Ahhh, Joao thought, she touched a nerve.
“What made an animal out of you, Travis?” Rhin asked.
He had himself under control, though, and all he said was, “You have a sharp tongue, my dear. Too bad your mind doesn’t match it.”
“That’s not up to your usual standards, Travis,” she said, and she smiled at Joao.
But Joao had heard the crying-out in their voices and he remembered Vierho, the Padre, so solemn, saying, “A person cries out against life because it’s lonely, and because life’s broken off from whatever created it. But no matter how much you hate life, you love it, too. It’s like a caldron boiling with everything you have to have—but very painful to the lips.”
Abruptly Joao reached out, pulled Rhin to him and kissed her, pressing her against him, digging his hands into her back. Her lips responded after only the briefest hesitation—warm, tingling.
Presently he pulled away, pressed her firmly into her seat and leaned back on his own side.
When she could catch her breath, Rhin said, “Now, what was that all about?”
“There’s a little animal in all of us,” Joao said.
Does he defend me? Chen-Lhu asked himself, sitting bolt upright. I don’t need defense from such as that!
But Rhin laughed, shattering his anger, and reached out to caress Joao’s cheek. “Isn’t there just,” she said.
And Chen-Lhu thought: She is only doing her job. How beautifully she works. Such consummate artistry. It would be a shame to have to kill her.
Chapter IX
They have such a talent for occupying themselves with inconsequentials, these humans, the Brain thought. Even in the face of terrible pressures, they argue and make love and throw trivialities into the air.
Messenger relays came and went through the rain and sunshine that alternated outside the cave mouth. There was little hesitation over commands now; the essential decision had been made: “Capture or kill the three humans at the chasm; save their heads in vivo if you can.”
Still, the reports came because the Brain had ordered: “Report to me everything they say.”
So much talk of God, the Brain thought. Is it possible such a Being exists?
And the Brain reflected that certainly the humans’ accomplishments carried an air of grandeur that belied the triviality of their reported actions.
Is it possible this triviality is a code of some sort? the Brain wondered. But how could it be… unless there’s more to these emotional inconsequentials and this talk of a God than appears on the surface?
The Brain had begun its career in logics as a pragmatic atheist. Now doubts began to creep into its computations, and it classified doubt as an emotion.
Still, they must be stopped, the Brain thought. No matter the cost, they must be stopped. The issue is too important… even for this fascinating trio. If they are lost, I shall try to mourn them.
Rhin felt that they floated in a bowl of burning sunlight with the crippled pod at its center. The cabin was a moist hell pressing in upon her. The drip-drip feeling of perspiration and the smell of bodily closeness, the omnipresent tang of mildew, all of it gnawed at her awareness. Not an animal stirred or cried from either passing shore.
Only an occasional insect flitting across their path reminded her of the watchers in the jungle shadows.
If it wasn’t for the bugs, she thought. The goddamn bugs! And the heat—the goddamn heat.
An abrupt hysteria seized her and she cried out, “Can’t we do anything?”
She began to laugh crazily.
Joao grabbed her shoulders, shook her until she subsided into dry sobs.
“Oh, please, please do something,” she begged.
Joao forced all pity out of his voice in the effort to calm her. “Get hold of yourself, Rhin.”
“Those goddamn bugs,” she said.
Chen-Lhu’s voice rumbled at her from the rear of the cabin: “You will please keep in mind, Doctor Kelly, that you’re an entomologist.”
“And I’m going bugs,” she said. This struck her as amusing and again she started to laugh. One shake from Joao’s arms stopped her. She reached up, took his hands, said, “I’m all right; really I am. It’s the heat.”
Joao looked into her eyes. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
She disengaged herself, sat back in her corner, stared out the window. The sweeping passage of shoreline caught her eyes hypnotically: fused movement. It was like time—the immediate past never quite discarded, no fixed starting point for the future—all one, all melted into one gliding, stretched-out forever…
What ever made me choose this career? she wondered.
As though in answer, she found projected upon her memory the full sequence of an event she’d left buried in her childhood. She’d been six and it was the year her father spent in the American West doing his book about Johannes Kelpius. They’d lived in an old adobe house and flying ants had made a nest against the wall. Her father had sent a handyman to burn out the nest and she had crouched to watch. There’d been the smell of kerosene, a sudden burst of yellow flame in sunlight, black smoke and a cloud of whirling insects with pale amber wings enveloping her in their frenzy.
She’d run screaming into the house, winged creatures crawling over her, clinging to her. And in the house: adult anger, hands thrusting her into a bathroom, a voice commanding, “Clean those bugs off you! The very idea, bringing them into the house. See you don’t leave a one on the floor. Kill them and flush them down the toilet.”
For a time that had seemed forever, she’d screamed and pounded and kicked against the locked door. “They won’t die! They won’t die!”
Rhin shook her head to drive out the memory. “They won’t die,” she whispered.
“What?” Joao asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “What time is it?”
“It’ll be dark soon.”
She kept her attention on the passing shore—tree ferns and cabbage palms here, with rising water beginning to pour off around their trunks. But the river was wide and its central current still swift. In the spotted sunlight beyond the trees she thought she saw flitting movements of color.
Birds, she hoped.
Whatever they were, the things moved so fast she felt she saw them only after they were gone.
Thick billowings of clouds began filling the eastern horizon with a look of depth and weight and blackness. Lightning flickered soundlessly beneath them. A long interval afterward, the thunder came, a low, sodden hammer stroke.
The heaviness of waiting hung over the river and the jungle. Currents crawled around the pod like writhing serpents—a muddy brown velvet oozing motion that harried the floats: push and turn… push, twist and turn.
It’s the waiting, Rhin thought.
Tears slipped down her cheeks and she wiped them away.
“Is something wrong, my dear?” Chen-Lhu asked.
She wanted to laugh, but knew laughter would drag her back into hysteria. “If you aren’t the banal son of a bitch!” she said. “Something wrong!”
“Ahhh, we still have our fighting spirit,” Chen-Lhu said.
Luminous gray darkness of a cloud shadow flowed across the pod, flattened all contrast.
Joao watched a line of rain surge across the water whipped toward him by bursts of wind. Again, lightning flickered. The growl of thunder came faster, sharper. The sound set off a band of howler monkeys on the left shore. Their cries echoed across the water.