by John Boorman
He laughed and fell. Caught in the slipstream, he hung for a moment. “How pointless!” he cried again. He danced one moment longer on thin air and then was lost without a cry.
Zed saw him fall like a brilliant dart into the clouds below, his cloak still fluttering gaily as if in mockery of his death.
CHAPTER THREE
The Vortex As Heaven
Zed still stood in the mouth, leaning against the upper teeth, mirroring the last position of his victim. Zed had taken the place of that body in more ways than one. He was the only aware being on the flying craft, all the rest were as dead, or about to be dead. He smiled at the thought.
He looked down with something of the triumph the man had earlier showed to him.
Zed allowed himself a faint smile. Things were progressing favorably. He still lived.
He let the wind whip at his clothing and the light rain beat against him. It ran from his body as it ran from the surface of the flying vehicle.
As it ran down Zed’s lips so it ran down the curved lips of Zardoz, and Zed looked out from that awful mouth-doorway, a minute figure. The gaping mouth, the glaring eyes floated serenely on, but they contained a new commander, Zed. Through the glowing orbs which had so frightened Zed as a boy, youth, and man, Zed looked down upon the cities of which he had been so afraid. Zed had pierced the God head. He was inside the hollow shell he had once so revered. From whence or how it moved, he knew not, but that it was false, he was certain. The love and reverence with which Zardoz had once filled him could no longer protect him, for he had found that his God was hollow as this ship. He was alone. His quest had begun.
The head floated on, gradually descending through the clouds into a valley cradling a lake. A fertile, green oasis in a black land. He flew lower and lower over fields that pleased him with their verdant exactness. Carefully laid paths and canals crisscrossed the neatly tilled land. Rows of fruit-bearing trees led the way downward. A profusion of blossom and color rose up to greet the head. The head circled slowly as if searching for a gap in an invisible wall, as if the valley were protected by more than high cliffs and mountains.
It sank down toward a cluster of dwellings, strange and elegant yet archaic. Zed did not look down on them; he had reburied himself in the grain at the center of the head.
With a strange hiss like the sighs of a thousand voices the head came to rest. Zed waited a moment, then ran to the mouth, leaped through, tumbled down the stony beard, and ran for cover as fast as his lightning reflexes and strong muscles would take him. There was no moment to look and wonder. He just had time to run, leap, and hide. The head had come to rest in a cluster of farm buildings, its mouth facing inward on to a courtyard, its eyes glaring down at the rooftops.
Gun first, he probed into the building in whose doorway he had sheltered. A strange and dusty interior. White dust everywhere. Long cones poured more dust into sacks. The smell of baking filled the air. Zed crept quietly along rows of freshly made loaves. He reached and picked one up, and as the mill ground corn into flour, the flour was mixed and cooked, all by some unseen hand. Zed tasted food for the first time in many days.
Only a bite, a taste. The bread was green. Bread—a slave food; green-magic! He touched the floury surface. He scanned the room as a hunter, detached and quick. The next moment he left the bakery to continue its automatic way. Almost soundlessly, he left as he had entered.
Zed was once again in a courtyard. The head had come to rest outside, the bakery was behind him. To his right, another building seemed to call him. It was a cottage, with two distended transparent domes in front of it, bulging breast-like, filled with plants.
Intrigued, Zed approached cautiously. On the roof were delicate silver vanes, turning into the sun, following its rays like a flower. Inside the cottage Zed gently prodded the dome doorways; they parted like lips.
Zed was within a womb of foliage, that itself contained many other transparent buds and growth points for infant plants. They lived in membranes that swelled and grew from floor to ceiling, each attached by tubings to other plants and sources of nourishment.
The wet earth in troughs crawled with life, teeming with worms and soft many-legged insects. A rotting sweet stench of decomposition pervaded all. The moist air seemed to close around him condensing on his body. Vivid blossoms hung before him. He brushed against thick leaves that seemed fashioned by a demon’s hand rather than grown from the soil. Spiky thorns clutched at him as he passed. Spheres within spheres contained other, greener growths wreathed in moist fogs.
Slime begat gases and nutrients for plants which in turn fed larger, stranger breeds, fulfilling some subtle biological plan. Seasons stretched on or speeded by in other tanks and casks.
Familiar wheat plants basked in unearthly violet lights while their naked roots floated in clear liquid. Some grain plants were monstrously tall, others fat and sleek with grass stems. The whole, a green menagerie of the exotic and half real, a universe in which he was the alien. All this was in step with a purpose. He was a lone mammal, adrift in their land. Notwithstanding this, there was human presence overall. The fine-tuned tubing, the delicately calibrated vessels, the scales, the bright bags of colored dusts, the clean and neat arrangement of the place—it all be-spoke a planner. All was complex and interwoven, yet it had been conceived and ordered. The lush vegetation was the result of countless plans and progresses—where was the creator of all this life?
Zed was enfolded and lost within the slippery midget forest of glass and plants. Its humid air oppressive, he groped for a door—an exit into air. He felt the walls, sniffing like a dog for its prey. He sensed his quarry lurked here. In some seclusion deeper than this, beyond these walls yet near at hand, was the man who had made all that.
His hands ran over the walls, searching. His cunning fingers found a crack. He pushed and a door creaked open, revealing a flight of steps. His hunter’s skill was bearing fruit.
The new room was quite different from the first. It was a jumble of strange bits and pieces, yet it seemed to have a life, a happier purpose than the places below. Drawings, plans, and toys were cluttered and crammed into the attic of the cottage. Zed picked up one box, and opening it, jumped back as a tiny toy popped out at him, then hung, limply suspended. Was it all a complex joke? Were they all in one vast game? He walked through a beaded curtain into another room, velvet curtains enclosed a painting – Zardoz! Zed leaped back as if discovered. Could Zardoz still see him? Was the God alive?
“Attention, attention, attention!”
Zed felt that he was not yet discovered, but knew the voice was near. It came from a mirrored box. Opening it, he saw a ring with a crystal stone. It was glowing with an inner light and the voice issued from it.
“Harvest produce report, submit surpluses and needs for inter-Vortex barter and exchange, year 2293, third harvest yield.”
As Zed toyed with the ring, figures began to float in the air before him, in red and green and white.
He reached out to touch them, remembering how he had tried to touch the gun of Zardoz in the same manner when a boy. The figures vanished and reappeared in ascending and descending order. Soap, leather, salt, barley, oats. The surplus of one Vortex could pass to another which had need of it. Numbers passed from one section to another. And all in midair, issuing from the ring. He moved his hand and caught the figures on his palm, compressing them down until one hand covered the other. He sent the images spiraling and shooting around the room. Then they vanished, and the air was still. Hunger pulled at him. His fast had been long.
“Meat,” he mumbled.
Meat appeared in midair, transparent but real. An image in thin air. He spoke again.
He could look into the ring and see the image still. He could project it onto the walls. He could command it.
“Who lives here?”
The face of the man he had killed in the flying head’s mouth appeared before him.
“I am Arthur Frayn – Vortex Four.”
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p; “No!” How could this man come back to haunt him, to betray him? The face grew huge, until only a single eye filled the wall. It cartwheeled across the ceiling as Zed’s hand shook.
“I am Arthur Frayn, Vortex Four. I am Arthur Frayn, Vortex Four.”
The accusing voice continued, unhindered, remorseless, in its calm insistence, a mocking denial of its own death. Zed shook with fear, there was no end to this repeating answer. Zed’s question had begun an endless comment on his murderous action. He shook the ring, stamped on it, shouted for it to stop, but the voice droned on as if to drive him mad. In desperation he stuffed the ring under a cushion, to suffocate the image. But soon the voice came from under there, muffled but distinct.
“I am Arthur Frayn, Vortex Four…”
Zed was startled by newer voices, from outside the walls. Moving to the window he looked down and saw people unloading the Zardoz head of its membrane-covered bodies. They were all young and lovely. They carelessly threw the bodies onto wooden carts. One girl counted them off.
“Three from Vortex Eight. Four from Vortex Five.”
“Did you ever see such mangled limbs?”
“Some kind of rock fall in their quarry.”
“Liver malfunction…Myopia, left eye…”
Others helped unload the grain in which Zed had hidden. This they took into the bakery.
They all spoke with familiarity and joked as they worked, but they were getting dangerously close to his hiding place.
CHAPTER FOUR
The People
Zed ran lightly, through lush greenery, over unfamiliar plants until he felt it safe to stop. The trees were green with leaf, rich with blossom. Ahead through the branches he saw a larger house. Built of old, carved, and yellowed stone it still had an added strangeness. Tall transparent domes clustered to form a huge roof above the older structure. Zed watched and wondered, the unfamiliarity of habitations in good order being new to him. How unlike the smoke-blackened gaping windows were those in front of him. Glass glistened in every pane. How unlike the smashed tiles and rafters was the magical roof on the house before him. So far from the ruined cities of the Outlands. Everything was in exquisite order, even the plants underfoot seemed constructed, and neatly painted.
He picked one and held it to the ring.
“What is it?”
“Flower.”
“For what?”
“Decorative.”
The object “so neat and richly colored fell from his fingers.
There was a sound, high and hypnotic, that grew from the trees. A girl had appeared, like magic from the woods, bare-breasted, blonde, astride a white horse. She gazed at him, through him, her eyes penetrating his deepest places. She was one of the other people, yet she had not the disdain in her face, only infinite love and knowledge.
Zed checked his crystal ring – was this one of its hallucinations?
Then there were others, suddenly visible as their combined song rose. They sat in groups within the high branches and at the foot of one great tree, a giant cyprus. They were apart from him, in some other world that he could not see, joined by their song, their meditation.
Was the beautiful girl inviting him to join with them, to become one with their music? It could be no trap, Zed felt, yet it seemed to offer a new and infinite universe for him as he went forward, drawn toward it.
She waited on her horse, passive and all-knowing. She was no illusion but more beautiful than any of his vivid sleep-visions where such godlike women often walked.
Then she was gone, the spell broken. Leaves fluttered in another direction. The carriers of the maimed ones approached; Zed followed them closely, but still kept under cover. It brought him nearer to the house. The smooth green grass rolled out in front of him. In the center of the lawn stood a pyramid, as tall as he, made of a hard bright smooth substance that almost rang with reflected light. Those carrying the bodies walked behind the pyramid, and did not reappear, the long line somehow eaten up by this small structure.
Zed leaned back against a tree, gazed at the ring, the pyramid, the house. He breathed deep, and then moved quickly, running down through the woods, to something which he knew and needed – clear water.
Zed drank deep. The cold surface reassured him. It reflected the clouds and the dark lands beyond that he knew well. The icy liquid refreshed him3 clearing his thoughts. This was all real. At the lakeside Zed regained himself.
Someone approached silently along the water’s edge. A woman, moving on foot, evenly, directly at him, for him. He turned and swung toward her, gun aiming. He felt it was too late, although she was nearly naked, and unarmed, alone upon the beach. He was afraid.
Sharp blinding pain leaped from her eyes and into his. He staggered out into the shallows, the gun flying from him, whether thrown from his hand or drawn from it he could not tell, except that she was the source of his agony.
Disarmed, he faced her. She had a beauty like the other woman, yet it was stronger – there was a threat here. Her auburn hair flowed around her face, the eyes were slightly slanted and, like the corners of her mouth, they held a mocking certainty, a power and grace. She was an adversary.
“Do you know where you are?”
“A Vortex…”
“You come from the Outlands. You were told about the Vortex?”
“Zardoz says…” He looked about him nervously, the pain she had given him was real, he felt defenseless. What was her plan? Could she see into his mind, determine truth from falsehood? He must have time.
“What does Zardoz say?” Her eyes bored into his. He rose up.
“Zardoz says that if you obey him you’ll go to a Vortex when you die and there you’ll live forever…”
“Happily?”
“Yes.”
“So you think you’re dead?”
“Am I?”
He looked out over the silent dreaming lake. He who knew death so well was yet a stranger to it. Could this be the place beyond death?
He was still sweating but he felt more confident. He must avoid those painful eyes. She moved toward him. His back was to the lake, he could not run.
“You’re an Exterminator?” Another question-statement for him.
“I kill for Zardoz.” He could back away no farther, yet still she advanced.
“You came here in the stone head.”
”I don’t know.”
“It’s the only path and passage into the Vortex. You will show me how you come to be here.”
It was quiet. Light from the setting sun played on the water. A shaft of sunlight made a Jacob’s ladder between them. Her face was averted as she stood, deep in thought.
He was able to appraise her as a woman for the first time as the sun illuminated the line of her full breast, her narrow hip. Then she turned to face him. Conscious now of the change in him, she was unsettled. He felt more sure of himself, a feeling to be short-lived.
“You have a name.”
“Zed.”
“Zed,” she echoed.
The sunlight caught her left breast and seemed to separate it from her body. Zed was entranced with its beauty, paralyzed by its power. His eyes were drawn upward to hers, fearfully dragged there. A silent bolt of light flashed again from her eyes into his brain, worse than the first shock when he had lost his gun. This one drilled deeper than any bullet, yet he lived…but fell into the darkness and the void beneath his feet, skewered on the pin of light.
CHAPTER FIVE
Subterranean Interrogation
Zed was at home again, hunting.
They galloped along by the sea’s edge, sometimes splashing through the breaking-foam, always scudding after the prey.
Spurts of sand kicked up by their horses’ hooves were echoed by the bullets plowing into the ground, the occasional shot that had gone wide.
It was more fun to use the lance, to spike the prey. Some preferred to cut with the saber. To Zed all three means were as one.
They scampered ahead, some fall
ing, others turning off to try to draw the hunters away, the females trying to protect their young.
The tenacity with which these lower beings clung to life was great, and gave spice to the hunt.
Zed leaned forward and stuck the bobbing man in the back. The little figure stopped pacing his horse’s head and vanished from view. Another target. This man still carried the lance that had split his back, there was life in him still. Zed passed him up: live prey was best. He swung down and executed a perfect cut. The head flew from the shoulders of the Brutal below him.
He rose in his stirrups and cut down on the other side, severing another creature from his breath by hacking clean through from neck to hip. Zed’s men roared approval. It was a good day.
“I love one that puts up a good fight. I love to see them running. I love the moment of their death when I am One with Zardoz.” Zed heard his own voice speaking these words.
“Its coordination is exceptional.” Another voice came in to cloud Zed’s brain. Was this voice a dream from the past, or future? Was this life he could feel and breath itself a dream? The voice had a ring of memory: of an auburn-haired girl, by a lake.
Zed galloped past the main body of dead and dying, leaving them to his followers. He had his eyes on better game. The woman was fleet of foot. Like the others she was dirty, dressed in tatters, and she splashed along the sea edge.
Unlike the other females, she had not tried to offer herself, or to protect her young. She must be fresh and untried. A good specimen.
Zed leaned back in his saddle and drew his net. He cast it high and wide ahead of her. It snaked out, then spread, fanlike, around her. As it snapped shut at her thrashing limbs, Zed reined in, leaped from his horse, and was on her. He kissed her lip, then bit into it as she struggled less and less.
The dream returned to him. The auburn-haired woman who had hurt him had a friend, another woman like herself, proud and strong. She had pale eyes, brown hair, was dressed in green clothing. Taller than the first, she had an icy gaze and deep disdain of him. The two conferred, within a glacial, smooth windowless chamber, glancing down at him from time to time. He was pinioned, or so it seemed. The dream swam away.