Zardoz

by John Boorman

  Colors, for their own sake, grew from one white light, split into primary lines, wove themselves into dazzling pictures which grew up and around him, towering above him. Then they shrank, and he was amazed by their smallness and intricacy and his own gigantic size.

  He walked the earth again, from the beginning of time. He was all men, all women, from the past, come forward to one moment. He fell across huge gaps, black chasms that could lose him, as a white spark of light. A lightning bolt of life. He could be the source, the darkness, the electric bolt, and the flaming target, all at once—and was.

  The pulses flowed through him, from his head on down. He bucked in pleasure as they rippled through him from the hands of the women by him. He saw that they were all parts of one being. He thrust into them, each in turn. He penetrated their bodies. Their orgasms burst like sun-flares before his eyes, each revealing a new light, other carnal knowledge.

  Replete and shimmering, the group that was him and May and her women seemed to part for an instant. The sexual, sensual communion ebbed and waned. Its peak past, they coasted over a review of their loving labors. They moved together as in flight over a mountain range built of intricate, jumbled white-and-colored scaffolding picked out with jeweled points all set on a black sea. There was no scale to judge it on; they flew over the highest peak, and the darkness faded up into daylight slowly through gray and grainy lightness.

  His body still hummed with the resonance of that first time away from now.

  The women rested too. They had been before him as more than a group; they were all parts of one larger creature—the Vortex. Each one, like parts of a robot body, had been chosen at the outset as a special partner with a unique function, to work in harmony with another. Each one had a special part. As apathy had set in, so specialists had fallen away from the main body, leaving gaps in the process. This meant the reserve skills of each had been pushed forward. They had been stretched. When the Renegades had begun to threaten the static system, their expulsion had meant the best, most oblique minds had been lifted from the Vortex; thus even more strain was put on the remainder. It left only the orthodox, and they more overstretched than before. A core left to cope with mounting extremism. This single being (built though it had been with resources more than needed and endowed with an ample reserve) was overstrained.

  It was trying to split up and re-bud. May and her group would be the cells in this living organism to take it out into another place. The Tabernacle was the artificial nervous system that ran the news from one section, group, or individual back and forth across the geography that was Vortex, the organism that was the commune. Therefore, it was not a central brain, for that would have made it king here. It was a network of knowledge lines intersecting and crisscrossing as the occasion demanded. A different foe from the one Zed had imagined, not a giant, but a legion.

  His rage rose up uncontrollably and it seemed he was in the Tabernacle room, the place that was the womb of this being, the place of regeneration for the Vortex body. Did the Tabernacle lurk behind these walls? Zed fired his gun blindly at them. But no bullets splayed against the surface. His shells were empty. The hideous rebuilding figures in their soup of life grinned back.

  Then May, pressing on the other side of him cried: “The Tabernacle is indestructible and everlasting.”

  They shook him out of his dream. He was back on the couch. They caressed him, still hungry for his body, awaked from their centuries of glacial frigidity.

  Friend entered the curtained room, the tent-like zone where they had renewed the mind of Zed in exchange for new life.

  The flash of nightmare had passed through Zed and he was relaxed and back into real-time before he plunged once more through space. He landed on the long flat strip of road that ran from time’s end to time’s beginning over the blackness. Loop on loop flowed in its own pattern, freed from the gravity, the pull, of one-way time.

  Friend passed his hand across Zed’s eyes and they were both swimming down to the lost road again.

  It was near the beginning of Vortex history. The Eternals, in their separate cocoons of silk, sat in the contemplation room where Zed had been displayed. The contemplation aids were augmented by the hollow tubes of silk within which they sat. They could be visible to the rest but detached from them, until such time as their minds returned.

  Friend and Zed, as ghosts, strode among them. Some Eternals talked to each other in a litany of learning. Endless games of skill and strength from history and the mines of chance were played back and forth with lightning speed. Debates and information flowed back and forth evenly and lightly. Zed and Friend moved forward in time to the same room, years ahead. Now, more Eternals had taken to contemplation. Finding that the exchange of facts and further study had not opened any new doors, they had turned in on their minds in search of spiritual perfection. Astral travel was the only means for distant exploration. Avalow was growing in this manner. To other Eternals much of the traveling was simply magic-carpet riding, empty and vacant and passive, as the pictures rolled beneath them. Later these became some of the Apathetics. Others, seeing new routes and changes that were not allowed, became disturbed and, finally, Renegade. They could see too much; others, not enough.

  The contemplation room was low-lit and voices rose around them. As the ghosts of Friend and Zed faded from this past, they surfaced like tiny silver bubbles racing to the surface of a pond, and burst into the present.

  Friend spoke. “We have come so close to penetrating the mysteries, only to find our minds are wanting. We wanted to solve all the problems that had betrayed men, but we just weren’t up to it.”

  Zed nodded. “I see one creature. A blind monster condemned to Eternal Life. Rebuilding itself from fading plans.”

  Just as a human body’s cells grew old, and as they died, were copied, letting flaws and smudges be reproduced—these in turn turning out to be grainier and more defective pictures of the last—so here, the Eternals, when rebuilt, became paler shadows of their former selves, until the paler shadows begat paler copies yet and the shadows melted back into sunlight and oblivion.

  But how were they linked to each other and the Tabernacle? Friend took him back again, to the beginning, and down they sank. A stately scientist, in real-time a babbling Renegade, the one who had pointed at Zed that first time, was standing at a slab, on which was May, her forehead open from a deep incision. In his fingers was a clamp and at the end of this a tiny crystal which he set into the wound, saying, “This crystal shall join us, each to each, and all to the Tabernacle.” And each was ceremoniously loaded with this third eye of light.

  So, all the Eternals carried this tiny transmitter which beamed out their every experience to be recorded in the Tabernacle. When they died, they were rebuilt from their plans, starting from a tissue record. The accelerated fetus was programmed with all the life-experiences of the dead person up to the moment of death so that he would step into his place in the Vortex, alive and the same as before.

  The old scientists had started it. They had done it. Friend explained. “They were the scientists—the best in the world. But they were middle-aged, too conditioned to mortality. They went Renegade. We were born into Vortex life. We are their offspring. We were better able to deal with Eternal Life.”

  The Renegades raged and ranted, sad remnants of their earlier glory.

  As Zed watched, Friend dissolved them back to an earlier time; their faces and bearing changed, making them into more stately and proud creatures. The chief scientist was on a platform with the others; he faced them in the room.

  “We seal ourselves herewith into this place of learning. Death is banished forever. I direct that the Tabernacle erase from us all memories of its construction, so we can never destroy it if we should ever crave for death. Here man and the sum of his knowledge will never die but go forward to perfection.”

  The initiators of the place, the builders of the commune, had deliberately hidden all knowledge of the building of the life-lines,
so it would be doubly secure against attack, even from themselves.

  When they had built this place the times were desperate, the world and all its people sick with more than fear. The holocaust, like the returning Flood, had drowned all except a few, who, prepared like clever Noah, had floated safe on its crest in the isolation of the Vortex. But having sealed it tight against the storm, they’d locked themselves inside forever.

  “It’s a prison! It’s a prison!” Zed cried. He was lying on the couch in Friend’s room while Friend, like a doctor-teacher, sat at one side sagely nodding among his clutter of past times and promises of moments yet to come.

  Friend was relaxed as he counseled Zed. It was as if Zed were on a voyage undersea, with Friend afloat to help him when he surfaced and look down when he was swimming in the deeps and see him through the glassy stillness, distorted by the liquid of time’s change.

  Zed pulled strongly through these places and absorbed all that he met. He was not a passive traveler, so much amazed by the newness of the sensation and so dazzled by the beauty of the sights that he became awash with mindless joy. He was proud, alert, and unafraid—like a captured barbarian chieftain being taken through the Imperial Capital. And he was like this in more ways than one, for he was in the center of all that he had fought but would not bow his head in homage, rather preferring to watch, learn, and wait for an opportunity to strike. Although outnumbered and enchained, his spirit was supreme. His clear eye never flickered in fear, always roaming over the new landscape, always learning.

  He had perceived that the Vortex was a prison and the Eternals were locked inside its walls forever. If they behaved they could look forward to hundreds of years of the complex interplay between the men and women and the power groups. Slyness and remorse, wit and wisdom were constantly being replayed and reordered from their limited numbers. They were all in luxury cells. The disobedient were aged down into darker dungeons. Those who killed themselves were brought back to play the prison-game again. The weaker souls whose minds had seen the true conditions and lacked the will to change became sickly Apathetics, consigned finally to oblivion. Yet there was no jailer, just the process, the Tabernacle which ran this dread place. To think that Brutals had tried to gain entrance here, convinced the beauty they saw was real and so desirable!

  This prison was most cruel in its complexity.

  Friend interrupted his thoughts, reading them.

  “It’s a ship. A spaceship. All this technology was for travel to the distant stars. That was why they developed extended life and the anti-gravity devices—the flying stone head.”

  “Did you go?”

  “Yes, another dead end. Some are still out there traveling into the void.”

  This was another voyage that need not concern Zed’s present tribulation.

  “I need time,” Zed muttered.

  So it was an ark, set adrift to await the ebbing of the flood. It was planned to settle somewhere and restart the Earth, or if the waters never receded, to sail on forever, drifting helplessly, yet thriving within. Other ships had gone out to the stars, to perpetuate the problems of humanity on far-off planets. There was no knowing if they landed safely or not. If they had, they would still be faced with their own essential natures as well as the new problems of the fresh planet.

  The reviving system which brought them back to life here was for spaceflight. If these ships were voyaging light-years, and they would have to get to the nearest stars, they would have needed this eternalizing machinery for its crews; all specialists, all parts of the ship’s control, bound each to each and all to the ship—by a Tabernacle.

  The whole ship enclosed in a wall through which they could see but which would protect them from meteors and other bodies that might attack them—hence the force field around Vortex. The force drawn from gravity itself. This was how the head had flown.

  The mediation, the communal mind—to keep them spiritually strong and bound together.

  The zoo in which Zed had lived was to repopulate the island-planet on which they landed. Tough stock from which to breed new lines.

  So—the Eternals were like monastic navigators, living lives of hard work and spiritual exertion, meditating and perfecting, their mental skills, until such time as they could land and colonize. This Vortex in which Zed now stood was the control. If this, the home model, was in decay before his arrival, then the others would be showing equal signs. The basic design was at fault, the flaws were inherent in the plan. The link was left behind here on Earth, a vehicle moving through space as fast as its brethren. An impermeable satellite, level with Earth’s surface—the time-ship Vortex.

  Consuella’s guard smashed the battering ram into the door above. They hammered the wood against the barrier with rapid strokes, but down below the rhythm of the beat was infinitely slow and booming.

  May and her women had elongated time for Zed. By speeding up their living rate, they flew through time like rockets, making the outside world seem sluggard. Nonetheless, Consuella’s troops were nearly through the door and there was little real-time left.

  Avalow had entered through a secret path and stood before Zed. She gave him another token for his strength—a crystal much like the ones implanted in the Eternals’ foreheads long ago, but much larger. Offering it to him, she spoke:

  “Now we have given you all that we are, one gift remains. It contains everything and nothing.”

  In their minds they swam toward each other through the blackness of no-time. Jewels sparkled in the darkness, some a million miles away, of huge dimensions, others so small and close they brushed onto their skins like Stardust. Dewy opalescence, pearls of petals of emotion and experience slowly shed to show the ripe center of pure feeling, glowing from his touch to high horizons. Entwined as one they flew headlong trailing stars in their wake like a comet’s tail, over cliff-tops that yawned a thousand miles below their flying bodies. They interwove their limbs and climbed like one great bird soaring on the hot gusts of sweet desert air. It wafted them on perfumed breezes miles high above swaying violet plants that beckoned to them through an invisible sea, their tendrils of unspeakable lengths and complexity. The tendrils flowed with the essence of life and the fliers felt them, sudden scudding changes shuddering them back and forth. A melodious whistling from the great speed filled their ears and sang in to their hearts’ center. As they touched, they endlessly cavorted and spun in the current of ecstatic space. Penetrating and interpenetrating each other’s flesh, they glowed with each other’s touch. Delicate fingertip touches sent them up and out, the smallest movement a herald of great floods of sensation. Always they mounted upward to one supreme moment, which became in turn just the foothill peak of another, vaster range revealed by a parting in the cloud layer. Then this in turn was peaked and yet another height was calling, up and on to new snowy peaks of softness. Pleasures were almost painful, time stretching out and on. Avalow had been pure for three hundred years, now the inviolate child-woman was at last penetrated. Instants dilated to centuries of experience that wiped away all thought and drove behind memory in its intensity. Fondness, love, lust, insatiable hungers were quenched, then were renewed and replenished by unimagined fulfillments, yet welcome and familiar as new friendship. Cadences of pleasure undreamed-of, bodily sensations beyond imagining—yet always strong and certain, straight and shining in their intensity, moving into the divine whiteness of the sun’s center—a cold flame that consumed and renewed.

  Zed was back in the liquid deeps once more. Avalow preferred the jewel as May had the gun. It lay in his palm.

  “Look into it. You will see lines running into the future. You will make insight-jumps. When you can see into this crystal, then you will be ready. Only then.”

  As he touched the crystal, it flared with light, burning his hand, and he was back in Friend’s room.

  Zed looked into the gem and saw only his face, multiplied and quizzical. His other selves gazed back at him in an echelon, rainbow halations shining around his many
faces, like haloes around a pantheon of rogue saints. But nothing more could he see in it; no clue.

  His reverie was disturbed by a faraway voice.

  “I have come for you.”

  Zed jumped to his feet, gripping the revolver in one hand and the crystal in the other.

  “Over here,” the voice cried, luring him on.

  Zed crept toward the voice, down corridors of stone men and bronze women to a place of costumes, where wax figures waited, gorgeously attired, for a homage that would never come. Many figures stood about him, dummies clothed in costumes of the ages, kings and queens and courtesans. A jarring reminder to the Eternals of the Earth’s past. No doubt these had been intended to be preserved in a museum at some landing place; or perhaps it was just booty, looted quickly before the world fell into disorder and collapse; or maybe it was a reminder of the follies of power that had brought the world to this pass. The voice had come from among them. The dead faces looked the more sinister for their emptiness. Zed slid through, gun forward. A white-gloved hand touched him as he passed. Zed turned to face a tall figure, dressed in a top hat, cloak, and evening suit. He ripped at the bland face and pulled away a thin rubber mask.

  “We’ve met before, I believe.”

  The face was round and smiling, the small beard bobbing.

  It was Arthur Frayn.

  “Frayn!”

  “Come now. My Brutal friends call me Zardoz.”

  The smile faded. Zed looked into the eyes and they searched him with madness. Too late he saw Frayn’s hand fly up below his breastbone. Zed saw the knife blade vanish into his chest, but did not feel pain. The shock of knowing he was dying hit him like cold rain. Caught off-guard by a trickster.

  “Revenge!” cried Frayn.

  Zed gripped the knife as Frayn released the hilt, smiled, turned, and was gone. He pulled out the knife—the blade twanged back; it was a joke, a stage-knife. Another of Frayn’s games.