Ian Watson - The Embedding

Almeida slammed the jeep into gear viciously and trod on the accelerator.

“You think I wanted to give them the other key, you bastard?”

When it was done, and the generator shed relocked, Charlie climbed back into the jeep to find Jorge playing with the.38 he kept under the driver’s seat.

“Pass that over, Jorge, huh?”

“So you can give it to the Captain—like I gave him the key?”

But he handed it over to Charlie and Charlie made a display of checking it was still loaded, while Jorge drove the jeep back towards the store shed. He hadn’t told Jorge to drive there. Now they were heading that way, he found he didn’t dare tell Jorge not to.

Paixao greeted Charlie at the doorway.

“An unexpected failure of energy, Mr Faith. You wouldn’t be so kind as to switch the electricity back on? No? Well—I would use the helicopter batteries except for the rain, and it’s tactically stupid to tie the craft down with such poor visibility. If you value your life so lightly, at least we value our dam more highly! Luckily I have a whip in the helicopter. Of tapir hide. Did you know that in ancient Chinese legends the tapir was said to be an animal that feeds on dreams? I wonder what secret revolutionary dreams my tapir whip can discover? What a shame for her you turned the electricity off. Electricity leaves no scars—except maybe in the soul. But the tapir whip, in the hands of an expert like Olimpio—to put it bluntly, Mr Faith, it flays a person alive.”

His voice hardened to ice and steel.

“So will you kindly switch the electricity back on!”

Charlie hesitated.

This was the crossroads he’d tried to avoid for years.

Something hard in his trouser pocket was pressing against his thigh.

“Captain Paixao, if you don’t get out of here with your prisoners and take them to jail in the proper way—”

“Yes? What will you do, Mr Faith? Do tell me—I’m curious. Being myself the proper authority in the matter.”

“I’ll kick up one helluva stink in Santarém and with our embassy and with the news media in the States. I’ll name names and everything. I’ll take it up with the Church here in Brazil! How would you like being excommunicated? That’s what the church thinks of torturers these days!”

“Instead of employing them, eh? What threats! You’d think you were the Papal Nuncio himself. Mr Faith, you are naïve. In the most unlikely event of my exclusion, let me assure you without a doubt that I would be received back into the bosom of mother church like a shot once civilization had been successfully preserved. This clerical liberalism is no more than a kite flown in the wind. When the wind falls, the kite will be hauled down soon enough by Rome. Now, you hear me. I wish to speak to this bitch! What shall it be? You choose. The Electricity—or the Whip?”

Charlie chose.

He pulled out the.38 and pointed it at Paixao’s belly.

Zwingler sat a while with Sole as the Air Force jet hurried them down through Mexico and Central America and on over Colombia. He asked questions about Pierre and read the Frenchman’s letter through a couple of times carefully.

“I guess this is one piece of protest writing that might pay off,” was his acid comment as he handed it back.

He left Sole feeling as though he was harbouring some leper or criminal who happened—purely by coincidence—to have some useful contribution to make to society. He held long hushed conversations with the three other passengers.

These three men were introduced to Sole as Chester, Chase and Billy. Chester was a tall Negro with a kind of ebony beauty about him that was just a bit too slick and superficial—like a tourist carving at an African airport. Billy and Chase were clean-cut out of cemetery marble, two Mormon evangelists. Sole imagined the two large steel suitcases they’d hauled on board and blocked the aisle with as packed with thousands of Sunday School texts.

At a Brazilian airstrip on the edge of the Great Lakes scheme they transferred to a light survey plane and flew on over the devastation of the great flood. In some places all except the tallest trees had drowned. Soon they entered rainmists, where the boundaries of earth and sky and water had dissolved. The blur of a dirty aquarium tank hung about them for one hour, for two.

The helicopter pilot who was going to fly them on the last leg of their journey climbed on board out of the rain at the southernmost of the subsidiary dams—a tall easygoing Texan wearing a holstered pistol. Gil Rossignol was his name—a name to set you thinking of the French quarter of New Orleans and showboats, of cabaret and gamblers with concealed derringers—except that Rossignol’s raw T-bone bulk contradicted this image flatly.

“Hi! You Tom Zwingler?”

“Didn’t they give you a recognition phrase to say?”

“Why sure they did—it slipped my mind. Excuse me. Quote, Why is the sky dark at night?”

Zwingler nodded.

“The answer is—because the universe is expanding.” He flashed his ruby moons apologetically. “I just want to do this thing properly.”

“Professionally,” agreed Chester.

The Texan grinned.

“So long as you don’t ask me what it’s supposed to mean, sky being dark at night, and the universe and all!”

Sole found a sentence from Shakespeare in his head, and quoted it on impulse.

“The stars above, they govern our condition.”

Chester stared at him curiously.

“Just a bit of Shakespeare,” shrugged Sole. “We wouldn’t be here right now if it weren’t for the stars.”

Zwingler waved a ruby at him, disapprovingly.

“I seem to recall how the guy in King Lear who said that got his eyes put out for his trouble. Stars aren’t going to govern our damn conditions. The whole point of the exercise is how we’re going to set conditions for the stars!”

To Gill Rossignol, he said:

“We want to have a word with the engineer in charge here. After that we’ll hop over to the reception centre for the Indians—we ought to doublecheck on the whereabouts of the village before we head down there.”

The Texan shuffled his bulk about awkwardly.

“Trouble is, Mr Zwingler, there’s been some real mayhem here. Charlie Faith—he’s the engineer—he got himself a crack on the skull and he’s concussed. He’s been flown out to the hospital in Santarém. Far as I can make out from his Brazilian assistant—who’s in a frankly unstable state of mind right now—to tell the truth he’s pretty drunk and been sniffing ether—Charlie pulled a gun on some policeman who was interviewing political suspects in a pretty brutal style in one of the sheds here. And he got a rifle butt in his head.”

“Did you say political suspects? Here—in this middle of nowhere?”

“We’ve had the word passed down that there’s goin’ to be some kind of attack on Amazon Project personnel. The communists are getting anxious. Seems like they need to make a big scene in the world press. They’ve sent combat units up here. One of these units was being questioned when Charlie got in the way—though far as I can make out they’d come to kill him, not make friends with him.”

“How ‘brutal’ was ‘pretty brutal’?” Sole demanded.

The Texan gazed out of the plane window.

“Wasn’t pretty at all, I guess. They had this girl hanging upside down nude with electrodes on her tits and eyeballs and I dunno what. Charlie switched the current off so they fetched a whip and sort of… flayed her I guess you’d say. She wasn’t worth looking at when they’d done, the Brazilian said, just a carcass of raw meat. Personally I don’t blame him getting drunk after that—but he isn’t worth speaking to right now—”