The soldier with the boy’s mother over his shoulder moved down the embankment, following a line of other soldiers carrying bodies. They filed into the trees and disappeared. The boy flinched every time he heard the deep thump of something heavy being tossed into the river beyond sight. After a few minutes, the noises stopped.
Gradually, the boy stopped struggling and became quiet.
He felt dislocated from his body, as if he were hovering above it. There was a loud buzzing in his ears.
The soldier whispered that everything would be all right and stroked his head occasionally. The boy closed his eyes in exhaustion and succumbed to the arms encircling him.
Some more soldiers arrived. Their uniforms were unmarked by dust or blood, and their shields shone dully in the grainy light. The man holding the boy released his grip on him and stood up. “You must wait here,” he said. “Somebody will take you soon.”
The boy did not respond. He sat at the side of the road with his legs crossed, looking around, unable to focus his mind on anything he was seeing. A banner lay torn in front of him. It read, La selva no se vende. Beside it was the piece of gum his brother had given him earlier. He picked it up and put it in his mouth.
* * *
… Moises woke to Wendell slapping his face.
“Mama,” he cried and bolted upright. His head throbbed sickeningly and for a second he thought he would faint. He opened his eyes and Wendell stepped back.
Mr Dollie stood over him. “Your mother isn’t here. It’s just me and these fellas I’m afraid.” Dollie gestured to the people behind him and winced a little at the movement of his damaged arm. Moises slid himself from the back of the canvass-covered truck and looked around. A scattering of soldiers stood around, eyeing him with a mixture of curiosity and awe. The jungle was close, blotting out the sky and softening everything with its sleepy shadows. It hung over them from every angle, pushing at the steel fences around the property, green and rich and fragrant. He could see a rough road that had been cut through it, bending away into the gloom. The large electric gates were open. Moises had never been there before, but he recognised it all the same. They were in Santa Clara; this was Dollie’s house.
“We’re fixin’ to go inside now and get some chow. You’re gonna stay here until you have read every story on that butterfly’s wings and then–” Dollie’s eyes widened in surprise and he reached around to his back. “What in Jesus?”
Around him became commotion. Moises saw splinters of darkness flying from the jungle and the soldiers reacting to them with their automatic weapons. The harsh rattle of the guns shook the trees, but they did not stop the hail of barbs coming from them. Dollie turned toward the attack and Moises saw a familiar dart in between the Texan’s shoulder blades: curare – the flying death. Dollie was struck again and as he staggered away, the arrows followed him, hitting his upper body repeatedly. He stumbled up the steps to his hacienda and came face to face with a group of Indians who had just exited his front door and were firing their blowpipes into the backs of his soldiers. Dollie fell to his knees in the doorway.
Moises froze, anticipating the sting of the poisoned arrows, but the seconds ticked by and he was untouched. The gunfire became more and more sporadic. Most of the other soldiers were sitting down now as if they had suddenly fallen under a sleeping spell. Finally, the bullets and the arrows stopped flying, but it was clear which had been the more effective.
Only Moises remained standing. In front of him, soldiers lay wheezing their last breaths like old men. Some had curled into foetal positions, their guns held limply, oozing delicate curls of blue smoke.
The air was very still, painfully quiet. In the skies above, a flock of yellow parakeets, frightened into flight by the gunfire, circled anxiously.
The jungle opened in a few places and the Yaguas came forward warily, the long pucanas still at their lips. Moises walked up the path and knelt by the stricken Dollie. There were four darts in his chest. His body hitched with every laboured breath as the curare poison slowly paralysed the muscles in his lungs. Moises took the damp matchbox from his shorts, pulled out the small piece of chewing gum and dropped the gum into Dollie’s gaping mouth.
“From my brother … for the journey.”
Moises Quispé took Lyman Dollie’s hand in both of his and held it. The Texan looked at him incredulously. He tried to speak, his face reddening with effort, and a line of spittle ran from the corner of his mouth. His bulging, bloodshot eyes rolled back and his chest settled.
Moises went into the fortress. He was torn between his urge to see Hawthorne, to say goodbye, and his anger at the man for what he had done to him. He saw the way of things now, but it did not comfort him; he did not feel enlightened.
There was nothing of the camera or the machine which processed the image in the house. Moises knew it must be downtown, in the building he had read about. He sat in the same wicker chair Dollie had often used and cried.
The Yagua chief came for him, his grass skirt and vest rustling loudly as he passed through the silent house. “We must leave,” he said. The trill sound of the Yagua language was perfectly understandable to Moises now.
The other Indians were waiting at the edge of the rainforest when they came outside. One of them, Moises noticed, was holding the box that held the black butterfly. Somehow, he knew it was the boy Raphael.
“Where’s the …?” he realised he didn’t know the word in Yagua and thought that there probably wasn’t one. “Microscopio?” he asked.
The old man shook his head in ignorance.
Moises aped looking down an imaginary microscope. “The machine … for looking?”
“You do not need a machine,” he said, taking the gourd from around his neck and offering it over.
Moises drank the water greedily.
“The stories are–”
“Real … or will be … or have been.”
“And the butterfly?” Moises asked.
“It is one of those that imagines reality.”
“There are others?”
The old man shrugged. “Perhaps.”
Moises looked at his swollen thumb, where the insect had bitten him when he caught it. He felt like understanding was very close, but part of him didn’t want to understand.
Moises looked up and imagined a giant eye peering down at him from between the clouds, reading a story about a boy from the wing of some immense butterfly. He sat down quickly on the porch step, light-headed with fear. Dreams within dreams: his hopes and fears, and Alice’s, and all the people they had met, all mixed up together. The black butterfly reflected their thoughts and … “I made these things real.”
The chief threw some herbs on Dollie’s body and repeated a quick incantation. A cloud of flies lifted from the Texan’s face and resettled.
“What will happen to me?” Moises asked.
The old man’s eyes showed no emotion as they studied the boy.
“You are the black butterfly. Come with us.”
The two men passed through the bodies of the dead soldiers and joined the other Indians at the edge of the property. With a final look over his shoulder, Moises walked into the trees and la selva swallowed them all as if they had never been.
...now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a
butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly
dreaming I am a man.
Zuangzi
The Age of the Black Butterfly
North of Puno, Peru
September 10th 2068
The sun rose like a molten phoenix from the damp ashes of the night. Light that had deserted Valentina Dollie the previous evening found her once again, as though she had been dissolved into darkness and was now re-invented to face another day. Her boots appeared, wraith-like, from the pale mist that lapped against them as she climbed
. In her weariness, she was comforted by the movement of her legs; the metronomic precision of their swing, keeping the beat to which her body played a thoughtless tune. The heat began to eat through her thin shirt and the scarf protecting the nape of her neck. Soon, tickling rivulets were running down her lean back, following the same contours of muscle they had every day for the past week.
At around nine o’clock, Valentina stopped and leaned her back against a desiccated tree, not daring to sit for fear she would never get up again. She turned a little, shuffling against the bark to get a look at the vista surrounding her, drinking the wondrous sight like a split-lipped beggar at a cool well. A panorama of mountains and valleys, blue and grey, misted by strange cloud formations that crackled with flashes of electricity. Valentina thought she caught the howl of a thousand voices on the slight breeze, and then it was gone again. Perhaps it was her imagination, or somebody else’s. Mankind was dying, drowning in its own nightmares, and the earth was suffering as well, but sometimes you had to shave a dog to rid it of every parasite. What a show it all made.
Valentina took a little water from the bottle on her hip and looked uphill. Now she could clearly see a number of small copses towards the summit. Valentina knew exactly which one of them hid the home of the man she was looking for. The rainforest that had protected its most famous son for almost seventy years, covered but a few acres now. Moises Quispé had left it ten years ago. Valentina knew that for a fact too. You couldn’t hide from DNA sensors any more than you could avoid the effects of the black butterflies. But she had chosen to leave the old man alone because there had simply been no point in capturing him. There were hundreds like Moises now. He was irrelevant.
And yet, Moises Quispé had been the first to verify the existence of the black butterfly, what it could do and what that might mean for the planet. The images of the boy talking at the UN headquarters were as iconic as the moon landing footage, the twin towers collapse or the South African Pig Flu Pandemic, when the world had sealed off a whole nation and watched it die. Moises’s face still adorned T-shirts but most people couldn’t tell you why. His churches were filled, not with adherents, but with refugees, just like every other building still standing. Everybody was a refugee these days, running from horrors that could not be escaped indefinitely.
Valentina removed her cap and scratched at her short hair, put the cap back on. She forced herself to move away from the tree. Her face, locked into a determined grimace, looked up from time to time as she climbed. She was becoming more and more nervous as the trees grew in her vision. Like an old woman, she thought of the past to soothe her mind, because now it held more for her than the future ever would. Valentina had spent her childhood bewitched by the myth of the black butterfly. Her grandfather, Lyman Dollie, had told the story to her repeatedly. Though that was more to do with his own fixation with the hunt for the creature, than the love he held for his granddaughter, Valentina later realised. He had died trying to claim the butterfly’s secrets and her father had continued the same ruthless quest.
Despite the intoxicating stories, and the constant talk of the business, Valentina had not wished to be a part of it all. Growing up, she had noticed an ugliness in the obsession afflicting those two paternal figures and it turned her off the whole idea. Besides, she was a born athlete, only ever truly happy when her muscles had been shredded, and she was in the empty bliss of complete physical exhaustion. At eighteen, she signed for the Sacramento Sirens and became the most successful WFL quarterback of the 2044 season. Valentina rubbed her neck at the memory. It ached more than ever these days, a nagging reminder of the ending of her career just a few months after that big breakthrough season. The napalm bombing of the 2045 WFL Super Bowl by the New Shining Path terrorist group had broken her neck and killed a quarter of the people in the stadium. She had been lucky. Her neck was broken after she was knocked to the ground and trampled by fleeing players from both sides, who were turned into flaming marionettes as they left the pitch. From where she lay paralysed on the 20-yard line, Valentina could feel the heat reddening her cheeks and see the crowds burning. She closed her eyes but could not cover her ears. It was said that the ululating of twenty thousand people aflame could be heard thirty miles away that evening. Valentina could still hear it in her quieter moments.
She came into the trees at midday and found the little stone hut soon after. No Yagua, with blowpipes at their lips, were waiting for Valentina. The last of them had been hunted down years before by her father. There was a pig pen, but no pig, just a few chickens pecking in the dust in front of the hut. She knocked on the door, feeling slightly ridiculous, studying its dry twists and knots, breathing heavily from the climb.
The summons to enter did not come.
Valentina pushed the door open and winced at its shriek. There was a chair directly in front of her on the other side of the room. Behind it was a small window. Strips of white heat cut through the broken shutter into the heavy stillness, baking the back of the figure who sat in the chair.
Valentina stepped forward until she was striped by the warm bars of light, her presence stirring swirls of glittering dust motes. The old man in the chair remained still, silent, as if he were waiting for precisely the right moment to speak. Valentina studied the solemn, heavily wrinkled face.
“Moises, is it you?”
There was no reply, just the smell of long-dead wood and the comforting throb of the cicada. She reached through the light and into the shadows beneath the old man’s slumped chin.
“Moises, I came to say sorry …”
Her hand came up against a smooth softness that parted and the old man’s carcass fell in on itself with a sigh. Valentina cried out and jumped back in shock, her fingers still outstretched, coated in dust.
“What did you expect?”
The words, calm and emotionless, came from the corner to Valentina’s right. Valentina turned toward the voice and reached for the pistol in her shorts.
“Who is there?”
A face swam out of the darkness as she focussed.
“Raphael?”
“Raphael.”
“What are you doing there?”
“Waiting for you.”
Valentina pulled the pistol from her belt and levelled it at the ghostly face.
“I could have killed you when you walked in Valentina. Moises and I saw this moment thirty years ago.”
Valentina sighed and put the gun away. “I thought … I don’t know what I thought.”
“The butterfly is there, take it.”
Valentina looked back at the heap of dust on the chair. Her eyes, adjusting now to the meagre light, saw a shape in it. She steadied herself and reached into the heap of ash-like skin, pulled out the blood-black pupa that was hidden there. “My God,” she said, staring at the miracle in her hands, and could think of nothing more for a few moments.
“Do you know that in Kansas there are drifts of bodies fifty feet high in places? Occasionally, when the wind drops a little, strange sounds can be heard as it rattles through the dunes of bone. Some say it is God whispering to us.” She chuckled, staring at the remains on the chair. “Did you see all of that coming?”
“Moises saw most things, carried the burden of them all these years.”
Valentina turned. “Do I ask you to come with me Raphael?”
“You leave alone.”
“When will all this end?”
“Nothing ends, things just change, mankind will change … into something else.”
“Into what?”
“I do not know, but it will happen soon, if it hasn’t started already.”
Valentina tried to frame all the questions she had in her mind, but now, in this moment, they seemed suddenly pointless. She was so tired.
“Do you need anything?” She asked.
“No.”
Cradling the butterfly pupa in both arms, Valentina left the hut without another word and made the short climb to the summit, shame quickening her pace as she went. She stood admiring the view from the hilltop, shaking with grief, letting the steady flow of tears drip from her chin. To the south lay Lake Titicaca, like a giant tear God himself might have shed millennia before, anticipating the folly of man. That tear was nearly dry now.
“What have I done?” She whispered. It was not the question of a woman standing over a lifeless body with a blood slicked knife in her hand, more that of one who had watched, frozen with indecision, as another committed the act, always hoping that the murderer would stop before the final thrust. CEO of Emerald Earth for close on fifteen years, and what had she done? Too little without a doubt. Too little, too late. Around the world at that very moment, people were still finding black butterflies. Some of them might destroy the insects before they could be read, others would read them in a desperate attempt to find a cure for all the madness, only to use their diseased imaginations to unleash more nightmares into reality. The butterflies were mirrors. Looking glasses into the heart of a species gone mad on the rigours of its own ambition.
Valentina put the pupa into the sack and found a tree to lie under. Briefly, she wondered if Raphael would kill her as she slept and take the pupa back, but it was a stupid thought and she dismissed it. She slept dreamlessly until early evening.
On open ground just above the dwelling, Valentina built a fire of grey, brittle branches. The sun slid slowly off the rim of the world and burst like a rotten orange, its juices draining across the horizon. Valentina held a match to the pile of wood. The fire caught easily, snapping and spitting fireflies into the rapidly cooling mountain air. She removed the pupa from her rucksack and stood over the heat, her face a flickering, bronze mask as she moved the pupa lightly from hand to hand: a quarterback contemplating what would be her last play of the game. Despite everything she knew, the curse of her curiosity, her humanity, stayed her hand.
The Dreams of the Black Butterfly Page 20