The Embedding

by Ian Watson

  “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 easily 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?

  FOURTEEN

  THE VIEW ON the screen looked calm. But Rosson was well aware it was a deceptive calm. There was violence in the children's minds now. Mostly it kept below the surface. But every day some time it erupted.

  They'd accomplished what it had taken hundreds of generations of Stone Age children to accomplish — and done it in a flash of days. They had invented language. But what language was it they had invented?

  Vidya, followed by the other children, had passed through the babbling phase. It was now clear to Rosson that it hadn't been just a babbling of sounds — but a babbling of ideas and concepts. They had resumed whole speech. However it was a whole speech that bore little relation to the whole speech they had been learning before the crisis. And it was interrupted by storms of violent, destructive activity that left the children lying about the room exhausted, hunted nearly to death by the pack of zombie words.

  The computer programme to analyse their new language lay barely started on Rosson's desk. He had no time. Things were going too fast. He felt like a blind man staring at Madame Curie's blob of radium — seeing nothing, but getting his blind eyes burnt in the process.

  As he watched, Vidya rose with a savage snarl twisting his face. He began to stalk an invisible prey. Picking up speed, he trotted off in a long ellipse around the room.

  Every time a crisis occurred, a fresh variable seemed to be thrown into the equation. Fresh neural pathways fused open. The brain was blowing fuses — but the fuse wires sprouted across the gaps spontaneously, and rapidly — almost as a function of the fusing itself.

  The experiment was out of control now, and only Rosson was interested.

  What to do about it? Withdraw PSF from their diet? When the drug was so obviously producing results?

  Vasilki got up next and set off on her own course round the room, helter-skelter.

  Then Rama. Then Gulshen.

  Soon the four children were running round the room, faces warped with concentration.

  Briefly Rosson switched the monitor to the two other environments, hunting for a nurse. But there was nobody on duty in the logic world. Nobody seemed to be on duty in Richard Jannis's world.

  He telephoned the nurses' standby room upstairs.

  “That's Martinson? Rosson here. Get down to the Embedding World will you? You may have to use the Trank-kit. But stay in the airlock till I tell you. I want to watch the crisis develop—”

  Then he cut back to Sole's children. Zoomed in on their snarling, obsessed expressions.

  The ellipses they were running wound tighter and more furiously as he looked. He understood the relation between movement and speech in his own logic world. There, the dance of the children was a redundancy strategy — letting language be purified of excess. But here something else was going on. Some different, new relationship between motion and thought. Between the movement areas of the brain and the symbol areas. Were the tensions in the children's minds discharging themselves out of the symbol world of thought and language, into the world of movement? Or were new symbolic relationships being formed by these mad bursts of activity themselves?

  Rosson chewed his fingernail as he thought about the effect of new cross-modal connections forming in the brain. . .

  “Martinson here. I'm in the airlock. They've got some pretty vicious expressions on their faces, that lot, Mr Rosson—”

  “Yes, well d
on't go in yet.”

  Suppose PSF speeded up the manufacture of ‘information molecules’ to such an extent that the mind got over-saturated, would the mind be forced to create fresh symbols to carry on functioning? And would these symbols be formed in the action centres of the brain, if the normal symbol areas were already overloaded? Then these would be ‘action-symbols’ — symbols that sensed it as their duty to manipulate the outside world directly. The way that magicians used to believe they could, through their spells and magic shapes — their ‘reality symbols’.

  The children raced closer to a fearful density of symbolic experience.

  Abruptly, they collided. Limbs were mixed up together as madly as a Hindu god's. Then the four bodies were hurled apart as if by an electric shock.

  They fell apart so violently that Gulshen was left lying up against the maze wall with her left leg crumpled under her body at an impossible angle.

  “Martinson — get in there! The girl's smashed her bloody leg!”

  FIFTEEN

  PH'THERI EMERGED FROM the scout ship towards midnight and waited under the sharp desert stars till Sciavoni went out to greet him.

  Military police hurried round the building complex alerting Americans and Russians.

  The alien stood there looking sad and haunted. But when he spoke, he sounded more impatient and irritable than sad.

  “Concerning the trade exchange—”

  “Won't you come inside the building, Ph'theri?”

  “It is larger here. I see quite well in the dark.”

  “As you like. We have a human corpse on ice — shall we bring it on board your ship?”

  “To the ramp will do. Other Sp'thra will take it inside.”

  “Can't we look in your ship then? We're very curious.”

  “Technology is trade-assessable—”

  These monotonous economics were beginning to get on Sciavoni's nerves. He was supposed to believe these creatures were haunted by some kind of thwarted love — like Abelards of outer space, mutilated philosophers hunting for their Heloise in another dimension. Yet they carried on their love affair like spooks or machines.

  “The corpse, Ph'theri! How about that? Isn't that worth a peek inside your ship?”

  The alien exaggeratedly shook his head, a consciously reconstructed gesture creakily at odds with his anatomy.

  “No. Because the corpse is a necessary sub-item of the main trade deal. We have to know in advance the right way to separate brain from body. Are you capable of performing this operation?”

  “I guess not. Give us five years—”

  “Wait five years? Ridiculous!”

  “No, you've got me wrong. I don't mean you've got to wait. I mean in five years our doctors oughta be able to maintain the brain in isolation. The psychological problems might be the hardest nut to crack. Tell me this, Ph'theri, what will you do to stop these brains going crazy when they're cut off? They're humans — we've a right to know.”

  “We do not intend to let our property be hurt. The brains will have sensory links with the outside world. The primary difference is, they will no longer be mobiles. But they will not be idle. They have work to do, preparing them for their place in the Language Moon. You worry about their rest and dreaming function? Whatever is necessary for the human brain will be provided. The Sp'thra are used to minds from a thousand cultures of space, water, air and earth, remember. Entertainments? We have many hours of your TV output that can be screened before their eyes—”

  “They'll still have eyes?”

  “Eyes usually are an integral part of the brain in the case of hominids. Isn't that so with you? We shall examine the dead one. Bring it over to the ramp now—”

  “Surely, Ph'theri. But I still think a corpse rates a look round your ship.”

  “Why can you people not trade-assess correctly? If your culture revered the corpse, as the Xorghil dust-whales do, things would be different. These dust whales are the sentient patterns imposed on the densest dust of a bright nebula, who tow their dying individuals towards a stellar contraction pool where their dead bodies may finally be compacted into a star and reborn as light. They care. But your culture cares nothing for corpses. Witness your entertainments! What is not valued by you, is not trade assessable. Surely that is obvious?”

  Sciavoni called through the crowd of people who had gathered.

  “Somebody bring the body out. Up to the foot of the ramp. They'll take it from there.”

  “What's so obvious about it?” growled a Russian scientist. “So now we are the ones to suffer the fobbing-off with a few shiny beads — like your feathered Indians here in America were traded beads for their precious pelts and skins? As though we are the primitives! Quite a neat dialectical irony. Yet how naturally the spirit of man rebels against such an exploitation, when our dream is of the stars and mastery of nature!”

  “It seems other beings have already mastered nature pretty effectively for themselves,” sighed an American voice. “Maybe we oughta be thankful they think enough of us to want our brains. Even if they buy them like apples off a stall.”

  “I'll remind you people,” Sciavoni snapped, “that the price tag for a human brain may still turn out to be a ticket to the stars—”

  “S'posing anything materializes out of the Amazon,” grunted the elder astronomer from California.

  Ph'theri's paper-bag ears swelled up to capture the exchange of words.

  “How soon till the Brain that Self-Embeds is here?” he demanded.

  “Soon, soon,” soothed Sciavoni.

  Ph'theri threw up a hand peremptorily. Was it only an illusion — a reflex of their minds — or did the palm actually glow in the dark?

  “Now who is being vague?” asked the alien icily.

  “For Pete's sake!”

  Sciavoni's eyes ranged frantically through the crowd for the discreet man from the NSA who was handling liaison with Brazil.

  “Mr Silverson, what's the latest situation report, please?”

  Silverson was a slice of low-calorie crispbread beside the doughy crusts of the Russians. Faintly scandalized at the number of people present, ambiguous in the darkness, he reported:

  “Niagara hasn't fallen yet, Mr Sciavoni. We reckon it'll be at least twelve hours after that event before our team evacuate from Franklin. Big Bird and seismographs are on the look-out.” He hesitated. “Perhaps I should add there's been some guerrilla activity reported throughout the Project area. We don't know what effect this might have—”

  “We're proceeding as fast as we can, you see, Ph'theri,” Sciavoni said defiantly.

  Ph'theri's ears shifted shape again as he paid attention to the scarlet wires.

  “The Sp'thra suggest this time bonus: you may come inside our ship with your recording equipment, if the Brain that Self-Embeds arrives within forty-eight hours. Now what about the normal language brains?”

  “That's being taken care of, right now. You'll be given English, Russian, Japanese, Eskimo, Vietnamese and Persian language samples — they ought to fit the bill, linguistically.”

  • • •

  Merchant Seaman Noboru Izanami's first journey outside of the home islands of Japan led him straight to San Francisco. He passed through the Golden Gate, where suicides stand and face the city to die, and it seemed to him like a great torii gateway to the shrine of the American dream.

  Noboru took the elevator up Coit Tower, and shot off half a reel of film from the top. Then he turned his steps towards the Japanese residential area off Post and Buchanon, to wander nostalgically along the shopping streets, delighted to find an American city so like a Japanese one. He ate a bowl of fried soba noodles in a restaurant called Teriko's — with a display of plastic replicas of the Japanese food in its window. Outside Teriko's he met two native San Franciscans. One of them was a second or third generation Japanese immigrant, who still miraculously spoke Japanese.

  “Eego sukosi mo wakaranai? No, Lloyd, he don't speak a word of English. Ano ne, kizuke
no tame ni ippai yaro, yoshi? I'm askin' if he'd care for a pick-me-up, just along the street a little way. Tyotto sokorahen made—”

  Noboru worried in case he'd be a nuisance.

  “Don't give it a thought. Do-itashimashite. Anata no keiken no ohanasi ga kikitai no desu. I'm makin' out we'd love to hear 'bout his travels. Such as those are, Lloyd, such as those are!”

  Noboru introduced himself with a tight little bow.

  “Watakusi wa Izanami Noboru desu. Doozo yoro-shiku!”

  They set off eastward along Post Street, wreathed in smiles.

  “Gaikokungo wa dame desu kara ne!” Noboru wrinkled his nose apologetically.

  “Seems like he's no damn good at foreign languages, Lloyd. Just our boy.”

  • • •

  A low-slung ambulance slid through the snowploughed streets of Valdez, Alaska, towards the airfield. Its windscreen wipers scooped out arcs of glass from the feathery snow.

  A flat-faced, blubbery woman lay on a stretcher breathing noisily through her mouth.

  “Why does she have to be transferred in this kinda weather?” whined the nurse. “Who's gonna explain to her? She can't speak a word of English. You know that?”

  “I know,” the driver called over his shoulder. “They got some Eskimo interpreter woman in Anchorage.”

  “What I'm thinking about is her husband. How do we tell him she's been spirited away a hundred miles, maybe die on her own, nobody talking to her she knows?”

  “A kidney machine has come available. She needs it. Simple.”

  “I don't get how an illiterate Eskimo woman has all this care lavished on her so sudden. Kidney machine treatments come expensive.”

  “Maybe it's her lucky day. Make sure you tell her man it's all for his woman's good, huh? Fisherman, ain't he?”

  “Ordinary fisherman. I don't get it.”

  The ambulance slid softly through the snow.

  SIXTEEN

  AT NIGHT, THE women of the village replenished the wood on the bonfire platforms in the small clearing and set light to them.