The Green Brain (v4.0) Page 6

  "What word from our messengers who penetrated the barrier?" the brain asked.

  The answer came: "Hiding place of the messenger group unknown."

  "The messengers must be found. They must stay in hiding until a more opportune moment. Communicate that order at once."

  Specialist workers departed at once to obey the order.

  "We must capture a more varied sample of humans," the brain commanded. "We must find a vulnerable leader among them. Send out observers and messengers and action units. Report as soon as possible."

  The brain listened then, hearing its orders being obeyed, thinking of the messages being carried off across the distances. Vague frustrations stirred in the brain, needs for which it had no answers. It raised its sensory mask on supporting stalks, formed eyes and focused them upon the cavemouth.

  Full daylight.

  Now it could only wait.

  Waiting was the most difficult part of existence.

  The brain began examining this thought, forming corollaries and interweavings of possible alternatives to the waiting process, imagining projections of physical growth that might obviate waiting.

  The thoughts produced a form of intellectual indigestion that alarmed the supporting hives. They buzzed furiously around the brain, shielding it, feeding it, forming phalanxes of warriors in the cavemouth.

  This action brought worry to the brain.

  The brain knew what had set its cohorts into motion: guarding the precious-core of the hive was an instinct rooted in species survival. Primitive hive units could not change that pattern, the brain realized. They had to change, though. They had to learn mobility of need, mobility of judgment, taking each situation as a unique thing.

  I must go on teaching and learning, the brain thought.

  It wished then for reports from the tiny observers it had sent eastward. The need for information from that area was enormous -- something to fill out the bits and scraps garnered from the listening posts. Vital proof might come from there to sway humankind from its headlong plunge into the death-for-all.

  Slowly, the hive reduced its activity as the brain withdrew from the painful edges of thought.

  Meanwhile, we wait, the brain told itself.

  And it set itself the problem of a slight gene alteration in a wingless wasp to improve on the oxygen generation system.

  ***

  Senhor Gabriel Martinho, prefect of the Mato Grosso Barrier Compact, paced his study, muttering to himself as he passed a tall, narrow window that admitted evening sunlight. Occasionally he paused to glare down at his son, Joao, who sat on a tapir-leather sofa beneath one of the bookcases that lined the room.

  The elder Martinho was a dark wisp of a man, limb thin, with gray hair and cavernous brown eyes above an eagle nose, slit mouth and boot-toe chin. He wore old style black clothing as befitted his position. His linen gleamed white against the black. Golden cuffstuds glittered as he waved his arms.

  "I am an object of ridicule," he snarled.

  Joao absorbed the statement in silence. After a full week of listening to his father's outbursts, Joao had learned the value of silence. He looked down at his bandeirante dress whites, the trousers tucked into calf-high jungle boots -- everything crisp and glistening and clean while his men sweated out the preliminary survey on the Serra dos parcecis.

  It began to grow dark in the room, quick tropic darkness hurried by thunderheads piled along the horizon. The waning daylight carried a hazed blue cast. Heat lightning spattered the patch of sky visible through the tall window, and sent dazzling electric radiance into the study. Drumming thunder followed. As though that were the signal, the house sensors turned on lights wherever there were humans. Yellow illumination filled the study.

  The Prefect stopped in front of his son. "Why does my own son, the renowned Jefe of the Irmandades, spout such Carsonite stupidities?"

  Joao looked at the floor between his boots. The fight in the Bahia Plaza, the flight from the mob -- all that just a week away -- seemed an eternity distant, part of someone else's past. This day had seen a succession of important political people through his father's study -- polite greetings for the renowned Joao Martinho and low-voiced conferences with his father.

  The old man was fighting for his son -- Joao knew this. But the elder Martinho could only fight in the way he knew best: through the ritual kin system, with pistolao "pull" -- maneuvering behind the scenes, exchanging power-promises, assembling political strength where it counted. Not once would he consider Joao's suspicions and doubts. The Irmandades, Alvarez and his Hermosillos -- anyone who'd had anything to do with the Piratininga -- were in bad odor right now. Fences must be mended.

  "Stop the realignment?" the old man muttered. "Delay the Marcha para Oeste? Are you mad? How do you think I hold my office? Me! A descendant of fidalgoes whose ancestors ruled one of the original capitanias! We are not bugres whose ancestors were hidden by Rui Barbosa, yet the caboclos call me 'Father of the Poor.' I did not gain that name through stupidity."

  "Father, if you'd only . . ."

  "Be silent! I have our panelinha, our little pot, boiling merrily. All will be well."

  Joao sighed. He felt both resentment and shame at his position here. The Prefect had been semi-retired until this emergency -- a very weak heart. Now, to disturb the old man this way . . . but he persisted in being so blind!

  "Investigate, you say," the old man mocked him. "Investigate what? Right now we don't want investigation and suspicions. The Government, thanks to a week of work by my friends, takes the attitude that everything's normal. They're almost ready to blame the Carsonites for the Bahia tragedy."

  "But they have no evidence," Joao said. "You admitted that yourself."

  "Evidence is of no importance in such a time," his father said. "All that counts is that we move suspicion far away from ourselves. We must gain time. Besides, this is the very sort of thing the Carsonites might've done."

  "But might not've done," Joao said.

  It was as though the old man had not heard. "Just last week," he said, gesturing with arm swinging wide, "the day before you arrived here like an insane whirlwind -- that very day, I spoke to the Lacuia farmers at the request of my friend the Minister of Agriculture. And do you know that rabble laughed at me! I said we'd increase the Green by ten thousand hectares this month. They laughed. They said: 'Your own son doesn't even believe this!' I see now why they say such things. Stop the march to the west, indeed."

  "You've seen the reports from Bahia," Joao said. The IEO's own investigators . . ."

  "The IEO! That sly Chinese whose face tells you nothing. He is more bahiano than the bahianos themselves, that sly one. And this new female Doutor he sends everywhere to snoop and pry. His mae de santo, his sidaga -- the stories you hear about that one. I can tell you. Only yesterday, it was said . . ."

  "I don't want to hear!"

  The old man fell silent, stared down at him. "Ahhhh?"

  "Ahhhh!" Joao said. "What does that mean?"

  "That means Ahhhh!" the old man said.

  "She's a very beautiful woman," Joao said.

  "So I have heard it reported. And many men have sampled that beauty . . . so it is said."

  "I don't believe it!"

  "Joao," the Prefect said, "listen to an old man whose experience has given him wisdom. That is a dangerous woman. She is owned body and soul by the IEO, which is an organization that often interferes with our business. You, you are an empreiteiro, a contractor of renown, whose abilities and successes are sure to have aroused envy in some quarters. That woman is supposed to be a Doutor of the insects, but her actions say she has a cabide de empregos. She has a hatstand of jobs. And some of those jobs, ahh, some of those jobs . . ."

  "That's enough, Father!"

  "As you wish."

  "She is supposed to come here soon," Joao said. "I don't want your present attitude to . . ."

  "There may be a delay in her visit," the Prefect said.

  Joao studied hi
m. "Why?"

  "Tuesday last, the day after your little Bahia episode, she was sent to the Goyaz. That very night or the next morning; it is not important."

  "Oh?"

  "You know what she does in the Goyaz, of course -- those stories about a secret bandeirante base there. She is prying into that . . . if she still lives."

  Joao's head snapped up. "What?"

  "There is a story in the Bahia headquarters of the IEO that she is . . . overdue. An accident, perhaps. It is said that tomorrow the great Travis-Huntington Chen-Lhu himself goes to seek his female Doutor. What do you think of that?"

  "He seemed fond of her, when I saw them in Bahia, but this story about . . ."

  "Fond? Oh, yes, indeed."

  "You have an evil mind, Father." He took a deep breath. The thought of that lovely woman down somewhere in the deep interland where only jungle creatures now lived, dead or maimed -- all that beauty -- it left Joao with a feeling of sick emptiness.

  "Perhaps you'll wish to march to the west to seek her?"

  Joao ignored the jibe, said, "Father, this whole crusade needs a rest period while we find out what's gone wrong."

  "If you talked that way in Bahia, I don't blame them for turning on you," the Prefect said. "Perhaps that mob . . ."

  "You know what we saw in that Plaza!"

  "Nonsense, but yesterday's nonsense. This must stop now. You must do nothing to disturb the equilibrium. I command you!"

  "People no longer suspect the bandeirantes," Joao said, bitterness in his voice.

  "Some still suspect you, yes. And why not, if what I've heard from your own lips is any sample of the way you talk?"

  Joao studied the toes of his boots, the polish glittering black. He found their unmarked surfaces somehow symbolic of his father's life. "I'm sorry I've distressed you, Father," he said. "Sometimes I regret that I'm a bandeirante, but" -- he shrugged -- "without that, how could I have learned the things I've told you? The truth is . . ."

  "Joao!" His father's voice quavered. "Do you sit there and tell me you besmirched our honor? Did you swear a false oath when you formed your Irmandades?"

  "That's not the way it was, Father."

  "Oh? Then how was it?"

  Joao pulled a sprayman's emblem from his breast pocket, fingered it. "I believed it . . . then. We could shape mutated bees to fill every gap in the insect ecology. It was a . . . Great Crusade. This I believed. Like the people of China, I said: 'Only the useful shall live!' And I meant it. But that was quite a few years ago, father. I've come to realize since then that we don't have complete understanding of what's useful."

  "It was a mistake to have you educated in North America," his father said. "I blame myself for that. Yes -- I am the one to blame for that. There's where you absorbed this Carsonite heresy. It's all well and good for them to refuse to join us in the Ecological Realignment; they don't have as many millions of mouths to feed. But my own son!"

  Joao spoke defensively: "Out in the Red you see things, father. These things are difficult to explain. Plants look healthier out there. The fruit is . . ."

  "A purely temporary condition," his father said. "We'll shape bees to meet whatever need we find. The destroyers take food from our mouths. It's very simple. They must die and be replaced by creatures which serve a function useful to man."

  "The birds are dying, Father."

  "We're saving the birds! We've specimens of every kind in our sanctuaries. We'll provide new foods for them to. . ."

  "Some plants already have disappeared from lack of natural pollination."

  "No useful plant has been lost!"

  "And what happens," Joao asked, "if our barriers are breached by the insects before we've replaced the population of natural predators? What happens then?"

  The elder Martinho shook a thin finger under his son's nose. "This nonsense must stop! I'll hear no more of it! Do you hear?"

  "Please calm yourself, Father."

  "Calm myself? How can I calm myself in the face of . . . of . . . this? You here hiding like a common criminal! Riots in Bahia and Santarem and . . ."

  "Father, stop it!"

  "I will not stop it. Do you know what else those mameluco farmers in Lacuia said to me? They said bandeirantes have been seen reinfesting the Green to prolong their jobs! That is what they said."

  "That's nonsense, father!"

  "Of course it's nonsense! But it's a natural consequence of defeatist talk just such as I've heard from you here today. And all the setbacks we suffer add strength to such charges."

  "Setbacks, Father?"

  "I have said it: setbacks!"

  Senhor Prefect Martinho turned, paced to his desk and back. Again, he stopped in front of his son, placed hands on hips. "You refer, of course, to the Piratininga."

  "Among others."

  "Your Irmandades were on that line."

  "Not so much as a flea got through us!"

  "Yet a week ago the Piratininga was Green. Today . . ." He pointed to his desk. "You saw the report, It's crawling. Crawling!"

  "I cannot watch every bandeirante in the Mato Grosso," Joao said. "If they . . ."

  "The IEO gives us only six months to clean up," the elder Martinho said. He raised his hands, palms up; his face was flushed. "Six months!"

  "If you'd only go to your friends in the government and convince them of what . . ."

  "Convince them? Walk in and tell them to commit political suicide? My friends? Do you know the IEO is threatening to throw an embargo around all Brazil -- the way they've done with North America?" He lowered his hands. "Can you imagine the pressures on us? Can you imagine the things that I must listen to about the bandeirantes and especially about my own son?"

  Joao gripped the sprayman's emblem until it dug into his palm. A week of this was almost more than he could bear. He longed to be out with his men, preparing for the fight in the Serra dos Parecis. His father had been too long in politics to change -- and Joao realized this with a feeling of sickness. He looked up at his father. If only the old man weren't so excitable -- the concern about his heart. "You excite yourself needlessly," he said.

  "Excite myself!"

  The Prefect's nostrils dilated; he bent toward his son. "Already we've gone past two deadlines -- the Piratininga and the Tefe. That is land in there, don't you understand? And there are no men on that land, fanning it, making it produce!"

  "The Piratininga was not a full barrier, Father. We'd just cleared the . . ."

  "Yes! And we gained an extension of deadline when I announced that my son the redoubtable Benito Alvarez had cleared the Piratininga. How do you explain now that it is reinfested, that we have the work to do over?"

  "I don't explain it."

  Joao returned the sprayman's emblem to his pocket. It was obvious he wouldn't be able to reason with his father. It had been growing increasingly obvious throughout the week. Frustration sent a nerve quivering along Joao's jaw. The old man had to be convinced, though! Someone had to be convinced. Someone of his father's political stature had to get back to the Bureau, shake them up there and make them listen.

  The Prefect returned to his desk, sat down. He picked up an antique crucifix, one that the great Aleihadinho had carved in ivory. He lifted it, obviously seeking to restore his serenity, but his eyes went wide and glaring. Slowly, he returned the crucifix to his desk, keeping his attention on it.

  "Joao," he whispered.

  It's his heart! Joao thought.

  He leaped to his feet, rushed to his father's side. "Father! What is it?"

  The elder Martinho pointed, hand trembling.

  Through the spiked crown of thorns, across the agonized ivory face, over the straining muscles of the Christ figure crawled an insect. It was the color of the ivory, shaped faintly like a beetle but with a multi-clawed fringe along wings and thorax, and with furry edgings to its abnormally long antennae.

  The elder Martinho reached for a roll of papers to smash the insect, but Joao restrained him with a hand. "Wai
t. This is a new one. I've never seen anything like it. Give me a handlight. We must follow it, find where it nests."

  The Prefect muttered under his breath, withdrew a small permalight from a desk drawer, handed the light to his son.

  Joao held the light without using it, peered at the insect. "How strange it is," he said. "See how it exactly matches the tones of ivory."

  The insect stopped, pointed its antennae toward the men.