The Embedding

by Ian Watson

  “LEFT US,” he howled terrifyingly, though he did not move or wring his hands or show any sign of tears, as a human being giving vent to such an expression of loss would — he stood, bound up in an alien agony, Cross and Crucified united in the same tall dry form. Raised arms and orange palms would be too feeble a protest to express this pent-up inner grief.

  “I don't get it,” Sole shouted in frustration — though nobody else was making a noise now. Many had moved back from the alien, as if scared. “How do you communicate with creatures that are changing meanings all the time? What sort of permanence is that? But — thirteen thousand years! And you've kept this crazy love alive for all that span of time? How — and why?”

  Ph'theri's cry had been like the howl of an untuned radio set — when he got to tune himself in again, his message came through clearly enough, for an alien answer to a human question.

  “The Change Speakers desired something when they phased with the Sp'thra — what it was we did not understand. They themselves were hurting with love. Our signal trading quest is to cancel the great sense of their sadness, so that we Sp'thra can be left alone again — without that vibration in our minds, imprinted so many centuries ago by their passage. Yes, they branded us! They left a long echo in their wake. It is the eddy in water left standing in a bowl. A retinal image of a blinding light. We are haunted by the Change Speakers. By this ghost of love, which is pain.”

  “Did they ‘phase’ with no other races you've met on your travels?” asked Sole. “Has no one else got this echo in their minds?”

  “Surely we humans have, in the person of Our Saviour!” an evangelical Southern voice cried out. “I swear it's God he means, in his alien way—”

  Sciavoni made an angry pianissimo gesture.

  “No, it's a collective psychosis,” a Jewish specialist in Abnormal Psychiatry from New York offered as his diagnosis — though he sounded hysterical himself. “These aliens are collectively insane. Their obsessive activity is simply a way of hiding the truth from themselves — by turning their delusory system upside down and externalizing it. All that time ago some collective madness took hold of them. Maybe a genetic mutation. Or some bug they caught on their travels. Maybe they're breathing their mind poison out into our air and minds right now?” His voice rose giddily. “What have we done to quarantine ourselves and this creature? What's fifty miles of wild country — to a star virus?”

  “Not so,” howled Ph'theri, raising both arms and tick-tacking his thumbs in the utmost anger or agitation. “We Sp'thra are not sick. We are aware. Change Speakers exist — in another reality plane! When they phased with This-Reality, the event set up a resonance which is this Bereft Love and this Anguish and this Grim Haunting all at once. You have not known this. No other race has. The Change Speakers modulate all the reality tangents to the plane of our embedding here. But where they brushed, they set that point in this universe resonating — like a sounded bell in ancient Sp'thra. With the reality-pictures of so many species in our moon, we shall transcend This-Reality as they do, pursue the Change Speakers and—”

  Ph'theri hesitated.

  “What then?” pressed Sole. The alien's arms collapsed. A mute, eroded witness to the inexplicable, he admitted:

  “We disagree what to do. Signal them? Love them? DESTROY them for the anguish they inflicted on us? Some heretics even suggest that the Change Speakers are ourselves, from some far future or alternative reality. A pre-echo of our own Evolved Selves resonating back in time — to force us to assassinate them in a future that has grown intolerable to them, but which they cannot escape from of their own will. These future Sp'thra, caught up in the incredible anguish of some unknown situation — perhaps it is Immortality? — can only commit suicide through the agency of their earlier selves; so the story goes—”

  “Is this a popular explanation among your people?”

  “No! This heresy has appeared several times since the language moon was hollowed out, been discounted and destroyed—”

  “And those who believed in it?”

  “Destroyed too! It is against the signal-trading destiny and duty of the Sp'thra.”

  “For God's sake, the creature is paranoid! Isn't it obvious his whole race is? Assassinate the future? Assassinate schmassinate!”

  “Who would say that your own species is mentally pure,” accused Ph'theri, “when you send out repetitive pictures of dying, killing, maiming and torture?”

  “But that isn't the idea of being a human being,” the psychiatrist protested angrily. “That is a misreading. Those things are all accidents, mistakes, disasters.”

  “Really? You seem to dote on them. As we see it, your signals are you. These things are your sport, your art, your religion. Why do you balk at trading six brains of Earth, whom a great destiny awaits — to escape from the Embedding with the Sp'thra. To master the tangents. To enjoy the freedom of love sated and satisfied!”

  The Embedding.

  It was a concept that seemed to haunt the aliens as fiercely as it had, in another context, haunted Sole. Was there any real comparison — or was it just a chance similarity of words?

  It didn't seem like a chance similarity to Sole, right then. More like a miraculous discovery.

  Sole felt himself filled with wonder, as he saw his way through to a fusion of Ph'theri's obsession with his own.

  “Ph'theri — I've tried to achieve a kind of ‘embedding’, to test out the frontiers of reality, using young human brains. Maybe it's a coincidence of words? No, I don't think so. You think it's impossible to test out reality with one species on one planet. Tell me this, Ph'theri, would you be willing to miss the tide if it was worth your while? If it brought your search to an end? If it saved all time for the Sp'thra?”

  Sole fished Pierre's letter out of his pocket.

  And began to tell the tall alien all that he knew of the Xemahoa tribe of Brazil . . .

  Outside, it was full daylight now. The sun shone on to Ph'theri's ship, on the desert scrub, the peaked mountains beyond. The sky hadn't a single contrail in it. The area must have been cleared of air traffic.

  When Sole had finished explaining — and while people stared at Sole, bemused — Ph'theri considered for a long time. His paper-bag ears crinkled through rapid shape changes as he communicated like a silent ventriloquist with the other Sp'thra.

  The alien finally addressed the crowd.

  “If this is true, we Sp'thra shall miss the tide. And for the Xemahoa brain unit, we assess the value thus: the transfer to you of interstellar travel techniques, together with the lending of one gasgiant Tide Reader. This ‘package’ will enable your race to reach the Tide Reader star within five of your years and make your own trading arrangements.”

  A hush of awe filled the room. The bright sunlight made it a moment of eternity.

  Then a groundswell of naked greed took hold of the crowd, and Sole felt himself being clapped and pounded on the back.

  “You damn clever bastard,” Sciavoni hissed in his ear. “Was any of that true?”

  “But it has to be,” muttered Sole. “Doesn't it?”

  “Sure as hell it does!” Sciavoni laughed.

  “Hey, Dr Sole,” another voice insinuated, “we'd better be turning the taps off down Brazil way, hadn't we?”

  “Before we lose our baby in the bathwater, eh?”

  An almost hysterical gaiety. Amid it all the tall Sp'thra stood like a gloomy lighthouse in a storm.

  As the babble grew deafening, Ph'theri's ears scaled down to flat cardboard packets.

  • • •

  A sub-committee of the Washington Special Action Group met in a walnut-panelled room with false windows. Views of New England in the Fall surrounded them — a blaze of russet trees, that could change at the touch of a switch to the Everglades, Hawaiian beaches, or the Rocky Mountains.

  The President's Chief Scientific Adviser, a German émigré with a leonine head of white wiry hair, said:

  “There's a hell of a l
ot more to it than just snatching a couple of Indians. We've got to safeguard our assets — and if these Indians have stumbled on to something so unique that it's worth the secret of star flight to our friends, then we need it too—”

  “We're going on pretty slender evidence. A letter from a crazy frog full of propaganda,” said a quiet man from the CIA, who'd been doodling on his notepad, producing a series of awkward drawings of a winged dragon like an advertisement for a correspondence course in art in a comic book.

  “But we know the thing's possible. What did that man Zwingler say they'd discovered at that Hospital in England? Some kind of chemical to enhance the intelligence—”

  “He said they weren't sure of that, sir.”

  “Yes, but they said lasers were impossible a few years ago then they were in commercial production not long afterwards. The more we find out about the mind, the more likely it seems we can make it do tricks we never dreamed of. The Russians can make a person feel bravery or fear just by injecting a chemical into the brain. Any emotion they like. We can prevent senility to a certain extent. It's no big deal to predict we'll be able to make people think better in the near future—”

  The President had a visionary — some would say, romantic — taste in scientific advisers. The current adviser's rise to power took him out of an obscure professorship in social psychiatry at a Mid-Western university, through the Hudson Institute's Committee on the Year 2000, to his present position, with a speed that alarmed some of his former colleagues. Not that he was a young man. On the contrary. He'd stayed a suspect maverick for too long, pursuing research into dubious topics such as genetic intelligence and conditioning techniques. However, the President had a firm faith in the possibility of managing people and events according to well-defined scripts drawn up by ‘responsible’ psychologists and sociologists. Or, as he put it in a State of the World message, of ‘orchestrating domestic and international events to make harmonious music’.

  “Take that Russian who was smashed up in a car crash in Moscow. Bokharov. They reversed his death okay but they couldn't do anything about the damage to his brain during the time he was dead. His value as a scientist was quartered. But look what we accomplished with that nuclear fusion man at Caltech—”

  “Hammond?”

  “Sure. His IQ rating was going off by a few fractions of a percentage point. Not enough to make any difference to the average guy. But in a top scientist like him, that's the difference between excellent routine work — and what for want of a better word we got to call genius. We managed to buck him up for those vital months till we caught up with the Russians—”

  “That was using DNA extract?” a sharp-faced Italian-American — the Treasury Department's head of drug intelligence — asked the Adviser, who nodded.

  “Imagine if we could inject some drug that makes the difference of whole percentage points of intelligence at the peak of a man's career. Give him the power to integrate everything he knows. We got to save the whole environment of these Indians — we need that drug, and at this stage that means the whole natural system it comes from.”

  “It ain't so awkward as it sounds,” said the CIA man, looking up from his dragons. “We can repair the dam afterwards — make it smaller. Then the area those Indians live in can be made into a sorta reserve — big enough so they don't cotton on and act unnatural, like stop cultivating the drug . . .”

  TWELVE

  CHARLIE HUMMED, TO cheer himself, as he rode back through the rain from the other side of the dam.

  How soon before he would be ‘Ridin’ home to Albuquerque' like the song said.

  He needed cheering. Images of the Nam haunted this landscape more and more these days.

  The heat. The waiting. The sense of being trapped.

  The cafe tarts stinking of ether. Girls who really knocked a man out! Anaesthetize was the name of the game . . .

  Jorge was standing waiting at the end of the dam in the wet, waving the jeep down frantically . . .

  “Charlie!” A cry of fear.

  The noose round Charlie's neck tightened a stage further.

  “That Captain Paixao is here. With two prisoners. They're questioning them in the store shed. A man and a woman.”

  “Were they coming to — kill me?”

  “You selfish sonofabitch! Paixao and his thugs are torturing them for information — a woman too!”

  Charlie bit his lip.

  “Shit . . . that's bad. I guess we'd better—”

  “What had we better? Put a stop to it? How do you do that — you tell me!”

  “Shit, Jorge, I dunno. But one thing I'll do right now is see what's goin' on.”

  Jorge climbed on board the jeep, clothes dripping wet from the rain.

  Charlie revved the jeep towards the most distant of the tin sheds.

  Graders and bulldozers were parked on the concrete there — and so was Paixao's helicopter. The pilot sat smoking a cigarette, pointing an automatic rifle idly at the approaching jeep.

  The door to the shed was guarded by another of Paixao's men, with the face of a boxer dog and black bushy sideburns.

  He shouted at the jeep as they pulled up.

  “What's he sayin'?”

  “To piss off — it's none of our business.”

  “Say I insist on seeing Paixao.”

  Jorge translated, then gave Charlie a despairing look.

  “Captain will come see you in his own good time, he says.”

  “Well that ain't no good. Say I need some equipment outa that shed. Urgent — for the dam. Oh fuck it — make something up. How did they get in there anyways — smash the lock?”

  “They took the key off me,” flushed Jorge.

  “You mean you gave them it — knowing this would happen?”

  “What the hell could I do? They're the police. They want to do it here, not in the village — too many witnesses there.”

  “You're sure that's what they are doing? Maybe it's not so bad.”

  “Oh Charlie, Charlie — I heard such screams before I ran off to meet you.”

  “See anything through the window?”

  “That man said he'd put a bullet through my foot for me if I went anywhere near.”

  “Dammit, he won't dare shoot me! Jorge, you stay with the jeep. If anything happens drive off and raise Santarem on the radio. Don't try to help.”

  Charlie tugged Jorge over into the driver's seat as he was getting out. The guard shouted something at him as he walked towards the window.

  “You speak English?” Charlie shouted back, still walking. Inside his head a question lit up in bright red lights: Charlie, what the hell are you taking this risk for? To stand up straight and true in Jorge's eyes? Or to make up in some way for that girl's suffering eyes and that boy spitted on your bayonet and that blazing hut long ago?

  Events spun round him faster and faster like a malicious wheel of fortune. The Huey Slick, the wet heat, these interrogations of prisoners — hide as deep in the Amazon as you can, these things will hunt you down like Furies.

  Charlie peered through the dripping bars.

  Only one of the two lights in the shed was working. It cast giant shadows into the gloom beyond the crated equipment and fuel drums, where a group of figures were. Charlie wondered why they were standing in darkness. Whether the second light bulb had just packed up. Then he made out the cable dangling from the light socket down to the floor.

  Charlie ran at the door and tried to push his way past Sideburns.

  The guard shoved him back roughly into the rain.

  “You bastard, it's my goddam hut! I got to see Paixao. Understand, Paixao?”

  The man nodded and made him a sign to keep his distance. He banged his gun butt a few times on the door behind him. The gun was pointing approximately at Charlie's groin.

  “You stupid shit,” Charlie swore under his breath.

  They had to wait a time till the door opened and Orlando's ratty features thrust out.

  The h
alfcaste heard Charlie's inept attempts at framing sentences in Portuguese for a while, impassively, then walked away. Charlie couldn't be sure that he had been understood at all, until the Captain himself came to the door.

  Paixao had that antiseptic band-aid smile stuck on his lips.

  “Mr Faith. You'll be glad to hear we have trapped two terrorists on their way here to kill you. They admit as much. Unfortunately we lost one of their group in the jungle. But he will probably die there, without any supplies or transport. We shall not borrow your shed much longer. Another hour then we shall be on our way. You can wait that long?”

  “Excuse me, Captain, but I want to know what you're doing to those people in there!”

  Charlie thrust himself past Paixao and stared down the shed.

  One figure lay huddled on the floor. The other figure somehow seemed to be standing on its head. Then Charlie made out the rope round its ankles. The rope looped over the roofbeam, suspending the body. The legs were bare. Maybe the whole body was naked — but Paixao's men stood in the way. “What you doing, man!”

  “You did your duty in Southeast Asia, Senhor Faith, so you must understand about doing one's duty. A rat has been caught in a trap. It's necessary to squeeze the rat. No need to involve yourself. We just need your electric supply for our — recording gear. And a roof over our heads.”

  “Is it true one of those people is a woman?”

  “Both are guerrillas, Mr Faith. Both are saboteurs and murderers. Enemies of civilization. And your potential assassins. The question of sex is immaterial.”

  Ah, girl with your doe eyes, what did it matter, what happened between us, when anyway you had to die? Was that the thing called rape — that explosion of my own anguish?

  To tell the truth, Charlie wasn't even certain that rape had occurred. He wasn't certain what had occurred after he felt the sinking home of the bayonet. Charlie reconstructed a probability of rape, that was all. It was an identikit picture of what might have taken place. And he was an identikit soldier performing identikit deeds as per boot camp training.