Phylogenesis - Alan Dean Foster [145]
For the first time, the senior editor showed some animation. “Why? Why should you care what happens to the work of some obscure alien artist? The art means nothing to you. He meant nothing to you.”
“I’m not sure. Maybe—maybe it’s because I’ve always felt that everybody should stand for something, even if the rest of society doesn’t agree on what that is, and that nobody should die for nothing. I’ve seen too many people die for nothing. I don’t want it to happen to me, and I don’t want it to happen to Des.” With a shrug, he looked away, toward the single window that was too small for a prisoner to crawl through. Outside lay the city and beyond, the rain forest.
“It’ll probably happen to me anyway. I’m not anything special. Never was and probably never will be. But I’m going to see to it that it doesn’t happen to him.”
While the reporters waited respectfully, the editor considered the prisoner’s words. Eventually he looked back up at Cheelo. “All right. We agree to your terms. All of them. Provided there’s something significant and real at the end of this alien rainbow of yours.”
A mollified Cheelo leaned back in his chair. Despite the backpack, despite its unarguably alien contents, he was not sure until the very end that the media people would go for it. Unless he was very much mistaken, he would soon be walking the streets again. A dead thranx poet had cost him a career but bought him his freedom.
What the consequences of that freedom would be he could not have foreseen. He expected to be free. He did not expect to be famous.
Searching only within the section of rain forest specified by the thief allowed the reporters and their staff to locate the hive within a few weeks of Cheelo supplying them with coordinates. Worldwide revelation followed and outrage ensued. Exposed and confronted, the representatives of the colony and their covert human allies pleaded a case which for them could have only one outcome.
Their careful, cautious diplomacy undone, human and thranx emissaries scrambled to salvage what they could of a shattered process of prudent negotiation. Forced to advance all interspecies colloquy and bring forward proposals that were barely in the preliminary stages of synthesis, they hastened to compose and then sign the first formal treaties between humans and thranx some twenty to forty years before they were ready. Both species would simply have to deal with the unpredictable consequences. The alternative was a formal break in relations coupled with the possibility of open hostilities.
As for the Amazonian colony, it was allowed to remain only because humans were hastily granted reciprocal colonization privileges on the thranx homeworld of Hivehom in addition to the much smaller installation on Willow-Wane. A site was selected on what the bipeds soon came to call the Mediterranea Plateau, a dominion too bleak and cold and dry for the thranx to settle. Forced together by the circumstance of revelation, human and thranx rapidly discovered that they complemented one another in ways that could not have been predicted by formal diplomacy. The first tentative steps were taken to overcome each species’ abhorrence of the hideous appearance of the other.
As for Cheelo Montoya, who only wanted to sink back into the backstreet society in which he had grown up, albeit with a bit more money, he found himself transformed from petty, remorseless street hustler into a paragon of interspecies first contact. It was a celebrity he did not seek and did not want, but once his part in the business was revealed he no longer had any choice in the matter. Eagerly sought out for interviews, thrust beneath world-spanning tridee pickups, he was repeatedly reminded of his personal inadequacies by questions he could not answer and requests for opinions that were beneath his ability to formulate. With his face thrust relentlessly before an inquisitive world, he lost any semblance of personal privacy. Poked, prodded,