The Green Brain (v4.0) Page 8

  He noted in the dash screen that the Indian back there had a hand under the elder Martinho's back. The Indian appeared to be massaging the dead man's back. The rhythmic rasping matched the motion.

  Anger filled Joao. He felt like diving the airtruck into an abutment, dying himself to kill these crazy men.

  The truck was approaching the city's outskirts. Ring-girders circled off to the left, giving access to the boulevard. This was an area of small gardens and cottages protected by overfly canopies.

  Joao lifted the airtruck over the canopies, headed toward the boulevard. To the clinic, yes, he thought. But it's too late.

  In that instant, he realized there were no heartbeats at all coming from the rear compartment -- only that slow, rhythmic grating plus, now that his ears searched for it, a cicada-like hum up and down the scale.

  "To the mountains, there," said the Indian behind him. Again that hand came forward to point off to the right.

  Joao, with the hand close to his eyes illuminated by the dash lights, saw the scale-like parts of a finger shift position. In that shift, he recognized the scale shapes by their claw fringes.

  The beetles!

  The finger was composed of linked beetles working in unison!

  Joao turned, stared into the Indian's eyes, saw then why they glistened so brightly: they were composed of thousands of tiny facets.

  "Hospital, there," the creature beside him said, pointing.

  Joao turned back to the controls, fought to keep from losing composure. They weren't Indians . . . they weren't even humans. They were insects -- some kind of hive-cluster shaped and organized to mimic a man.

  The implications of this discovery raced through his mind. How did they support their weight? How did they feed and breathe?

  How did they speak?

  Every personal concern had to be subordinated to the urgent need for getting this information and proof of it back to one of the big government labs where the facts could be explored.

  Even the death of his father could not be considered now. Joao knew he had to capture one of these things, get out with it. He reached overhead, flicked on the command transmitter, set its beacon for a homing call. Let some of my Irmaos be awake and monitoring their sets, he prayed.

  "More to the right," rasped the creature behind him.

  Again Joao corrected course.

  The voice -- that rasping, stridulant sound. Again, Joao asked himself how the creature could produce that simulation of human speech. The coordination required for that action had profound implications.

  Joao looked out to his left. The moon was high overhead now, illuminating a line of bandeirante towers off there. The first barrier.

  The truck would be out of the Green soon and into the Gray of the poorest Resettlement Plan farms -- then, beyond that, another barrier and the Great Red that stretched in reaching fingers through the Goyaz and the inner Mato Grosso, far out to the Andes where teams were coming down from Ecuador. Joao could see scattered lights of Resettlement Plan farms ahead, darkness beyond.

  The airtruck was going faster than he wanted, but Joao knew he dared not slow it. They might become suspicious.

  "You must go higher," said the creature behind him.

  Joao increased pump displacement, raised the nose. He leveled off at three hundred meters.

  More bandeirante towers loomed ahead, spaced at closer intervals. Joao picked up the barrier signals on his dash meters, looked back at his guard. The dissembler vibrations of the barrier seemed to have no effect on the creature.

  Joao looked out his side window and down as they passed over the barrier. No one down there would challenge him, he knew. This was a bandeirante airtruck headed into the Red . . . and with its transmitter sending out a homing call. The men down there would assume he was a band leader headed out on contract after a successful bid, calling his men to him for the job. If the barrier guards recognized his call wave, that would only confirm the thought.

  Joao Martinho had just completed a successful bid on the Serra dos Parecis. All the bandeirantes knew that.

  Joao sighed. He could see the moon-silvered snake of the Sao Francisco winding off to the left, and the lesser waterways like threads raveled out of the foothills.

  I must find the nest -- wherever we're headed, Joao thought.

  He wondered if he dared turn on his receiver -- but if his men started reporting in . . . No. That would make the creatures suspect; they might take violent counteraction.

  My men will realize somethings wrong when I don't answer, he thought. They'll follow.

  If any of them hear my call.

  "How far are we going?" Joao asked.

  "Very far," the guard said.

  Joao settled himself for a long trip. I must be patient, he thought. I must be as patient as a spider waiting beside her web.

  Hours droned past: two, three . . . four.

  Nothing but moonlighted jungle sped beneath the truck, and the moon lay low on the horizon, near setting. This was the deep Red where broadcast poisons had been used at first with near disastrous results. This was where the first wild mutations had been discovered.

  The Goyaz.

  This is where my father said Rhin Kelly went, Joao thought. Is she down there now?

  The moonfrosted jungle told him nothing.

  The Goyaz: this was the region being saved for the final assault, using mobile barrier lines when the circle was short enough.

  "How much farther?" Joao asked.

  "Soon."

  Joao armed the emergency charge that would separate the front and rear compartments of the truck when he fired it. The stub wings of the front pod and its emergency rocket motors would get him back into bandeirante country.

  With the specimen behind him safely subdued, Joao hoped.

  He looked up through the canopy, scanned the horizon as far as he could. Was that moonlight glistening on a truck far back to the right? He couldn't be certain . . . but it seemed to be.

  "Soon?" Joao asked.

  "Ahead," the creature rasped.

  The modulated stridulation beneath that voice sent a shiver along Joao's spine. Joao said, "My father . . ."

  "Hospital for . . . the father . . . ahead," the creature said.

  It would be dawn soon, Joao realized. He could see the first false line of light along the horizon behind. This night had passed so swiftly. Joao wondered if his guard had injected some time-distorting drug into him without his knowledge. He thought not. He felt alert, maintaining himself in the necessities of each moment. There wasn't time for fatigue or boredom when he had to record every landmark half-visible in the night, sense everything he could about these creatures around him. The bitter-clean smell of oxalic acid hinted at acid-to-oxygen chemistry.

  But how did they coordinate all those separate insect units?

  They appeared conscious. Was that more mimicry? What did they use for a brain?

  Dawn came, revealing the plateau of the Mato Grosso: a caldron of liquid green boiling over the edge of the world. Joao looked out his side windows in time to see the truck's long shadow bounce across a clearing: stark galvanized metal roofs against the green -- a sitiante abandoned in the Resettlement, or perhaps the barracao of a fazenda on the coffee frontier. It had been a likely place for a warehouse, standing as it had beside a small stream with the land around it bearing signs of riverbank agriculture.

  Joao knew this region; he could put the bandeirante grid map over it in his imagination -- five degrees of latitude and six degrees of longitude it covered. Once it had been a place of isolated fazendas farmed by independent browns and blacks and branco sertanistos chained to the encomendero plantation system. The parents of Benito Alvarez had come from here. It was hardwood jungles, narrow rivers with banks overgrown by lush trees and ferns, savannahs and tangled life.

  Here and there along the higher reaches of the rivers lay the remains of hydroelectric plants long since abandoned, like the one at Paulo Afonso Falls -- all repla
ced by sun power and atomics.

  This was it: the sertao of the Goyaz. Even in this age it remained primitive, a fact blamed on the insects and disease. It lay there, the last stronghold of teeming insect life in the Western Hemisphere, waiting for a modern tropical technology to lift it into the Twenty-first Century.

  Supplies for the bandeirante assault would come by way of Sao Paulo, by air and by transport on the multi-decked highways, then on antique diesel trains to Itapira, by aviadores river runners to Bahus and by airtruck to Registo and Leopoldina on the Araguaya.

  And when it was done -- the people would return, coming back from the Resettlement Plan areas and the metropolitan shanty towns.

  A passage of turbulent air shook the truck, breaking Joao from his reverie, forcing him into an acute consciousness of his situation.

  A glance at his guard showed the creature still crouched there, watchful . . . as patient as the Indio it mimicked. The presence of the thing behind him had become cumulative, and Joao found himself required to combat a growing sense of revulsion.

  The gleaming mechanical pragmatism of the truck pod around him felt as though it were at war with the insect creature. It had no business here in this cabin flying smoothly above the area where its kind ruled supreme.

  Joao looked out and down at the green flow of forest, the zona da mata. He knew the area beneath him crawled with insects: wire worms in the roots of savannahs, grubs digging in the moist black earth, hopping beetles, dart-like angita wasps, chalcis flies sacred to the still thriving backwoods Xango cult, chiggers, sphecidae, braconidae, fierce hornets, white termites, hemipteric crawlers, blood roaches, thrips, ants, lice, mosquitoes, mites, moths, exotic butterflies, mantidae -- and countless unnatural mutations of them all.

  That, for sure.

  This would be an expensive flight -- unless it had already been lost.

  I mustn't think that way, Joao told himself. Out of respect for my father, I mustn't think that way . . . not yet.

  IEO maps showed this region in varied intensities of red. Around the red ran a ring of gray with pink shading where one or two persistent forms of insect life resisted man's poisons, jelly flames, astringents, sonitoxics -- the combination of flamant couroq and supersonics that drove insects from their hiding places into waiting death -- and all the mechanical traps and luring baits in the bandeirante arsenal.

  A grid map would be placed over this area and each thousand-hectare square offered for bid to the independent bands to deinfest.

  We bandeirantes are a kind of ultimate predator, Joao thought. It's no wonder these creatures mimic us.

  But how good, really, was this mimicry he asked himself. And how deadly to the predators? How far had this gone?

  "There," said the creature behind him. The multi-part hand came forward to point toward a black scarp visible ahead of them in the gray light of morning. Heavy mist against the scarp told of a river nearby hidden by the jungle.

  This is all I need, Joao thought. I can find this place again easily.

  His foot kicked the trigger on the floor, releasing a great cloud of orange dye-fog beneath the truck to mark the ground and forest for more than a kilometer around. As he kicked the trigger, Joao began counting down silently the five-second delay to the automatic firing of the separation charge.

  It came in a roaring blast that Joao knew would smear the creature behind against the rear bulkhead. He sent the stub wings out, fed power to the rocket motors and banked hard left. Now he could see the detached rear compartment settling slowly earthward above the dye cloud, its fall cushioned as the pumps of the hydrostatic drive automatically compensated.

  I will come back, Father, Joao thought. You will be buried among family and friends.

  He locked his pod controls, turned to deal with his guard.

  A gasp escaped Joao's lips.

  The rear bulkhead crawled with insects clustered around something yellow-white and pulsing. The mud-gray shirt and trousers were torn, but insects already were repairing it, spinning out fibers that meshed and sealed on contact. There was a dark yellow sac-like object extruding near the pulsing surface -- and glimpses through the insects of a brown skeleton with familiar articulation.

  It looked like a human skeleton -- but dark and chitinous.

  Before his eyes, the thing was reassembling itself -- long furry antennae burrowing inward and interlocking, one insect to another, claw fringes weaving together.

  The flute weapon wasn't visible, and the thing's leather pouch had been hurled into a rear corner by the blast, but its eyes were in place in their brown sockets, staring at him. The mouth was reforming.

  The dark yellow sac contracted, and a voice issued from the half-formed mouth.

  "You must listen," it rasped.

  Joao gulped, whirled back to the controls, unlocked them and sent the pod into a wild, spinning turn.

  A high-pitched rattling buzz sounded behind him. The noise seemed to pick up every bone in his body and shake it. Something crawled on his neck. He slapped it, felt it squash.

  All Joao could think of then was escape. He stared out frantically at the earth beneath, glimpsing a blotch of white in a savannah off to his right and in the same instant recognizing another airtruck banking beside him, the insignia of his own Irmandades bright on its side.

  The white blotch in the savannah resolved itself into a cluster of tents with an IEO orange and green banner flying beside them. Beyond the flat grass could be seen the curve of a river.

  Joao dove for the tents.

  Something stung his cheek. Crawling things were in his hair -- biting, stinging. He kicked on the braking rockets, aimed for open ground beside the tents. Insects were all over the inside of the pod's glass now, blocking his vision. Joao said a silent prayer, hauled back on the control arm, felt the pod mush out, touch ground, skidding and slewing. He kicked the canopy release before the motion stopped, broke the seal on his safety harness and launched himself up and out to land sprawling on hard ground.

  He rolled over and over, eyes tightly closed, feeling the insect bites like fire needles over every exposed part of his body. Hands grabbed him and he felt a jelly hood splash across his face to protect it. Hard spray slammed against him from all sides.

  Somewhere in a hood-blurred distance he heard a voice that sounded like Vierho's shout, "Run! This way -- run!"

  He heard a spraygun fire: Whoosh!

  And again.

  And again.

  Hands rolled him over. Spray hit his back. A wash that smelled like neutralizer splashed over him.

  An odd thudding sound shook the ground and a voice said, "Mother of God! Would you look at that!"

  V

  Joao sat up, clawed the jelly hood from his face, stared across the savannah. The grass there seethed and boiled with insects around an Irmandades airtruck.

  A voice said, "Did you kill everything inside the pod?"

  "Everything that moved." The reply was husky, halting, as though overcoming pain.

  "Is there anything in it we can use?"

  "The radio's destroyed."

  "Of course. That's the first thing they go for."

  Joao looked around him, counted seven of his Irmandades -- Vierho, Thome, Ramon, Pietr, Lon . . .

  His eye was caught by the group clustered beyond his men -- Rhin Kelly among them. Her red hair was awry. Dirt streaked her face. There was a wild, glazed look in her green eyes. She was staring at him.

  He saw his pod then, to the right, on its side and just within what appeared to be a perimeter ditch. Foam and spray residue were all over it. His eye traversed the line of the ditch, saw that it ringed a hard-packed dirt area with the tents in the center and savannah beyond. Two men in green IEO uniforms stood beside him holding sprayer handtanks.

  Joao returned his attention to Rhin, remembering her as he'd seen her in Bahia's A'Chigua. Now she wore a plain IEO field uniform, its green blotched by red-brown dirt. Her eyes held no invitation at all.

 
"I see poetic justice in this -- traitors," she said.

  Her hysterical tone of voice caught Joao's ear and it took a second for her words to filter through. Traitors?

  He grew aware of the bedraggled, worn look of the IEO people.

  Vierho approached, helped Joao to his feet, proffered a cloth to wipe off the jelly.

  "Jefe, what is happening?" Vierho asked. "We picked up your signal, but you didn't answer."

  "Later," Joao rasped as he recognized the anger in Rhin and her companions. Rhin appeared feverish and ill.