Ian Watson - The Embedding

Pierre shook his head stubbornly.

“No. He knew—he promised me.”

“Believe what you like, damn you! But to me, this monster is the real climax of the maka-i business. The one and only conclusion it would have come to without our intervention. Kayapi is just a plain lucky opportunist.”

They might handle Pierre more tactfully, Sole reckoned. It was stupid putting his back up like this. He tried to shift the tenor of the conversation away from recrimination and bickering.

“That’s as may be, Tom. But mightn’t we still be right about these Indians? To put it in Ph’theri’s words, about their high trade value? It still seems to me the Indians are tackling the same sort of problem as the aliens are tackling with their thirteen thousand years of technology. The Sp’thra found themselves confronted by something abnormal—something from outside of Nature. They built a universal thought machine to answer the challenge. The Xemahoa were faced by this unnatural flood and fought back in their own terms—not technological terms this time, but biological and conceptual ones—”

Pierre stared at Sole in bewilderment, wondering, perhaps, whether another wave of the drug-reality had just washed over him. Of course, Pierre knew nothing whatever about the Sp’thra Signal-Traders. Taking part in a discussion with him on these terms was rather like inviting an ancient Roman priest of Jupiter to discuss salvation with a couple of Jesuits!

“For crying out loud, Chris, you’re not trying to suggest that that monster is any sort of answer?”

“It’s alive. Let’s keep it that way, is all I suggest. Maybe there’s a reason why it has no eyes.”

“Sure! Its DNA is so fucked up by that fungus!”

“Maybe it will see another reality outside of this. Who knows what language it may be capable of generating? What it may be able to describe? Can’t we find something to feed it? It breathes. It can eat.”

“They’re not marching out to the manger bearing any gifts, I notice,” observed Zwingler sarcastically. “They can’t think much of it.”

“Oh, that is explained,” Pierre said briskly. “Kayapi has told them, he employs you as Caraiba Bruxos—so they keep away.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell us! Let’s see about getting some milk for that brat. Show me where, Frenchman.”

Chester seized hold of his arm and marched him away towards the village.

Sole went into the hut to take another look at the maka-i child.

What flight of fancy had made him come out with that remark about an ‘answer’? He was grasping at straws. This whole business of the ecology and chemistry and linguistics of the Xemahoa culture would take a couple of years’ patient research to disentangle. Maybe in the end all they would find out was that these people had discovered some naturally-occurring stimulator like the one that Haddon had already synthesized, but with particularly undesirable hallucinatory and teratogenic side-effects—producing fantasies and monsters instead of more efficient thought.

The baby let out a kitten’s squeal as Sole’s shadow fell across its exposed brain. He experimented moving backwards and forwards. Could it sense light and shade after all?

What the hell! It would die. And be better off dead—like the mangled mother by its side, whose nine months of taboo imprisonment only led to this sorry mess.

Chester returned from the village, pulling a woman along brusquely by the hand. Her breasts were swollen with milk, their nipples fat pepper pots. Pierre splashed alongside, speaking to her in Xemahoa consolingly.

The sight of the dead mother and the freak baby made her moan with fear, but Chester kept a firm hold on her, goosed her nipples and shoved his long black finger at the baby’s mouth.

“Tell her not to pick the baby up, Frenchman—she’ll harm it.”

The woman finally understood what was expected, bent over the baby, guided a swollen nipple to its lips. The lips closed on her and sucked her lustily.

“Christ only knows if there’s any way through that thing from its top end to its bottom. Maybe it’s all tied up in knots inside. That’s the story, isn’t it—clever snake tied himself up in knots?” Still, Chester watched the woman carefully in case she damaged any of the ruptures.

“Sorcerer’s apprentice is wandering round the village looking half-demented—realized he’s not heir apparent to this shit-heap any more—”

“It isn’t a shit-heap, you white Negro,” growled Pierre.

Chester laughed scornfully.

The woman fled back to the village after half an hour. But Pierre had told her to come again, and she said she would.

Since no one else seemed prepared to do anything about the dead mother’s body—and it couldn’t stay lying beside the baby—Chester finally carried it out of the hut and away into the jungle. He left it wedged in the crook of a tree. It could be buried when the water had all gone. Or the Xemahoa could burn it—whatever the local custom was. He came back to the hut and lay down on the pallet beside the monster, with a shrug of disgust, to get some rest. Nowhere else was dry.

Late on in the afternoon Pierre reappeared with some dry fish and some kind of pasty soft-boiled taproot which he handed to Sole.

Sole shared the meal with his two companions—and discovered how hungry he was. Even dry fish and boiled root seemed delicious.

When they finished eating, Pierre demanded:

“What’s it all about then, Chris?” He was cold sober now. “Am I supposed to understand that the American Government has wrecked its own dam for the sake of a few Indians? That’s a pretty tall story.”

Sole gathered up his courage and told him.

The subsequent confessional episode left Sole feeling limp and exhausted. He felt swarmed-over, sensitized, eroticized, and guilty—very vulnerable—as though he had become emotionally dependent on the Frenchman once again, in some dark corner of himself. As though Pierre had been reinstated in his position as Sole’s conscience and superego. Which simply wasn’t the case. He was clear of that hang-up now. He was free. It was just a question of proceeding by the most effective route to gain Pierre’s acceptance of what was going to happen—since Pierre was the person who had influence with Kayapi. So he had to confess—to gain the right emotional leverage. Or so he reckoned, at any rate. Cold facts would not be sufficient for Pierre.

Tom Zwingler could see none of this. He regarded Sole’s confessional performance with open hostility and contempt—though he was none too sure of himself, by this stage. His ruby-nudity was showing—his armour had been missing for too long.

For Sole it was excessively disturbing—this vulnerable, touchy explanation to his former friend and the one-time lover of Eileen. The man who had given life to his son.

Pierre went away to think, or to get some sleep.

Sole hunted for somewhere to lay his own tired body. His nerves felt raw with over-stimulation. Chester woke up when he wandered into the hut a second time; and Sole took his place on the straw bed. He fell asleep beside the baby.

No helicopter came.

The woman returned from the village to feed the baby when the stars came out.

Pierre held himself aloof, except for providing some more dried fish and root for them to eat. They tasted less delicious this time. He refused to talk about the Sp’thra or the brain trade. Anyway, these seemed ever more remote as the next day dragged on dampfooted into yet another dusk. And another wet dawn.

Zwingler grew progressively more gloomy. He consulted his watch mechanically from time to time. But as the American grew more saturnine, Sole’s spirits began to recover. The problem of the Sp’thra became a fantasy interpolation between the secluded solidity of Vidya’s world and the equally secluded and solid reality of the Xemahoa people. The two special worlds connected up with one another in his mind healthily and cleansingly.