Exit Alpha (24 page)

The shaking. My God. He grabbed one of the metal chairs, turned it so he could prop a knee on it, then held the back with both hands. That was better. He took two deep breaths, called, ‘Very slow. Begin.’

Zuiden prodded a button. The perverted bitch dropped 3 inches and stopped, her mass slightly bouncing on the rope. But she’d lifted her legs.

He motioned to Zuiden again. Her body dropped more. No matter how she writhed, her toes would soon be dissolving.

He waited for the agonised bellows.

They never came.

Her face contorted. Her legs dropped. Steam rose from the vat.

Cyanide!

He howled with rage and smashed the chair against the wall.

T
he next morning the showers were on. They waited in queues to get clean. The naked Hunt was so stunning that no one in the bathroom, male or female, could drag away their eyes.

As they dressed, he said, ‘You’ve got an amazing body.’

‘And EXIT’s fully exploited it, I assure you.’

They queued again for breakfast, then joined the crowd in the lounge while lists were posted on the board. Everyone had been allocated times when they were authorised to leave the building. Their time was 3 pm.

Cain said, ‘Bugger this. Let’s try and get out of here.’

They followed the first batch to the alcove for kitting up. Each person was ticked off at the door by two over-large young surgeons.

‘Must be cadets,’ Hunt murmured.

‘Just shows how stretched they are.’

When they reached for their hanging outer suits, one of the youths confronted them. ‘You two aren’t scheduled till afternoon.’ The thickness of his neck, the sloping set of his shoulders, everything about him was hostile. The second cadet closed ranks behind the first.

Young punks, Cain thought — super-sensitive to hierarchy, measuring personal success by the degree of intimidation. He said, ‘Stop strutting. I’m not impressed.’

‘What are you on about?’

‘Ever killed anyone, son?’ He doubted they had. He knew that Hunt was probably wired enough to take them single-handed — chopping throats and poking eyes without them seeing it coming. But he could no longer trust his damaged body in a fight against young animal fitness.

Then Zuiden entered the porch, eyebrows encrusted, breathing vapour. The apprentice thugs snapped to attention.

Zuiden said, ‘Two against the world, huh? Don’t try it, Cain. You’ll lose.’

‘Been monitoring us, have you?’

‘Yes, God knows why. You’re an invalid and you’ve lost it. Without a gun you’re stuffed. So what’s your beef?’

‘I want to see John.’

‘Your wants don’t count.’

Cain knew the surgeon had expected him to say Rhonda and that the request had surprised him. He also knew they didn’t want fuss and were barely coping as it was. And that despite Zuiden’s blustering, a dentist Grade Four was the biggest threat in the base. ‘I want to see him, or I’ll make things very difficult for you here.’

Zuiden weighed it up, then turned to the two thugs. ‘Let him through. Not her.’

Cain flashed a glance at the savage-eyed Hunt that said, ‘Hold your fire. I’ll be back.’

He walked with Zuiden across the cold vault beneath the domes, his felt-lined rubber-soled boots slipping on the overtrodden ice.

‘If you took the cadets,’ Zuiden said, ‘there’s still the guardhouse. And if you got past that we’d come after you. And even if we didn’t, where the hell would you go?’

Cain knew he was right. Sixteen countries operated over thirty permanent bases in Antarctica and all kinds of expeditions shared the ice. For an uninhabitable wilderness it was becoming rather densely populated. Even tourism was becoming a problem. But Alpha was as isolated as Vostok, 800 kilometres from anywhere, with the only workable egress by a full-scale traverse or a Herc. And two fleeing people couldn’t organise either. He turned to Zuiden. ‘If reincarnation exists, I bet you come back as a bird.’

‘I’ll bite.’ Zuiden drawled. ‘Why?’

‘So you can shit on people.’

Zuiden chuckled. ‘I’ll piss on your grave before I go.’ He walked up steps into the cold porch of a red-painted building and told the two cadets inside the entrance, ‘This piece of Paki shit has clearance to see number three. He gets an hour in there. Any fuss, buzz me.’

The pope had a cabin-like room with a desk and a bed. He wore polar clothes too big for him and was correcting a typed manuscript. As Cain entered, he looked around, astonished. ‘Ray!’ He lurched up from his chair to embrace him, knocking papers flying.

Cain said, ‘Thank God you’re all right.’

‘They said you were almost killed.’

‘They’ve patched me up. But I’m not good.’

‘How wonderful to see you.’ He sat down again a little breathless, beaming with delight.

Cain helped gather up the papers. ‘I think they’re going to kill us. I don’t trust things here.’

‘No. But events don’t matter. Only what we are.’

‘But I’m afraid for you.’

John smiled. ‘Leave what happens to God. Why complain? What we are
now
is all there ever is.’

‘I know that theoretically but . . .’ He sat on the bunk. There wasn’t a second chair.

John leaned forward and held Cain’s hand in both of his, his face full of kindness. ‘Relax. Come back inside.’

He tried to bring his attention back to his body.

‘You remember when we were children? How we stared with such wonder at the sun? So naive. But the sentiment was true. Perhaps that youthful aspiration is the finest thing we have. Truer than our fashionable despair. Truer than the ruins of a life.’

The words went in as they always did with him, soothing, reaffirming, and the year since their last meeting dropped away.

‘You feel it?’ John went on. ‘Why did primeval cultures worship the virgin?’

‘What have you been doing?’

‘Reading. Sufi poems. The Taoists. Gurdjieff.’ He pointed to boxes stacked against the wall. ‘They let me bring a few books.’

‘Gurdjieff was a giant. A shame the Jesuits made a dog’s breakfast of the enneagram.’

‘Yes. The inevitable distortion. It shows how dry our doctrine’s become and how desperate people are to infuse it. Gurdjieff offered practice but most people just respond to his theory. The approach to Being is incomprehensible to most because it belongs to eternity, not time.’

‘May I ask you a daring question?’

‘Daring?’ John lifted something off his desk.

‘Have you abandoned the concept of God?’

‘Why name it? Labels shut you off. Fear God. Why? Because one attracts what one fears?’ A smile. ‘What a creaking construction.’

Cain nodded slowly. ‘Concepts hiding truth? Is that the tragedy of the Church?’

‘That depends on the level of perception.’

‘So there are no steps to the throne?’

‘Too sweeping. Read this — from here.’ He handed over bound sheets of typescript.

Cain took the manuscript and read aloud: ‘Religion is the ruse of the wise. It aims to bring the unsuspecting aspirant to a heightened inner vibration that reasoning can’t reach. So it promotes irrationality — for a worthy aim. It is the only deception that can’t be called untrue.

‘This is beautiful.’

‘I don’t know. But it’s the best of me. The need to express, you see? God’s journalist.’

He skipped a few pages, read on, silently this time.

‘When not “I” then AM. When the observer is abandoned, seeing simply is — an experience that reaches through diversity to unity in an enfolding verticality to time. “And there shall be time no longer.” These words are literally true. Eternity is not duration but the infinite potential of all ages in the sunburst of unified awareness. We need to die to be born to that experience. But who is interested in inner death?’

He looked up, filled with the truth of it. ‘What would the Curia make of this?’

‘The dead would bury the living.’

He read on:

‘Belief is superstition, piety straw and chastity without knowledge mistaking the means for the end. The end is the blind, true probing into that core predating time where knowledge and bliss are made flesh. The resurrection of the body is not a historical event but the central transformation of consciousness. We are asked to incarnate Christ. Not the spirit but the flesh must be transformed. The organism must be afire — the kingdom of God on earth.’

He looked away from the words, intensely moved.

The old pope smiled. ‘You know what it’s saying, don’t you? And to know is a great achievement. But blessed are ye if ye do it.’

So this was what John had been working on through long years — distilling his wisdom far beyond the point of heresy. He knew the manuscript had to survive — for Ray Cain if for no one else.

He handed back the pages with care. ‘Have you read Krishnamurti?’

‘Life begins where thought ends. Yes.’

‘I discovered such a clear expression of his recently. “In attention there is no centre. There is no me attending.”’

‘Exactly.’ The old man put the manuscript into a scruffy padded postbag. ‘Exactly.’

‘Is your book finished?’

‘As much as it will be.’

They sat in silence for a moment.

Then the pope murmured, ‘And darkness was upon the face of the deep. The Buddhist view. Everything comes from nothing. Form is emptiness. Emptiness form.’

Cain looked into the wise eyes. ‘Is that how you feel it?’

John’s inward look, as if he were exploring it. ‘The nature of that emptiness is so interesting. Death is the matrix of life. Not the other way around. Do you see it?’

He was trying to comprehend. ‘Not yet.’

‘The only knowing is being. But being is to be nothing. No memory. No anticipation. Blank.’

‘It can’t just be blank.’

‘It can’t and it can. Always the paradox. Everything flowers from nothing.’

He nodded, trying to keep up inwardly. ‘But you say there are no steps to that.’

A bottomless look. ‘Attention — the natural prayer of the soul. Or as the Diamond Sutra says, keeping the mind in its natural state. Remember Eckhart: riddance of goods, riddance of friends, riddance of self. But who understands that precise effort, that intensity? It’s naive trying to be a finer person. Spirituality is not to be derived. That’s working for wages — craving. It’s an infusion of grace — induced by psychological death.’

As usual, with John, vistas kept expanding. ‘I’ve missed this so much.’ How quickly the pope had dismissed the danger they were in. Yet had that danger made this moment — this richness with him — possible? The old man used everything for his aim.

* * *

In exactly an hour, a cadet interrupted them.

Cain was taken back to the entrance and met by Zuiden who escorted him across the ice beneath the dome.

‘How’s it feel to be down the toilet?’ Zuiden sneered. ‘You’re rooted, Cain.’

‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’

‘You can forget those days,’ the half-listening man said, focused as usual on his stomach. ‘Now all we get down here is lasagna.’

Cain limped beside him, fearful for the pope, wondering if he’d ever see him again. ‘You have a strange effect on people, Jan. They either hate you or loathe you.’

‘Black bastard,’ the surgeon guffawed. ‘Never give up, do you? Well I hope the old boy saved your soul. Because your body’s soon going to be fucked.’

A
t precisely 3.30 pm Hunt and Cain were cleared by the guardhouse. A senior surgeon escorted them up the ramp. He walked ahead as if trying to put them at ease but probably had a weapon beneath his windproofs. They followed him in full kit, lugging rucksacks. They’d been told they were being relocated but didn’t believe it.

Cain let his overmitts dangle from their harness. Gloves and glove liners would do until they got to the warmed Hagg. His limp was bad. He was breathless, felt vulnerable and old.

They walked from shadow into dazzling sunlight. For once the windiest continent on earth offered nothing but a light breeze but it was close to minus 40 degrees centigrade and breathing hurt. He glanced at the crystalline snow. If he removed the goggles it would become a field of diamonds — exquisite — and cause snow-blindness.

The man led them past the vehicle workshop to where a loader, a tractor and a Hagg were plugged into the power cable hitching-rail. The vehicles were plastered with snow, but only on one side, like iced cakes.

A man was uncoupling the cable from the front of the Hagg. It ran the cab-warmer and the in-line coolant heater that kept the engine from freezing. Several people stood around the back of the vehicle, waiting.

Their escort took their bags and heaved them into the front cab. As they reached the group of people, Cain recognised the two old men.