Phylogenesis by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online Page B

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.

4
    A s time passed and contact was not resumed, Desvendapur could not keep from wondering if his friends had indicated their willingness to help him in his endeavor only to shut him up, and had forgotten all about his request as soon as they had returned to the comfort and familiarity of their own homes. But though it took a while to make things happen, the reluctant Broud eventually proved to be as good as his word.
    There came a day when Des received a formal notification from the sub-bureau in charge of poets for his region, informing him that he had been assigned the post of fifth-degree soother to Honydrop. Hastily, he looked it up on his
scri!ber
. It was a tiny hive situated outside the main current of Willow-Wane life whose inhabitants worked at gathering and processing a few fields of imported, cultivated berries. Located high on a mountainous plateau, it suffered from weather sufficiently harsh to discourage most thranx from wanting to visit, much less immigrate. He would need protective clothing, a rarity among his kind, and a stolid disposition to endure the unforgiving climate. Furthermore, accepting the transfer would drop him two levels in status. He did not care. Nothing else was important.
    What mattered was that the Honydrop hive was situated less than a day’s journey from Geswixt.
    There was no information to be had on a hypothetical, unacknowledged, and highly improbable human colony, of course. His personal scri!ber was a compact device capable of accessing every information storage dump on the planet, and he had long since given up hope of finding even the most oblique reference to such a development in its innards, no matter how clever or rigorous a search he assigned to it. There was plenty of information on the humans—more than he could hope to digest in a lifetime—and some on the progress of the mature project on Hivehom. But there was nothing about a continued presence on Willow-Wane of bipedal, intelligent mammals. Despite his most probing efforts, it all remained nothing more than rumor.
    Reaching Honydrop