NINETEEN
Roused from sleep, Sciavoni gulped down a benzedrine tablet and a glass of milk then pulled on his clothes and stumbled from the room with the military policeman who wakened him.
Silverson was waiting for him on the ground floor.
“Before you talk to the alien, Mr Sciavoni—Franklin has had to send out a search and rescue mission to look for Zwingler and his Indians.”
Sciavoni, who had been dreaming an Italian spaghetti Western till just a couple of minutes before, found this information faintly confusing and shook his head sleepily, hoping the pill would hurry up and take effect.
“The thing is,” Silverson whispered, as they headed for the door to outside, “guerrilla activity’s getting worse down there. We just heard the bastards dynamited Project Headquarters in Santarém. Apparently the whole situation has been much worse than the Brazilian authorities realized. In a sense, this exonerates us for blowing that dam. Let’s say it confuses the issue nicely. But we still don’t know where Zwingler and that man Sole are, even if they’re still alive—”
“So I have to stall Ph’theri?”
“Yes, that’s no joke,” sympathized Silverson. “But that isn’t all. I fear our friends made too good a job of blowing the dam. The really worrying thing is reports of the sheer volume of water emptying down that river. We’re afraid the lower dam is going to be overtopped. If that happens and the weight of both lakes gets down to the primary dam upstream of Santarém—well, that’s that. I wouldn’t like to be in Santarém.”
Sciavoni passed a hand over his tousled wiry hair agitatedly. NASA spent billions of dollars to safeguard the lives of a trio of human beings a quarter million miles from home—the idea of protecting life sank in after a while.
“Still,” Silverson consoled, “I hear the guerrillas blew up a barge-load of gelignite inside one of the locks at Santarém. So when the structure fails, it can always be blamed on them. It’ll make it seem more plausible they sabotaged the upper dam too.”
“Bad. It’s bad. Look Silverson, I can’t concentrate on that aspect right now. All I want to know about is Sole and Zwingler and those precious Indians.”
“Well, like I said. Franklin has a search mounted now. They know roughly where to look.”
However, Ph’theri wasn’t to be stalled, out there under the stars which were his stars.
“Forty-eight hours,” the alien said sharply, raising his hand. “The time bonus lapses—”
“It’s the terrain, Ph’theri. Dense jungle, it’s terribly difficult…”
“Is there any real evidence for the existence of this Self-Embedding Brain? We have traded with species who thought themselves wily, before.”
“I resent that, Ph’theri. We’re going to a lot of trouble to get that brain for you.”
“Where are the ordinary brain units?”
“They’re all here now, Mr Sciavoni,” Silverson said brightly. “The Soviets came through with theirs about half an hour ago. I guess their SST landing was what alerted Ph’theri.”
“Good,” said Ph’theri. “Let us get on with that transfer, at least. We have dissected the corpse. We will perform brain excision together with eyes and elements of the spinal column. Subsequent testing procedures should occupy another twenty-four hours, which will allow you time to establish the intelligibility of the data we transfer to you. If there is no sign of the Self-Embedding Brain by then, we will wait another twenty-four hours, then we shall have to leave—”
Two other Sp’thra, who must have been monitoring the conversation, appeared in the doorway of the scoutship. They carried a display screen with a small control panel down the ramp and set it on the concrete before Sciavoni.
“This is programmed with the relevant information. And now, the brain-units please,” Ph’theri insisted.
Reluctantly, Sciavoni called out instructions; and shortly after that the first of six mobile stretchers with a sedated human form on it was wheeled through the glass doors.
Sciavoni hurriedly bent to inspect the data screen.
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—”