The Sensory Deception (43 page)

Over the next hour they passed from heaven to hell and back. On the outskirts of hell, where the land had been cleared, plowed, and planted, crops grew in orderly lines: sugarcane for ethanol production.

O’Reilly adjusted their path due west toward the jungle below the steppes of the Andes desert. Gloria watched everything. She responded to every bird below them, every ripple in the water, and every breeze through the trees. Chopper found himself watching her with envy. He’d never seen someone, not even a child, so absolutely caught in the instant. She wasn’t plagued with worry. She cared, though. When they caught sight of deforested areas, quiet tears flowed over her cheeks. Chopper was not a compassionate man, but Gloria’s tears got to him. He rubbed her shoulders, brushed her hair back, and when that didn’t help, he kissed her tears away.

O’Reilly interrupted Chopper. “Is that the village?”

Chopper looked down. There were no flames here, just leaf-draped huts along the creek. There was smoke, though. The line of deforestation was closing in. Within weeks Mariano would have to decide. He would have three obvious choices: move his people farther upriver, cave in to the forces of change and accept enslavement by the plantation, or make a stand and fight for their patch of paradise.

Chopper thought of a fourth choice: they could burn.

The village was on a grassy slope next to a wide, calm segment of river. Villagers ran to the bank as the plane splashed down and came to a stop. Children jumped up and down, women tried to prevent them from getting too close, and men stood back and looked on with little expression.

Chopper helped Gloria off the plane and walked her up the slope. She looked at the forest canopy, turned about in a full circle, then lowered her gaze and turned again in a slow, data-saturated dance.

He pulled the duffel bags and backpack off the plane, carried them up onto the grass, and set them down near but still just outside the worn grounds of the village. Children hovered a few steps away. They were dressed essentially the same as the people in Uarini, in shorts and shirts. One had a Yankees T-shirt and a few men wore caps. Those who weren’t barefoot wore sandals. Chopper recognized Mariano Tuxauas with several other men who stood in front of a cabin, arms crossed, faces somber, watching the plane. Mariano was wearing a wide-brimmed leather hat.

The village looked different. The huts were still there, but the paths that connected them were cluttered with debris.

O’Reilly called Chopper back to the plane. He wrote down their GPS position on two sheets of paper, handed one to Chopper, and pocketed the other. Then he asked when they wanted to be picked up. Chopper told him not to worry about it. O’Reilly shrugged and restarted the engine.

Chopper settled Gloria next to their things. Sitting with her legs tucked under her, she stared into the jungle. A little girl in a big red T-shirt walked up and touched Gloria’s shoulder, poking her as if to see if she were real.

Chopper approached Mariano, greeted him in Spanish, and asked where he should make camp. The man didn’t appear to understand the question. The two men standing with him looked confused. Other men behind them were shuffling from hut to hut, adding to the piles of debris. Women fussed over the piles, organizing their contents, and covering them in blankets.

Chopper shrugged, went back, and unpacked the duffel bag. He pitched and staked a two-person tent, draped the solar panels over it, and configured the battery. Then he went back to Mariano and asked in Spanish how things were going. On his last visit, Chopper had given Mariano a crash course in herbal pharmacology. Mariano described how the village had profited, not just by trading tlitliltzin-prime and similar seedpods, but with more traditional staples. He pointed out the new sandals many of the villagers wore and tipped his leather hat.

Chopper understood the value of patience; he just didn’t have any. He sat through the boring conversation, waiting for the man to say something about the smoke that snaked through the trees and into the clouds. Ashes were evident on every surface and already accumulating on the solar panels.

When Mariano finally stopped talking, Chopper said, “They’re burning your forest. What are you going to do about it?”

Mariano sighed. He stood and looked around, said something in Portuguese to his men, and they scattered. He stepped closer to Chopper and placed a weathered hand on his shoulder. He spoke as though he were sharing a great legend. His people had lived in the forest as long as stories had been told. Though they had spent a few generations virtually enslaved at a sugar plantation, they’d resumed this lifestyle when the revolution that drove the Portuguese out of power presented the opportunity. Most of his people had been born here, just as he had, and spent their lives here—except for the young men, of course. He laughed. “Like all stallions, the best men need something to conquer.” Most of them returned later with brides. They fished in the river, hunted in the jungle, and at every full moon the chief and the men who had stood with him earlier canoed down the river to an outpost where they traded food, and now herbs, for medicine, clothes, and weapons.

On a planet oozing the shame of humanity, these were innocents. Still, the slow rambling monologue tested Chopper. His eyes wandered. Gloria was at the river with the little girl. He looked back at the village. The mahogany bench that had been in front of Mariano’s hut was gone. No, not gone—it was upended against one of the piles of debris.

Chopper got it. They were packing. They were leaving.

Mariano was in midsentence.

“No!” Chopper said. “You are not running away.”

Mariano looked confused. “But the forest, she is burning.”

Chopper asked, “What weapons do you have?”

Mariano cocked his head as though speaking to a child. “We cannot fight them.” Then he pointed up the river and said that they had scouted land in the hills toward the base of the Andes.

Chopper looked into the forest. One of the big, white, cone-shaped blossoms seemed to look back at him. He took a breath,
turned back to Mariano, and said, “No. We can solve this. You and me.” He motioned to the audio, temperature, and video sensors and the satellite transmission equipment in front of the tent. “We can beat them without firing a shot.”

But then Mariano made a mistake. He’d become a tired old man in the seven months since Chopper’s first visit. As he looked over his shoulder and up at the smoky sky behind him, he smiled. “No, no,
amigo
, we’re heading for the hills.”

He said it with a smile. A smile.

The flames were moving in, but a greater conflagration ignited in Chopper’s belly. He clenched his jaw, and as he did, his cheek pushed against his eye socket, forming a malevolent squint.

Mariano’s smile flipped into a frown.

The sensory-processing regions of Gloria’s brain developed more and more overlapping connections among disparate parts with every dose of Chopper’s drug. Her response to stimuli evolved to the point that each sensation triggered responses from every sense—full-blown synesthesia.

As Gloria watched the river flow, she listened to flickering orange sunlight, her eyes jittering to its rhythm. The chorus of birds squawking and whistling and insects clicking and screeching covered her tongue, tasting alternately sour, then sweet, then salty. The water flowed up her legs in a melody of greens and blues with popping white-bubble percussion. The banks, thick with mud, felt like they were enveloping her. Since she lacked the ability to consider and judge its content, Chopper’s lecture took hold and she felt the sea’s lusty affection fill her loins. The smell of life in every direction, the thick humidity, even mosquito bites
combined into a rush of warmth. A gash of pleasure forced her back to arch, her toes to curl, and every joint in her body erupted in a light show.

A glimpse of fleeting color called to her. A child. A small girl in a red T-shirt that hung to her knees knelt next to Gloria and touched her. The tiny, sticky fingers moved from her shoulder to her cheek. The girl’s smile sang. The sunlight tangoed with her shiny black hair, and then the child spoke and it tasted like ice cream.

Gloria’s engagement with reality and Chopper’s disengagement with humanity didn’t change over the next few days. Gloria followed the girl in the red shirt around the village and into the jungle. When the girl rejoined the village for meals, Gloria stayed at her side like a pet, and the child’s family welcomed her, tolerant of the defects that they perceived as stunted growth. When the girl went to her parents’ hut for the night, Chopper brought Gloria to his tent. Since the entire village participated in caring for their offspring, no one minded the girl’s preoccupation with Gloria. It looked to Chopper as though the village had adopted Gloria. Her integration into their society gave him an idea.

Chopper spent his time mapping the path of destruction, planning how and where and by whom the rain forest VR data should be acquired. Since Ringo had been unable to interpolate the battle between Moby-Dick and the colossal squid in software, Chopper understood that the recorded experiences had to be decisive. Simple, mundane, everyday life in the dying forest would not do.

On the day that Mariano and his village assembled everything they would take with them in the move upriver, Chopper
made his decision. Except for a few minutes in the morning and evening when he administered her doses of sensory deception drug, Gloria abandoned him for the villagers. He sat at the river and watched Mariano lead his people away from the home of their grandfathers’ grandfathers. He saw Gloria holding the child’s hand, being led away.

Chopper did something for the second time in a month that he hadn’t done since, well, since before he was dubbed Chopper. Romeo Vittori cried.

He tried to shake off the tears with a cough. The tears fell to the ground and pooled together in the mud. He stood and jogged over to Gloria. Her eyes flitted up to his and held them for an instant. Her nose quivered. The little girl offered to hold his hand, too. The child’s mother said something and the girl let go of Gloria’s hand and stepped away. Chopper took Gloria’s hand and pulled her out of the crowd, back to the riverbank and his tent.

He started with the satellite uplink. He fit the harness over Gloria’s shoulders and locked the belt around her waist with a cable tie that couldn’t be removed without a sharp blade. He placed his hand on the back of her neck and she leaned forward. Her hair fell in front of her eyes. He connected the headband and checked the angle of the sensors just above her forehead. He repeated the process over her ears, then affixed a third sensor, a larger one for temperature and scents, to the back of her head above the buckle. The headband was stretched tight, but not so tight that it would be uncomfortable.

He touched her chin and she looked up. He tucked errant hair into the headband so it wouldn’t interfere with the sensors. Her cheeks tightened the slightest bit. He loosened the Velcro attachment and she relaxed. He locked it in place with another cable tie. His fingers lingered on her cheek. The only flaws on her skin were the faint signatures of the dimples that formed when she smiled.