The Embedding

TWENTY

The woman in the hut died, and her maka-i laden brain with her, about midday, in spite of Chester’s efforts.

Yet the deformed baby still lived on after a fashion. Its ruptured organs continued to function. Its exposed brain remained conscious. Its blind head shuffled after sounds like a worm. It squealed.

The Xemahoa all went back to the village shortly after dawn, Kayapi leading the sick, confused Bruxo by the hand like a child. No one bothered to look into the taboo hut. For the baby it was plainly a case of ordeal by exposure—and Caraiba. Perhaps it didn’t matter to Kayapi whether the baby was alive or dead, from the point of view of interpretation.

The Indian men retired to their hammocks to sleep their racing headaches off. Only Pierre seemed to be trying to come down from his drug trip by racing it to death—splashing back and forth along the jungle corridor between village and hut, obsessively. His behaviour reminded Sole of a shellshocked ex-submariner who used to run up and down the road outside his house when he was a boy, performing endless trivial errands.

After the mother died, they confronted the Frenchman, to see whether his exertions had induced a more lucid frame of mind yet.

But Chester was in a sour mood at his failure to preserve the Indian woman’s life and Tom Zwingler was feeling sick at heart at the delay to their mission, so that the confrontation did not start off sympathetically or happily.

“Did you tell this Kayapi guy the Bruxo has to go away?” demanded Chester.

“The birds of his thought have flown off,” Pierre sighed. “All lost in the forest since he saw that baby. But Kayapi will call them back—Kayapi knows how.”

This faithful trust in someone who had done nothing whatever for the woman or her child was the last straw to Chester.

“Smart guy. Your Kayapi’ll eat shit with the best of them—and know exactly why he’s doin’ it. Like us, hey? Only, more effective, hey? He’ll get what he wants. Look how he manipulated you—drugs and girls and I don’t know what else!”

For a moment Pierre was utterly taken aback.

“But Kayapi is a man of knowledge,” he stammered. “The Xemahoa have an amazing comprehension of the world—”

“Don’t give me that crap. Kayapi couldn’t care a blue damn about ‘the world’. He’s seen where he’s best off. He wouldn’t cut much ice in the outside world away from this shit-heap, is all.”

Pierre stared at the Negro in worried disgust.

“He is my teacher—”

“A fine baby their ‘amazing comprehension’ produced! They’re lucky it had a mouth and a nose on its face.”

Pierre fluttered his hands in agitation.

“Kayapi has suffered and learnt in exile. Now he comes home. He is the true hero figure.”

“It’s all so bloody accidental!” Tom Zwingler exploded. “It isn’t as if he knew the water was going to go down. We blew the dam. He couldn’t have known things were going to happen this way.”

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.

Sole began going down to the village and looking round, watching the reviving life of the jungle people with increasing fascination. The women wove fish traps, winding the long strands of leaf fibre in and out according to traditional patterns that Pierre said were derived from the shape of the constellations—stars swam in the sky, a harvest of light trapped in imaginary lines, and so fishes were supposed to swim into the traps, attracted by these mimic lines, entangling their fins in them. Women smoke-dried the fish which the men scrupulously gutted—the dragging out of entrails being a male preserve, though as the men were untidier than the women a perpetual heap of stinking guts lay not far away from the huts, host to droves of flies—on the other hand, maybe this kept the flies away from the huts themselves.

The male children played games of marbles with small round stones and gourds with holes in the end as jackpots, the winner dancing round rattling the full gourds like maracas—and the girls tried to slip in and steal any of the stones that popped out of the hole during the boy’s gyrations. Inevitably the boy lost some of his winnings, had to chase and trap the girls who snatched them up while their friends ran interference for them. This could be guaranteed to lead on to the Laughing Contest, a slap and tickle routine of sexplay and an endurance test carried on with huge high spirits.

Kayapi and the Bruxo stayed secluded till late on the third day after the birth in the hut with the mat over the door. Then the young Indian reappeared, looking tired but supremely confident, a long distance runner on his winning stretch. He called a crowd together—from the fringe of which the sorcerer’s apprentice looked on, face stubbornly blank, the new mental leper.

When enough had gathered, he went back inside and led the old man out. Blood still clung to the Bruxo’s lips and nose in a dry black crust that flies settled on, which he was too weary to wave off. His bodypaint had run and mixed till he looked like a mess of balled-up plasticine, with his macaw-feather pubic bush tatty and mud-stained now.

The old Shaman looked down at the mud that remained of the flood, and smiled.

Together, uproariously, the Xemahoa men laughed.

They took their laughter seriously, sending it booming round the clearing, chasing away the last gremlins of the flood. Of all the men, only the apprentice refused to laugh, keeping a stiff face and finally slinking away with his tail between his legs—Kayapi laughed volubly in the direction of his retreat, hooting him off the scene.

The Bruxo and Kayapi set off for the hut where the baby lay.

At the taboo hut, Kayapi gestured Chester and Zwingler aside impatiently, took the old man by the arm and led him in. Sole approached Pierre.

“What are they going to do with the baby? Any idea?”

Pierre shrugged his shoulders, contemptuously as Kayapi.

They stayed inside a long time, till the stars came out and the moon to light the clearing. Chester and Zwingler stood behind the other Indians, nervously alert for sounds, Chester fingering the dart gun and Zwingler consulting his watch—and except for the absence of bonfires on their stands of stakes in the deeper floodwater of three days before and the absence of a mother in the hut, it was a replica of the original birth scene. From within the hut after a time came a loud groaning noise, and from the women grouped outside, who hadn’t participated during the events three days previously except as passive spec tators, arose in response a loud groan—mimic birth pains which the Xemahoa men promptly uttered short barking laughs at.

“Fucking thing would have been dead if I hadn’t got it fed,” growled Chester. “This whole thing’s so fucking arbitrary—like you said, Mr Zwingler.”

“They know perfectly well what they’re doing,” Pierre rebuked him loftily, a shade too sanctimoniously so it seemed to Sole.

After a period of groaning and laughter under the moonlight, the Bruxo appeared in the hut doorway, spoke to the tribe.

Pierre condescendingly interpreted.

“Changes are coming to pass. Let me tell you a fresh story of how the snake has come out of the stone again—how he has coiled himself round the outside of the stone. Bruxo says that the child lacks eyes because he doesn’t need them. Eyes are the tunnel the brain looks through. However this child’s brain is already outside of his head, watching us and knowing us without the need of eyes—the brain itself looks out…”

“I sure admire this guy’s inventiveness.”

“Imbecile—this is the birth of mythic thinking. A vast change could be coming over this inbred people.”

“Damn cute opportunism, I still say. Took him three days to work out an alibi—”

“If we could only explain our own culture shocks to ourselves as meaningfully,” wished Sole.

“Quite!” breathed Pierre intensely, giving him the first sympathetic look for many hours.

Then Kayapi came out carrying the ruptured child into the moonlight—the baby uttering sharp kitten cries.

“Christ, be careful,” hissed Chester, handling his dart gun impotently.

Kayapi held the child up high to the stars and moon, walked among the Xemahoa daintily, delicately, as the Bruxo spoke stumblingly on from the doorway.

“The thinking brain has come outside. Have dreams left the Xemahoa people then? he asks. No, for Kayapi my son from Outside, who knows the Outside World, will put dreams back inside the Xemahoa stone. How? Watch him. Water is gone from xe-wo-i—that’s the tree the fungus is parasitic on. The maka-i mother has gone to lie in xe-wo-i’s arms—”

The Bruxo stumbled towards the crowd which divided and fell in behind him and Kayapi, as Kayapi bore the baby out into the jungle, holding it high.

They came to the tree where Chester had lodged the mother’s body—it still hung in the tree crotch. “Hey, is that the tree?”

“How the hell do I know?” snapped Pierre. “I told you I never knew—”

“Big coincidence,” sneered Chester. “Maybe he’s just making out that’s the fungus tree. Somebody must have slipped into their hut and told them I put her there. Everything’s grist to that bastard’s mill—”

“Maybe the Bruxo divined it,” sniggered Zwingler.

“Shut up, he’s saying she is buried in the sky—I suppose he means the air, rather than underground—so that maka-i may have room to reenter the earth and the Xemahoa to dream new dreams—”

“He’s planning on getting rid of the baby, I’m telling you—I can smell it a mile off!”

“Damn it, Chester, we’re powerless—watch!—be an observer.”

“At least until you hear your helicopter coming,” Pierre smiled grimly.

“At least till that.”

Kayapi knelt by the tree roots, laid the baby down on the still wet soil, began scooping at the mud like a dog with his forepaws intent on burying a bone.

Dug a hole.

Some of the yellow clay he exposed he scooped into his mouth, chewed and swallowed down.

“Bruxo says he will return to the Xemahoa people—to the inside of the tribe—bringing inside with him what was outside, the escaped dreams—”

Kayapi picked the baby up—and the women groaned in unison—and the men gave vent to guttural barking laughter.

Abruptly he brought the baby to his mouth, sank his teeth into the brain hernias. For minutes he gnawed as ravenous-seeming as a wild dog or vulture at the baby’s brain hernias, while the women groaned and the men laughed, gulping that living brainmatter down till he’d peeled brain back to the smooth rifted skull.

Sole vomited as Kayapi’s tongue flicked into the fissures deep as he could, slobbering at the soft baby skull in a cannibalistic french kiss.

Finally he thrust the spent body into the hole he’d dug, without touching the hernias of the guts, pressed down the soil around it, hid it; patted the soil down with a smug grin…

Face distorted, Pierre stared at Sole and his pool of root and fish vomit.

“You sell brains, now he eats them!” he screamed. “Oh but the universe is a filthy cannibal place—existence itself is exploitation! Don’t your space monsters just prove that too. Come on Chris, tell me some more about the wonders of the galaxy—then let’s get out there and eat knowledge!” Pierre jabbed a finger viciously up at the overhead leafcover, hiding the bland cold stars…

Thereafter Kayapi strutted about, while the old Bruxo lay in a state of collapse inside the taboo hut on the pallet where the baby had been born.

Chester watched over the old man sullenly—over the last remaining Self-Embedding Brain—trying to make things tolerable for him.