God looked mildly ruffled. “Why call me that? Surely that is less than a God.”
Did a ripple of pain pass through Hell as Sean demeaned Him? God believed He was God—even if He hadn’t been, to begin with—and He had the evidence of this whole world to back Him up . . . We made Him into God, so He became one.
“You’re God, but you don’t really know—the whole picture! What is this ‘Whole’? Does it know?” (Now God pursed His lips, as though some constraint prevented Him from answering.) “Whatever else, you must be the first agnostic God!”
Sean looked around. A peacock pecked at the lawn. It quit pecking, cocked its tiny head and erected its great plumes in a quivering fan of iridescent blue and green towards God—who smiled approvingly. A white lamb wandered by, bleating at the sudden verdant sunrise of feathers, at the trembling bright eyes there arrayed.
“Are my friends here too?”
“Nearby.”
“We’ve been here such a little time compared with everyone else, and already we’ve died twice. They spend years in Hell, don’t they? Do you want something special from us, God? Something new?
“You should know what I want.”
“Before I can give you it?”
Looking into the calm, young, golden-framed face, knowing that He—or some greater Whole—was responsible for the engineering and the continued existence of this whole world in the form it now took, Sean quailed.
“I recommend the oranges,” smiled God, indicating the grove like a head waiter encouraging a guest.
Were they the trees of knowledge? Accompanied by God, Sean ambled towards the orange orchard. At its edge, he plucked and ate.
The orange tasted wonderfully sweet, however it didn’t suggest a solution to him. Was there, perhaps, no solution?
“Raise your eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh wisdom,” said God cryptically, and He took His leave.
TWENTY
There were two Eves for Adam: one all black, one white and gold. First, Sean found Muthoni with Jeremy, taking their ease beside the lake of the porcelain fountain. Beyond, an African savannah opened out towards jagged slate-blue crags standing in a row like so many petrified cloaks, waistcoats and jackets. A single white giraffe with a cartoon head prowled the savannah. Further away, perhaps an elephant.
Then Denise wandered down through the orange grove to the lakeside.
“I talked to the God. He wants something. But he can’t say what it is. I have to know what it is, first.”
The Devil had gobbled Sean down—digested him—as soon as he’d suggested that the Devil actually worshipped Man. And the God was confessedly Man’s Son. So, then: a deity entrammelled schizophrenically by a band of space-faring neo-apes?
“. . . whose psychic Fiihrer was Heinrich Strauss.”
“Hmm, I was the Captain, though,” remarked Jerem/ wistfully. His earlier, resurrected confidence seemed to be evaporating. “I never even met Strauss in the flesh. I was the tough stern Captain. Used to be, anyway! How could he have been our, hmm, leader? In what respect?”
“He understood the secrets of the psyche. He imposed his vision when the God scanned you all. The ur-God, before He descended into Son and Holy Ghost-bird and Devil and whatever else. And forgot what He originally was.”
“The God has been demoting me ever since, at Strauss’s instigation? Keeping me confined to psychic quarters?” Jeremy spat out an orange pip. “You understand those secrets too, eh Sean? You’re the brainpeeler from Earth. Do you suppose God wants you to brainpeel Him?”
Sean laughed harshly. “It’s hardly necessary. It’s spread out all around us everywhere we go. Only, it isn’t His brain. It’s ours. This world’s projected out of the psyche of us all. But the kind of projection is shaped by one man’s vision in particular. I’m not a brainpeeler, though, Jeremy. Machine- assisted reconstructive psychiatry went out a few years after you left. I’m an ‘endopsych,’ if you want the cant term. The unconscious terrain, the inherited archetypes. Neojung- ian. This gained a whole new dimension with the possibility of interstellar colonies. How well can the age-old inheritance mesh in with alien circumstances? Very well indeed, at first sight, on this little world! The only trouble is, the inheritance hasn’t meshed in with any alien environment at all. No, it has projected itself. It’s become the environment, almost to the exclusion of conscious neo-cortical thought for quite a lot of people. We’ve got the whole paraphernalia of psychic reintegration working itself out worldwide. But did the God engineer this voluntarily—or did He have no choice?”
“God chose what to create for us!”
“Ah, did He? Or did it choose him?”
“I don’t see what’s so unconscious about the Gardens. Okay, people have forgotten things—who they once were— and what they’re living now is based on that painting which is full of symbolism, right? But it’s a symbolism based on alchemy—and alchemy is the science that transforms people into perfect, superconscious people. This world may be a laboratory, but it’s all out in the open. Most people are aware of this at the back of their minds—if not at the front of their minds! God is the transforming spirit. Do you think people don’t cooperate, even in Hell? How they yearn to! How I would, if only I could stop remembering what brought us here and who I was—if only I could snap out of it!”
Sean had rarely seen Jeremy so passionately frustrated.
“If I could really become a new man! Not just the old one, modified and chastened in new flesh. No, I tell a lie. I haven’t been diminished by some agreement between God and Knossos. That’s paranoid thinking. That big stem Captain personality was all a front. There, I’ll admit it! I schooled myself to it, but it wasn’t ever the real me. It was my space armor. Oh how I worked on it, every zip and seal.” Jeremy laughed giddily. “Wonders! I can admit it. Another layer of the onion has been fried off in Hell. But ah, I am ever the witness. I am what-was. I’m held apart.”
“You may be conscious of what’s going on, because it’s hardly going on in you!” retorted Sean rather cuttingly. “Perhaps someone has to be an example of ordinary consciousness. The others are all living out what are basically unconscious processes, and you won’t convince me otherwise —whatever Loquela and the hermaphrodite and the rest of them may say.”
“Well, you’ve some idea of what’s going on too! So that makes four of us.”
“Seven,” said Sean, “Maybe seven. Don’t forget Faraday and the other two.”
“I hope they’re all right,” wished Muthoni. “I hope a lion hasn’t eaten them. They’d be in Hell for years, running around in circles like tape loops.”
It’s all very well for you, who can meet God,” snapped Jeremy, self-pity welling up in him. “I haven’t. I missed him by a hair’s breadth this time. Do you know something? I’m going to stick to you people like a velcro hook. I’ve said it before: you’re my luck.”
They were walking across the savannah toward the cliffs when a leopard burst from the grass and raced toward them.
“Oh no, dear Lord!” Jeremy slipped shamelessly behind Muthoni, a little boy hiding behind his mother’s buttocks.
The leopard skidded to a halt and paced around them, snarling.
With a deliberate effort (so it seemed) it curbed its lip-curling, teeth-baring aggression—automatic finale to its dash—and purred instead: heavy, deliberate, wracking purrs. It rubbed itself in between Muthoni and Jeremy, prising the once-Captain away from her. Once it had separated him, the leopard reared up, planted its paws upon his shoulders, and began thrusting him steadily further away from the trio. After dancing backward with it for a while Jeremy lost his balance and sprawled in the grass. The leopard sheepdogged him, with a nip and a nudge.
“Go ahead,” he wailed. “God doesn’t want me along. I’ll be waiting back at the lake. You’ll come back for me? Promise you will!”
“Of course we will,” called Denise.
“If we can,” added Sean, sotto voce.
Summoning up
his dignity, Jeremy scrambled back to his feet and loped off decisively toward the lake. For a while the leopard paced him then it sprawled in the grass and snoozed. Jeremy continued on his way; and they on theirs.
“Was God operating that leopard?” wondered Muthoni. “What does He have against Jeremy?”
“Anywhere on this world we’re in God’s thoughts all the time,” said Denise, quite reverently. “He must have other plans for Jeremy.”
A voice spoke from out of the clear air.
—“In My thoughts all the time . . .” an echo, except that there was nowhere yet for the words to rebound off; besides, the words were altered.
“Did you hear that?” she cried.
—“To the hills, whence cometh wisdom ...”
“That’s what he said to me before. Go to the hills. God!” called Sean. There was no answer; the words had slipped away into tendrils of breeze. “This world’s like a huge recording! We’re recorded. He can play us back, body and soul, from Hell to Eden. We’re part of Him and so is everyone else. They’re all linked: people, birds, fishes . . . They’ve all drifted into a kind of protoplasmic and psychic sink. We just haven’t dissolved into this sink yet.”
“And Jeremy?”
“Jeremy believes in the God, when all’s said and done.” “And we don’t?” sighed Denise.
“He exists—but what is He?”
“A glob,” said Denise. “That’s what we’ll find in the hills. An alien glob, that dreams things into existence, and swallows existence into its dreams. We’ll find something that’s been hunkering here for eons on a barren world, but couldn’t change anything or create anything because it hadn’t got any pattern. Until people came. Then it made them a world full of alchemy to suit Knossos. Full of gnostic knowledge and a Devil and a God. Because people can’t do without God. ‘Awe’ is part of our programming, isn’t it, Sean, from the first crash-bang of thunder? And if there’s superhuman Creation—as there is—you’ve got to have a Creator, or the whole thing’s illogical. But there’s really a glob.”
Sean scratched his head. His scalp felt itchy. “If people can’t do without a God, and if Captain Van der Veld-that-was was his own God to himself—but a false one—then he really needs the God to exist outside himself, doesn’t he? Now he does. Even though God teases him like Abraham, demanding sacrifices—and everything on faith. He’d be destroyed if he—”
“ . . .discovered a glob. What do we tell Jeremy when we discover one? We’ll pat him on the head and tell him of course there’s a God. Even though it’s a glob.”
“Let’s find out.”
A blue-waistcoat hill rose up soon in a smooth metallic stone cuirass. It was the obvious place to head for. From the open neck of the hill a marble spire with a pepper-pot top rose up high into the sky. The bottom stone button of the waistcoat was undone— a blue boulder lay to one side. A vent led into the hollow belly of the hill . . .
Within the hollow hill was a cathedral nave of cool blue stone. Massive pillars rose from floor to roof. It was a building but at the same time it was a natural grotto. It was both, either— indistinguishably. Morning light spilled down from the opening in the arched, ribbed roof through which the spire rose up, as massive as a sequoia sprouting from the stone. Even though they spoke in whispers, a tide of voices flowed up and down the nave, a hidden murmuring choir.
At the far end of the nave should be the altar . . .of the alien God. Something was indeed there: a rock, a boulder. They walked slowly down the nave toward it. The faint slap of their bare feet beat like wings around the high vaults.
The cathedral stood empty, waiting for what? For worshipers? Hardly! Everyone already ‘worshiped’ the God by being what they were outside, by their mesmerized striving.
Sean shivered. Being in here was like being in hyb again. It was as though he’d been shrunk down to a microscopic scale and set loose in a coldsleep cabinet belonging to some absent giant. Outside lay the world—which wasn’t a ‘real’ world, but the dream world of the giant’s unconscious projected into reality. But the giant had absconded. Here they were mites, below the level of the projection. Almost; not quite. Was there a level below even this? A crypt, where Denise’s all-powerful glob hunched, projecting the world and the God and the Devil—unable to tell them what it was, yet wanting them to find out?
No one came to worship or confront a glob, when God Himself walked the world. So the cathedral remained empty.
“Behind the altar,” murmured Sean. “There may be a crypt underneath all this—the heart of the world. It wants us to find it, but it can’t express itself. Everything already is expressed, outside. Pressed out of us. Molded into shape.” This cathedral cave was perhaps the first . . .projection, the first bubble of metamorphosed matter breathed out by It into the airless vacuum originally surrounding this planet: a meeting place where It might have come to terms with the people of Copernicus, except that as they came closer into this solar system more and more had been specified out of their minds, captivating the God. No: generating it into a God, a God of a particular kind . . .
They reached what Sean had been trying to compel into the semblance of an altar. It was a large excrescence of porous tufa: a stone sponge, a rocky tumor coughed out of the throat of the thin cave or tunnel which cleft the floor behind it, leading down at an angle of forty degrees or so. The tunnel walls glowed phosphorescently. They converged as they descended as though the tunnel was only staying open with an effort, squeezing back the rock that tended to drift together and seal this fault in the otherwise impeccable cathedral floor.
“Strait is the gate,” remarked Sean.
“To what?v asked Muthoni.
“The truth? What God is? What God has forgotten that He is?”
“What then, when we find it? The millennium—right away?”
Sean spread his hands, feeling slightly episcopal. He evaded the question.
“What is going to happen at the end of another eight hundred years or so? I mean, is this whole world going to resolve itself into Denise’s glob? A metabeing? Ah, that’s why the God wants you to chip in!” Muthoni teased, but cuttingly. “He doesn’t think it’s going to work without a bit more psychological guidance than old Knossos can feed in.”
“Now don’t start resenting me!” Sean snapped his fingers impatiently. “I’m sorry. That’s all the Devil’s fault. He was sowing seeds of doubt. The Devil doesn’t believe in the Work.”
“He wouldn’t, would he? What’s the point of having a Devil otherwise?”
“The Devil’s a rationalist,” said Denise doubtfully. She chewed her lip. “This whole business of accelerated evolution —a kind of ladder of advancement up which everything is scurrying, fish included . . . well, it’s lovely, but it isn’t rational. It isn’t Darwinian evolution. It’s a dream of evolution. We’ve got that dream so deep in us. I have. I know I have. Even though it’s so unecological, because we need all those niches and creatures sovereignly adapted to them, every one. But the secret dream’s still here—the dream of purpose.” She swatted her breast, and smiled wryly. “No bugs here, are there? The bug niche is empty. It’s a non-Darwinian world. Have to be, wouldn’t it, with a God presiding?”
“But Bosch didn’t even know anything about purposeful evolution,” said Muthoni. “Why bother with the fish? What are they doing here?”
“He knew about the Great Chain of Being. It’s that, plus the ‘advancement’ ideas of the alchemists, that powers this world’s version of evolution . .
“Which seduces you. And Sean. Yes, Sean, he whom you hunt for long enough thou shalt come to resemble! If you’ll pardon a small psychological insight from me.”
“You mean that I’m setting myself up as a second Knossos? Or being set up?”
Muthoni shrugged. She peered down the cleft. “Eerie. It’s a kind of dream-squeeze.”
“The birth canal in reverse? Well, we’ve been reborn twice—third time lucky?”
“I think I’ll stay
here. At least I’m wearing my own colors at the moment. I belong to myself. Eden’s a nice place. Just like home. Even if some cartoonist drew the giraffe.”
“And I’m Primavera,” smiled Denise.
“Look,” Sean whispered—but the cathedral magnified his words notwithstanding, “I’m very much in favor of . . . no, not in favor! I’m fascinated by what I see going on here: this whole projection of unconscious processes through living symbolism. So this is what happens when humanity touches down inside the sphere of a superintelligence alien to it? Do the old archetypes stretch and snap? No, they damn well bind that intelligence. But how? Did the God evolve from preconscious mind the way we all did? Did he evolve so far beyond the earliest stages that He’s fallen prey to them—coming from an unexpected direction? What is this world? An act of compassion, or a game, or a dire necessity? Has it really only got until the millennium to run to completion—or is that just a projection of Knossos’s religious obsessions? I’ve got to concentrate on this. As soon as we stop worrying about these questions, God’ll process us. Absorb us in the scheme. I’m sure of it. He’s already got Jeremy as his yardstick of ordinary consciousness. He doesn’t need more of us for that. We’re still a curiosity to Him. At the moment. We can tell Him something objective about the stage all this Work has got to ... No, damn it again, we can tell It something. It wants us to do it. So long as it needs us, we’re relatively immune to the mesmerism—except,” he glanced sidelong at Denise, “to the extent that we can mesmerize ourselves. Enchant ourselves. And I include myself in that warning.”
Muthoni peered down the tunnel again. “Well, I’m supposed to be a doctor—but everyone’s immortal for the next eight hundred years or so. Or for ever? So I’m redundant. I guess I knew that when I raged in Hell. I’m on God’s welfare now.”
“Yes, do think of it that way. It’s His—or 7^—welfare. You’ve got an alien superbeing as a patient, who’s sort of sick—with us. He’s manifesting symptoms all over the world. And you, Denise, wouldn’t you love to know how it feels to run a whole ecology just by willing it?” Though this was her own special seductive trap . . . Yet he evoked it, so shortly after cautioning her about it. He was sure that all three of them must go down the tunnel together.
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