by Ian Watson
‘Catlow here. Commander! Michelangelo! Don’t light the fusion torch. Abort!’
‘Sixty seconds.’
‘I’ve realized what the sign means, Commander. It isn’t eyes at all. It’s the two full moons nearly in conjunction, before the closer one eclipses the other. When they’re side by side in the sky, something happens! How often does that occur?’
A voice he didn’t recognize, from M: ‘Every thirty-one years, local.’
‘Thirty seconds.’
‘She’s in sight.’
‘For heaven’s sake don’t light that torch till we’ve worked this out!’
‘Everdon here,’ said Mary. ‘Agree Catlow. Unwarrantable cultural tampering.’
‘Fremantle. Good experiment. Trigger programmed behaviour. Demonstrate existence of.’
‘No!’ cried Peter.
‘Fifteen seconds.’
‘Take stonemason’s word? Navigate voidship by hammer and chisel?’ A woman. Who? Ramirez?
‘Please, Ash!’
‘Protest noted.’
In the sky – to all appearances right next to the moon, though actually fifty thousand kilometres closer – the fusion torch of the voidship ignited, the torch that could accelerate Michelangelo to hyperphase. The light seemed to expand to the size of the moon.
Around the yard hieroglyphicals strained at the leash of that new luminosity as if about to dive, to fly, to wrestle, to tip themselves open. Of a sudden the night was loud with the warbling and twittering of what could have been thousands of startled birds.
Lemurs flooded into the yard. Females clutching squealing babies, males hauling youngsters along, they jammed through that doorway of the double eye (ah no, of the double moon), plunging down into darkness. Peter was buffeted, pulled by the river of bodies all crowding towards one goal.
‘Hey,’ from the radio, ‘cat among the pigeons! They really got the wind up!’
No, it wasn’t lemur hands which were pulling Peter along now. It was Mary, urging him.
‘Must see what goes on down there!’
Peter heard himself moan. All those bodies packing into that close, dark catacomb! But he couldn’t escape the pressure. Their torchbeams jerked about as Mary and he stumbled, crouching, down the hard clay stairs, and into one of the chambers. This cell was already half full. As the two humans piled in, panting, lemurs wrestled the bottle-wood door shut behind them, firmly. The door fitted tight against the clay rim, and the lemur commissionaires withdrew, apparently satisfied that those still surging past down the corridor outside wouldn’t attempt to force entry.
Now all of the lemurs calmed. They sat and settled, even the youngest. The presence of the big humans with their lights and videocom and chattering radio voices seemed immaterial. No sound of lemur feet outside, not any more.
‘Christ!’ Radio voice. ‘What a bloody dust storm!’ Allen?
‘Dust? The whole place is smoking.’ That was certainly Carl.
‘Can’t see a thing –’
As Mary tuned the videocom it was plain that all the survey cams had gone to infrared. Distorted bright images of lemurs staggered through a fog. Gargoyles, babewyns, walls of exhaling thick pink clouds through all their microscopic stone pores. Images of lemurs, surely out of focus, clung to stonework, crouched, climbed, engaged in strange acrobatics.
‘Whole city hidden.’ Chang’s voice, from the base. ‘Leave if possible.’
‘Allen, Security. Guard mask integrity. Grab cams to point way. Hold vidscreens to eyes. See in infrared. Keep lenses cleaned.’
‘Coated in the damn stuff. My scalp’s itching like crazy–’
Why did lemurs on screen look so contorted? Why were they moving in sluggish slow motion? Why was that one climbing up a pillar?
‘Patel.’ She was back in base. ‘Entire fabric of city is releasing spores, billions of spores. Like fungus, puffballs.’
‘Ash here. More like spawning coral. Synchronously, once yearly in old days all along Australia’s Barrier Reef. Viewed this on vacation when child. Triggered by temperature and tidal cues – and by full moonlight! City may be social organism. Colony of microorganisms. Air reef. Reef in air, not sea. Comment, Fremantle?’
‘Busy.’ A cough. Peter spoke. ‘Triggered by double moon. The semblance of. The moon and Michelangelo. Together.’
‘Ash here. Catlow?’
Mary reported, ‘Everdon and Catlow in burrow, see channel twenty. Lemurs took refuge. Shut doors tight. Thus some survivors. But of what?’
‘Of that, Mary!’ Peter jabbed a finger at the little screen. Though the image was doubly foggy due to the coating on the cam lens it was still possible to see one lemur backed up against a pillar, shaggy with spores. The native’s mouth was gaping wide, its neck was arching. Its penis had burst forth from the furry sheath, stiffened, crusty, and huge. The lemur was in process of becoming a hieroglyphical of rutting lust. While it clung, backward, to that pillar, its legs bent up away from the ground, shrinking, contracting, and edging it higher and higher in concert with its cruelly twisted arms, till it stopped and hung as if cemented.
‘Natives turning into monsters!’ they heard. ‘It’s goddam Halloween.’
‘Itchy –’
‘Don’t scratch –’
‘Protein incompatibility,’ said Chang. ‘Should not affect humans. But recommended detox and quarantine.’
‘My leg’s stiff –!’
A scream… of panic? Whose panic?
‘They don’t make the statues, Mary,’ Peter said. ‘They become the statues. And the rest of the fabric! They never built this city. Generations of their bodies have fused into it. As Ash says! – coral reefs in air! Nourished by night-soil and cooking water chucked over it. And at sporing time the coral organisms coat the lemurs, turn them into more reef.’
‘But the lemurs are altering so grotesquely…’
‘Yes! The spores take their bodies over. Metamorphose them – according to the lemurs’ own, I don’t know, archetypal emotions, passions, instinct programs.’
‘And thus they rejoin Nature.’ She mused. ‘But they don’t run away to live in the woods. Instead they rely on a burrow that’ll save enough survivors to let the race continue. They probably breed quite fast. Thirty-odd years will be time enough to repopulate, and more. But they don’t try to escape their destiny. It’s the only thing that gives them culture, cities.’ The voices of teams one and two were just grunty now, or ghastly. Chang was talking.
‘Control by chemical signals in air. Coral is architect. Maybe influences shape of bottle-trees too? We make anthropomorphic error. Assume lemurs dominant because resemble us. Instead, part of symbiotic system.’
‘That’s it,’ Mary said to Peter, ‘symbiosis.’ Of a sudden she looked desperately sad. ‘It isn’t Cultural Anthro at all, it’s Bio. Plain beastly biology.’
Chang said, ‘Lemurs nourish coral, are periodically incorporated, used to manufacture more coral mass. Lemurs benefit by shelter, tools, agric with which to nourish coral – and their thoughts given form and substance, reinforcing programs governing lemurs.’
‘They must give their bodies to their God,’ murmured Mary.
‘Coral true intelligence here,’ chanted Chang. ‘Bioengineering, eh, Fremantle? Down on molecular level.’
Silence from Fremantle.
‘Can transmute body elements. Can unwind and rewind cells, reproducing self throughout microscopically. Affect humans too. But intelligence impenetrable as stone. Not intelligence in our sense. Fooled by fusion-flare.’
A groan from the radio, as of some material stretching, splitting, then hardening.
‘How long will the air down here last?’ wondered Mary.
The native refugees in the cell were almost comatose by now, hardly moving or reacting despite the noise and light produced by two guests. In other cells Peter could imagine total inertness. Thus to conserve oxygen. That, too, must be part of the program. In this case, of racial survival. For the go
od of the city, the benefit of the coral.
‘Long enough,’ he said, ‘if we weren’t here. Compared with them we’re gobbling oxy.’
Michelangelo was radioing worried enquiries.
‘City still sporing,’ by way of answer. ‘Could go on all night. Probable loss, four personnel. Two more sheltering down sealed burrow.’
‘Abort grand tour? Circle moon, return to Rock orbit?’
‘Negative,’ said Ash. ‘Base in no danger. Future field-work, body recovery, wearing protective suits.’
Peter murmured, ‘They’re going to hack Fremantle and Co out of the coral? Wonder what they became…’
At the moment the hieroglyphical basis of lemur life and society came clear to him – or seemed to come clear to him; the way in which these furry beings were revealed to themselves at last in a transcendent moment of understanding, a peak of consciousness at the time when the spores coated and invaded, transmuted and petrified them and sealed them into the substance of their city in rampant caricature, in emblem which at first sight seemed monstrous but which was not necessarily so.
Plain biology, indeed! What was the word which he’d heard Mary use in derision?
Reductionism, that was it. The reduction of wonderfully patterned complexity down to an elementary jiggle of chemical reactions. The reduction of dream to electrochemical programs, of vision and passion down to the vibration of molecules.
Peter knew that he must determine his own dominant category of being, his primal humour, in the eternal rock root of his own existence.
Timidity, covetousness, envy, lust? Or loving joy, or patience, or some other of the virtues?
Was this not also a sort of reduction…?
He remembered the words of a long-dead French poet, Saint-Jean Perse, which he had once committed to memory. On ne bavarde pas sur la pierre… You don’t gossip on stone. You don’t babble, or ramble on. Reduce your meaning to its essentials.
‘I’m going up top,’ he told Mary. ‘I can’t stand it down here. It’s squeezing me. Up, and out.’
‘You’d die! Masks don’t protect us. And you’d let the spores in!’
‘Plenty of doors. Close this one tight behind me – unless you’d rather come as well?’
She shuddered. ‘Peter, you’re committing suicide. You’ll die.’
‘No, I shan’t. I’ll become eternal. Archetypal. I’ve come so many light years, Mary, to meet myself. How could I ship back to Earth as a surplus artisan, a joke, when I could become what my whole life has been aimed at? Promise you won’t let them hack me out of the city. Don’t let them cart me home in a specimen bag. Promise!’
‘Look, we’ve had a set-back, you and me, but isn’t what we’ve found just as fascinating?’
‘Oh yes indeed.’ He handed his com-set to her. ‘It sets the dream free, to shape the self for ever.’
‘Sets it free? You’d be locked in an alien coral reef. It mightn’t even be able to cope with you. Different codings, alien ones. The lemurs would throw crap and veg water in your face.’
‘Promise you won’t let them take me back!’
‘Yes. If they’ll listen to me.’ She sounded deeply scared now, which he regretted.
‘Make them listen for once. Tell them how they ought to have listened to me about M and the moon. Tell them I hope to communicate with the coral by offering myself to it, but it’ll take until the next sporing for any effects to show. Yes, tell them that. And tell them: transmutation of protein into rock! What wouldn’t Earth give for the knack of altering the molecular structure of rock into protein?’ Even if certain farmers, who had bedded barmaids, lost their investment.
‘I won’t say goodbye, since you’ll see me again.’ Stuffing his torch temporarily under his armpit, Peter clawed at the clay to release the bottle-wood door. This popped free, and he slipped quickly into the corridor, which looked clear of motes. Tush it tight!’
No sign of lemurs, either. Doors behind him blocked cells. The stairs ahead mounted to the door of two-moons, which was shut. He ascended, crouching.
He unpeeled the top door, dodged out, tugged the barrier shut behind him as best he could. Now his torchlight yellowed a dense fog. He couldn’t see a single object in the yard of hieroglyphicals; however, he thought he recalled a convenient gap between two neighbouring grotesques roughly in that direction. He soon collided with hard lumps, barely visible. Turning, backing between those lumps an arm’s distance away, he met relative smoothness.
Not all lemurs would become hieroglyphicals or gargoyles or babewyns. By no means! Many lemurs must simply crunch up to become supporting blocks, sections of wall or pillar, part of fabric rather than design. The ordinary bedrock of society, those! Whereas he, Peter from another planet, was unusual? Outstanding? Or perhaps those types were the more perfect, Platonic specimens.
He ripped off his mask, breathed deep, and almost choked. But already a hot (yes, itchy) exaltation coursed through his veins and nerves.
Thoughts sped through his mind, a riot of images trying to dovetail and achieve a unified solid pattern, to array themselves like a squad on parade.
He didn’t care about his discomfort. Even, agony? Vaguely he was aware that parts of himself were being warped and twisted. However, he was opiated, his pain centres disconnected. Only terror had made that radio voice scream.
What of Mary? What of the barmaid? Who were they, compared with the centuries? His devotion was to stone. He aspired to be a spire. He stretched up and up. And he knew the sublime.
Jewels in an Angel’s Wing
Damnably, I’d just been chewed up by a shark. And I’d thought I was doing so well!
As soon as the shark bit through my legs I went into dream-mode. The sensation was sickening, like being eaten in a dream. I felt squeezed and reduced. Maybe that’s how a prey often feels when a predator snaps its jaws; natural anaesthesia takes over. Except in our case, our bodies go ‘astral’ in dream-mode. With enough effort we can pull free and flee. That feels like wading out of deep, treacly mud. Then you need to find a powerpoint to eat to boost your energy back to a safe level.
No such luck this time. If you’re already low on energy after an earlier escape, you’ve had it. You fade out. You reassemble somewhere else, usually somewhere you don’t want to be, and you’re starving for a powerpoint. Three such fade-outs in succession – don’t ask me who does the counting – and you get zapped back to a lower level.
But trying to keep out of harm’s way can’t work forever, either. The only way you can win through is by risking being eaten time and time again. It’s a hell of a life.
Am I puzzling you? We were equally puzzled. Believe it. We pretty well knew what to do, but we had no idea why. It was as though we’d lost half of our memories, had them locked away from us.
The first level of existence was radioactive ruins. Scattered throughout a wreck of a city were various safe enclaves -which never stayed safe for long. Radioactivity slowly seeped in, or else the mutants would mount an attack. You had to keep on the move, hunting for new havens which were clean, stocked with food and drink. And you had to collect powerpoints, whilst avoiding the attentions of mutants and clouds of plutonium gas. Powerpoints on this level came in the form of antiradiation pills, usually to be found in deathtrap buildings, all of them a good distance from the nearest sanctuary and in opposite directions. If you could eat enough pills without being too badly irradiated or mauled by mutants… well, I finally managed to, and found myself instantly reassembled on the second level. Ghoul Castle.
With all this rushing about and hiding, we didn’t exactly get to hold public meetings, but I’d estimate there were about a hundred of us; and of this number about half had succeeded in escaping from the ruins before I did. So I’m no paragon of agility and quick wits. To start with, in fact, I was quite a slow slob. However, I was persistent and I was capable of cooperating and learning. Indeed, I’d found my ideal partner: Isbeth Anndaughter. Isbeth and I had teamed in the ruins
. More than teamed; we had become lovers. We covered each other, ran interference for each other. During my successful run that led me to level two, she sidetracked several mutants at great risk to herself. Then before the winning route had time to change, she too ran it solo, gobbling power, and boosted herself out of those ruins to rejoin me.
Of course, I saved Isbeth from close shaves too, but I’d say the balance sheet of debts was in my favour. She must genuinely have loved me, seen in me qualities which she could enhance. Maybe my ability to share. You did come across various individualists who wouldn’t cooperate with anyone. Other men and women you met en route would swap experiences briefly. That’s how Isbeth and I knew about Ghoul Castle in advance, since some of those latter had already escaped, and been zapped back, and were trying to leave the ruins a second time.
Others – no-hopers – had already given up the struggle. They just dashed from one sanctuary to another in the ruins, hoping not to get caught, hardly even trying for the power pills. Apparently you could sink no lower than the ruins, no matter what.
Ghoul Castle was an immense complex of halls, corridors, towers, battlements, staterooms, galleries, tunnels and dungeons, courts and moats and mazes of sewers -haunted by lethal ghosts, prowled by ghouls and monsters, besieged by barbarians, enchanted by wizards. Jewels were the power-points there.
It took Isbeth and myself ages to make it through. How long? Six months, a whole year? It was hard to keep track of time. By the skin of our teeth we avoided being zapped back to the ruins. We learned the ropes – those shifting ropes.
From time to time we met fellow adventurers (or victims), some of whom had already reached the water-world only to be zapped. So we did some advance details of the third level, which Isbeth and I already felt sure must exist. We felt that in our bones, instinctively, along with an urge to reach it.
Yet if any of the others had discovered how we got into this fix, or who we had been before we all found ourselves in the ruins, they weren’t saying.
Unfortunately, ghosts and ghouls homed in avidly on gatherings of more than a couple of persons, which rather set a time limit to more general speculations. The castle was better furnished than the ruins had ever been. Food and drink were definitely superior. If you could keep clear of nastiness, it wasn’t too bad a life, merely nerve-wracking. Some of our contacts confided that they intended to hang on in the castle. But that wasn’t enough for Isbeth, or for me.