"We need a scapegoat, you see?" Chen-Lhu said. "That's why I was sent here -- to find a scapegoat. We're fighting for more than our lives."
"You could always blame the Northamericans," Hogar said, his tone bitter.
"I fear we've worn that one out, even with our people," Chen-Lhu said. "We did the thing ourselves, you see? There's no escaping that. No . . . all we could hope for was to find here a way of blaming someone else. The British and French provided some of our poisons. We explored that with no success. Some Russian teams helped us . . . but the Russians haven't realigned their entire country -- only to the Ural Line. They could show the same problems as we have and . . . you see? They'd make us appear foolish."
"Why haven't the Russians said anything?" Hogar asked.
Joao looked at Hogar, thinking: Senseless words, senseless words.
"The Russians are quietly rolling back their Ural line into the Green," Chen-Lhu said. "Re-infesting, you see? No . . . my last orders were to find a new insect, typically Brazilian, that would destroy many of our crops . . . and for whose presence we could blame . . . who? Perhaps some bandeirantes."
Blame bandeirantes, Joao thought. Yes, everyone is blaming the bandeirantes.
"The really amusing thing," Chen-Lhu said, "is what I see in your Green. Do you know what I see?"
"You're a devil!" Vierho grated.
"No, just a patriot," Chen-Lhu said. "Are you not curious as to what I see in your Green?"
"Speak and be damned!" Vierho said.
That's telling him, Joao thought.
"I see the signs in your Green of the same blight that has struck my poor nation," Chen-Lhu said. "Smaller fruit, smaller crops -- smaller leaves, paler plants. It's slow at first, but everyone will see it soon."
"Then maybe they'll stop before it's too late," Vierho said.
That's foolishness, Joao thought. Who ever stops before it's too late?
"Such a simple fellow you are," Chen-Lhu said "Your rulers are the same as mine: they see nothing but their own survival. They will see nothing else until it's too late. This is always the way with governments."
Joao wondered why the tent was growing so dark after being so bright. He felt hot and his head whirled as though he'd had too much alcohol. A hand touched his shoulder. He looked down at it, followed the hand up to an arm . . . a face: Rhin. There were tears in her eyes.
"Joao . . . Senhor Martinho, I've been such a fool," she said.
"You heard?" Chen-Lhu asked.
"I heard," she said.
"A pity," Chen-Lhu said. "I'd hoped to preserve some of your illusions . . . for a little while, anyway."
What an odd conversation, Joao thought. What an odd person, this Rhin. What an odd place, this tent with its ridgepole coming around to face me.
Something thudded against his back and his head.
I've fallen, he thought. Isn't that odd?
The last thing he heard before unconsciousness flooded his mind with black ink was Vierho's startled voice:
"Jefe!"
There was a dream in which Rhin hovered over him saying, "What difference does it make who gives the orders?" And in the dream, he could only turn a baleful stare on her and think how hateful she looked -- in spite of her beauty.
Someone said, "What's the difference? We'll all be dead soon anyway."
And another voice said, "Look, there's a new one. That one looks like Gabriel Martinho, the Prefect."
Joao felt himself sinking into a void where his face was held by clamps that forced him to stare into the monitor screen on the dash of his airtruck's pod. The screen showed a giant stag beetle with the face of his father. And the sound was a cicada hum up and down the scale with a voice inside the hum: "Don't excite yourself. Don't excite yourself . . ."
He awoke screaming to realize there was no sound in his throat -- only the memory of screams. His body was bathed in perspiration. Rhin sat beside him wiping his forehead. She looked pale and thin, her eyes sunken. For a moment he wondered if this emaciated Rhin Kelly were part of a dream; she seemed to give no notice to the fact that his eyes were open although she looked right at him.
He tried to speak, but his throat was too dry. The movement attracted Rhin, though. She bent over him, peered into his eyes. Presently she reached behind her, brought up a canteen, trickled a few drops of water down his throat.
"What . . ." he croaked.
"You had the same thing that hit me, but more of it," she said. "A nerve drug in the insect venom. Don't try to exert yourself."
"Where?" he asked.
She looked at him, sensing the broader question. "We're still in the same old trap," she said, "but now we have a chance of getting out."
His eyes spoke the question that his lips couldn't form.
"Your truck pod," she said. "Some of its circuits were badly damaged, but Vierho rigged substitutes. Now be quiet a moment."
She checked his pulse, put a blood-gauge thermometer against his neck, read it. "Fever's down," she said. "Have you ever had heart trouble of any kind?"
Instantly he thought of his father; but this question wasn't directed to his father.
"No," he whispered.
"I have a very few energy packs," she said. "Direct feed. I can give you one if you don't have a weak heart."
"Do it," he said.
"I'll use a vein in your leg," she said. "They gave it to me on the left arm and I saw blue and red lights for an hour." She bent to a case beside the cot, took a flat black cartridge from it, pulled the blanket off his feet and began applying the energy pack to his left leg.
He could feel her working there, but it was so far away and he was so drowsy.
"This is how we brought Dr. Chen-Lhu around," she said, pulling the blanket back over his feet.
Travis didn't die, he thought. He felt that this was an extremely important fact, but couldn't place the reason. "It was more than the nerve drug, of course," she said. "With Dr. Chen-Lhu and with me, that is. Vierho spotted it in the water."
"Water?"
She took the word as a request, dribbled more water down his throat from the canteen.
"Our second night here we dug a well in one of the tents," she said. "River seepage, naturally. Water's loaded with poisons, some of them ours. That's what Vierho tasted: the bitterness. But my tests shows there's something else in that water: a hallucinogenic that produces a reaction very like schizophrenia. It isn't anything humans put there."
Joao could feel energy pumping into him from the pack on his leg. A cramp like acute hunger knotted his stomach. When it passed, he said, "Something from . . . them."
"Very likely," she said. "We've rigged a crude still. There's a variable resistance to this hallucinogenic. Hogar appears to be completely immune, but he didn't get any of the venom drug. That seems to leave you wide open." Again she checked his pulse. "Are you feeling stronger?"
"Yes."
The cramps were in the muscles of his thighs now -- rhythmic and painful. They receded.
"We've analyzed that skeleton in your pod," she said. "An amazing thing. Remarkably like a human skeleton except for ridges and tiny holes -- presumably where the insects attach themselves and articulate it. It's bird-light but very strong. The kinship to chitin is quite apparent."
Joao thought about this, letting the energy from the pack on his leg accumulate. He was feeling stronger by the second. So much seemed to have happened, though: the pod repaired, that skeleton analyzed.
"How long have I been here?" he asked.
"Four days," she said. She glanced at her wristwatch. "Almost to the hour. It's still fairly early."
Joao grew aware then of the forced cheerfulness in her tone. What was she hiding? Before he could explore the question, a hiss of fabric and brief flash of sunlight told of someone entering the tent.
Chen-Lhu appeared behind Rhin. The Chinese seemed to have aged fifty years since Joao had last seen him. Skin sagged and wrinkled at his jawline. The cheeks were concave pocket
s. He walked with a fragile caution.
"I see the patient is awake," he said.
The voice surprised Joao by its strength -- as though all the man's physical energy had been channeled into this one aspect of him.
"He's under pack right now," she said.
"Wise," Chen-Lhu said. "There isn't much time. Have you told him?"
"Only that we've repaired his truck pod."
This must be phrased very delicately, Chen-Lhu thought. Very delicately. Latin honor can shoot off at strange tangents.
"We are going to attempt escaping in your pod," Chen-Lhu said.
"How can we?" Joao asked. "That pod won't lift more than three people at the most."
"Three people is all it'll carry, that is correct," Chen-Lhu said. "But it won't be required to lift them; in fact, it cannot lift them."
"What do you mean?"
"Your landing was rather rough: one of your float-skids is damaged and you ruptured the belly tank. Most of the fuel was gone before we discovered the damage. There's also the matter of controls: they're not of the best, even after the Padre's most ingenious ministrations."
"That still means only three people in it," Joao said.
"If we can't transmit a message, we can carry it," Rhin said.
Good girl, Chen-Lhu thought. He waited for Joao to absorb this.
"Who?" Joao asked.
"Myself," Chen-Lhu said. "Only for the reason that I can testify to the debacle in my nation, warn your people before it's too late."
Chen-Lhu's words brought an entire conversation flooding back into Joao's awareness -- in the tent: Hogar, Vierho . . . Chen-Lhu babbling about . . . about . . .
"Barren earth," Joao said.
"Your people must learn before it's too late," Chen-Lhu said. "So I will be one of the passengers. And Rhin here because . . ." He managed a weak shrug. ". . . because of chivalry, I would say, but also because she's resourceful."
"That's two," Joao said.
"And you will make three," Chen-Lhu said, and he waited for the outburst.
But Joao merely said, "That doesn't make sense." He lifted his head, stared down along the length of his body on the cot. "Four days here and . . ."
"But you're the one with pistolao -- political connections," Rhin said. "You can make people listen."
Joao dropped his head back onto the cot.
"My own father wouldn't even listen to me!"
The statement evoked a surprising silence. Rhin looked up at Chen-Lhu, back to Joao.
"You have your own political pipelines, Travis," Joao said. "Probably better than mine."
"And perhaps not," Chen-Lhu said. "Besides, you're the one who saw this creature close up, the one whose skeleton we will take back with us. You are the eye-witness."
"We're all eye-witnesses."
"It was put to a vote," Rhin said. "Your men insist."
Joao looked from Rhin to Chen-Lhu, back to Rhin. "That still leaves twelve men here. What happens to them?"
"Only eight now," Rhin whispered.
"Who?" Joao managed.
"Hogar," she said. "Thome of your crew; two of my, field aides: Cardin and Lewis."
"How?"
"There is a thing that looks like a qena flute," Chen-Lhu said. "The creature in your truck pod carried one."
"Dart gun," Joao said.
"No," Chen-Lhu said. "They mimic us better than that. It's a generator of a sonic-disruption pattern. What it disrupts is human red blood cells. They must get fairly close with it, though, and we've been keeping them back since we discovered it."
"You can see we have to get this information out," Rhin said.
No doubt of that, Joao thought.
"Surely there must be someone stronger, better able to insure the success of this," Joao said.
"You'll be as strong as any of us in a couple of hours," Rhin said. "We are not in the best condition, none of us."
Joao stared up at the gray light of the tent ceiling. Very little rocket fuel, damaged controls. They mean to make for the river, of course: float out in the pod. It'll afford some protection from those . . . things.
Rhin stood up. "You rest and build up your strength," she said. "I'll bring you some food in a little while. We have nothing but field rations, but at least they're loaded with energy."
What river is that? Joao wondered. The Itapura, very likely. He made a rough estimate based on his knowledge of the region and the length of his flight over it before the crash landing here. It'll be seven or eight hundred kilometers by river! And we're right on top of the rainy season. We don't stand a chance.
VI
The dancing pattern of insects on the cave ceiling appeared as a lovely thing to the Brain. It admired the interplay of color and motion while it read the patterned message:
"Report from listeners in the savannah; acknowledge."
The Brain signaled for the dance to proceed.
"Three humans prepare to flee in the small vehicle," danced the insects. "The vehicle will not fly. They will try to escape by floating away on the river. What do we do?"
The Brain paused to assess data. The trapped humans had been under observation twelve days. They'd provided much information about their reactions under stress. The information expanded data obtained from captives under more direct control. Ways to immobilize and kill humans became more obvious daily. But the problem wasn't how to kill them. It was how to communicate with them in the absence of fear or stress on either side.
Some of the humans -- like the old one with the grand manner -- made offers and suggestions and appeared to display reason . . . but could they be trusted? That was the key question.
The Brain felt a desperate need for observational data on humans under conditions it could control without that control being noticed. Discovery of the listening posts in the Green had aroused a frenzy of human activity. They used new sonotoxics, deepened their barriers, renewed their attacks on the Red.
Another worry compounded all this -- the unknown fate of four units which had penetrated the barriers before the Bahia catastrophe. Only one had returned; its report: "We became twelve. Six gave up unit-identity to envelop the area where we captured the two human leaders. Their fate is unknown. One unit was destroyed. Four dispersed to produce more of us."
Discovery of those four units at this time would be catastrophe, the Brain realized.
When would the simulacra emerge? That depended on local conditions -- temperature, available foods, chemicals, moisture. The lone unit that had returned had no knowledge of where the four had gone. We must find them! the Brain thought. The problems of individually-directed action dismayed the Brain then. The simulacra were a mistake. Many identical units would only attract disastrous attention.
That the simulacra meant no great harm and were conditioned only to limited violence had no meaning under present conditions. That they wanted only to be allowed to speak and to reason with human leaders -- this plan carried only pathos and irony now.
The reported words of the human called Chen-Lhu came back to plague the Brain: "Debacle . . . barren earth." This Chen-Lhu offered a way to solve their mutual problem, but what were his true intentions? Could he be trusted?
The Brain suspended decision, directed a question at its minions: "Which humans will try to escape?"
Attention must be paid to such details, the Brain knew. Hive orientation tended to ignore individuals. The error with the simulacra had originated in this tendency.
On the surface, the Brain knew its problem appeared deceptively simple. But just under the surface lay the hellish complications of emotional triggers. Emotions! Emotions! Reason had so many barriers to hurdle.
The messengers had consulted their listening-post data. Now they danced out the name sounds: "The latent queen, Rhin Kelly, and the ones called Chen-Lhu and Joao Martinho."
Martinho, the Brain thought. That was the human from the other half of the airtruck. In this fact lay an indication of the humans' complicated quasi-
hive kinship. There could be value in that relationship. And Chen-Lhu would be in the vehicle, as well.
The insects on the ceiling, having been bred with a repeat factor to insure communication, repeated their previous question:
"What counter action is required?"
"Message to all units," the Brain said. "The three in the vehicle will be allowed to escape to the river. Offer just enough resistance to make it appear we oppose the escape. They are to be followed by action groups capable of disposing of them whenever necessary. As soon as the three have reached the river, overwhelm the ones who remain."
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