The Embedding

by Ian Watson

  “It's too dangerous to release news of this calibre, Chris. Carl Gustav Jung predicted that the reins might be torn from our hands — metaphorically speaking. We'd be bereft of our dreams as a species — it could kick the legs right out from under us.”

  “Or give us a timely kick in the pants?”

  “False optimism, Chris. We're going out to collect it — meet it — whatever. If it's a robot drone, humanity needn't be traumatized — not yet awhile, till we've got people prepared — maybe not for another hundred years. Naturally the Russians were bound to find out sooner or later so we took them into our confidence. They see our point about discretion, and providing there's a quid pro quo about information sharing they'll play along with us. A Russian scientist will be travelling out with our crew to intercept—”

  “When?”

  “They're leaving tomorrow night from the Cape. But in case it isn't a robot—”

  “It's got to be, Tom! Be reasonable. The statistical chances.”

  “In case it isn't, like I say, is why I'm here.”

  Sam nodded sagely — wanting things both ways — for the safety of Mankind, and the greater glory of Haddon.

  “We'd like someone from here over in the States in a consultative capacity—”

  Concentrating his attention on the blank screen behind Zwingler's back, Sole thought of Vidya wrenching at the innermost embedded doll.

  “Well, Chris?”

  So why had Vidya done it?

  “Provided you realize there might be nothing in it for you — if this thing turns out to be a robot — and let's hope to hell it is, in my humble opinion!”

  “Why me?” murmured Sole. “I can't just walk out on the children on the spur of the moment . . .”

  “Chris, my poor Chris — think! This is the Big Thing of all time, maybe. Whatever it is, it's helluva big. Don't you want to be involved?”

  “Rather a schizophrenic attitude to this thing you've got,” Sole temporized (conscious too of this aspect in himself . . . damn Pierre and his untimely letter!). “You want it and you don't want it. It's the Big Thing and the Worst Thing That Can Happen—”

  “Of course you can leave Haddon temporarily, Chris, you might be involved in a car smash or something. We'd have to find a stand-in then.”

  “Thanks a lot, Sam.”

  “What I mean is, Lionel can look after your kids while you're in the States. You have to go as our representative, Chris — keep the flag flying.”

  “May I put it this way?” Zwingler smiled. “Practical alien linguistics could be pretty essential soon.”

  “Unless it's a robot.”

  “Well, we still get our old broadcasts back — when I left the States they were sending some vampire movie . . .”

  “Maybe our aliens have got a sense of humour—”

  Zwingler shook his head.

  “Doubt it. They wouldn't understand the cultural context. Baseball, striptease, vampires — it'd all be the same to them. Incidentally, how fit are you?”

  “Fit?”

  “It might involve you being sent into space via the Shuttle, who knows?” Ruby moons ascended, blasted off.

  “Pretty big carrot, Chris — get any lazy donkey on the move.”

  “Equally there may be nothing in it.”

  Behind the American's back, the blank video screen clamoured for Sole's attention, Vidya twisting the tiniest doll on tape, inexplicably. Overhead, the neon-framed skylight black with space . . .

  And very high overhead, way out beyond the Moon's orbit, something — a seed of the stars — returning the electromagnetic refuse of Earth back to Earth, the Coke bottles and condoms of TV culture, the Nude Auction Show, a Vampire movie screened in the wee hours when only muggers and addicts prowl the deserted streets; a sound sweep sweeping down the star lanes, decelerating as it comes . . .

  SIX

  “YOU KNOW THE snake in the log, and the snake in the stone, Pee-air?”

  “Yes I know them.”

  “Well, they are Man and Woman. So they want to make love. They will fuck together to give birth to the Xemahoa people. The Log and the Stone will lie together.”

  “The Stone will lie on top of the Log?” I hazarded, thinking of the shape of the head on top of the body.

  Kayapi shook his head impatiently.

  “How do the Xemahoa make love, Pee-air? We lie side by side, so any sperm spills on the soil not on the limbs. Listen to me, Pee-air. Do not have your own ideas, or you will not know the Xemahoa.”

  So much for the ‘Missionary Position’, I thought wryly! My mistake.

  I said sorry, and he grunted a surly acknowledgment, then carried on:

  “The snake in the stone and the snake in the log want to lie together. But they cannot come out of the stone or the log, or the stone and the log will close up and not let them in again. The stone and the log want to be empty. They will not be tricked a second time. So the two snakes can only half fuck. They spill a lot of sperm. From the part of their fuck that goes into the log, the tribe of Xemahoa is born. But from the part that falls on the soil — what do you think?”

  I made a guess.

  “Maka-i grows, Kayapi?”

  He beamed a broad smile, stretched out his arm and clapped me on the shoulder many times.

  I could predict that some other Xemahoa myth — taking such concrete objects of the jungle as stones and birds and plants, for its working parts — would neatly splice together the sperm that spills on the soil at night — and the nightsoil of the Xemahoa that they manure the maka-i fungus with. That is how intricate — and logical — this Indian culture is!

  Nevertheless it was a disorderly jigsaw yet.

  I didn't want to offend Kayapi so soon after showing glimmerings of intelligence, so I put off asking for the other pieces to be put into place: particularly the problem of the woman in the taboo hut, pregnant and yet receiving the embedding drug . . .

  “Pee-air,” Kayapi said thoughtfully, “I think maybe you can take maka-i now without the birds losing their way out of your head. But it will be hard for them to find their way back if you cannot call them back in Xemahoa.”

  “I am learning, Kayapi. I must learn fast. The water is higher today.”

  He hardly glanced at the flood. Spat at it.

  “That doesn't matter. I add water to it, see!”

  I saw.

  But I didn't really see, as yet.

  • • •

  Last night one of the Xemahoa girls crept to my open-mesh hammock.

  “Kayapi sends me,” she hissed. “To the Caraiba who is a little Xemahoa.”

  I started to say something in Xemahoa to her, but she stuck two fingers softly in my mouth and tapped my tongue. Just in time, I remembered the mistake that the stone and the log had made, and used my tongue to force her fingers out. She giggled as I did so. In the dark of the hut I couldn't see her face or body well, yet her giggle sounded like the giggle of a young girl.

  For a moment I thought she might even be a boy. Her chest felt so smooth to my hand, the way it bulged ever so softly into nipples. But when I slid my hand lower, I knew which she was. She was wet there already. Had she been greased or ointmented? Or was she in a state of excitement already? She moaned as I touched her.

  My tongue found hers, and that put an end to her giggling.

  She took my penis in her hand, then chafed the knob of it gently till I was nearly coming. But I guess she was more interested in my lack of a foreskin than in exciting me just then, if the truth be told. The Xemahoa don't practice circumcision. The blunt bone of my penis was a once-in-a-lifetime curiosity to a girl embedded in this incest culture.

  How do you fuck in a Xemahoa hammock?

  The best way is side by side, I soon discovered.

  If it hadn't been for the floodwater seeping into the hut, some of my sperm must surely have spilt through the loose mesh on to the soil after I pulled out of her.

  The Xemahoa myths were becoming living real
ities to me.

  Was this why Kayapi had sent the girl?

  After we'd made love, the girl stuffed a couple of fingers in my mouth to stop me saying anything, and I played with her fingertips with my tongue, while she played at trying to trap it . . .

  She slipped away before dawn, so I didn't see her face.

  I slept a while.

  When I woke to the daylight I noticed dry blood on my penis shaft and hairs. The first thing I thought was she must have been a virgin. But when I thought about it a little longer, and about how I'd entered her in that sideways position without any difficulty, I realized that the initial wetness of her sex hadn't been grease or excitement, but must have been menstrual flow.

  She'd been having her period.

  “Yes, it was her bleeding,” Kayapi confirmed casually when I saw him later on.

  So much for menstrual taboos, at least in this society! Unless it was a studied insult.

  But this I doubted.

  Maybe the fact of the girl having a period cancelled out the incest rule of the tribe. My sperm going in, was cancelled by her blood coming out, which permitted me to couple with a Xemahoa girl though myself an outsider.

  I glanced casually round the girls paddling their way about the village, wondering who it had been. And whether she'd be back! But I doubted it. It had been a cultural copulation, there in the hut last night. Kayapi had sent the girl to show me myth in practice — and tie my nervous system into the Xemahoa.

  I was outlining my idea to Kayapi as clearly as I could, and he was busy nodding vigorously when we heard the noise of the helicopter. The sound came chattering closer over the trees and I thought to myself, those bloody priests are coming back to try a different tack — bringing the big guns of technology to bear.

  But Kayapi thought differently.

  “Go hide in the jungle, Pee-air!” he said urgently.

  “What for? It's those White-Robes who spoke about the Flood. They fly a Caraiba bird.” Feeling foolish, I repeated the remark in Portuguese, substituting ‘helicopter’ for ‘bird’.

  “No!”

  He pushed me roughly out of the village clearing, back into the dense maze of rearing vegetation it had been hacked from.

  I was wanting to stay and tell the priests to fuck off back to their miracle dam and tell them to stop this flooding — before they destroyed something irreplaceable, I resisted Kayapi.

  Then he did a crazy thing.

  He pulled a knife on me and screamed at the top of his voice.

  “If you don't go hide in the jungle and stay there, I kill you, Pee-air!”

  So I retreated into the jungle. Wouldn't you? I could easily keep an eye on Kayapi's whereabouts and slip inside the helicopter to talk to the priests before he had a chance to knife me. If indeed he meant his threat — but I hadn't cared for that look in his eyes.

  From cover, I watched him.

  He ran to my hut and emerged a few moments later with all my equipment bundled up in the hammock and ran into the jungle with it.

  I realized then that Kayapi believed enough in me to intend keeping me here forcibly with the Xemahoa — but naturally my excitement at this breakthrough was mixed with a certain irritation, not to say fear, at the means used to demonstrate it!

  Already the helicopter was hovering overhead and the Xemahoa children were pointing up at it; but their parents were calling them into the huts, or into the jungle.

  It wasn't priests that landed.

  It was some sort of police. Soldiers. Paramilitary. I recognized the type. An elegant, viciously handsome Caucasian officer in a drab olive uniform and black jackboots jumped down into the water. Then two others in boots and informal fatigues — a giant Negro with a submachine-gun, and a runtish halfcaste with an automatic rifle and fixed bayonet. The pilot sat pointing an automatic weapon out of the cabin. In the machine's guts I could see two or three other men skulking with guns.

  I'd seen the same sort of thing in Mozambique.

  Only there the villagers had been ready with their AK-47s and grenades and bazookas. That particular helicopter hadn't lifted off again.

  The runt and the Negro raced from hut to hut, poking their guns inside, ignoring the Xemahoa people entirely, while their officer stood masterfully in the centre of the village.

  “Nothing,” the Negro shouted. “There's nothing.”

  What kind of incredible political foresight was it had sent Kayapi scuttling off into the jungle with my things? I wondered too, would he have gone to so much trouble for me before I was bonded to the tribe by that ritual love-match last night?

  Kayapi wandered in casually from the forest. He came from a different direction from the one where he'd taken my things.

  The officer shouted at several of the Xemahoa men, asking them if they spoke Portuguese. But they all, including Kayapi, stared back at him blankly.

  The runt with the bayonet finished his skirting of the main circuit of the village — and the taboo hut lay within his field of vision a hundred yards away down the forest path that was now a wet canal.

  The runt hesitated, taking in the dank mass of trees between him and the hut — the menace of jungle — the distance from the helicopter. Then he pretended not to have seen it.

  “There's nothing here either,” he shouted.

  What in hell's name were they looking for?

  I couldn't believe they could be looking for the same thing those Portuguese troops had been looking for in that Makonde village when they landed their Alouette. Not in the heart of this unpolitical jungle! In the streets of Rio, yes — or in the coastal countryside. But deep in the Amazon? It seemed ridiculous.

  The officer shouted into the helicopter and a miserable-looking Indian interpreter appeared, who addressed the village through a loudhailer in some Tupi dialect then in a couple of others. But there's a kind of linguistic fault-line that divides the Xemahoa from their neighbours. He couldn't communicate with them in any of the dialects he tried. And Kayapi wasn't volunteering anything.

  Abruptly the officer wheeled about and snapped his fingers for the Negro and the runt who came bounding back through the flood to scramble into the helicopter. The blades turned, beating down fists of air on the water, rustling the fronds of the huts. Then they lifted off, and disappeared beyond the trees.

  They could only have been in the village ten minutes.

  Later I asked Kayapi what would have happened if the runt had gone as far as the taboo hut.

  “We kill them maybe.”

  “Kayapi, you know what those guns can do?”

  “I know guns, yes.”

  “You know carbines, rifles, pistols, Kayapi. Guns that fire once or twice or three times. You don't know those guns. They shoot kai-kai times in this space of time.” I snapped my fingers as the officer had snapped his.

  Kayapi shrugged.

  “Maybe we kill them.”

  “Why did you hide my things in the jungle?” I demanded.

  “Was it not right, Pee-air?”

  “Yes. In fact it was right.”

  “So.”

  “But my reason would not be the same as your reason, Kayapi.”

  He stared at me, shook his head, and laughed.

  “Tomorrow, Pee-air, you must meet maka-i. We all meet him together.”

  • • •

  Preparations are going on for the dance. But it will be a dance through two feet of water. Some of the nearby jungle is deep water already — six feet, or worse, where the land slopes down.

  And this village is on something of a slope. God knows how deep the water will be in a few weeks. How high is that bloody dam? Thirty or forty metres?

  The ants are going crazy, swarming through the branches. Iridescent blue morpho butterflies, the ones that get made into ornaments — plaques and plates of blinding blue — flutter above the waters. Red and orange macaws scatter through the trees, propelled by their own screeches. I saw a couple of alligators scuttling near the village this morning.
Fish are wandering into the jungle. They'll soon be swimming through the branches.

  But enough talk of nature. Description for its own sake means next to nothing. The Xemahoa know that. Nature here isn't ‘pretty’. It isn't a picture, a landscape. It's a larder and a glossary. And I fancy it's more important as a glossary than as a larder, to the Xemahoa mind. Macaws are first and foremost feather-number creatures.

  Kayapi came to me just now and confided what they're expecting from the pregnant woman.

  Those White Robes would have crowed with delight.

  Or shrunk back in horror!

  They expect their maka-i ‘God’ to take on flesh and blood inside her. It's the Christ thing all over again.

  So that's what Kayapi meant about the maka-i baby coming ‘when it was time’! That's why the woman has been high on maka-i through her pregnancy.

  God knows what condition she must be in! Her nose must have half rotted off by now — if the mess that the Bruxo's own nostrils are in, is anything to go by.

  And God knows what the genetic consequences may be!

  SEVEN

  DESCRAMBLED TRANSCRIPTION FO EXHANGERS WITH “LEAP FROG”

  T PLUS 3 DAYS 14 HOURS 30 MINUTES

  MISSION CONTROL HOUSTON “You're closing nicely. The object maintains a steady rate of deceleration relative to Earth. I tell you, we'd be pretty scared if it wasn't. There'd be a hell of a hole someplace in Wisconsin otherwise! The size estimate is still one nautical mile diameter. You should expect visual acquisition soon.”

  PETR S TSERBATSKY “Surely that would depend on its mass. The hole in Wisconsin.”

  MIKE MCQ DALTON (NAVIGATOR) “You think it's a balloon some joker has blown up and tossed us to catch?”

  TSERBATSKY “An expanded structure maybe. An interstellar ramjet scoop. I am just speculating.”

  PAULUS S SHERMAN (MISSION COMMANDER) “That's possible, Mike.”

  TSERBATSKY “Or it could be a hollowed out asteroid. Both suggestions are feasible.”

  MISSION CONTROL “Distance forty, that's four oh, nautical miles — it's closing at a relative velocity of two hundred and decelerating — one-ninety-nine . . . one-ninety-eight—”