The Gods Look Down (6 page)

‘I can hardly wait.'

Blake shook his head and said, ‘Though what the hell it all means I don't know. We might be chasing rainbows – or phantoms.'

‘I don't think so,' Queghan said. Then after a moment, ‘How's the patient coming along?'

‘Which one?'

‘The “cerebral go-between” I think you called him.'

Blake stood up and moved towards the desk. ‘We gave him the shot of Oxypertine but it didn't have the desired effect.' He shuffled some papers and then pushed them aside. He looked at the mythographer. ‘You might as well know, Chris. We lost him.'

‘He's dead?'

‘No, not dead. We had to lock him away. He's raving mad.'

*

Queghan had always set great store by instinctive emotional response. His senses were finely attuned and he was able to gauge those imperceptibly merging shades of character which make up the spectrum of a unique and individual personality. He knows that Milton Blake was caught in the classic scientific dilemma of trying to reconcile the urge for knowledge with a humane consideration for mankind: the hard scientific drive against the reverence for the human species. It was a dilemma which could not be satisfactorily resolved.

With Dr Francis Dagon the impressions were confused and conflicting: he received a multitude of mental images which didn't, when one was set alongside another, form a sensible or coherent pattern. It was like seeing somebody's fractured reflection in a splintered mirror and trying to fit the pieces into a cohesive structure. The fact was that they didn't and wouldn't conform, and Queghan was disconcerted – for he prided himself on the acuity of his sense-perception and was dismayed when it let him down.

Blake had warned that he should prepare himself for the physically disturbing but he hadn't expected to be faced with something that was semi-human. The first shock came when he discovered that Dagon was strapped into a parachair which contained a life-support system; that's to say his upper half was thus confined, for there was nothing at all below the pelvic bone. He was, quite literally, a half-man. The life-support module in the base of the chair, connected via tubes to his lower trunk, took care of the major organic and circulatory functions, removing impurities from the bloodstream and providing
sufficient oxygen to maintain cellular regeneration. In his chest, Quegan later learnt, there was a prosthetic respiratory implant which enabled him – technically speaking – to ‘breathe', though the actual purpose of this was to supply air to the electrosynthetic larynx which reproduced patterns of sound. As a result his speaking voice was soft and sibilant, full of sighing pauses as the airstream activated the membranes of the larynx.

He was also a blind man who could see. His eyes were ceramic spheres containing solid-state light sensing arrays connected to microcircuits implanted between the two brain hemispheres at the rear of the cranium. These stimulated the visual cortex and produced tiny flashes of light, called phosphenes, which built up a pattern to be interpreted by the brain, in much the same way as an eye scanning a display screen. Dr Francis Dagon was a miracle of highly sophisticated surgical prosthesis techniques; Queghan had seen nothing, not even in the experimental lab, to compare him with.

Towards the evening of his second day at PSYCON Queghan was taken to meet the classical linguist and molecular biologist – in itself an odd combination of academic and scientific pursuits. Blake had set aside a small room in which Dagon could work undisturbed and as they went in he proffered a hand which felt as smooth and boneless as a thermoplastic shell. He didn't greet the mythographer but said immediately in his sighing voice, ‘Myth Technology isn't my field but Blake assures me that you can be of service to the project. You understand what we're trying to achieve.'

This seemed neither a question nor a statement and Queghan didn't feel obliged to respond; neither was he happy at being regarded as a necessary if minor adjunct to the neuron processing experiment. He got the impression that Dagon would have liked nothing better than to have plugged him into the system and forgotten his existence.

Blake said jovially, ‘Chris knows the broad outlines but I've left the details to you. In any case I'm not sure I fully understand the significant differences between Aramaic and Hebrew sematology. Perhaps you could explain.'

‘Will that be necessary?' Dagon's head came up, the flesh smooth and hairless under the cone of light from the desk lamp. The corners of the room were in shadow: large heavy volumes
slumbered on metal racks and a diamond-shaped grid held rolled parchments like dusty bottles of wine.

Queghan said, pleasantly enough, ‘I think so, Dr Dagon.' His face was pale and narrow above the penumbra of lamplight. ‘If you want the experiment to succeed.'

‘Perhaps it's as well,' Dagon said as if following some inner line of thought. The breath rasped in his throat. ‘You're not trained in linguistics I take it.'

Again it was no more a question than an assertion.

‘I think I could probably grasp the essentials. If you explain them to me very slowly.'

Blake smiled behind his hand and looked into the shadows.

Dagon nodded. ‘Very well.' His hand stole across the page and made a few squiggles in the margin. Quegan could hear the faint gasp of breath as he prepared to speak again. ‘I would appreciate it, if we are to work together, that you refrain from indulging in what passes for sarcasm. It can be very tedious.'

‘As can boorish behaviour,' said Queghan, unsmiling, though his tone was not harsh.

It wasn't a promising start to the collaboration. Queghan wasn't prepared to be accepted under suffrance – implicit in Dagon's attitude. The project interested him but not enough to be treated with such brusque indifference, nor to have his intelligence called into question. He had entered worlds Dagon had never dreamt of.

Dagon seemed to overcome his sour disposition, for he took the trouble to explain in considerable detail what he hoped the experiment would achieve. It was a complex story, and began, as Blake had said, when Dagon had first come across the name Dagon ben Shem Tov, author of the 13th century text
Sepher-ha-Zohar
. This comprised three books of ancient knowledge which were part of the esoteric teachings of Judaism as contained in the Kabbalah – a word derived from the Hebrew
QBLH
meaning ‘that which is received'. Further research revealed a whole series of texts which together made up a corpus of traditional knowledge: the Aramaic
Cremona Codex
, the Latin
Kabbalah Denudata
and the much later English translation,
Kabbalah Unveiled
, published in 1892 Pre-Col.

Queghan began to understand the immensity of the task Dr Francis Dagon had set himself, and he was impressed. The
linguist had had to translate and transcribe the texts of five different languages: Aramaic, Hebrew, Latin, Spanish and English. They all dealt with roughly comparable periods, dating from 1000 years before the birth of Christ up to and including the 13th century. Much of the material was religious dogma and propaganda but there were certain passages in each of the texts which made reference to a god called the ‘Ancient of Days'. What intrigued Dagon was the fact that this god consisted of a male part and a female part and that, according to the description, it could be broken down into pieces and reassembled again. What kind of god was this, Dagon asked himself, whose ‘body' was divisible and could then be put together again like a do-it-yourself assembly kit?

So he began a painstaking line-by-line investigation of the 2173 verses of
The Book of Splendours
, based on the Latin and Aramaic texts, and found in the book called
HADRA ZVTA QDIShA
(the
Lesser Holy Assembly)
a detailed description of the god ‘Ancient of Days'. In part it read:

Comparison with other texts wasn't much help. Dagon showed Queghan a similar passage from the Kabbalah which began:

The mythographer was totally perplexed. ‘Is it supposed to make sense? What's all this about heads and skulls and brains? And what's this “holy oil” it refers to? Blood?'

Dagon said in his soft hissing voice, ‘I think the god they speak of as the “Ancient of Days” is a machine. What kind of machine, or what its purpose is, I don't know. Perhaps you, Queghan, can discover the secret. Blake tells me that Myth Technology is a wondrous science.'

He even speaks like an ancient text, Queghan thought. He was completely bemused by it all. He said, ‘Which period are we talking about exactly?'

‘One thousand
BC
, give or take two hundred years.'

‘So the texts were written over two thousand years after the events they describe.' He shook his head hopelessly. ‘There could be a dozen explanations. Over that length of time the simplest, most commonplace occurrences could be made to seem miraculous. What credence can we give to ancient rumour and superstition?'

Dagon said, ‘None at all – if the several texts didn't happen to agree. There are five independent sources which all mention the god “Ancient of Days”. Are they all the result of rumour and superstition?' He unrolled a scroll of parchment and pointed to a row of symbols which Queghan couldn't decipher.
‘What do you make of this: “She is conjoined to the macroprosopus. On the Sabbath a trance falls upon the macroprosopus and the woman is removed from his back. The parts are laid separately and washed.”'

Queghan squinted into the light. ‘I don't know what to make of it. But a machine one thousand years
BC
 … where did it come from?'

‘I'm hoping that you will tell us that, eventually,' Dagon said, allowing the parchment to roll itself up with a hollow rustling snap. He inspected his white hairless hands under the light; it seemed to Queghan that the wrinkles in them had been made artificially. ‘Perhaps you will also be able to tell us what kind of experiments my namesake was conducting.'

‘Blake tells me he was an alchemist.'

‘A philosopher-scientist would be more accurate. Elsewhere in the
Sepher-ha-Zohar
he speaks of transmuting base metal into gold by the “master principle of nature”. Unfortunately he doesn't say what methods were used. I do know that it derived from Islamic alchemy and that the process was divided into seven stages: calcination, putrefaction, sublimation, solution, distillation, coagulation, and tincture. In those times the natural sciences were regarded as an extension of philosophy and metaphysics. No proper distinction was made between them because it seemed there was a unity in all things, a symbolism which permeated the physical, mathematical and spiritual disciplines. Truth was indivisible and they believed in a precise and exact correlation between macrocosm and microcosm – “As above, so below” to quote the belief.

‘They had also a penetrating view of the cosmos. The Islamic text
The Quran
specifies a model of the universe which, although it employs religious symbolism, is a highly sophisticated intellectual concept: a medieval cosmology which moves through a number of ascending levels until it reaches the throne of God. We shouldn't brush aside these hypotheses as being naive or misguided: the mystics and philosopher-scientists of the time were perhaps in closer touch with the elemental forces of the universe than we may realize. Dagon ben Shem Tov was not a credulous fool.'

‘Is there any evidence that he succeeded in transmuting base metal into gold?' Queghan asked.

‘Only his own testimony. But we must remember that his description of the process wouldn't be in terms of our own advanced technology. Such terms would be unknown to him, so instead he would use anthropomorphic words – “brain” in place of computer, “hairs” in place of tubes or pipes, “skull” in place of vessel, “fire” in place of nuclear power source.'

‘But if I understand this correctly he was transcribing folklore which had been handed down over many generations. The machine he describes existed hundreds of years before the birth of Christ.'