“Investigate, you say,” the old man mocked him. “Investigate what? Right now we don’t want investigation and suspicions. The government, thanks to a week of work by my friends, takes the attitude that everything’s normal. They’re almost ready to blame the Carsonites for the Bahia tragedy.”
“But they have no evidence,” Joao said. “You admitted that yourself.”
“Evidence is of no importance in such a time,” his father said. “All that counts is that we move suspicion far away from ourselves. We must gain time. Besides, this is the very sort of thing the Carsonites might’ve done.”
“But might not’ve done,” Joao said.
It was as though the old man had not heard. “Just last week,” he said, gesturing with arm swinging wide, “the day before you arrived here like an insane whirlwind—that very day, I spoke to the Lacuia farmers at the request of my friend the Minister of Agriculture. And do you know that rabble laughed at me! I said we’d increase the Green by ten thousand hectares this month. They laughed. They said: ‘Your own son doesn’t even believe this!’ I see now why they say such things. Stop the march to the west, indeed.”
“You’ve seen the reports from Bahia,” Joao said. “The IEO’s own investigators …”
“The IEO! That sly Chinese whose face tells you nothing. He is more bahiano than the bahianos themselves, that sly one. And this new female Doutor he sends everywhere to snoop and pry. His mae de santo, his sidaga—the stories you hear about that one, I can tell you. Only yesterday, it was said …”
“I don’t want to hear!”
The old man fell silent, stared down at him. “Ahhhh?”
“Ahhhh!” Joao said. “What does that mean?”
“That means Ahhhh!” the old man said.
“She’s a very beautiful woman,” Joao said.
“So I have heard it reported. And many men have sampled that beauty … so it is said.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“Joao,” the Prefect said, “listen to an old man whose experience has given him wisdom. That is a dangerous woman. She is owned body and soul by the IEO, which is an organization that often interferes with our business. You, you are an empreiteiro, a contractor of renown, whose abilities and successes are sure to have aroused envy in some quarters. That woman is supposed to be a Doutor of the insects, but her actions say she has a cabide de empregos. She has a hatstand of jobs. And some of those jobs, ahh, some of those jobs …”
“That’s enough, Father!”
“As you wish.”
“She is supposed to come here soon,” Joao said. “I don’t want your present attitude to …”
“There may be a delay in her visit,” the Prefect said. Joao studied him. “Why?”
“Tuesday last, the day after your little Bahia episode, she was sent to the Goyaz. That very night or the next morning; it is not important.”
“Oh?”
“You know what she does in the Goyaz, of course—those stories about a secret bandeirante base there. She is prying into that … if she still lives.”
Joao’s head snapped up. “What?”
“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.
The elder Martinho reached for a roll of papers to smash the insect, but Joao restrained him with a hand. “Wait. This a new one. I’ve never seen anything like it. Give me a handlight. We must follow it, find where it nests.”
The Prefect muttered under his breath, withdrew a small permalight from a desk drawer, handed the light to his son.
Joao held the light without using it, peered at the insect. “How strange it is,” he said. “See how it exactly matches the tones of ivory.”
The insect stopped, pointed its antennae toward the men.
“Things have been seen,” Joao said. “There are stories. Something like this was found near one of the barrier villages last month. It was inside the Green … on a path beside a river. Remember the report? Two farmers found it while searching for a sick man.” Joao looked at his father. “They’re very watchful for sickness in the newly Green, you know. There’ve been epidemics … and that’s another thing.”
“There’s no relationship,” his father snapped. “Without insects to carry diseases, we’ll have less illness.”
“Perhaps,” Joao said, but his tone said he didn’t believe it.
Joao returned his attention to the insect on the crucifix. “I don’t think our ecologists know all they say they do. And I mistrust our Chinese advisors. They speak in such flowery terms of the benefits from eliminating insect pests, but they won’t let us inspect their Green. Excuses. Always excuses. I think they’re having troubles they don’t wish us to discover.”
“That’s foolishness,” the elder Martinho growled, but his tone said this wasn’t a position he cared to defend. “They are honorable men—with a few exceptions I could name. And their way of life is closer to our socialism than it is to the decadent capitalism of North America. Your trouble is you see them too much through the eyes of those who educated you.”
“I’ll wager this insect’s one of the spontaneous mutations,” Joao said. “It’s almost as though they appeared by some plan … . Find me something in which to capture this creature and take it to the lab.”
The elder Martinho remained standing beside his chair. “Where’ll you say it was found?”
“Right here.”
“You would not hesitate to expose us to more ridicule, is that it?”
“But Father …”
“Can’t you hear what they’ll say? In his own home this insect is found. It’s a strange new kind. Perhaps he breeds them there to reinfest the Green.”
“Now, you’re talking nonsense, Father. Mutations are common in a threatened species. And we can’t deny there’s threat to these insects—the poisons, the barrier vibrations, the traps. Get me that container, Father. I can’t leave this creature, or I’d get the container myself.”
“And you will tell where it was found?”
“I can do nothing else! We must cordon off this entire area, search out the nests. This could be … an accident, of course, but …”
“Or a deliberate attempt to embarrass me.”
Joao looked up, studied his father. That was a possibility, of course. His father did have enemies. And the Carsonites were always there to be considered. They had friends in many places … and some were fanatics who’d stoop to any scheme. Still …
Decision came to Joao. He returned his attention to the motionless insect. His father had to be convinced, and here was the perfect lever for the argument.
“Look at this creature, Father,” he said.
The Prefect turned a reluctant gaze on the insect.
“Our earliest poisons,” Joao said, “killed off the weak and selected out those immune to this threat from humans. Only the immune remained to breed. The poisons we use now—some of them—don’t leave such loopholes … and the deadly vibrations at the barriers …” He shrugged. “Still, this is a form of beetle, Father, and somehow it got through the barriers. I’ll show you a thing.”
Joao drew a long, thin whistle of shiny metal from his breast pocket. “There was a time when this called countless beetles to their deaths. I merely had to tune it across their attraction spectrum.” He put the whistle to his lips, blew into it, all the while turning the end of it.
No sound audible to human ears emerged from the instrument, but the beetle’s antennae writhed.
Joao removed the whistle from his mouth.
The antennae stopped writhing.
“It stayed put, you see,” Joao said. “It’s a beetle and should be attracted by this whistle, but it did not move. And I think, Father, that there’re indications of malignant intelligence among these creatures. They’re far from extinction, Father … and I believe they’re beginning to strike back.”
“Malignant intelligence, pah!” his father said.
“You must believe me, Father,” Joao said. “No one listens when we bandeirantes report what we’ve seen. They laugh and say we are too long in the jungle. And where’s our evidence? They say such stories could be expected from ignorant farmers … then they begin to doubt and suspect us.”
“With good reason, I say.”
“You will not be
lieve your own son?”
“What has my son said that I can believe?” The elder Martinho was totally the Prefect now, standing erect, glaring coldly at Joao.
“In the Goyaz last month,” Joao said, “Antonil Lisboa’s bandeirante lost three men who …”
“Accidents.”
“They were killed with formic acid and oil of copahu.”
“They were careless with their poisons. Men grow careless when they …”
“No! The formic acid was particularly strong, a heavy concentrate, and identical to that of insect origin. The men were drenched with it.”
“You imply that insects such as this …” The Prefect pointed to the motionless creature on the crucifix. “That blind creatures such as this …”
“They’re not blind.”
“I did not mean literally blind, but without intelligence,” the Prefect said. “You cannot seriously imply that such creatures attacked humans and killed them.”
“We’ve yet to determine precisely how the men were slain,” Joao said. “We’ve only the bodies and physical evidence at the scene. But there’ve been other deaths, Father, and men missing, and reports of strange creatures that attack bandeirantes. We grow more certain with each day that …”
He fell silent as the beetle crawled off the crucifix onto the desk. Immediately it darkened to brown, blended with the wood surface.
“Please, Father—get me a container.”
The beetle reached the edge of the desk, hesitated. Its antennae curled back, then forward.
“I’ll get your container only if you promise to use discretion in your report of where this creature was found,” the Prefect said.
“Father, I …”
The beetle leaped off the desk far out into the middle of the room, scurried toward the wall, up the wall and into a crack beside the window.
Joao pressed the handlight’s switch, directed the beam into the hole which had swallowed the insect. He crossed the room, examined the hole.
“How long has this hole been here, Father?”
“For years. It was a flaw in the masonry … an earthquake several years before your mother died, I believe.”
The Green Brain Page 6