Zardoz (10 page)

“I saw the trick,” Zed said.

“So that was it,” May murmured.

“Wi
zard
of
Oz
,

ZARD—OZ
,

Zardoz
.”

And in his past, he once again covered the letters with his fingers to create the holy name from the title of a children’s book.

Flashing forward, Zed relived the moment after they had left him in the head. He looked up through the grain and there was Arthur Frayn, speaking into his communicator ring. The voice distorted into that of Zardoz as Frayn watched, amused, through the crystalline eyes, the cowering audience outside.

“Zardoz is pleased. He will watch over you. Work hard and grow good crops and when you die you will go to the Vortex and live…forever.”

“So that was the way of it. It was so long ago. Arthur’s idea. He called it that, a simple way of controlling the Outlands. The Wizard of Oz was an old story about a man whose amplified voice and awesome mask frightened people,” May said, understanding it now.

“Until they looked behind the mask and saw the truth.”

As in the book, so in the Outlands. Fearful gullible people had been cowed by shabby but extraordinary tricks. In awe they had worked for a charlatan, a jackanapes in god’s clothing. He had bullied them and in exchange had given them cheap advice dressed up as religion, the while stealing from them, forcing them to live in uncertainty, using them to maintain his high position over all. Zed’s life had been this man’s whim. Under this yoke of superstition they could not progress to wisdom, to a freedom and a better understanding of the world, but they would always live in the darkness of fear, ignorance, and exploitation. Furthermore, they had to worship and obey. If he abandoned them—without his guns, outnumbered by the Brutals as they were—they would all be wiped away, in days. Worst of all, Zardoz had turned them against their own race. They were genocidal soldiers—killing their own stock, spilling their own people’s blood in the name of a foreign and grotesque alien cause.

Now they were used as a slave granary for Zardoz’ kingdom. While Zed’s people starved and died, Zardoz grew fat and laughed at them.

May had led Zed back into the real-time of the room.

The past no longer flashed back and forth before his eyes. He need no longer fight to hold his sanity as his mind was whipped back and forth at May’s command.

“It was a cheap trick played on people’s lives, to get your dirty work done for you.”

“The rich have always done the same to the poor.”

“A lie.”

“Is the truth more palatable? I don’t think so. History shows that superstitious religion is usually preferred, to truth.”

“Well, the truth is what I want.”

“Truth or revenge?”

“The truth!”

“Truth or revenge!”

“Revenge! Revenge!”

He fell into her embrace as the last hidden words of his plot were wrenched out. He was a child again.

She kissed his brow and stroked his head.

“I remember feelings such as these… They stir in me.”

He kissed her breasts: they shivered with anticipation as long forgotten sensations coursed back into her body, entering from him. There was a union between them.

May’s eyes cast across the ceiling in ecstasy, then flicked down toward the door, troubled by a noise.

Consuella stood there, triumphant, blazing.

“So this is your scientific investigation! There’s another word for it—bestiality!”

Zed rolled and turned, gaining his feet and moving toward the voice.

As he was set to pounce she swung her gaze from May and shot him through with the deadly look.

He was jolted back across the floor through the hanging rainbow cloths, splashing showers of colored light in his wake.

“For this you will be aged fifty years,” Consuella shouted. “No man or woman or beast will ever desire you again!”

Zed forced himself to rise. Weakened by May’s ruthless interrogation, stung by Consuella’s shaft of light, he dragged himself to his feet.

She flashed again and he fell, but rose back through the waves of killing hatred that were stabbing at his brain from Consuella’s deadly eyes. If he could not survive this ordeal, he would die—of this he was certain.

She hurled her most venomous thunderbolt of rage, concentrating all her force. He leaned into it and walked at her, into the blinding pain that seared through his bones and body.

May was astonished. Zed was surviving the worst that could be thrown at him. His powers were supreme. Consuella had cast enough force to stop fifty men. She was defeated. She wailed in frustration and, now, fear—an emotion these cosseted creatures could scarce recall.

Now he pounced upon her. Lunging through the hanging cloth that still cut the room into multicolored areas of light, he hurled himself at Consuella. The pain had desensitized him. He was a brutal animal again. He threw Consuella down and tore at her. May tried to pull him back. In their fall, looms toppled over and Zed was entangled in the skeins as the two women rolled away from his chaotic rage. He groped for them. May cried out:

“He is blind.”

“We can no longer control him,” Consuella gasped. “Now we must become hunters and killers ourselves.”

They backed away through the door and ran.

He stumbled in the ribboned winding sheet that entangled him. He could not see. Consuella’s force had burned out his eyes. He heard someone approach. A soft hand took his and led him away.

It was Avalow. “Come,” she said and guided him out of the room.

He was in the domed greenhouse that fronted Frayn’s cottage, standing amid the trees and plants with Avalow. She had led him, almost blind, stumbling through secret pathways to this room that was neither indoors nor out.

Cool leaves and herbs were placed on his eyes to soothe away the pain.

“This will restore your sight and you will see better and deeper than you ever saw before.”

Her beauty was too much for him. She was perfect, inviolate, unattainable, yet so close.

He raised a trembling hand to her, remembering the hard rules he had lived by in the Outlands. A new emotion rose in his chest. He was moved by tenderness. He felt compassion.

‘I've seen men rape an old cripple woman in a wet ditch.”

He recognized this new feeling as a weakness. She looked into his newly-seeing eyes. She saw his future there. She paled and trembled.

“I see now why you are here. You are the one. The Liberator.”

These were mysterious words, as yet beyond him. She appeared to come to a decision.

“I will help you if when the time comes you will set
me
free. You have great strength, but there are times when strength will fail you.”

She broke a leaf from a musky plant and gave it to him.

“Eat this when the need arises.”

Zed placed it in a pocket. He felt renewed now from her ministration, but the new emotion had given rise to another—a bitter self-pity.

“This place is built on lies and suffering. How could you do what you did to us?”

Her eyes closed. She looked sadly into the past.

“The world was dying. We took what was good and made an oasis.”

She took his hand and it was as if they had moved back to the founding of the Vortex. They were as ghosts, insubstantial, and unable to change events, able only to watch and learn from them.

They were at the Vortex edge, the Periphery of the enclave. Eternals strode in groups, laughed, gardened, sunned themselves while outside on the other side, behind the invisible wall, hundreds of ragged people, Zed’s forefathers, beat and scratched in vain.

They begged and pleaded and fell sobbing to the ground.

Men, women, and children—of all ages, all common in their misery. As poor as those inside were rich.

Insulated from the sounds of dying, the inhabitants of the Vortex averted their eyes from the praying, weeping remnants of the old and dying world.

Like dogs they threw themselves against the wall, unable to accept that they would be abandoned by so beautiful, rich, and educated a group as that which lived within the glacial enclosure.

Avalow spoke softly to him.

“We few, the rich, the powerful, the clever, cut ourselves off to guard the knowledge and treasures of civilization as the world plunged into a dark age. To do this we had to harden our hearts against the suffering outside. We are the custodians of the past for the unknown future.”

The Brutals pounded hopelessly on the mighty wall. Its fragile transparency was contradicted by its strength.

No sound nor wind could penetrate its surface—yet air, light, and warmth flowed freely through it. There was one entrance high up to admit the Zardoz stone. There had been a time when this wall did not exist, so there would be another time when it ceased to be; for nothing that man built would stand forever.

The blossoms, and the flowerlike Eternals walking among the peacocks and the statuary over neatly barbered lawns, contrasted with the browns, grays, and darker tones outside the Shield. For the Brutals it was like a painting of Paradise; but no pigment, light, and shade created by a master could have portrayed a heaven so convincingly as this they saw. But other men, scientists, not artists, had built this heartless place that mocked their misery.

The Brutals beating on the wall subtly changed in form. It seemed to Zed as though they were now Eternals struggling to find a way in.

Zed and Avalow dissolved from the past dream-time back into their present. Their spirits reentered their bodies. Their astral frames flitted back to their own hosts and were one again. They were still within the transparent soft greenhouse, unprotected by reflexes or consciousness, and as Zed settled back into his body, his mind’s eye still retained the Brutals’ image as they threw themselves against the Periphery Shield. This jumped into a present picture, his reality. It was Consuella and a dozen men, beating on the insubstantial covering that made this tropical place. They had seen him and would crush the dome upon him with their fists and weapons, then beat him till he died.

Consuella The Warlord

The plastic sagged under the pressure. Avalow stepped back, her offered hand of help too late to save him as the structure shivered and caved in upon him.

The crowd surged forward like a wave against the semi-circular base, and drove and washed the form again. They slashed it with their swords and knives but the thin membrane would not yield.

The material bowed in. A club, carried through the looseness, struck his body. He fell. The whole annex shuddered, groaned, then folded flat, tent-like, over him. He would suffocate.

Drawing himself onto his hands and knees he tried to fight his way through, but the membrane, though clear as water, was as tough as steel.

Blows rained down upon him. His attackers were pressing the life out of him, squeezing the air from the canopy, and out of his lungs.

He closed his right fist, placed it before his face, turned slowly onto his back, and concentrating his mind into his muscles as he had when Consuella sought to quell him, began to push against the membrane.

The plastic bowed before his hand. The attackers paused to watch his dying attempt against the impenetrable fabric.

Then they gasped out as his hand came through, slowly but surely, into the lightness that was life. They stepped back in reflexive fear, and as they moved back, so he pushed forward. He ripped and tore his way out in a fury of ultrahuman energy. And like a snake that sheds its skin, he wriggled out from the embryo sac, leaving it wrinkled and empty in the litter of broken plants and containers that was once Frayn’s experimental garden. As he stood erect, they lashed at him once more.

Darting through them, he ran to a cart, close by the bakery. Snatching a sack full of freshly-ground flour, he flung it in the path of his pursuers.

A sheet of blinding snow-white dust sprang across the air between them, a screen behind which he vanished.

The Eternals lost their quarry within the blinding fog.

When it was settled, he was gone.

No trace of him, no track, no slightly swinging gate betrayed his passing.

He was at large within the Vortex. Deadly and enraged, a proven killer of too great a strength for them to hold, he now ran loose.

Zed ran sleek and low to the point on the Periphery where he had last seen his comrades.

Many more were assembled there now; they gathered, waiting, at the invisible wall for their commander—Zed. He signaled rapidly that he had just six more days left to live, now less, and that his task was far from finished. Then he waved them back to hiding, for he heard the horses of Consuella pounding after him.

They melted back into the underbrush as Consuella, heading a column of pursuers, flashed along the narrow boundary of the wall.

She must have formed groups to race along arcs of the circle that was the boundary. In this way she could cover the entire Periphery in minutes. Did she know he had supporters waiting in the Outlands close by the wall; or did she think he would try to get through himself in a last bid for escape?

He hoped it was the latter, for this would mean she still thought less of him, and hoping this, he bucked straight into the air and fell almost vertically down a long slope that no horse could follow. He might have jumped just before she came. His signaling, the withdrawal of his troops, and his escape might have been accomplished in secrecy. If she had been galloping hard and straight, the trees could have given him that cover, those extra seconds. He hit the ground at a run and took off, not wasting time to look back and see if she had seen him. She had patrolled the boundaries, now she would draw in the net, close in on him, and try to catch him once for all.

He loped through the woods to the familiar walled enclosure of the Apathetics, the windows of the houses peering blackly through the stones. He paced along the wall, through the slender trees to the gateway, and skittered into the courtyard. He was just ahead of Consuella. They surely had seen him enter it. He hesitated and dodged into an opening.

It was the place where he had spilled the bread and thrown himself into a frenzied dance of life before the dead audience of the Apathetics.