Phylogenesis by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online Page A

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,
qué
? 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 Montoya’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.