by Trevor Hoyle
‘Just about,’ Blake said. He spoke through the talk-back to the technicians below. ‘How does everything look?’
‘No problems. The readings are normal.’
‘Is NELLIE behaving herself?’
One of the technicians scanned the dials on the Neuron Processor and reported, ‘She’s okay. Shall we link up?’
Blake breathed out slowly. His hands were clasped together like a black knot in the lap of his pristine white coat. ‘Let’s do it.’
The technician connected a transductor to a socket in the transmission table and pressed a series of buttons. ‘We have a reading.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Stage III.’
Blake glanced at the wall chronometer. ‘What would you say – five minutes?’
‘About that,’ the technician replied matter-of-factly.
Dagon gazed down through the observation window. He drew on the cigar and let the smoke trickle out of his nostrils. Blake was distracted into wondering how it was possible to smoke through a respiratory implant; where did the smoke go to? He looked at the chronometer again and explained unnecessarily, ‘When he reaches delta sleep he’ll start to dream and the display should begin to register brain images.’ He said into the talk-back, ‘Advise when REM activity begins.’
The greenish light made everything below seem as if it was underwater. The patient looked relaxed, sleeping peacefully. Beneath the cushioning on the transmission table an inlaid circuit of germanium picked up and transmitted his neurological landscape and fed it via the Neuron Processor to the display. Already, in deep trance, he had descended through Stages I and II and was now approaching the most active level of dreaming sleep, Stage IV, at which point an electric shock would trigger the brain chemical acetylcholine. This would boost the delta wave rhythms to a peak and prolong the dreaming phase. The purpose of the Indexer, attached to the patient by electrodes, was to induce the wave rhythms through alpha to delta and monitor their varying strengths.
Blake had no qualms about this phase of the operation: it was routine and he’d performed it hundreds of times on as many patients. Few of them suffered any ill-effects, but then they had been ‘normal’ people who didn’t possess the gift of mythic projection. This was the first time he’d tried it on a Myth Technologist.
Dagon said abruptly, ‘How long can we keep him under?’
‘Three hours.’
‘Will that be long enough?’
‘It’ll have to be.’ Blake wasn’t prepared to risk Queghan’s life for the sake of an experiment, even if it discovered the secret of the Holy Grail.
‘We have REM activity,’ one of the technicians reported. ‘And we have a Stage IV reading.’
Blake looked down on the patient and saw the rapid movement of the eyelids, indicating that he was descending to the delta level.
‘Has the acetylcholine been triggered?’
‘Not yet.’
Blake touched the controls in front of him, even though the display was blank and impassive. ‘Come on, come on,’ he said under his breath. He looked at the chronometer and tapped his foot.
Dr Francis Dagon hadn’t taken his eyes off the patient. He sat imperturbably, occasionally blowing a plume of grey smoke into the close still atmosphere of the observation room. Nothing would ever disturb or upset him, Blake thought, and he jumped as one of the technicians said:
‘Acetylcholine has been released.’
‘Check pulse, heart rate, respiration and blood pressure,’ Blake said at once. He waited while the technicians checked the readings and made notes on the clipboards.
‘Adrenal level is high.’
‘What is it?’
‘472 mg per 100 ml.’
‘He must be responding,’ Blake said to Dagon. ‘The acetylcholine stimulates the pituitary and adrenal glands which pump hormones into the system.’ His broad handsome face had tightened with concentration.
‘REM increasing,’ said one of the technicians.
The patient’s eyelids were now flickering rapidly and his body had begun to move restlessly on the padded table. There were flecks of saliva at the corners of his mouth.
‘Pulse rate dropping.’
‘What’s the central brain temperature?’
‘Rather high but remaining constant.’
‘We’re into Stage IV,’ said the other technician.
‘We’re not getting anything,’ Blake said impatiently.
‘Pulse rate still dropping.’
‘Come on,’ Blake said. ‘Come on.’
‘Respiratory rate falling.’
‘Adrenal level increasing.’
Something moved on the display, a coloured light. It flickered and was gone.
‘Is the VTR running?’ Dagon inquired.
Milton Blake nodded, his eyes fixed on the screen. One of the technicians said, ‘Something’s happening to him.’ His voice was uncertain as though he had been caught off-balance.
Blake looked quickly through the angled observation window. He felt as jumpy as a cat. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
The other technician said, ‘My God.’
‘What is it?’
‘His hands,’ the technician said. ‘You can see through his hands. You can see the bones—’
Dr Francis Dagon craned his neck forward, looking down intently into the transmission area. ‘The man’s skull is visible,’ he remarked. ‘His flesh is becoming transparent.’
Blake said through the talk-back, ‘Watch those readings. Report immediately any fluctuations outside the norm. What’s the adrenal level?’
‘510.’
‘An interesting physiological condition,’ said Dagon, craning forward. ‘Has it happened with any of your other patients?’
Blake was about to reply when the display came to life: an image had appeared in three-dimensional colour. He said through the talk-back, ‘We have something.’
‘I don’t like this,’ one of the technicians said.
Dagon turned to Blake and said conversationally, ‘He seems to be having a fit. Is this normal?’
The patient’s head was thrown back so that the transparent musculature of his neck was visible. There was foam on his lips and his eyes were now open, the eyeballs upturned into the head, white and blindly staring. His limbs were rigid, jerking stiffly as spasms of uncontrollable energy passed through them like bursts of electrical current. The face and hands were now completely translucent, displaying the bones, muscles and blood vessels within.
Both technicians were staring anxiously towards the observation room. Blake said, ‘Watch those levels. Report any deviations outside the safety parameters.’
‘Is he all right do you suppose?’ Dagon asked, relighting his cigar. ‘Will we have to abort the experiment?’ His interest seemed purely academic.
Blake adjusted the controls on the display and brought the image into fine focus. ‘I hope all this is worth it.’
‘Are we to proceed?’ Dr Francis Dagon said with faint surprise.
Blake took out his handkerchief and wiped the palms of his hands. ‘You wanted mythic projection and that’s what you’ve got,’ he said, and then through the talk-back, ‘We’re on vision and recording. Watch those levels.’
5
The Aleph
The whip lashed home seven times, lacerating the flesh with seven neat slices. The crowd in the market-place, who had nothing better to do than gawp, cackled and snorted and spat into the baked red earth.
‘Give ‘im one for luck!’ somebody shouted in a cheery cracked voice and the crowd laughed and stamped its feet in agreement.
‘Seven is the penalty and seven’s been paid,’ said the town clerk officiously. He turned his head and mumbled over his shoulder, ‘Throw him down. Let the dogs at him.’
He was flung into the dust, an idiot-child of a man with a misshapen head and red drooling lips, and the town dogs gathered round and licked his raw back. One shoulder was hunched, the protruding sho
ulder-blade showing bleak and white like an embryonic wing. That side of his body, the left, had been devastated by a stroke and both the hand and the leg were at odds with their counterparts.
Somebody kicked at him pettishly (a man who had lain awake all night suffering from haemorrhoids) but he hardly felt it through the hot clawing fury of pain which seared his back. The dogs snuffled and licked greedily, relishing the warm salty tang of fresh blood. Because of the half-formed ‘wing’ he was known derisively as Angel, and now somebody called his name in a soft undertone. When he didn’t respond the girl came closer, repeating his name in the same gentle tone. She was dressed in a cloak and hood which kept her face hidden so that only a suggestion of her features was visible to the curious onlooker.
‘Get up, Angel, the dogs are getting a taste for you,’ and she kicked the scrawny animals away, indifferent to their yelps and squeals.
The man struggled to his knees and with the girl’s support managed to stand upright. Even with his hunched deformity he was taller than her by half a metre, a tower of a man alongside her slender insubstantial figure. He pulled the tattered scraps of the rough shirt together across his crooked shoulders and followed the girl to where a tired-looking horse waited stoically between the shafts of a farm cart. She didn’t try to help him but merely stood watching as he hauled himself up on to the back of the cart and lay face down in the straw. The flesh of his back was raised up in an ugly welter of puffy stripes, the seven merging into each other. The girl climbed up and with a pointed stick spurred the nag into lurching motion.
‘Don’t get the idea you have been rescued, Angel,’ Meria ben Shem Tov said above the creaking of wheels, jabbing at the horse’s withered flanks. ‘You have yet to settle with my father and he too will want his pound of flesh.’
*
The house of black sandstone, once the residence of a lord and landowner, stood on a gentle slope which, at the rear, fell away precipitously to a deep ravine where goats grazed on the scrubby vegetation. The single rutted track wound upwards through clumps of knarled olive trees and dense thickets of bougainvilia, their flowers vivid blotches of dark purple against the parched earth. The horse barely made the shallow incline and had to be encouraged a number of times by means of the specially pointed stick, eventually collapsing to a halt in the small paved courtyard surrounded by a wall constructed in the ornamental Moorish style.
Meria ben Shem Tov threw back her hood and stepped down, ignoring the pathetic animal which sagged between the shafts, and told the man to go at once into the house. Her colour was high and her eyes fierce and dark above the sharp prominence of a nose which threatened to dominate her face: her features were strong and emphatic, in keeping with a character that was forthright, self-assertive, almost brutal in its disregard for the feelings of others. She was not yet twenty and already a fearsome woman who knew her own mind and wanted her own way; she was seldom denied it.
In the great hall, beneath the large framed portraits darkened by woodsmoke, the stooping lame-shouldered giant called Angel stood before the master of the house, a small thin man with large expressive eyes and pale delicate hands. He was physically unremarkable, except perhaps that his head was fractionally too large for his body; his manner was discreet, his gestures constrained and unemotional. Dagon ben Shem Tov spoke in a soft disinterested voice, though a spark of anger resided in his dark eyes. As his daughter removed her cloak and draped it across a chair he asked, ‘What’s the cretin been up to this time? Did he receive the lash for stealing?’
Meria brushed the tousled black hair away from her forehead. ‘He was found playing with the children. You know what the townspeople are like, they jump at their own shadows.’
‘Did he harm any of them?’
Meria revealed her teeth in a cold smile. ‘Why should he harm them when he’s a child himself? They caught him making daisychains and floating them in the stream, so they dragged him into the square and whipped him.’ She adjusted her bodice and stood by the huge marble fireplace, idle and listless, kicking at the dead ash.
Dagon regarded the hulking misshapen man and his hands fluttered like pale moths. ‘Why do you disobey me, Angel?’ he inquired tonelessly. ‘You were told not to leave the house. This is the second time in a month you’ve run off. Do you seek punishment? Do you crave it? Do you want to be chained up and left in the dark for a week?’
The idiot man-child remained mute and passive. He didn’t possess the faculty of speech but he could make sounds which were intelligible to those familiar with them; now he stared dumbly, the uneven set of his features – slanting brow, ill-matched eyes and gross lips – oddly pathetic in their twisted ugliness.
Dagon ben Shem Tov clicked his tongue and turned away abruptly. He said, ‘I hope for your sake the townspeople don’t come pestering me about your exploits. I don’t want them anywhere near the house, much less to enter it. Do you understand me, Angel? Do my words penetrate that solid bone skull of yours?’
‘Save your breath,’ Meria said boredly. ‘You can’t talk to an addled egg and expect a reply. He’s lost what few wits he once had.’
The creature was dismissed and he lumbered away, seemingly oblivious to everything but the stinging taste of the whip. He inhabited the house like a phantom. Later in the evening, as Dagon ben Shem Tov and his daughter were dining together in the great hall, the tallow candles throwing long dancing shadows against the stone walls and high timbered ceiling, a visitor was announced. His arrival was unexpected, though Dagon ben Shem Tov showed no sign of surprise, his large eyes calm and watchful as the stranger entered and made a brief formal bow. He was a tall young man, fair-haired, with a casual manner and amiable disposition, and he apologized for intruding on their privacy. Dagon ben Shem Tov and Meria remained seated as he explained his presence.
‘I’ve travelled many miles to be here – as no doubt you can see from the state of my dress. I had intended to arrive at a more suitable hour but there was an incident at the border which delayed me.’
‘Then I hope your journey hasn’t been wasted,’ Dagon ben Shem Tov said, wiping his lips fastidiously and throwing down the napkin. ‘We’re not prepared for guests, nor do we welcome them. Your name is Daneri?’
‘As I told your manservant.’ For a moment the young man seemed at a loss. ‘You haven’t heard of me?’
Dagon ben Shem Tov pursed his lips together but didn’t otherwise respond.
‘Jorge Luis Daneri,’ the young man said hopefully, as though expecting his name to mean something to them. When it apparently didn’t he went on, ‘I was led to believe … I was told quite definitely that you would be expecting me. You haven’t received a letter?’
‘No letter mentioning you,’ Dagon ben Shem Tov said, glancing at his daughter. ‘Who is supposed to have written this mythical letter?’
‘My patron, Carlos Zungri. You know of him?’
Dagon ben Shem Tov rose to his feet. ‘You have studied with Zungri?’
‘For three years. He said that I showed promise in certain arts and practices and that if I wished to progress there was only one man in all of Europe who could instruct me. He promised to write – in fact he did write, I saw the letter – and ask if you would accept me as an initiate. I’ve travelled for many weeks to be here and at last, in the great moment, I’ve only succeeded in showing myself to be a fool and simpleton. You must think me unworthy of even your smallest consideration.’
‘What is a lost letter between practitioners of the ancient arts?’ said Dagon ben Shem Tov, stepping forward to take the young man’s arm. ‘As a favoured novice of Carlos Zungri you are more than welcome.’ He led him to a chair by the fire, musing softly, ‘Daneri … Daneri … I should have heard the name but it doesn’t come readily to mind.’ He said with a halfsmile towards Meria, ‘I haven’t been keeping in touch with developments lately. Too much to occupy my mind.’
‘You are deeply involved in your work, I understand that,’ said Luis Daneri gravely. He wa
s looking at Meria for the first time; he had not so far paid her any attention. Now he watched her covertly, taking in her fresh high colour and raven-black hair, the fine curve of the neck which led the eye willingly to the softer parts of her anatomy temptingly concealed amongst filigree lace and ruffles of green velvet.
She acknowledged his look openly, not lowering her eyes as maidens were expected to do: he was an attractive man, her frank steady gaze told him so.
Dagon ben Shem Tov seated himself in the chair opposite. ‘Did Carlos happen to give you a letter of introduction?’ The firelight glinted and moved in his dark eyes, winking points of light reflecting glassily.
Daneri said hastily, ‘I naturally assumed you would have received his personal letter and be expecting my arrival. Under the circumstances I can only offer my abject apologies for this intrusion. However, I would never—’
‘We are pleased to have your company,’ Meria said, reaching for the decanter. ‘I speak for us both.’ She poured brandy into a long-stemmed glass and brought it to him. ‘My father doesn’t feel the need for companionship and tends to forget that others can grow weary of solitude; and that they might pine for the stimulus of a fresh mind.’
‘I have nothing against fresh minds,’ said Dagon ben Shem Tov. ‘On the contrary – and particularly when it’s someone who can converse intelligently on the subject of metaphysics. The matter is so affected by superstitious twaddle and mumbo-jumbo that most people sit and gawp like dumbstruck imbeciles when confronted with the true way, the right path.’
‘I am still a novice,’ Luis Daneri reminded him humbly. ‘My patron spoke of you as the Master Adept who was engaged on great and momentous works. If you will accept me as an initiate I ask nothing more than to sit at your feet, to listen and learn.’
Dagon ben Shem Tov looked into the flames. ‘Did Carlos specify these “great and momentous” works of mine?’
‘Not beyond saying that you had succeeded in understanding the wisdom of many centuries and had set about the task of putting it down in the form of a manuscript.’