Phylogenesis (5 page)

“If it exists, this is not only a secretive but highly sensitive government undertaking.” Nio put a truhand on Des’s thorax, just below the neck and above the first pair of breathing spicules. “You’re not going to do anything antisocial, are you? I would hate for you to end up as a negative mention on the daily tidings.”

“I don’t care about that.” She found his degree of indifference alarming. “But I will be careful, because if I break a law it will keep me from accomplishing what I hope to achieve. My own inner, personal goals—not the rules of society—will keep me honest.”

“You need help.” Broud’s head was bobbing steadily, an indication of how seriously he viewed his colleague’s intentions. “Urgent therapy.”

“Perhaps the effort alone will be enough to divert me into the tunnel of satisfaction. Perhaps the presence of humans is in fact no more than rumor. In either event, the change will relieve me of my boredom and help to alleviate my depression.”

Broud was heartened by this assessment, if not entirely put at ease. “I will research possible openings near Geswixt. As soon as I have found the closest, I will recommend you for the position. It might be a lesser post than the one you enjoy now.”

“That does not matter,” Des assured him. “I will compose poetry for sanitation workers charged with disposing of hazardous wastes. I will sweep tunnels.”

“Machines do that,” Nio reminded him.

“Then I will write poetry for the machines. Whatever is necessary.” Seeing the way in which they held themselves, he was compelled to comment further. “I can tell that you both think I’m crazy. Let me assure you that I am in possession of all my mental faculties and am perfectly sane. What I am is relentlessly driven.”

“As a fellow poet, I know how small the difference is,” Broud commented dryly. “You walk a thin line in this matter, Desvendapur. Have a care you don’t fall off.”

3

T
he image in the center of the room was notably unstable, flickering between two and three dimensions, the colors shifting more than the broadcast parameters ought to have allowed. But it was an old tridee projector, the best the backcountry establishment could afford. Nobody complained. Here in the depths of the Amistad rain forest, even the smallest comfort was appreciated.

Nor were the men and women whose blurred gazes occasionally turned to the image sufficiently sophisticated to complain about such details. Most appreciated the noise that emanated from the image more than the visuals. They were too engrossed in other matters to pay much attention to the broadcast, their serious interests lying in copious alcohol, swift-acting narcotics, cheap sex, expensive promises, and each other.

At the bar—a traditional affair of battered cocobolo wood, hard unupholstered seats, bottles of luminescent metal and glass and plastic, foul-mouthed conversation and unrealized dreams, overhead lighting, and a complaisant mixologist—the dented but still functional multiarmed automated blender was the only concession to modernity. A couple sat at one end, negotiating a price for services that had nothing to do with the surrounding rain forest and everything to do with the most basic mammalian needs. One man lay on the floor, snoring loudly in his own spittle, ignored by those around him.

Two others had turned in their seats to watch the tridee. Near them a third sat hunched over his drink, a pale green liquid concoction that whispered to him in soft, reassuring tones. The liquorish voice was not metaphorical: The drink actually spoke, its reassuring recording embedded in the fizzing molecules within the glass. As the level was lowered by consumption, new sentences manifested themselves for the benefit of the drinker, like the layers of a drunken onion.

“Fat Buddha, would you look at that!” Shifting on his seat, whose aged and poorly maintained internal gyros struggled to keep the boisterous tridee-watching imbiber they supported from crashing to the floor, the speaker pointed at the image hovering in the center of the room. His clothes were thick with decomposing rain forest and he needed a shave.

“Man, I never seen anything so ugly!” agreed his companion. Turning slightly in his chair, he jabbed a finger hard into the side of his neighbor. “Hey, Cheelo, take a look at this, man!”

The false promises of his voluble drink lingering in his ears, the third drinker turned reluctantly to gaze at the tridee. The image presented therein, in unstable three dimensions, only barely impacted on his liquor-sedated consciousness.

His tormentor, an ostensible friend, poked him again. “Are they gruesome lookin’, or what?” An unpleasant frown creased the man’s dark face. “Hey, Cheelo—you getting any of this?”

“Look at his eyes,” the heavyset drinker urged his companion. “He’s right on the edge. Push him again and I bet you five credits he passes out. His chair ain’t strong enough to hold him.”

The words stung worse than the liquor. Cheelo Montoya sat a little straighter in his seat. It took a sustained effort, but he forced himself. “I ain’t—I’m not going to pass out.” He struggled to focus on the tridee image. “Yeah, I see ’em. So they’re ugly. So what?” He looked sharply at his “friend.” “You just have to look at ’em, not sleep with ’em.”

This observation struck the two other men as uproariously funny. When the coughing and hooting had died down, the larger man wagged a fat finger at the diminutive Montoya.

“Sometimes I can’t never figure you, Cheelo. Sometimes I think you’re as stupid and ignorant as the rest of these sorry-ass poachers and
grampeiros
around here, and then you’ll go and surprise me by saying something almost intelligent.”

“Thanks,” Montoya muttered dryly. He nodded in the direction of the tridee image. Feeling the familiar, irresistible glaze spreading over his eyes like heavy honey, he determinedly blinked it back. “What are they, anyway?”

The other men exchanged a look, and the one nearest Montoya replied. “You mean you don’t know, man?”

“No,” Cheelo mumbled. “I don’t know. So shoot me.”

“Waste of a bullet,” the heavyset drinker husked, but too softly for Montoya to overhear.

“They’re bugs, man.
Bugs.
” The speaker waved his arms wildly in front of Montoya, though the visual emphasis was unnecessary. “Giant, gross, filthy, stinking, alien bugs! And they’re here! Right here on Earth, or at least at the two official contact locations.”

Leaning back against the bar, the heavyset drinker gazed dully at the tridee. “Actually, I hear they smell kind of nice.”

Visibly outraged, his lanky friend whirled on him. “What? Smell nice? They’re
bugs
, man! Bugs don’t smell nice. Especially alien ones.” His tone fell threateningly, bursting with false courage. “I wish I had a size fifty shoe, so I could step on ’em and squish every one of ’em.” Glancing down at the floor, he promptly slid off his seat and landed feet first on a large tropical roach. The insect tried to dodge, failed, and crunched audibly beneath the pair of heavily scored jungle boots. “
That’s
how you treat bugs, man. I don’t care if they do make speeches and build starships.”

The bartender leaned slightly forward to peer over the bar. A look of mild distaste soured his expression as he evaluated the fresh black smear on the floor. “Did you have to do that, Andre?”

“Oh, right,” the bug smasher replied sarcastically. “Like it seriously impacts the elegant décor of your fine establishment.”

The eyebrows of the beefy individual behind the bar rose. He did not blink. “If you don’t like it here anymore, there’s always Maria’s down the street.”

The heavyset drinker choked melodramatically. “Maria’s? This dive is Ambergris Cay compared to that hole. Hey, hey—” He prodded his friend. “—I bet if you paid enough you could get one of Maria’s whores to sleep with a bug.” He chuckled at his own debased humor. “They’ll sleep with any
body
. Why not any
thing
?”

“Ay—they build starships?” Swaying slightly, Montoya struggled to focus on the tridee image.

“That’s what they say.” The man next to him resumed his explication. “First the lizards, now bugs. Me, I think we should keep to the solar system and forget about the rest of it.”

“They’re not lizards.” His marginally more erudite associate did not hesitate to correct his drinking companion. “The AAnn are lizardlike. Just like the thranx are insectile, but not insects.”

“Ahhhhh, go plug yourself, Morales. They’re
bugs
.” The other man’s conviction was not to be denied, nor was he about to let awkward facts interfere with his ripening xenophobia. “If it was up to me, I’d call the nearest exterminator. Let ’em infest their own planet, but stay the hell away from ours. Keep Earth pure. We already got enough bugs of our own.” He downed a long, corrosive swallow of biting blue brew, wiped his lips with the back of a hairy hand that was too conversant with manual labor, and remembered the smaller man on his other side.

“What about you, Cheelo?” Andre nodded at the tridee. “What do you think we should do about ’em? Let ’em hang around us or dust the lot of ’em? Me, I’d rather hang out with the lizards. Least they got the right number of legs. Cheelo? Hey, Montoya, you in there?”

“What?” Swaying on his seat, the smaller man’s response was barely audible.

“I said, what would you do about the bugs, man?”

“Forget it,” Morales said. He had turned away from the media image on the tridee and back to the bar. “You expecting a considered opinion on alien contact from
him
?” He tapped his glass, calling for a refill. “Might as well ask for his opinion on how to retire the world debt. He doesn’t have an opinion on anything, and he’s not going to do anything about anything.” Small, porcine blue eyes glanced contemptuously in Montoya’s direction. “Ever.”

The words penetrated the dark, sweet mist that was slowly creeping through Cheelo’s consciousness. “I am too going to do something.” He coughed, hard, and the man seated next to him hastily backed out of the line of fire. “You’ll see. One of these days I’ll do something. Something
big
.”

“Yeah, sure you will.” The drinker next to him guffawed. “Like what,
qué
? C’mon, Cheelo, tell us what big thing you’re gonna do.”

There was no reply from the other seat because it was now vacant, its occupant having slid slowly out of the chair and down to the floor like a lump of diseased gelatin. Overwhelmed, the seat’s internal gyros whirred back to vertical.

Peering over the barrier, the bartender grunted as he gestured to the other pair. “I don’t give a good goddamn if he does something big, so long as he doesn’t do it in my place.” Reaching into a front pocket of his shirt, he removed a handful of small white pills and passed two of them to the heavyset man. “Take him outside and let him do his big thing there. If you’re his friends, don’t dump him in the street.” He glanced at the ceiling. “Coming down pretty hard tonight, and you know it won’t let up again till sunrise. Try and get these down him. It’ll detox some of the alky radicals so maybe when he comes around he won’t feel like his brain’s trying to punch its way out of his skull. Poor bastard.” Having done his duty, he turned back to his liquids and potions and other customers.

Thus co-opted, the two speakers reluctantly hauled Montoya’s limp corpus outside. Tropical rain was plunging vertically into the earth, shattering the night with unrelenting moisture. Beyond the dark row of tumbledown buildings that marked the other side of the town’s single street, rioting vegetation climbed a dark slope, the beginnings of the wild and empty Amistad.

Making ample show of his distaste, the heavyset man forced the pills into Montoya’s mouth and roughly massaged his throat before rising.

“He get ’em?” the other drinker wondered. His gaze turned upward, to the deluge that formed a wet wall just beyond the dripping rim of the porch overhang.

“Who the hell cares?” Straightening, his companion nudged the limp form with one booted foot. “Let’s toss him out in the rain. Either it’ll sober him up or he’ll drown. Either way he’ll be better off.”

Together, they lifted the pliant form off the prefab plastic sidewalk sheeting and, on the count of two, heaved it far out into the downpour. It wasn’t difficult. Montoya was not a big man and did not weigh very much. Chuckling to themselves, they returned to the warmth of the bar, the heavyset man glancing backward toward the street and shaking his head.

“Never done anything, never will.”

There was mud seeping into his open mouth, and the rain was falling hard enough to hurt. Montoya tried to rise, failed, and collapsed face first back into the muck that was running down the imported plastic avenue. Standing up being out of the question, he rolled over onto his side. The tepid rain coursed down his face in miniature cascades.

“Will too do something,” he muttered. “Something big. Someday.”

Got to get out of this place, he heard himself screaming. Got to get away from here. Miners too tough to skrag; merchants too heavily armed to intimidate. Need money to get to someplace decent, someplace worthwhile. Santo Domingo, maybe. Or Belmopan. Yeah, that was the place. Plenty of tourists with wide eyes and fat credit accounts.

Something was crawling across his stomach. Sitting up quickly, he saw a giant centipede making its many-legged way across his body. Uttering the forlorn cry of a lost child, he slapped and swung at himself until the enormous but harmless arthropod had been knocked aside. It was a harbinger, but he had no way of knowing that.

Then he turned once again face down to the street and began to retch violently.

4

A
s time passed and contact was not resumed, Desvendapur could not keep from wondering if his friends had indicated their willingness to help him in his endeavor only to shut him up, and had forgotten all about his request as soon as they had returned to the comfort and familiarity of their own homes. But though it took a while to make things happen, the reluctant Broud eventually proved to be as good as his word.

There came a day when Des received a formal notification from the sub-bureau in charge of poets for his region, informing him that he had been assigned the post of fifth-degree soother to Honydrop. Hastily, he looked it up on his
scri!ber
. It was a tiny hive situated outside the main current of Willow-Wane life whose inhabitants worked at gathering and processing a few fields of imported, cultivated berries. Located high on a mountainous plateau, it suffered from weather sufficiently harsh to discourage most thranx from wanting to visit, much less immigrate. He would need protective clothing, a rarity among his kind, and a stolid disposition to endure the unforgiving climate. Furthermore, accepting the transfer would drop him two levels in status. He did not care. Nothing else was important.

What mattered was that the Honydrop hive was situated less than a day’s journey from Geswixt.

There was no information to be had on a hypothetical, unacknowledged, and highly improbable human colony, of course. His personal scri!ber was a compact device capable of accessing every information storage dump on the planet, and he had long since given up hope of finding even the most oblique reference to such a development in its innards, no matter how clever or rigorous a search he assigned to it. There was plenty of information on the humans—more than he could hope to digest in a lifetime—and some on the progress of the mature project on Hivehom. But there was nothing about a continued presence on Willow-Wane of bipedal, intelligent mammals. Despite his most probing efforts, it all remained nothing more than rumor.

Reaching Honydrop involved no less than four transfers, from a major tube line to, at the last, a place on one of the infrequent independently powered supply vehicles that served the isolated mountain communities of the plateau. He had never imagined so hostile an environment could exist on a world as long settled and developed as Willow-Wane.

Outside the transparent protective dome of the cargo craft in which he was riding, trees grew not only at absurd distances from one another, wasting the space and soil that lay between, but stood independent of mutual contact. No familiar vines or creepers draped in graceful arcs from one bole to its neighbor. No colorful blossoms added color to trunks that were drab and dark brown. The tiny leaves they sported seemed too insignificant to gather sufficient sunlight to keep the growths alive.

Still, many grew tall and straight. It was exactly the sort of landscape in which one might expect to encounter alien visitors. But the only movement came from animals that, while exotic to his lowland eyes, were quickly recognized by the transport’s crew and were well documented in the biological history of the planet.

A glance at the cargo craft’s instrument panel showed that the temperature outside was much nearer freezing than he had ever hoped to experience other than theoretically. He made sure his cumbersome leg wrappings were securely belted and that the thermal cloak that slipped over his abdomen was sealed tight. This left his head and thorax unavoidably exposed. A thranx had to be able to see and to breathe. Knowing that he would tend to lose the majority of his body heat through his soft under-abdomen, he felt as confident as one could be in his special apparel.

The two drivers were similarly clad, though in contrast to his their suits displayed evidence of long wear and hard use. They ignored the single passenger seated behind them as they concentrated on their driving and on the softly glowing readouts that hovered above the instrument panel. The vehicle sped along over a crude path pocked with muddy patches and small boulders. These did not impact on its progress because the bulky cargo craft traveled on a cushion of air that carried it along well above such potentially irritating natural obstructions. Outlying communities like Honydrop and Geswixt were too small and isolated to rate a loop on the network of magnetic repulsion lines that bound together Willow-Wane’s larger hives. They had to be supplied by suborbital fliers or individual vehicles like the one on which he managed to secure transport.

One of the drivers, an older female with one prosthetic antenna, swiveled her head completely around to look back at him. “Cold yet?” He gestured in the negative. “You will be.” Her mandibles clicked curtly as she turned back to her controls.

The paucity of vegetation compared to what he was used to was more than a little unnerving. It suggested an environment hostile beyond anything he had ever experienced. Yet, thranx lived up here, even at this daunting altitude and in these horrific conditions. Thranx, and if the Willow-Wane Project was more than just rumor, something else—something the tri-eints who made the decisions that affected all thranx wanted to keep from the eyes of their fellow citizens.

Other than an orbiting station, they couldn’t have chosen a better place, Des mused as the cargo vehicle sped along below the granitic ramparts of the high mountains that framed the plateau. This was not terrain where thranx would casually wander or vacation. The AAnn would find the thinner air and infinitely colder temperatures equally uninviting. Glancing out the dome, he saw that the upper slopes of the peaks whose gaze they were passing beneath were clad in white. He knew what
rilth
was, of course. But that did not mean he had any desire to see it up close or to touch it. His body shivered slightly at the thought. There were certain kinds of inspiration he could do without.

Hardship, however, was not among them. Even if there was no colony, or if there was some other kind of clandestine government project involving subject matter that did not include bipedal intelligent mammals, the harsh surroundings had already suggested more than a few couplets and compositions to him. Any poet worthy of the designation was an open spigot. He could no more turn off the thoughts and words that cascaded through his head or the relevant twitches and tics that convulsed his arms and upper body than he could cease breathing.

There was little to see when they arrived. Unlike more established thranx communities in more salubrious climes, Honydrop was situated almost entirely below ground. Normally the surface would be covered with vehicular docking alcoves, a forest of power air intakes and exhausts, bulk storage facilities, and parks—lots of parks. But except for places where the brush and some of the peculiar local trees had been cut down, the terrain the cargo carrier embraced late that afternoon had been left in a more or less natural condition.

He had been expecting too much. Honydrop, after all, was only a very small community on the fringe of what was still the ongoing settlement of Willow-Wane. Three hundred and sixty-odd years was a long time in the settlement of a continent, but with an entire world to develop and civilize, there was still space to accommodate little-visited, empty places. The vast plateau on which Honydrop, Geswixt, and a few other minuscule outposts had been established was one locale where frontier still prevailed.

The transport slipped smoothly into a weather-battered shelter. Immediately, double doors labored to close behind it. To Des’s surprise, the two drivers did not wait for the interior temperature to be raised to a comfortable level. They cracked the dome soon after shutting down the vehicle’s engines.

The blast of cold air that struck the poet made him gasp. Shocked spicules caused his entire thorax to contract in reaction. Using all four hands he hurried to tighten the unfamiliar, constricting clothing around his unacclimated limbs and abdomen.

At least the interior of the warehouse reflected traditional thranx values. Everything was organized and in its place, although he had expected to see more in the way of supplies. An isolated community like Honydrop would require more support than a hive of similar size set in an equitable climate. Perhaps there were other storage facilities elsewhere. Disembarking from the cargo carrier, he took further stock of his surroundings. Power suits and mechanical assistants at the ready, a stevedore crew appeared. Working in tandem with the drivers, they began to unload the big bulk carrier. Des waited impatiently for his baggage, buried unceremoniously among the rest of the cargo.

A foothand prodded him from behind. Turning clumsily in the cold-weather gear, he saw a middle-term male staring back at him. Seeing that the local was encumbered by even more clothing than himself made Desvendapur feel a little bit better. The people who lived up here were not superthranx, inured to temperatures that would stiffen the antennae of any normal individual. They were subject to the same climatic vagaries as he.

“Greetings. You are the soother who has been assigned from the lowlands?”

“I am,” Des replied simply.

“Wellbeing to you.” The salutation was curt, the touch of antenna to antenna brief. “I am Ouwetvosen. I’ll take you to your quarters.” Pivoting on four trulegs, he turned to lead the way. When Des hesitated, his host added, “Don’t worry about your things: They will be brought. Honydrop is not a big enough place in which to lose anything. When can you be ready to recite?”

Apparently, traditional protocol and courtesy were as alien to his new home as was the climate. A bit dazed, Des followed his guide. “I’ve only just arrived. I thought—I thought I might accustom myself to my new surroundings first.”

“Shouldn’t take you long,” Ouwetvosen declared bluffly. “The people here are starved for therapeutic entertainment. Recordings and projections are all very well in their way, but they’re not the same as a live performance.”

“You don’t have to tell me.” Des followed his host into a lift. When the doors closed, the temperature within approached something closer to normal. His body relaxed. It was as if he had stepped into a larval nursery. Aware that Ouwetvosen was watching him closely, he straightened his antennae and shifted from six legs back onto four.

“Chilled?”

“I’m fine,” Des lied.

His guide’s attitude seemed to soften slightly. “It takes some getting used to. Be thankful you’re not an agricultural worker. You don’t have to spend time on the outside if you don’t want to. Myself, I’m a fourth-level administrator. I don’t go to the surface unless somebody orders me.”

Desvendapur felt emboldened. “It can’t be that bad.” He indicated his cold-weather gear. “Equipped like this, I think I could stand it for a workday.”

The administrator eyed him thoughtfully. “After a while, you probably could. That’s how the agri folk dress. Except when the rilth is precipitating out of the atmosphere, of course. Then they require full environmental suits.” His mandibles clicked sharply. “One might as well be working in space.”

Des had not made it to the administrator’s sarcasm. “You are subject to falling rilth? Here, at Honydrop? I saw some compacted on the high peaks, of course—but it actually
falls
here?”

“Toward the end of the wet season, yes. It does sometimes grow cold enough to freeze precipitation and make it fall to the ground. You can walk on it—if you dare. I’ve seen experienced, long-term agri workers do it barefoot. Not for more than a few moments,” he added quickly.

Des tried to imagine walking barefoot in rilth, the icy frozen moisture burning the underside of his unprotected foot-claws, numbing nerves and crawling up his legs. Who would voluntarily subject themselves to such hell? That kind of cold would penetrate right through the chitin of a person’s protective exoskeleton to threaten the moist, warm fluids and muscles and nerve endings within. Did he dare?

“One question, Ouwetvosen: Why did they name a hive situated in country like this, in a climate like this, Honydrop?”

His host glanced back at him and gestured with a truhand. “Someone had a sense of humor. What kind of sense, I’d just as soon not say.”

Desvendapur’s private quarters turned out to be of modest dimensions and were equipped with comfortable appointments. Once settled within, he prepared to address the matter of the individual climate control. His mouthparts parted contemplatively, then hesitated. It was his state of mind that was chilled, not his body. Here below the surface, within the Honydrop hive, the temperature was set at thranx norm and the internal humidity was raised to the appropriate 90 percent. Stop thinking about conditions on the surface, he admonished himself, and the rest of your body will follow your mind’s lead.

Already he had composed and discarded a good ten minutes’ worth of material. Inspired by what he had seen, it had been full of portentous references to the searing cold and barren mountains. Reviewing the stanzas, he realized that these were not what the locals would want to hear about. They wanted to be soothed, to be transported by his words and sounds and hand gestures; not reminded of the harshness of their surroundings. So he threw out everything he had contrived and began anew.

His inaugural recitation was well attended. Anything fresh was a novelty in Honydrop, and that included a recently arrived therapist like himself. Having full confidence in his abilities, he did not force his performance, and it went “soothly.” Following his well-thought-out coda, more than a few females and males walked to the center of the small community amphitheater to congratulate him and to chat amiably. After the stark, tense journey up from the lowlands, it felt good to be back among a swarm, the warmth and smell of many unclothed thranx pressing close around him. He accepted their thanks and comments readily, grateful for the attention. Veiled promises of possible mating opportunities were appreciatively noted.

Reassured and exhausted, he retired to his quarters at the appropriate hour, reviewing in his mind all that he had seen and experienced since arriving. The isolation, the ruggedness of his surroundings, should make for inspired composing. In a few days he felt he would be mentally secure enough to join the agricultural workers on one of their daily forays to the berry fields, to watch them at work and experience more of this exotic, little-visited corner of Willow-Wane.