Ursula closes the station door behind her and crosses the small clearing, settling her pack on her shoulder. The rain forest greets her with its thick, sweet aroma of orchid and plum. Breathing is more like drinking here, and walking is more like swimming, especially just after dawn, as the cool fog heats and gently spirals up through the subcanopy branches and the dark spaghetti of vines to the luminous green of the canopy ten stories above, where the leaves interlock in jagged, crystalline patterns veined by the brightness of the sky and the blooms of even higher trees, sparkles of yellow, magenta, violet, winking through the green like daytime stars. Looking up induces the same feelings in her that it has every day for the last ten months, a mixture of dizziness, humility, sadness, and hope—sadness because of course it is disappearing, and for all the reality it represents the teeming life around her might as well be a painted backdrop; but hope simply because a place like this is actually possible.
She picks her way between the trees along a paca trail, feeling as tiny as a termite in a patch of tall reeds. She is not even exactly at ground level but rather at root level—the giant trees stand on their roots here as if on tiptoe. The hum of insects is constant, louder than rush-hour traffic, punctuated by the squawks of parrots, the howls of howler monkeys, and the twittering of small birds passing under the canopy. The noise was one of those things she hadn’t expected, but now she can’t imagine living in a silent room, without the noise of life communicating with life, noise not only of sound but of sight and smell as well, creatures calling out for friends and mates with the bright jewels of their coloration, the enticing perfume of their secretions. Fashion is everywhere, programmed into every living thing, down to the smallest of insects. Even creatures without brains at all have a fashion sense, a better one really than the rest of us. Nothing is more fashionable than a flower; it is the perfect advertisement, the perfect transmitter of desire. No wonder the women of the Yanomama tribe wear flowers in their ears.
An enormous particolored moth flutters past. If she’d brought her net with her she would have snagged it just in case, but being netless she is content to watch it wend around a few slender trunks and then loft upward to disappear in a fan of palm leaves.
She stops at the base of a giant fig tree that is being slowly imprisoned by the roots of a strangler elm. The struggle has probably been going on for a hundred years already, and in the normal course of events it would go on for another hundred before the fig tree perished. But in this case both the attacker and the defender will be destroyed in the same quarter of an hour.
She may as well begin here today. She kneels down between the splayed, lichen-covered roots and examines the forest floor. A scatter of leaves as big as welcome mats lie in a sheen of rainwater. She takes the edge of one between her fingers and holds it up to the diffuse canopy light, which shines through the missing sections—the feeding patterns of skeletomizer insects—as it would through the missing panes of a stained-glass window. Putting the leaf aside, she studies the thin layer of ochrous soil under a fine tangle of roots and white fungal threads. A Hercules beetle is struggling to move a fig ten times its size. She removes another leaf, and a frog, black with fluorescent-yellow racing stripes, sits there for a moment before hopping away, not too concerned. Just like back home, the fluorescent colors advertise caution: predators know that these frogs are fatally poisonous if eaten. The Yanomama cook and dry their skin and stick it to the tips of the darts they blow through hollowed-out stilt-palm roots. They say a single dart can paralyze a paca in minutes.
She tears off a chunk of moss from the grappling roots and finds what she’s looking for: at least a dozen different creatures are crawling around in the underside of the moss. She sets it down gently and digs the collection kit out of her pack. With a pair of elongated cup-ended tweezers she begins with the largest species, some kind of bright-red plant bug. She collects three of them for the sake of genetic diversity and seals them in a plastic compartment.
Next she tries for a spade-shaped cockroach. These are fast, just like their urban siblings, and for a moment she considers leaving it out of her collection. Perhaps all the other gatherers will omit the cockroaches, too, out of simple prejudice, thus clearing the way for a future cockroach-free jungle. Maybe while they’re at it they could leave out the mosquitoes and the ticks as well. Back at the station they all joke about this, but they know that for every species lost, a dozen others that feed on it will be likewise doomed.
She works her way down to the smaller bugs, which are far more numerous. Even after all these months she still hasn’t learned enough about entomology to know whether some of these smaller ones are just baby versions of the larger ones she’s already gotten. For that matter, she doesn’t know for sure that every creature she will manage to collect today hasn’t already been gathered a half dozen times by other gatherers. It’s unlikely, though, since at any given time a single tree can house ten thousand different species of insects. If she’d wanted to she could have spent her whole time here on this tree alone, working her way up from the roots all the way to the canopy branches, where the spider monkeys, hanging by their tails, would watch her hanging from her cords and pulleys, netting wasps and butterflies.
Working at the canopy level is tricky and requires a lot of practice. Almost all of the collectors get up there from time to time, but some of them have come to specialize in the task, working up in the high branches every day. Ivy is one of these specialists. Over the last ten months she’s built up great networks of bright-yellow nylon cords running up and down sets of trunks at various elevations and spanning from one tree to the next. In the mornings she floats upward, hoisted by a gas-powered motor to her perch, and then spends the rest of the day checking her snares, edging out on slender branches to pluck eggs from their nests with her mouth, sliding down along cords strung between the trees like some cross between Tarzan and James Bond, collecting birds and butterflies and iridescent mosses and plants whose roots never touch the ground. Ivy is good at her job, is generally acknowledged to be the best there is, and she takes tremendous pride in it. Her mind remains something of a weather system, but the latest medication, combined with the respect and support of her coworkers, seems to buffer her from the worst of the winds and storms.
Ursula prefers variety, and like most of the other collectors she chooses not to specialize but rather just to do whatever’s needed. Occasionally one of her supervisors tells her to try to find more grubs, or worms, or katydids. Sometimes she’s instructed to walk in a straight line and collect everything in her path. Other times she’s given self-dispensing canisters of KaOX Mist to send up through the breezeless air in order to drop a column of insects onto her collection mat. At the end of each day the supervisors make a cursory examination, jot down a few notes on their clipboards, and pack the samples into watertight crates to be shipped downriver and stored in giant freezers at the Ark, Inc. headquarters. The idea is to save as many species as possible. It doesn’t matter so much if in the process they collect a thousand of the same kind of insect, or so the thinking goes. In the future there will be plenty of time to sort them all out. Or even better, there will be a robot programmed to perform the task at an amazing speed, an enormous robot with built-in cyclotrons, microscopes, cameras, computer-imaging equipment, a built-in library containing every known gene, a built-in nanogarage full of nanoforklifts, nanocranes, nanobulldozers, nano–arc welders, a well-stocked supply of the building blocks of life, a built-in primordial pool, petri dish, fish tank, birdcage, terrarium, greenhouse, and a couple of built-in plasma bulbs, buzzing with purple and blue rays, just for show. And when the time is right the mayor of the world will cut a ribbon and a crowd will cheer and a multicultural team of technicians will flick the On switch and the robot will go to work, re-creating the Amazon rain forest and shipping it piecemeal to a freshly cleared two-million-square-mile swath of Brazil, or if the bidding is higher elsewhere, to a climate-controlled Canada, or a climate-controlled China, or a climate-controlled North Pole. In the end there will be no shortage of Amazon rain forests—there will be plenty of them to go around.
Spotting some movement, Ursula looks past the tree trunk and sees a Yanomama man making his way toward her, carrying a bow in one hand and a red, blue, and yellow macaw in the other. He holds the dead bird out for balance as he steps over a fallen tree. He is naked, his genitals darker than the surrounding skin. His face and body are painted with the serpentine patterns of the Patahamateri tribe. As he gets closer, she recognizes him.
“Hi, Walter,” she says.
Walter waves. “Yo, Ursula, how’s the bug business?” He squats down next to her. From up close she sees that his long, pale body is covered with more red bites and scratches than usual.
“The bug biz is booming,” she says. “Thanks to you—looks like you’re feeding half the bugs in this jungle.”
Walter laughs and nods, scratching a bite on his chest and smearing the seed-paste pattern in the process.
“I hear you’ll be leaving us soon,” he says.
“Tomorrow.”
“Going back to the big-city life, eh?” His voice carries a note of derision.
Ursula nods, preparing to explain, but Walter doesn’t ask.
“Why don’t you come and say good-bye to the tribe? Dan’s doing a new ceremony today. It might be cool.”
“Dan? I thought Günter was your shaman.”
“His malaria got bad a couple weeks ago. Had to go downriver.” Walter slaps the back of his skinny neck, looks at his hand.
“What’s the ceremony?” Ursula asks.
“We’re honoring the spirits of dead tribesmen.”
“Why? Has anyone in your tribe died?”
“Well . . . ,” Walter says, shifting uncomfortably on his haunches, “not recently. We’re contacting past members. You know. . . .”
“Oh, you’re honoring the real Patahamateri,” Ursula says. She knows this is a bit cruel, but she can’t help it.
Walter pokes around the ground leaves with the end of his bow. “We prefer not to think of ourselves as unreal, actually.”
“Oh, sure. I’m sorry.”
“Well, I’d better be on my way.” He stands, his penis at her eye level. Walter is pretty well endowed. No doubt the ego boost his nakedness provides him with compensates somewhat for all the scratches and bug bites. “You coming?” he asks, as an afterthought.
“Sure.”
Walter turns around, displaying his fuzzy, clenched buttocks, and starts walking. Ursula repacks her kit and follows. His blond hair is bowl-cut in the Yanomama style, the base of his skull and the back of his neck bright pink from shaving. His hair’s golden hue attracts bees by the dozens, forcing him to shoo them continually with his free hand.
“Is this going to be an actual Yanomama ritual?” Ursula asks.
“Well, they didn’t use to have much in the way of religious ceremonies,” Walter says. “We kind of felt that it would be a good addition. But there will be plenty of authentic aspects—chants and dances and stuff. We’re pretty sure they’re authentic, anyway. We damn well paid enough for them.”
That the real Yanomama are at least making a bit of money off this whole charade is the one indisputably good thing about it. The shantytown villages of the settlement program are atrocious: the former tribespeople have no work and nothing to do. The men and boys take turns hunting for free pornography on the village WebTV, while the women and girls hang out by the logging road all day, begging for money and prostituting themselves to the loggers. Ironically enough, the dark Avon eye shadow, blush, and lipstick the women now pay so dearly for looks far more savage on their round, childlike faces than the vivid seed paste and flowers they used to wear. The only remaining bright spot in their lives is when one of the neo-Yanomama like Walter emerges from the jungle seeking authentic folklore, herbal remedies, food sources, and, especially, ritual ceremonies. The villagers, dressed in T-shirts and poorly made cutoff jeans and skirts, gather round the naked, painted American or European, and when they’ve finished laughing their heads off, the naked white man tells them he wants to buy a ritual, and the oldest among them nods sagely, negotiates a price, and then explains the appropriate chants and movements. Whether he is giving him actual ceremonies or just making them up off the top of his head is anybody’s guess. The neo-Yanomama long ago gave up trying to get the real Yanomama to abandon their shacks and join them in the jungle. The real Yanomama, particularly the young ones, now regard nakedness, communal living, and Indianness in general as embarrassing and even shameful.
Walter and Ursula enter the neo-Patahamateri village, a large clearing surrounded by a shapono, a single ring of thatched roofing jutting from the ground, propped up by palm slats. In the circular, wedge-shaped space beneath the roof, eighty or so neo-Patahamateri live communally, without a single wall to divide them. They lounge in hammocks, the flaccid white flesh of their bottoms pressing through the netting like threaded balls of cheese. Although the sight of them fills her with the usual mixture of pity and frustration, she’s glad she has come, if only so she can see for one last time the thatched structure itself. Like the rain forest surrounding it, the shapono will have ceased to exist within a couple of years. But Ursula will at least be able to carry the memory of it back to the city with her. And living in whatever anonymous apartment she finds for herself—surrounded by walls thick enough to isolate her from but not quite thick enough to block out the presence of neighbors she’ll never even know—she’ll remember the shapono and remember that once there were people who were never alone, who spent their entire lives in the company of their tribe, and that this gave them strength, and a deep understanding of their interdependence, and yes, sometimes even happiness. And she knows that when she tells people about this they’ll roll their eyes and say it sounds like hell and that they’d never want to live with their families. But hell is not necessarily other people, no, not necessarily; hell is being surrounded by people who share no solidarity, it’s like dying of thirst on the bank of a contaminated river. Hell is the Middle City metropolitan area and ten thousand other metropolitan areas just like it, ground zeros of densely packed buildings, each surrounded by a hundred-square-mile radius of flat suburban sprawl, as though our race had been so filled with the fear of a nuclear apocalypse that, like a return of the repressed, we’d ended up acting out the devastation of it by other means, making of our lives a living monument to death.
And tomorrow she’s going back.
In the middle of the shapono clearing a large campfire blazes, an absurd waste in the heat of the daytime. Near the fire a dozen tribespeople prepare for the ceremony, adorning one another’s hair with white down. Walter and Ursula walk toward the group.
“It seems weird to do this kind of ceremony in the daylight,” she says. “Is this when they told you to do it?”
“They didn’t really say. But at night we can sleep. In the day we’ve got to fill the time somehow.”
“Don’t you people have to hunt? Or do you just order out for Chinese?”
“Nowadays, with all the logging, the animals practically leap into the pot.”
Ursula points to the campfire. “And I suppose you’re not too concerned about the waste of wood,” she says.
“With half the forest burning up north? What difference could this possibly make?”
He’s right, of course, but still, the carnivalesque atmosphere here in the village makes Ursula uncomfortable. Probably half of these neotribes-people are serious, at least according to their own skewed reasoning, about preserving a culture and a way of life; the other half are just the latest brand of ecotourists. The whole forest, or what remains of it, is steadily filling with thrill-seekers of all kinds, from weekend campers to apocalyptic cultists. Ursula can’t blame any of them, really. She can’t even bring herself to hate the people who come here to hunt the remaining leopards, or the speculators who bottle rain-forest air and laminate leaves in plastic. She can’t blame people for wanting to experience this place in whatever limited way they can. After all, consumption is a kind of love, she thinks, the only kind most of us happen to be any good at.
“Yo, Walt.” The shaman takes a couple of steps toward them. His balding head is blanketed with white down, and his face is painted brown, with an orange stripe running down the center. He is short and thickly built, and his large, hairy belly is peppered with short, impressionistic paintstrokes. His penis is thicker than it is long, as though it had gained muscle mass from the daily exercise of resisting the crushing weight of his belly.
“Yo, Dan. You ever meet Ursula?”
“Yo, Ursula,” he says, holding up a meaty hand. Coincidentally, Yo is an actual Yanomama word, used in greeting. Not surprisingly, it’s one of the few Yanomama words that have caught on here.
Dan turns back to Walter. “See you got a bird.”
“Threw itself on my arrow.”
The shaman nods somberly, then leads them back to the rest of the group, who are now sitting cross-legged in a circle. All of them are already painted and topped with down. The women’s bottom lips are pierced in the traditional three places, and the holes have small sticks stuck through them; the large holes in their earlobes are filled with red and yellow flowers. Their breasts have already begun to make peace with gravity, aureoles turning toward the ground. The owner of the breasts she’s staring at waves, and Ursula looks up, embarrassed. The woman’s name is Giselle; they’ve talked before. Giselle makes room for her and Walter in the circle.
Walter begins to pluck the bird, doling out feathers that the tribes-people proceed to dip in paste and affix to their shoulders in fanlike patterns. Dan walks into the middle of the circle, carrying a long stilt-palm root and a wooden bowl full of powder. He sits down and snorts some powder from his pinched fingers, then packs the end of the tube with the stuff and holds it out to a tribesman, who guides it to his mouth. Dan blows on the other end while the tribesman inhales. He then repacks the tube and holds it out to Giselle.
“What kind of drug is this?” Ursula asks.
“Ground-up epene seed,” Walter says. “A hallucinogen.”
“Very trippy,” Giselle croaks, massaging her throat.
The tube comes Ursula’s way, and she declines. It moves on to Walter.
“So are you looking forward to going back?” Giselle says.
Ursula looks at Giselle’s prismatically decorated face. “I know I’m going to miss this place,” she says.
“Why don’t you stay, then, join the tribe?”
Ursula follows the smoke rising from the fire. The sky is beginning to cloud over, soaking up the forest moisture for the afternoon rain.
“Giselle,” she says, “where will you go when the forest is gone?”
“What are they going to do, run their bulldozers right over us?” After she speaks her eyes betray a glimmer of uncertainty, as though her question had been posed in earnest. But then she smiles, gathering in the mounting euphoria of the epene seed. “Let ’em try,” she decides. “We’ll give ’em a faceful of darts.”
For all these people’s apparent flakiness, Ursula knows this isn’t an idle threat. They will defend this place however they can. They’ll make of their bodies links in the human chain and fight for every last tree. And at night they’ll sleep soundly, secure in that rarest of modern-day certainties, the conviction that their lives, if not necessarily helping the world, at least aren’t making it any worse. For these reasons Ursula finds the invitation to stay with them more than a little tempting, but she knows this isn’t her tribe. Her tribe, she’s pretty sure, is back in Middle City, and in other cities and suburbs and towns—a tribe of scattered, isolated individuals, a tribe that doesn’t yet know it is a tribe. With any luck, though, she’ll find at least a few of its members. And in the meantime, she has her plans. Back at the station she has a small box containing a few sample materials she’s culled from the forest over the last few months—cloudy cocoons, diaphanous webs, blood-red root systems, pale fungal threads—and even more important, she has her sketchbooks, filled with studies for the new work she’s planning, not a painting this time but an installation. The webs, she imagines, will ensnare. The cocoons will pacify. The roots and threads will connect the webs to the cocoons. It will be a system by turns breathtaking and baleful, but not, in the end, incomprehensible, not inescapable. From an outside vantage point—a platform, she imagines, at the far end of the room—the work will be wholly graspable in a single insight, a single moment of recognition. In this way she believes, it will be empowering. In this way, it will give people the courage to go on trying to understand and master all those other forces acting on them that at first seem too pervasive and too insidious ever to take on.
Squatting on his haunches, the shaman begins to chant in a basso voice she wouldn’t have thought him capable of:
“Aaaah krashiii, aaaah krashiii, aaaah krashiii. . . .”
Without warning the tribespeople around her shriek with delight, then jump up and start running around the shapono’s central plaza, red feathers bristling on their shoulders, down flying from their heads. Some of them flap their arms and make shrill noises. Others sway their arms above them as though swinging through vines. One man crawls on the ground in painstaking slow motion, turning his head very slowly and smiling exactly the way sloths do. Most of their animal imitations are eerily accurate. She can even recognize Giselle’s imitation of a plant-cutter ant.
Then one after another they flail about and fall to the ground as though struck by lightning. From the family areas of the shapono other tribespeople come out and carry the limp bodies back to the shaman, who continues to chant as he walks around the fire, lighting a stick wrapped in some kind of leaf. The stick doesn’t catch fire exactly but just glows at the tip and smolders like incense. He walks over to the recumbent tribesmen and chants over each of them in turn, waving the smoking stick. One by one they reanimate, sit up slowly, and stare searchingly into the fire, imbuing it, she assumes, with whatever personal meaning they choose. Until recently Ursula didn’t think people could assemble their own religions and go on to invest in them even the slightest amount of actual belief. But observational evidence, it seems, is proving her wrong. Perhaps what she’s been witnessing is the birth not only of a new religion but of a new kind of religion, an ironic religion—one that never claims to be absolutely true but only professes to be relatively beautiful, and never promises salvation but only proposes it as a salubrious idea. A century ago there were people who thought art was the thing that could fuse the terms of this seemingly insuperable oxymoron, and no doubt art is part of the formula. But maybe consumerism also has something to teach us about forging an ironic religion—a lesson about learning to choose, about learning the power and the consequences, for good or ill, of our ever-expanding palette of choices. Perhaps, she thinks, the day will come when the true ironic religion is found, the day when humanity is filled with enough love and imagination and responsibility to become its own god and make a paradise of its world, a paradise of all the right choices. It will be in such a world, she likes to think, that Javier will awaken. She knows, for his sake, that she’ll do her part to help that future along.
It was with a little ad hoc, new-time religion of their own that she, Chas, and James T. Couch said good-bye to him. They went to the cryonic facility not knowing exactly what to expect. What they found was oddly unspectacular but at least clean and well maintained, an industrial basement housing a hundred or so stainless steel cylindrical tanks standing on end. A manager led them to the one in which he assured them Javier was now being maintained at a constant temperature of minus 196 degrees Celsius, the temperature of liquid nitrogen. He pointed out the LED temperature gauge and described the thoughtful combination of computer monitoring systems and live inspections, as well as the failsafe wiring in back connecting the tank to an on-site backup power generator. The manager was a technician, of course, and not a priest, so when he’d finished describing the operations of the facility, he judged his duties fulfilled, wished them well, and left them alone with Javier’s tank.
For a while no one said anything.
The surface of the tank was featureless and smooth.
The closest thing to an interface with Javier was the temperature gauge, and it was to this that their eyes gravitated, the number –196, lingering for a few seconds at a time before disappearing and immediately reappearing. For a long time to come, maybe centuries, this would be all anyone would know, or need to know, about the man inside.
It was Chas who broke the silence.
“I saw a kid with a tire-tread haircut,” he said, bringing his piercing eyes to bear on the tank. “He had on a black T-shirt that said, ‘I Won’t Go Down in History, But I’ll Go Down On You.’ ”
He folded his arms, and waited.
–196 . . . the gauge flashed. –196 . . . –196. . . .
Couch spoke next.
“I saw a highly delectable cyborg girl in the park the other day, in a minidisk-sequined cloak and a fiber-optic drape choker.”
He shared a moment of all-embracing mockery with the tank, his eyebrow creeping over the frame of his TV glasses.
–196 . . . –196 . . . –196 . . .
“I saw a poodle with dreadlocks,” Ursula gushed, breaking into a smile at the memory. “I looked it up later on a dog-fancier website. It’s an actual breed of dog. Not a poodle at all. It’s called a puli.”
She fell silent, blushing with exhilaration. She was pretty sure that this little piece of information would be too much for Javier to resist, that even now his eyes must be popping open, that at any moment the top of the tank would begin to unscrew, and out he’d come, raving about all the supercool things they had in store.