Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

RuthClaire spoke to the blue Haitian sky: “Too bad I don’t believe in murder. I could end this whole mess by putting a bullet in Dr. Nollinger’s brain.” She stared at her tormentor. “Do you think anybody’d ever find your body, mister?”

“Probably not,” he admitted.

“Your bones, maybe—two million years from now. But only by a conjunction of skill and luck. Too bad murder’s not in my behavioral arsenal.”

“Where’s a bloodthirsty Tonton Macoute when you really need one?” Caroline asked RuthClaire. She added, “Why don’t you talk to Adam? Brian may be just the man to write an ethnography of the Rutherford Remnant… if anyone’s going to do one. I can vouch for his character.”

“And the Pope could vouch for Colonel Khadafy’s,” I said. “Never mind that he’d be an idiot to do it.”

Pointedly, the two women ignored me.

Where was Erzulie? Where were her fellow citizens of Prix-des-Yeux? For that matter, where was Adam?

RuthClaire led us across the clearing to the houngfor . Inside, we found Adam seated at the base of the poteau mitan , the central post of the roofed part of the temple called the tonnelle . Down this post, the gods of the voodoo pantheon, known individually and collectively as loa , descend upon the service from their spiritual abode in “Yagaza,” meaning either “Africa” or “the immaterial world beyond death.”

But Adam, still in his Baron Samedi costume, was not alone in the tonnelle . Facing him at the foot of the spirit pole sat Erzulie, legs crossed lotus fashion and hands clasping Adam’s in the same viselike manner that couplings on railway cars achieve an unbreakable grip. Adam had shut his eyes, and when we went deeper into the peristyle, walking cautiously beneath its hanging gourds and trinkets, we saw that Erzulie had shut hers too. The wizened habiline and her well-traveled grandson were communing through the agency of trance. What addled me even more than their abstraction from the present moment, though, was the fact that providing a weird Laocoön link between them was the sinuous body of a twelve-foot python. It curled about Adam’s torso, made a spavined loop around his and Erzulie’s arms, and, after lazily girdling the woman’s waist, rested its flat, evil-looking head atop her grubby scarf.

“My God,” Caroline said. “Are they all right?”

“They’re fine,” RuthClaire said. “We just can’t talk to them for a while.”

“But the snake—”

“It’s nonpoisonous, Caroline. Haiti has no poisonous snakes.”

Brian said, “It’s a local kind of python called a couleuvre . Islanders revere them because they eat rats. I’ve been in Dominican and Haitian homes where they put out food to attract the blesséd things: saucers of milk, fresh eggs, dishes of flour. You’re lucky if you have a couleuvre , Caroline.” He tilted his head to look at it. “Pretty, no?”

Even in the shade, the python glinted bronze and garnet. Its eyes sparkled like beryls. No one could dispute its prettiness, but it stank. The unmistakable odor of serpent drifted through the tonnelle like a thin gas. I covered my nose and turned aside.

“Cripes!” I said. “How do they stand it?”

RuthClaire regarded me with some sympathy. “It hit me that way, too, at first. You get used to it, just as you get acclimated to Montaraz.”

“But what are they doing?” Caroline asked.

“View the three of them as a symbiotic unit of old Arada-Dahomey spirits—Papa Guedé, Erzulie, and Damballa. There are plenty of other loa in the voodoo pantheon, but on Montaraz, that’s the Big Three. Damballa’s personal symbol is the serpent. He’s the god of rain, a guardian of lakes and fountains. Erzulie is Damballa’s mistress. Adam says when they link up like this, they make a metaphorical conduit between past and present, Africa and the New World, the spiritual and the material. The python’s the flow—the electricity—necessary to convey the gist of their messages.”

I was standing just inside the temple’s door again. “That doesn’t sound like Adam, RuthClaire. It sounds like superstitious gobbledegook.”

“The gist of what message?” Nollinger demanded. “What kinds of information are they supposed to be communicating?”

RuthClaire said, “The kinds that can’t be verbalized.”

“That’s appropriate,” I said. “Erzulie can’t talk much, the snake’s probably no orator, and Adam’s natural eloquence is lost on their likes.”

“Telepathy?”

“I wouldn’t call it telepathy, Dr. Nollinger. That has an unsavory paranormal ring. Mostly, though, it’s inaccurate.”

“How about witchcraft?” I said. “When it comes to savoriness, witchcraft takes the cake. Give me witchcraft over telepathy any day.”

“You’re making fun,” RuthClaire said, “but witchcraft implies an element of mysterious interplay that telepathy lacks. To explain what’s going on here, that element has to be accounted for. It’s religious, Paul, not crassly materialistic.”

“Wow. With you and Adam, everything’s religious.”

“Try holy. Or sacred. That’s even better.”

Avoiding the cabalistic vevés that had been laid out on the floor with cornmeal, flour, and colored sand, Caroline picked her way across the temple and crouched behind the center post to look at Adam and Erzulie. The couleuvre flicked its tongue. She drew back so quickly that she had to put her hand behind her to keep from falling on her butt. Recovered, she shifted but kept staring at the habilines. Without looking up, she said, “Can’t you give us a general idea of what they’re not talking about?”

“It’s hard to say,” RuthClaire said. “Details of Adam’s life on Montaraz before ego-crystallization. Maybe some stuff about habiline history both here and in the Lolitabu catacombs. It may go as far back as the beginning of the species. In fact, Adam says it does. Erzulie’s knitting him back into the unraveling fabric of his people without tearing him out of the life he’s made with me. He does this at least once every time we come up here. In a way, I envy him.”

“Why?” Caroline asked.

“Because it’s making it easier for him to forget what happened to Paul. I could use that kind of help myself.”

“Can’t you do this, too?”

“I’m afraid to. And I’m not a habiline.”

“Do you have to be? Isn’t simply being human enough? It was enough for you and Adam to marry.”

“Well,” RuthClaire said, “he’s human, but I… I’m not a habiline. It’s like time’s arrow, I guess—a one-way street. So I’m frightened and envious.”

“If you were an anthropologist,” Brian began, “you could…”

“What?”

“Try to identify with the habilines. Take part in their ceremonies. Translate the nonverbal images Adam and this woman are trading into an impressionistic history of human origins. You can see what that would mean. You can see why I’m badgering you to let me try it. It might revolutionize our whole species’ self-concept, our fundamental notions of who and what we are.”

I said, “You never let up, do you, Brian?”

Here, Adam leaned his head back and let go such a piercing cry that all four of us ducked away from it. Then Adam’s eyes sprang open. So did Erzulie’s. The couleuvre , Damballa’s living avatar on Montaraz, slipped the knots that it had tied around Erzulie’s waist and Adam’s torso and crawled away from them. Caroline leapt aside to let it pass.

The snake knew where it was going, namely, up onto a crude wooden dais beyond the poteau mitan . There, the habilines had arranged the three sets of Arada-Dahomey drums traditionally played during a vaudun ceremony. The python, taking its time, gripped the base of one of the tall asotor drums and flowed up it to the leather drumhead. Here the serpent balanced, as if on a fulcrum, until it could bridge the chasm between the drum and one of the posts supporting the houngfor ’s outer wall. Still calmly flowing, the great bronze-and-garnet snake reached the top of the truncated wall, and, as its weight shifted from the drum to the rafter of the peristyle, the entire temple shook. To prevent the houngfor from collapsing on me, I stepped outside. Soon, though, Damballa came to rest on the flimsy rafter, and the temple stopped swaying.