by James Morrow
There were other predators in the jungle, but none like this one. This predator hunted his own kind. He could kill within his species.
A fallen log, grooved and mossy, caught Burne Newman’s eye, became in his mind a chair. When he attempted to use it as such, it promptly disintegrated. Insects no longer inhabited the log, but before vacating they had mined and farmed it until there was more air than wood.
Burne did not bother rising, but merely shifted his rump from the splinter pile to a fern patch. His every tendon taunted him with an ache. This chase had been exhausting, nauseating, a depraved rendition of connect-the-dots: his prey was zigzagging, leaving its mark, a debrained body, at the turns: each gamekeeper’s hut, each hermit’s treehouse, each firemoss cutter’s cottage where the neurovore stopped became a scene of unresisted murder, thirteen to date. Connect-the-deaths.
Luta was not the first planet where Burne had been called upon to kill. After graduating from high school he served a hitch in Nearth’s police force and saw action during a strike at the Donaldson Crysanium Mine. The miners, Affectives forever, expected retirement benefits from their Rationalist employer, John Donaldson. Mr. Donaldson went home, did the arithmetic, and called out the police because it was cheaper.
The strikers, who had enthusiasm, attacked the police, who had yeastguns. The enthusiasm made martyrs; the guns, holes. A courageous young woman got a hole from Burne the second before she would have furrowed his face with a hoe.
Burne did not mind killing courageous young women in self-defense, or even risking his life in a vicious skirmish, but he minded terribly being on the wrong side. The next day he resigned from the Rationalist Party and asked his captain for a desk job. He spent the remainder of his hitch sorting obfuscations into file folders.
With the present task, though, Burne knew he was on the right side. The Zolmec priests had confessed their race’s devotion to nonviolence by way of convincing him to hunt the neurovore, and, while he couldn’t bring himself to believe that Quetzalian pacifism was total, he was nonetheless forced to admit that the father at the drawbridge had behaved with a restraint bordering on the supernatural.
His debates with jungle residents also failed to disclose hypocrisies. “What would you do if you came home tomorrow and found somebody raping your sister?” he remembered asking a firemoss cutter, a high-cheeked woman who was a dead ringer for Nefertiti Jones, the kinepic star. It was a question commonly posed to those who refused to enter the Nearth police force on grounds of conscience. Induction officers were unadmiring of such claims. Willing young people should feel lucky to serve their planet, and unwilling young people deserved to serve their planet.
“I’d tell him to stop raping my sister,” the Nefertiti Jones lookalike replied.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all—since raping my sister is already something he wouldn’t be doing. You’re in Quetzalia.”
“Suppose everyone here thought as you do?” Burne asked. “Wouldn’t your enemies run you over?”
“Everyone here does think as I do,” replied Nefertiti Jones’s double, “and consequently I have no enemies.”
BEFORE BEDDING DOWN, Burne had instructed his subconscious to refuse him a full night’s sleep, to in fact wake him after three hours. He sensed the Brain Eater’s proximity, could practically inhale its miasmic breath. Far better to lose sleep than time. If he kept going all night, he would catch his prey at dawn.
He was lucky. The nocturnal sky bloomed clear and cloudless, permitting the Milky Way to pour down and silver the trees. Forty days ago these stars became his sole beacon when the jungle had clotted to an impassable tangle, and the lipoca and its provisions, oil lantern included, had to be abandoned. Burne carried only a pack filled with selected essentials, such as food, matches, and a method for killing neurovores.
Awakening on schedule, he shouldered his pack and entered the jungle with a final-seconds, score-tied queasiness. He had not gained twenty meters before a sphere of light bobbed in the far darkness, denoting either a gigantic relative of the mythical firefly or a human with a lantern. “Who are you?” he shouted.
The quiet presence approached. It was a human with a lantern.
“Runner!” said a reedy voice. By the glass-mantled flame she looked meager, spectral, a will-o’-the-wisp. Her handsome young face and pliant limbs made Burne nostalgic for Nearthian holovision. He had seen such provocative prettiness a thousand times before, in close-up, telling him to employ the correct deodorant, purchase the proper magnecar, and get himself a screw.
Entering the lantern glow, Burne divulged that he was the famous extraterrestrial. “Ticoma Tepan” came the response. He expected that Ticoma would follow the custom of previous runners, pestering him for news, then racing off for Aca or Tepec. But her intention, he learned, was to stay with him for the next eight hours, nine hours—however long it took to get the Brain Eater at bay.
“It won’t be easy keeping up with me,” he warned. “The neurovore doesn’t stick to the trails.”
Ticoma replied, simply, “I’ll keep up with you.”
Keeping up was not the question. The runner soon forged ahead, her lantern becoming Burne’s guide.
Ticoma had grown up in Oaxa, the northernmost jungle town, where children could make a tidy income catching chitzals and selling them to the hospitals for their murm. She had learned her jungle’s every stump and trail. She understood its moods, anticipated its transmogrifications, mourned its losses, fertilized its floor with her urine.
Now her talents rushed back, and she found herself spotting neurovore toemarks with the same inexhaustible acuity she had once used to track the gawky fur-balls. Burne shivered with admiration. By midnight he badly wanted to sleep with her.
A cacophony blurted from the darkness. Somewhere in front of Ticoma, an orchestra of aliens, each from a different world, was tuning up. “What’s that?” Burne called.
“Big Ghost Bayou. Don’t wander off.”
With the constancy of a shadow, Burne followed Ticoma as she tightrope-walked fallen branches and jumped astutely from stump to rock to root to stump. All around, smooth trees squatted on their exposed roots like teeth atop gum disease. Acrid moss, hanging everywhere, evoked from Burne unfavorable comparisons with the underbelly of a wet dog. And weaving it all together: a treacherous porridge of water, mud, silt, sand, where floated countless logs crowded with warbling reptiles, their beautiful eyes, embedded with luminous bacteria, swirling around the travelers like a galaxy of double stars.
By dawn the swamp was blessedly behind them. Better yet, the neurovore’s trail became synonymous with a flagstone road. Compared with the previous night of swatting away vines and negotiating gunk, this present journey seemed effortless, fun. Burne took advantage of his renewal by running.
As he drew up next to his scout, a small pond, clear as a mirror, swung into view, and Ticoma suggested a rest. They collapsed gratefully, awakening their sluggish faces with water. Ticoma smiled toward Iztac, addressed it playfully. “No more need of your little brother.” She brought the oil lantern toward her face, peeled back the globe, blew. Gray fingers of smoke curled upward from the wick. Burne followed Ticoma as she rose and pressed on toward the lantern’s sibling, awesome and ascending.
THE NEUROVORE’S LATEST ZAG, launched in a straight line with the dead pointing finger of its latest victim, a male hermit with big hands, pulpy lips, and, now, a gutted head, had by the evidence of bloody footprints brought the beast off the road and into a vast orchard, source of that exquisite native fruit, the opo. Seeing the corpse, Ticoma nearly vomited. Burne urged her away, onto the orchard’s grassy floor. They paused by the first tree, taking its fruit, sucking hard until the sweet opoblood trickled into their throats.
Everywhere they turned, straight-cut corridors formed by rows of opotrees sat mute and still while the opos brazenly proceeded to subvert the rationality of it all by dropping themselves thrumpt-thrumpt at random spots and times. Burne
gazed down a corridor, walked, gazed down a corridor, walked, gazed…
The jolt was total, penetrating, marrow-scorching. At the end of the corridor stood a salivating exception to the rule of peace and quiet and thrumpting opos, its eyes flaring, its beard snot-matted. It opened its mouth, and all the toilets of hell flushed at once.
Was it sight, sound, or odor that told the neurovore of an enemy’s approach? Whichever, it now presumed to run, to charge, left paw tight on a tool designed for unlocking skulls. Burne, who had tracked and killed giant bonetoads on Lapus, wrestled and walloped huge bladderbugs on Verne, had never before faced such a quarry, this hunted that sought in mindless fury to prove itself a hunter. He would prove it wrong.
In a single jerk Burne removed his pack and swung it onto the grass. Pushing food and matches aside, he seized his weapon. Armed, ready, and trembling only slightly, he anchored himself next to his inherently defenseless, strangely unpanicked Quetzalian ally.
“I’ve never seen one before,” said Ticoma grimly, setting down her lantern.
The Brain Eater halted a meter shy of the secret weapon. Burne’s fingers spanned the lid of the vitreousteel cage, pulled it back. The Brain Eater cocked its head, eyes spurting hate, lips parting to display a broken battlement.
Burne pushed the cage toward the neurovore, gave the freed prisoner a nudge. In a hop invented by its remote Coleoptera ancestors, the corkscrew beetle took to the air. It landed where Burne had aimed it, on the neurovore’s round, hairy stomach. Nose spinning, it proceeded to behave as a corkscrew beetle behaves. It drilled.
There were cries, cries of fear and incipient agony, so shrill they seemed to gouge pits in the air. What followed was ghastlier yet, and when it was done the neurovore’s insides poured through a three-centimeter hole. The monster lay oozing and gurgling and dying, and then oozing and quiet and dead.
“God of the brain!” Ticoma’s face was solid sweat.
They stared at the mess, relieved and revolted, burdened by neither time nor thought.
Finally, Burne said, “Help me get the damn bug or Lostwax will throw six fits.”
Together they kneeled, rolled the body over, their teeth clenched, their nostrils awry, as if they were handling the equivalent in excrement. The insect was just now surfacing through the lower back. Burne dropped the cage, rattling it until Cortexclavus tumbled forward, trapped. He rose and pushed the cage deep into the pack, getting the assassin out of his dazed sight if not out of his stunned mind.
Ticoma also rose but did not take her eyes from the butchered neurovore. “It will be difficult to mourn this one,” she said.
“Don’t go,” Burne barked, as if she’d said she would.
“Well, Dr. Newman, my true wish is to stay here and light a candle to you, but the sooner I run this good news to Tepec—”
“What do you mean, ‘mourn’?”
She weaved her hand through the air above the corpse. “We must acknowledge the death of this human,” she said, voice fluttering.
“You’re joking.” He studied her eyes. They were excellent crystals milky with tears. Tears! Incredible! And no less pretty for it.
He brushed her cheek. “Come here.” But she stayed weeping by the corpse. “Come here, runner, and help me cool down.” He stroked her arm repeatedly, making sure his fingers snagged the robe until at last it rolled from her shoulder.
A hazy fear spread through Ticoma. “You expect copulation, is that it? Three opochs ago I got married, Dr. Newman.”
“I deserve this,” Burne said, kicking the dead thing. “But for me your husband’s brain might be sitting in that heap’s gizzard, getting turned into—” No, this approach is wrong, he thought. I don’t want her upset.
“There’s no way I can stop you. Do you enjoy taking candy from babies?”
“Babies,” Burne repeated dully. “It’s my style to insist on things, Ticoma, not beg for them.” He turned his ardor to the other shoulder and, by unclothing it, sent the whole robe gliding like an opoleaf to the orchard floor.
Ticoma made no countermove. Burne smiled. A breeze brought goosebumps to her breasts and thighs. How far can these people be pushed? As far as I want? His curiosity was as burning as his penis.
“Dr. Newman, this is absurd,” she quavered. “In a few days you’ll be a national hero. Women will throw themselves in front of your oncoming genitals.”
“I know. But you’re here now.” The helplessness of Ticoma, her native incapacity to break away and the certain consummation this foretold, aroused in Burne alternating lust and pity. With lust on top, he thought slyly, removing his robe.
“It’s settled then?”
“Don’t be frightened,” said Burne.
“Where there’s inevitability there’s no fear.” Her voice was toneless.
“Excellent,” said Burne. Then he added, “On Nearth we have emotions.”
“God of the brain!” Ticoma snapped back. “You think because violence is dead here then so is caring? You think I won’t experience total disgust?”
“I think you won’t.”
“Smug parasite! You’ll find me unresisting. Don’t misinterpret. It’s pseudo-willingness. It’s just to minimize pain.”
He embraced her limp nakedness, brought it to the grass. I must plant her gently, he thought—a city dweller planting his rooftop garden. But no measure of gentleness could redeem his pleasure or change its name.
Afterward they had nothing to say to each other. Why should I be ashamed? Burne thought as Ticoma lost flaccidity, got nimbly to her feet. I didn’t hurt her, didn’t rip her. There was a snubbing, almost mortifying arrogance in the way she didn’t bother to reclothe herself. She picked her robe off the ground, tossed it smoothly over her shoulder, and, grabbing her lantern, strode naked across the grass.
At the orchard’s edge she stopped, spoke without deigning to face her tormentor. “There is no revenge in Quetzalia,” she said through vibrating teeth. “But we do have the Temple of Tolca.” She started forward, and the jungle bore her away, an insolent Eve refusing to bemoan her exile.
As he got dressed, a thick gloom settled over Burne. Shouldering his pack, he retraced Ticoma’s footprints in the grass. He foamed with self-hatred. At first he decided he hated himself for feeling nothing, not a twinge of guilt, over murdering the neurovore, who by Quetzalian criteria was a human being. Next he decided he hated himself for allowing such cataclysmic guilt to accrue to his recent, silly, harmless discharge of semen.
Eventually he realized that he hated himself for having raped Ticoma.
After an hour’s hike his depression vanished, not because his opinion of himself improved but because the unexpected appearance of granite pegmatites crowded all other events from his mind. Pollucite! he thought, dropping to his knees. The crystals were isometric, cubic, colorless; they contained conchoidal fractures.
Certain now, he seized a pegmatite, hefted it in his palm. He made a solemn vow. Somehow, some way, he would get this rock back to Darwin. He would make the Quetzalians renounce their creampuff ways. He would make them fight neurovores.
Having finished his vow, Burne put the fuel to his lips and kissed it.
11
WHAT MORE could a human want? Francis Lostwax boasted classy food on his plate, an expensive roof over his head, and now a requited love in his life. Tez’s decision to live at Olo was quick and immutable, despite romantic entanglements, one of whom, an entanglement named Ixan Tolu, was grimly serious about the joy Tez brought him and on learning of her move took to saying things like, “If there were a harmless way to do it, I’d kill myself.” But Tez refused to feel guilty. She knew where her fascination lay. Ixan Tolu was vain and ordinary, whereas Francis Lostwax was diffident and from another planet.
Quetzalia even satiated Francis’s scholastic appetites. He owed this last comfort to a man he hated named Loloc Haz, Tez’s collaborator on marionette plays. Loloc, a bachelor, showed every evidence of being a rival. He was obnoxiously h
andsome, having no doubt willed himself that way for the purpose of baiting Francis. It didn’t help that Loloc and Tez were working on a sex comedy, Planet of the Interchangeable Genitalia.
But as days went by and the puppeteers continued to stay a chaste distance from each other, Francis realized that he liked his rival immensely. One wouldn’t know it from his hobbies, but Loloc was a thoroughgoing intellectual, a heavyweight in the Iztac Library’s biology department. Between rehearsals, he and Francis talked insects. Luta had only a few of its own, all of them fully studied and quite dull, but enough of Earth’s more provocative species had survived the Eden Three voyage to keep the discipline alive. It was a treat to be arguing about parthenogenetic progenesis again, and prothoracic glands and morphs and molts.
Loloc invited Francis to offer an entomology course, and the initial lecture was so successful that the library president cut the Nearthling in on a mammoth publishing project: a natural-history encyclopedia whose authors would be profusely paid by the government. Francis responded with a quartet of articles, not because he wanted more cortas but because a world finally wanted his ideas. He wrote about Siteroptes graminum reproduction, gall-midge ecological strategies, the Cortexclavus areteus, and the spirituality of beanlice.
Crowning it all was the curing of Francis’s diabetes. The weekend of the herb conference he lay* snoozing and reading in his bedroom, the one place where he was unlikely to encounter another lecture on arteriosclerosis or side-conversation about leukemia. These sorcerers reveled in pathology; the most cheerful thing they ever discussed was gastric ulcers.
Tez entered, propelling a bald man toward the bed. “This is Dr. Murari,” she explained. Like everybody else in the room, Murari had a chitzal scar around his head, but Francis did not have time to marvel at the coincidence. The doctor plunked a bottle of green pills onto the mattress.
“Every hour on the hour,” he said brightly, “until you’re at the bottom.”
