Darkness built up its hold on the river. Briefly, the clouds parted in the west and presented a sky like a sheet of burnished turquoise that drifted swiftly from yellow into a deep wine as red as a bishop’s cloak. The river looked black and oily. Clouds dropped across the sunset and once more a jagged fire-plume of lightning etched itself against the distance.
The rain took up its endless stammering on the canopy, washing the shorelines into dove-gray mist. Night covered the scene.
“Oh, God, I’m scared,” Rhin whispered. “Oh, God, I’m scared. Oh, God, I’m scared.”
Joao found he had no words to comfort her. Their world and everything it demanded of them had gone beyond words, all transformed into an elemental flowing indistinguishable from the river itself.
A din of frogs came out of the night and they heard water hissing through reeds. Not even the faintest glow of moonlight penetrated the clouded darkness. Frogs and hissing reeds faded. The pod and its three occupants returned to a world of beating rain suspended above a faint wash of river against floats.
“It’s very strange, this being hunted,” Chen-Lhu whispered.
The words fell on Joao as though they came from some disembodied source. He tried to recall Chen-Lhu’s appearance and was astonished when no image came into his mind. He searched for something to say and all he could find was: “We’re not dead yet.”
Thank you, Johnny, Chen-Lhu thought. I needed some such nonsense from you to put things into perspective. He chuckled silently to himself, thinking: Fear is the penalty of consciousness. There’s no weakness in fear… only in showing it. Good, evil—it’s all a matter of how you view it, with a god or without one.
“I think we should anchor,” Rhin said. “What if we came on rapids in the night, before we could hear them? Who could hear anything in this rain?”
“She’s right,” Chen-Lhu said.
“D’you want to go out there and drop the grapnel, Travis?” Joao asked.
Chen-Lhu felt his mouth go dry.
“Go ahead if you want,” Joao said.
No weakness in fear, only in showing it, Chen-Lhu thought. He pictured what might be out there waiting in the darkness—perhaps one of the creatures they’d seen on the shore. Each second’s delay, Chen-Lhu realized, betrayed him.
“I think,” Joao said, “that it’s more dangerous to open the hatch at night than it is to drift… and listen.”
“We do have the winglights,” Chen-Lhu said. “That is, if we hear something.” Even as he spoke, he sensed how weak and empty his words were.
Chen-Lhu felt fluid heat ripple through his veins, anger like a series of velvet explosions. Still, the unknown remained out there, a place of ravenous tranquility, full of furiously remembered brilliance even in this blackness.
Fear strips away all pretense, Chen-Lhu thought. I’ve been dishonest with myself.
It was as though the thought thrust him suddenly around a corner, there to confront himself like a reflection in a mirror. And he was both substance and reflection. The abruptly awakening clarity sent memories streaking through his mind until he felt his entire past dancing and weaving like fabric rolling off a loom—reality and illusion in the same cloth.
The sensation passed, leaving him feverish with an inner trembling and a sense of terrible loss.
I’m having a delayed reaction to the insect poisons, he thought.
“Oscar Wilde was a pretentious ass,” Rhin said. “Any number of lives are worth any number of deaths. Bravery has nothing to do with that.”
Even Rhin defends me, Chen-Lhu thought.
The thought enraged him.
“You God-fearing fools,” he snarled. “All of you chanting: ‘Thou hast being, God!’ There couldn’t be a god without man! A god wouldn’t know he existed if it weren’t for man! If there ever was a god… this universe is his mistake!”
Chen-Lhu fell silent, surprised to find himself panting as though after great exertion.
A burst of rain hammered against the canopy as though in some celestial answer, then faded into wet muttering.
“Well… would you listen to the atheist,” Rhin said.
Joao peered into the darkness where her voice had originated, suddenly angry with her, feeling shame in her words. Chen-Lhu’s outburst had been like seeing the man naked and defenseless. The thing should’ve been ignored, not given substance by comment. Joao felt that Rhin’s words had served only to drive Chen-Lhu into a corner.
The thought made him recall a scene out of his days in North America, a vacation with a classmate in eastern Oregon. He’d been hunting quail along a fence line when two of his host’s mismatched brindle hounds had burst over a rise in pursuit of a scrawny bitch coyote. The coyote had seen the hunter and had swerved left, only to be trapped in a fence corner.
In that corner, the coyote, a symbol of cowardice, had whirled and slashed the two dogs into bloody cravens that had fled with tails between legs. Joao, awed, had watched and allowed the coyote to escape.
Remembering that scene, Joao sensed that it encapsulated the problem of Chen-Lhu. Something or someone has trapped that man in a corner.
“I am going to sleep now,” Chen-Lhu said. “Awaken me at midnight. And please—do not become so distracted that you fail to peer ahead with your ears.”
To hell with you! Rhin thought. And she made no attempt at silence as she pushed herself across the seat into Joao’s arms.
“We must place part of our force below the rapids,” the Brain commanded, “in case the humans escape the net as they did before. They must not escape this time.” And the Brain added here the overhive-survival-fear-threat symbol to produce the greatest degree of angry alertness among messengers and action groups.
“Give the little-deadlies careful instructions,” the Brain ordered. “If the vehicle eludes our net and passes the rapids safely, all three humans must be killed.”
Golden winged messengers danced their confirmation on the ceiling, fluttered out of the cave into the gray light that soon would be night.
These three humans have been interesting, even informative, the Brain thought, but now it must end. We have other humans, after all… and emotion must not figure in the logical necessities.
But these thoughts only aroused more of the Brain’s newly learned emotions and brought the nurse insects scurrying to adjust their charge’s unusual demands.
Presently the Brain put aside the subject of the three humans on the river and began to worry about the fate of its simulacra somewhere beyond the barriers.
Human radio carried no reports that the simulacra had been discovered… but this meant nothing really. Such reports might be suppressed. Unless they could be located by their own kind and warned (and that soon), the simulacra would come out. The danger was great and the time short.
The Brain’s agitation brought its attendants to a step they seldom took. Narcotics were brought up and administered. The Brain sank into a lethargic, drowsing half-sleep where its dreams transformed it into a creature like the humans, and it stalked a dream trail with a rifle in its hands.
Even in its dream, the Brain worried lest the game elude it. And here the nurse insects could not reach and minister. The worry continued.
Joao awoke at dawn to find the river cloaked by a restless drapery of fog. He felt stiff and cramped, his thoughts confused by a feverish sensation as fuzzy as the fog on the river. The sky held the color of platinum.