by Ian Watson
It was Roussel speech.
Pierre had been appalled and intrigued by the arrogant way Raymond Roussel pushed his poetry past the bounds of human comprehension. The poem New Impressions of Africa became a sort of mistress for Pierre, one he constantly quarrelled with, but who continued to fascinate him. Her aristocratic manners repelled him. He wanted to master her, for the sake of logic and justice. If only he could know her completely, through one long night of understanding, he'd be free of his temptress. But like all great temptresses, this poem had her hidden wiles — her tricks. She hypnotized. She induced loss of memory.
The only way of getting near to the heart of her — if only to stab her in the heart and be done with her! — was by hearing the words she spoke. Yet the maze they formed forever defeated the unaided human mind. If Logic was so easily put to flight by a poem, what hope was there for the reform of the world itself by logic? This mistress was an elegant bitch, a Salome who cared not a hoot for the Third World and the Poor — a constant reminder to Pierre of the falsity of the aesthetic choice in life. Beauty instead of truth.
And right now, unaccountably, she was actually consoling Pierre in the midst of the injustices he witnessed in the Brazilian jungle!
It was this contradiction that made Sole pull out the letter again in search of a clue.
The words on the stamp read ORDER AND PROGRESS — the motto of Brazil, given a new and insistent reality by the military regime.
He chose a page where he noticed Roussel's name leering out at him.
“. . . I may as well write to you as to anyone else — at least you will appreciate the uniqueness of this particular tribe.
“They call themselves Xemahoa, but they may not be around to call themselves anything for very much longer, in spite of the incredible last stand of their tribal shaman, their Bruxo — a last stand not conducted with bows and poison arrows and blowpipes however!
“They have so little idea of the enormity of what they are up against; what pawns (oh less than pawns!) they are in their own jungle home to the Big Players! Their Bruxo's attempts to deal with the coming disaster in his own cultural terms truly have a pathetic grandeur about them. And oh what a zany similarity to Roussel's poem too! What an amazing similarity to the mind-sanctuary that our French dilettante built for himself. This is what astonishes me. When I am not livid with rage, I toy with the idea of somehow translating Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique into Xemahoa B.
“I say Xemahoa B, since apparently there's a two-tier language situation operating here — and in Xemahoa B, if in any language on this vicious globe, Roussel's poem might at last be made comprehensible.
“The essence of the Bruxo's enterprise for flood control is this — let me assure you, my dear Chris, you will be astonished too — and afterwards you will be enraged . . .”
Sole threw the letter down.
My poor Pierre, and so would you be astonished to see me sitting here watching my Indians.
Astonished — and afterwards? How enraged would you be?
To Sole's eyes, they were uniquely beautiful.
Their world was beautiful.
And their speech.
He adjusted the controls to filter out his own and Rosson's voices; tuned the feathermike pickups for whatever the children might be saying.
But they were silent at the moment.
He had hundreds of hours of their speech on tape, from the earliest babbling through the first whole utterances to the sentences they were making now — embedded statements about an embedded world. He had walked among them, played with them, shown them how to use their maze and teaching dolls and oracles — wearing a speech-mask which snatched the words from his lips as soon as he whispered them, sent them to the computer for sorting and transforming, before voicing them.
Strictly speaking, he had no need to listen and look in, in this doting way. Monitoring was automatic; all the children said could be picked up by feathermikes, processed and sorted and stored on tape. Interesting or unexpected word patterns would be printed out for him.
Yet he found it intensely healthy to look in on them. A kind of therapy. Already, his dark sense of alienation had largely lifted.
Sole's wasn't the only world hidden away beneath Haddon Unit. There were two other worlds with their children in them — the Logic World run by Dorothy Summers and Rosson; and the ‘Alien’ World invented by Jannis the psychologist.
The life support systems for the three worlds were automated as well as the speech programmes. There'd be less and less reason to go down there in person as the kids grew older and more capable of managing. It might even be less and less desirable. The Gods will have to ration their appearances, joked Sam Bax, Director of Haddon.
Competent, bouncy Sam Bax, thought Sole. Leave him to handle politics. The money-getting, the Institutes and Foundations, the military tie-up, the security. It's none of my business. Let Pierre bother himself about the politics of Brazil. Don't pull me into it. Just let me get on with my bloody work! The children of my mind are here, my Rama, my brave Vidya, my beloved Gulshen, my darling Vasilki. Don't make the Gods withdraw from the scene too soon, Sam.
On the screen, Vidya opened his eyes and stared at the shapes of Sole and Rosson. Giant lips moved silently, fleshy and foot-long — and spoke bad language at him.
By night, as the children slept, their speech would be reinforced by the whispering of feathermikes, by the hypnothrob of sleepteaching.
• • •
In the canteen at lunchtime, another vicious bitchy brush with Dorothy.
Sole sat at the same table with her, chewed a piece of gristly stew and thought how indigestible Dorothy was herself, emotionally. She betrayed little of Sole's dangerous love for his children. Fortunate for her charges that her partner in the enterprise, Rosson, was the warm human being he was.
“Dorothy, do you ever worry about when the kids grow up?” Sole blurted out rashly. “What's going to happen to them for the next forty or fifty years?”
She pursed her lips.
“Their sex drive can be controlled, I suppose—”
“I don't mean sex, I mean what about them as people. What's going to happen? We don't ask that question, do we?”
“Need we ask it? I'm sure there'll be space for them.”
“But what sort of space? Outer Space? Space in a thermos bottle tossed in the cosmic sea in the direction of the nearest star? A crew for a starship?”
Dorothy Summers didn't seem to encounter any gristle or else swallowed what she did.
“I told Sam it was a mistake appointing married people,” she said tartly. “I don't imagine your having a child of your own helps objectivity.”
Sole thought instinctively of Vidya — before he remembered that ‘his’ child was called Peter . . .
“Do you have any idea how large the world's population is?” she demanded. “I mean, can you visualize it? All the children that are going to be born before today's over — or wiped out before tonight by accident! Do you think it matters one scrap that a dozen boys and girls are brought up — lavishly, I might add — in somewhat unusual circumstances? Don't come whining to me, my friend, if you get cold feet on a winter's morning.” Sole smiled uncomfortably.
“Can you visualize what the fate of these brats might have been had they not come here? Haddon is Aladdin's Cave so far as they're concerned. Instead of the rubbish heap!”
“Aladdin's Cave? May they discover the Open Sesame for us poor mortals then—”
“Indeed, Chris, yes in-deed. I'll tell you one thing — if they don't find it for us, then somebody else will. The Russians have some pretty queer things going on in their mental hospitals — besides using them to keep their intellectuals locked up!”
“What awful stew this is,” said Sole, hoping to escape from her clutches; but she pinned him tight as a piece of meat on her fork, for she'd seen Sam Bax heading their way with his own plate of stew. Dorothy blandly reported the conversation to him as soon as
he sat down.
Sam nodded sympathetically.
“Have you heard the story about the American spinster and her Venus Fly Trap, Chris?”
And Sam proceeded to tell a sick-funny story that deftly put Dorothy down as the spinster she was and Sole as the sentimentalist. The situation was glossed over — apparently Sam wanted his staff to be on the best of terms today.
“This woman lived in a New York skyscraper where they wouldn't let her keep any pets, not even a goldfish,” Sam explained in a jolly, steamrolling manner, between forkfuls of stew. “So she bought a plant to keep her company. A Venus Fly Trap. The Fly Trap can count up to two so it can obviously think after a fashion—”
“A plant can count?” sniffed Dorothy suspiciously.
“Truly! One tap on the tripwire of this botanic gin-trap — say a grain of sand falls on it — and there's no reaction. But give two taps, like a fly would when it lands and stamps its feet — and the jaws snap shut. That's genuine counting — thinking, of a sort. Well, this woman's apartment was so clean and airconditioned and high above the city streets, there weren't any flies ever — so she had to feed it cat food to keep it happy. This went on for two years till one day she found a fly in the kitchen. She thought she'd give her Trap a treat so she caught the fly and fed it to it. Trap closed. Trap digested the fly. A few hours after that the Trap died of food poisoning. Live prey! It died of reality!”
“Or of DDT,” sniffed Dorothy.
“Of the perils of a controlled environment, I prefer to think! There's a moral in that for us. Any danger the kids face isn't concerned with their being in those three worlds down below — but in being brought out of them.”
Sam forked up the rest of his stew then sat back surveying Sole and Dorothy Summers amiably.
“More important than this little argument between you two people, however, is — tomorrow.” He wiped his mouth with the paper napkin, screwed it into a ball and dropped it neatly in the centre of his plate. “We're receiving a visit from one of our American colleagues, which I gather the powers-that-be consider rather important.”
He fished in his pocket.
“I've got a working paper this man's written on your subject, Chris, Would you glance through it before then?”
Sam passed the xeroxed sheets over.
Thomas R. Zwingler: A Computer Analysis of Latent Verbal Disorientation in Long-Flight Astronauts. Part One: Distortion of Conceptual Sets.
Dorothy craned her neck to read the title too.
“My God,” she sniffed. “The pomposity of it.”
Sam shook his head.
“I don't think you'll find Tom Zwingler so pompous in person.”
“Where did you meet him?” Sole asked.
“A seminar in the States last year,” Sam answered vaguely. “Tom Zwingler's a floater — attached to a number of agencies. Sort of experiment co-ordinator.”
“What agencies?” Sole pressed, annoyed at his own recent display of vulnerability. “Rand? Hudson? NASA?”
“I gather he's on the salary roll of the National Security Agency. Communications Division.”
“You mean espionage?” Dorothy raised an eyebrow sarcastically.
“Hardly that, judging from this paper, Dorothy. A communications man.”
“A half-way house man,” smiled Dorothy. “Like our Chris?”
Sam frowned. He rose bulkily from his seat.
“Tomorrow afternoon then, two-thirty. We'll give him a run-down on the present state of the art at Haddon. Right?”
Sole nodded.
“I suppose so,” sniffed Dorothy ungraciously.
TWO
THE POLICE CAPTAIN flew in by helicopter, a war-surplus Huey Iroquois Slick, in the midst of a downpour, and wanted to interview Charlie Faith immediately.
Jorge Almeida, Charlie's Brazilian adviser, put his head round the door — a slim serious individual with hot dark eyes and a light milk chocolate skin suggesting perhaps an Indian grandparent.
“Visitors, Charlie,” he called against the rattle of rain on the tin roof.
Jorge was proud with a truly Brazilian pride of this Amazon Project now opening up half of a country that was itself half a continent, but which had lain dormant for so long: had remained a subconscious landscape, peopled by fantasies of El Dorado and lost cities and giant anacondas that could outrun a horse. Jorge despised these fantasies almost as much as he despised the savages haunting the jungle like ghosts of this dreamscape. From the safe, hitherto uninvolved distance of Amazonia he tacitly supported the military regime that had sworn to tame and civilize this land. His own talents had been approved by two years at the National Civil Engineering Laboratory in Lisbon, and resentment lurked in his soul at being subordinate to a yanqui engineer, however temporary the arrangement. Charlie wasn't blind to this, but they were stuck with each other and usually made the best of it.
Charlie's head throbbed with a trace of hangover hardly improved by the drumming on the roof and he was having trouble maintaining radio contact with the Project Control Centre nine hundred kilometres north at Santarem.
Damn visitors, he thought. More bloody priests.
He was a small, once muscular man, whose muscles had turned to flab since his days in the army; whose hair had thinned out since then, till it lay plastered stickily over his scalp in short brown fronds — a wet, serrated, dying leaf. The knobbly upturned end of his nose stood out from his features, softened with large greasy pores and slightly too large — as though he'd spent a few years with a finger up each nostril stretching them. Capillary breakdown had started to lay red spiders over his cheekbones some time ago.
His daydreams, as well as his daily radio call, focussed on that two-bit town Santarem — the exit point from this hole in the jungle. A strange anomaly of a place was Santarem: a hangover from the American Civil War. Confederate soldiers who refused to go along with General Lee's surrender settled there and their descendants lived there to this day, hard by other leftovers of American presence through the years — Henry Ford's settlement Fordlandia, now derelict, his Belterra, also abandoned: two reminders of the great rubber boom that had reared a rococo palace to opera in the heart of Amazonia, at Manaus, and brought La Pavlova a thousand miles upstream to dance for the rubber barons. Nowadays Santarem was filled with a fresh influx of Americans, to advise on the building of the great primary dam that would stretch sixty-five kilometres across from Santarem to Alenquer, with a twinbasin lock set in the hard rock, deepwater harbour, turbines and transmission lines; and oversee the construction of the dozen subsidiary dams of the future inland sea that would soon balance, on the globe, the Great Lakes of the northern hemisphere.
A vast sea would embrace the Amazon. Estimates were, it would cost half a billion dollars to map the whole region adequately from the air. But only half that sum to flood it and erase the embarrassments of geography forever.
Charlie's own subdam consisted of ten kilometres of tamped-down earth faced with bright orange plastic carved out of the middle of the jungle. A lake fifteen thousand kilometres square would back up behind it, nowhere too deep for the big timber dredges to haul out the wealth of trees it drowned. A million trees. A billion trees. Who knew the number? Hardwoods, mahoganies, cedars, steel-woods. Silk-cotton trees and garlic trees and chocolate trees. Balsa, cashews, laurels. So many trees. So much land. And so much water. All useless to mankind, up till the present.
Damned rain, thought Charlie. Rots the soul. But at least it was speeding up the filling of the lake, bringing measurably closer the time when he could get the hell out of here.
“Who are they, priests from the camp?”
“No, it's a political police captain and a couple of his sidekicks. It's queer, I've never seen—”
He looked worried; flashed a quick grin of bravado,
“Careful what you say, hey Charlie? Remember, you're a long way from home.”
Charlie regarded the Brazilian dubiously.
“Is that mean
t to be a bit of friendly advice? I guess I'm okay politically.”
“They came by helicopter. Can you hurry up, Charlie? They're impatient people.”
“Damn it, I'm on the air. Oh never mind, I can't hear nothing but static anyway. Santarem, d'you read me? Reception's terrible. I'm signing off now — call you back later, okay? Over and out. Get a bottle of brandy, Jorge, huh? I'll see them in here—”
Jorge was turning to leave when a hand shoved the door fully open and propelled him into the room. Three men pushed their way in and looked round, at radio, dam models, drip buckets, hammock with dirty sheet on it, open charts and records, stacks of Playboys.
The Captain wore a crisp olive uniform with a jaunty red spotted neckerchief, black leather boots, a holstered pistol. But if he had a reasonably military air about him, his two companions looked more like capangas, the thugs hired by landowners and developers in the Brazilian outback. A ratty vicious-seeming halfcaste. And a massive Negro with teeth almost as black as his skin and web-creamy eyes of bloodshot curds and whey. They wore the same style boots with stained khaki trousers and sweatshirts. The Negro crooked a submachine gun under his arm. Ratface had an automatic rifle with burnished bayonet attached to it.
Jorge was heading around the Negro when a sharp rap of the gun across his ribs halted him.
“Stay here and listen, Almeida — it concerns you as well. Mr Faith, I suppose you don't speak Portuguese?”
The Captain spoke good English with an American accent, but his smile held no real humour in it, only a kind of gloating chilly anticipation.
“Sorry, I understand some. Jorge usually translates for me.”
“We shall speak English then.”
“Jorge was just going for drinks. You could drink a glass of brandy?”
“Excellent. We shall have some brandy. But not my pilot.”
Charlie stared from Ratface to Negro, confused.
“Which one's the pilot?”
