Chapter 14

Venezuela

Jaron hurried along the trail. He’d run out of notepaper three weeks earlier and he could feel the loss of data with each step as he hurried toward the ecological station. Each minute more observations slid away, lost, gone. With the knowledge he’d gained reviewing the biological journals last spring, he and Harold had plunged into the Amazonian Basin once more.

Now that his eyes were clear of assumptions and predispositions, it was much easier to see the patterns and interactions that truly existed, and those that didn’t exist as well. At long last he arrived in the clearing and headed straight for the lab. He barely thought to give the living quarters, now completely collapsed and buried in lush growth, much of a wide berth. That was part of the past. His goal was to record the present.

He pushed open the door. He was inside before he registered that the vines were fresh-cut back from the door edge. And the lights were on. And someone was at his terminal. Harold screamed in his ear and launched himself out through the closing door. He attempted to follow, but it had shut.

The person grew in size to impossible proportions as it rose out of the console chair. Jaron bumped his shoulder back against the door several times with no result. Some part of his brain was informing him that the door opened inward, but he was unable to lodge the thought anywhere that would be of use.

A massive hand extended toward him as he shrank against the door. It stopped like a knife aimed at his heart.

“Hi, I’m Robbie.”

He blinked. It was a high voice. He glanced down at the vast expanse of white t-shirt. Robbie was a woman. A very large woman. Her eyes were dark, the brown of mahogany, about the same shade as her close-cropped hair. Her skin almost as white as the shirt she wore. And while their eyes were at the same level, that was where the similarity ended.

Her broad shoulders and massive arms were built on a scale to move mountains. Her legs could be the very pistons that made the world spin upon its axis. They were planted like great tree trunks upon the floor. And her bosom, the whelps of the gods could have nursed there. All his family had been lightly built and he’d never met any other. He’d never imagined a being built on such a scale, much less meeting one.

Her hand lowered and a frown crossed her face.

Had he just failed some test? Was she come to finally kill the last of his family? What about the data only he knew? What about Harold?

“What are you doing here?” his voice creaked from lack of use.

“I’m a researcher.” She pointed toward the terminal. “Is that data yours? You don’t look like an Isabel.”

“Jaron. I’m Jaron.” A researcher. “A researcher of what?”

“Jungle botany.”

“Plants?”

“Yes, botany is the study of plants.”

“I knew that.” The conversation, even to Jaron’s inexperienced ear, was not going well. He glanced over at the terminal again. A complex graph with six axes and dozens of differently colored and weighted lines hung above the desk.

“What are you doing with my data?”

“So, you must be Isabel.”

“Isabel.” He glanced once more at those dark, eyes. They were not the eyes he’d always feared a WEC killer would have. “Isabel? Oh, no. My sister. She’s…gone.”

“I’m sorry.”

He tried to picture his long lost sister, but other than an impression of dark hair, he couldn’t really recall her. How long had it been?

“I’m a student. Some crazy grant organization sent me here.”

“A student? A grant?” If that was true? If she wasn’t from the WEC, what was she doing with his data?

“Are you a parrot? You’re thin enough to be one. Is that you? Jaron, Lord of the Parrots. I caught a glimpse of your macaw. He’s beautiful.”

“Harold.” His attention moved back to the graph. There were patterns and echoes of patterns between the various lines. He edged around the massive bulk of the intruder and slid into the chair. It was still warm from the woman’s body. And there was a strange scent. Not of the jungle. A smell he’d never found before, like, he didn’t know what. Like the scent of moss on the fall air, high in the mountains. But that wasn’t right either.

He squirmed to get away from the heat of the plas chair but it was all around him.

“Where’s my data?” Yet the graph—there were familiar patterns here.

“This is yours? Do you realize how much it contradicts the modern scientific literature?” A large hand reached past his shoulder and toggled the command keys. Layer upon layer of his research flashed up in vast arrays of tables.

He toggled it back to the graph. “Every single fact here has been verified by a minimum of ten separate observations. The other researchers are wrong. You didn’t touch my data, did you?”

Jaron spun to face the intruder and came face-to-face with a huge pair of breasts straining outward against the thin white t-shirt. He fell backwards off the chair and caught his shoulder on the console. One of the massive hands lifted him back to his place like Harold moving a leaf with his massive beak.

“Your data is just fine. I simply graphed the results.”

He traced the axes for habitat, diurnal cycles, and interspecies competition through the air. The finger that extended into the lines of twisting light was incredibly grimy. But it was attached to an arm he was sure was his. With the massive woman looming behind him, he was suddenly intensely aware of how he must look. He shoved the offending hand beneath the desk.

But the leaf ant wasn’t right. He toggled back to his data, scrolled down to Atta, and began altering the data string.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Your chart is elegant, socialization by habitat zone. But the leaf ant only follows this reaction in the river valleys. The effect rolls off and ceases fifty meters above the high flood mark. The social zoning alters in reaction to various predators differently in the valleys than the rest of the jungle. Microhabitat adaptation.”

He flipped back to her chart and the curve had shifted to show the habitatal specialization.

“That is really excellent.”

Jaron glanced at the woman again, he’d almost forgot he wasn’t speaking to Harold. The vast white expanse of her chest was barely a hand’s-breadth away. This time he caught his elbow as he fell from the chair.