Watson, Ian - Novel 08

by The Gardens of Delight (v1. 1)

  “So you still remember what your . . . grandparents told you—about coming from Earth?” cut in Sean.

  “No, his forefathers,” Muthoni corrected him. “It’s been seven or eight generations by now. At least three full lifetimes.”

  Jeremy grinned. “Oh no, / remember coming. Me, personally. Of course, it’s all rather remote by now. The hyb tanks. Waking up to find we’d grown our nails and hair long. Friend, I was the Captain of the Copernicus

  “That’s nonsense,” protested Muthoni. “You’re only in your thirties. Do you get younger instead of older? Is time different here?”

  “Let’s see, I was Captain Jeremy . . . now what was the name? Jeremy Van der Veld, that’s it. At your service. It’s because I brought us here—being the figurehead, as it were—that I’m . . . well, not singled out exactly, but rather elected as the permanent witness. Maybe I elected myself. A case of overweening responsibility, don’t you know? I was the little demi-God of Copernicus. ”

  “But you’re so young,” Muthoni shivered. “Is there no ageing here? No death?”

  “Of course there’s death. Look at that poor giraffe. You scared it out of its wits. Did the splits, it did. They never get up again if that happens, you know—it gives them a fatal shock. Of course there’s death” Jeremy smiled craftily. “But there’s resurrection too. We die, not of old age or disease, need I say, but either voluntarily—say, in the caves or the death-shells—or else some animal takes it into its head to murder us. Maybe a lion or tiger. Though they’re delightful beasts most of the time—the lions and tigers.”

  “Animals don’t murder. ” Sean was puzzled. A little puzzle was better than a big one at the moment. “An animal just kills.”

  “Well, here they murder. Only occasionally, of course. If the death-heron pays a call on you, and you don’t take the Big Hint, some animal will murder you sooner or later. Which is a bit messier than a voluntary death.”

  Sean stared at the giant goldfinch administering the last rites, of blackberry juice, to the lingering giraffe. It had been joined by a small bird, which perched on the giraffe’s horns. A butcher-bird, he thought.

  Jeremy followed his eyes. “Shrikes for violent death, herons for voluntary death. That’s the way. Either way we die. And off to Hell we go. Where eventually we get ourselves killed again—though we’re a lot tougher over there, believe me. Got to be. Then we pop up here again, a bit changed by the experience. I’m rather far removed from old Captain Van der Veld, as you’ve gathered—but I’m still the Fliegende Hollander. Ah, I was a tall, tough, conquering person then. Much more definition, cut and dried. I was all wound up for the mission like a jet drag-racer—the original self-wound man. But I hadn’t really thought about journey’s end—what I’d do when I got here. I’m much more fluid now—a new man. You might say this has all been my salvation. After a fashion.”

  “You don’t have hair on your bodies,” Sean observed cautiously, wondering whether the answer to this too would be: it isn’t in the picture.

  “Well, God has a beard. Not that I’ve met him personally. That’s his prerogative—badge of office. Ach, He’s the only true adult on this world so far—and we’re His children. The path of growth begins in children’s land, don’t they say? Kiddies don’t have body hair. If you want a fleece on you, become a beast. Or a devil. Some devils can be pretty hairy characters. You see, hair conceals. We don’t go in for, well, concealment hereabouts. As you might have noticed!”

  “Kiddies,” said Paavo bitterly. “Yes, everyone’s behaving pretty childishly.”

  “But where are the actual children?” asked Muthoni.

  “Ah, I’m rambling a bit. Unfair of me. You caught me unawares, you see. I’ve got to catch up with you, hmm, Earthfolk. It’s just so obvious to me after all this time.”

  “The children!”

  “We aren’t mature enough to have new children yet. But Copernicus carried a lot of human ova as well as animal ova. All the fertilized ova we brought with us are alive—grown up or transmuted.” Jeremy nodded at a huge speckled flatfish that was advancing, flap by flap, across the turf. No doubt this was easier for it to accomplish in the lower gravity, but even so it took a deal of effort. And even so again, the fish seemed almost luxurious as it wallowed onward.

  Muthoni jerked her thumb at the couple who had been making love upside-down, and now sat on the greensward, fingers laced, playing gentle silent pressure music as though trying to create a special handsign, a clasp of ultimate recognition. “You mean that those are sterile copulations? Prepubescent, non-functional ones?” She giggled briefly, conscious of the contrast between the clinical question and the caresses it referred to. She flared her nostrils, smelling musk and civet and clear mint.

  “That’s, hmm, not their function. Making children isn’t their function. Not yet. Attunement, balance, rhythm, celebration—that’s what love’s about for now.”

  “You’d better begin at the beginning,” said Sean. “Would you like to come up inside? Please?”

  “It’ll be like old times, Captain Van der Veld,” invited Paavo, panfaced. Muthoni glared at him.

  “No, I wouldn’t feel happy inside the . . . what’s its name?”

  “Starship,” prompted Paavo, sarcastically.

  “Schiaparelli ” said Muthoni. “That’s its name.”

  “No, when we go inside somewhere it’s for a . . . transformation. You can all safely come outside. A steel hull isn’t going to make one whit of difference. It won’t shield you from anything—except knowledge. The opportunity for knowledge, at any rate. Besides, didn’t you say your Schiaparelli has shut down? Shouldn’t you report who you are to me?” he said sharply, momentarily a Captain once more.

  “True enough,” agreed Sean pleasantly. “This is our doctor and biologist, Muthoni Muthiga. And Paavo Kek- konen, pilot and engineer. I’m Sean Athlone, psychologist. We have a new theory about how the archetypal imagery inherited from our colonists’ world of origin might map on to an alien environment or be modified by it. We thought this could be pretty vital as to how effectively colonies in general could ‘take’ ...”

  Jeremy chuckled. “I’d say that we’ve had our psychological problems pretty well sorted out for us.”

  “Austin Faraday’s our Captain and planetologist. Tanya Rostov is an agronomist, among other things. Denise Laroche is our ecologist.”

  “Athlone, eh? Laroche?” Jeremy seemed to be enjoying some private joke. “Well, well, I wonder what your own deeper motivation was in coming? Interesting name, yours.” “Athlone? It’s just a town in Ireland. Presumably my ancestors were peasants, who took the name of the town. They weren’t lords of the manor or anything.”

  “There’s only one Lord here, Sean: Himself. Laroche, too, now there’s a good name!”

  “What’s so funny about our names?”

  “Oh, you’ll find out. He should like them. He has a sense of elective affinites.”

  “Whoever or whatever ‘He’ is, they sure need a psychologist here,” confided Muthoni. Aloud, she said to Sean, “I’m thirsty. How about fetching the others? As the man says, a steel hull isn’t going to make much difference. And while you’re about it, bring a canteen with you.”

  “If you’re thirsty, just help yourself off any bush,” said Jeremy. “Or else there’s a pool through the hedges there. I promise you won’t get poisoned or doped.” He waved breezily. “Who needs hallucinations, when you’ve got this for a reality?”

  A naked woman, who’d been watching with a faint anticipatory smile upon her face, advanced towards them now. (Naked, yes, but the clothed crewpeople were the curiosities . . .) She had little round breasts like fruits, and her body was particularly white, the white not of pastiness but of milk or ivory. Her long damp hair was drying back to a strawy yellow. As Sean turned to walk back up the access ramp, she pouted and assessed Paavo instead. Muthoni it was, though, whom she walked up to and kissed lightly upon the cheek.

  “Nigredo
,” laughed the woman. She made ironic sheep’s eyes at Muthoni, who stepped back.

  “What did she call me?” she asked Jeremy, as though he was their interpreter.

  Jeremy ignored the question. “Take your pleasure as you will,” he said instead. “So long as you don’t cause hurt. Not strenuously, at any rate. The strenuous hurt, the hurt that is serious, belongs in Hell.”

  “What does ‘nigredo’ mean?”

  The naked woman clapped her hands delightedly. “I’m Loquela. Hullo there. Why are you all dressed up? Beware, you’ll turn into beasts or lure bad beasts to you.” It was hard to say whether she was teasing or serious.

  “These are called clothes,” explained Paavo loftily. “One wears them on board a starship when one’s not in coldsleep.”

  “We’ve been naked in our ice boxes for eighty-seven years,” added Muthoni lightly. “It makes a pleasant change.”

  “Oh, so the cold got into your bones, my dusky beauty! Is this a . . . starship, then?” Loquela sounded vague about it, though. The name seemed to lack any precise reference in her mind.

  FOUR

  Sean either forgot about Muthoni’s water-flask or else he took Jeremy at his word. He reappeared, emptyhanded, shepherding the other three members of the crew. Denise gazed around the lawns of the meadow with open delight, Tanya with a certain sulky trepidation as though the God Sean had spoken of might step out from behind a bush to accost her, and Austin with as authoritative a stance as he could muster. Noticing Sean’s omission, Loquela promptly ran to a bush and returned with a redcurrant the size of a melon which she presented to Muthoni.

  The Kenyan woman hesitated briefly, then bit into it. Red juice spurted and stained her silver-grey jumpsuit. “Oh God, that’s beautiful. Mzuri sanaV’ She passed the berry to Denise, who tasted it then offered it in turn to Austin, who ignored it. Loquela seemed enchanted by Denise’s golden tresses; she fondled them, though her full admiration was reserved for Muthoni’s jet-black skin.

  “Captain Van der Veld?” asked Austin. “I mean, you were Captain Van der Veld? What do I mean?”

  “Just call me Jeremy.”

  “What is this world, Jeremy? Who’s this ‘God’ you were telling my people about? An alien superbeing—is that it? Have we finally met up with an alien intelligence?”

  Jeremy cocked his head. “Obviously God is alien, in the sense that we can’t know Him. He’s beyond the level of our present understanding, don’t you see? But we strive, we reach upward. Even the fish do that, don’t they? He helps us, Captain. I suppose it is help—though it sometimes works in, let’s say, devious ways.”

  “But what is this God? That’s what I want to know. Is he, well, localized? In one spot? Or does he, er, reach out—to the rest of the universe? I mean, if he’s the God, he’d have to be everywhere, wouldn’t he?”

  Sean suspected that the chain of command aspect was worrying Austin almost as much as whether there was a God or a superbeing, or indeed whether the two must needs be the same thing. So Austin mainly wanted to know the limits of the God’s authority. Well, it was a practical first step . . .

  “You’re asking me to define our God? Ah, that’s what we’re busy doing all the time. Helping Him define Himself too, I fancy! To answer you literally, He’s everywhere hereabouts by extension—and in Eden in particular.”

  Though it wasn’t the first step Sean would have taken. Perhaps it might be better to know one’s own limits first—and the limits of these amnesiac, sybaritic colonists ... Or rather, what they thought they were learning by forgetting their Earth-assigned role and making merry in this paradise.

  Three men had ridden into the meadow, side by side, on three proud stags. Between them the men were carrying a great lugubrious carp, blotched pink and white. Its pectoral and pelvic fins were too small for it to be able to haul its own weight across the ground. In any case, it was an up-and-down fish; it would have tumbled over . . . Did the God help these people, as they helped the fish?

  A magpie flapped down just then, to perch at the top of the access ramp. It cocked its head at them as though eavesdropping, then flipped its tail impertinently and shat messily on the shining metal. Jeremy glanced at it, then searched the perimeter of the meadow warily.

  “This world couldn’t have been like this to start with,” said Paavo firmly.

  “To start with? It’s always the start here. The beginning. Our new beginning. Oh, it was like this when we landed—so far as landscape goes. The birds and beasts and fis^ came later, out of the pools and the caves, out of the shells d the rock-towers. Of course, they’d been taken from our ova stores. How long it took to lay on I honestly don’t know, though I think only a short while. This planet’s rather small, and it doesn’t rotate, you know.”

  “So we noticed,” said Austin.

  “It oughtn’t to have the atmosphere or the gravity it does have.”

  “We realize that. So this God actually terraformed an unsuitable world for you—in a matter of hours?” Austin wiped his brow. “What is He?” There was a note of capitalization in his voice now. “You told Sean He has a beard. Does that mean that He looks human?”

  “Well, I haven’t met God. Few people have apart from the clothed man. He has a human form, yes. Now, that is. A beard. Pink robes. He reigns in Eden, but his senses are everywhere. You see, He’s particular and general. It’s my opinion that we defined God for Himself as we arrived, and now we’re all trying to evolve to a stage where we can understand what we specified.”

  “So we have a superbeing . . . who was sitting here, doing what? Looking for some way to define itself? A being with the power to transform a whole world, the power to create . . . What did this being evolve from? How? Is it a single being? Or one of many?”

  Sean squinted aloft. The sky was no longer quite cloudless; some rain was drifting down in sheets from a solitary anvil cumulus, though falling nowhere near this meadow. The cloud reminded him of a watering can. Overhead, swallows and swifts of ordinary size darted and veered in a swarm, as one creature. They swooped about a tiny, child-like body with long blue wings. He spotted another of these imp-birds —then a unique kind of flying fish: it was a long sage-green torpedo with wings which seemed to float upon the air as though the air was water. It looked rather like an earthly shark, fitted with long wide insubstantial whale flippers. One of the imp-birds darted around it as it slowly sailed the air.

  Sean pointed. “What are those up there? Cherubs?”

  “Sprites,” replied Jeremy. “Metamorphs. Evolving phases.”

  “Phases of people? Or what?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I’m not up there, am I? And there’s a skyfish, look.”

  The flipper-shark banked lazily, following some unseen aerial stream as the sprite landed on its long back. With its own wings widespread the sprite stood erect, on tiptoe, balancing like a surfboard rider—and was borne away.

  “Does this superbeing have a name?” asked Austin.

  “If He has a particular name, He hasn’t told us. You know, asking His name seems a bit ridiculous. Unlike asking yours, Athlone!” Jeremy gave a wicked grin. “The clothed man could possibly answer you. He’s His confidant. I’m just His fall-guy. Or so it seems at times.”

  “Does the planet have a name?”

  “Gardens, Eden and Hell—that’s all we call it. Depending on where you are. Three worlds in one.”

  “Oh, and I suppose we have a trinitarian God!” jibed Tanya. “How original.”

  Jeremy peered at her. “Perhaps He’s a dialectical God: thesis, antithesis and synthesis?”

  “Give me strength!”

  “He will. And that’s the sun up there. It had a number, didn’t it? Can’t recall what it was.”

  “4H . . . Oh never mind,” said Austin. “Whatever He is, He’s switched our ship off. Does He have messengers—those flying sprites? Can we get in touch with Him?”

  Jeremy looked, instead, at the magpie perched on the ramp. “Birds are me
ssengers. Birds of death, birds of life.” “Caw,” said the magpie. “Caw-caw.” It preened its feathers, ducking its black beak under a ruffled wing.

  “The difficulty is sometimes in understanding the message.”

  “That bird is intelligent!” creid Denise. “It’s listening to us.”

  “Well, it isn’t dumb.”

  “Caw, ” the bird agreed. A glossy eye emerged from under its wing.

  “Can you communicate with it?”

  “That’s really the clothed man’s bird. He has the hot line to Him.”

  “Who’s this clothed man?” interrupted Sean. “Is he human? Or is he another person in your holy trinity?”

  “He’s the Mystery Master. I think he knows what’s going on—or he’s a few stages ahead of us in finding out. That’s his Great Work. So far as I know he was one of the colonists— frozen in hyb, so we never met before. He gives his name out as Knossos now, so I guess he was a Greek. Perhaps he was the original Cretan liar?”

  Jeremy approached the magpie. The bird bounced from foot to foot. It turned its head from side to side, fixing its right eye upon him and then its left, triangulating. Perhaps its left eye saw things differently from its right.

  “Is Knossos nearby? He is, isn’t he?”

  “Caw.”

  “Should these people try to find him?”

  “Caw caw.”

  “Will he find them?”

  “Caw. Caw."

  “What does God want them to do?”

  Abruptly the magpie launched itself at Sean. Sean only flinched momentarily, though he did shut his eyes tight. The bird’s claws gripped his shoulder. Gently it inserted its beak into his ear, as though in search of ticks. Its throat rattled. The noise reverberated in his ear, vibrating his ear-drum, and he heard blurred words where before he only had heard a bird call.

  (“Find God?” croaked the voice. “Want to? Have to learn how to, first! Stay here instead? Pleasant. Yes? No?”)

  The magpie withdrew its beak and launched itself off his shoulder, unbalancing Sean as it flapped up into the air. The bird rose and circled and came to rest high up on top of the starship, where it was only a tiny black blot. Flapping its tail, it shat another stain then took off and away.