The Embedding

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Ian Watson's brilliant debut novel was one of the most significant publications in British SF in the 1970s. Intellectually bracing and grippingly written, it is the story of three experiments in linguistics, and is driven by a searching analysis of the nature of communication. Deep in the Brazilian jungle, an isolated tribe face eviction from their ancestral lands - and the psychedelic fungus that makes their religious language possible. In a British laboratory, a brilliant linguist conducts cutting-edge experiments - but does his search for answers come at too high a cost? And in the ultimate test of linguistics, First Contact presents a challenge unlike any humanity has faced before . . . Fiercely intelligent, energetic and challenging, The Embedding immediately established Watson as a writer of rare power and vision, and is now recognized as a modern classic of SF.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 252

Sample

CHRIS SOLE DRESSED quickly. Eileen had already called him once. The second time she called him, the postman had been to the door.

“There’s a letter from Brazil,” she shouted from the foot of the stairs. “It’s from Pierre—”

Pierre? What was he writing for? The news bothered him. Eileen had been so distant and detached since their boy was born-involved in herself and Peter and memories. It wasn’t a detachment he found it particularly easy to break through any more-or, to be frank, that he cared to. So what effect would this letter from her one-time lover have on her? He hoped it wouldn’t be too troublesome.

The landing window gave a quick hint of black fields, other staff houses, the Hospital half a mile away on top of the hill. He glanced momentarily-and shivered with morning misgivings. They often attacked him between waking up and getting to the Hospital.

In the kitchen, three-year-old Peter was making a noisy mess of his breakfast-mashing cornflakes and milk in his bowl, while Eileen stood skimming through the letter.

Sole sat down opposite Peter and buttered a slice of toast. Casually he examined the boy’s face. Didn’t these thin foxy features add up to an image of the Pierre who so many years ago had been photographed as a small boy in a field of marguerites somewhere in France? Already the boy had the same pointed urgency as Pierre, and the glossy brown eyes of a dog fox on the prowl.

Sole’s own face had a sort of phoney distinction about it. It was too well balanced. Slide a mirror up against his nose and he wasn’t split into two different faces, like most people, but a pair of identical twins. This balance of the features was initially impressive, but the end result was a cancelling out of one side of the man by the other, more visible as the years went by.

He glanced at Eileen as she read. She was slightly taller than he was and her eyes had an in-between colour that her last passport described as grey, but which could easily be blue. They’d seemed bluer in Africa-the blue of swimming pools and open skies, which the airmail paper now briefly reflected.

Africa. Those hot still evenings when the open louvres brought no air into their flat and the beer came warm from the overloaded icebox. The brightly-lit university buildings there on the hill, and the yellow glow of the city a dozen miles away by the sea, with the sticky darkness in between syncopated by the mutter of drums. It had been good then, that rapport, that togetherness, before the sadness and the contradictions entered in. Before Pierre slipped over the border into Free Mozambique with Frelimo guerrilla fighters to study the sociology of liberation among the Makonde people on the far side of the Ruvuma river. Before Sole ever heard of the good and profitable destiny awaiting him in this English hospital unit. Before that final diffident encounter with Pierre in Paris four years ago, when Eileen had gone away with the Frenchman for a night and come back the next morning knowing how far their lives had separated and gone down different tracks.

“It seems he’s living with this tribe in the Amazon,” she said, “but they’re being flooded-fighting with poison arrows-and taking drugs—”

“Can I read it?”

She held on to the letter a moment longer, her fingers crumpling the paper to give it a touch of ownership; before surrendering it with a sad lost eroticism of gesture that made him ache, since it wasn’t directed at him. “Shall I read it out?” he asked.

He suspected his voice might rob these lines of the emotional content they possessed for her, so that what had been a love letter would become a mass of folklore and politics. Why do it then? To make some kind of physical contribution to the dialogue of Pierre and Eileen—which he hadn’t been able to join emotionally, though he reaped the fruits of the Frenchman’s ideas? Or to prove that the ideas were more important-and compete with the evidence of love Eileen had, in the shape of Peter? “Eileen?”

“I can’t concentrate right now. He’s getting milk all over the place. Read it yourself-I’ll finish it later—”

Wiping the boy’s mouth with a tissue, she stared at his features intently, then guided his hand on the spoon, picking stray cornflakes up with her other hand and dropping them into her saucer.

Sole cradled his hand round the letter guiltily, like a schoolboy not wanting his answers to be copied, and read.

“You may wonder why I’m using yourselves, Chris and Eileen, to vent my anger on? After so long too! But perhaps you, Chris, will understand when I say that there are some curious threads that lead through years and countries, linking dissimilar people, places and events-is this too mystical a thought for a marxist to entertain?-and that in this case it is that zany surrealist poem of Raymond Roussel’s that we talked about so often in Africa that is the link between yourselves and my own discoveries here and now among one particular Amazon tribe.

“These people have Hobson’s choice-doomed to be drowned if they stay where they are-or else destroyed by a life of tin huts, rum, prostitution and illness, if they’re ‘sensible’ enough to move out of the way of the flood that is even now covering up the whole surface of their world. Need I say nobody cares which option they choose.

“Issues seemed so simple in Africa, compared with here in the heart of Brazil. It was so easy to find an honourable and recognizable role to play in the Mozambique bush. Even the remotest Makonde tribesman knew what the political issues were, was aware of ’Politics’ as such…”

Damn it, he thought, apprehensive at the mention of Roussel’s name. Let Pierre get on trying to reform the world. Just leave me alone to discover what the world really is, how the mind of Man sees the world!

“But how can these Indians perceive any difference between the other Caraiba-that bastard Portuguese word the Indians use for any foreigners, including the European-descended Brazilians themselves-and myself? We’re all outsiders, aliens. Frenchmen, Americans. Right Wing, Left Wing. It’s all the same. Caraiba.

“Those who are aware of Politics, and the Politics of the Amazon Flood, seem so far away, city men occupied with city struggles. Even when they move out into the countryside to fight, what have they got to do with the Indians in their forests? What can they have to do, till the Indians have been destroyed as Indians and become poverty-stricken civilizados?

“So should I be in favour of a human zoo where these ’quaint savages’ can linger on in their interesting savagery? How much it goes against the grain to say, yes maybe-for the Indians there can be no political reply!

“How glad the Brazilian régime is of this distraction foisted on them by the Americans!-the glory of building the greatest inland sea on Earth, the only one of Man’s works visible from the Moon.

“It is a political project, though its victims know nothing of politics-and cannot be made aware of politics without introducing a kind of virus that destroys them. That’s the paradox that sickens me: my own impotence here. I can only record the death of this unique people. Mark up the indictment for the future. And to console myself, listen to my tape of Roussel’s crazy poem…”

Sole shuddered. A hot African sun used to warm their talk of Roussel and it had seemed so innocent and exciting then, the dawning idea of his own research. He remembered the view of red corrugated roofs from a rooftop bar. Shining white plaster walls. Flame trees. A mosque. Peugeots and Volkswagens parked in the dusty street below. The sellers of carvings squatting in shorts and torn shirts while Moslem women passed by on flip-flop sandals, their bodies wrapped in black shrouds, with parcels balanced on their heads. The beer bottles on the tin table slimy with condensation, as Pierre and he talked about a poem that was practically impossible for the human brain to process-which a machine would have to be built to read…

Warm and innocent then-but now that Vidya, Vasilki, Rama and Gulshen and the others were learning their lessons in the Special Environments at the Hospital, Pierre’s triggering of memories of that happy mood came with an accusing force.

As though Eileen had read his thoughts she looked up from the boy and said sharply:

“Chris, there’s something I wanted to ask you. You can finish reading the letter later on.” “What?”

“Nothing very important, I don’t suppose. Only, I was talking to one of the village women whose husband does gardening at the Hospital. She said something odd—”

“Yes?”

“That you’re teaching the children there bad language.”

Shock.

“Bad language? What does she mean? Doesn’t she know it’s a hospital for kids who can’t speak properly-who’ve suffered brain damage? Of course they speak bad language.”

Glancing at the paragraphs he’d just read, he found himself assaulted by certain phrases that would not leave him alone.

Such as ‘human zoo’ and ‘political project’.

The words had a faint aura round them on the paper-they blurred into a fog as though his brain was reluctant to process them. But wouldn’t disappear. Their very indistinctness irritated him, brought them nagging to his attention. Perhaps rain had dripped on to the paper while Pierre was writing, smearing these particular words before they had a chance to dry.

Eileen was watching her husband calmly.

“I know what the Unit’s supposed to be doing. That’s what I told her, what you’ve just said to me. But you know how these country wives go all mysterious and confidential. She knew the Hospital was up to something else, she said-something secret and shameful. And what it was, was teaching children bad language—”

“So what does she mean by bad language then? What’s her definition?” he demanded.

“I said about the brain damage and speech defects,” she shrugged, “but that wasn’t what she meant.”

Sole drank some coffee swiftly, scalding his mouth, and laughed.

“I wonder what the poor gossipy bitch thinks we’re up to? Teaching the kids to lisp out ‘fuck’ and ‘bugger’?”

“No, Chris, I don’t feel she was talking about ‘fuck’ and ’bugger’.”

The Victorian wrought-iron pub table by the window was piled with spice jars and cook books-it had cost twenty pounds at an auction and they’d painted it white together when she was five months pregnant, imagining the child sitting at it in a high chair while Sole sat opposite, drinking a glass of beer maybe and steering the child’s early efforts at speech.

“The gardener’s wife! It’s just a bit of nonsense.”

But Eileen persisted, touching Peter anxiously as though the boy was threatened by events at the Hospital.

“You used to talk to Pierre about bad language. You didn’t mean swearing then. You meant wrong languages.”

“Listen Eileen, a child speaks bad language when its brain’s damaged. It has difficulties-has to be taught by roundabout routes.”

“She also said—”

“Yes?”

“There’s a front and a back to the Hospital. The real work goes on in special rooms you can’t get into without a pass. And it isn’t curing the children at all but making them sick. That’s where the bad language comes in. Or do I say bad languages, plural? Is that more accurate, Chris? What is going on at the Unit? Is it despicable-or something I can admire?”

“Damn it, the woman’s just describing any hospital! There are always closed wards.”

“But it isn’t a mental hospital.”

Sole shrugged, noticed the blue ghost of a ‘human zoo’ trying to catch his eye.

“Any hospital dealing with damaged brains is a kind of mental hospital at the same time as it’s a physical hospital. You can’t draw a line between the two. Language is a mental thing. Damn it, they hired a linguist in me, not a doctor.”

“So they did.”

Eileen watched curiously as he folded the airletter, stuffed it back into the envelope and put it in his pocket. She didn’t raise any objection to his taking it away.

As he walked up to the Unit, Sole watched the sky lightening into a calm crisp blue day, sucked in the clean cold air and blew it out ahead of him as white smoke.

How about being in Alaska, where your spittle hit the ground as a tight ice ball that bounced and rolled? That would be something.

Or in Brazil?

How about being Pierre? Confident anguished idealistic Pierre.

So difficult to imagine the otherness of another person. Yet wasn’t that his own task at the Hospital-to create otherness? Oh Vidya, and all you others: will you really tell us so much about what humanity is, through our little act of inhumanity?

Inevitable that somebody somewhere should try out this set of experiments sooner or later. It had cropped up in the literature for years. The yearning to try it out became a kind of pornography after a while, a sort of scientific masturbation. To raise children in isolation speaking specially designed languages.

He walked up a gravel drive between lofty skeletons of poplars and bushes like wire sculpture models of mind that might have been made in the Hospital and thrown out as too simple.

The Unit itself was a large country house with modern functional wings added on at the sides and rear, where it jutted back into several dozen acres of close-packed firs that stretched half a mile behind the building and along its flanks in a great green skirt that grew taller and thicker year by year.

Sole had been into the plantation a couple of times but found it hard going. All the low interlocking branches and uneven sods underfoot. Anyway, there was nothing to see among the trees except more of the same. No dells or glades in there, no rides cutting through them.

(Fifty feet inside the green gloom, and it’s another world. The traveller loses all sense of direction. The monotony and alienation of endless wastes of savage vegetation bear down on him. To journey a hundred yards he has to crawl on his belly, humping himself over fallen logs, and wriggling through a network of creepers; or hack a path clear for himself in the most exhausting and futile manner imaginable…)

The elegant central mansion was bracketed incongruously by the concrete wings. Before it, twin stone lions thrust out their paws on to a lawn pocked with molecasts. Brown eruptions marked the turf like boils on a once-lovely complexion. Gardener, indeed!

The figure in the purple raincoat striding along the field path was the biochemist Zahl.

Sole thrust Pierre’s letter deeper in his pocket, feeling otherwise it might fall out and be lost before he had time to read it.

Half a dozen cars stood parked on the gravel, and a lowslung United States Air Force ambulance.

The brass nameplate read:

HADDON NEUROTHERAPY UNIT.

He pushed the heavy door open and was assaulted by the hot dry air within. Crossing the hallway between the wards in the righthand wing and the service areas in the left, where computer room, kitchens, surgery and lab were, he paused by the Christmas tree at the foot of the great oak staircase leading to the nurses’ quarters.

It was losing so many needles in this heat. What a scurf of green it was scattering on the tiles.

A nurse passed behind him, wheeling a trolley stacked with dirty plates from the kids’ breakfast, rolling it gently on rubber wheels, the only noise to mark its passage a faint percussion of china rocking against greasy china.

Paper streamers crisscrossed the corridors and hallway. Balloons, pinned over doorways, seemed to summon different kinds of attention. Blue attention. Green attention. Red attention. Different areas of the injured brain blowing empty speech bubbles.

What would the bubbles be filled with?

Accusations? Or the key to reality? The E=MC2 of the mind?

The spring door locked behind him automatically. There was a short corridor with a second door at the end of it. He chose a second key, unlocked the door and walked through into the rear wing, where fir branches reached out to brush the windows. A corridor ran right round the outside of the wing.

The window glass bore a fine mesh of wires within it, low voltage electrified, computer monitored as part of the alarm system.

To look down from the upper windows of the manor house on to this rear wing would show you great opaque skylights that lit the rooms within the circuit of the corridor-a blank aquarium.

He unlocked his office, switched on the neon strip lights to buck up the weak winter light filtering from overhead, then as he always did first thing in the morning sat before the monitor screen and switched on.

Bad language, Eileen? Oh yes-the worst, and the best!

The screen flickered and unfogged. In a large undulating playroom two naked dark-skinned children, boy and girl, were rolling a giant beachball along. They were three or four years old. Another naked girl wandered after them, dragging a coiled plastic tube, and a second boy brought up the rear, holding his hands out before him, pretending to be blind and feeling his way.

Sole touched another switch and the sound of voices came from the playroom. However these weren’t the children’s voices.

He panned the camera-past the transparent-walled maze-to the great wall-screen that was the source of the voices. The magnified images of Chris Sole and computer man Lionel Rosson moved on it.

The voices were theirs. And yet, not exactly theirs. The speech computer had taken their voices apart and put them together again. Otherwise their words wouldn’t have flowed naturally. Sole couldn’t have framed the sentences he heard his recorded voice saying, without a great deal of hesitation. They were English sentences, yet so un-English. It was the arrangement of those strings of words that caused the confusion. The words themselves were simple enough. Such kids’ talk. Yet organized as no kids’ talk before, so that adults couldn’t for the life of them follow it without a printout of the speech with a maze of brackets breaking it up to reestablish patterns the mind was used to processing.

It was Roussel speech.

Pierre had been appalled and intrigued by the arrogant way Raymond Roussel pushed his poetry past the bounds of human comprehension. The poem New Impressions of Africa became a sort of mistress for Pierre, one he constantly quarrelled with, but who continued to fascinate him. Her aristocratic manners repelled him. He wanted to master her, for the sake of logic and justice. If only he could know her completely, through one long night of understanding, he’d be free of his temptress. But like all great temptresses, this poem had her hidden wiles—her tricks. She hypnotized. She induced loss of memory.

The only way of getting near to the heart of her—if only to stab her in the heart and be done with her!—was by hearing the words she spoke. Yet the maze they formed forever defeated the unaided human mind. If Logic was so easily put to flight by a poem, what hope was there for the reform of the world itself by logic? This mistress was an elegant bitch, a Salomé who cared not a hoot for the Third World and the Poor—a constant reminder to Pierre of the falsity of the aesthetic choice in life. Beauty instead of truth.

And right now, unaccountably, she was actually consoling Pierre in the midst of the injustices he witnessed in the Brazilian jungle!

It was this contradiction that made Sole pull out the letter again in search of a clue.

The words on the stamp read ORDER AND PROGRESS—the motto of Brazil, given a new and insistent reality by the military régime.

He chose a page where he noticed Roussel’s name leering out at him.

“… I may as well write to you as to anyone else—at least you will appreciate the uniqueness of this particular tribe.

“They call themselves Xemahoa, but they may not be around to call themselves anything for very much longer, in spite of the incredible last stand of their tribal shaman, their Bruxo—a last stand not conducted with bows and poison arrows and blowpipes however!

“They have so little idea of the enormity of what they are up against; what pawns (oh less than pawns!) they are in their own jungle home t. . .