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'Joao ... Senhor Martinho, I've been such a fool,' she said.
'You heard?' Chen-Lhu asked.
'I heard,' she said.
'A pity,' Chen-Lhu said. 'I'd hoped to preserve some of your illusions ... for
a little while, anyway.'
What an odd conversation, Joao thought.
What an odd person, this Rhin. What an odd place, this tent with its ridgepole
coming around to face me.
Something thudded against his back and his head.
I've fallen, he thought.
Isn't that odd?
The last thing he heard before unconsciousness flooded his mind with black ink
was
Vierho's startled voice:
'Jefe!'
There was a dream in which Rhin hovered over him saying, 'What difference does
it make who gives the orders?' And in the dream, he could only turn a baleful
stare on her and think how hateful she looked - in spite of her beauty.
Someone said, 'What's the difference? We'll all be dead soon anyway.'
And another voice said, 'Look, there's a new one. That one looks like Gabriel
Martinho, the Prefect.'
Joao felt himself sinking into a void where his face was held by clamps that
forced him to stare into the monitor screen on the dash of his airtruck's pod.
The screen showed a giant stag beetle with the face of his father. And the
sound was a cicada hum up and down the scale with a voice inside the hum:
'Don't excite yourself. Don't excite yourself ... '
He awoke screaming to realise there was no sound in his throat - only the
memory of screams. His body was bathed in perspiration. Rhin sat beside him
wiping his forehead. She looked pale and thin, her eyes sunken. For a moment
he wondered if this emaciated Rhin
Kelly were part of a dream; she seemed to give no notice to the fact that his
eyes were open although she looked right at him.
He tried to speak, but his throat was too dry.
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The movement attracted Rhin, though. She bent over him, peered into his eyes.
Presently she reached behind her, brought up a canteen, trickled a few drops
of water down his throat.
'What ... ' he croaked.
'You had the same thing that hit me, but more of it,' she said. 'A nerve drug
in the insect venom. Don't try to exert yourself.'
'Where?' he asked.
She looked at him, sensing the broader question 'We're still in the same old
trap,' she said, 'but now we have a chance of getting out.'
His eyes spoke the question that his lips couldn't form.
'Your truck pod,' she said. 'Some of its circuits were badly damaged, but
Vierho rigged substitutes. Now be quiet a moment.'
She checked his pulse, put a blood-gauge thermometer against his neck, read
it. 'Fever's down,' she said. 'Have you ever had heart trouble of any kind?'
Instantly he thought of his father; but this question wasn't directed to his
father.
'No,' he whispered.
'I have a very few energy packs,' she said. 'Direct feed. I can give you one
if you don't have a weak heart.'
'Do it,' he said.
'I'll use a vein in your leg,' she said. 'They gave it to me on the left arm
and I saw blue and red lights for an hour.' She bent to a case beside the cot,
took a flat black cartridge from it, pulled the blanket off his feet and began
applying the energy pack to his left leg.
He could feel her working there, but it was so far away and he was so drowsy.
'This is how we brought Dr Chen-Lhu around,' she said, pulling the blanket
back over his
feet.
Travis didn't die, he thought He felt that this was an extremely important
fact, but couldn't place the reason.
'It was more than the nerve drug, of course,' she said. 'With Dr Chen-Lhu and
with me, that is. Vierho spotted it in the water.'
'Water?'
She took the word as a request, dribbled more water down his throat from the
canteen.
'Our second night here we dug a well in one of the tents,' she said. 'River
seepage, naturally. Water's loaded with poisons, some of them ours. That's
what Vierho tasted: the bitterness. But my test shows there's something else
in that water: a hallucinogenic that produces a reaction very like
schizophrenia. It isn't anything humans put there.'
Joao could feel energy pumping into him from the pack on his leg. A cramp like
acute hunger knotted his stomach. When it passed, he said, 'Something from ...
them.'
'Very likely,' she said. 'We've rigged a crude still. There's a variable
resistance to this hallucinogenic. Hogar appears to be completely immune, but
he didn't get any of the venom drug.
That seems to leave you wide open.' Again she checked his pulse. 'Are you
feeling stronger?'
'Yes.'
The cramps were in the muscles of his thighs now - rhythmic and painful. They
receded.
'We've analysed that skeleton in your pod,' she said. 'An amazing thing.
Remarkably like a human skeleton except for ridges and tiny holes - presumably
where the insects attach themselves and articulate it. It's bird-light but
very strong. The kinship to chitin is quite apparent.'
Joao thought about this, letting the energy from the pack on his leg
accumulate. He was feeling stronger by the second. So much seemed to have
happened, though: the pod repaired, that skeleton analysed.
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'How long have I been here?' he asked.
'Four days,' she said. She glanced at her wristwatch. 'Almost to the hour.
It's still fairly early.'
Joao grew aware then of the forced cheerfulness in her tone. What was she
hiding?
Before he could explore the question, a hiss of fabric and brief flash of
sunlight told of someone entering the tent.
Chen-Lhu appeared behind Rhin. The Chinese seemed to have aged fifty years
since Joao had last seen him. Skin sagged and wrinkled at his jawline. The
cheeks were concave pockets. He walked with a fragile caution.
'I see the patient is awake,' he said. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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