Ian Watson - The Embedding

I made a guess.

“Maka-i grows, Kayapi?”

He beamed a broad smile, stretched out his arm and clapped me on the shoulder many times.

I could predict that some other Xemahoa myth—taking such concrete objects of the jungle as stones and birds and plants, for its working parts—would neatly splice together the sperm that spills on the soil at night—and the nightsoil of the Xemahoa that they manure the maka-i fungus with. That is how intricate—and logical—this Indian culture is!

Nevertheless it was a disorderly jigsaw yet.

I didn’t want to offend Kayapi so soon after showing glimmerings of intelligence, so I put off asking for the other pieces to be put into place: particularly the problem of the woman in the taboo hut, pregnant and yet receiving the embedding drug…

“Pee-áir,” Kayapi said thoughtfully, “I think maybe you can take maka-i now without the birds losing their way out of your head. But it will be hard for them to find their way back if you cannot call them back in Xemahoa.”

“I am learning, Kayapi. I must learn fast. The water is higher today.”

He hardly glanced at the flood. Spat at it.

“That doesn’t matter. I add water to it, see!”

I saw.

But I didn’t really see, as yet.

Last night one of the Xemahoa girls crept to my open-mesh hammock.

“Kayapi sends me,” she hissed. “To the Caraiba who is a little Xemahoa.”

I started to say something in Xemahoa to her, but she stuck two fingers softly in my mouth and tapped my tongue. Just in time, I remembered the mistake that the stone and the log had made, and used my tongue to force her fingers out. She giggled as I did so. In the dark of the hut I couldn’t see her face or body well, yet her giggle sounded like the giggle of a young girl.

For a moment I thought she might even be a boy. Her chest felt so smooth to my hand, the way it bulged ever so softly into nipples. But when I slid my hand lower, I knew which she was. She was wet there already. Had she been greased or ointmented? Or was she in a state of excitement already? She moaned as I touched her.

My tongue found hers, and that put an end to her giggling.

She took my penis in her hand, then chafed the knob of it gently till I was nearly coming. But I guess she was more interested in my lack of a foreskin than in exciting me just then, if the truth be told. The Xemahoa don’t practice circumcision. The blunt bone of my penis was a once-in-a-lifetime curiosity to a girl embedded in this incest culture.

How do you fuck in a Xemahoa hammock?

The best way is side by side, I soon discovered.

If it hadn’t been for the floodwater seeping into the hut, some of my sperm must surely have spilt through the loose mesh on to the soil after I pulled out of her.

The Xemahoa myths were becoming living realities to me.

Was this why Kayapi had sent the girl?

After we’d made love, the girl stuffed a couple of fingers in my mouth to stop me saying anything, and I played with her fingertips with my tongue, while she played at trying to trap it…

She slipped away before dawn, so I didn’t see her face.

I slept a while.

When I woke to the daylight I noticed dry blood on my penis shaft and hairs. The first thing I thought was she must have been a virgin. But when I thought about it a little longer, and about how I’d entered her in that side-ways position without any difficulty, I realized that the initial wetness of her sex hadn’t been grease or excitement, but must have been menstrual flow.

She’d been having her period.

“Yes, it was her bleeding,” Kayapi confirmed casually when I saw him later on.

So much for menstrual taboos, at least in this society! Unless it was a studied insult.

But this I doubted.

Maybe the fact of the girl having a period cancelled out the incest rule of the tribe. My sperm going in, was cancelled by her blood coming out, which permitted me to couple with a Xemahoa girl though myself an outsider.

I glanced casually round the girls paddling their way about the village, wondering who it had been. And whether she’d be back! But I doubted it. It had been a cultural copulation, there in the hut last night. Kayapi had sent the girl to show me myth in practice—and tie my nervous system into the Xemahoa.

I was outlining my idea to Kayapi as clearly as I could, and he was busy nodding vigorously when we heard the noise of the helicopter. The sound came chattering closer over the trees and I thought to myself, those bloody priests are coming back to try a different tack—bringing the big guns of technology to bear.

But Kayapi thought differently.

“Go hide in the jungle, Pee-áir!” he said urgently.

“What for? It’s those White-Robes who spoke about the Flood. They fly a Caraiba bird.” Feeling foolish, I repeated the remark in Portuguese, substituting ‘helicopter’ for ‘bird’.

“No!”

He pushed me roughly out of the village clearing, back into the dense maze of rearing vegetation it had been hacked from.

I was wanting to stay and tell the priests to fuck off back to their miracle dam and tell them to stop this flooding —before they destroyed something irreplaceable. I resisted Kayapi.

Then he did a crazy thing.

He pulled a knife on me and screamed at the top of his voice.

“If you don’t go hide in the jungle and stay there, I kill you, Pee-áir!”

So I retreated into the jungle. Wouldn’t you? I could easily keep an eye on Kayapi’s whereabouts and slip inside the helicopter to talk to the priests before he had a chance to knife me. If indeed he meant his threat—but I hadn’t cared for that look in his eyes.

From cover, I watched him.

He ran to my hut and emerged a few moments later with all my equipment bundled up in the hammock and ran into the jungle with it.

I realized then that Kayapi believed enough in me to intend keeping me here forcibly with the Xemahoa—but naturally my excitement at this breakthrough was mixed with a certain irritation, not to say fear, at the means used to demonstrate it!

Already the helicopter was hovering overhead and the Xemahoa children were pointing up at it; but their parents were calling them into the huts, or into the jungle.

It wasn’t priests that landed.

It was some sort of police. Soldiers. Paramilitary. I recognized the type. An elegant, viciously handsome Caucasian officer in a drab olive uniform and black jackboots jumped down into the water. Then two others in boots and informal fatigues—a giant Negro with a submachine-gun, and a runtish halfcaste with an automatic rifle and fixed bayonet. The pilot sat pointing an automatic weapon out of the cabin. In the machine’s guts I could see two or three other men skulking with guns.

I’d seen the same sort of thing in Mozambique.

Only there the villagers had been ready with their AK-47s and grenades and bazookas. That particular helicopter hadn’t lifted off again.

The runt and the Negro raced from hut to hut, poking their guns inside, ignoring the Xemahoa people entirely, while their officer stood masterfully in the centre of the village.

“Nothing,” the Negro shouted. “There’s nothing.”

What kind of incredible political foresight was it had sent Kayapi scuttling off into the jungle with my things? I wondered too, would he have gone to so much trouble for me before I was bonded to the tribe by that ritual love-match last night?

Kayapi wandered in casually from the forest. He came from a different direction from the one where he’d taken my things.

The officer shouted at several of the Xemahoa men, asking them if they spoke Portuguese. But they all, including Kayapi, stared back at him blankly.