Fontenot’s hovercraft was sitting below his house. The amphibious saucer had been an ambitious purchase, with indestructible plastic skirts and a powerful alcohol engine. It reeked of fish guts, and its stout and shiny hull was copiously littered with scales. Once emptied of its fisherman’s litter, it could seat three, though Kevin had to squeeze in.
The overloaded huvvy scraped and banged its way down to the bayou. Then it sloshed across the lily pads, burping and gargling.
“A huvvy’s good for bayou fishing,” Fontenot pronounced. “You need a shallow-draft boat in the Teche, what with all these snags, and old smashed cars, and such. The good folks around here kinda make fun of my big fancy huvvy, but I can really get around.”
“I understand these Haitians are very religious people.”
“Oh yeah,” nodded Fontenot. “They had a minister, back in the old country, doing his Moses free-the-people thing. So of course the regime had the guy shot. Then they did some terrible things to his followers that really upset Amnesty International. But…basically…who cares? You know? They’re Haitians!”
Fontenot lifted both his hands from the hovercraft’s wheel. “How can anybody care about Haiti? Islands all over the world are drowning. They’re all going under water, they’ve all got big sea-level problems. But Huey…well, Huey takes it real personal when charismatic leaders get shot. Huey’s into the French diaspora. He tried twisting the arm of the State Department, but they got too many emergencies all their own. So one day, Huey just sent a big fleet of shrimp boats to Haiti, and picked them all up.”
“How did he arrange their visas?”
“He never bothered. See, you gotta think the way Huey thinks. Huey’s always got two, three, four things going on at once. He put ’em in a shelter. Salt mines. Louisiana’s got these huge underground salt mines. Underground mineral deposits twice the size of Mount Everest. They were dug out for a hundred years. They got huge vaults down there, caves as big as suburbs, with thousand-foot ceilings. Nowadays, nobody mines salt anymore. Salt’s cheaper than dirt now, because of seawater distilleries. So there’s no more market for Louisiana salt. Just another dead industry here, like oil. We dug it all up and sold it, and all we got left is nothing. Giant airtight caverns full of nothing, way down deep in the crust of the earth. Well, what use are they now? Well, one big use. Because you can’t see nothing. There’s no satellite surveillance for giant underground caves. Huey hid that Haitian cult in one of those giant mines for a couple of years. He was workin’ on ’em in secret, with all his other hot underground projects. Like the giant catfish, and the fuel yeast, and the coelacanths…”
Kevin spoke up. “‘Coelacanths’?”
“Living fossil fish from Madagascar, son. Older than dinosaurs. They got genetics like fish from another planet. Real primitive and hardy. You nick off chunks from the deep past, and you splice it in the middle of next week—that’s Huey’s recipe for the gumbo future.”
Oscar wiped spray from his waterproof flight suit. “So he’s done this strange thing to the Haitians as some kind of pilot project.”
“Yeah. And you know what? Huey’s right.”
“He is?”
“Yep. Huey’s awful wrong about the little things, but he’s so right about the big picture, that the rest of it just don’t matter. You see, Louisiana really is the future. Someday soon, the whole world is gonna be just like Louisiana. Because the seas are rising, and Louisiana is a giant swamp. The world of the future is a big, hot, Greenhouse swamp. Full of half-educated, half-breed people, who don’t speak English, and didn’t forget to have children. Plus, they are totally thrilled about biotechnology. That’s what tomorrow’s world is gonna look like—not just America, mind you, the whole world. Hot, humid, old, crooked, half-forgotten, kind of rotten. The leaders are corrupt, everybody’s on the take. It’s bad, really bad, even worse than it sounds.”
Fontenot suddenly grinned. “But you know what? It’s doable, it’s livable! The fishing’s good! The food is great! The women are good-lookin’, and the music really swings!”
They struggled for two hours to reach the refugee encampment. The hovercraft bulled its way through reedbeds, scraped over spits of saw grass and sticky black mud. The Haitian camp had been cannily established on an island reachable only by aircraft—or by a very determined amphibious boat.
They skirted up onto the solid earth, and left their hovercraft, and walked through knee-high weeds.
Oscar had imagined the worst: klieg lights, watch-towers, barbed wire, and vicious dogs. But the Haitian émigré village was not an armed camp. The place was basically an ashram, a little handmade religious retreat. It was a modest, quiet, rural settlement of neatly whitewashed log houses.
The village was a sizable compound for six or seven hundred people, many of them children. The village had no electricity, no plumbing, no satellite dishes, no roads, no cars, no telephones, and no aircraft. It was silent except for the twittering of birds, the occasional clonk of a churn or an ax, and the distant, keening sound of hymns.
No one was hurrying, but everyone seemed to have something to do. These people were engaged in an ancient peasant round of pre-industrial agriculture. They were literally living off the land—not by chewing up the landscape and transmuting it in sludge tanks, but by gardening it with hand tools. These were strange, museumlike activities. Oscar had read about them in books and seen them in documentaries, but he’d never witnessed them performed in real life. Genuinely archaic pursuits, like blacksmithing and yarn-spinning.
It was all about neatly tended little garden plots, swarming compost heaps, night soil in stinking wooden buckets. The locals had a lot of chickens. The chickens were all genetically identical. The birds were all the very same chicken, reissued in various growth stages. They also had multiple copies of a standard-issue goat. This was a hardy, bearded devil-eyed creature, a Nietzschean superman among goats, and there were herds of it. They had big spiraling vines of snap beans, monster corn, big hairy okra, monster yellow gourds, rock-hard bamboo, a little sugarcane. Some of the locals were fishermen. Sometime back, they had successfully landed a frightening leathery creature, now a skeletal mass of wrist-thick fish bones. The skeleton sported baleen plates the size of a car grille.
The communards wore homespun clothes. The men had crude straw hats, collarless buttoned vests, drawstring trousers. The women wore ankle-length shifts, white aprons, and big trailing sunbonnets.
They were perfectly friendly, but distant. It seemed that no one could be much bothered with visitors. They were all intensely preoccupied with their daily affairs. However, a small crowd of curious children formed and began trailing the three of them, mimicking them behind their backs, and giggling at them.
“I don’t get this,” Kevin said. “I thought this was some kind of concentration camp. These folks are doing just fine here.”
Fontenot nodded grudgingly. “Yeah, it was meant to be attractive. It’s a Green, sustainable farm project. You bump people’s productivity up with improved crops and animals—but no fuel combustion, no more carbon dioxide. Maybe someday they go back to Haiti and teach everybody to live this way.”
“That wouldn’t work,” Oscar said.
“Why not?” said Kevin.
“Because the Dutch have been trying that for years. Everybody in the advanced world thinks they can reinvent peasant life and keep tribal people ignorant and happy. Appropriate-tech just doesn’t work. Because peasant life is boring.”
“Yeah,” Fontenot said. “That’s exactly what tipped me off, too. They oughta be jamming around us asking for cash and transistor radios, just like any peasant always does for a tourist from the USA. But they can’t even be bothered to look at us. So, listen. You hear that kinda muttering sound?”
“You mean those hymns?” Oscar said.
“Oh, they sing hymns all right. But mostly, they pray. All the adults pray, men and women. They all pray, all the time. I mean to say, all the time, Oscar.”
Fontenot paused. “Y’know, outside people do make it over here every once in a while. Hunters, fishermen…I heard some stories. They all think these folks are just real religious, you know, weird voodoo Haitians. But that ain’t it. See, I was Secret Service. I spent years of my life searching through crowds, looking for crazy people. We’re real big on psychoanalysis in my old line of work. That’s why I know for a fact that there’s something really wrong in the heads of these people. It isn’t psychosis. It’s not drugs, either. Religion’s got something to do with it—but it’s not just religion. Something has been done to them.”
“Neural something,” Oscar said.
“Yeah. They know they’re different, too. They know that something happened to them, down in that salt mine. But they think it was a holy revelation. The spirit flew into their heads—they call it the ‘second-born spirit,’ or ‘the born-again spirit.’” Fontenot removed his hat and wiped his brow. “When I first found this place, I spent most of a day here, talking to this one old guy—Papa Christophe, that’s his name. Kinda their leader, or at least their spokesman. This guy is a local biggie, because this guy has really got a case of whatever-it-is. See, the spirit didn’t take on ’em all quite the same. The kids don’t have it at all. They’re just normal kids. Most of the grown-ups are just kind of muttery and sparkly-eyed. But then they’ve got these apostles, like Christophe. The houngans. The wise ones.”
Oscar and Kevin conferred briefly. Kevin was very spooked by Fontenot’s story. He really disliked being surrounded by illegal alien black people in the middle of an impenetrable swamp. Visions of boiling iron cannibal pots were dancing in Kevin’s head. Anglos…they’d never gotten over the sensation of becoming a racial minority.
Oscar was adamant, however. Having come this far, nothing would do for him but to interview Papa Christophe. Fontenot finally located the man, hard at work in a whitewashed cabin at the edge of town.
Papa Christophe was an elderly man with a long-healed machete slash in his head. His wrinkled skin and bent posture suggested a lifetime of vitamin deficiency. He looked a hundred years old, and was probably sixty.
Papa Christophe gave them a toothless grin. He was sitting on a three-legged stool on the hard dirt floor of the cabin. He had a wooden maul, a pig-iron chisel, and a half-formed wooden statue. He was deftly peeling slivers of brown cypress wood. His statue was a saint, or a martyr; a slender, Modigliani-like woman, with a serene and stylized face, her hands pressed together in prayer. Her lower legs were wrapped in climbing flames.
Oscar was instantly impressed. “Hey! Primitive art! This guy’s pretty good! Would he sell me that thing?”
“Choke it back a little,” Kevin muttered. “Put your wallet away.”
The cabin’s single room was warm and steamy, because the building had a crude homemade still inside it. Presumably, a distillery hadn’t been present in the village’s original game plan, but the Haitians were ingenious folk, and they had their own agenda. The still had been riveted together out of dredged-up automobile parts. By the smell of it, it was cooking cane molasses down into a head-bending rum. The shelves along the wall were full of cast-off glass bottles, dredged from the detritus of the bayou. Half the bottles were full of yellow alcohol, and plugged with cloth and clay.
Fontenot and the old man were groping at French, with their widely disparate dialects. Fed with Christophe’s cast-off chips of cypress wood, the still was cooking right along. Rum dripped down a bent iron tube into the glass bottle, ticking like a water clock. Papa Christophe was friendly enough. He was chatting, and tapping his chisel, and chopping, and muttering a little to himself, all in that same, even, water-clock rhythm.
“I asked him about the statue,” Fontenot explained. “He says it’s for the church. He carves saints for the good Lord, because the good Lord is always with him.”
“Even in a distillery?” Kevin said.
“Wine is a sacrament,” Fontenot said stiffly. Papa Christophe picked up a pointed charcoal stick, examined his wooden saint, and drew on her a bit. He had a set of carving tools spread beside him, on a greased leather cloth: an awl, a homemade saw, a shaving hook, a hand-powered bow-drill. They were crude implements, but the old man clearly knew what he was doing.
They’d left their ragtag of curious children outside the cabin door, but one of the smaller kids plucked up his courage and peered inside. Papa Christophe looked up, grinned toothlessly, and uttered some solemn Creole pronunciamento. The boy came in and sat obediently on the earthen floor.
“What was that about?” Oscar said.
“I believe he just said, ‘The monkey raised her children before there were avocados,’” Fontenot offered.
“What?”
“It’s a proverb.”
The little kid was thrilled to be allowed into the old man’s workshop. Papa Christophe chopped a bit more, directing kindly remarks to the child. The rum dripped rhythmically into its pop bottle, which was almost full.
Fontenot pointed to the child, and essayed a suggestion in French. Papa Christophe chuckled indulgently. “D’abord vous guetté poux-de-bois manger bouteille, accrochez vos calabasses,” he said.
“Something about bugs eating the bottles,” Fontenot hazarded.
“Do bugs eat his bottles?” Kevin said.
Christophe hunched over and examined his charcoal outline. He was deeply engrossed by his statue. For his own part, the little boy was fascinated by the sharp carving tools.
The kid made a sudden grab for a rag-coated saw blade. Without a moment’s hesitation, the old man reached behind himself and unerringly caught the child by his groping wrist.
Papa Christophe then stood up, lifted the boy out of harm’s way, and caught him up one-handed in the crook of his right arm. At the very same instant, he took two steps straight backward, reached out blindly and left-handed, and snagged an empty bottle from its shelf on the wall.
He then swung around in place, and deftly snatched up the brimming bottle from the coil of the still. He replaced the bottle with the empty one—all the while chatting to the little boy in friendly admonition. Somehow, Christophe had precisely timed all these actions, so that he caught the trickling rum between drips.
The old man then sauntered back to his work stool and sat down, catching the child on his skinny leg. He lifted the rum bottle left-handed, sampled it thoughtfully, and offered Fontenot a comment.
Kevin rubbed his eyes. “What did he just do? Was he dancing a jig backward? He can’t do that.”
“What did he say?” Oscar asked Fontenot.
“I couldn’t catch it,” Fontenot said. “I was too busy watching him move. That was really strange.” He addressed Papa Christophe in French.
Christophe sighed patiently. He fetched up a flat piece of planed pine board and his charcoal stick. The old man had a surprisingly fine and fluid handwriting, as if he’d been taught by nuns. He wrote, “Quand la montagne brûle, tout le monde le sait; quand le coeur brûle, qui le sait?” He wrote the sentence blindly, while he turned his head aside, and spoke pleasantly to the child on his knee.
Fontenot examined the charcoal inscription on the pine board. “‘When the volcano catches fire, everybody knows. But when the heart catches fire, who knows it?’”
“That’s an interesting sentiment,” Kevin said.
Oscar nodded thoughtfully. “I find it especially interesting that our friend here can write down this ancient folk wisdom while he talks aloud to that child at the very same time.”
“He’s ambidextrous,” Kevin said.
“Nope.”
“He’s just really fast,” Fontenot said. “It’s like sleight of hand.”
“Nope. Wrong again.” Oscar cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, could we go out for a private conference please? I think it’s time for us to move along to our boat.”
They took Oscar at his word. Fontenot made his cordial good-byes. They left the old man’s cabin, then limped their way silently out of the village, f
ull of broad uneasy smiles for the inhabitants. Oscar wondered at the fate that had stuck him with two different generations of lame men.
Finally they were out of earshot. “So what’s the deal?” Kevin said.
“The deal is this: that old man was thinking of two things at once.”
“What do you mean?” Kevin said.
“I mean that it’s a neural hack. He was fully aware of two different events at the same moment. He didn’t let that little kid hurt himself, because he was thinking about that kid every second. And even though he was carefully working that hammer and chisel, he wouldn’t let that bottle overflow. He was listening to the bottle while he was wood carving. He didn’t even have to look at the bottle to realize it was full. I think he was counting the drops.”
“So it’s like he’s got two brains,” Kevin said slowly.
“No, he only has one brain. But he’s got two windows open on the screen behind his eyes.”
“He’s multitasking, but with his own brain.”
“Yeah. That’s it. Exactly.”
“How do you know that?” Fontenot asked, squinting skeptically.
“My girlfriend won the Nobel Prize for establishing the neural basis of attention,” Oscar said. “Supposedly, that’s years away from any practical application. Supposedly. Right? This is Green Huey at work here. I’ve been waiting for that shoe to drop for quite a while.”
“How can you prove that a man is concentrating on two things at once?” Fontenot said. “How do you prove he’s thinking at all?”
“It’s difficult. But it’s doable. Because that’s what they’re doing, all right. That’s why they’re never bored here. It’s because they pray. They pray all the time—and I wouldn’t be surprised if all that prayer wasn’t serving some other purpose, too. I think it’s some kind of relay between two separate streams of consciousness. You tell God what you’re thinking every minute—and that’s how you know it yourself. That’s what Christophe was trying to tell us with the song-and-dance about the ‘fiery heart.’”
“So it’s like he’s got two souls,” Fontenot said slowly.
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