The Triple Goddess (175 page)

Syndrome added, ‘Actually, it used to be Barrington-White until I dropped the Barrington.’

‘And I prefer to go by Jack,’ said Sweeney.

‘Jack it shall be,’ said Gloria; and on they went around the ward. No one missed his turn. Even Steerforth, who to general surprise seemed affected by what was happening, announced in a quavery voice that he believed himself to be the former James Cruickshank, MBE, a retired bank manager and widower.

‘Forgive me if I behaved...I didn’t mean to be so…call me Jim.’

Sorias was last, and when it came to him he wiped a hand across his forehead. ‘Anstey is my name, Edward Anstey. I was adopted as an orphan by a childless couple, both dead before the troubles, who lived in a bungalow on a housing estate. I haven’t the least idea where my story came from; or the things I said about its significance; or my premonition, miss...madam, about who you were...are...and that you were coming in.

‘I had no Aunt Jenny. To my knowledge there neither is nor was a Dragonburgh castle occupied by Plantagenets, nor a Lord Huntenfisch. No witches, no B.J., no dragon. The best I can come up with is that it was we Impatients who suggested the Ingredients to me.’

‘You have no reason to be confused, Edward,’ said Gloria. ‘The story you told is a true one, as were the ones that went before.’

The ward was dumb as Gloria Mundy again went to the end of the ward and raised her arms. The windows closed and became part of the wall. The scents and sounds from outside were gone. The light dimmed to darkness, a darkness not of night but one so dark that it was as if the sun had been extinguished and it would never be light again in the world.

Doubting that he still existed, everyone touched his face and body.

Gloria said in a pleasant voice, ‘Lie down, please’—and they all did. ‘Relax and feel your weightlessness.’

As the former Slaves and Impatients did their best to obey, they felt their muscles dissolve, and their perceptive senses become elevated and enhanced to a degree that none of them had ever before experienced. Because sight was gone, hearing sharpened, and picked up the slightest noise—the intake and exhalation of breath, the rustle of a sheet.

A glow, or effusion of muted light, appeared above them, which increased until the great dome of the ceiling manifested itself again: not as the Tiffany-style stained-glass dome of before, but a planetarium that was pierced by the light of many constellations.

Gloria Mundy’s voice came again: ‘Behold the stars; there is nothing now between you and them.’

But the lights were not quite as stars because they changed in colour, like myriad jewels sewn onto a great black cloth.

‘It is the Phoenix come to carry you aloft.’

Then each person’s spirit rose through the dome, and was impaled upon the point of a star as if it were a shard of glass, so that it became one of the multiplicity of heavenly bodies.

The star-studded Phoenix, like an exotic spaceship, climbed higher and higher, and the individual lights drew together until there was a single brightness no longer composed of many colours, but only of white; before the shining, which was as intense as the sum of all suns, vanished.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

It was early afternoon on Friday 13th April, 2033, the meteorites were visible on Central’s short-range systems, and in a few hours the thunderbolts from Zeus would be all over the world like ugly on an ape. In Miltonic language, the long and the short of it was that Earth, like Satan, was about to be “Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky |With hideous ruin and combustion down |To bottomless perdition.”

The four horses of the Apocalypse were saddled, and their girths tightened in preparation for the great ride in response to the blowing of the last trump that heralded the Day of Judgement.

As Nemesis stalked the Earth, half the world was on its knees praying like there was no tomorrow; the other half was either drunk or stoned, or both, and had been that way for months, wallowing in an orgiastic revel that made its Roman model seem ascetic. It was too late for solutions and last-minute reprieves, as from the falling sky the last droplets of Time were filling the bucket of oblivion to overflowing.

Despite his early convictions, and the massive works that had been conducted under his aegis, as the grains of sand slipped through the waist of the hourglass, shortly to be turned over for the last time, Hugo Bonvilian 4285D was still wrestling with nothing more than abstractions and theoretical panaceas, and the occasional pancreas. Nature had shrugged off his efforts to master it, and left him foxed, frustrated, and fed-up.

Although the Exeat’s Director had never ceased to exert his puissant brains in the great cause, every time that he thought he might be getting somewhere, the formulae that looked so impressive on paper and in the computer models proved impossible to translate into reality. Bonvilian’s investigations into the human microcosm, which he was convinced held the key to Creation, had yielded nothing. The early and promising additional insights that he gained into the human genome, the information encoded in the DNA within each cell of an organism, had proved illusory, misleading, deceptive. Despite the thousands of biopsies and transfusions and organic transplantations that had been performed at his instigation; and despite thousands more chemical analyses, induced mutations, cellular fusions and fissions, and twiddlings and fiddlings with nerves and neurons and axons and dendrites and synapses, the only ends reached were dead ones.

Bonvilian was no closer than before to deconstructing the tick of temporality, to discovering the components of chronology. As a result, the great Project of rolling back the clock was no more, and there was no prospect of averting, halting, or reversing the forces of destruction; no anticipation of hearing triumphant cries of “Eureka!” ringing from the laboratories. There was no prospect of anything.

The great dog Tempus was in the pound and about to be put down.

Bonvilian’s last supervisor at Central, Augustus Boloch 9110A, had washed his hands of the boy wonder: no
deus ex machina
he. With the acquiescence of his supreme lord and master, 0001A, and his Fool, 0002A, Boloch had declared the Project dead and the Exeat’s Director—whose life, his all, his everything, that the Project had been—disgraced. The massive engine of research had sputtered and died, and the army of technicians that had cranked it were disbanded and had dispersed.

At the desk in his office at the Institute, divested of his black Director’s coat, ex-Director Hugo Bonvilian exhaled deeply. He was composed as he devoted his last thoughts to Gloria Mundy, the girl whose fingers he so wanted to be interlaced with his as they danced the last dance together, before they went their separate ways into the incorrigible night.

As elusive as she remained, Gloria was Hugo Bonvilian’s last remaining constant, his personal icon of immortality. If only Mankind had been made in her image, instead of Adam’s, and he sprung from her rib!

Wherever Gloria Mundy was now, and whatever she was doing, the non-emeritus Director hoped that she might sense his empathy. How badly he wanted to believe that, at the last, she might know how much she had meant to him and meant to him now; and that failure had not diminished the sincerity and strength of the desire that had driven him to make her a gift of Eternity.

No doubt, he thought, Gloria was at this moment passing the last hours of her life in the company of some pencil-neck who, however close that person thought he was to her and she to him, was ignorant of the Bonvilean gulf that lay between them, surrounding the island of her perfection and flooding and filling every contour and inlet of her body and mind.

In case she and this interloper were now married—people who were about to be parted in distance or foreseen death often did decide to get hitched—Hugo Bonvilian recast himself as Sir Lancelot, and Gloria Mundy as Queen Guinevere. Whatever consolation her husband, that pusillanimous prevaricating pretender King Arthur, might be attempting to afford her at this moment, against the tide of fate was but a drawn pebble on the beach compared to the rock of Hugo Bonvilian’s devotional sympathy.

“Greater love hath no man than this,” says St John, “that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Lancelot, the best knight in the world, had begged to differ, believing to fulfilment that he who loved the most would lay down with the wife at the end.

Spurning the electronic equipment on his desk, Bonvilian opened a drawer, and removed from it a pad of foolscap paper and a silver fountain pen that had belonged to his father’s father. Unscrewing the top of a bottle of black ink, he filled the pen as scrupulously as if it were a hypodermic syringe, and wiped it with a Kleenex. He had only just shaken off a bad cold, and it was the last one in the box.

Then, unhurriedly and without pause, he applied the nib to the page:

Sitting alone

In the Joyous Isle

I think of you and him,

And me and you,

And jot down brittle

Lines of loneliness

That shiver like

A lance in a tournament;

Imagining my prowess

As the Ill-Made Knight

That never was matched

By earthly hand.

Pulling

Up unscathed at the end

Of the first pass, and sighting

An apocalyptic stare,

Steam-snorting with

Eyes deep pitiless

Wells of pitch, dark-

Slatted by the helm

I dress my spear

For the last time

And we hurtle together

Like two wild bulls.

His death bespoke

Through clouds of dust

From the final drum roll

Of our hooves, I deflect

His aim with my shield

And smite him, thrilling

Level through armour,

Riving his pulsing

Entrails as his misguided

Wondering softness is borne

Out of the saddle

Slowly into the air.

As broken and contorted

He lies in spasm,

Writhing in the dirt,

My momentum hurtles

On before its sable shield

Bearing a silver queen

And a kneeling knight;

I follow erect and

Expressionless, to receive

A shyly given favour;

While others wait to vie

For nothing more than

A fair maid and a gerfalcon.

Hugo Bonvilian leaned back in his hickory button-tufted swivel chair, and ideated the sky through the ceiling. In the creation of his poem he had purged himself of jealousy, and it no longer mattered who had tilted at whom: he had no rival, and the result of the joust meant nothing to him.

As to the meteorites, he had no fear of the Jovian force behind them; and, now that the end of the world was imminent, he was no more going to quail in a craven bunker than he was deliver himself into the hands of those who hated him, to be lynched. He neither understood his unpopularity, nor saw any reason to take his defeat personally and fall on his sword, Brutus-like at Philippi.

He had never regarded the innocents who passed through Ward One as enemies, or taken pleasure in torturing them. He had merely used them as experimental material in the greatest of all scientific causes; and instead of being vilified, he thought that he deserved people’s thanks and understanding for having pursued a solution with single-minded devotion, to the exclusion of having a life of his own.