Phylogenesis - Alan Dean Foster [118]
“You’re mighty confident I won’t.”
“No, I’m not.” Antennae bobbed in a complex pattern. “I have been monitoring your pheromones. The levels rise and fall according to your state of mind. I know when you’re thinking about killing me, and when you are not.”
“You’re reading my mind?” Cheelo gazed unblinkingly at the thranx.
“No. I’m reading your body odor. As I mentioned before, it is very strong. Even it is a source of suggestion to me.” The heart-shaped head dipped slightly. “One more day.”
“And then I can kill you? You just said yourself it would be the logical thing to do.”
Again the alien nodded. “Very much so. But I don’t think you will do it. If I did I would already have slipped away during the night.”
Cheelo’s tone was challenging. “What makes you so sure I won’t do it?”
“Because you haven’t already. And because doing the illogical thing, the unexpected, is what separates the exceptional individual from the great mass of the hive. Sometimes that individuality is not well regarded. In both our societies, iconoclasts and eccentrics are viewed with great suspicion.”
“Well, I’ve sure as hell always been viewed with suspicion. One day.” He considered. “All right. Tomorrow afternoon you go your way and I go mine.”
“Agreed.” The thranx gestured with both his scri!ber and with a foothand. “I already have enough material to nourish composition for several years. It wants only some framing, some greater context. If you would consent in the time we have remaining to us to answer a few questions, I will depart your company tomorrow very much content.”
“Yeah, sure. But right now let’s concentrate on getting away from here, okay?” Raising a hand, he pointed upstream. “Let’s put some more distance between us and that airborne scanner.”
Falling in alongside the human, Desvendapur held his scri!ber out, the better to pick up the biped’s voice more clearly. “Please tell me: When you killed your fellow human, what did it feel like?”
Cheelo glanced over sharply, wishing he could read those compound eyes. But they only stared back, glittering in the light that filtered down through the canopy, siliceous gems set in blue-green chitin.
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
“A difficult one,” the alien replied. “Easy answers make for weak poetry.”
The interrogation, as Cheelo came to think of it, was relentless, continuing all through the remainder of the day and on into the night. What the thranx gained in response to queries that Cheelo felt waned from the irrelevant to the inane he could not imagine, but the alien seemed pleased by every reply, be it fleeting or lengthy. Cheelo endured it all, not really understanding the purpose, knowing that tomorrow he would be free of questions and questioner alike. Free to make the appointment in Golfito that would forever change his life.
He was awakened not by the sun or the chorusing of monkeys, not by demonstrative macaws or buzzing insects, but by a gentle prod to the shoulder.
“Later,” he grumbled. “It’s too early.”
“I agree,” came a familiar, soft, gently modulated voice, “but it is necessary. I do not think we are alone any longer.”
Cheelo sat up fast, throwing off the blanket, instantly awake. “Your friends, come looking for you?”
“That is the peculiar thing. I see only evidence of passing, and it is not of the sort that traveling thranx would leave behind.”
Cheelo frowned. “What sort of evidence?”
“Come and look.”
Following the alien into the undergrowth, Cheelo was brought up short by a sight as expected as it was shocking. The pelts had been neatly stretched and hung to dry on racks fashioned of trimmed poles bound together with vine. There were signs of recent cooking as well as places where the soil had been compacted by repeated bootprints. No biologist, he still recognized the skin of the jaguar and the two margays. There