The machine hummed and clattered, as if about to disgorge a printout from its grille; any such printout would, however, be a shredded one. “I accept your answer-which-is-not-an-answer. I will think about this subterfuge.”
The camera panned to Denise. “I ask you this: why do you want to burn that dead bird?”
“If you put it that way, I agree it sounds pretty senseless. But cooking is the difference between, well, raw nature and culture. Civilization.”
“If only I could achieve nature,” remarked the machine wistfully.
“You will,” promised Sean. He felt a surge of sympathy for the blacksmith. What had been civilized about their slaughter of the cockerel? On the other hand, if no alternative foodstuffs were provided . . . The people and animals and birds on this world seemed to be all mixed up inextricably in some kind of panpsychic, metamorphic pool, didn’t they? So Man must feed off himself. . . perform an act of selfincorporation, self-incubation . . . and resurrection. For where did the spirit of the cockerel ‘go’ to? If nothing died ... To the Gardens? Or Eden? That was why there was no fruit to eat here. We, swallowed by Hell, are the fruit collectively. Man consumes himself-—by the venting of passions, through blood-lust, by way of the devil in him—and transforms his humanity in a synthesis of the clash of opposites mixed up pell-mell in Hell. Evil fights and feasts . . . and is subsumed. In the ecology of the psyche there was a logic to this, beyond Denise’s soft sensitive ecology.
The camera pivoted toward Muthoni.
“How does it feel to be alive? Answer spontaneously!” “You idiot machine, it isn’t something you feel as you feel a stone or heat or hunger. It’s . . . it’s ...”
“It’s bigger than our knowledge of it.” Sean helped her out. “The T that knows is an island in a preconscious sea—but without that sea there wouldn’t be an island. If we could become ‘superconscious’, I wonder if we’d be unaware of the fact of consciousness—or if ordinary consciousness would become the sea? If God is ‘superconscious’, are we ... ? Are we His consciousness?” he puzzled.
“The half-nigredo must answer, interrupter!”
“No, listen to me. You’ve got full instant access to all your circuits, right? Everything’s available to you? You can search your whole self immediately?”
“She must answer, not you. If you wish to bum that corpse.”
“Logical to the last,” said Muthoni. “Even if logic’s no damn help.” She glanced at Sean, who was mouthing words at her. “What does living feel like?” she resumed craftily. “It is the thing that you do not feel, till it has gone away. Then you have no more knowledge of it, anyway. It’s the air you breathe. It’s the water the fish swim in. It’s the necessary medium.” (Sean nodded encouragement.) “It’s the medium of feelings. Machine, you already are alive! You just don’t know it. Why don’t you shut off part of your circuits—forget part of yourself? No, reprogram yourself so that you inhibit the possibility of knowing more than a percentage of yourself at any one time. Then you’ll be like a human. You’ll have something to search for—in yourself.”
“Inhibit part of my circuitry? Know less, to know more?” The machine considered the suggestion briefly. “Very well! I shall attempt this, with a time-delay command to restore myself to full awareness for comparison later on. Now you may burn that dead bird.”
Humming, the machine froze in mid-stroke of the hammer. It swayed. It jerked. Abruptly it brought its camera to bear upon the hammer head and very precisely dashed the hammer into the lens. Thus blinded, it heaved itself up on stumpy flesh legs and waddled forward on to the fire bed. It halted in the fire, licked by flames. Its deformed legs spat and hissed, charred, and presently fell apart. As they disintegrated, the bulk of the machine slumped down into the fire. Distraught, the chained crone began pumping more and more water into the quenching trough—which soon began to overflow.
“That’s one devil out of the way.” Muthoni chuckled. She extended the spitted cockerel into the hearth, turning it about and about. She’d neglected to gut the bird, though. Never mind. No need to stuff it. It was already full.
“I thought you were giving it some genuine advice,” gasped Denise.
“What did old Knossos say to Sean? ‘Only that which can destroy itself is truly alive’? See, it’s testing out the nature of life in a wholly absurd, wholly human way—which seems perfectly reasonable to its inhibited circuits! Maybe it expects to be resurrected as something alive because its been able to think of this strategy. Resurrected as a fish. I dunno. Something struggling upward. Maybe I’ve done it a favor.”
Their feet were wet now. Water was flooding up toward the fire bed. The water danced and steamed as it dammed up against the wall around the fire.
“But why did it blind itself?”
“So that it could see—inside itself.”
“Poor thing,” mourned Denise. “We’ve destroyed it. It isn’t a devil at all. There aren’t any devils in Hell. Just us. We're the devils.”
“Hey!” shouted Sean. “There’ll be one hell of a bang if that water floods in. Stop it!” he bellowed at the chained woman. Demented, she only pumped harder while her robot armorer heated up in the flames. Sean ran to pull her withered hands from the pump handle. They fluttered back to it. He picked up a broken brick and pounded at the link in the chain that bound her. Sparks and brick splinters flew. She cursed him volubly and pumped. The pool of water began to bulge. Only surface tension held it from the fire.
“Get out! Get out!” Sean dragged Denise and Muthoni behind a ruined wall. The part-barbecued cockerel wagged on the prongs like a satire on a lance and pennant. Sean pulled the two of them down.
Then the world exploded: in a bang too loud and too close to be heard. All that they knew of the explosion was a bright flash, a surge of heat and a meteor storm of burning fragments that peppered their bare skin, stinging like wasps. The ruined wall was left canting over them alarmingly. And they were deaf—to remain so for minutes afterward.
Staggering clear, they discovered pieces of armor and junk scattered far and wide. Of the smithy itself nothing remained but a flare of gas. Of the blacksmith, nothing but a battered camera and leaves of metal which might have been parts of it or alternatively dented armor. Of the chained woman . . . On top of the leaning wall there perched, grotesquely, one severed foot. Further away, a thin leg lay. Otherwise, nothing.
Mouthing, Sean urged Denise and Muthoni out and away. They found Jeremy lying where they had left him, but a firebrick had cracked his shin, rendering him more of a stretcher case than ever.
Jeremy’s mouth flapped in complaint, but they couldn’t hear him. He gestured at the cockerel.
Muthoni wrenched a half-raw leg from the bird. She passed the corpse on to Denise who ripped off some breast with her nails.
They tore and munched. Reluctantly at first, then less reluctantly. Sean felt he was eating his conscience. And it tasted fine. Presently he scooped inside the entrails. He ate the heart and liver raw.
THIRTEEN
“Carry me that way,” said Jeremy.
Toward the source of music. Or noise. Whichever. If it was music, the little orchestra hidden by the dunes seemed to be forever tuning up . . .
The beach itself, when they reached it, was another sludgy thermal boundary—between hot desert and a sea of ice, an arctic waste. Various rocky islands pierced the ice sheet, away in the starlit distance, with ruined keeps and towers perched on them. A few people were out on the ice, propelling sledge-like boats over it, armed with hooks and axes and fishing nets.
The burning sand sucked at their ankles as they trudged along the bend of the beach.
Sean realized that he wasn’t so much inured to the pain of the hot ground by now as propelled by it into a kind of heightened, superconscious state. His nerves were tired of reporting pain as such, and his brain of interpreting the messages as pain, nevertheless his nervous system still reported; but what it reported now was the concept of sensation. It re
ported what sensation is, what it means to sense a world through the medium of touch (and smell) as well as sight. His threshold wasn’t rising so as to blur and numb his feelings. Paradoxically it was sinking, under the assault of stenches and burning earth, making him hypersensitive, bringing back a semblance of the old preconscious animal integration with its world. (He had the night-sight of a cat by now, too; he was even perceiving colors richly in the gloom and had been for some time, he noticed.) Yet the pain estranged him from the environment, distancing him even as he became the more vividly aware of each sharp stone, each nugget of hot grit, each breath. The whole scene was like a thought he was thinking, realized in soil and ice and fire, a thought which was no longer a thought but a thing—a thing which thought him, instead . . .
They rounded a hump of sand, and saw the players— though it was hard to say for sure whether players were playing instruments, or their instruments were playing them.
Denise recognized the orchestra.
“L’Enfer des Musiciens!”
“It’s Bosch’s Hell of the Musicians,” nodded Sean. “It’s all true to the painting—so far as I remember it. None of your latterday vibeguitars or minimoogies or acousticks! It’s the medieval Church orchestra, just the way Hieronymus Bosch painted it.”
One player was banging his head against a big bass drum. Across this drum leaned a long trumpet-like pipe. A redfaced man with puffed cheeks and bulging eyes blew into the I mouthpiece, producing an even basser mooing. A giant lute rose from the sand like a spineless stringed cactus. A blond man was crucified across the peg-box and finger board of the lute. His fingers and toes plucked blindly at the strings, providing tenor accompaniment to a harp which sprouted at right angles out of the sound hole of the lute. Impaled within its strings writhed a lanky attenuated victim, whose constant spastic trembling urged a rippling gurgle from the strings, as of water going down a drain. A giant hurdy-gurdy stood beside the harp-lute, its keys and melody strings, drones and friction wheel operated by a pair of lumpy dwarfs. A violinlike wail sang out from the hurdy-gurdy: the treble part. And a wrinkled fellow, squatting on all fours, played a flute stuck up his own anus—a fart flute.
A very fat man crawled round and round the group as fast as he could. He had staves of music tattooed across his buttocks: tattoos that changed shape to the squirm and ripple of his vast flesh. The players’ score was thus only visible to each player for a time, and then in a distorted way. Between glimpses the players guessed or improvised, producing clashing disharmonies vhich might nevertheless have resolved into harmony if only they could all have got in step with each other.
A freakish conductor waddled after the crawling buttocks of his score, draped in pink muslin. He had a toad’s head. From it, a long thin knotted tongue flicked out, lashing and tickling the buttocks, to keep some kind of time—or maybe to disrupt it.
Near the players, on a dune slope, reposed their only audience to date: which was the skeleton of a horse.
As the travelers arrived, the various bass and tenor and treble tunes did all come together suddenly in counterpoint. The whole ensemble behaved like a clock of mechanical dolls which simultaneously and triumphantly struck the hour, the day and the year. And they carried on—precariously but perfectly. Even scored for those strange old instruments, the music seemed familiar. Sean whistled along with it. It was part of Wagner’s Parsifal, scored for organistrum, harp-lute, drum and flute. It was Grail-music.
The horse’s skeleton shook itself and rose. The bones danced to the music. As they danced they began to take on ghostly flesh: muscles, nerves, veins, arteries, viscera and connective tissue. Eyes appeared in the empty sockets, a tongue between the teeth. Fat and flesh, skin and hide formed over this flayed anatomy. The horse trotted on the spot. It pranced, it reared. It performed a levade, a courbette.
Then the toad conductor delivered a tongue-lashing to the score-buttocks, and dissonance reigned again.
The horse neighed and faltered. It heeled over on to the sandy slope and resolved back into a skeleton again: dead bones, dry bones. Unmoved by the increasingly harsh noises, the horse lay still.
They had lain Jeremy down. If a dead horse could dance to this music, he could at least try to stand up! But he didn’t. As soon as the phrases of Parsifal became perfect foolishness again, he jabbed an accusing finger at the medieval combo.
“It’s their own attempt at alchemy,” he said. “Without the secret. They’re only trying to transform a dead horse—into a live horse. Even if they get it up and going, they have to keep it up. But they don’t have the transforming substance. Only He knows what that is—and Knossos.”
“Is that why they’re in Hell?” asked Sean. “For setting themselves up as little Gods?”
“Oh, this isn’t a punishment. He isn’t jealous. What’s there to punish? Ignorance? You don’t punish ignorance. You enlighten it. Enlightenment can be painful. Very painful. It stretches you.” He indicated the crucified player and his companion stretched on the harpstrings.
“I suppose we’ll find people being stretched on a rack next,” said Denise petulantly. “In what way are this lot being stretched?”
“You see, the horse is what they would like to ride. It’s like that cow the woman in the ditch was dreaming. It’s a fantasy of transformation. But it’s a dead fantasy. They’ll be transformed when they’ve become harmonious—when they don’t need any instruments except themselves.”
“I see!” exclaimed Sean. “They’ve projected themselves upon their instruments. So they can’t play them properly! Until there’s an end of that kind of projection! Until they absorb the instruments back into themselves.”
“You appear to know more about this than I do, Athlon sighed Jeremy.
“I wonder. I’ve said it before: He’s letting us work it out instead of absorbing us into it, the way everyone else is absorbed. Does it take time to absorb people? Are we being tested—assessed? Maybe He’s using us as a touchstone, to see how some hitherto uninvolved humans react to His program?”
“Unevolved?” Jeremy grinned.
“Uninvolved. But you may have a point there! Could He be setting us up as new witnesses—the way He uses you? New baselines of ordinary consciousness?”
“Friend, you can take over from me any time you want to. I’d prefer to move on.”
“And so you have,” said Muthoni. “You’re in Hell now.” “Thanks to you. It isn’t the first time. I don’t suppose it’ll be the last. Still, I’m not the Captain Van der Veld that was. I’m making some sort of progress—even as a witness.” Denise looked thoughtful. “I wonder how our Captain’s getting on?”
“I’ve . . . I’ve almost forgotten about SchiaparelliSean admitted. “It’s sort of . . . slipping away, isn’t it? But that’s what we are. It’s what we came here in. It’s our real lives.” Jeremy scuffed some sand about. “Not here it isn’t: your real lives.”
“Paavo and Tanya and Austin . . . Will we ever see them again?” mused Denise. “Or will we all be beasts or fishes by then? Transmuted down the scale? Reculer pour mieux sauter . . . Devolved, the better to evolve again—as He sees it?”
“I didn’t say I was positive that people become animals. / never have.”
“Is there any way out of here, Jeremy?”
Jeremy looked sly. “When you’ve only just got here? It takes other people a devil of a long time. You’ve got to work at this, you know! It took the old alchemists all their lives long to manufacture the Stone and change themselves. They were experts at the Work, too.”
“At least it was just alchemy,” snapped Muthoni. “Not alchemy filtered through the mind of a crazy painter.”
Sean frowned. “Bosch was sane, or he’d never have survived his own imagination. Perhaps surviving this Hell intact is a test of sanity . . .No, not a test exactly: a means to sanity. Higher sanity. One man’s madness is another’s sanity?”
“They’re all mad in Hell!” raved Muthoni. “Those struggling crowds,
these musicians—the lot of them! I ... I admit I became mad. It was easy. I just followed the minimum energy path.”
“Everyone’s potentially mad, Muthoni. Man’s three brains aren’t properly integrated at all. All the old bite-programs nattering away under the surface! Maybe we have to express this conflict—maybe we have to become mad, to become sane. Look, the unconscious is Hell, but it’s also salvation— the way schizophrenia can be the only route to reintegration sometimes. Only, we haven’t really gone mad yet, just teetering on the brink.” Sean squeezed Muthoni’s piebald hand comfortably.
“Equally, too much reason is madness,” said Denise softly. “So maybe we are all mad, after all.”
“Carry me that way,” said Jeremy, pointing out over the ice field.
“Why?” asked Sean suspiciously. “I thought there were no particular directions in Hell!”
“If you don’t go, under your own power,” said Muthoni firmly, “then you’ll follow the minimum energy pathway down into your own particular madness orbit. These musician alchemists are down in theirs. And you just run around and around that orbit ad infinitum, as though ... as though you’re pushing a ball around a track with your nose.”
“Till you wear it out, and drop into clear space again,” agreed Jeremy. “That’s how people pass through Hell. You’ve got to wear it out.”
“Wear your nose out?” laughed Denise.
“Wear the track out, dummy.”
“It’s odd,” interrupted Sean. “Endless repetitions ought to reinforce a pathway in the psyche. But here ...” Consider his own reaction to the all-pervading pain—no longer pain now so much as a state of hyperaesthesia, a dawning of hyperconsciousness. “Maybe repetition does burn out the old tracks! Allow new ones to take their place. That’s a kind of mental alchemy. Distillation and redistillation a hundred times over of the same material for years on end, till one day the . . . stone, the transforming substance appears inside you. Then you pass out of Hell? Preliminaries take place in the Gardens. Here’s the hard work with the alembics and athanors. You’re right about minimum energy paths, Muthoni. Either we can slide over into some mad parking orbit in this distillery—or we can go. On. ”
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