“Of course, Rhin, of course,” Chen-Lhu said. “But are those our friends?”
She said, “Until I know for sure…”
“Exactly!” Chen-Lhu said. “And how will you know for sure?” He pointed toward the figures standing now behind them as the shore once more drifted into a line of overhanging trees and vines. “That is a school, too, Rhin—that jungle over there. You should learn its lesson, too.”
Double meaning, double meaning, she thought.
“The jungle is a school of pragmatism,” Chen-Lhu said. “Absolute judgments. Ask it about good and evil? The jungle has one answer: ‘That which succeeds is good.’”
He’s telling me to get on with the seduction of Senhor Johnny Martinho while the poor fool’s still wide open from shock, she thought. True enough—danger, shock and horror, they all create their own rebound.
She nodded to herself. But where do I bounce?
“If those were Indians, I’d know why they put on that show,” Joao said. “But those are not really Indians. We cannot tell how these creatures think. Indians would do that sort of thing to taunt us, saying: ‘You’re next.’ But these creatures…” He shook his head.
Silence invaded the pod: an impressive solitude magnified by heat and the hypnotic flow of shoreline.
Chen-Lhu lay back, drowsing, thought: I will let the heat and idleness do my work for me.
Joao stared at his hands.
He’d never before been trapped in a situation where both fear and idleness forced him to look inward. The experience terrified and fascinated him.
Fear is the penalty of consciousness forced to stare at itself, Joao thought. I should be busy with something. With what? Sleep, then.
But he feared sleep because he sensed dreams poised there.
Emptiness… what a prize that would be: emptiness, he thought.
He felt that somewhere in his past he had reached a glowing summit devoid of before-and-after complications, a place of no doubts. Action… play… reflex motion—that had been the life. Now, it all lay there, open to introspection, open to study and re-examination.
But he sensed there might be a tip-over point with introspection, that somewhere within him lurked memories which could engulf him.
Rhin rested her head against the back of the seat, looked up at the sky. Someone’ll start looking for us soon, she thought. They must… they must… they must.
Must rhymes with lust, she thought. And she swallowed, wondering where that thought had originated. She forced her attention to the sky—so blue… blue… blue: a blank surface upon which anything could be written.
Searchers could come over us at any minute now.
Her gaze wavered, went to the mountains along the western horizon. Mountains grew and diminished there as the river carried her through its blue furrow.
It’s the things we must not think about because they’d overpower us with emotion, she thought. These things are the terrible burden. Her hand crept out, clasped Joao’s. He didn’t look at her, but the pressure of his response was more than a hand enfolding hers.
Chen-Lhu saw the motion and smiled.
Joao stared out at the passing shore. The pod drifted on an enchanted current between drooping curtains of lianas. The current carried them around a bend, exposing the towered brilliance of three Fernan Sanchez trees: imperative red against the green. But Joao’s eye went to the water where the river was at work, slowly undercutting clawed roots in the muddy bank.
Her hand in mine, he thought. Her hand in mine.
Her palm was moist, intimate, possessive.
Rising waves of heat encased the pod in dead air. The sun grew to a throbbing inferno that drifted over them… slowly, slowly settling toward the western peaks.
Hands together… hands together, Joao thought.
He began to pray for the night.
Evening shadows began to quilt the river’s edges. Night swept upward from the trench of slow current towards the blazing peaks.
Chen-Lhu stirred, sat up as the sun dipped behind the mountains. Amethyst vapors from the sunset produced a space of polished ruby water ahead of the pod—like flowing blood. There came a moment at the dark when the river appeared to cease all movement. Then they entered the damply cushioned night.
This is the time of the timid and the terrible, Chen-Lhu thought. The night is my time—and I am not timid.
And he smiled at the way the two shadows in the front seats had become one shadow.
The animal with two backs, he thought. It was such an amusing thought that he put a hand to his mouth to suppress laughter.
Presently, Chen-Lhu spoke: “I will sleep now, Johnny. You take the first watch. Wake me at midnight.”
The small stirring noises from the front of the cabin ceased momentarily, then resumed.
“Right,” Joao said, and his voice was husky.
Ahh, that Rhin, Chen-Lhu thought. Such a good tool even when she does not want to be.
Chapter VIII
THE REPORT, although interesting for its variations, added little to the Brain’s general information about humans. They reacted with shock and fear to the display along the river bank. That was to be expected. The Chinese had demonstrated practicality not shared by the other two. This fact, added to the apparent attempts of the Chinese to get the other two to mate—that might be significant. Time would tell.
Meanwhile, the Brain experienced something akin to another human emotion—worry.
The trio in the vehicle were drifting farther and farther away from the chamber above the river chasm. A significant delay factor was entering the system of report-computation-decision-action.
The Brain’s sensors reviewed once more the messenger pattern being repeated on the cavern ceiling.
The vehicle was approaching a series of rapids. Its occupants could be killed there and irrevocably lost. Or they might renew their efforts to fly away in the craft. There lay a worry-element requiring a heavy weighing factor.
The vehicle had flown once.
Computation-decision.
“You report to the action groups,” the Brain commanded. “Tell them to capture the vehicle and occupants before they reach the rapids. Capture the humans alive, if possible. Order of importance if some of them must be sacrificed: first the Chinese is to be taken, then the dormant queen, and finally the other male.”
The insects on the ceiling danced their message pattern and hummed the modulation elements to fix them, then took off into the dawn light at the cave mouth.
Action.
Chen-Lhu stared downriver across the front seats, watching the moon-path crawl beneath the pod. The path rippled with spider lines in the eddies, flowed like painted silk in the broad reaches.
The breathing sounds of deep, satiated sleep came from the front of the cabin.
Now I probably will not have to kill that fool, Johnny, Chen-Lhu thought.
He looked out the side windows at the moon, low and near to setting. Bronze earthlight filled out the middle circle. Within this darker area there appeared the likeness of a face: Vierho.
He is dead, Johnny’s companion, Chen-Lhu thought. That was a simulacrum we saw beside the river. Nothing could’ve survived that attack on the camp. Our friends out there have copied dear Padre.
Chen-Lhu asked himself then: I wonder how Vierho encountered death—as an illusion or as a cataclysm?