“Could we possibly sit down?” asked Weinberger, in more practical vein. He gestured at the Death-infested space. “Somewhere away from thatV'
“Oh yes. If you will return to the Long Hall which you have shaped, I will follow you. At a polite distance.”
“Are you real?” demanded Jim, not wanting to turn his back on the being.
The angel twitched its wings, perhaps impatiently, perhaps in amusement.
“That is a large question to discuss in a corridor, when your friend is dying to sit down.”
Was ‘dying to sit down’ a joke? If this angel could make jokes, perhaps it could be trusted. But if it was the Master of Death, which imprisoned souls . . .?
“If you want me to make any sense to you,” added the angel, “you must tell me your story first. You must tell me exactly how you came here — why and wherefore.”
“Have we got time for that?”
“Time? He asks me if he has time! You don’t know what time is, or untime either. Or space and unspace, for that matter. Did you come all this way — I ask you seriously — just to return immediately, with your eyes still seeing only what they expect to see?”
“Okay, sorry, we’ll go and sit down.”
Jim followed Weinberger back into the long hall. The angel followed Jim.
While the two men settled themselves into one of the brocaded sofas, the angel strode over to the wall and began to tap here and there as though to test its solidity. Finding one section which returned a hollow echo, it twisted a boss. A panel fell open on hidden hinges. The compartment inside held a quart bottle of whisky, three glasses and an ice bucket.
“Name your poison,” said the angel.
“Neat,” said Weinberger. The angel poured a couple of fingers of whisky. Reaching out with exaggerated discretion till it almost overbalanced, it passed the glass to Weinberger.
“That’s the whisky you wanted back in the shack,” whispered Jim. Weinberger swallowed half of the drink then nursed the rest.
“What if it is?”
“Then it isn’t real.”
“It tastes real enough to me.”
“Neat, or on the rocks?” the angel asked Jim. “It is curious how those who worry about wasting time proceed to waste it. Obviously this is a place that you have shaped. Somewhere that you have defined. However, I share it with you. That is its nature: it can be shared.”
“Neat,” said Jim. “Please.”
The angel poured, and passed the glass, stretching out again in a parody of delicacy.
“What a waste of ice,” it remarked. “Someone must have wanted ice. Me, perhaps? ’ ’ The angel popped a cube into its mouth and crunched the ice up. Then it poured itself some whisky.
So angels drank whisky with the dead, did they?
Its wings fluttered briefly.
“Interesting taste — like drinking brown electricity.”
“Is that what you usually drink? Electricity?”
“Electricity belongs to space, my dear, not to unspace. Let us exchange names, shall we? It will make everything so much easier, since you people are beset by names for everything.”
Which was something that Ananda had told Jim . . .
“I’m Jim,” said Jim.
“Nathan,” said Nathan.
“You may call me Tulip.”
“That’s a ridiculous name!” protested Jim. “You don’t look remotely like a tulip.”
“All the better to call me by! Our true names are the signatures of our being. A word cannot serve that purpose. But perhaps you’re right . . . What name do you think best suits me?”
“Death’s-head Hawkmoth.”
“Too much of a mouthful — like that ice. How about . . .?”
“Al,” suggested Weinberger. “Al the Alien.”
“How about. . . Lai? Why not? Yes, Lai it is. Now, will you tell me exactly how you came here, and why, and what conclusions you draw?”
“You invented the cage, Nathan. You tell him.”
And this Weinberger proceeded to do, while Lai remained standing with its whisky glass clasped in one claw-like extremity, its other arm resting on the drinks shelf. Occasionally, as it listened, it freshened its own glass.
TWENTY-FIVE
When Weinberger was done, Lai divided what little remained of the whisky between their three glasses. This time the angel did not bother to keep its distance. It sat down on the end of the sofa, draping a thin arm around Weinberger’s shoulder. To his credit, Weinberger did not flinch.
‘This angel’s drunk,’ thought Jim. ‘What a situation: we’ve imagined ourselves a drunken alien angel.’
“Now then,” said Lai, “you’ve got everything inside-out and backside foremost, of course. But to your credit, you did imagine a way to come here, and imagine a ‘here’ to come to. This makes us rejoice.”
With its free hand, Lai toasted them.
“Cheers, beings of ordinary life, who are still alive! So you think of the red creatures as parasites that prey upon dying consciousness? You think that they haul dying souls off into the crystal fog to fertilise those crystals? Now why would they do that, I wonder? What’s in it for them? Eh, Nathan?”
“They feed off the emotions of the trapped souls. They eat the phoney events. That’s their nectar. That’s their entertainment.”
“Then who am I? I must be the ringmaster! Perhaps it is we angels who feed and amuse ourselves, while they are only the messenger boys and go-betweens — the pimps of the crystal brothel? The creatures, by the way, are our own artificial children. I might as well admit that right away. Oh yes, we direct them.
“As you guessed, if a human being dies very suddenly our messengers don’t get there in time — swift as they are! They don’t home in on the pheromone of death, which you — alone of all your kind — have correctly identified as the psychochemical of dying. It does indeed alert other living creatures to an impending death. But it plays a far more important role for the dying person himself! It weans the dying spirit away from the shadows of the ordinary world. It counteracts the attractions of the ordinary and familiar. The pheromone disintoxicates the soul — otherwise it might simply linger on as an earth-bound ghost.”
“There must be a hell of a lot of ghosts haunting Russia and China,” said Weinberger. “Still intoxicated.”
Lai wagged an admonishing finger.
“Obviously everyone who dies suddenly doesn’t automatically become a ghost — or your world would have been packed out with ghosts long ago. Only a very small number of sudden fatalities actually meet that fate. You see, the pheromone is an evolutionary vestige from the time when your souls were less coherent than they are now. Many spirits passed into the earth and trees and rocks back in earlier times. There is the source of your earth-spirits, your earth magic, your Japanese kami. Etcetera. The pheromone was an evolutionary development when your souls were relatively weaker than they are now.
“Anyhow, let us suppose that our little friends don’t get there in time. What happens then?”
“It would be better to dissolve into limbo,” said Jim, “than to carry on indefinitely in some hell or purgatory.”
“Oh, such lack of imagination! No wonder you could only come up with a rather large hallway, in quite atrocious taste, for this encounter of ours. And earlier, you shaped a world which wouldn’t even solidify properly. Though that, admittedly, was because you were still alive. No doubt its failure to solidify saved you from its clutches.”
Emptying its glass, Lai set it down noisily on the parquet floor.
“And I wish there was some more of this whisky. Really, your sense of provisioning is too poor — as witness your bold hike into the wilderness! Oh don’t worry, I am only speaking flippantly. Really, I enjoy our conversation. It’s quite unique. How I shall sing about it, how I shall dance it in unspace! Tush, do you think that I speak as an impresario again? As an artist of a higher plane, who sculpts with souls? I suppose it’s just as well there isn’t any
more whisky . . .
“Now where — yes, where — do you imagine that all those suddenly dead souls go, if our own little Deaths don’t grab them and snip the umbilical cord and haul them off protesting? As I said, your souls are relatively stronger nowadays. Relatively.”
“If they don’t become ghosts,” answered Jim, “and you say that the vast majority don’t, obviously they must go into the crystal fog.”
“And they don’t get through it, mister. They don’t make it. Very few even have the wisdom or the insight to try. But those who do are doomed to failure because of the sheer extent of the fog these days.
“I use the word ‘days’ loosely, of course! Time is a little different here, you realize? Days and hours belong to the realm of suns and worlds, and all the other clocks of ordinary space. You actually came here in mere moments, though as to the time you spend here . . .”
“We couldn’t have spent more than an hour in that crystal we blundered into, but when we got back —”
“Don’t blame me for your blunders! Ah, but I am being short- tempered . . . Blame it on the booze.” The angel rubbed its forehead.
“Are you telling us that all those little Deaths are hauling people clear through the fog — which would trap them otherwise? The fog hasn’t got anything to do with you? It’s just something in the way — an enemy?”
“Eggs-actly, Jim. We are your bosom buddies, did you but know it. Of course it’s better that you don’t know it. If you did, you’d be queueing all the way from birth to euthanasia to avoid dying suddenly. You characters do everything to excess on that little world of yours. You would abolish your species. Far better that some are lost than that there are no more new folk ever again. ’ ’ “We already came pretty close to abolishing our species.”
“In the late, great atom-splitting war? Indeed. Oh, there was a terrible boost to the opposition because of that damnfool war. The fog grew so much greater all of a sudden. You’d already killed enough people in all your recent wars to cause us grave concern, but this was the bloody limit. And then our little Deaths couldn’t even keep up with all those who died slowly in the aftermath, even though they rushed to and fro, working overtime. The number of our little Deaths is based on average death statistics, you see — like one of your old insurance companies, hicV9
Lai hiccuped. The angel’s words were still fluent enough, but it seemed to Jim that Lai was by now definitely supporting itself upon Weinberger’s shoulder. Obviously whisky affected an alien angel powerfully; and Lai had drunk the lion’s share of it. Would they find out the truth before Lai succumbed to its effects? Or was that the whole point: they couldn’t find out?
Lai’s hand patted Weinberger rhythmically a few times, like a metronome.
“Ah, but your society of Good Death is a fine thing! Yes, we influenced it. We can’t make direct contact with you living people, except in such rare circumstances as these now, my buddies. But we influenced it imag-in-atively — though the shock which opened your imaginations to us was your own doing. I refer to the war.” “Don’t tell me that you’re responsible for Norman Harper’s output!” cried Weinberger. “Don’t tell me you’re his muse!”
“A very hidden muse . . . Otherwise we would sabotage our own plan, you see? If people knew that there was a state beyond death, and that the alternative was to be encysted like a fly in amber by the crystal fog, well, you might easily euthanase yourselves away, eh?
Our little Deaths could never cope with the demand. It would become a runaway thing, a hysteria. You must be a very hysterical lot or you wouldn’t fight wars. Stands to reason.”
“Norman Harper.” Weinberger groaned. “That . . . that twiddler of words.”
“Don’t blame us for your low aesthetic standards,” said Lai, aggrieved. “Harper’s popular, isn’t he? By and large, I’m sorry to say, your imaginations are fairly meagre. Though acceptable, acceptable... I guess that comes from living a world-bound ‘life’. So don’t blame yourselves. You do improve with keeping — once you can grasp the possibilities. ‘Mind-wings can fly.’ Personally I would blame your deficient imaginations on the way that commerce polluted your art for so long. You packaged the products of your imagination like cans of peaches with pretty labels on them, and lots of syrup inside. We, on the other hand, who inhabit a wholly imaginative realm . . . But I should not boast in my cups.” Lai’s foot twitched, accidentally knocking over the empty whisky glass. The angel glanced down. “You do make some fairly decent liquor ... I think I’m going to sleep.”
“Don’t!” cried Jim.
The angel’s red eyes looked distinctly bloodshot.
“To think I shot Harper,” muttered Weinberger. “And now he’s stuck in some damn crystal.”
“Some crystal Parnassus, perhaps?” Lai patted the man consolingly. “So you see, my buddies, your quest is an utterly mistaken one. You should surrender, and die gently. Then you can come back here the usual way, shepherded by our little Deaths, and get on with the real business.”
“And what,” asked Jim, “might that be?”
“Tell me, Jim old buddy, how did unspace seem to you? By unspace I mean the zone you were in just before this rather empty vestibule took its place.”
“It was like an infinite number of possible places — worlds, rooms, I dunno — which all coexisted with each other. You could choose one. You could enter any one that you —”
“Could imagine.” Lai cut him off. The alien waved its free hand around. “Since this is a sharing place, you can’t help but see doorways to other possibilities. But you’ve put all those possibilities behind closed doors, haven’t you? The picture frames should be your catalogue — your screen, your window — but they’re all blank. Unspace, Jim, is the realm of the infinite sharing imagination where you envision worlds and domains as an act of creative genius. It is where you will never be alone, since all have access to each other. It is where you give whole worlds to others, for adventure and enlightenment and joy, and even for terror — which is a kind of fearful joy — and others in turn give these to you. It is the ultimate place of free creative energy, common to all beings. You would soon learn to open all those doors in full awareness, till you had no need of doors at all — though you might like to keep them on as a useful convention. Like a rhyme scheme.”
“What are those pesky crystals, then?”
Lai blinked at him, as though it was a very naive question.
“I believe that evolution in your own little pocket of existence gave rise to the predator and prey relationship? It generally does! How else could anything evolve to any great extent, other than by competition? Why should you think it’s any different after your worldly death? It’s just the same, old son. But now the stakes are larger than life. Much larger. A prey who gets caught is stuck in what you folks call Hell.”
“The crystal fog is Hell?”
“A living Hell. In the sense that anything is ‘living* here, it is alive. Which is another way of saying that it is deadly purposeful — as are we all. As you noticed, unspace is made up of infinitely many parts, which all arise out of each other and coexist. The fog is a native inhabitant of unspace. It evolved here. But it is the ultimate in separation. Once a part of it has successfully encysted itself around you, it has you, boy. You never reach the sharing possibilities of unspace. And oh, is there a pile-up of the fog around your world! Was it breeding fast, till we took a hand! Really, it was seriously unbalancing the whole ecology of unspace. Which is why we bred our aviary of little Deaths from out of our own selves, as a rescue operation. Certainly we are altruistic and generous — since unspace is a place of sharing — but we must confess to a certain self-interest too. The pile-up was getting oppressive. It spread too far.”
“Generous?” echoed Weinberger. “One of your little Deaths cured me. I was sick, and it burnt me clean. I guess that’s generosity, all right.*’
Lai undraped its arm from Weinberger and stood up, on the second attempt, rocking about a bit.
The angel flapped its wings to steady itself, then it half-walked, half-flew to the door. Putting two claw digits to its mouth, it whistled shrilly.
TWENTY-SIX
Red Death streaked through the doorway. Braking in mid-air, it alighted hawklike on Lal’s thin wrist.
Lai whistled several more times, and other little Deaths sped through the door. They circled the hall, and hung themselves on carved headpieces and empty picture frames.
“If you want my opinion,” said Lai, “Death was just trying to get away from you. You being alive, and all. But you entangled it imaginatively, in your own death-knot. Poor simple thing, it had to unravel that knot before it could escape. And it did. What did you want to do with the little Death: exhibit it in a zoo? What a wild scheme: to cage Death, when it is itself the pass-key!”
Jim had been watching the newly-arrived Deaths nervously. “Lai, you said that unspace is a place —“
“It is all places that you can possibly imagine yourself entering.”
“You said that it’s a sharing place — but it’s full of fierce competition, too. How can it be both?”
“Competitive sharing; isn’t that the very definition of a living ecology? The same holds true of the ecology of death. But I think I see your point. You worry about cruelty and oppression — about the misuse of one being by another. Let me assure you, that doesn’t happen here. We compete in the desirability of our world creations: their attractiveness, their inventiveness. The finer they are, the more they will be common to all. The more everyone will wish to share them and enjoy them, and be fulfilled by them, and maybe even suffer in them. But the crystal fog knows nothing of this. It’s like a virus, which only wants to repeat itself. The fog would crystallize unspace into separate cells which have no connection with each other. It would freeze the imagination into endlessly repeating patterns — of self-worlds.”
Lai hoisted Death aloft.
“This one will guide you home. The others will escort you. Hurry now! I suspect that your time is up.”
Watson, Ian - Novel 10 Page 16