by Edward Docx
‘I want to talk to you.’
He fixed his pale eyes on me as if reading something in my face that I did not concede. ‘This is a great habit of yours, Dr Forle, if I may say so – saying that you want to talk to a person when in actuality you already are talking to a person. You are here. You are talking to me. Let us not dispute it further.’
‘How long do you plan to use the Station as a registration post?’
He balanced the pan on the burner. The water slopped and brimmed its weight in chasing circles. The tiny stove would topple, I thought. The hut would surely burn, the trees, the forest.
‘Do you have a difficulty with this policy?’
‘No, I think it is a clever idea – thoroughly thought through and very well organized.’
He looked up sharply. ‘You are not without a sense of humour, Doctor. This is good. Those without a sense of humour cannot be trusted with anything.’ A precarious equilibrium had now been achieved and he straightened up to face me. ‘Well, what shall we do, then – you and I? What do you propose? What next? Every morning, it’s the same question – no?’
‘The jetty has collapsed,’ I said. ‘It’s unsafe. You can’t do anything else here until it is repaired. You can use our computer if you wish to send a message.’
‘To whom?’ His thumb had found the woman’s foot and begun a slow massage. She shifted her legs apart a fraction the better to accommodate his attention though her eyes remained on me. ‘To whom shall I send this message?’
‘I don’t know – whoever you want – but I’m telling you that we are here for four months and that I will not let you use the Station as a registration post until you have mended the jetty.’
‘I am enjoying this assertiveness, Dr Forle. Is it the woman or the drugs – or is something else inside you uncurling again?’
‘When that is done,’ I continued, ‘if you want to carry on here, then we will need to organize a system so that there are not too many people registering at once. We will also have to cordon off our side of the clearing.’ Our side. ‘I don’t want people wandering anywhere near the lab. The equipment in there is irreplaceable. We can’t afford to have anything damaged or stolen. Not just for our sake, but because – presumably – your government is going to want to rent the place out to scientists in the future.’
‘The savages are thieves and hooligans – is that it?’
‘In the meantime, you will have to set up somewhere else.’
Foam fell from his face. ‘I agree – I agree absolutely,’ he said.
‘Good.’ I was taken aback but I spoke without showing it. ‘Then that is decided: no registration here until the jetty is fixed.’
‘As you wish.’ He raised her foot to his lips.
‘Thank you.’
‘I will peddle my democracy elsewhere.’ He kissed further up her calf and she smiled. ‘Where it does not affect you.’
The water had started to boil. He let go of the foot and stepped smartly back to the table. I saw for the first time that he was carrying a cut-throat razor in the waistband of his pyjamas.
‘That look in your eyes makes me feel better, Doctor. It reminds me of home. Of the men I have sentenced.’
I hesitated. ‘Where is the Colonel?’
He took out the blade and sat as if to eat soup.
‘I have no idea. But he will be doing as he sees necessary. He goes on despite, Doctor, despite. Much like your friend, the German, I notice. It is you and I who are to blame with our observational natures. The absurd sham of non-engagement.’ He raised his jaw to scrape the blade up his throat and looked down his nose at me. ‘Who knows where the Colonel is? The Colonel is out there.’
He flicked foam from the blade. The woman had still not taken her eyes off me.
‘Ah, you may feign your disagreement and your disgust – especially in front of the women, Doctor – but you don’t really believe in all the mud and the huts. Not in your heart. Nobody does. When they ethnically cleansed America for those angry and disaffected Europeans, they also brought industry and endeavour and fortitude and civilization and law and medicine and welfare and technology and, yes, science. And in your heart you believe – despite the genocide – in your heart, you believe that it is better this way. We all do. It began – as it always begins – in blood and slaughter; it became conquest and slavery; and by way of shame and in need of disguise, it pulled on the robes of religion and then the suit and tie of the market; until eventually it came to’ – he laughed – ‘con-servationism.’
‘I will see you both this evening, I hope,’ I said.
Close beside the veranda, there was a maddened tree: the walking palm, Socratea exorrhiza. They lurch slowly through the forest on stilted roots in search of more light.
V
We gathered in the sanctuary of the lab. Lothar had made a flask of his treacle-thick morning coffee, which he poured into whiskey tumblers. We sat together at the bench amidst the welcome orderliness and calm.
I relayed the Judge’s assurances.
Kim wondered who would tell the Indians and the ribereños.
I said that my guess was that the Judge had either already decided to leave or that he would set up somewhere else and that, hopefully, everybody would come to know of the change by mid-afternoon in the same way that everybody in the jungle always did: quickly and mysteriously.
Felipe, meanwhile, felt that it was his pressing duty to spend the day attempting to return the Station to a measure of normality and cleanliness. He was worried about Jorge, who had not been seen since the trip to Machaguar. But most of all, he wanted to know what we thought he, Felipe, should do about the jetty.
Jorge would most likely come back on the same boat as Sole, we reckoned, and he might as well forget about the jetty.
After that we got on to the work and Lothar argued that it would be quicker for him to carry on cataloguing the results his marathon had generated rather than for Kim to take over and decode his jottings.
Kim agreed and expressed a great deal of appreciation for the hours he had put in.
I suggested that without Lothar or Felipe to act as guides, the best course was for Kim and me to go together to the cluster of easily accessed sites directly upriver that we both knew well. And that we should not waste any more time but start straight away.
VI
Stage Three
Not only did Darwin realize that the ants were his ‘one special difficulty’, but he was also the first person to think of a solution. This later came to be known as ‘kin-selection’. And, for a long time, this theory (developed and expanded by others) gave science a way around the problem: a way of explaining the cooperative ants without running up against the laws of natural selection and what came eventually to be thought of as the selfish gene.
Kin-selection works because of the strange way ants inherit their sex: fertilized eggs become female and unfertilized become male. The consequences of this method of gender determination are profound: it means that each new female ant is born three-quarters related to her sisters. Why? Because each sister has inherited an identical half of her genes from her father (since the male father was in effect a clone) to go alongside the standard shared quarter set of genes inherited from her non-clone mother. In other words, ants are more closely related to their sisters than they are to their parents or would be to their offspring.
Thus, it makes more sense, in terms of the genes, for a worker ant not to produce young but to devote herself instead to caring for her close-kinned sisters. And, once it becomes more beneficial to favour sisters over children, a colony is formed. As long as the queen is able to have more offspring as a result of each of her daughters’ communal attention to their sisters, then the shared genes will still be favoured and so disperse more quickly through the population.
In this way, for a while, biologists were able to preserve the gene’s eye view of natural selection and explain the cooperation of the colony.
But the ants def
y us at every turn. For now we know that they – our Myrmelachista more so than most – mock even this explanation. How so? Because in the Devil’s Gardens there are many queens. And the daughters of one queen behave cooperatively towards the daughters of another – behave cooperatively, that is, towards other ants to which they are not related. (In truth, we have long suspected that the lemon ants are cooperating between colonies. And this was the really significant work that Dr Quinn and I had in mind when we first began.)
So, in the third and most important phase of our study, our aim is to demonstrate – to prove – that the Myrmelachista are ‘helping’ one another when there is no good genetic reason to do so. Such a finding, we hope, will bring us directly into the crucible of the debate. For the only thing that ants cooperating across colonies have in common . . . is their species.
The stakes could not be higher.
On the one hand, we have the selfish-gene merchants, who claim that traits can evolve only for the good of the individual and not for the good of the group. This has many implications for biology, but also for our society: most of all, it turns the individual into the king of the biological hierarchy. Most of science covertly or explicitly subscribes to this view.
On the other hand, we have those who say that evolution is multi-level: yes, individuals evolve traits, but groups also succeed against one another and these groups will beat other groups in the evolutionary game. Evolution works both within the group and between the group. Further, the most successful groups may well comprise many altruistic individuals. Again, the implications echo through every aspect of our existence.
VII
Sole was lying asleep sideways on my bed. She had been waiting for me. In five strides, I was across to her. Her eyes were smiling, drowsy, as she shifted onto her back, but now they widened as she saw my intention. She feigned a playful fright, raised herself and offered her lips. I slipped her belt and slid her jeans leg from leg.
Afterwards, we lay together listening to the evening calls of the forest. During our separation, something had changed between us: the acts of lovers no longer acts, our bodies become messengers of deeper things.
‘So what was it?’ I asked. ‘What was wrong with Yolanda?’
Sole smiled. ‘It was a boy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She had been with a boy from one of the villages . . . and she got hepatitis. B and D together, the doctor said.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Fourteen.’
‘Christ.’
‘She couldn’t tell her father. Only her mother. She thought she was dying from bad magic.’
‘She would have died?’
‘The doctor said it happens – especially when you get complications.’ Sole rubbed her hand back and forth across my chest. ‘But Yolanda was lucky: my doctor, who is not a doctor, saved her life.’
‘I went to a party. You went to the hospital.’
‘That’s true.’ She smiled. ‘And I spent a lot of your money. You’ll probably have to sell your house and get a big drainpipe in Laberinto.’ She raised a finger – a bird was calling, three notes ascending in a minor key, sad and beautiful and hypnotic. A seringueiro. The light was beginning to fade.
After a while, she propped herself on her elbow and said, softly: ‘Tell me?’
‘What? Tell you what?’
‘Whatever it is that has changed your eyes.’
I felt my shoulders tense.
‘Please don’t lie,’ she said. ‘Or this becomes like everything else.’
I was aware of the sound of my own breathing.
‘I met a man at Machaguar,’ I said. ‘He introduced me to a soldier who went out to the plane that crashed . . . the plane that Quinn was in. The soldier told me what he had seen – the wreckage, the dead.’
She murmured.
‘I stayed at the bar after he left. I was drinking. Then one of the girls came over and sat with me. I bought some cocaine from her. Maybe that was what she was supposed to do – sell me cocaine first and then sex. I don’t know.’
‘Did you go with her?’
‘No. I took some of the cocaine. But it was strong – really strong. I left her the rest and went back to the river. I don’t know how. I was drunk. I felt like death.’
Gentle fingers traced the bones of my face.
‘Cocaine has always been here,’ she said.
‘I know that but after wh—’
‘And part of you has been hoping all this time that Dr Quinn was alive.’
‘Yes.’ I looked up at her steady eyes. ‘Yes, I have been hoping. And I have been lying to myself, too, about lots of things. But no more. What happens, happens. We just have to live.’
‘We do.’ She lay down beside me.
The room was almost dark. I wanted only the feeling of where our bodies met. The seringueiro called again – closer now.
‘What did you get in the city?’ I asked. ‘What was it? Why did you want to go?’
‘No. Not now, I will tell you later.’ She was silent a moment and then she said: ‘My mother was a cocaine girl like that once. That’s how she met my father.’
I reached for her hand and side by side we fell asleep.
SEVEN
I
For a few days, Kim and I worked hard. Absorbed in the forest, it seemed as if we had never been away and I began to feel that the Devil’s Garden was at the heart of things, that the affairs of the ants were the real business of the world and everything else fleeting and tertiary. I thought about Quinn and about his idealism – how he loved the Greeks and talked about them as if they were his friends. My mind stood up to its full height and I began to see the importance of our study again: the human effort to understand life – the only meaningful chance of salvation. Science had helped overthrow the beautiful deceits of religion but at what cost? A new age of uncontested materialism – so painfully antithetical to human well-being with its relentless appeal to insecurity, jealousy and accrual, ignoring need where found, creating need where none. We had to go deeper – into biology, chemistry and the laws of physics. We had to understand ourselves and our place in the universe – with dignity and without flinching.
Phase one – the poisoning – was merely a matter of the proof we were day by day collecting. Phase two – the limitation question – Kim would lead. And phase three – the cross-colony cooperation – this, we would work on together. My intention – if only we could proceed fast enough – was that this would become the denouement of my book. Thanks to Quinn, we had gene-sequencing equipment at the lab and at the storage hut. We could establish non-relatedness. We could provide evidence of cooperation. Was it beyond the bounds of possibility to start some early experiments straight away?
My idea was that we devise a way to measure whether one colony was lending workers to another for tasks – fighting off predation, for example – and then see if those same workers were returning to their original nest without any obvious recompense or benefit. Except it was not at all clear – to me, to Kim, to anyone – what exactly ‘recompense or benefit’ meant.
‘It’s a big problem,’ Kim agreed, as we sat eating boiled potatoes on our field stools in the forest. ‘Altruism is messing with the universe.’
‘Maybe we just have to watch the helper-ants’ bank accounts for the rest of their lives,’ I said, ‘to make sure that they never cash the evolutionary cheque.’
‘Assuming this place lasts that long.’ She raised her wrist and passed the sweatband across her brow. ‘It feels like a very human trait, though – don’t you think? I just can’t imagine any other animal bothering with altruism toward strangers. Not for long, anyway. It’s too close to self-delusion for any other species.’
I looked about the forest. ‘Maybe that’s what we have here, a self-deluding ant. Now how would you test for that?’
‘Psychometrics,’ she grinned.
I smiled. ‘Anyway, I have a theory that self-delusion is the best indica
tor of intelligence.’
She swigged her water. ‘You might be on to something there, Doc. Think of all the most successful and charismatic people – totally self-deluded.’
Opposite where we were working, I noticed a branch broken so that it formed a sharp and splintered elbow pointing up. It could have been snapped by any one of a dozen creatures, but I also remembered how Lothar had said that he came across evidence of the un-contacted peoples’ warnings all the time.
II
Back at the Station that same evening, we found Tord waiting at the comedor with a bag full of gifts: baseball caps bearing the legend ‘C. I. A. (Christians in Action)’ and T-shirts which proclaimed in English: ‘You don’t know Jack if you don’t know Jesus’. Felipe and Estrela, neither of whom spoke English, managed a display of gratitude on behalf of the rest of us.
Later on, and feeling more irreligious than usual, I went up to the Judge’s hut to ask him if he wished to join us for dinner. Despite everything, I was still hoping for cordiality between us. His hut was dark though – and there was no answer when I rapped on the locked door. Nobody had seen him or Rafaela leave. And there was no way of knowing if he had simply been true to his word and set up his registration post somewhere else or whether he had vanished for good.
In the continuing absence of Jorge, Estrela made one of her guinea-pig casseroles, which we ate with uneasy conscientiousness. After dinner, Sole went to use the computer. And so we made a four for cards. We were almost as we were before the first arrival: Tord, Kim, Lothar and I sat at the dining table; Estrela lolling on the lounge chairs, muttering occasionally, one thickened leg propped up; and Felipe busy beside her, snipping fantasies from his lifestyle magazines with rusty scissors. Kim had crushed fruit to drink. I had added vodka. Unusually,she was bare-skinned in her shorts and T-shirt and she had been spraying herself with insect repellent all evening. The heat stuck the cards.