by Ian Watson
The desert resembled a vast inhabited used-car lot, with the hundreds of vehicles parked about at random off the road. Even carts and bicycles. Some shacks had been run up out of cardboard and corrugated iron, scavenged from somewhere. Really they were little more than roofs on poles, but people cooked in them, and sold enchiladas, tortillas, tequila, beer. An air of exhaustion hung over the mass of people. Those who weren’t dozing in cars or under lorries were squatting in hunched rows facing the wire and Mount Mezapico beyond as though waiting for a cinema show to start on the blue screen of the sky…
The only people on the move, apart from Angels, were a tribe of thirty or forty Californian hippies dancing in slow circles banging tambourines and playing flutes, some in jeans, some in saffron robes. And some isolated individuals wandering about among the scrub and cacti, drunk, drugged, or shocked.
Five thousand people in that shanty encampment, sleeping or sitting in the heat, waiting for nightfall…
A Priest and two soldiers were down by the wire, extricating a corpse for burial. A row of six crossways-tied sticks already poked up from sand graves.
“I shall file no more reports about this,” snarled Morelli. “It only makes matters worse. They can give me the sack—”
“Hardly a very dynamic attitude to adopt!” she mocked. “I thought you felt called upon to oppose Paul?”
“No one is neutral or immune, I agree. Nobody is simply an observer. But to observe events helps to create them. I do not choose to collaborate in this… hysterical new reality.”
Switching on the ignition, Ruth rolled the Sierra downhill, past a half-track to the spot where the Priest was reading out of a tattered missal. The soldiers leaning on their shovels, their automatic rifles slung across their shoulders, looked more weary than reverent. Morelli climbed out and marched over to the Priest. It was the same Father Luis who had rung his bell in protest.
“You’re wasting your time, Father,” he interrupted brutally. “They’ll all try to swarm over the wire tonight. The whole mob. They’re mesmerized by that light on the mountain. See, it’s angled, to catch the Sun. It’s turning slowly to keep the maximum brightness centred in it. That’s no observatory. That’s a hypnosis machine!”
“Yes,” nodded Father Luis. “It is the same as my vision. I foresaw it. It calls them. Bends their minds.” He kept his back to Mount Mezapico. “I—will—not—look at it,” the old man stammered.
Morelli gripped him by the shoulder with a fierce comradeship.
“Yet, Father, have you thought that they might try to destroy the machine, if they reach it? Since it is destroying their souls? They only need the idea.”
The Priest’s head rocked in disagreement.
“These… are sacrificial goats. It makes no difference. The effect has already… ah, spread far beyond them, I hear. Besides, it is not an easy machine to pull down. The soldiers will kill them…”
Leaving the Sierra too, Ruth strayed nearer the wire. Tatters of cloth hung spiked on it; some barbs were black with flies swarming and resettling. Dried blood.
Circling, a Satan’s Slave headed towards her—an unnaturally thin, rangy youth, whose jeans rode high up his dirty leather boots, with the name DANNY picked out in studs on the front of his leather jacket. On the back he’d painted the Devil card from the Tarot pack: the horned God with male and female homunculi chained at its feet. Welded into his helmet were ridiculous, puckish horns—certain to drive right through his skull if he had a bad spill on the highway.
“Hey Danny,” Ruth cooed over the wire.
“Hi Talent,” He jerked a thumb at the charred remnants of the bonfire on his side, and the graves the soldiers were digging on hers. “Like, we miss Black Mass?”
“Don’t worry, there’ll be another show tonight. I’d be a big boy and ride on home if I were you.”
Danny slapped his machine affectionately across the flank with a bony fist.
“I could bounce this hog over your barbed wire and be up and over the hill before those dumb hick soldiers ever woke up!”
“Don’t be too sure of that, Danny Boy.”
He stood straddling the bike, preternaturally tall, thin as a rake.
“Say, Talent, lift you over, split a beer with the Slaves, hey?”
“My name’s Ruth,” she bridled, “not Talent. Ruth Hammond.”
“Shoot! That right? You his daughter?”
“His wife, Danny.”
Danny executed a mock obeisance, stooping over his handlebars till his horns tapped the telescopic front-wheel forks. Whipping upright, he hooted:
“Slaves! I present Hammond’s old lady to you! Pick you over the wire, lady, we worship you with our bodies,” his long childish face leered.
Ruth leaned, faint, against a wooden crosspiece of the wire, smelling her fantasy come real in the flesh, grease, hair and leather.
To Danny, it appeared she was bending forward for his arms to lift her over, shutting her eyes like so many chicks surrendering on jerry-built altars behind filling stations, in lorry parks…
Dropping his spade across a grave, the nearest Mexican soldier unslung his rifle and waved it at the tall Angel, who grinned back insolently as he reached out to grab this small dark prey, knowing she was between him and any bullet.
Then Morelli sprinted over, spat in the Angel’s face and wrenched Ruth away.
Very slowly, Danny backed his bike.
“My eyes are photographing your features, Mister,” he shouted. “I advise you memorize them too! Mrs Ruth—Satan’s Slaves ride for you tonight.”
“Piss off,” swore Morelli. He shouted at the soldier, in Spanish: “Shoot that scum in the leg, do the world a favour.” However the soldier shook his head. It only took a pebble in the pond, to set the ripples spreading. One shot, maybe, to galvanize those thousands of catatonic spectators to a more desperate bout of violence.
Morelli hurried Ruth back up the crumbling slope, gripping her so tightly that the crook of her arm stung. Would Richard Kimble have dragged her out of bed with that newsman as fiercely because he disapproved? No. Richard had stood there gawping and whining. The Italian was potent in his darkest impotence.
“Filthy West Coast degenerates,” he raged. “What did you think you were doing, Ruth? Cockteasing them? While your husband hypnotizes the whole world, is this the best you can imagine for yourself?”
“I felt faint down there,” she excused herself. “So many people and they’re all Paul’s doing, it horrifies me. The phoney bastard…”
“Would you say so out loud in public, Ruth?”
“Uh?”
“Will you help me?”
“To pull Paul down?” She shook her head morosely. “He’s for real. Authentic. A genius. You know Rasputin? They shot him, poisoned him and drowned him, yet still he walked and talked and mesmerized people. They couldn’t finish him off with axes, those quilted Russian coats they wear. I’ve been reading about him in The Reader’s Digest. Rasputin was only a country magician. Paul’s a great scientist, he doesn’t need crystal balls. He has a radio telescope, the biggest looking-glass in all history! He has a galaxy called after him… Rasputin was a pig with women,” she rambled on, “and they adored him. Paul seems pretty cool and suave that way. Did you know he’s really awful in bed?”
Morelli’s eyes clouded.
Ruth’s expression was twisted midway between the axes of laughter and commiseration.
“He can do it,” she emphasized, “he’s just lousy as a lover. Damn him, he thinks he’s as brilliant at sex as at everything else!”
“Have you told him to his face he’s no good in bed, Ruth?”
She shook her head.
“Do it,” he whispered fiercely. “For God’s sake, do it!”
“Maybe it’s me that’s lousy, not him. He’d divorce me, it wouldn’t pull the carpet out from under him—”
“Sexual performance is very near the kernel of a man’s ego,” Morelli forced himself to say. “Sexu
al despair is the most devastating despair.”
“Despair of existence itself is worse,” chided Father Luis.
“One can lead straight on to the other! A man’s being is a sexual thing. All his works are sublimations.”
“You overvalue it,” the old Priest said gently.
“Hammond’s theory of Nothingness is surely a projection of his own hidden fears on to the greatest screen he has available.”
“My son, the whole world is sick with nothingness. But it does not fear a failure of sexuality. It fears starvation, it fears too many people through the agency of sexuality. The decay of civilization, the vanishing of fuel, the poisoning of the seas—these it fears!” His flimsy hand gestured at the Pacific, visible as a vivid blue streak along the desert edge.
“The seas? Our greatest sexual symbol!” raved Morelli. “Thalassa, the Set, is the womb of our being. Once we poison that, we sterilize ourselves. As the fish die, so we kill the sperm of the spirit!”
Ruth drew fractionally away from him, closer to the soldiers. He seemed distraught enough to attack her. She had no wish to be mutilated, like him.
(Yet only moments earlier she dreamed of a rape by Angels? Would that have left her untarnished? Or with tribal marks razored in her cheeks? Branded on her breasts!)
“Sex is the life energy, but we have used up the whole planet’s energy, and without energy we are impotent. In our hearts we know this, Father, so we seek a religion of impotence—that the universe may reflect ourselves. What we seek, we shall surely find, for the most scientific of reasons!”
• • •
The Land Rover that Morelli had formerly arrived in rounded the bend in the road from San Pedro, then, with Richard Kimble at the wheel and Paul Hammond in the passenger seat…
The spectacle of Hammond actually coming in person to inspect this flimsy boundary of hysteria he had created horrified Morelli into silence. With anyone else it would have been sheer irresponsibility. But is the megalomaniac “irresponsible”? On the contrary, his is a case of aggravated responsibility. We speak of diminished responsibility. So why not aggravated responsibility? He makes himself responsible for everything.
“I thought you might be in danger here, Ruth,” boomed Hammond as he clambered out, while Kimble kept the engine idling. “Fool, Morelli, bringing her here!”
“Far stupider, you coming here!”
“I have to protect my wife. Obviously you have no sense. Climb in with me, Ruth, and Richard can drive the Sierra back.” He made no mention of giving Morelli a lift—in his own hired vehicle.
Ruth thought Paul was going to take her by the arm as Morelli had a moment before, but her husband walked right past her and down to the wire barricade where he halted and stared across. A Mexican lieutenant ran from one of the tents and began begging him to leave. Impatiently, Hammond yawned.
Far away on Mezapico Mountain, the Big Dish held a spoonful of condensed sunlight, burning it into the retinas of the crowd…
Angel Danny coasted his bike back to the wire and stared at Dr Paul.
Then whooped his name aloud.
Rashly, the lieutenant jerked his pistol from its holster. Waving it at the bike’s front wheel, he squeezed the trigger. Paul Hammond neatly seized hold of the officer’s elbow and jerked it—but to re-aim the gun, not drag it aside. Richard Kimble could see that much quite plainly from where he was sitting. Magnified at the end of a visual tunnel: the hand. The gun. The accurate aim.
The bullet struck the fuel tank instead of the wheel, and the tank exploded in a ball of fire. Flames snaked up the lanky, rearing figure of the Angel, spattering a few gobs across the wire. Hammond danced back nimbly, leaving the lieutenant to be slightly scalded by burning petrol. The officer dropped his pistol with a yelp and fled back towards the tents, shouting.
Danny fell screaming over and over in the sand. The painted devil on his back darted out particularly bright green tongues of flame. He finally lay extinguished twenty yards from his burning machine, legs kicking spasmodically like a giant electrified frog’s…
Yet the other Slaves had heard what he shouted out. Chanting the name “Hammond!” in chorus, they gunned their bikes towards their leader’s body. And the name sped back among the crouched ranks facing the mountain. With the undulant motion of a millipede, the crowd rose and wavered.
Hammond propelled Ruth bodily towards the Land Rover, ignoring her protests.
“Get out, Richard! Drive the Sierra!”
Kimble sat stubbornly still.
“You killed him, Paul. I saw you point the gun—”
“He’s not dead, just hurt, they’re pulling him to his feet—see? Walking him away—”
“Dragging him, he’s dying—”
“Damn you, Richard, will you get out! Or we’ll all be dead—”
Ignoring the shooting entirely, as though it was an irrelevance, Morelli demanded:
“Why is your telescope always reflecting the Sun this way, Dr Hammond?”
“What the hell are you talking about! The Dish follows an automatic programme. It’s locked on to one of the microwave discrepancies. I haven’t time for interviews now.”
“It’s locked on to us, down here.”
Hammond forced the Italian away with a brisk punch in the chest, and pulled open the passenger door to bundle Ruth inside. She huddled there miserably, while he marched round the vehicle and wrenched Richard’s door open.
Richard was still sitting there, refusing to make a move, when a light machinegun opened fire from the top of the nearest half-track, kicking up a line of dust along the near side of the wire.
A susurrus of sound rippled among the crowd: wind over human wheat…
Richard scrambled out smartly and raced for the Sierra.
“Hurry up Morelli,” he called over his shoulder. “Come with me!”
The Italian was perfectly right about the telescope, he realized.
The machinegun raked the wire again, ripping dusty pockmarks.
Seventeen
Bob Pasko had outlined the problem to Dr Kato. Behind those rimless bifocals, hooded eyes were already squinting at the matter inwardly. The old man’s field of vision might terminate a few metres in front of him; but it stretched back to a remote vanishing point far inside his head.
Kato was also thinking pleasurable thoughts of seeing Miss Patton again. Her dumpiness tickled him erotically. She possessed the lavish stumpiness of a fat-calfed peasant maid in a resort inn, kneeling in tight bright kimono offering a sake flask to a tipsy old man and playing in the bath with him. Visitors to his office were served weak green tea by such a girl, recruited from the countryside, wearing a nurse’s white coat.
Enozawa talked rapidly to the old man in tight bursts of Japanese. The breathless strangleholds on the even flow of his speech implied a certain deference; however, it was a staccato, impatient deference, and even the polite verbal tentatives that Enozawa used snapped off short, like broken lobster feelers.
Kato inspected Georgi Nilin curiously while Enozawa was speaking—nodding meanwhile at most of the pauses, slipping in verbal punctuation in counterpoint…“Hai!… ee… so…”
The child coolly returned his gaze. He even sipped the brackish green tea, scorning the candy bar Pasko had produced from his pocket.
“I did think of that, Mr Pasko,” Kato laughed gently, as the psychiatrist tossed the candy in the trash can irritably. “But I reasoned that a porcelain cup of Japanese tea might be a better test of adulthood as opposed to his childishness, you see?”
Setting his cup down with great precision on Kato’s desk, the boy slid off his seat to pursue his relentless quest for paper clips and rubber bands and pencils and other office paraphernalia, which his fingers began knitting obsessively into an assemblage. A pseudo-machine took form on the desk, then, ungainly and precarious. But it held together.
Meanwhile, while he assembled this machine, they discussed his own assembly…
“They must hav
e imprinted different aspects of the mind model on his brain at different periods,” the psychiatrist suggested thoughtfully. “Alternatively, the total model many times over. The infant brain simply doesn’t mature at an even rate, and you can’t programme when the circuitry isn’t available. Why, we’re still not sure whether many of the neurons are capable of transmitting impulses at all for ages. The myelin insulation’s still being laid down along the axons for at least the first two years of life, hand in glove with the kid’s behavioural development.”
“Ah, but which comes first?” interrupted Tom Winterburn. “Does traffic along the nerves trigger the insulation effect? Or is it insulation that makes traffic possible? If it’s the first, then interference by imprinting could actually set up pathways—in other words force development: speed up pathway formation. But I agree this consciousness transplant isn’t likely to be produced straight off. Personally I think it must be by reinforcement, using the total model, over a long period. But how long a period?”
“You’re assuming the boy is programmed? I’m only theorizing, you know.”
“I’ve got to assume it, don’t you see? If they’re using the 370-185 on Sakhalin to programme human personality models into sperm whales and lord knows what else!” Tom Winterburn turned to Kato. “Well, sir, do you think it is possible?”
.“We brought him here too,” babbled Orville Parr rudely, his claustrophobic anxieties unabated, “in case anything triggers him, the way the zoo did. Pasko’s told you about that? And the kid seems to like communicating through models. Objects, not words—”
“We have many models of whale brains here,” blinked Kato. “Sections of genuine brains too. Our agents on the whaling boats collect these, whenever feasible. We have a number of hando iruka too… dolphins, embalmed alive, not to mention a small shachi, a killer-whale baby…” He smiled, with polite connoisseurship.
“Embalmed alive?” Chloe fluttered.
“Vital perfusion technique, Chloe!” Herb Flynn hissed. “It’s standard practice. The anaesthetized animal has its blood replaced by a saline solution, then by preservative. Technically it’s alive. Not conscious of course. It can never recover consciousness. But we can still run some electrode stimulus tests on the brain.”