She drove off with the Toyota Land Cruiser without telling anyone, before the diesel stink of the Hiller truck was gone. The Toyota was the newest of the Xingu vehicles and the only one with a full tank. She plunged it down the muddy hill after the Hiller truck. There weren’t that many ways to get to Xavantina.
She caught up with the truck in less than half an hour, but stayed out of sight, a klick or so behind.
Xingu’s rutted jungle access turned to a graded lumber trail, and she dropped even further back. When the scraggly trees gave way to burned stumps and abandoned timber, she gave herself more distance, until the Hiller truck was a speck behind the speck of the Jeep, forging along the muddy curvesin the ruined hillsides.
She followed them through grim little settlements of displaced Indians and rubber tappers who lived in squalor downstream from the local plantations, past islands of pristine jungle where monkeys screamed at her and brilliant parrots burst out of the trees in clouds of pure color.
Fourteen hours from Xingu, long after the moon went down, the truck turned off the half-paved local Xavantina highway onto a dirt road along a narrow river. In the pitch blackness, it made a sharp right and came to a stop.
Maria pulled into the last stand of trees. Doors slammed and there was a brief silence. Then a bank of floodlights came on overhead and she could see the truck sitting by the Jeep in a cleared area at the foot of a high chain-link fence. The Indians peered out of the back, pointing into the darkness while N’Lykli pulled the gates open and the vehicles drove through.
There were no signs to identify the place. Maria hunched over the Toyota’s steering wheel, stiff in her shoulders, thick in her head, tired beyond even the desire for coffee. She lit her last cigarette and dragged deep for energy and ideas as N’Lykli swung the gates shut, locked them, tugged on them, and vanished into the dark.
In a minute, the floods went out, leaving Maria with the glowing tip of her cigarette. She waited a while longer, turned on the dome light and crawled into the back of the car where the tool box was. She dug until she found a heavy-duty pair of wire cutters.
Inside the gate, the road deteriorated into a wasteland of bulldozed ruts. Weeds and young trees grew to shoulder height. Small animals scurried away as Maria groped through the dark. Bloodthirsty insects found her bare neck, her ankles, and the backs of her hands. Finally, she saw the glow of sulfur-colored floodlights, and at the top of the next rise, she got her first glimpse of the “facility.”
A huddle of blocky, windowless buildings surrounded a fenced central courtyard. It had the look of an unfinished prison. Wire-topped fences glinted in the security floods.
She expected dogs, but didn’t hear any. She made her way through the weeds expecting snakes, but decided that N’Lykli and his blood-sucking colleagues at Hiller had probably eliminated every poisonous thing for miles around-no accidental losses in their gene pool of cures. The whole idea made her furious-atthem for such a blatant exploitation, and at herself for so badly needing what they’d found.
She circled the compound, trying to find an inconspicuous way to get into the inner courtyard, but the fences were new and some of them were electrified. When she had come almost all the way around to the front again, she found a lit row of barred windows on the ground floor of one of the blockhouses.
There was no one inside. The lights were dim, for security, not workers or visitors. Maria climbed up a hard dirt bank to the window sill and hung onto the bars with both hands.
Inside, modern desks and new computers lined one side of a huge white room. At the other end, there was a small lab with racks of glassware and a centrifuge. Color-coded gene charts covered the walls.
Yellow lines braided into red, producing orange offspring. Bright pink Post-it notes followed one line and dead- ended with a handwritten note and an arrow drawn in black marker. She could read the print without effort:Autism?
Mitten-handed mutants. Ghostly spirit children.
She let herself down from the windowsill and crept through brittle grass to the edge of the wire fence.
Inside, she could see one end of the compound and the lights of the blockhouse beyond. Dark human shapes were silhouetted against small fires and she realized she’d expected them to be treated as inmates, locked up for the night and under constant guard. Instead she could smell the wood smoke and hear their muffled voices. Women laughing. A baby squalling, then shushed. Hands pattered on a drum.
She touched the fence with the back of her hand, testing for current.
Nothing.
She listened, but there was no alarm that she could hear.
Someone chanted a verse of a song. A chorus of children sang in answer. For the first time, Maria saw the enormity of what she was about to do.
The Cure for Everything. Not just Luck now’s.
She pulled out the cutters and started working on the fence. The gene chart.Autism. The wayhis voice had sounded, shriekingJamarikuma! None of this was right.
She crawled through the hole in the fence and they saw her right away. The singing and conversation stopped. She got to her feet, brushed off her knees and went near enough to the closest fire to be seen, but not close enough to be threatening. The Cure for Everything gave Maria a quick, urgent nod but he didn’t stand up. Around him, a few heads cocked in recognition of her face, her skin.
The withered old woman Maria had seen at Xingu hobbled over from one of the other fires, leaning on her walking stick. She frowned at Maria and started speaking in accented Portuguese.
“We saw you at Xingu. You’re the Jamarikuma. What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to help,” said Maria.
“Help us do what?” said the old woman.
“You don’t have to stay in this place,” said Maria. “If you do, you and your children and your grandchildren’s children won’t ever be allowed to leave.”
The old woman-and half a dozen other older members of the tribe-glanced at the Cure. Not in a particularly friendly way.
“What’s this all about?” said the old woman to the Cure, still in Portuguese. “You’ve got a spirit arguing for you now?”
He replied in their own language. To Maria he sounded sulky.
“Do you understand why you’re here?” said Maria. “These people…” She gestured at the looming buildings. “They want your blood, your…”Genes might meansouls to them. “You have a-a talent to cure diseases,” said Maria. “That’s why they want your blood.”
Guarded eyes stared back from around the fire.
The old woman nodded. “What’s so bad about that?”
“You won’t ever be able to go backhome,” said Maria.
The old woman snorted. “At home they were trying to shoot us.” She spat into the fire. “We’re afraid to go back there.”
“Buthere we’re animals.” The Cure pushed himself to his feet. “We’reprisoners! ”
“We’ve had this discussion,” said the old woman sharply and turned to Maria. “We made a decision months ago. We said he didn’t have to stay if he didn’t want to, but he stayed anyway, and now he’s bringing in spirits to make an argument that no one else agrees with. We’re safer right here than we’ve been for years. No one’s shooting at us. So we have to wear their ugly jewelry.” She touched the ruby sampler in her ear. “So we lose a little blood now and then. It’s just a scratch.”
“But you’re in a cage,” said Maria.
“I don’t like that part,” said the old woman. “But you have to admit, it’s a big cage, and mostly it keeps the bandits and murderers out.”
The Cure jabbed a finger at Maria, making his point in harsh staccato tones. Maria only caught the wordXingu.
The old woman eyed Maria. “What would happen to us at Xingu?”
“We’d teach you how to be part of the world outside,” said Maria. “We’d show you what you need to know to be farmers, or to live in the city if that’s what you want.”
“Are there guns in the world outside?”
It was a patronizing question. Maria felt sweat break out at the small of her back. “You know there are.”
“Would we all be able to stay together, the entire tribe?” asked the old woman.
“We do the best we can,” said Maria. “Sometimes it isn’t possible to keep everyone together, but we try.”
