Watson, Ian - Novel 10

by Deathhunter (v1. 1)

  If they had flown in a straight line they would soon have struck one of these — and perhaps plunged inside it, for there was something about the faces of the crystals that suggested still pools rather than hard sheets of glass. Most of the crystals seemed to repel them gently, as they passed among them. But a few attracted them, pulling softly . . .

  Now that they were in the midst of the crystal horde the fog was no longer white at all, except away in the distance. (Or were they in the midst? Maybe they were still only on the very fringe.) The immediate vicinity was multicoloured with the spillage from all the floating prisms and gems. Further off, where all the colours of the crystals recombined, was that hint of white light. Here, though, was ruby. Nearby was sapphire. Above, was garnet. Beyond was emerald . . .

  “Wait!”

  Intrigued, Jim slowed and hovered by a ruby larger than himself which was turning very slowly, weightlessly. He pressed closer to it; it seemed softly to resist him. A safe one, this ruby, somehow... It did not want him to dive into it. (But how could it ‘want’ anything?)

  Weinberger hung beside him impatiently, though reluctant to press on alone. Anyway, they had almost overhauled Death. They could allow it a little leeway.

  As Jim shifted about, trying to see something inside the ruby, suddenly the jewel space opened for him — though he knew that he was still safely outside it. Its interior faces unfolded like falling cards; and he saw, as through a fish-eye lens, a world: a world in miniature, yet whole, full-grown.

  It was a world of crystal crags and shattered blocks and lakes of solidified lava. Bubbles had burst in the lava before it had cooled and set into great eggcup shapes. An angry, gritty wind blew through that world. A large red sun hung in the sky, providing the ruby light. People nested in the lava eggcups which sheltered them somewhat from the grit and wind and which concentrated a little the feeble warmth provided by the sun. It did not look like a happy or a comforting world . . .

  “Do you see? Don’t look too long! Do you seel”

  Somehow, Jim feared that if he looked too long into the jewel, despite its soft, almost ‘satisfied’ repulsion of him he might end up inside it.

  “No . . . what? Yeah —!”

  “Come on, then.”

  They chased Death again, recovering their lost ground, and paused again beside a smoky garnet. Catching the angle of vision for this jewel, they saw two amber suns inside. The suns were oval, linked by a curving golden whip wrapped round their waists. The world which they illuminated was a jungle hell of swamp and tangled islands riotous with violent vegetation. Great pink and white pitcher plants yawned wide their gullets like rows of hungry blotched carp standing on their tails. Sundew-bushes spread wide diadems of sparkling sticky liquid light. Vines thrashed about and slithered like snakes, trying to strangle each other with knotted nooses. Hummingbirds with dagger beaks hovered in the sanctuaries (for them) of anemone-shrubs whose polyp tentacles suckered other little bodies, and skeletons, to them. These bright birds shot forth like darts from their deathly havens to stab lurid butterflies. Venus’s fly-traps held spikes agape.

  A naked woman stood on the only bare spit of land; a writhing tentacle-arm sprouted from her chest like a hugely elongated third breast. She advanced across the spit towards an island, waving her breast tentacle before her, and as she waved it the sticky blobs of sundew withdrew from her path, and the pitcher plants shut their gullets so that she could stride across them like stepping stones, and the spikes of the fly-traps snapped shut prematurely. Somehow her tentacle controlled the vegetation. The woman howled at the sky, and began to sing . . .

  “Alien worlds: is that where dead souls go to?”

  “I doubt it, Jim. Alien worlds fill up with alien souls, not human souls.”

  “Is that woman human?”

  “I guess she’s as human as she can manage to be.”

  The jungle thrashed about while the woman sang. She was playing it, compelling it to bend this way and that, forcing the plants to open up again and eat each other: swallow each other, strangle each other, tear each other to pieces, dissolve each other — till there was a knoll of land completely cleared in the middle of the island for her to lie down on to sleep.

  “If that’s how she gets her rest, I’d hate to see what she does when she’s feeling lively!”

  The woman was raw power.

  “That’s her world,” said Jim. “It’s the world she fantasizes, made real. It’s full of all her lunacies come true. You’re right: it isn’t an alien planet at all. It’s an imagination world. Hers.”

  “Or ours. We could be imagining her.”

  “I don’t think so. But if we dived into a crystal we could check that out.”

  “No thanks. Death hasn’t dived into any of them yet.”

  They sped on.

  Inside a third jewel, a yellow zircon, was a velvety garden with yew hedges, arbours, bowers, pergolas, gazebos. The garden stretched on and on over hill, down dale. Obscene black statues stood about the lawns and peeked from behind bushes. A naked orgy was in progress on one of the lawns. All the participants had grossly distorted sexual organs, or else their sexual organs were in the wrong place. One man sported a great penis for a nose. Another man’s whole head was a penis with eyes and nose and mouth. Worse yet was a mobile penis on legs which seemed to have been torn out of a giant’s groin and set down to run about. One woman’s face had labia where her lips should have been and nipples instead of eyes; her actual eyes were set in her breasts . . .

  They watched this world for more moments than they had intended, forcing themselves to stay in place despite the soft contrary thrust. The infrared creature had winged so far ahead of them by the time they let themselves drift away that it had almost disappeared.

  Hastily they sped above, beneath and around many other world- crystals. More seemed to attract than to repel them now. Jim couldn’t be sure, having no wish to yield to their attraction, but it seemed to him that those crystals which did attract were like blanks with no world inside them, ‘wanting’ someone to enter and stamp their own vision upon uncreated territory.

  Away to one side something tiny — not Death — caught Jim’s notice.

  “Look!”

  It was a little wriggling brown thing. . . he couldn’t make it out. Then Red Death was there too. Death dodged out from around a shoal of crystals. But it was a different Death from the one that they were chasing. That one still raced on ahead. This second Death dived at the wriggling thing, then veered away — just as the wriggling thing struck a golden crystal. Instantly the crystal convulsed, and split. It became two golden crystals that slowly moved apart. One of these crystals remained ‘blank’, but the other was full of a play of light and transformation for a short while before it settled down.

  The second Death flew off at speed. It had been like an old warplane releasing a bomb or missile: namely, the wriggling thing.

  Weinberger called out something about Tibetans.

  “What Tibetans? They’re all dead, in the War. Russian bombs, Chinese bombs, radiation ...”

  “The old Tibetans! They said that if a dead soul follows the wrong light after death, then it winds up in some foul alien world. That’s what these crystals are — and we’ve seen how foul they are inside. There must be billions of them — enough for everyone on Earth, past, present, future! One each.”

  “One each? But I saw more than one. person in that first one. And what about in the orgy world? I don’t know if those were all people, but. . .”

  “Did you see more than one real person? Or were the others all just fantasy actors and actresses — the furniture of one dead soul?”

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  Jim shuddered. It was far better that the soul should not survive death, if the alternative was this: to be deluded for ever more!

  Deluded. Or, perhaps, creative? Creating a whole world for oneself? A world of one�
��s own choice?

  “Somewhere in all this there must be paradises.’’

  “Must there? Oh, there once may have been — and in that case I guess there still will be. But who believes in a heaven now? And if you don’t believe, you’ve crapped out. Besides, who’s to say that any of this exists for man’s benefit? Who’s to say, Jim?”

  “Maybe the dead souls in those worlds could say?”

  “Jim, I see Death as hauling souls out, and dumping each one into a separate crystal — to fertilise it. So that Death can feed on it. So that Death can have fun. Hell, we just saw that other Death do that! It dumped a soul.”

  “If that wriggling thing was a soul . . . That Death was like a warplane, firing a missile.”

  (‘Is that exactly what I saw? Was that exactly how it happened?’)

  “Death’s a parasite, but it’s an almighty powerful one. We’re like the aphids that it milks. Here is its honeycomb, and we’re its honey. Our fantasies are. Our anguish is. All our hallucinations, made real. It squeezes our lives into those crystals,” Weinberger said.

  “If it catches us. But what about all those sudden, accidental deaths which happen too quickly for Death to get there in time? The ones that give off no signal? Where do those souls go, damn it?”

  “Maybe they reach the white light beyond, whatever it is. Peace, union ... I see Death as —”

  “I don’t see Death at all. Anywhere. Where’s it gone to, Nathan? We’ve lost it.”

  They sped faster, hunting, trying to pick up the trail. They failed. After a while they drifted to a halt.

  Without the infra-red creature to follow they were lost in this shifting three-dimensional maze. They had no way of telling where Death’s roost lay, or in which direction the exit from the maze existed, if indeed there was any exit. The white light might be in any direction, or in all directions. Around them the jostling of the crystal domains seemed to go on forever. Now that they had lost their impetus the two men concentrated on avoiding those crystals which pressed slowly towards them. And they concentrated on not getting separated from each other.

  “Up there!” cried Weinberger, pointing.

  Another red blur came arcing this way and that towards them.

  It was yet another Death. And this Death held something struggling in its beak. A worm? No, it was one of those wriggling brown things — and now Jim had no doubt what it was.

  It was a human soul: a wormlike miniature of a person. It had a human face, and it wriggled. It was like something that had crawled out of the top of the spinal column. It was like a sperm, writhing its way through the maze . . . until it met the great egg of a crystal and bored its way inside. But this soul wasn’t free to swim. Death was bearing it along to the destination chosen for it. How that soul struggled! How impotently, how ineffectively! If it fought free of Death’s beak it could perhaps swim right through the maze, to bliss and unity. But Death held it tight.

  ‘Our soul’s like a worm,

  And a bit like a sperm,’ thought Jim, in a Norman Harper way.

  There came a brief flurry of red creatures, darting and dipping through the crystals like a flock of swallows. Each carried a single worm in its beak.

  One of these Deaths veered close to the two men, and for a moment Jim clearly saw the face of the worm it had captured. It was that of an elderly woman. Her little eyes bulged in horror and surprise.

  Those Deaths flashed by with their prey, which they would thrust into some crystal to ferment it into an intoxicating, toxic world which they would sip on like wine, growing drunk on the soul’s deranged dreams.

  The two men chased after the flock of Deaths. But the Deaths were all flying by slightly different routes. As Jim and Weinberger tried to chase them all at once, and still remain together, they collided. Their reflection bodies tangled.

  The mixing felt like a breathing in of warm smoke by their arms and legs and torsos. There was a stickiness to it, as if the smoke was suffused with honey.

  Before they could fully pull apart, a diamond crystal swung in

  their way. It drew them to it at the same time as it slowly bore down on them. If they had not been pulling at cross purposes they could still have steered clear . . .

  They hit it. They broke through its face, like two divers through a pool. Then they were inside the jewel.

  At once the whole crystal fog vanished . . .

  SEVENTEEN

  In its place, was a world . . .

  And the world was a place of blue mossy glades with clumps of feathery white trees stuck in the ground around the glades like so many goose-quill pens. The landscape was all blue and white. The ocean and icebergs of Weinberger’s scene-screen had been transformed into moss and trees — the same colours, but different forms.

  A sun was about to rise. Already, the spillover of light gave the cool dawn air a pearly hue. Some stars were still visible in the sky. Their winking lights were faintly ruby and topaz and sapphire. Those stars must be the other crystals, by now infinitely far off.

  This world seemed curiously empty. It was incomplete — merely sketched in. Even the trees looked as though they had just been poked into the surface. But at least it held no obvious threats — unless it threatened to starve them of food, or variety; it was simply quiescent.

  “Compared with those others it’s fairly pretty,” said Jim as they stood looking around. “But there isn’t a lot to it, is there?”

  “That’s because we didn’t put enough into it! We couldn’t, because we’re still alive. Or maybe we cancelled out each other’s wishes? If it’s normally a case of one dream-world per soul, well, with two of us involved either you’d end up with bizarre paradoxes, or you’d get something like this — a sort of minimal limbo. At any rate, there isn’t very much for Death to get itself excited about here!”

  The sun rose suddenly, flooding the world with white light. That sun was far away and considerably smaller than the Sun seen from Earth, more the apparent size of Venus. But it was incomparably brighter. After the first blinding glarffce, which left afterimages dancing like ball lightning among the trees, it was impossible to look even briefly in its direction.

  Jim and Weinberger set out hastily for the closest shade. Their ability to fly had vanished.

  As soon as they took their first steps across the blue moss, however, the whole surface began to ripple. With each footfall it rose and fell like a waterbed. The ground was merely a coating over liquid — as though it had not yet had time to set firmly.

  Weinberger’s foot broke through the moss. He stumbled, recovered himself then bounded on in great ground-hugging strides which somehow kept him ahead of the holes which his feet punched in the surface. Arriving at a feather-tree he clung to it.

  Jim reached another nearby tree and clutched it. The two men stared at each other across a strait of the deceptive moss.

  “Whoever dreamed this up?” shouted Jim. “How do we go anywhere?”

  “Run, and hope for it?”

  “There could be things under the moss. Hungry things.”

  Together, they had created this world. (Or, as Weinberger suggested, cancelled out each other’s dream.) But to the extent that this world must partly be Jim’s own creation, it occurred to him that it was all very well illuminated and enlightened up above, yet was actually hollow and deceitful, with no real solidity, but only treacherous amorphous depths. In the same way as his own world of good death and oceanic peace was hollow — and had always been so?

  He rejected the idea. This world was frail because he wasn’t truly dead; nor was Weinberger. That was all.

  “We could try rolling,” suggested Weinberger. “We’d spread our weight that way.”

  “Rolling about like self-propelled logs? But where to?”

  Maybe the water under the skin of this world was indeed the ocean of unity and peace? If so, Jim couldn’t see it for what it actually was because of all the blue moss . . .

  “We have to find somewhere more substa
ntial, Jim!”

  And if they did? If, by searching for firmness, somehow they enforced firmness on this world?

  “Then we’d be really trapped! Don’t you see? This is no place for us. We’ve got to get out of here — right out.”

  “Just show me how, and I’ll be right behind you. Meanwhile, how about rolling over to this tree?”

  “No, you come over here.”

  “Chicken.”

  Both men laughed. Then they laughed again, rejoicing briefly in their ability to laugh.

  As the tiny, white-hot sun climbed higher, sweaty heat came in the wake of the intense light. The feather-trees began to furl their foliage around their thin trunks. Before long the two men were sheltering behind mere spikes of a girth hardly greater than one of Weinberger’s scrawny legs.

  And Jim thought: if they were to die here, of heat-stroke and thirst and exhaustion; if the silver threads which bound them to Egremont were to snap — would this world suddenly take on a more solid face? Would the waters recede — or evaporate — to reveal hard lands beneath?

  That silver cord! Of course.

  He tried to twitch it so that he could reel himself back to the waterbed in Egremont. He felt a slight lessening of his weight, but nothing else happened.

  As the sun burned ever more fiercely, the moss turned brown, at first in isolated patches, then everywhere. As it shrivelled, it broke up to reveal pools, then open rivers of blue water.

  The moss must simply be a growth of the night — a twelve hours’ wonder of fecundity which repeated its life cycle every night between dusk and dawn. Now it had spored or done whatever else it did. Crisped by the sun, it decayed.

  Slowly the spikes of the trees began to tilt and bob and float free. Most still balanced precariously on their underwater root-mats, but others keeled right over. Maybe the ‘trees’ were nothing more than hairy stalks or filaments of the blue water-moss. Maybe there was only one kind of plant life here after all . . .