Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (12 page)

 
          
“It’s
still bloody painful.”

 
          
“Didn’t
Jeremy say that our bodies are tougher in Hell?

 
          
This
is what a human body ought to be like. It’s what the human body should evolve
into—something as resilient as this!”

 
          
“Biocontrol.”
Denise nodded. She believed that too. Then she
wrinkled her nose. “We’re closer to perfection—
in Hell?
Is that what you’re saying?”

 
          
“But
my mind’s still obsessed by the cold and the pain— even while they’re not even
damaging me. If I could just switch off the old instincts! I almost believe I’m
creating
this cold and pain for
myself.”

 
          
“How
superior we are in Hell.” She laughed bitterly. “You know, we
are
that. We’re talking about it. And
I’m still thinking straight—most of the time. So are you.
He's
letting us try to work it out—instead of just absorbing us
into it, the way ... the way I can feel I might be otherwise. My body, my
hind-brain
are
just raring to take me over. My legs
want to run me. My cock wanted to ram itself into you. But He’s still letting
us think, and reason—if we’re up to it.”

 
          
His
feet shuffled about as the ice burned into them. ‘Git!* they urged. ‘Shift it.
Quick march.
Find that fire.’

 
          
“Come
on, let’s find Muthoni.” His hand pointed in the direction of the blazing
buildings and the bridge of turmoil. His other hand took her arm and pulled.

 
          
They
moved out.

 
          
Denise
cocked her head quizzically. “Do you really think that Hell’s designed to make
us stronger?”

 
          
As
they walked, he told her what the gatehouse had said to him. “Even the machines
want to rise above themselves! Maybe this is
their
proper place of evolution, while ours is the Gardens. You
know, this body of mine seems rather machinelike over here!
Impervious—even
though my nerves cry out.
We’re a sort of flesh robot here.”

 
          
“Is
that really what those machines are?
The spawn of
Copernicus?
Why should the God
want to dismantle and evolve the
Copernicus
computer elements?”

 
          
“I
know that ‘devils’ are supposed to be liars!
But.
. .
maybe the God cares about anything that can try to comprehend Him? On the
other hand, we created machine intelligence so maybe we’re responsible for it
now. It shares our fate.”

 
          
“We
didn’t make it as intelligent as
that—even
if
Copernicus
did have a more
quasi-alive computer than
Schiaparelli
/”
“No, we didn’t—but He’s optimizing it, just as He’s optimizing us. The machines
are a . . . projection of
ourselves
, so they have to
be here. They aren’t machines of loving grace, though. They’re devil-boxes.”

 
          
“Machines of
what?”

           
“Loving grace.
There’s some old poem—a vision of a cybernetic future as a meadow full of
animals and humans ‘all watched over by machines of loving grace.’ The machines
have got rather detached from the meadow, though.”
“Because
we never really trusted them?
Only
used
them, the way we always used nature? Or we could have made them really
intelligent—even superintelligent by now? Didn’t somebody develop all the
schematics for an independent self-programming machine brain?”

           
“Eugene Magidoff? That was long ago.
Nobody could follow up his work.”

           
“Because no one
was allowed to!
Man has to be the crown of creation. You’re prejudiced,
my dear psychologist. They’re getting their chance now—the chance we denied
them. Maybe the God
is
just and
good.” She bit her lip. “It’s all heresy, though.”

 
          
“What’s
heresy?”

           
She struggled with herself.
“The idea of evolution for everything—even for fishes and
machines—in the sense of
advancement.
I’d dearly love it to be true—oh, my fantasy’s out of the closet now,
mon
ami.
But strictly I have to admit it
isn’t scientific. Darwinian evolution isn’t about
advancement.
That suggests that amoebae and fishes are somehow
insufficient—just the lower rungs of a ladder.
Darwin
’s evolution is all about sovereign
variety—sufficiency unto the ecological niche. Whereas here,” she beamed,
embarrassedly, “the theme
is
advancement.
Because there’s a God presiding.
As soon
as you introduce a presiding God you must believe in a tendency toward Him.”
She shook her head. “But it isn’t scientific—which is why Jeremy was shy of
telling us at first. Maybe a God can’t be scientific, though!”
“Because He’s a paradox?”

 
          
“But
if we start believing that, how can we ever get to grips with what He is? I’m .
. . torn two ways.”

           
“The ice of
science and the fire of faith?”

           
She shrugged. They were steadily
approaching the inhabited war zone. Abruptly the frozen tundra ended, becoming
desert: baked earth, dingy in the darkness but perhaps genuinely red if enough
light shone upon it. A swampy ditch divided the zones of hot and cold. As they
waded through this

 
          
ditch
, the temperature soared. Their wet feet sizzled on the
dark red soil as they stepped out. Here was pain again: a different, hot-plate
kind of pain. Sean felt impelled to hop from one foot to the other. Yet the
soles of his feet neither burned nor charred. It only felt as though they did.
He did his best to switch off the sense of pain; unfortunately he didn’t quite
know where the switch was.

 
          
Hell’s
kilns lay ahead.

 
          
However, it was to
be Muthoni who found
them. It was she who hunted them.

 
          
A
new and violent person, she walked out of a place of fire with a pitchfork in
her hand. Inspecting this more closely, she discovered that the tines of the
fork were surgical scalpels.
Blades for healing by cutting.
Slicing, reshaping, discovering and correcting the infirmities within. Making a
new person of someone by means of a blessed wound . . . They reminded her as
well of barbecue skewers, another means of transforming flesh: from raw into
cooked, from nature to culture, a higher stage . . .

 
          
She
found herself in a strange amalgam of hospital and kitchen: a surgeon’s
kitchen. A blue-faced hag with the belly of a plucked turkey sat complacently
turning a skewered man upon a roasting spit. The same fire heated a cauldron of
water. In it, protesting and gasping, there floated the parboiled, bodiless
heads of men and women. Yet actually it was only by virtue of the heating of
the water—by virtue of the convection currents—that these heads were saved from
sinking to the bottom of the pot and drowning. So Muthoni reasoned to herself.
Therefore the blue hag was doing them a service—it was she who had set the
cauldron there for stock to ladle-baste the man she was roasting.

 
          
This
victim turned and turned indifferently, cranked round by the hag’s claw-hand.
He wore an expression of patience and endurance—even of concentration. If
Muthoni had been worrying about this, his expression must have seemed at odds
with the torment he was surely suffering . . .

 
          
Some
sly harassment of the hag’s kitchen work came from a second, fat-faced cook who
wore a red neglige and a lace mantilla. She kept on thrusting a huge frying pan
into the fire. Inside the pan a severed hand slid about, flexing its fingers; a
dismembered leg which was trying to kick its way out of the fat; and a severed
head rocking about from side to side, its ears wagging and its eyeballs rolling
appealingly as though this was its only means of communication.

 
          
“Ha!”
cried Muthoni.
And, “Ha!” again.
She dug her fork into
the frying pan. She stuck the tines through the eyes of the severed head,
hoisted it up and ran off. The slut in the neglig6 screamed abuse after her.

 
          
“Bring
him back, you half-and-half! Cheater! Pander! He’s my man!”

 
          
(‘Why am I doing this? Does the surgeon
nurse a secret desire to dismember people?')

 
          
Self-questioning
was lost in a bilious intoxication. Heaving her fork, Muthoni tossed the head a
long way off. The head bounced and rolled to a halt. Somehow, then—maybe by
contracting the neck muscles or waggling the ears—it began to rock blindly back
towards the open-air kitchen, lurching inch by inch. The slut whistled for it
piercingly. As it lurched closer, Muthoni intercepted it. She kicked it on its
way again with the side of her foot. The slut howled louder.
“You
half-and-half!”

 
          
And
only then did Muthoni pause to pay attention to
herself
.
Her body felt strong, strong as a lioness’s, with the lasting power of a
cheetah or a leopard. But, like a leopard’s, it was spotted. It was a piebald
black and white. Howling with rage, she set out to find whoever had stolen her
nigredo from her—to find who wore her skin. The devil in her was roused. She’d
slice that stolen skin off with the scalpels and graft it back on to herself!
The operation couldn’t possibly hurt
her.
She was invulnerable—except for the leprous white patches on her. Those
stung a little: weak skin, more sensitive to the furnace heat—paltry putty
stuff.

 
          
(‘Hey,
this is fun. You thought you got punished by devils! Like Hell you do.’)

 
          
(‘Stop
it, Muthoni!
Think!’)

 
          
Ignoring
both voices in her head, she bounded towards a hillock from where, perhaps, she
could spy out the land. Her eyes had accommodated rapidly and she saw
everything that she bothered to concentrate on as though through a
lightenhancing nightscope.

 
          
But
plaintive mooing distracted her. In a ditch below the hillock an articulated
white maggot of some bulk lay squirming, stretching and contracting.

 
          
She
focused. It was ... a singularly fat recumbent woman. And she was
giving birth
to the white maggot . . .
which was: a full-grown cow. The cow oozed from her, as though boneless,
inflating into a balloon of flesh that lay floppy and soft, mooing, quaking and
bellowing.

 
          
Ah,
wait now! This called for real, obstetric attention! That cow wasn’t birthing
from the fat woman’s cunt. It was flowing, like some inflatable plastic foam,
out of the back of her skull—becoming a living cow in the process. The
shuddering mass of woman and cow were fused together like Siamese twins at the
head.

 
          
Aha,
she could see the problem now. They were stuck together, weren’t they? They
couldn’t get apart. That’s why both of them lay flopping and moaning down there
in the ditch.

 
          
Muthoni
leaped down nimbly. Sliding the scalpel of her pitchfork down the back of the
woman’s skull, she began slicing, shearing away the putty mass.

 
          
“Don’t
steal my dreams away!” the woman screamed. Too late, though. The bulk of the
cow flopped free. The beast staggered to its feet. It scrambled up the bank of
the ditch. Lowing disconsolately, it galloped away.

 
          
The
fat woman sat up, eyes bleary with rheum. She rubbed her head. “What did you do
that for?
Devil!”
She spat. “I’ll have to dream
another one now.” And she lay back down again upon her tires of fat.

 
          
Muthoni
kicked her; the woman’s fat wobbled vastly. “What do you think you’re doing,
fatso?”

 
          
The
woman glanced at her slyly, almost coquettishly. “Don’t imagine for one minute
you’re seeing the real me! Let me tell you
I’m
beautiful.
I can remember
that!
I’ll not forget it quickly.
Never.”

 
          
“So
that’s your dream, is it?
Beauty?”
Muthoni jeered.
“You just dreamt a cow—a fucking great ugly heap of cow!”

 
          
“How
can I see what I’m dreaming?” whined the woman. “It comes out from behind me!
A
cow?
You’re
lying. Jealous bitch! I know it was beautiful—because
I am.
That’s why you chased it away. I’d done it!
Almost done it.
I could feel it was a beauty.”

 
          
“Sorry,”
said Muthoni. “I’m afraid your imagination’s run away—without you!”

 
          
The
woman screwed fat eyelids shut, blanking Muthoni out in concentration. A
ghostly little blob—something ectoplasmic—began to emerge from the back of her
skull, oozing out and inflating like bubble gum. Muthoni pricked it derisively
with her pitchfork. The fat woman beat a tattoo of frustration on the ground
with balled-up fists.

 
          
“Thus
she apes the manner in which God separates the world from Himself,” said a
voice. “She makes a mockery of this, for she knows not what kind of death she
died. But she’ll surely learn—as soon as she can free herself of her fancies
and see them for what they really are.”

 
          
The
speaker’s naked body was a sickly blue hue. In all other respects, however, he
was . . .

 
          
“Jeremy!
You bastard, you ran out on us! You left us to be tom to pieces. You call
yourself a Captain?”

 
          
“Now
wait a minute—”

 
          
“Coward!
Runaway!
Mwoga!
Mtoro!”

 
          
Enraged,
Muthoni sprinted up out of the ditch. Hefting her pitchfork, she drove it deep
into his belly. Jeremy screamed and fell backward, off the blades. Clutching
his punctured stomach, he lay moaning.

 
          
Disregarding
him, Muthoni raced up the black hillock again to spy out the land.

 
          
“Aha!”
she cried.

 
          
Ultraviolet
ice lands stretched beyond the area of baked infrared earth. Treading
tenderfooted across the hot soil, toiled two little figures. One had a golden
mane. The other was a black man. Despite his thieved coloration she recognized
him instantly.

 
          
“Marizi!
Thief!”

 
          
Piebald
Muthoni confronted them. There was fresh blood on the blades of her fork. She
waved it about. She sketched figure-eights in the air.
Infinity
signs.

 
          
“Sean
hasn’t stolen anything,” protested Denise.

 
          
“So
now you’re his accomplice, are you? I thought so. He’s stolen my skin, that’s
what.”

 
          
“Don’t
be silly, Muthoni.” Muthoni poked the fork towards Denise. Denise retreated
swiftly.

 
          
“You
see, you’re guilty!”

 
          
“Don’t
be so bloody paranoid!”

 
          
“Hush,”
whispered Sean. “The old lizard and limbic brain is having a field day.”

 
          
“Are
you calling me a lizard, you false nigger?”

 
          
Sean
sat down patiently on the hot soil. It seared his buttocks. He crossed his legs
for protection, though now the base of his scrotum burned.

 
          
“Muthoni,”
he said gently, “doesn’t some little voice whisper inside you, ‘Why am I
carrying on like this?’ Doesn’t some little voice whisper,
'Stop
carrying on like this’? Your old hindbrain and midbrain are
acting their aggressions and lusts and jealousies. It’s the beast in us all:
the reptile drives and the primitive paleomammalian limbic system. This is
what’s going on in Hell. The old brain is back in control: the brain where our
nightmares come
from,
and all the instinctual
bite-programs that make us torment others—and torment ourselves in the process.
But God’s letting us work it out, if we
can.
We’re privileged to carry on thinking—so that He can think about it all, too.”

 
          
“How
saintly,” she sneered.
“How sanctimonious.
I have a
score to settle with you, baby, on account of this leprosy on me!”

 
          
“But
why do you have a score to settle?”

 
          
“You
led us into that ambush.”

 
          
(‘Did I? My blood was roused
. .
.*)
“Look here, Muthoni, if nigredo is a
state of mind, why then, you haven’t lost it all, have you? You’re partially
aware of this. God’s tattoo is on you. Some of you is still . . . well, the
color of the first stage of The Work, as Jeremy called it.”

 
          
“Oh,
I dealt with Jeremy!
Snivelling coward.
I poked him
like the pig he is.”

 
          
“He’s here?”

 
          
Muthoni
gestured hillockward with her fork. Slowly she looked down the fork to the
blood on the blades. “Oh my God, I stuck this in him. I thought it was fun.”

 
          
“I
imagine it was fun, for the old reptile or paleomammal in us. Or if not fun
exactly, gratifying. It isn’t fun any longer. We can all have that sort of fun
here—sado or maso—till it really goes sour.
Till it ferments
into
something else.
”