11
As had quickly become his routine, Cheelo was awakened by the gothic choir of howler monkeys greeting the return of the sun. Lying on his back beneath the thin tropical blanket, he gazed up through the dense, featherweight material of the tent. This close to the Earth’s waist, the sun rose and set with equal alacrity. “Lingering twilight” was terminology that belonged to the temperate zone and had no place in the equatorial rain forest.
Yawning, he reached up to scratch an itch—and sat up fast, yelping. Looking down, he saw a rushing river of red-tinged brown flowing across his stomach from left to right. The river entered through a hole in the left side of his tent and exited through a gap of correspondingly tiny dimensions on his right. It went over, around, or through anything and everything in its path. It might have gone through him as well if he had not been tucked into the tough, inedible blanket.
He had gone to sleep without activating the electronic insect repeller in his backpack.
The army ants had eaten through his tent because it was in their path. Able to surmount his sleeping form, they had chosen to go over him. This was fortunate, though he did not think so until later, when he had time to reflect on the closeness of his call. At the moment he was standing and screaming, slapping at the soldier ant that had sunk its mandibles deep into the flesh of his right thumb. Had he known more of army ants and their ways he would have reacted in a more circumspect fashion.
Detecting the release of alarm pheromones from their smashed colleague, a subsection of the living brown stream detached and attacked. Flailing wildly as if afflicted with some aberrant disorder of the nervous system, Cheelo hopped and stumbled out of the tent and the trees, across the open, intervening beach, and into the river. Even submerged, the ants hung on tenaciously. Since it was not the dry season and ample customary prey was available, the resident piranhas ignored this violent intrusion into their world. The four-meter long black caiman on the far bank did not, slipping silently into the water, its dragon’s tail cleaving the rippling, mirrored surface as it sinuously advanced to investigate. By the time it arrived, a fully awake and much chastened Montoya had slogged back onto the beach. Disappointed, the caiman sank back beneath the surface, its intended quarry as ignorant as ever of its majestic, carnivorous presence.
Muttering a steady stream of gutter curses, Cheelo made his way back to his tent. Reaching inside, he checked his pack carefully before picking it up. A pouch within yielded ointment to treat the red welts left behind by the jaws of the soldiers. A pair of tweezers were necessary to remove the mandibles and attached heads of those ants that had refused to release their grip, even after having been drowned and dismembered.
There was not much he could do then except wait for the column to finish moving through. Fortunately, all of his foodstuffs and concentrates were vacuum sealed. This was critical not only to prevent spoilage in the dank depths of the rain forest but to keep edibles from detection by marauding scavengers no matter what their size.
It was late afternoon before the rear guard moved through the hole in his tent and out the other side. After carrying out a visual inspection to ensure that no stragglers remained, he broke down the shelter and its contents and placed them once more in the boat. Normally before loading his gear he would have first checked everything for those dangerous lovers of dark places who inhabited the rain forest: scorpions, spiders, kissing bugs, and their ilk. Subsequent to the column’s passage he knew that would not be necessary. As efficiently as if they had intentionally been making amends, the ants would have scoured clean his tent and belongings. In the wake of their passage, nothing lived.
He vowed that from now on he would be more careful in his choice of campsites. In the rain forest no locality was perfect, however. Bushes concealed dangers of their own; trees were home to voracious insects of other species; and sleeping in the boat, where he could not erect his tent, would expose him to predation by mosquitoes and worse, such as disgusting parasites like the human botfly. Despite his unfortunate experience, he continued to favor open ground within the forest itself for sleeping. He carried a patch kit for the tent, and the holes the insectile multitude had gnawed could be repaired.
Perversely, he was grateful for the presence of everything that stung, bit, chewed, or parasitized. All contributed to conditions the average tourist found uninviting. The worse the climate, the more rapacious the fauna, the less likelihood there was of him running into a tour supervised by a querulous escort. Despite the area’s isolation, a guide or even a tourist equipped with a communicator could quickly call a skimmer full of rangers down on him. With the unfortunate encounter in distant San José still a recent item on police call sheets throughout the hemisphere, that was a confrontation Cheelo desired devoutly to avoid. By the time he was ready to return to Golfito, the furor surrounding his unfortunate encounter ought to have died down.
So far he had been successful. What was proving more difficult than evading the attention of the authorities was living off the land. He had succeeded in catching plenty of fish: The river was awash with them, and they bit at the first hint of bait. But he discovered that there were far fewer edible fruits and nuts than he had hoped to find, and he had been beaten to most of those by the park’s thirteen species of monkey or dozens of parrots and macaws before he could so much as find a ripening tree. The fish were plentiful and tasty and kept him sated, but after a couple of weeks, even a steady diet of piranha and catfish grew boring.
The craving for variety in both taste and nutrients forced him to draw down his stock of concentrates to a point where he began to grow uneasy. Having worked so hard to isolate himself, he was extremely reluctant to make his way to Maldonado, the nearest town, to replenish his supplies. He did find some yuca root that he cleaned and fried. That restored his confidence in his back-country abilities, learned if not polished during his youth in Gatun and its own tropical environs. He knew he was being too hard on himself. Nothing could really prepare one for living beyond the limits of civilization, in the greatest surviving rain forest on Earth, in the place known as the lungs of the planet.
When he found the grove of fruit trees, planted long ago by vanished villagers and now gone wild, he was euphoric. Not yet decimated by monkeys, the fruit was a welcome and refreshing addition to his food stores. His success cheered him mentally as well as physically. That evening he caught a thirty-kilo catfish on his compact line and streamer, enough meat to fill the preserver compartment in his pack to bursting.
Cruising upriver, he lay back in the boat and let the onboard navigator take control. It would keep him from running into the banks, or any floating logs or embedded snags. Beneath him, the electric motor hummed almost silently, its batteries recharged by the amorphous solar cells that lined the sides and top of the boat. For a fugitive, he was exceptionally relaxed.
Until the boat struck something unseen.
A cry of distress, a pained yelp, came from near the bow. Sitting up quickly, Cheelo looked over the side just in time to see the injured pup floating on the surface. Blood streamed from the side of its head and flank. Preoccupied with chasing fish in the murky water, it had failed to react to the boat’s presence in time. Now it limped along the surface, yipping piteously.
Swarming to its aid, the rest of the pack instantly focused on the assumed attacker. Nearly two meters long and weighing in at more than thirty kilos, the adult river wolves swarmed the boat, barking angrily.
“Ay, it was an accident!” Cheelo found himself yelling as he scrambled frantically to unholster his pistol. “The kid ran into me!”
The dozen or so giant otters did not understand him. Even if they had, it was conceivable they would not have been swayed in their course of action. Two leaped into the boat and began nipping at his feet, taking bite-sized bits out of his jungle boots. Their canines were as long as his thumb. Jaws powerful enough to crunch bone snapped at his calves while bright black eyes glared furiously.
It took an eternity to free the gun, but he couldn’t use it lest he risk holing the boat. Instead, he fired over the heads of his attackers. Barking and squeaking in panic, they dove back over the side, but not before one practically ran up his leg to take a bloody chunk out of his left biceps. By the time the cursing, fulminating fugitive could bring the weapon to bear, the otters had vanished into the depths of the river.
Setting the pistol aside, he grumbled aloud as he sought to bind up the wound. With all the poisonous insects, lethal snakes, giant crocodilians, burrowing parasites, and voracious rodents in the rain forest, leave it to him to be grievously assaulted by otters. Dousing the open wound with disinfectant, he sprayed sealer over the injury and wrapped it in a thin layer of transparent artificial skin. The tape immediately contracted and began to bond with his own flesh. Once healing had concluded beneath, the artificial epidermis would dry, crack, and flake off, leaving the restored flesh exposed. Finishing up the first aid, he restowed the emergency kit and cleared some vegetation from the autobailer so it could more efficiently remove from the bottom of the boat the water the otters had brought in with them.
That was when one of them, apparently deciding that the intruder had not been punished enough, jumped out of the water and onto his back.
As its teeth and claws tore into his shoulders, a screaming, cursing Cheelo flailed wildly at his back in an attempt to pull it off. Twisting violently, locked together, man and otter overbalanced the narrow craft and tumbled into the river. As he fell, the flailing fingers of Cheelo’s free hand contacted his backpack and instinctively grabbed hold. The safety strap connecting it to the side of the boat gave way beneath his weight and followed him into the water. Automatically righted by its internal gyro, the swift craft promptly resumed its course upstream—carrying with it Cheelo Montoya’s tent, sleep sack, and all of his supplies that were not contained in the pack.
Perhaps the impact dislodged the river wolf as well as discouraging it. Or possibly it had finally slaked its need for revenge. Regardless of the reason, the meter-and-a-half-long otter released its bloody grasp on Cheelo’s shoulders and swam off, occasionally popping its head out of the water to look back long enough to sputter a few final insulting chirps and barks at the intruding human. Treading water, Cheelo had no time to respond to the insults of his fellow mammal. Clutching tightly to the backpack with one hand and his pistol with the other, he struck out for the shore opposite the one favored by the otter clan, occasionally glancing upstream to track his boat as it blithely powered on out of sight minus its absent passenger.
He shouldn’t have been such a lazy sailor, he reflected in dismay. With its autonav activated the craft would continue to make steady progress until halted by impassable rapids or some other obstacle it had not been designed to cope with. Then it would stop and wait for instructions from its absent owner.
Thoroughly drenched, he hauled himself out on the nearest beach. Smooth-shelled turtles watched him from a nearby log, butterflies fluttering about their snouts in search of extruded salts. Wading birds accelerated their stride to give him additional room. Checking his pants for worms, candiru, and other potentially dangerous hangers-on, he contemplated his options.
Recharging by day, the boat would not run out of power. Programmed to proceed upstream, it would not pause for rest or sleep. It was gone, and along with it much that he had brought to sustain him in the rain forest. By great good fortune he had shoved the compact fishing kit into the backpack after the last time he had used it. That was helpful, but still left him with little choice. No longer could he gambol carelessly through the forest. In order to make his critical appointment with Ehrenhardt, he had to find his way to a town, an isolated farm, even a tourist encampment, and he had to start now. Anyplace would do so long as it was not home to official authority. A convincing liar, he felt that he could successfully pass himself off to a group of adventurous tourists as a kindred spirit. It would take very little to render wholly believable the story of falling out of a boat set on autonav and not being able to catch back up to it.
With luck he would find assistance in returning to civilization. There he could access his credcard and without further ado, book the sequence of flights necessary to take him back to Golfito. Because he was on foot he would have to move a little faster now, that was all. He still had ample time to make the deadline.
But first he had to find those hypothetical charitable tourists, and avoid the attention of park rangers while doing so.
Two days later he felt he was closer to the nearest town but no nearer fellow sightseers. So preoccupied was he with searching for food to supplement the small stock of concentrates that remained in his pack that he almost overlooked the probe. Disguised as a split-tailed eagle, the drone came gliding down the river at treetop level. It was not the smoothness of its flight that caught Cheelo’s attention and caused him to duck deeper into the woods, but the fact that the too-perfect raptor did not flap its wings—not even once. Superb glider that it was, even a large eagle needed the intercession of an occasional wingbeat to keep it aloft.
Tracking its progress from behind the buttress roots of a rain forest hardwood, he watched as the drone circled a spot on the far bank, descended to a height of several meters, and proceeded to hover. Eagles could hover, he knew, but only on strong, warm updrafts. There was no updraft a couple of meters above the riverbank, certainly not one forceful enough to support even a medium-sized hawk, much less the eagle. The cameras that were its eyes were doubtless taking pictures and relaying them back to one of the distant ranger stations that ringed the perimeter of the immense Reserva. Monitoring the health of the forest and its fauna without disturbing any of the inhabitants was a task best carried out by such disguised mechanicals.
Surely they couldn’t be looking for him, he thought. Even if the authorities had somehow managed to track him and trace his flight from San José to Lima, there was next to nothing to lead them to the middle of the rain forest. He thanked whatever deities looked after such as him that he had grabbed his pack while falling out of the boat: It contained all his identification. Then it occurred to him that they might not be looking for him, Cheelo Montoya, wanted for murder, but for the missing occupant of a runaway boat. Proceeding mindlessly on its way upriver, it was not unreasonable to assume that the intruding craft had caught the attention of one of the Reserva’s robotic monitors. Rangers and administrators could be expected to wonder at the presence of an unoccupied craft, packed with supplies, cruising blithely northward devoid of passengers. It would be percipient for them to assume that a small disaster might have occurred and to go looking for the owner of the wayward craft.
That was fine, except that he did not want to be rescued. It was his intention in coming to the Reserva to get himself good and lost. He did not want to be found, no matter how well-intentioned his would-be saviors were. Despite his reluctance to abandon the only landmark he knew, he had no choice but to move away from the main river and deeper into the forest. Searchers, human or mechanical, would assume that stranded travelers would keep to the shoreline and the beaches where they could easily be spotted. He had taken care to acquire a boat that could not be traced, so if scanned it would not lead back to him. With luck, it would sink and break up before inquisitive rangers could haul it ashore and check its contents.
Meanwhile he plunged deeper into the forest, knowing that it would conceal him like a hot, green blanket. The profusion of life in the canopy and on the ground would make it next to impossible to isolate his heat signature from the air, even if a properly equipped drone knew exactly where to search. He made slow but steady progress. Unlike thicket or jungle, virgin rain forest permitted relatively easy hiking. Large trees grew well apart, and the canopy harvested the sunlight before it could hit the ground, restricting the density of the undergrowth.
Not only was the solid overstory reassuring, it was also beautiful—diverse with epiphytes and flowers. Monkeys rattled their way through the arboreal highways, and the belllike warbling of the oropendula punctuated his footsteps. He was careful to shuffle his feet as he walked. Making as much noise and vibration as possible would keep the local serpents out of his path. Avoiding the authorities would not help him if he accidentally stepped on a bushmaster or fer-de-lance.
After making a careful check for ants, he settled down between the buttress roots of a sprawling tree and prepared to spend the night. His tent was still on the boat, but his pack yielded a light, strong emergency blanket. One root curved sideways and out, creating a swooping overhang that when combined with the blanket served to protect him from the evening rain. It was a good thing he had not come in the wet season, he mused. Without his boat he would be helpless, trapped by flooded rivers and lakes, unable to cross ground churned to mud. That he was going to get wet despite the lightweight raincoat he could extract from the pack was a fact he could not avoid: He was, after all, deliberately lost in Earth’s greatest rain forest. But he would not drown and, so long as he could fish, he would not starve. He did not care to think what he would have done had the folding fishing kit been lost along with the boat.
He had no difficulty the following morning pulling several small fish from a sizable pond. Using his belt knife, he gutted and filleted them. His camp stove was on the wayward boat, and making a fire was out of the question. Even if he could find sufficiently dry wood in the waterlogged forest, it would most likely be too soft to burn for long, or already so rotted it would fall apart in his hands. Nor could he risk giving away his location by producing smoke.
As he ate the fish raw he wished for a few limes or lemons. They were not available, so the tang of ceviche would have to wait until he found himself once more in a town. But the fish would give him strength. With the small remaining stock of supplements contained in the pack’s emergency kit, he ought to be able to keep going for some time. At least, he thought with a grim smile, he would not be slowed down by the weight of supplies.
Settling the pack on his shoulders and back, he struck off into the trees, keeping to the highest ground that presented itself. His feet stayed warm and dry, as the surrounding mud and muck was repelled by the permanent static charge in his jungle boots. He was glad that when he had made his purchases he had not stinted on appropriate clothing. It would have been nice, however, to have the tent.
On the other hand, he might have grabbed something besides the pack when tumbling out of the boat. He did not care to think about what his situation might be like without it. He would have had no choice but to risk rescue by the Reserva rangers and to hope that no one connected his face to the one that was by now no doubt splashed across police wanted files all across the planet.
The repeller in the pack kept the swarms of ravenous insects at bay. He could see them, could hear them humming and clicking and chittering as they flew and crawled all around, unable to enter the restricted sphere of electronic dislocation that had at its core a warm, pulsating, blood-filled figure. They wanted to nibble on his flesh and drink his blood. Mosquitoes and flies, beetles and ants, all gave way as the precisely modulated stridulations of the repeller urged them aside like a drifting iceberg parting the sea. Without the compact device, he knew, his skin would by now have taken on the reddened, uneven contours of a strenuously abused golf ball.
The birds kept him company, and the monkeys. While easy to hear, the latter were difficult to see. The natives who had once inhabited this region had been fond of monkey, but the thought of consuming a simian was not one that appealed to Cheelo. Anyway, he had only a single-bladed knife and could not have used a bow and arrow had heaven provided them.
The following morning a skimmer flashed by overhead, traveling slowly at treetop level. Alerted to its approach by the startled screeches of a family of squirrel monkeys, he had taken shelter beneath a dense cluster of dieffenbachia. Thick, spatulate leaves shielded him completely from above. Peeping out as the skimmer thrummed past, he saw that it was camouflaged visually as well as aurally. If not for the panic that had arisen among the monkeys he would never have noticed it until it was right on top of him. Despite the cover provided by the trees, he might have been spotted.
The forest is my friend, he thought, waiting beneath the concealing leaves until he was sure the patrolling vehicle was gone. When he resumed his march, his confidence was shaken by unexpected uncertainty.
Come to think of it, why would Reserva rangers need to camouflage their patrol craft? True, the soft whine a skimmer generated might disturb the native fauna, but it was hardly loud enough to be flagrantly unsettling. Masking the sound of an engine was an expensive procedure that hardly seemed justified by the limited disruption it might cause.
He could understand disguising drone probes as eagles and other birds. They could move more freely among the forest creatures, taking surveys and monitoring their health. But it seemed a waste of money to camouflage a skimmer. Its size and unfamiliar shape would instantly identify it to the creatures of the forest as an unknown and possibly hostile intruder. His confusion deepened.
If the skimmer was not disguised to conceal it from the denizens of the rain forest, then from whom? Wouldn’t it be more likely that an official Reserva vehicle would be boldly emblazoned with identifying marks and colors? A scientific expedition might opt for anonymity, but not for expensive camouflage. In the event of an emergency, they would want to make certain their craft could be spotted from the air by a search party. The same would be true for a tourist vehicle.
That left open to speculation the possibility that there were others in the rain forest who did not wish their presence advertised. Biochemical companies, for one, extracted enormously valuable and useful derivatives from rain forest plants. Most of these took the form of legal, government-approved, exhaustively tested products. A few did not. Their scarcity and novelty value enhanced their price.
If botanical pirates were active in this part of the forest, they might—once he had the chance to explain himself—accept him as a kindred spirit and take him in. That would obviate his need to find his way into a town, thereby risking exposure to the local authorities. On the other hand, such illicit organizations did not usually take kindly to the appearance of uninvited outsiders, no matter what their social standing. Depending on the frame of mind of the people in charge of such a hypothetical illegal operation, they might as readily decide to punch a hole in his chest and dump him in the nearest river for the caimans and the piranhas to clean up as invite him to share their camp.
He would have to tread carefully. He might already have tripped hidden sensors, resulting in the appearance of the patrolling skimmer. If he had strayed inside some undefined perimeter, the possibility of automated traps could not be discounted. From now on he would have to pay even more attention than usual to where he put his feet. But, he reminded himself, any assault by the authorities on a clandestine rain forest operation would come from the air. He would be cautious anyway. He did not know what he was dealing with, and until he did, he would continue to treat his immediate surroundings with heightened suspicion.
Another skimmer flew over later that day, forcing him to take shelter a second time. He knew it was a different vehicle from its size and silhouette. It only reinforced his conviction that it was someone other than the local authorities who was searching for him. If it was the police and they suspected a fugitive was afoot in the area, they would have called for him to surrender himself. If it was the as-yet-unidentified owner of the wayward boat who was being sought, they would have advertised the opportunity for rescue rather than gone to expensive lengths to conceal its presence.
That left him with his suspicions of a criminal operation hidden somewhere in the depths of the rain forest, its operators as eager as he to avoid the attention of the authorities. They would be people who might as readily kill him as welcome him, even if he invoked Ehrenhardt’s name. The choices thus presented were not easy ones. He decided that until he knew more he would maintain his privacy. Meanwhile let them search for him. He had avoided the authorities all the way from San José to the Reserva. No manufacturers of illicit pharmaceuticals were going to find him if he did not want to be found.
Whoever they were, he reflected as he stepped over a fallen log lush with fungi, they had money. Camouflaging a skimmer’s appearance was one thing, but muting its engine called for expensive technological expertise. This remote corner of the vast rain forest was not being guarded by a handful of amateurs working out of a few thatched huts. The presence of not one but two such costly disguised skimmers hinted at a level of sophistication outside his experience.
Maybe he could do more than merely survive here, he thought. Maybe there was a chance to make some contacts—big, important contacts. If the opportunity presented itself to fall in with a group of well-connected felons, he would take it. Or he might learn all he could about them and then turn in their operation to the nearest authorities, using his knowledge to bargain for the dropping of the charges that would have arisen from the incident in San José. That had been an accident, after all. No one could claim premeditation. Either way, he had options. What he needed now was to supplement them with knowledge, as much as he could gather without being discovered.
It struck him that the drone that had been disguised as an eagle might be owned and maintained not by the Reserva authority but by these same people. Monitoring a buffer area outside their immediate zone of operations, it could watch for patrolling rangers and unwitting tourists without drawing attention to itself. He whistled softly to himself, impressed by the implications. Everything he had seen so far suggested the existence of an illegitimate operation on an imposing scale. That was assuming he was right in his assumptions and that it was not the local authorities who were conducting the flyovers.
For a moment he worried that the electronic repeller might give him away. Then he relaxed, secure in the knowledge that if it was going to, it already would have. Its output must be infinitesimal, he decided. Anyone close enough to pick it up would be able to see and identify its owner. Even so, he considered turning it off. The continued presence of the active insect multitude that had helped to keep this portion of the Reserva pristine for hundreds of years forestalled him. He was uncomfortable enough already. He would not add to his discomfort by exposing his flesh to the attentions of a million marauding mandibles, stingers, and probing proboscises. Aside from the potential for loss of blood and the acquisition of disease, he flat-out hated and always had despised bugs.
Trying to make as little noise as possible as he advanced, he kept his eyes alert for the glint of metal and plastic and composite, and his ears attuned to the harmonic discord of the surrounding forest. If the monkeys failed to warn him next time, the birds might do so. He was not alone here; he had allies, however unconventional. He had escaped confinement and mindwipe by never letting down his guard and by trusting no one. Early in his life he had chosen to swap companionship for freedom. It was a philosophy that had served him well, and he saw no reason to tamper with it now.
Overhead, a pair of scarlet macaws were screeching with pleasure as they attacked a cluster of ripe figs. A pair of the juicy green fruits fell to earth not far from where Cheelo was standing. Bending, he picked them up and, after checking for ants, shoved them in a pocket. Later, when his stomach was feeling more adventurous, he might try a bite. Raising a hand, he saluted his rain forest confederates with a grin before moving on.
It did not matter who was looking for him, he decided with satisfaction. Police or traffickers, rangers or poachers—he would avoid them all until he and he alone decided it was time for Cheelo Montoya to leave the Reserva. They kept the rain forest at arm’s length: He embraced it. The trees and the animals and the insects were his friends, his shield. All he had to do was find out what was going on here, in this empty, isolated place, and figure out the best way to profit from that knowledge before he left.
While taking care, of course, to make sure that his friends and his shield did not poison, infect, dismember, eviscerate, or otherwise impede him.