“What do you mean, you’re there? This is the only colony you’re on. By chance.”
“Sean Athlone, I am part of a plan. Or maybe we should call it a heuristic strategy . . . But anyway I devised it. Now listen to me. The administrator of each new colony is convinced that the colony will survive because of his or her administrations. Likewise the principal sociologist. Likewise the prime psychologist. But I am there too: the transmutator, the spiritual alchemist. I’m hidden away among the other colonists, disguised as a rather brilliant biochemist and xeno- biologist.”
“So here you are. So you hid yourself away—and there’s precisely one of you. There’s no master plan in that!”
“But there is.”
“It’s rank coincidence that you happened upon a place where you could come out of the woodwork.”
“An unbelievable coincidence?” Strauss grinned, rather lopsidedly. He surveyed the heavens speculatively, as though linked to other islands of blue beyond the darkness. “I am on all the expeditions, Sean, under one name or other. Ticking away. Biding my time. Or biding my offspring’s time. They cloned me, Sean, you see. Because star travel is alchemy. Starships are the spagyric flasks, isolating the essence of humanity, preparing it for utter change. Alien suns are the athanors, the furnaces!”
“Cloned you? But cloning’s banned. It was banned when you left. It was banned when I left.”
“Cloned me, and accelerated the growth and education of my clones. This, Sean, was the secret. Under various aliases I was to be, you might say, the alchemical guide of the colony—if the need arose, and I always knew it would as the colony shifted register, transmuting humans into alien beings. They cloned me alone, because there were always plenty of good administrators and such, but there was only ever one of me—who had kept the faith! Of course, the public imagined that a colony was a purely ordinary affair: a matter of transplanting Middletown or Metropolis to an alien world. But it wasn’t ever going to be that way. Colonization as a way of shifting excess people off Earth is ridiculous. More people are born every hour than can be sent off in a year.”
“That wasn’t ever the reason! It was to . . . reproduce humanity out among the stars. Hedge our survival bets.” “Well, it couldn’t ever do that either. Not out among alien suns. No, alien worlds would make alien beings. / knew that. It was a way, Sean, of interrogating our very humanity—and our transhumanity; a way of enquiring what we might change into. That’s the only possible true deep reason for colonization. An evolutionary one. New niches, new beings.”
“You mean evolution in the Darwinian sense.”
“I mean spiritual evolution too. Triangulating upon the meaning of the universe from alien perspectives! Surpassing ourselves. But how could you ever sell that to the voting public? Oh Zinjanthropos, pour your treasure into Homo Habilis. Oh Neanderthalers, use your strength to propel Cro-Magnon Man forward. Yet the will to evolve and be i transformed is a deep enduring archetype, as you should know! It was this, cloaked in the panoply of interstellar travel, that provided the true deep emotional impulse—just , as long as hardly anyone acknowledged it openly! It was as deep as survival itself. But what is survival? Survival spells change and transformation. It always has done. My confreres elsewhere—or their cloned descendants, since they were well trained in that aspect of biology!—will be having a slower time of it than here, where the gold has fallen right into my hands. Now do you see what the colonization of other worlds really means? And how it must be secretly shepherded? Think about it, Sean, my apprentice: Man must alter.”
Sean sat numbly on a log. Knossos squatted at his feet in affable parody of the master-apprentice relationship. The log had not fallen to rot; it was a natural rustic seat, preserved, maintained.
“So you’re a Strauss clone?”
“No, Ym the original. I had luck, Sean. Luck. Luck is a factor in the universe, after all. Coincidence. Synchronicity. Isn’t that the word your spiritual mentor Carl Gustav used? Call it what you will. Consider your own name, Athlone. Elective affinity, eh? Your mentor Jung understood that well enough. This is a very long plan, Sean. Yes, I am—or was—on all the expeditions.”
Sean smacked a fist into his open hand. “No! I simply can’t believe that Earth set up a whole bloody colonization program to serve your . . . alchemical obsessions! It won’t wash, Strauss. You’re lying.”
“Oh dear. Of course that wasn’t the overt reason. It was simply the true deep unacknowledged motive. Naturally Earth didn’t put clones of myself on every ship for my benefit—or even because they grasped that I was right. Yet I did ‘sell’ myself, Sean, and successfully—as what the old futurologists used to call a far-out projection, a wild card. I was a man of some influence. I knew people—I made sure of that. I could pull strings. At the same time I could sing for my supper. Transplanting people to an alien world isn’t the same as shifting them across the Atlantic, you know. It’s a whole new ball game, Sean. You have to carry at least one wild card with you because you might just need the joker in the pack for sheer survival. Let’s be modest: there may even have been others, unknown to me! Here, by happy serendipity, I am the joker who had to be played. Immediately. Target One let us down so badly—there were stellar instabilities which the Genesis probe never picked up. So Captain Jeremy once recalled. Then Target Two betrayed us. But here were the aliens. The mimics. The reality-projectors.”
Sean gestured at the spire-tip of Schiaparelli. “Earth wants to know the results. They’ll want to know how well you’ve done.” Schiaparelli seemed to waver, in a trembling of the air; momentarily Sean saw it as something else—another possibility, more appropriate.
“Sean, Sean, don’t baby me. I responded to the challenge of this world and its alien creators correctly.”
“So there was a meeting of minds—a compact between vou and them!”
Strauss chewed his lips. “In hyb, yes. I had a vision. A dream-contact with them. Everyone must have done. I met them in their psychic space. I interceded lucidly. My . . . imagery attracted them. Because they are transformers. Transmutators.”
“And the God? You must have believed in a God, to have included one.”
“Well, yes. Now we are developing a God, a state of deity into which we’ll all enter.”
“He seems chary of the role.”
“Growing pains!”
“You didn’t have to include Hell!”
“How could I not? It clarifies. It distills. And it isn’t forever. The majority of most people’s time on the upward spiral is spent in the Gardens, which you must admit are rather nice.” Sean glanced at the rich blackcurrant vintage, hanging ready to hand. He nodded.
“I’m glad you mentioned that, though,” went on Knossos. “If you were to report back, the situation here might seem somewhat, well, excessive to the Earth authorities. I do realize that it would take several hundred years in all before they could try to interfere here, and I frankly doubt if they couid, given the powers the aliens command, but they might regard my clones in the other colonies as . . . less of a joker, more of a viper in the bosom.”
“I’m sure Earth would understand that you acted for the best,” said Sean ironically.
“We’ll all evolve in a healthy symbiosis with the aliens, to our mutual and immortal benefit,” nodded Strauss. “Then the world can all be Gardens and Eden. But tell Earth about Hell, the crucible? Ah no. Too soon.”
“How can a non-rotating world be covered in Gardens?” “Oh, Sean. You just spin it. Come the Millennium.”
“But momentum—”
“Will be transferred to the little black hole at the center of this world shell. Our aliens have powers, Sean. They just somewhat lack purposes, save for the purposes of other races which they borrow. They’re chameleons! Super-chameleons.”
“What happens after the Millennium?”
“Who can say what a world of perfected beings will choose to do?”
“Perhaps have children? At last?”
&nbs
p; “Ah yes. I didn’t want the little ones to have to go through Hell. I am a compassionate man. The adult population is quite large anyway. I persuaded the mind-horde to clone a number of suitable individuals as well as developing all our frozen ova to adult state with imprinted orientation knowledge: language, abilities, a sense of the meaning of the world. Those neo-adults have, of course, developed their own inherent personalities since then during the course of the Work.”
“Suitable individuals? How—?”
“—could I know? By sensing their pattern.”
“Their spectrum.”
“Ah, you understand! You see it like that, do you, as a spectrum? Hmm. Yes, it fits. You can read out very fine details of a psyche. I thought of it in terms of a fractional distillation column or a chromatograph. But then, that’s my background ... A few adults, too, are projected imitative bodies animated by the mind-horde. There are enough of us—but still we may choose to have children: perfected Eden children.”
“And what happens, Herr Professor, if Earth seeks you out nevertheless—with greater impact than Schiaparelli? What if Earth builds faster than light stardrives?”
Knossos shrugged. “The mind-horde can’t move their worlds faster than slow sublight speeds even though they draw on the very energy of the Void. No other race whom they reanimate ever built FTL ships to follow up their radio-eggs. FTL seems impossible. When we all reach the perfect stage, Sean, we’ll be on quite a different threshold: of contact with those other perfected creatures by another channel—of the spirit!”
“Assuming they’re all still around, on some other level of existence! A mighty big assumption.”
“Think big, Sean. No doubt some of them went to the wall. But life is the language of the universe. Shall the universe forget how to articulate itself, unto itself?”
“Ah yes, your holovision program!”
“You know about that?”
“A little machine told me. Your vanity kept your dossier from being a complete secret.”
“Vanity? Oh no! My dossier is . . . simply irrelevant. I am Knossos now.”
“Gnosis.”
Strauss executed a graceful little bow. Then his face hardened. “If you want to play the role of Devil’s advocate, though, I promise you there’s a place for that! I’d much rather you were my apprentice, or equal.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“On the contrary! Hell is where you’ll slide to, automatically. Until you purge yourself of jealousy and false commitments. I don’t ask for your belief—because everybody believes. Belief is the framework for any thought or action. Belief in something, even in unbelief. Belief is the air we breathe, or we wouldn’t be alive. No, you already have some knowledge of the psychic mechanics of the projection. I merely ask you to apply that knowledge instead of denying it. Isn’t that your job?”
“Amongst other things my job was to report back to Earth.”
“Well, there’s your starship over there. Go to it. Go to your Captain and his crew. See how well that belief- framework applies after all that you’ve learned. You are different now, Sean. You’re altered.”
“Yes,” Sean admitted. He could sense Muthoni, Denise, Jeremy ... the Devil, the God, where they all belonged in the pattern of transformation into a higher kind of being. He could sense their location, if he put his mind to it, like tracks in a bubble chamber tracing out the collision of their ‘particles’ with other particles, burst of energy giving rise to new charged particles—their slowly transforming selves. Jeremy seemed to be a perennial decay product—or, no, an exchange particle, something that was perpetually exchanged between other interacting particles, like a photon, a unit of observation. A track of light in the lens that was the microcosm of this planet. He could sense their distribution curves, their spectra —and what exotic yet long-lived particles all the ‘alien’ beasts and birds with their own psychic energy signatures represented . . . Briefly, the Gardens blossomed for him— into a kaleidoscope of sparkling, conversing energies: an intercourse of living light.
“The old loyalties are hooks, Sean. Go and unhook yourself.”
The spire of Schiaparelli beckoned Sean brightly now. Perhaps only his own resistance—or the continuing resistance of Austin, Paavo and Tanya—was maintaining its concrete existence within the planetary projection? It could alter, he thought—fearfully, yet with a thrill of excitement. It could be absorbed into the projection, become a cromlech or some other apparatus of this world of transformations . . .
“I shall certainly go,” he said. Corvo the magpie dipped low and shat derisively upon his tunic.
TWENTY-FIVE
“Hey, Austin! Captain!”
The access ramp still jutted down on to the turf. Where the main jets of Schiaparelli had spouted fire, the sward was long since healed, a brighter apple-green. The landing jacks were clustered about with flowers: marguerites and cowslips. Forget-me-nots bloomed in their shade like specks of sky, and convolvulus twined up the steel.
Attracted by his shout, a small brown bear lumbered into the meadow. It swayed upright on to its hind legs and peered myopically at him; whereupon it didn’t seem quite so small after all. The bear strutted forward, clapping its forepaws rhythmically as though out to bust his head. She: it was a she-bear. He thought it was Tanya Rostov, transformed into a comic though dangerous Russian bear for having adopted such a bearish attitude to the Boschworld . . .
“Tanya?”
Yet it wasn’t quite her. No, but it was still a creature in resonance with her!
Halting and swaying, the bear said something glutinous and growly m what he thought might be Russian.
“I can’t understand you!”
People didn’t genuinely change into birds and beasts; that was the province of the subdivided mind-horde. Yet it smelled of Tanya still.
Laughter cackled from the bushes. Tanya herself skipped out, naked. Mad? The Russian woman was daubed with mud and leaves. She looked like an infantrywoman in camouflage gear, though it was only really make-up over her bare skin. Whistling shrill phrases from Petrushka, she started to dance. She executed an entrechat, a pas de chat and a pirouette. The bear danced clumsily, grotesquely, doing its best to copy her. Tanya halted. Hands on hips, she stared feverishly at Sean.
“My little bear—she’s well trained, isn’t she? She can even speak ventriloqually! Oh what a lovely world this is! It’s magic, like a painting of Chagall’s. Soon cows will fly!”
She danced some more, her ballet choreographed to random phrases of Stravinsky: a parody of the yogic, Pythagorean acrobatics of others in the Gardens.
She halted, panting. “If only there was some wodka to go with it! Of course,” she added furtively, “if I let her off the leash of my mind she might turn on me and tear me to pieces.
I think. Therefore I dance.”
Tanya had vehemently rejected the planet. Consequently the world—the alien mind-horde—let her control a little part of itself, with more and more effort on her part . . . until she reached snapping point. Madness preceded reconstruction. This was the beginning of her own descent into the unconscious. She was being set up for Hell, for the dark gulag of the other hemisphere. When she relaxed and her resistance wavered, that bear would despatch her there just as the lion had despatched Sean and the unicorn Denise. Superficially the scene was gay: a gipsy fair. Or at least mock-medieval: a
St. Vitus’s dance. Obviously there was no communicating with her, no warning her. She and the bear—her anti-soul— were bound together like the poles of a horseshoe magnet. She would have to harrow Hell in her own way, plant the seed of her new self there.
Whistling ebulliently, she danced some more while the bear parodied her dance steps, grunting and snuffling.
“Who the Devil—!”
Austin Faraday stood at the top of the access ramp, dressed still in his Schiaparelli apparel. He wore a filter-mask across his nose and mouth.
“Athlone! You’re back. Good God, you’ve grow
n hair—or is it a wig? That’s one of our uniforms, butchered about! Ah, those wicked apes . . .”
“Does it matter how I’m dressed? Compared with the fact that I’m back!”
Austin Faraday patted the flanks of his own jumpsuit comfortingly. Formerly they only wore jumpsuits; now Faraday exalted them into uniforms. The Captain stiffened, as though Sean ought by rights to snap a salute. Meanwhile the bear and mad mud-daubed Tanya capered on in their Ballet Russe . . .
“Where are Muthiga and Laroche?”
“Muthoni’s heading back. Denise is, er, still investigating the ecology. Where’s Paavo, for that matter?”
“Kekkonen? Bah. He is a sexual pervert. You might find him feasting and copulating anywhere. With anything.” A shudder ran through Faraday. “Mr. Kekkonen,” he corrected himself stiffly, “is currently absent on a field trip. In the vicinity.”
Sean walked up the ramp as Tanya whistled out a shrill piping-on-board. Sean slapped his Captain sharply across the cheek. “Austin! Snap out of it!”
Tears started into Faraday’s eyes. Then, luxuriously, amazingly, he wept—and leaned upon Sean’s shoulder for support.
“Sorry, Sean . . . What have they done to us? I’m sure it’s in the fruit and the water. Cumulative stuff. I’m on ship’s rations. You must have been poisoned by now. You’ve been taken over. Go away!”
Sean raised his hand again. Faraday flinched. “You’re right, I’m being hysterical. It’s relief, Sean, sheer relief. That’s what it is.” He giggled. “You’ve come to relieve me. I thought I’d lost you. You’ve been gone so long.” The Captain squared his shoulders. “I’ve been holding things together, though. As best I could. Trying to keep awake as much as possible. Popping pep pills.” He looked haunted. “In my dreams Schiaparelli changes, ” he whispered furtively. “Can’t let a ship change into a stalagmite, can we? I swear I’m holding the damn ship together—by strength of will!”
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