Phylogenesis - Alan Dean Foster [16]
The words stung worse than the liquor. Cheelo Montoya sat a little straighter in his seat. It took a sustained effort, but he forced himself. “I ain’t—I’m not going to pass out.” He struggled to focus on the tridee image. “Yeah, I see ’em. So they’re ugly. So what?” He looked sharply at his “friend.” “You just have to look at ’em, not sleep with ’em.”
This observation struck the two other men as uproariously funny. When the coughing and hooting had died down, the larger man wagged a fat finger at the diminutive Montoya.
“Sometimes I can’t never figure you, Cheelo. Sometimes I think you’re as stupid and ignorant as the rest of these sorry-ass poachers and grampeiros around here, and then you’ll go and surprise me by saying something almost intelligent.”
“Thanks,” Montoya muttered dryly. He nodded in the direction of the tridee image. Feeling the familiar, irresistible glaze spreading over his eyes like heavy honey, he determinedly blinked it back. “What are they, anyway?”
The other men exchanged a look, and the one nearest Montoya replied. “You mean you don’t know, man?”
“No,” Cheelo mumbled. “I don’t know. So shoot me.”
“Waste of a bullet,” the heavyset drinker husked, but too softly for Montoya to overhear.
“They’re bugs, man. Bugs.” The speaker waved his arms wildly in front of Montoya, though the visual emphasis was unnecessary. “Giant, gross, filthy, stinking, alien bugs! And they’re here! Right here on Earth, or at least at the two official contact locations.”
Leaning back against the bar, the heavyset drinker gazed dully at the tridee. “Actually, I hear they smell kind of nice.”
Visibly outraged, his lanky friend whirled on him. “What? Smell nice? They’re bugs, man! Bugs don’t smell nice. Especially alien ones.” His tone fell threateningly, bursting with false courage. “I wish I had a size fifty shoe, so I could step on ’em and squish every one of ’em.” Glancing down at the floor, he promptly slid off his seat and landed feet first on a large tropical roach. The insect tried to dodge, failed, and crunched audibly beneath the pair of heavily scored jungle boots. “That’s how you treat bugs, man. I don’t care if they do make speeches and build starships.”
The bartender leaned slightly forward to peer over the bar. A look of mild distaste soured his expression as he evaluated the fresh black smear on the floor. “Did you have to do that, Andre?”
“Oh, right,” the bug smasher replied sarcastically. “Like it seriously impacts the elegant décor of your fine establishment.”
The eyebrows of the beefy individual behind the bar rose. He did not blink. “If you don’t like it here anymore, there’s always Maria’s down the street.”
The heavyset drinker choked melodramatically. “Maria’s? This dive is Ambergris Cay compared to that hole. Hey, hey—” He prodded his friend. “—I bet if you paid enough you could get one of Maria’s whores to sleep with a bug.” He chuckled at his own debased humor. “They’ll sleep with anybody. Why not anything?”
“Ay—they build starships?” Swaying slightly, Montoya struggled to focus on the tridee image.
“That’s what they say.” The man next to him resumed his explication. “First the lizards, now bugs. Me, I think we should keep to the solar system and forget about the rest of it.”
“They’re not lizards.” His marginally more erudite associate did not hesitate to correct his drinking companion. “The AAnn are lizardlike. Just like the thranx are insectile, but not insects.”
“Ahhhhh, go plug yourself, Morales. They’re bugs.” The other man’s conviction was not to be denied, nor was he about to let awkward facts interfere with his ripening xenophobia. “If it was up to me, I’d call the nearest exterminator. Let ’em infest their own planet, but stay the hell away from ours. Keep Earth pure. We already got enough bugs of our own.” He downed a long, corrosive swallow of biting blue brew, wiped his lips with the back of a hairy hand that was too conversant with manual labor, and remembered the smaller man on