“That way,” repeated Jeremy. “I fancy it.” The ice field looked quite uninviting, even to people whose feet were burning. It stretched away and away. One would need to find food. One would need to fish. Muthoni still had her pitch fork. Now it would be a fish spear.
They walked till they felt like dropping, then staggered on some more till they actually did drop: right into sleep. Unless they achieved sleep at the first attempt, as they found over the next immeasurable stretch of time, the frozen surface kept them tossing and turning; the more so once it began to melt—then they were sliding and shivering on a skin of chilled water. Or else the skin refroze, glueing them in an ice cradle which one volunteer must tear himself free of, to melt the others free. Their bodies were tough, though; they withstood. Then, to get food to keep going, they must search for a treacherous patch of thinner ice to smash and poise over like Eskimos, waiting for their fishy raw breakfast to surface . . .
They travelled for twenty or thirty sleep-times in this manner. Knobs of islands were rare, far from the shore, and all those they came across were defended either by solitary hermit gladiators or else by lonely brooding machines which brayed out questions then chased them off with volleys of iceballs. Hell was hardly overpopulated, however. Loneliness begat crowding; crowding begat loneliness: a demographic see-saw. How many fertilized human ova had there been in Copernicus? Twenty thousand? Plus the original thousand cold-sleepers. The population of Hell couldn’t be any greater now—especially since no children were bom. People couldn't, thought Sean, be devolving into animals . . .
Eventually, Jeremy was on his feet again, belly healed, keeping pace with them.
Eventually, too, they sighted a further shore: a rim of dark red sand and heat haze which promised paradise to their frozen bodies ... for the first few thawing seconds, at least.
FOURTEEN
There were no directions in Hell . . .
A combo of musicians plucked and blew and banged out discords on the hot desert shore beyond the ice. One player was crucified on the strings of an enormous harp. Another lay on top of an organistrum, turning its handle. A third banged the bass drum with his head . . .
“Oh no!” Denise rounded on Jeremy accusingly. But Jeremy only laughed.
“No directions in Hell: isn’t that what you said, Athlon?”
“We walked in a straight line!” protested Muthoni. “I was watching the stars. They can’t lie! This is a planet. It has a surface, and a north and south. We must be somewhere else! How can different places be the same place?”
Sean stepped forward from ice into fire, feeling a moment’s blessed relief then a new sort of pain.
“They aren’t the same people,” he said slowly. “This isn’t the same place.”
“Look at that guy crawling round with the score on his arse. Look at old toad-face, the conductor! Look at the horse’s bones! We’ve walked round in a bloody great circle.”
Sean shook his head. “It’s the same scene. But it isn’t the same place.”
As on the other side of the ice, the players achieved temporary integration. Now they were playing Richard Strauss. The bones of the horse rose and danced. Organs strung themselves together in the rib cage. Sinews sprouted. Veins and arteries spread like desert vines in a rainstorm.
“First Parsifal—now Strauss! Why don’t they play medieval music?” complained Denise. “Is that the whole point? They’re playing the wrong music, anyway?”
“Score one for the away team,” laughed Jeremy, but apparently he didn’t know.
Then the music grated, and the horse collapsed into a heap of bones again.
“See,” pointed Sean, “that’s a woman banging her head against the drum, and the crucified man isn’t blond—he has black hair. They’re definitely different people. There must be zones in Hell where the same scene repeats itself! Just as they're repeating the same events ad nauseam. Is Hell so impoverished, Jeremy? Is that an essential quality of Hell: impoverishment? You can go, as far as you want, but you’ll arrive at the same scene some place else?”
“Quite a small painting, really, to wrap around a planet,” shrugged Jeremy. “I told you there were quite a few Cavalcades here and there in the Gardens. As well as quite a lot of empty space.”
Sean had a piece of fish bone stuck between his teeth. His jaw had been too numb for him to notice this before. Now, in the heat, his gums felt inflamed. Angrily he dislodged the sliver of bone and spat it out. His spit sizzled as it hit the soil.
“Is God constrained by Knossos? Can He only imagine what is in Knossos’s mind? Incredible! Is He impoverished, Himself? He’s supposed to be the Creator of this damn world. But what has He actually created?”
“Quite a lot,” said Jeremy, offended. “Really, quite a lot! Soil, air, plants, transmutation towers, bodies.”
“But He needs inspiration.” Sean shook his head. “I suppose a superbeing must be a kind of now-omnipotent God! He didn’t make the universe. He’s only part of it, the same as we are, whatever weird kind of part He is.”
“If we were all divine Gods,” said Jeremy floridly, “and we were to sit together at table, who should bring us food? We bring Him food—for thought. He digests it. Oh, but He is a God. He is a God whom we can know—rather than some abstraction, some nowhere-nobody. You’re quite right. He isn’t something ‘outside’ the universe. Why shouldn’t a universe give rise to a God—rather than the other way about? But He certainly has the power to create, maintain His creation, raise us from the dead. You’d better believe it.”
“What the devil is He?”
“Devil? Ah, it’s a while since I’ve been here, but . . . that I believe I can show you.” Jeremy smirked. “Not everything’s repeated. Some things are unique.”
Abandoning the musicians to their frustrating exercises, the party walked inland, in so far as away from the ice was ‘inland’ . . .
Yet it was. Hell mightn’t have directions, if the same scene could repeat itself in a number of places, but as they trod the hot soil past burning towers and ruins where ignorant miniarmies clashed by night—striving to become less ignorant by wearing their ignorance down to the bare bones?—Sean became aware of ... a tendency, a slope. It wasn’t in the terrain as such, but in his own steps—in the way he planted one foot in front of the other. It felt as though he was walking steadily downhill, even though his eyes told him differently. Something drew them all ‘downhill’ like dust down the gravity well of an invisible world.
“Hang on.” Sean looked back the way they had come. Still plainly visible was the expanse of red soil, the ruins, the random skirmishes. Nothing sloped uphill; and yet . . .
He started to retrace his steps.
“We’re heading this way,” called Muthoni.
“This way, that way: I think there’s only one way now. It’s a new variation on the theme of no-direction. Can’t you feel it? Wait a bit—I won’t be long.”
Jeremy watched brightly. He appeared to be cheered by Sean’s behavior. “He’s right. Perceptive of him!”
“What does he want: a private pee?”
Sean found it impossible to walk a straight course. He could see perfectly well where he was going, but his feet paid no attention to what his eyes told him. Crab-like, they meandered to one side of his intended line. He re-oriented himself and marched off again. And found himself sidling off-course. Once more he stepped out, this time with his eyes closed, and did not stop until he bumped into Denise, who stepped aside a moment too late. He had come around full circle.
He stumbled, laughing, into her arms. On the impetus of his stumble he kissed her.
“Try it yourself, cherie. We’re inside a horizon we can’t see—but our bodies obey it! Or our minds do; I think it must be a psychic horizon. That means—doesn’t it, Jeremy?—that we’re on our way out.”
They stared at him, Jeremy nodding.
“We’re going down the sink hole of Hell. Let’s hope the sink isn’t blocked. Maybe Hell and t
he Gardens have the shape of a Klein bottle in the God’s mind . .
“The sink isn’t blocked. It has a filter, though.” Jeremy winked. “You know who.”
“The one and only Devil, right? God’s extension in Hell? He has to be His assistant, doesn’t he? We can provide all the rest of the deviltries ourselves.”
“Usually one can’t find this place for a long time. It’s a hell of a job,” nodded Jeremy. “Of course everyone, in their own way, finds it eventually. We should consider ourselves privileged.”
“Privileged ... to meet the Devil?” cried Denise. “What kind of Devil? Oh no!” For she already knew.
“Bosch’s Devil,” said Sean. “The blue, bird-headed gobbler of souls squatting on his privy of a throne. If the God’s true to the painting, then that’s who.”
“Like I said,” agreed Jeremy.
“Look over there, against the skyline—do you see it?”
They strained their eyes. However, all that Denise and Muthoni could make out as yet was a vague white hump against the horizon.
Sean could see what was there quite clearly. Was Hell dark primarily in order to force the eyesight—and the inner vision—to evolve? There was an old saying: Nihil erat in intellectu quod non prius in sensu—nothing could exist in the intellect which didn’t first exist in the senses. Here, the sensory environment—the visible darkness, the burning unconsuming heat—assaulted one’s senses with paradoxes. Was this so that the intellect, which did not care for paradoxes, could conceive the paradox of a God?
A shooting star raced down the sky, reminding Sean briefly of space; of the existence of an alien solar system where, objectively, they were—objects of the alien God’s manipulations. Yet how familiar (though grotesque) was this scenery which He had sculpted for them . . .
Muthoni rubbed her hands together. “All downhill from now on, eh? I guess we’ve almost come through. Just the Devil to deal with ...” She peered into the darkness.
“All I need now is a cheerleader!” groaned Jeremy.
“Well, it hasn’t been too abominable. Apart from madness, and cold, and heat ...”
Jeremy nursed his belly, and looked as though he was about to fold up again. “That’s what’s bothering me. Minimum energy pathway—complacency comes before a fall. ”
“The hell with that!” Sean snapped out of his reverie. “It is downhill—one-way-only. I just proved that.”
“Gueule du Diable!” Denise shivered. “Downhill into the Devil’s gob.”
As they walked on across the empty darkling plain towards the white shape looming on the horizon, Jeremy cast furtive looks around.
Even so, he almost missed the coming of the demons.
FIFTEEN
With a sudden cry, Jeremy took to his heels. “Run, run!” he screamed back, as an afterthought.
They stared around, nonplussed. There was nothing.
Then Denise looked up and whimpered.
Demons were dropping from the zenith as though newly cast out of Heaven, though there was no sign of Heaven up there, only star-studded darkness.
Metallic devils, cyborg devils—with visored helmet heads sprouting antennae, thin steel arms clutching weighted nets, swollen blue pot-bellies and folded butterfly wings! Half a dozen of them were falling fast. Their wings suddenly opened —brimstone, spotted with false eyes like peacock plumes— clapping the air with sonic booms. The creatures shat convulsively, offloading ballast. A foul rain fell.
“Run!”
The demons’ diarrhea was transformed into billows of asphixiating gas as it splattered the ground and the fleeing four.
Gasping, eyes streaming blindly, Sean ran . . . directly into a clinging, tightening mesh. It tripped him and wound around him. As he crashed to the iron soil, the net jerked him back up again into the air—out of the clouds of tear gas. Struggling to breathe, still half blind, he squinted through a mask of mesh at rocking ground and yawing sky.
Three other netted bundles were pirouetting beneath climbing demons, who warbled at each other with the noise of high-speed data exchange. The demons slowly flew a great circle course with the distant white hump as its center.
Presently a wide crater appeared, dimly lit by fires deep down in it, flickeringly illuminating machines, apparatus. A wretched, insane scream rose thinly from the depths, again and again.
The helmet-head dipped toward Sean’s head. “Welcome to the food-testing unit,” it clucked. “So what shall we test first? Your testicles, perhaps? We miss so many pilgrims on their way to the Master’s banquet! But you smelled quite . . . unprepared, from far off. Unbasted, unspiced, unstuffed, untenderized! We shall rectify that, beginning perhaps with a stake up your rectum.”
The demon shut its wings and dropped like a stone, pulling up with an ear-splitting smack of air against those seemingly delicate wings only inches short of tenderizing Sean’s whole trussed body on the crater floor. The net sprawled open.
Other demons—wingless ones these, animated suits of armor with tridents clutched in their mailed gauntlets— meandered over. As they herded the prisoners to their feet with sharp jabs, Sean saw the source of the screaming.
Beyond an open oven large enough to walk around in, a man was stretched on a complicated upright rack. ITie victim s body was abominably long; even his fingers and toes had been disjointed to twice their proper length by separate pulleys—and his scrotum was a long rubber hosepipe held in a vice. A tinman with a beast’s head—a long piggy snout, wet little eyes and jagged hairy ears capped by a tall cook’s hat—was supping in his testicles with a long silver curette spoon, while the man shrieked. Other tinmen with a jackal head and an eagle head supped, too, from other parts of his body selectively—the tunneled-into liver, the eyeball, the flayed thigh—nodding like connoisseurs, spitting what they tasted into tall silver spittoons set around the rack.
The butterfly-winged demon sidled up to Sean. “Shock has a terribly detrimental effect on the quality of our Master’s food, you see! Pale soft exudative meat is the result. Wet, poor-textured stuff! Muscles become deficient in oxygen, glycogen breaks down to lactic acid. His food should be pre-stressed well before death, to get all this out of the system.” It cackled metallically. “Hell exists to prepare the flesh of those who offer themselves to him, but some fools still rush in. Our Master possesses a highly delicate sense of taste. We must protect him from offensive flavors.”
“N-non-nonsense,” stuttered Jeremy. “I’ve never seen a band of you together! You’re just pirates. Mavericks. You’ve no right. Devil!” he shrieked, as though the Devil itself would reach a hugely long arm over the crater wall to haul him to safety in its bosom.
“Non-nonsense must be sense,” the winged demon mocked him. “We like to learn about flesh, for the day when we too will be fleshed out. You wouldn’t deny us that? What, hinder our evolution?” The demon stamped its foot petulantly.
“These things have gone mad! The real Devil is a lot saner ...”
“Too damn sane,” giggled the demon. “So are you—you’ll give him indigestion.”
“Madness is sanity,” leered another. “Sanity is damnation.” This one seized Jeremy by the wrist and hauled him off. Other demons dragged Sean, Muthoni and Denise. They were incredibly strong, for their size. Resisting them was like trying to stop oneself being pulled along by a horse.
The demons dragged their prisoners past the oven and the great rack toward a hill of giant cooking utensils—fluted pastry wheels, cutters, whisks, carvers, poultry shears, hinged gingerbread men molds, rolling pins, lemon- squeezers, colanders—which now took on the dimensions of vicious intruments of torture. A great meat shredder and mincing machine, a pork-fat cutter and a sausage boiler stood puffing away, steam-propelled, at the base. A tinman with a bearded goat’s head—which seemed now, as did the other beast heads, to be an organic head-mask, something protoplasmic growing around the metal within, perhaps built up from slices of people—scrambled up the hill and sledged back down i
t astride a gingerbread mold. Jeremy gibbered as demons squeezed him inside this, slammed the lid, danced up and down on it till it locked, and bore him off to the oven. “Run, run, as fast as you can!” they chanted.
A winged demon seized Denise’s hair as another capered down the slope with a selection of shears, small and large. “Too many appendages!” it shrieked. “Off with the hair, then the fingers, then the toes. Then the tongue and the tits! Shear the ears, nip the lip! Then a bit of grafting, and bind up a nice rolled ham. Perfection is a sphere.”
Another began pinching Muthoni all over with metal claws, drawing blood. “I smell black pudding!” it cried. “Too much white fat in this one though! Is it a white pudding or a black one?”
It reached for Sean, and nipped his buttock searingly. “White pudding in a black skin? That’s a sin! Got to change your skins around!”
Sean bit down hard on his lip. “How can you evolve if you’re so cruel?” he said. “You can’t evolve this way! You’ll never learn to live!”
The demon with shears skidded to a halt. “Oh, so the pudding argues? So riddle me this, my wrong-skinned sausage: what is the only thing in the universe that is deliberately and intentionally cruel? Isn’t it man? And woman? So if we can be deliberately cruel, we will be men at last! Ha!” With great hacks, it sheared off Denise’s golden hair, stuffing it into a hole in its visor. From a nozzle in its rear a long golden wire extruded, in coils. It whipped this wire, which had been her hair, around her, trussing her tightly; caught up one leg, crashing her to the ground, and snipped off one little toe which it passed to Goathead to taste. Denise either fainted, or was knocked senseless by her fall. The demon abandoned her temporarily, in annoyance.
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