"Herbert, Frank - The Green Brain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

The voice - that rasping, stridulant sound. Again, Joao asked himself how the creature could produce that simulation of human speech. The coordination required for that action had profound implications.
Joao looked out to his left. The moon was high overhead now, illuminating the line of bandeirante towers off there. The first barrier.
The truck would be out of the Green soon and into the Gray of the poorest Resettlement Plan farms - then, beyond that, another barrier and the Great Red that stretched in reaching fingers through the Goyaz and the inner Mato Grosso, far out to the Andes where teams were coming down from Ecuador. Joao could see scattered lights of Resettlement Plan farms ahead, darkness beyond.
The airtruck was going faster than he wanted, but Joao knew he dared not slow it. They might become suspicious.
'You must go higher,' said the creature behind him.
Joao increased pump displacement, raised the nose. He leveled off at three hundred meters.
More bandeirante towers loomed ahead, spaced at closer intervals. Joao picked up the barrier signals on his dash meters, looked back at his guard. The dissembler vibrations of the barrier seemed to have no effect on the creature.
Joao looked out his side window and down as they passed over the barrier. No one down there would challenge him, he knew. This was a bandeirante airtruck headed into the Red ... and with its transmitter sending out a homing call. The men down there would assume he was a band leader headed out on contract after a successful bid, calling his men to him for the job. If the barrier guards recognised his call wave, that would only confirm the thought.
Joao Martinho had just completed a successful bid on the Serra dos Parecis. All the bandeirantes knew that.
Joao sighed. He could see the moon-silvered snake of the Sao Francisco winding off to his left, and the lesser waterways like threads raveled out of the foothills.
I must find the nest - wherever we're headed, Joao thought.
He wondered if he dared turn on his receiver - but if his men started reporting in ... No. That would make the creatures suspect; they might take violent counter-action.
My men will realise something's wrong when I don't answer, he thought. They'll follow.
If any of them hear my call.
'How far are we going?' Joao asked.
'Very far,' the guard said.
Joao settled himself for a long trip. I must be patient, he thought. I must be as patient as a spider waiting beside her web.
Hours droned past: two, three ... four.
Nothing but moonlighted jungle sped beneath the truck, and the moon lay low on the horizon, near setting. This was the deep Red where broadcast poisons had been used at first with near disastrous results. This was where the first wild mutations had been discovered.
The Ooyaz.
This is where my father said Rhin Kelly went, Joao thought Is she down there now?
The moonfrosted jungle told him nothing.
The Goyaz: this was the region being saved for the final assault, using mobile barrier lines when the circle was short enough.
'How much farther?' Joao asked.
'Soon.'
Joao armed the emergency charge that would separate the front and rear compartments of the truck when he fired it. The stub wings of the front pod and its emergency rocket motors would get him back into bandeirante country.
With the specimen behind him safely subdued, Joao hoped.
He looked up through the canopy, scanned the horizon as far as he could. Was that moonlight glistening on a truck far back to the right? He couldn't be certain ... but it seemed to be.
'Soon?' Joao asked.
'Ahead,' the creature rasped;
The modulated stridulation beneath that voice sent a shiver along Joao's spine. Joao said, 'My father ... '
'Hospital for ... the father ... ahead,' the creature said.
It would be dawn soon, Joao realised. He could see the first false line of light along the horizon behind. This night had passed so swiftly. Joao wondered if his guard had injected some time-distorting drug into him without his knowledge. He thought not. He felt alert, maintaining himself in the necessities of each moment. There wasn't time for fatigue or boredom when he had to record every landmark half-visible in the night, sense everything he could about these creatures around him. The bitter-clean smell of oxalic acid hinted at acid-to-oxygen chemistry.
But how did they coordinate all these separate insect units?
They appeared conscious. Was that more mimicry? What did they use for a brain?
Dawn came, revealing the plateau of the Mato Grosso: a caldron of liquid green boiling over the edge of the world. Joao looked out his side windows in time to see the truck's long shadow bounce across a clearing: stark galvanised metal roofs against the green - a sitiante abandoned in the Resettlement, or perhaps the barracao of a fazenda on the coffee frontier. It had been a likely place for a warehouse, standing as it had beside a small stream with the land around it bearing signs of riverbank agriculture.
Joao knew this region; he could put the bandeirante grid map over it in his imagination - five degrees of latitude and six degrees of longitude it covered. Once it had been a place of isolated fazendas farmed by independent browns and blacks and branco sertanistos chained to the encornendero plantation system. The parents of Benito Alvarez had come from here. It was hardwood jungles, narrow rivers with banks overgrown by lush trees and ferns, savannahs and tangled life.
Here and there along the higher reaches of the rivers lay the remains of hydroelectric plants long since abandoned, like the one at Paulo Afonso Falls - all replaced by sun power and atomics.
This was it: the sertao of the Goyaz. Even in this age it remained primitive, a fact blamed on the insects and disease. It lay there, the last stronghold of teeming insect life in the Western Hemisphere, waiting for a modern tropical technology to lift it into the Twenty-first Century.
Supplies for the bandeirante assault would come by way of Sao Paulo, by air and by transport on the multi-decked highways, then on antique diesel trains to Itapira, by aviadores river runners to Bahus and by airtruck to Registo and Leopoldina on the Araguaya.
And when it was done - the people would return, coming back from the Resettlement Plan areas and the metropolitan shanty towns.
A passage of turbulent air shook the truck, breaking Joao from his reverie, forcing him into an acute consciousness of his situation.
A glance at his guard showed the creature still crouched there, watchful ... as patient as the Indio it mimicked. The presence of the thing behind him had become cumulative, and Joao found himself required to combat a growing sense of revulsion.
The gleaming mechanical pragmatism of the truck pod around him felt as though it were at war with the insect creature. It had no business here in this cabin flying smoothly above the area where its kind ruled supreme.
Joao looked out and down at the green flow of forest, the zona da mata. He knew the area beneath him crawled with insects: wire worms in the roots of savannahs, grubs digging in the moist black earth, hopping beetles, dart-like angita wasps, chalcis flies sacred to the still thriving backwoods Xango cult, chiggers, sphecidae, braconidae, fierce hornets, white termites, hemipteric crawlers, blood roaches, thrips, ants, lice, mosquitoes, mites, moths, exotic butterflies, mantidae - and countless unnatural mutations of them all. That, for sure.
This would be an expensive flight - unless it had already been lost.
I mustn't think that way, Joao told himself. Out of respect for my father. I mustn't think that way ... not yet.
I.B.O. maps showed this region in varied intensities of red. Around the red ran a ring of gray with pink shading where one or two persistent forms of insect life resisted man's poisons, jelly flames, astringents, sonitoxics - the combination of flamant couroq and supersonics that drove insects from their hiding places into waiting death - and all the mechanical, traps and luring baits in the bandeirante arsenal.
A grid map would be placed over this area and each thousand-hectare square offered for bid to the independent bands to deinfest.
We bandeirantes are a kind of ultimate predator, Joao thought It's no wonder these creatures mimic us.