Ian Watson - The Embedding

As evening fell, Pierre finally asked the Indian.

“Which of the Xemahoa was your father, Kayapi? Is he still alive?”

“Can’t you guess that, Pee-áir?”

“The Bruxo?”

Kayapi nodded.

“He visited my mother’s village. They said they wanted to honour him because of his power and his knowledge. Wanted to steal some of it maybe. But my father was cunning. He insisted on a bleeding girl. The same as for you, Pee-áir. So that there will be no baby from him, and the Xemahoa can stay together. But something happened anyway, he was so powerful a man. The girl made a baby. I am his halfson. It is my grief—and my glory.

You know about being half, Pee-áir. Half of you went north with those men.”

“True, Kayapi.”

Kayapi abruptly swung the dugout towards the bank, drove it deep into the branches, killed the engine…

“You hear?”

Pierre strained against the rainfall of water on leaves. At last he caught the deepening beat of a motor. Kayapi was pointing upwards through the branches at the sky.

Some minutes later, a helicopter passed through the rainmist, following the line of the watercourse—a dark ugly whale lumbering through the wet air.

It shone a spotlight on the waters below, Kayapi pressed Pierre down into the bottom of the dugout, so that his white face and arms wouldn’t show.

The jet began its landing approach over mountains which moonlight cut out harsh and rutted with shadows. These rapidly dipped into foothills as the plane fell keeping pace with the falling ground. Hard to be sure they were descending except for the gut sense of changing inertia. Then the jet touched and was rolling along a level barren valley between landing lights towards a bright-lit cluster of buildings. A droop-nosed SST with cyrillic letters on its side dwarfed the other jets parked there.

Despite the presence of these brightly lit buildings and jets, the whole area struck Sole as empty and meaningless. These artefacts existed in a limbo like a flat concrete zone hidden away in the subconscious of a catatonic. They represented wealth, surely. Investment. Expertise. But investment in nothing; expertise for no apparent motive; a bankrupt wealth. This meeting place between Man and Alien might have been set down prepacked in this desert valley, clipped off the back of a cereal carton.

An armed military policeman in a white helmet met them outside the terminal, checked their names off a clipboard and waved them upstairs.

Here they found forty or fifty people gathered in a long room, one wall of which was glass, giving a view of the airstrip illuminated by its landing lights and the dark moon-silhouetted hills.

The crowd formed local eddies of three or four people each. Zwingler acknowledged a few nods, but made no move to join any of the sub-groups. He stood with Sole looking out at the night while the last few arrivals filtered into the room. Sole heard Russian voices as well as American. After ten minutes the soldier stepped inside and flashed a brief, subdued salute at a man in his late forties with short-cropped wiry black hair highlighted by a few grey strands, lending him a certain maestro-like presence.

“They’re all here now, Dr Sciavoni—”

Sciavoni looked as though he could be holding a conductor’s baton—he had something of the poise and personal electricity. But maybe not for a symphony orchestra, maybe for a night club band. Sciavoni wasn’t quite impressive enough for the occasion he was now called upon to supervise.

He had a habit of opening his eyes imperceptibly while he was speaking to someone. The extra white made the eyes seem to gleam from his sallow face with an inner light. But it was a mechanical trick rather than real charisma.

Sciavoni cleared his throat and made a speech of welcome.

“Gentlemen. Ladies too, I’m pleased to see. First off, let me say how delighted I am to welcome you to the State of Nevada. And to the USA, for those of you whose first visit this is—” He smiled engagingly at the Russians in their heavy tweed suits.

Tomaso Sciavoni, who’d been put in charge of the reception team, worked for NASA. Sole’s attention wandered as ‘the conductor’ talked on about the communication and data-processing facilities available at the airstrip—facilities of no-place they seemed, servomechanisms of the void in Man. He found Sciavoni’s slightly theatrical gestures and occasional gleams of the eyes as meaningless, after a while, as this whole house of cards erected in the desert. Apparently the place had something to do with the Atomic Energy Commission—but all trace of alternative function had been carefully erased. A quiet fantasy developed in his mind of white-helmeted soldiers walking round the desert with giant gum erasers, rubbing out a face here, and a building there, and a jet plane somewhere else—and pencilling in alibi men and alibi machinery. When the alien spacecraft landed, did they hope a giant eraser would descend from the sky and remove it conveniently too?

Sciavoni broke off talking about protocol and personalities and cocked his head, as news came through the plug in his ear.

“Tracking reports a separation,” he announced. “Right now the Globe is heading up over the East Siberian Sea. A smaller vehicle is veering away, swinging sharply towards North America. Altitude is falling rapidly. It’s at eight hundred nautical miles now. Velocity is down from an initial ten thousand to nine thousand five and falling—

Sciavoni carried on a running commentary as the smaller vehicle dropped swiftly across the roof of the world. Above the Arctic ice. Over the Beaufort Sea. Mackenzie Bay. The Yukon. Then along the chain of the Rocky Mountains, till over Western Montana it began sharply decelerating and losing height.

“We’ve got visual acquisition now. The vehicle’s a blunt cylinder shape about a hundred metres long by thirty. There’s no indication of the means of propulsion. It’s crossing the Idaho stateline now at an altitude of eighty nautical miles. Velocity down to three thousand—”

“I’ll tell you one thing, Chris,” hissed Zwingler. “We’d give our eyeteeth to be able to handle reentry the way they’re doing now. I hate to think of the energy wastage—”

“They’re across the Nevada stateline now. Altitude ten nautical miles. Velocity one thousand. Commencing rapid descent—”

“What are we all standing about inside for anyway?”

Sole turned away from the throng that were now pressing closer to the window, hesitated only briefly before heading downstairs.

The soldier stepped in his way to scrutinize his identity tab, then pushed the glass door open and followed him outside.

Sole gazed north.

Already a shape was visible. A rushing blob of darkness against the stars.

“Can’t hear a sound. How’s that thing staying in the air?” The soldier shivered.

“I hate to think. Antigravity? That’s only a word. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“If there’s a word, Mister, must mean somethin’—”

“No, there are a lot of words for things that don’t exist. Imaginary things.”

“Such as what?”

“Oh I dunno. God, maybe. Telepathy. The soul.”

“I don’t much care for that notion, Doctor What’s-your-name. Place I come from, words mean things.”

The squat dark cigar shape, without portholes or fins, hung briefly over the airstrip. No lights or jetglow visible. No engine noise audible.

Slowly and silently it slid down on to the concrete, a couple of hundred yards from where they stood. At the last moment before it grounded, Sole glanced up at the mass of faces pressed to the long window upstairs. They looked like kids staring into a sweetshop.

Then came the sound of people fighting their way downstairs, pushing and elbowing.