“Fresh oranges from the green country. Never been a bug near these.”
He avoided the hand, but the odor of the oranges came near to overpowering him.
Now he was clear of the stalls, around a corner down a narrow side street. Another corner and he saw far away to his left the lure of greenery in open country, the free area beyond the town.
He turned toward the green, increased his speed, measuring out the time still available to him. He knew it would be a near thing. Poison clung to his clothing, but clean air filtered through the fabric—and the thought of possible victory was like an antidote.
We can make it yet!
The green drew closer and closer—trees and ferns beside a river bank. He heard running water, smelled wet soil. There was a bridge thronging with foot traffic from converging streets.
No help for it—he joined the throng, avoided contact where possible. His leg and back linkages were beginning to slip, and he knew the wrong kind of blow, a chance collision, could dislodge whole segments.
The bridge ordeal ended and he saw a dirt track leading off the path to the right and down toward the river. He turned toward it, stumbled against one of two men carrying a pig in a net slung between them. Part of the skin simulation on his right upper leg gave way. He could feel it begin to slip down inside his trousers.
The man he’d hit took two backward steps, almost dropped the pig.
“Careful!” the man shouted.
The man’s companion said, “Damn drunks.”
The pig set up a squirming, squealing distraction.
In this moment, he slipped past the men onto the dirt track, shuffled toward the river. He could see water down there now boiling with aeration from the barrier filters, the foam of sonic disruption on its surface.
Behind him, one of the pig carriers said, “I don’t think he was drunk, Carlos. His skin felt dry and hot. Maybe he was sick.”
He heard and understood, tried to increase his speed. The lost segment of skin simulation had slipped halfway down his leg. A disruptive loosening of shoulder and back muscles threatened his balance.
The track turned around an embankment of raw dirt dark brown with dampness and dipped into a tunnel through ferns and bushes. The men with the pig no longer could see him, he knew. He grabbed at his trousers where the leg surface was slipping, scurried through the green tunnel.
Where the tunnel ended he caught sight of his first mutated bee. It was dead, having entered this barrier vibration area without any protection against that deadliness. The bee was one of the butterfly type with irridescent yellow and orange wings. It lay in the cup of a green leaf at the center of a shaft of sunlight.
He shuffled past, having recorded the bee’s shape and color. His kind had considered the bees as a possible way, but there were serious drawbacks. A bee could not reason with humans. And humans had to listen to reason soon, else all life would end.
There came the sound of someone hurrying down the path behind him. Heavy footsteps pounded the earth.
Pursuit?
Why would they pursue? Have I been discovered?
A sensation akin to panic fluttered through him, lent his parts a burst of energy. But he was reduced to slow shuffling and soon it would be only a crawling progress. Every eye he could use searched the greenery for a place of concealment.
A thin break darkened the fern wall on his left. Tiny human footprints led into it—children. He forced his way through the ferns there, found himself on a low narrow path along the embankment. Two toy aircars, red and blue, lay abandoned on the path. His staggering foot pressed into the dirt.
The low path led close to a wall of black dirt festooned with creepers. It turned sharply as the dirt wall turned and emerged onto the lip of a shallow cave. More toys lay in the green gloom at the cave’s mouth.
He knelt, crawled over the toys into the blessed dankness, lay there waiting.
Presently, the pounding footsteps hurried past a few meters below. Voices reached up to him.
“He was headed for the river. Think he was going to jump in?”
“Who knows? But I think me for sure he was sick.”
“Here! Down this way; somebody’s been down this way.”
The voices grew indistinct, blended with the bubbling sound of water.
The men were going on down the path. They had missed his hiding place. But why had they pursued? He hadn’t seriously injured that man. Surely they didn’t suspect.
But speculation had to wait.
Slowly, he steeled himself for what had to be done, brought his specialized parts into play and began burrowing into the earth of the cave. Deeper and deeper he burrowed, thrusting the excess dirt behind and out to make it appear the cave had collapsed.
Ten meters in he went before stopping. His store of energy contained just enough reserve for the next stage. He turned onto his back, scattering the dead parts of legs and back, exposing the queen and her guard cluster to the dirt beneath his chitinous spine. Orifices opened at his thigh, exuded the cocoon foam, the soothing green cover that would harden into a protective shell.
This was victory; the essential parts had survived.
Time was the thing now—some twenty days to gather new energy, go through the metamorphosis and disperse. Soon there’d be thousands of him—each with its carefully mimicked clothing and identification papers, each with this appearance of humanity.
Identical—each of them.
There’d be other checkpoints, but not as severe; other barriers—lesser ones.
This human copy had proved to be a good one. The supreme integration of his kind had chosen well. They’d learned much from study of scattered captives in the sertao. But it was so difficult to understand the human creature. Even when they were permitted a limited freedom, it was almost impossible to reason with them. Their supreme integration eluded all attempts at contact.
And always the primary question remained: How could any supreme integration permit the disaster that was overtaking this entire planet?
Difficult humans—their slavery to the planet would have to be proved to them… dramatically, perhaps.
The queen stirred near the cool dirt, prodded into action by her guards. Unifying communication went out to all the body parts, seeking the survivors, assessing strengths. They’d learned new things this time about escaping notice from humans. All the subsequent colony clusters would share that knowledge. One of them at least would get through to the city by the Amazon “River Sea” where the death-for-all appeared to originate.
One of them had to get through.
Chapter II
PASTEL SMOKES drifted on the cabaret’s air. Each smoke, the signature of a table, wafted upward from a table’s central vent—here a pale mauve, across the way a pink as delicate as baby skin, there a green that brought to mind Indian gauze woven of pampas grass. It had just turned 9:00 P.M. and the Cabaret A’Chigua, Bahia’s finest, had begun its nightly entertainment. Tinkling bell music set a sensuous rhythm for a troupe of dancers posturing in stylized ant costumes. Their fake antennae and mandibles waved through the smokes.
A’Chigua’s patrons occupied low divans. The women were a sprinkling of tropical color as rich as jungle flowers arranged against men in white linen and, here and there like punctuation marks, the glistening white smocks of bandeirantes. This was the Green area, where bandeirantes could relax and play after duty in the Red jungle or at the barriers.
Shoptalk and smalltalk in a dozen languages flowed through the room—
“Tonight I take a pink table for luck. It is the color of a woman’s breast, no?” “So I laid down a blanket of foamal and we went in and cleaned out the whole nest—mutated ants like they had in the Piratininga. Must’ve been ten, twenty billion of them right there.”