“There is a story in the Bahia headquarters of the IEO that she is… overdue. An accident, perhaps. It is said that tomorrow the great Travis Huntington Chen-Lhu himself goes to seek his female Doutor. What do you think of that?”
“He seemed fond of her, when I saw them in Bahia, but this story about…”
“Fond? Oh, yes, indeed.”
“You have an evil mind, Father.” He took a deep breath. The thought of that lovely woman down somewhere in the deep interland where only jungle creatures now lived, dead or maimed—all that beauty—it left Joao with a feeling of sick emptiness.
“Perhaps you’ll wish to march to the west to seek her?”
Joao ignored the jibe, said, “Father, this whole crusade needs a rest period while we find out what’s gone wrong.”
“If you talked that way in Bahia, I don’t blame them for turning on you,” the Prefect said. “Perhaps that mob…”
“You know what we saw in that Plaza!”
“Nonsense, but yesterday’s nonsense. This must stop now. You must do nothing to disturb the equilibrium. I command you!”
“People no longer suspect the bandeirantes,” Joao said, bitterness in his voice.
“Some still suspect you, yes. And why not, if what I’ve heard from your own lips is any sample of the way you talk?”
Joao studied the toes of his boots, the polish glittering black. He found their unmarked surfaces somehow symbolic of his father’s life. “I’m sorry I’ve distressed you, Father,” he said. “Sometimes I regret that I’m a bandeirante, but”—he shrugged—“without that, how could I have learned the things I’ve told you? The truth is…”
“Joao!” His father’s voice quavered. “Do you sit there and tell me you besmirched our honor? Did you swear a false oath when you formed your Irmandades?”
“That’s not the way it was, Father.”
“Oh? Then how was it?”
Joao pulled a sprayman’s emblem from his breast pocket, fingered it. “I believed it… then. We could shape mutated bees to fill every gap in the insect ecology. It was a… Great Crusade. This I believed. Like the people of China, I said: ‘Only the useful shall live!’ And I meant it. But that was quite a few years ago, Father. I’ve come to realize since then that we don’t have complete understanding of what’s useful.”
“It was a mistake to have you educated in North America,” his father said. “I blame myself for that. Yes—I am the one to blame for that. There’s where you absorbed this Carsonite heresy. It’s all well and good for them to refuse to join us in the Ecological Realignment; they don’t have as many millions of mouths to feed. But my own son!”
Joao spoke defensively: “Out in the Red you see things, Father. These things are difficult to explain. Plants look healthier out there. The fruit is…”
“A purely temporary condition,” his father said. “We’ll shape bees to meet whatever need we find. The destroyers take food from our mouths. It’s very simple. They must die and be replaced by creatures which serve a function useful to man.”
“The birds are dying, Father.”
“We’re saving the birds! We’ve specimens of every kind in our sanctuaries. We’ll provide new foods for them to…”
“Some plants already have disappeared from lack of natural pollination.”
“No useful plant has been lost!”
“And what happens,” Joao asked, “if our barriers are breached by the insects before we’ve replaced the population of natural predators? What happens then?”
The elder Martinho shook a thin finger under his son’s nose. “This nonsense must stop! I’ll hear no more of it! Do you hear?”
“Please calm yourself, Father.”
“Calm myself? How can I calm myself in the face of… of… this? You here hiding like a common criminal! Riots in Bahia and Santarem and…”
“Father, stop it!”
“I will not stop it. Do you know what else those mameluco farmers in Lacuia said to me? They said bandeirantes have been seen reinfesting the Green to prolong their jobs! That is what they said.”
“That’s nonsense, Father!”
“Of course it’s nonsense! But it’s a natural consequence of defeatist talk just such as I’ve heard from you here today. And all the setbacks we suffer add strength to such charges.”
“Setbacks, Father?”
“I have said it: setbacks!”
Senhor Prefect Martinho turned, paced to his desk and back. Again, he stopped in front of his son, placed hands on hips. “You refer, of course, to the Piratininga.”
“Among others.”
“Your Irmandades were on that line.”
“Not so much as a flea got through us!”
“Yet a week ago the Piratininga was Green. Today…” He pointed to his desk. “You saw the report. It’s crawling. Crawling!”
“I cannot watch every bandeirante in the Mato Grosso,” Joao said. “If they…”
“The IEO gives us only six months to clean up,” the elder Martinho said. He raised his hands, palms up; his face was flushed. “Six months!”
“If you’d only go to your friends in the government and convince them of what…”
“Convince them? Walk in and tell them to commit political suicide? My friends? Do you know the IEO is threatening to throw an embargo around all Brazil—the way they’ve done with North America?” He lowered his hands. “Can you imagine the pressures on us? Can you imagine the things that I must listen to about the bandeirantes and especially about my own son?”
Joao gripped the sprayman’s emblem until it dug into his palm. A week of this was almost more than he could bear. He longed to be out with his men, preparing for the fight in the Serra dos Parecis. His father had been too long in politics to change—and Joao realized this with a feeling of sickness. He looked up at his father. If only the old man weren’t so excitable—the concern about his heart. “You excite yourself needlessly,” he said.
“Excite myself!”
The Prefect’s nostrils dilated; he bent toward his son. “Already we’ve gone past two deadlines—the Piratininga and the Tefe. That is land in there, don’t you understand? And there are no men on that land, farming it, making it produce!”
“The Piratininga was not a full barrier, Father. We’d just cleared the…”
“Yes! And we gained an extension of deadline when I announced that my son and the redoubtable Benito Alvarez had cleared the Piratininga. How do you explain now that it is reinfested, that we have the work to do over?”
“I don’t explain it.”
Joao returned the sprayman’s emblem to his pocket. It was obvious he wouldn’t be able to reason with his father. It had been growing increasingly obvious throughout the week. Frustration sent a nerve quivering along Joao’s jaw. The old man had to be convinced, though! Someone had to be convinced. Someone of his father’s political stature had to get back to the Bureau, shake them up there and make them listen.
The Prefect returned to his desk, sat down. He picked up an antique crucifix, one that the great Aleihadinho had carved in ivory. He lifted it, obviously seeking to restore his serenity, but his eyes went wide and glaring. Slowly, he returned the crucifix to his desk, keeping his attention on it.
“Joao,” he whispered.
It’s his heart! Joao thought.
He leaped to his feet, rushed to his father’s side. “Father! What is it?”
The elder Martinho pointed, hand trembling.
Through the spiked crown of thorns, across the agonized ivory face, over the straining muscles of the Christ figure crawled an insect. It was the color of the ivory, shaped faintly like a beetle but with a multi-clawed fringe along wings and thorax, and with furry edgings to its abnormally long antennae.