Chapter Three

The image in the center of the room was notably unstable, flickering between two and three dimensions, the colors shifting more than the broadcast parameters ought to have allowed. But it was an old tridee projector, the best the backcountry establishment could afford. Nobody complained. Here in the depths of the Amistad rain forest, even the smallest comfort was appreciated.

Nor were the men and women whose blurred gazes occasionally turned to the image sufficiently sophisticated to complain about such details. Most appreciated the noise that emanated from the image more than the visuals. They were too engrossed in other matters to pay much attention to the broadcast, their serious interests lying in copious alcohol, swift-acting narcotics, cheap sex, expensive promises, and each other.

At the bar—a traditional affair of battered cocobolo wood, hard unupholstered seats, bottles of luminescent metal and glass and plastic, foul-mouthed conversation and unrealized dreams, overhead lighting, and a complaisant mixologist— the dented but still functional multiarmed automated blender was the only concession to modernity. A couple sat at one end, negotiating a price for services that had nothing to do with the surrounding rain forest and everything to do with the most basic mammalian needs. One man lay on the floor, snoring loudly in his own spittle, ignored by those around him.

Two others had turned in their seats to watch the tridee. Near them a third sat hunched over his drink, a pale green liquid concoction that whispered to him in soft, reassuring tones. The liquorish voice was not metaphorical: The drink actually spoke, its reassuring recording embedded in the fizzing molecules within the glass. As the level was lowered by consumption, new sentences manifested themselves for the benefit of the drinker, like the layers of a drunken onion.

"Fat Buddha, would you look at that!" Shifting on his seat, whose aged and poorly maintained internal gyros struggled to keep the boisterous tridee-watching imbiber they supported from crashing to the floor, the speaker pointed at the image hovering in the center of the room. His clothes were thick with decomposing rain forest and he needed a shave.

"Man, I never seen anything so ugly!" agreed his companion. Turning slightly in his chair, he jabbed a finger hard into the side of his neighbor. "Hey, Cheelo, take a look at this, man!"

The false promises of his voluble drink lingering in his ears, the third drinker turned reluctantly to gaze at the tridee. The image presented therein, in unstable three dimensions, only barely impacted on his liquor-sedated consciousness.

His tormentor, an ostensible friend, poked him again. "Are they gruesome lookin', or what?" An unpleasant frown creased the man's dark face. "Hey, Cheelo—you getting any of this?"

"Look at his eyes," the heavyset drinker urged his companion. "He's right on the edge. Push him again and I bet you five credits he passes out. His chair ain't strong enough to hold him."

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 decor 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 any-body. 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 his other side.

"What about you, Cheelo?" Andre nodded at the tridee. "What do you think we should do about 'em? Let 'em hang around us or dust the lot of 'em? Me, I'd rather hang out with the lizards. Least they got the right number of legs. Cheelo? Hey, Montoya, you in there?"

"What?" Swaying on his seat, the smaller man's response was barely audible.

"I said, what would you do about the bugs, man?"

"Forget it," Morales said. He had turned away from the media image on the tridee and back to the bar. "You expecting a considered opinion on alien contact from him!" He tapped his glass, calling for a refill. "Might as well ask for his opinion on how to retire the world debt. He doesn't have an opinion on anything, and he's not going to do anything about anything." Small, porcine blue eyes glanced contemptuously in Montoya's direction. "Ever."

The words penetrated the dark, sweet mist that was slowly creeping through Cheelo's consciousness. "I am too going to do something." He coughed, hard, and the man seated next to him hastily backed out of the line of fire. "You'll see. One of these days I'll do something. Something big."

"Yeah, sure you will." The drinker next to him guffawed. "Like what, que? C'mon, Cheelo, tell us what big thing you're gonna do."

There was no reply from the other seat because it was now vacant, its occupant having slid slowly out of the chair and down to the floor like a lump of diseased gelatin. Overwhelmed, the seat's internal gyros whirred back to vertical.

Peering over the barrier, the bartender grunted as he gestured to the other pair. "I don't give a good goddamn if he does something big, so long as he doesn't do it in my place." Reaching into a front pocket of his shirt, he removed a handful of small white pills and passed two of them to the heavyset man. "Take him outside and let him do his big thing there. If you're his friends, don't dump him in the street." He glanced at the ceiling. "Coming down pretty hard tonight, and you know it won't let up again till sunrise. Try and get these down him. It'll detox some of the alky radicals so maybe when he comes around he won't feel like his brain's trying to punch its way out of his skull. Poor bastard." Having done his duty, he turned back to his liquids and potions and other customers.

Thus co-opted, the two speakers reluctantly hauled Mon-toya's limp corpus outside. Tropical rain was plunging vertically into the earth, shattering the night with unrelenting moisture. Beyond the dark row of tumbledown buildings that marked the other side of the town's single street, rioting vegetation climbed a dark slope, the beginnings of the wild and empty Amistad.

Making ample show of his distaste, the heavyset man forced the pills into Montoya's mouth and roughly massaged his throat before rising.

"He get 'em?" the other drinker wondered. His gaze turned upward, to the deluge that formed a wet wall just beyond the dripping rim of the porch overhang.

"Who the hell cares?" Straightening, his companion nudged the limp form with one booted foot. "Let's toss him out in the rain. Either it'll sober him up or he'll drown. Either way he'll be better off."

Together, they lifted the pliant form off the prefab plastic sidewalk sheeting and, on the count of two, heaved it far out into the downpour. It wasn't difficult. Montoya was not a big man and did not weigh very much. Chuckling to themselves, they returned to the warmth of the bar, the heavyset man glancing backward toward the street and shaking his head. "Never done anything, never will."

There was mud seeping into his open mouth, and the rain was falling hard enough to hurt. Montoya tried to rise, failed, and collapsed face first back into the muck that was running down the imported plastic avenue. Standing up being out of the question, he rolled over onto his side. The tepid rain coursed down his face in miniature cascades.

"Will too do something," he muttered. "Something big. Someday."

Got to get out of this place, he heard himself screaming. Got to get away from here. Miners too tough to skrag; merchants too heavily armed to intimidate. Need money to get to someplace decent, someplace worthwhile. Santo Domingo, maybe. Or Belmopan. Yeah, that was the place. Plenty of tourists with wide eyes and fat credit accounts.

Something was crawling across his stomach. Sitting up quickly, he saw a giant centipede making its many-legged way across his body. Uttering the forlorn cry of a lost child, he slapped and swung at himself until the enormous but harmless arthropod had been knocked aside. It was a harbinger, but he had no way of knowing that.

Then he turned once again face down to the street and began to retch violently.