Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest Read online

  Other than the tiny lobby, this comprised the only part of Jiboa used above ground. The rest had been abandoned when Mama Lavao moved the hotel rooms underground in fear of another heavy-water rain shower, or equivalent horrors not yet unleashed by the Blueboy scientists. And business had boomed for a hotel in a state with restricted travel. Customers preferred the structure’s womb-like safety, and claimed that the neural disruptions conjured by the war games were eliminated below ground. Negated for all except Eric. Eric sensed even the most distant weapons employed for effect, and so the brothers’ rooms were housed at the bottom-most level, where at least the effects on him were diminished.

  “We must go down,” said Jeri as he pointed to a set of stairs. He was still upset by the incident on the street.

  Skaff shook his head. “I’ve never taken the elevator. Let’s ride.”

  The ironwork cage had been replaced by a clear seamless bubble, but the elevator ran on the original system of gears and cable-car lines. Its slow descent along a helical track was impressive. Jeri, however, remembered the stairs down to the four subterranean levels, the twisting and turning cases that were colored in whatever exotic paints Mama could find. These felt like the soul of the hotel to him, and they gave rise to the hotel’s present name. The multi-hued Jiboa snake slinked along the edges of the Pantanal, staying within its camouflage of vegetation.

  “But the stairs are quicker.”

  “I’ve been driving three days, a few minutes more won’t matter.”

  Jeri nodded, and as they boarded the elevator, a heavyset woman with a singular grace to her form and movements squeezed in with them. She clasped Jeri to her broad breasts, with no care as to the sensuality of the gesture, and she held his head between them. He straightened up. Her wide bronze face, without lines save for the perfection of the curves about her soft mouth, smiled beneath a profusion of red-brown curls scented with orchids. She wore a floral dress and a gold crucifix.

  “Jeraldo,” Mama Lavao said, as if the one word explained a longing hidden in the regal planet of her body. She punched a button and the three of them began to drop along the track. “I arrived too late to help with the ambulance, but I’m so happy to see you.” Her smile collapsed. “Eric is gone, though.”

  Jeri turned rigid and looked Mama in the eye. “Gone? When?”

  “The bad boys came late last night. They’ve come before, but never like this. They just busted through the building.”

  “Why Eric? Do they still test him?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Impresario didn’t say that was the problem with his health.”

  “We avoided the truth in our letter, just to allow Mr. Rios to get it past inspection. I’m sorry. I always managed to get him healthy again with the money you’d send. And I didn’t think they were testing diseases on him, or anything. Just wearing him down.” Her hazel eyes glazed with remorse. “He never quite recovered inside, though. He’d see them coming for him before it happened. Or have visions of mutated beasts from the swamp. Crazy things, you know.”

  Skaff cleared his throat. “Drugged. He’s drugged.”

  “I suppose,” she said as tears ran along her cheeks. “Only there was little sign of it in his body. They worked on his head. The bad boys want his gift, you know.”

  The elevator passed the landing for the second sub-level, and Jeri shook with rage. He stared up at the track that spiraled above them, and tried to divine a message in its twists, a revelatory pattern in the chaos of the world. They had Eric. He’d come home to repair the past; now Eric appeared beyond reparation.

  “Where did they take him?”

  “We don’t ask. I can’t afford to. The less I ask questions, the better it is for everyone at the hotel.”

  “Who would know, Mama?”

  “The Impresario, if anyone,” said Skaff.

  “Possibly,” Mama added, brightening again. “He’d talk with Eric quite often.”

  Jeri remembered the diminutive man who resided at Jiboa, the survivor of a wargames accident that left him without an organic lower body. Several of Mama’s staff were scarred by the military games, for she made a point of helping out that way, but The Impresario was her sole charity case as a boarder . . . save Eric, when he could no longer work. The Impresario holed up in the hotel, voicing a grudge against those who ruined him. But he accepted his fate. Jeri no longer felt capable of that.

  The elevator docked at the third level of Jiboa with a jolt, and the door slid open. Mama stepped out and waited for Jeri and Skaff.

  “The Impresario’s in the Commons, Jeri. I’ll see you for dinner?”

  “Both of us are starved, if that’s okay? Skaff’s had a long drive.”

  “He’s welcome.”

  Jeri watched Mama stop at the mouth of a hallway, turn back and try to smile. She limped away.

  “I don’t think she likes me,” Skaff commented.

  “She’s distracted.”

  Jeri heard the Impresario’s sing-song voice echo from another hall, so they followed the sound. They found him on the burgundy rug of the Commons, holding court for a group of Americans with their video cameras.

  In his mid-sixties, The Impresario reached medium height when he bobbed high on his bionic legs—crab legs—of fitted brass and fiber optic circuits lit in orange and yellow. He held his back ramrod straight, though with a certain social poise that affected a relaxed and imperious attitude one might expect of a man trained within a strict Argentinean military school. He was robust once, at the time Jeri had left for the mines, but a slow deterioration now gripped him, perhaps one of the unnamed diseases of a metamorphosing Amazonia. His neck showed all its veins and sinews. The cuffs and collar on his blue uniform seemed baggy about his bony hands and shriveled neck. He still managed to keep his bald head shined, his white goatee trimmed, and his orator’s voice, obviously, in good timbre.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been ghostin’ more and more of late.” His face glowed with the light of rapture. “I’ve seen the hours raise their dark rigging. They’re sailing away. Sailing toward that future moment, that skirmish with the powers that be. I can feel it up there, up the line.”

  “Tell us more,” Jeri called out. The Impresario swiveled at the hip, broke into a laugh. He shouted louder, drawing the walls in closer with his gestures.

  “This man’s seen it too. We’ve got to react now. Get out in the streets and raise our throats to the wind.”

  “Amen,” Skaff said, surprising Jeri.

  “Yes, friends. We’ll let the bells toll in our jaws. Let our voices climb. Or else we’ll be digging graves again with our fingernails and feeling our bones ripen in the great heat. Things are coming to a head. Just you wait and see!”

  The group tittered, clacking away in English.

  Skaff took a deep breath. “Either we move with it, or we get swallowed in the dust.”

  The political vein of their talk intrigued Jeri. He considered the possibility that Skaff and The Impresario were kindred souls. They spoke as if using a code of chivalry, masking their displeasure with WestHem in rococo phrases.

  “Friends,” The Impresario said with the slightest dip to effect a bow. “If you’ll excuse me. I’ve business to talk with these fine gentlemen.”

  The group bowed in return, and wandered off toward the hallway with nervous expressions on their faces. The Impresario strutted closer with some measure of skill on his mechanical limbs.

  “Ah, Jeri. I’ve been expecting you.” The man canted as far forward as his frame allowed, and gave Jeri a firm hug. The old man sighed. Then he broke away and swiveled to greet Skaff.

  “Pleased to see you, good man.” The Impresario shook Skaff’s hand with vigor. “Most people call me The Impresario.”

  “I know. I’m Skaff Rios. I delivered your letter.” Skaff brushed a hand through his hair. “Tell me, who were they?”

  “A scientific group that’s studying the swamp. But I believe it is a cover for an eccentric m
an, the tall black one weighted with gold necklaces.”

  “How eccentric?”

  “Mama says he is a gourmet cook of exotic foods. And he understands the Blueboys are mutating plants and animals in the swamp. I think he’s interested in collecting specimens for his greenhouses as well as his studies.”

  Jeri groaned. “I just lost my appetite.”

  The Impresario spun at the waist and returned his attention to Jeri.

  “I’ve missed you.”

  “It was your note that brought me.”

  “Our Eric has been taken. You’ve heard, haven’t you?”

  “From Mama, yes. And I know why.”

  “Oh?” That captured the interest of both men.

  “We had a run-in at the border. Blueboys looking for guerrillas. They ran a check on me and no doubt realized that they’d better scoop Eric up while they could still find him. It was that damn Berkey woman.”

  A twinkle caught fire in The Impresario’s brown eyes, and he seemed to give Jeri his undivided attention. Jeri continued.

  “It began one winter. Then lasted another. Now they act as if they own this place and everyone in it. My brother isn’t a toy.”

  The Impresario rubbed his left ear and tugged at his goatee. He flexed his metallic limbs—an innovation of the Blueboys’ hi-tech—until he rose exactly to Jeri’s eye level. Then he rocked forward, maintaining his balance on the thin stilts.

  “These days, we speak about it in a more, ah, veiled manner. Because of the bad boys, you know. And the woman who leads them.”

  “Not me. I’m tired of pretending.”

  “Many of us are,” said The Impresario. “But . . . ”

  “But nobody fights it.”

  “Would you be shocked, my boy, if I told you that I’d talked with friends who feel the same way? People who consider the treatment of your brother as symbolic of how terrible things have gotten. They want footage. They would like to write articles and petition the governments in Sao Paolo and Washington.”

  “Talk won’t get him back.”

  “What if they had documented proof?” said Skaff.

  Jeri raised his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

  “What if certain, you know, sources had a clue to where Eric was? And perhaps had the means for a rescue. Or at least for getting some of their, ah, indiscretions on film.”

  “You’re talking about guerrillas, Skaff. I thought you were against getting involved?”

  The man puffed up. “Yeah, maybe.”

  Jeri weighed Skaff’s offer against his need for rest. He felt tired and dirty and groggy from the psychomists, yet a desire to retaliate burned inside him.

  “What kind of force? Just a distraction, or enough men to meet the Blueboys head to head?”

  The Impresario said, “Now, it might be a mistake to anger them. You’ve seen what they can do.”

  Maybe The Impresario believed what he’d said in the heat of speech, about a need for change, but his opinions went just so far. It was obvious he feared the Blueboys. Jeri wondered if this was even the same man from his teenage years, the kindly, fastidious gentleman who adored chess and reminisced about his days as a peacekeeper on the southern Pampas rangelands. He would be no help. Still, Jeri doubted Skaff could be useful either. The smuggler owned resources and men, no doubt, but he couldn’t be counted on. He was a drug trader, and as such a one-dimensional man.

  But then, could Jeri be choosey?

  “Okay. Clue me in.”

  “Shall we talk someplace in private? There are details.” Skaff looked about the Commons.

  “Eric’s room,” Jeri said. Then, “How much of my savings will this cost?”

  Skaff shrugged. “Cloaking devices and lasers don’t come cheap.”

  ***

  Eric sensed that he lay flat, but only as a blind man senses the size and textures of the space about him. What he saw were things that did not exist. Or, actually, did not yet exist.

  Weighty kong sloths. Toy jaguars the size of a man’s hand. A toucan whose beak shined with its own light. Trees the height of skyscrapers. Butterflies that lived off decaying flesh. Frogs that imitated brilliant mosses. Carnivorous mosses that in turn imitated those brilliant frogs. Fish of every imaginable perversion. Crocodiles large enough to swallow a motorized vehicle whole. Invisible stinging wasps that drove the unwary mad.

  Visions bloomed for him and took hold.

  And when Eric had answered every question that the scientists could ask, undergone ten hours of brain scans and mind probes, suffered drugs that coursed his veins and quickly ebbed, they delivered his tired body to the Blue Queen in her private quonset at the fringe of the compound. The hut smelled of orchids. A late afternoon breeze blew through the end windows, and Berkey offered him a drink while she changed into a nightgown that covered her synthetic skin in diaphanous folds.

  Eric sat on her bed as she rubbed her hips against him. She dragged her hollowed fingernails down his arms and back as she undressed him. The light scratches flared with E-pheromones, and he found renewed energy; he shivered with sexual tension that caused his groin to tighten and ache for release. He reached for her. She escaped him.

  Eric chased the Blue Queen, but she danced out of reach with power-augmented ease and laughed as he tripped himself over furniture and stumbled against walls. She squeezed her arms together and jutted her breasts at him. Bared the twin halves of her ass. At last, she allowed herself to be caught and dragged to bed, and there she whispered in his ear, urged him to take her roughly, to vent his frustration on her. He entered her with a cry, and though Eric hurried his passion, hoping to reach the quick release that would free him, she dampened the sensory centers of his brain with drugs that sent cold tendrils up the backs of his legs and along his spine. Her extended nails gouged his buttocks. Three times she shuddered with pleasure, while he slapped himself against her on the brink of orgasm. A brink that he never could tumble over.

  And when he was too exhausted to continue, to take her once more into pleasure, she held him. Stroked his head. Asked him questions he could not refuse to answer. And answer again.

  ***

  At twilight on the evening of Eric’s abduction, two airboats packed with armed men emerged from the dark tunnel of a canal-like igarapee and eased out along the shadowy edge of a large stretch of the Pantanal. Jeri squeezed into the bow of one airboat, content to let more experienced hands command the raid. His pilot was a fisherman, while a cocky little man named Vaqui—a leader of the insurgents—sat in the pilot’s seat of the second boat. They cruised at a speed which allowed no more than a hum to echo across the water’s surface, and they pulled alongside a small island dominated by two giant trees.

  Jeri consulted with Vaqui through the distorting shimmer of the cloaking devices. Their voices wavered.

  “You say the base is about three tenths of a kilometer more?”

  “Yes,” Vaqui said as his image warped toward Jeri. “The Blues call it D Base. There’s nothing strategic or crucial about it, just an experimental center for engineering new strains of swamp life. But we suspect they experiment on people here too. Anyways, it’s small, if Skaff ‘s sources are correct.”

  Jeri stared at their crude map. “So no hoverchops.”

  “Not usually, those stay at the airbase. But we expect one with General Berkey there.”

  “Why for Berkey?”

  “Our intelligence contact says there’s few more powerful than her in the entire military.”

  “Won’t that mean more soldiers?”

  “Maybe not. They’re fairly cocky about their superiority.”

  “And?”

  Vaqui frowned and tugged at his camouflage hat. “Sorry, I’ve been avoiding some unpleasant news. Our contact said that she uses the base as a lover’s rendezvous. A place to meet your brother. So we’re expecting slack security.”

  “Eric?” Jeri pushed his mouth in a sarcastic twist. “I don’t believe it.”

  “I doubt
he’s a willing partner.”

  “My god!” Jeri stood and shook his fist at Vaqui. “What are we waiting for? Why did you keep that from me?”

  “We couldn’t let you go off half-cocked. A raid takes a cool head and absolute secrecy.”

  “And dumb-ass patience,” Jeri’s pilot added. “I don’t move our butts until I know our diversion has worked. You might as well chill it.”

  Jeri stood and paced in a tight circle through volunteers that checked their guns or sat and smoked. He wondered what else these people had kept from him. It made him pound his forehead in frustration. “I’m trying to understand why no one told me.”

  “Because you’d have done what you’re doing now.”

  Jeri didn’t hear Vaqui. Insects bit him through his sweat-soaked clothes. His beard stubble itched. He muttered and fidgeted until a woman guerrilla sat him down, lit a cigarette for him. The others on the boat talked to him.

  “Screw off!” he yelled at them.

  Then the radio packet beeped on Vaqui’s belt, a prearranged signal that meant another force of raiders had begun a harassment of Base C, twenty kilometers west of their position. Jeri picked out a lasrifle with a grenade launcher from an armory box recessed in the deck, then kneeled, his eyes fixed ahead.

  ***

  Eric stirred on the Blue Queen’s great round bed, and he found himself spread-eagled again. The night was hot, without the breezes that had preceded dusk. Walls seemed to close in, seemed to tower and bend over him. Ugly thoughts flapped in his head like faceless bats. He rolled over and covered his head with a pillow. Visions continued.

  Somewhere bright flashes clawed through the vines and fronds of the jungle, and two insectoid hoverchops rose above the canopy to spin about and cast more light. One hoverchop skidded in a crash when it dove too close to the enemy. A Blueboy radio call went out across the Pantanal for help.

  Eric’s own call stirred shadows in the jungle. Jaguars stopped licking their paws in the trees. Tapirs snorted and pulled back in their bunkers of dirt and decaying debris. Boas coiled tighter about their limbs.