Watson, Ian - Novel 08
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Authors: The Gardens of Delight (v1.1)
Ian Watson
THE GARDENS
OF DELIGHT
THEY HAD FOUND A WORLD
OF THE IMAGINATION MADE REAL - AS REAL
AS THE
POWERFUL SECRET HIDDEN THERE!
HUNTING IN HELL
Sean,
Muthoni and Denise were all consumed by pangs of hunger now, actually
salivating in anticipation. Ignoring Jeremy, they penned the cockerel in. The
cockerel flapped his wings.
At
a cry from Denise, they rushed it. As the big bird flapped off its roost she
threw herself and her spear forward, spitting the bird neatly. Headlong she
stumbled with her prize, plunging full-length into the dunghill. Heedless of
the reek, she scrabbled along the shaft of the fork and wrung the bird's neck.
. . .
"How
do we cook it?" asked Sean. . . .
"Plenty
of fire ahead," said Muthoni. "Hey," she exclaimed, "why
are we heading toward that bridge? It's rush hour there. I came the other way.
There was a kind
of.
. . kitchen. God no, I don't want
to see
that
again!" Absently,
she began stripping plumage off the bird.
"What's
wrong with a kitchen?" Sean asked her.
"It's
what they were cooking. They were cooking people. Living bits of people."
THEGARDENS
OF DELIGHT
Ian Watson
A TIMESCAPE BOOK
PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS
NEW
YORK
A
Timescape Book published by
POCKET
BOOKS, a Simon & Schuster division of
GULF
& WESTERN CORPORATION 1230 Avenue of the
Americas
,
New York
,
N.Y.
10020
Copyright
© 1980 by Ian Watson
Cover
photo reproduced with permission from Scala/EPA Inc.
Published by arrangement with Victor Gollancz, Ltd.
All
rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof
in any form whatsoever.
For
information address Victor Gollancz, Ltd.,
14 Henrietta Street,
London
WC2E 8QJ
,
England
ISBN:
0-671-41604-9
Originally published in
Great Britain
in 1980 by Victor
Gollancz, Ltd.
First
Timescape Books printing February, 1982 10 987654321
POCKET
and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster.
Use
of the trademark TIMESCAPE is by exclusive license from Gregory Benford, the
trademark owner.
Printed in the
U.S.A.
For Jack Cohen and his ink torus
CONTENTS
GARDENS
The sky was
a cloudless forget-me-not
blue. High in the zenith there appeared a fan of incandescent gas which became
a neat tongue of fire as the starship sank down through denser air. Thunder
rolled across the hills and meadows. For a while it disturbed the festivities
of the people and the beasts. As the shining torpedo fell more slowly,
unfolding its landing jacks tipped with delicate antennae, they wondered
whether it might not be some new kind of metamorphic spire lowering itself from
the empyrean, even though Hell’s fires poured from its anal vent. The flames
incinerated a few flying sprites who wandered too close . . .
From
his vantage point on top of a knoll a naked man watched the starship sink down
into a meadow. The fires were quenched underneath it in billows of steam as
though the grass itself had extinguished them, rising up as mist.
Which cleared.
And all was still.
Many
other naked men and women saw the starship land, too, but only this naked man
knew it for what it was. Only he saw the sleek ablative lines of human
manufacture . . .
Once
the thing was silent and its fires were out people and creatures resumed their
former pursuits. However, a few of them did at least redirect their pursuits in
the direction of the new phenomenon—which is slightly less than saying that
they rushed to inspect it. Its meaning would no doubt become apparent, but for
the moment it was still sealed to the world, a secret without obvious entry
point. In due course a wise owl—or a goldfinch,
who
was good at teasing things out— might give a clue to its meaning.
The
naked man
thought
that he alone saw
the landing of the starship for what it was.
However,
a clothed man watched too, and knew. He stood, shading his eyes, on the balcony
of a rose-red branching tower away to the south: a stone tree with translucent
marbled ducts tunneling up through it, standing astride a river that ran into a
lake.
The
clothed man pursed his lips and grinned.
A
magpie perched on one of the spiky stone-leaves that crowned the tree-tower
like a giant fossil yucca. The bird ruffled first its white feathers then its
black feathers and launched itself into the air.
The
clothed man called after it.
“Too big for your beak, Corvo!”
“Caaaw,”
it crowed back at him,
circling.
“Go
to it,” he laughed.
It
flew on its way.
The
bird would reach the meadow where the starship had landed long before the naked
man arrived. Though the naked man wasn’t running there; he was only making his
way wistfully in that direction.
Loquela
emerged from the pool, bedewed. Wisely, she’d dodged the thunder of that
silver, fire-shitting thing’s descent by diving underwater and holding her
breath. She was puzzled but not frightened by it. Shaking herself, she waded
ashore, stepping over large pearls resembling clutches of eggs—perhaps their
insides would soften presently from the mineral state into yolk and albumen.
An
ape capered and gibbered at her from the bank. It clapped furey black hands to
its little ears then somersaulted to indicate that the world had just turned
upside down for it.
A
large lung-
cod
with
glazed eyes and a cedilla hook of flesh beneath its chin like an inverted
question mark, wheezed at her from the bank. Had it just laid those pearls? No,
it was still gravid, swollen with roe. It must have taken something of a sonic
battering from the new arrival. Straining at its weight, Loquela picked it up
and humped it into the pool, then washed her hands clean of its mucus in the
water. Further off in the blue water the merman she had been sporting with
earlier—or rather teasing, since its erect penis could only be accommodated by
cupped hands—was still thrashing his long arching tail in some distress at the
shock of sound. The nigromerman had a smooth helmet of a head, a hard fleshy
visor with the beaver firmly closed. “Well enough armored, I’d have thought!”
Waving goodbye to him, Loquela ran light-foot over the turf, her little white
breasts bobbing like lychees, to the high hedges. She ducked her way through,
startling a pangolin which had curled up in a ball of sharp jutting scales and
was just on the point of unwinding back into an enormous fir cone again.
Perhaps it had been shocked into a ball—or perhaps the noise had woken it up.
Pangolins were nocturnal sleepers, though here where there was never any night
they had to make do with the shade of hedges and thickets.
On
her way through the hedges she plucked a giant blackberry with both her hands
and bit into its juice-cells till the sweet liquid ran down her chin. The drink
excited her. It filled her veins with sugar, energy, and anticipation.
In
the large meadow beyond, a few casualties lay about on the turf. Mainly they
were giant fish. A smell of charring wafted from them. Slow creatures!
A wonder that they could move overland at all.
But this was
how they evolved, straining upwards towards the condition of legs, or even
wings. People often took pity on them and carried them. As indeed some human
refugees from the meadow were doing now, bearing a great red mullet between
them. They laid it down on the turf so that it could see the amazing silver
tower. The mullet’s eyes gaped glassily up at it, observing what was towering
up into the air as foggily and as out of focus as people see things underwater.
A
white giraffe had fallen in flight, doing the splits, wrenching
itself
apart. A shrike—the bird of violent death— already
was perched on the horns of the wheezing, dying animal, calling urgently. A
mocking bird laughed at it from somewhere. Quickly Loquela ran to the stricken
beast, clutching her dripping blackberry. A goldfinch as large as Loquela
herself hopped from the bushes—it could hardly fly! It accepted the blackberry
from her in its beak and thrust it at the floppy prehensile lips of the
camel-pard, cracking more juice cells, squirting refreshment and peace.
Above,
over black burnt earth, rose the sleek metal tower. The landing jacks had
ruptured through the turf down to bedrock, as though the world was a mere skin
and a thin skin at that. Assessing the excellent uprightness of the tower—
which the mullet must surely envy—a man and a woman who had been carrying the
fish proceeded to perform a perfect handstand, face to face, and in that
precarious position, upside-down, they made sweet love. The position appealed
to Loquela. She looked around her for a partner, though it occurred to her that
the ideal partner might be this silver tower itself. No hint of flames came
from it any more, though a little heat still radiated from the vents and
nozzles at its base, creaking as they cooled. Before long all the heat had
dispersed, and the two handstanding lovers had reached their inverted climax,
after which they fell neatly apart—a fourarmed upside-down quadruped which
suddenly fissioned into two equal beings
who
could
walk upright at last.
The
lovers beckoned her with lazily caressing hands, inviting her into their
twosome, but she shook her head. She felt too intense, too urgent, for their
gently choreographed afterplay. With understanding smiles the lovers sat down
languidly on the lawns together, heads touching, hands now entwined. A toad
appeared and hopped about them presently, chanting ‘brek-ek’. The woman fed it
a large daisy and it wandered up to Loquela with the flower dangling out of its
mouth, as a love-gift. Laughing, Loquela
flopped
the
toad up on to her head. She walked this way and that, balancing it, till the
toad finally maneuvered the daisy stalk behind her ear. With a triumphant
‘brek!’ it launched itself away, landing on the turf and bouncing over it in
diminishing leaps, a leathery bag playing ducks-and-drakes across the green.
Twiddling the flower behind her ear, Loquela waited for the silver tower to
disgorge its secret and engorge her with it.