Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (14 page)

 
          
At
a cry from Denise, they rushed it. As the 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.

 
          
She
arose, covered in wet brown dung.

 
          
“Masai
hair-style,” Muthoni mocked her. “All mud- plaits.” Denise slapped hands to her
befouled locks in horror, dropping the fork and the slain cockerel—-both of
which Muthoni snatched up.

 
          
With
an effort Muthoni controlled herself from running off with her prize.

 
          
“How
do we cook it?” asked Sean.

 
          
Jeremy
laughed convulsively upon the ground. He squeezed his belly to hold his blood
and stomach juices inside the wounds.

 
          
“None
for you!” snarled Muthoni.

 
          
“Heh
heh, you’ve killed a cockerel. Even in Hell, on the very dungheap, it bravely
cries out for illumination of the spirit! So you killed it.”

 
          
“I
said
,
how do we cook it?”

 
          
“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.”

 
          
Jeremy
hooted.

 
          
The
bridge-cum-causeway looked quite impassable. People still fell off from time to
time and swam for the shore, but this didn’t diminish the opposing throngs since
the swimmers pulled
themselves
ashore only to race
round and rejoin the tail of the queue. The people in the two crowds had lost
their individuality. They just
had
to
be in the thick of their own group. The clash on the causeway was rather like a
grotesque sports event.

 
          
“What
a damned silly struggle!” exclaimed
Muthoni.
“If it’s
so loathsome on the other side that
that
lot want out, what
do the other lot
want in for? Or is
it just so hellish on both sides that any change seems for the better?” Unwittingly,
she herself was alternating her weight from one foot to the other to relieve
the scorching of the soles of her feet—a fact which Denise pointed out acidly.

 
          
“Maybe
they can’t remember what it was like a few minutes ago or a few hours ago? I’d
nip back to the ice-fields for a cool-off, myself, if I didn’t remember how
bloody cold it was there!”

 
          
“Can
you
remember what you looked like a
few hours ago?” Muthoni wrinkled her nose.

 
          
“Merde
. ”
Denise inspected her rapidly drying coat of mire, and the straggle of her hair
which was now like lengths of brown string. She slid down the bank to test the
water then plunged in to wash herself.

 
          
Attracted
by her splashes, one of the displaced swimmers directed his strokes in her
direction as though her patch of water must be particularly enviable. Once he
had neared the shore, though, the attraction of the causeway overcame him.

 
          
“You’ll
miss your place!” he taunted Denise, torn between the fact that she still
lingered there and his lemming yearning for the causeway.

 
          
As
the swimmer stamped out of the water, Sean collared him by the scruff of the
neck. He was a skinny, carrot-haired fellow with a warty nose.

 
          
“Why
do you want to get across that bridge? The other people are all trying to
leave, damn it!”

 
          
“We
must, we must! I was nearly across, till some bugger pitched me off.”

 
          
“You’re
all cancelling each other’s efforts out,” sighed Sean.

 
          
A
wily look came into the man’s eye. “So opposites cancel each other out? Is that
it?”

 
          
As
Sean relaxed his grip, the fellow writhed free. He sprinted off along the
strand, senselessly chanting, “Opposite bank, opposite bank!”

 
          
Sean
scratched his head. “You know, I believe they
are
actually learning something—through repetition and
frustration, like maze rats. Only, they’re people. Perhaps people have to
recognize the rat in them—and the reptile? Have their faces rubbed in it.”

 
          
“Learning?”
mocked Muthoni. “That doesn’t bring us any closer to a bite of roast chicken!”
She swung the denuded rooster impatiently by the gizzard.

 
          
“Their
conscious mind is almost extinguished, don’t you see? So they can’t
discriminate. That’s what the conscious mind does: it discriminates. The
unconscious mind is quite indiscriminate. I’ve been wondering where I got this
notion that Hell doesn’t have separate parts . . . Well, it
doesn't.
That’s why the other side of
that causeway is
the same
as the side
they’re on—a mirror reflection. But they’re wild to cross the bridge. Crossing
a bridge is ... an act of development. But they just meet themselves coming
back. So no one gets across. The harder they struggle, the more they cancel
their own efforts out. They can’t think it through. They can’t think in
paradoxes yet!”

 
          
“A
paradox skewered me,” Denise said brightly. “A unicorn is a fabulous beast, so
it’s a paradox, isn’t it? Like the fish-on-land? Muthoni’s a walking paradox
right now,” she added with a touch of bitchiness.
“Piebald
paradox!”

 
          
Sean
cut her off. “What we’ve got here are indistinguish- ably mixed-up opposites,
frustrating and torturing everybody, like ice and fire side by side—and
opposites are fused together in the Gardens, like—yes—the fish on land, or that
hermaphrodite ... I wonder if Hell is really teaching these people to think in
paradoxes, so that they can
live
in
the Gardens?”

 
          
“Accept
God,” said Jeremy cryptically.
Advice—or a comment on
paradoxes?

 
          
“I’m
hungry.” Muthoni stamped one hot foot more emphatically than the other. She
pointed. “I spy some fire, down past the causeway.”

 
          
“Shall
we follow our instincts? The analyzing mind hardly belongs in Hell.”

 
          
“Different
strokes for different folks,” said Jeremy, from the scalding soil. “Pick me up,
will you?”

 
          
Sean
and Denise carried Jeremy between them now. Muthoni brandished the cockerel and
the pitchfork.

 
          
The fire was
an open hearth furnace,
fueled by gas venting from the ground through a mass of coals and hot stones.
It stood inside a broken brick enclosure. A machine-devil was busily hammering
out swords and pikes and pieces of armor. It had an armored body itself and
three steel tentacle arms, one of which had a hammer for a hand. A small
camera, mounted on its crown, tracked them as they scrambled over tumbled
bricks, having deposited Jeremy outside.

 
          
A
naked woman, chained to the furnace, was pounding a bellows contraption open
and shut with one hand, modulating the flame, while with the other hand she
pumped water into a long quenching trough. Sweat ran off her. Her hair had
turned white. She was almost a skeleton.

 
          
“You
want weapons?
Projectiles?
We are working on a new
line of projectiles.” The words emerged from a grille in the machine’s body. A
metal tentacle snaked out and demonstrated a harpoon with wicked-looking barbs.
“Projectile- proof armor?”

 
          
“With a guarantee?”
Muthoni asked it sarcastically.
“After sales service?”

 
          
“Caveat emptor
retorted the machine.

 
          
“Just
what would we use for money?”

 
          
“You
work the pump. You instruct me about human life.” The hammer descended on a
glowing breastplate. A second tentacle hauled it from the forge, dunked it into
the quenching trough—which instantly steamed bone dry—and tossed it with a
clang on to the armor heap. Frantically, the emaciated woman worked the pump to
replenish the trough. Water spewed out of a pipe into it, presumably all the
way from the lake.

 
          
Denise
hunched down beside the laboring wraith. “Sold yourself to the blacksmith, did
you?”

 
          
“I’m
trading for a suit of armor!” the woman snapped.
“What for?”

           
“To protect my
body, of course!
To save my beauty.
They won’t
be able to rape me then. It’s happened a thousand times if it’s happened once.
I’ll be safe.”

 
          
“But
. . . doesn’t she know what she looks like by now?” “What do you want with me?
Get away! You’re interfering.” The woman lashed out at Denise; but the chain
held her leashed.

 
          
The
machine tossed some junk into the fire pan and recommenced panel beating.

 
          
“It
learns about human life from her?”
mused
Sean. “Maybe
it does! It learns illogic—the irrational.
Obsession.
Paranoia.
Maybe it’s a fair exchange. Character-armor: that’s
what she’s trading for. I wonder how she liked being naked in the Gardens?
Maybe she sewed aprons of fig leaves ...”

           
“Why not?”
Muthoni scowled. “Why should people put on a nude lust show for God to gawp at?
You psychologists get everything the wrong way round. What was the latest when
we left home?
Rape-therapy?
Neo-Zen
Assault Therapy?
Equip yourself with all the traumas you haven’t got,
because it’s an illusion that you haven’t got them. And if you know you’ve got
them, then you haven’t . . . Q.E.D.: Satori.”

           
Sean assessed the sweating crone.
“It’s hard to remember what the fashion was two centuries ago.
Self-hatred Integration?
Pain-Pleasure
Center
Rerouting?
I thought the
Copernicus
colonists were better screened than that . . .”

 
          
Denise
laughed at him. “You
need
people who
are slightly nuts for them to become colonists in the first place. Oh, there’s
the pioneer spirit, to be sure!
And
obsession
too.
You need obsession to fire a colony. People
who
want
to make a massive traumatic
break. As well as good farmers and technicians, you need people who want their
own way!
Folie a plusieurs
, Sean! We
must all be slightly nuts ourselves, to take the long cold sleep. Don’t you
even realize that? I was nuts. Earth’s such a filthy place for an ecologist.
It’s an insult to my calling. Oh, but there must have been a lot of
drole de types
in the hyb-tanks. Not
least of all Monsieur Knossos! You must have been nuts too, Sean! And here
we’ve arrived on Nutsworld. Half of it’s a lunatic asylum in full swing, and
the other halfs a therapy garden for the lobotomized.’’

 
          
“You
know, Denise, you could be right! Maybe the God had to build a Hell to burn out
all the madnesses in people. But turn and turn about—like the armor, heated up
then dunked in cold water to temper it!’’

 
          
“Oh,
so now you see symbols everywhere?
Even in a smithy?’’

 
          
“Well,
it’s a symbol-landscape, isn’t it?’’

 
          
“Do
you need weapons or armor?’’ snapped the blacksmith impatiently.

 
          
“We
just want to cook this bird,’’ Muthoni told it. “
Right in
front of your hearth.’’

 
          
The
machine clicked and clucked. “I will permit this if you will each answer one
question.’’

 
          
“What
if we get the answer wrong?” asked Denise cannily. “You cannot get the answer
wrong!
An answer is an answer. It cannot
be a non-answer.” The machine hammered red-hot metal fretfully.

           
“You could ask questions that we
don’t know any answer to. You could ask us what this poor woman’s name is, for
instance. Or what your own name is. Just for instance. Or how long is a piece
of string.”

 
          
“Why
do you search for excuses not to answer?”

 
          
Sean
clapped his hands gleefully. “I’ll tell you.
Because we don’t
want to get trapped in a logical paradox.
There now, that’s your first
question answered!
Two to go.”

 
          
The
machine hummed and clattered, as if about to disgorge a printout from its
grille; any such printout would, however, be a shredded one. “I accept your
answer-which-is-not-an-answer. I will think about this subterfuge.”

 
          
The
camera panned to Denise. “I ask you this: why do you want to burn that dead
bird?”

 
          
“If
you put it that way, I agree it sounds pretty senseless. But cooking is the
difference between, well, raw nature and culture.
Civilization.”

 
          
“If
only I could achieve nature,” remarked the machine wistfully.

 
          
“You
will,” promised Sean. He felt a surge of sympathy for the blacksmith. What had
been civilized about their slaughter of the cockerel? On the other hand, if no
alternative foodstuffs were provided . . . The people and animals and birds on
this world seemed to be all mixed up inextricably in some kind of panpsychic,
metamorphic pool, didn’t they? So Man must feed off
himself
.
. . perform an act of
selfincorporation, self-incubation . . . and resurrection. For where did the
spirit of the cockerel ‘go’ to? If nothing died ... To the Gardens?
Or
Eden
?
That was why there was no fruit to eat
here. We, swallowed by Hell,
are
the
fruit collectively. Man consumes himself-—by the venting of passions, through
blood-lust, by way of the devil in him—and transforms his humanity in a synthesis
of the clash of opposites mixed up pell-mell in Hell. Evil fights and feasts .
. . and is subsumed. In the ecology of the psyche there was
a
logic
to this, beyond Denise’s soft sensitive ecology.

 
          
The
camera pivoted toward Muthoni.

 
          
“How
does it feel to be alive? Answer spontaneously!” “You idiot machine, it isn’t
something
you feel as you feel a stone
or heat or hunger. It’s . . . it’s ...”

           
“It’s bigger than our knowledge of
it.” Sean helped her out. “The T that knows is an island in a preconscious
sea—but without that sea there wouldn’t be an island. If we could become
‘superconscious’, I wonder if we’d be unaware of the fact of
consciousness
—or if ordinary
consciousness would become the sea? If God is ‘superconscious’, are we
... ?
Are we His consciousness?” he puzzled.

 
          
“The
half-nigredo must
answer,
interrupter!”

 
          
“No,
listen to me. You’ve got full instant access to all your circuits, right?
Everything’s available to you? You can search your whole self immediately?”

 
          
“She
must answer, not you.
If you wish to bum that corpse.”

 
          
“Logical
to the last,” said Muthoni.
“Even if logic’s no damn help.”
She glanced at Sean, who was mouthing words at her. “What does living feel
like?” she resumed craftily. “It is the thing that you do not feel, till it has
gone away. Then you have no more knowledge of it, anyway. It’s the air you
breathe. It’s the water the fish swim in. It’s the necessary medium.” (Sean
nodded encouragement.) “It’s the
medium
of
feelings. Machine, you already
are
alive! You just don’t know it. Why don’t you shut off part of your
circuits—forget part of yourself? No, reprogram yourself so that you inhibit
the possibility of knowing more than a percentage of yourself at any one time.
Then you’ll be like a human. You’ll have something to search for—in yourself.”

 
          
“Inhibit
part of my circuitry? Know less, to know more?” The machine considered the
suggestion briefly.
“Very well!
I shall attempt this,
with a time-delay command to restore myself to full awareness for comparison
later on. Now you may burn that dead bird.”

 
          
Humming,
the machine froze in mid-stroke of the hammer. It swayed. It jerked. Abruptly
it brought its camera to bear upon the hammer head and very precisely dashed
the hammer into the lens. Thus blinded, it heaved itself up on stumpy flesh
legs and waddled forward on to the fire bed. It halted in the fire, licked by
flames. Its deformed legs spat and hissed, charred, and presently fell apart.
As they disintegrated, the bulk of the machine slumped down into the fire. Distraught,
the chained crone began pumping more and more water into the quenching
trough—which soon began to overflow.

 
          
“That’s
one devil out of the way.” Muthoni chuckled. She extended the spitted cockerel
into the hearth, turning it about and about. She’d neglected to gut the bird,
though. Never mind. No need to stuff it. It was already full.

 
          
“I
thought you were giving it some genuine advice,” gasped Denise.

 
          
“What
did old
Knossos
say to Sean? ‘Only that which can destroy
itself is truly alive’? See, it’s testing out the nature of life in a wholly
absurd, wholly human way—which seems perfectly reasonable to its inhibited
circuits! Maybe it expects to be resurrected as something alive because
its
been able to think of this strategy.
Resurrected
as a fish.
I dunno.
Something struggling upward.
Maybe I’ve done it a favor.”

 
          
Their
feet were wet now. Water was flooding up toward the fire bed. The water danced
and steamed as it dammed up against the wall around the fire.

 
          
“But
why did it blind itself?”

 
          
“So that it could see—inside itself.”

           
“Poor thing,” mourned Denise. “We’ve
destroyed it. It isn’t a devil at all. There aren’t any devils in Hell.
Just us.
We're
the
devils.”