Muthoni shrank away.
“Tush, you must learn to be swallowed up. Ndiyo?”
“How do you know Swahili? You can read my mind!”
“Not at all. I tasted that in dear little . . . Denise, on her
way through. She must have picked up a few expressions from you. Let me tell you something,” the Devil hissed conspiratorially.
As Muthoni leaned forward to hear it, the claw snaked out even further than before. The Devil heaved her up bodily.
“You’ve whetted my appetite for more Swahili!”
The Devil crammed Muthoni into his mouth. A few moments later she fell out of his bowels and down the well shaft, gasping and staring in horror.
“Now you, I think,” he remarked to Sean. “I shall keep as my fool or jester. I know where you’re from now! You’re invaders. Extraterrestrial pests! Do I have to keep open house for the whole galaxy? Must the whole cosmos beat a path to my door? Must I process the entire universe through my guts? Is there no end to it?”
“To what? The universe? Don’t you know?”
“Dear boy, I am unknowing. I swallow modes of knowing. You think you know a lot, don’t you? Ah, I have the flavor of you from your two friends—who aren’t, incidentally, quite so friendly as you may imagine. But isn’t that true of everyone? Hidden resentments lurk, ah yes. Grievances and bitterness. Would you believe that they believe you were sent along to spy upon their mental health? They believe you’ve been watching them all the time, weighing every word. Denise fears that her parascientific fantasies will be reported. Muthoni is positive that you regard her as a savage throwback, in your heart of hearts—a generic savage. Thus she raged like a beast. Because of you. Why should you wish to accompany these covert enemies? Listen to me, Sean: do you know what the greatest torture is? It’s to know someone else’s mind. It’s to read it with a lick of the tongue. No wonder my bowels stay slack! Your flavor, hmm . . . That of a brain peeler! You think, no doubt, that you can analyze me like a patient on a couch?”
“I don’t believe what you say about Muthoni and Denise distrusting me. There may be an element of that—but it isn’t central. If it’s so rotten knowing other people’s minds—”
“Ah, the burden,” groaned the Devil. “It really gives me diarrhea.”
“If it’s so rotten, then you must be a real masochist—and so must I.”
“Twin souls? Ah, my jester! You alone can crack jokes with the King! Am I not King? Am I not a religious presence?”
“You’re part of an alien superbeing who happens to be able to terraform worlds—this world at any rate!—and who can recycle souls, and who calls itself the God.”
“Then I am indeed a religious presence. Bow down to me, my fool.”
“I said it ‘calls’ itself the God.”
“Is it not better by far to have a God whom one can meet and experience, rather than an empty vacuous abstraction— who is no God at all, but only a meaningless name? Who, then, can be God for the God Himself? Would that be Himself alone? How solipsistic. You see, jester, I do not believe in God, if I am part of the God. I deny Him.” The Devil cackled merrily. “As do you. So you are mine to play with. On the other hand, were you to worship Him in me . . . that might just liberate you from my clutches.”
Sean decided that he should have taken the advice of the eastern negro at Last Stop Tavern. The master of lies was spinning a web of argument for him.
The Devil leaned avidly towards him. “What shall be the form of your worship?”
“Obviously the religious spirit—the sense of worship, of awe—is inherent in mankind ...” Sean temporized, aware that he was very close to being forbidden passage through the Devil’s guts, and kept as a toy instead.
“Is it inherent in me?” The Devil pounced. “I repeat: whom do I worship? Himself that is Myself? How can God have a God? Thus, there is none. Yet I believe because it is impossible.” The Devil clacked his beak. “That saying has passed my lips ... on the way down my gullet.”
“I’ll tell you who you should worship. Because it’s exactly what you’re doing already! You worship us. Yes, Devil, us. Because we’ve made the whole of you into a viable God. And how do you worship us? By a sacrament. By taking our flesh and blood into your mouth, and transubstantiating them— transforming their substance into—”
The Devil shrieked. It snatched Sean up in its claw. He lofted, dizzyingly. Before he knew it was happening, he was crammed head first down the dark gizzard. Peristaltic convulsions squeezed the wind from him. He slid, he oozed. He was the outside-in of a squirming python. Like a baby, birthing, his head burst from the stinking cheeks of its rump. His lungs sucked in a suffocating fetor which no one could possibly breathe. It filled his lungs, nevertheless, as his head hung down into the fart-sack.
Pressure crushed his shoulders. For a moment it felt as though he was going to be sucked back into the Devil’s bowel. Then he fell free. His face parted the membrane of the gas-bag. Briefly he stared down the gully pit. The hole in the ground opened into blackness, nothingness. Down into the darkness he fell. Far off, deep down, there seemed to be a funnel of light. But either the Devil’s gastric juices were already at work on his flesh, dissolving it after brief contact, or the sheer acceleration of his fall overcame him. He blacked out.
Part Three
EDEN
NINETEEN
A hand lightly held Denise’s wrist. It took her pulse. Or perhaps it granted her a pulse? Power, wakefulness and life itself flowed from those fingers through her wrist into her whole body.
She opened her eyes.
A man in a pink robe bent over her. His feet were bare. He wore a loose toga-like linen garment, fastened at the neck by a golden brooch. He had golden, shoulder-length locks, a darker auburn beard and a thin drooping moustache. His nose was long, his forehead high. His eyes bulged somewhat.
Making what appeared to be a sign of peace or blessing, He drew Denise to her knees. Then, letting go of her, He walked down the greensward where she had awoken, toward a grove of orange trees. She found she was kneeling on a little hillock. Beyond the grove she could just see the far side of a lake of milky blue, shot-silk water. Something pink, like a spire, poked up. A long-eared hare hopped and bounded, but crouched still as He passed.
Her body felt laundered crisp and clean. Her Primavera hair fell sleek and golden again down her shoulders, over her breasts.
“Oh,” she breathed, touching the tresses wonderingly. Her injured foot . . . was healed, the little toe restored.
“Wait,” she called after the departing stranger.
He turned, and regarded her with a certain severity. Or was it appraisingly? Assessing her—as a potential bride? If God descends into the flesh, how far down into it may He choose to descend? Perhaps He was already wedded to her by His mere touch upon her wrist . . .
“You,” she said chastely, rather abashed. She wondered whether she should cover herself with her hands. What for? He had already molded her breasts and thighs.
“I am He,” He replied calmly and continued on His way. He disappeared through the orchard.
So I’m Eve, she thought. But where’s Adam? She looked around her.
The Sun stood at ten o’clock. It was morning, of the world-day. Here was a paradise garden, of lawns and groves and pools, perhaps more beautiful than the Gardens, but in a quieter key: of restful pastel colors rather than the bright pigments of the Gardens. All was in proportion, too; Denise saw no giant birds nor enormous berries—not yet, at least. Morning mists might just have been warmed away by the kindly sun—though she also realized that it had been this way for a very long time. Here was a place of freshness rather than luxury. She wondered whether the creatures copulated, or simply played ... No, there was a scent of fecundity in the air: of new creatures, new life. She sniffed: a fragrance of verdant milkiness, as though crushed grass were to spill not sap, but fresh milk. It seemed to waft from the lake beyond the grove—not a scent of copulation,
but of birth. She stared hard; the far shore seemed to be . . . bubbling, with a wave of emerging creatures. She rubbed her belly. Could she too have a child? No, perhaps not: she was His child.
The hare bounded up to her, nose wrinkling. Liquid eyes stared up at her. She ruffled its long ears. It stayed by her for a while, heart and sides thudding, then abruptly shied away—halting and shying again, as though to lead her.
“Hi, there.”
Muthoni blinked, sat up and rubbed her eyes. Her body was as black as soot once more. The mottling had all gone. She ran her fingers over her skin deliciously. Yes, she was restored to herself. Jeremy, for his part, looked younger and firmer—less hesitant and equivocal. Muthoni had a curious feeling that someone else had just left them, tiptoeing away . . .
They were in a rough shelter of poles and thatch, leaning against a sandstone wall. In front of this makeshift hut was a narrow beach, lapped lazily by an opaline lake. A slim rococo fountain of translucent pink porcelain rose from the center of the lake. The base of the fountain was a tiny clinker-like isle studded with various crystal tubes and phials. The fountain spire itself was adorned with ceramic leaves, sprays and husks. A pheasant and a peacock perched in these branches. Blades of water spilled at various heights from taps as thin as fencing foils. Soft rapiers of liquid descended to perturb the lake, adding to the ripples set up by a gang of mallards paddling among reeds on the far side—and by a parade of creatures marching and squirming out of the water below a small honeycombed cliff: frogs, salamanders, axolotls, turtles, tortoises. A heron stood astride these, dipping its neck occasionally to seize a wriggling body and toss it down its gullet: the quality controller? A single hint of death, balancing the burgeoning new life.
To one side of the cliff grew an orange grove. On the other, cropped grassland rolled away towards a line of blue hills as sharp and abrupt as flints. Grazing antelope roamed the plain. A solitary elephant, as white as chalk, marched there with a large ape riding upon its shoulders like a mahout. Flapping her ears, the elephant trumpeted jovially.
From behind his back Jeremy produced a pomegranate which he held out to Muthoni. She prised open the red-gold rind and sucked in the sweet pulp, spitting the seeds out into the lake.
“Thank God for some fruit! Is this really true? No more cannibalism, no more burnt roosters, no more raw fish?”
“Thank God indeed,” nodded Jeremy. He produced an orange for himself. Together they breakfasted.
Sean awoke. Where was he? He had ijo idea. Once, years and years ago, he had got roaring drunk and woken up next morning similarly with no idea where he was. What city, what country. Yes, it had been in a beer garden in old Salzburg beside the foaming Salzach river that he had drunk too much, fooling himself that so long as the descending saddle between two hills in the distance and the ascending peak of another hill beneath it maintained their perfect criss-cross, the landscape somehow embodied cross-hairs of sobriety. That old memory . . . ah, it was so like chasing dreams, each of which held the tail of the previous dream in its teeth!—reminded him that he had indeed recently got very drunk, somewhere. The alcoholic amnesia of long ago reminded him of another amnesiac awakening recently . . . from a very cold sleep. No, not from the real cold sleep!
Now at any rate it was warm. He stretched his limbs sensuously. He lay on soft turf under a swollen fleshy tree which bore spiky green fronds in a fan shape: a nopal cactus mated to a palm tree ... A curiously naive tree. A vine wreathed its trunk and lower branches bearing clusters of amethyst grapes. Poised on the trunk, a scarlet lizard fixed its eye upon him. Above the fronds was a powder blue sky. There were orange trees some way off—and the edge of a lake.
Who am I? My personality’s slipping away. I can still reach it if I make the effort. No, it isn’t really a question of ‘reaching’. Rather, of unreaching: of falling back into the confines of my old self, readopting that particular limited existence. In this moment of forgetful awakening, I’m free of myself.
I dreamed ... a living dream. Ah yes, of a starship called Schiaparelli; of a planetfall on a world which is a painting rich in the deepest psychic imagery made over into the actual natural environment. I wandered across Dayside with my friends—till the death-which-was-not-death took me. I awoke in Hell. The Devil ate me. I can make all that my history and become someone called Sean Athlone again ... or I can simply make it into several phrases in a language that speaks of what-I-am-not-yet. Now what did I say to the Devil to persuade him to pass me through his system, so rudely? Ah yes, I posed a paradox: That he worshipped me. I achieved paradoxical insight. I spoke the language of the psyche, whereas before I only ever spoke about it. Now it speaks me, and everybody who lives and dies and lives again here.
A shadow fell across Sean’s face. A pink-robed, bearded man in his thirties—though by whose counting system?— looked down at him. Sean sat up abruptly.
The auburn beard must be a set of false whiskers. The face belonged to . . .
“Knossos!”
The man shook his head. “Knossos is my son, who lives in the Gardens. My spirit always flies with him—it is his bird companion.”
“You’re . . . the God? The Superbeing? Why do you look so much like Knossos?”
“I am that aspect of the God, who is God-the-Son: the Son of Man. I must resemble Man. God and Man mirror one another. Only in this way can I present myself to you, Sean.”
“But Knossos is really Heinrich Strauss: a man with such a powerful obsession that—”
“That he compelled me to resemble him? I hear your thoughts, Sean.” The God smiled gently. “Watch.” Bending over, he scooped His hands into the turf, slicing it as smoothly as a knife cuts butter. He held the sod up in cupped hands, squeezed them together briefly then opened them. A robin redbreast stood beady-eyed upon his palm. He tossed it away into the air. Up it flew to perch on a frond of the nopal palm, where it sang joyously.
Slowly, the tuft healed its scar.
A miracle—or a conjuring trick?
“Where did you get that bird from?”
“From elsewhere in this world, where it was dying—in the jaws of a civet cat. I am the transmuting medium, Sean. My bones are the lapis: the Stone. In My veins flows aqua nostra. Enjoy My world, I enjoin you—learn from it.”
“I’d like to learn where you came from.”
“In a wider sense, I am begotten from the Whole God.” “So you aren’t really the God?”
“I am, and I am not. I was always here, but did not notice My own presence—in your human sense—till your people, who are now My people, came and became My mirror. I, who am speaking to you at this moment, am only a part of My Whole Self. I have resigned from that Wholeness, in order to be for you. My Devil has resigned even further from the Whole Light, even unto darkness. He is the dark side of the mirror.”
“Have you any idea what’s going on in Hell? The pain, the madness, the tormented, tormenting machines!”
“Sean, since My Devil is there, surely I am there too. Wherever a being is, I am. It is My hope that you will redeem Me, through your suffering and joy and learning—redeem Me from the darkness of matter, which is at its nadir and also at its turning point in Hell.”
“You want . . . help?” asked Sean, astonished.
Must a God necessarily tell the truth? The truth, that is, other than men—such as Knossos—could conceive? Knossos was clothed to conceal his secret knowledge; that was his occult robe, as high priest. This God wore clothes too: to conceal the brightness of knowledge from men—and even from Himself? Otherwise, He couldn’t be here on His world in person? I can talk to the God, thought Sean, but it’s only talk. It isn’t insight—into what lies beneath robes and flesh and bones.
This particular God had been ‘specified’ when the Copernicus entered the God-zone of this solar system—beyond which lay the rest of the universe, where such conditions plainly did not apply . . .
God watched him patiently. “It is My pleasure to walk in this Ede
n, and talk with My children,” He remarked, invitingly.
“Do you need food? Do you eat?”
“I am nourished by you all, Sean. Even by you most recently arrived.” God pursed His lips. “You are hungry for energy after your awakening. Please eat.” He indicated the bunches of grapes hanging from the vine on the nopal palm. “A Tree of Life.” He plucked a bunch of dark grapes and handed them to Sean.
The sweet juicy pulp invigorated Sean as soon as it was in his mouth. He wolfed grape after grape while God stood watching him at his banquet.
Sean wiped the juice from his chin. “So what was this world like before? Airless and barren? It’s too small to hold this atmosphere, but the gravity’s stronger than it should be for the size. How do you manage that?”
God shrugged pleasantly. “I am not . . . the Whole that did this. Why, it happened! Fiat mundus! Now I maintain this world.”
“How long do you plan to maintain it for?”
“A millennium, of course—a thousand years. What else?” “How can anybody measure years when there’s no day and night—when they both last forever?”
“You forget, Sean—just as My other children forget, freed from the tyranny of time—that this world still travels round a sun. Each traveling measures one more year—timeless, true, but still a year.”
“Till you’ve counted up to a thousand—then what?”
“The Work should be completed.”
“Thy Will will be done? Or is it ours? You’re a strangely Christian gnostic deity to find here in space!”
“I mirror—”
“Yes, Knossos and his gnostic alchemy. There must be some way to see you—as you see yourself! That’s the real Work, isn’t it? To get behind this tapestry of living symbolism? That’s what you want us to do, isn’t it—because you're trapped in this tapestry spun from yourself! Aren’t you, alien superbeing?”
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