The Embedding

THIRTEEN

Zwingler sat a while with Sole as the Air Force jet hurried them down through Mexico and Central America and on over Colombia. He asked questions about Pierre and read the Frenchman’s letter through a couple of times carefully.

“I guess this is one piece of protest writing that might pay off,” was his acid comment as he handed it back.

He left Sole feeling as though he was harbouring some leper or criminal who happened—purely by coincidence—to have some useful contribution to make to society. He held long hushed conversations with the three other passengers.

These three men were introduced to Sole as Chester, Chase and Billy. Chester was a tall Negro with a kind of ebony beauty about him that was just a bit too slick and superficial—like a tourist carving at an African airport. Billy and Chase were clean-cut out of cemetery marble, two Mormon evangelists. Sole imagined the two large steel suitcases they’d hauled on board and blocked the aisle with as packed with thousands of Sunday School texts.

At a Brazilian airstrip on the edge of the Great Lakes scheme they transferred to a light survey plane and flew on over the devastation of the great flood. In some places all except the tallest trees had drowned. Soon they entered rainmists, where the boundaries of earth and sky and water had dissolved. The blur of a dirty aquarium tank hung about them for one hour, for two.

The helicopter pilot who was going to fly them on the last leg of their journey climbed on board out of the rain at the southernmost of the subsidiary dams—a tall easygoing Texan wearing a holstered pistol. Gil Rossignol was his name—a name to set you thinking of the French quarter of New Orleans and showboats, of cabaret and gamblers with concealed derringers—except that Rossignol’s raw T-bone bulk contradicted this image flatly.

“Hi! You Tom Zwingler?”

“Didn’t they give you a recognition phrase to say?”

“Why sure they did—it slipped my mind. Excuse me. Quote, Why is the sky dark at night?”

Zwingler nodded.

“The answer is—because the universe is expanding.” He flashed his ruby moons apologetically. “I just want to do this thing properly.”

“Professionally,” agreed Chester.

The Texan grinned.

“So long as you don’t ask me what it’s supposed to mean, sky being dark at night, and the universe and all!”

Sole found a sentence from Shakespeare in his head, and quoted it on impulse.

“The stars above, they govern our condition.”

Chester stared at him curiously.

“Just a bit of Shakespeare,” shrugged Sole. “We wouldn’t be here right now if it weren’t for the stars.”

Zwingler waved a ruby at him, disapprovingly.

“I seem to recall how the guy in King Lear who said that got his eyes put out for his trouble. Stars aren’t going to govern our damn conditions. The whole point of the exercise is how we’re going to set conditions for the stars!”

To Gill Rossignol, he said:

“We want to have a word with the engineer in charge here. After that we’ll hop over to the reception centre for the Indians—we ought to doublecheck on the whereabouts of the village before we head down there.”

The Texan shuffled his bulk about awkwardly.

“Trouble is, Mr Zwingler, there’s been some real mayhem here. Charlie Faith—he’s the engineer—he got himself a crack on the skull and he’s concussed. He’s been flown out to the hospital in Santarém. Far as I can make out from his Brazilian assistant—who’s in a frankly unstable state of mind right now—to tell the truth he’s pretty drunk and been sniffing ether—Charlie pulled a gun on some policeman who was interviewing political suspects in a pretty brutal style in one of the sheds here. And he got a rifle butt in his head.”

“Did you say political suspects? Here—in this middle of nowhere?”

“We’ve had the word passed down that there’s goin’ to be some kind of attack on Amazon Project personnel. The communists are getting anxious. Seems like they need to make a big scene in the world press. They’ve sent combat units up here. One of these units was being questioned when Charlie got in the way—though far as I can make out they’d come to kill him, not make friends with him.”

“How ‘brutal’ was ‘pretty brutal’?” Sole demanded.

The Texan gazed out of the plane window.

“Wasn’t pretty at all, I guess. They had this girl hanging upside down nude with electrodes on her tits and eyeballs and I dunno what. Charlie switched the current off so they fetched a whip and sort of… flayed her I guess you’d say. She wasn’t worth looking at when they’d done, the Brazilian said, just a carcass of raw meat. Personally I don’t blame him getting drunk after that—but he isn’t worth speaking to right now—”

Zwingler looked horrified—his moons fluttered out of control.

“Disgusting. Perverted—yeah, filthy. Doesn’t bear contemplating. Some of these governments we support, I wonder—”

“We got a job to do, Mr Zwingler,” Chester sighed. “Never get anything done if your eyes are full of tears.”

A job, cried Sole silently—such as kidnapping? And scooping out somebody’s brains to sell? Is the whole world in Hell, and the Galaxy too—where a whole race of beings roam in a mental torment they call ‘Love’ to buy brains for a language computer? One thing to fix the mind on: one beautiful thought—Vidya and Vasilki safe in their refuge…

“These guerrillas,” the Negro enquired, “are they just planning on killing people—or sabotaging as well?”

“I guess they’ll try sabotage if they can manage it—there’ve been minor cases from time to time—but hell, isn’t much they can do to a ten mile earth wall like this one—

“Not much those commie guerrillas can do, maybe.” Chester’s teeth flashed a dazzling toothpaste smile, sharp as a knife cutting butter. “How convenient these guerrilla attacks could be, considering.”

Chase and Billy stayed behind at the dam with their two steel suitcases and the survey plane. Tom Zwingler had to change his clothes for something lighter and left his ruby tiepin and cufflinks with Billy for safekeeping.

Gil Rossignol piloted the others southward after a visit to the Indian Reception Centre.

Zwingler pored over thermographic pictures of the area radioed down by an Earth Resources Inventory satellite a few hours before they left the States, pinpointing the few remaining heat sources in that monotony of cool water. Father Pomar had scribbled notes on to a map they brought. The map was hopelessly outdated by the flood. Nevertheless the Texan flew on through a fog of rain, fast and unconcerned, relying on instruments and dead reckoning.

“There’s nothing to bump into, friends,” he yawned. “Nothing sticking up.”

Pomar had circled two heat sources in particular, bemused by this means of locating the remaining Indians. Privately he disbelieved that a few cooking fires could be filmed through rain from a height of a hundred miles. But he kept this opinion to himself and begged to come along for another assault on the Xemahoa conscience. Zwingler, naturally, refused.

Maybe he was more anxious to miss Pierre, than to meet him?

Sole asked himself this, but couldn’t decide—sensing his own relief when the first heat source proved abortive. A village several feet deep in water—deserted, with the sodden embers of a fire propped upon a rough platform. It reminded Sole of pictures of the Inca Hitching Place of the Sun—the Solar Altar at Machu Picchu—oddly out of place in this jungle far from the Andes. Maybe these Indians were some degenerate descendants of the Incas—futilely calling on the Sun from a platform of fire? And only succeeding in calling down a helicopter, directed from space by infrared spy eyes, wanting to sell their brains to the stars.

No one was about.

They hovered over the clearing for a few minutes, their downdraught winnowing the flood, before soaring up again and resuming their southward course.

Yet there was no need to feel ashamed of meeting Pierre, in the event. The Frenchman and all the Xemahoa men were high on the fungus drug—and oblivious.

The score of large straw huts that made up the main village enclosed a lake like a coral atoll. Rossignol landed the helicopter here on its floats and tossed an anchor into the water. The other three men let their bodies down gingerly into the brown water, then waded thigh-deep towards the small clearing where the dance was going on.

The Indians were naked, apart from their penis sheaths ornamented with dazzling feathers, like clumps of surrealistic pubic hair. They waded with glazed eyes around a small hut, led by a man so patterned with bodypaint it was hard to say what age he was—whether he was human, even. The loops and whorls on his body made him into a moving collage of giant fingerprints. Were the red blotches on his lips pigment—or blood? They looked horribly like gobs of blood spilling from his nose. He chanted a wailing singsong which the fat-bummed men took up in turns, chanted for a time then let drop into the water with glazed giggles. Nobody paid much attention to the new arrivals—whether white or black.

“They’re stoned out of their minds!” laughed Chester. “That’s one way to greet the end of the world.”

Then Sole saw Pierre Darriand himself wade from the further side of the hut—naked as the rest of them, with his own penis sheath and grotesque clump of blue feathers sprouting out above it. His chalk-white limbs stood out among the Indians’ like a leper’s.

He hesitated briefly when he saw the three of them, but stumbled onwards with the dancers, shaking his head with a puzzled frown.

“Pierre!”

Sole waded towards him. With a shock of disgust he saw the black leeches clinging to Pierre’s thighs and suppurating flybites pocking his white frame.

“I got your letter, Pierre. We’ve come to do something about it.”

(But don’t say what!)

Pierre cried out some words in the same singsong way as the Indians.

Chester caught hold of his arm and shook him roughly.

“Hey Man, we got to talk to you. Snap out of it.”

Pierre stared down at the hand restraining him, flicked at the black fingers with his free hand and said something that sounded more lucid but was still Xemahoa.

“For heaven’s sake speak English or French. We can’t understand you.”

Pierre began to talk in French; but the syntax was hopelessly mixed up.

“I can’t make head or tail of it,” Tom Zwingler sighed. “He must be free-associating.”

“The sentence structure is all broken up, that’s true, but maybe he’s trying to translate what the Indians are chanting—

Pierre fixed Sole with a curious stare.

“Chris?” he asked cautiously. Then abruptly he pulled his arm free of Chester’s grasp and stumbled off. He took up the chant of the Painted Man. Grinned at the naked Indians about him. Fluffed up his blue bush of feathers with a gesture of childish pride.

“Did you see the bloodflecks in his nose?”

“The man’s mindblown,” sneered Chester. “We’re wasting our time on him.”

“He must have kept some records, Tom. He was the methodical type. A bit romantic—but methodical. Probably we’re interrupting him at an impossible time right now. Let’s go look in the huts for some notes or something.”

“Okay—we’ll leave these guys to their games. Wonder why they’re dancing out here, instead of the village.”

“Water’s not so deep here—that’s why maybe.”

Chester found Pierre’s tape recorder and diaries in one of the huts, slung in a hammock above the water.

Sitting inside the helicopter, Sole translated Pierre’s diary aloud. With a growing thrill of conviction he read from entry to entry. At the beginning of the New Year, the diary lapsed for a while and there were several blank pages before it resumed—as though Pierre had lost track of time and the blank was all he could put down to express this.

“So he met the guerrillas?”

“Seems that way.”

“And now this drug-dosed baby is on the way. So that’s what’s happening. It’s amazing. He’s found out so much—he’s been at the hub of things all along.”

“I agree with you, Chris, it’s highly plausible. But remember, Nevada is the real hub of events. Like the man said, it’s the stars above govern our condition.”

“Yes,” agreed Sole dubiously—so glad that Pierre was stoned out of his mind. How long would he stay in that condition?

Zwingler nodded to Chester.

“Okay. I approve. We’ll go ahead with Niagara Falls.”

“You think so?”

“I damn well hope so! Everything in the Frenchman’s papers suggests it’s okay. Gil, would you call up Chase and Billy?”

“That’s good,” the Negro smiled. “I like things to go with a bang.”

“Chase,” Zwingler said carefully into the microphone, “why is the sky dark at night?”

“On account of the universe expanding,” crackled the reply.

“That’s right, Chase. Now listen to this. The word is Niagara. Niagara, confirm?”

“Niagara—that’s all?”

“For the moment. The Falls part to be delayed till the helicopter gets to you. I’m sending Gil to pick you up and bring you down here. Start Niagara Falls as soon as you pull out. We’ll evacuate onward to Franklin. Tell Manáus to send the jet down to Franklin to pull us out, will you? And pass the news to Stateside that the situation here is positive. We’re sending documents and tapes for analysis. Get them to Manáus by way of the spotter plane as soon as you can—have the documents telexed from the consulate there.”

Zwingler had the instructions read back to him before signing off.

“What, you’re sending Pierre’s records back to the States?”

“Sure. They’re our only instruction manual for Xemahoa.”

The three men climbed back into the muddy water, Chester carrying a long canvas bag and Zwingler a TWA airline bag. They waded into Pierre’s hut as the helicopter took off. Zwingler dumped the airline bag beside him on the hammock.

“How about some explanations, Tom? I’m all at sea.”

“Okay, Chris.”

“What’s this Franklin place then?”

“It’s a jungle airstrip used for surveys for the Amazon Project, south side. It can also handle jets, incidentally. The other Roosevelt, Teddy, has a river named after him hereabouts so we called it Franklin—”

“And Niagara Falls?”

“Maybe it’s a bad choice of a codename. Says too much about the operation.”

“A waterfall? Pouring water?”

“Uh-huh. Billy and Chase are gonna pull the plug on the dam. What those guerrillas couldn’t manage in a month of Sundays we can do in two minutes flat. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away—”

“How do you pull the plug on all this, Tom? I thought the idea was just to fly a couple of the Indians out.”

Zwingler shook his head briskly.

“If there’s anything in this drug business, we got to save the whole ecology, Chris. That’s the thinking at the top, back home. Your friend Pierre ought to be pleased.

Billy will be using two mines. One kiloton apiece. Water action will finish the job. Strip the dam away like sealing tape.”

“Christ, you’re not thinking of using nuclear explosives?”

“Nuclear’s just a word, Chris—don’t get all worked up about a word. They’re only one kiloton apiece. Together that’s only a tenth of the Hiroshima bomb.”

“But what about fallout—and the flooding?”

“There’ll be very little fallout. Barely detectable. Billy will mine the dam over on the far side. Flooding? Well, I guess a guy could as easily get killed crossing the street in New York or London or Rio. Let’s call it the automobile casualty factor—that’s all it is.”

“They’ll say the guerrillas did it,” grinned Chester. “We’ll let that word get out, even if it does mean a prestige buck for them. Nobody’ll know it was nuclear, small blast like that.”

“But downstream?”

“That reception camp’s on fairly high land, ain’t it?”

Sole felt a sense of neutrality. Yet this neutral cool was invaded from within by sparks of hot excitement and restlessness. Not anger, but excitement. It was as though Pierre had all along been a political superego. And Pierre was switched off now. Yes, it was like Nietzsche said about God being dead—anything was possible. Sole’s mind pursued this idea obsessively, while Zwingler talked on.

“This automobile casualty factor is a good concept to keep in your head through all this. We’re handling the future of man among the stars—not to mention on earth. An explosion might hurt some people. I’m not saying it will, just might. Likewise it could upset these Indians when we take their Bruxo away. But they’ll easy get over that. With their Messiah born. The flood vanishing. The fungus sprouting again. This man Kayapi in the saddle, who knows? Later on we’ll be able to synthesize the drug.

It could be dynamite to your PSF, Chris.”

How marvellous for the Xemahoa, this turn of fortune—which happened to fulfil their prophecies. How amazed Pierre would be when he came to his senses.

Sole’s fingers had located a loose end of fibre sticking out of the hut wall, and been tugging it this way and that restlessly. He realized he’d cut one of his fingers on the sharp edge and it was bleeding; popped the finger in his mouth and sucked it gaily like a child.

Now what was that concept he had to keep in his mind?

The automobile casualty factor. A nice bland phrase.

Only one thing was wrong with it. There weren’t any cars driving round in the jungle.

Don’t split hairs.

Split dams.

Split them like you split the seal on a pack of cigarettes. Whatever is sealed shall be unsealed, when the embedded child is born. He felt exhilarated and euphoric. Yet cool, at the same time. A well-tempered shiver of excitement filled his body and spirit.

He felt sure Pierre would understand. To understand all, is to forgive all—isn’t that an old French proverb?

And to know all, is all that really counts. That was why the Bruxo had snorted maka-i, till his nose ran red. That was why the Xemahoa men danced in a trance, sucked by leeches.

To know the whole truth of life, as a direct experience.

From his canvas bag Chester was taking the components of an oddly-shaped gun which he now began fitting together.

“What’s that, Chester?”

“You know those Indian blowguns, fire curare darts. This baby fires anaesthetic needles. Bring down a rhino before it reached you. That fast, man.”

Why of course. How merciful. How sensible.

How well thought out.

Pierre’s closeness elated Sole now rather than anything. His worries had gone. Had there ever been any real worries?