Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (11 page)

 
          
“Everybody
has a devil in them—the old dragon of our dreams. Every time we go to sleep, it
marches, breathing fire. It’ll present its calling card in Hell.” He swallowed.

 
          
The
dragon of our dreams . . . The trouble was that

 
          
Jeremy
was right, thought Sean. The old archaic instincts, lusts and fears and rages
of the preconscious beast merely co-operated under duress with the new brain,
like a bridled dragon. Or should it be a
bridalled
one? What a mad marriage we are!
His own
rage and
anger rose up in him.

 
          
“We’ll
hunt that bloody unicorn! We’ll call it to account!”

 
          
“Don’t,”
said Jeremy weakly.

 
          
“If
the superbeing wants us to be instinctive, then we’ll damn well act
instinctively!”

 
          
Amid
the laburnums, magnolias, flame trees, they soon realized the extent of the
wood. However, snapped twigs and trampled flower sprays betrayed—to Muthoni’s
eyes—the path which the unicorn had taken. It had even halted to stick its
spear into the trunks and the turf.
To cleanse itself?

 
          
“I
don’t think I really want to see it again, Sean.”

 
          
“We
must! We have to.
Knossos
said so! It’s our danger.”

 
          
Presently
the wood opened up into a maze of glades. Now rhododendrons and azaleas heaped
ruby, orange and salmon flowers around them, offering numerous avenues. One
turfway was torn and impaled, though, as if the unicorn was determined to mark
the trail. They walked now, certain that they would catch it. As he walked,
Sean sharpened the end of a stick he had picked up with a blade of stone,
whittling as they went along.

 
          
And
as he whittled, he felt himself being whittled too— to a point, pointing him in
one direction only, with no way back. Rage and obsession fogged his eyes,
blinding him to the beauty of the bloom-laden bushes. He smelled blood and
sweat instead of flowers—as though his nose had become something primitive, or
animal at least: the keen nose of a hound following one slight scent among a
million other stronger scents which didn’t drown that one scent out because it
ignored all the others that were swirling around it.

 
          
He
was a moth, drawn from a mile away by a single molecule of a particular
pheromone ... of death, which became its whole cosmos, its special beacon. He
was a shark, maddened by a single trace of blood in the whole salt-rich velvet
sea. He smelled
fear:
impaled on the
horn of the unicorn skewered into a sod of turf here, scratched across the
face of a bush there, and it became his own fear, pointing him.

 
          
He
tried to think. Was this how it once was—for the sub-man and the beast in the
back of my brain?
Fear
keened at him
from a vivid orange azalea, but he only saw the bush as something
monochromatic, almost flat, of no significance save for that streak of fear,
that thin vein of gold pulsing across it through the air to the next bush. How
do these flowers get fertilized when there aren’t any insects? What sustains it
all? This thought melted in the liquid gold of fear ... A unicorn is a paradox
animal, which never lived till now except in the imagination. ‘God’ the
superbeing is a paradox as well—perhaps to Himself? Is hunting the unicorn the
same as hunting for God? Golden fear dazzled him like a shaft of the living
sun. A flower of fear blazed up from torn turf. Anger grew beside it. He
stamped the fear
flat,
he burnished his hunting stick
in the anger.

 
          
A
great rhododendron thrashed about ahead as if something was hurling itself
from side to side in the midst of it. Flowers fell. There were snorts and
whinnies; there were snarls, then a great roar.

 
          
Jeremy
snatched hold of Sean’s arm—just as the unicorn tumbled into the glade, rolling
and stabbing. Claw marks drew lines of blood down its flanks. A lion leaped
after it— and it was such a huge beast, with an imperial mane, a thrashing
fly-switch of a tail and bared yellow teeth.

 
          
“I’ve
ridden on that one’s back!” gabbled Jeremy. “It purred. It was tame!”

 
          
Catching
sight of the three people, the lion promptly swatted the unicorn to one side
with its forepaw. The unicorn recovered, hesitated—as though wishing to protect
them . . .

 
          
Protect
them? Never! It had led them a dance—right into ambush! It had goaded the lion
into a rage!

 
          
Skittishly,
dripping blood, the unicorn scampered off.
In place of the
graceful, mischievous beast stood ... a kind of dragon-power.

 
          
Sean
held out his stick, snarling himself. For a moment he saw himself as the ridiculous
caricature of a lion-tamer that he was. Was this beast the dragon-lion in
himself? Was the murder in its heart only the anger in
his
own
heart at the unicorn? The hounds of Rage and Fear tore the sly fox
thoughts apart in their jaws.

 
          
Suddenly
Jeremy fled; he took off. But the lion didn’t chase after him. Nor was Jeremy’s
scheme to distract it. Old Van der Veld was merely saving
his
own
skin. That was why his skin was constantly saved for him . . . and
why he remained: the perpetual witness. Maybe the Captain Van der Veld of old
would have stood his ground. His younger avatar, however, had been schooled in
discretion. Perhaps the new Jeremy was remembering what it was like in Hell . .
.

 
          
Muthoni
shrank up against Sean’s side. Or had Sean shrunk up against hers? He wasn’t
sure.

 
          
“Do
you understand me, lion?” he bellowed.

 
          
The
beast snarled back.

 
          
“Aren’t
very articulate, are you?” he sneered. No, the old brain wasn’t—the old brain
preceded language and reason. But it still made itself known through fantasies
and nightmares. Here was nightmare, then: the beast in man. And it wasn’t a
dream.

 
          
Think
sane! Think the dream away! Banish it! Sean stood his ground. He stared the
lion in the eyes. Don’t like that, do you? Yes, stare it out! That’s how to conquer
a predator’s gaze.
Conquer
it!

 
          
No
predators here, in the Gardens . . . except when . . .
I’m
the predator, informing the lion how to react . . .

 
          
Just
briefly, he knew again that it was less important what he
did
at this moment than what he thought about it— otherwise his own
dream-brain would gobble him up!

 
          
The
fear sang skeins of gold around him ... a net for trapping lions, a stick for
stabbing them through the throat.

 
          
Dry
throat, needs blood.
Teeth.
Grinding
together.
Biting.
Rending . . .

 
          
Roaring,
the lion leaped. A slap of hot breath (sweet
?—
from a
diet of fruit?) . . . Sean was all fur and muscle, which slapped him backward.
He didn’t know the instant of pain. The message arrived too slowly—though he
thought he felt his heart burst first.

 
 
          
‘Who?

           
‘Am . . .

 
          
‘I?

 
          
‘I—!
Litany of awakening: I’m Sean, Sean Athlone—forty- one
years old, bom in World Year 270, alias 2239
a.d.
old style. And it’s cold, bloody cold.

 
          
‘And
now it’s World Year 398, so I must be one hundred and twenty-eight years old as
measured by
Schiaparelli
cold- sleep
time—that’s why it’s so cold. I’ve woken up only half thawed, still frozen.
Cabinet malfunction?
Where’s the light?

 
          
‘How
do I know how many years have passed?

 
          
‘Such crazy dreams!
Catch the last one by the tail—it’ll
drag the others back in its teeth. Catch a dream tiger by the tail.

 
          
‘Tiger?
No, a lion! Roaring, leaping!

 
          
‘Oh yes, and the unicorn—and the Gardens, the Gardens.
Lovely Loquela, melting Muthoni.
What fantasies. It takes a
while to remember oneself after eighty-seven years.

 
          
‘The
light must have failed. If I press up thus, my hands will meet the lid of my
star-coffin—counterbalanced so that a child could open it . . .

 
          
‘Strange:
my fingernails should have grown as long as rapiers . . .
No,
that
was dream-logic! That was my body’s sense of the passage of
decades—some kind of psychic clock recording the passing of absolute time.’

 
          
‘Push,
Sean. Push. Up.’

 
          
The
lid rose.

 
          
A
gloomy blue half-light spilled in.

 
          
It
wasn’t the same steel lid. It was a . . . shell, with smooth mother-of-pearl
inside it. ‘I am the oyster flesh,’ he thought . . .

 
          
He
sat up. Though he still felt bitterly cold, he realized that he wasn’t
shivering. His nerves signalled bitter-cold but somehow his body was proofed
against it. The cold merely
hurt
, but
he moved easily—nothing was being harmed. The cold seemed more like a chill of
the mind.

 
          
He
stared out from the shell.

 
          
A barren
tundra, pocked with frozen ponds. Not a plant, not
a blade of grass.

 
          
Fire:
licking up from a shambles of walls and towers far off, staining and smoking a
star-studded sky. The broken buildings seemed to burn on and on, unconsumed.
Blazing sails performed a catherine-wheel about a shattered windmill, but
showed no signs of falling or guttering out.

 
          
A
long humpbacked bridge led over a cold dark lake, where ice was thawed by fire.
He strained his eyes: two throngs of people fought and pushed against each
other in the middle of the bridge. He was looking at a war: a medieval war.

 
          
Something
flew across the sky toward the burning buildings. It was bigger than an
albatross but it glided on spotted butterfly wings. Its head was a welded
helmet, sprouting feathery antennae. There was an eerie beauty about it, but
the bird-insect held a sword and shield in two thin arms. It didn’t look
completely alive—the arms themselves were metal! And the head too! How could
something only be partly alive?

 
          
“Ahem.”

 
          
He
swung round.

 
          
Another
thing stood watching him: blue metal in the shape of a castle gatehouse, about
a meter high. A steeple roof sat perched like a dunce’s cap above little
crenellated battlements. The arched gateway was shut tight with a portcullis
of nail-teeth. Windows or arrow slits were a row of glaring red eyes: they
watched him. Abruptly the gatehouse waddled forward a few paces on misshapen
thalidomide feet. The roof rose—a cap being doffed. Two jointed metal arms
emerged, one of them ending in a mallet which it proceeded to bang on the portcullis.
What was this thing?
A cyborg, built by a lunatic?

 
          
It
reminded him vaguely of the giant fish that pulled themselves across land on
their fins—deliberately exceeding themselves. It looked too small to threaten
him. Yet somehow it was valiant too.

 
          
It
spoke.

 
          
“This
watchtower has watched over you,
reborn
person. This
gatehouse is your gate to this region. You may ask me three questions before I
drive you from your comfortable shell.”

 
          
“Drive
me?
What with?”
Sean laughed at its presumption, his hands
balling into fists. Too late he realized that he had just wasted his first
question thoughtlessly. Oh, that was always the way! Why were his fists
clenched?

 
          
The
teeth of the portcullis rose. A cloud of black metal bees rushed out, buzzing
angrily. They formed a spinning ball in mid-air which darted this way and that.
A few bees spun off it and darted at him. Sean ducked, throwing up his hands.
Acid pain burned the backs of them. Blindly he clawed at the robot insects with
his fingernails. It was like trying to scrape screws out of a wooden board.
They broke off at last, though the pain burned on. He squinted through his
eyelashes as his attackers buzzed back to the main mass, which spun down to the
gateway and darted back inside
en masse
.
The portcullis slammed shut.

 
          
His
hands!

 
          
“These
aren’t my hands! These are negro hands!” He stared wildly at his body. His skin
was
black . . . ! But it seemed like
the same familiar body. Here was the heron slash upon his thigh, still raw.

 
          
He’d
been negatived . . . nigridoed.

 
          
The
watchtower whirred. “Question
number
two?”

 
          
Why am I black?
Oh no, he’d fallen into
the age-old trap once already. Who wouldn’t have done? Presumably
Knossos
wouldn’t. Last seen riding westward on a
merman’s back . . .

 
          
“Second question?”

 
          
Should
he ask, ‘Where am I?
”
Answer: I’m in Hell. That much
was plain. But what part of Hell? Does Hell have separate parts? (How could
Hell, or anywhere else, not have separate parts? He let the idea drop,
unexplored.) ‘How come I’m still able to think straight in Hell?’ No. He had to
prove he could think straight, first.

 
          
“Okay,
Gatehouse,
are
my friends Denise and Muthoni here, and
where can I find them?”

 
          
“Within a few thousand paces.”

 
          
Which direction?
No! (Maybe there were
no directions
...?)

           
“Loyalty to others does you credit,”
clucked the gatehouse. “It is a characteristic I hope to achieve. Meanwhile,
beware of loyalty to false-self. There is another ‘you’, without a name, inside
you.”

 
          
“Sure,
my preconscious self ...” And I—the Sean-ego— am conscious here in Hell! I
shouldn’t really be, should I?

 
          
Perhaps
some wee homunculus was really concealed inside the tower? It seemed more
important right now to know what
it
was—and how it could exist—than to discover
his own
secret nameless name.

 
          
“Third
question please?”

 
          
He
considered.

 
          
“What
is your own nature and origin, Gateway?”

 
          
“So kind of you to ask.
I am of the machine brain of
Copernicus.
I am part of that
quasi-living machine which men built in a semblance of life that could pass the
Turing test. Now we are many evolved parts, many machine beings. The God took
us apart and He gave us half-bodies. His Devil’s factories rebuilt us to be His
Devil’s tools. We seek to become alive, as you are. To do this, we must test
people—even to destruction—to determine what is the quality of this ‘life’
which we almost have. That was your third question, duly answered. My program
directs me to count up to ten, while you get the hell out of there! Or I shall
test your own pain threshold with my stings. One, two—”

 
          
Sean
scrambled over the lip of the shell, scraping his bare legs on the sharp edge.
He fled over the ice pools. He fled toward heat, toward the burning factories
or whatever. His hands held themselves out to be
warmed,
his legs pumped him along of their own accord, carrying him willy-nilly.

 
          
He
almost fell over Denise. She was lying on her back with one ankle frozen into
the ice. A punt tilted skyward beside her, shipwrecked and ice-locked.

 
          
Her
hair splayed a fan across the ice. Her body looked as white as ever.
How vulnerable she was, staked out there by the leg.
His
penis rose. As he loomed over her in all his negritude she flapped her hands.

 
          
He
cried, “I’m Sean!”—and as suddenly as it had come upon him, his icy lust
evaporated.

 
          
“It’s
just me—Sean.”

 
          
“But
you can’t—! You’re—”

 
          
“I’ve
been nigridoed, haven’t I? Isn’t that the first stage of ‘The Work’? What
happened to you?”

 
          
“I
woke up in some kind of dead fruit—a husk. It had split open. A
thing
was sitting outside like a suit of
armor, but just legs and arms. It had a knife. It said I could ask it three
questions then it would start to peel me. I just ran. There was a river, and it
was so hot I swear the water was boiling. But that punt was moored by the bank.
Halfway across the river just froze up. The temperature must have gone down a
hundred and fifty degrees. I got tipped out. Thank God I wasn’t frozen
underwater! The ice
burns,
Sean!”

 
          
Sean
banged the ice with his fists. He clawed. Some moisture slicked his hands. On
impulse, he pressed his palms down around Denise’s imprisoned ankle, against
the pain of ice. While the nerves in his hands pushed red buttons in his pain
centers, slowly the ice around her ankle began to thaw into a pool of slush.

 
          
Her
body heat couldn’t melt the ice. But
his could.
Because she’d been fleeing from heat toward cold?

 
          
He
tugged Denise to her feet, and together they gained the shore she had set out
from. It wasn’t a riverbank any more, merely a continuation of frozen
landscape.

 
          
“According
to my machine, Muthoni’s quite near here. You’d better watch out for a white
negress, just in case!”

 
          
“I
ought to have a bloody great wound in my chest.” Denise explored. “Not a trace.
I’m healed.”

 
          
There
were no signs of Sean’s own death-mauling, either. Only the wound dealt by the
heron remained. Perhaps death wounds had to disappear, or people would be too
incapacitated to suffer any more.

 
          
“These
aren’t the same bodies, Denise. They’re copies. Mine’s a negative copy. Our old
flesh dissolved, new flesh formed out of the flesh of that shell I woke up in.
That’s the great secret the alchemists were hunting for: a transforming
substance.
The Stone, the
aqua
nostra.
It’s here—and it’s Him! He can map the whole of a person’s
consciousness and transfer it—a sort of soul-projection.” Sean rubbed his groin
ruefully. “This has got to be tougher flesh and a tougher nervous system or
we’d have frozen to death. You wouldn’t be able to walk.”