by John Boorman
The Eternals worked closer to his hiding place, attracted by the rising noise as more Apathetics fought for his person. They were becoming charged with his powerful psyche, and it rose within them and out against their sickly reason, into action. Zed felt his life returning from Avalow’s potion, felt it burn through emptied channels, down thickening veins to his extremities. His life recharged again. He had survived once more. Consuella and two other horsemen clattered into the stone-flagged room and bayed out as they saw him. Zed turned and stumbled through another exit, overturning a cart to stop them following out into the courtyard, through the gate from whence he had come, swinging it shut, and—back into the forest, hounded still.
He glanced over his shoulder as he ran and saw the renewed Apathetics and Consuella’s group collide in conflict.
Some were trampled, other Apathetics pulled Eternals from their horses; smoke rolled across his field of view, flames rose behind him as he ran.
The Vortex was fighting itself. It might be the first moments of a holocaust that would wreck it, if he lived to feed the fires.
Zed stumbled, lurched, and fell into a staggering run, his body kept going by his will and Avalow’s knowledge within the leaf.
Daytime was sinking with his spirits. He was fading like the sunlight that caught him horizontally as he ran through the woods. His mind was failing. Just to keep going, but where he went was in some other’s hands, or none.
In the darkness he heard strange singing and music. Little lights bobbed ahead of him like will-o’-the-wisps dancing in a marsh, and just as eerie, strange, and frightening.
The lights were carried by the Renegades, their heads bloated and grotesque in the lights. He swayed and saw they were wearing masks and fancy dress, perhaps in celebration of the burning of the buildings. They shrieked and danced and cackled around him. He was too tired to fight now. They had him.
An old man prodded at the slack figure. “It’s him! It’s him!”
One dressed as death bent over Zed’s fallen form.
“None of them could catch him—but he falls into the hands of the poor old Renegades.”
Zed spoke in a whisper, up into the ring of faces enclosing him. “Death! I can bring death to you all! Find Friend! Take me to Friend!”
“What’s he say?” an old woman asked.
“Shut up!” another answered.
Zed tried to see them as they had been. These wrecks were once the best of Vortex life—vigorous, alert, and brilliant. They were the only people now who might help him through. If they could just raise the veils of senility and see him as a mirror image from their own past.
They gnashed and twittered over his head in some un- known private quarrel and debate.
He closed his eyes.
He came back to the present time after a spell in total darkness, a dreamless crypt, to find that he was walking. He felt his strength returning with each stride. The little lights still danced around him. Now he was part of the procession which had stumbled upon him. He walked with death. He was her bride.
The sly Renegades had dressed him in an old bridal gown, a veil covered his face. Through the lacy gauze he saw sharp patterns of new light. Fire on torches carried from one bonfire to another. Flames licked and fed around him. All the population were giddily drunk with old memories of violent times refreshed by fire.
Passions were erupting through the still and stoic modes that had once held the Vortex firm. Stupefied with excess, they reeled around him, as if the world were being tilted back and forth, shaken at its core.
Through this welter, the Renegades led their stately, wicked little march. Death had Zed’s arm, he patted it, and grinned up through the patterned net. Zed saw an old sparkle in the young eyes, flaring in the crumpled face; times remembered, deeds done.
Zed looked about him with mounting horror. The gaps were widening, the implosion would occur. Some Apathetics had trapped an Eternal in the bushes and were stoning him to death, their laughter drowning his screams. Couples made passionate love to each other in the light of fired houses where trapped people raged. Madness reigned.
Young and old laughed, danced, killed, and made love with a mindless hysteria that shook even Zed, who had lived through, led, and initiated worse deeds himself. Could he be weakening in his resolve to destroy, to kill the center of the state?
An old man bent down to two ex-Apathetics who rolled in each other’s arms.
“It’s a miracle. We’re Apathetics.”
He crackled, “Tell us how. Please. We want some too.”
Still in love-throes, the Apathetic explained, “We started chasing the Brutal. We got excited. We saw someone. We thought it was him.”
“It wasn’t, but we killed him, anyway,” added her partner.
“Then we felt desire,” the first explained. The infectious violence had stirred dead sexual longings.
Zed glanced up to a tree silhouetted in a rocket-flare that burst and briefly hung before it fell, to start a low fire in the fog-damp woods. A body had been crammed into a forked branch, like a big cat’s killing. Eternals hurrying past were caught in the pale red glow of the flare, their shapes picked out with guns and swords, and they all hunted only him.
Death clawed Zed’s hand in his.
“Look at all the excitement you’ve caused—you naughty girl.”
Dawn was breaking on a vastly changed Vortex. Dusk had left the Vortex sitting orderly in its light, smug and secure. Now the Vortex of the dawn looked a hundred years forward into the ruin of time’s hand; or could the place have been ravaged by a brutal senseless army of the night? Looted, raped, and ravaged, the fabric of the commune burned, but the steel heart still beat safely underground within the inviolate pyramid. The dead would rise again as surely as the sun. Doubles of these corpses, breathing lightly and smiling, would rebuild the chaos into the once-stable hell that smoldered here.
Death and bride approached the house in a stately parody of a marriage march. Consuella, her horse turning and wheeling, shouted orders. Zed saw her, martial, proud, and beautiful. Then he, too, felt the return of the old martial rhythms within him. He was recovering. He was back.
Consuella spoke up, her voice exciting him to combat. As she stirred her soldiers, so he, too, was roused to fight. “Your task is to secure all arms and weapons. Cut off food supplies. Work house to house. East to west down the valley. If you find the Brutal destroy him immediately. He’s trapped. It’s only a matter of time.”
And you’re trapped, too, he thought as he looked up at her. You and I are both locked together like two poisonous scorpions in a green bottle. He reconsidered. No, she was the head of a wolf and he was a secret deadly insect in her hide, who would bite into her veins a paralyzing poison while he drove her mad with irritation.
The system fought itself. He had been “seen” a hundred times that night and “killed” a dozen more. Old feuds were being settled in the name of law and order. If he could only strike one lasting blow to the vitals—to the brain—all would be his. This damage about him now, fearful though it was, was only on the surface. He must get underground to face his final dragon.
Consuella turned her horse, wheeled, and nearly rode over Zed, who stepped back to let her gallop by. He felt the whisk of her whip as it cut down on the flank, smelled the steam rise from the horse, and she was gone. A ringing clatter in the street hung for a moment, then was spent like the gray wall of smoke that rose a hundred feet over all the Vortex! A death veil, suspended in mid-air.
“Friend! Friend!” Death took Zed’s hand and led him to the man standing before the doorway of his workplace. Zed smiled at his ancient colleague in a resigned way. Despair haunted Friend’s features, but his masklike face could not conceal a deep delight in what went on.
“Kiss the bride, dear Friend. Kiss the bride.”
He let himself be shouldered, nudged, and worried up to Zed by these mad old infants. Death lifted up the veil, opened his eyes wide, and barked a new laug
h back at Zed’s strong face.
“You did well,” Friend whispered. “I will take the bride. Death comes closer for us all. Find May. Tell her Friend needs her.”
The limping procession turned away, aping the exit of the troops. Friend gripped Zed’s arm and led him through the doorway of the museum and down into its maze-like heart.
May picked her way through the serried ranks of statuary toward them. The monumental clutter of Friend’s cavern looked neat now compared to the slaughter and rapine of the surface above. Zed’s gun hung from her fingers, low against her body. She stepped out into the living area, the unfamiliar weapon balanced in her hands. Her finger ran along the barrel and down to the chamber and the bullets as she looked at them both in turn.
“Friend, I cannot sanction this violence and destruction.”
“It’s too late, May. There’s no going back.”
She pleaded with him, with the revolver as a pivot and a threat.
“Don’t destroy the Vortex. Let’s renew it. A better breed could prosper here. Given time…”
“Time! Wasn’t eternity enough?” said Friend.
Zed spoke at last. “This place is against life. It must die.”
His words fell with a terrible finality. May trembled, wavered, then passed the gun to Zed as a token of her agreement.
“I have my followers. Inseminate us all, give us your seed. In return we’ll teach you all we know, I'll give you all I have. Perhaps you can break the Tabernacle—or be broken.”
Friend clasped May’s hand and joined it with his in Zed’s. A triple pact. A triangle against the circle of the Vortex.
Friend: “An end to Eternity!”
May: “A higher form.”
Zed: “Revenge!”
CHAPTER NINE
Exchange of Powers
The three conspirators stood in the center of Friend’s arena, the curtained place leading off into countless passages that looped and struck out into rows of memories.
Statues, paintings, badges, costumes, weapons, jewelry, bric-a-brac—solidified moments from the past. Friend had had a near-insuperable task, but had made inroads into the accumulation of centuries within which he lived. He had made passages through piles of crates. Simply moving them into related groups had taken many years. Then the opening of the crates, the cataloging of the contents and the correlation, all this long before he could draw conclusions from this collection of monuments to man’s diversity. These conclusions from the past, gleaned from the evidence of long ago, what of them? Perhaps that was why he had become so cynical, so despairing.
However, here would be a good place to teach Zed, and Friend would make a good teacher and a better guide through the sum total of the past. They were underground, behind stout doors, well-protected at the center of a maze.
May and her women were the objective teachers. Each one was a messenger and communicant with a special branch of knowledge. Individually they would give Zed weapons of knowledge with which to fight the dragon. Physics, chemistry, mathematics, linguistics, philosophy…each woman, in turn, had insights that branched out in other realms, with which to arm him for the battle, to help him hunt the Tabernacle down.
Like Zed in the Vortex—a needle in a haystack—so, too, the Tabernacle was hidden in the finite volume of the community.
A half-sphere extending from the highest point of the force field—circular like the peripheral edge of the land and Vortex—was Zed’s and his quarry’s ground. The Eternals hunted him—he hunted the Tabernacle.
The force field might extend underground into a sphere. Zed might be locked into another round world. So—he was trapped inside an invisible globe.
This globe extended high above his head and far below his feet. At the center was the author of this force and next to it was Zed. The only way to penetrate the wall was to strike at the center. First, Zed must equip himself like any other warrior with the special weapons needed for the fight and all the information with which to find and kill his prey. Then he must hunt, kill, and dispatch him. The walls would fall, and the breach complete, his confederates would pour into the city and kill the population, level the buildings, and withdraw, their mission over.
He was the spy within the citadel, but he had been exposed, caught, and sentenced, and lived now on stolen time.
There was not time to prepare or search. Brilliant though he was he could not absorb all the necessary skills. It would take years of study and mental exercise. No one man could scale those heights. Time had defeated him. Another invisible and relentless force had caught him. Time—that was the key. Allies he already had.
Friend was an implacable colleague, as filled with hatred of the systems as Zed, his purpose the same as Zed’s: an end to this place. May’s bargain would be honored. Zed would inseminate her and her followers and direct them away from the attacking horde that would sweep in from the west when he had blown the walls. They could ride out into the wasteland to begin a new existence and a new world, nurturing the life within them. With their combined strengths they might repopulate the land, and if by some mischance they were all killed, then so be it. It would be Nature’s choice.
May wanted life from him. She would not fail him either; though time might.
This musing passed through Zed’s mind in an instant, then his thoughts were shattered by a dull booming from above. Consuella’s gang were at the door.
Zed spoke to May. “How much time do we have?” he knew that there was none.
“We will not work in time. We will touch-teach you. You will take our knowledge by osmosis, out of time. Your mental powers are greater than any of ours. With our knowledge, you may accomplish what we have failed to do.”
It was the dangerous but inevitable way for her to take him. They would guide him and bathe him in their knowledge, so that their minds would mix through the touching of their skins. And as he mated so would they pass back to him their own seeds of information that would grow in him, as the life he transmitted would grow in them.
A mystical, sexual binding would wrap them all into one astral level, apart from the world, outside of the lengths of natural time. It would be fierce for one so untutored in the arts of mediation and bodily perfection, but there was no other way for them. So, taking his hand, she led him to her woman who had been waiting quietly unseen, hidden in the museum.
They laid him down, and like petals enfolded him. Science, religion, philosophy, and art, four monumental zones through which to ride in a moment stolen from time’s breath. It could not be enough, for they could not represent all areas of fact and fiction, art and life. Though they could not give him armor in full, yet they could arm him well enough—if he could stand the madness that might come from leaving time again. Each Eternal had practiced and evolved slowly into higher dream-places where time flowed in and out like the tide. It took a hundred years of study and devotion. To plunge him deep into the most dangerous reaches of other-time yet again and expect him to take the jolts of input knowledge might be fatal.
That was their risk, the chance they would take. The stake was high; so were the odds. They had just one dice throw with which to win. He had been used, his memories displayed before their gaze. His secrets had been driven and drawn from him. He had been taken back in time to see the beginning of this place. Now at least he would be given pictures from the lives of others. He would be replenished with strong thoughts, detailed and well-constructed in their design. An architecture that had grown tough through the tests of time and other men’s inquiry.
The Apathetics had nearly drawn his spirit, his life-force, clean from him; the times to come would help replenish him.
The Eternals had battered on his body and chased it raw. The women would rub soothing balm into his muscles while he slept the waking-dream.
He looked around at the velvet curtained area, his silken couch, then felt their touch and was transported into a continuum of space and time that stretched out like a flat zig-zag road across a black n
othingness, a road on which he moved, random, unrelated, lost.
Characters from other languages grew up before him. Words were chanted in many tongues. The patterns of many languages forming dazzling shapes across his face, the music and poetry of words from the ends of time surrounding him.
The women rolled across and around him. He felt adrift in space—beyond any gravity or help he knew. Other views poured across him other times. His central mind absorbed the endless information. His frontal, outside thinking could not comprehend the traces as they flashed through, for all was too fast and rich for his conscious comprehension.
It was a rich fabric interwoven with too many strands at which to clutch. The tapestry’s pattern and color were too vast for him to view. He was too close to the weave.
The women were massaging him, mounting him, and he, them. He felt their bodies and their minds as one, as they felt him. Where the Apathetics had touched there was the pain of loss, where these women touched was the joy of gain. Images dazzled his eyes. Amoebas, soft, and pliable, grew and danced in dimensions undreamed-of, enveloping him within their gelatinous mass. Geometric palaces grew in scale and intricacy around him, filled with numbers and circuits that flashed on and off with changing lights.
The women’s bodies grew larger; then their flesh dissolved to show their bones and workings; then they changed to diagrams of life, which fluttered back to ancient delineations of man’s body, the lineage of life; then ran forward to the present, and once again he was engulfed by the pleasing presence of the female force, whole, firm, and warm. He looked with a new eye. The blinding light did not hurt, it filled him. He glowed, all his veins fluoresced, each one alive with new growth.
He was taken high above the earth, then swooped back into its deeps. Into the center of molecules, then back out into deep space to look down at his own infinite smallness. And all in ecstasy. Warriors refought wars through him. Campaigns that lasted a century ran through him in an instant. Music rang through him as a parade of notation, and reverberation echoed and multiplied in his system: all his body was one live harp.