She tipped Liz’s chin up to look her directly in the eyes, continuing to smile her dazzling smile. By now Gaius had hold of Danny’s hand also, firmly leading him forward. Danny looked at him helplessly and Gaius bestowed on him the same beatific smile.
They passed through the portico and entered a wide agora laid out on smooth stone paths stretching forward and crossing at right angles. The paths were dappled by sunlight filtering through pergolas and a lacing of flowering vines and roses. In the intimate sunlit squares formed by the intersecting paths fountains played, trailing bougainvillea and passionflower covered low walls, and there were stone seats spread with creamy drapes and deep crimson cushions. In some of the squares there were small domed summer-houses with wooden doors half ajar. People were gathered in the squares, in small groups. Some were lounging in casual embraces. Others were talking, with occasional confident smiles and bursts of tuneful laughter. Every now and then they would steal a glance at the curious procession making its way down the central arcade, and once or twice one of them would give an excited little wave.
“There, up ahead, that is where we’re going.” Emmanuelle gave the information with a sweet low inflection and pointed to what seemed like a large plaza a hundred or so paces in front. It was dominated by a building much bigger than the others, splendid in crystal white and veined marble.
“This is one of the oldest, most treasured baths we have. Here is where you will be welcomed, be refreshed and enter our company fully. And you will be given proper clothing!” Emmanuelle, Gaius, Dante and Milton all looked at each other and at the heavy thermal suits and laughed gently, allowing just a little humor about the clumsy dress. But they quickly smiled encouragingly at Danny and Liz, inviting them also to share the joke.
The group moved across the plaza and ascended the wide formal steps to the colonnade and door. As they climbed a man stepped out from the shadow to greet them, as if he had been waiting. He was dressed in a white toga with gold edging, and seemed older than the others because of the lines around his eyes and on his forehead. But his dark skin was supple and fresh and the hair of his head and beard was black and lustrous. He looked at the group, singling out Liz and Danny with bright eyes.
“Welcome, O welcome to the first great bathhouse established by the pioneers. Welcome to the weary travelers, and most of all welcome to our dear new children, Homelanders from the north, soon to be the newest gods in Heaven! Here you will begin your transformation from mere mortals into divinities! Do not be alarmed, all will become clear and all will be beautiful. I am Pandit the keeper of the Baths and it is my great privilege to greet you. Now, my little ones, to begin your transformation you must abandon all fear, the curse of mere mortals, and surrender without hesitation to the ministry of my assistants. My dear ones, what are your names?”
Gaius winked at Milton and they both struggled to keep a straight face.
“He’s a long-winded old fool,” Gaius whispered through the side of his mouth to Danny, “But do what he says, he’s been inducting newcomers for four hundred years!”
Pandit was still looking expectantly at the pair. “Well?” he said with arched eyebrows.
Danny finally found his voice. “I, we… My name is Dan.”
“I…I am Liz.”
“Well, we always want to give more beautiful names to those whose appellations are mired with mortality. So Dan, you obviously must become Daniel, and Liz, let me think what we should do about that: how about changing it to Charlize?"
The Northerners continued to gaze witlessly at the Master of Ceremonies. After a brief moment he simply smiled and said, “Splendid, that's settled then. Follow me.” He turned away, clapping his hands together as he led them forward into the semi-gloom of the building.
Six or more eye-level walls of golden onyx extended in a straight line from the door into its interior. On their tiled surfaces were set scented oil lamps, leading the eye forward into an endless dark well. Between the walls steps led down to pools whose waters were stirred by rippling currents. A dozen or so attendants appeared and divided themselves between the travelers. Dante and Milton were each led to a side bath. Liz and Danny, accompanied still by Emmanuelle and Gaius, were surrounded by bands of attendants and guided separately to the central pools. The attendants were male and female, semi-naked or fully naked. Their bodies were midnight black to the same light tan as Emmanuelle, and none of them showed any embarrassment or diffidence. Some of them entered the water immediately and cast up vertical sprays with their hands, filling the air with intoxicating droplets from the perfumed waters.
Liz and Danny were trembling. The effect of the flight, the abrupt assault of a new world, and now the heady atmosphere and easy proximity of male and female bodies had all become a cascade. They fell into the low stone seats at the foot of the steps and the brim of the water. Neither of them could resist as the attendants took off their boots, popped the clasps of their suits and unzipped them. As the thermal layer came off and they were stripped to their underclothes Emmanuelle and Gaius stepped forward carrying trays with pitchers and cups. They set the drink beside them and poured glasses for themselves and for the newcomers. The assistants drank first and offered the refreshment to Liz and Danny. They accepted readily, even greedily, as the cup was guided to their mouths. It was a sweetened cordial with a slightly bitter but not unpleasant aftertaste. Then in a few swift moves by the attendants, and without hardly realizing it, they too were naked.
There was another clap and Pandit’s voice rang out from somewhere in the dim recesses of the building.
“These are waters of rebirth. They prepare the mind as well as the body. They will begin in you a generative process, which our wonderful scientists have produced for us. This means you will never age. You will live for untold years and will be gods like the rest of us. But first your souls must pass through the river of divinity! It is from the waters at the dawn of time that all life first came. In the era of the storms our beneficent mother became a tyrant. She rose up against us and threatened all human life. But our great scientists also rose to the height of the challenge, and found a way to control water, to dominate and subdue her, and thus we became greater than our goddess mother. She is now our gentle servant and companion, and she acknowledges we are divine like her. Through unity with her, Charlize and Daniel will become divine in their own eyes, in their own minds. So, now! Let the rebirth begin!”
And he clapped one more time.
The waters had a slight peaty bronze color, an effect perhaps of the stonework, or maybe due to some kind of herb or essence. They were both warm and cool to the touch, like a silk scarf drawn across the skin, and deeply scented, a swirl of honeysuckle and musk. The two neophytes were led by the hand, down shallow steps until they were waist-deep. They had been given a drug that was already beginning to take effect. Emmanuelle and Gaius had also taken it and they, now naked too, were always in sight of their charges continuing to gaze at them with the same beatific smile. Danny and Liz had begun to feel wonderfully relaxed. Their previous bewilderment and shock was replaced by enormous well-being and pleasure. They felt deeply attracted to the water and were very willing to sink into it, forgetting all their previous thoughts and worries.
The attendants guided them backward and placed little floats under their shoulders, heads and tailbones. Danny and Liz allowed themselves to sink back, surrendering fully to the intense comfort. The earthy tint of the water seemed like the earth itself, and so perhaps they were the seed of flowers and the scent of the water was their blossoming. Assistants poured oil on their bodies and flowing hands lightly massaged it across their skin. They were submerging in a sea of pleasure without any one point to focus on. Their breathing had become shallow and had slowed to a prolonged interval. They were reaching a point of pseudo-death, and were losing consciousness except for a last residual sense of liquid well-being. Then they were under the water and not breathing. The attendants had gently slipped the pads and pushed down on th
eir torsos until they were eighteen inches below the surface. Something inside their heads said they were dead because they were under water, not breathing. Yet they were happy, at one with the watery womb in which they were enclosed. They seemed to see Emmanuelle and Gaius floating near to them and slowly dissolving away. It felt as if they were calling them into the water itself, to become one with its endless pleasure and beauty. Then they slipped into oblivion.
***
Many hours later Liz and Danny regained consciousness. They were lying in separate rooms, their bodies covered in sweet bay and roses. There was a slight heaviness in their chests, but they hardly noticed it compared to the delight of relaxation that lingered in their limbs and the astonishing memory of all that had just happened. They lay in perfect stillness. The question that Liz had asked when they first arrived reoccurred and this time with more reason: “Am I dead?” But the sensation in their bodies, the flower petals, and the stone walls of the rooms with their high glassless casements looking out on a cloudless sky, all evoked the world they had just met. With its boundless beauty and power this was a more real world than they had ever imagined possible. So, dead or alive did not matter much.
They both continued to lie where they were, overwhelmed. The Master of Ceremonies had said they would be gods. Perhaps this was it, what it felt like to be a god, an Immortal. They thought of life in the Homeland, the icefields and the Centers. The memory was still there, but it seemed distant, remote, as if they had crossed a bridge they could not return on, nor would they ever want to.
Neither of them knew how long they lay there, not worried, not fearful, just feeling this strange, new way, and liking it, wanting it to go on and on. At last it was Liz who stirred. She felt her muscles stiffening a little, so she sat up and dropped her legs over the cushioned bench where she had been lying. Some of the flower petals dropped to the floor and she brushed others away. On a stool nearby she saw a white chiffon robe, the kind she had noticed some of the people wearing as she had come through the Agora. She wrapped it around her, naturally, as if she had been wearing one all her life.
The room was not large. It was covered in marble up to waist height, then stone, leading up to a wooden roof. There was nothing in it except the couch and the stool. An open door led out to a hallway, which was constructed in the same way. On the far side she saw another room with its door open. She went across the hall and entered the doorway, her bare feet slapping slightly on the marble floor. Danny was lying on his back covered in rose petals as she had been. He did not turn his head.
“Hi,” she said.
Danny continued to stare at the roof. “Are you a ghost?”
“I don’t think so.”
He slowly turned his head toward the door.
“How are you? You look divine. What was the name that man gave you?”
“Charlize.”
“It suits you. I think we should call you that.”
“It is kind of pretty. How about you?”
“I think I’ll probably stick to Danny.”
“Actually I meant how are you?”
“Oh! Well different, for sure. I’m wearing petals.”
“There should be a robe here somewhere. Yes, there, at the foot of the couch.”
She walked over to the stool and picked it up. Danny did not move.
“Let me brush you off,” she said. She went to his couch and started to brush the petals off his chest.
Danny smiled. “I think the right expression you’re looking for is deflower!”
She giggled. And Danny reached for her and pulled her to him.
2. ICE CAMP
Poll sat at the back of the ice-tractor, hunched up on his seat with his feet braced against the floor and his hands locked on the rail in front of him. He was warm—the tractor engine was powerful and it cycled a constant blast of hot air through the cabin, but his ribs ached. The pitching of the suspension as the tracks bumped over the broken tundra was exhausting and made it impossible to rest. Initially the ice road had been good, well-marked and with its surface consistently melted and frozen smooth by the alternating sun and frigid night. But in the borderlands the weather was disrupted by cloud and snowfall and the going got progressively worse. The road was always under fresh snow and the ice sheet was broken by crevasses and ice walls. The tractor was always changing gears and revving up to go around or over obstacles. The noise was high-pitched and nerve-wracking, and the swaying and jolting seemed endless.
There were two other prisoners in the main cabin, Miller, the older man who had been brought to the holding place after Poll, and a morose kid called Finn who had come in that morning and didn’t look big enough to be sent to the camps. The two guards sat in the driving cab buckled up on upholstered seats and they were having a famous time. The leader of the pair, Nute, the one who had jumped on Poll, was driving. His associate, Dogg, sat beside him, and together they were creased with laughter, checking over their shoulders to see their passengers flung up to the ceiling each time the tractor hit a ridge. Also the trip had already lasted several hours with no stops, and Finn had peed himself, unable to hold on with the jolting. This was part of the guards’ game plan, and once they got the scent it became the source of endless remarks on the bladder weakness of Teppers and how much they stank.
After several hours the tractor finally came to a well-kept ice road with tall markers. About twenty minutes later the bumped and bruised passengers saw orange sodium lights on high steel pillars standing out against the snow of the horizon.
“There she is,” yelled back Dogg, “Your new vacation home, Camp Conquest. Isn’t she beautiful? Aren’t you guys glad to be home?”
There was no real entrance to the camp, just a sprawl of ugly dwellings on either side of the road as it wound across the frozen steppe. They were of indistinct colors, dirty gray or rusted yellow, and all had the same shape. They were not like the domed TEPs but semi-cylindrical in form, like barrels halved along their length, their roofs reaching to the ground on either side and raised walkways extending along the apex. As the prisoners drove up the central road it was evident what the walkways were for. There was a number of individuals standing on them, clearing snow from the roofs with long shovels and rakes. The impression these figures made was striking. They were covered in great hoods and ragged capes. On their hands they wore enormous gloves, much bigger than the standard thermal mittens used in the Sector. They looked like misshapen insects and they made the scene grim and fearful in a way that not even Nute and Dogg had managed to convey.
Suddenly the tractor swerved from the road, pulling in sharply next to one of the buildings.
“OK, this is where you get out,” announced Dogg. “That door there. Knock and it will be opened!”
He pointed to a heavy metal hatch set in the end wall. The exit from the tractor released with a hiss and steps unfolded beneath it. Miller stumbled off first, followed by Finn and Poll. The cold greeted them like steel knives, wind-assisted, something wholly new in their experience. They all instinctively doubled over and half fell, half ran toward the hut. Miller hit the door with the side of his fist and almost immediately it cracked open. A huge gloved paw reached out and grabbed the prisoners one by one, more or less lifting them over the bulkhead and sending them sprawling on the other side.
“Reception,” a voice growled.
From that moment Poll truly entered another world. Any sense of connection with the Sector and the Homeland he had known was broken. He became part of what was clearly a more primitive era. Gone were the finely calibrated energy systems of the TEPs, gone were the transports, gone the holograms, gone the ever-present screens and audios. And gone also was the religion of the Homeland, its promise of a better life to come and its sense of collective purpose.
Instead there was a relentless struggle for survival in a world entirely without beauty. The barrack-style huts had doubled metal skins filled with insulation, but through expansion and contraction it had shifted and i
n places become ineffective. Secondary insulation was applied inside the buildings, but as this was always drooping or falling off it made them look like subterranean caves with formless stalactites hanging from the roofs. As for routine and order, if you did not keep up you could not expect to live long, as simple as that. New arrivals soon discovered that the camp was run by a group of old-hands recruited from the prisoners themselves. They had little hope of getting back to normal life but neither did any of them really care to. For whatever reason—domestic trouble, a ruined reputation, or sheer ill will —they had no motivation to return, plus the little bit of power and opportunity to make others suffer was more than enough compensation. They were a law unto themselves, and as long as they kept the plant machinery serviced the Sector never interfered with what they did. Some had been there for a very long time, longer than anyone remembered, and this inner group of veterans formed a tacit government. They were known as the Icemen, because the long years of exposure to bitter cold had not killed them, only weathered them, so they seemed almost indifferent to the brutal conditions.
The Icemen were not often seen, and no one was entirely sure anyway who was or was not part of the inner circle. Certain individuals simply had the reputation. In the normal course of things it was dangerous young men like Nute and Dogg who acted as their deputies. These thugs were brought on by hints and nods, suggesting they too would one day be accepted into the brotherhood. While they waited they were kept on the leash by the small measure of power they enjoyed and being played off against each other.
Poll and the others of course understood none of this and saw very little of anything as they were upended on the floor. The giant hand that had pulled them inside belonged to one of the lieutenants, a towering hulk who was acting as enforcer for another, less massive figure also there to welcome them. As the new arrivals lay helpless on the ground this other man stepped forward and walked around them looking down. He was wearing a heavy military cloak, impeccably neat. His face was pale, with soulless gray eyes. He spoke quietly.
Pascale's Wager: Homelands of Heaven Page 8