germs.”
“I’ve had all my shots,” she said, and kept walking.
They weren’t asleep. It was too dark to make out details, but from her shadowy hiding place, Maria could see seven or eight people sitting by the nearest fire, talking to each other. No different than a hundred other intakes. Exhausted little kids had been bundled into the shelters. The adults would watch for unknown dangers until sunrise.
Maria crouched in the leaves, invisible, and listened. Five hundred years of isolation would mean an unfathomable dialect. She might be able to catch a word or two, but the proof of the Hiller Project would be in what she could hear and not comprehend. She had the rest of the night to decide if N’Lykli was lying, and if she decided he was, she would tell Horace everything in the morning. She would tell him the exact name for her ghostliness and what N’Lykli had promised her. Horace would understand.
She squinted into the haze of wood smoke. The tone of the conversation around the fire had risen, like an argument. One young man made wide, angry gestures. Something flashed in his ear, a brilliant ruby red, and Maria thought she caught the word forprisoners in Tupi-Guarani.
Across from him, a remarkably old woman pounded a walking stick on the packed dirt. The fire showed her nearly-naked body-withered breasts and wiry muscles-striped here and there with yellow paint.
And a scarlet glint in her ear.
The old woman pounded her walking stick even harder, raising puffs of dust. Flames leaped up, giving Maria a snapshot view of a half dozen elders with braided hair and feathers, the ruby glint in each earlobe. Their ancient faces focused on the young man’s dissent. He shouted in a staccato burst of glottals and rising tones, closer to Chinese opera than any Amazon Basin language Maria had ever heard.
The old woman made an unmistakably dismissive motion with both arms. Emphatic. The young man jumped to his feet and stalked off. The elders watched him go. The old woman glowered at the fire, and no one said another word.
In the dark, surrounded by mosquitoes and thick, damp heat, Maria eased out of her crouch. Bugs were crawling into her socks. Her left leg was cramping and she was holding her breath, but she could feel her body changing. She was becoming solid and brighter than she’d ever been before. Her life as a ghost was over. Right here. In this spot. Her invisibility and their isolation. Her scrupulously unconceived, mitten-handed mutant children, who had burrowed into her dreams for so many years, drifted around her, dispersing like smoke, and Maria felt the trees, the dirt, the insects and night birds-everything-hopeful and alive, and full of positive regeneration, for the first time in her life.
She got to her feet, wobbly with optimism, turned around and saw him.
He stared at her the way they all did. She stared back at his wide-set eyes and honest mouth. Yellow face paint and brilliant macaw feathers. His ruby earring wasn’t jewelry at all, but a tiny digital sampler of some kind, ticking off combinations of numbers, pulsing as he breathed. She tried to tell herself he wasn’t the one N’Lykli had told her about. That this wasn’t the face and trim body of The Cure for Everything.
But it was.
My germs,she thought, and took an unsteady step backward.
He moved toward her and spoke in halting Portuguese. “You see me speak. You hear me.”
She nodded.
He took a breath through his teeth. “Please. Take me away,Jamarikuma.”
Another word with ancient, Tupi-Guaranian roots.Jamarikuma: a grandmother of powerful female spirits.
She turned around and ran.
She went to see N’Lykli. Pounded on his door and woke him up.
“Where are you really taking them?” she said. “There’s nothing in Xavantina but a couple of bankrupt rubber plantations.”
He hunched on the edge of the cot, covering himself with the sheet. “International Pharmaceutical has a facility there.”
“Do those peopleknow you’re-you’remilking them?”
His face made a defensive twitch. “We’ve explained what we need from them and they’ve discussed it.
They all understand about the dam. They know why they can’t stay in Ipiranga.”
“Why do they think they’re going to be prisoners?”
N’Lykli sat up straight. “Look. They’re not captives. There’re a few who don’t like the idea, but we’re not taking them against their will. We’ve been in contact with them for almost a decade. We even explained about Xingu and your assimilation programs. They didn’t want anything to do with it. They don’t want to be separated.”
“We don’t separate families.”
“Can you relocate an entire tribe-eight hundred and seventy-four people-to a nice neighborhood in Brasilia?”
“But there’s only-”
“This is the last group,” he said. “We’ve been staging them into Xavantina for a month.”
She sat down on the only chair in the room. “I can’t even interview them to find out if any of what you’re saying is true.”
He shrugged again.
She took a breath. “So what am I supposed to do? Wait around until International Pharmaceutical announces a cure for Luck now’s?”
N’Lykli rubbed his chin. “You don’t have to be cured of the syndrome to have normal children. You just need the right father.”
Maria stared at him.
He looked down at the floor. “We don’t just take blood samples. I can send you something in a couple of weeks. It’ll be frozen and you’ll have to use it right away. I’ll send instructions…”
“You’re going to send mesperm? ”
“How else should I do it?” he said. “Would you rather make an appointment with him?”
“Oh, forChrist’s sake!”
He watched her head for the door. “You’re going to tell your boss what’s going on?”
Maria stopped. Put her hands in her pockets and glared at him, the mosquito netting, the dank, bare room.Jamarikuma. Like hell.
“Goddamit,” she said. “You’d better be out of here by daylight.”
The Hiller Project truck pulled out at dawn, this time with the Jeep in the lead.
Maria stood out in full view, watching. N’Lykli gave her a half-salute and looked around nervously, probably for Horace. The Mexican driver gunned the engine, going too fast over the ruts and holes of the unpaved road.
The truck followed, angling for the open gate. In the back, every face turned to stare at her.
The Cures for Alzheimer’s, Luck now’s, and all kinds of cancer made small gestures against spirits, turned to each other to whisper, but they didn’t look frightened. They didn’t look resigned to their fates.
They looked like tired travelers who were sick of cheap motels, ready to be wherever they were going.
Except for one.
The Cure for Everything lunged against the railing.“Jamarikuma!” He shouted high in his throat.“Jamarikuma!” He shook the wooden side rails as the truck lurched through the gates and down the hill. She could hear him yelling over the diesel rumble even when the truck was well out of sight.
She stood there in the gray sunlight, taking deep breaths of churned earth and fumes, and felt her body go vague again. It was sudden and strange, like a wind had blown through her.
She knew she should go down to Intake and tell Horace everything, but she was afraid to. It seemed sickeningly obvious now that she should have made the Hiller people stay. Even if what N’Lykli had told her was true, she should have gone over to the Indians arguing around their campfires and made them talk to her. If The Cure for Everything could speak a little Portuguese, so could a few of the others.
Was sheso desperate in her ghostliness that she would betray herself like this, give up her job, her life, her colleagues and friends-everythingfor a cure? For frozensperm?
Yes, she was that desperate. Yes, she was.
She turned away from the gate and the diminishing sounds of the truck.It’s too late, she told herself, and felt the lie in that as well.
