Ian Watson: The Embedding

Some more of the dam was visible now. The plastic-covered face cut a shocking orange slash through the dull green landscape. Along it, pairs of jaribu storks stood side by side like stiff husbands and wives on a promenade.

“Why, with all due respect to Mr Faith, the yanqui overseer?”

“Let me explain, damn it,” Charlie shouted, furious. “Jorge’s perfectly well qualified and skilled. It’s just that Portugal’s mountainous terrain made them concentrate on high arch dams—not this sort of long low earth dam we happen to have more experience with in the States. And it was our Hudson Institute drew up the blueprint for this scheme way back in the late Sixties. That’s why I’m here. Not because Jorge is no good. He’s damned good. Knows a damned sight more than me about some things. Like dam models. Who do you think made those there?”

Paixao dropped his cigar butt on the floor and crushed it out thoughtfully.

“Supposing that this dam did burst, what effect would there be downstream?”

“In that unlikely event—let me emphasize how unlikely it is—I guess the millions of tons of water in the lake would just have to flood downstream as far as the next dam in line.”

“If that dam bursts?”

“Forget it, Captain! It’s about as likely as a visit from outer space.”

“No sweat then, Mr Faith. It must be you the terrorists are after.”

“I’m sorry, Jorge, truly,” said Charlie humbly, when the three men had gone.

“Charlie, sometimes I think the cure is worse than the disease. Terrorists there may be, but—” He shrugged emphatically.

“I know what you mean, pal.”

That blazing hut in the Nam. Smoke hovering over it in the dusk. A man with a bayonet fighting a boy with a knife. So confident that there wasn’t any need to pull the trigger even. And a doe-eyed girl staring on sick with fear….

“Do I know what you mean! Jorge, let’s take ourselves out on the dam and clear our heads.”

Tapping fingers had fallen silent at last.

“We’ll go down to the café tonight, okay? Hell, but we two people have nothing to quarrel about!”

A bitter smile was all Charlie got from Jorge, though they walked out on to the dam together, while the last of the rain drifted down gentle as mist.

They heard the chatter of the Huey Slick echoing off the water. It seemed not to be flying away in a straight line, but circling.

Soon, Charlie realized there were two distinct sounds. The noise of the helicopter and the puttering of an out-board motor across the tree-infested lake.

The two sounds coincided for a while, then the helicopter passed out of earshot as the boat moved closer.

Presently it came in sight from behind the drowning trees—a twenty-foot shallow draught boat with an awning rigged up to shelter the two white cotton-robed figures in it. One of these raised an arm in salute.

“I guess they’re coming from a safe direction, those ones. There’s nothing but jungle and Indians for a couple hundred miles that way.”

Jorge looked slyly at Charlie.

“You think so?” He gave a soft chuckle.

Charlie slapped him on the shoulder with a show of playfulness that seemed phoney to him as soon as he’d done it.

“Hey Jorge, quit trying to scare me will you? I can recognize them all right. It’s those two priests.”

The boat reached the point where the ramp entered the water. The two figures climbed out and beached it on the concrete, then started up the long slope.

“Heinz and Pomar, wasn’t it? One was full of beans. The other guy had cheeks like ripe apples…”

“What a spectacle!” Father Heinz cried as he came in earshot. “An orange banner across the world like on the flag of Brazil itself. I tell you, it’s like a great festival flag in these dingy forests. Something almost miraculous. A sash of honour. A perpetual sunrise flooding the landscape.”

The priest puffed from the effort of scaling the slope, but his native garrulity overcame the need for oxygen.

“Believe me, Mr Faith, seeing this appearing through the rain like a great frontier between savagery and civilization, it was a welcoming home indeed!”

“Oh, you remembered my name?” grunted Charlie as the men shook hands.

The priests looked white and thin and tired from their stay in the jungle. The beans had fallen out of Heinz, the red was drained away from Pomar’s cheeks. Charlie reckoned it must be two or three months since he saw them setting off.

They weren’t quite home yet. ‘Home’ was ten kilometres further downstream—the complex of concrete-floored tin-roofed huts, the kitchens and dispensary, church and school, made ready to receive whatever exodus of Indians there might be from the drowning jungle.

To date, the resettlement camp only held about a third of the number that had been predicted from aerial surveys of the thousands of square kilometres being flooded. The planes had dropped bags of fish hooks and knives and pictures of the Safe Village and the Great Orange Dam, with photographs of the faces of contact men like Heinz and Pomar.

Charlie was about to say something else—ask how they’d got on—when he heard a jeep engine further out on the dam.

He squinted at the distant rainmist, saw the jeep speeding along the freeboard towards them, still a couple of kilometres away.

Charlie recognized it for one of their own jeeps. Still, the sight had him worried briefly—stuck out on the limb of the dam like this.

“It’s just Chrysostomo,” Jorge explained sweetly. “I sent him along this morning.”

“Yeah, good. But you know I’m not so jumpy about the impending arrival of my killers that I can’t recognize one of our own vehicles! Hell, these terrorists seem pretty much like a myth now that our friend has flown off. He’s his own worst terrorist.”

Jorge grinned and walked off to meet the jeep.

“What’s this then, Senhor Faith?” bubbled Heinz. “Did I hear you say terrorists?”

“It’s nothing—just a scare. A Security Police Captain flew in a while ago. Why don’t you two people come indoors and have a drink? And I’ll see about getting your boat over the ramp then.”

“So that’s who it was. A helicopter flew over us. We waved. I saw them take photographs.”

He took them indoors, poured a generous shot of brandy for himself, then emptied the remains into the same tumblers as Orlando and Olimpio had used.

Priests reminded him of army chaplains. A sour memory. But he wanted a drink. And he tried to keep his own rule banning solitary drinking during daylight hours.

“Somebody wants to blow up the dam,” he shrugged phlegmatically. “Or kill the yanqui who built it.”

“How terrible,” exclaimed Heinz. “Your work is a blessing. How can people not see this? After the gloom and ignorance of the jungle savages—”

Pomar, the younger priest, did quietly recall the occasion when the Archbishop of São Paulo had ordered notices pinned to the church doors throughout his archdiocese denouncing the torturing of priests and lay workers by the security police. Maybe guerrillas, although misguided men and atheists—

But Heinz recollected something that rankled more.

“We met a Frenchman living with one of the jungle tribes. He aroused my suspicions, Mr Faith. This man was in a kind of despair. He compared the behaviour of the natives in Africa, who fight the Portuguese government with Chinese weapons, with the impotence of the savages here to do anything, as though he regretted it.

I say maybe he was a terrorist.”

Charlie shook his head; he remembered the foxy-featured Frenchman passing over the dam during the latter stages of construction.

“No, he was some kind of anthropologist. He came this way. A pretty hostile type. But not a terrorist for my money. Some halfcaste brought a letter of his a few weeks back addressed to England to be put on the plane—”