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

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The Green Brain
Frank Herbert
1966


Part of this novel has appeared in Amazing Stories as a novelette entitled Greenslaves, 1965





I


He looked pretty much like the bastard offspring of a Guarani Indio and some backwoods farmer's daughter, some sertanista who'd tried to forget her enslavement to the encomendero system by "eating the iron" -- which is what they call lovemaking through the grill of a consel gate.

The type-look was almost perfect except when he forgot himself while passing through one of the deeper jungle glades.

His skin tended to shade down to green then, fading him into the background of leaves and vines, giving a ghostly disembodiment to the mud-gray shirt and ragged trousers, the inevitable frayed straw hat and rawhide sandals soled with pieces cut from worn tires.

Such lapses grew less and less frequent the farther he emerged from the Parana headwaters, the sertao hinterland of Goyaz where men with his bang-cut black hair and glittering dark eyes were common.

By the time he reached bandeirantes country, he had achieved almost perfect control over the chameleon effect.

Now, he was out of the wilder jungle growth and into the brown dirt tracks that separated the parceled farms of the resettlement plan. In his own way, he knew he was approaching one of the bandeirante checkpoints, and with an almost human gesture he fingered the cedula de graicias al sacar, the certificate of white blood, tucked safely beneath his shirt. Now and again, when humans were not near, he practiced aloud the name that had been chosen for him -- "Antonio Raposo Tavares."

The sound emerged a bit strident, harsh on the edges, but he knew it would pass. It already had. Goyaz Indios were notorious for the strange inflections of their speech. The farm folk who'd given him a roof and food the previous night had said as much.

When their questions had become pressing, he'd squatted on their doorstep and played his flute, the qena of the Andes Indian, which he carried in a leather purse hung from his shoulder. The gesture of the flute was a symbol of the region. When a Guarani put flute to nose and began playing, that said words were ended.

The farm folk had shrugged and retired.

His trudging progress, the difficult and carefully mastered articulation of legs, had brought him now into an area of many humans. He could see red-brown rooftops ahead and the white crystal shimmering of a bandeirante tower with its aircars alighting and departing. The scene held an odd hive-look.

Momentarily, he found himself overcome by the touch of instincts that he knew he must master. These instincts could make him fail the ordeal to come. He stepped off the dirt track, out of the path of passing humans, and went through the regimen that united his mental identity. The resultant thought penetrated to the smallest and most remote units of his person: We are greenslaves subservient to the greater whole.

He resumed his way toward the bandeirante checkpoint. The unifying thought lent him an air of servility that was like a shield against the stares of humans trudging past all around. His kind knew many human mannerisms. They had learned early that servility was a form of concealment.

Presently, the dirt track gave way to a two-lane paved market road with footpaths in the ditches on both sides. This, in turn, curved alongside a four-deck commercial transport highway where even the footpaths were paved. Now there were groundcars and aircars in greater numbers, and the flow of foot traffic increased.

Thus far he'd attracted no dangerous attention. The occasional snickering side-glance from natives of the area could be safely ignored. He watched for probing stares. These could hold peril, but he detected none.

Servility shielded him.

The sun stood well along toward mid-morning and the day's heat had begun to press down on the earth, raising a moist hothouse stink from the dirt beside the pathway, mingling it with the perspiration odors of humanity around him. There was a sourness to the smell that made every part of him long for the sweetly familiar odors of the hinterland. And the lowland smells carried another harmonic that filled him with an inaudible humming of unease. Here were greater and greater concentrations of insect poisons.

Humans were all around him now, close and pressing, moving slower and slower as they approached the checkpoint bottleneck.