Zardoz (9 page)

Zed saw May through the loom room window as he stole along the outside of the house. She stood silently among the many-colored hangings. Her body was awash with reflected colors from the skeins that mixed as he moved past.

Once in the room, he walked across the wooden floor, lifting layer after layer of gauzelike cloth to reach her side. Her body became more and more distinct as he approached, until finally just her own contemplation cloth separated her from the outside air, and his hands.

She was immobile within her silken wrapping, her slow and even breath being the only sign of outward life, a living statue in a forest of transparent tapestries.

He stood before her. Her eyes focused back from the infinite to the present.

“May, I want your help.”

Without moving or acknowledging his presence, she spoke.

“You want to destroy us, the Tabernacle.”

“I want the truth.”

“You must give the truth if you wish to receive it.”

“It will burn you.”

“Then burn me.”

He knew that this would be his weakest moment, for in his next step he would be within her power, in her total strength. If he took the step into the web she held up so invitingly, he would be lost for many minutes, he would be trapped and transported, his body a shell that could be killed in his spiritual absence. Must he step forward?

She smiled and beckoned him. A beautiful face; but what lay behind it? Could she turn into some haggard witch when he was in her arms, then snuff him out at will?

He had to trust her. She alone held the key to the last door. He knew she needed him more than she could admit now. She wanted him, body, soul, spirit, and seed. Would she mate, then kill him like some female spider and discard his empty body? He looked at her again. Her smile faded and her eyes lowered for an instant, then rose to look at him, unaffected by any design he could perceive other than her drive to make a new life from the old.

He paused, sucked a breath of air as if diving under water, then went beneath the surface of her rainbow veil. May moved and he was with her.

He went to her and was enclosed, enfolded by the patterned web. He felt a tingle run over his skin; from her, or from himself, or from the shimmering sheet he did not know.

“Tell me everything, show me pictures. Open your mind, your memory. Go back to the beginning, open—open—open.”

He was trapped within the web. As a fly to a spider he had flown into the sticky center willingly, while she merely waited. She had expected him. There was no escape. Only her eyes filled his mind, the terrible piercing look which grew ever larger. He tried to hold onto the side of his consciousness but felt himself slipping back into the vaulted dark, sliding down into the dark mist of sleep she controlled. He fought against it like a shipwrecked mariner adrift with just one piece of timber for support. Just as those hands slipped off the floating wood, so his main-mind slipped away and down from his consciousness, and left it awash and solitary on the surface. No longer could he hold out.

Zardoz boomed: “You are the chosen! Go forth into the Outlands and kill!” The cruel wind bit at them as they screamed their eternal love for him. Their voices were puny as that same wind scattered the sounds across the plains to the mountains where the echo of their God still rolled.

May’s voice, a dim dream, spoke. “Come. We’ve seen this. Deeper, further.”

“Zardoz is our only God,” he answered. “He moves in mysterious ways.” He could just see her. Just comprehend the game that she played, with him as board and all the pieces.

“But you lost your faith. Show me how.”

He sank deeper yet.

The city street rattled with their comings and goings. A fine hunt this was. Galloping in and out of houses, around and around. The quarry was good. Young and determined, they fought back nowadays, not like the older times. These men had strength, some even carried weapons. They were no long hideous manlike monsters, but like Zed had matching limbs; they were strong and fast but still not as strong and fast as Zed, still not so lithe and dangerous as he; how could they be when Zardoz was not theirs? The Exterminators, who had fallen to the Brutals, could look for no quick end. They would string out the death for many days with much rejoicing, but the weapons were the real source of celebration. To capture guns was their dream.

This made things more exciting for these exterminating angels. Murdering the aged, the passives, and the weak was just a chore. Now,
these
were men. They pursed their victims farther.

The streets, like the houses, were littered with debris; they formed a cluttered stony dunescape with many intervening walls and rooftops.

“Zardoz gave us the Gun. We rode out. I knew the truth. Man is born to hunt and kill. It was enough. But something happened. It changed everything. I lost my…innocence,” Zed said.

The street issued onto a large square, bigger buildings of many floors flanking it. In the center was the encampment of the Brutals. Here they would make their stand, among their rugged tents and children, where they could no longer run.

A light flashed in a window high to Zed’s left. He turned and saw a face beckon, then vanish, a masked face, or a monster.

He slid from his horse and ran into the buildings, as his friends put the camp to the sword. He would leave them to their play. This game he hunted was more interesting.

He ran through corridors. They narrowed, grew thinner, spread and multiplied. They were walled with, books, from floor to ceiling, book by ancient book. All musty, many damaged; some had fallen to the floor like bricks from crumbling walls. Here was an indoor city of old paper. As on the outside, there were open areas, like squares. Zed sniffed for the scent of man and stepped quietly through this labyrinth, over old volumes, past desks, searching.

A figure, the man he had seen before, stood briefly at the foot of wooden stairs. He beckoned Zed, then turned and ran up them lightly, into darkness.

Familiar with the art of ambush, yet intrigued, Zed stepped cautiously after the little figure. His gun cocked, he slipped quietly on and up. His killer-sense told him where the man was hiding. Now he had him.

The man was boxed into a dead end. Zed had him now for sure, stone dead. He raised his gun and centered the sights on the body, paused, then lowered the gun.

“Why did you spare him?” May asked.

“Something… I don’t know,” Zed answered.

The man was holding a book and calmly reading.

“Had you ever seen a book before?” she asked.

“Never.”

Zed glanced around the section they were in. The books were brighter and simpler than the others, their covers crisper. The book the man held showed pictures. He stood with his back to Zed, quite unafraid and absolutely lost in the strange pursuit of watching the pages. Zed crept closer. If this was of more importance than the fear of death, he must know it. He had seen men beg and cry and even laugh when fronted by the ultimate, but never this.

As he approached, the man stepped sideways, vanished in an unseen passage, and left the book to hover in midair.

This so amazed Zed that he did not pursue the creature down the maze into which he had fled. There was just the book. He touched it carefully and felt the thin wires that supported it and led up to the ceiling. There was no trap here. There was nothing primed to fall on him, or shoot at him—simply, this book.

An apple was on the first page, above it a sign, an “A”; on the next page a blue ball, above it another mark, a “B.” Overleaf a tiny cat sat with its back to him, underneath a “C.”

“You learned to read?” May said, following his vision.

“Yes.”

How long did it take you?”

“Not long. I read everything. I learned all that had been hidden from me. The ways of the world before the darkness fell. Then I found the book called…called…” His voice faltered, caught in some strangled emotion, something too painful to recall.

Zed’s enlarged brain had read with incredible speed. He had learned the manner of reading in a few minutes. He found that a book could be read as fast. His eyes could flick over the pages quicker than thought. All that he read stayed fast in his head. He sucked in learning as a desert in the first rain soaks up water, endlessly and without effort. He felt himself filling, brimming with new life. His whole existence slowly pivoted onto a new axis.

One book stopped him like a bullet.

“What was the book? What was the name of the book?” May was pressing him. She sensed this book’s importance.

He ripped it in two and then into halves again, and again until the pieces were no bigger than snowflakes. He scattered them into the air, then clawed the dictionaries, the encyclopedias, the language primers, the mathematic textbooks, the histories from off the shelves and up into the air. A blizzard of paper whirled about him in his rage. He was the center of this storm.

Zed floated back to the room. May was pressing him close. He fought against her will.

“I don’t remember.”

“Tell me! Show me! You must tell me!”

He was being crippled by her eyes.

“I can’t!”

It felt as though she would blind him, forever.

He twisted from her, yet could not resist her kind arms pulling his face to her breasts. She smoothed his hair.

“Tell me how you came into the stone.”

“Don’t know.”

“Of course you know.”

“I can’t remember.”

He felt himself beginning to suffocate underneath the cloth, inside her arms. He could see out, see into the room; but as at the edge of the Vortex, he was sealed within.

“Yes, you can.”

He was going back in time again, back to the head, the grain.

“You knew that Arthur was Zardoz, didn’t you?”

“No!”

“You killed Arthur, didn’t you?”

Again he faced Arthur in the flying head.

“No.”

“Show me the whole image.”

Desperately he tried to hold back the image of Arthur.

“No.”

He could hold it back no longer. It burst out of his mind. Again Zed shot him dead, straight through the body. Again he turned and smiled, this man who was coming back so soon from the dead, rising up, just as he was now sinking down.

Zed convulsed in the weaving room, racked with pain. May soothed him, smoothed him.

“You murdered your God…by accident…or was it an accident?”

Zed felt such peace that he was unburdened of the memory. The tight pain in his head had gone.

She smiled down at him and then purred. “Now…show me the book.”

Catlike she cradled him. If he moved, her claw-like eyes sank far into his brain. There was a smile behind the eyes. A warmth behind the cruelty, layers of good and evil in her heart.

His body responded as though possessed, jolted by her madness.

“The book. That book.”

He ripped and tore it once again to shreds.

“It’s all a trick! It’s all a trick!”

“What was the trick? Tell me!”

Her eyes had damaged him. He was wounded. He could not resist. His head fell forward. He was exhausted, spent. The confession flowed out unstemmed.

“Zardoz said stop…said no more…”

The fields stretched out to the blackened edges of his landscape. Beneath the ashen, sterile earth, scorched and corrupted by nameless agencies so surely and so long ago, lay moist fertile soil, waiting for seeds.

Zed had overseen the planning and the digging. The prisoners worked in rows, until they died and were replaced. Zardoz had decreed it so. He gave them the special seeds, and only these would rise. They were from Heaven—Vortex; divine gifts to be revered, planted with prayer and nourished.

“Zardoz told you not to kill anymore.

“Yes.”

“But to take prisoners.”

“Yes.”

“To make slaves.”

“Yes.”

“To cultivate instead of kill.”

“Yes.”

“To grow wheat.”

“Yes.”

“Did you need wheat?”

“No, we ate meat. We were hunters, not farmers. Zardoz betrayed us.”

“By now you knew about Zardoz, or guessed… That book.”

“No.”

“Show how you got into the stone. Show!”

Zed had been prepared. The others, such as he, were waiting. He had passed on his learning to them and they, having the same skills in absorbing knowledge, had grown with him to this moment. The head passed slowly over their bodies; they pushed their faces into the ground in homage and in fear of his coming.

They waited meekly. The rows of horse-drawn carts brimmed with golden grain; planted, grown, reaped, and winnowed according to the instructions boomed out to them from the head. It came now to collect its harvest. Now, Zed waited to invade the creature’s homeland just as Zardoz had invaded his.

“Your friends were mutants too?” May prodded.

“Yes.”

“You had a plot?”

“Yes.”

“Revenge?”

“The truth. We wanted the truth,” Zed said.

“Show it. What is the book?”

She had swooped back in his mind, to the library again. The book he held was revealed. He could conceal it no longer.

THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ

WIZARD OF OZ

The heading shot up toward him in his memory’s eye. Then he cut forward, jumping in time to the moment he had entered that dark mouth.

Zed and his three comrades stood on the lips of “Zardoz, whipping the slaves in to unload their baskets of grain. They filed in a loop from the carts to the center of the mouth and back again.

Zed nodded to his aides, then dived into the heap. They shoveled grain on to him, more grain was spilled on top of him from the slaves’ baskets; all in a moment, barely interrupting the rhythmic shuffle of feet and the dry whisper of grain raining down. Zed was underneath, deep inside the cargo of Zardoz, a living part of the sacrifice they offered each season, ready to be transported to the God’s home, the heaven known as “Vortex.”