The Cult of Loving Kindness (30 page)

Also, Blendish found it hard to think. There was a roaring and a buzzing in his ears, and his vision was tormented by small flecks of color in the periphery. They darted back and forth, making geometric patterns which vanished when he moved his eyes.

Cathartes took a few steps closer, and as he did so, he seemed to penetrate some barrier of intimacy. “Ah,” said Deccan Blendish. “What’s wrong with me?” he said, his nose attacked by a strong male odor, made softer, sharper by the hint of some cologne.

Deccan Blendish found it hard to think. Cathartes’s words sounded distorted: “The doctor here says you have developed quite a combination of exotic illnesses. Hepatitis, of course—you must have known that. From the food. But that infection on your leg—do you know what that is?”

“I don’t know,” said Deccan Blendish. Over the past week, his thigh had swelled up so that he had had to cut his pants along the seam. And he could see there was an infection in his blood, for the veins and arteries of his leg had swollen and changed color, and his thigh was crisscrossed with angry purple lines.

“It is the guinea moth,” Cathartes said. “It breaks out of the skin. The doctor says you dug it out yourself—without sterilization, without antibiotics. You didn’t get it all. The eggs have spread into your blood.”

“She did it,” mumbled Deccan Blendish.

He raised his head. Cathartes was staring at him, his face intolerably close, his dark eyes radiant. “What did you say?”

“She did it for me. The girl who ran away.”

Cathartes let his breath out in a slow, even rush, and Blendish caught the odor of some mint. “She poisoned you,” Cathartes said.

“I don’t think so… .”

“Yes. The sorcerer is dead. He buried his relic of the devil Angkhdt and burned himself to death rather than give up his secret. But the girl escaped—you must have heard.”

“Heard what?” Deccan Blendish stood up straight. He took a step backward so that he could press his leg into the desk, and he was blinking and squinting, for his eyes had trouble coming into focus. “Heard what?” he repeated. “I’ve been in the hospital.”

“The girl’s come back. She’s claimed to be the new bishop of Charn. She’s raised some kind of armed rebellion. The Cult of Loving Kindness—they attacked a town. Four days ago she was at Nyangongo. Now she’s coming here.”

Cathartes had moved behind the desk. There were some papers spread across it; he lifted one to reveal an envelope full of photographs. “These were taken from the airship the night of the full moon.”

He shuffled through them. “As you see, there were some technical difficulties. But some are better. We had an agent in the crowd.”

Several showed the stage at Nyangongo, at the moment when Longo Starbridge had lit the statue of Beloved Angkhdt on fire. Off to the side stood a woman, hidden by the raised hand of someone in the crowd. But in the last photograph, the man’s fingers had spread apart somewhat, and Cassia’s face was clearly visible, dazed and bleached under the spotlights.

But Deccan Blendish paid no attention to that one. He reached out and plucked another from the envelope: a smear of yellow in the sky. It was a view of Paradise, taken from the crippled helicopter.

“That night I saw it from the window of my room,” he said.

 

The guards took him away, leaving Cathartes alone inside the weight room. And as soon as the door closed, his posture changed. He slumped a little bit as he pulled in his chest and tied his bathrobe closed. He was smiling to himself in a soft way, and shaking his head as he walked toward the bathing cubicle where he had left his clothes. Water had condensed on the glass screen. He pulled it open, releasing a small mist of steam. Then he stepped inside and closed it behind him, just at the moment when the center mirror on the wall opposite the windows levered outward on its frame to reveal a listening booth. An old man stood behind it, his hand upon the one-way glass.

 

He peered into the room and then climbed down. He closed the mirror carefully behind him. Then he stepped across the carpet toward the desk.

He was a small man, robust, vigorous, and barrel-chested. His dominant feature was his sharp bony nose, so big that when his face was in profile, all his other features seemed to recede from it—his brow, his skull extending backward from the ridge while his chin sloped away under his nostrils. His grey hair was combed backward.

This was Professor Marchpane, the inventor and metallurgist. He was dressed in an old uniform that gave no hint of his prominence in the company or in the university. In this way he contrasted with Cathartes, who always wore his dissertation ribbon and his various insignia. When he reappeared out of the cubicle he was wearing a starched shirt and linen pants.

“You do seem to have a hold on him,” said Marchpane.

Cathartes smiled. “I’m using what I have at my disposal.”

“Quite.” Marchpane crossed his hands behind his back. “I appreciate your expertise in this,” he said. “I appreciate your help in these … spiritual matters. I’m not sure I saw what I was supposed to see.”

“I have an idea.”

“Quite.” Marchpane stepped over to the desk. He picked up the envelope of photographs. Shuffling through them, he also hesitated at the photograph of Paradise. “Why did you bring him here?” he asked.

Cathartes shook his head. “I gave my evidence to the police, and I was done. Kurt Sofar is in charge of the plantation now. I was looking for a fast way back. I never thought that I’d be stuck here while they fixed your damn machine.”

“Ah yes, our helicopter. But what about him?”

“I was doing him a favor. After all, he had made the actual find.”

“Ah yes, the find,” said Marchpane. “You never told me what his theory was.”

Cathartes shrugged. “It’s not even that original. It’s just another hope that science will conform in some way to mythology. You’ve heard the story of a monkey called the hypnogogic ape?”

Professor Marchpane raised his eyebrows. He often answered questions in this way.

“Yes,” Cathartes said after a pause. “He became convinced of the existence of this creature. It was part of his research—all from secondary sources, but he came to the Treganu site to look for it. Unsuccessfully. And he was sick too—he was already sick. As he got weaker, he got more obsessed, especially as the site was changing; his failure to find traces of the creature seemed one more proof of its powers of illusion.”

“So?”

“So he has a theory. His theory is that this creature is earth’s only true indigenous primate. He thinks we’re all descended from it. He thinks it’s the source of our capacity for deception, which, according to him, distinguishes us from other mammals.”

Marchpane looked up from the photographs. He had rearranged them in a careful block; now he laid them down upon the desk. “Interesting,” he said. “And what about the skull?”

“He believes the skull to be the relic of some godlike creature, which in prehistoric times was able to mate successfully with this ape. Who knows how, but anyway, he’s quite a gifted draftsman. He’s made all kinds of diagrams from what he claims to be the fossil record. You know the sort of thing. Just a piece of jawbone an inch long, and he’s reconstructed an entire skeleton.”

“Interesting,” repeated Marchpane. “And am I right in thinking that this creature … ?”

“Came from the moon,” Cathartes interrupted. “Of course it came from the moon. It came down from Paradise in a chariot of gold. Can you see why this is dangerous and reactionary? How it’s just another version of the same reactionary nonsense?”

Marchpane pressed his lips into a line. “I would like to see the diagrams,” he said.

Cathartes shrugged. He produced a key from his pocket and then walked around the desk. Sitting in the trainer’s chair, he reached down to unlock the left-hand bottom drawer, and then he pulled it open. He lifted out a metal box, which he placed on the desk.

“I’ll show you the whole thing,” he said. There was a combination lock above the box’s hasp; he entered three numbers and flipped open the top.

“Here,” he said, taking out a sheaf of drawings.

Marchpane pushed aside the photographs and newspapers, and made a space for them upon the surface of the desk. Then he laid them out with his long, pale hands. He ran his forefinger down the paragraph or so of text that explained each one, his lips moving as he read.

Each drawing showed a skeleton, and then beside it a naked figure, sometimes in profile. Each one was labeled at the top:
TREGANU, STARBRIDGE, CAUCASIAN, ANTINOMIAL, DUAURVEDIC,
and a few more.

Notations along the right-hand margin described differences in bone structure, hair growth, pigmentation, average size, brain capacity, dentition. Occasionally these differences were illustrated. Three or four circles decorated the bottom of each page, containing close details of fingers, tailbones, teeth.

The last two pages were unlabeled. One showed the ape—a small squat-legged primate with an anxious furry face. The other showed a human body, heroically muscled. Its head was disproportionate, deformed, with a protruding jaw.

“I see,” murmured Professor Marchpane. He raised his eyebrows. “And the model?”

Cathartes lifted it out of the box, still in its nest of paper. “Here,” he said, raising the skull. Marchpane placed an interrogatory finger on the manuscript.

“It is the Bekata Codex of the Song of Angkhdt,” explained Cathartes. “It disappeared from the temple at the same time.”

“Ah,” murmured Professor Marchpane. He took the skull into his hands, and then lifted it up to stare at it face-to-face.

“It’s interesting,” he said, “what a seductive explanation this could be. It explains, for example, the sexual character of the text, as well as the sexual emphasis in the iconography.”

“Of course,” answered Cathartes, a hint of impatience in his voice. The professor was turning the skull in his thin hands, examining the minute carvings.

“What are these?” he asked.

Cathartes shrugged.

“Ah.” Marchpane lowered the skull again, and his face took on a soft expression. “My grandfather once told me how Paradise was a new arrival in our system. He didn’t explain. But he told me stories of a perfect world. There were no men yet, just smaller animals. He used to make up stories about them.”

“It is an ancient myth,” said Cathartes coldly.

“No doubt. But that’s the point, you see. Now I’m an engineer, but I know enough astronomy to understand what a peculiar science it is. Peculiar in this way—there seems to be a separate explanation for everything that has to do with Paradise, a separate category of natural law. All of the nine planets describe simple, regular orbits, or at least they would, except for the gravitational effect of this one rogue. But Paradise—I once saw my teacher compute on the blackboard the time and date of the next apparition—this was a long time ago, when I was just a student. It was inconceivably complicated—he posited literally hundreds of small epicycles, as well as many strange fluctuations in speed and gravitation. And even then his calculations were off by a few hours.”

As he spoke, he patted the top of the distorted skull, and then replaced it on the desk. “Who can explain it? Who can explain the strange lack of consensus in our history from season to season, year to year? The reports of even trained observers differ wildly, and I have read some which swear the moon has phases like the other planets; others which claim that it itself is a source of light, and that it moves around us like another sun. Now the other night it appeared clear to me that I was witnessing a reflective effect only. So what am I to make of that? Can I dismiss for that reason the statements of so many other observers … ?”

“And why not?” demanded Cathartes. He leaned forward in his chair. “Why can’t you conclude that eyes diseased by superstition and religion cannot observe properly? For example, people from the period tell many stories about the sugar rain, which falls here at the end of spring. They describe how it is like snow or glass or fire or ice or stone or acid falling from the sky. They analyze its chemical composition. They fill book after book with speculations. Yet we know for a fact that it is only rain. Its force and its duration make men lose their objectivity.”

“I see,” said Marchpane. “Still it was not so very long ago.”

But Cathartes was angry. He leaned forward, and his handsome face was flushed. “What do you mean?” he demanded. “Explain yourself—what do you mean to say about it?”

“Nothing at all. Only that cleverer men than I have speculated whether Paradise was quite a … natural phenomenon.”

He was staring out past Cathartes’s shoulder. Outside the window, the sky had gotten dark. The exercise room was provided with electric lights set into the ceiling. At seven o’clock they had turned on—automatically, unobtrusively. As the day had darkened they had grown brighter, maintaining always the same level of illumination in the room. It was a steady, yellow, shadowless, pervasive light.

A lamp stood on a corner of the desk. Now Professor Marchpane turned away from it. He stepped over to the bank of windows and stared out into the night. He spread his delicate thin fingers out against the glass.

“You told your spy I wanted to see him,” said Cathartes after a little while.

“Yes. He’s off in fifty minutes. We’re going to meet him.”

“After dark?” Cathartes frowned.

Marchpane stared out past his own reflection, out into the night. “He’s in the pit. It’s never dark.”

“But is it safe? What kind of man is he?”

“He’s a spy.”

The glass under his hand was vibrating—a steady rhythm from the mine. Marchpane stared out past the reflection of his eye.

“Shall we go?” he said after a little while.

Outside the window Carbontown was burning in the darkness. Below and to the left, five conical smokestacks rose beside a long, low building—the top level of a nine-tiered gallery. Long streams of fire blew out of each stack, twenty, thirty feet into the air, alternating with putrid clouds of ash.

The gallery spilled down over the steep slope toward the mine. A yellow glare was pushing through its nine rows of slitted windows. It was a livid, constant glow. But over the course of a few minutes the color shifted somewhat, became deeper, blacker, redder, according to the cycle of the Marchpane convection. The building housed the famous blast furnaces of Carbontown, rebuilt and improved, now operating around the clock, through all the twenty hours of the day.