Watson, Ian - Novel 08

by The Gardens of Delight (v1. 1)

  “So what maintains this fair climate?” Tanya asked. “With the sun always at high noon in the sky?”

  “It’s morning and afternoon in other areas,” said Denise foolishly.

  “Permanently . . . Maybe they had damn long nights lasting a year or ten years! Do they migrate en masse? Hibernate?”

  Sean’s eyes roved. He took in the rich baize of the green, spotted here and there with white and yellow flowers like pool balls, the bowers of giant berries, a deer-sized finch with golden bars on its wings and a carmine harlequin mask around its beak, an orange pomegranate husk the size of a diving bell resting near the boskage with a jagged break in its side, and particularly the two erotic gymnasts—so casually and joyfully naked even in the face of the starship and the dead victims of the landing. He was conscious of a swelling in his flesh which had already thawed out but not really awoken yet—not till now. Yet it was a curiously innocent excitement he was filled with as more people spilled back into the meadow to get on with what they had been doing before the ship landed, in sublime—yes indeed,“sublime—disregard of the starship in their midst. No, not disregard either. They simply seemed to regard it as something other than what it was: something akin to one of those strangely baroque citadels of rock which he alone believed he had glimpsed during the final stages of the descent. Those formations had appeared to be partly natural and partly sculpted or built; also—somehow—partly organic, growths of mineral matter. Perhaps those were the people’s homes, castles, keeps? But how had they come into being?

  None of the curious rock towers was visible from where the starship stood. However, Sean held a printout photo of one loosely in his hand, taken during descent. The others hadn’t seen it yet. Somehow it was a photo of something already in his head, a photo of a dream, as though someone had built an archetypal image he already knew from somewhere else.

  “We could try asking them,” he said.

  Austin Faraday shook his head. “We didn’t travel for eighty-seven years to run out and throw our clothes off just because the water looks fine.”

  “Take a look at this.” Sean held out the photo which he’d been keeping to himself, he realized, as though to him it particularly belonged. “I caught a glimpse of several structures like this on the way down—just briefly. I managed to key in on this one. It’s telephoto from about five thousand meters up.”

  The color print, slightly blurred by the vibration of the descending starship, showed a blue rock rising among neat bushy trees. The rock opened into tulip petals or blue lettuce leaves. From this mineral rosette serrated pink spires arose, and what looked like twin blades of stiff curving grass—as tall as sequoias if he’d got his scale right. These blades converged above the pink spires to support a hoop, a perfect circle high in the sky. A forked tree trunk in the shape of a dowser’s wand bisected the spires, too, as though tossed there by some fearful storm; yet the outcome of the storm was serenity and balance.

  “That isn’t a natural formation,” said Austin softly. “Is it?” He sounded doubtful.

  “It’s a building,” affirmed Denise. “Probably their factories and whatnot are underground. It would follow, wouldn’t it, if the winter night lasts an extremely long time? It looks almost armored, though I suppose it’s rock. Immensely strong. Contoured to resist any weight of ice. Maybe it retracts into the ground? Closes up like a flower? That loop at the top looks like an aerial of some sort, and the,” she giggled, “the divining rod could be an aerial too.”

  “Copernicus would have rejected this world if it had nights and days as long as years,” said Tanya acidly.

  “Maybe they had no choice? Degradation of ship systems?”

  “An aerial?” Paavo shook his head. “Broadcasting on what frequency? The air waves are dead.”

  “Maybe it’s some kind of psychotronic radiation generator?” blurted out Denise. “Maybe it taps natural energies and broadcasts them? Biological energy, expressing itself in this riot of life forms! There were experiments along those lines on Earth long ago before we spread so much merde around. Yes, maybe that’s how they produce those enormous berries and fruits out there. If they’ve found out how to do this, it’s worth, oh, coming any distance. You don’t see evidence of farming and cultivation because it’s going on on a psychotronic level. In direct contact with nature.”

  Tanya laughed derisively. “I don’t know about broadcasting energy to the berries, but it’s had a wild effect on the birdlife! Is that thing a finch down there? You do realize, even in this gravity, it’s far too big to use its wings? Oh, it’ll need giant berries to eat. It’s a wonder it doesn’t gobble up people too, like worms!”

  Denise blushed. “Maybe the beacons broadcast, hmm, benign harmonies?”

  “You know, it all reminds me of something,” said Sean. “That rock. The whole landscape.”

  The landscape itself wasn’t the only puzzle, of course. This planet was slightly smaller than Mars, yet it held an Earthlike atmosphere. It must be far denser than Mars or Earth—rich in heavy elements, a superb industrial lode—since the surface gravity was fully three-quarters that of the Earth’s. Somehow the climate was temperate, even though the world was apparently rotation-locked to its sun (an implausibility at this distance). Not only was it temperate, with a mere twenty- degree temperature gradient from the poles to the equator on the dayside, but the darkside had those extensive hot patches. Even if that was evidence of extensive vulcanism on the darkside, though, there was no sign of volcanoes along the three giant rift valleys which stretched neatly all the way from pole to pole down the eastward and westward terminators between day and night and two-thirds of the way across the dayside—forming a great divide. Apart from this great divide, the dayside terrain was remarkably regular. And it was all land: rolling hills and meadows interspersed with lakes and rivers and streams. No seas. The great dayside divide could have been a thin pole-to-pole sea, but it wasn’t. So where was the water reservoir? And where was the atmospheric circulation pump?

  Dayside—itself divided geographically into one-third and two-thirds by the great divide—was neatly embraced by the eastern and western terminator rifts almost as though the dayside was confined inside a frame . . .

  The contents of this frame—the landscape—were the telling clue. As Sean stared out, a black head and a golden head emerged from the crack in the pomegranate-bell—still dazed by the starship’s descent, perhaps newly recovered from unconsciouness, but protected by the tough skin of the fruit. The unicorn danced toward them, fencing the air, feinting with its long white horn. The negress’s breasts bobbed as, reaching out, she tossed a raspberry the size of both her fists at the advancing beast. The berry spitted on the tip of its horn, and the unicorn reared up, shaking its white mane, and pranced round the pomegranate on its hind legs, its forehooves clicking together as though applauding. Then, with a flick of its long tail, it was gone, tottering precariously through the bushes still on two legs, a tall white ghost.

  “Doesn’t it remind you?”

  “Remind?” cried Tanya. “How can an alien planet forty- five light years from Earth remind us of something? Oh, I’ll grant you that they’ve spread terrestrial plants and animals around to a remarkable extent, and in superfast time, albeit mutated and distorted ... Or do you just mean the style of that tower they’ve built?”

  “No. Muthoni almost got it right before. It is a garden. It’s the hortus deliciarum—the. Garden of Earthly Delights.”

  Muthoni misunderstood him. “The Garden of Eden? Do you think we’ve found the Garden of Eden?” She laughed boisterously. “Oh, man. So God transported Adam and Eve from his assembly line here across forty-five light years? He could have parked Eden a bit closer to Earth! Don’t be corny, Sean. Those are human colonists outside. This is Target Three.”

  “Mad,” snapped Tanya. “But what a remarkably banal vision of the universe, too!”

  “He means it figuratively,” said Denise, excusing at the same time her own psycho
tronic flights of fancy.

  “No, I didn’t say Eden. I said this is the Garden of Earthly Delights. Quite literally. And the Garden of Earthly Delights is the name of the central panel of a painting.”

  “Oh no!” Denise, at any rate, knew it and remembered it. “The Hieronymus Bosch painting?”

  “The very one. It all fits, doesn’t it? The naked human lovers, the giant birds and fruits, the big land-fish.” Sean tapped the photoprint. “This tower. There’ll be others too. Lots of them. Bosch only showed a few kilometers of landscape, but this is spread out across the whole hemisphere as far as I could see. Unless, of course, we did just happen upon part of the world which they’ve made over into this scene.”

  “You’re saying that we’ve landed in a painting?” mocked Paavo. “We didn’t fly through a black hole into another reality. We’re still in the ordinary universe!”

  “Is the universe ordinary, Paavo, old friend?”

  Muthoni frowned. “If our hair and nails carry on growing in hyb, maybe our brain cells carry on dying. Maybe we’ve woken up stupid, like old folk, with our minds wandering.” “Landed in a painting,” muttered Paavo. “That’s too absurd even to call absurd. The Tau Ceti colonists didn’t arrive in the midst of Canaletto’s Venice or a Dali world, did they? Leaving aside the sheer impossiblity of terraforming even part of a hemisphere in the time they’ve had, the colonists who came here weren’t a bunch of biomanipulating art historians. They were farmers and technicians.” “Nevertheless,” said Sean, though Muthoni’s remark worried him. Maybe they were all dreaming now, while wide awake? Dream-deprivation always caught up with people. It would even well up into waking consciousness. Were they actually wide awake, yet catching up on an eighty-seven year backlog of frustrated reveries? Were they imposing dream imagery upon this world—which was really something quite different? He strained to see something else outside: a factory chimney, say, belching smoke. Or furrows planted with maize and barley. But no. The Gardens remained. Lush, but somehow tended. Riotous, but at the same time neat— composed. An exuberant parkland, inhabited by a weird menagerie of beasts. And naked people.

  “Well, I don’t know your painting,” said Tanya. So she couldn’t be hallucinating it. “There must be some other reason for the giant birds and fish and the way those people are carrying on outside. Maybe this is the planet’s mental ward? A new form of psychotherapy? Something for people who can’t adjust to an alien reality? Give them something even crazier as therapy—familiar imagery, but wildly exaggerated? Deliberately distort familiar things to drive them out—to alienate the old world? Come on, Sean, you’re the psychologist. This is what you’re here for. How about it? Those birds and beasts could be, well, robots or android things.”

  This was indeed why Sean was present on the ship: to understand any clash between the old archetypal Earth- inherited imagery, the myth pathways of the old world, and the new psychological channels which must presumably be formed if the colonists were to become inhabitants rather than mere visitors—the archetypes of alien experience for an alien world. But could age-old archetypal patterns alter in this way? Could they adjust themselves? Could new and appropriate mythic symbolism really arise? Perhaps, as Tanya suggested, the chief psychologist of the colony ship Copernicus really had hit on this solution: the exorcism of the ancient dream-paths by grotesque and manifest exaggeration. Yet why choose Bosch’s dreamlike—and often nightmarish— imagery? And how was it physically possible?

  “Paavo,” said Captain Faraday, “try to get someone on the radio. The Governing Council or the Central Committee or whatever else they’ve come up with. Tell them we’ve landed up here in this . . . park. They must have seen us coming down from one of those towers or whatever they are.”

  A few moments later, the Finn swore softly.

  “The radio’s gone dead now. Our equipment’s packing up. There’s no power. Okay, I’ll run a computer check.”

  Paavo tapped keys. However, now the cathode screen stayed blank.

  “I don’t understand. Nothing.” He shivered. “The computer’s just shut down. But it can’t have done. It’s self- diagnosing. Christ, it has shut down though.”

  “Don’t panic.” Austin licked his lips, which seemed to have gummed up. “Test out the orbital boosters.”

  “How can I do that, if the computer won’t accept instructions?”

  “Bypass it. Set up an ignition sequence. We aren’t going to blast off into the blue without trajectories. Just set one up, Paavo. Mock it up.”

  “The board’s dead,” reported Paavo a little later.

  “So,” said Austin. “Either there’s some program in the computer we know nothing about—which would be a damn fool trick to play on us . . .”

  “Or else something from outside has shut us down,” concluded Denise, Primavera hair aswirl about her jumpsuit. “The same something that nudged us over to land here? Superior technology? But whose?”

  “I think the time has come,” said Sean slowly, “to ask those people outside. If nothing works in here, we haven’t a great deal of choice.”

  Muthoni had been checking the various life support systems.

  “We can breathe, we can eat. Can’t cook anything, though. The power to the lift and hatches is still on. At least we can descend normally without having to torch our way out and shin down nylon.”

  “Just suppose we have landed in this painting,” said Austin, “which someone has wrapped around the planet—is it all like this? One big garden?”

  Denise, too, was visualizing the triptych by Bosch: those three panels only the central one of which depicted the Garden of Delights. She was scared.

  “If we’re in the Garden of Delights here,” calculated Sean, “then beyond the rift valley could well be—I hate to say it now—Eden, where God is.”

  “The morning of Creation,” nodded Denise.

  “So what’s on Darkside?” Austin’s voice was threatening, as though he blamed Sean; as though whatever Sean said in the next moment would become true the moment that he uttered it, whatever he chose to say.

  “That’s Hell, Austin. Hell, with devils and tortures . . . and ice and fire. That’s what’s on Darkside, where we thought we saw all those volcanoes. Hell, Austin. Hell.”

  “Look,” cried Tanya.

  A naked man was standing out in the meadow, a hundred meters from the base of the starship, waving up at it, mouthing something.

  THREE

  He was of medium height, and not particularly muscular, though he certainly wasn’t spindly. His skin was tanned only lightly in view of his constant exposure to sunlight. He had an oval, wistful face, topped by a thatch of curly brown hair— though the rest of his body was smoothly hairless. Indeed everyone was as naked of body-hair as they were of clothes. Did they shave themselves with flints in the cold streams?

  The man’s expression was friendly, though with a hint of melancholy at odds with the gay amusements of the scene. As he watched Sean, Paavo and Muthoni descend the access ramp a look of surprise crossed his face. His gaze lingered on Muthoni’s black features, then he nodded to himself as though remembering something. Not, surely, what a black woman was? There was another negress holed up in that pomegranate shell.

  “Hullo there, I’m Jeremy.” The man ducked his head in an apology for a bow. Hesitantly he stuck out his hand. Did one still shake hands on the Earth that these travellers had come from? Sean took his hand and squeezed it. It was warm, solid and real.

  “Jeremy . . . Bosch, perhaps?”

  “Oh no, nothing like that.” The man grinned. “I didn’t invent this. My name really is Jeremy, though I take your point! And my name probably appeals to His sense of humor—or His sense of propriety! At least you’ve realized where you are!”

  “According to Sean here, we’re in a medieval painting by some Dutchman,” frowned Paavo. “Look, our ship has switched itself off. The computer won’t accept instructions. The radio’s gone dead, and the jets. What has done t
his?”

  “Obviously He’s switched them off.”

  “And who might He be?” asked Muthoni.

  Jeremy waved a hand airily. “Oh, He is God. For want of a better name, or a better pronoun. He’s our God. He lives over in the West. Your ship doesn’t fit into the picture, you see. Anyway, be welcome! Relax, enjoy yourselves. You may learn something! This world will see to that. There’s a lot of learning going on.”

  Sean did relax. Why not? The air smelled so sweet after the steel air of the starship—rather heady too—perhaps higher in oxygen than they were used to. A bouquet of scents spiced it: musk, sharp citrus, oakmoss, smoky amber, fresh lily of the valley.

  “It doesn’t look as though anything’s going on,” complained Paavo.

  “That only proves how much you have to learn. Ah, but you must have come a long way!”

  “Of course we’ve come a long way, man! We’ve come from Earth—and that’s still forty-five lights and eighty-seven frozen years away. We haven’t improved on the spacestress drive since your own Exodus ship left. Limits—there are limits.” Paavo stamped his foot petulantly, as though to remove the last trace of chill from his toes.

  “Ah yes, I know.” Jeremy nodded brightly. “I remember. I’m the only one who does ... go in for remembering that kind of thing. It’s my, hmm, you might say role. Lucky you landed here. I don’t suppose it was entirely a coincidence, though, eh?”

  “Guidance went haywire at the last moment. Damn lucky to get down in one piece.”

  “Blessed lucky. Ah, I see God’s hand in that. Setting you right down in the best place.”

  “I set us down,” said the Finn.

  “That’s as may be.”