Phylogenesis (32 page)

“You’re full of surprises, bug.”

The heart-shaped head and its great golden eyes turned toward him. “My name is Desvendapur.”

“Ay, right.” He reached out with both hands. “I’ll take that now. Not that I don’t think you can use it, but I’m probably a better shot than you.” As the poet complaisantly handed over the weapon, Cheelo added by way of afterthought, “You
do
know how to use it, don’t you? You weren’t bluffing?”

“Oh, I’m sure I could have activated it. The firing mechanism is simple, and although the weapon is designed for human arms and hands, it fits well enough in mine. I would never have done so, of course.”

“What’s that?” Maruco strained to make certain he had heard properly.

“Although we have had to fight to defend ourselves in the past, and have evolved from primitive ancestors who battled constantly among themselves, we have become a peaceful species.” Antennae bobbed elaborately. “I could never have shot you unless my life was directly threatened.”

“It was threatened!” Cheelo reminded him.

The thranx shook its head, further surprising the poachers by its mastery and utilization of a common human gesture. “My freedom of movement was at risk, not my life. Although my preference is to return to the colony, I could have tolerated being transported to another part of your planet, could have lost myself in exposure to an entirely new environment and surroundings.”

Maruco blinked. “Then why did you pick up the gun in the first place?”

“As I said, because for many reasons I would prefer to return to the hive. Also because my life and freedom of movement were not the only ones at stake.” Both antennae dipped in Cheelo’s direction.

A welter of conflicting emotion surged to the fore within the thief as the thranx’s words sank in. It didn’t object to being sold. It had picked up the rifle for his sake as much as for its own. Confronted by the rara avis of actual, genuine emotion, he had no idea how to respond, did not know what to say.

Screw it.

“Come on, Deswhel—Desvencrapur. We’re outta here.” With the rifle, he gestured at Maruco. “I want the airtruck. I told you, I’ve got an appointment to keep. If coaxed right, I think that truck’ll make it all the way up to the isthmus.”

Keeping his hands in plain sight, the angry poacher nodded in the direction of the accessway that connected the ridge-top living quarters to the shop and garage. “You’ll leave us marooned here.”

“Bullshit.” Cheelo laughed, enjoying the turn of events fully. “Your buyers are going to come running, and they’ll be bringing their own transportation.” He grinned broadly. “Of course, they’re not gonna be real happy with you when they find out that the prize you offered them decided not to hang around. Now, what about that truck?”

“It’s an open design,” Hapec told him. “Take it. I just have to unlock the navigation system.”

“Like hell. All you have to do is activate the cencomp. You think I’m gonna give you a chance to program the engine for self-destruct? D’you think I was born dumb, like you two?” Maruco’s expression tightened, but the poacher said nothing.

“Let’s go.” Cheelo gestured with the muzzle. “Despindo—Des, you follow me. We’ll get as close to this colony of yours as you think we safely can, and I’ll drop you there.”

“Colony?” Maruco’s small black eyes blinked. “What colony?”

Cheelo ignored him, waiting for the thranx’s reply.

“Among my people I am guilty of the most egregious antisocial activity. They would confine me until I could be sent offworld for more formal punishment. So if you do not object, Cheelo Montoya, I would rather continue to travel in your company. For a little while longer, at least.”

“No can do, big-eyes. This boy’s jungle jaunt is over. I got to fly a long ways now, or I’m gonna be late for the dance. Besides, don’t you have your poems, your compositions, to perform for your fellow bugs?”

The blue-green head swayed gently from side to side. “Insufficiently mitigating circumstances, I am afraid. I would far rather continue my ruminations, would much prefer to seek additional inspiration. Some day, of course, I will reveal them to all the hives. But not yet.” Overhead lighting sparkled in his eyes, imparting to the multiple lenses a muted crystalline gleam. “There is still so much more I wish to do.”

“Have it your way.” An indifferent Cheelo gestured again with the rifle. Plenty of time to decide what to do with the bug once they were safely back down in the rain forest. As the two poachers stumbled off ahead of him, Maruco looked back over his shoulder.

“What were you saying about a colony? There’s a whole colony of ’em here on Earth? Down in the Reserva? I never heard nothing about anything like that.”

“Shut your face and keep moving. I know the truck’s coded, so you’re going to start it for me.”

“Then it’s true! There’s an alien outpost in the Reserva that’s being kept from the public.” Rising excitement dominated the poacher’s voice. “And you didn’t say outpost; you said colony.” He looked over at his partner. “This might be the biggest secret on the planet. Any one of the fifty big media groups would pay a lifetime annuity for that kind of information. It’s worth a helluva lot more than one live bug.” Once more he looked back at the stony-faced Cheelo.

“What do you say,
vato
? We’ve got the facilities here for communicating worldwide while hiding the source of the signal. We sell the information to the highest bidder and split it three ways. Nobody gets sold; nobody gets hurt. Plenty credit for everybody.” When Cheelo failed to respond, Maruco’s agitation increased. “Hell, we don’t need
you
to sell it. But the Reserva’s a big place, and this colony or base or whatever it is must be really well hid. Hapec and I are down there a lot, and we’ve sure never suspected anything like this was there.
You
know where it is. Whatever media group buys in ain’t going to want to go hunting for the place. They’ll want to set down right on top of it, before some competitor gets wind of what’s going on.” His voice fell slightly. “You
do
know where it is?”

“Pretty much,” Cheelo lied. “Close enough so that anybody interested could find it within a week.”

“Well come on then, man! Don’t waft this off. We can be partners. All of us, we’ll be rich.”

“First you were going to kill me,” Cheelo reminded him, his tone chilly. “Then you were going to sell me as a talking accessory to a bug.”

“Heyyy,” the poacher demurred, “it was nothing
personal
.” They were approaching the garage. “That was just business. You’re a businessman,
chingón
. That was business then; this is business now. You need our business contacts; we need what you know.”

Cheelo found himself growing confused. The poacher’s insinuating spiel was beguiling. “What about the bu—about Des. He may be an outcast among his own people, but he’d never agree to the premature exposure of the colony.”

“
Chinga
the bug,” Maruco snapped. “If it has a problem with this, blow its stinking guts out. We don’t need it no more. What do you care? It’s just a big, ugly, alien
bug
.”

“It’s intelligent. Probably more so than either of you two. Probably…probably more than me. It’s…it’s an artist.”

Maruco laughed madly as they entered the garage. The airtruck rested where it had been parked, sleek and silent, its propulsion system fully recharged and awaiting only coded reactivation. With it at his disposal Cheelo knew he could reach Golfito. Or at least Gatun, where he had friends and could safely refuel.

His finger tightened imperceptibly on the rifle’s trigger. “It’s not funny. I used to think it was, but I’ve changed my mind. So now what the hell am I supposed to do? Trust you?”

“Yeah, you can trust us. Can’t he, Hapec?”

“Sure. Why should we do anything? We need you to show the site to whoever buys the story,” the other poacher observed. As he spoke, he was drifting to his left, toward a wall lined with tools.

“Don’t even think about it.” The muzzle of the rifle flicked sideways so that it was aimed straight at the bigger man’s back. As soon as it shifted away from him, Maruco whirled. A compact, high-strung bundle of muscle and furious energy, he threw himself at Cheelo.

21

A
s he tried to bring the rifle around to bear on his attacker, Cheelo’s finger contracted reflexively on the trigger. A tiny, very intense, and highly localized sonic boom echoed through the building. Hapec gazed down in disbelief at the small but lethal hole that the sonic burst had punched through him from stomach to spine. Even as he clasped both hands over the perforation, blood began to gush forth between his fingers. Mouth gaping in a silent “O” of surprise, he staggered toward the two combatants before sinking to his knees and then toppling languidly forward, like a brown iceberg calving from the face of a glacier, to the floor of the garage.

Maruco managed to grab the muzzle of the rifle before Cheelo could bring it around for a second shot. They struggled violently and in complete silence for possession of the weapon—until a second boom rattled the diminutive oneway windows that lined the walls of the enclosure.

Thorax pumping, Desvendapur pressed back against the airtruck and contemplated the bloody panorama spread out before him. Two humans lay dead on the floor, their body fluids leaking from their ruptured circulatory systems. Only one remained standing, the weapon dangling loosely from a hand. Heart pounding, chest heaving, Cheelo stood staring down at the body of Maruco lying at his feet like a broken doll.

Desvendapur had of course read of such violence, and he knew of it from the evidence of his own family history. Here was the sort of confrontation that harked back to the time when the AAnn had attacked Paszex and wiped out most of his ancestors. But despite holding the weapon earlier himself he had not really expected to have to use it. This was the first time he had ever witnessed such savagery in person. “This—this is barbaric! A terrible thing!” Wonderful new phrases were already evolving unbidden in his brain, refusing to be ignored.

Cheelo took a deep breath. “It sure is. Now we’ll never learn the activation code for the truck. We’re stuck.”

The poet’s eyes rose to fix the surviving biped in their multilenticular stare. “I don’t mean that. I mean that two sapient beings are dead.”

Cheelo pushed out his lower lip. “Nothing terrible about that. Not as far as I’m concerned.” His voice rose in protest. “Hey, you think I
wanted
to shoot them?” Desvendapur took a wary step in the direction of the accessway. “Take it easy. The conversation got kind of tense, I got a little confused, and they tried to jump me.” When the alien did not respond, Cheelo became upset. “Look, I’m telling you the truth. They thought I was going to shoot them after they activated the truck. I wasn’t going to. Sure, I
wanted
to, but I was going to leave them alive. All I wanted was out of here so I could get to my meeting. And before you go getting all bent out of joint, remember that they’d figured it out, about your being from a colony and all. If they’d been left here they still could’ve sold that information. Look at it like this: I had to shoot them to protect your people down in the Reserva.”

“They might have tried to persuade others to go looking for the hive, but without specific coordinates they would never have found it. Never.” Desvendapur continued to eye the biped accusingly, or at least in a manner that the defensive Cheelo continued to interpret as accusing.

“It doesn’t matter,” Cheelo finally declared curtly. “They’re dead and we’re not. Believe me, it’s no loss to the species.”

“The death of any sapient is a loss.”

His human companion uttered several sharply intoned words whose meaning the thranx did not recognize. “I don’t know about species wide, but there are sure some variations in our individual values.” With the muzzle of the rifle he roughly nudged the corpse at his feet. Maruco the poacher did not move and would not poach again.

Walking over to the tool rack, Cheelo snapped the rifle into an empty charging cradle and turned to ponder the silent airtruck. “I can try to start this big bastard up, but unless these guys were completely confident in their isolation here, or were total idiots, there are probably about two million possible key codes.” His gaze rose to the nearest of the one-way windows. “You saw the country around here on the way in. This place is really isolated. There’s nothing nearby but some automated farming projects. We can try for one.”

“I do not think so.” Desvendapur argued.

“Why not?” His respiration slowly returning to normal, Cheelo stared at the thranx.

“While you were fighting with our captors I was hearing voices from their communicator. Someone with an especially authoritative voice was demanding to know where the one called Maruco had gone. When no response was forthcoming, the transmission was terminated with the words ‘See you soon you little shit.’ While I do not interpret that to mean that the speaker’s appearance is imminent, it struck me as a promise to arrive in a finite period of time.”

“You’re right. Dammit!” Cheelo thought furiously. “I forgot about their bug buyers. We’d better not be around when they show up.” A look of distaste on his face, he calmly contemplated the human debris staining the floor. “Help me with these two.” Moving off, he searched for the manual door opener he knew had to exist.

“What are we going to do? Carry out some kind of formal burial ritual?” Despite his dismay at the carnage that had occurred, it would not prevent the poet from recording the details of what promised to be a particularly fascinating human rite.

“More like an informal one.” Locating a control panel, Cheelo brushed touchplates, activating lights, servos, and an automatic washer before finding the one that operated the garage door. Cold, intensely dry air swept in from outside as the barrier rattled upward.

Working together, they hauled the bodies of the two poachers one at a time to the rim of the nearest obliging precipice and shoved them over the edge, watching as each limp lump of dead meat rolled and bumped its way into cloud-swathed oblivion. Desvendapur was disappointed by the lack of ceremony, having anticipated a certain amount of exotic alien chanting or dancing. But the biped who had become his companion mouthed only a few words, and none of them struck the poet as especially complimentary to or respectful of the deceased.

That onerous duty done, they returned to the deserted outpost where Desvendapur did his best to assist the human in cleansing the garage floor of blood. When he was satisfied, Cheelo stepped back to survey their work, wiping sweat from his forehead. Though the exudation of clear fluid by the biped’s body as a means of maintaining its internal temperature was a process Desvendapur had already observed in the forest, he never ceased to be captivated by it.

“There!” Cheelo sighed tiredly. “When their buyers arrive, they won’t know where their favorite
ninlocos
have hopped off to. They’ll see that the airtruck is still here—we can’t do anything about that—but that won’t automatically lead them to assume that something’s happened to them. They’ll start a search, but one that’s considered and unhurried. By the time they find the bodies,
if
they find the bodies, and figure out that maybe they ought to be looking for somebody like us—or like me, anyway—we’ll both be safe and out of sight back down in the Reserva. I know if I follow the river it’ll take me into Sintuya, where I can book a flight back to Lima. I still have enough time to make it to Golfito.” Walking back to the wall, he yanked the sonic rifle free from the charging bracket.

“Expensive little toy, this.” He rotated the sophisticated weapon in his hands. “So our trip up here wasn’t a total loss. Let’s help ourselves to the pantry and get out of here before nanny shows up.”

“I cannot.”

Cheelo blinked at the alien. “What d’you mean, ‘you cannot’? You sure as hell can’t stay here.” He indicated a window that revealed the barren plateau outside. “Whoever comes looking for those two
ninlocos
won’t hesitate about shoving you in a cage.” Nobody’d make any money off it, either, he reflected.

“I will explain matters to them. That I wish to study them.” Antennae bobbed. “Perhaps a mutual accommodation can be reached.”

“You can take your goddamn studying for inspiration and…!” Cheelo calmed himself, remembering that the visibly flinching thranx was sensitive to the volume of the booming human voice. “You don’t understand, Des. These people who are coming, they’re gonna be nervous and on edge because they’re unable to contact their two guys here. They’ll come in fast and quiet, and if the first thing they see is a giant, big-eyed bug wandering around loose instead of properly caged up, they might not stop to smell the roses—or the alien that smells like one. They’re liable to blast you into half a dozen pieces before you get the chance to ‘explain matters’ to them.”

“They might not shoot first,” Desvendapur argued.

“No, that’s right. They might not.” He pushed past the thranx, striding toward the corridor that led to the outpost’s living quarters. “I’m going to start packing. You want to stay here and put your life in the hands of a bunch of senior
ninlocos
who aren’t exactly experienced in the formalities of unanticipated interspecies contact, you go right ahead. Me, I’d rather put my trust in the monkeys. I’m heading down into the forest.”

Left behind in the garage to meditate on his limited options, Desvendapur soon turned to follow the biped into the other part of the station.

“You don’t understand, Cheelo Montoya. It is not that I
want
to remain here. The fact is that I have little choice in the matter.”

Cheelo did not look up from where he was stuffing handfuls of concentrates from the outpost’s food locker into his backpack. “Ay? Why’s that?”

“Did you not notice that I was barely able to help you remove and dispose of the two cadavers? It was not because their weight was excessive. It was because the air here is far too dry for my kind. More importantly, the temperature is borderline freezing.”

Pausing in his scavenging, Cheelo turned to regard the alien. “Okay, I can see where that could be a problem. But from here it’s all downhill into the Reserva. The lower we go, the hotter and more humid it’ll become and the better you’ll feel.”

The heart-shaped head slowly nodded acquiescence while truhands and antennae bobbed understandingly. “I know that is so. The difficult, and critical, question is: Will it become hot and humid enough soon enough?”

“I can’t answer that,” the human responded evenly. “I don’t know what your tolerances are.”

“I cannot answer it myself. But I fear to try it. By the wings that no longer fly, I do.”

From hidden, long-unvisited depths Cheelo dragged up what little compassion remained in him. “Maybe we can rig you some kind of cold-weather gear. I’m no tailor, and I don’t see an autogarb in this dump, but I suppose we could cut up some blankets or something. Your only alternatives are to wait here and hope you can talk faster than the people who are coming can shoot, or to strike out across this plateau and try and find another place far enough away that they won’t search it.”

The thranx indicated negativity. “If I am to walk, better to aim for a more accommodating climate than one I already know to be hostile.” Turning, he gestured at the terrain beyond a window. “I would not make it across the first valley before my joints began to stiffen from the cold. And remember: I have one bad leg.”

“And five good ones. Well, you think about it.” Cheelo returned to his foraging. “Whatever you decide to do, I’ll help you if I can—provided it doesn’t cost me any more time.”

In the end, Desvendapur decided that despite his increasing mastery of the human’s language, he was neither confident nor fluent enough to risk an encounter with the dead poachers’ customers. Already he had experience of the volatile nature of human response and its reaction to unforeseen events. Not knowing what to expect within the outpost that now failed to respond to their queries, whoever was coming in search of the absent poachers might well unload a rush of lethality in his direction before he could explain himself.

Whatever the chastisement meted out to him upon his return to the colony, it would not include summary execution. The question was, could he make it all the way down to the salubrious surroundings of the lowland rain forest? It seemed he had no choice but to try. Certainly the biped thought so. Having made the decision, the poet fell to scrounging supplies of his own from the outpost’s stores, relying on the human to elucidate the contents of the bewildering variety of multihued food packages and containers.

When their respective packs were bulging with supplies, human and thranx turned their attention to the question of how to insulate someone whose anatomy did not remotely resemble that of an upright mammal. Utilizing the clothing of the deceased proved impossible: None of it would fit over Desvendapur’s head or around his body. They settled for wrapping his thorax and abdomen as best they could in several of the high-altitude, lightweight blankets that covered two of the station’s beds. Unfortunately, these relied for their generous heating properties on picking up waved energy from a broadcast coil located in the floor of the single bedroom. Outside the buildings and beyond the coil’s limited range, the caloric elements woven into the blankets would go inert.

“That’s the best I can do,” an impatient Cheelo assured his chitinous companion. “There’s nothing else here that’d work any better. It’s all tech stuff. Stands to reason they’d bring in the most basic of everything they’d need. In a town we could probably find some old-style, heavier wrappings.” He nodded curtly toward the nearest window. “No telling how far it is to the nearest village. I know I didn’t see one on the way here.”

“Nor did I,” conceded Desvendapur. Wrapped in the blankets that the human had clumsily cinched around him with cord, the thranx knew he must present a highly incongruous sight. Contemplating himself in a reflective surface, he removed his scri!ber from the thorax pouch that was now hidden beneath the artificial covering and began to recite.

Cheelo looked on in disgust as he tightened a strap on his own pack. “Don’t you ever take a break from that composing?”

Winding up a stanza that oozed systemic emotion, the thranx paused the instrument. “For someone like myself, to stop composing would be to start to die.”