The Unreasoning Mask (3 page)

 

 

One of the superstitions of the sect was that prayer rugs, if rolled,
unrolled themselves just before al-Khidhr, the Green One, appeared. If
unrolled, the rug moved its edges to indicate the coming of al-Khidhr.

 

 

Ramstan turned away. He was getting too nervous, he told himself.
Next, he'd be hallucinating al-Khidhr himself.

 

 

The bulkheads had been bare and glowing faintly yellow. Now, murals
appeared on them, ship's electronic reproductions of paintings by
Ramstan. Most were geometrical abstracts, but there was one naturalistic
St. George slaying the dragon and another of Aladdin during his first
encounter with the djinn of the lamp. These two were his most recent
works. It had taken him a long time to overcome his early conditioning
against the representation of living things in art.

 

 

Ramstan, though he'd abandoned the faith of his ancestors, still could
not eat the flesh of swine, regarded dogs as unclean, and wiped with
the left hand after defecating. But he had overcome his conditioning
against drinking alcohol.

 

 

He stood before the St. George and dragon, spoke a code phrase,
and the bulkhead opened, its central point of distention the dragon's
eye. Within was a large globe open at one end. It contained two plastic
boxes, one larger than the other. The smaller held top-secret records,
little spheres, each set in a hollow. The other -- that held the reason
why he had ordered al-Buraq to leave Tolt so quickly and why the Tolt
ship was now here.

 

 

He struggled with the desire to open the larger box and look at its contents.
He sighed, shuddered slightly, and told the bulkhead to close up. He patted
the bulkhead, and it quivered. Al-Buraq was watching him, and she had
interpreted the pat as a touch of affection from her master. Somewhere,
in the dark chamber in ship where the synthetic brain floated, a complex
of neural circuits, unanticipated by the designers, had grown. The
"obedience" configuration now had an "affection" annex.

 

 

Ramstan turned away and uttered another code word. A viewplate on the
bulkhead across the cabin widened, and it began to run off a film of the
cabin since Ramstan had left it. He watched it with his mind on other
things: the Tenolt, Branwen Davis, and the bodiless voice in the tavern.

 

 

His indrawn breath was a knife-edge scraped across a whetstone.
He cried, "Hold it?"

 

 

The film continued running. He said, "Freeze it!" and the film stopped.
In one corner flashed 10:31 ST, the time of the photographing.

 

 

Ramstan groaned, and he said, "Run it back," and then, again, "Freeze it."

 

 

The screen had showed an empty cabin. Then, suddenly, the figure had
appeared. It had not entered through the iris; it had just popped out
of nowhere like a ghost materialized.

 

 

Its back was to Ramstan, and it was facing the mural of St. George and
the dragon. Its head was concealed beneath a green hood, and the body
was covered with a green cloak. The back of the hands were very wrinkled
and bore huge blue veins and dark liver-spots.

 

 

He groaned again. He had seen such a hood and cloak and such hands once
before. A long time ago on Earth.

 

 

At Ramstan's command, the film began running forward again. The figure
stood looking at the mural for three minutes, then it turned. Ramstan was
looking into a face that he could not see clearly because it was deep
within the hood. But he recognized it. It was ancient, ancient, carved
with wrinkles, and it could have been the face of a very old man or woman.

 

 

The shadowy eyes seemed to be looking into his.

 

 

Then the person in green vanished.

 

 

Ramstan cried, "Al-Khidhr!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

... 3 ...

 

 

Ramstan sat before the table in his quarters. Canceling all shadows
except those in his mind, light pulsed faintly from the deck, bulkheads,
and overhead. His only communication with the outside was the audio from
the first-bridge, and that was one-way.

 

 

On the top of the table was an egg-shaped object below the electron
microscope. To the unaided eye, the egg was faintly yellowish-white.
It was smooth to the touch. Looking at the screen while he turned the
controls, Ramstan felt as if he were in an aircraft descending toward
a large albino elephant with a very wrinkled hide.

 

 

The wrinkled blank expanded, carrying the ends of the egg out of sight.
Tiny figures appeared, indistinct at first, then, suddenly, sharp. The
surface was as crowded with sculpture as an ancient Hindu temple.

 

 

Ramstan moved the controls so that the view swept to the figures at
the end to his left. Here, rising up from the surtace of a choppy sea,
was a multitude of forms: a twelve-tentacled squid with a bony, serrated
fin; a vast fishlike creature behind it, its leviathan mouth filled with
curving teeth and open to suck in the desperate mollusk fleeing via the
double propulsion of jet and sail; a gigantic amoeba which seemed to
pulse, its pseudopods reaching out to encircle and ingest a sharklike
creature; the gap of the shark's mouth about to close on a bulbous,
fat-lipped fish, the jaws of which were clamped on a bulging-eyed thing,
half lobster, half conical shell; the claws of the hybrid opening to
release in its death agony an eel-like creature with a cockatoo crest;
a school of things like animated flowers fleeing into the shallows;
a band of fish with fins that could swim in the sea or pull them along
like cripples on the beach sands, two of the crutch-fins lurching across
the beach toward low-growing plants.

 

 

Ramstan adjusted the controls again, and the sea surface became translucent.
Seemingly far below, though the distance must be an illusion, were many
things of many forms that crawled on the muck of the ocean floor, eating
the torn parts and the bodies that sifted from the carnage above, eating
the carrion and each other, dying, themselves being eaten, while eggs
spurted from mothers and fathers, eggs hatched, the young darted out in
all directions to escape the eaters, some of whom were their own parents.

 

 

Dimly, through the murk, the outlines of a long-buried city advanced and
receded, a shattered ziggurat topped by an altar and a leaning idol, a
pillar, a broken arch, an upside down trireme ragged with living valves
clinging to its hull, the hint of a huge and fearsome creature with
burning eyes quivering in its hollow, the granite head of a massive
statue up to its mouth in mud mixed with bones and shells, its long
curving nose and fierce eyes stonily proclaiming terror, arrogance,
and invincibility to an uncomprehending thing of a hundred skinny legs
and a beak like a vulture's.

 

 

Another turn of the controls. Beneath the mud? He could not determine
what it was. Something batlike and grinning.

 

 

He turned the controls back and moved the eye past the shore and into the
jungle. Here was a strange creature which seemed to stretch for miles,
which was, actually, a procession of beasts and birds sequentially
advancing, progressing, and retrogressing from the crutch-creature that
had achieved a total land life. It was many beings making a single being,
flowing out from the other, branching, flowering, sometimes a branch
curving back to enter the sea, a many-bodied many-limbed, many-headed
flow of flesh.

 

 

Ramstan reached out to turn the egg slightly, stopping his fingertips
short of it as if he feared that it might burn him or cling to his
flesh and suck him into it. After a few seconds' hesitation, he felt it,
and it was, as always, cool and smooth. But he could feel the squirm of
life and the suddenness and soddenness of death and the tingling of tiny
voltages of tenor and pain and laughter and joy and triumph and despair.

 

 

So he sat, turning the ovoid, adjusting the microscope, tracing the slow
spiral of sculpture.

 

 

Here was a city, proud and high-waned, about to be destroyed by barbarians
from the mountains, a horde that had wandered for decades over desert and
now coveted the milk and honey, the gold and the jewels, the furniture
and the trinkets, the women and the herds.

 

 

Here was another city destroyed only by time. The rains had gone, the
land had dried, the people had died or gone seeking a place where the
soil was wet and black and thick and the skies were wet and cloudy.
A jackalish beast crossed the wide street, now covered with sand, where
victorious armies had once marched down its length, dragging captives
behind chariots piled with loot while the citizens cheered and the band
played loud martial music. Now the only sound was that of the wind through
empty dusty rooms, the hoot of an owl, the hiss of a serpent. Beyond, the
descendants of the refugees pushed their herds across vast steppes, headed
toward a distant land of walled cities, many rivers, and easy pickings.

 

 

And here were rockets poised for the first manned leap to another planet,
helmeted figures working around it.

 

 

And there was the first starship, and beyond it the first confrontation
of explorers and natives.

 

 

And here was a sculpture which had puzzled Ramstan the first three times
ho had studied it. Now he understood that it was composed of symbolic
figures representing the universe, or
a
universe, collapsing, every
bit of matter from giant red stars to free hydrogen rushing back toward
the point of origin. Beyond that was another easily interpreted figure:
the single primal colossal star exploding. Beyond, stars forming. Beyond,
planets. Beyond, the thick sea with life forming.

 

 

And here and here and here were figures that filmed his skin with cold.
In the midst of the life and death of universes was a tiny, often-repeated,
egg-shaped object. Always with it were three hooded figures.

 

 

Ramstan understood what their ubiquitous presence meant, or he thought
he understood, but he could not believe it.

 

 

The river of birth and death and rebirth spiraled around the egg. But on
its one end was a blank area. Either the sculptors had not lived long enough
to complete their work or they had intentionally left it unfinished. If the
latter, why?

 

 

The glyfa could tell him, but it was silent and had been for some time.

 

 

Ramstan had taken the glyfa out of the bulkhead-safe, moved it easily to
the table since the a-g units on its ends reduced its 500-kilogram weight
to five grams, and asked it to speak to him. But the voice was still.

 

 

Was it mute because it wanted him to study the thousands of sculpturings,
to learn from them something that it could easily tell him but which
he would believe only if be had taught himself? Or was it occupied with
its own thoughts or with whatever went on under that impenetrable surface?

 

 

Though the glyfa had never hinted at it, Ramstan felt that the egg hid
inside it a world as thickly populated as a dozen planets. Within that
white compress was a seething, a ferment. Sometimes, he imaged a nest of
jam-packed writhing and hissing snakes, sometimes a multitude of angels
on pinpoints, sometimes snakes with angel wings.

 

 

More than once be envisioned a tiny sun hanging in the center of the
hollow egg. It glared down upon the curving surface, a closed infinity
of living sculptures a million times more intricate and extensive than
those on the exterior. Through them wandered a tiny old man, creator of
the egg-world, self-exiled, self-enclosed, nomadic and monadic.

 

 

Why did be see an old man there? Why not an old woman or a nonhuman male,
female, hermaphrodite, or neuter?

 

 

Ramstan thought he knew why. The adult tended to use the mental images
he'd lived with in childhood. He had been raised and educated in a Muslim
sect which was orthodox enough except for its focus on the mysterious
al-Khidhr. The Green One, talked of but not named in Surat 18 of the Qu'ran.

 

 

But al-Khidhr had been a figure of Arabic folklore long before Muhammad
became the voice of Allah. He was supposed by scholars to be, in fact,
Elijah, the Hebrew prophet. Certainly, many identical tales were
told of them, and they were often equated in the people's minds.
Late twentieth-century scholarship, however, had indicated that the
legends of al-Khidhr existed before Elijah had been born.

 

 

Ramstan didn't know the truth about the Green One nor did he care. When he
was a child, he had believed that there truly was at least one immortal
with magical powers. But, in his early adulthood, he had decided that
al-Khidhr was only one of the legion of folklore figures, no more real
than the Mulish Nasruddin, Paul Bunyan, or Sinbad the Sailor. He also
became aware that the Khidhrites had incorporated many of the elements
of that other mysterious person of Muslim legend, Loqman, with those
of al-Khidhr.

 

 

Still, though his mind denied its verity, his emotions, connected to
and powered by the child buried in him, were ready to evoke the image of
the Green One when the proper stimulus touched him. Within him, as there
seemed to be within the egg, an old man -- Melchizedekean pre-Muhammad,
pre-Kaaba, pre-Mecca -- wandered the lion-haunted, lion-yellow deserts,
coeval with Ishmael, that "wild ass of a man," when Ishmael was a senile
great-great-great-grandfather babbling of Ibrahim and Hagar and of the
lover of his youth, the divine Ashdar. The adult Ramatan classified
al-Khidhr as a myth, a symbolic figure, or an archetype fleshed only
in dreams.