Frank Herbert - The Green Brain

Slowly, the hive reduced its activity as the brain withdrew from the painful edges of thought.

Meanwhile, we wait , the brain told itself.

And it set itself the problem of a slight gene alteration in a wingless wasp to improve on the oxygen generation system.

Senhor Gabriel Martinho, prefect of the Mato Grosso Barrier Compact, paced his study, muttering to himself as he passed a tall, narrow window that admitted evening sunlight. Occasionally he paused to glare down at his son, Joao, who sat on a tapir-leather sofa beneath one of the bookcases that lined the room.

The elder Martinho was a dark wisp of a man, limb thin, with gray hair and cavernous brown eyes above an eagle nose, slit mouth and boot-toe chin. He wore old style black clothing as befitted his position. His linen gleamed white against the black. Golden cuffstuds glittered as he waved his arms.

“I am an object of ridicule,” he snarled.

Joao absorbed the statement in silence. After a full week of listening to his father’s outbursts, Joao had learned the value of silence. He looked down at his bandeirante dress whites, the trousers tucked into calf-high jungle boots—everything crisp and glistening and clean while his men sweated out the preliminary survey on the Serra dos Parcecis.

It began to grow dark in the room, quick tropic darkness hurried by thunderheads piled along the horizon. The waning daylight carried a hazed blue cast. Heat lightning spattered the patch of sky visible through the tall window, and sent dazzling electric radiance into the study. Drumming thunder followed. As though that were the signal, the house sensors turned on lights wherever there were humans. Yellow illumination filled the study.

The Prefect stopped in front of his son. “Why does my own son, the renowned Jefe of the Irmandades, spout such Carsonite stupidities?”

Joao looked at the floor between his boots. The fight in the Bahia Plaza, the flight from the mob—all that just a week away—seemed an eternity distant, part of someone else’s past. This day had seen a succession of important political people through his father’s study—polite greetings for the renowned Joao Martinho and low-voiced conferences with his father.

The old man was fighting for his son—Joao knew this. But the elder Martinho could only fight in the way he knew best: through the ritual kin system, with pistolao “pull”—maneuvering behind the scenes, exchanging power-promises, assembling political strength where it counted. Not once would he consider Joao’s suspicions and doubts. The Irmandades, Alvarez and his Hermosillos—anyone who’d had anything to do with the Piratininga—were in bad odor right now. Fences must be mended.

“Stop the realignment?” the old man muttered. “Delay the Marcha para Oeste? Are you mad? How do you think I hold my office? Me! A descendant of fidalgoes whose ancestors ruled one of the original capitanias! We are not bugres whose ancestors were hidden by Rui Barbosa, yet the caboclos call me ‘Father of the Poor.’ I did not gain that name through stupidity.”

“Father, if you’d only…”

“Be silent! I have our panelinha , our little pot, boiling merrily. All will be well.”

Joao sighed. He felt both resentment and shame at his position here. The Prefect had been semi-retired until this emergency—a very weak heart. Now, to disturb the old man this way… but he persisted in being so blind!

“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!”