Zardoz (12 page)

The force field might extend underground into a sphere. Zed might be locked into another round world. So—he was trapped inside an invisible globe.

This globe extended high above his head and far below his feet. At the center was the author of this force and next to it was Zed. The only way to penetrate the wall was to strike at the center. First, Zed must equip himself like any other warrior with the special weapons needed for the fight and all the information with which to find and kill his prey. Then he must hunt, kill, and dispatch him. The walls would fall, and the breach complete, his confederates would pour into the city and kill the population, level the buildings, and withdraw, their mission over.

He was the spy within the citadel, but he had been exposed, caught, and sentenced, and lived now on stolen time.

There was not time to prepare or search. Brilliant though he was he could not absorb all the necessary skills. It would take years of study and mental exercise. No one man could scale those heights. Time had defeated him. Another invisible and relentless force had caught him. Time—that was the key. Allies he already had.

Friend was an implacable colleague, as filled with hatred of the systems as Zed, his purpose the same as Zed’s: an end to this place. May’s bargain would be honored. Zed would inseminate her and her followers and direct them away from the attacking horde that would sweep in from the west when he had blown the walls. They could ride out into the wasteland to begin a new existence and a new world, nurturing the life within them. With their combined strengths they might repopulate the land, and if by some mischance they were all killed, then so be it. It would be Nature’s choice.

May wanted life from him. She would not fail him either; though time might.

This musing passed through Zed’s mind in an instant, then his thoughts were shattered by a dull booming from above. Consuella’s gang were at the door.

Zed spoke to May. “How much time do we have?” he knew that there was none.

“We will not work in time. We will touch-teach you. You will take our knowledge by osmosis, out of time. Your mental powers are greater than any of ours. With our knowledge, you may accomplish what we have failed to do.”

It was the dangerous but inevitable way for her to take him. They would guide him and bathe him in their knowledge, so that their minds would mix through the touching of their skins. And as he mated so would they pass back to him their own seeds of information that would grow in him, as the life he transmitted would grow in them.

A mystical, sexual binding would wrap them all into one astral level, apart from the world, outside of the lengths of natural time. It would be fierce for one so untutored in the arts of mediation and bodily perfection, but there was no other way for them. So, taking his hand, she led him to her woman who had been waiting quietly unseen, hidden in the museum.

They laid him down, and like petals enfolded him. Science, religion, philosophy, and art, four monumental zones through which to ride in a moment stolen from time’s breath. It could not be enough, for they could not represent all areas of fact and fiction, art and life. Though they could not give him armor in full, yet they could arm him well enough—if he could stand the madness that might come from leaving time again. Each Eternal had practiced and evolved slowly into higher dream-places where time flowed in and out like the tide. It took a hundred years of study and devotion. To plunge him deep into the most dangerous reaches of other-time yet again and expect him to take the jolts of input knowledge might be fatal.

That was their risk, the chance they would take. The stake was high; so were the odds. They had just one dice throw with which to win. He had been used, his memories displayed before their gaze. His secrets had been driven and drawn from him. He had been taken back in time to see the beginning of this place. Now at least he would be given pictures from the lives of others. He would be replenished with strong thoughts, detailed and well-constructed in their design. An architecture that had grown tough through the tests of time and other men’s inquiry.

The Apathetics had nearly drawn his spirit, his life-force, clean from him; the times to come would help replenish him.

The Eternals had battered on his body and chased it raw. The women would rub soothing balm into his muscles while he slept the waking-dream.

He looked around at the velvet curtained area, his silken couch, then felt their touch and was transported into a continuum of space and time that stretched out like a flat zig-zag road across a black nothingness, a road on which he moved, random, unrelated, lost.

Characters from other languages grew up before him. Words were chanted in many tongues. The patterns of many languages forming dazzling shapes across his face, the music and poetry of words from the ends of time surrounding him.

The women rolled across and around him. He felt adrift in space—beyond any gravity or help he knew. Other views poured across him other times. His central mind absorbed the endless information. His frontal, outside thinking could not comprehend the traces as they flashed through, for all was too fast and rich for his conscious comprehension.

It was a rich fabric interwoven with too many strands at which to clutch. The tapestry’s pattern and color were too vast for him to view. He was too close to the weave.

The women were massaging him, mounting him, and he, them. He felt their bodies and their minds as one, as they felt him. Where the Apathetics had touched there was the pain of loss, where these women touched was the joy of gain. Images dazzled his eyes. Amoebas, soft, and pliable, grew and danced in dimensions undreamed-of, enveloping him within their gelatinous mass. Geometric palaces grew in scale and intricacy around him, filled with numbers and circuits that flashed on and off with changing lights.

The women’s bodies grew larger; then their flesh dissolved to show their bones and workings; then they changed to diagrams of life, which fluttered back to ancient delineations of man’s body, the lineage of life; then ran forward to the present, and once again he was engulfed by the pleasing presence of the female force, whole, firm, and warm. He looked with a new eye. The blinding light did not hurt, it filled him. He glowed, all his veins fluoresced, each one alive with new growth.

He was taken high above the earth, then swooped back into its deeps. Into the center of molecules, then back out into deep space to look down at his own infinite smallness. And all in ecstasy. Warriors refought wars through him. Campaigns that lasted a century ran through him in an instant. Music rang through him as a parade of notation, and reverberation echoed and multiplied in his system: all his body was one live harp.

Colors, for their own sake, grew from one white light, split into primary lines, wove themselves into dazzling pictures which grew up and around him, towering above him. Then they shrank, and he was amazed by their smallness and intricacy and his own gigantic size.

He walked the earth again, from the beginning of time. He was all men, all women, from the past, come forward to one moment. He fell across huge gaps, black chasms that could lose him, as a white spark of light. A lightning bolt of life. He could be the source, the darkness, the electric bolt, and the flaming target, all at once—and was.

The pulses flowed through him, from his head on down. He bucked in pleasure as they rippled through him from the hands of the women by him. He saw that they were all parts of one being. He thrust into them, each in turn. He penetrated their bodies. Their orgasms burst like sun-flares before his eyes, each revealing a new light, other carnal knowledge.

Replete and shimmering, the group that was him and May and her women seemed to part for an instant. The sexual, sensual communion ebbed and waned. Its peak past, they coasted over a review of their loving labors. They moved together as in flight over a mountain range built of intricate, jumbled white-and-colored scaffolding picked out with jeweled points all set on a black sea. There was no scale to judge it on; they flew over the highest peak, and the darkness faded up into daylight slowly through gray and grainy lightness.

His body still hummed with the resonance of that first time away from now.

The women rested too. They had been before him as more than a group; they were all parts of one larger creature—the Vortex. Each one, like parts of a robot body, had been chosen at the outset as a special partner with a unique function, to work in harmony with another. Each one had a special part. As apathy had set in, so specialists had fallen away from the main body, leaving gaps in the process. This meant the reserve skills of each had been pushed forward. They had been stretched. When the Renegades had begun to threaten the static system, their expulsion had meant the best, most oblique minds had been lifted from the Vortex; thus even more strain was put on the remainder. It left only the orthodox, and they more overstretched than before. A core left to cope with mounting extremism. This single being (built though it had been with resources more than needed and endowed with an ample reserve) was overstrained.

It was trying to split up and re-bud. May and her group would be the cells in this living organism to take it out into another place. The Tabernacle was the artificial nervous system that ran the news from one section, group, or individual back and forth across the geography that was Vortex, the organism that was the commune. Therefore, it was not a central brain, for that would have made it king here. It was a network of knowledge lines intersecting and crisscrossing as the occasion demanded. A different foe from the one Zed had imagined, not a giant, but a legion.

His rage rose up uncontrollably and it seemed he was in the Tabernacle room, the place that was the womb of this being, the place of regeneration for the Vortex body. Did the Tabernacle lurk behind these walls? Zed fired his gun blindly at them. But no bullets splayed against the surface. His shells were empty. The hideous rebuilding figures in their soup of life grinned back.

Then May, pressing on the other side of him cried: “The Tabernacle is indestructible and everlasting.”

They shook him out of his dream. He was back on the couch. They caressed him, still hungry for his body, awaked from their centuries of glacial frigidity.

Friend entered the curtained room, the tent-like zone where they had renewed the mind of Zed in exchange for new life.

The flash of nightmare had passed through Zed and he was relaxed and back into real-time before he plunged once more through space. He landed on the long flat strip of road that ran from time’s end to time’s beginning over the blackness. Loop on loop flowed in its own pattern, freed from the gravity, the pull, of one-way time.

Friend passed his hand across Zed’s eyes and they were both swimming down to the lost road again.

It was near the beginning of Vortex history. The Eternals, in their separate cocoons of silk, sat in the contemplation room where Zed had been displayed. The contemplation aids were augmented by the hollow tubes of silk within which they sat. They could be visible to the rest but detached from them, until such time as their minds returned.

Friend and Zed, as ghosts, strode among them. Some Eternals talked to each other in a litany of learning. Endless games of skill and strength from history and the mines of chance were played back and forth with lightning speed. Debates and information flowed back and forth evenly and lightly. Zed and Friend moved forward in time to the same room, years ahead. Now, more Eternals had taken to contemplation. Finding that the exchange of facts and further study had not opened any new doors, they had turned in on their minds in search of spiritual perfection. Astral travel was the only means for distant exploration. Avalow was growing in this manner. To other Eternals much of the traveling was simply magic-carpet riding, empty and vacant and passive, as the pictures rolled beneath them. Later these became some of the Apathetics. Others, seeing new routes and changes that were not allowed, became disturbed and, finally, Renegade. They could see too much; others, not enough.

The contemplation room was low-lit and voices rose around them. As the ghosts of Friend and Zed faded from this past, they surfaced like tiny silver bubbles racing to the surface of a pond, and burst into the present.

Friend spoke. “We have come so close to penetrating the mysteries, only to find our minds are wanting. We wanted to solve all the problems that had betrayed men, but we just weren’t up to it.”

Zed nodded. “I see one creature. A blind monster condemned to Eternal Life. Rebuilding itself from fading plans.”

Just as a human body’s cells grew old, and as they died, were copied, letting flaws and smudges be reproduced—these in turn turning out to be grainier and more defective pictures of the last—so here, the Eternals, when rebuilt, became paler shadows of their former selves, until the paler shadows begat paler copies yet and the shadows melted back into sunlight and oblivion.

But how were they linked to each other and the Tabernacle? Friend took him back again, to the beginning, and down they sank. A stately scientist, in real-time a babbling Renegade, the one who had pointed at Zed that first time, was standing at a slab, on which was May, her forehead open from a deep incision. In his fingers was a clamp and at the end of this a tiny crystal which he set into the wound, saying, “This crystal shall join us, each to each, and all to the Tabernacle.” And each was ceremoniously loaded with this third eye of light.

So, all the Eternals carried this tiny transmitter which beamed out their every experience to be recorded in the Tabernacle. When they died, they were rebuilt from their plans, starting from a tissue record. The accelerated fetus was programmed with all the life-experiences of the dead person up to the moment of death so that he would step into his place in the Vortex, alive and the same as before.

The old scientists had started it. They had done it. Friend explained. “They were the scientists—the best in the world. But they were middle-aged, too conditioned to mortality. They went Renegade. We were born into Vortex life. We are their offspring. We were better able to deal with Eternal Life.”