Galapagos Regained (42 page)

“If it were my decision, Père Teilhard, I would see your book distributed far and wide. Which is not to say I understand your orthogenesis in full.”

A husky female voice intruded on our conversation. “It's doubtful whether Pierre himself understands his orthogenesis in full.”

The paleontologist and I glanced up to behold a handsome woman of mature years looming over us, dressed in a safari jacket and jodhpurs. She exuded a capacious intelligence, as if her mind encompassed a particularly large sector of the noosphere.

“Lucile!” cried Père Teilhard.

“
Mon cher!
” exclaimed the woman. “At last I've tracked you down.”

The paleontologist made the introductions, presenting me as “my faithful water-pipe companion” and his friend as “Lucile Swan, the sculptress who fashioned the first bust of Peking Man. She is also my best friend in the world.”

“Pierre claims to know all about evolution, yet he scorns its erotic essence,” said Miss Swan, inserting an empty chair between Père Teilhard and myself. “He knows nothing of concupiscence.”

I felt my face turn scarlet with mortification, though in this murky place the change was probably imperceptible.

“I'm no stranger to concupiscence, Lucile, merely to its conventional culmination,” said Père Teilhard pointedly.

Settling into her chair, Miss Swan fixed me with a gaze so luminous it cut through the smoky grotto like a beam from a lighthouse. “If Pierre's biographers are honest men, they will call me the love of his life.”

“When I committed myself to poverty, obedience, and chastity, I intended to honor all three vows,” Père Teilhard admonished his friend.

“On paper you may be poor, Pierre,” Miss Swan replied, “but I've noticed that priests who travel with the scientific elite enjoy a posh sort of privation. As for obedience, your Holy Office dossier has grown so thick that Rome now holds you a borderline heretic. Evidently chastity is the only pledge you take seriously.”

“Lucile…”

“This man lives atop a mountain the rest of us can only dream of scaling,” said Miss Swan, caressing my hand. She took a puff of hashish, slid the nozzle from her lips, and pointed the tip at Père Teilhard. “Once again, my love, I must implore you to descend to my level. Perhaps our species is destined to fuse with a Cosmic Christ. I cannot speak of such matters, and I'm not persuaded you can, either. What we
do
know is that
Homo sapiens
is here because once upon a time a population of celibate algae transformed themselves into lusty eukaryotes. There's no noosphere without ten trillion acts of physical love, Pierre, no transmutation without plenary copulation!”

“But one day we shall be past all that,” Père Teilhard insisted. “The universe is moving forward, Lucile! We cannot return to the
Urschliem!
”

“Listen, Pierre, the instant I finished telling Yusuf Effendi my story, he looked me in the eye and said, ‘I am moved by your plight, madam. For the rest of the afternoon, my humble cellar rooms belong to you and your holy man.' He gave me a tour of his
salle de lit
. The sheets are clean. The pillows are soft.”

“Please, Lucile. This is madness.”

“Hear my logic. Your vows apply only to the life you're living on planet Earth in 1950, whereas at present we occupy a fantastical netherworld emanating from the vanished Byzantine Empire. We may be a far cry from the Omega Point, but we're equally distant from Rome.”

“My dearest, loveliest, sweetest Lucile…”

Seeing an opportunity to make a judicious exit, I feigned a headache, speculating aloud that it might be eased by a steam bath back at the palace.

“During our hashish intervals, I came to treasure your tolerance for my convoluted
Weltanschauung
,” said Père Teilhard as we embraced for the last time. “If only the Society of Jesus boasted your caliber of patience.”

And so it happens, Father, that I cannot tell you the upshot of Miss Swan's designs. Sometimes I feel certain that she and her priest descended to the cellar. At other times I feel skeptical. Would you like to know my preferred outcome? Heaven forgive me, but I hope that the afternoon found Miss Swan and Père Teilhard acting the part of
Homo concupiscentus.

With boundless affection,

Bertram

Granville felt like dancing. Apart from his son's obtuse failure to grasp Teilhard de Chardin's exhilarating philosophy, the new message overflowed with good news. The quest remained on schedule. Once Noah's ark reached Constantinople, local politics would not prevent its delivery to England, the Russo-Turkish War having been postponed. What's more, Miss Swan had surely found herself in the arms of her beloved. So momentous was this last occurrence that Granville decided to suspend his Omega Point cycle and instead celebrate Father Teilhard's initiation into Eros.

The longer he thought about his subject, the more possibilities it revealed. Owing to the pioneering efforts of Adam and Eve, humans had become adept at perpetuating themselves, and now the union of Pierre and Lucile promised to carry the species to a plane beyond the procreative, the empirical, or even the metaphysical. Having experienced seminal ecstasy, Father Teilhard would be inspired to revise his
Phénomène Humain
over and over until at long last Rome allowed him to share his vision with the world (thousands of readers subsequently coming to perceive themselves not only as living souls redeemed by Christ's blood but also as vibrant cells in an evolving megabrain). True, Granville still lacked for a canvas, but he would make a virtue of privation, imposing his newest painting atop
The Sixth Eye of God
.

He labored all afternoon and well past dusk, until
No Transmutation without Plenary Copulation
had emerged in all its corporeal grandeur. Even in the anemic gaslight seeping into his cell, he could see that he'd done justice to his theme. Being ignorant of Yusuf ibn Ziayüddin's rooms, he'd taken artistic liberties, appointing the
salle de lit
with a gilt-framed mirror and a Persian cat, though the spectator's attention remained focused on the bodies sprawled across the bed. Granville was particularly pleased with his treatment of Miss Swan: Teilhard's pulchritudinous muse, with an emphatic bosom, inviting thighs, and a navel that was the Omega Point. The longer he stared at that holy omphalos, the happier he became, and as he climbed onto his mattress that night, he thanked his Creator for that felicitous innovation called flesh.

*   *   *

Assuming that a person's hot-air balloon must be attacked by panicked condors in the first place, then the wreck of the
Lamarck
—its fitful cruise through a palm-tree grove and thence into the soft sands of the riverbank—could hardly be counted a disaster. Certainly Chloe would never rank this event with the sinking of the
Equinox
, Mr. Flaherty's consumption by piranhas, or Captain Runciter's suffocation by an anaconda. True, Mr. Chadwick had lost consciousness, but he'd come to his senses almost immediately, and the passengers' appreciable injuries were confined to Solange's sprained wrist, Ralph's twisted ankle, and the vicar's cracked rib, beyond which the company had sustained only lumps, bumps, bruises, scratches, and scrapes. As for the airship itself, Léourier believed that the ruptured envelope and fractured gondola could be repaired using silk from the supply locker and wood from the Peruvian savannah. He even insisted that he could replace the shattered glass in the observation port with transparent sheets fashioned from—of all things—the cured swim-bladders of Rio Jequetepeque fish.

“Swim-bladders?” said a skeptical Chloe. “How
many
swim-bladders?”

“Perhaps a hundred.”

“And how long must we allow for the
Lamarck
's resurrection?”

“If we can enlist the aid of at least twenty Indians, I would estimate three weeks,” said Léourier.

“Three weeks?” wailed Chloe, enduring her most virulent attack of frustration since Torresblanco had rejected her various schemes for shortening their voyage up the Solimões. “That is entirely unacceptable,
Monsieur le Capitaine!
”

“Then I fear you will have to reach the Encantadas through the benevolence of a sea captain putting out of Puerto Etén.”

“And lo, the clouds parted,” said Solange, “and Chloe's favorite deity dropped a thousand swim-bladders at her feet.”

“To quote my favorite line from
Siren of the Nile
,” said Chloe, “‘Sarcasm is but the piety of cynics.'”

Under Léourier's direction the company collected the scattered pieces of the flying-machine and wrapped them up securely in the silk envelope, whereupon Akawo pointed towards the river, declaring that it would take the company directly to the Huancabamba village.

As the journey progressed—the fogbound Jequetepeque on one side, glossy black rocks on the other—Mr. Chadwick cupped his hand about his cracked rib, Ralph palliated his injured ankle with a crutch improvised from a eucalyptus branch, and Solange soothed her hurt wrist by complaining about it. The farther Chloe and her companions traveled, the more signs they saw of the imminent Indian community. Whereas the river displayed a succession of weirs (walls of woven palm stems affixed to upright posts, forming labyrinths from which no
pirarucú
or
tambaqui
fish could hope to escape), the banks featured maize fields, cassava plots, and sarsaparilla arbors. Beyond these agricultural enterprises spread a savannah scored by arroyos and dotted with trident-shaped plants bearing fruits not unlike the cactus pads so beloved of Mr. Darwin's tortoises.

At last the village emerged from the mist, a sprawling settlement in the form of a wheel, its hub a plaza of crushed stone, each spoke a row of adobe dwellings. Akawo's unheralded appearance amongst her people prompted the sort of incredulous laughter and joyful weeping that might attend a person's return from the dead, which was in fact how the Indians perceived her arrival, enslavement on the Pacopampa Rubber Plantation being equivalent (as the princess explained to the adventurers) to captivity by Bora-Chi, god of the underworld. No one laughed louder or wept more copiously than Akawo's parents—the portly tribal leader, Nenkiwi, and his fine-boned wife, Andoa—who managed to retain a certain regal bearing despite their intoxication by bliss.

Solemnly Akawo recited the names of the thirty-two Indians who'd died from either battle wounds or the late General Zumaeta's malevolence. As the victims' relations slipped into the shadows to grieve, Akawo announced that if all went well some three hundred liberated
seringueiros
in Princess Ibanua's keeping would soon return to the Jequetepeque valley, followed shortly thereafter by another five hundred under Prince Gitika's protection. Not surprisingly, this news sent cheers resounding through the village, but then the atmosphere turned somber again, as Akawo reported that amongst these survivors was a score of rubber tappers blinded or maimed on orders from the devil Zumaeta.

With the coming of dusk the Indians began feasting and dancing, a celebration that rivaled in frenzy the
carnaval de la victoria
back at the Dominican mission. There was much
epená
sniffing, of course, especially by Mr. Chadwick, who found in the resin a balm for his cracked rib, and the revelers also consumed many calabashes of
masato,
a beverage fermented from cassava roots soaked in human spittle. In time Akawo bid the Europeans good night, explaining that she wished to tell her father about the Lost Thirteenth Tribe
scenario
. Chloe elected to remain near the bonfire—an ill-considered decision, as it happened, for the flames conjured up the fall of Castillo Bracamoros, including the sobering truth that, for all the distress she'd endured whilst dropping death-eggs on the mercenaries, the whole business had also been rather thrilling.

According to the vicar's pocket watch, the celebration ended shortly before 2:00 a.m. As the Huancabambas retired to their homes, so that the god of sleep, Cona-Caina, might cure them of exhaustion and cleanse them of
epená,
Mr. Chadwick explained to his fellow adventurers that they were permitted to occupy the empty huts on the rim of the village (or so he'd inferred from his fractured conversation with the princess's cousins). Thus did Chloe and her friends fall asleep that night in separate quarters, each such dwelling guarded by a doll-sized image of a local god. She could not identify the stout wooden figure poised at the foot of her pallet, but from his carnal smile she fancied he might be the Huancabamba equivalent of Dionysius—call him Suisynoid: lord of misrule, author of illusions, director of masquerades so persuasive as to deceive even the Reverend Simon Hallowborn.

*   *   *

At first light Ralph appeared outside Chloe's hut and announced that, having borrowed a donkey cart from the Huancabambas, he was on the point of departing for Puerto Etén, where he would attempt to persuade a whaling master or survey-ship captain to ferry the troupe from Peru to Galápagos. When Chloe praised Ralph for his loyalty to the Encantadas Salvation Brigade, he told her that saving the jeopardized species was the noblest of endeavors, “or so my tattooed octopus believes, despite the gulf separating cephalopods from vertebrates.”

Chloe passed the remainder of the day immersing herself in Old Testament narratives—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and onward—the better to instruct her disciples in their Israelite heritage. She quickly decided that the Book of Judges must not figure in these lessons, for the thing was a horror story from first to last, featuring such gruesome episodes as Jael pounding a tent stake through Sisera's head, Gideon tearing the elders of Succoth apart with briars, and Samson tying three hundred foxes together by their tails prior to setting them on fire.