Phylogenesis (21 page)

In any event, benefits from the confrontation were already manifesting themselves. A rush of suggestive stanzas raced through Desvendapur’s freshly stimulated brain. Reaching back with a foothand, he searched for his scri!ber.

The sudden movement alarmed the suspicious biped. “Hey, what are you doing there?” Again, the small pointed device the mammal was holding made an appearance on the rim of the bough.

Maybe it’s got a gun, Cheelo found himself thinking nervously. And if it did, would he be able to recognize an alien weapon if it was pointed in his direction? Maybe he should just shoot it, right now. But what if it was not alone? What if it was a member of some larger exploration party? What if it was working in concert with people, with human scientists? Painfully aware of his ignorance, he realized that until he knew more it would be prudent to react cautiously. He had not survived worse than the rain forest and come as close to realizing his lifelong dream as he had by acting impetuously. Observe, analyze, think, plan, then act: the ancient lessons of the street.

Besides, the stiff-legged alien didn’t look particularly fast, and it gave no indication of wanting to run away. He could always shoot it later.

Not wanting to upset the biped further, Desvendapur brought the scri!ber out very slowly. “This is a harmless recording device.”

“I don’t give a shit what it is.” Cheelo gestured with the pistol. “Don’t point it at me.” He did not want his picture taken, either.

“As you wish.” Exhilarated by the tension and the unexpectedness of the contact, Desvendapur proceeded to deliver a stream of clicks, whistles, and sibilant syllables to the scri!ber, together with breathless suggestions for appropriate accompanying gestures. Throughout the euphonious discursive, the human continued to gaze down at him from its perch up in the tree. Such a primitive stare! the poet thought. So straightforward and unvarying, heightened by the directness of a single lens. Human eyes were very vulnerable, Desvendapur knew. A thranx could lose part of an eye, dozens of individual lenses, and still be able to see, albeit with a reduced field of vision and focus. Should a human lose its lens, the ocular function of the entire orb would be largely lost. The realization transformed part of his discomfiture into sympathy.

When he was finished he attached the scri!ber to the pouch hanging from his thorax, where it could be accessed quickly. The human responded by lowering the unidentified mechanism it had been clutching so tightly in one hand.

“You still haven’t answered my questions. I told you who I am and what I’m doing here. I’m still waiting to hear your story.”

Desvendapur knew he would have to summon all the creative inventiveness at his command. It was vital to prevent the human from notifying the authorities. If that happened, not only would the poet’s presence be revealed to the outside world, so would that of the colony. He could hardly explain that he had found his way to the forest preserve from the official, highly restricted contact sites halfway around the planet. Officially, few thranx had even set foot on the human homeworld.

The biped claimed to be an amateur naturalist. But unless he was concealing his equipment, he appeared to Des to be traveling exceptionally light even for a casually interested nonprofessional. For that matter, why was he even bothering to have this conversation? Any human encountering an unannounced alien could be expected to immediately contact a higher authority. Instead, this Cheelo individual seemed content, at least for the moment, to perform his own interrogation. Something was not as it seemed, but Desvendapur knew it was far too early for him to render judgments. He needed more information—a great deal more. After all, what did he know of human scientific procedures? Perhaps this self-proclaimed naturalist’s gear was stored or buried nearby.

Irrespective of the actual explanation, the delay was greatly to the poet’s liking. The longer the encounter lasted before it was terminated due to contact with the planetary authorities, the greater the opportunities to set down new and exciting poesy.

“I am a food preparations specialist.” He spoke slowly to make certain he was being understood.

He was being understood, all right. Utterly ignorant of thranx dining deportment, Cheelo did not much like the sound of “food preparations specialist.”

“Who do you prepare food for?” He looked past the bug, scrutinizing the rain forest from which it had emerged. “Not just yourself, surely? There must be more of you.”

“There are,” Desvendapur explained creatively, “but they are,
crrrk,
carrying out limited studies of their own far, far from here. I am on a solitary expedition of my own.”

“To do what?” Suspicious to a fault, Cheelo kept searching the woods for any hints of closing ambush. “Gather herbs and spices?” He lowered his gaze. “Or maybe you’d like to catch me off guard so you could kill and eat
me
?”

Utterly unanticipated, the sickening speculative accusation caught Desvendapur completely off guard. He had thought that his surreptitious research and studies adequately prepared him for just this kind of contact, but he was wrong. Unwilled and unbidden, an image formed in his mind: the human, stripped of clothing and nude, its pulpy, fleshy pink form stretched out over a fire; raw animal fat dripping from its scorched limbs, oozing into the flames and sizzling; the smell of carbonizing meat…

Reeling, he promptly regurgitated the undigested portion of the day’s meal that had been quietly fermenting in his upper stomach. He had turned away not out of embarrassment but to avoid retching into the space between himself and the human. That would have constituted a serious breach of manners, though without further knowledge of human habits he was unsure how the biped would have reacted to it.

As it was, the lone male’s tone rose in volume. Based on his studies, a retching Desvendapur thought it sounded slightly alarmed.

“Ay—what’re you doing? Are you all right?” It looked like the alien was throwing up, but for all Cheelo knew it might have been seeding the ground with its spores, planting more of its kind deep in the rain forest soil. As the creature explained when it finally recovered its equilibrium, Cheelo’s initial assumption had been the correct one.

“I am apologizing.” As it spoke, the bug was cleaning its four opposing mandibles with the back of a leaf it plucked from a nearby plant. “Your insinuation conjured up a most unpleasant picture. Thranx do not eat”—his voice quavered—“do not eat…other creatures.”

“Ay—vegetarians, eh?” Cheelo grunted. “Okay, so you’re a cook or something. That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing out here all by your lonesome.”

Desvendapur plunged ahead. He had nothing to lose now, less so by revealing himself to this representative of another species. “I am also an amateur poet. I was transmuting my impressions of my alien surroundings into art.”

“No shit? You don’t say?”

Desvendapur was unsure if he had heard correctly. “Yes I do say,” he responded hopefully.

A poet. That sounded about as unthreatening as anything Cheelo could imagine. “So when you were speaking into that recording device of yours, you were composing poetry?”

“A portion of it. Much of the artistry lies in the delivery. You humans use gesture as a supplement to language. For thranx, how we move is as important a part of communication as what we say and how we say it.”

Cheelo nodded slowly. “I can see that. If I had four arms, waving them around would probably be twice as important to me, too.” While he still did not trust the alien, neither did it appear as threatening as it had at first appearance. Nevertheless, a giant bug was still a giant bug, even if taxonomically it wasn’t a bug at all. He kept the pistol drawn as he rose from his crouch and scrambled down the trunk of the tree.

Desvendapur watched in awe. While adept at traversing rocky slopes or narrow ledges, a thranx had difficulty with verticalities. A certain sinuosity of self was required that their inflexible exoskeletons did not permit. To thranx eyes, the actions of a climbing human were as fluid as those of a snake.

Leaping the last meter to the ground, Cheelo found himself confronting the outlandish visitor. Inclined back on its four hind legs with thorax, neck, and head stretched as high as possible, the creature’s face came about to Cheelo’s chest. He estimated its weight at fifty kilos or so, perhaps slightly less. When erected, the twin feathery antennae added another thirty centimeters to its height.

“So,” Cheelo continued, “this expedition of yours? It’s authorized by the authorities? I thought all aliens were restricted to contact on orbiting stations, with only a few high-ranking diplomatic types allowed to actually set foot on Earth.”

Desvendapur falsified rapidly. “A special waiver was granted to my group. They are being supervised by representatives of your own kind.” Years of practice had given him the ability to lie with great facility and skill.

“Then you’ll be rejoining them soon?”

How best to answer so as neither to make the biped suspicious nor activate its defensive instincts? “No. They will be continuing their work for,” he fumbled for the appropriate human time referents, “another of your months.”

“Uh-huh.” The human’s head bobbed up and down several times. From his studies Desvendapur recognized the gesture as a “nod,” an indication of general concurrence. It was one the thranx could easily mimic. Though he normally would have used his truhands to suggest agreement, the poet duplicated the motion in so natural and relaxed a fashion that the biped did not think to question its unlikely origin.

For a self-proclaimed naturalist, Desvendapur reflected, the human’s queries seemed to troll far from the realms of science.

“So this special group of yours is here kind of secretly, so it can do its work without alerting the media or even the locals?”

For a second time Desvendapur “nodded,” finding the movement natural if overly simplistic, as were the majority of human gestures.

Cheelo was more than merely relieved. For a disquieting time he had been forced to deal with the prospect of dozens of reporters swarming the site of the first thranx expedition to pastoral Earth. Wandering media types might well have trailed an adventurer like this Desvenbapur, anyway. That was all Cheelo needed—half a dozen tridee pickups shoved in his face as their manipulators asked the rain forest hiker for comments. Following broadcast, one of the automated fugitive matchers that monitored the media would set off alarms in half the police centers in this part of the world, and that would be the end of his freedom and anonymity, not to mention any chance of delivering his fee to the waiting Ehrenhardt in time to secure the precious franchise.

But if he was reading the situation correctly, then this small group of thranx this Desvenbapur was talking about were as anxious to keep their presence hidden from the rest of the world as was he. He and this cook-poet were symbiotes in secrecy. Unless…

“Okay, I accept that you are what you claim to be. But what are you doing out here by yourself?” He gestured expansively without stopping to wonder if the sweeping movement of his arm would be interpreted correctly, or indeed if it would mean anything at all to the alien. “This is one of the most isolated, primitive places on the planet. There are dangerous animals here.”

“I know.” With its inflexible face the thranx could not smile, but its upper limbs moved expressively. “I have met several of them. As you can see, I am still unharmed.”

“Defended yourself, huh?” Cheelo squinted as he tried to identify the purpose of the visible bulges in the creature’s backpack. Amiably as they were conversing, he still did not trust the alien as far as he could throw it.

“Not really. Some I avoided, while others proved not as dangerous to me as I believe they are to your kind.” With the middle digits of his left truhand Desvendapur tapped the center of his thorax. “Unlike you, my people wear their supportive skeletons on the outside. We are more resistant to punctures and cuts. However, because of the nature of our respective circulatory systems, if epidermally compromised, we bleed more easily.”

“Then you’re not armed?” Cheelo tried to peer deep into the alien’s eyes but was unsure where to focus.

“I did not say that. Should it prove needful, I can protect myself.” The biped was being agreeable, but it would not do to let it know how helpless Desvendapur really was. Capabilities unrevealed are capabilities held in reserve.

“Glad to hear it.” Cheelo was mildly disappointed. Not that the alien had acted in any way hostile.

“Actually,” it continued in its soft, melodious rendering of Terranglo, “I am lying. I am actually part of a large complement of warriors scouting sites for the invasion.”

Cheelo’s expression dropped, and he started to bring up the hand holding the pistol. Then he hesitated. The bug was emitting a vibrant, high-pitched whistle, and the feathers of its antennae were quivering.

“Chinga—that was a joke, wasn’t it? A goddamn up-front right-out-there joke! Bugs with a sense of humor. Who woulda thought it?” Carefully, he holstered the pistol, though he kept the safety off.

“You see, despite your unavoidably hideous appearance we have many things in common.” The valentine-shaped head inclined slightly to one side, momentarily giving the alien the appearance of a querulous canine. “You will not reveal my presence here to the local authorities? To do so would be to put an end to my gathering of raw material for my artistry—and to the work of my fellow expedition members as well.”

“Naw, I won’t give you away. Tell you what—I won’t mention your presence here, and you don’t mention mine to your coworkers when you rejoin them.”

“I am pleased with the arrangement, but why do you wish your presence here to remain unknown? Surely secrecy is not a necessary component to the work of a naturalist?”

Cheelo did not think as fast as the poet, but he managed to improvise a reply before Desvendapur could grow uneasy.

Lowering his voice, he moved a little nearer. As the lanky bipedal form loomed over him, Des took a step backward, then forced himself to halt. Was this not, after all, what he had come for? The decreasing distance that separated them would have been easier to deal with if the human had not smelled so bad. The climate of the humid rain forest served to magnify the pungency of its body odor, which unavoidably reeked of previously ingested flesh.