Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (15 page)

 
          
“Hey!”
shouted Sean. “There’ll be one hell of a bang if that water floods in. Stop
it!” he bellowed at the chained woman. Demented, she only pumped harder while
her robot armorer heated up in the flames. Sean ran to pull her withered hands
from the pump handle. They fluttered back to it. He picked up a broken brick
and pounded at the link in the chain that bound her.
Sparks
and brick splinters flew. She cursed him
volubly and pumped. The pool of water began to bulge. Only surface tension held
it from the fire.

 
          
“Get
out! Get out!” Sean dragged Denise and Muthoni behind a ruined wall. The
part-barbecued cockerel wagged on the prongs like a satire on a lance and
pennant. Sean pulled the two of them down.

 
          
Then
the world exploded: in a bang too loud and too close to be heard. All that they
knew of the explosion was a bright flash, a surge of heat and a meteor storm of
burning fragments that peppered their bare skin, stinging like wasps. The
ruined wall was left canting over them alarmingly. And they were deaf—to remain
so for minutes afterward.

 
          
Staggering
clear, they discovered pieces of armor and junk scattered far and wide. Of the
smithy itself nothing remained but a flare of gas. Of the blacksmith, nothing
but a battered camera and leaves of metal which might have been parts of it or
alternatively dented armor. Of the chained woman . . . On top of the leaning
wall there perched, grotesquely, one severed foot. Further away, a thin leg
lay.
Otherwise, nothing.

 
          
Mouthing,
Sean urged Denise and Muthoni out and away. They found Jeremy lying where they
had left him, but a firebrick had cracked his shin, rendering him more of a
stretcher case than ever.

 
          
Jeremy’s
mouth flapped in complaint, but they couldn’t hear him. He gestured at the
cockerel.

 
          
Muthoni
wrenched a half-raw leg from the bird. She passed the corpse on to Denise who
ripped off some breast with her nails.

 
          
They
tore and munched.
Reluctantly at first, then less
reluctantly.
Sean felt he was eating his conscience. And it tasted fine.
Presently he scooped inside the entrails. He ate the heart and liver raw.

 
          
“Carry me that
way,” said Jeremy.

 
          
Toward the source of music.
Or noise.
Whichever.
If it was music, the little orchestra hidden by the dunes seemed to be forever
tuning up . . .

 
          
The
beach itself, when they reached it, was another sludgy thermal boundary—between
hot desert and a sea of ice, an arctic waste. Various rocky islands pierced the
ice sheet, away in the starlit distance, with ruined keeps and towers perched
on them. A few people were out on the ice, propelling sledge-like boats over
it, armed with hooks and axes and fishing nets.

 
          
The
burning sand sucked at their ankles as they trudged along the bend of the
beach.

 
          
Sean
realized that he wasn’t so much inured to the pain of the hot ground by now as
propelled by it into a kind of heightened, superconscious state. His nerves
were tired of reporting pain as such, and his brain of interpreting the
messages as pain, nevertheless his nervous system still reported; but what it
reported now was the
concept
of
sensation. It reported what sensation
is
,
what it means to sense a world through the medium of touch (and smell) as well
as sight. His threshold wasn’t rising so as to blur and numb his feelings.
Paradoxically it was sinking, under the assault of stenches and burning earth,
making him hypersensitive, bringing back a semblance of the old preconscious
animal integration with its world. (He had the night-sight of a cat by now,
too; he
was even perceiving
colors richly in the gloom
and had been for some time, he noticed.) Yet the pain estranged him from the
environment, distancing him even as he became the more vividly aware of each
sharp stone, each nugget of hot grit,
each
breath. The
whole scene was like a thought he was thinking, realized in soil and ice and
fire, a thought which was no longer a thought but a thing—a thing which
thought him
, instead . . .

 
          
They
rounded a hump of sand, and saw the players— though it was hard to say for sure
whether players were playing instruments, or their instruments were playing
them.

 
          
Denise
recognized the orchestra.

 
          
“L’Enfer des Musiciens!”

           
“It’s Bosch’s Hell of the
Musicians,” nodded Sean. “It’s all true to the painting—so far as I remember
it. None of your latterday vibeguitars or minimoogies or acousticks! It’s the
medieval Church orchestra, just the way Hieronymus Bosch painted it.”

 
          
One
player was banging his head against a big bass drum. Across this drum leaned a
long trumpet-like pipe. A redfaced man with puffed cheeks and bulging eyes
blew into
the I
mouthpiece, producing an even basser
mooing. A giant lute rose from the sand like a spineless stringed cactus. A
blond man was crucified across the peg-box and finger board of the lute. His
fingers and toes plucked blindly at the strings, providing tenor accompaniment
to a harp which sprouted at right angles out of the sound hole of the lute.
Impaled within its strings writhed a lanky attenuated victim, whose constant
spastic trembling urged a rippling gurgle from the strings, as of water going
down a drain. A giant hurdy-gurdy stood beside the harp-lute, its keys and
melody strings, drones and friction wheel operated by a pair of lumpy dwarfs. A
violinlike wail sang out from the hurdy-gurdy: the treble part. And a wrinkled
fellow, squatting on all fours, played a flute stuck up his own anus—a fart
flute.

 
          
A
very fat man crawled round and round the group as fast as he could. He had
staves of music tattooed across his buttocks: tattoos that changed shape to the
squirm and ripple of his vast flesh. The players’ score was thus only visible
to each player for a time, and then in a distorted way. Between glimpses the
players guessed or improvised, producing clashing disharmonies \vhich might
nevertheless have resolved into harmony if only they could all have got in step
with each other.

 
          
A
freakish conductor waddled after the crawling buttocks of his score, draped in
pink muslin. He had a toad’s head. From it, a long thin knotted tongue flicked
out, lashing and tickling the buttocks, to keep some kind of time—or maybe to
disrupt it.

 
          
Near
the players, on a dune slope, reposed their only audience to date: which was
the skeleton of a horse.

 
          
As
the travelers arrived, the various bass and tenor and treble tunes did all come
together suddenly in counterpoint. The whole ensemble behaved like a clock of
mechanical dolls which simultaneously and triumphantly struck the hour, the day
and the year. And they carried on—precariously but perfectly. Even scored for
those strange old instruments, the music seemed familiar. Sean whistled along
with it. It was part of Wagner’s
Parsifal
,
scored for organistrum, harp-lute, drum and flute. It was Grail-music.

 
          
The
horse’s skeleton shook itself and rose. The bones danced to the music. As they
danced they began to take on ghostly flesh: muscles, nerves, veins, arteries,
viscera and connective tissue. Eyes appeared in the empty sockets, a tongue
between the teeth. Fat and flesh, skin and hide formed over this flayed
anatomy. The horse trotted on the spot. It pranced, it reared. It performed a
levade
, a
courbette.

 
          
Then
the toad conductor delivered a tongue-lashing to the score-buttocks, and
dissonance reigned again.

 
          
The
horse neighed and faltered. It heeled over on to the sandy slope and resolved
back into a skeleton again: dead bones, dry bones. Unmoved by the increasingly
harsh noises, the horse lay still.

 
          
They
had lain Jeremy down. If a dead horse could dance to this music, he could at
least try to stand up! But he didn’t. As soon as the phrases of
Parsifal
became perfect foolishness
again, he jabbed an accusing finger at the medieval combo.

 
          
“It’s
their own
attempt at alchemy,” he said.
“Without the
secret.
They’re only trying to transform a dead horse—into a live horse. Even if they
get it up and going, they have to keep it up. But they don’t have the
transforming substance. Only He knows what that is—and
Knossos
.”

 
          
“Is
that why they’re in Hell?” asked Sean.
“For setting
themselves up as little Gods?”

 
          
“Oh,
this isn’t a punishment. He isn’t jealous. What’s there to punish?
Ignorance?
You don’t punish ignorance. You enlighten it.
Enlightenment can be painful.
Very painful.
It
stretches
you.” He indicated the
crucified player and his companion stretched on the harpstrings.

 
          
“I
suppose we’ll find people being stretched on a rack next,” said Denise
petulantly. “In what way
are this lot
being
stretched?”

 
          
“You
see, the horse is what they would like to ride. It’s like that cow the woman in
the ditch was dreaming. It’s a fantasy of transformation. But it’s a dead
fantasy. They’ll be transformed when they’ve become harmonious—when they don’t
need any instruments except themselves.”

 
          
“I
see!” exclaimed Sean. “They’ve projected themselves upon their instruments. So
they can’t play them properly! Until there’s an end of that
kind
of projection!
Until
they absorb the instruments back into themselves.”

 
          
“You
appear to know more about this than I do,
Athlon
sighed Jeremy.

           
“I wonder. I’ve said it before: He’s
letting us work it out instead of absorbing us into it, the way everyone else
is absorbed. Does it take time to absorb people? Are we being tested—assessed?
Maybe He’s using us as a touchstone, to see how some hitherto uninvolved humans
react to His program?”

 
          
“Unevolved?”
Jeremy grinned.

 
          
“
Uninvolved.
But you may have a point
there! Could He be setting us up as new witnesses—the way He uses you?
New baselines of ordinary consciousness?”

 
          
“Friend,
you can take over from me any time you want to. I’d prefer to move on.”

 
          
“And
so you have,” said Muthoni. “You’re in Hell now.”
“Thanks to
you.
It isn’t the first time. I don’t suppose it’ll be the last. Still,
I’m not the Captain Van der Veld that was. I’m making some sort of
progress—even as a witness.” Denise looked thoughtful. “I wonder how
our
Captain’s getting
on?
”

           
“I’ve . . . I’ve almost forgotten
about
Schiaparelli
Sean admitted.
“It’s sort of . . . slipping away, isn’t it? But that’s what we
are.
It’s what we came here in. It’s our
real lives.” Jeremy scuffed some sand about.
“Not here it
isn’t: your real lives.”

           
“Paavo and Tanya and Austin . . .
Will we ever see them again?” mused Denise. “Or will we all be beasts or fishes
by then? Transmuted down the scale?
Reculer
pour mieux sauter
. . . Devolved, the better to evolve again—as He sees
it?”

 
          
“I
didn’t say I was
positive
that people
become animals. /
never
have.”

 
          
“Is
there any way out of here, Jeremy?”

 
          
Jeremy
looked sly. “When you’ve only just got here? It takes other people a
devil
of a long time. You’ve got to work
at this, you know! It took the old alchemists all their lives long to
manufacture the Stone and change themselves. They were experts at the Work,
too.”

 
          
“At
least it was just alchemy,” snapped Muthoni. “Not alchemy filtered through the
mind of a crazy painter.”

 
          
Sean
frowned. “Bosch was sane, or he’d never have survived his own imagination.
Perhaps surviving this Hell intact is a test of sanity . .
.No
,
not a test exactly: a
means to
sanity.
Higher sanity.
One man’s madness is another’s
sanity?”

 
          
“They’re
all mad in Hell!” raved Muthoni.
“Those struggling crowds,
these musicians—the lot of them!
I ... I admit I became mad. It was
easy.
I just followed the minimum energy
path.”

 
          
“Everyone’s
potentially mad, Muthoni. Man’s three brains aren’t properly integrated at all.
All the old bite-programs nattering away under the surface! Maybe we have to
express this conflict—maybe we have to become mad, to become sane. Look, the
unconscious is
Hell
, but it’s also
salvation— the way schizophrenia can be the only route to reintegration
sometimes. Only, we haven’t really gone mad yet, just teetering on the brink.”
Sean squeezed Muthoni’s piebald hand comfortably.

 
          
“Equally,
too much reason is madness,” said Denise softly. “So maybe we are all mad,
after all.”

 
          
“Carry
me that way,” said Jeremy, pointing out over the ice field.

 
          
“Why?”
asked Sean
suspiciously.
“I thought there were no
particular directions in Hell!”

 
          
“If
you don’t
go,
under your own power,”
said Muthoni firmly, “then you’ll follow the minimum energy pathway down into
your own particular madness orbit. These musician alchemists are down in
theirs. And you just run around and around that orbit
ad infinitum,
as though ... as though you’re pushing a ball around
a track with your nose.”

 
          
“Till
you wear it out, and drop into clear space again,” agreed Jeremy. “That’s how
people pass through Hell. You’ve got to wear it out.”