Phylogenesis - Alan Dean Foster [83]
When he was finished he attached the scri!ber to the pouch hanging from his thorax, where it could be accessed quickly. The human responded by lowering the unidentified mechanism it had been clutching so tightly in one hand.
“You still haven’t answered my questions. I told you who I am and what I’m doing here. I’m still waiting to hear your story.”
Desvendapur knew he would have to summon all the creative inventiveness at his command. It was vital to prevent the human from notifying the authorities. If that happened, not only would the poet’s presence be revealed to the outside world, so would that of the colony. He could hardly explain that he had found his way to the forest preserve from the official, highly restricted contact sites halfway around the planet. Officially, few thranx had even set foot on the human homeworld.
The biped claimed to be an amateur naturalist. But unless he was concealing his equipment, he appeared to Des to be traveling exceptionally light even for a casually interested nonprofessional. For that matter, why was he even bothering to have this conversation? Any human encountering an unannounced alien could be expected to immediately contact a higher authority. Instead, this Cheelo individual seemed content, at least for the moment, to perform his own interrogation. Something was not as it seemed, but Desvendapur knew it was far too early for him to render judgments. He needed more information—a great deal more. After all, what did he know of human scientific procedures? Perhaps this self-proclaimed naturalist’s gear was stored or buried nearby.
Irrespective of the actual explanation, the delay was greatly to the poet’s liking. The longer the encounter lasted before it was terminated due to contact with the planetary authorities, the greater the opportunities to set down new and exciting poesy.
“I am a food preparations specialist.” He spoke slowly to make certain he was being understood.
He was being understood, all right. Utterly ignorant of thranx dining deportment, Cheelo did not much like the sound of “food preparations specialist.”
“Who do you prepare food for?” He looked past the bug, scrutinizing the rain forest from which it had emerged. “Not just yourself, surely? There must be more of you.”
“There are,” Desvendapur explained creatively, “but they are, crrrk, carrying out limited studies of their own far, far from here. I am on a solitary expedition of my own.”
“To do what?” Suspicious to a fault, Cheelo kept searching the woods for any hints of closing ambush. “Gather herbs and spices?” He lowered his gaze. “Or maybe you’d like to catch me off guard so you could kill and eat me?”
Utterly unanticipated, the sickening speculative accusation caught Desvendapur completely off guard. He had thought that his surreptitious research and studies adequately prepared him for just this kind of contact, but he was wrong. Unwilled and unbidden, an image formed in his mind: the human, stripped of clothing and nude, its pulpy, fleshy pink form stretched out over a fire; raw animal fat dripping from its scorched limbs, oozing into the flames and sizzling; the smell of carbonizing meat…
Reeling, he promptly regurgitated the undigested portion of the day’s meal that had been quietly fermenting in his upper stomach. He had turned away not out of embarrassment but to avoid retching into the