Bedlam Planet (19 page)

“That’s more or less what I’ve been feeling lately,” Dennis said, frowning. “I seem to have been looking at the potential of Asgard for its own sake, so I’ve been getting things done. But the rest of them seem to be looking at the ways it fails to measure up to Earth.”

“Yes, the transition is horribly difficult,” nodded Abdul. “It’s a shock to the vanity, if nothing else, to realise that Asgard-Man isn’t master of his planet, a member of a multi-billion society which can afford to rack up knowledge on dusty shelves on the vague chance that someone may one day find it useful for a doctorate thesis. He’s a species competing from scratch with others who got here first, and he’s got to behave as such, or he’ll become extinct.

“On the other hand, of course, when I compared us to demi-gods I wasn’t joking. If we do win out, when our descendants look back generations from now, they will recognise that we, and we only, are the ones who made the big jump across the lightyears. Did Parvati tell you what must have happened when you got poisoned by that stinging fish?”

“She said,” Dennis answered slowly, “that it drove me sane.”

“That’s right. We tend to think of sanity as being what other people find acceptable. But what account do animals take of public opinion? No, what sanity consists
in is doing what
the planet you live on
will accept. And precisely because Asgard is not Earth, what is sane here may well seem crazy in Earthly terms.

“So what we have to do—what we’ve desperately been trying to find a way of doing—is drive the entire Asgard colony Asgard-sane.”

T
HERE WAS A PAUSE
. Eventually Dennis said, “Was it—uh—’Asgard-sane’ to sabotage all that equipment, or was it done in a fit of blind fury?”

“It was the best we could manage,” Parvati said. “And it didn’t work. You see, when we’d had a chance to talk together about the various experiences we’d had, mentally, we realised the fatal flaw in our existing plan. It’s impossible to do what we were trying to do—conquer Asgard wholly by the power of reason. Man isn’t a rational being. He’s a rational
animal,
and unless the animal and human parts of us are perfectly integrated we shall always live here as strangers. Which would be absurd—this is an incredibly hospitable world for human beings! But when we tried to explain what we’d figured out to people like Saul and Tibor, we found them so attached to the rational approach they wouldn’t listen. They were even proposing to lock us up at gunpoint because we wanted to do things which didn’t fit their logical attitude: drink unpurified water, eat native-grown plants, and sweat out the necessary period of transition to an Asgard diet.”

“When I found myself absent-mindedly chewing on a bit of woodplant bark, I thought for a moment I was crazy,” Dennis said. “If I hadn’t had the evidence of my survival on the diamond island, I’d have rushed straight for a medical check.”

“Of course.” That was Tai speaking up. The blocky Chinese hunched forward, his face very serious. “Any of us would have felt the same if we hadn’t been—ah—
taken by surprise. Look, let me explain what goes on when you try and adapt to an Asgard diet, shall I? It’s complicated, but the essential factor is this. Your body is wiser than your mind; it’s been around longer, and carries memories in its cells which we’ve barely begun to guess at.”

“I gave him your image of a dog looking for emetic grasses,” Parvati said.

“And I’d already thought of something related to that,” Dennis said, and quoted the example of the pioneer submariners.

“That shows insight,” Tai approved. “But there’s another point. Know anything about sheep-farming? No? Well, there’s an important Earthly grazing grass called
Phalaris tuberosa
which sheep normally eat quite happily. Sometimes, though, when they browse off young spring shoots, they get a disease called staggers from it. That’s due to an unusual concentration of tryptamine alkaloids. What was harmless yesterday suddenly exceeds the tolerance level, and—” Tai snapped his fingers. “Now our tolerance level is much lower than that of a sheep because our nervous system is more complex. Plants like the opium poppy, or the coca plant, can hit us with so damned many permutations of alkaloids it took advanced computers to sort them out, and some of them affect us in such minuscule concentrations you’d need a Shlovsky-Har fractionator to detect them. We lost ours. That was why, when I called for test subjects, I knew I was taking a risk. And the risk proved to exist, although luckily …” He hesitated, scowling into nowhere.

“You know what a vitamin precursor is?”

“A substance which the body can metabolise into the vitamin form,” Dennis said promptly.

“Correct. Well, what we ingest from Asgard vegetation, whether it’s of Earthly or indigenous stock, includes a hallucinogen precursor. And—ho, brother!” Tai chuckled ruefully. “Lysergic acid is weak compared to
this
stuff! I think what we do is hang a urea group on the
molecule, which our test animals couldn’t because they aren’t primates, and I also suspect that it blocks amine oxidase more efficiently than anything we ever dreamed up on Earth, thus shooting the serotonin balance to hell. But that’s irrelevant. What counts is this. What does a hallucinogen do?”

“It destroys perceptual sets, isn’t that right?”

“That’s the standard definition,” Parvati said. “But did you ever stop to think
exactly
what that statement means? ‘Except ye become as little children …’!”

Drawn as though by a magnet, Dennis’s gaze fixed on the sleeping form of Dan Sakky.

“That’s right,” Abdul confirmed. “We’ve found a way to strip ourselves of all sophistication. We can approach what grows on Asgard with an animal lack of inhibition, and let our cellular memory judge what’s safe and what isn’t.” He shivered, as though in awe. “It’s almost as though the entire trend of human culture was towards the colonisation of other worlds! That’s what gives me my confidence in our ultimate success. Something’s been working like a leaven in human thinking, preparing us psychologically for the process of dying and being reborn as a different species. Asgard-Man is only the first of many, I’m certain.”

“What happens when you take this—this drug you’ve discovered?” Dennis said after a pause.

“The conscious mind is suspended,” Parvati said. “Just as happened to you on the diamond island. It shunts a human being from an Earthly into an Asgard frame of reference.”

“A species which isn’t hampered by thinking about what it’s doing, but responding to what its belly and glands tell it, has the edge on an alien world.” Looking pleased with his summation, Tai leaned back against the nearby rock wall.

“But one gets over it?” Dennis demanded.

“No, it’s cumulative,” Parvati said. “That’s why it took two or three days for the stuff to work the first time on us six.”

“But you’re communicating with me now okay,” Dennis said.

“Ah, I see what you mean. You take the stuff, it begins to work, and then for six to eight hours you behave like an animal, retaining only species-recognition and certain other traits we regard as human. Eventually you fall asleep, as Dan’s doing right now, and this gives the brain a chance to absorb and file the alien images acquired during the experience. You do know, presumably, that the only purpose of going to sleep is to get some dreaming done? The human body is far too efficient to need so much inactivity, but the brain isn’t.”

“Y-yes,” Dennis was frowning with concentration.

“And, during the sleep, the mind organises the impressions it’s stored into the most acceptable form it can. Your own images drawn from Irish legend are an example. Eventually—at least this is what we’re hoping—we’ll get rid of all our Earthly preconceptions: this food is good, that is bad, this place is safe, that’s dangerous. And we’ll have acquired Asgard replacements for them, which will allow us to relax and be happy here.”

Parvati leaned forward. “Haven’t you noticed that ever since we arrived the only thing which has made the colonists happy is feeling that we’re making this planet over in the image of Earth? We couldn’t
ever
do that! We’ve been chasing a ghost!”

“I suppose we have,” Dennis admitted. “And this is what you were trying to drive them to face when you—ah—sabotaged everything?”

“We couldn’t make them understand that it was essential to do the same as we’d done,” Abdul said. “Their minds simply closed up,
snap!
All they could see was that one morning we’d been found babbling about gods and demons, and they wouldn’t admit we could have learned anything from the experience. So on the spur of the moment we thought we’d call in the help of hunger and thirst—smash the dam, put native-grown food in with the supplies, wipe the computer memories to throw them back on what their bodies could tell
them …” He sighed. “It didn’t work. It made them more hostile than ever.”

“Damned right it did,” Dennis muttered. He hesitated for a moment. “You know, the more I think about this, the more sense it makes! Everything fits—even the
síd.”

“What?” Kitty said.

“The
síd
in my vision. The fairyland where one night can be a hundred years. It’s a metaphor for the timelessness of qua-space, obviously.” Dennis’s voice rose in excitement. “And there’s something else, too! I suddenly remembered that I was wondering when I set off on my trip to hunt for diamonds whether our skills were too great for what we were trying to do.”

“I’m not surprised,” Parvati said. “You were the only outsider among us, the only unwilling colonist. You’ve always had detachment the rest of us couldn’t match.” She gave him a warm smile and laid her hand briefly on his. “What’s more, of course, you’d already been overtaken by what you called a trap that Asgard sprung on you.”

Dennis nodded, thinking of his fit of madness with Sigrid, which had amazingly done him no harm. “How did the truth come to you, then? How did your subconscious interpret it into terms you could understand and act upon?”

“As I told you,” Abdul said, “this is the first time the protagonists of legends have been able to appreciate them on both levels. All our visions had two things in common. First, they drew images from our own particular traditions, and second, they stressed real-life preoccupations—the moon, where so many of our companions died, the food problem, owing to the outbreak of scurvy, and so on. I saw myself being made to eat the bread and drink the water offered by Ament, the ancient Egyptian goddess who was called ‘The Lady of the West’. And that ties in interestingly with your image of sailing westward beyond the sunset, doesn’t it?” He shook his head wonderingly. “Presumably we’ve always
thought of the night sky in which stars appear as lying to the west … Never mind that for the moment, though. What this was supposed to do was to make you a ‘friend of the gods’; in other words, you had to enter the Hall of Double Justice where men’s souls are judged, and once in the other world you could never return to Earth.”

A shiver of awe went down Dennis’s spine.

“It bears out what the poet Graves used to teach, back in the twentieth century,” Parvati said. “He maintained there were two kinds of truth, scientific and poetic. He called them Apollonian and Dionysian. We’ve learned a poetic truth. The same sort of thing happened to me. I hammered together images from half a dozen different branches of Indian mythology and they wound up making .sense. The moon in some stories is regarded as the abode of the dead, the kingdom of Yama who was the first man ever to die. But in others it’s the reservoir of the divine intoxicant ‘soma’, which the gods regularly drain—hence the phases of the moon, you see? When I came to myself, I found I was identifying my breasts, as sources of milk, with the waning moon as a source of soma, and covering one of them up because it seemed wrong for there to be two!”

“I had the moon and the food problem in my visions, too,” Tai Men said. “I was obsessed with the ancient ceremony of making offerings to the moon, which only women took part in because the patron being of the moon—the Hare—is also regarded as the patron of inverts. I think my subconscious was saying a very Chinese thing to me: that if I wanted descendants to do honour to my memory, I must stop paying attention to the moon. In other words, I must stop being afraid of dying under an alien sun, as the crew of the
Pinta
did, and face the truth of my own mortality.”

“That’s akin to what I remember!” Dennis exclaimed. “I—uh—I
woke up
realising that even the great heroes must die.”

“Most of us seem to have been concerned about that,”
Abdul said. “Dan told us about his visions, and they all centred on the ancient tribal secret societies of his ancestors, the initiates who passed on tribal lore from generation to generation, and inspired themselves by inhaling the smoke of sacred herbs-read ‘eating local plants for the sake of the visions they induce’, if you like. He was concerned about the moon, too. He recounted a story about how people tried to build a tower and climb to it, to discover what it was. The tower fell down, and most of them were killed. But the idea of death wasn’t depressing, as he explained it. The spirits of the ancestors who died so that their descendants could live in prosperity were a simple fact of life, not something you could resent.”

He glanced across at the Negro. “Parvati, I think he’s waking up—will you take care of him?”

Nodding, Parvati rose and went over to him. Dennis heard her murmuring in a soothing tone as Kitty Minakis took up the tale.

“I saw the base island as the afterworld,” she said. “The place where the sun never shines—and let’s face it, Old Sol doesn’t shine here except as a star, does it?—surrounded by the rivers you have to buy passage across. And one of them, of course, is Lethe, whose waters you drink to forget about Earth.”

“That was lucky,” Ulla said wryly. “I’m sure it was your obsession with Charon’s ferry which led you to make off with that cushionfoil! It was the one which had been stocked up for three people to go in search of you,” she amplified for Dennis’s benefit. “We’ve got it hidden in the bushes yonder. When you turned us loose from the cage Saul shut us up in, she came and fetched us off the base island, and the supplies on board kept us going while we made our night-time raids and fetched the seeds and what was left of the gibberellins which made our little garden possible. Not that we have to depend exclusively on Earthly crops, of course—not now. It was you, wasn’t it, who stopped the overnight watch in the
Santa Maria?”