Phylogenesis - Alan Dean Foster [117]
“I’m here right now because I killed somebody.”
Desvendapur felt a thrill run through him. This was more than he could have hoped for: inspiration taken to and beyond a degree he could not have imagined in his wildest dreams. “You murdered another of your own kind?”
“It wasn’t intentional,” Cheelo protested. “I never meant to hurt nobody. Killing’s bad for business. It just—happened. I needed the money. So I had to get away, to someplace where I could lose myself for a while.” He gestured at the wild, all-enveloping rain forest. “This is a good place for that. Or it was, until I ran into you.”
“You are still ‘lost,’” Desvendapur assured him. “I will not give you away.”
“You don’t have to ‘give me away.’” Cheelo’s tone was accusing. “Like you said, all your brother bugs and their human friends have to do is find me with you and I’m history. Don’t matter anyway. I was on my way out when you found me. I got an appointment. And you ain’t helping me make it.” Quietly, his hand strayed toward his gun.
“One more day.” The thranx glanced skyward. “They haven’t found me yet. I don’t think they will, if I choose to continue hiding, but all I ask for is one more day in your company.”
Cheelo’s fingers hovered. Why wait? he told himself. Kill it now and move on. They’ll find the body or they won’t. Either way, he wouldn’t be connected to it. As far as this unauthorized colony and its allies were concerned, he’d be just another solitary wanderer in the vast reaches of the rain forest.
But there was something in the alien’s manner—an unrestrained eagerness, a desperation to learn, a need to achieve—that appealed strongly to something deep inside Cheelo Montoya. It wasn’t that they were in any way alike: That was an absurd thought. Cheelo had never had a poetic or artistic impulse in his life, unless one counted the skill with which he relieved the unsuspecting and the unlucky of their valuables.
The camouflaged scanner had already passed this way. It was unlikely a second would be following it. Surely the resources of this secret colony were limited and any search it instituted, however frantic, must necessarily be circumspect. Otherwise it would attract the attention of the Reserva rangers or their own automatic monitoring devices. If he and the bug kept moving in the direction the eagle scanner had come from, they ought to be free of observation and safe from detection for quite a while.
Without really knowing why, he heard himself saying, “One day?”
The thranx nodded. Cheelo no longer thought the familiar gesture strange when executed by the alien. “One day. So that I may finish my note taking and observations and round them off smoothly and completely.”
“I’m not sure I know what the hell you’re talking about. I don’t owe you nothing.”
“No, you do not. Even though we are, in a way, spiritually of the same clan.”
Cheelo frowned. “What are you babbling about?”
The thranx’s tone did not change. “We are both outcasts, antisocials. And takers of life. I too am responsible for the death of another. All because I wish to compose something of importance.”
There it was. This alien, this grossly oversized bug from another world, wanted to do something big, just like Cheelo Montoya.
No, he thought angrily, refusing to accept the analogy. We don’t have anything in common! Not me and a goddamn bug! He said nothing aloud. What was there to say? He knew nothing of thranx society, of what it considered acceptable and what it did not, though he felt he could be certain of one thing: Surely among any intelligent species, the murder of one’s fellows was considered inappropriate. He was wrong, but correct where the thranx were concerned.
“And if at the end of that time you remain tormented by uncertainties,” Desvendapur was saying, “you can still kill me.”
Cheelo started, his eyes widening slightly. “What makes you think I’d want to kill you?”
“It would be the logical thing to do.” Two hands gestured in the direction of the human’s holstered