Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (28 page)

 
          
But,
as Heinz addresses himself to the keyboard . . .

 
          
I
must have
dozed off. We’re emerging
from the submarine blue of the Hole in the Hills into bright mid-daylight. Zoe
yawns. We stare at one another for a moment, wondering why we stare. No. For no
reason.

 
          
A
gravel plain stretches away from the mountain wall, chequered with snow lakes
of white porphyry chips. Dunes ripple the horizon. And the saffron and gold
glow of the gas giant’s equator is the greatest dune of all.

 
          
“Peter—”

           
“Hmm?”

           
“Which of us will it be?” (Who dies.
It’s unspoken. We both know what I mean.)

           
“I’ve no idea.
How
it’ll happen is what I’d like to know.”

           
“Oh, I know. The enemy will have the
shape of Jacobik.” “Isn’t it enough that you’ve killed him once already? God,
do you have to repeat the performance?”

           
“You aren’t jealous of him, by any
chance?”

           
“Jealous of a ghost? Amy, I don’t
hold you responsible for .. . for what happened. It wasn’t you, love. It was
all of us, channelling hatred through you.”

 
          
“His
aska remains. It lies in wait.”

           
“For you? Or for me? Is that what
you really want deep down? For him to kill me?”

           
“Then you’d be lord of my heart,
darling. Let’s not quarrel. We’re on edge. No human being has ever gone to
their death before with a gold-backed guarantee that there’s no death at all.
We still can’t quite believe it, can we? Oh, to be free of that weight, Peter!
And for everyone on Earth to be free of it! ” Peter kicks his heels into the
rhaniq, pulling us level with Samti-menVao.

 
          
“Samti,
is menVao the same as Vilo was in life?”

 
          
“The
same? We
are
Samti-menVao, Starbom.
menVao is— how shall I put it?—the perfected self of Vilo. What is the special
flavour of this perfection? Her memories are open to me, yet they are untouched
by pain or grief or suspicions or discontent. They are unspoilt by the
partial, failing quality of ordinary existence. She shines in a new light, and
I reflect that light: her mirror.”

 
          
“But
is she still herself?”

 
          
“Personality
remains, yes. It isn’t the simple, partial personality of life. It’s a
fullness, a fulfilment of what she yearned to be. Soon enough you’ll know this
yourselves.”

 
          
Lizards
flicker on the gravel: chameleons, taking on its colouration. Patches of jet
and coal scuttle away from our beasts’ hooves, lofting themselves up on
preposterously stilted legs. It’s as though a knot of ground has come alive
spontaneously, sprouted feet, then settled back into dead stone again. When
they rush on to a patch of snowy porphyry they become snow-skinned. Samti
whistles at the fleeing lizards. They poise erect, listening, captured by the
sound. He dismounts, still whistling, and picks some of them up for food, pops
them into a bag. It seems almost unfair to them, darting little mesmerised
things.

 
          
When
we camp this evening we cook the lizard meat. Their madder flesh tastes like
smoked salmon.

 
          
The
perfected self? Do I really know you, Peter? Or you me? I feel like a creature
without a past. Or with only an eroded, notional past. I’m a vase which has
mysteriously appeared in the midst of this alien desert, full of the water of
life. A gratuitous being. All my past has no significance, beside what is about
to happen.

 
          
Perhaps
my vase has only ever been half-full, not brim-full. Why do I need to pour
Peter’s life into mine, to complete myself? Or mine into his? Am I so
incomplete and partial that I need another soul?

 
          
“Happy
dreams.” He squeezes my hand. “What shall they be?” “I’m losing my dreams,
Peter.”

           
“I know. It’ll come right.”

 
          
We
sit in a ring around the guttering cooking fire—made from kindling that we carry
with us. One of the rhaniqs, folded up like a collapsed clothes horse, bleats
plaintively in the queer, golden dusk. For the sun has set, yet a mighty slice
of the gas giant still glows brightly, while the rest of the segment hangs
ghostly, leached of its borrowed radiance, forming a solid monochrome cloud. So
we see a huge, curved triangle of a moon.

 
          
“We
should try to reach
Pilgrim
again, in
a co-ordinated dream of the real world,” announces Wu briskly.

 
          
“Whatever
for? In just another day or two we’ll be . . .
transfigured.
We’ll be able to intervene directly.” Transfigured .
. .
Tod und Verklarung
: death and
transfiguration . . . Now where did I get the word from? I feel deeply
reluctant. Something in me whispers ‘no’. Maybe because last time I met... I
don’t wish to meet Jacobik on the ship. Jacobik is death incarnate. It isn’t
time to meet him yet.

 
          
“To
spy out the land, Amy.”

 
          
“The
Maoist cavalry rides again?” Peter chuckles. “I’m game.”

 
          
“Me
too,” crows Ritchie.

 
          
“Actually,
Sun Yat-sen devised the style of dress,” says Wu. “It’s merely one of the
perversions of history that Mao’s name is invoked.”

 
          
For
some reason Zoe also demurs, but she finally comes round. As do I.

 
          
As
Heinz addresses himself to the keyboard . . .

 
          
It’s
the moment just after the previous moment; yet a gulf of time hangs between the
two.

 
          
“Wait,”
says Captain K. “Something happened, Dove. What was it?”

 
          
“It
all
stopped
happening—then it started
up again! Time has gone by. We’ve ridden on. We’re camping out in the desert.
Zoe?” She’s still here—or here again, thank God, but is it really her?

 
          
Zoe
flashes a quick smile. “The real me, Amy.”

 
          
“We
were planning a dream ride to
Pilgrim
—an
out-of-the- body experience. We did it once before. We can see you uptime in
the present. But we can’t interact with you—not yet.”

 
          
“Did
you remember anything, Dove? Back in your body?”

 
          
“No.”

 
          
“Denby?”

 
          
Zoe
shakes her head. She shivers. “I feel footsteps walking over my grave . . .
Ritchie and Rene and Wu are riding their surrealistic nags over that
craterscape outside, not knowing that we’re really here inside.”

 
          
“Maybe
we’re with them—in reflection.”

 
          
Salman
knits his fingers together, and cracks the joints. “Over your grave? But what
is
death?”

 
          
“Samti—the
Getkan hero we’re with—says that his dead love has become the perfected form of
her living self.”

 
          
“He
also said that personality remains,” adds Zoe. “Ego fives on, sculpting those
imaginary mock-worlds.”

 
          
“If
there’s no death,” pursues Salman doggedly, “then the past has no significance.
The past disappears. There’s no chance of any new ideas, any new presences—if
there’s no dialogue of life and death. No future, either. The world will slowly
collapse on itself like a balloon.”

 
          
“There
is
a dialogue. Samti and menVao: life
and death.” “It’s a false dialogue, Amy. Life and death have become the same
experience. The removal of death from the equation of existence is the ultimate
deceit. This is the real evil of the Veil Being. It intercepts souls, it stores
them in itself. It uses a collective of souls
as
its own being, and veils reality. And it slowly destroys worlds,
because there’s no longer any history, no longer any ‘becoming’.”

 
          
“Theology
is all we need just now!” sighs Heinz.

 
          
“No,
the Harxine are deeply interested in this. It was their point of contact with
me, in my memory of
Isfahan
. They told me this through the lips of my Mulla. They’re trying to
develop cybernetic rules for the Creator and the Created.”

 
          
“Cybernetic
theology? For the universe as a Black Box?” Heinz perks up. “With the
experimenter—God—inaccessible to us, who are the contents of the box? With the
input, what?” “Creative energy—the hierarchy of descent from the
hadrat al-rububiyya
to the
mushahada:
from the Presence of the
Masterhood to the ordinary sensory world.”

           
“Ach,
yes. And the output . . . what would that be? Life- memory, gated through
death? Or is God the Black Box, to us? The inaccessible, who seems more
spuriously accessible from God’s World?”

           
“It all comes down to death, doesn’t
it?” challenges Salman. “Death has been distanced. There’s an energy circuit—a
circuit of being—between God and the world; and the output back into God is
blocked.
There’s a closed loop
situation. Something exists upon that loop, by virtue of it—and sustains it. It
blocks the way back to the Absolute, and undoes reality. God’s veil has become
evil
That’s an anagram of ‘veil’ in
English, isn’t it? The same thing turned inside out! ”

 
          
“Oh,
Islam is always fishing for hidden meanings in the roots of words,” shrugs Zoe.

 
          
“In
Arabic words maybe. But it’s true: another anagram is
live
—the opposite of ‘die’! The malignant perpetuation of ‘I
live’—the denial of death—is the definition of this evil.”

 
          
“Negotiate,
Anders,” orders Captain K.

 
          
But
as Heinz prepares to type, the reply already flows . . .

 
          
‘You perceive our quest correctly, humans.
We have frozen, then unfrozen, this memory-space so that it would have the same
configuration for your mind-visitors were they able to return; as they have now
done. We are interested in your offer. Please proceed with this hypnosis. We
shall not terminate you until the first manifestation of attack. But then we
must, at the very first intrusion. Our Group-ones are poised around you. They
will act instantly.*

           
“So,” says Captain K, “first you,
Dove. Denby second.”

 
          
“I’m
ready.” I stand in front of him. He begins his fatherly, hypnotic enchantment.
It all seems quite ordinary, almost commonplace. I hear what he says. I don’t
go to sleep (but then, I
am
asleep).
On the other hand ...

 
          
Death.
At the moment of death. After the moment of death. And transfiguration. I.
Shall. Remember. This. I hold the key. The key is death. At the moment of death
...

 
          
The
mess room wavers, and is snuffed out. Where was I?

 
          
What
should I remember?

 
          
Remember,
ember, embers: the embers of our camp fire.

 
          
The Maoist cavalry
invaded the asteroid
again. They boarded
Pilgrim.
They
marched to the control deck where our friends were lying wired up, this time
with an insectoid poised over every one of them. Marched, in dream gravity; but
did not interact with the reality. And I was there with them
—so they say.
I know I wasn’t there. Nor
Zoe either ...

 
          
The
rhaniqs’ hooves leave rows of dimples in the dunes, sharper and less slurred
than they would be on Earth, less prompt to fill—though the breeze is already
at work, shifting grains. These sandhills rise a hundred to a hundred and fifty
metres, and are eloquent with colour, on one side at least. The sunlit slopes
shimmer through the whole spectrum like tilted, flowing oil. But the shaded
sides are suddenly cold and lustreless, drained of iridescence beyond each
clear-cut ridge.

 
          
Eloquent
to the ear are these dunes too. Each has its own voice. The wind and the
vibrations of our passage trigger them, and they seem to converse with each
other wordlessly, each dune’s voice carved by its current shape. They speak
with a rumble of thunder, with a distant siren song, with a thin wavering
whistle, with a drum-roll, a twang, a heartbeat
\'7bthud, thud
,
thud),
a
bellow, a clanging bell note. The desert is talking, or making music to itself,
about us as we pass. We are ants marching over the taut strings and stretched
drumskins of some set of instruments that flow into and out of one another. It’s
a hypnotic, eerie place.

 
          
This
constant thin gonging, the faint hammering, the bell notes affect Ritchie
first. He slaps a cupped palm against his ear to swat the invading sounds. He
grabs for the treksack, pulls out an L-27.

           
“What is it, man?” cries Ren6.
“There’s nothing there. Put it away.” The curling dune tosses back his cry,
mockingly.

 
          
“Ritchie,”
purrs Wu.

 
          
“Damn
it, I’m commander, still and all. Just checking out the hardware.”

 
          
A
temple bell tones beneath our feet.

 
          
The
crazy boy fires his rifle across the dune, burning, wounding, drilling spears
of hot fused quartz into its flank.

 
          
A
harsh shrill races through the sands—a cry of pain, a challenge.

 
          
Again
he fires. Again the wild cry throbs through me, nauseating me. The world rolls
and heaves. The dunes are huge waves at sea.

 
          
Samti-menVao
nudges his mount closer. “Do you wish to meet death already? You aren’t wearing
your mask.”

 
          
“The
gun still works,” smirks Ritchie. He has gone a little mad. But he does return
the laser to the trekpack.

 
          
These
sands seem more alive now, seeking out our wavelengths. The eardrums of the
desert hear us—ossicles of sands, auditory labyrinths filled with sand-fluid.
The air is electric— and thinner, headier. We inhale more with each breath. My
heart still races from Ritchie’s abrupt impulsive action. When the time comes,
do we die not from a demon’s stroke but from heart failure?

 
          
“What
did I do wrong, huh? Did I fry somebody’s memories? Cook someone’s soul?”
Ritchie pants, then ludicrously he hiccups.
Hie, hie.
Latin for ‘here’! A tiny creature asserting its presence,
its thisness.

 
          
A
world’s memories encoded here: is it possible? Zeraini memories too. And Dindi
memories, and others. And ours. A trillion trillion transducer crystals,
receiving the rhythms of consciousness—the soul waves—of all the golden beings?
Or a mere nothingness, a place of death, sculpted by the empty winds? Here are
no more lizards. Their home is the gravel desert we have left behind. Yes,
these sands are remembering us, just as they remember every thought and action
and dream-act of those close to Askatharli...

 
          
Peace,
whisper the sands now. Peace to you. We take longer, deeper breaths.

           
Here is a bowl, an eroded crater
perhaps two kilometres across where the winds have smoothed out a sand lake.
Beyond it, dunes to the horizon—an iridescent moire banded by thin dull shade
lines, brooded over by a little more of the Eye, muted in the sunlight.

 
          
Masked,
Samti-menVao scans the terrain.

 
          
“Here
is suitable, Starborn. We shall wait above with the beasts.”

 
          
So
here we are: the arena of immortality. An empty basin. Empty, but we have seen
a creature of light walk over the ash- strewn water to take on the shape of
death ...

 
          
“The
sands already know you are here. The masks will amplify the call. You will go
down two by two.”

 
          
With
a brash shrug—for he has pulled himself together— Ritchie breaks out two L-27s.

 
          
There’s
something I must remember . . . But what? No doubt I shall remember it
at the moment
.

 
          
“Who
goes first?”

 
          
“When
Ritchie and I go,” says Wu, cannily postponing the moment of her own going, “I
don’t wish to use the light weapon. Samti-menVao, may I use Vilo’s sword?”

 
          
“We
are honoured.” Samti draws it from its scabbard.

 
          
“I’ve
never used a sword in my life! ” protests Ritchie.

 
          
Wu
shrugs. Has she ever used a sword? I doubt it. What is she planning?

 
          
“Can
I still use my gun, Wu?”

 
          
“As
you like.”

 
          
A
laser can kill from a hundred metres, burn from two hundred, blind from a
thousand ... Is she sacrificing herself? For Ritchie’s sake? To live within him
forevermore, rather than he in her?

 
          
“Shall
we go first?” Rene invites Zoe softly. “I would like to learn more about this
strange symbiosis. Not least,” he adds gallantly, “of me with you,
negresse d'or
.” He strikes a pose,
mock-dandyish. “Do you know Baudelaire’s poem,
The Death of Lovers? ‘Nous echangerons un eclair unique
. . .
et plus tard un Ange, entr’ouvrant les
portes, viendra ranimer
. . .' ‘Our hearts will be two torches, their light
reflecting in our minds—twin mirrors. We will exchange one single flash of
light. .. after which an Angel, half-opening the doors, will come to restore to
life . . . the mirrors and the flames.’ So here are the mirrors: our shields.
Here is the source of that flash of light: the laser. And here is the place of
the angel, who slays to immortalise, so that our hearts may perfectly reflect
each other.” There’s an ironic whimsy to his rhapsody, which appeals more to
Zoe right now than if he was entirely serious.

 
          
She
smiles at him. “The poetry’s fine—even going on the translation—but
theologically I still smell a rat.”

 
          
“
Si vous cdlieZy Madame
,
au vrai pays de gloire, sur les bords de la
Seine
/ ” he quotes charmingly. “Ah, but you’ll speak French fluently enough
once we have full access to each other! ”

 
          
Wu
is busy examining her own face (ivory downed with gold) in Ritchie’s mirror
shield. She stares unblinkingly into her own eyes. Does she see another course?
If she does, she doesn’t say what it is.

 
          
We
all shake hands; and embrace.

 
          
Zoe
and Rene don their helmets, heft their shields and lasers, and set off down
into the sand basin. We watch, unhelmeted, as they grow smaller, separating,
moving apart. The Eye of Menka beats a ghostly gong of faint gold beyond the
violet sky. Mirages set the sand atremble in the sparkling distance—light
transmuted into unreal liquid.

 
          
Rene
and Zoe turn the mirror shields towards one another, in salute:
morituri
. . .

 
          
Dust
cavorts into the air among the mirages. A shining vortex dances out of the mock
waters.

 
          
They
angle their shields in the direction of this dust devil, triangulating on it,
to pull it closer. This is how we were told it would be. I see how Rene
visualizes the coming encounter: as a duel, one
Paris
morning a hundred and more years ago in the
Bois. But is that thing of light the foe—or the adjudicator?

 
          
The
light dances in between them.

 
          
And
light becomes body. It is a prancing Cubist fetish—a four-legged monster with
toothy skulls upon its knees. Its body is a box with a gaping wooden-toothed
mouth wide open in the belly. The hole passes right through its midriff. Upon a
tall, rag-

 
          
clad
muddy neck shudders an oval head with four bulging wooden eyes and a mouthful
of broken crocodile teeth. Muddy hag-hair dangles almost to the ground. Taller
than either Rene or Zoe, turning about and about, the thing stamps and
whistles. Its arms are bone-thin, bangled and overlong. Each hand clasps a
red-stained machete.

 
          
It
darts towards Rene, then back towards Zoe. It flails its machetes. It dances on
a string, held taut between them. Closer and closer to them it bounds with each
swing. It must slash one of them with its bloody blades soon!

 
          
“Burn
it! ” shouts Rene.

 
          
He
fires; Zoe fires simultaneously. She screams; she falls. Rene’s laser beam has
gone right through that gaping belly- mouth. Hers has ... the fetish flares up
in flames. Hers hit it. Air keens in the furnace it becomes. It bounds towards
her, blazing and shrilling, its blades plunging at her fallen body even as it
bums away.

 
          
Away
into smoke, into wisps in the air, into nothing at all.

 
          
Dropping
his laser, Rene sinks to his knees in the sand. He tears off the helmet-mask
and cradles his head.

 
          
Before
any of us can start down the slope to his side, or to Zoe’s, he rises. He
straightens up. He walks back uphill towards us, ignoring Zoe’s corpse. His
expression is enchanted. He runs his hands up and down his hips as though
caressing a new, strange frame.

 
          
“We
are Rene-men Zoe,” he laughs. “It’s all true. Two lives we’ve lived. Now
they’re one, in me. Blind. We’ve been blind till now! ”

 
          
“Zoe’s
still alive?” asks Peter cautiously.

 
          
“Her
body died. Only her body. She’s with me now. She’s a . . . presence, to me.
Lover, sister, mother, child: all of these. She’s in the dream domain, yet here
too. I know her dreams and memories.
We
know them.
Je est un autre.
I’m the
dreamer; she’s the dream—the dream of her life.
Ah, comme je bavardel
”

 
          
“Who
controls your body? Can she—?”

 
          
“Can
we still speak to her? To
you
, Zoe?”
I ask her-who-is- not-here (yet is).

 
          
“I
feel her touch upon my body, strange to her. I feel the thrust of breasts, the
cleavage of my sex—her sex. When my lips touch each other now, they kiss:
myself, herself. Her tongue is in my mouth. I’m . . . complete. Entire. I
didn’t know how partial I was. And still am! I’m not wholly of Askatharli yet.
But I can wait. There are souls beyond souls, dreams beyond dreams: dreams that
are awake, like fabulous living palaces. We’ve seen a little of this, but now
it’s the whole fabric of her existence. She is imagination now. She is music
and creation—and she is still herself. I bear her memories, like a child within
me, whose mind I know in the womb. She’s beyond them now—yet they’re still the
matrix from which she arises.
Ah
,
quel bavardage!”