Joao whirled as far as his safety harness would permit, looked back across the savannah. Where the distant cluster of tents had been there now rolled a gray mound that heaved and extruded odd protuberances which flailed and subsided.
With a deep shudder, Joao realized the mound was composed of billions of insects overwhelming the camp.
An eddy caught the pod, turned it away from the scene as though some instinct within Joao controlled the motion to remove from view a thing he no longer could bear to see. For a moment the river shimmered ahead of him with a glassy orange haze. Then night blotted the view. The sky became a luminous silver with a thin slice of moon.
Vierho, Joao thought. Thome… Ramon…
Tears blurred his eyes.
“Oh, God!” Rhin said.
“God, hah!” Chen-Lhu barked. “Another name for the movement of fate!”
Rhin buried her face in her hands. She felt that she was up for try-out in some cosmic drama, without script or rehearsal, without words or music, without knowing her role.
God is a Brazilian, Joao thought, calling to mind his nation’s old expression of self confidence touched by fear. At night, God corrects the errors Brazilians make during the day.
What was it Vierho had always said? “Believe in the Virgin and run.”
Joao felt a sprayrifle across his lap, the metal cold against his hands.
I couldn’t have helped them, he thought. The range was too great.
Chapter VII
“YOU SAID the vehicle would not fly!” the Brain accused.
Its sensors probed the messenger pattern on the cave ceiling, listened for the afferent hum that might expand the meaning. But the configuration revealed on the ceiling by the phosphor-light of servant insects remained firm, as steady as the patch of stars standing in the cave-mouth beyond the messengers.
Chemical demands pulsed through the Brain, sending its servant nurses into a frenzy of ministrations. This was the closest to consternation the Brain had ever experienced. Its logical awareness labeled the experience as an emotion and sought parallel references even while it worked on the substance of the report.
The vehicle flew only a short distance and landed on the river. It remains on the river with its thrusting force dormant.
But it can fly!
The first serious doubt of its information entered the Brain’s computations then. The experience was a form of alienation from the creations which had created it.
“The claim that the vehicle would not fly came directly from the humans,” the messengers danced. “Their assessment was reported.”
It was a pragmatic statement, more to fill out the report predicting the escape try than to defend against the Brain’s accusation.
That fact should have been part of the original report, the Brain thought. The messengers must be taught not to intervene, but report all details complete with weight-by-source. But how can this be done? They’re creatures of firm reflex and tied to a self-limiting system.
Obviously new messengers would have to be designed and bred.
With this thought, the Brain moved even further from its creators. It understood then how an action-of-mimicry, a pure reflex, gave birth to itself, but the Brain, the thing-produced-by-reflex, was having an inevitable feedback effect, changing the original reflexes which had created it.
“What must be done about the vehicle on the river?” the messengers asked.
With its new insight, the Brain saw how this question had been produced—out of survival reflex.
Survival must be served, it thought.
“The vehicle will be allowed to proceed temporarily,” the Brain ordered. “There must be no visible sign of molestation for the time being, but we must prepare safeguards. A cluster of the new little-deadlies will be conveyed to the vehicle under the cover of night. They must be instructed to infiltrate every available hole on the vehicle and remain in hiding. They must not take action against the occupants of the vehicle without orders! But they must stand ready to destroy the occupants whenever necessary.”
The Brain fell silent then, secure in the knowledge that its orders would be carried out. And it took up its new understanding to examine as though this were an autonomous fragment. The experience was both fascinating and terrifying because here, living within its single-self, was an element capable of debate and separate action.
Decisions—conscious decisions, the Brain thought, these are a punishment inflicted upon the single-self by consciousness. There are conscious decisions that can fragment the single-self. How can humans stand up under such a load of decisions?
Chen-Lhu tipped his head back, resting in the corner between the window and rear bulkhead, stared up at the melon-curve of moon lifting across the sky. The moon was the color of molten copper.
An acid-etched frost line ran diagonally down the window to the faired curve of exterior skin. Chen-Lhu’s eyes followed the line and, for a moment as he stared at the place where the window ended beside him, he thought he saw a row of tiny dots, like barely visible gnats marching across the window.
In an eyeblink, they vanished.
Did I imagine them? he wondered.
He thought of alerting the others, but Rhin had been near hysteria for almost an hour now since witnessing the death of their camp. She’d have to be nursed back to usefulness.
I could’ve imagined them, Chen-Lhu thought. Only the moon for illumination—spots in front of my eyes; nothing unusual about that.
The river had narrowed here to no more than six or seven times the pod’s wingspan. A shadowy wall of overhanging trees hemmed in the track of water.
“Johnny, turn on the wing lights for a few minutes,” Chen-Lhu said.
“Why?”
“They’ll see us if we do,” Rhin said.
She heard the almost-hysteria in her own voice and was shocked by it. I’m an entomologist, she told herself. Whatever’s out there, it’s just a variation on something familiar.
But this reasoning lacked comfort. She realized that some primal fear had touched her, arousing instincts with which reason could not contend.
“Make no mistake,” Chen-Lhu said, and he tried to speak softly, reasonably. “Whatever overwhelmed our friends… it knows where we are. I merely wish the light to confirm a suspicion.”
“Are we being followed, eh?” Joao asked.
He snapped on the wing lights. The sudden glare picked out two caverns of brilliance that filled with fluttering, darting insects—a white-winged mob.
The current swung the pod around a bend. Their lights touched the river bank, outlined twisting medusa roots that clutched dark red clay, then swung with the vagaries of an eddy to pick out a narrow island—tall reeds and grass bending to the current, and the cold green reflections of eyes just above the water.
Joao snapped off the lights.
In the abrupt darkness, they heard the whining hum of insects and the metallic chime calls of river frogs… then, like a delayed comment, the coughing barks of a troop of red monkeys somewhere on the right shore.
The presence of the frogs and monkeys, Joao felt, carried a significance that he should understand. The significance eluded him.
Ahead, he could see bats flicker across the moonlit river, skimming the water to drink.
“They’re following us… watching, waiting,” Rhin said.