Ian Watson - The Embedding

“Is this a popular explanation among your people?”

“No! This heresy has appeared several times since the language moon was hollowed out, been discounted and destroyed—”

“And those who believed in it?”

“Destroyed too! It is against the signal-trading destiny and duty of the Sp’thra.”

“For God’s sake, the creature is paranoid! Isn’t it obvious his whole race is? Assassinate the future?

“Who would say that your own species is mentally pure,” accused Ph’theri, “when you send out repetitive pictures of dying, killing, maiming and torture?”

“But that isn’t the idea of being a human being,” the psychiatrist protested angrily. “That is a misreading. Those things are all accidents, mistakes, disasters.”

“Really? You seem to dote on them. As we see it, your signals are you. These things are your sport, your art, your religion. Why do you balk at trading six brains of Earth, whom a great destiny awaits—to escape from the Embedding with the Sp’thra. To master the tangents. To enjoy the freedom of love sated and satisfied!”

The Embedding.

It was a concept that seemed to haunt the aliens as fiercely as it had, in another context, haunted Sole. Was there any real comparison—or was it just a chance similarity of words?

It didn’t seem like a chance similarity to Sole, right then. More like a miraculous discovery.

Sole felt himself filled with wonder, as he saw his way through to a fusion of Ph’theri’s obsession with his own.

“Ph’theri—I’ve tried to achieve a kind of ‘embedding’, to test out the frontiers of reality, using young human brains. Maybe it’s a coincidence of words? No, I don’t think so. You think it’s impossible to test out reality with one species on one planet. Tell me this, Ph’theri, would you be willing to miss the tide if it was worth your while? If it brought your search to an end? If it saved all time for the Sp’thra?”

Sole fished Pierre’s letter out of his pocket.

And began to tell the tall alien all that he knew of the Xemahoa tribe of Brazil…

Outside, it was full daylight now. The sun shone on to Ph’theri’s ship, on the desert scrub, the peaked mountains beyond. The sky hadn’t a single contrail in it. The area must have been cleared of air traffic.

When Sole had finished explaining—and while people stared at Sole, bemused—Ph’theri considered for a long time. His paper-bag ears crinkled through rapid shape changes as he communicated like a silent ventriloquist with the other Sp’thra.

The alien finally addressed the crowd.

“If this is true, we Sp’thra shall miss the tide. And for the Xemahoa brain unit, we assess the value thus: the transfer to you of interstellar travel techniques, together with the lending of one gasgiant Tide Reader. This ‘package’ will enable your race to reach the Tide Reader star within five of your years and make your own trading arrangements.”

A hush of awe filled the room. The bright sunlight made it a moment of eternity.

Then a groundswell of naked greed took hold of the crowd, and Sole felt himself being clapped and pounded on the back.

“You damn clever bastard,” Sciavoni hissed in his ear. “Was any of that true?”

“But it has to be,” muttered Sole. “Doesn’t it?”

“Sure it does!” Sciavoni laughed.

“Hey, Dr Sole,” another voice insinuated, “we’d better be turning the taps off down Brazil way, hadn’t we?”

“Before we lose our baby in the bathwater, eh?”

An almost hysterical gaiety. Amid it all the tall Sp’thra stood like a gloomy lighthouse in a storm.

As the babble grew deafening, Ph’theri’s ears scaled down to flat cardboard packets.

A sub-committee of the Washington Special Action Group met in a walnut-panelled room with false windows. Views of New England in the Fall surrounded them—a blaze of russet trees, that could change at the touch of a switch to the Everglades, Hawaiian beaches, or the Rocky Mountains.

The President’s Chief Scientific Adviser, a German emigré with a leonine head of white wiry hair, said:

“There’s a hell of a lot more to it than just snatching a couple of Indians. We’ve got to safeguard our assets—and if these Indians have stumbled on to something so unique that it’s worth the secret of star flight to our friends, then we need it too—”

“We’re going on pretty slender evidence. A letter from a crazy Frenchman full of propaganda,” said a quiet man from the CIA, who’d been doodling on his notepad, producing a series of awkward drawings of a winged dragon like an advertisement for a correspondence course in art in a comic book.

“But we know the thing’s possible. What did that man Zwingler say they’d discovered at that Hospital in England? Some kind of chemical to enhance the intelligence—”

“He said they weren’t sure of that, sir.”

“Yes, but they said lasers were impossible a few years ago then they were in commercial production not long afterwards. The more we find out about the mind, the more likely it seems we can make it do tricks we never dreamed of. The Russians can make a person feel bravery or fear just by injecting a chemical into the brain. Any emotion they like. We can prevent senility to a certain extent. It’s no big deal to predict we’ll be able to make people think better in the near future—”

The President had a visionary—some would say, romantic—taste in scientific advisers. The current adviser’s rise to power took him out of an obscure professorship in social psychiatry at a Mid-Western university, through the Hudson Institute’s Committee on the Year 2000, to his present position, with a speed that alarmed some of his former colleagues. Not that he was a young man. On the contrary. He’d stayed a suspect maverick for too long, pursuing research into dubious topics such as genetic intelligence and conditioning techniques. However, the President had a firm faith in the possibility of managing people and events according to well-defined scripts drawn up by ‘responsible’ psychologists and sociologists. Or, as he put it in a State of the World message, of ‘orchestrating domestic and international events to make harmonious music’.

“Take that Russian who was smashed up in a car crash in Moscow. Bokharov. They reversed his death okay but they couldn’t do anything about the damage to his brain during the time he was dead. His value as a scientist was quartered. But look what we accomplished with that nuclear fusion man at Caltech—”

“Hammond?”

“Sure. His IQ rating was going off by a few fractions of a percentage point. Not enough to make any difference to the average guy. But in a top scientist like him, that’s the difference between excellent routine work—and what for want of a better word we’ve got to call genius. We managed to buck him up for those vital months till we caught up with the Russians—”

“That was using DNA extract?” a sharp-faced Italian-American—the Treasury Department’s head of drug intelligence—asked the Adviser, who nodded.

“Imagine if we could inject some drug that makes the difference of whole percentage points of intelligence at the peak of a man’s career. Give him the power to integrate everything he knows. We have to save the whole environment of these Indians—we need that drug, and at this stage that means the whole natural system it comes from.”

“It ain’t so awkward as it sounds,” said the CIA man, looking up from his dragons. “We can repair the dam afterwards—make it smaller. Then the area those Indians live in can be made into a sort of reserve—big enough so they don’t cotton on and act unnatural, like stop cultivating the drug…”