Phylogenesis - Alan Dean Foster [115]
This time Cheelo did not laugh. He stood away from the tree, his expression turning serious. “You mean your research expedition is an illegal one?”
Desvendapur hesitated only briefly. “How much can I trust you, Cheelo Montoya?”
“Completely.” Expression blank, the human waited patiently.
“There is no research expedition.” Turning his upper body slightly, the poet pointed eastward. “With the aid of certain select representatives of your own kind, a colony has been established in this part of your world.”
“Colony? Of bugs?” Cheelo digested this, then shook his head sharply. “That’s crazy! Even in a place as isolated as the Reserva Amazonia something like that would’ve been spotted before it got started.”
Desvendapur begged to disagree. “Everything was done below the surface. Research, design, excavation, construction: everything. The colony’s human sponsors provided and continue to provide the necessary cover to maintain our seclusion. Once the initial excavating was completed, expansion was not difficult. Or so the history that I studied of the colony declaims. I was assigned here. Unauthorized egress from the hive is strictly forbidden.”
“This ‘colony’ of yours…” Cheelo hesitated uncertainly. This was bigger than he’d suspected. Much bigger. “It hasn’t been authorized by the government, then? I mean, I don’t exactly scan the media every day, but the big things, the major stories, you hear about them from other people. I’ve heard about your kind, but never anything about a bug colony.”
“It is not authorized by your visible government,” Desvendapur admitted readily. “Apparently only a few individuals from certain departments are involved. They have moved forward with this project on their own.”
Like a child’s building blocks, a crude but recognizable structure was assembling itself in Cheelo’s brain. “So if this colony’s been planted here on the sly, and nobody’s supposed to know about it, and nobody from inside is supposed to go outside, then you’re illegitimate twice over.”
“That is correct.”
Cheelo stood stunned, gaping at the calm, composed alien. Here he thought he was the one who had to be wary of discovery, and all along he had been traveling in the company of someone who had committed an offense beside which Cheelo Montoya’s entire lifetime of minor misdeeds and infractions paled into insignificance. Every felony the part-time resident of Gatun and Golfito had committed had been provincial in nature, even the accidental killing in San José. Standing quietly before him was malfeasance on an interstellar scale.
He frowned. “Why’re you telling me this?”
“To observe your reaction. I collect reactions.” The thranx shifted on its trulegs, trying to spread his weight away from the injured, splinted limb. “I am not a researcher any more than you are a naturalist. I am a poet who seeks inspiration. I arranged to come here, to your world, in search of it. I illegally exited the colony in search of it.” Like accusatory fingers, twin antennae were pointed directly at the biped. “It was in hopes of finding it that I went in search of humans who had not had prior contact with my kind.”
Cheelo’s thoughts swirled and collided. All the time the bug had been tagging along, it hadn’t been studying the forest—it had been studying him. Not for scientific purposes, either. His bug was a goddamn artist, all right.
In his comparatively short lifetime Cheelo had thought of himself, envisioned himself, imagined himself as many things. A source of poetic inspiration was not one of them.
“What’ll they do to you if they find you out here?” he asked pointedly.
“Take me back to the hive, to the colony. Debrief me. Ship me offworld as soon as proves feasible. Punishment will follow. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless my unauthorized sojourn here results in composition the likes of which has never been beheld before. I do not know how it is among humans, but among my kind great art excuses a multitude of transgressions.