Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

Puzzled, and somewhat afraid, he glanced down at the ferns and saw scattered among them pieces of a fibrous black husk. Upon examining them, he discovered that the insides of the pieces were figured by smooth indentations that conformed exactly to the shapes of his face and limbs. There could be no doubt that prior to his awakening, he had been enclosed within the husk, like a seed in its casing. His anxiety increased when—on setting down one of the pieces—his fingers brushed the clay beneath the ferns and he saw before his mind’s eye the pitching deck of a vast wooden ship, with wild seas bursting over the railings. Men wearing steel helmets and carrying pikes were huddled in the bow, and standing in the door that led to the gun decks (how had he known that?) was a gray-haired man who beckoned to him. To him? No, to someone he had partly been. João Merin Nascimento. That name—like his vision of the ship—surfaced in his thoughts following contact with the clay. And with the name came a thousand fragments of memory, sufficient to make the young man realize that Nascimento, a Portuguese soldier of centuries past, lay buried beneath the spot where he was sitting, and that he was in essence the reincarnation of the old soldier: for just as the toxins and radiations of the September War had transformed the jungle, so the changed jungle had worked a process of alchemy on those ancient bones and produced a new creature, human to a degree, yet—to a greater degree—quite inhuman. Understanding this eased the young man’s anxiety, because he now knew that he was safe in the dominion of the jungle, whose creature he truly was. But he understood, too, that his manlike form embodied a cunning purpose, and in hopes of discerning that purpose, he set out to explore the jungle, walking along a trail that led (though he was not aware of it) to the ruins of Manaus.

Nine days he walked; and during those days he learned much about the jungle’s character and—consequently—about his own. From a creature with a dozen bodies, each identical, yet only one of which contained its vital spark, he learned an ultimate caution; from the malgaton, a fierce jaguarlike beast whose strange eyes could make a man dream of pleasure while he died, he learned the need for circumspection in the cause of violence; from the deadly jicaparee vine with its exquisite flowers, he learned the importance of setting a lure and gained an appreciation of the feral principles underlying all beauty.

From each of these creatures and more, he learned that no living thing is without its parasites and symbiotes, and that in the moment they are born their death is also born. But not until he came in sight of the ruined city, when he saw its crumbling, vine-draped towers tilting above the canopy like grotesque vegetable chessmen whose board was in process of being overthrown, not until then did he at last fathom his purpose: that he was to be the jungle’s weapon against mankind, its mortal enemy who time and again had sought to destroy it.

The young man could not conceive how—fangless and clawless—he would prove a threat to an enemy with weapons that had poisoned a world. Perplexed, hoping some further illumination would strike him, took to wandering the city streets, over cracked flagstones between which he could see the tunnels of guerilla ants, past ornate wrought-iron streetlamps in whose fractured globes white phosphorescent spiders the size of skull crabs had spun their webs (by night their soft glow conveyed a semblance of the city’s fabulous heyday into this, its rotting decline), and through the cavernous mansions of the wealthy dead. Everywhere he wandered he encountered danger, for Manaus had been heavily dusted during the September War and thus was home to the most perverse of the jungle’s mutations: flying lizards that spit streams of venom; albino peacocks whose shrill cries could make a man bleed from the ears; the sortilene, a mysterious creature never glimpsed by human eyes, known only by the horrid malignancies that sprouted from the flesh of its victims; herds of peccaries, superficially unchanged but possessing vocal chords that could duplicate the cries of despairing women. At night an enormous shadow obscured the stars, testifying to an even more dire presence. Yet none of these creatures troubled the young man—they seemed to know him for an ally. And, indeed, often as he explored the gloomy interiors of the ruined houses, he would see hundreds of eyes gazing at him, slit pupils and round, showing all colors like a spectrum of stars ranging the dusky green shade, and then he would have the idea that they were watching over him.

At length he entered the lobby of a hotel that—judging by the sumptuous rags of its drapes, the silver-cloth stripe visible in the moss-furred wallpaper, the immensity of the reception desk—must once have been a palace among hotels. Thousands of slitherings stilled when he entered. The dark green shadows seemed the visual expression of a cloying mustiness, one redolent of a thousand insignificant deaths. His footsteps shaking loose falls of plaster dust, he walked along the main hallway, past elevator shafts choked with vines and epithytes, and came eventually to a foyer whose roof was holed in such a fashion that sharply defined sunbeams hung down from it, dappling the scummy surface of an ornamental pond with coins of golden light. There, sitting naked and crosslegged on a large lily pad—the sort that once hampered navigation on the Rio Negro due to the toughness of its fiber—was an old Indian man, so wizened that he appeared to be a homunculus. His eyes were closed, his white hair filthy and matted, and his coppery skin bore a greenish tinge (whether this was natural coloration or a product of the shadows, the young man could not determine). The young man expected intuitions about the Indian to flow into his thoughts; but when this did not occur, he realized that though the Indians, too, had been changed by the September War, though they were partially the jungle’s creatures, they were still men, and the jungle had no knowledge of men other than that it derived from the bones of the dead. How then, he wondered, could he defeat an enemy about whom he was ignorant? He stretched out a hand to the Indian, thinking a touch might transmit some bit of information. But the Indian’s eyes blinked open, and with a furious splashing he paddled the lily pad beyond the young man’s reach. “The arcevoalo must be cautious with his touch,” he said in a creaky voice that seemed to stir the atoms of the dust within the sunbeams. “Haven’t you learned that?”

Though the young man—the arcevoalo—had not heard his name before, he recognized it immediately. With its Latinate echoes of wings and arcs, it spoke to him of the life he would lead, how he would soar briefly through the world of men and then return to give his knowledge of them to the jungle. Knowing his name opened him to his full strength—he felt it flooding him like a golden heat—and served to align his character more precisely with that of the jungle. He stared down at the Indian, who now struck him as being wholly alien, and asked how he had known the name.

“This truth I have eaten has told it to me,” said the Indian, holding up a pouch containing a quantity of white powder. Grains of it adhered to his fingers. “I was called here to speak the truth to someone…doubtless to you. But now I must leave.” He slipped off the lily pad and waded toward the edge of the pond.

Moving so quickly that he caused the merest flutter of shadow upon the surface of the water, the arcevoalo leaped to the far side of the pond, blocking the Indian’s path. “What is this ‘truth?’” he asked. “And who called you here?”

“The powder derives from the asuero flower,” said the Indian. “A plant fertilized with the blood of honest men. As to who called me, if I had known that I might not have come.” He made as if to haul himself from the pond, but the arcevoalo stayed him.