The Embedding

by Ian Watson

  Then the hanging body swung round and Charlie saw her breasts. And the wires.

  He ran down the room.

  The Negro Olimpio caught hold of him roughly and pinioned him till the Captain caught up.

  Charlie couldn't believe the scene — a human being hung up like a slaughterhouse animal. Maybe that was why he stood so limply in Olimpio's grasp. The identikit had taken over once again. As it had taken over for the woman hanging upside down, turning her into a laboratory animal. Only Paixao seemed wholly alert and aware.

  The Identikit Charlie Faith could think of nothing particular to do or say. Olimpio propelled him easily back along the room and thrust him out into the rain.

  “Mr Faith!” Paixao called after him. “Do remember that it's your life.”

  A scream of animal misery overtook him outside. This — combined with the slap of rain — shocked him back to awareness from his mental haven.

  Charlie ran to the jeep.

  “Jorge, you idiot, we got to get the key to the generator shed! We got to switch the current off. I hope you didn't give them that key too?”

  Almeida slammed the jeep into gear viciously and trod on the accelerator.

  “You think I wanted to give them the other key, you bastard?”

  • • •

  When it was done, and the generator shed relocked, Charlie climbed back into the jeep to find Jorge playing with the .38 he kept under the driver's seat.

  “Pass that over, Jorge, huh?”

  “So you can give it to the Captain — like I gave him the key?”

  But he handed it over to Charlie and Charlie made a display of checking it was still loaded, while Jorge drove the jeep back towards the store shed. He hadn't told Jorge to drive there. Now they were heading that way, he found he didn't dare tell Jorge not to.

  Paixao greeted Charlie at the doorway.

  “An unexpected failure of energy, Mr Faith. You wouldn't be so kind as to switch the electricity back on? No? Well — I would use the helicopter batteries except for the rain, and it's tactically stupid to tie the craft down with such poor visibility. If you value your life so lightly, at least we value our dam more highly! Luckily I have a whip in the helicopter. Of tapir hide. Did you know that in ancient Chinese legends the tapir was said to be an animal that feeds on dreams? I wonder what secret revolutionary dreams my tapir whip can discover? What a shame for her you turned the electricity off. Electricity leaves no scars — except maybe in the soul. But the tapir whip, in the hands of an expert like Olimpio — to put it bluntly, Mr Faith, it flays a person alive.”

  His voice hardened to ice and steel.

  “So will you kindly switch the electricity back on!”

  Charlie hesitated.

  This was the crossroads he'd tried to avoid for years.

  Something hard in his trouser pocket was pressing against his thigh.

  “Captain Paixao, if you don't get outa here with your prisoners and take them to jail in the proper way—”

  “Yes? What will you do, Mr Faith? Do tell me — I'm curious. Being myself the proper authority in the matter.”

  “I'll kick up one helluva stink in Santarem and with our embassy and with the news media in the States. I'll name names and everything. I'll take it up with the Church here in Brazil! How d'you fancy being excommunicated? That's what the church thinks of torturers these days!”

  “Instead of employing them, eh? What threats! You'd think you were the Papal Nuncio himself. Mr Faith, you are naïve. In the most unlikely event of my exclusion, let me assure you without a doubt that I would be received back into the bosom of mother church like a shot once civilization had been successfully preserved. This clerical liberalism is no more than a kite flown in the wind. When the wind falls, the kite will be hauled down soon enough by Rome. Now, you hear me. I wish to speak to this bitch! What shall it be? You choose. The Electricity — or the Whip?”

  Charlie chose.

  He pulled out the .38 and pointed it at Paixao's belly.

  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 tbe 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 tbe 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. Pardon 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 gonna set conditions for the stars!”

  To Gil 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 hospital in Santarem. 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 communist
s 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 bein' 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 sorta . . . flayed her I guess you'd say. She wasn't worth lookin' at when they'd done, the Brazilian said, just a carcass of raw meat. Personally I don't blame him gettin' drunk after that — but he ain't worth speakin' to right now—”

  ZwingJer looked horrified — his moons fluttered out of control.

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

  “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 bin minor cases from time to time — but hell, ain'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, consid'rin'—”

  • • •

  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.

  “Ain't nothin' to bump into, friends,” he yawned. “Nothin' stickin' 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 infra-red 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 outa 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. “It's like he's 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, 'stead 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 reckon?”

  “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 Manaus 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 Manaus 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.