Now, in the year 1637, there was no fort, and no European town, but there was a village, a small settlement of the Manao Indians. “Manaus” was their word for the confluence; it meant, “mother of the gods.”
Above Manau, Central Amazon
The Sandterne lurched upward, caught by an updraft, and the elevatorman adjusted the elevator to compensate. He checked the variometer, a barometer modified to measure the rate of change of altitude. “Holding steady again, Captain.”
Captain Neilsen eyed the rainforest below. “Looks good.”
Maria spoke. “Can you bring us down any farther?”
“Not a chance,” said Captain Neilsen. “I have to keep at least thirty feet above the treetops. There’s no telling when a downdraft might send us down.”
“But if that happened, couldn’t you adjust the elevator wheel, or drop some more ballast?”
“Sure. But there are limits to how much, how fast.”
Maria studied the ground. “But Henrique and I need to get down there, and pick the rubber trees whose seeds we want to harvest. And of course we’d like to get back up again, too, it’s a long walk back to Gustavus. And the canopy is a good hundred feet high. I am not going to manage a hundred-thirty-foot descent, even in that ‘spy basket.’”
“Then we will need to find a clearing,” said Captain Neilsen. “That would be best in any event, since I wouldn’t want the wire to snag on these giant trees.”
“Does the river count as a clearing?” Henrique asked abruptly.
“This gondola is waterproof, so we can ‘land’ on water. And you could then lower a canoe. But we have only practiced landing on a lake, I am not comfortable about landing on a river, except for an emergency.”
Nature might or might not abhor a vacuum, but Nature qua rainforest most definitely abhorred open spaces. A tree struck by lightning might fall over and, connected by lianas to neighboring trees, cause a chain reaction that cleared a considerable area, but the sudden exposure to sunlight would cause seedlings and saplings to burst into frenetic activity, and soon the clearing would be erased by a green explosion. They found a clearing, close to the Rio Negro, a major tributary of the Amazon, but it was at least a day’s hike away from Manaus.
It would have to do.
* * *
Maria gazed out over the coffee-colored waters of the Rio Negro. She knew, from her studies in Grantville, that the color was the result of tannins leached out of decaying vegetation.
“Henrique, I think I have spoken of movie night at the Higgins Hotel in Grantville.”
“Moving pictures, yes. What about them?”
“This place reminds me of a movie called Creature from the Black Lagoon. The creature was a Gill-man—”
“Excuse me?”
“A Gill-man. Half-man, half-fish. My friend Lolly said that it was based on a merman legend from the Amazon, so naturally I thought of it here.”
Henrique pondered this for a moment, then gestured with his gun. “If it comes here, I’ll shoot it.”
* * *
The next day, as they approached the outskirts of the Indian village of Manaus, Coqui and several of his fellow Manao Indians jumped in front of them.
Henrique lowered the rifle he had just pointed at Coqui. “You idiot, I could have killed you.”
Coqui was still grinning. “We saw the great bird, and I see it laid two little eggs.”
* * *
Coqui held out a reed basket. “Here are many seeds, all from a tree that gave much tree-milk when I cut it the way you taught me.”
“‘Milk of the Moon,’” she dubbed it.
“Milk of the Moon,” Coqui repeated. “But the Man in the Moon is male, a warrior. How can the moon give milk?”
“How does the moon enter into it?” asked Henrique. “I know that the moon makes the tide, and that affects fish, but I don’t remember seeing any change in the flow of latex according to the lunar phase.”
“There isn’t,” said Maria, “I just like the alliteration. It works in Dutch as well as English. ‘Melk’ and ‘Maan,’ you know.”
Henrique pondered this. “It even works in Portuguese,” he said in a surprised tone. “‘Leite’ and ‘Lua.’”
“Besides,” added Maria, “the Indians up north call gold the ‘Tears of the Sun,’ and the encyclopedias say that latex was once called, ‘white gold,’ and the moon is ‘white’ . . . I just like the imagery.”
“Well, you’re an artist . . . I’m not surprised. . . .”
Coqui rapped the trunk to get their attention. “There is evil news from downriver. Where the Cuyari meets the Mother of Rivers, there are many bad white men.” The Cuyari was the Indian name for what the Portuguese, and the up-time atlas, called the Madeira. “The whites make war on the Tupinamba.