Ian Watson - The Embedding

“Mr Silverson, what’s the latest situation report, please?”

Silverson was a slice of low-calorie crispbread beside the doughy crusts of the Russians. Faintly scandalized at the number of people present, ambiguous in the darkness, he reported:

“Niagara hasn’t fallen yet, Mr Sciavoni. We think it’ll be at least twelve hours after that event before our team evacuate from Franklin. Big Bird and seismographs are on the look-out.” He hesitated. “Perhaps I should add there’s been some guerrilla activity reported throughout the Project area. We don’t know what effect this might have—”

“We’re proceeding as fast as we can, you see, Ph’theri,” Sciavoni said defiantly.

Ph’theri’s ears shifted shape again as he paid attention to the scarlet wires.

“The Sp’thra suggest this time bonus: you may come inside our ship with your recording equipment, if the Brain that Self-Embeds arrives within forty-eight hours. Now what about the normal language brains?”

“That’s being taken care of, right now. You’ll be given English, Russian, Japanese, Eskimo, Vietnamese and Persian language samples—they ought to fit the bill, linguistically.”

Merchant Seaman Noboru Izanami’s first journey outside of the home islands of Japan led him straight to San Francisco. He passed through the Golden Gate, where suicides stand and face the city to die, and it seemed to him like a great torii gateway to the shrine of the American dream.

Noboru took the elevator up Colt Tower, and shot of! half a reel of film from the top. Then he turned his steps towards the Japanese residential area off Post and Buchanon, to wander nostalgically along the shopping streets, delighted to find an American city so like a Japanese one. He ate a bowl of fried soba noodles in a restaurant called Teriko’s—with a display of plastic replicas of the Japanese food in its window. Outside Teriko’s he met two native San Franciscans. One of them was a second or third generation Japanese immigrant, who still miraculously spoke Japanese.

“Eego sukosi mo wakaranai? No, Lloyd, he don’t speak a word of English. Ano né, kizuke no tame ni ippai yaro, yoshi? I’m askin’ if he’d care for a pick-me-up, just along the street a little way. Tyotto sokorahen made—”

Noboru worried in case he’d be a nuisance.

“Don’t give it a thought. Do-itashimashite. Anata no keiken no ohanasi ga kikitai no desu . I’m making out we’d love to hear about his travels. Such as those are, Lloyd, such as those are!”

Noboru introduced himself with a tight little bow.

“Watakusi wa Izanami Noboru desu. Doozo yoroshiku!”

They set off eastward along Post Street, wreathed in smiles.

“Gaikokungo wa dame desu kara né!” Noboru wrinkled his nose apologetically.

“Seems like he’s no damn good at foreign languages, Lloyd. Just our boy.”

A low-slung ambulance slid through the snowploughed streets of Valdez, Alaska, towards the airfield. Its windscreen wipers scooped out arcs of glass from the feathery snow.

A flat-faced, blubbery woman lay on a stretcher breathing noisily through her mouth.

“Why does she have to be transferred in this kind of weather?” whined the nurse. “Who’s going to explain to her? She can’t speak a word of English. You know that?”

“I know,” the driver called over his shoulder. “They got some Eskimo interpreter woman in Anchorage.”

“What I’m thinking about is her husband. How do we tell him she’s been spirited away a hundred miles, maybe die on her own, nobody talking to her she knows?”

“A kidney machine has come available. She needs it. Simple.”

“I don’t get how an illiterate Eskimo woman has all this care lavished on her so sudden. Kidney machine treatments come expensive.”

“Maybe it’s her lucky day. Make sure you tell her man it’s all for his woman’s good, huh? Fisherman, isn’t he?”

“Ordinary fisherman. I don’t get it.”

The ambulance slid softly through the snow.

At night, the women of the village replenished the wood on the bonfire platforms in the small clearing and set light to them.

Fire flared across the flood. Danced on the waves the stamping feet set up.

Pierre was still wading round the hut and moaning—his blanched body ghostly in the flickering light.

With nightfall insects also descended. The three undrugged spectators felt the needle-pricking and the fierce flushing itch. Tom Zwingler located a tube of insect repellent in his bag.

“I’ll swear things are crawling on my legs,” shivered Sole as he smeared some cream on. “You saw all those damned leeches on Pierre. Can’t you feel something?”

“Won’t get through your clothes,” hoped Chester, who did not like the idea of being fed on by leeches. “Water’s moving about your legs, is all.”

“Why is it?”

“All the dancing.”

“Flies don’t seem to bother the Indians much. Maybe it’s the fires. Women and kids have moved near them.”

“Let’s move nearer. The men are all stoned anyhow. They couldn’t care less.”

“Queer, isn’t it—not caring about strangers watching this? A foreigner even taking part in it. I got the idea they were secretive from what Pierre wrote.”

“We don’t exist, man,” sniggered Chester. “Just let them wait.” He brandished his dart gun in the air.

However, wait was all they had to do. No helicopter showed up.

They stared at the ecstatic faces in the firelight. Waited, while the Bruxo with bloody nostrils led the men endlessly round the hut.

Listened, without comprehension, to the myths being chanted.

“There’s an undertow, Tom—”

“Shut up about the fucking leeches will you? Sure I feel something—but just shut up about it!”

“You think it’s the dam, Chris?”

“Maybe.”

“Shit, man, this place’ll take days to drain!”

Tom Zwingler thought about it.

“We’re near one of the main river channels. But it must be emptying in a hell of a hurry if we feel effects already—”

“Didn’t you say the dam would strip away like sealing tape?”

“I guess I did, Chris.”

“If we’re feeling it here, what the hell’s it like downstream !”

“Maybe a bit more than we anticipated? If that’s the case, where the hell are Chase and Billy?”

“Could be the water is pulling,” grunted the Negro. “Better than leeches I suppose.”

“What was the time fuse on those mines, Chester?”

“Fifteen minutes, Mr Sole. They just had to dump the mines down the side of the dam from the helicopter—”

“Isn’t that cutting it a bit fine?”

“Christ, no—they fly straight on after dumping them. No sweat—they’d be miles out of the blast zone.”

When the second steel suitcase had slid underwater, Gil flew the machine on along the line of the dam for four kilometres to the trees.

As they rose up over the first wall of forest, a line of half a dozen coin-size holes suddenly punched themselves in the plexiglass.

Gil’s jaw shattered.

Flew away in a spray of blood and bone splinters.

He fell across the altitude control stick, his heavy body thrashing about on top of it. From the remnants of his mouth gurgled a sheeplike bleat.

Like water spilled from a jug, the machine began to fly at the ground.

Billy caught hold of Gil’s body; but they were too close to the trees already. The helicopter struck. Turning over twice, its blades scythed leaves and branches before they crumpled up and snapped.

The wrecked machine settled into a nest of branches and hung there, dripping fuel. It didn’t burn. But the broken bodies inside burned with pain enough.