The Devil's Garden (17 page)

So, in the third and most important phase of our study, our aim is to demonstrate – to prove – that the
Myrmelachista
are ‘helping’ one another when there is no
good genetic reason to do so. Such a finding, we hope, will bring us directly into the crucible of the debate. For the only thing that ants cooperating across colonies have in common . . . is their
species.

The stakes could not be higher.

On the one hand, we have the selfish-gene merchants, who claim that traits can evolve only for the good of the individual and not for the good of the group. This has many implications for
biology, but also for our society: most of all, it turns the individual into the king of the biological hierarchy. Most of science covertly or explicitly subscribes to this view.

On the other hand, we have those who say that evolution is multi-level: yes, individuals evolve traits, but groups also succeed against one another and these groups will beat other groups in
the evolutionary game. Evolution works both within the group and between the group. Further, the most successful groups may well comprise many altruistic individuals. Again, the implications echo
through every aspect of our existence.

VII

Sole was lying asleep sideways on my bed. She had been waiting for me. In five strides, I was across to her. Her eyes were smiling, drowsy, as she shifted onto her back,
but now they widened as she saw my intention. She feigned a playful fright, raised herself and offered her lips. I slipped her belt and slid her jeans leg from leg.

Afterwards, we lay together listening to the evening calls of the forest. During our separation, something had changed between us: the acts of lovers no longer acts, our bodies become messengers
of deeper things.

‘So what was it?’ I asked. ‘What was wrong with Yolanda?’

Sole smiled. ‘It was a boy.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She had been with a boy from one of the villages . . . and she got hepatitis. B and D together, the doctor said.’

‘How old is she?’

‘Fourteen.’

‘Christ.’

‘She couldn’t tell her father. Only her mother. She thought she was dying from bad magic.’

‘She would have died?’

‘The doctor said it happens – especially when you get complications.’ Sole rubbed her hand back and forth across my chest. ‘But Yolanda was lucky: my doctor, who is not a
doctor, saved her life.’

‘I went to a party. You went to the hospital.’

‘That’s true.’ She smiled. ‘And I spent a lot of your money. You’ll probably have to sell your house and get a big drainpipe in Laberinto.’ She raised a
finger – a bird was calling, three notes ascending in a minor key, sad and beautiful and hypnotic. A
seringueiro
. The light was beginning to fade.

After a while, she propped herself on her elbow and said, softly: ‘Tell me?’

‘What? Tell you what?’

‘Whatever it is that has changed your eyes.’

I felt my shoulders tense.

‘Please don’t lie,’ she said. ‘Or this becomes like everything else.’

I was aware of the sound of my own breathing.

‘I met a man at Machaguar,’ I said. ‘He introduced me to a soldier who went out to the plane that crashed . . . the plane that Quinn was in. The soldier told me what he had
seen – the wreckage, the dead.’

She murmured.

‘I stayed at the bar after he left. I was drinking. Then one of the girls came over and sat with me. I bought some cocaine from her. Maybe that was what she was supposed to do – sell
me cocaine first and then sex. I don’t know.’

‘Did you go with her?’

‘No. I took some of the cocaine. But it was strong – really strong. I left her the rest and went back to the river. I don’t know how. I was drunk. I felt like death.’

Gentle fingers traced the bones of my face.

‘Cocaine has always been here,’ she said.

‘I know that but after wh—’

‘And part of you has been hoping all this time that Dr Quinn was alive.’

‘Yes.’ I looked up at her steady eyes. ‘Yes, I have been hoping. And I have been lying to myself, too, about lots of things. But no more. What happens, happens. We just have to
live.’

‘We do.’ She lay down beside me.

The room was almost dark. I wanted only the feeling of where our bodies met. The
seringueiro
called again – closer now.

‘What did you get in the city?’ I asked. ‘What was it? Why did you want to go?’

‘No. Not now, I will tell you later.’ She was silent a moment and then she said: ‘My mother was a cocaine girl like that once. That’s how she met my father.’

I reached for her hand and side by side we fell asleep.

I

For a few days, Kim and I worked hard. Absorbed in the forest, it seemed as if we had never been away and I began to feel that the Devil’s Garden was at the heart of
things, that the affairs of the ants were the real business of the world and everything else fleeting and tertiary. I thought about Quinn and about his idealism – how he loved the Greeks and
talked about them as if they were his friends. My mind stood up to its full height and I began to see the importance of our study again: the human effort to understand life – the only
meaningful chance of salvation. Science had helped overthrow the beautiful deceits of religion but at what cost? A new age of uncontested materialism – so painfully antithetical to human
well-being with its relentless appeal to insecurity, jealousy and accrual, ignoring need where found, creating need where none. We had to go deeper – into biology, chemistry and the laws of
physics. We had to understand ourselves and our place in the universe – with dignity and without flinching.

Phase one – the poisoning – was merely a matter of the proof we were day by day collecting. Phase two – the limitation question – Kim would lead. And phase three –
the cross-colony cooperation – this, we would work on together. My intention – if only we could proceed fast enough – was that this would become the denouement of my book. Thanks
to Quinn, we had gene-sequencing equipment at the lab and at the storage hut. We could establish non-relatedness. We could provide evidence of cooperation. Was it beyond the bounds of possibility
to start some early experiments straight away?

My idea was that we devise a way to measure whether one colony was lending workers to another for tasks – fighting off predation, for example – and then see if those same workers
were returning to their original nest without any obvious recompense or benefit. Except it was not at all clear – to me, to Kim, to anyone – what exactly ‘recompense or
benefit’ meant.

‘It’s a big problem,’ Kim agreed, as we sat eating boiled potatoes on our field stools in the forest. ‘Altruism is messing with the universe.’

‘Maybe we just have to watch the helper-ants’ bank accounts for the rest of their lives,’ I said, ‘to make sure that they never cash the evolutionary cheque.’

‘Assuming this place lasts that long.’ She raised her wrist and passed the sweatband across her brow. ‘It feels like a very human trait, though – don’t you think? I
just can’t imagine any other animal bothering with altruism toward strangers. Not for long, anyway. It’s too close to self-delusion for any other species.’

I looked about the forest. ‘Maybe that’s what we have here, a self-deluding ant. Now how would you test for that?’

‘Psychometrics,’ she grinned.

I smiled. ‘Anyway, I have a theory that self-delusion is the best indicator of intelligence.’

She swigged her water. ‘You might be on to something there, Doc. Think of all the most successful and charismatic people – totally self-deluded.’

Opposite where we were working, I noticed a branch broken so that it formed a sharp and splintered elbow pointing up. It could have been snapped by any one of a dozen creatures, but I also
remembered how Lothar had said that he came across evidence of the un-contacted peoples’ warnings all the time.

II

Back at the Station that same evening, we found Tord waiting at the
comedor
with a bag full of gifts: baseball caps bearing the legend ‘C. I. A. (Christians
in Action)’ and T-shirts which proclaimed in English: ‘You don’t know Jack if you don’t know Jesus’. Felipe and Estrela, neither of whom spoke English, managed a
display of gratitude on behalf of the rest of us.

Later on, and feeling more irreligious than usual, I went up to the Judge’s hut to ask him if he wished to join us for dinner. Despite everything, I was still hoping for cordiality between
us. His hut was dark though – and there was no answer when I rapped on the locked door. Nobody had seen him or Rafaela leave. And there was no way of knowing if he had simply been true to his
word and set up his registration post somewhere else or whether he had vanished for good.

In the continuing absence of Jorge, Estrela made one of her guinea-pig casseroles, which we ate with uneasy conscientiousness. After dinner, Sole went to use the computer. And so we made a four
for cards. We were almost as we were before the first arrival: Tord, Kim, Lothar and I sat at the dining table; Estrela lolling on the lounge chairs, muttering occasionally, one thickened leg
propped up; and Felipe busy beside her, snipping fantasies from his lifestyle magazines with rusty scissors. Kim had crushed fruit to drink. I had added vodka. Unusually,she was bare-skinned in her
shorts and T-shirt and she had been spraying herself with insect repellent all evening. The heat stuck the cards.

Was there a moment when we became aware of a commotion coming from the river? Perhaps it was gradual. But we seemed to stop our game and look up at one another in unison.

I pressed out my cigarette, slowly, as if this would somehow improve my hearing. A distorted bass, a thudding drum; a voice that did not sing but spat. Kim’s chair faced inwards. She
swivelled in her seat, her brown arm crooked over the high back. Tord’s eyes followed her. Raised voices. Cries over the music; crisscross lights in the trees. Lothar put on his hat. I braced
myself.

Darkened figures emerged from the river path – arms aloft, their faces obscured by the crazy dance of their torches. We waited in a rigid silence. Only when they entered the range of the
comedor
’s lights did we see them more clearly. Tribesmen. And the Judge.

He walked at the front like the conductor of a military band. His hair was slicked down and the more unsettling for that. Beside him was an older man with a tattered open shirt and a heavy scarf
around his neck. Half a dozen boys danced around them; they were barefoot and wore only shorts with polished-bone necklaces over their bared chests. The raging music came from a massive machine,
shouldered by the oldest. He was taller than the others and he wore red lines and some sort of white beading across his cheekbones.

‘Drunk,’ Tord mouthed at Kim as she turned back to face us.

‘Tupki’s son.’ Lothar’s hoarse voice was raised against the music.

Kanari – I hadn’t recognized him with his face painted. And now I realized that the scarf around the older man’s neck was not a scarf but a snake. I had seen this before; some
of the villagers kept anacondas as pets to deter the rodents – they drugged them with some kind of root. But this one was big: head and tail, either side of the old man, it writhed slowly,
sedated.

The Judge stopped and held up his palm. Kanari turned down the volume. The sudden silence was as shocking as the noise.

Kim stood.

The Judge spoke as though addressing the stage from the footlights. ‘Hello there, my good Christian soldier.’ This to Tord, who now also rose. ‘I see you have come among us
with your blessings. How about we all drink to your poor under-achieving God tonight? He’s not done all that well, has he? Not so far.’ He mounted the steps one at a time. ‘We
require more wine. And then more music.’ He extended an arm back out into the night. ‘For how do we charm the snakes if not with music and wine?’

Tord’s voice was querulous. ‘What are you doing, sir? What are you doing with these people?’

The Judge paused a moment – affecting to consider Tord anew. Then he started slowly towards our table, his palms before him as if for an aria. And before I could guess his intentions, he
had dropped to his knees in front of Kim, clasping her bare legs to his face. The gesture was horribly intimate. She was caught, trapped, frozen by the joke, the seriousness, by a burning
embarrassment and alarm. She tried to recoil but she was too strongly grasped to step away without greater force or a kick that she was unwilling yet to risk.

‘Miss Van der Kisten, you are right, you are right: the world has not cared for these men. But see, we are all here debased – the black man, the red man, the white man. Will we ever
forgive one another? How many generations does it take?’

‘Sir, let her go!’ Tord’s shout rang out into the trees, his voice powerful, declamatory, a firebrand as he started towards the Judge. ‘You justify yourself in the sight
of men, but God knows your heart. For that which is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God.’

But the Judge – suddenly spry – was off his knees and on his feet in an instant.

‘She is yours.’ He threw his hands out violently then sent them vigorously through his hair so that it stood up in its customary fashion. ‘Be wary of this ridiculous man, Miss
Van der Kisten, be wary. His intentions are worse than mine. I want a night. Less. He wants to steal your life and plant his resentful little seed up and down your womb.’

Laughing, the Judge stepped backwards and bowed, ushering Tord and Kim together.

‘I’m fine.’ Kim pulled away from Tord’s arm, fury and embarrassment and repugnance fighting in her face. ‘Let go of me.’

The Judge wheeled his arms. ‘Why is the music quiet?’ He looked about. ‘And get these men a
drink
. We are desperate. We are all desperate.’

This last was thrown in Felipe’s direction. But he was frozen where he sat, his scissors half-raised as though trying to cut invisible cords in front of his chest.

I stood. ‘You can’t have any more,’ I said. ‘Not here. These are our supplies. And you should take these men back. They’ve had enough. I think we
sh—’