Sitting on the plane flying West, Sole listened in on the seat earphones to the different stations whose airspace they were passing through. WBNS, Columbus Ohio. WXCL, Peoria Illinois. KWKY, Des Moines Iowa. KMMJ, Grand Island Nebraska.
Station KMMJ was playing some oldies from West Coast acidrock bands.
The Jefferson Airplane sang:
‘Hijack the Starship!
They’ll be building it up in the air ever since 1980
People with a clever plan can assume the role of the Mighty
Hi-jack the Starship!
And our babes’ll wander naked thru the Cities of the Universe—‘
The album was called Blows Against the Empire.
And yet, thought Sole, the Empire still stands strong. Intercepting the first real starship. Orbiting it over oceans where none of the people, except a few frostbitten Icelanders and sailors on the high seas can see it. Flooding the Amazon. Funding through dummy foundations neuro-therapy units in other lands.
He glanced at Zwingler. The American was sleeping like a prim babe in his seat. Wasn’t it a fact that all those who were in the know wanted to get this embarrassing alien business cleared out of the way as quickly and clinically as possible, so that they could get back to their own obsessions again—whether these happened to be the breaking of Chinese codes, the flooding of Brazil… or the rearing of Indo-Pak refugee children to speak alien languages?
Zwingler was right. The visitation was as idiotic and annoying as a bout of flu—but maybe as potentially lethal as a dose of flu had been to isolated tribes in the South Pacific.
So the aliens had invited the Leapfrog crew into a cage of glass—and now this plane was heading for a manmade cage of sand hidden in Nevada. Which raised the question: who was quarantining who?
On Station KMMJ the Jefferson Airplane sang:
‘In nineteen hundred and seventy five
All the people rose from the countryside
To move against you government man
D’you understand?’
Sorry, Jefferson Airplane, murmured Sole, it’s later than that already, and the Empire still stands firm.
Bored with the radio sounds, but unable to sleep, Sole hunted through his pockets till he found Pierre’s letter. Idly, he recommenced reading it.
‘…Their Bruxo is practising with amazing skill that deep embedding of language—that Rousselian embedding which we talked about so long ago in Africa as the most freakish of possibilities.
‘To do this, he makes use of some psychedelic drug. I haven’t yet pinned down the origin of it. Every night he chants the complex myths of the tribe—and the structure of these myths is reflected directly in the structure of the embedded language, which the drug enables him to understand.
This embedded speech keeps the soul of the tribe, their myths, secret. But it also permits the Xemahoa to participate in their myth life as a direct experience during the dance chant. The daily vernacular (Xemahoa A) passes through an extremely sophisticated recoding process, which breaks down the linear features of normal language and returns the Xemahoa people to the space-time unity which we other human beings have blinded ourselves to. For our languages all set a barrier—a great filter—up for us between Reality and our Idea of Reality.
In some ways Xemahoa B is the truest language I have ever come across. In other respects, of course—for all practical purposes of daily life—it directs crippling blows at our straightforward logical vision of the world. It is a lunatic language, like Roussel’s, only worse. The unaided mind has no hope of holding on to it. But in their hallucinations these Indians have found the vital elixir of understanding!’
And now Sole sat up and really took notice. Reaching overhead, he directed the cool-air nozzle on to his face to sharpen his attention. He felt a surge of excitement—of dark doorways opening—as though it was the whole outside world he was breathing through the lungs of the plane, as he read on:
‘…The old Bruxo snorts this drug through a cane tube into his bleeding, rotting nostrils—and he aims for no less than a total statement of Reality uttered in the eternal present of the drug trance. And by achieving a total statement of reality, to be able to control and manipulate that reality. The age-old dream of the wizard!
‘But what wizard has set himself up against such dragons? The whole weight of American imperialist technology. The Brazilian military dictatorship. Imposing their will on this jungle from afar, while the Indians within it are trapped as casually as flies are trapped on a fly-strip, whilst the making of the meal goes on—the great feasting of the giants on the Amazon’s wealth: the meal of spectacular consumption.
‘The Bruxo is killing himself in the process. No shaman has ever dared stay high on this drug so long before—except for some myth figure, the world-creating culture hero Xemahawo, who vanished on the day of creation of the world, dissolving into the environment like a flock of birds scattering in the forest.
‘For the Bruxo and for the Xemahoa, knowledge isn’t an abstract thing, but something coded in terms of the birds and beasts, and rocks and plants, of the jungle—in terms of the clouds and stars above the jungle—in terms of the concrete actuality of the world. Therefore total description of this knowledge is no abstract thing—but a taking-hold of the actual reality about them. And to take hold of reality is to control it—to manipulate it. So he hopes!
‘Soon, he will hold a giant embedded statement of all the coded myths of the tribe in his present consciousness. Day by day, in the drug dance, he adds more material to this statement of a totality of meaning—all the while maintaining his awareness of past days and past material as something ever-present by means of the maka-i drug—despite the terrible overload on brain and body.
‘Soon, he may achieve total consciousness of Being.
Soon, the total scheme underlying symbolic thought may be clear to him.
If this is true? That would be incredible indeed. In such a place! Such a “primitive” backwater!
‘Incredible—and damnable. For just as this occurs, the genius-fly is about to be drowned, poxed out, poisoned—on that orange fly-strip of a dam! If only some of its poison might fall into the gluttonous feast of the exploiters…
‘I take the opportunity of sending this cry of rage out by way of a halfcaste who is passing through. He should reach that bloody dam in about a week, and get the letter posted. He’s cagey about why he’s making the journey. Maybe he’s found some diamonds—who knows? After all, this mess is supposed to contain El Dorado!
‘I at least suspect I’ve found my own El Dorado of the human mind here—at the moment it is due to be swept away.
They embed the Amazon in a sea you can see from the Moon—and drown the human mind in the process.
To yourself and Eileen, my useless love.
—Pierre Darriand.’
On the way over Utah, Station KSL announced the launch of the spectacular new Russian transpolar satellite.
“—Reports say it’s brighter than the planet Venus. Only, you won’t be able to see it unless you’re an eskimo or a headhunter in the South Seas. Other news at this late-night news hour. NASA has quashed speculation that this week’s launch from Cape Kennedy to Skylab Orbiting Laboratory carried a Russian scientist on board—”
Zwingler had woken up by now and was listening intently on his own seat’s earphones.
“You hear that, Chris? The Globe’s in the right orbit—”