“Let me make a phone call,” said N’Lykli. “We’ll get this straightened out.”
Horace snorted and waved him toward Maria. “She’ll show you where it is.”
“This way,” said Maria.
It wasn’t that Horace would kick the Indians out if they didn’t have authorization. He’d kick out the Hiller whatever-the-fuck-that-was Project first, and hold onto the Indians until he knew where they were from and what they were doing on the back of a truck. Indians were shipped out of settlements all over Brazil as an act of mercy before the last of the tribe was gunned down by cattle ranchers, rubber tappers, or gold miners. Xingu’s big fat grant was a sugar pill that thePlano de Desenvolvimen to gave out with one hand while stripping away thousands of years of culture with the other. Horace knew it. Everyone knew it.
N’Lykli followed her across the compound, between swirls of floodlit mosquitoes, through the evening din of cicadas. The phone was on the other side of the reserve, and Maria slowed down to make him walk beside her.
“So what’s a Hiller Project?” she said.
“Oh,” he said, “we’re part of a preservation coalition.”
“Which one?” asked Maria. “Rainforest Agencies?”
“Something like that.”
“You should be a little more specific.” Maria jerked a thumb in Horace’s direction. “Horace thinks Rainforest Agencies is a front for the World Bank, and they’re not interested in preservinganything. If he finds out that’s who you work for, you’ll never get your little Indian friends out of here.”
N’Lykli hesitated. “Okay. You’ve heard of International Pharmaceuticals?”
“They send biologists out with the shamans to collect medicinal plants.”
“Right,” he said. “IP underwrites part of our mission.”
“You mean rain forest as medical resource?” Maria stopped. “So why’re you taking Indians from Ipiranga to Xavantina? They won’t know anything about the medicinal plants down there. Ipiranga’s in an entirely different ecological zone.”
He made a motion with his shoulders, a shrug, she thought, but it was more of a shudder. “There’s a dam going up at Ipiranga,” he said. “We had to relocate them.”
“To Xavantina?” She couldn’t think of anything down there except abandoned gold mines, maybe a rubber plantation or two. “Why can’t you leave them with us?”
“Because they’re…unique.”
He was being so vague, so unforthcoming, she would have guessed that the entire tribe was going to be sold into gold-mining slavery, except that something in his tone said that he really cared about what happened to them.
“Unique?” said Maria. “You mean linguistically? Culturally?”
He stuck his hands in his pockets. He licked his lips. After a while he said, “Genetically.”
That was a first. “Oh yeah?” said Maria. “How’s that?”
“Ipiranga’s an extremely isolated valley. If it wasn’t for the dam, these people might not have been discovered for another century. The other tribes in the area told us they were just a fairy tale.” He glanced at her. “We don’t think there’s been any new blood in the Ipiranga population for five hundred years.”
Maria let out a doubtful laugh. “They must be completely inbred. And sterile.”
“You’d think so,” said N’Lykli. “But they’ve been very careful.”
A whole slew of genetic consequences rose up in her mind. Mutants. Family insanities and nightmarish physical defects passed down the generations. She knew them all. “They’d have to have written records to keep so-and-so’s nephew from marrying his mother’s grand-niece.”
“They have an oral tradition you wouldn’t believe. Their children memorize family histories back two hundred generations. Theyknow who they’re not supposed to marry.”
Maria blinked in the insect-laden night. “But they must have a few mistakes. Someone lies to their husband. Someone’s got a girlfriend on the side-they can’t be a hundred percent accurate.”
“If they’ve made mistakes, none of them have survived. We haven’t found any autism, or Down’s.” He finally gave her that three-armed sideshow freak look again. “Or Luck now’s.”
Maria clenched her teeth, clenched her fists. “Excuse me?”
“Luck now’s Syndrome. Your albinism. That’s what it is. Isn’t it?”
She just stood there. She couldn’t decide whether to sock him or start screaming. Not even Horace knew whatit was called. No one was supposed to mentionit. It was supposed to be as invisible as she was.
N’Lykli shifted uncomfortably. “If you have Luck now’s, your family must have originally been from the Ivory Coast. They were taken as slaves to South Carolina in the late 1700s and mixed with whites who were originally from County Cork in Ireland. That’s the typical history for Luck now’s. It’s a bad combination.” He hesitated. “Unless you don’t want children.”
She stared at him. Her great-grandfather from South Carolina was “high yellow,” as they said in those days to describe how dark he wasn’t, referring not-so-subtly to the rapes of his grandmothers. His daughter’s children turned out light-skinned and light eyed, all crazy in their heads. Only one survived and that was Maria’s mother, the least deranged, who finally went for gene-testing and was told that her own freakishly albino daughter would bear monsters instead of grandchildren. That they would be squirming, mitten-handed imbeciles, white as maggots, dying as they exited the womb.
“Who thehell do you think you are?” whispered Maria.
“There’s a cure,” he said. “Or there will be.” He made a vague gesture into the descending night, toward Intake. “International Pharmaceutical wants those people because their blood lines are so carefully documented and soclean. There’s a mutation in their genes-they all have it-it ‘resets’ the control regions in zygotic DNA. That means their genes can be used as templates to eliminate virtually any congenital illness-even aging. We’ve got an old lady who’s a hundred years old and sharp as a whip.
There’s a twelve-year-old girl with the genes to wipe out leukemia.” He moved closer. “We’ve got a guy who could be source for a hundred new vaccines. He’s incredible-the cure for everything. But we’ll lose them all if your boss keeps them here. And he can. He has the authority.”
“Get on the phone to International Pharmaceutical,” she said and heard her voice shaking. “Get them to twist his arm.”
“I can’t,” he said. “This isn’t a public project. We’re not even supposed to be here. We were supposed to pick them up and get them down to the southern facility. We wouldn’t have stopped except we spent a day fixing the truck.” He spread his hands, like the plagues of the world, not just Luck now’s, would be on her shoulders if she refused to lie for him. “Help us,” he said. “Tell your boss everything’s fine in Xavantina.”
She couldn’t make herself say anything. She couldn’t make herself believe him.
He moved even closer. “You won’t be sorry,” he said in a low voice. “Do it, and I’ll make sure you won’t ever be sorry.”
She took him back to Intake and told Horace that Hiller seemed to be a legit operation, that there was a receiving area at Xavantina and it had been approved according toPlano de Desenvolvimen to standards.
Horace grunted and smoked and made more irritated pronouncements about Xingu as a cheap motel on the highway to Brazil’s industrial future. At about one in the morning, he stubbed out his cigarette and went to bed, leaving Maria to lockup.
Maria showed N’Lykli and the Mexican driver where they could sleep, and then she walked down to Area C, to have a better look at The Cure for Everything.
Xingu’s compounds would never make it into Frommer’s, but to fleeing tribes, the split greenwood shelters, clean water, and firepits were five-star accommodations. The only fences were to keep the compound areas separated. Intertribal conflicts could survive bulldozers and rifles like nothing else.
Maria passed the Xingu guard, who squinted at her, then waved her on. Closer to Area C she was surprised to run into a second guard. A short guy-the truck driver, she realized-built like a brick and too bulky for his Hiller jacket.
His eyes widened at the sight of Maria and he crossed himself. “You can’t come in here.”
“I work here,” snapped Maria.
“Everybody’s sleeping,” said the guard, but Maria took another step toward him, letting him get a good look at her spirit-pale face, and his resolve seemed to evaporate. “Germs,” he said weakly. “Don’t give them your
