Generally the Paxmen kept out of our way. They let us exiles bully and harass each other and fight to be top dog or run with the pack in charge.
Generally. But if Hell showed signs of becoming too comfortable, the Paxmen would reduce the quality of life for a while by switch- mg off the water-cascade or raising or lowering the temperature so that the exiles cooked or froze. They'd done this before; they would do it again, if we ever looked to be having it easy.
Now, once you got used to the assorted rigours and cruelties, life was rather better than it appeared to be—to those who weren't themselves living it, namely the Paxmen whose abode was way off in another cavern. So after a while I realized that Jean-Paul's regime was almost benevolent. He'd been boss for half a dozen years, and he was a more complex tyrant than at first he seemed. Looking back, the sudden arbitrary murder of Max had been done to prove how savagely Jean-Paul ran the shop, but without actually killing anyone's dear friend in the process. Likewise, his other outbursts of violence. Booting that porteress. Slapping me so hard.
We were allocated billets around the various circles of this spiral Hell. Tessa and I were assigned to a nook close to Jean-Paul's own king-pin cave. Only later did I cotton on that this was so that Jean-Paul could keep a semi-kindly eye on the two of us: the old woman and the child. To begin with, I would never have believed it. My mouth was still stinging from his blow and my teeth felt loose (though they weren't), so I hated him.
Ours was a tiny little cave. A tatty curtain hung over the entrance, and inside there was barely room enough for two sleeping pallets. ("Farewell, my lost palazzo!" mourned Tessa when she first saw inside.) On the other hand, we had no possessions to clutter the cave with. All hygiene and cooking was communal, carried out nearby. Unlike some other new arrivals, we were well away from the worst heat of the suns.
The suns: these dimmed but did not die by night, which was twilit throughout. Someone told Tessa that not once during Jean- Paul's reign had the Paxmen quenched the lamps of Hell to chasten its inhabitants. On several prior occasions the whole Hell-pit had been plunged into darkness for days on end. People had fallen to their deaths. A few had gone mad.
Tessa was set to work as a cook; and indeed she showed such an ingenious flair for improving the cuisine that one day Jean-Paul felt obliged to stop by specially to kick over one of her best creations. Tessa took this in her stride as a compliment to the chef. She had cottoned on to his real motives a bit ahead of me.
I was set to work as her assistant peeler and washer-up. Shades of my stay with Doctor Edrick!
Of Bernardino and Prof we saw little. They were labouring over on the other side of Hell. Of Kalima we saw a lot more, since Jean- Paul had ordered her to his own billet, beaten her a bit, and taken her as mistress. Personally I wouldn't have trusted Kalima in bed with me in case I got knifed in the ribs while I was snoring. But obviously I'm not always a brilliant judge of character. She seemed to acquiesce happily in her new role. She put on queenly airs. Now she was Jean-Paul's "secretary".
There were no kids, except for me. Apparently the water contained a drug very like our own Safe back home. An exile's only offspring was whatever they contributed to the Godmind's seed- ships.
Thus life proceeded, after a fashion.
For me, this was a routine of peel, peel, fetch and carry, scrub, scrub. Now and then the monotony was interrupted by the spectacle of fights or beatings administered by the swaggering Beards. As punctuation we heard the occasional muffled bang as new galleries were blasted in the rock. I began to appreciate another reason for the arduous chores hereabouts: there was nothing else to while away the years.
Nothing at all?
Oh, with one exception! Every now and then a couple of Paxmen would appear, locate somebody and lead them off in the direction of the great enterprise, to donate of themselves. The donors departed from a distant cave housing a transport tube. They always returned, none the worse for wear.
The Paxmen had no difficulty in locating whoever they wanted, because we were all under surveillance in the pit. Powerful glass eyes watched us from the roof, hidden amongst the suns. So when Jean-Paul had kicked Tessa's vegetarian lasagne over, he'd expected this to be noted on high with approval.
One day a couple of Paxmen came for me.
"Accompany us," said one of them.
"I'm not donating so much as a flake of dandruff to your wretched seedships!" said I.
"No," he agreed blandly, "you aren't. The Godmind wishes to converse with you privately in His garden."
"In its what?" Incredulous, I took in the terraces of cabbages, bean-sprouts, watercress, whatever.
"Not here. Elsewhere. Hurry up."
* * *
The Paxmen escorted me to the cave I've mentioned. This was bare, apart from several glass eyes scanning the interior. The travel-tube itself was sealed off by a metal door, to which one of the Paxmen had a key. He only used this when a green light glowed to show that a capsule was waiting on the other side.
We boarded. With the exception of a number of seats bolted to the floor, the capsule was almost entirely blank metal inside. No windows at all. A fan-machine purred behind a grille, creating a draught.
One Paxman sat in the nose where there was a tiny control panel. The capsule door shut. We sighed away.
The other Paxman sat opposite me, watching, barely blinking.
"Hey, you guys," I said, "when you're off duty what do you do for fun?"
"A Paxman is never off duty," my escort replied. Ah, here was progress indeed! No one had ever got very far trying to chat up a Paxman. If the Godmind had decided to talk to me, maybe their tongues were loosened too.
"Don't you have desires, ambitions?"
"We desire to do our duty; that's our ambition."
Hmm. Did I say progress? Maybe not.
I tried: "Were you bom, or made?"
"Which were you?" he countered.
"Bom, of course!"
"Wrong. Your body was vat-made in Eeden."
"Oh, I know that! But I was bom: the original me. How about you?"
"Made to measure. To suit the Godmind."
"Hey, are you trying to be witty? Well gosh, witty folk like you must do something to amuse themselves!"
The Paxman regarded me levelly, then said, "I garden."
"You do what?”
"I garden roses."
Roses: you know the name? "The Queen of Flowers", so-called. You'll never have seen any roses, of course. To us, they're just a myth.
I first saw roses in palazzo gardens in Venezia. Roses come in different colours and styles. Some are big, some are tiny. Some are flat and simple, others densely petalled. Some are climbers, others bushes. Many are perfumed. Roses have nasty thorns to prick your flesh.
So where, inside the rocky Moon, did my Paxman garden roses? Or was that just a conversation stopper? It certainly put a stop to my chatter!
Our capsule soon soughed to a halt. The door opened upon an empty, well-lit platform with a wall mosaic announcing: Rosaluna Station. The other Paxman stayed inside when we two stepped out. Behind us, the capsule itself was hidden by a second wall, of metal.
A corridor curved away. We went along this, passing through a couple of metal doors intended to keep the air in, in case of moon- quakes.
The third door opened upon. . . .
. . . masses of foliage and blooms under a sunlit, cloud-dappled blue sky! There were beds and thickets and mazes of roses. There were arbours, pergolas and archways all clad with leaf and flower. There were trellises, screens, tubs, hedges, brick walls a-blossom! Extending how far? Three thousand spans in length, and as much in breadth? I don't know which sight was the more amazing; the garden or the view of the sky above!
About one hundred spans above. I could tell that the sky was artificial. The real sun shone down through it from beyond, but the white clouds floating about were flat. They were squeezed between two giant panes of glass the size of the garden itself; and were adr
ift in some blue liquid. Since the clouds changed shape slowly as they drifted, they must be like blobs of oil in water: of a different substance from the blue medium they floated in. The false sky filtered and diffused the sunlight which would otherwise, perhaps, be too fierce—as there was no air between the Moon and the Sim.
The sky surely couldn't be made of ordinary glass, else it would have snapped under its own weight, not to mention the weight of the liquid sandwiched between. Anyway, didn't little rocks rain down on the Moon all the time, according to what I'd heard? That was why Hell was underground.
Yet here was a sky! So why couldn't Hell have a sky? Presumably because Hell was Hell. . . .
A number of Paxmen were browsing, here and there, snipping off overblown blooms and wiring up stray new growth.
We descended a broad brick stairway between trusses of fluffy white blossoms, on to an earthen avenue. This avenue was flanked by large bushes bearing vermilion and creamy-buff flowers alternately, and led towards a metal gazebo set upon a low mound in the very centre of the garden; the gazebo roof was ringed with glass eyes.
We were only part of the way towards that gazebo, which I guessed was our destination, when my Paxman turned aside to lead me around by pebbled paths on a guided detour.
He stopped by a trellis tangled with branches bearing pinky carmine blooms. "This is Zepherine Drouhin. Uniquely, as you'll see, it has no thorns. It's a climbing Bourbon rose, with semidouble blooms. Please smell the fragrance."
To oblige him, I sniffed. "Nice," I said.
"We have to watch out for spindly growth. That's on account of the lower gravity. Equally, there's the plus of bigger blossoms and a longer flowering season."
"Oh really?"
"And here we have Picasso, the first Floribunda rose to be described as 'hand-painted'—though of course we don't literally paint it by hand."
Next he pointed out a blood-red specimen. "Ah, Parkdirektor Riggers. It's vulnerable to mildew and blackspot, but of course we don't have any of that on the Moon."
He pinched off a couple of flowers which were nearly finished. It occurred to me that Edrick would have felt beautifully at home here, stripping off mildewed leaves to the glory of the Godmind, though of course there weren't any such diseased leaves, said my guide.
"Now here's Pink Grootendorst, a rugosa shrub. Observe the frilled petals. The bush itself isn't much to look at. But the flowers are excellent for displaying at our annual rose show."
A rose show? And practically next door we had to grub around in our wretched pit painfully growing vegetables!
"Are you mad?" I said.
Ignoring my jibe, he indicated a bush of silvery lilac flowers which looked like thin porcelain. "Here's Blue Moon. It's as close as you can ever breed to a true blue rose. Why? Because the rose family doesn't anywhere include the blue pigment Delphinine."
"I shouldn't have thought the Godmind would have too much trouble making a blue rose! Not when it can turn people into alien birds and merfolk at long distance."
"Ah, but that would be cheating."
"I give up."
I oughtn't to give up, though. Not if the Godmind cared so much about this crazy lovely garden. How, I wondered, did one go about introducing mildew and black spot into it? Was that why we had been sprayed when we first landed on the Moon?
Why the hell did the garden exist? What did it all mean? Could the Godmind's glass eyes really perceive beauty? Could these robotic Paxmen?
Aha. If the Godmind tried its hand (a mech-hand) at painting or pottery to prove to itself what an artist it was—just like real human bemgs!—it might have made a fool of itself. But flowers were safe. Rowers were already dipped in beauty.
Our route led us back presently to the metal gazebo.
"You go on up, Yaleen. I'll be dead-heading nearby." My Paxman gave me a little push in the right direction.
I mounted the metal steps and entered. "I'm here, Godmind," I said to the air. "Why roses?"
After a wee pause the same rich sombre voice as I'd heard in the Basilica spoke from the roof. (If I remember aright. It was a catchy little verse):
"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
"Time is still a-flying:
"This same flower that smiles today
"Tomorrow will be dying. ..."
"You're lucky to be here while so many are coming into bloom, Yaleen. Roses are transitory. Humans too."
"So you do admit it!"
Pause. "Admit what?"
"Admit that you plan to bum the brains of everyone alive in another thousand centuries or so!"
Pause. "Well, aren't you going to answer?" I demanded.
"Please note that our conversation will inevitably suffer from brief delays. That's because I am on the Earth, which is some distance away. You can see it, if you look at the sky above the entrance."
I hastened to look, and spotted a swirly blue and white ghost of a disc beyond the blue of the false sky . . .
"I shall say 'finish' when I finish speaking," the voice went on. "You will kindly do the same, otherwise we may get tangled up. I've been considering in depth your idea that I have had, or have, or will have mastery of time. I've been mulling your theory that I myself planted—or will plant—the black destroyers, yet do not know this. Alternatively, that such creatures exist as a result of my past or future effort to reach back through time. You sparked an interesting speculation, and I'd be interested to learn exactly how you arrived at it. Finish."
I was just about to say that I was a whole lot more interested in the fate of the whole human race, finish, goddam finish. But then I had an inspiration.
"Don't get me wrong!" I assured the voice, in a tone which I hoped sounded fervent and sincere. "I've changed my mind a lot recently. I think your plan to build a lens is a super, fabulous one. It's a stroke of Godly genius. It's far beyond the sort of thing that people could dream up, which is how I had trouble adjusting to it." My brain was zipping along nineteen to the dozen. "I want in on your plan. I want to know what the universe is all about. I want to know what time is, and what &?-space is, and why anything exists. That's what I really want. But you need someone on your side who understands you, and who isn't just a puppet. I'm sure you do, or you wouldn't be talking to me now! . . . er, finish," I concluded breathlessly.
Pause.
"You've changed your tune, Yaleen. It isn't long since you abused me bitterly. And set fire to my Basilica."
"Oh that! I had to draw attention to myself. In any case, I didn't personally bum the Basilica."
"... a spell in Hell is salutary, perhaps? Please don't interrupt."
"Sorry! Oops."
". . . but how can I know if this is a true seeing-of-the-light upon the Damask road, as in precog myth? Finish."
Whatever was the Damask Road? I visualized a bolt of rose-red silk rolling out along a highway.
"Oh precog, tree-frog!" said I. But this hardly squared with my new demeanour. "No, wait! What I mean is: precog myths mightn't be precog at all. They might be the proof that you influenced time past—that's how they got planted there in the past. But anyway: about my change of heart. People often oppose things because they secretly want in on them! Didn't you know that? The closer folk come to seeing the light, the more bitterly and blindly they oppose it. Till all of a sudden, flip. That's human nature. Finish."
One thing stood out for sure. The Godmind didn't really know me. The Worm had strolled around my mind nonchalantly, whether I liked it or not. The Worm really knew the Kas in its Art-store. But the Godmind could only use the psylink to shift Kas around: back to Eeden to inhabit new bodies.
Maybe it could build a lens with the Kas of all the dead, but they certainly wouldn't inhabit its bosom afterwards. Not unless the view through its lens showed it how.
Whatever its limitations, the Worm had insight. The Godmind didn't. Yet. So the Worm was like the blind spot in its eye: an entry point to awareness, where nothing could actually be seen by it.
"Conversion is a behavioural jump, as in Catastrophe Theory?" The voice seemed to be asking itself, not me. "Perhaps—" and this definitely was addressed to me—"you're just fed up with peeling carrots and washing dishes? Finish."
"Oh no, that isn't it! It's all on account of this fabulous garden. Here's my damask rose. Road, I mean. I'm overwhelmed. I've fallen in love with it. I mean, just look around! Here in this garden you're searching for order and beauty—for the roots of existence! And the blossoms. Anyone who can fix up a garden like this just has to be on the ball. Finish."
The Godmind was obviously proud (as Hell) of its garden. Maybe, when it had solved the secret of existence and wiped out the human race in the process, here it could walk in the afternoon warmth of the lunar sun, alone and content.
"Walk"? If the Paxmen all went "poof" at the same time as everyone else, it could always jolly up some mech-gardeners with glass eyes. . . .
"Ah yes indeed. This is probably the leading rose collection anywhere in the universe. It far outrivals the Empress Josephine's Malmaison. It can definitely hold a candle to the Parc de la tete d'Or, the Westfalenpark or the Hershey Rose Garden. You still haven't said how you arrived at your other conclusions Finish."
"I intuited them, Godmind. Because . . . because I guess I must have been bom with a freak gene for intuition! I can guess right, and I usually do." (What a lovely lie. If only it were true!) "Here's an example. This is just on account, as a goodwill gesture. I'll tell you how you'll be able to zap your enemy the black current, and any others of its ilk that are lurking about. I'll tell you how to wipe that cataract from your vision, that blot from your plan, that warp from the lens of your telescope!" Nice rhetoric, huh? "When your lens is ready," I said, "why should it only receive? Why shouldn't it also transmit? And focus? and. ..." I left my clue dangling.
Watson, Ian - Black Current 02 Page 13