Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (8 page)

 
          
The
hermaphrodite’s voice, in response, was almost song-like: a spoken song,
stylized though without undue affectation.

 
          
“He
passed by, oh, at the prelude to the cavalcade—with his magpie scouting around.
Who are these three? They look like original clay—unresolved.
Beautiful—though about to be shaped.
What they’ll become is
only an idea in their minds as yet, I’d say.”

 
          
So
Jeremy introduced the star-travelers, Denise first of all.

 
          
The
hermaphrodite savored her name.
“So.
A woman called
Dionysus? May you have your wish to alter! Laroche . . . Ah, the stone. Yes,
that’s certainly how you may alter. Seek the stone, the rock!”

 
          
“We’re
heading for that rock tower over there,” she nodded. “That’s where
Knossos
must be heading too. The Greek man—the one
who’s in the know.”
(Said by her, mainly to confirm that they
were hunting the right man.
Jeremy looked mildly wounded.) Beyond the
next hill crest, visible to them but not to people of the cavalcade, rose the
spire of a pink tower with a bulbous tip resembling one of the onion domes of
the Kremlin, but elongated into the sky and accompanied by a curving, serrated
rose-red antenna like a long agave leaf . . .

 
          
“Ah,
that is not
the
stone. Yet it is on
the way there.”

 
          
“What’s
he talking about?” Denise whispered.

 
          
“Hush,”
muttered Sean. “I’ve just realized.”

 
          
“Well,
what
?”

 
          
“You’re
not going to believe me.”

 
          
“Try
me.”

 
          
But
Jeremy was already introducing Sean by name.

 
          
“Athlone,”
mused he-she. That person’s eyes brightened.
“Hie opus
,
hie labor est
, ”
he-she sang out. “ ‘This is the work, this is the
labor!’
Knossos
will be delighted when you catch up with
him. He’ll appreciate a Greek word like that when he hears it, even if you do
mispronounce it, and even if he wasn’t ever really Greek.”

 
          
“Wasn’t
he?” said Denise.

 
          
“Maybe, maybe not.”

 
          
“How
do you mean, mispronounce?” asked Sean.

 
          
“Your
name
, man.”
Coming from this hermaphrodite, the word ‘man’ seemed more than an
impatient familiarity.
It was almost an accusation—of being partial, a
half-person.
“Athlon:
that’s the way
to say it. Don’t you know what it means? Don’t you know what its meaning must
make you?
The Great Work.
The Opus.”

 
          
“It’s
a place in
Ireland
,” said Sean uncomfortably.

 
          
“It’s
the Greek word for The Work!”

 
          
“What
work?” interrupted Denise.

 
          
Sean
ignored her. “That’s pure coincidence.”

 
          
“What
is a coincidence? It’s a coming together. I am a coincidence—of opposites, who
nevertheless belong together.
Coniunctio
Oppositorum!
And who is this nigredo lady?”

 
          
“This
is Muthoni,” Jeremy said.

 
          
“Yes,
now I can tell you what a nigredo is,” whispered Sean to her. “God almighty,
this man
Knossos
is responsible for something! If it’s all
his doing

 
          
“Best
be on your way,” advised the hermaphrodite, “or you’ll never catch him till
nightfall.”

 
          
“You
see, there’s no night here,” explained Jeremy superfluously. “Night reigns
over Hell.”

 
          
“Make
a change from all this sunshine,” said Denise airily.

 
          
“He
means that if you don’t catch him here you’ll have to die and go to Hell first.
ⁿ

 
          
“It’s
so hot in parts of Hell that people’s hair can all fall out,” laughed the
hermaphrodite, eyeing Sean’s bald pate.

 
          
“I
should worry,” said Sean.

 
          
“It
might grow back as feathers. You’ve the makings of a splendid owl: full of
earthly intelligence, which is fine for ordinary science . .
.No
,
no,” ‘herself interrupted ‘himself. “He’d be an egret or a stork. His urges are
for higher,
whiter
things. He’s
Athlon: he’s the Work. Yes, I can just see him as a stork. Not one of your
ordinary egrets down there in the pool.”

 
          
“I’ll
be damned if I’m going to turn into a bird for your amusement,” snapped Sean.

 
          
“Yes,
you’d be damned.” The hermaphrodite giggled.
“Quite true.”

 
          
Jeremy
chewed his lip. “Is it really true,
Double-
one, that
people are transformed into birds, if they have to devolve before they can
re-evolve?”

 
          
The
hermaphrodite folded his/her arms across those pert breasts and winked.
“Maybe, maybe not.
Everyone’s course is special to them.”

 
          
“But
have you ever been a bird or a beast? It’s said that people become birds and
beasts but I’ve never actually met anyone who—” He broke off. “Of course, I
seem to be immune,” he said sadly.

 
          
“Hey,”
cut in Muthoni, “is this some sort of racist utopia? ‘
Higher,
whiter
things’?
Why should the
color white be so special?”

 
          
“You
misunderstand me, fair nigredo.” Unfolding his arms, the hermaphrodite bowed to
her, breasts bobbing. “The nigredo is an honorable estate. You see the ravens
perched upon the shoulders of the ladies down there?”

           
“Yeah.
Blackbirds.”

           
“Ravens.
Those are birds of wisdom:
a wisdom
beyond the
ordinary senses. Yet that wisdom has become darkened and has to be reconquered,
do you see? This darkened wisdom has the color nigredo. It is the first stage
of one route to wisdom. Do you see how some of the women down there are nigredo
too? They are a little further along that path than their white sisters.
Consequently ravens ride them. When the egret darkens, it is rehatched as a
raven. Don’t tell me that you’re only mocfc-nigredo? You may need to become
white before you can become black again!”

 
          
“You’re
mad,” said Muthoni. “Go copulate with yourself.” The hermaphrodite grinned.
“Oh, I do intend to. Believe me. One day I shall fertilize myself and give
birth to myself. Then the work will be done for me, and I shall be perfect.”
He-she made a circle of thumb and forefinger and blew through this little hoop
mischievously; then the hermaphrodite scampered away into the shrubbery.

 
          
“Wow.”
Muthoni flapped her hand before her face as though to divert the air he-she had
blown at her, in case it was a conjuration. “Is that guy
demented!
”

 
          
“‘Demented’
merely means ‘out-of-one’s-mind’,” said Jeremy. “Actually, he
is
out of it. He’s into another state of
mind. And another state of body: a paradox one. I agree that the course he’s
set himself seems an extreme one. I wish I knew if people do really turn into
birds, or if the birds and beasts are all just ‘principles’, essences
incarnated from our ova banks . . . But no, they’re evolving—so they must have
bird and beast personalities of their own!”

 
          
“You’re
mad too. The superbeing has demented everybody.”

 
          
The
cavalcade was reaching its climax now. The beasts galloped round, egged on by
their riders’ heels and by rump-slapping. A goat cannoned into a griffin, into
a horse, into a unicorn. Of a sudden all the animals skidded to a halt in
a lather
. The riders leaped from their backs and sprinted toward
the pool of ladies. Egrets and ravens flapped their way into the air to avoid
the splashing, churning bodies. The pool foamed . . .

 
          
“No,
this isn’t madness,” said Sean. “It’s something a lot stranger.
And
coherent.
If you’ve got the key.”

 
          
“As you have,
Athlon
smiled
Jeremy.

 
          
Sean
shook his head numbly. “I’ve got to think about this. I’ve got to get it right.
Come on, we must bypass this valley or we’ll end up . . . submerged in
enchanted waters.
Mesmerized.”

 
          
Most
people are generally mesmerized all their lives long by instinctual programs,
he reflected. His own past life, before he had been ‘submerged’ in the
hyb-tank, seemed like an automatic, mesmerized routine now: his childhood in
Ireland, his psychological studies at Dublin and Chicago, his career with
EarthSpace . . . Here the mesmerism had simply become overt—obvious and
directed, by a superior guide. To what end?
That everyone,
.having gone deeper into mesmerism, should gradually become unmesmerized . . .
But first one must submerge oneself.
He resisted submergence, at least
in this particular pool, at this particular time.

 
          
“Come
on.”

 
          
‘Athlon’:
he had, of course, known somewhere at the back of his mind of this secret sense
of his name in another language. There must have been some time when he had
found this out, and when it had amused him. Then he had disregarded it. Or had
he really? His own psychological studies—seen one way—could be interpreted as a
form of “The Work’: of psychic integration . . . Had he programmed himself to
undertake them
because
... No! On the
other hand, he must have been aware of this link, subliminally at least . . .

 
          
Denise,
he truly believed, was innocent of any hidden meaning to her name. ‘Rock’, for
her, was simply part of nature: an ecological base. Yet a vein of Earthmagic
ran through her . . .

 
          
“‘Come
on,’ indeed! Wake up, Sean! We’re waiting for

 
          
“It’s Alchemy,” Sean
explained. “That’s
what’s going
on ;
here—living alchemy. This whole
planet’s being run on alchemical lines—and somehow there’s the power available
to make this alchemy work! Isn’t that right, Jeremy?”

           
They sat eating cherries—food for
thought—at the foot of an open meadow that ran up to the great pink and
rose-red cromlech which was their destination.

 
          
A
cromlech it was indeed, but an enormous one, well over a hundred meters high.
Its
flat table-top of stone rested upon four giant granite
legs that were honeycombed with little caves. Crystal tubes jutted from the
mouths of some of these caves, while more crystal tubes stuck up out of the
table-top like organ pipes—and above rose the stretched onion-dome spire,
towering perhaps two hundred meters higher up into the sky. The base of that
spire was blue-veined marble, but the upper reaches became a flush of pink
granite. Out of the table-top there also grew that curving agave leaf—a leaf of
stone?—a hundred meters or more from its axil to its tip. On its ascent the
leaf transfixed an enormous burr, or nut husk. A feathery willow tree presided
over the table-top too, rooted in a tent-shaped lean-to of pink stone. Thus
stone became vegetation, and vegetation became stone, while marble became
granite: transmutations were at work . . .

 
          
The
whole structure reared up like a great petrified pink elephant, bearing a
fossilized howdah on its back with a full-sized tree for a frond-fan.

 
          
A
tiny figure was climbing up the agave leaf, using the saw teeth along the edges
as his stepladder. He was naked, not clothed, so unless the mysterious Knossos
had stripped for action it couldn’t be he . . .

 
          
“Well,
you can’t just come out and tell a bunch of technoscientists from Earth
that
—I mean, can you? Not right away,”
said Jeremy defensively. “But you’ve figured it out . . . Athlon old buddy. I
didn’t expect you to, quite so soon. It’s alchemy, all right.”

 
          
Sean
plucked another bunch of cherries from a bough which was simultaneously in
blossom and in fruit. He sucked the flesh and spat the stones far out,
wondering whether new trees would spring up there in time, invading the lambent
green of the meadow.
Or not?
Orchard and meadow were
quite distinct. One ended; the other began—just here.

 
          
“Alchemy?”
cried Muthoni. “You mean that business about transmuting lead into gold? Stuff
like that?”

 
          
“Or
transmuting
people?”
asked Denise,
eyes shining. Her hair was already spun into gold . . . “And plants and beasts
too?”

 
          
“Exactly!”
Sean nodded. “That’s what alchemy was really
about deep down. It was about the search for the perfect human being—the
evolution of a higher being from any species, I suppose. Manufacturing gold was
just a smokescreen—only, all the retorts and alembics and distillation methods
of the alchemists happened to give rise to ‘genuine’ chemistry so the real
hidden meaning of what the alchemists called ‘The Work’—the Opus, the . . .”
(he squirmed) “the
Athlon
—got
channelled off into a bankrupt mysticism. This planet is an
alchemical
one. The superbeing has
reinstated alchemy as a going concern.”

 
          
“So
where are the laboratories?” asked Muthoni.

 
          
“I
wouldn’t be surprised if that cromlech-tower up there is one piece of
apparatus—and all the other rock-buildings too. But don’t you see
,
this whole world is the laboratory?
Someone’s
laboratory.
And the substances being transformed aren’t lead or tin or
mercury—but living beings! That cavalcade was riding round the bath of
rebirth. These are ancient symbols. Carl Jung wrote several superb works about
the archetypes involved. Some power—‘the God’—has actualized them . . . and
Knossos must have been obsessed by them! Here they’re all out in the open.
They’re in the landscape itself. That’s why they called you ‘nigredo’, Muthoni.
‘Nigredo’ is the first stage of ‘The Work’—a darkening process. I happen,” he
swallowed, “to know a bit about this because of the connection with Jung.”

 
          
Muthoni
threw up her hands. “You said that this world was landscaped after that Dutch
painter Bosch! You said this was his Garden of Delights.”

 
          
“And
it is! There’s a lot of very strange symbolism in old Hieronymus’s pictures.
Nobody really knows where he got it all from. Out of
his own
head, or from folklore—or from some secret mystical sect, or from astrology ...
or
from the alchemists!
He could have
done so. Alchemy can be mapped on to his inventions—and then they mightn’t be
inventions at all, but a hidden code for a secret science or prescience. The
superbeing seems to have made the connection, and this world’s built around it!
Bosch and alchemy.”
He whistled.
“In
the twenty-fourth century.
What a crazy revival.”

 
          
“But
it
isn't
the twenty-fourth century
here,” Jeremy flapped his hands dismissively, looking a little like the
flustered hen.

 
          
“You
can’t grasp this world if you think of it as being the twenty-fourth or
whatever. You’ve got to get away from that, hmm, starship Earth-time of yours,
out into the Gardens to realize. The day goes on forever, the sun never sets,
it’s
always the beginning. Twenty-fourth
century
?
Phooey. The time is
now.
Or else it’s
the year several million or several billion of our evolution, depending on what
stage you count from—but that’s uncountable time. The one time it isn’t is
Space Year whatever!”

 
          
“But
why?"
fretted Sean, conceding
the point.
“Why a Boschian alchemy world?
Out of all possible ways of responding to a shipload of
colonists.”

 
          
“God
knows.” Jeremy didn’t say this dismissively, though. He winked: he
meant
it.

 
          
“And
Knossos, our mystery man, knows what’s going on. He has a hot line to the God.”

 
          
“Maybe
you’ll have one as well,
Athlon
, ”
chuckled Jeremy. “Or you,
La Roche.”

 
          
“I
think ... I think,”
said
Sean, “that your superbeing
may well have fished all this obsession out of the mind of Knossos—and made a
kind of compact with him. If this ‘God’ scanned the minds of all your crew and
your hibernating colonists and settled on one single vision of reality as way
out as this—”

 
          
“As
fundamental,
Sean,” Jeremy corrected
him. “You’ve admitted that. It’s something deep and ancient.”

 
          
“Okay,
it’s true. Well, Knossos must have been a very strange and powerful man. An
alchemist—a secret savant— leaving twenty-first century Earth on board a
starship with his faith intact? Getting a place on board the
Copernicus
in the first place! With all
the screening there must have been!”

 
          
“Even
a God has to have interests,” suggested Denise pertly. “Maybe it suited Him
this way. Knossos was the only person on board who actually had a faith. So the
God made it come true. Perhaps God had no choice? Perhaps, in a sense, Knossos
captured
Him?
What sort of world
might it have been otherwise?” Denise shivered.
“Barren rock.
A dead place. God brought it to life for the
Copernicus.
And He could only bring it to life if He could discover
some sort of context for transmuting dead matter into a living existence? Well,
he found that context in Knossos.”

 
          
Sean
spat out another cherry stone. Somehow he doubted it would take root, out there
on the open velvet sward. “He did a neat job, anyway. Let’s go and see whether
that tower really is a piece of alchemical apparatus for distilling . . .
people.”

 
          
“You’ll
only find that out,” said Jeremy, “if you’re prepared to be distilled
yourself!”

 
          
As
they marched up the flank of the meadow, the name Knossos echoed in Sean’s head
like the clip-clopping of a horse upon a metalled surface. The hermaphrodite
had denied that Knossos was a Greek . . . Sean experimented with the name,
pronouncing it this way and that. Suddenly he let out a whoop.

 
          
“Knossos
isn’t his real name at all!”

 
          
“Well,
I know
that ”
said Jeremy impatiently.

 
          
“No,
I mean it’s a mispronunciation—a typical alchemical smokescreen. His real
name—or rather his
title
, not the
name he was bom with—isn’t Knossos. It’s
Gnosis.
That’s Greek for ‘knowledge’—‘occult, hidden knowledge.’ Just twist the sound a
little and you get the Cretan lie. He’s the hidden king of this world, all
right—given his divine right by the superbeing; and the name of the game ...
is
knowledge.”

 
          
Jeremy
eyed the great cromlech rising up ahead like a fossil pachyderm, a stone tree
that burst into actual foliage at its crown. He sighed wistfully. “You see? You
do know, Athlon —more than me.”

 
          
“It’s
a place in Ireland,” repeated Sean lamely.

 
          
“That’s
always been your purpose, hasn’t it?
Knowledge.
Now
you’ve found the right place to fulfil that purpose.
As did
Knossos.
Thanks
be
to God.”

 
          
“He’s
only a superbeing,” said Muthoni.

 
          
“Only?
Only?” Jeremy giggled.

 
          
“I
mean, he isn’t God
—
The
God.”

 
          
“What
Muthoni means,” said
Sean,
“is that ‘God’ is something
abstract and universal. God is an idea, a principle —which we humans seem to
have an instinctive feeling for deep in our psyches. When you decouple all the
other mental sub-systems—by trance or meditation, say—there isn’t just
nothing
left, there’s an oceanic sense of deity. Your
superbeing can’t be
that
God—though
that’s what He’s playing at being, because of this instinct of ours.”

 
          
“What’s
the difference? He has all the attributes of God. What do you know about God,
anyway?” Jeremy wagged a finger at Muthoni. “Watch out, lady, you’ll lose your
nigredo. You’ll be reduced to buck private. Or maybe even rabbit!” He wriggled
his nose clownishly.

 
          
“One
of God’s attributes being the habit of punishing folk in Hell? I don’t think I
like this God. He’s capricious. This world is a caprice.”

 
          
“Maybe
the whole universe is a caprice? Have you thought of that? I wonder if our God
wholly
knows
what He is?” said Jeremy
lightly. “Maybe He’s a bit of a caprice too.”

 
          
“But
you can’t have an ignorant God!”

 
          
“Ah,
so now you want Him to be omniscient? You can’t have it both ways, lady. Either
He’s God or He isn’t—though in so far as God is a paradox, maybe that isn’t
true either ...”

 
          
“Being, superbeing!
If this
alien
is part of natural reality, we can understand what part He
is.”

 
          
“But
what if you can’t understand? Unless . . .”

 
          
“Unless
what?”

 
          
“Unless
you transform yourselves alchemically . . . You could, of course,” added
Jeremy, “just enjoy yourselves, on the other hand. Have fun. Have a ball. It
is
fun here, you know.
In the Gardens.
You might find you were transforming
yourselves faster by having fun!”