Ian Watson - The Embedding

Zwingler looked horrified—his moons fluttered out of control.

“Disgusting. Perverted—yeah, filthy. Doesn’t bear contemplating. Some of these governments we support, I wonder—”

“We got a job to do, Mr Zwingler,” Chester sighed. “Never get anything done if your eyes are full of tears.”

A job, cried Sole silently—such as kidnapping? And scooping out somebody’s brains to sell? Is the whole world in Hell, and the Galaxy too—where a whole race of beings roam in a mental torment they call ‘Love’ to buy brains for a language computer? One thing to fix the mind on: one beautiful thought—Vidya and Vasilki safe in their refuge…

“These guerrillas,” the Negro enquired, “are they just planning on killing people—or sabotaging as well?”

“I guess they’ll try sabotage if they can manage it—there’ve been minor cases from time to time—but hell, isn’t much they can do to a ten mile earth wall like this one—

“Not much those commie guerrillas can do, maybe.” Chester’s teeth flashed a dazzling toothpaste smile, sharp as a knife cutting butter. “How convenient these guerrilla attacks could be, considering.”

Chase and Billy stayed behind at the dam with their two steel suitcases and the survey plane. Tom Zwingler had to change his clothes for something lighter and left his ruby tiepin and cufflinks with Billy for safekeeping.

Gil Rossignol piloted the others southward after a visit to the Indian Reception Centre.

Zwingler pored over thermographic pictures of the area radioed down by an Earth Resources Inventory satellite a few hours before they left the States, pinpointing the few remaining heat sources in that monotony of cool water. Father Pomar had scribbled notes on to a map they brought. The map was hopelessly outdated by the flood. Nevertheless the Texan flew on through a fog of rain, fast and unconcerned, relying on instruments and dead reckoning.

“There’s nothing to bump into, friends,” he yawned. “Nothing sticking up.”

Pomar had circled two heat sources in particular, bemused by this means of locating the remaining Indians. Privately he disbelieved that a few cooking fires could be filmed through rain from a height of a hundred miles. But he kept this opinion to himself and begged to come along for another assault on the Xemahoa conscience. Zwingler, naturally, refused.

Maybe he was more anxious to miss Pierre, than to meet him?

Sole asked himself this, but couldn’t decide—sensing his own relief when the first heat source proved abortive. A village several feet deep in water—deserted, with the sodden embers of a fire propped upon a rough platform. It reminded Sole of pictures of the Inca Hitching Place of the Sun—the Solar Altar at Machu Picchu—oddly out of place in this jungle far from the Andes. Maybe these Indians were some degenerate descendants of the Incas—futilely calling on the Sun from a platform of fire? And only succeeding in calling down a helicopter, directed from space by infrared spy eyes, wanting to sell their brains to the stars.

No one was about.

They hovered over the clearing for a few minutes, their downdraught winnowing the flood, before soaring up again and resuming their southward course.

Yet there was no need to feel ashamed of meeting Pierre, in the event. The Frenchman and all the Xemahoa men were high on the fungus drug—and oblivious.

The score of large straw huts that made up the main village enclosed a lake like a coral atoll. Rossignol landed the helicopter here on its floats and tossed an anchor into the water. The other three men let their bodies down gingerly into the brown water, then waded thigh-deep towards the small clearing where the dance was going on.

The Indians were naked, apart from their penis sheaths ornamented with dazzling feathers, like clumps of surrealistic pubic hair. They waded with glazed eyes around a small hut, led by a man so patterned with bodypaint it was hard to say what age he was—whether he was human, even. The loops and whorls on his body made him into a moving collage of giant fingerprints. Were the red blotches on his lips pigment—or blood? They looked horribly like gobs of blood spilling from his nose. He chanted a wailing singsong which the fat-bummed men took up in turns, chanted for a time then let drop into the water with glazed giggles. Nobody paid much attention to the new arrivals—whether white or black.

“They’re stoned out of their minds!” laughed Chester. “That’s one way to greet the end of the world.”

Then Sole saw Pierre Darriand himself wade from the further side of the hut—naked as the rest of them, with his own penis sheath and grotesque clump of blue feathers sprouting out above it. His chalk-white limbs stood out among the Indians’ like a leper’s.

He hesitated briefly when he saw the three of them, but stumbled onwards with the dancers, shaking his head with a puzzled frown.

“Pierre!”

Sole waded towards him. With a shock of disgust he saw the black leeches clinging to Pierre’s thighs and suppurating flybites pocking his white frame.

“I got your letter, Pierre. We’ve come to do something about it.”

(But don’t say what!)

Pierre cried out some words in the same singsong way as the Indians.

Chester caught hold of his arm and shook him roughly.

“Hey Man, we got to talk to you. Snap out of it.”

Pierre stared down at the hand restraining him, flicked at the black fingers with his free hand and said something that sounded more lucid but was still Xemahoa.

“For heaven’s sake speak English or French. We can’t understand you.”

Pierre began to talk in French; but the syntax was hopelessly mixed up.

“I can’t make head or tail of it,” Tom Zwingler sighed. “He must be free-associating.”

“The sentence structure is all broken up, that’s true, but maybe he’s trying to translate what the Indians are chanting—

Pierre fixed Sole with a curious stare.

“Chris?” he asked cautiously. Then abruptly he pulled his arm free of Chester’s grasp and stumbled off. He took up the chant of the Painted Man. Grinned at the naked Indians about him. Fluffed up his blue bush of feathers with a gesture of childish pride.

“Did you see the bloodflecks in his nose?”

“The man’s mindblown,” sneered Chester. “We’re wasting our time on him.”

“He must have kept some records, Tom. He was the methodical type. A bit romantic—but methodical. Probably we’re interrupting him at an impossible time right now. Let’s go look in the huts for some notes or something.”

“Okay—we’ll leave these guys to their games. Wonder why they’re dancing out here, instead of the village.”

“Water’s not so deep here—that’s why maybe.”

Chester found Pierre’s tape recorder and diaries in one of the huts, slung in a hammock above the water.

Sitting inside the helicopter, Sole translated Pierre’s diary aloud. With a growing thrill of conviction he read from entry to entry. At the beginning of the New Year, the diary lapsed for a while and there were several blank pages before it resumed—as though Pierre had lost track of time and the blank was all he could put down to express this.

“So he met the guerrillas?”

“Seems that way.”

“And now this drug-dosed baby is on the way. So that’s what’s happening. It’s amazing. He’s found out so much—he’s been at the hub of things all along.”

“I agree with you, Chris, it’s highly plausible. But remember, Nevada is the real hub of events. Like the man said, it’s the stars above govern our condition.”

“Yes,” agreed Sole dubiously—so glad that Pierre was stoned out of his mind. How long would he stay in that condition?