Frank Herbert - The Green Brain

Now, the messengers were released. They had their instructions, and they fluttered out of the cave into the bright sunlight above the roar of water.

In the west, a cloud passed over the sun.

And the Brain marked this fact, noting that the sound of the river was louder today.

Rains in the highlands , it thought. This thought elicited images within its memory: wet leaves, rivulets on the forest floor, damp cold air, feet splashing on gray clay.

The feet of the image appeared to be its own, and the Brain found this an odd fact. But the nurse insects had the chemical serenity of their charge well in hand now, and the Brain went on to consider every datum it possessed about Cardinal Newman. Nowhere could it discover reference to a stuffed Cardinal Newman.

The patch consisted of leaves bound with tent lines and vines on the outside and spray coagulants from a doctored foamal bomb which Joao had exploded inside the float. The pod floated upright on the river beside the beach now while he stood waist deep beside it, checking their work.

The charged hiss and cork-popping of sprayrifles and foamal bombs went on intermittently above him. The air was thick with the bitter smell of the poisons. Black and orange scum floated past him down the river and lay in puff mounds on the beach around the remains of their vine-powered windlass. Each bit of scum carried its imbedded collection of dead and dying insects.

Rhin leaned over during a lull in the attack, said, “For the love of God, how much longer?”

“It seems to be holding,” Joao rasped.

He rubbed at his neck and arms. Not all the insects were being caught by the sprayrifles and bombs. His skin felt like fire from the accumulation of stings and bites. When he looked up at Rhin, he saw that her forehead was welted.

“If it’s holding, shove us off,” Chen-Lhu said. He appeared above Joao, standing behind Rhin, glanced down and returned his attention to the sky.

Joao staggered with a sudden dizziness, almost fell. His body ached with weariness. It required a distinct effort to lift his head and scan the sky around them. Distant sky. They had perhaps an hour of daylight left.

“For God’s sake, shove off!” Rhin shouted.

Joao grew aware that the firing had resumed. He pulled himself along the float toward the beach, and the action sent the pod outward. It swung over him and he stared stupidly upward at the patched belly tank wondering who had done that work.

Oh, yes—Vierho .

The pod continued to drift outward, caught now by the current. It was at least two meters from Joao when he realized he was supposed to be aboard it. He lunged for the right float, caught its rear edge and hauled himself sprawling onto it with almost the last of his strength.

A hand reached down from the open hatch, grabbed his collar. With the help of the hand, he clambered to his knees, crawled up into the cabin. Only when he was inside did he see that it was Rhin’s hand.

They had the canopy down and sealed, he noted. Chen-Lhu was darting around the interior smashing insects with a roll of charts.

Joao felt something sting his right leg, looked down to see Rhin kneeling there and applying a fresh energy pack.

Why is she doing that? he wondered. Then he remembered: Oh, yes—the stings, the poisons .

“Won’t we have some immunity from the last bout?” he asked and was surprised when his voice came out a whisper.

“Maybe,” she said. “Unless they hit us with something new.”

“I think I have most of them,” Chen-Lhu said. “Rhin, did you seal the hatch?”

“Yes.”

“I sprayed with the hand unit under the seats and dash.” Chen-Lhu reached down, put a hand under Joao’s arm. “Here we go, Johnny. Into your seat, eh?”

“Yes.” Joao staggered forward, sank into the seat. His head felt as though it rested on slack rubber. “Are we in the current?” he gasped.

“We seem to be,” Chen-Lhu said.

Joao sat there panting. He could feel the energy pack like a distant army working inward against his weariness. Perspiration flooded his skin, but his mouth felt dry and hot. The windshield ahead of him was dappled with the orange and black spray and foam residue.

“They’re still with us,” Chen-Lhu said. “Along the shore over there and some kind of a group overhead.”

Joao peered around him. Rhin had returned to her seat. She sat with a sprayrifle across her lap, her head thrown back, eyes closed. Chen-Lhu knelt on the gig-box and peered at the left-hand shore.

The interior of the cabin appeared to Joao to be filled with dappled gray-green shadows. His mind told him there must be other colors present, but he saw only the gray-greens—even Chen-Lhu’s skin… and Rhin’s.

“Something’s… wrong… with… color,” he whispered.

“Color aberration,” Chen-Lhu said. “That was one of the symptoms.”

Joao looked out a clean place in the right windows, saw through the trees a scattering of dun peaks and a gray-green sun low above them.

“Close your eyes, lean back and relax,” Rhin said.

Joao rolled his head on the seat back, saw that she had put aside her sprayrifle and was bending over him. She began massaging his forehead.

She spoke to Chen-Lhu: “His skin feels hot.”

Joao closed his eyes. Her hands felt so peaceful and cool. The blackness of utter fatigue hovered around him… and far off on his right leg he felt a drumbeat: the energy pack.

“Try to sleep,” Rhin whispered.

“Rhin, how do you feel?” Chen-Lhu asked.

“I put a pack on my leg during that first lull,” she said. “I think it’s the A.C.T.H. fractions—they seem to give immediate relief if you haven’t been hit too hard.”

“And Johnny got much more than we did from our friends.”

“Out there? Of course he did.”

The word sounds were a distant fuzziness to Joao, but the meanings rang through with a startling clarity, and he found himself fascinated by voice overtones. Chen-Lhu’s voice was loaded with concealment. Rhin’s carried suppressed fear and genuine concern for himself.

Rhin gave his forehead one last soothing caress, sank back into her seat. She pushed her hair back, looked out to the west. Movement there, yes: white flutterings and things that were larger. She moved her gaze upward. Alto cirrus clouds hung in the distance above the trees. Sunset poured color through them as she watched and the clouds became waves as red as blood.

She averted her eyes, looked downstream.

The current swept the pod around a sickle-shaped bend and they drifted almost due north in a widening channel. Along the eastern shore the water flowed with mauve-tinted silver, metallic and luminous.

A deep booming of jungle doves sounded from the right bank—or was it doves. Rhin looked around her, feeling the hushed stillness.

The sun dipped behind distant peaks and the nightly patrol of bats flickered overhead, swooping and soaring. Noises of evening birds lifted, stilled and were replaced by night sounds—the far off coughing growl of a jaguar, rustlings and quiverings and a nearby splash.

And again that hushed stillness.

Something out there that everything in the jungle fears , Rhin thought.

An amber moon began to climb over them. The pod drifted down the moon-path like a giant dragonfly poised on the water. A skeleton butterfly fluttered into view through the pale light, waved the filigree of its transparent wings on the pod’s windshield, departed.

“They’re keeping a close watch on us,” Chen-Lhu said.

Joao could feel warmth coursing upward from the energy pack as the A.T.P., the calcium and acetylcholine, the A.C.T.H. factions diffused in his body. But a sensation of dizziness remained, as though he were many persons at once. He opened his eyes, looked out to the fuzzy spread of moonlit hills. He realized he actually saw this, but part of him felt as though it clung to the fabric ceiling of the cabin behind the canopy, crouching there, really. And the moon was an alien moon, like none he had ever known, its earthlighted circle far too big, its melon-curve of sun reflection far too bright. It was a false moon on a painted backdrop and it made him feel small, dwindling away to a tiny spark lost in the infinity of the universe.