The Martian Inca

Book 167: Gateway Essentials

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

The Mars Probe has crashed. A triumph of Soviet technology, the first two-way interplanetary probe performed brilliantly until the final stage of its return. Then something went wrong: rather than following its programmed course to a soft landing in its country of origin, the probe crashed in the Peruvian Andes. Now a weird infection beyond the understanding of medical science has wiped out an entire village - except for one man, who, alone and undiscovered by medics, survives. He has awakened to find himself become his own ancestor, and a god. Suddenly the flames of an Indian revolution are spreading South America; he is the Martian Inca.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 306

Sample

THE VILLAGE OF Apusquiy clung to the base of a I double mountain on the edge of the interminable yellow-brown flatland.

Apusquiy was all of slanting steps and shelves. Even its central plaza was two-tiered; and on the upper tier a rectangular marquee of poles and kaleidoscopic woollen blankets had just been erected.

Julio Capac surveyed it with satisfaction. His dozen helpers sat around drinking from some of the hundred bottles of watered cane alcohol stored inside.

This was the first carnival fiesta he had sponsored; the first real rung on the ladder of village life. Military service the previous year made him a fully-fledged man, but the fiesta would make him a respected, prestigious individual, someone whose advice was sought and carried weight. Some day in the future, after sponsoring more fiestas, he would be a mallku, headman.

Even this minor fiesta cost all the wages he had saved during three months’ labour in the tin mines. Alcohol, cigarettes and coca; several hundred kilos of potatoes, peas, beans, and barley. Money! Life was never cheap or simple if you wanted your voice to be heard. But he would be a great speaker, a great maestro of life’s etiquette, a great giver of celebrations.

He blew a kiss to the Sun, for luck.

Like other Apusquenos, he was short and dark, his skin almost chocolate brown apart from his cheeks, which bulged out in glowing red apples, chapped and swollen by sun and wind.

Cheeks also were swollen by chewing coca. His helpers had all been munching spinachy green quids as they laboured on the marquee, making the labour seem timeless and painless. Spent wads dried to lichenous crusts on the ground. But only lifelong adolescents became prisoners of coca, with stinking, shaking lips.

“Christobal!” Julio shouted. “Is someone watching? Has he a rocket?”

Of course. A boy was up at the cemetery. But a real organizer kept every string in his grasp, however long the string. It was a good idea to give each string a tug now and then. Christobal Pinco, Julio’s majordomo for the fiesta, shouted confirmation.

People were arriving now: from neighbouring Quepa, and from the more distant Aymara-speaking village of Santa Rosa. The Santa Rosans were easily distinguished by the floppy style of their knitted caps, earflaps hanging down like grey baggy old women’s udders. Those people were a nuisance. They never managed to speak Quechua properly. Always you had to talk to them in their own Aymara. When their clumsy tongues did attempt Quechua, as like as not they turned a gentleman into a lake of grease.

Still, they brought vegetables and bottles of beer with them—though it was hard to see how you could fit them into the web of presents and obligations! A problem for Christobal. He already had his notebook and pencil out, was jotting down details.

A Santa Rosan man who had worked with Julio in the mines greeted him boisterously in incoherent Quechua. After other slovenly greetings the Santa Rosan contingent settled down on the southern side of the lower half of the plaza. The native Apusquenos found their time-honoured sites in the upper half. Bottles began to pass from the marquee. Donations passed inward—though less frequently. Christobal scribbled away. Smells of steamed dough and potato soup drifted out.

Up in the jumbled cemetery above the village, a boy sat on top of a small grave-hut of sods, staring out along the thin line of the road to San Rafael. Only the boy’s mouth moved slightly, munching garlic. Before him the Altiplano stretched flat as a table to the westward, achieving a kind of infinity: for the distant Western Cordilleras pushed up their white-tipped wall from a base far below the horizon itself, as though built out on a platform beyond the rim of the world. Yet there was nothing vague about that other, far mountain chain. The peaks looked as sharp as the teeth on a saw. Visibility on the Altiplano was the visibility of Space. The plain’s thin frigid air was drenched with light by a near equatorial sun that yielded hardly any heat, but an abundance of pure light.

As a distant dot became a tiny truck, the boy snapped out of his trance and scrambled down to where a rocket was propped in a bottle half buried in the dirt. Laid out on a stone were a few matches and twists of paper. While the truck crawled forward the boy kneaded his hands together patiently, restoring life to them.

A solitary tree grew in the graveyard: a dark twisted kenua which stooped like an ancient grandmother twisted by arthritis. Or rather, it never grew, but never died either—like the village.

The boy bent and plucked some velvety yellow gentian blooms and hid them under the llama-hide flap of his cap. A certain girl had teased him with her provocations at the last fiesta …

Now he could make out passengers on the truck: mites on a beetle. He struck a match, lit a paper spill.

Erupting from the bottle, the rocket left a blue milky ghost boiling angrily within unbroken glass. A good sign. The boy dropped one flower down the bottleneck, whispering a quick prayer, for luck.

And then the rocket burst high over Apusquiy, showering it with orange daylight stars.

“Baltasar Quispe is returning to us from the army!” Julio bellowed at the crowd. However it was still too early to start his speech. He ordered the youth in charge of rockets in the plaza to fire one. At his signal, the church bell began tolling too; for this wasn’t just a welcoming-home fiesta, it was the third day of March as well. Holy Cross. Cleverly, Julio sponsored two-in-one.

When green stars rained over the plaza, the band struck up, their cane pan-pipes fluting up and down the scale, drums banging.

Julio sat, excited, upon the single stone bench, place of honour adjacent to his marquee. He needed all his energy. He had no wife to carry him home when drunk. That was a problem to be faced soon. But for Angelina Sonco’s curious perversity in undertaking a trial marriage with Martin Checa it would have been dealt with already—decisively, delightfully. Plucking leaves from the pouch under his poncho, Julio stuffed them into his mouth, peeling the stalks through his teeth. From a little gourd on the thong, he added lime powder to the moist ball in his mouth. He sucked and chewed and spat saliva. The coca taste was bitter, fragrant, numbing. Inhaling, he filled his lungs with its savour.

Another twenty minutes elapsed before the Mercedes truck ground into the plaza, bearing a corral of people and beasts behind the cab. Most passengers were Apusquenos coming back from trading potatoes, llama and mutton in the nearest big town, San Rafael. Baltasar Quispe sat in front with the driver, as befitted his far longer journey.

Jumping down, Baltasar hugged his mother and father and sister. He looked something of a stranger, dressed in his grey military fatigues, till Julio strode over, pulled off his own bright chullu cap and jammed it down on Baltasar’s crewcut skull. Everybody burst out laughing. Baltasar began unloading his gifts: a cage of scuttling guinea pigs, a box of dried fish, a case of canned trout, and tropical fruits hardly ever seen here. He passed out bananas, oranges and papayas almost too fast for Christobal to keep a record of who received what.

The most important gift he reserved for Julio—even though only Julio Capac could be shown it. Baltasar pressed a bundle of sacking on him, and whispered in his ear.

An automatic rifle with sights.

“Now we can shoot vicuna,” chuckled Baltasar, deftly including himself back in co-ownership of the gift. “We’ll go up Apup-Chaypi—to our secret place, where we saw them, eh? You’ll grow rich on the skins? Then you’ll be able to take on the Saint Peter feast.”

“My dear friend!” breathed Julio.

“But … pacta, take care!”

Julio nodded, glancing at the Santa Rosans. Hunting vicuna was one of those strange illegal things; and ever since the Government made Santa Rosa the county capital, Santa Rosans tended to put on airs and throw their weight about. It wouldn’t do to have them knowing. Obviously absurd laws were made to be used, not to use you. In this case they simply made a few vicuna skins very valuable—enough to pay for a whole fiesta! Still, pacta, as Baltasar had observed … Julio rushed into the marquee and bundled the sacking away behind piles of potatoes.

Returning, he climbed on to the stone bench.

“Rimanaymi!” he shouted. “I am about to speak …” He raised one hand, palm outwards, and patted his ear. The crowd and the band fell silent; after a moment, the church bell too.

“Now, six months’ military service is no small thing. A service to society! That’s what they say in La Paz, those mallku soldiers who want to stick a finger in everyone’s affairs and leave nobody’s strip of land alone. Well, they should know. They’re all true Bolivians.”

Mockingly he rubbed his finger across his upper lip, and the crowd laughed appreciatively. Facial hair was a sure sign of European ancestry.

“But who is this working class they serve? Is it the people of Apusquiy or any of our sort? No, it means a few tin miners. A few factory workers. Now, I’ve been a tin miner myself. When I had enough money for this fiesta I came straight back here, and I tell you I didn’t see many tin mines on the way home. I wouldn’t have had to go so far otherwise. I only saw campesinos like you and me. I think maybe the Common Man, for whom our mallku soldiers are making this revolution, aren’t so common! It was a hard thing and doubly burdensome for Baltasar Quispe to give service in these circumstances. He had to shoot at cousins who speak our language, not Spanish. This is no feud that we choose. Though we fight feuds when we do choose! It’s a war and a revolution for the miners and the labour unions—so that they can tell us how to farm our own land to feed them!”

He exaggerated slightly. The border feud with Peru and the Chilean blockade hardly amounted to a war. Still, the crowd growled agreement.

“Baltasar had been a brave soldier notwithstanding! Baltasar has had to listen, the same as me last year, to hours of their talk. Their ‘indoctrination’—without even a cheekful of coca to numb the boredom. He’s had to pull the flaps of his chullu down over his ears. Or he wouldn’t have come back here, the same Baltasar!”

Julio spoke much more to this effect. His Quechua words were sweet. His speech, a song. He put words together in new ways to describe the complexity of Baltasar’s service to the State; and he was admired for his coinages. His words weren’t stone statues, cut to one shape to stand for one thing only; but drops of mercury free to combine and recombine. They cast magnetic nets out into the Unknown. They drew the iron filings of the world into fresh and forceful shapes. Throughout all his speech throbbed the pulse of Man’s life; and the life of birds, beasts and mountains. The Government of the People’s Revolution co-existed with Puma and Condor: as another psychic beast that affected people’s spirits, while happening to occur in the real world too. His particular skill as an orator, several senior Apusquenos remarked that afternoon, was to put their Government in its proper place. Julio wasn’t worried that the Santa Rosa contingent would report him to the Government judge in their home village. He felt safe in his language, shielded. What other rampart had the Inca people possessed through all these years?

Finally, the crowd cheered Julio Capac as much as Baltasar Quispe.

The band played again. The people laughed. Women’s wide bright skirts spun round them, striped shawls flapping and tinkling with silver medallions, felt bowler hats turning like fat black potatoes on plates. Many of the men wore the knee breeches of courtiers naturalized from a world far away across a sea, four hundred years ago. They danced with arms linked. Then they danced in lines facing one another. Finally they danced as separate couples: and Julio Capac, flushed with success, was dancing with Angelina Sonco, whom he had chased up the mountainside after just such a dance, till he caught her and loved her, till she sighed and cried for him … But what use had that been!

“How long will you live with that man Martin?” he whispered. “It’s only sirvinacuy, not a full marriage. No children coming? You can still break with him. You know, it’s you who is stopping me from being sponsor of Saint Peter’s feast. I have to marry first. But who do I want to marry? Only you.

Without you by my side it would be such a hollow fiesta!”

But all she said, with a regretful humorous smile, was:

“Love if you have anyone to love, Julio.”

“But that’s you.”

“We’re too close in blood.”

“Nonsense.”

“Too close,” she repeated, her teeth flashing teasingly. Whereupon the dance of couples was at an end.

Beautiful was his Angelina. A vicuna he had chased in the mountain clefts and trapped for an hour, touching soft skin, taking soft flesh with his own flesh, losing his soul in exchange. But she was lost to him. She was the Hummingbird who flies straight through the Condor’s mouth and out again, escaping. Why?

The truck driver wandered over with a bottle of beer and accosted Julio in angry, tipsy Spanish. From his broad, dour features Julio knew him for an Aymara; but he had given up all his Indian culture to ape the European way.

The man spat out a froth of beer and coca juice.

“One of your admirers explained your pretty speech. You’re the world’s biggest reactionaries, you people, you know? How much do you spend on these fiestas? Everything! You work to burn money. And where do you think the profit goes? To the rich in the towns who sell you your liquor and fireworks and take your potatoes for a song! Do you ever get angry with them? No, only with the Revolution—just to keep every damned furrow separate from the next, to grow your own private potatoes to buy fireworks! That’s all your villages are—separate furrows fighting to stay weak, and bleeding themselves dry for pride.”

“Why drink our beer, if you hate the fiesta?” demanded Julio, incensed. “Is it as a fee for your advice? We can do without it. And what are you talking about? Baltasar and I fought for this Revolution of yours.”

“You always fight against it in your hearts! We won’t win or lose on the borders. They’re just thorns stuck in our sides by the Americans. All the people have to fight together, in their minds. Miners, truck drivers, campesinos. The lot. A mine union isn’t enough. An army isn’t enough. Yet you make a speech like that! You carrion.”

The driver seized hold of Julio’s poncho. Being a tall man, he pulled Julio up on tiptoes. Who knows how much of their alcohol he’d been drinking? What choice did he give Julio now but to fight him? Yet to start a fight on the occasion of this fiesta would be a poor thing. Besides, the man was Aymara. The Santa Rosans might join in.

Baltasar Quispe caught Julio’s shoulder and whirled him away.

“Julio, the sky!”

Other people were shouting and pointing now. The truck driver staggered back indecisively, bemused by the sudden commotion. Up in the sky, a trio of red birds were carrying a bright basket down in their claws and failing. As the birds tore loose one by one, the shining burden fell faster, over the village towards the mountainside. An orange sail broke free; then the thing had vanished behind the church, and they heard a thump.

Julio ran back into the marquee to recover the bundle with his gun in it. He wasn’t leaving that for anyone to pick up.

Already the crowd were moving out of the plaza by the main road, to see what they could pick up on the hillside; everyone getting in everyone’s way.

Julio and Baltasar took a zigzag side street, steep as a flight of steps, to bring them out ahead of the others.

“Aircraft?” panted Julio.

“Too small!”

“But made of metal—” A piece of fine metal would always find a multitude of uses. Most families still sheared their llamas with clippers of pounded, sharpened tin cans.

They waded through the tola bushes fringing the graveyard just as the vanguard of the crowd appeared.

Torn orange silk spread over two grave-huts. A third hut was destroyed by the impact of a steel sphere with sprouting fins and unreadable letters on its side.

The sphere had ruptured into three sections. A fire had started but fizzled out for lack of oxygen. Gruelly reddish sand spilled from the centre of the machine.

Julio touched the metal cautiously. Warm, but not too hot. Tugging a broken panel aside, he scooped red sand away to free the parachute silk trapped inside. Fine, tough silk. He bundled it up while Baltasar gathered the cleaner silk from the grave-huts.

As soon as the other Apusquenos arrived and failed to man-handle sufficiently large chunks of metal loose, an argument broke out about sharing the silk. Julio spoke up promptly with a compromise.

“We can’t go to Santa Rosa to ask the judge, or it’ll all be taken away! So listen to me: we’ll call a council to settle it. But we can’t do that today, during a fiesta. I think we should let Baltasar Quispe, whom we are honouring, be custodian of that silk he picked up over there to stop any wind blowing it away. As for this silk that I found inside—” He spotted Angelina in the crowd. “A big bundle! A big responsibility. I suggest the Sonco household. You all know I have no links with the Soncos, or with Martin Checa who lives there.”

Wadding the silk in his sandy hands, Julio pressed it upon Angelina, who turned away, embarrassed but amused, hiding her face in the silk until she sneezed convulsively; and sneezed again.

“The metal will have to stay here till tomorrow. Lift it if you can!”

A few men tried again abortively; then everyone set off downhill to resume the celebrations.

Back in the plaza, one voice suggesting—in Aymara—that they ought to report the crashed machine to Santa Rosa was shouted down angrily. It was broken up. No use but for scrap. Where had it come from anyway? There were only nonsense letters written on it, from some foreign country.

The fiesta gathered intensity. More rockets exploded in the sky. A small brass band took over from the pipes and drums. The men started drinking in earnest. The disillusioned truck driver changed his mind about staying the night and drove off for San Rafael, carrying only one or two passengers.

Julio and Baltasar drank till they were pleasantly tipsy and Julio chewed more coca than usual to keep himself awake. Because of this he didn’t feel particularly hungry, though there were platefuls of steaming quinua dough and hot chestnutty potato soup and hot pastries available to tempt him. They talked about Baltasar’s months in the Army, then about hunting vicuna and the cave they knew where they would skin the animals and hide the remains.

Perhaps Julio drank more than he realized. He began feeling sick. Not sick in the stomach, exactly. His whole body tingled as though electrified, then shivered and felt like lead.

H. . .