“I love you, Joao,” she whispered, and closed her eyes.
Joao found himself blinded by tears. He saw her face through a mist. I must, he thought. God help me—I must. Convulsively, he jerked the trigger.
The gun roared, bucking in his hand.
Rhin jerked backward as though pushed by a giant hand. She half turned and pitched face down into the reeds.
Joao whirled away, unable to look, stared down at the pistol in his hand. Movement by the trees attracted him. He shook away the tears, stared at the line of creatures trailing out of the forest. There were the ones like the sertao Indians who had kidnapped him with his father… more forest Indians… the figure of Thome from his own band… another man, thin and in a black suit, hair shiny silver.
Even my father! Joao thought. They copy even my father!
He brought the pistol up, its muzzle pointing at his heart. He felt no rage, only an enormous sorrow as he pulled the trigger.
Darkness slammed him.
Chapter X
THERE WAS a dream of being carried, a dream of tears and shouting, a dream of violent protests and defiance and rejection.
Joao woke to yellow-orange light and the figure that could not be his father bending over him, thrusting a hand out, saying, “Then examine my hand if you don’t believe!”
It cannot be my father, Joao thought. I am dead… he is dead. They’ve copied him… mimicry, nothing more.
Numbing shock invaded Joao’s awareness then.
How am I here? he wondered. His mind searched back through memories and he saw himself killing Rhin with Vierho’s old blunderbuss, then turning the weapon on himself.
Something moved behind the figure that couldn’t be his father. Joao’s attention jerked that way, saw a giant face at least two meters tall. It was a baleful face in the strange light, eyes brilliant and glaring… enormous eyes with pupils within pupils. The face turned and Joao saw that it could be no more than two centimeters thick. Again, the face turned. The strange eyes focused toward Joao’s feet.
Joao forced himself to look down, lifting his head, then falling back with a violent trembling. Where his feet should have been he’d seen a foaming green cocoon. Joao lifted his left hand, remembering that it had been broken, but the arm came up without pain and he saw that his skin shared the green tones of that repellent cocoon.
“Examine my hand!” ordered the old-man figure beside him. “I command it!”
“He is not quite awake.”
It was a booming voice, resonant, shaking the air all around them, and it seemed to Joao that the voice came from somewhere beneath that giant face.
What nightmare is this? Joao asked himself. Am I in hell?
With an abrupt, violent motion, Joao reached up, clutched the proffered hand.
It felt warm… human.
Tears flooded Joao’s eyes. He shook his head to clear them, remembered… somewhere… doing that same thing. But there were more pressing matters than memories. The hand felt real… his tears felt real.
“How can this be?” he whispered.
“Joao, my son,” said his father’s voice.
Joao peered up at the familiar face. It was his father and no mistaking, down to the very last feature. “But… your heart,” Joao said.
“My pump,” the old man said. “Look.” He pulled his hand away, turned to display where the back of his suit had been cut away. Its edges appeared to be held by some gummy substance. An oily yellow surface pulsed between those fabric edges.
Joao saw the hair-fine scale lines, the multiple shapes. He recoiled.
So it was a copy, another of their tricks.
The old man turned back to face him, and Joao couldn’t avoid the youthful look of glee in the eyes. They weren’t faceted, those eyes.
“The old pump failed and they gave me a new one,” his father said. “It shares my blood and lives off me. It’ll give me a few more useful years. What do you think our medical men will say about that?”
“It’s really you,” Joao gasped.
“All except the pump,” the old man said. “But you, you stupid fool! What a mess you made of yourself and that poor woman.”
“Rhin,” Joao whispered.
“Blew out your hearts and parts of your lungs,” his father said. “And you fell right into the middle of all that corrosive poison you’d sprayed all over the landscape. They not only had to give the two of you new hearts, but whole new blood systems!”
Joao lifted his hands, stared at the green skin. He felt dazzled by it and unable to escape a dream quality in his surroundings.
“They know medical tricks we haven’t even imagined,” his father said. “I haven’t been this excited since I was a boy. I can hardly wait to get back and… Joao! What is it?”
Joao thrust himself up, glared at the old man. “We’re not human anymore! We’re not human if… We’re not human!”
“Oh, be still,” his father ordered.
“If this is… They’re in control!” Joao protested. He forced his gaze onto the giant face behind his father. “They’ll rule us!”
He sank back, gasping.
“We’ll be their slaves,” Joao whispered.
“Such foolishness,” the drum-voice rumbled.
“He always was melodramatic,” the elder Martinho said. “Look at the mess he made of things out there on the river. Of course, you had a hand in that. If you’d only listened to me, trusted me.”
“Now we have a hostage,” the Brain rumbled. “Now we can afford to trust you.”
“You’ve had a hostage ever since you put this pump in me,” the old man said.
“I didn’t understand the price you put on the individual unit,” the Brain said. “After all, we’ll spend almost any unit to save the hive.”
“Not a queen,” the old man said. “You won’t spend a queen. And how about yourself? Would you spend yourself?”
“Unthinkable,” the Brain muttered.
Slowly, Joao turned his head, looked beneath the giant face to where the voice originated. He saw a white mass about four meters across, a pulsing yellow sac protruding from it. Wingless insects crawled over it, into fissures along its surface and along the stone floor of the cave underneath. The face reared up from that mass supported by dozens of round stalks. Their scaled surfaces betrayed their nature.
The reality of the situation began to penetrate Joao’s shock.
“Rhin?” he whispered.
“Your mate is safe,” the Brain rumbled. “Changed like yourself, but safe.”
Joao continued to stare at the white mass on the cave floor. He saw that the voice issued from the pulsing yellow sac.
“Your attention is drawn to our way of answering your threat to us,” the Brain said. “This is our brain. It is vulnerable, yet strong… just as your brain.”
Joao fought down a shiver of revulsion.
“Tell me,” the Brain said, “how you define slave.”
“I’m a slave now,” Joao whispered. “I’m in bondage to you. I must obey you or you can kill me.”
“But you tried to kill yourself,” the Brain said.
The thought unfolded and unfolded in Joao’s awareness.
“A slave is one who must produce wealth for another,” the Brain said. “There is only one true wealth in all the universe. I have given you some of it. I have given your father and your mate some of it. And your friends. This wealth is living time. Time. Are we slaves because we have given you more time to live?”
Joao looked up from the voice sac to the giant, glittering eyes. He thought he detected amusement there.