by Ian Watson
“I tell you a story, Pee-air.”
“Is it the same story the Bruxo was telling last night?”
“How do I know what Bruxo said? Maka-i was in him, not in us.”
“Why was that? Isn't there much of the maka-i left?”
“She needs a lot. Maybe Bruxo keeps it for her.”
“She? But you said women don't take maka-i!”
Kayapi nodded.
“But she's pregnant, Kayapi!”
“You speak like a baby who has found the sun is in the sky!”
“Sorry, Kayapi. I'm a stupid Caraiba. Not a Xemahoa like you. I have to learn.”
“Then I tell you a story, Pee-air. You listen and learn.”
So I listened, and recorded Kayapi's story.
“I tell you about Soul Laughter and Stupid Gaiety. Okay? Now, many creatures want to make men laugh with Stupid Gaiety so that they can get inside us, past our tongue, when it is not the master of words. The monkeys play tricks up in the trees to get us to laugh. But we do not laugh. Except for a scornful burst of Soul Laughter which sends them running away.
“Do you know how Man is made, Pee-air? He is made of a hollow log and a hollow stone joined together. Some say a round gourd but I think a hollow stone. Now the hollow log is lying on the soil one day when along come two snakes. One is a man snake. The other is a woman snake. The woman snake wants to live inside the log, but she can see no way into it. The ends are closed up. There are no branch holes in it. She is unhappy. She asks the man snake how she can get inside. He thinks he knows the way. He runs away and brings his friend the woodpecker, asks him to tap with his beak at the log to try to make a hole. But the wood is so hard, it hurts the woodpecker's mouth. The woman snake is still unhappy. So again the man snake runs away and brings another friend. A small bird named kai-kai. Kai-kai is lighter than a feather and sings a very deep long song, although he is so small. He sings the way the Bruxo chants, round and round, deep and deep. The snake likes kai-kai because when kai-kai sings, the snake understands how to curl round and round himself. You are listening to me, Pee-air? I am telling you.”
“I'm listening Kayapi. My box is listening. I don't understand everything yet — but I will.”
But Kayapi got bored with my not understanding and put the rest of the story off to another day.
• • •
A note on the Xemahoa language.
The form of the future tense is peculiar. I'm still not sure it is a true future tense. More like an emphatic present containing the seeds of futurity — a ‘mood’ peculiar to Xemahoa. They add the word ‘yi’, meaning literally ‘now’, on to the present verb, or else ‘yi-yi’, ‘now-now’. Kayapi explained the difference to me by saying the present tense of the verb ‘to eat’ while holding his hand to his mouth and moving his lips. Then he held his hand further away from his mouth and pursed his lips and said the eat-verb with ‘yi’ added on. Finally he thrust his hand as far away as it would go and made a tight face like a man sucking a lemon and said the eat-verb followed by ‘yi-yi’. I interpret these three versions of the verb as ‘now’, ‘the immediate future’, and ‘the far future’ — but they are all treated as aspects of the present tense by the Xemahoa.
Odd that the weight of ‘now’ upon the present should distance the present into the future. Yet I begin to suspect that this is an essential feature of this remarkable language. If Xemahoa B — the drug speech — is as deeply self-embedded as my recordings lead me to suspect, then an utterance ‘now’ is already pregnant with the future completion of the utterance. It aims to abolish the spread-out through time of a statement — which inevitably occurs since it takes time to utter a statement (by which time conditions have changed and the statement may no longer be quite so true).
• • •
Another note on the Xemahoa language.
In fact the measuring of time is more subtle than I thought. They are able to use the same bird-feather words that count numbers to measure time past and time future. However, the ‘numbers’ of time are not fixed units. Instead they apparently modulate according to the context of reference. The same numbers can thus measure and quantify the stages in the development of the human foetus from conception through to birth, as in another context can measure and quantify the stages of a man's whole life.
Confusing enough for a poor Caraiba like me! Yet it's an admirably sophisticated and flexible — if highly culture-specific — instrument. The qualifiers ‘yi’ and ‘yi-yi’ play an important part in this. Thus the compound word ‘kai-kai-yi’ signifies ‘x’ quanta of whatever it is (of stages of pregnancy, of the ages of Man, of sections of a ritual) forward along the time-line; while, equally useful and ingenious, the term ‘yi-kai-kai’ signifies ‘x’ quanta from the present back along the time-line towards the past — back along that embedding stream of words that bears life along.
• • •
Kayapi picked up his story at the point where he dropped it a couple of days ago.
“Are you listening, Pee-air? Kai-kai sings a funny song. He tries to make the log laugh. Because he knows the woodpecker will never succeed in breaking a hole through the log by means of violence. His song is funny because it goes round-and-round and in-and-in. Because it sings the same shape of song as the shape of the snake when he curls himself round himself.
“Yet even this song does not make the log laugh. The log keeps his mouth shut tight. Then kai-kai has an idea. Remember, he is so light. His claws are not like the woodpecker's heavy claws. Kai-kai's claws tickle the log . . .”
I didn't recognize the word for ‘tickle’. Kayapi demonstrated by tickling me in the ribs.
He tickled me cleverly — the way kai-kai must have tickled the log, in the story. He was trying to make me laugh. But I remembered about Profane Gaiety and kept a straight face. He smiled approvingly.
“So kai-kai tickles the log, till the log laughs. In the moment the log opens his mouth to laugh, the woman snake jumps in through the log's mouth. She coils round and round inside, before the log has time to spit her out.
“That, Pee-air,” he proclaimed, smacking his belly with the flat of his hand, “is how we men come to have entrails. But woman still has a little of the hollow of the log inside her — that's where her baby finds the space to coil up in . . .
“I'm hungry, Pee-air,” he grinned. “My belly has a hole in it . . .”
He wandered off to get some dried fish — piraracu — which he gnawed on.
It had been raining heavily. Now, for a time, thin rays of light filtered down through the branches, creepers and parasites of the forest upon a wet world.
Away in the forest, the grunt, scuttle, splash of a wild pig, as some of the youth hunted it down cautiously — queixada is more vicious and violent than the jaguar. Finally, echoing across the mirror of water, a piercing squeal of death . . .
• • •
Today Kayapi finished the story.
“That is how entrails came to be, Pee-air. However the man snake wants somewhere for himself also. He moves on till he comes to this stone.”
“Which some say is a gourd?”
Kayapi grinned.
“Yes, Pee-air, but I think it is a hollow stone. It keeps its mouth tight shut. It has seen what happened to the log. So the man snake wonders. Then he goes away and asks his friend the woodpecker to bite a hole in the stone. But this hurts the woodpecker's mouth more than the log hurt him. He goes right away. So the snake asks his friend kai-kai to tickle the stone, but the stone cannot feel what the log could feel. Kai-kai is too small and light. So the man snake goes and asks his friend the pigeon (‘a-pai-i’) to come and help him. A-pai-i treads on the stone, to tickle it, but the stone holds its mouth shut tight. So the man snake thinks again. He moves in front of the stone where the stone can see him. And there he ties himself in a knot.”
Kayapi's fingers knotted themselves together, in a mime.
“When the stone sees the man snake tie himself in a knot,
it forgets itself. It opens its mouth and laughs. And when it is laughing and its tongue is busy with Profane Gaiety and there are no words to guard its mouth, the man snake unties himself and leaps in quickly through the open mouth and ties himself in a big knot before the stone can spit him out. A big knot tied many times. That is how we get brains in our heads.”
So this myth of the stone and the snake was their explanation for the origin of their embedded language.
Many details that had puzzled me about the Xemahoa are beginning to fall into place. Their attitude to laughter. The reason why women who laugh frivolously do not snort maka-i. (But what about the woman in the hut??) Their incestuous kinship system. Their sophisticated awareness of quanta of time, amazing among inhabitants of this great timeless monochrome jungle. Many tribes are aware of the stars — the rising of the Pleiades at a particular time of year. Yet the Xemahoa's concept of time may be unique. The way in which the object of their attention modulates the bird-feather time scale, functioning like a sort of mental rheostat, generating a variable resistance.
It's remarkable, how the Xemahoa use the concrete things of the jungle — the trees, the feathers of the birds — to code such abstract concepts! And how utterly they will be destroyed by ‘re-location’! How right they are to ignore it. What other choice have they? To dig up the jungle around them and move it?
It's also noteworthy how wide a scale of measurement their ‘mental’ rheostat permits. From the extent of a man's whole lifetime, down to the Reichian microtime of orgasm. Incidentally, they are great sexual artists, I have heard from Kayapi. Unhappily for myself their incest system precludes any personal experience of this on my part — no matter how seductive these girls to my eyes and desires! (Ah, Makonde girl in the bush of Mozambique with your ebony thighs and cream of chocolate nipples, your pubic darkness, your warmth of Africa — like making love to the throbbing night itself, to the hot African night!) Yes, the stages of orgasm in their love speech would have enchanted Wilhelm Reich. They can express the whole range from this microtime of orgasm, through the stages of embedding of the foetus in the womb, to the Ages of Man — to . . . God knows what else! Could they grasp the concept of geological time in this ‘rheostat’ speech?
Our own Western talk of time is all wrong. All out of shape. We have no direct experience of time. No direct perception of it. But for the Xemahoa mind time exists as a direct experience. And time shifts according to the infinitely-variable resistance of the proposition. Time can be conceived directly, in terms of the things around them in the jungle. The tail feathers of a macaw. The wing feathers of the kai-kai. It is while wearing such feathers that they dance time to the chant of the Bruxo!
Another thing that Kayapi's story tells me — these supposed ‘savages’ understand that thinking takes place in the head, inside the brain — and while this may seem a pretty obvious idea to us, let's not forget that the Ancient Greeks with their Aristotles and their Platos had no such idea. The brain was just a pile of useless mush, for them.
FIVE
ZWINGLER SAT ON the edge of Sole's desk, back to the blank video screen.
“I still find this kinda embarrassing,” the American said after a long silence spent staring at Sole's feet as though finding something wrong with them. “Fact is, the radio dish run by the Navy down in New Mexico has been picking up some strange traffic lately.”
Sole nodded impatiently — queer enough traffic on his video screen, when his itching fingers could get to turn it on.
“This dish is big, understand — just a shade under three times the size of your own Jodrell Bank. The idea's . . . well, to eavesdrop on Russian and Chinese domestic traffic as they're reflected back from the Moon. Not much signal reflects back, of course, around the order of a billion billionth of a watt if I remember right — still, that's way over the background noise, so we can use it. When the Moon isn't up above the horizon, the dish gets used for more routine radio-astronomy projects. A while ago, as it was tracking across the sky it picked up this . . . well, strange traffic. Strange traffic coming from that part of the sky I should say! The Stone Scissors Paper show of a few months ago, playing backwards.”
“That's the TV nude auction thing?”
The Victorian passion for naked harems and slave markets found its outlet in stagey ‘masterpieces’ adorning grimy municipal galleries. The Stone Scissors Paper game performed the same sublimatory role for the Media Age with far less ambiguity.
“Right! You know the game — stick out your fist, fingers, or flat of your hand — stone blunts scissors, scissors cuts paper — every lost trick loses you a garment which the studio audience gets to bid for, till the loser has nothing else left, and then . . .”
“We don't get to see it over here,” said Sam, a shade regretfully. “Government banned it after Lightpeople protests. Not that I saw much harm in it personally, psychologically speaking you need some sort of safety valve in today's society . . . liberates tensions.”
Sole found himself laughing — a hacking kind of sound came out of him like a bout of whooping cough ending on a high-pitched whistle.
“The Great Masturbation Show — our first cultural export!”
Zwingler jerked his hand angrily in the direction of the dark skylight.
“Damn it, Man, from space!”
“Like a used condom washed up on the celestial shore—” tears in Sole's eyes.
The rubies glared at him chastely.
“It isn't funny. The show was played over and over again, backwards. By this time of course the dish was locked on to that point in the sky — away from the galactic plane where there's less background noise or we shouldn't have picked up anything. You realize it wasn't an echo effect — the show had gone out months earlier. The thing was being deliberately retransmitted. And backwards just to rub in the point.”
“Sort of electronic buggery, eh?”
“Naturally we checked there were no bugs in the circuits. The SSP Show was exchanged for some baseball game after a few hours—”
“Backwards too?” enquired Sole, for whom this whole confidential briefing was taking on the dimensions of a grotesque farce. Surely it was all a big hoax. Remember the Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds’ hoax broadcast and the panic that ensued — this must be something along the same lines, only designed by post-Wellesian McLuhanite man as a spoof on his own TV civilization.
“Right. Let me tell you that looked even crazier — at least you could pretend the other folks were putting their clothes on, 'stead of stripping them off. But the most important difference was this baseball match went out later than the SSP Show by exactly a week and it was followed in turn by a newsreel from a week later still. We decided it was a cute way of tipping us off when they're getting here.”
“You're sure it's a ‘Them’?”
“That's the problem. Them — or It — could be a robot probe presumably.”
“It's nothing that you or the Russians have sent out that way? What about the Jupiter Orbiter? The Russian Saturn probe?”
“Wrong direction. Give us some credit, will you. Deep Space Instrumentation Facility monitors every bit of telemetry. Air Force radar keeps an eye on every last bit of tin trash in orbit. We know where everything is, whatever flag it's flying. This thing isn't flying any flag.”
“Just flying the nude auction show? What a joke. The stars look down — as voyeurs.”
“Could just be the stars,” Zwingler agreed primly. “Don't see what else it could be. Frankly.”
“But it's got to be a robot, Tom!” How desperately Sam sounded like he wanted to believe this version of the facts — cock of his own dunghill here at Haddon, how smartly he put himself in the place of humanity, longtime cock of its. “No sane race would squander the time and resources to survey even a fraction of the stars by going there in person, on the off-chance.”
“We're putting out as much radio traffic today as a fair-sized star so how long do you think it is since the signal strength
became noticeable out there? Maybe they heard — and came to see?”
“No, Tom — that would put them within a couple of dozen light years of us, unless they know how to travel faster than light, which is a physical impossibility. It's just not probable, another civilization so close to us. It's got to be a robot. Maybe one out of hundreds or thousands sent out goodness knows how long ago. The thing could have been travelling for centuries before it picked up our signals. The fact that it only echoes our own broadcasts instead of sending one of its own proves it's a drone.”
“Of course,” Sole pointed out, “they'd have no reason to expect you to be looking out for any signals from that particular direction with the sort of sophisticated radio-dish you mention — unless you acknowledged their re-broadcasts. Have you done that — or is everyone sitting on their hands in panic?”
Zwingler nodded.
“In fact we have — we sent a 1271 bit test-panel. But no response — just our own programmes being played back at us, backwards.”
Now that he'd partially absorbed it, the news exhilarated Sole rather than scared him. It seemed to absolve him from his petty worries about Pierre and Eileen and his guilt in the face of Dorothy. His experiments with the children took on a purer, clearer complexion, the sort of exhilarated mood he imagined the realization of the ‘Death of God’ had filled Nietzsche with. Anything was possible in the world where God was dead; likewise with a world about to be visited from the Stars. Then he realized he was using the news as an anaesthetic — and the pain returned.
“How soon is this thing getting here?” fretted Sam.
Zwingler shook his head sadly.
“At the current rate of deceleration — extrapolating from the broadcasts — we reckon on it being in the vicinity of the Moon in five days' time.”
Sam looked heartsick and Zwingler visibly sympathetic. The rubies circulated consolingly.
“It's been decided not to release the news.”
“But that's ridiculous. How do you propose to make that stick? And for God's sake why?”