The Embedding

by Ian Watson

  Fire flared across the flood. Danced on the waves the stamping feet set up.

  Pierre was still wading round the hut and moaning — his blanched body, ghostly in the flickering light.

  With nightfall insects also descended. The three undrugged spectators felt the needle-pricking and the fierce flushing itch. Tom Zwingler located a tube of insect repellent in his bag.

  “I'll swear things are crawling on my legs,” shivered Sole as he smeared some cream on. “You saw all those damned leeches on Pierre. Can't you feel something?”

  “Won't get through your clothes,” hoped Chester, who did not like the idea of being fed on by leeches. “Water's moving about your legs, is all.”

  “Why is it?”

  “All the dancing.”

  “Flies don't seem to bother the Indians much. Maybe it's the fires. Women and kids have moved near them.”

  “Let's move nearer. The men are all stoned anyhow. They couldn't care less.”

  “Queer, isn't it — not caring about strangers watching this? A foreigner even taking part in it. I got the idea they were secretive from what Pierre wrote.”

  “We don't exist, man,” sniggered Chester. “Just let them wait.” He brandished his dart gun in the air.

  However, wait was all they had to do. No helicopter showed up.

  They stared at the ecstatic faces in the firelight. Waited, while the Bruxo with bloody nostrils led the men endlessly round the hut.

  Listened, without comprehension, to the myths being chanted.

  “There's an undertow, Tom—”

  “Shut up about them fuckin' leeches will you? Sure I feel something — but just shut up about it!”

  “You think it's the dam, Chris?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Shit, man, this place'll take days to drain!”

  Tom Zwingler thought about it.

  “We're near one of the main river channels. But it must be emptying at one hell of a lick if we feel effects already—”

  “Didn't you say the dam would strip away like sealing tape?”

  “I guess I did, Chris.”

  “If we're feeling it here, what the hell's it like downstream!”

  “Maybe a bit more than we anticipated? If that's the case, where the hell are Chase and Billy?”

  “Could be the water is pulling,” grunted the Negro. “Better than leeches I s'pose.”

  “What was the time fuse on those mines, Chester?”

  “Fifteen minutes, Mr Sole. They just had to dump the mines down the side of the dam from the helicopter—”

  “Isn't that cutting it a bit fine?”

  “Christ, no — they fly straight on after dumping them. No sweat — they'd be miles out of the blast zone.”

  • • •

  When the second steel suitcase had slid underwater, Gil flew the machine on along the line of the dam for four kilometres to the trees.

  As they rose up over the first wall of forest, a line of half a dozen coin-size holes suddenly punched themselves in the plexiglass.

  Gil's jaw shattered.

  Flew away in a spray of blood and bone splinters.

  He fell across the altitude control stick, his heavy body thrashing about on top of it. From the remnants of his mouth gurgled a sheeplike bleat.

  Like water spilled from a jug, the machine began to fly at the ground.

  Billy caught hold of Gil's body; but they were too close to the trees already. The helicopter struck. Turning over twice, its blades scythed leaves and branches before they crumpled up and snapped.

  The wrecked machine settled into a nest of branches and hung there, dripping fuel. It didn't burn. But the broken bodies inside burned with pain enough.

  Billy fought back the nausea of his broken bones and got the hatch open. He peered down upon tier on tier of interlocking branches. Red macaws spattered through the foliage, visions of his own heartblood, as Billy fainted.

  Burning with fever, flybites and hunger, Raimundo stumbled out from the cover of the trees on to the freeboard of the dam. He tried to see where the helicopter had fallen. But couldn't.

  Yet he heard the noise from the treetops, then the sudden silence, and a sullen grin spread across his face. The automatic rifle trembled in his hand as he turned away from the forest to face the causeway stretching endlessly towards the east.

  How bitterly he hated this dam. How purely too. For days as he waded through the jungle the dam had been burning into his mind's eye like a red-hot bar. Even the agony of worms hatching out in his wounds meant nothing.

  It stretched into the distance — on one side it drowned the world, on the other side it strangled it.

  Then, absurdly, as he stared, the dam bloomed into a sunburst. Before his eyes flowered an incandescent point of sunlight, that bored painfully into his vision.

  Instinctively he jerked his head away.

  The sunburst moved with his head, though already the actual light had disappeared in a boiling cloud of mud and foam.

  The ground snatched itself away from his feet, a fist of air slapped him down.

  Raimundo picked himself up and fled back into the trees, terrified and confused. He collapsed inside the forest, exhausted. He still saw that heatflower — it glowed with the power of his hatred, and only faded as his strength ebbed.

  SEVENTEEN

  NOW, AT LONG last, a climax seemed imminent.

  As the first bodies began to brush directly up against the wet straw wall, the Bruxo emitted a series of snorts from his bloody nostrils like a bull with asthma, slowing the dance to a halt. Then the painted figure shouted out at the top of his voice what even Sole, ignorant of the Xemahoa language, could recognize for the grand finale of the myth cycle.

  In the silence that followed, with a final wag of his orange bush of pubic feathers, the old man disappeared into the hut.

  The rest of the men drifted together before the doorway, with the Frenchman near the back of the group — tight albino buttocks among all the rotund tan-brown bums.

  “I'm going to have another shot at talking to him—”

  The play of light and shadows on the men's sweaty bodies made their decorated genitals seem grotesquely deformed. Already he was surrounded by alien beings as alien as any of the Sp'thra, as he slipped through the Indians to his friend's side.

  “Pierre—”

  The Frenchman stared in his face and nodded in recognition. His eyes were widely dilated by the drug — the pupils all black filling up the whole space of the iris. Sole glanced down. That ridiculous penis sheath of his with its blue bush! Eileen would — But what would Eileen think? Sole dismissed the thought, half-formed, and it easily disappeared.

  “Do you realize the water's going down, Pierre? The dam's gone, you know. Finished. Kaput.”

  “Quoi?”

  “The dam's been blown up, Pierre. Can't you feel the water pulling your feet?”

  Pierre stared at the water then bent down to touch it. He thrust his hands under the surface and groped about.

  “The Xemahoa are safe. So is the fungus.”

  A scream of pain cut through the night from the inside of the hut, followed by a howl of words in the Bruxo's voice that set the crowd shuffling about nervously.

  Sole seized hold of Pierre's arm and dragged him upright.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “C'est une cesarienne, vous savez—”

  “A caesarian? You mean the old man's operating on that poor woman?”

  Pierre nodded enthusiastically.

  “But he'll kill her — he's stoned out of his mind. He won't know what he's doing!”

  “Oui, mais la pierre est coupec—”

  “What stone is split?”

  The Bruxo must be opening the pregnant woman like you'd crack a nut to get the kernel out, thought Sole in horror — as another scream set the crowd rustling.

  “What stone?” repeated Sole.

  But he already had the answer — it was in the Xemahoa stor
y about how the brain came into existence. He tried to remember what happened, according to Pierre's diary. A stone had been tricked into opening itself up — and a man snake had slipped in and tied himself in knots. The origin of the brain that invented the embedded speech, Xemahoa B.

  The rest of the story was about the origin of entrails. By the sound of it, the woman's entrails were being ripped open brutally now to bring that brain-child out into the open!

  A last scream. Then the Bruxo shouted, and his shout rapidly became a howl that drove the Xemahoa back in an agitated pack — as though something evil was writhing out of the hut, some invisible snake coiling across the water. They knocked into Sole and Pierre, nearly sweeping them off their feet.

  From the corner of his eye, Sole noticed Chester hoisting the dart gun behind the crowd, hoped he wouldn't be stupid and bloody-minded enough to use it.

  The Bruxo rushed out of the hut, his eyes wild and hysterical. He waved bloody fingers at the crowd, took a couple of steps forward then fell into the water. He crouched there like a beast and howled a single word.

  “MAKA-I !”

  “Bugger taboos!” snarled Sole. He dragged Pierre with him towards the hut, skirting the roaring creature in the water.

  Nobody tried to stop them.

  • • •

  Inside, he shone a torch on to the rough pallet bed.

  The woman lay in a semi-conscious state with her baby tucked against her breast. Her belly gaped open, roughly cut by the sharp flint lying beside it. The chopped-off birth cord hung out of it.

  But the baby—

  Sole stared at it, too shocked to feel sick.

  Three brain hernias spilled from great vents in its skull — grey matter slung in tight membrane bags about its head, like codroe at the fishmonger's. The top part of its face, beneath those bags of brain, had no eyes — two smooth dents where they ought to have been.

  From several places in its torso spilled ruptures. They jutted out of a body that only approximately contrived to contain itself within itself.

  Pierre bent over the tiny being pulsing by the woman's side. The question whether it was male or female seemed immaterial now.

  “Living!” he cried in a kind of raptured disgust,

  “Yes, Pierre — alive. But for how long!”

  The head squirmed towards the sound of their voices. The eyeless forehead tracked them. The mouth opened red and empty as a baby bird's and a shrill squeal came out of it.

  “Ah,” sighed Pierre, as though he understood something in that primal squeal of sound.

  From outside, incredibly, came cries of joy — unmistakable shouts of victory.

  Sole whirled away from Pierre to the door to see what was going on.

  Kayapi stood by the Bruxo, gesturing at the waters — he'd realized at long last that the flood was going down.

  Solemnly, the young Indian put his arm round the Bruxo's shoulder and helped him up. Coughing, and bleeding from the nose, the old man clung to his natural son, to stop himself from stumbling.

  The Bruxo's apprentice splashed towards them but Kayapi made an angry, spiteful gesture at him to get back, and the youth shrank away through the other men, unnoticed and unwanted.

  Sole returned to the bed and plucked Pierre away from the woman and her freak. He came away reluctantly, rubbing his eyes.

  “What's Kayapi saying now, Pierre? Translate, damn you.”

  “Maka-i himself drinks the flood,” Pierre stammered.

  “Yes?”

  “Feel him drink the waters — they pour down his throat—”

  “Go on.”

  “The great plan has worked, thanks to Father Bruxo. But the baby — ah, the cunning devil, Kayapi—!”

  “Go on!”

  “The baby isn't Maka-i himself. It's his message to the Xemahoa. Maka-i cannot come in person. But it's a true message he's sent — he drinks the flood to prove it. Now his message has to be explained to the Xemahoa by the right man—”

  “I've got it!” Sole cried.

  “Eh?”

  “Listen to me, Pierre, you go to Kayapi and tell him he's right about the baby being a message and having to explain it. But remind him that he can't do that while the old Bruxo's still here. He'll have to go away — and we'll take him away! Say that. And the woman in the hut too, we'll take her. Go on, promise him. You don't know how important it is.”

  (Christ, though, the woman — would none of the Xemahoa women enter the hut to help her? She had to be kept alive, her mind was saturated in the drug awareness!)

  Sole dragged Pierre across the clearing to face Kayapi.

  “Go on, tell him,” he shouted. “We'll take the old man and the woman. Then Kayapi will have a free hand—”

  Leaving him standing there, he hurried on to Chester and Zwingler, praying Pierre had the wit to do what he was told. Chester was still waving the dart gun about, but with less confidence now. Tom Zwingler started asking questions, but Sole interrupted:

  “Either of you know any first aid? The mother is lying all torn up by the clumsiest caesarian operation in history and we need her — she's saturated in the drug. She'll satisfy the Sp'thra, same as the old Bruxo will. And if Pierre tells Kayapi what I said to tell him, we'll be able to take mother and Bruxo out of here without having to fire a single dart into anyone.”

  “Is the baby alive?”

  “Christ, that's a disaster. It's alive — but with multiple hernias, brain and body. Kayapi's trying to explain it away right now. But we've got to save that woman, she's hurt bad—”

  “Can you handle it, Chester?”

  “Gimme the bag.” The Negro thrust his dart gun at Zwingler to hold and rummaged through the airline bag.

  “Some sulfa powder here, and penicillin tablets. A few other things. See what I can do.”

  He grinned broadly.

  “Hope she doesn't think the Devil's come for her.”

  “She's in no shape to think anything. Here, take the torch — you'll need it.”

  Chester pushed his way brusquely through the Indians. Their whole attention was centred on Kayapi now. Sole still felt surprised at how suddenly the ‘taboo’ on the hut had evaporated now that the child was born. Now it didn't seem to matter who went in there.

  “Where the hell's the bloody helicopter, Tom?”

  Zwingler tucked the gun under his arm and shrugged.

  “How far's this Franklin place?”

  “Eighty, ninety miles. We shan't have to walk. They'll have a helicopter. They'll send it, if anything's happened to Chase and Billy.”

  “They just might send it too bloody late.”

  Zwingler swung away from Sole abruptly, to end the conversation.

  Overhead, a skyful of stars and scudding rainclouds. He stared up at them, pursing his lips — whistling soundlessly.

  After a time, the clouds gathered into larger masses that masked the stars, and rain began to fall again.

  Now that the Xemahoa knew the flood was receding, no one bothered to heap any more dry wood on to the bonfire platforms. In another half-hour the fires guttered out.

  EIGHTEEN

  Memo to: CHIEF OF STAFF, US ARMY CHIEF OF STAFF, US AIR FORCE CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS COMMADANT OF THE MARINE CORPS CONSULTANT MEMBERS, US INTELLIGENCE BOARD DIRECTOR, NATIONAL AREONAUTICS & SPACE ADMINISTRATION Subject: WASHINGTON SPECIAL ACTION GROUP MEETING # 1 ON PROJECT “LEAPFROG”

  13. ... But beyond the technological and political desirability of acquiring this knowledge lies a whole psychological domain, which we might go so far as to characterize as a crisis in this planet's Noosphere (to borrow the theologian Teilhard de Chardin's word for the zone of operation of the human mind).

  This crisis has been looming over Mankind ever since the Neolithic Revolution first ushered in the germs of a technology that would transform the natural environment.

  In a very meaningful sense, the crisis that we have reached in the late 20th Century is the logical outcome of technological civil
ization itself. Once the technological path is chosen, Man must elect to expand outwards by means of his technology — or else collapse. No steady-state is conceivable or desirable once expansion has begun. The steady-state may be dreamt of or fantasized about — but it is merely a pipe-dream which will not work in practice, and which would have disastrous cultural and psychological repercussions, if any sustained effort was made to make it work.

  Technological and cultural de-escalation is no more possible than Devolution is biologically acceptable for a species. In the same way as biological evolution is an antientropic process, leading towards ever more complex states of physical organization, so technological culture (the culmination of a million years of evolution) involves an ongoing process of complexification and expansion.

  Nevertheless a critical point does occur in this growth process. This is the stage where there appear to be 'no further worlds to conquer' — and where the side-effects of conquering the one world that is available appear to be producing an increasingly negative pay-off. At this stage a take-off to Stage Two technological culture has to occur — the stage of planetary and stellar exploration and expansion. Otherwise a disastrous and traumatic collapse must surely ensue.

  The disillusionment with Project Apollo must be viewed in this light. Man has reached the Moon. Where is there to go now? The answer seems to be 'nowhere that we can realistically hope for'.

  The assault that has been gaining momentum for a decade now, of ecopolitical protest groups, implies a profoundly damaging psychological withdrawal from these delimited boundaries. It would terminate Stage One without ushering in Stage Two. The result could only be apathy and decay on a planet-wide scale — besides being politically contrary to what we conceive of, fundamentally, as our identity as a nation. (See Hudson Institute Papers HI 3812-p, 'The Perils of the Steady-State'; HI-3014-p, 'The End of the Neolithic Noosphere: Implications for US Policy'.)

  The alien visit is bound to hasten this process of disintegration and withdrawal disastrously, as the full implications of the haste, and indifference of the beings known as the Sp'thra to the finest ambitions of the human race, come to be more widely realized.