She was one of five people alive who’d spent enough time with the Pirahã tribe to learn their language. After nearly two years, she felt no closer to realizing her grandfather’s dream of uniting the remaining Master Builders. She watched the unique people working by the river. They would be considered primitive by western standards, yet out here in the deadly jungle, they were supremely gifted in all the ways necessary to ensure their continued survival. They knew the benefit of various important plants and where they were located, they intrinsically understood the behavior of local animals and how to catch them or avoid them, and they had the uncanny ability to walk into the jungle naked, with no tools or weapons, and walk out again with a basket of fruit, nuts, and small game.
Their culture was concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory. Pirahã have a simple kinship system that includes their immediate family. Daniel Everett, an anthropologist who spent more than thirty years living and working with them, noted the strongest of Pirahã values is no coercion. You simply don't tell other people what to do. There appears to be no social hierarchy and the Pirahã have no formal leaders. Their social system can thus be labeled as primitive communism, in common with many other hunter-gatherer cultures in the world, although rare in the Amazon because of a history of agriculture before Western contact.
The adult man whistled a melodic tune, and his son ran to the edge of the river and began dropping stones into the water. He made a different sound, and the boy stopped. A moment later, the man threw a spear at a group of fish that were swimming away from the falling stones. The spear connected with a fish. The man withdrew the spear and examined his catch. He smiled. It was a medium sized fish. No other sounds were made and all five of the family came over and quickly ate the fish raw.
Billie smiled. Their language was unique and totally unrelated to any other extant tongue. Based on just eight consonants and three vowels, the Pirahã had one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possessed such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations. They had no name for numbers or colors, although they occasionally joined two words to make the description of a color, such as blood-stone or bone-powder. They used morphological markers that encode aspectual notions, such as whether events were witnessed, whether the speaker was certain of its occurrence, whether it was desired, whether it was proximal or distal, and so on. Yet, none of the markers encode features such as person, number, tense or gender.
One of the other splendid features of their language which particularly separated it from all other spoken languages in any civilization currently living or not, was the fact that it was entirely devoid of any type of grammatical recursion — an attribute that every other language in the world shared. Grammatical recursion basically means that a story may have a subordinate idea or ideas inside. For example, in English, one might say a simple sentence such as, Michael has an earthy spear. Adding recursion to that sentence might lead the speaker to include the following, Michael, whom you know very well, has a brown spear. The recursion can continue almost indefinitely. For example one could say, Michael, whom you know very well, has an earthlike spear and it’s lying there beneath the tree. But of the three sentences, only the very first could be understood or communicated by the Pirahã.
Billie watched as one of the children, now full from the fish, patiently hand carved an airplane he’d seen in the sky, out of a piece of wood over the course of a number of hours. The same child, as with the rest of the tribe, was incapable and uninterested in drawing even simple shapes or pictures in the sand. Yet he was masterful at modelling complex shapes or designs. Once he finished making his airplane, he played with it for a few minutes before discarding it and walking away. She watched the boy disappear into the forest.
A moment later she stood up and strode down to the river to quench her thirst. She reveled in this time, with these strange people, because she knew the beast would return soon — and all of them, herself included, would once again be cast under its strange spell.
It would be coming for her — for all of them — very soon. The thought terrified her, while at the same time enthralling her and sending her heart into a flutter. It was nothing more than a cheap gimmick designed to enslave the primitive Pirahã tribe. There was nothing mysterious about the creature they called the Black Smoke. The thick smoke which engulfed the jungle like a blanket. It was immediately followed by an incredibly distinct and strange sound, which could be heard for miles — and, like the Sirens of Homer’s Odyssey, it drew all souls who heard it to follow.
She thought about the creature for a moment. The smoke could easily be explained by someone burning damp leaves. The voices were those of mortals and not Gods. The persuasiveness of those voices was enhanced by some chemical being burned. The smoke of any number of hallucinogenic, neurotoxic, or psychotropic plants had the power to enslave.
The one thing she couldn’t understand was the collective power the monster achieved with the primitive tribe, herself included. It was as though they were all hypnotized. She’d never been reduced to submission by anything or anyone before in her life. No one since the first grade right through to her most recent employer, Sam Reilly, had found a way to make her obedient.
But the Black Smoke rendered her powerless.
The thought of losing control again terrified her, but there was something else there, too. When she considered fleeing now, there was definitely a good chance she’d survive, but she couldn’t force herself to take the risk. It wasn’t because she was afraid of dying. Better to die than become something’s slave for an eternity. So why didn’t she want to run? Was it because she liked the idea of being subservient to the creature again? Even if she wanted to escape, she didn’t even know how far she’d have to go to escape its net. She was frightened by what it would do when it found her, but most of all she didn’t want to disappoint the creature. She laughed at herself at the thought. The creature — she was thinking of it as a living breathing thing now — was just smoke.
And there she had it. Something about the smoke was comforting. It was addictive, and she needed the generalized warmth, comfort, pleasure and satisfaction it provided. She recalled the euphoria at being able to perform a series of ancient masonry skills, which she’d never been taught. This, she realized, was how the Master Builders had achieved the construction of the pyramids. Not like a heroin addict needed the drug to feel okay, but more like she wanted to please it. She wanted to prove that she could build the most spectacular temple in the world. That she had been honored to be chosen to be part of this great process.
She could not run from it any more than a child could run from its mother. When the depth of her situation had become complete, she realized why the U.S. Military was so concerned about the Master Builders. Why they had spent so much money funding Sam Reilly’s research in secret. They knew about the mind controlling drugs the Master Builders had developed — they had the power to control the human race, turning everyone into puppets.
That was the final thought, which made her decision for her. No matter what she wanted, Billie needed to escape. She needed to get back to civilization. Someone needed to know of the most terrifying threat to the human race. She filled her bottles with water, and packed her backpack with the last of her food. Her pleasure and her joy were irrelevant given the situation. She needed to escape. She needed to get word to Sam Reilly, before it was too late.