"You watch me, Johnny," Chen-Lhu said. "What do you think you see?"
Two can play that game, Joao thought. And he said, "I watch a man at work."
Chen-Lhu stared. It wasn't the kind of answer he'd expected -- too subtly penetrating and leaving too much uncommitted. He reminded himself that it was difficult to control uncommitted people. Once a man had invested his energies, he could be twisted and turned at will . . . but if the man held back, conserved those energies . . .
"Do you think you understand me, Johnny?" Chen-Lhu asked.
"No, I don't understand you."
"Really, I'm quite uncomplicated; it's not difficult to understand me," Chen-Lhu said.
"That's one of the most complicated statements any man ever made," Joao said.
"Do you mock me?" Chen-Lhu asked, and he put down an upsurge of dismay and anger. Johnny was acting most out of character.
"How could I mock if I don't understand?" Joao asked.
"Something has come over you," Chen-Lhu said. "What is it? You are behaving most strangely."
"Now we understand each other," Joao said.
He goads me, Chen-Lhu thought. HE goads ME! And he asked himself: Will I have to kill this fool?
"See how easy it is to keep busy and forget our troubles," Joao said.
Rhin glanced back at Chen-Lhu, saw a smile spread across his face. He was speaking mostly for my benefit, she thought. Wealth and pleasures -- that's the price. But what do I pay? She looked at Joao. Yes, I hand him a bandeirante on a platter. I give him Joao to use as he sees fit.
The pod floated backward down the river now, and Rhin stared upstream at hills that disappeared into drifting clouds. Why do I bother with such questions? she wondered. We don't stand a chance. There are only these moments and the opportunity to take whatever pleasure we can from them.
"Are we down a little on the right side?" Joao asked.
"Perhaps a little," Chen-Lhu said. "Do you think your patch is leaking?"
"It could be."
"Do you have a pump in this stuff?"
"We could use a sprayhead from one of the hand units," Joao said.
Rhin's mind focused now on the weapon in Joao's pocket, and she said, "Joao, don't let them capture me alive."
"Ahh, melodrama," Chen-Lhu said.
"Leave her alone!" Joao snapped. He patted Rhin's hand, looked out and around the pod on all sides. "Why do they leave us alone like this?"
"They've found a new place to wait," Rhin said.
"Always look on the black side," Chen-Lhu said. "What is the worst that could happen, eh? Perhaps they want our heads in the fashion of the aborigines who lived here once."
"You're a great help," Joao said. "Hand me the spray-head off one of those hand units."
"At once, Jefe," Chen-Lhu said, his voice mocking.
Joao accepted the metal and plastic hand pump unit, slipped back to the rear hatch and down to the float. He paused there a moment to study their surroundings.
Not a sign of the creatures he knew were watching them.
Downstream at a bend in the river, a rock escarpment loomed high over the trees -- distance perhaps five or six kilometers.
Lava rock, Joao thought. And the river may have to get through that rock some way.
He bent to the float, unlocked the inspection plate and probed with the pump. A hollow sloshing echoed from the interior of the pontoon. He braced the pump against the side of the inspection hole, worked the toggle handle. A thin stream of water arched into the river, smelling of poisons from the sprayhead.
The yelping cry of a toucan sounded from the jungle on his right and he could hear the murmur of Chen-Lhu's voice from the cabin.
What is it he talks about when I'm not there? Joao wondered.
He looked up in time to see that the bend in the river was wider than he'd expected. The current carried the pod now away from the rock escarpment. The fact gave Joao no elation. The river could meander a hundred kilometers through here in this season and return to within a kilometer of where we are now, he thought.
Rhin's voice lifted suddenly, her words distinct in the damp air: "You son of a bitch!"
And Chen-Lhu answered, "Ancestry is no longer important in my land, Rhin."
The pump sucked air with a wet gurgling, the sound drowning Rhin's reply. Joao replaced the cap on the inspection hole, returned to the cabin.
Rhin sat with arms folded, face forward. A red blush of anger colored her neck.
Joao wedged the pump into the corner beside the hatch, looked at Chen-Lhu.
"There was water in the float," Chen-Lhu said, his voice smooth. "I heard it."
Yes, I'll bet you did, Joao thought. What's your game, Dr. Travis-Huntington Chen-Lhu? Is it idle sport? Do you goad people for your own amusement, or is it some-thing deeper?
Joao slipped into his seat.
The pod danced across a pattern of eddy ripples, turned and faced downstream toward a shaft of sunlight that stabbed through the clouds. Slowly, great patches of blue opened in the clouds.
"There's the sun, the good old sun," Rhin said, "now that we don't need it."
A need for male protection came over Rhin, and she leaned her head against Joao's shoulder. "It's going to be sticky hot," she whispered.
"If you'd like to be alone, I could step out on the float," Chen-Lhu mocked.
"Ignore the bastard," Rhin said.
Do I dare ignore him? Joao wondered. Is that her purpose -- to make me ignore him? Do I dare?
Her hair gave off a scent of musk that threatened to clog Joao's reason. He took a deep breath, shook his head. What is it with this woman . . . this changeable, mercuric . . . female"
"You've had lots of girls, haven't you?" Rhin asked.
Her words elicited memory images that flashed through Joao's mind -- doe-brown eyes with a distant look of cunning: eyes, eyes, eyes . . . all alike. And lush figures in tight bodices or mounding white sheets . . . warm beneath his hands.
"Any special girl?" Rhin asked.
And Chen-Lhu wondered: Why does she do this? Is she seeking self justification, reasons to treat him as I wish her to treat him?
"I've been very busy," Joao said.
"I'll bet you have," she said.
"What's that mean?"
"There's some girl back there in the Green . . . ripe as a mango. What's she like?"
He shrugged, moving her head, but she remained pressed close to him, looking up at his jawline where no beard grew. He has Indian blood, she thought. No beard: Indian blood.
"Is she beautiful?" Rhin persisted.
"Many women are beautiful," he said.
"One of those dark, full-breasted types, I'll bet," she said. "Have you had her to bed?"
And Joao thought: What does this mean? That we're all bohemian types together?
"A gentleman," Rhin said. "He refused to answer."
She pushed herself up, sat back in her own corner, angry and wondering why she had done that. Do I torture myself? Do I want this Joao Martinho for my own, to have and to hold? To hell with it!
"Many families are strict with their women down here," Chen-Lhu said. "Very Victorian."
"Weren't you ever human, Travis?" Rhin asked. "Even for just a day or so?"
"Shut up!" Chen-Lhu barked, and he sat back astonished at himself. The bitch! How did she get through to me like that?
Ahhh, Joao thought, she touched a nerve.
"What made an animal out of you, Travis?" Rhin asked.
He had himself under control, though, and all he said was, "You have a sharp tongue, my dear. Too bad your mind doesn't match it."
"That's not up to your usual standards, Travis," she said, and she smiled at Joao.
But Joao had heard the crying-out in their voices and he remembered Vierho, the Padre, so solemn, saying, "A person cries out against life because it's lonely, and because life's broken off from whatever created it. But no matter how much you hate life, you love it, too. It's like a caldron bo
iling with everything you have to have -- but very painful to the lips."
Abruptly Joao reached out, pulled Rhin to him and kissed her, pressing her against him, digging his hands into her back. Her lips responded after only the briefest hesitation -- warm, tingling.
Presently he pulled away, pressed her firmly into her seat and leaned back on his own side.
When she could catch her breath, Rhin said, "Now, what was that all about?"
"There's a little animal in all of us," Joao said.
Does he defend me? Chen-Lhu asked himself, sitting bolt upright. I don't need defense from such as that!
But Rhin laughed, shattering his anger, and reached out to caress Joao's cheek. "Isn't there just," she said.
And Chen-Lhu thought: She is only doing her job. How beautifully she works. Such consummate artistry. It would be a shame to have to kill her.
IX
They have such a talent for occupying themselves with inconsequentials, these humans, the Brain thought. Even in the face of terrible pressures, they argue and make love and throw trivialities into the air.
Messengers relays came and went through the rain and sunshine that alternated outside the cave mouth. There was little hesitation over commands now; the essential decision had been made: "Capture or kill the three humans at the chasm; save their heads in vivo if you can."
Still, the reports came because the Brain had ordered: "Report to me everything they say."
So much talk of God, the Brain thought. Is it possible such a Being exists?
And the Brain reflected that certainly the humans' accomplishments carried an air of grandeur that belied the triviality of their reported actions.
Is it possible this triviality is a code of some sort? the Brain wondered. But how could it be . . . unless there's more to these emotional inconsequentials and this talk of a God than appears on the surface?
The Brain had begun its career in logics as a pragmatic atheist. Now doubts began to creep into its computations, and it classified doubt as an emotion.
Still, they must be stopped, the Brain thought. No matter the cost, they must be stopped. The issue is too important . . . even for this fascinating trio. If they are lost, I shall try to mourn them.
***
Rhin felt that they floated in a bowl of burning sunlight with the crippled pod at its center. The cabin was a moist hell pressing in upon her. The drip-drip feeling of perspiration and the smell of bodily closeness, the omnipresent tang of mildew, all of it gnawed at her awareness. Not an animal stirred or cried from either passing shore.
Only an occasional insect flitting across their path reminded her of the watchers in the jungle shadows.
If it wasn't for the bugs, she thought. The goddamn bugs! And the heat -- the goddamn heat.
An abrupt hysteria seized her and she cried out, "Can't we do anything?"
She began to laugh crazily.
Joao grabbed her shoulders, shook her until she subsided into dry sobs.
"Oh, please, please do something," she begged. Joao forced all pity out of his voice in the effort to calm her. "Get hold of yourself, Rhin."
"Those goddamn bugs," she said.
Chen-Lhu's voice rumbled at her from the rear of the cabin: "You will please keep in mind, Doctor Kelly, that you're an entomologist."
"And I'm going bugs," she said. This struck her as amusing and again she started to laugh. One shake from Joao's arms stopped her. She reached up, took his hands, said, "I'm all right; really I am. It's the heat."
Joao looked into her eyes. "Are you sure?"
"Yes."
She disengaged herself, sat back in her corner, stared out the window. The sweeping passage of shoreline caught her eyes hypnotically: fused movement. It was like time -- the immediate past never quite discarded, no fixed starting point for the future -- all one, all melted into one gliding, stretched-out forever. . . . What ever made me choose this career? she wondered. As though in answer, she found projected upon her memory the full sequence of an event she'd left buried in her childhood. She'd been six and it was the year her father spent in the American West doing his book about Johannes Kelpius. They'd lived in an old adobe house and flying ants had made a nest against the wall. Her father had sent a handyman to burn out the nest and she had crouched to watch. There'd been the smell of kerosene, a sudden burst of yellow flame in sunlight, black smoke and a cloud of whirling insects with pale amber wings enveloping her in their frenzy.
She'd run screaming into the house, winged creatures crawling over her, clinging to her. And in the house: adult anger, hands thrusting her into a bathroom, a voice commanding, "Clean those bugs off you! The very idea, bringing them into the house. See you don't leave a one on the floor. Kill them and flush them down the toilet."
For a time that had seemed forever, she'd screamed and pounded and kicked against the locked door. "They won't die! They won't die!"
Rhin shook her head to drive out the memory. They won't die," she whispered.
"What?" Joao asked. "Nothing," she said. "What time is it?"
"It'll be dark soon."
She kept her attention on the passing shore -- tree ferns and cabbage palms here, with rising water beginning to pour off around their trunks. But the river was wide and its central current still swift. In the spotted sunlight beyond the trees, she thought she saw flitting movements of color.
Birds, she hoped.
Whatever they were, the things moved so fast she felt she saw them only after they were gone.
Thick billowings of clouds began filling the eastern horizon with a look of depth and weight and blackness. Lightning flickered soundlessly beneath them. A long interval afterward, the thunder came a low, sodden hammerstroke.
The heaviness of waiting hung over the river and the jungle. Currents crawled around the pod like writhing serpents -- a muddy brown velvet oozing motion that harried the floats: push and turn . . . push, twist and turn. It's the waiting, Rhin thought.
Tears slipped down her cheeks and she wiped them away.
"Is something wrong, my dear?" Chen-Lhu asked. She wanted to laugh, but knew laughter would drag her back into hysteria. "If you aren't the banal son of a bitch!" she said. "Something wrong!"
"Ahhh, we still have our fighting spirit," Chen-Lhu said.
Luminous gray darkness of a cloud shadow flowed across the pod, flattened all contrast. Joao watched a line of rain surge across the water whipped toward him by bursts of wind. Again, lightning flickered. The growl of thunder came faster, sharper. The sound set off a band of howler monkeys on the left shore. Their cries echoed across the water.
Darkness built up its hold on the river. Briefly, the clouds parted in the west and presented a sky like a sheet of burnished turquoise that drifted swiftly from yellow into a deep wine as red as a bishop's clock. The river looked black and oily. Clouds dropped across the sunset and once more a jagged fire-plume of lightning etched itself against the distance.
The rain took up its endless stammering on the canopy, washing the shorelines into dove-gray mist. Night covered the scene.
"Oh, God, I'm scared," Rhin whispered. "Oh, God, I'm scared. Oh, God, I'm scared."
Joao found he had no words to comfort her. Their world and everything it demanded of them had gone beyond words, all transformed into an elemental flowing indistinguishable from the river itself.
A din of frogs came out of the night and they heard water hissing through reeds. Not even the faintest glow of moonlight penetrated the clouded darkness. Frogs and hissing reeds faded. The pod and its three occupants returned to a world of beating rain suspended above a faint wash of river against floats.
"It's very strange, this being hunted," Chen-Lhu whispered.
The words fell on Joao as though they came from some disembodied source. He tried to recall Chen-Lhu's appearance and was astonished when no image came into his mind. He searched for something to say and all he could find was: "We're not dead yet."
Thank you, Johnny, Ch
en-Lhu thought. I needed some such nonsense from you to put things into perspective. He chuckled silently to himself, thinking: Fear is the penalty of consciousness. There's no weakness in fear . . . only in showing it. Good, evil -- it's all a matter of how you view it, with a god or without one.
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