by John Brunner
Even the unaccustomed presence of Tibor Gyorgy, overseeing the medical test equipment in his capacity as their chief electronicist, wasn’t enough to provide the symbolism she wanted, which would have made her feel she was really committing herself. She was going to go through it without involvement, detached, distant from reality.
And there, now, was Tai himself raising a glass of the first juice to emerge from the extractor and gulping it down. Saying, “Tastes okay, that’s for sure! Right, mark the precise time down, will you? Urine tests at one hour and three hours, blood tests at one, two and four, absolutely without fail. I’ll have my stomach pumped after the next batch, but there’s no need to inflict that on everybody. Who’s next—you, Parvati? Fruit or vegetable juice?”
And she heard herself choose the latter, and could tell no difference as the cool dark fluid slipped past her teeth and into the darkness without recall of her mysterious metabolism.
Exactly what everyone had expected to see by way of result, she couldn’t tell. It was clear from the covert glances her companions who had not sampled the native-grown juices gave whenever they thought she wouldn’t notice that they were unconsciously looking for some outward clue to what had happened. Outward or inward, she could detect none herself, except that by the second day of the trial she seemed to have lost a grey depression so subtle she had barely been aware that she was suffering from it—the penumbra of scurvy, presumably. She deliberately pinched a generous fold of her forearm as hard as she could between finger and thumb, and looked again after half an hour. There was no trace of the darkening which would follow the rupture of scurvy-weakened capillaries.
We’re going to make it, she decided with premature optimism. And, as she went on her rounds of the base island, saw nothing to convince her otherwise. All the test subjects were as fit as she was, so far, and that meant a trifle fitter than many of their companions. Her duties took her to every corner of their microcosm of mankind’s world at least once every day, and as she went from the kilns where they were firing their own clay dishes to the miniature furnace that produced steel reinforcement rods for Dan, from the sawmill stacking up its supplies of planks to the scrap-reclaiming team denuding the Niña, she noted everywhere the insidious lethargy and barely-controlled irritability which Tai had warned against.
There was one additional problem, however, which remained in the forefront of her mind. What about Dennis Malone?
The evening when he had failed to call in, for the first time this trip though not the first time ever, she had begun to worry, but on his last trip he had, admittedly, missed one call and reported in on schedule the next day, not bothering to apologise. According to Ulla, moreover, by now he should be in the most promising of all the suspected locations where diamonds might be found. It was entirely possible he had wandered a long distance from his boat and the radio in it, been overtaken by nightfall close to a site he wanted to investigate by daylight, and decided to camp where he was.
When he failed to call in the next day as well, she grew really alarmed, but by then the need to undergo all Tai’s metabolic tests—a total of eighteen of them in every twenty-four hour period—and the demands of her routine work which must be kept up at all costs conspired to make her and Abdul put off the dispatch of a search-party until the day following, although they were both agreed on the importance of it. It took time to select a group who could be spared, too. But in the end one of Ulla’s aides, one of Dan’s, and Yoko, were chosen and briefed. The colony’s second-line cushionfoil was checked out by Saul, stocked for the trip, which would be short because it would only need to include a straight-line leg out and back, and programmed appropriately.
So, first thing in the morning, the rescue party would set off. And would find …
Restless, she lay on her bunk and listened to the sounds of their village settling down for the night: doors closing, people calling good night to one another, the crunching noise of footsteps as the two colonists on overnight watch in the ship went up to relieve the evening pair. Two people were always stationed aboard the Santa Maria from sunset to midnight and midnight to dawn, on guard against the emergency which had not materialised.
The nights were still warm well into the small hours, although the first hints of fall could be detected now. A revised wind-forecast had caused Kitty to ask Dan to attend to the securing of the houses with guys before, instead of after, building his boat-sheds, and that encouraged a tremor of apprehension. But in general things were going well, as before. Certainly she and the other five test subjects were showing only good effects from their trial diet-additives.
She tossed and turned, inexplicably unable to relax and sleep though she was feeling healthily tired after another long day. Saul had asked if he could join her for the night, but Tai had suggested that none of the test subjects kiss anyone until the results were all in—transfer of saliva was potentially liable to skew his instrument readings. Was that why she was so restless? She liked Saul well; his dry personality appealed to her, perhaps because his background made him more at home than most of the colonists on this world of widely scattered islands. Being used to an environment resembling this, he was relaxed.
Lying on her back, gazing up at the exposed ceiling-joists and overlapping shingles of her room—the kind of thing she had never seen at home on Earth, which no one saw to pay attention to unless like Dan they were involved in the actual construction of a building before the finish was fitted to it—she began to wonder absently why the planners of the Asgard colony had been so insistent on complex, relatively inefficient designs like this, with its flat roof and four-square layout. Granted, the right angle was an intellectual achievement, symbolising man’s intervention. But would it not have been better to employ, say, Dymaxion domes, which could equally have been built from local materials and afforded them greater privacy, better insulation during the coming winter, more space to move around in for a given quantity of effort?
Yes, certainly that roof should be domed. She bulged it upward in her imagination, and it receded from her. Passive, she watched it balloon out, noting also: I feel very giddy.
Indeed, suddenly her head was swimming. The roof came down again, rose, came down, like the pulsing of a vast heart. Its latest descent threatened to crush her. Alarmed, she rolled off the bunk and crouched on the floor, on hands and knees, gazing upwards with her mouth ajar.
Something’s happening to me. What—?
She clawed to her feet, clutching the edge of the bunk. The floor rose and fell under her like a stormy sea. Uttering a faint moan, she put one foot before the other until she reached the door and was able to fumble it open. Across the threshold: the sights and sounds and smells of an alien world.
The thought of death became real to her, and she tried to run from it, quite naked, into the alien night.
XIV
May the god Soma, he who is called the moon, liberate me!
Charnel-house moon, the abode of the dead, where crushed corpses lie intermingled with shattered fragments of metal, plastic, glass, ceramic, bone …
Indra is Svargapati: see the dome of heaven, lit with the jewels that flowed from the mouth of Bali whom he slew. Those that were his bones are diamonds and his marrow emeralds; from his blood sprang rubies, drop by drop; his teeth were pearls, his blue eyes shattered into sapphires beyond the power of man to count, his very flesh turned translucent as crystal. Indra is Meghavahana, and the clouds pile in the west, ready steeds for his riding. Indra is Vajri, thunderer.
And the storms will come.
May the god Soma, he who is called the moon, give me release!
The first to die: Yama, king of the dead, lord of the reservoir of oblivion. Garlanded with skulls, the stems of lilies threaded through the empty sockets of their eyes, his mouth a mockery of a human smile—that great gaping grin, wide as a gate, through which all men created take their way …
The instant of Agni: the striking of fire. “First cut the wood of the Sami tree
, then make a wand with the wood of the tree Asvattha. By turning one against the other you will make fire.” Thus the Gandharvas. This done, the creation of Agni, who was cursed to eat all things for telling the truth.
May the god Soma, he who is called the moon, make me free!
Pledged that he would not attack with weapons of wood or stone or iron, nor with anything wet or dry, neither by day nor by night, Indra yet struck down the demon Vritra. Vishnu incarnate in a cloud of foam was his club, at the moment when the sun cut the horizon. Thus he turned preservation to destruction. Ponder this, O Born of Woman, and learn that all things are one.
Filled with divine fury, Mother Kali struck down her husband, trampled him in the midst of the heaping corpses. By this she was made ashamed, but nothing changed. The mother that gives birth shall also inevitably destroy; Vishnu the preserver shall be made a killing tool; the moon that is the holy cup of soma shall be drained, and Kali-Durga shall reign, and Yama, in the age of Shiva, who destroys all things. For all things are maya. The wheel turns. In every dimensionless point of the universe there may be found an Enlightened One.
Helpless with wonderment under the failing moon, Parvati Chandra looked at herself. She touched her breasts and made to strike a gash across one’s underside, covering the other, because it seemed somehow wrong to know that there were two. “Durga, my sister,” she murmured, and wondered about the death which must come forth from her womb. Blood ran down dark from the tip of the finger whose sharp nail she had used to mark herself.
Also …
The giddiness overtook Tai Men while he was asleep, so that his trained awareness fought a losing battle all the way up the shivering tunnels from unconsciousness towards the peak of wakefulness. At one point knowledge and experience were precisely poised, but he was not yet in command of his faculties; he could know, but he could not act. When he was able to, the action he took was merely to stagger from his bunk, through the door of his room, and out under the palace floor of the August Personage of Jade.
The Heavenly Master of the First Origin was long gone to his deserved retirement, leaving to fend as best they could those awkward, clumping creatures whom his successor had made from clay and carelessly left in the rain, so that when the breath of life was wished on them, some went halt, some were blind, some ugly and deformed. This was a matter for which there would be a calling to account at the end of the divine year; meantime, from an infinite distance, the Celestial Master of the Dawn of Jade of the Golden Door looked on benevolently, wishing them well in their brief span before the inception of his reign.
Beyond that he had no interest in them. They might do as they chose.
To the moon, as it is prescribed, on the fifteenth day of the eighth month: a sacrifice in the form of fruit. Perhaps this is what the Divine Hare takes, there in the palace of the moon, and makes with it the elixir of immortality. Yet to live long without wisdom does not mean happiness. Witness the discomfiture of I, the Excellent Archer, who once saved the world in the very long ago, whose wife the most beautiful of all created women is under the protection of the Hare, the patron of those men who will have no commerce with women. He had the elixir first, for his shooting of the nine fierce suns that threatened to bum the world, and by it lost his wife.
Thirty and three are the levels of Heaven. One may ascend by virtue and aspire to be a god oneself, but to become a god is not assurance of eternal bliss. There is a reckoning. There is a calling to account.
Do not fail. The laws are strict. There is no celestial compunction about dismissing those who prove inadequate. There is only the benign authority of the August Personage of Jade, who gives and takes impartially according to what you have deserved.
The Second Lord may come upon you in any of two and seventy guises, eager in the business of his emperor. His dog may rend you like an evil spirit. Do what you must without resentment; that way freedom lies, and no fear.
In the palace of the moon resides the most beautiful of women, Chang-O who was once the Excellent Archer’s wife. It is not reported that she and her husband had children. She sits and drinks the elixir of immortality with the Hare. It is improbable that her new protector will father children on her. It is said, discreetly behind lacquered screens in cool halls of marble where such important subjects may fitly be discussed, that the Hare has no urge in that direction. It is said that this is why men take no part in the sacrifice of the autumn equinox, of fruit to the full moon. They are afraid for their virility. They will not risk the certainty of dutiful children against the hypothesis of everlasting life.
Tai Men, who had made the sacrifice of fruit under the moon, sat weeping on a rock beside the road, and could not be consoled for the loss he had not suspected before it was too late.
Also …
In sleep where he was building beautiful imaginary cities, organically conceived like the densest natural jungle, yet substantial and efficient like a single vast machine, there was Daniel Sakky, the big dark man whose thews and muscles made it seem he could himself have heaped up the high towers of which he dreamed, instead of tracing them in delicate shadowy forms on the input board of a computer and leaving quiet metal machines to give them solidity.
Still three-quarters immersed in his visions, he wandered out across the raw new ground of Asgard, at first puzzled, growing little by little more afraid.
Masks of straw and wood daubed with coloured mud lending them a repellent, awe-inspiring aspect, the old wise men sat and explained the universe. Under the thatched roof of the hut no outsider might enter on pain of magic sickness, the drums spoke with a supernatural voice. On that spear the blood of a leopard not yet dry, glistening in the wan flame of a mystic fire; the skin of the beast shrouding the spindly limbs of the oldest and wisest of all them who spoke, to symbolise what naked weakling man could do by power of thought and magic.
But the voices uttered warnings against arrogance.
Once the people wanted to know, “What is the moon?” And one said, “We shall climb to it and see.” He took a pole and a pole and a pole, and lashed one to another and sank them in a pit in the ground. Then he took a pole and a pole and a pole and climbed to secure the new ones to the first ones. After him came others, curious, eager, inquisitive. Pole after pole tied with bands of creeper, leather thongs from the hide of the hippopotamus, braided plaits of hair from the mane of a lion, very strong, very potent magic. They climbed and they climbed and still they were not at the moon, and one day the poles broke and they were all hurled to the ground and many were killed. So they never did know what the moon was, and many wives wept.
A wrinkled hand fumbled in a medicine-bag and sprinkled ghost-herbs on the fire. Inhaled, the smoke of them brought visions.
Men die, but the people of the moon do not. Why not? It will be told. Once Libanza called all to come before him, he the very powerful, the sorcerer above heaven whose hearth-smoke is the stormcloud, whose speaking drum utters the thunder when he beats it, whose knife flashes the lightning as he turns it this way and that. He said, “Come! Be quick! Attend me!”
At once the people of the moon came, running, and Libanza was pleased. But the people of the earth came walking, slowly, complaining to one another, and Libanza was angry. He said to the people of the moon, “You shall not die! You shall rest two days a month, and no more.” He said to the people of the earth, “You shall rest every day, and you shall die forever, knowing because you have seen that the people of the moon only rest and rise again after two days.”
Breathe deep the smoke that clogs the space below the roof. Marvels and mysteries shall be made plain: truth about life, truth about death.
By the rivers and on the forest paths, there you shall meet Mokadi; in the high places of the hills when you grow giddy with the thinness of the air, you shall know the spirits of the ancestors are by. In all the places where your forefathers have trod, there they are dead and there they are buried. Sometimes they are angry, for it is hard to be a ghost. But pro
pitiate them, make offerings, play music and dance to give them pleasure, for it was they who bought you this, clear ground, fat herds, much game to wet your spear. Thanks to them you sleep with your wives and children under a good sound roof, you wear a gown of many-coloured cloth and when it is a festival day you drink much palm-wine until you laugh and laugh.
Remember those who became ghosts that we might build this village.
The voices died. The smoke blew away through the chinks under the eaves. The hands of the drummer ceased, and the blood of the leopard was dry.
Heir to all this, Daniel Sakky composed himself cross-legged at the brink of the stream, where there was heavy dull clay in quantities, and set himself to forming figures of men and women as though he, like Massim-Biambe, could inject into their substance tchi. He bowed sometimes to the devil-mask of the moon, for that too had been bought for him by those who turned to ghosts.
XV
Likewise …
Dreams as from, the penumbra of the Ragna Rökkr, that night from which the gods themselves shall not awake, troubled the sleep of Ulla Berzelius. Her lithe tanned limbs sprawled to the four corners of her bunk, a thick tress of fair hair wound over her mouth and trailing across her breast, she dreamed of strangulation and woke to see, through the window, the moon three parts gone in the jaws of Fenris Wolf.
Hart es i heimi, hordomr mikkil,
Skeggi-aold, skalm-aold, skildir klofnir,
Vind-aold, varg-aold, adhr vaerold steipisk!
In the day when evil dreams shall come to trouble the sleep of the Aesir, it shall go hard with Earth:
Hard in the home then, whoredom abounding,