The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [140]
“Aaaah krashiii, aaaah krashiii, aaaah krashiii. . . .”
Without warning the tribespeople around her shriek with delight, then jump up and start running around the shapono’s central plaza, red feathers bristling on their shoulders, down flying from their heads. Some of them flap their arms and make shrill noises. Others sway their arms above them as though swinging through vines. One man crawls on the ground in painstaking slow motion, turning his head very slowly and smiling exactly the way sloths do. Most of their animal imitations are eerily accurate. She can even recognize Giselle’s imitation of a plant-cutter ant.
Then one after another they flail about and fall to the ground as though struck by lightning. From the family areas of the shapono other tribespeople come out and carry the limp bodies back to the shaman, who continues to chant as he walks around the fire, lighting a stick wrapped in some kind of leaf. The stick doesn’t catch fire exactly but just glows at the tip and smolders like incense. He walks over to the recumbent tribesmen and chants over each of them in turn, waving the smoking stick. One by one they reanimate, sit up slowly, and stare searchingly into the fire, imbuing it, she assumes, with whatever personal meaning they choose. Until recently Ursula didn’t think people could assemble their own religions and go on to invest in them even the slightest amount of actual belief. But observational evidence, it seems, is proving her wrong. Perhaps what she’s been witnessing is the birth not only of a new religion but of a new kind of religion, an ironic religion—one that never claims to be absolutely true but only professes to be relatively beautiful, and never promises salvation but only proposes it as a salubrious idea. A century ago there were people who thought art was the thing that could fuse the terms of this seemingly insuperable oxymoron, and no doubt art is part of the formula. But maybe consumerism also has something to teach us about forging an ironic religion—a lesson about learning to choose, about learning the power and the consequences, for good or ill, of our ever-expanding palette of choices. Perhaps, she thinks, the day will come when the true ironic religion is found, the day when humanity is filled with enough love and imagination and responsibility to become its own god and make a paradise of its world, a paradise of all the right choices. It will be in such a world, she likes to think, that Javier will awaken. She knows, for his sake, that she’ll do her part to help that future along.
It was with a little ad hoc, new-time religion of their own that she, Chas, and James T. Couch said good-bye to him. They went to the cryonic facility not knowing exactly what to expect. What they found was oddly unspectacular but at least clean and well maintained, an industrial basement housing a hundred or so stainless steel cylindrical tanks standing on end. A manager led them to the one in which he assured them Javier was now being maintained at a constant temperature of minus 196 degrees Celsius, the temperature of liquid nitrogen. He pointed out the LED temperature gauge and described the thoughtful combination of computer monitoring systems and live inspections, as well as the failsafe wiring in back connecting the tank to an on-site backup power generator. The manager was a technician, of course, and not a priest, so when he’d finished describing the operations of the facility, he judged his duties fulfilled, wished them well, and left them alone with Javier’s tank.
For a while no one said anything.
The surface of the tank was featureless and smooth.
The closest thing to an interface with Javier was the temperature gauge, and it was to this that their eyes gravitated, the number –196, lingering for a few seconds at a time before disappearing and immediately reappearing. For a long time to come, maybe centuries, this would be all anyone would know, or need to know, about the man inside.
It was Chas who broke