Origin (20 page)

She kneels beside me, her feet tucked under her, and stares up at the sky. “Have you ever been in an airplane?” she asks suddenly.

I smile ruefully. “No. Not yet, anyway.”

“Oh.” She sighs wistfully. “I’ve always wanted to sit in an airplane. Way above the trees, like a bird.”

I look up through the canopy at the flecks of sky. I have seen two planes in my life, one when I was five and one when I was twelve. They were so high and tiny they were almost imperceptible. Uncle Antonio once told me we were too far from any cities to see many planes, but even so, there are enough trees cultivated in Little Cam to cover the compound from any aerial eyes. “Where would you go?” I ask Ami.

“Eio’s Papi told us about places where there are no trees. Sometimes it’s all buildings made of concrete, for miles and miles. Sometimes it’s just sand, so much that you can’t even see the end of it.”

I try to imagine such a sight, but it seems impossible. “I’ve never been outside the jungle.”

Ami takes my hand and smiles broadly. There’s a slight gap between her two front teeth. “We’ll go one day. You and me, in a plane. We’ll go to China and America and Antarctica.”

I stare at her. “How do you know all that?”

“Know what?”

“All those names.” I think of my map, recall the words printed on it. “China. That’s in…Asia?” The names taste strange on my lips, like some foreign food.

She nods. “Papi made Eio and me learn so many names of so many places. He said we should know as much as we can about the world and that…” She screws up her face, thinks for a second, then says in the same singsong manner I use when I recite the periodic table of the elements, “That ‘ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith
we fly to heaven.’ That’s by some
karaíba
called Shakespeare.” She smiles smugly. “Sometimes I learn quicker than Eio.”

“Shakespeare, huh?” He must have been a scientist; it sounds like something Uncle Paolo would say.

I feel an unexpected bite of jealous anger. Someone from Little Cam has been teaching Ami and Eio about the outside world while leaving me sitting in the dark like an idiot. Sure, I can name all the parts of a paramecium, but a seven-year-old knows more about the world than I do. If knowledge is “the wing wherewith we fly to heaven,” then I am a bird with clipped wings.

My fingers dig into the soft soil on the bank, squeezing it with all the frustration I don’t want Ami to see on my face.

Above us, a colony of golden tamarins chatter and laugh as they chuck berries at our heads. Ami shrieks back at them, and one comes scurrying down to hop on her shoulder. It plays with her hair and hisses at me when I try to pet it.

“Ami speaks to monkeys,” Eio says, suddenly coming up behind us and shaking water from his hair, “because she is half monkey herself.”

“Am not!” She holds her arm toward him, and the tamarin runs down it and leaps onto Eio’s head and begins pulling his hair. He yells and swats at it, and Ami and I laugh, my anger falling away.

When Eio finally rids himself of the little golden monkey, Ami scoops it up and charges into the pool, startling a pair of hoatzins who squawk and flutter away, the tufts of feathers on their heads rippling behind them.

“Her parents died, so she was raised by Achiri,” Eio says. “She is like my little sister. That means I’m her protector.”

“She’s an angel,” I say. “I’d give anything to have a little sister like her.”

Eio throws himself onto the ground beside me, stretching his length across the thick layer of leaves that blanket the jungle floor. He stretches his arms over his head, giving me a full display of his abdominal muscles flexing. I feel my cheeks flush, and I swallow, trying not to look like I’m mentally diagramming every inch of his tanned skin.

“How can you believe in angels?” he asks. “You’re a scientist.”

“I don’t.” Or Uncle Paolo doesn’t, anyway. I pause for a moment. “But I think some of the others do, like Aunt Nénine. She just doesn’t say so, or Uncle Paolo gets mad.”

“You can’t take someone’s gods away. You can try, but they’ll hide them and pray to them anyway. That’s what Kapukiri says.”

“You put a lot of faith in what he says.” I think of the villagers’ reaction to what he said the second time I came to Ai’oa.
Jaguar, mantis, moon.

“He is our medicine man, our miracle worker. If we are sick, it is Kapukiri who heals us. He sees things before they happen, and sometimes he walks in the spirit world without even using
yoppo
.”

“
Anadenanthera peregrina
,” I say automatically. “A hallucinogen.”

He nods. “You wouldn’t like it though.
Karaíba
never do. It makes your brain”—he spreads his fingers on either side of his head—“
pyoo!
Like an explosion.”

“You’re right. I don’t think I’d like it.”
Yuck.

My distaste must show on my face, because he laughs.
“We Ai’oans do things a lot differently, yes, but in many ways we are just the same as you.”

“How?”

He shrugs and picks a fern frond, pulling one tiny leaf off at a time and rolling them into little beads. “We eat, we sleep, we breathe. We smile when we’re happy, and we cry when we’re sad. When we swim, we must come up for air. When we work all day, our backs get sore. When we get cut, we bleed.”

I look at my pale wrist.
Not all of us.

“Those of us who are strong take care of the weak, and we live to please those in power over us.”

“Uncle Paolo thinks the weak should be culled,” I say quietly. “He says that the rest of the world disagrees. That’s why the scientists first came here; they had to work in secret because their ideas were too advanced for everyone to accept. They were scorned and discredited because their way of strengthening the human race meant making hard decisions.”
They called them monsters
, Uncle Paolo told me.
And they despised men like Dr. Falk. So Falk came here, to the jungle, where he heard a legend of a flower that could make one immortal
.…

Uncle Paolo is angry at the outside world that forced Dr. Falk and his colleagues into hiding.
“They were stupid, Pia, and they still are. They don’t understand that taking life can sometimes be a greater mercy than saving life. You have to see the bigger picture, have to look at the whole and not the individual. Once you focus on the leaf and not the whole tree, you lose your objectivity, and your reason is compromised. Always see the tree, Pia. Always be objective. Your reason must rule your heart, not the other way around.”

“And what do
you
think?” Eio asks, rolling onto his stomach and staring me straight in the eye. “Do you agree?”

“Me?” I stare at him. No one’s ever asked me how I feel about Uncle Paolo’s views. In Little Cam, everyone thinks that way. “Well, I don’t
dis
agree. I mean, Uncle Paolo is a scientist. He reaches his conclusions through careful observation and documentation and—”

“Look.” Eio says suddenly. He brushes some leaves aside and draws a line in the dirt with his finger. “What is it?”

I look from the line to Eio uncertainly. “Huh?”

“Well, is it a line or a circle?”

“What is this, a trick question?”

“Just answer it.”

Guardedly, I reply, “It’s a line.”

“So it’s not a circle? You’re sure?”

I give him a flat, unamused stare. “Yes.”

“Okay,” he says amiably. Then he reaches behind me and picks up a circular leaf—
Tropaeolaceae tropaeolum
, my mind supplies—which he holds lengthwise at eye level, so that it looks like a thin line in the air.

“Line or circle?”

“Okay, smart guy.” I roll my eyes. “I get it.”

“Line or circle?” he insists.

“It’s both. Ha ha.” I grab the leaf and hold it upright, my eyes tracing its round outline.

“It’s something Papi showed me once,” Eio says. “He said that seeing and understanding are two different things. Our eyes show us one side of an object, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t five other sides we
can’t
see. So why trust your
eyes? Why live your whole life thinking that just because you can’t see every side to something, those other sides don’t exist?”

“If you can’t trust your eyes then what can you trust?”

He smiles and closes his hand around mine, lifting one finger to tap the leaf. “You trust someone who can see the other sides.”

“Like you?” I mean the question in disbelief, but it comes out, to my surprise, completely sincere.

“Well…why not?” His smile is wide and cocky, as if he’s inviting me to argue with him. “Are you really so surprised we
natives
aren’t as ignorant as your scientists say? Do you think you’re the only one allowed to be smart?”

I want to say something sharp and clever in response, but my lips stay shut, and I stare at him with slightly bewildered fascination. Still smiling, he yawns and halfheartedly stretches.

“There’s a papaya tree over that way. I’ll go get us some, and then I’ll teach you more smart things.” He laughs when I roll my eyes, then stands and heads into the jungle.

“Yeah?” I call after him. “You think you’re a proper genius, don’t you?”

He turns, gives a short, mocking bow, then disappears into the jungle, laughing.

Shaking my head at his self-satisfaction, I kick off my shoes, roll up my pants, and wade in after Ami.

“What? Too scared to get wet?” She splashes me, and I hold my hands up in defense and laugh.

I notice a dark ripple in the water behind her and point. “What’s that?”

“I don’t know.” Ami wades into the water to get a closer look.

Then I see it. “Ami, no!
Get back!
”

“What—”

She disappears under the water. In mere seconds a snake as thick as my thigh is coiled four times around her little body, and before my horrified eyes, it begins to tighten.

“A
mi!” I scream. “I’m coming!”

I plunge into the water. The anaconda is by far the largest I’ve ever seen. There’s no way to measure exactly, but it is definitely over fifteen feet.

“Ami! Hang on!” I can’t see its head, so I grab at its body and pull. It responds by squeezing further. Ami gasps as her face reddens.

“No! You just breathe, Ami! Just keep breathing, damn it!” I pick up rocks and smash them across the snake, and its head rises above Ami’s and hisses at me. Its tongue is long and black and forked.

“Get off of her! Let
go
!” I throw a rock at its head, and it strikes true. But instead of dying, the snake moves as fast as the liquid mercury with which Uncle Sergei likes to experiment. It slides off Ami’s body, and color returns to her face. I grab her and hold her close.

“It’s all right, it’s all right.”

“Pia!”

I feel something tighten around my leg, and then I’m underwater. It holds me there for one…two…three minutes. Most people would have drowned by now, but I feel myself enter a strange stasis in which air is no longer necessary. Still, when I thrust upward, plunging my face back into the air, I gulp down one greedy breath before the anaconda pulls me under again. It moves around me like some demonic rope, its skin slick and smooth and cold. It wraps around my legs first, then my waist and chest. On its last pass the snake slides across my neck, slowly this time, almost lovingly, as if trying to soothe me to my death.
Don’t you know I can’t die, snake?

But you can be swallowed
, a sibilant voice responds, and though I know it’s my own, my imagination credits it to the snake.
Swallowed into the wet, dark belly
.…

I plant my feet on the streambed and use all my strength to thrust myself upward, lifting my head from the water. I suck down air and smell the rotting musk of the snake, and I gag.

Ami is screaming on the bank, and the rocks she throws all go wide. The serpent’s head hovers inches from my face, its yellow slitted eyes fixed on mine, its mouth almost smiling.

Suddenly the snake tenses and tightens, and I feel the air squeezed from my lungs. I give a little half gasp, half squeak. I want to tell Ami to run, get help, something besides throwing rocks uselessly, but I can’t speak. I don’t have the breath. I hate how useless my immortality is at this moment. I would trade it in a heartbeat for the strength to throw this monster off.

The snake draws itself tighter and tighter around me. I’m on my knees in the water, legs scraped and scratched by stones.

Immortality, Pia, aren’t you lucky? An eternity in the belly of a snake.

Black patches fill my vision, blocking out Ami. Where the black is not, colors dance vividly, a kaleidoscope sucking me under, luring me into unconsciousness.

I hear a wild yell, water splashing all around, and Ami shrieking. The snake tightens, tightens…then releases. Its thick coils fall away like some horrific, scaly garment dropping to the floor. I lunge forward and fall onto the bank. Ami has my hands; she’s pulling me out of the water.

I collapse, gasping and coughing and crying, on the mossy bank. I pound my fist on the ground, trying to force air back into my body. When I turn to look back, I see Eio embroiled in battle with the serpent. His eyes are wild, his teeth are bared, and he has an arrow in one hand that he’s trying to stab into the snake’s head.

“Kill it, Eio! Kill it!” yells Ami.

He’s certainly trying his best. When the snake wraps a coil around his chest, he slips a hand under it and struggles to push it off. Muscles strain beneath his tanned skin, his face reddens with effort, but he succeeds in thrusting it off himself. The fight lasts long minutes, and the entire time my heart is in my mouth.
Please, please, please
…I wish I knew of a god to pray to. Instead, I can only send the word out like a distress call over the radio. Please, please.…

With a deep, wordless bellow, Eio heaves the snake away from his body. It flips wildly in the air, thrashing and hissing, and lands with a splash in the water. I think it’s over, because Eio’s free, and we can run now, but he goes after it.

“No!” I croak.