Ian Watson - The Embedding

In some ways Xemahoa B is the truest language I have ever come across. In other respects, of course—for all practical purposes of daily life—it directs crippling blows at our straightforward logical vision of the world. It is a lunatic language, like Roussel’s, only worse. The unaided mind has no hope of holding on to it. But in their hallucinations these Indians have found the vital elixir of understanding!’

And now Sole sat up and really took notice. Reaching overhead, he directed the cool-air nozzle on to his face to sharpen his attention. He felt a surge of excitement—of dark doorways opening—as though it was the whole outside world he was breathing through the lungs of the plane, as he read on:

‘…The old Bruxo snorts this drug through a cane tube into his bleeding, rotting nostrils—and he aims for no less than a total statement of Reality uttered in the eternal present of the drug trance. And by achieving a total statement of reality, to be able to control and manipulate that reality. The age-old dream of the wizard!

‘But what wizard has set himself up against such dragons? The whole weight of American imperialist technology. The Brazilian military dictatorship. Imposing their will on this jungle from afar, while the Indians within it are trapped as casually as flies are trapped on a fly-strip, whilst the making of the meal goes on—the great feasting of the giants on the Amazon’s wealth: the meal of spectacular consumption.

‘The Bruxo is killing himself in the process. No shaman has ever dared stay high on this drug so long before—except for some myth figure, the world-creating culture hero Xemahawo, who vanished on the day of creation of the world, dissolving into the environment like a flock of birds scattering in the forest.

‘For the Bruxo and for the Xemahoa, knowledge isn’t an abstract thing, but something coded in terms of the birds and beasts, and rocks and plants, of the jungle—in terms of the clouds and stars above the jungle—in terms of the concrete actuality of the world. Therefore total description of this knowledge is no abstract thing—but a taking-hold of the actual reality about them. And to take hold of reality is to control it—to manipulate it. So he hopes!

‘Soon, he will hold a giant embedded statement of all the coded myths of the tribe in his present consciousness. Day by day, in the drug dance, he adds more material to this statement of a totality of meaning—all the while maintaining his awareness of past days and past material as something ever-present by means of the maka-i drug—despite the terrible overload on brain and body.

‘Soon, he may achieve total consciousness of Being.

Soon, the total scheme underlying symbolic thought may be clear to him.

If this is true? That would be incredible indeed. In such a place! Such a “primitive” backwater!

‘Incredible—and damnable. For just as this occurs, the genius-fly is about to be drowned, poxed out, poisoned—on that orange fly-strip of a dam! If only some of its poison might fall into the gluttonous feast of the exploiters…

‘I take the opportunity of sending this cry of rage out by way of a halfcaste who is passing through. He should reach that bloody dam in about a week, and get the letter posted. He’s cagey about why he’s making the journey. Maybe he’s found some diamonds—who knows? After all, this mess is supposed to contain El Dorado!

‘I at least suspect I’ve found my own El Dorado of the human mind here—at the moment it is due to be swept away.

They embed the Amazon in a sea you can see from the Moon—and drown the human mind in the process.

To yourself and Eileen, my useless love.

—Pierre Darriand.’

On the way over Utah, Station KSL announced the launch of the spectacular new Russian transpolar satellite.

“—Reports say it’s brighter than the planet Venus. Only, you won’t be able to see it unless you’re an eskimo or a headhunter in the South Seas. Other news at this late-night news hour. NASA has quashed speculation that this week’s launch from Cape Kennedy to Skylab Orbiting Laboratory carried a Russian scientist on board—”

Zwingler had woken up by now and was listening intently on his own seat’s earphones.

“You hear that, Chris? The Globe’s in the right orbit—”

Sole had been half-attending to the news, the rest of his mind still on that other amazing news contained in the letter, and the irritating suspicion that Pierre had pipped him at the post again—first his wife, now his work…

“Apparently folks are ‘speculating’,” he sneered.

Zwingler laughed.

“Phooey. That’s no sweat, Chris. A little bit of speculating? I tell you, the thing’s going okay.”

The day after he snorted the fungus powder and finally met maka-i, Pierre left the Xemahoa village, filled with a consciousness of what he must do that was as urgent as it was ill-defined.

Kayapi went along with him—he flourished no knives this time, made no threats. All the Indian said was:

“Pee-áir, we got to be back before maka-i is born, okay?”

Pierre nodded absently. He was still caught up in the experience. It was like the first sex experience, but a first sex experience of the whole consciousness. Overwhelmingly so—to the point of ecstasy and terror. He could concentrate on little else.

He had to rely on Kayapi to locate the dugout they’d arrived in. To empty out the rain slops. Clean the outboard. Pile Pierre’s things under some plastic sheeting.

Kayapi assisted without any complaints. He seemed to appreciate this irrational purpose that was urging Pierre to make the journey north to the dam.

He navigated the dugout, while Pierre stared out through the rain into the flooded maze of trees.

The bunches of epiphytic and parasitic plants crowding the terraces of the branches triggered a memory of a city far away—and highrise flats that he vaguely remembered being crowded with people all facing north during some disaster—a planecrash or a fire. Where had it been? Paris? London? Or was it just an image from a movie, that had suddenly woken to life? Saüba ants, driven off the forest floor, made tracks along low branches with leaf segments held over their bodies like columns of refugees protecting themselves with parasols. Macaws fired tracer messages of feather-numbers through the high leaves—numbers that he couldn’t count.

When the pium flies descended on them in bloodsucking, stinging clouds, Kayapi rummaged through Pierre’s things till he found a tube of insect repellent to smear on the Frenchman’s skin, so that his flesh wouldn’t swell up with the dropsy these flies left as their calling card.

At midday, it was Kayapi who pressed dried fish into Pierre’s hand and urged him to eat.

Pierre stared for hours into the dull green chaos of the forest that periodically came aflame with birds and butterflies and blooms.

There was chaos there, to a foreigner’s eyes—but there was no chaos in his mind.

There was a dawn of understanding.

Or rather, it was a memory of the dawn of understanding—which he struggled to hold on to.

His nostrils itched with the memory of maka-i, as though they’d been bitten raw by pium flies.

The day seemed endlessly, timelessly, long, like a long track rising over bleak, lonely mountains from the valley of the previous night, which a mist drifted up from now, to veil—yet without there being any clear line of demarcation between the two zones. He must have emerged from the experience at some particular time, he reasoned. Yet the boundary wasn’t definable. The greater could not be bounded by the lesser. The perception of last night could not be imprisoned in terms of today’s perception, when it was a vaster, more devastating mode of perception. Thus its bounds could not be set. How could a two-dimensional being who had been able to experience three dimensions set up a frontier post anywhere in his flat territory—and say beyond this point lies the Other? For the Other would be everywhere—and nowhere, to him. And as for clock-time, Pierre had let his watch run down and wore it only as a bracelet now. Time seemed like a useless ornament—a distraction. The sense of time he’d possessed the night before hadn’t been time by the calendar or time by the clock. It hadn’t been historic time, but a sense of the spatio-temporal unity out of which space and time are normally separated into an illusory contrast with one another.