Frank Herbert - The Green Brain

What ever made me choose this career? she wondered.

As though in answer, she found projected upon her memory the full sequence of an event she’d left buried in her childhood. She’d been six and it was the year her father spent in the American West doing his book about Johannes Kelpius. They’d lived in an old adobe house and flying ants had made a nest against the wall. Her father had sent a handyman to burn out the nest and she had crouched to watch. There’d been the smell of kerosene, a sudden burst of yellow flame in sunlight, black smoke and a cloud of whirling insects with pale amber wings enveloping her in their frenzy.

She’d run screaming into the house, winged creatures crawling over her, clinging to her. And in the house: adult anger, hands thrusting her into a bathroom, a voice commanding, “Clean those bugs off you! The very idea, bringing them into the house. See you don’t leave a one on the floor. Kill them and flush them down the toilet.”

For a time that had seemed forever, she’d screamed and pounded and kicked against the locked door. “ They won’t die! They won’t die! ”

Rhin shook her head to drive out the memory. “They won’t die,” she whispered.

“What?” Joao asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “What time is it?”

“It’ll be dark soon.”

She kept her attention on the passing shore—tree ferns and cabbage palms here, with rising water beginning to pour off around their trunks. But the river was wide and its central current still swift. In the spotted sunlight beyond the trees she thought she saw flitting movements of color.

Birds, she hoped.

Whatever they were, the things moved so fast she felt she saw them only after they were gone.

Thick billowings of clouds began filling the eastern horizon with a look of depth and weight and blackness. Lightning flickered soundlessly beneath them. A long interval afterward, the thunder came, a low, sodden hammer stroke.

The heaviness of waiting hung over the river and the jungle. Currents crawled around the pod like writhing serpents—a muddy brown velvet oozing motion that harried the floats: push and turn… push, twist and turn.

It’s the waiting , Rhin thought.

Tears slipped down her cheeks and she wiped them away.

“Is something wrong, my dear?” Chen-Lhu asked.

She wanted to laugh, but knew laughter would drag her back into hysteria. “If you aren’t the banal son of a bitch!” she said. “Something wrong!”

“Ahhh, we still have our fighting spirit,” Chen-Lhu said.

Luminous gray darkness of a cloud shadow flowed across the pod, flattened all contrast.

Joao watched a line of rain surge across the water whipped toward him by bursts of wind. Again, lightning flickered. The growl of thunder came faster, sharper. The sound set off a band of howler monkeys on the left shore. Their cries echoed across the water.

Darkness built up its hold on the river. Briefly, the clouds parted in the west and presented a sky like a sheet of burnished turquoise that drifted swiftly from yellow into a deep wine as red as a bishop’s cloak. The river looked black and oily. Clouds dropped across the sunset and once more a jagged fire-plume of lightning etched itself against the distance.

The rain took up its endless stammering on the canopy, washing the shorelines into dove-gray mist. Night covered the scene.

“Oh, God, I’m scared,” Rhin whispered. “Oh, God, I’m scared. Oh, God, I’m scared.”

Joao found he had no words to comfort her. Their world and everything it demanded of them had gone beyond words, all transformed into an elemental flowing indistinguishable from the river itself.

A din of frogs came out of the night and they heard water hissing through reeds. Not even the faintest glow of moonlight penetrated the clouded darkness. Frogs and hissing reeds faded. The pod and its three occupants returned to a world of beating rain suspended above a faint wash of river against floats.

“It’s very strange, this being hunted,” Chen-Lhu whispered.

The words fell on Joao as though they came from some disembodied source. He tried to recall Chen-Lhu’s appearance and was astonished when no image came into his mind. He searched for something to say and all he could find was: “We’re not dead yet.”

Thank you, Johnny , Chen-Lhu thought. I needed some such nonsense from you to put things into perspective . He chuckled silently to himself, thinking: Fear is the penalty of consciousness. There’s no weakness in fear… only in showing it. Good, evil—it’s all a matter of how you view it, with a god or without one .

“I think we should anchor,” Rhin said. “What if we came on rapids in the night, before we could hear them? Who could hear anything in this rain?”

“She’s right,” Chen-Lhu said.

“D’you want to go out there and drop the grapnel, Travis?” Joao asked.

Chen-Lhu felt his mouth go dry.

“Go ahead if you want,” Joao said.

No weakness in fear, only in showing it , Chen-Lhu thought. He pictured what might be out there waiting in the darkness—perhaps one of the creatures they’d seen on the shore. Each second’s delay, Chen-Lhu realized, betrayed him.

“I think,” Joao said, “that it’s more dangerous to open the hatch at night than it is to drift… and listen.”

“We do have the winglights,” Chen-Lhu said. “That is, if we hear something.” Even as he spoke, he sensed how weak and empty his words were.

Chen-Lhu felt fluid heat ripple through his veins, anger like a series of velvet explosions. Still, the unknown remained out there, a place of ravenous tranquility, full of furiously remembered brilliance even in this blackness.

Fear strips away all pretense , Chen-Lhu thought. I’ve been dishonest with myself .

It was as though the thought thrust him suddenly around a corner, there to confront himself like a reflection in a mirror. And he was both substance and reflection. The abruptly awakening clarity sent memories streaking through his mind until he felt his entire past dancing and weaving like fabric rolling off a loom—reality and illusion in the same cloth.

The sensation passed, leaving him feverish with an inner trembling and a sense of terrible loss.

I’m having a delayed reaction to the insect poisons , he thought.

“Oscar Wilde was a pretentious ass,” Rhin said. “Any number of lives are worth any number of deaths. Bravery has nothing to do with that.”

Even Rhin defends me , Chen-Lhu thought.

The thought enraged him.

“You God-fearing fools,” he snarled. “All of you chanting: ‘Thou hast being , God!’ There couldn’t be a god without man! A god wouldn’t know he existed if it weren’t for man! If there ever was a god… this universe is his mistake!”

Chen-Lhu fell silent, surprised to find himself panting as though after great exertion.

A burst of rain hammered against the canopy as though in some celestial answer, then faded into wet muttering.

“Well… would you listen to the atheist,” Rhin said.

Joao peered into the darkness where her voice had originated, suddenly angry with her, feeling shame in her words. Chen-Lhu’s outburst had been like seeing the man naked and defenseless. The thing should’ve been ignored, not given substance by comment. Joao felt that Rhin’s words had served only to drive Chen-Lhu into a corner.

The thought made him recall a scene out of his days in North America, a vacation with a classmate in eastern Oregon. He’d been hunting quail along a fence line when two of his host’s mismatched brindle hounds had burst over a rise in pursuit of a scrawny bitch coyote. The coyote had seen the hunter and had swerved left, only to be trapped in a fence corner.