Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (23 page)

 
          
No
one came to worship or confront a glob, when God Himself walked the world. So
the cathedral remained empty.

 
          
“Behind
the altar,” murmured Sean. “There may be a crypt underneath all this—the heart
of the world. It wants us to find it, but it can’t express itself. Everything
already
is
expressed, outside.
Pressed out of us.
Molded into shape.”
This cathedral cave was perhaps the first . .
.projection
,
the first bubble of metamorphosed matter breathed out by It into the airless
vacuum originally surrounding this planet: a meeting place where It might have
come to terms with the people of
Copernicus,
except that as they came closer into this solar system more and more had been
specified out of their minds, captivating the God. No: generating it
into
a God, a God of a particular kind .
. .

 
          
They
reached what Sean had been trying to compel into the semblance of an altar. It
was a large excrescence of porous tufa: a stone sponge, a rocky tumor coughed
out of the throat of the thin cave or tunnel which cleft the floor behind it,
leading down at an angle of forty degrees or so. The tunnel walls glowed
phosphorescently. They converged as they descended as though the tunnel was
only staying open with an effort, squeezing back the rock that tended to drift
together and seal this fault in the otherwise impeccable cathedral floor.

 
          
“Strait
is the gate,” remarked Sean.

 
          
“To
what
?
^v
asked Muthoni.

 
          
“The truth?
What God is? What God has forgotten that He is?”

 
          
“What
then, when we find it?
The millennium—right away?”

 
          
Sean
spread his hands, feeling slightly episcopal. He evaded the question.

 
          
“What
is
going to happen at the end of
another eight hundred years or so? I mean, is this whole world going to resolve
itself into Denise’s glob?
A metabeing?
Ah, that’s why
the God wants you to chip in!” Muthoni teased, but cuttingly. “He doesn’t think
it’s going to work without a bit more psychological guidance than old
Knossos
can feed in.”

 
          
“Now
don’t start resenting me!” Sean snapped his fingers impatiently. “I’m sorry.
That’s
all the
Devil’s fault. He was sowing seeds of
doubt. The Devil doesn’t believe in the Work.”

 
          
“He
wouldn’t, would he? What’s the point of having a Devil otherwise?”

 
          
“The
Devil’s a rationalist,” said Denise doubtfully. She chewed her lip. “This whole
business of accelerated evolution —a kind of ladder of advancement up which
everything is scurrying, fish included . . . well, it’s lovely, but it isn’t
rational. It isn’t Darwinian evolution. It’s a dream of evolution. We’ve got
that dream so deep in us. I have. I know I have.
Even though
it’s so unecological, because we need all those niches and creatures
sovereignly adapted to them, every one.
But the secret dream’s still
here—the dream of purpose.” She swatted her breast, and smiled wryly. “No bugs
here, are there? The bug niche is empty. It’s a non-Darwinian world. Have to
be, wouldn’t it, with a God presiding?”

 
          
“But
Bosch didn’t even know anything about purposeful evolution,” said Muthoni. “Why
bother with the fish? What are they
doing
here?”

 
          
“He
knew about the Great Chain of Being. It’s
that
,
plus the ‘advancement’ ideas of the alchemists, that powers this world’s
version of
evolution .
.

 
          
“
Which seduces you.
And Sean.
Yes,
Sean, he whom you hunt for long enough thou shalt come to resemble!
If you’ll pardon a small psychological insight from me.”

 
          
“You
mean that I’m setting myself up as a second
Knossos
? Or
being
set up?”

 
          
Muthoni
shrugged. She peered down the cleft. “Eerie. It’s a kind of dream-squeeze.”

 
          
“The birth canal in reverse?
Well, we’ve been reborn
twice—third time lucky?”

 
          
“I
think I’ll stay here. At least I’m wearing my own colors at the moment. I
belong to myself.
Eden
’s a nice place. Just like home.
Even if some
cartoonist drew the giraffe.”

 
          
“And
I’m Primavera,” smiled Denise.

 
          
“Look,”
Sean whispered—but the cathedral magnified his words notwithstanding, “I’m very
much in favor of . . . no, not in favor! I’m
fascinated
by what I see going on here: this whole projection of
unconscious processes through living symbolism. So this is what happens when
humanity touches down inside the sphere of a superintelligence alien to it? Do
the old archetypes stretch and snap? No, they damn well
bind
that intelligence.
But how?
Did the
God evolve from preconscious mind the way we all did? Did he evolve so far
beyond the earliest stages that He’s fallen prey to them—coming from an
unexpected direction? What is this world?
An act of
compassion, or a game, or a dire necessity?
Has it
really
only got until the millennium to run to completion—or is
that just a projection of
Knossos
’s religious obsessions? I’ve got to concentrate on this. As soon as we
stop worrying about these questions, God’ll process us. Absorb us in the
scheme. I’m sure of it. He’s already got Jeremy as his yardstick of ordinary
consciousness. He doesn’t need more of us for that. We’re still a curiosity to
Him.
At the moment.
We can tell Him something
objective about the stage all this Work has got to ... No, damn it again, we
can tell
It
something. It wants us to
do it. So long as it needs us, we’re relatively immune to the
mesmerism—except,” he glanced sidelong at Denise, “to the extent that we can
mesmerize ourselves. Enchant ourselves. And I include myself in that warning.”

 
          
Muthoni
peered down the tunnel again. “Well, I’m supposed to be a doctor—but
everyone’s immortal for the next eight hundred years or so.
Or
for ever?
So I’m redundant. I guess I knew that when I raged in Hell.
I’m on God’s welfare now.”

 
          
“Yes,
do think of it that way. It’s
His
—or
7^—welfare. You’ve got an alien superbeing as a patient, who’s sort of
sick—with us. He’s manifesting symptoms all over the world. And you, Denise,
wouldn’t you love to know how it feels to run a whole ecology just by willing
it?” Though this was her own special seductive trap . . . Yet he evoked it, so
shortly after cautioning her about it. He was sure that all three of them must
go down the tunnel together.

 
          
“It
could be such a beautiful ecology all over.
Gardens
everywhere—with people all conscious of the magic processes at work.
But
it has to end, doesn’t it? The patient has to be cured?”

 
          
“Reintegration
is the name of the game. But what follows reintegration?”

 
          
“Do
you think it could be paradise, for ever?
An earthly
paradise?
Maintained by the superbeing and people together?”

 
          
“We
won’t find out by kicking our heels here.”

 
          
Muthoni
flipped an imaginary coin. Since it was imaginary she had already made her mind
up. “Tails I lose. Down I go.”

 
          
Denise
glanced back round the empty cathedral. She licked her lips. “I’ve never met a
glob. I suppose I ought to see what one looks like. And I don’t fancy being
left alone. I remember a certain unicorn!”

 
          
“Denise,
that’s
your
image: the glob. Don’t
force God to be a . . . glob. Don’t force
It
to be anything at all. Let it
show us what it is.”

 
          
They
descended into the cleft in Indian file.

 
          
They edged, crablike,
down the steep
crack, lowering
themselves
pace by pace. Sean’s
heartbeat thumped back and forth between the sandwich of rock; or could it be
the heartbeat of Denise’s ‘glob’ somewhere deeper underground?

 
          
Still
descending, the fissure turned a sharp corner, doubling back underneath the
cathedral. Phosphorescence lit their way.

 
          
Just
as the encroaching walls were threatening to squeeze them to a standstill the
passage zigzagged then opened into an undervault: a long, high crypt eerily lit
by the same phosphorescence. Toward the far end of the crypt, a massive stone
column thrust into the roof; it was the base of the cathedral spire. Channels
ran up through it, fluting its sides, organlike —a petrified bundle of huge
hollow nerve fibers.

 
          
A
round pool floated at the base of this organ-tree, its surface faintly oily,
exactly level with the floor of the crypt so that the pool seemed like a part
of the floor though of a different substance.
A lens.
A flat jelly eye set in the socket of the floor. The organpipe trunk was its
optic nerve . . .

 
          
The
urge to biologize is overpowering, thought Sean, trying to see what was
actually there.

 
          
If
that was a lens, and there was the optic nerve, then where was the brain? Up in
the emptiness of the cathedral— in that hollow skull? Or out in the open air,
in the sky, in the whole world?
In the physical God, and the
physical Devil, and all the creatures?
In
Knossos
?
Here was simply a point of focus ... a
focal point. Ah, everything was inside out! But, in a projection, everything
would have to be . . .

 
          
Denise’s ‘glob’?
No word fitted the ‘pool’.

           
They discovered they were holding
hands to keep in touch with each other in the sudden enormity of the crypt
after the squeeze of rock. Released from the strait-jacket of the stone they
breathed in deeply. Like three children or a trio of lovers they approached the
brink of the pool.

 
          
Down
they gazed into its brimful depths—or perhaps
shallows
:
hard to say which, for the faint light bent and twisted in its jelly. Motes and
tendrils and lozenges of light swam hither and thither: bubbles and threads of
yellow, green, orange.

 
          
Kneeling,
Sean placed his free hand flat upon the surface but the surface resisted his
pressure. His palm slid across the oily membrane and he almost fell, but
Muthoni’s grip held him. Despite its phantom internal structure, the pool was
all one thing: whole, entire, within its monomolecular skin.

 
          
“It’s
a water bed,” decided Denise. “Do we jump on to it? Do we make love? Do we
conceive the perfect being?”

 
          
Sean
shook his head. “No, it’s a lens.
An eye.
But what
does it see?”

 
          
Muthoni
let go of Denise’s hand. Kneeling too, she jabbed her index finger at the pool.
The skin dimpled beneath her fingertip, but still it did not break.

 
          
“It’s
a single thing,” she whispered. “It’s one single
cell.
See, those are the lysosome particles—enzymes, down there.
And mitochondria, there—the energy bodies.
A lake of viscous cytoplasm.
Protein ribosomes.
Vesicles.
Golgi bodies.
Look
down there in the center: there’s the
nucleus
with the chromosomes—and nucleoli.”

 
          
“No,
it’s a pupil,” Sean contradicted her. He sketched with both hands. “Around it
is the iris—and the humor. Those stone tubes up there are ... a kind of optic
nerve—a telescope, reflecting the world down into it.”

 
          
“Rubbish.
It’s a single cell—
magnified.”
Muthoni stared up at the organ pipes rising above their heads, passing through
the roof above where they must become internalized within the towering spire.
“This place is a huge microscope, that’s what! Those are the tubes. The
eyepiece is the opening into the sky, high up above. Here’s the object stage.
It’s
God’s microscope, for peering into a cell made huge.
But it magnifies the cell
in reality
,
not just in our eyes. This is the template cell for all the creatures on this
world. It’s the basis, the plan of all the life here.
An
Earth-evolved
cell—based on the Earth
pattern.”

 
          
“So
God isn’t even a glob,” giggled Denise, in a brittle way. “He’s a great big
protozoon.” She slapped the membrane. “I’ve never made it before on top of a
bag of DNA.”

 
          
Whatever
was
Muthoni seeing in this eye?
wondered
Sean.

 
          
“It’s
the ur-cell,” she went on. “God has turned into this. All his other parts
spring from here—and He’s part of everyone by now. Damn it all, how can we
speak to a single cell—which is our own kind of cell, anyway?”

 
          
“We
should go back and ask the God,” suggested Denise.
“The
mouthpiece.
The Christ.”
She felt a surge of
love for the pink-robed figure. “What happened to the crucifixion? Is having to
be in the world—any world at all—enough of a nailing down?”

 
          
“This
isn’t canonical Christianity,” said Sean. “Remember that. It’s gnostic
alchemical evolutionism. Symbolically, Christ is the perfect man. The
successful alchemist would assume the place of Christ. ‘Christness’ would
replace the man’s earlier personality.
Knossos
may have become equivalent to Christ,
having crucified himself in stone in Hell. You see, man redeems himself in the
alchemists’ system and becomes the Christ—the perfect man. The God whom we—or
rather whom Denise and I—met is the ‘perfect man’ aspect of
It
.”

 
          
“How
can He be perfect if He wants us to help Him?” asked Muthoni.

 
          
“Because He has fallen too—into the world.
It’s only an
approximation here: the search for perfection, because it isn’t . . . reality.
It isn’t Darwinian evolution, as you said, Denise. It isn’t the real universe.
It’s an idealization. Even so, there’s a creature with God-like power behind it
all. If
It
hadn’t been equivalent to a God, this
could never have happened.”

 
          
“Back
to paradox, eh?” Muthoni jabbed the membrane again. “So what’s this?”

 
          
“A lens.
The eye of the world telescope.
God’s eye.”

 
          
“Blah.
I told you it’s a cell.
On a microscope
slide.”

 
          
“It’s
a jelly trampoline,” laughed Denise. “The springboard this world takes off
from, where this world is dreamed and procreated. You can talk about ‘Him’ and
‘It’ till you’re blue in the face. Oh, pardon me—you’re a bit blue already!
Funny old phosphorescence.”
She sounded tipsy.
Hysterical.
“Aren’t you going to do something? This world is
for
fun.
It’s a sport. It’s His game.
So here’s one in the eye for the glob!”

           
Before Sean or Muthoni could stop
her, Denise had launched herself out in a belly dive.

 
          
A
convulsion of light welled out of the pool as she hit it with her full weight:
a writhing of insubstantial, spectral photic tentacles—rose and violet, orange
and green.

 
          
Denise
. . . burst, fractured,
multiplied
. She became a hundred
interpenetrating images of herself: a solid holographic image of
herself
snipped into a hundred separate parts all of which
contained the same total information but with less definition, less exactitude.
For just a moment she was legion. Then abruptly, in place of a hundred
conflicting replicas of her, was: a milling flock of birds.
Finches,
nightingales, buntings, larks, goldcrests.
The birds burst upward, as
though sucked by a gust of wind, up into the many tube openings of the
organ-spire, up through them and away.

 
          
The
surface of the lens was empty. The living, sentient
holographic
lens, realized Sean, which projects the actual reality
of this world! The whole surface of the planet could be contained in it, in
scrambled coded form. It wobbled and was still,

 
          
“She’s
gone.” Muthoni gaped. “It split her up. The way
It's
been split up—into a million lower things. What do we
do?”
“It’s in Bosch, you know, in the
pattern! The birds of life flying out of the holes in a spire . .
. returning
on foot into the egg-cave eventually. She’ll
come together. She
must. ”

           
“In time for the
millennium?
Has she got to evolve back into Denise first? Don’t you
care
, man?”

 
          
“She’ll
be all over the land—everywhere at once. An ecologist’s dream . . . that’s what
I tempted her with.”

 
          
“I
want
Denise
back! God, give her
back!” shouted Muthoni. Her voice echoed in the crypt.

 
          
“Maybe
He wants Himself back.
Itself.
Whatever.
I know what this projection is all about—it’s about reintegration.
Of the psyche.
Ours
—and
His.
The two mesh together. And the method is a kind of
holographic projection: of solid actualities, not just images you can walk
right through.
Of symbols into existence.
But the
power—the energy—required for that! Where can it possibly come from? I don’t
understand that, but I do understand the psychological process of
pro- iectio.
In some weird way,
proiectio
—the projection of the
unconscious on to the outside world—has met up with a physical means of
realizing it! I’m going to try and make a bargain.
No, not a
bargain exactly.
A gift, of knowledge.
I’m
going to try and—”

 
          
“If
I had a scalpel,” scowled Muthoni, “I’d take it to this cell—”

 
          
“So?
Whoosh: everything rushes out of the world? The projection vanishes? Leaving
what?
Barren rock?
Everybody dead?
More likely you’d just damage His eye so that He sees things askew, till it can
repair itself. There’d be plague in the Gardens.
Disease.
Ugliness.
War.
Spilling over from
Hell.”
“But it turned her into birds!”

 
          
“Beautiful
birds ...”

 
          
“Dumb, speechless birds!”

 
          
“They’ll
sing. They’ll celebrate existence. They’ll reintegrate into Denise. It was
just a demonstration—of
Its
own predicament.”

 
          
“Birds, indeed!
You really do want to be the second
Knossos
, don’t you? But Sean, we’re an expedition
from Earth!
From Solspace.
Remember? This is a human
colony— not some psycholab for your amusement. A whole lot of human investment
and faith and hope went into this.”

 
          
“I’m
doing
my job, Muthoni. With due
respect, I’m the only one of us who is.
Though obviously I
can’t speak for Austin or Tanya or Paavo.
But I doubt whether they’re
making much headway. I’ve got to come to grips with Him—or
It
—
through
the projection, which projects the ‘God’ we met too! And we
mustn’t forget that there’d be no colony here at all
without
this projection. Whether it seems magical or magnificent or
malign is quite secondary to that simple fact.”