by John Boorman
It occurred to him that the Eternals all thought him to be as rugged as his exterior, a tough and active animal with no powers of thought.
It did not occur to them that he could reason.
Consuella proudly stood before him, and gazed right into his eyes. Behind her the screen had blanked of images except the line relating to his sexual pulse. That continued to trace an unwavering line.
Zed flicked his glance from her to the line and back. A thought crossed his mind and issued across his face in a brief smile. He could control his body. She still stood there.
Zed produced the desired erection for the benefit of the audience.
“Consuella’s done the trick herself!” said Friend. They giggled, laughed, and applauded.
Consuella was the object of the Brutal’s affection!
Consuella could produce “the reflexive erection,” she was no better than the captive primate!
He smiled sweetly at her. Consuella flushed, enraged; but did he detect the shadow of envy crossing the face of May?
Consuella watched Zed sleep in his cage. She spoke into her communicator ring.
“The Brutal is now in the fourth hour of unconscious sleep. It is astonishing that Homo sapiens spends so much time in this vulnerable condition, at the mercy of its enemies. Is there any data on sleep patterns of primitive people?”
“Is that a priority request?”
“Yes. I will now test its working response to danger stimuli,” Consuella said.
She reached through the cage, her hand like a talon, toward the deeply sleeping Exterminator.
Zed’s hand appeared, grabbed her wrist. He was instantly awake and alert. She gasped at the physical contact. He released her.
“Does it please you to sleep?”
Zed remembered he had seen no beds here, nor yet any person sleeping.
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“I have dreams.”
As she searched his face for meaning the Tabernacle voice began to answer Consuella’s earlier question.
“Sleep was necessary for man when his waking and unconscious lives were separated; as Eternals achieved total consciousness, sleep became obsolete and second level meditation took its place. Sleep was closely connected with death.”
Zed looked up at the night sky and its tiny points of light high above the rooftops.
Dancing glowing clusters of light. Spheres that rolled and spun. Darkness from which came spots of harmony. An enveloping warm blackness through which swam a curiously organic architecture.
“You. Your genetic structure. Your life chart.”
May’s voice.
They were below ground again, deep within the pyramid, worshiping at the Tabernacle. May spun out a web of scientific litany before the screen, a homage to the rings master. She had scanned Zed’s body deeply with her communicator ring. At her command it had painlessly probed and captured Zed’s design. His skin, blood vessels, muscle fiber, then deeper and smaller, into the cells and beyond them even into their components. Finally, his essential particles, the smallest plan within him had been projected onto the screen—for May’s benefit and the eye that saw and projected for her. Might it not also record him for its own use? Did it scan all the incoming information and select the principal and most important for further use—as a line of defense and possible attack?
Using his military mind, Zed knew that whatever lay at the end of the invisible threads that led to, and joined up with, the center—the mystic spider web axis—was a silent, dormant king, plotting carefully for a confrontation and ultimate battle, its Armageddon.
Was it filing away his innermost thoughts as well as his physical details? To be sure, it might have most of him on file by now, but not his soul. Not yet, not ever.
“Look.”
His eyes continued to follow the patterns as they ebbed and flowed before him. He struggled but could not decipher the images on the screen.
“You’re a mutant. A second, maybe third generation. Therefore genetically stable.”
The sentences came from her deliberately, slowly, as if they were thoughts confirmed and made real by her vocal admission. Like entries in a long-kept book. She was underlining and ticking off suspicions that had been written at the time of his arrival.
“Enlarged brain, total recall. Your potential is…”
She became speechless. Her arms raised as if to encompass smoke that grew and filled the room. She shrugged. She could not find words.
“Your breeding potential…”
“Breeding?” inquired Zed, leaning up on the slab.
They both paused, conscious that May had exposed a soft flank to him with those words. She looked at him with a frown, now on the alert.
“Arthur Frayn…”
He blankly looked back. His mind skipped a thought or two, then slid back to its shock point. Breeding—he could breed in the Outlands, it was his sacred right. Zardoz had decreed it so. He had felt it was a just and true reward for his superiority over others. He could only mate with those women who were as well-formed as he, no mutant female could he inseminate, no wild-witch creature could be his, only those of the design prescribed by Zardoz. Then the nagging doubt gnawed through and he felt the sickness that was Frayn’s involvement. Was Zed just another life-form for Frayn to toy with? Had his love actions been part of a great gardener’s plan, just a careful planting in the spring season, watched over from afar? Could his killings have been just the pruning and weeding for the same distant farmer?
Was he just a single barbed flower in a field of other special blossoms? Might he not be as grotesque as the mutants he abhorred? Was he not as strangely designed and perfected as they? They were the offspring of the random oneness that was life. Was he the product of a willful human reason—Frayn’s? He must not betray these sentiments even to himself or he would weaken, and she would seize on them, securing them for her own use.
“How did you get into the Vortex? What is your purpose?”
He knew that she wanted him, however powerful she was. Her objective interest was aroused by his potential. Her body craved his.
“You’re mentally and physically vastly superior to me or anyone else here.”
Her eyes flickered. Zed sensed she was torn between the threats she saw and the potential she had uncovered. They were the same.
“You could be anything. You could do anything…”
She wavered, then made her move.
“You must be destroyed.”
Did she really feel this? If so, would she carry out her threat, and when?
“Why?” he said evenly.
“Because you could destroy us.”
He breathed deeply. “As you have destroyed the rest of life? Can you unknow what you now know—about me?”
She thought deeply, then replied: “For the sake of science I will keep this knowledge from the others for the moment, keep you alive. But you must follow me, obey me, be circumspect, make no disruption, quietly do whatever work is given you. I will watch over you.”
The meal rattled on as usual. All the Eternals were present. The evening light spilled from the mirror table back up onto their faces; it sparkled through the crystals set upon the surface.
The room was warm and friendly, the food simple but good. Like an elegant rich family, they bantered and teased as they ate; too spoiled to really understand anything outside themselves; too inward-looking ever to see themselves simply and clearly. Nonetheless, they presented a pretty picture to Zed as he assisted Friend, whose turn it was to serve the meal.
Zed never ceased to wonder at the elegance and fine detail of the place. The clothing, the cutlery, the shining skeins of cloth in the farther room; their beauty was confounded by the lack of appreciation in its owners. They acted as if it were their due. They looked but didn’t see.
He moved easily, carrying the potatoes to and from the steaming kitchen, glad to be alive, fully mobile, able to move even in the humblest cap
acity. He was functioning. Still alive.
Friend did not take to his chores so readily. Perspiring and irritated, he bit his lip and carried on.
Zed performed bis instructions to the letter. Each person approached from the left, a slight bow, the offering of the course; more? Removal of any dishes. Quietly, humbly, in rotation, each attended like the other, equally.
“Get a move on, you silly beast,” Friend barked.
The others didn’t mind Zed. They rather liked him. Especially the girls. They smiled and tittered. Zed calmly carried on. Consuella would be next; she began to tremble with revulsion at his closeness.
“Friend! Put that thing outside!”
She flashed her look of hatred at them both. An ominous silence fell over the table. Friend sighed, provocatively sweet.
“Anyone else troubled? Let’s take another boringly democratic vote. Shall we…Consuella?”
Zed carefully proffered the potatoes to her, from the left. The steam from them traced its way before her eyes, settled on her brow, condensed. She shook, but throttled down her voice.
“It’s Friend’s day to make the food. He must do it without help as we all do. It is fundamental to our society that we do everything for ourselves on a basis of absolute equality, and Friend knows that perfectly well.”
Zed held a moist potato forward in its ladle, to her face.
“Yes or no!” His voice was strong.
She spun to face him, incensed at his interruption in the debate.
“Potatoes? Yes or no.”
Everyone laughed, except Consuella. As it subsided
Friend continued his dangerously sarcastic monologue. “Take a vote! I say get more Zeds to do the work. We have Eternal life and yet we sentence ourselves to all this drudgery. I tell you. I’m sick of two hundred years of washing up—and I’m sick of pitting my bare hands against the blind, brute stupidity of nature!”
His arm flung out to the somber garden. The evening light had faded into malignant darkness.
The chatter subsided, the air grew tense. The battle lines were drawing firmer. Zed felt he should stop the confrontation, but could not do it. Consuella and Friend would have their final battle soon and one would be expelled and fall: Renegade or Apathetic?
Zed would be pulled down with them. He moved to May.
“You’d better do something about this.”
It was her task to protect him now; they shared a secret which put her in jeopardy as well.
She nodded. He was valuable to her alive for longer than his sentence had to run.
“Consuella is right. Zed is being kept here for scientific study. He can earn his keep on the land, but he should not do the work of a servant.”
Consuella would not pick up this hand of friendship.
“Time enough has gone to finish your study, May. Destroy it. See how it disrupts our community.”
Could Zed detect a wider meaning in these words?
“It is almost over.”
The agitation around the table proved Consuella’s claim; they were disturbed, unserene. Out of character they looked quite insignificant and weak.
One girl spoke up.
“How can you speak like that in front of Zed? He feels—I sense that.”
“Vote!” cried Consuella.
Friend shouted back, “Yes, vote!” The two extremists faced each other. The short quick gestures of the Eternals’ private language clashed and burbled with the noises of dissension. Bickering and bitterness were breaking through. Squabbles started again that went back to other days. Had Consuella and Friend once been as one? How could they resolve an eternal, Fundamental division while locked forever in the same building? Old wounds were slowly opening wide.
The voting ended, one woman spoke; she had been the focus for the activity.
“May has been given seven days to complete her studies. Then Zed will be exterminated.”
Although their voting process had been thorough, many still continued their confused debate. Zed was horrorstruck by the news, but had to wait his chance for escape. The Eternals’ clamor rose.
Only Avalow was stable. She looked from Zed to May and understood. She rose quietly.
Her hands began to hover and flutter in front of her, a long low note, more than musical, grew from her. The members of the commune became still and gazed at her. They quieted and grew watchful. The arguing had stopped.
Zed could feel that all were seeping into one unseen person, gradually, inevitably.
“The Monster is a mirror.”
They all rose, almost floated to their feet, and their hands began to touch. Their eyes opened to see beyond the room and back into a general mind that came from all. Avalow was the initiator, the high priestess of their communion.
“When we look at him we look into our own hidden faces. Their natural eyes were quite blind. Their bodies, empty vehicles.
“Meditate on this at second level. ...”
Soft music issued from some. Others threw their transparent veils into the air so that they settled on their bodies, as if to insulate them against reality.
They were becoming one.
There was an exception—Friend.
He fought the communal mind, he still sat, and then spoke in a strangled voice.
“No, no, no, I will not go to second level. I won’t. I will not be one mind with you. I know what May wants with Zed. The Vortex is an obscenity… No! I hate all women! Birth—fertility—superstition. No, no!”
His words caused pain to the meditators.
They turned to him with their palms pointing to focus their thoughts onto him as he struggled. Their eyes widened, deadly and determined, as one. A great Cyclopean single eye. May spoke up; to stop him? Zed edged toward the window.
“Friend is beyond redemption.”
Friend shouted, “No!”
“Friend is Renegade! Cast him out! Cast him out!” all the Eternals chanted.
Zed felt the invisible, tremendous and unequal battle going on before him. The only outward signs were the stretched hands as they pointed at Friend. He seemed to buckle under waves of pressure, and fought back, trying to tear himself from a giant’s grip. Then Friend pitched forward onto the table, dead or wounded by a ghostly paralyzing force. The crystal ring fell from his finger, plucked by an invisible force.
The Eternals turned to face each other, slowly lowering their hands, paused, then continued with their groupings. They turned toward one another and touched, becoming the same blind creature that Friend had refused to join, and which had smitten him. His eyes rolled up, his mouth sagged open. Zed moved to his side. He picked up the leaden head. It fell from his fingers and thudded onto the cold tabletop.
Zed sensed death—his own. He ran.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Doomsday Approaches
Zed ran beyond his limit. The multiple mind was too much. Here was a mystery he could not begin to penetrate. May’s knowledge and intentions might now be known to all. They would vote him into instant oblivion, and were probably debating it at this instant. Could those looks really kill, or had Friend, poor lost Friend, been joking when he said, “Looks can kill here”? Might they be summoning up one long piercing bolt to catch him as he ran—or could they only stun what was in sight?
He pushed himself on; on and away from this place. Over the lush green fields, toward the edge of the Vortex. He glimpsed again the black bills edging the land through the trees; then as he ran toward the Frontier, he saw the edge of life.
A scorched furrow, some ten yards wide, stretched along his line of sight. It separated the ashen wastes he knew so well from the green Vortex as certainly as a knife across a throat cut life from death. He kept up his stride as he ran toward this line: he might just clear it with a jump, for it was surely poisoned and fatal if touched. A familiar voice began to echo on the wind.
“Caution, you are approaching the Periphery Shield. Caution, you are approaching the Periphery Shield.”
The
n he felt a pull, as if he fell. Not down but back along the ground from whence he came. It was as if he hit a wall, hard and final. Picking himself up he ran along the edge, feeling the pressure always pushing him back, with more strength than ever he or his men could have mustered. Even the wind was stilled by it. A prison without bars, glacial and perfect. He peered up to the hillsides, perhaps for the last time. His hunting ground no longer. Three riders came from the distant crest and stared down at him—familiar warriors. Zed raised his arm in a salute. The lead horse reared. They fired a bright rocket in greeting, then turned and vanished, impassive.
Zed slipped back through the trees. He could not escape so he would attack. His only chance, however frail, was to do battle with the Vortex.
His men were nearby, but they might as well be a hundred miles away, until the wall was breached. If it did not fall, Zed would pull the Vortex down from the center—or die in the attempt. The prospect thrilled him. All the odds were stacked against him. It would be a fitting final contest for a great warrior.
He circled back. He followed the leafy path carefully, from the side so as not to meet any traveler. It was not well-used. It was green, showing signs of overgrowth. He ventured out and stepped along its way, following the rising hill.
He slipped away from the path and circled in closely through the bushes, then darted to the huge window that ran along one side from floor to ceiling, catching sunlight. He was back at the Renegades’ headquarters.
Inside the inky blackness, life stirred. Zed’s view was marred by the reflections of the trees. He moved closer and cupped his hand over his eyes, pressing his face to the glass.
The old people were dancing. Slowly they turned, couple by couple, around the ancient dance floor. One decrepit figure turned to Zed, his long bony arms slowly raised up and pointed at him; in recognition? The watery eyes and parrotlike toothless mouth quivered with the exertion. Zed felt stung, not as by an Eternal’s punishing look but by pity for these creatures. Admiration too, for they insisted on maintaining their ludicrous dance, keeping in step with time, apparently forever. He felt himself drawn to them and walked through the sliding door.