Ian Watson - The Embedding

Kayapi’s fingers knotted themselves together, in a mime.

“When the stone sees the man snake tie himself in a knot, it forgets itself. It opens its mouth and laughs. And when it is laughing and its tongue is busy with Profane Gaiety and there are no words to guard its mouth, the man snake unties himself and leaps in quickly through the open mouth and ties himself in a big knot before the stone can spit him out. A big knot tied many times. That is how we get brains in our heads.”

So this myth of the stone and the snake was their explanation for the origin of their embedded language.

Many details that had puzzled me about the Xemahoa are beginning to fall into place. Their attitude to laughter. The reason why women who laugh frivolously do not snort maka-i. (But what about the woman in the hut??) Their incestuous kinship system. Their sophisticated awareness of quanta of time, amazing among inhabitants of this great timeless monochrome jungle. Many tribes are aware of the stars—the rising of the Pleiades at a particular time of year. Yet the Xemahoa’s concept of time may be unique. The way in which the object of their attention modulates the bird-feather time scale, functioning like a sort of mental rheostat, generating a variable resistance.

It’s remarkable, how the Xemahoa use the concrete things of the jungle—the trees, the feathers of the birds—to code such abstract concepts! And how utterly they will be destroyed by ‘relocation’! How right they are to ignore it. What other choice have they? To dig up the jungle around them and move it?

It’s also noteworthy how wide a scale of measurement their ‘mental’ rheostat permits. From the extent of a man’s whole lifetime, down to the Reichian microtime of orgasm. Incidentally, they are great sexual artists, I have heard from Kayapi. Unhappily for myself their incest system precludes any personal experience of this on my part—no matter how seductive these girls to my eyes and desires! (Ah, Makonde girl in the bush of Mozambique with your ebony thighs and cream of chocolate nipples, your pubic darkness, your warmth of Africa—like making love to the throbbing night itself, to the hot African night!) Yes, the stages of orgasm in their love speech would have enchanted Wilhelm Reich. They can express the whole range from this microtime of orgasm, through the stages of embedding of the foetus in the womb, to the Ages of Man—to… God knows what else! Could they grasp the concept of geological time in this ‘rheostat’ speech?

Our own Western talk of time is all wrong. All out of shape. We have no direct experience of time. No direct perception of it. But for the Xemahoa mind time exists as a direct experience. And time shifts according to the infinitely-variable resistance of the proposition. Time can be conceived directly, in terms of the things around them in the jungle. The tail feathers of a macaw. The wing feathers of the kai-kai. It is while wearing such feathers that they dance time to the chant of the Bruxo!

Another thing that Kayapi’s story tells me—these supposed ‘savages’ understand that thinking takes place in the head, inside the brain—and while this may seem a pretty obvious idea to us, let’s not forget that the Ancient Greeks with their Aristotles and their Platos had no such idea. The brain was just a pile of useless mush, for them.

Zwingler sat on the edge of sole’s desk, back to the blank video screen.

“I still find this kind of embarrassing,” the American said after a long silence spent staring at Sole’s feet as though finding something wrong with them. “Fact is, the radio dish run by the Navy down in New Mexico has been picking up some strange traffic lately.”

Sole nodded impatiently—queer enough traffic on hi$ video screen, when his itching fingers could get to turn it on.

“This dish is big, understand—just a shade under three times the size of your own Jodrell Bank. The idea’s… well, to eavesdrop on Russian and Chinese domestic traffic as they’re reflected back from the Moon. Not much signal reflects back, of course, around the order of a billion billionth of a watt if I remember right—still, that’s way over the background noise, so we can use it. When the Moon isn’t up above the horizon, the dish gets used for more routine radio-astronomy projects. A while ago, as it was tracking across the sky it picked up this… well, strange traffic. Strange traffic coming from that part of the sky I should say! The Stone Scissors Paper show of a few months ago, playing backwards.”

“That’s the TV nude auction thing?”

The Victorian passion for naked harems and slave markets found its outlet in stagey ‘masterpieces’ adorning grimy municipal galleries. The Stone Scissors Paper game performed the same sublimatory role for the Media Age with far less ambiguity.

“Right? You know the game—stick out your fist, fingers, or flat of your hand—stone blunts scissors, scissors cuts paper—every time you lose it costs you a piece of clothing, which the studio audience gets to bid for, till the loser has nothing else left, and then…”

“We don’t get to see it over here,” said Sam, a shade regretfully. “Government banned it after Lightpeople protests. Not that I saw much harm in it personally, psychologically speaking you need some sort of safety valve in today’s society… liberates tensions.”

Sole found himself laughing—a hacking kind of sound came out of him like a bout of whooping cough ending on a high-pitched whistle.

“The Great Masturbation Show—our first cultural export!”

Zwingler jerked his hand angrily in the direction of the dark skylight.

“Damn it, Man, from space!”

“Like a used condom washed up on the celestial shore—” tears in Sole’s eyes.

The rubies glared at him chastely.

“It isn’t funny. The show was played over and over again, backwards. By this time of course the dish was locked on to that point in the sky—away from the galactic plane where there’s less background noise or we wouldn’t have picked up anything. You realize it wasn’t an echo effect—the show had gone out months earlier. The thing was being deliberately retransmitted. And backwards just to rub in the point.”

“Sort of electronic buggery, eh?”

“Naturally we checked there were no bugs in the circuits. The SSP Show was exchanged for some baseball game after a few hours—”

“Backwards too?” enquired Sole, for whom this whole confidential briefing was taking on the dimensions of a grotesque farce. Surely it was all a big hoax. Remember the Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds’ hoax broadcast and the panic that ensued—this must be something along the same lines, only designed by post-Wellesian McLuhanite man as a spoof on his own TV civilization.

“Right. Let me tell you that looked even crazier—at least you could pretend the other folks were putting their clothes on, ‘stead of stripping them off. But the most important difference was this baseball match went out later than the SSP Show by exactly a week and it was followed in turn by a newsreel from a week later still. We decided it was a cute way of tipping us off when they’re getting here.”

“You’re sure it’s a Them’?”

“That’s the problem. Them—or It—could be a robot probe presumably.”

“It’s nothing that you or the Russians have sent out that way? What about the Jupiter Orbiter? The Russian Saturn probe?”

“Wrong direction. Give us some credit, will you. Deep Space Instrumentation Facility monitors every bit of telemetry. Air Force radar keeps an eye on every last bit of tin trash in orbit. We know where everything is, whatever flag it’s flying. This thing isn’t flying any flag.”