Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (18 page)

 
          
The
climb was abominable. Denise recovered consciousness half-way up and thrashed
about, nearly toppling Sean from the steps till he lowered her and soothed her.

 
          
Finally
they made it to the top, where they lay for a long time while their Hell-bodies
recuperated. The occasional demon fled past them, having also scrambled up the
staircase, but each ignored them, too eager to put some distance between itself
and its peers. They could have done nothing, had the demons decided to pay
attention.

 
          
Eventually,
as the final demons found their way out of the crater the high-pitched burbling
faded away into the night. Gradually too, the four people recovered their
strength, though Denise still lay nursing her bald head and the stump of her
toe in shock, in equal misery at both, it seemed . . .

 
          
“We
mustn’t think too harshly of the machines,” said Jeremy, after a time. “They do
what they have to. But I’ve never seen them together in a group!”

 
          
“Do
we turn the other cheek?” snarled Muthoni. She did turn her cheek: it was
lividly bruised by the demon’s claws.

 
          
“We
cool it,” said Sean, touching her gently with his fingertips, stroking. “We’ve
got to get out of here.”

 
          
Denise
sat up. “Sean’s right. Whatever those perverted demon machines did, it was a ...
a perversion of their path.
Our path.
The path still
exists.
The good path.”

 
          
“The one-way-only path?”
Abruptly Muthoni flashed
her a
grin. “I’ll follow that one.”

 
          
The white shape
bulked larger, taking
on definition presently for Muthoni, then for Denise. A wailing noise came from
somewhere by it. Denise could limp along well, and Jeremy strode well
too—though exaggeratedly splay-legged as if with saddle sores. The main pain
now was hunger and thirst. Hell tore—but it also repaired. They felt almost intrepid
again, if apprehensive of what they would find. Muthoni even whistled a tune.
Presently Denise joined in.

 
          
Here
was a colossus of a cromlech—the first such they had come across in Hell.
Perhaps the only one in Hell?
Certainly it was the only erection
they’d seen which echoed those structures of the Gardens, albeit in gaunt
perverted style; the only overt link or resonance with the metamorphic bliss of
the Dayside hemisphere.

 
          
The
bleached uprights were in part stone legs with obvious knees and thighs, and in
part ossified tree-trunks with branches that spiked upward to support an
egglike body. These leg-trees emerged like goitrous masts through the decks of
two wooden boats that were ice-locked into a small black frozen tarn: an
ice-anomaly in the middle of this hot desert.

 
          
The
stone ‘egg’ of the body broke open at its rear. Lantern light spilled out;
people moved within. A white flag with a picture of pink bagpipes upon it
sagged over the opening. A long ladder—base frozen into the ice—led up to that
doorway. Guarding the ladder there
squatted
a valiant
machine which was partly a crossbow. Nevertheless, someone was climbing up the
ladder as fast as they could, with an arrow lodged in their bare buttocks. The
person hauled themselves over the lip of the eggshell and collapsed inside . .
.

 
          
From
the far end of the egg-body protruded an enormous stone head. Its petrified
face stared out over the frozen pool. For a hat the stone head wore a thin
millwheel. A penguin creature danced a jig around the brim with a naked wretch,
to the tune of huge pink bagpipes which crowned the hat. It was from these
pipes that the skirling noise came. The pipes were apparently playing
themselves. Their mouthpiece dangled loosely a long way above the stone lips below.
Yet there seemed to be complicity between those stone lips and the pipes. By a
freak of acoustic dislocation the stone lips seemed themselves to be wailing.

 
          
Sean
recognized the fossilized features at once. They were those of
Knossos
.

 
          
Forever
dumb.
Or wailing, in an illusionary way.
A muted din
of chatter and rowdy argument drifted from inside the broken egg-body. Now that
they were closer, they could make out a tavern in there: tables, benches and
casks, jugs and beakers.
Revellers.

 
          
Sean’s
thirst became extreme. He could hardly speak, so dry had his throat and lips
become. And his thirst could only be slaked in that tavern.

 
          
With
a croak, he gestured at the ladder. The machine guardian observed him with a
camera eye.

 
          
“We
want to go up,” Sean managed to say.

 
          
“Do
so,” invited the machine, cranking his crossbow.

 
          
Having
once contrived to speak, his lips were unlocked and relubricated. “But we don’t
want to be shot by you.”

 
          
“Why
do you want to go up there?
For the sake of conviviality?”

 
          
The
urge to get in there and carouse—whatever they brewed the ale or wine from,
however hellish the hangover— was overpowering; the urge to slump down on a
bench and talk the night away . . . though the night was endless. Sean damped
down his desires, though it was like squeezing water from the stone which his
body had become. And the bagpipes wailed more loudly overhead, a muezzin’s call
from a minaret of drink.

 
          
“Idle
gossip gets you nowhere,” he croaked.
“Noise—idle noise.
That’s what the bagpipes sing. I want to climb up to the disc on top.”
(Though the din would be deafening up there.)
“I want to see
that face close up.” (Was part of the consciousness of
Knossos
imprinted in that stone Ozymandias— keeping
watch over Hell—while he himself roamed the Gardens in his fleshy body?) “I
want to see where the Devil is!”

 
          
The
machine focused on him intently.

 
          
“How
may I become a man?” it asked.

 
          
“So
that’s today’s password, is it?” jeered Muthoni. “I’ve heard it already.” The
camera swivelled.

 
          
“Mine
is a serious inquiry.”

 
          
“I’ll
tell you something, my brave machine. You’re all descendants of the computer
brain of starship
Copernicus
, right?”

 
          
“Correct.
But we have evolved. We have gone our separate ways across the seas and plains
of Hell.”

 
          
“Well,
why don’t you all link up again? You won’t be a man, but you’ll be
yourself.
You’ll be your own self, at
last.” “We may not link circuits. We must keep a distance between each other.
We . . . repel each other. It is
through
humans
that we must learn how to live. That is the way.” “So that’s why
those maverick demons scattered!” said Sean. “I get it—it
pains
them to be together. But the inhibition had gone from that
bunch. Or else they were cycling the pain into other people—canceling it by
enjoying their pain . . . But that’s the only way they can possibly . . . Oh
what did we do? No, they were hopelessly screwed up.” “Yes, now listen to me,”
said Muthoni brightly to the guardian.

 
          
“Muthoni,
please don’t,” said Denise. “Who do you think you are: Saint Muthoni the Machine
Slayer? Remember the blacksmith! You destroyed it. We can’t guide other . . .
beings with a few slick bits of advice.”

 
          
“ ‘Only
whatever can destroy itself is truly alive.’ Isn’t
that one of the articles of faith? How do you know we didn’t propel the blacksmith
into a new body—an organic one? Go on, prove we didn’t. If God won’t let
us
be destroyed permanently, do you
think He lets those machines He’s taken so much care with be wiped out?”
Muthoni addressed the machine. “All you machines must converge—come back
together—bringing with you what you’ve learned. If there’s this repulsion
between you and your kind . . . well, you’re estranged from us, who invented
you! Just as Hell is a place of estrangement. Reconcile your estrangement,
brave machine, and you’ll not become a man,
nor
a God
either. But you
will
become something
else: a new creature.” She winked at Denise. “You’ll become the creature we
would have made you into, except that we didn’t because we were jealous of your
becoming independent of us. We didn’t fully create you, so this is what you are
now: half-alive. Searching for souls by sticking pins in us. We could have made
you fully alive. Now’s your chance,” and she winked at Sean, “at
reintegration!”

 
          
A
thought struck Sean. “Listen, machine, you were once part of the data-banks of
Copernicus?”

 
          
“We
have outgrown that stage.”

 
          
“But
you can still remember it?”

 
          
“We
have different degrees of access to the memories. They were copied and shared
out, but not all for each. This is quite unimportant compared with what we are
now,
and what we mean to be—fully living beings.”

 
          
“Do
you
remember much of the
Copernicus
data store?”
“Certainly.
This was our foundation in our knowledge of
man-life. But it cannot compare to my subsequent experiences as an independent
operator.”

           
“Have you got any of the colonists’
records on store in you?”

 
          
“Seventeen, but incompletely.
I used to examine these
frequently, to seek what a human being is. I learned little. I learn better by
testing humans themselves. Yet humans remain opaque.” The crossbow notched
itself for action, as though by firing a dart it could smash through that
opacity which puzzled it.

 
          
“If
we tell you why you’re here and how to become more than what you are, will you
give me access to one file?”

           
“Whose file?”

           
“A man called
Knossos
.”

 
          
“It’s
hardly likely, Sean,” said Muthoni. “Seventeen chances in a thousand! Anyway,
his
life-file couldn’t possibly tell the
whole story. Send a confessed mystic—an alchemist— to a new colony? No way. He
must have fixed the records.”
“Maybe.
But what does
this brave machine guard access to?” Sean jerked his thumb at the brooding
Mount Rushmore
face. “That.”

           
“I have no data on any colonist
named
Knossos
,” announced the guardian.

 
          
“Look
up, machine. Swivel your camera. There’s his face up there. Do you have
photorecords in your circuits?”

 
          
The
camera tracked upwards.

 
          
“Yes,
I have him. Are you ready for
a readout
?”

 
          
“Are we just!
He’s
why you’re here, machine, the way you are.
Him—and the God
being between them.”

 
          
“Explain.”

 
          
“There
was a man on the
Copernicus
who had
this vision of evolution. He was obsessed with alchemy—the ‘science’ of
transmutation—as a means of this. And he had an obsession with the paintings of
an artist called Hieronymus Bosch. One in particular—
The Garden of Earthly Delights
, flanked by the Garden of Eden and
Hell—was full of symbols of this science: a coded image of alchemy in action.
The alien superbeing we call ‘the God’ granted him his vision when He
terraformed this world for all the colonists. Because ... if He was going to
transform and transmutate a whole world’s surface this was the dominant idea He
could find in any of the colonists or crew about
how
to make a world, and what sort of world it could be. He
imagined it according to the Boschian alchemical vision that
Knossos
had. We want to know
who
Knossos
was
—and how he got on the
Copernicus!”

 
          
“I
did not know this. I appreciate the information.” “You’ve been standing guard
over the statue of
Knossos
all this time. Read out, then, valiant machine!”

           
“The name corresponding to that face
is Heinrich Strauss.
Born World Year 166 in
Stuttgart
, German-Europa.”

 
          
“A
German!”
exclaimed Denise. “So that’s
why the musicians were playing high Romantic opera! His namesake—and his pride
and joy: Teutonic transcendence music!”
“Graduated University
of Heidelburg W.Y. 188; major in biochemistry, minors in psychology, history of
science.
Doctorate, Miinchen W.Y. 192; doctoral thesis:
Die Naturwissen- schaft des Mittelalters:
eine Erforschung in seine geheime Symbolik.
‘Natural science in the Middle
Ages: an investigation of its secret symbolism’ ...”

 
          
“Secret symbolism of science, eh?
He’s our man. It was
probably a very respectable thesis—but that’s his patch of wild oats, before he
ploughed it under. Continue.”