Standing Wave Page 4

  “Come on,” Larkin said, standing and hefting his gear again. “That’s our flight.”

  The flight to Amianac aboard an aging tiltrotor heliplane was pleasantly uneventful. At landing, Cortland saw that the small vertiport airfield stood in a broad valley of golden grass, splotched here and there with stands of trees.

  “This is pretty country,” Roger Cortland remarked as they began the trek from the vertiport into town.

  “Looks can be deceiving,” Larkin said evenly. “These grasslands are artificial, the result of improved medical care.”

  “What?” Cortland said, waving his sunhat over his trauma-grayed hair in an attempt to cool himself.

  “Lower infant mortality rates and better health care have caused the population of the Pemoni Indians to soar,” Larkin explained, “but it hasn’t caused them to alter their traditional slash and burn agriculture. The ash from each family’s plot of burned-off rainforest provides only enough fertility to allow for two years of crops. After that, the soil is exhausted. Then the Pemoni move further into the forest, slashing and burning as they go. There are now so many Pemoni, though, that the burned-over and farmed-out areas no longer have time to regenerate their forests.”

  “Can’t they run cattle here?” Cortland asked.

  “They could,” Larkin said with a shrug as they walked deeper into the valley, “but this is all low-nutrient grass—so low that it takes at least twenty acres of the stuff to support one cow. Grazing cattle make the erosion worse, too. The power authority doesn’t like that. They don’t want the largest hydropower dam in the world silting up into a big mudflat. They’ve got enough trouble trying to put out the fires the Pemoni start.”

  “To prevent erosion and mudslides?” Cortland ventured, trying to watch his footing as they moved over a part of the track which had become overgrown with the tussocky grass. In the far distance, he saw a ridge of flat-topped mountains, some wreathed in clouds.

  “That’s right,” Larkin said with a nod. “Used to be this was all rainforest. Couldn’t walk twenty feet without scaring up flights of blue and red macaws, or sending bands of monkeys howling and shaking green waves through the forest canopy. Huge butterflies all along the river. Look at it now. About the only things that thrive on this sabana are the termites.”

  Larkin pointed to the large mounds that punctuated the tough, sharp-edged grass from time to time.

  “Even they prosper only temporarily,” he said. “The termites exhaust their surroundings and have to move on too, like the Pemoni. They build another mound some distance away. Most of these mounds you’re looking at are probably abandoned.”

  Cortland followed Larkin over a rise. Below them he saw a settlement scattered along the banks of the muddy, enormously swollen river. They walked in silence, down to the noisy confines of a boom town that had seen better days.

  Larkin had described Amianac as a place of mud and street dogs and plank sidewalks and crying babies, but this was worse than Roger had expected. The strangest part was the juxtaposition of heavily guarded, richly furnished mansions cheek by jowl with shacks and lean-tos of cardboard and corrugated metal.

  “This area was part of the gold country a few decades back,” Larkin explained. “All the big transnational mining companies were here. Then the gold ran out. By that time, though, the miners had poisoned the waters hereabouts. Fishing used to supply a lot of the local protein before the miners came, but that’s long gone. Things were pretty tense last time I came through.”

  “In what way?” Roger asked, curious, as they made their way through and around knots of children playing peaceably enough in the streets.

  “The rich were telling the poor, ‘You have too many mouths to feed—you shouldn’t have so many kids,’” Larkin explained. “The poor were saying, ‘You eat too much—you shouldn’t be so greedy.’”

  “The way of the world, only in miniature,” Roger said, struck by the thought.

  “Indeed,” Larkin said. “The North always talking about the South’s overpopulation, the South always talking about the North’s overconsumption, and nobody doing much of anything about any of it.”

  Roger nodded. Looking about him, seeing how calmly and lackadaisically the security guards were going about their jobs, he felt oddly reassured.

  “The situation doesn’t look very tense right now,” Roger said. “Maybe things have changed since the Light.”

  “One can always hope,” Larkin said with a shrug.

  Not much later they found the “outfitters” Larkin had been looking for. They were surprised to find inside a very dark young man with an old cell phone to his ear, and relieved to learn he spoke English. Larkin introduced himself. The young man knew the foreigner’s identity immediately.

  “My grandfather, Juan Carillo Garza spoke of you and your sister often,” the youth said enthusiastically. “It was one of my favorite stories when I was a little boy.”

  “And your grandfather—?” Larkin said, trying to be tactfully elliptical.

  “Dead,” the young man said solemnly. “Killed by indígenas or rangers in the World Park north of here.”

  Larkin offered condolences, but didn’t really seem surprised. Roger wondered briefly if the man they were speaking of had been killed while poaching. The young outfitter, however, quickly passed to other matters.

  “You wish to travel to Caracamuni tepui?” he asked.

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  The young man shrugged lightly and fiddled with his ancient cell phone.

  “My grandfather’s stories, for one thing,” he said. “We’ve heard that there’s a lot going on in that area now, too.”

  The young man, whose name was Ignacio Garza y Nieto, would elaborate no further. He and Larkin began negotiating fees for a guide and bearers and supplies, which ended up taking nearly half an hour. When Larkin and Cortland left, the older man was muttering under his breath about how much prices had gone up since his last trek here.

  They found a small hotel in which to spend the night. It turned out to be so humid and bug-infested a place that Roger was actually anxious to get on with their journey the next morning. With their small squad of bearers and with Ignacio serving as guide, they loaded themselves and their gear into outboard-motor canoes. Making their way into the main body of the river, they soon saw that the river here was more like a lake, stretching from horizon to horizon.

  Further up the broad river, the lingering skeletons of newly drowned rainforest trees hung ghostly gray above them. They passed boatloads of brown men accompanied by chain saws which burred like enormous angry metal insects. The men were felling the skeletons, clearing wide lanes through the flooded forest, scavengers on a battlefield where some unheard-of war of the elements had been fought.

  From time to time their small party skirted the great rafts of logs that floated down the river unsupervised—or guided by gangs of men, many of them armed. When they asked Ignacio about what had killed off the trees, the usually voluble young man became vague and laconic. Something about the rainy season, or the new hydropower dam downstream, or a combination of the two. When asked about the guns, Ignacio was even less clear, muttering about indígenas and rubber tappers and world park rangers.

  Toward evening they began to see a river with discernible banks again, with vast mud flats beyond. Smoke columned into the setting sun—great, towering curtains of gray-black that dropped a steady snow of soot and ash, so much of it that they seemed almost to be traveling in the vicinity of a major volcanic eruption. The smoke-filled air imparted an apocalyptic tinge to the sunset light, as if they were motoring upstream toward the Last Days.

  Night did not so much fall as slide in by slow degrees. Around bends in the river they came upon groups of wary men piling enormous logs and entire flood-killed trees onto great bonfires. Smoky holocausts flared over the mud flats. The lurid torches of their flames were reflected in the surface sheen of the broad plains of muck, the flats broken here and there by s
tumps left from the forest that once was.

  They left the river and spent the night in a no-man’s land of shattered and sodden trees and treacherous, crawling muds. None of them ventured far from camp: the exact depth of the mud, though usually passable, was never sure. One of Garza’s men sank into a pit of the stuff up to his neck. After helping to rescue the man, Larkin and Cortland concluded sagely that the stump of a great tree must once have been there but had since rotted away or been removed.

  They had no choice but to sit about in camp, waving endlessly at the clouds of annoying insects, sweating and listening to the night. They heard only the sounds of distant night birds and bats, the rare creaking of frogs and the plashing of the other unknown things hunting them. The place was far too quiet, almost mournful, as if the world hereabouts were stretched upon its deathbed. The deep, pause-filled quiet made Larkin in particular long for the leafy bustle and tree-noise he’d always associated with jungle places.

  After fitful sleep they continued the next morning up a river which Roger recognized as exactly the chocolate gray color of the Ganges where it flows past the great ashen ghats of the burning dead. The further upstream they went in the great river of silt and soot and ashes, the more obvious grew the channel and the current. Eventually, with some lightening of heart, they passed beyond the areas tortured by flood, chainsaw, and fire—and found themselves surrounded by mist forest.

  Ahead loomed tall brown and white curtains of waterfalls, mountains of dirty wet lacework that stretched on for more than a kilometer. At one place the earth seemed to have subsided several hundred feet, with no regard for the immensity of river that flowed over it. They had no choice but to portage through the mist forest around it.

  The portage was long, muscle-tearing, back-clinching work, made all the harder to coordinate by the unending din of the roaring falls, a white noise that made their loudest shouts incomprehensible as language. Drenched and bone-weary, they camped far enough from the falls that the sound of the broad cataracts, which had tormented them all day, lulled them to sleep that night.

  The portage at least had taken them beyond the land of mud and ashes. The flooding and felling and tree-burning had not come so far as this—at least not yet. Cortland, too exhausted to ask, did not know whether they were on the same river now or had portaged onto a different one. He no longer knew whether they were in the Amazon or the Orinoco drainage, but he figured they must be moving deeper into the backcountry of the World Park. The ravages of the fringers were less pronounced here.

  Canoeing and portaging up river and stream for a further day and a half, they at last began to see the macaws, monkeys, and butterflies old Larkin had gone on about. Puttering along upriver, Roger at last saw a young boy with wide brown eyes peering out at them from the dense leafy greenery, his face painted red and blue under a yellow headdress. That was when Roger realized he had indeed entered the different world of the World Park, a living fossil preserved by human law against human rapacity.

  Leaving the river and packing through the jungle, though, wasn’t quite so pleasant. The snakes and scorpions, the stinging ants and eternal mosquitoes Larkin had warned him about when they were still in the orbital habitat. They were all here in abundance and the ants and mosquitoes seemed particularly fond of dwelling in his beard, no matter how neatly trimmed he kept it.

  What Larkin had neglected to mention in adequate detail was the climate. Air so thick with sticky steaming humidity that breathing seemed a waste of effort. Heat and dampness that turned his clothing and pack into a portable sweat lodge. When night came, noisy with the jungle and dense with clouds of bloodsucking wonders hovering about in the dusk, the air did grow a bit cooler—yet seemed to grow even more humid, if that were possible.

  For two slogging days more the rhythm of their lives was the sound of machetes on brush-grown trail, of insects and animals and muttered human curses, and always the dripping and drumming of precipitation onto or off of the forest canopy. The trail switchbacked endlessly, frustratingly, wracking knees and legs and backs and lungs. Roger knew they must be gaining altitude, but still the forest cover did not break. He seemed to walk the twisting, blade-slashed green tunnel even in his dreams, when he managed to sleep at all.

  Surmounting a ridge, they at last left the rainforest. As they dropped their packs and made camp, Larkin looked around them and suddenly began to point excitedly at one of the mountains on the nearer horizon: a high plateau shaped roughly like a giant anvil, partially cloven in the middle by some unknown force.

  “It’s back!” Larkin cried excitedly. “Caracamuni tepui! Back again like it never left!”

  Roger had known Larkin long enough to understand the deeper cause of the old man’s excitement. Clearly, Paul Larkin’s joy at the return of Caracamuni tepui was also caught up in his excitement at the hoped-for return of his long lost sister, Jacinta. The way Larkin was always telling it, she had disappeared into space when Caracamuni’s top floated off and vanished, all those years ago.

  Roger wondered vaguely if they would meet her. If Larkin’s story were true, how far and fast had his sister gone? If she’d been traveling fast enough, would she have aged much at all?

  As night fell, they saw that they were not the first to reach Caracamuni. What looked to be helicopters and their lights swarmed over and around the tepui’s top. Through binoculars they saw that, on the top itself, domes and tents had appeared, lit from within. Old Larkin glanced knowingly at Roger. Not long after nightfall a cool wind began to blow against their own tents, blowing colder all night through.

  Over the next day and a half they made their way along the backbone of the ridge, toward the tepui itself. Not an easy passage. At many points the trail turned into a goat-scramble up talus slopes, around boulder-strewn uplifts. They seemed always to be balancing on logs, precariously fording rushing streams, or leaping from rock to rock with chill water in between, or—once—swimming their gear across a broad stretch of unbelievably frigid water.

  The switchbacking of the trail increased, if anything. They seemed forever to be walking under leaden skies, but at least now the elevation gain became more obvious. They moved from one biome to the next in quick succession, the air growing steadily cooler. They passed completely above and out of any hint of rainforest canopy, into a landscape where hardy plants struggled to survive, punctuated here and there by small copses and the occasional lush spots, microclimates favored with protection from the heaviest winds and rains.

  They rested from their march in a sheltered swampy glade, a place filled with tree-ferns, club mosses, living fossil plants of a dozen types, all surrounded by the glint of dragonflies, the unending hum and chitter of nameless insects. Roger felt he had stumbled into a spot of lost time, straight out of the Carboniferous. Sitting there, he wondered when he’d begin to hear giant amphibians thrashing about in the bushes, or see killer proto-scorpions long as his arms. Any moment now, massive Arthropleura centipedoids should come scurrying toward him out of his lost-world surroundings.

  He felt superfluous there, for the place had no need of human beings whatsoever. Despite its great beauty, he was glad to move on.

  Noon of the fourth trail day since the broad waterfalls brought them shivering, at last, to the final run of upslope scrambling leading to the tepui’s top. They had barely started up it, however, when their progress was halted by guards clad in camouflage, guns drawn.

  Despite all the disappointment, the frustration, and the bitter sadness of denied hope in Larkin’s arguments, the soldiers had their orders. They would hear not a word of the little expedition’s proceeding any further.

  Roger found himself feeling secretly relieved. That tepui up there might have proved to have more history than he could handle.

  * * * *

  The forty-two year old man with the slightly thinning blond hair had not traveled under his Christian name in years. That identity had been blown when he was still serving in uniform. Now he traveled under the name
of Dundas in these heathen parts, at least on this trip. If anyone had ever bothered to check, they might have noticed that the initials of his aliases were always “R.D.”, which corresponded with the initials of the real name he used only at home.

  With many others this morning he had run through the mazed streets of the subterranean city the psiXtians called Sunderground, the Sun Underground. Drums had pounded like syncopated thunder all around him. He had been participating in the drug-free version of their “altered states initiation.” Apparently the psiXtians believed that drumming and running through mazes could be used to initiate altered states of consciousness, but all it had done for him was make him hot and sweaty and dirty and tired.

  He would not have risked his immortal soul in such a place as this, save for the fact that “Raymond Dundas” was one of the top infiltrators for the Autonomous Christian States of America, and he had a job to do.

  As he walked through the community’s airy, herb-hung underground halls and corridors—long passages illuminated at intervals by sunlight falling from the surface through the roughly bell-shaped skylight holes the locals called “sun chimneys”—Dundas reflected on how a weird bunch of heretics these psiXtians were. He’d been here a month and he still wasn’t sure whether “psiXtian” stood for “psi Christian” and paranormal powers, or “psychedelic Christian” and state-altering drugs, or “peace Sixtian,” since they seemed to fetishize that decade of the last century so much—and definitely weren’t his kind of Christian. Maybe the name stood for something else he couldn’t even imagine.

  Perhaps the “P” stood for the first name of that loon what’s-his-name. Forestiere. Dundas remembered his briefing on the “sandhog” whose Underground Gardens had inspired the first psiXtians to live in solar-powered homes dug into fans of hard alluvial clay in deserts and semi-arid regions throughout the world. The psiXtians were certainly close enough to Forestiere’s original work, here in the same Central Valley of California. But no—that crazy’s first name had been “Baldassare” or something equally foreign-sounding. It hadn’t begun with a “P”.