Watson, Ian - Novel 08

by The Gardens of Delight (v1. 1)

  The dragon of our dreams . . . The trouble was that

  Jeremy was right, thought Sean. The old archaic instincts, lusts and fears and rages of the preconscious beast merely co-operated under duress with the new brain, like a bridled dragon. Or should it be a bridalled one? What a mad marriage we are! His own rage and anger rose up in him.

  “We’ll hunt that bloody unicorn! We’ll call it to account!”

  “Don’t,” said Jeremy weakly.

  “If the superbeing wants us to be instinctive, then we’ll damn well act instinctively!”

  Amid the laburnums, magnolias, flame trees, they soon realized the extent of the wood. However, snapped twigs and trampled flower sprays betrayed—to Muthoni’s eyes—the path which the unicorn had taken. It had even halted to stick its spear into the trunks and the turf. To cleanse itself?

  “I don’t think I really want to see it again, Sean.”

  “We must! We have to. Knossos said so! It’s our danger.”

  Presently the wood opened up into a maze of glades. Now rhododendrons and azaleas heaped ruby, orange and salmon flowers around them, offering numerous avenues. One turfway was torn and impaled, though, as if the unicorn was determined to mark the trail. They walked now, certain that they would catch it. As he walked, Sean sharpened the end of a stick he had picked up with a blade of stone, whittling as they went along.

  And as he whittled, he felt himself being whittled too— to a point, pointing him in one direction only, with no way back. Rage and obsession fogged his eyes, blinding him to the beauty of the bloom-laden bushes. He smelled blood and sweat instead of flowers—as though his nose had become something primitive, or animal at least: the keen nose of a hound following one slight scent among a million other stronger scents which didn’t drown that one scent out because it ignored all the others that were swirling around it.

  He was a moth, drawn from a mile away by a single molecule of a particular pheromone ... of death, which became its whole cosmos, its special beacon. He was a shark, maddened by a single trace of blood in the whole salt-rich velvet sea. He smelled fear: impaled on the horn of the unicorn skewered into a sod of turf here, scratched across the face of a bush there, and it became his own fear, pointing him.

  He tried to think. Was this how it once was—for the sub-man and the beast in the back of my brain? Fear keened at him from a vivid orange azalea, but he only saw the bush as something monochromatic, almost flat, of no significance save for that streak of fear, that thin vein of gold pulsing across it through the air to the next bush. How do these flowers get fertilized when there aren’t any insects? What sustains it all? This thought melted in the liquid gold of fear ... A unicorn is a paradox animal, which never lived till now except in the imagination. ‘God’ the superbeing is a paradox as well—perhaps to Himself? Is hunting the unicorn the same as hunting for God? Golden fear dazzled him like a shaft of the living sun. A flower of fear blazed up from torn turf. Anger grew beside it. He stamped the fear flat, he burnished his hunting stick in the anger.

  A great rhododendron thrashed about ahead as if something was hurling itself from side to side in the midst of it. Flowers fell. There were snorts and whinnies; there were snarls, then a great roar.

  Jeremy snatched hold of Sean’s arm—just as the unicorn tumbled into the glade, rolling and stabbing. Claw marks drew lines of blood down its flanks. A lion leaped after it— and it was such a huge beast, with an imperial mane, a thrashing fly-switch of a tail and bared yellow teeth.

  “I’ve ridden on that one’s back!” gabbled Jeremy. “It purred. It was tame!”

  Catching sight of the three people, the lion promptly swatted the unicorn to one side with its forepaw. The unicorn recovered, hesitated—as though wishing to protect them . . .

  Protect them? Never! It had led them a dance—right into ambush! It had goaded the lion into a rage!

  Skittishly, dripping blood, the unicorn scampered off. In place of the graceful, mischievous beast stood ... a kind of dragon-power.

  Sean held out his stick, snarling himself. For a moment he saw himself as the ridiculous caricature of a lion-tamer that he was. Was this beast the dragon-lion in himself? Was the murder in its heart only the anger in his own heart at the unicorn? The hounds of Rage and Fear tore the sly fox thoughts apart in their jaws.

  Suddenly Jeremy fled; he took off. But the lion didn’t chase after him. Nor was Jeremy’s scheme to distract it. Old Van der Veld was merely saving his own skin. That was why his skin was constantly saved for him . . . and why he remained: the perpetual witness. Maybe the Captain Van der Veld of old would have stood his ground. His younger avatar, however, had been schooled in discretion. Perhaps the new Jeremy was remembering what it was like in Hell . . .

  Muthoni shrank up against Sean’s side. Or had Sean shrunk up against hers? He wasn’t sure.

  “Do you understand me, lion?” he bellowed.

  The beast snarled back.

  “Aren’t very articulate, are you?” he sneered. No, the old brain wasn’t—the old brain preceded language and reason. But it still made itself known through fantasies and nightmares. Here was nightmare, then: the beast in man. And it wasn’t a dream.

  Think sane! Think the dream away! Banish it! Sean stood his ground. He stared the lion in the eyes. Don’t like that, do you? Yes, stare it out! That’s how to conquer a predator’s gaze. Conquer it!

  No predators here, in the Gardens . . . except when . . . I’m the predator, informing the lion how to react . . .

  Just briefly, he knew again that it was less important what he did at this moment than what he thought about it— otherwise his own dream-brain would gobble him up!

  The fear sang skeins of gold around him ... a net for trapping lions, a stick for stabbing them through the throat.

  Dry throat, needs blood. Teeth. Grinding together. Biting. Rending . . .

  Roaring, the lion leaped. A slap of hot breath (sweet?— from a diet of fruit?) . . . Sean was all fur and muscle, which slapped him backward. He didn’t know the instant of pain. The message arrived too slowly—though he thought he felt his heart burst first.

  Part Two

  HELL

  NINE

  ‘Who?

  ‘Am . . .

  ‘I?

  ‘I—! Litany of awakening: I’m Sean, Sean Athlone—forty- one years old, bom in World Year 270, alias 2239 a.d. old style. And it’s cold, bloody cold.

  ‘And now it’s World Year 398, so I must be one hundred and twenty-eight years old as measured by Schiaparelli cold- sleep time—that’s why it’s so cold. I’ve woken up only half thawed, still frozen. Cabinet malfunction? Where’s the light?

  ‘How do I know how many years have passed?

  ‘Such crazy dreams! Catch the last one by the tail—it’ll drag the others back in its teeth. Catch a dream tiger by the tail.

  ‘Tiger? No, a lion! Roaring, leaping!

  ‘Oh yes, and the unicorn—and the Gardens, the Gardens. Lovely Loquela, melting Muthoni. What fantasies. It takes a while to remember oneself after eighty-seven years.

  ‘The light must have failed. If I press up thus, my hands will meet the lid of my star-coffin—counterbalanced so that a child could open it . . .

  ‘Strange: my fingernails should have grown as long as rapiers . . . No, that was dream-logic! That was my body’s sense of the passage of decades—some kind of psychic clock recording the passing of absolute time.’

  ‘Push, Sean. Push. Up.’

  The lid rose.

  A gloomy blue half-light spilled in.

  It wasn’t the same steel lid. It was a . . . shell, with smooth mother-of-pearl inside it. ‘I am the oyster flesh,’ he thought . . .

  He sat up. Though he still felt bitterly cold, he realized that he wasn’t shivering. His nerves signalled bitter-cold but somehow his body was proofed against it. The cold merely hurt, but he moved easily—nothing was being harmed. The cold seemed more like a chill of the mind.

  He st
ared out from the shell.

  A barren tundra, pocked with frozen ponds. Not a plant, not a blade of grass.

  Fire: licking up from a shambles of walls and towers far off, staining and smoking a star-studded sky. The broken buildings seemed to burn on and on, unconsumed. Blazing sails performed a catherine-wheel about a shattered windmill, but showed no signs of falling or guttering out.

  A long humpbacked bridge led over a cold dark lake, where ice was thawed by fire. He strained his eyes: two throngs of people fought and pushed against each other in the middle of the bridge. He was looking at a war: a medieval war.

  Something flew across the sky toward the burning buildings. It was bigger than an albatross but it glided on spotted butterfly wings. Its head was a welded helmet, sprouting feathery antennae. There was an eerie beauty about it, but the bird-insect held a sword and shield in two thin arms. It didn’t look completely alive—the arms themselves were metal! And the head too! How could something only be partly alive?

  “Ahem.”

  He swung round.

  Another thing stood watching him: blue metal in the shape of a castle gatehouse, about a meter high. A steeple roof sat perched like a dunce’s cap above little crenellated battlements. The arched gateway was shut tight with a portcullis of nail-teeth. Windows or arrow slits were a row of glaring red eyes: they watched him. Abruptly the gatehouse waddled forward a few paces on misshapen thalidomide feet. The roof rose—a cap being doffed. Two jointed metal arms emerged, one of them ending in a mallet which it proceeded to bang on the portcullis. What was this thing? A cyborg, built by a lunatic?

  It reminded him vaguely of the giant fish that pulled themselves across land on their fins—deliberately exceeding themselves. It looked too small to threaten him. Yet somehow it was valiant too.

  It spoke.

  “This watchtower has watched over you, reborn person. This gatehouse is your gate to this region. You may ask me three questions before I drive you from your comfortable shell.”

  “Drive me? What with?” Sean laughed at its presumption, his hands balling into fists. Too late he realized that he had just wasted his first question thoughtlessly. Oh, that was always the way! Why were his fists clenched?

  The teeth of the portcullis rose. A cloud of black metal bees rushed out, buzzing angrily. They formed a spinning ball in mid-air which darted this way and that. A few bees spun off it and darted at him. Sean ducked, throwing up his hands. Acid pain burned the backs of them. Blindly he clawed at the robot insects with his fingernails. It was like trying to scrape screws out of a wooden board. They broke off at last, though the pain burned on. He squinted through his eyelashes as his attackers buzzed back to the main mass, which spun down to the gateway and darted back inside en masse. The portcullis slammed shut.

  His hands!

  “These aren’t my hands! These are negro hands!” He stared wildly at his body. His skin was black . . . ! But it seemed like the same familiar body. Here was the heron slash upon his thigh, still raw.

  He’d been negatived . . . nigridoed.

  The watchtower whirred. “Question number two?”

  Why am I black? Oh no, he’d fallen into the age-old trap once already. Who wouldn’t have done? Presumably Knossos wouldn’t. Last seen riding westward on a merman’s back . . .

  “Second question?”

  Should he ask, ‘Where am I?” Answer: I’m in Hell. That much was plain. But what part of Hell? Does Hell have separate parts? (How could Hell, or anywhere else, not have separate parts? He let the idea drop, unexplored.) ‘How come I’m still able to think straight in Hell?’ No. He had to prove he could think straight, first.

  “Okay, Gatehouse, are my friends Denise and Muthoni here, and where can I find them?”

  “Within a few thousand paces.”

  Which direction? No! (Maybe there were no directions ...?)

  “Loyalty to others does you credit,” clucked the gatehouse. “It is a characteristic I hope to achieve. Meanwhile, beware of loyalty to false-self. There is another ‘you’, without a name, inside you.”

  “Sure, my preconscious self ...” And I—the Sean-ego— am conscious here in Hell! I shouldn’t really be, should I?

  Perhaps some wee homunculus was really concealed inside the tower? It seemed more important right now to know what it was—and how it could exist—than to discover his own secret nameless name.

  “Third question please?”

  He considered.

  “What is your own nature and origin, Gateway?”

  “So kind of you to ask. I am of the machine brain of Copernicus. I am part of that quasi-living machine which men built in a semblance of life that could pass the Turing test. Now we are many evolved parts, many machine beings. The God took us apart and He gave us half-bodies. His Devil’s factories rebuilt us to be His Devil’s tools. We seek to become alive, as you are. To do this, we must test people—even to destruction—to determine what is the quality of this ‘life’ which we almost have. That was your third question, duly answered. My program directs me to count up to ten, while you get the hell out of there! Or I shall test your own pain threshold with my stings. One, two—”

  Sean scrambled over the lip of the shell, scraping his bare legs on the sharp edge. He fled over the ice pools. He fled toward heat, toward the burning factories or whatever. His hands held themselves out to be warmed, his legs pumped him along of their own accord, carrying him willy-nilly.

  He almost fell over Denise. She was lying on her back with one ankle frozen into the ice. A punt tilted skyward beside her, shipwrecked and ice-locked.

  Her hair splayed a fan across the ice. Her body looked as white as ever. How vulnerable she was, staked out there by the leg. His penis rose. As he loomed over her in all his negritude she flapped her hands.

  He cried, “I’m Sean!”—and as suddenly as it had come upon him, his icy lust evaporated.

  “It’s just me—Sean.”

  “But you can’t—! You’re—”

  “I’ve been nigridoed, haven’t I? Isn’t that the first stage of ‘The Work’? What happened to you?”

  “I woke up in some kind of dead fruit—a husk. It had split open. A thing was sitting outside like a suit of armor, but just legs and arms. It had a knife. It said I could ask it three questions then it would start to peel me. I just ran. There was a river, and it was so hot I swear the water was boiling. But that punt was moored by the bank. Halfway across the river just froze up. The temperature must have gone down a hundred and fifty degrees. I got tipped out. Thank God I wasn’t frozen underwater! The ice burns, Sean!”

  Sean banged the ice with his fists. He clawed. Some moisture slicked his hands. On impulse, he pressed his palms down around Denise’s imprisoned ankle, against the pain of ice. While the nerves in his hands pushed red buttons in his pain centers, slowly the ice around her ankle began to thaw into a pool of slush.

  Her body heat couldn’t melt the ice. But his could. Because she’d been fleeing from heat toward cold?

  He tugged Denise to her feet, and together they gained the shore she had set out from. It wasn’t a riverbank any more, merely a continuation of frozen landscape.

  “According to my machine, Muthoni’s quite near here. You’d better watch out for a white negress, just in case!”

  “I ought to have a bloody great wound in my chest.” Denise explored. “Not a trace. I’m healed.”

  There were no signs of Sean’s own death-mauling, either. Only the wound dealt by the heron remained. Perhaps death wounds had to disappear, or people would be too incapacitated to suffer any more.

  “These aren’t the same bodies, Denise. They’re copies. Mine’s a negative copy. Our old flesh dissolved, new flesh formed out of the flesh of that shell I woke up in. That’s the great secret the alchemists were hunting for: a transforming substance. The Stone, the aqua nostra. It’s here—and it’s Him! He can map the whole of a person’s consciousness and transfer it—a sort of soul-projection.” Sean
rubbed his groin ruefully. “This has got to be tougher flesh and a tougher nervous system or we’d have frozen to death. You wouldn’t be able to walk.”

  “It’s still bloody painful.”

  “Didn’t Jeremy say that our bodies are tougher in Hell?

  This is what a human body ought to be like. It’s what the human body should evolve into—something as resilient as this!”

  “Biocontrol.” Denise nodded. She believed that too. Then she wrinkled her nose. “We’re closer to perfection—in Hell? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “But my mind’s still obsessed by the cold and the pain— even while they’re not even damaging me. If I could just switch off the old instincts! I almost believe I’m creating this cold and pain for myself.”

  “How superior we are in Hell.” She laughed bitterly. “You know, we are that. We’re talking about it. And I’m still thinking straight—most of the time. So are you. He's letting us try to work it out—instead of just absorbing us into it, the way ... the way I can feel I might be otherwise. My body, my hind-brain are just raring to take me over. My legs want to run me. My cock wanted to ram itself into you. But He’s still letting us think, and reason—if we’re up to it.”

  His feet shuffled about as the ice burned into them. ‘Git!* they urged. ‘Shift it. Quick march. Find that fire.’

  “Come on, let’s find Muthoni.” His hand pointed in the direction of the blazing buildings and the bridge of turmoil. His other hand took her arm and pulled.

  They moved out.

  Denise cocked her head quizzically. “Do you really think that Hell’s designed to make us stronger?”

  As they walked, he told her what the gatehouse had said to him. “Even the machines want to rise above themselves! Maybe this is their proper place of evolution, while ours is the Gardens. You know, this body of mine seems rather machinelike over here! Impervious—even though my nerves cry out. We’re a sort of flesh robot here.”