Fire in the Abyss

by Stuart Gordon

  I tried my best. Stiffly I inclined my head. “It is possible I began, “that we may have been ignorant and selfish…” But I got no further: Azurara knew he was attacked though not understanding what Utak said; he interrupted and shouted me down. “You savages,” he bellowed at Utak, “that we called In-dios, Children of God, are children still, but not of God, for I have seen on television how your descendents have joined this satanic ‘Revolution of the People’! You are all scum, sons and daughters of whores!”

  Utak frowned at me amid the horrible silence.

  “English, what that man say?”

  “Oh,” I muttered, “he is somewhat disturbed.”

  “English, what he say?”

  I looked to Tari, Herbie, Ernstein, but got no help. Slowly I told the Mayan what Azurara had said… and Utak, with a surprising calm, eyed Azurara with contempt before turning away and sitting down.

  “Poor white god not remember truth,” said he, softly. Azurara turned to me, shaking with fury.

  “Gilbert, WHAT DID THAT SAVAGE SAY ABOUT ME?”

  I didn’t know what to do. I was never skilled at the politic lie, the soothing gesture. I sat dumbly, then Coningham said, “Look, er, Bernardino, old chap, don’t you think you’d better sit down?”—this accompanied by a distinctly officious downward motion of his hand which only enraged Azurara the more.

  “TELL THAT STINKING SAVAGE I WANT TO FIGHT HIM!” he roared, so that Utak glared and half-rose to his feet again; all of us stiffened; the white-suit guards at the door started forward with hypodermics at the ready; our chaperones eyed each other, nodding sagely as they made notes; and I gazed despairingly at Tari, seeing Circle finished before even truly begun.

  But Tari was expressionless. She did not move at all.

  That was when Hyperia stood up and said something in Latin, her voice gentle, but rising and insistent in a way that somehow caught and undid the ugly knot of the moment. Everyone looked at her, taken aback—then looked to me for the translation. But I did not have to give it. In her stumbling American she spoke:

  “All forget when birth,” she said. “Some more, others… not so more. But how remember anything if all behave like childs?”

  Utak smiled grimly when he understood this, and even Azurara was briefly shamed by the gentle rebuke. Hyperia… this was one of the last times we saw her… she was a fine woman, quiet and true, and if her remark was soon forgotten, well, it was not her fault.

  Yet at least we got through the rest of Azurara’s tale without more dispute, though of course that incorrigible man had learned nothing at all from the scene he was glad to have created.

  “Well, so,” he continued when we had quieted down, myself still wearily translating. “Where was I before this… interruption? Yes! By 1533 all was calm in Mexico: I elected to stay in the land and seek further afield. Pizarro had already gone to Peru to find his greatness there; so in the year 1540—in February, it was—I joined with Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, and a great company of us went north over the Rio Grande in search of the seven golden cities of Cibola. Well, we were much disappointed, for all we found were the rude adobe villages of a people called Zuni. We showed them the power of Spain so they should not misunderstand us; and while there we heard of more villages a hundred miles further north. So Francisco despatched Pedro de Tovar with myself and a friar called Juan de Padilla, and some others on horse and foot, to learn if these northern villages might be the golden ones. We heard they belonged to a tribe called Hopi, that called themselves ‘People of Peace.’

  “So we went, until late one day, near sunset, across the barren land we saw a village atop a mesa. We got there after dark and made camp at the foot. In the morning these Hopi came down from their village and tried to impress us with heathenish ritual, throwing cornmeal across the trail that went up to their stronghold. We were not impressed, and decided to teach them better, so, refusing to talk, we rode at them—and one of them had the effrontery to strike a horse on the bridle! ‘Why are we here?’ cried Padilla the friar, exhorting us, so that we sounded our battle-cry—‘Santiago!’—and charged with lance and sword, driving these savages up to their village, where most sensibly they surrendered and gave us presents. But then all their chiefs came and made a ceremony out of begging! They drew four lines of cornmeal on the ground, and one of them stepped up to the lines with his hand held out, palm up. ‘Give him something, said de Tovar. So one of our men dropped a trinket into that begging hand. The savages looked most disappointed, and all began muttering and mumbling! What did they expect? That we’d give them gold?

  “After that they fed and quartered us, but only so they could tell us absurdities; that we were brothers, and they had awaited our coming for many years, and we must join Christ with their wretched superstitions, and accept their correction of our laws! They were completely mad, and had no gold, so we went away and told Francisco there was nothing there. It was a great disappointment. Soon after that I started back over the ocean to Castile… and now here I am… forced to live like a pig with pigs!”

  “Jeeze!” Herbie muttered as we filed out at the end of the group. “What a jerk! Humf, how in hell can you talk to a guy like that?”

  “You do not understand!” I said stiffly, obscurely feeling my time was attacked. “One age’s meat is another…”

  “Oh, I understand! A jerk is a jerk, right? Doesn’t matter when he comes from—that guy is a jerk!”

  That night Circle was a boiling pot of personality clashes all caused by this Utak-Azurara dispute. I’ll not go into the names we called each other by image that night or in words next day, but it was clear we’d all been ready for it. At first it seemed all between the men: the women agreed they disapproved and told us so; within a day we men agreed we disliked the women as well as each other. Yes, absurd—but because of the suits we could not even touch each other! Like plague the bad mood quickly infected everyone, including our Institute guardians. No fucking in that place—abstention puts folk brittle and on edge: the velvet glove came off, and next, I don’t knew, Lucie shrilly denounced Tari as a “pagan bitch” on the volleyball court and we were all in a battle of pagan-catholic-protestant-banker-commie-jew-red-black-and-white dimension. Back on Square One, with fights breaking out on Walkabout so that our captors struck us with treatment and the solitary lock-up, and in Circle our rage denied reason, ignored Tari, who waited. God! A loveless time!

  But after Blund’s tragedy the Dancer stepped in.

  20. Why Othoon Laughed Himself to Death

  We were almost all of us in such a state at that time that it is hard now to recall the precise sequence of events. Yet I think it was probably the day after Azurara told his tale that Utak took on Ketil Blund at Space Invaders and quite casually bettered the obsessed Greenlander’s highest score; and during the next two or three days that Blund brooded on this humiliation, muttering about going berserk. Had the rest of us been in better order we might have paid some attention to his wounded pride, but as it was, we were all too full of our own resentments. So it came that one afternoon upstairs in the library he attacked Jud Daraul.

  I was distractedly playing chess with Coningham when it happened; about fifteen other Baldies were at the computer-screens. Blund was hulking at the Space Invaders machine, persuaded back to it by his two huge blond friends from tenth-century Norway, Brynjof and Thord. He must have been at it for over an hour, painfully trying to regain his touch and improve on Utak’s score—and for at least half that time Jud Daraul had been pacing back and forth, impatiently awaiting his turn l the machine which Blund would not give up—and Coningham had just taken one of my bishops when Jud, unable to wait any longer, suddenly stopped dead in the middle of the floor and shouted: “This is all jerkoff bullshit, man, playing with these goddamn stupid toys while these bastards slowly kill us!”

  Blund’s American wasn’t good, but he reacted to the angry tone, he must have thought himself insulted, for he turned, his face contorted, he roared and
rushed at Daraul, knocking the black man down. Amid the wailing of the alarm he tore Jud’s helmet off and had him almost throttled before the four white-suit guards in the room all converged to drag Blund off and needle him through his suit with a drug that immediately knocked him out. Brynjof and Thord threatened to attack as well, but held off as the rest of us stared and Daraul stood weakly, helmetless and breathing Modern air (though to him it was only a few years more modern).

  “See?” he panted, waving a finger at his naked head, “This is all complete bullshit! Trapped like dummies in these suits and fighting each other which is just like they want it!”

  Then the guards dealt with him too, and none of us did a thing about it as both of them were taken away for treatment.

  Jud was back in two weeks. They dealt not too harshly with him, putting him on a course of lithium and another drug called atropine methyl nitrate… but when Blund finally reappeared among us in late November he was no longer the same man, no more than a stirk is a bull. Not his balls but his brain had been castrated, an electrical pacifier having been placed in that part of it called the amygdala.

  They didn’t tell us this, and Blund couldn’t. We learned it in Circle… for by then, through vision and tragedy, we’d found some unity, and our plans were well-advanced.

  This sad event in the library was a turning-point, for it was that evening Masanva at last communicated.

  The Dancer had been part of us but not part of us; he had never sent images, never spoken to anyone in library or quadrangle or group, though often enough we’d seen him standing or walking alone, massive arms folded, an expressionless mystery who’d soon gained a number of nicknames privately among us—“Sphinx,” “Big Daddy,” “Ancient of Daze,” and so on. Some had tried talking to him, but without response. He would simply look at the importuner until he found himself left alone again, and so thus he had remained as great a mystery to us as to our captors. I suspect they made no headway with him at all.

  So, that evening in Circle we had horrid chaos for the fourth or fifth night in a row, with quarrels over what had happened to Blund and Jud Daraul, and Azurara again attacking Utak, who was sending sneering images of stupid white asses, and Herbie attacking Azurara, and myself attacking Herbie, lashing out, finding dark pleasure in it, using my friend to unburden myself of all my pent-up hate—for on one or another of these mad days he’d given me excuse for it by infuriating me with comment he’d made about Mery-Isis. “Wow, Humf, I’d really like to grab me a piece of that juicy ass!” he’d said with disgusting relish, watching her walk. “I mean just the thought of it keeps me going!” I had glared at him. “LEARN SOME RESPECT, YOU LOW MAN!—AND STOP CALLING ME HUMF!” And he’d punched me on the shoulder, complaining, “Aw, c’mon, Humf! Holy-schmoly, they like to doodle as much as we do, and she doesn’t pretend she’s a plaster saint, so why should you?”—Which left me speechless but vowing revenge, so that on this night I speak of I sent the low man a low image of a cock like a worm, crawling through the mud, with his face on the front of it and duck-feathers sticking out of the back; and in reply he sent image back of myself as a large stone prick permanently frozen upright—and this amid a visual concatenation of the same futile sort between many of us, when, suddenly…

  Jove’s Thunderbolt is the nearest I can think of.

  Either that or the Electric Shock Treatment.

  Like a bolt of lightning it struck through us all and shut us up with such effectiveness that for over a minute there was no response.

  Then Masanva showed his face.

  It was glowering, with hands clapped over ears.

  Next he showed a dozen of us jabbering at each other, all with distorted faces and ears of asses. He showed Utak with a monkey’s face, running desperately after a vague White God, then Azurara with drooling moron’s countenance topped by dunce’s cap as he drops a trinket into the offered red hand.

  Then all this dissolved into a thick darkness. There was not a breath of protest from any of us—though I did, strangely, seem to hear the distant echo of a ghostly laugh which at the time I thought came from Masanva. Then it too was gone, and there was nothing.

  I waited, suspended in that illimitable darkness imaged by Masanva, imaged so strong I no longer knew myself.

  In time, in distance, I sensed a dull red haze. It seemed to be coalescing from the abyss, to be thickening now into a circular form, spinning like a whirlpool as it grew brighter into crimson. Then above it another field of light appeared, and this slowly coalesced into a spin whose heart was emerald green—then above this, a third, that was golden yellow; then a fourth, again above, so that all these whirling fields described a vertical axis—and the fourth became a dazzling violet—and finally, so bright that I could sense it only as a field of indescribable incandescence that lit the entire universe and banished all darkness, the fifth leapt into creation.

  Then I saw the Man whose spine these whirling circles of light defined. He bestrode the living, shifting, suddenly animate cosmos—yet even as, dazzled, I looked again, I saw, no, not Man, but Woman, and then—no, not Woman alone, not Man alone, but both, and more!

  What happened next is beyond my words: there was a mighty turbulence, a tremendous dance of energy, the sense of simultaneous vision in many dimensions at once, a Making and Shaping and Shifting, a Song being sung in every register—then vision stabilised.

  I saw the earth, our earth.

  It was bright like a jewel, all colours, with people on it made from it and from the spirit breathed into it, their heads haloed by the light pouring through the open door in their crown, the Song and the spinning spheres full and rich and harmonious in them.

  But something went wrong. Darkness infiltrated the people, then fire gouted, and I saw that beautiful world destroyed.

  Yet the planet swam out of the catastrophe, renewed and fair, if not quite so bright as before—and the new people on it were not quite so bright either. This time I saw them killing animals and each other and so delighting in the cleverness of their hands alone that they forgot to look up, and their halo grew dull, the darkness came again, and a second catastrophe, for the earth lost its spin and wobbled, and rolled over twice like a drunk, then fell through space and froze into ice. And only those with a hint of the Song in their hearts had taken underground refuge with the ants in time.

  So came a third world, a world in sharper focus now, with harder edges and the light more locked-up and shaped into things made by hands; I saw the survivors multiply and build great cities; but the door atop their heads by now was almost completely closed; they knew they’d lost something but couldn’t remember what, or denied it had ever been; many worshipped the behaviour of beasts and rushed about in flying machines from which they attacked each other’s cities—

  There was a flash of that terrible invisible light.

  The rains came, and Flood covered the lands.

  Next, suddenly, I found myself amid a crowd of many and we were bobbing on the ocean, and our craft were not golden ships, but rafts of reed, and when at last the clouds cleared and the sun set behind us, there was still no land in sight. We sent off swallows that brought report of beautiful islands which soon we passed, but of each isle a voice in us whispered, “No, not this one, go on, go on!” And we were of every race who heard this voice—red, black, yellow, and white, and every admixture; all united on this great odyssey.

  On and on we went towards the rising sun. At length we came to a land of high mountains that marched north and south without a break, so we could find no place to land. Then the voice in us whispered: “Remember the door in the crown of your heads!” We stopped paddling, and relaxed, to let our vision-faculties work. Thus, with the aid of that inner eye which knows what outer sensation cannot, we found an opening in the giant cliffs, and through the narrow neck we went, and entered a great shining bay.

  Gladly we put ashore onto this hard new fourth world, but immediately sensed a giant before us, and heard a thunderous voic
e:

  “Who are you?”

  We knew who this was! He whose pride had wrecked the third world, who had been cast down into Death for it! But the One Who Made us had decided to give him (and us) another chance to learn the Song we can sing and the Dance we can dance, of our own will, so that All Tilings may come alive in spirit and splendour as the Plan intends!

  So with the greatest respect we asked the giant spirit in us if we might stay in this land, and the Caretaker (for so he was) rumbled, “Yes, but before you can settle to seek the Plan you must prove yourselves able to concentrate and remember. You must go about the land to every comer, north and south and east and west, to learn the shape of things and find your proper homes. But if on the way you forget what you are doing, there you will stop and freeze into grotesque forms and beliefs that will bring only unhappiness.

  “Now,” continued the thunder-voice, “I have a tablet here that I break into many pieces, and to each of you in your groups and families I give a piece of the broken tablet to carry with you on your separate ways: to you, black man, this piece; red man, this is yours; yellow man, here is the map of your direction; and white man, you take this piece.”

  Then in each of us the great voice spoke with instruction according to our individualities, preparing us to set forth and in time to return with knowledge, to join the tablet together again. And we were shown ways to remember these things down through the ages of the fourth world, so that when we met again we should recollect our brotherhood and work together with what we had all learned.

  “May we meet again!” we called to each other as we departed on our different ways through the long generations.

  So we made many journeys, and I know of them all, for we all try for the same, and in time I saw that some of us found our way back, but others forgot and founded stone cities, or wandered off their way, or partly remembered but got interested in something else. And so many were late returning, and many who did return were bitterly wounded though calling themselves whole. And many had blood on their hands.