The Triple Goddess (120 page)

Replacing Past and Future would be a sempiternal Present, a Present where one might as easily meet one’s great-great—to the power of a hundred—grandchildren, as visit ancient Babylon when Nebuchadnezzar was still King of the Chaldeans; or Egypt, to gaze at Cleopatra where she sat forever in the splendour of her Shakespearean barge, looking, as Hugo Bonvilian was sure that Cleopatra did, like Sister Gloria Mundy 2042M’s ugly sister.

Chapter Seven

In the middle of the ward, the resident physicians of Bonvilian’s praetorian guard gathered around their chief, and Nurses Clott and Pipette set about removing the trays of needles and swabs from 2042M’s Euthacart. The scene was reminiscent of Rembrandt’s
Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp
.

As the group formed, Director 4285D—it was the “crossword enlightenment”, as Central called it, which had vaulted him from J to D Class—assumed the power of a queen in the centre of a chess board. The tubes of his stethoscope were doubled around the Nehru collar of the black surcoat that he had started wearing, since his assumption of the Exeat Institute’s Directorship, in place of the standard consultant or registrar’s white one. A haemostat was tweaked to the lapel. The garment, one of a dozen, was already faded from dry-cleaning to remove bloody stains, but the italic letter
D
, embroidered in white thread, was bright on the breast pocket.

As Bonvilian looked up at the ceiling dome he did up a couple of the buttons without looking at them, so that they were uneven.

It was because of the gentle rays of coloured light from the dome that the ambience on the ward, rather than being that of a chamber of horrors, was not macabre. Here there was no whiff of the sepulchre or mausoleum; of the vaulted crypt filled with skulls and bones and funeral urns containing the ashes of the departed; a halfway house to the hereafter that echoed to the voice of St Michael:
How you are, I was, How I am, you will be
. Here the atmosphere was more like that of an old religious hospital, staffed by wimpled nuns.

As rich and varied as the colours of the stained glass were, it was only at night, when the fluorescent lights were off and there was a full moon, that the little panes came fully alive, backlit by the moon and illuminated like a planetarium of psychedelic stars.

Although the incongruous elegance of the stained-glass ceiling dome never failed to annoy Bonvilian—worse, he found its influence disturbing—his eyes were always drawn to it. He had heard of Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose creations it resembled, and despised him on more than aesthetic grounds. Comfort! The word, originally meaning strength, was anathema to the environment; his environment, where the only comfort was the deftness and delicacy with which he wielded his scalpels, as in a former life he had a fencing foil, and the Impatients’ consolation that their ordeal would soon be over.

Today the dome must have held his glance too long, for when 4285D looked down again he felt...not quite uncomfortable, but discomfited, and hot. He ran a finger round the inside of his collar and looked covertly about; fortunately the staff was still scurrying about making preparations.

To steady himself he mentally ran through, as if it were a catechism, the key phrases of Subsection Thirteen of the Citizen’s Code, Article Two a), which stated that all religions, credos, myths, legends, cults, beliefs in the supernatural, superstitions, bandying of woolly metaphysical concepts…anything that impugned Central’s secular supremacy…were forbidden. In case anyone should be in doubt as to what that meant, the Expurgatory Index, a supplement to the Code, listed the penalties, which left both little and much to the imagination, for participating in proscribed activities.

The Director knew them all by heart. Nonetheless he felt a sudden hatred and contempt for the bureaucracy that encumbered his life. His genius required assurance of complete latitude in decision-making. The Project was by far the most complex problem ever to confront humanity; without doubt what lay at the core of life was the core of his life’s work, and he could not be expected to home in on a solution with the certainty of pigeon as it arrowed to its loft from thousands of miles away.

Bonvilian was distracted by the fat buzzing of a bluebottle fly in the windows; and the insect was answered by another somewhere else. Having marked the first unhygienic intruder, 4285D’s eyes flickered in search of the second. Spotting it, his eyes narrowed and he became spider-still; it was sitting on the tip of Impatient Squiggle’s nose, brushing its wings with its legs. This the Minotaur took as a suggestion that Squiggle was the one he should devour next, as his
plat du jour
, instead of bothering to refer to the à la carte ward menu in the hand of Nurse Clott 1473T; and the Director was amused by the thought that the staff would take the choice as being scientifically based. Gastronomically Squiggle was small and bony,
crudités
to the Slimfast
Châteaubriand
of yesterday, and the offal from Spore’s thorax that the Director had dined on two days ago.

Observing the direction of her superior’s glance and knowing what it meant, Nurse Pipette 5749T prepared to supervise the insertion of the needles, and attachment of the external veins of tubing through which bright primary fluids would course into Squiggle’s vitals. Soon everything was properly connected. Also divining without being told who had been selected, Sister Mundy 2042M swung the Euthacart alongside Squiggle’s bed.

The small crowd parted to admit their swaggering chief to its centre and 4285D, doing up several buttons of his coat with the holes out of alignment, advanced to the foot of the iron bedstead, and detached the clipboard that bore the chart of Squiggle’s final statistics. The staff exchanged glances; the Director’s insistence on manually entered records instead of computer-printed sheets taxed their technologically oriented abilities, and one did so little handwriting these days that legibility was difficult to achieve.

Bonvilian scanned the details and yawned; visions of Gloria Mundy and Colonel Bonvilian, VC and bar, on African safari together had kept him awake longer than usual the night before, and deprived him of REM sleep. He had taken a sleeping pill at three a.m.; but after the soporific kicked in he had a very strange dream in which, unarmed, he was required to defend his lady love against, in quick succession, a charging rogue male elephant; a wounded man-eating lion; an enraged bull water buffalo; and a twenty-foot-long crocodile with teeth on its teeth. It was a series of challenges that Hercules, Perseus, or St George, or even the three together, would have found daunting.

As Gloria shrank behind him, the Colonel held his ground in front of the charging elephant. To his well-disguised relief, affrighted by his stern aspect, handlebar moustache and monocle, the pachyderm peeled off a tusk’s length away and disappeared into the bush.

Encouraged, Bonvilian dismembered the incoming lion by grabbing its forelegs as it sprang for his throat, and ripping its ribcage apart.

By now debonairly confident, his technique with the buffalo was to dive as it tried to gore Gloria in the river, where they had taken a moment to cool off, and interrupted its lunch. Surfacing behind the beast, the intrepid colonel jumped on its back, twisted its neck by the horns until it fell over, and drowned it; thereby ending its ambition to undergo anger-management treatment and be hired as a breeding bull to sire the buffalo cows that produce the milk used to make mozzarella cheese.

Dealing with the crocodile involved a sequence of strangle and wrestling holds, and a large number of tooth extractions performed with a camping tool. Before waking up, Bonvilian also recollected later receiving in the mail a cheque from a Mr Kwanpen, a manufacturer of crocodile leather products, in Singapore, upon Kwanpen’s receipt of the
Crocodylus niloticus
that he had sent to supplement the Singaporean’s supply of the premium saltwater small scale
Crocodylus porosus
skins his company used to make ladies handbags.

That night back at camp after his labours were over, Bwana Bonvilian, modest in victory, flicked a poisonous garter snake off his canvas chair, sat down and accepted the quadruple whisky and soda without the soda that Gloria handed him. Rolling him a cigarette, she lit it between her full lips, and placed it in his wry thin ones, then sat on the ground beside his chair with her knees drawn up to her chin gazing at him adoringly as he relaxed his tired muscles and restored his tissues.

Regretfully 4285D emerged from his reverie and gave Squiggle an appraising look.

‘How are we today, Squiggle? Not too under the weather, I hope, or nervous? A little squirrelly...or squiggly…perhaps?’

The Director waited to confirm that his attempt at humour was as infectious as nothing else was on the ward, and there were several dutiful ripples of amusement from his audience…one more than usual, and the bluebottle on Squiggle’s nose took off back to the windows to join its partner. Suspecting that his own flies might be undone and showing, Bonvilian held the clipboard over his private parts, squinted down the ward to divert everyone’s attention to whatever he might be looking at, and glanced down in case he had to surreptitiously adjust his dress. The only thing that he saw was that the top of his coat front was buttoned incorrectly; but there was nothing he could do about that now without appearing foolish.

‘Squiggle.’ 4285D spat out the name like a memorial tablet, divulged a hand from his pocket, and snapped his fingers. ‘Clotho, Lachesis!’ The two nurses, having no idea what he meant, smartly advanced two steps on either side of their immediate superior, 2042M, hoping for clarification. Although Gloria did not move or say anything, a muscle twitched in her right cheek.

The Director, it appeared, wanted to show off a little learning: ‘Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos...girls, they were the three Parcae or Fates who controlled the process of birth, life, and death. The Cruel Fates they were called, because of their impartiality. The first Fate, Clotho—you shall be familiar with the name from that of the longevity gene—drew each thread of life from her distaff, for Lachesis to spin on her wheel and measure off. Atropos then cut the thread with her shears. We continue the tradition here. Now that I and you have stood in for Clotho and Lachesis in bringing friend Squiggle to this pretty pass, as usual 2042M shall now perform the role of Atropos with her customary professionalism.’

4285D tapped a finger on one of the little bottles of coloured liquid on the Euthacart, thus indicating his choice for Sister Gloria to fill a syringe from and insert the needle into her choice of Impatient Squiggle’s veins. By a stroke of incredibly good fortune for Squiggle, the choice of drug signified that he was to be put to death quickly and painlessly, because the pharmacological experiments that would follow required his corpse’s data to be unimpaired by the throes of agony. Many of the other bottles contained chemicals that enhanced the Impatient’s experience, or prolonged it. But on this occasion the medics surrounding the bed would be observers, rather than participants in the unequal struggle of restraining the Impatient as he was vivisected.

Turning from Squiggle, the Director levelled his mouth in an authoritative half smile at the sister, and 2042M went a little paler than she already was, and raised her eyes to the level of 4285D’s collar. Bonvilian extended both arms together to his right, pointed them at Squiggle, and drew his left hand back across his chest, as if he were pulling a great bow; like Odysseus, or Little John from Robin Hood’s gang, thought the Director, powerful men both. No, like Robin Hood himself, a slighter man in build but commanding like Odysseus, and much better looking than Little John, the big oaf.

As the Robin Hood of the Exeat Institute, Bonvilian saw himself as killing to be kind, plundering riches from the bodies of the undeserving, in order to aid those who would put them to better use. Gloria, of course, was his Maid Marian.

Better still, Gloria Mundy was the virgin Artemis, goddess of the moon and the hunt, the beautiful and strong-willed daughter of Zeus and Leto, and twin to her brother Apollo, otherwise yclept Phoebus, or Helios, or Cyntheus, god of the sun. Artemis—Bonvilian favoured the Greek association over that of the more matronly Roman Diana, the giver of fertility and easy births, and the goddess of nature—was also known as Phoebe “the Bright One”; and Cynthia, and crescent-marked Luna. As goddess of the chase, and of wild beasts, she roamed the forests with her bow and silver arrows, free-spirited and aloof...except for the fifty hounds and fifty wood nymphs who accompanied her.

How Bonvilian envied Actaeon, the mortal who had glimpsed Artemis naked, when he was in the forest on a hunting trip and happened upon her in the glade where she was bathing! Envied him, that was, up to the point when in punishment for his sin Artemis changed Actaeon into a stag, so that, not recognizing him, his own pack of hounds tore him to pieces.

As a goddess the moon had three forms: she was Selene or Artemis when she was in the sky; a fertile mother-goddess on Earth; and Hecate in the lower world, or the world cloaked in darkness, a wise crone or witch with the power to heal or transform.

Cast as unchaste Selene, daughter of the Titans Hyperion and Theia, sister of Helios and Eos the Dawn, the moon goddess fell in love with the shepherd Endymion, a Bonvilian prefigurement, whom she kissed asleep at night with her silver beams.

Alternatively he, Bonvilian, was Orion the mighty hunter, the handsomest of men, with whom Artemis fell in love. Orion must have been a very special man, because Artemis hated the sex and had sworn never to marry. In which case Bonvilian might take heart: that Gloria had not yet demonstrated not one iota, shred, or scintilla of interest towards him, the moonstruck Luna-tic, should not be taken as her final answer to anything he might get up the courage to propose.