Ian Watson: The Embedding

Damn visitors, he thought. More lousy priests.

He was a small, once muscular man, whose muscles had turned to flab since his days in the army; whose hair had thinned out since then, till it lay plastered stickily over his scalp in short brown fronds-a wet, serrated, dying leaf. The knobbly upturned end of his nose stood out from his features, softened with large greasy pores and slightly too large-as though he’d spent a few years with a finger up each nostril stretching them. Capillary breakdown had started to lay red spiders over his cheekbones some time ago.

His daydreams, as well as his daily radio call, focussed on that two-bit town Santarém—the exit point from this hole in the jungle. A strange anomaly of a place was Santarém: a hangover from the American Civil War. Confederate soldiers who refused to go along with General Lee’s surrender settled there and their descendants lived there to this day, hard by other leftovers of American presence through the years-Henry Ford’s settlement Fordlândia, now derelict, his Belterra, also abandoned: two reminders of the great rubber boom that had reared a rococo palace to opera in the heart of Amazonia, at Manáus, and brought La Pavlova a thousand miles upstream to dance for the rubber barons. Nowadays Santarém was filled with a fresh influx of Americans, to advise on the building of the great primary dam that would stretch sixty-five kilometres across from Santarém to Alenquer, with a twinbasin lock set in the hard rock, deepwater harbour, turbines and transmission lines; and oversee the construction of the dozen subsidiary dams of the future inland sea that would soon balance, on the globe, the Great Lakes of the northern hemisphere.

A vast sea would embrace the Amazon. Estimates were, it would cost half a billion dollars to map the whole region adequately from the air. But only half that sum to flood it and erase the embarrassments of geography forever.

Charlie’s own subdam consisted of ten kilometres of tamped-down earth faced with bright orange plastic carved out of the middle of the jungle. A lake fifteen thousand kilometres square would back up behind it, nowhere too deep for the big timber dredges to haul out the wealth of trees it drowned. A million trees. A billion trees. Who knew the number? Hardwoods, mahoganies, cedars, steel-woods. Silk-cotton trees and garlic trees and chocolate trees. Balsa, cashews, laurels. So many trees. So much land. And so much water. All useless to mankind, up till the present.

Damned rain, thought Charlie. Rots the soul. But at least it was speeding up the filling of the lake, bringing measurably closer the time when he could get the hell out of here.

“Who are they, priests from the camp?”

“No, it’s a political police captain and a couple of his sidekicks. It’s queer, I’ve never seen—”

He looked worried; flashed a quick grin of bravado.

“Careful what you say, hey Charlie? Remember, you’re a long way from home.”

Charlie regarded the Brazilian dubiously.

“Is that meant for friendly advice? I guess I’m okay politically.”

“They came by helicopter. Can you hurry up, Charlie? They’re impatient people.”

“Damn it, I’m on the air. Oh never mind, I can’t hear anything but static anyway. Santarém, d’you read me? Reception’s terrible. I’m signing off now-call you back later, okay? Over and out. Get a bottle of brandy, Jorge, huh? I’ll see them in here—”

Jorge was turning to leave when a hand shoved the door fully open and propelled him into the room. Three men pushed their way in and looked round, at radio, dam models, drip buckets, hammock with dirty sheet on it, open charts and records, stacks of Playboys .

The Captain wore a crisp olive uniform with a jaunty red spotted neckerchief, black leather boots, a holstered pistol. But if he had a reasonably military air about him, his two companions looked more like capangas , the thugs hired by landowners and developers in the Brazilian outback. A ratty vicious-seeming halfcaste. And a massive Negro with teeth almost as black as his skin and web-creamy eyes of bloodshot curds and whey. They wore the same style boots with stained khaki trousers and sweatshirts. The Negro crooked a submachine gun under his arm. Ratface had an automatic rifle with burnished bayonet attached to it.

Jorge was heading around the Negro when a sharp rap of the gun across his ribs halted him.

“Stay here and listen, Almeida-it concerns you as well. Mr Faith, I suppose you don’t speak Portuguese?”

The Captain spoke good English with an American accent, but his smile held no real humour in it, only a kind of gloating chilly anticipation.

“Sorry, I understand some. Jorge usually translates for me.”

“We shall speak English then.”

“Jorge was just going for drinks. You could drink a glass of brandy?”

“Excellent. We shall have some brandy. But not my pilot.”

Charlie stared from Ratface to Negro, confused.

“Which one’s the pilot?”

“Neither of these, obviously. My pilot stays with his machine to look after it.” The Captain spoke to his men quickly, they grinned broken greedy grins and the Negro let Jorge past.

“So you’re wondering to what you owe this interruption of your useful work? For which we Brazilians are truly indebted to yourself, need I say, and to your companions in all these filthy jungle holes. Uncivilized here-such a far cry from Rio or Sao Paulo?”

“Fact is, I came direct from Santarém-never saw those cities.”

“That’s a shame. Let’s hope you have a chance to spend some of your bounty in our fine cities and enjoy real Brazilian hospitality after this vile jungle. It’s wonderful that you are flooding it, Mr Faith. Minerals, civilization, the new wealth—”

Was this character and his two thugs planning to roll him for his wad of dollars and cruzeiros? It hardly seemed to merit a special helicopter trip. Yet Charlie recalled that business of customs clearance for essential technical equipment at Santarém, when officials had rolled the whole outfit to the tune of several grand under the guise of customs fees. He hoped it wasn’t his turn.

Jorge reappeared with bottle and tumblers, slopped a few fingers of spirit into them and handed them round.

The Captain accepted the brandy from Jorge and sniffed it with a gesture of connoisseurship wasted on that particular juice. The Negro and Ratface drained theirs straight down then wandered about the room rifling through papers and looking into drawers and cupboards while the Captain talked.

“My name is Flores de Oliviera Paixao, Mr Faith. Captain in the Security Police. The Negro is Olimpio, the other one Orlando. Please remember their names, you may see a lot of them and need to ask their help.”

Olimpio glanced round and grinned at the mention of his name, but Orlando just carried on rummaging through Charlie’s things with quick furtive scrabbles of his free hand. Whenever the halfcaste’s bayonet caught the light, Charlie felt a cold squirming sensation in his guts that stopped him arguing about the cavalier way they were treating his room. His mind wandered back to the Nam and the same species of bayoneted rifle in his own hands as he rooted through a jungle hut. The blade had bathed in the guts of a dark-skinned rat of a youth very like Orlando, who went for Charlie with a knife thinking he was saving his sister. Ah, but the sister-cowering in a corner with big doe eyes, tiny cone-shaped breasts pushing at her shirt, the long black pigtails of a schoolgirl. Likely as not she’d never been near a school. She was beautiful. Orlando scrabbled vaguely and stupidly through Charlie’s equipment like a ghost of that thin boy, who had somehow seized the American soldier’s weapon from his hands in that hut a decade ago and lived on to threaten Charlie with it now, instead of dying.