Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (20 page)

           
“You tell that to the Devil,” the
eastern
negro
suggested with a guffaw. “He might
appreciate it!
Passing through.
Heh.
Ha! I like it.”

 
          
“I
just might do that,” nodded Sean. “Do you know who we are? No, of course you
don’t. We’re from a recontact survey ship
—from
Earth. ”

 
          
The
eastern
negro
stared at him, nonplussed. “What’s
Earth?” he asked innocently. He rubbed his brow fiercely, as though it might
burst into fire with memory.
“Something.
No. You’ve
got it all wrong.
This
is the Earth.
The Earth is in three parts: Eden, Gardens and Hell. One day the Sun may shine
on Hell and Gardens will grow here too.”

 
          
“What
do you think those little lights are in the sky?”
“Hmm. Stars.
Set in a crystalline sphere around the zodiac?”

           
“Suns, man. Other suns—far away,
with worlds. One of those worlds is called the Earth. You came from there.”
“Ah, you’re up to a bit of devilry yourself! Disputatious type, eh? You won’t
go down well!”

 
          
“I
see what you mean,”
sighed
Muthoni. “Okay, on our way.
Before we forget ourselves.”

 
          
Sean
hauled Jeremy up by the scruff of the neck.
“You too.”

 
          
The
four of them walked to the ladder. Waves of cheers buoyed them up as they
climbed. On these waves, they rose through the roof.

 
 
          
The domed roof
was deserted. One step
up from it, the bagpipes moaned of their own accord on the millstone disc. The
sculpted features of
Knossos
loomed below that disc. Jeremy stepped over to where the dome fell away
more steeply to stare down at the monumental image. The face was wistful, as
though accepting the necessity for a Hell, while pitying the hellish aspects of
it—which were a part of himself that he had come to terms with, so that it
couldn’t possibly harm him or confuse him. Hell—the thrash of the hindbrain
—had become a fossil, no longer kicking away on top of his spine, but turned to
stone; to
The
Stone, which was now
the firm skeleton and foundation of his mysterious activities in the Gardens .
. .

 
          
The
stone face kept watch, too, over something else . . .

 
          
Jeremy
pointed out across the tarn of ice which gripped those broken boats where
Knossos
’s feet were rooted.

 
          
The
land rose beyond the shore then dipped into a red laterite valley. High up as
they were, they could see into the valley—and it glowed with a furnace light.
The scene in the valley seemed magnified, brocken-like, as though the hot
valley air formed a lens.

 
          
They
saw a three-legged throne: a high chair with legs as tall as stilts. Upon it
perched a blue, bird-headed King of Hell who wore a cauldron for a crown—the
canonical Devil of Bosch. He (or it?) must have been four or five meters tall
if he (or it) ever stepped down from the throne. But could he ever step down?
His feet were imprisoned in amphoras, stone wine bottles fastened securely to
the cross-bar of the high chair. The Devil sat there, immobilized, like a gaunt
baby on its potty, emptying his lax bowels into a gaping hole in the ground
beneath. What he voided down this hole—through a bulging sac of bowel gas—was:
people.
The occasional person.
Very
occasional.
Though they watched for a long time through the magnifying
air, only two men and a woman came up to speak to him. After more or less
conversation he snatched one man and one woman up in a great clawed hand,
stuffed them whole into his beak, swallowed them then voided them out of his
nether end. The other man he dismissed and sent away . . . indigestible? No
more petitioners came, and the Devil was left quite alone, fasting in his
throne-valley.

 
          
“God’s
backside,” murmured Sean eventually.

 
          
They
scrambled down the shrouds of one of the boats encasing the tree trunks of the
Knossos
colossus, down to the deck. Overboard onto
the ice they stepped, and slipped and slid across to the shore. Sweating again,
flushing in the lurid orange glow from the valley beyond, they breasted the
rise.

 
          
Immediately
the Devil fixed them with a glossy black eye. As they walked slowly down
towards him, a chemical stench drifted to them from the cloacal hole beneath
his high potty throne: dissolution of the flesh, digestion, elimination . . .

 
          
From
what they thought was a discreet distance they stared up at the Devil. And its
beak clacked open.

 
          
“Now,
you
have been this way before, dear
Jeremy,” it chirped mournfully. “So what can I expect to learn from you, except
that the operation must be performed many times over before it can succeed?
Must I sit here for ever? All these men and women—and the beasts and fishes who
will surely follow them: oh I am in gross discomfort! I have indigestion.
Nourish me! Fill my belly for once!
Stay within me.
This is no real Hell, when I cannot keep the souls that I gobble up inside me.
I might learn something from them if I could. Ah, I am kept in ignorance. I may
not know who I already
Am
.
And Was.
And Will Be.
Ah, me.”

 
          
“Poor
old devil,” sympathized Jeremy cautiously.

 
          
The
Devil jerked a claw towards the stone features of
Knossos
, visible over the rise. “That person binds
me here, and he unbinds my bowels.
If you could possibly heap
that hilltop a little higher, so that I can’t see him?
Or melt the ice
around his boats so that he sinks a little? You must appreciate my predicament,
petitioners. After all, I am a very human devil. Will you call me the Father of
Lies? But what is a lie?
An untruth.
An anti-truth.
So, into my hands is given anti-truth and
anti-knowledge; so that He, Who I Am, may know
Myself
.
If only I weren’t forever digesting all these damned people! Oh for the old
simplicities, before there was any good and evil, any speaking and silence, and
right and left, or plus and minus, or mind and unmind—the whole damned turmoil
of it all.”

 
          
Sean
spoke up. “Hasn’t this whole world been forced upon the God—by Heinrich
Strauss? But how can you force something upon a God . . . ? I take it that you
are
part of the God, incidentally? A
part estranged from Him, by Himself— some sort of antithesis?
So that, in a sense, I’m speaking to the God right now?”

 
          
“Ah,
so we have a philosopher to digest! Now, who are
you?”

 
          
“Don’t
you know that already? God seems to have been greasing our tracks for us so
far! Or else
Knossos
has.”

 
          
“Tush,
am I supposed to know everything? Fool, I am the Father of Ignorance, the Son
of Chaos. What is chaos but information so scrambled that none of its content
or structure can be recovered? But let us debate.
First, a
bite to whet my appetite.”

 
          
Casually,
but so quickly, the Devil reached down. He plucked up Denise and popped her
into his beak. She thrashed, she screamed once in a muffled way, then she
disappeared down his maw.

 
          
Muthoni
and Sean started forward, collided, and drew back sharply as the Devil cuffed
them with a claw-mailed fist. Or was he greedily trying to catch them too?

 
          
A
few moments later, Denise slid from the Devil’s anus through the blue,
prolapsed gas balloon. Waving her arms wildly, she fell right through the
bottom of the bubble, down the dark hole beneath. The Devil’s tongue and beak
produced appreciative smacking noises.

 
          
“Yum.
A flavor foreign to my palate ... I am intrigued. Now,
don’t be shy, my dear. The only way out of Hell is through this body of mine.
And there’s only one way into the old anatomy. At least, no one’s every tried
rear entry! It’s really unfortunate the way you all keep on slipping through! I
suppose it stops me from getting fat. Do you taste foreign too, my piebald
nigredo?”

 
          
Muthoni
shrank away.

 
          
“Tush,
you must learn to be swallowed up.
Ndiyo?”

 
          
“How
do you know Swahili? You can read my mind!”

 
          
“Not at all.
I tasted that in dear little . . . Denise, on
her

 
          
way
through. She must have picked up a few expressions from
you. Let me tell you something,” the Devil hissed conspiratorially.

 
          
As
Muthoni leaned forward to hear it, the claw snaked out even further than
before. The Devil heaved her up bodily.

 
          
“You’ve
whetted my appetite for more Swahili!”

 
          
The
Devil crammed Muthoni into his mouth. A few moments later she fell out of his
bowels and down the well shaft, gasping and staring in horror.

 
          
“Now
you, I think,” he remarked to Sean. “I shall keep as my fool or jester. I know
where you’re from now! You’re invaders. Extraterrestrial pests! Do I have to
keep open house for the whole galaxy? Must the whole cosmos beat a path to my
door? Must I process the entire universe through my guts? Is there no end to
it?”

 
          
“To what?
The universe?
Don’t you
know?”

 
          
“Dear
boy, I am
unknowing.
I swallow modes
of knowing. You think you know a lot, don’t you? Ah, I have the flavor of you
from your two friends—who aren’t, incidentally, quite so friendly as you may
imagine. But isn’t that true of everyone? Hidden resentments lurk, ah yes.
Grievances and bitterness.
Would you believe that they
believe you were sent along to spy upon their mental health? They believe
you’ve been watching them all the time, weighing every word. Denise fears that
her parascientific fantasies will be reported. Muthoni is positive that you
regard her as a savage throwback, in your heart of hearts—a generic savage.
Thus she raged like a beast.
Because of you.
Why
should you wish to accompany these covert enemies? Listen to me, Sean: do you
know what the greatest torture is? It’s to know someone else’s mind. It’s to
read it with a lick of the tongue. No wonder my bowels stay slack! Your flavor,
hmm . . . That of a brain peeler! You think, no doubt, that you can analyze me
like a patient on a couch?”

 
          
“I
don’t believe what you say about Muthoni and Denise distrusting me. There may
be an element of that—but it isn’t central. If it’s so rotten knowing other
people’s minds—”

 
          
“Ah,
the burden,” groaned the Devil. “It really gives me diarrhea.”

 
          
“If
it’s so rotten, then you must be a real masochist—and so must I.”

 
          
“Twin souls?
Ah, my jester! You alone can crack jokes with
the King! Am I not King? Am I not a religious presence?”

 
          
“You’re
part of an alien superbeing who happens to be able to terraform worlds—this
world at any rate!—and who can recycle souls, and who calls itself the God.”

 
          
“Then
I am indeed a religious presence. Bow down to me, my fool.”

 
          
“I
said it ‘calls’ itself the God.”

 
          
“Is
it not better by far to have a
God
whom one can meet
and experience, rather than an empty vacuous abstraction— who is no God at all,
but only a meaningless name? Who, then, can be God for the God Himself? Would
that be
Himself
alone? How solipsistic. You see,
jester, I do not believe in God, if I am part of the God. I deny Him.” The
Devil cackled merrily.
“As do you.
So you are mine to
play with. On the other hand, were you to worship Him in me . . . that might
just liberate you from my
clutches.
”

 
          
Sean
decided that he should have taken the advice of the eastern
negro
at Last Stop Tavern. The master of lies was spinning a web of argument for him.

 
          
The
Devil leaned avidly towards him. “What shall be the form of your worship?”

 
          
“Obviously
the religious spirit—the sense of worship, of awe—is inherent in mankind ...”
Sean temporized, aware that he was very close to being forbidden passage
through the Devil’s guts, and kept as a toy instead.

 
          
“Is
it inherent in me?” The Devil pounced. “I repeat: whom do
I
worship? Himself that is
Myself
? How can
God have a God? Thus, there is none. Yet I believe because it is impossible.”
The Devil clacked his beak. “That saying has passed my lips ... on the way down
my gullet.”

 
          
“I’ll
tell you who
you
should worship.
Because it’s exactly what you’re doing already! You worship
us.
Yes, Devil,
us.
Because we’ve made the whole of you into a
viable God.
And how do you worship us?
By a sacrament.
By taking our flesh and blood into your mouth, and transubstantiating them—
transforming their substance into—”