Joao peered around him. Rhin had returned to her seat. She sat with a sprayrifle across her lap, her head thrown back, eyes closed. Chen-Lhu knelt on the gig-box and peered at the left-hand shore.
The interior of the cabin appeared to Joao to be filled with dappled gray-green shadows. His mind told him there must be other colors present, but he saw only the gray-greens—even Chen-Lhu’s skin… and Rhin’s.
“Something’s… wrong… with… color,” he whispered.
“Color aberration,” Chen-Lhu said. “That was one of the symptoms.”
Joao looked out a clean place in the right windows, saw through the trees a scattering of dun peaks and a gray-green sun low above them.
“Close your eyes, lean back and relax,” Rhin said.
Joao rolled his head on the seat back, saw that she had put aside her sprayrifle and was bending over him. She began massaging his forehead.
She spoke to Chen-Lhu: “His skin feels hot.”
Joao closed his eyes. Her hands felt so peaceful and cool. The blackness of utter fatigue hovered around him… and far off on his right leg he felt a drumbeat: the energy pack.
“Try to sleep,” Rhin whispered.
“Rhin, how do you feel?” Chen-Lhu asked.
“I put a pack on my leg during that first lull,” she said. “I think it’s the A.C.T.H. fractions—they seem to give immediate relief if you haven’t been hit too hard.”
“And Johnny got much more than we did from our friends.”
“Out there? Of course he did.”
The word sounds were a distant fuzziness to Joao, but the meanings rang through with a startling clarity, and he found himself fascinated by voice overtones. Chen-Lhu’s voice was loaded with concealment. Rhin’s carried suppressed fear and genuine concern for himself.
Rhin gave his forehead one last soothing caress, sank back into her seat. She pushed her hair back, looked out to the west. Movement there, yes: white flutterings and things that were larger. She moved her gaze upward. Alto cirrus clouds hung in the distance above the trees. Sunset poured color through them as she watched and the clouds became waves as red as blood.
She averted her eyes, looked downstream.
The current swept the pod around a sickle-shaped bend and they drifted almost due north in a widening channel. Along the eastern shore the water flowed with mauve-tinted silver, metallic and luminous.
A deep booming of jungle doves sounded from the right bank—or was it doves. Rhin looked around her, feeling the hushed stillness.
The sun dipped behind distant peaks and the nightly patrol of bats flickered overhead, swooping and soaring. Noises of evening birds lifted, stilled and were replaced by night sounds—the far off coughing growl of a jaguar, rustlings and quiverings and a nearby splash.
And again that hushed stillness.
Something out there that everything in the jungle fears, Rhin thought.
An amber moon began to climb over them. The pod drifted down the moon-path like a giant dragonfly poised on the water. A skeleton butterfly fluttered into view through the pale light, waved the filigree of its transparent wings on the pod’s windshield, departed.
“They’re keeping a close watch on us,” Chen-Lhu said.
Joao could feel warmth coursing upward from the energy pack as the A.T.P., the calcium and acetylcholine, the A.C.T.H. factions diffused in his body. But a sensation of dizziness remained, as though he were many persons at once. He opened his eyes, looked out to the fuzzy spread of moonlit hills. He realized he actually saw this, but part of him felt as though it clung to the fabric ceiling of the cabin behind the canopy, crouching there, really. And the moon was an alien moon, like none he had ever known, its earthlighted circle far too big, its melon-curve of sun reflection far too bright. It was a false moon on a painted backdrop and it made him feel small, dwindling away to a tiny spark lost in the infinity of the universe.
He pressed his eyes tightly closed, berating himself: I mustn’t think like that or I’ll go crazy! God! What’s wrong with me?
Joao felt that a pressure of silence filled the cabin. He strained to hear tiny sounds—Rhin’s controlled breathing, Chen-Lhu clearing his throat.
Good and evil are man-made opposites: there is only honor. Joao heard the thought as words echoing in his mind and recognized them. Those were his father’s words… his father, now dead and become a simulacrum to haunt him by standing beside the river.
Men anchor their lives at a station between good and evil.
“You know, Rhin, this is a Marxian river,” Chen-Lhu said. “Everything in the universe flows like this river. Everything changes constantly from one form to another. Dialectic. Nothing can stop this; nothing should stop this. Nothing’s static, nothing ever twice the same.”
“Oh, shut up,” Rhin muttered.
“You western women,” Chen-Lhu said. “You don’t understand dialectical reality.”
“Tell it to the bugs,” she said.
“How rich this land is,” Chen-Lhu murmured. “How very rich. Do you have any idea of how many of my people this land could support. With only the slightest alteration—clearings, terraces… In China, we’ve learned how to make such land support millions of people.”
Rhin sat up, stared across the seat back at Chen-Lhu. “How’s that again?”
“These stupid Brazilians, they never learned how to use this land. But my people…”
“I see. Your people come in here and show them how, is that it?”
“It is a possibility,” Chen-Lhu said, and he thought: Digest that for a bit, my dear Rhin. When you see how great the prize, you will understand the price that might be paid.
“And what about the Brazilians—quite a few million of them—who’re crowded into the cities and the farm plots of the Resettlement Plan while their Ecological Realignment is progressing?”
“They are becoming used to their present condition.”
“They can stand it only because they have hopes for something better!”
“Ah, no, my dear Rhin, you don’t understand people very well. Governments can manipulate people to gain anything that’s found necessary.”
“And what about the insects?” she asked. “What about the Great Crusade?”
Chen-Lhu shrugged. “We lived with them for thousands of years… before.”
“And the mutations, the new species?”
“Yes, the creations of your bandeirante friends—those we very likely will have to destroy.”
“I’m not so sure the bandeirantes created those… things out there,” she said. “I’m sure Joao had nothing to do with it.”
“Ah… then who did?”
“Perhaps the same people who don’t want to admit their own Great Crusade’s a failure!”
Chen-Lhu put down anger, said, “I tell you it is not true.”
She looked down at Joao breathing so deeply, obviously asleep. Was it possible? No!
Chen-Lhu sat back, thinking: Let her consider these things. Doubt is all I need and she will serve me most usefully, my lovely little tool. And Johnny Martinho—what a lovely scapegoat: trained in North America, an unprincipled tool of the imperialists! A man of no shame, who made love to one of my own people right in front of me. His fellows will believe such a man capable of anything!
A quiet smile moved Chen-Lhu’s lips.
Rhin, looking into the rear of the cabin, could see only the harsh angular features of the IEO chief. He’s so strong, she thought. And I’m so tired.
She lowered her head onto Joao’s lap like a child seeking comfort, burrowed her left hand behind his back. How feverishly warm he felt. Her burrowing hand encountered a bulky metallic shape in Joao’s jacket. She explored the outline with her fingers, recognized it as a gun… a hand weapon.