“What are you called?” No reason not to be friendly, I suppose.
“My name, among my people, was Guanamarioch, or Guano for my close friends. Here, they call me ‘Apache,’ perhaps because of my crest.”
As if to punctuate, Guano removed the rag from his right hand and, extending a claw, began to scratch furiously at the shreds of its crest. As it did so, it — more or less doglike — turned its head giving Boyd his first clear view of the missing eye with its still weeping socket.
“It was the jungle took my eye,” the box announced solemnly. “Took my eye… took my clan… took everything.”
Noticing the mad glare that had crept into the Posleen’s remaining eye, Boyd decided to change the subject, if he could.
“Do you have any relaxation or fun at all?” he asked. “Or do you just shine boots?”
The God King looked around furtively before answering. “Sometimes,” he said, “I sneak into the jungle when I think it is asleep and cut down a tree or two. If I can find an ant tree that is even better. But most of the ant trees are pretty deep inside and I am afraid I’ll awaken the jungle if I go too deep. And then, on really good days, the boss lets me sneak down to the French cut and hunt for caimen.”
Guanamarioch’s head lowered and his teeth bared in a half snarl. “I really hate caimen.”
Boyd laughed. “The jungle never sleeps, my friend.”
“Yes, it does,” the Posleen insisted, its ragged crest waving wildly. “It does! It does! Like any living being it must rest. It sleeps. Besides, if it were not asleep it would have killed me as it killed so many of my brothers.”
Obviously the God King thought the jungle was a living being. Boyd thought that was pretty ridiculous but saw no point in arguing about it. Besides, the alien seemed too distraught — and way too big and well clawed — to risk antagonizing it.
Suddenly, without warning, the God King picked up and rewound the rag, bent its head over the boot it held and began furiously polishing.
“It’s the boss,” the box whispered.
Boyd looked around and saw a half naked Chocoes Indian approaching at a leisurely walk. The Indian held a bow in his left hand, beneath a multi-striped brassard that indicated membership in one or another of the Indian Scout groups the Republic had raised in its dire need. There was nothing particularly unusual about that.
What was unusual was the Indian’s retinue. Meekly behind him, in double file, walked an even half dozen of every ethnicity one could hope to find in Panama. There was a Cuna Indian girl, short like the Chocoes but wearing an appliqué blouse and a ring through her nose. Beside the Cuna walked a tall slender black woman, descendant of Antillean workers who had labored on the canal and the railroad. Behind the Antillean Boyd could see an equally tall “rubia,” a white woman of pure or nearly pure European ancestry. The fourth was probably a Chocoes girl while the last two were plainly mestizas of mixed Euro and Indian blood.
If Ruiz recognized Boyd he gave no sign of it. Instead he announced, “I am chief of my tribe. This one,” and a point of the Indian’s nose indicated the Posleen, “is owned by us. Why are you disturbing him at his work?”
“Oh, just satisfying my curiosity,” Boyd answered. No sense in standing on ceremony, after all. “I was wondering, too, if you might be willing to sell your… pet.” What an intelligence asset he could be if… when we are attacked again.
“Perhaps I would,” the Indian answered. “But his price would be high. He owes me and mine much.”
“We could… negotiate,” Boyd answered.
The Indian turned his attention to the Posleen. He was not unwilling to sell, in principle, but wanted the best price possible. A hard working slave is surely more valuable than a lazy one.
“You!” he demanded. “Do I need to take you back into the jungle? It is asking for you, you know.”
The box remained silent but the Posleen God King, Guanamarioch of the host, flyer among the stars and leader of a war band, redoubled his efforts to make an American-owned jungle boot shine like glass.
Epilogue II
… the Sea shall give up her dead…
Boyd left his newly built headquarters for the Boyd Steamship Company (though “Steamship” was something of an anachronism now that the company was more concerned with commerce between planets) and walked along the pier to where a launch waited to take him out to the USS Salem, riding at anchor in the bay. On his way, he almost passed a pair of Posleen, one larger than the other, the larger one having a fair crest. The smaller, like the larger, sat on the pier’s very edge. Its head lay softly against the shoulder of the other.
The crested Posleen stared intently at the water below. In its hands was grasped a fishing pole that it moved slowly up and down, causing the line and, presumably, the unseen baited hook to move likewise. A human wearing a Fleet Strike uniform with the insignia for Military Intelligence sat on the other side, away from the smaller Posleen. The human asked questions which the Posleen answered without looking up. The answers the human wrote down in a small notebook.
Boyd walked over and said from behind, “Hello, Guano. How are they biting?”
Still looking down, Guano answered, through its AS, “Not so bad, Dictator.”
It was obvious that the Posleen had been through regeneration. Its crest was normal again, and it had both eyes. Well… an intelligence asset like that? You wouldn’t just let it die of old age, now, would you?
Of course, regeneration didn’t stop with eyes and crest. This tended to explain the other Posleen.
“This the new missus?” Boyd asked.
Guano still didn’t take his eyes from the water. “Yes, Dictator. She’s a cosslain. A fairly smart cosslain, too. Almost sentient. With that, and the new ways of telling which eggs will be Kessentai, we’re hoping to start a small family soon.”
“Where did you… ummm…?”
Eyes still intent on his fishing, Guanamarioch answered, “It’s amazing what you can find on eBay.”
“She was a bigger star than I ever thought about being.”
“Is she still alive down there?” Boyd asked of the Marlene Dietrich lookalike standing next to him.
Boyd was growing old again. Though he had twice been young, and though the process by which he had been made young the second time had also slowed down the aging process considerably, his hair was gray, his back a bit stooped, and every blasted joint in his body hurt.
His eyes were still bright though, staring at the featureless surface of the ocean between Isla Coiba and the Peninsula de Azuero.
He asked again, “Is she still alive?”
USS Salem’s avatar shook her head in negation. “At first I sensed nothing. Then, for a very little while, I could sense a little something of her below. But that gradually weakened until it disappeared altogether. If I had never sensed anything after she went down I’d have wondered and thought that maybe it was interference from the ocean. But as it is…”
Boyd sighed. “Are we doing the right thing, Sally, pulling her up like this?”
Salem answered, simply, “I don’t know.”
Salem had insisted on coming out to see her sister’s body raised. “It’s a family thing,” she had said, and Boyd had understood. Now, the recovery vessel standing close by off the port side, she and Boyd waited for word.