As the lepers moved off, Sanders followed behind them, dragging the cross in both hands. Through the trees he saw the train of the procession, but they seemed to vanish as quickly as they appeared, as if eager to familiarize themselves with every tree and grove in their new-found paradise. However, for no reason the entire troupe then turned and came round again, as if delighted to take a last look at Sanders and his cross. As they went by Sanders caught a glimpse of a tall dark-robed woman at their head, calling to the others in a clear voice. Her pale arms and face already shone with the crystal light of the forest. She turned to look back, and Sanders shouted over the bobbing heads: "Suzanne! Suzanne, here-!"
But the woman and the remainder of the troupe had scattered again among the trees. Hobbling along, Sanders found the last remnants of their meager baggage lying on the ground-rag shoes and broken baskets, begging bowls with their few grains of rice already half fused to the vitrified ground.
Once Sanders came across the half-crystallized body of a small child who had fallen behind and been unable to keep up with the others. Lying down to rest, it had become fused to the ground. Sanders listened to the voices fading away among the trees, the child's parents somewhere among them. Then he lowered the cross over the child and waited as the crystals deliquesced from its arms and legs. Freed again, the child's deformed hands clasped the air. With a Start it clambered to its feet and ran off through the trees, the dissolving light pouring from its head and shoulders.
Sanders was still following the procession, lost far away in the distance, when he reached the summer house where Thorensen and Serena Ventress had first taken refuge. It was now dusk, and the jewels of the cross shone faintly in the failing light. Already the cross had lost much of its power, and most of the smaller diamonds and rubies had faded to blunted nodes of carbon and corundum. Only the large emeralds still burned strongly against the white hulk of Thorensen's cruiser trapped in its fault in front of the summer house.
Sanders walked along the bank, past the crystal remains of the mulatto in his crocodile skin. The two had become merged, the man himself, half-white and halfblack, fusing with the dark jeweled beast. Their own outlines were still visible as they effloresced through each other's tissues. The face of the mulatto shone through the superimposed jaws and eyes of the great crocodile.
The door of the summer house was open. Sanders climbed the steps and walked into the chamber. He looked down at the bed, in whose frosted depths, like swimmers asleep on the bottom of an enchanted pool, Serena and the mine-owner lay together. Thorensen's eyes were closed, and the delicate petals of a blood red rose blossomed from the hole in his breast like an exquisite marine plant. Beside him Serena slept quietly, the unseen motion of her heart sheathing her body in a faint amber glow, the palest residue of life. Although Thorensen had died trying to save her, she lived on in her own half-death.
Something glittered in the dusk behind Sanders. He turned to see a brilliant chimera, a man with incandescent arms and chest, race past among the trees, a cascade of particles diffusing in the air behind him. He flinched back behind the cross, but the man had vanished, whirling himself away among the crystal vaults. As his luminous wake faded Sanders heard his voice echoing across the frosted air, the plaintive words jeweled and ornamented like everything else in that transmogrified world. "_Serena-! Serena-!_"
14 The prismatic sun
Two months later, as he completed his letter to Dr. Paul Derain, director of the leper hospital at Fort Isabelle, in the quiet of his hotel bedroom at Port Matarre, Sanders wrote:
– it seems hard to believe, Paul, here in this empty hotel, that the strange events of that phantasmagoric forest ever occurred. Yet in fact I am little more than forty miles as the crow (or should I say, the gryphon?) flies from the focal area ten miles to the south of Mont Royal, and if I need any reminder there is the barely healed wound on my arm. According to the bartender downstairs-I'm glad to say that he, at least, is still at his post (almost everyone else has left) -the forest is now advancing at the rate of some four hundred yards each day. One of the visiting journalists talking to Louise claims that at this rate of progress at least a third of the earth's surface will be affected by the end of the next decade, and a score of the world's capital cities petrified beneath layers of prismatic crystal, as Miami has already been-no doubt you have seen reports of the abandoned resort as a city of a thousand cathedral spires, a vision materialized from St. John the Divine.
To tell the truth, however, the prospect causes me little worry. As I have said, Paul, it's obvious to me now that its origins are more than physical. When I stumbled out of the forest into an army cordon five miles from Mont Royal, two days after seeing the helpless phantom that had once been Ventress, the gold cross clutched in my arms, I was determined never to visit the forest again. By one of those ludicrous inversions of logic, I found myself, far from acclaimed as a hero, standing summary trial before a military court and charged with looting. The gold cross had apparently been stripped of its jewels-the generous benefaction of the mining companies-and in vain did I protest that these vanished stones had been the price of my survival. Only the intercession of Max Clair and Louise Peret saved me. At our suggestion a patrol of soldiers equipped with jeweled crosses entered the forest in an attempt to find Suzanne and Ventress, but they were forced to retreat.
Whatever my feelings at the time, however, I know now that I shall one day return to the forest at Mont Royal. Each night the fractured disc of the Echo satellite passes overhead, illuminating the midnight sky like a silver chandelier. And I am convinced, Paul, that the sun itself has begun to effloresce. At sunset, when its disc is veiled by the crimson dust, it seems to be crossed by a distinctive latticework, a vast portcullis that will one day spread outwards to the planets and the stars, halting them in their courses.
As the example of that brave apostate priest who gave the cross to me illustrates, there is an immense reward to be found in that frozen forest. There the transfiguration of all living and inanimate forms occurs before our eyes, the gift of immortality a direct consequence of the surrender by each of us of our own physical and temporal identities. However apostate we may be in this world, there perforce we become apostles of the prismatic sun.
So when my recovery is complete I shall return to Mont Royal with one of the scientific expeditions passing through here. It should not be too difficult to arrange my escape and then I shall return to the solitary church in that enchanted world, where by day fantastic birds fly through the petrified forest and jeweled crocodiles glitter like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline rivers, and where by night the illuminated man races among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels and his head like a spectral crown.
Putting down his pen as Louise Peret entered the room, Dr. Sanders folded the letter and placed it in an old envelope from Derain in which he had written asking for Sanders's plans.
Louise came over to the desk by the window and put her hand on Sanders's shoulder. She wore a clean white dress that emphasized the drabness of the rest of Port Matarre-despite the transformation of the forest only a few miles away, here at the mouth of the river the vegetation still retained its somber appearance, although the motes of light that flickered within the foliage marked the crystallization soon to come.
"Are you still writing to Derain?" she asked. "It's a long letter."
"There's a lot to say." Sanders sat back, clasping her hand as he looked out at the deserted arcade below. A few military landing craft were moored against the police jetty, and beyond them the dark river swept away into the interior. The main military base was now at one of the large government plantations ten miles up-river. Here an airfield had been constructed and the many hundreds of scientists and technicians, not to mention journalists, still trying to gain some understanding of the advancing forest were flown in directly, so by-passing Port Matarre. Once again the riverside town was half deserted. The native market had closed down. The stall holders wit
h their crystallized ornaments had been put out of business by the forest's own over-abundant economy. However, now and then, during his walks around Port Matarre, Sanders would see some solitary mendicant hanging around near the barracks or police prefecture, an old blanket in his basket hiding some grotesque offering of the forest-a crystallized parrot or rivercarp, and once, the head and thorax of a baby.
"Are you resigning then?" Louise asked. "I think you should reconsider-we've talked-"
"My dear, one can't reconsider things to a hundred places of decimals. Somewhere one's got to make a decision." Sanders took the letter from his pocket and tossed it on to the desk. Not to hurt Louise, who had stayed with him in the hotel since his rescue, he said: "Actually, I haven't made up my mind yet. I'm just using the letter to work the whole thing out."
Louise nodded, looking down at him. Sanders noticed that she had begun to wear her sunglasses again, unconsciously revealing her own private decision about Sanders and his future, and their own inevitable separation. However, minor dishonesties such as this were merely the price of their own tolerance of one another.
"Have the police any news about Anderson?" Sanders asked. During their first month in Port Matarre Louise had gone down to the prefecture every morning in the hope of getting some news about her lost colleague, partly, Sanders guessed, to justify her extended stay with him in the hotel. That she could now dispense with this small squaring of her conscience meant that she had made other arrangements. "They might have heard something-you never know. You haven't been down?"
"No. Hardly anyone is entering the zone now." Louise shrugged. "I suppose it's worth trying."
"Of course." Sanders stood up, leaning on the injured arm, and then put on his jacket.
"How is it?" Louise asked. "Your arm. It seems all right now."
Sanders patted the elbow. "I think it's healed. Louise, it's been good of you to look after me. You know that."
Louise regarded him from behind her sunglasses. A brief smile, not without affection, touched her lips. "What more could I do?" She laughed at this, and then strolled to the door. "I must go up to my room and change. Enjoy your walk."
Sanders followed her to the door, and then held her arm for a moment. When she had gone he stood by the door, listening to the few sounds in the almost empty hotel.
Sitting down at the desk again, he read through his letter to Paul Derain. Thinking about Louise at the same time, he realized that he could hardly blame her for deciding to leave him. Sanders had in fact forced her out, not so much by his behavior at Port Matarre but simply by not being wholly there-his real identity still moved through the forests of Mont Royal. During his journey down-river in the ambulance craft with Louise and Max Clair, and his subsequent convalescence at Port Matarre, he had felt like the empty projection of a self that still wandered through the forest with the jeweled cross in his arms, re-animating the lost children he passed like a deity on his day of creation. Louise knew nothing of this, and assumed that he was searching for Suzanne.
There was a knock on the door, and Max Clair let himself into the room. Greeting Sanders with a wave, he put his surgical bag down on a chair. Since his arrival in Port Matarre he had been helping at the clinic run by the Jesuit fathers. On several occasions the latter had made an attempt to see Sanders, for the purpose, he guessed, of questioning him about Father Balthus's self-immolation within the forest. Obviously they suspected that his real concern had not been for his parish.
"Morning to you, Edward-I hope I'm not disturbing your meditation for the day?"
"I've finished." When Max glanced toward the halfopen door of the bathroom Sanders said: "Louise is upstairs. Now, what's the news today?"
"No idea-I haven't got time to hang around the police station. We're much too busy at the clinic. They're coming in from every hedge and byway."
"What do you expect-there's a doctor there now." Sanders shook his head. "Bring a doctor into a place like Port Matarre and you immediately create a major health problem."
"Well-" Max glanced at Sanders over his glasses, unsure how serious he was being. "I don't know about that. We certainly are busy, Edward. As a matter of fact, now that your arm is better we thought-the fathers, principally-that you might come and give us a hand. Just a couple of mornings a week to start with. The fathers would be grateful to you."
"I dare say." Sanders looked out at the distant forest. "I'd like to help you, Max, of course. As it happens, I'm rather busy at present."
"But you're not. You're just sitting here all day. Look, it's routine largely, nothing to take your mind off higher things, a few maternity cases, pellagra." He added quietly: "Yesterday a couple of cases of leprosy came in-I thought you might be interested."
Sanders turned and studied Max's face, with its bright shortsighted eyes below the domed head. The element of guile, if any, in this last remark was hard to assess. For some time Sanders had suspected that Max had known all along that Suzanne would run away into the forest after seeing Sanders, and that his own pointless search among the hill settlements had been a deliberate means of making sure that no one stopped her. During their time in Port Matarre Max rarely referred to Suzanne, although his wife by now would be frozen like an icon somewhere within the crystal forest. Yet Max's last reference to the lepers, unless intended to provoke him into returning to the forest suggested that in fact Max had no idea of the significance of the forest for Suzanne and Sanders, that for both of them the only final resolution of the imbalance within their minds, their inclination toward the dark side of the equinox, could be found within that crystal world.
"Two cases of leprosy? I'm not interested in the least." Before Max could speak Sanders went on: "Frankly, Max, I'm not sure whether I'm still qualified to help you."
"What? Of course you are."
"In absolute terms. It seems to me, Max, that the whole profession of medicine may have been superseded.-I don't think the simple distinction between life and death has much meaning now. Rather than try to cure those patients you should put them into a launch and send them up-river to Mont Royal."
Max stood up. He made a gesture of helplessness, and then said cheerfully: "I'll come back tomorrow. Keep an eye on yourself."
When he had gone Sanders completed his letter, adding a final paragraph and farewell. Sealing it into a fresh envelope, he addressed it to Derain and propped it against the inkwell. He then took out his checkbook and signed one of the checks. He slipped these into a second envelope on which he wrote Louise's name.
As he stood up, buttoning his jacket, he noticed Louise and Max talking in the street outside the hotel. Recently he had often seen them together, in the foyer of the hotel or at the door of the restaurant. He waited until their conversation ended and then went down to the foyer.
At the desk he paid the previous week's bills for himself and Louise, and settled their accounts for a further fortnight. After exchanging a few pleasantries with the Portuguese owner, Sanders went out for his usual pre-lunch stroll.
Usually his walk took him down to the river. He strolled through the deserted arcades, noticing, as he did each morning, the strange contrasts between light and shadow despite the apparent absence of direct sunlight in Port Matarre. At the corner, opposite the police prefecture, he flexed his injured arm for the last time against one of the pillars. Somewhere in the crystalline streets of Mont Royal were the missing fragments of himself, living on in their own prismatic medium.
Thinking of Captain Radek and of Suzanne Clair, Sanders reached the waterfront and walked down along the deserted jetties. Almost all the native boats had gone, and the settlements on the other side of the river had been abandoned.
One craft, however, as usual still patrolled the empty waterfront. Three hundred yards away Sanders could see the red-and-yellow speedboat in which he and Louise had first made their journey to Mont Royal. The tall figure of Aragon stood at the helm, letting the boat drift on the tide. Every morning he would watch Sanders walk by, but the
two men never spoke to one another.
Sanders walked toward him, feeling the wallet in his jacket. As he reached Aragon the latter waved to him, then started his motor and moved off. Puzzled by this, Sanders walked on, and then saw that Aragon was taking the craft down-river to the point of the bank where the crystallized body of Matthieu had been cast up two months earlier.
Sanders caught up with the boat, and then walked down the bank toward it. For a moment the two men regarded each other.
"A fine boat you have there, Captain," Sanders said at last, repeating the phrase he had first used to Aragon.
Half an hour later, as they moved off up-river, Sanders leaned back in his seat when they passed the central wharves. In the choppy water the spray broke unevenly, the fallen rainbows carried away in the dark wake behind them. In the street between the arcades an old Negro was standing in the dust with a white shield in his hand, waiting for the boat to go past. On the police jetty Louise Peret stood next to Max Clair. Her eyes hidden by the sunglasses, she watched Sanders without waving as the boat sped on up the deserted river.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J.G. Ballard, born in 1930 in Shanghai and educated at Cambridge University, is widely known for his imagination, intelligent, and powerful science fiction novels and short story collections, including _The Drowned World_, _High-Rise_, and _The Wind From Nowhere_. He is the author of _Empire of the Sun_, the basis for the Steven Spielberg film of the same name. J.G. Ballard's most recent book is _Super-Cannes_, published in 2000.
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The Crystal World Page 16