures of me with the machete.”

  “Hold it over your head,” she told him as she left Jorge’s side and approached.

  Mingus smiled for the camera and cocked his arm. Paulo and the Indios continued to work.

  “That’s it,” she said under her breath, “this is what you want.” She exhausted the rest of the chips in the cartridge while Mingus postured, the holocam whirring like some jungle insect as each image recorded its string of binary code.

  ***

  Dirt brown. White. Gray. Splotches of silver and red. This time the holo remains an abstraction even on closer examination. Whatever image has been recorded, it is blurred beyond any chance of recognition. Yet despite its lack of realism, the piece stands out as one of the most immediately striking in the exhibit. There is a sense of violent movement here, perhaps even violent death. One knows instantly . . . intuitively . . . that the bright streaks and splotches running through the cube like a random refrain are tracks of fresh blood.

  ***

  They heard the basso roar again, this time close at hand. Mingus once more pleaded to move faster. Moments later they broke through a particularly stubborn thicket and entered a clearing. Trees still towered about them, but the track of the old highway and the land around it were clear of brush.

  Jorge called a halt. He sent Paulo and one of the Indios to scout ahead. Mingus threw down his machete and fumed. He paced back and forth along the perimeter of the road, fondling his rifle, looking up and down the trail. He was a pathetic man, Genna thought, but nonetheless dangerous. The strength of his obsession gave him a kind of stature. She had noticed how the Indios, generally impassive, often treated him with deference.

  “Look!” Mingus shouted, startling them all.

  He was pointing to the exposed root system of a towering ceiba, his outstretched arm trembling with excitement. “Wild roses . . . Therese’s favorite flower. I know she must be nearby. I can feel it!”

  Genna looked around. Low thorny vines with small white blossoms draped the roots of most of the trees in the area, and in some cases, had begun to twine up the trunks. Other than the trees, they were the only vegetation that survived here.

  Overhead the sky had begun to darken. A low churn of distant thunder rumbled past them. By the time the scouts returned, large, widely spaced droplets splattered against the forest floor and dripped from the overhanging foliage, a slow tepid rain that did little to ease the heat of the day. Jorge conferred with Paulo and the Indios, and then announced something that disturbed Genna.

  “The jungle is rarely this open. And now my men tell me it’s clear of brush for at least a kilometer ahead.”

  “Then it should be easy to spread out and sweep the area,” Mingus said.

  “Paulo claims this is cleared land,” Jorge continued. “And kept that way.”

  Genna snorted. “That’s absurd. No one lives out here.”

  “Precisely, señorita.”

  “Precisely what?” Mingus looked wild-eyed and confused.

  “Precisely why we’ll stick together. And move cautiously.”

  “I’m not waiting,” Mingus announced.

  Jorge squinted through the falling droplets, which gave him a predatory look of shadow and power that intrigued Genna. “It is your choice, señor. I implore the others to remain.”

  Mingus looked to the Indios and Paulo, who stood behind Jorge and made no move to join him. Finally he fixed his gaze on Genna.

  “What about it? Do your services end here, too?”

  Genna shook her head, not in denial but disgust. “You know I won’t carry a gun.”

  Mingus smirked and patted his weapon, then stalked off along the road, which now rose up into higher country. Rain threw darkening streaks onto the grooved trunks about them. While Jorge set two men on guard and with the others began to pitch camp, Genna watched the tan of Mingus’ khaki outline shrink to a blob ahead. She gasped when it disappeared, followed by a loud shriek. A single shot rang out.

  “Chinga!” Jorge shouted.

  He motioned his men forward. They broke into a slow run, controlled by Jorge’s sense of order. Genna followed. The terrain swept up a slight ridge and across a dry stream bed, where the carcass of a tapir boiled with huge flies and gold scavenger butterflies. They moved laterally around the base of a wide gargantua tree and came upon Mingus wrestling with a silver bird, its feathers flashing like mirrors. The siren eagle clawed at his face and pecked his bald head as he struggled to beat it off, while its mate—a smaller female—circled to nip and bite at his legs.

  Genna was too stunned to reach for her camera. Jorge cut the smaller bird in two with a burst from his machine pistol. Mingus’ other attacker rose straight up over a low limb of the gargantua. While his men shot blindly through the leaves, Jorge rolled on the ground until he was out of the limb’s shadow. He fired in a wide arc, and a bird the size of a man plummeted to the forest floor next to Genna.

  The eagle had lost a wing, yet still lived. It pecked at roots and the ground with its beak, pushing itself away from her as best it could. The shattered stub of its exposed wing bone traced an uneven line in the dirt. Genna at last had the holocam in place. Bloodied silver feathers writhed in the rain-splotched tableau of her viewfinder. Her hands trembled as she took the shot. For a lengthening moment afterwards, she stared straight into one of the bird’s sad yellow eyes, and it seemed as if the creature were about to speak to her, to reveal some secret of the forest or of life itself. Then Paulo stepped forward and broke the eagle’s neck with a vicious swing of his rifle butt.

  Genna covered her mouth and turned to where Mingus lay.

  “I saw her,” he moaned, trying to rise, “I saw Therese! She’s alive!”

  “Stay still,” Genna told him as she knelt by his side. “Don’t move. You’re just getting dirt in your wounds.”

  Mingus continued to fight the bird in his mind, his arms thrashing wildly about his head, and Genna had to sling her camera over one shoulder and pin him down. After a brief arching of his back, he gave out and lay spent on a tangle of dead branches and crushed leaves. His neck and head were lacerated, bleeding profusely, too messy to determine the extent of the damage. A gash on one leg opened to the pearly gristle of ligament. More scratches covered his hands and arms. His blood speckled Genna’s camouflage shirt and pants, already dampened by the rain, and she immediately wished she could change.

  “All right,” Jorge said, “We’ll camp here and tend to Señor Jahns. Paulo, set up the sonics to stop any sucker bugs attracted by the blood. And get those dead birds outside the perimeter.”

  As Paulo and the Indios moved into action, Jorge came to Genna’s side. Mingus’ eyelids fluttered and he tried to speak, but all that came out was a frothy moan.

  “He says he saw his wife?” Jorge asked.

  Genna nodded.

  “But where?” One arm sweeping to take in the empty woods.

  At that instant—Jorge’s arm in mid-swing—lightning struck the clearing, blindingly bright, momentarily blanching all color from the scene. The thunder was simultaneous and deafening, rocking the ground beneath their feet. The rain fell more rapidly. Genna blinked as an after image of the flash overlaid her vision and pulsed across her retina like a black and white hallucination. The silhouette of a woman’s torso, a stylized face in stark chiaroscuro, a face she had never seen in the flesh yet knew by heart. Genna realized that Jorge was kneeling by her side and they were holding one another like frightened children. His body beneath her hands felt softer than it looked. Several moments passed before either of them gave any sign of letting go.

  ***

  The frame is cast as a dodecahedron, elongated and tapering at one end, so that the structure as a whole might be likened to that of a cubist egg. Within its faceted brilliance, either nature or the holographer is
playing tricks with color.

  A cascade of wild roses fills the sculpture, blooming with such abundance that the vines from which they sprout are barely visible. The petals of each and every flower are open to their fullest and glistening with water droplets. Not red petals. Not white or yellow. But petals of the palest emerald green.

  ***

  Rain continued through midday and into the afternoon. With Mingus bandaged and resting in his tent, rendered unconscious by the poison that tipped the eagles talons, Jorge joined Genna in hers.

  They made love fiercely at first, with shared abandon, Genna’s cries rising into the static of the rain. At the height of their desire, the Castilian cried out also, in Spanish, calling on a god he had long since abandoned, tears falling freely from his eyes to dapple her shoulders and breasts. As the storm abated, and their touches grew more lingering and ceased altogether, Genna felt drained rather than sated. Turning away from Jorge in the narrow bed, she drew up her knees and folded her arms across her chest.

  Everything was awry in this jungle, she thought, even basic human emotions could not be trusted. She saw the rainforest as a kind of rogue holo artist, the distortions in its vision not only altering the natural world it surveyed, but the lives and minds—the souls, if she could trust such a concept—of all who crossed its boundaries. Mingus’ obsession and false bravado were magnified to the point where a normally calculating personality was transformed to that of a reckless fool. Jorge’s rigid military mask grew more rigid until it cracked, revealing the child within the man. And here she was, Genna Opall, whom friends and colleagues, even lovers, had considered conservative in the ways of the flesh, having surrendered herself to a man she barely knew. If they traveled farther into the forest, would their individual distortions continue to increase? Perhaps at frame center, she thought, each of them would confront a self they could never have imagined.

  Jorge cupped her body from behind with his, stroking her hair, breaking in on her thoughts.

  “Why do you take pictures?” he asked.

  “They’re not exactly . . . pictures,” Genna answered after a moment.

  Jorge laughed softly. “What are they then?”

  “Just computerized images. Numbers really. When I get back to the studio I’ll project them into matrices and then play with them.”

  “It’s not like developing a photo, then?”

  “In some ways. Only I have more control over how the picture takes shape.”

  “I have trouble imagining this.”

  “It’s a new process using a silicon base that is sensitive to light. It takes two-dimensional pictures and projects solid shapes from them, something like the way crystals will grow in the right solution. The final structure is inherent in each crystal. A three-dimensional solid, actually a host of possible solids, is inherent in each two-dimensional image. I alter the structures as they develop, impose my own vision on them.”

  “Like the rainforest imposes its vision on all that grows within it.”

  “Yes, in some ways it’s exactly like that.”

  “But that doesn’t answer why. Why do you take holographs?”

  “It’s not an easy question,” Genna answered. “Why does any artist create? In part, I want to capture life and preserve it, or at least my vision of life. I want to collect people and remember them.”

  “Oh? Am I just another in your collection, then?” Jorge teased, his hand slipping lower along her side and across her belly.

  Although she felt both desire and need stirring within her, Genna took Jorge’s wrist, gently but firmly, and lifted his hand away from her body.

  After several seconds, without speaking, Jorge rolled away from her and stood. He dressed quickly and silently. Genna didn’t turn to look, but she imagined the expression on his face. A bruised look of rejection, soon to be replaced by the stoic mask once again.

  “Chinga!” Genna heard him exclaim for the second time that day, as he ducked out of the tent. She gathered the thin blanket around her and followed, turning back the flap to look.

  It was cooler outside. Sunlight had broken through the clouds and the rain had become a rising mist, swirling back toward the sky in the wind that followed the storm. At the center of their camp, the three Indios sat crouched in a small circle, passing a burning pipe and mumbling fearfully to one another. The wild roses Mingus had noted earlier, clinging to the exposed roots of each tree, now grew up the trunks to the height of a man. Their white blossoms had more than doubled in size and were now tinged with green.

  ***

  Shot at close range and enlarged further, several dark wormlike creatures stand out upon a ground of blue. The blue exhibits a wrinkled and reflective texture, perhaps that of a thin plastic sheet. Aligned in the same direction, the creatures appear to be on the march. In this blow-up they are the size of cats or small dogs. Their heads and torsos are visible in great detail: segmented, wet black, covered with erect cilia, bloated as if they have just fed.

  ***

  Whether due to a misplaced sense of duty, or because they were all now tainted with the mania of Mingus’ obsession, Jorge decided to make one more try at locating the humani. After showing Genna how to work the sonic projectors, he set out with his men in the late afternoon, carrying a remote phone. He explained that when they wanted to reenter the camp, he would call in for her to shut off the sonics.

  “Stay put,” he told her twice, once before leaving and again on the phone, a few minutes after the party had disappeared over the first rise.

  Genna wandered the small confines of the camp. Since the lightning flash her visual sense seemed heightened and at the same time distracted. Calm as the clearing remained, she felt barraged by the images around her: the trunks with their vines of roses, the branches overhead and the clouds moving swiftly behind them, even the plastic of their tents as it snapped in the breeze—along with the images she had experienced throughout the day—the dying eagle, Mingus patting his rifle, the sharp silhouette of Jorge’s shoulder blades as he moved above her. Together, these crowded in on her consciousness with a kind of leap-frog intensity so that no single impression survived for long.

  She checked on Mingus several times. Except for the gash in his leg, his wounds were not severe. He was resting peacefully, with no apparent fever. Yet either something in the siren eagle’s attack or another poison of the forest had infected his system. His ruddy complexion was much paler and the flesh around his eyes, wrists and ankles was noticeably olive in hue and beginning to swell.

  Again she wandered the campsite, unable to concentrate, images past and present assaulting her consciousness. Although there were several holo possibilities at hand, she could not frame a picture in her mind. Her camera remained in its case. The sonics continued to repel whatever creatures might be wandering nearby. Except for the occasional cry of an unseen bird, she might have been alone in the forest.

  The calm was shattered near sundown.

  Jorge’s voice, so breathless and hysterical she hardly knew it as his, came crackling over the receiver, telling her to shut down the field. Moments later Jorge and the Indio known as Mercao staggered in from the woods. Between them, they half dragged and half carried the limp body of Paulo.

  “He’s in a bad way,” Jorge said, lowering Paulo’s body to the ground. “We met with eagles, then suckers. They seemed to be working in unison against us!”

  “Where are the others?” she gasped.

  Jorge tore open his friend’s shirt without answering.

  A large silver insect clung to Paulo’s chest, its legs and eye stalks writhing. Jorge wrenched it free and crushed it beneath his boot heel. Paulo lay still.

  “My God!” whined Jorge, “he’s dead, too!”

  Genna pulled him to his feet and shook him. Jorge’s cap was gone and his hair now wildly awry as hers. Damp blood oozed from a wound somewhere on his scalp, plastering several dark strands to his forehead. More blood, already dry, ran in parallel tracks along one chee
k.

  “Get hold of yourself,” she said, her arms closing about his chest and squeezing tightly. “You’re still alive!”

  She could feel the pounding of his heart and his breath was heavy against her neck. He returned her embrace, yet there was no strength left in his arms. The Indio, squatting and rocking on his heels, had begun to chant.

  “You’re right,” Jorge said after several seconds, in a voice more like his own. “It is the living who count.”

  He stepped back from her, coughing and nearly losing his balance. Genna helped him to the ground, leaning him back against the broad trunk of a gargantua. The green roses framed his drawn and wounded face. His eyelids began to close . . . and then snapped open.

  “The sonics!” he exclaimed.

  Genna reactivated the field and quickly returned to his side with the med kit from her tent. The Indio squatted nearby, motionless, his voice rising in an ululating wail, then sinking to a serpentine hiss punctuated by soft clicks. He was crushing small red seeds in his palm and daubing his face with the sticky residue. Genna tended to the gash in Jorge’s scalp as best she could in the fading light. His eyes were closed but he was not asleep.

  “We must bury Paulo,” he told her. “The smell of death has to be covered as soon as possible.”

  Once his head was bandaged, drawing on some inner reserve of strength, Jorge rose to his feet. He shook the Indio from his trance and unfolded shovels from one of the packs; they both began to dig in the soft dirt. Genna lit their fire for the night, and then joined them.

  “Make it wide,” Jorge said. “More of us may soon die. No point in digging twice.”

  Genna gave Jorge a look of intense horror, but said nothing. Afterward, they ate dried beef and cold tortillas from their stores. Mercao, the surviving Indio, declined the food and sat at a distance from them, smoking his pipe. Mingus had still failed to stir. By the rays of a lantern, Genna could see that the greenish swelling had begun to spread up his cheeks and along his forearms. While Mercao took the first watch, Jorge joined Genna in her tent, not to make love, but so they could hold one another against the night.