Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (22 page)

 
          
This
particular God had been ‘specified’ when the
Copernicus
entered the God-zone of this solar system—beyond which lay
the rest of the universe, where such conditions plainly did not apply . . .

           
God watched him patiently. “It is
My
pleasure to walk in this
Eden
, and talk with My children,” He remarked,
invitingly.

 
          
“Do
you need food? Do you eat?”

 
          
“I
am nourished by you all, Sean. Even by you most recently arrived.” God pursed
His lips. “You are hungry for energy after your awakening. Please eat.” He
indicated
the bunches
of grapes hanging from the vine
on the nopal palm.
“A Tree of Life.”
He plucked a
bunch of dark grapes and handed them to Sean.

 
          
The
sweet juicy pulp invigorated Sean as soon as it was in his mouth. He wolfed
grape after grape while God stood watching him at his banquet.

 
          
Sean
wiped the juice from his chin. “So what was this world like before?
Airless and barren?
It’s too small to hold this atmosphere,
but the gravity’s stronger than it should be for the size. How do you manage
that?”

 
          
God
shrugged pleasantly. “I am not . . . the Whole that did this. Why, it happened!
Fiat mundus!
Now I maintain this
world.”

 
          
“How
long do you plan to maintain it for?”

 
          
“A millennium, of course—a thousand years.
What else?” “How
can anybody measure years when there’s no day and night—when they both last
forever?”

           
“You forget, Sean—just as
My
other children forget, freed from the tyranny of
time—that this world still travels round a sun.
Each
traveling measures one more year—timeless, true, but still a year.”

 
          
“Till you’ve counted up to a thousand—then what?”

 
          
“The
Work should be completed.”

 
          
“Thy
Will will be done? Or is it
ours?
You’re a strangely Christian gnostic deity to find here in space!”

 
          
“I
mirror—”

 
          
“Yes,
Knossos
and his gnostic alchemy.
There must be some way to see you—as you
see yourself! That’s the
real
Work,
isn’t it?
To get behind this tapestry of living symbolism?
That’s what you want us to do, isn’t it—because
you're
trapped in this tapestry spun from yourself! Aren’t you,
alien superbeing?”

 
          
God
looked mildly ruffled. “Why call me that? Surely that is less than a God.”

           
Did a ripple of pain pass through Hell
as Sean demeaned Him? God believed He
was
God—even if He hadn’t been, to begin with—and He had the evidence of this whole
world to back Him up . . . We made Him into God, so He became one.

 
          
“You’re
God, but you don’t really
know
—the
whole picture! What
is
this ‘Whole’?
Does it know?”
(Now God pursed His lips, as though some
constraint prevented Him from answering.)
“Whatever else, you must be
the first agnostic God!”

 
          
Sean
looked around. A peacock pecked at the lawn. It quit pecking, cocked its tiny
head and erected its great plumes in a quivering fan of iridescent blue and
green towards God—who smiled approvingly. A white lamb wandered by, bleating at
the sudden verdant sunrise of feathers, at the trembling bright eyes there
arrayed.

 
          
“Are
my friends here too?”

 
          
“Nearby.”

 
          
“We’ve
been here such a little time compared with everyone else, and already we’ve
died twice.
They
spend years in Hell,
don’t they? Do you want something special from us, God?
Something
new?

 
          
“You
should know what I want.”

 
          
“Before
I can give you it?”

 
          
Looking
into the calm, young, golden-framed face, knowing that He—or some greater
Whole—was responsible for the engineering and the continued existence of this
whole world in the form it now took, Sean quailed.

 
          
“I
recommend the oranges,” smiled God, indicating the grove like a head waiter
encouraging a guest.

 
          
Were
they the trees of knowledge? Accompanied by God, Sean ambled towards the orange
orchard. At its edge, he plucked and ate.

 
          
The
orange tasted wonderfully
sweet,
however it didn’t
suggest a solution to him. Was there, perhaps, no solution?

 
          
“Raise
your eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh wisdom,” said God cryptically, and
He took His leave.

 
          
There were two
Eves for Adam: one all
black, one white and gold. First, Sean found Muthoni with Jeremy, taking their
ease beside the lake of the porcelain fountain. Beyond, an African savannah
opened out towards jagged slate-blue crags standing in a row like so many
petrified cloaks, waistcoats and jackets. A single white giraffe with a cartoon
head prowled the savannah. Further away, perhaps an elephant.

 
          
Then
Denise wandered down through the orange grove to the lakeside.

 
          
“I
talked to the God. He wants something. But he can’t say what it is. I have to
know
what it is, first.”

 
          
The
Devil had gobbled Sean down—digested him—as soon as he’d suggested that the
Devil actually worshipped
Man.
And the God was confessedly Man’s Son. So, then: a deity entrammelled
schizophrenically by a band of space-faring neo-apes?

 
          
“.
. .
whose
psychic Fiihrer was Heinrich Strauss.”

 
          
“Hmm,
I was the Captain, though,” remarked Jerem/ wistfully. His earlier, resurrected
confidence seemed to be evaporating. “I never even met Strauss in the flesh. I
was the tough stern Captain. Used to be, anyway! How could he have been our,
hmm, leader?
In what respect?”

 
          
“He
understood the secrets of the psyche. He imposed his vision when the God
scanned you all. The ur-God, before He descended into Son and Holy Ghost-bird
and Devil and whatever else. And forgot what He originally was.”

 
          
“The
God has been demoting me ever since, at Strauss’s instigation? Keeping me
confined to psychic quarters?” Jeremy spat out an orange pip. “You understand
those secrets too, eh Sean? You’re the brainpeeler from Earth. Do you suppose
God wants you to brainpeel Him?”

           
Sean laughed harshly. “It’s hardly
necessary.
It’s
spread out all around us everywhere we
go. Only, it isn’t
His
brain. It’s
ours.
This world’s projected out of the
psyche of us all. But the
kind
of
projection is shaped by one man’s vision in particular. I’m not a brainpeeler,
though, Jeremy. Machine- assisted reconstructive psychiatry went out a few
years after you left. I’m an ‘endopsych,’ if you want the cant term.
The unconscious terrain, the inherited archetypes.
Neojung-
ian
. This gained a whole new dimension with the possibility
of interstellar colonies. How well can the age-old inheritance mesh in with
alien circumstances? Very well indeed, at first sight, on this little world!
The only trouble is
,
the inheritance hasn’t meshed in
with any alien environment at all. No, it has projected itself. It’s
become
the environment, almost to the
exclusion of conscious neo-cortical thought for quite a lot of people. We’ve
got the whole paraphernalia of psychic reintegration working itself out
worldwide. But did the God engineer this voluntarily—or did He have no choice?”

 
          
“God
chose what to create for us!”

 
          
“Ah,
did He? Or did it choose him?”

 
          
“I
don’t see what’s so unconscious about the Gardens. Okay, people have forgotten
things—who they once were— and what they’re living now is based on that
painting which is full of symbolism, right? But it’s a symbolism based on
alchemy—and alchemy is the science that transforms people into perfect,
superconscious people. This world may be a laboratory, but it’s all out in the
open. Most people are aware of this at the back of their minds—if not at the
front of their minds! God is the transforming spirit. Do you think people don’t
cooperate, even in Hell? How they yearn to! How I would, if only I could stop
remembering what brought us here and who I was—if only I could snap out of it!”

 
          
Sean
had rarely seen Jeremy so passionately frustrated.

 
          
“If I could really become a new man!
Not just the old
one,
modified and chastened in new flesh. No, I tell a lie.
I haven’t been diminished by some agreement between God and
Knossos
. That’s paranoid thinking. That big stem
Captain personality was all a front. There, I’ll admit it! I schooled myself to
it, but it wasn’t ever the real me. It was my space armor. Oh how I worked on
it, every zip and seal.” Jeremy laughed giddily.
“Wonders!
I can admit it. Another layer of the onion has been fried off in Hell. But ah,
I am ever the witness. I am
what-was.
I’m held apart.”

 
          
“You
may be conscious of what’s going
on, because it’s hardly going on in you!” retorted Sean rather cuttingly.
“Perhaps someone has to be an example of ordinary consciousness. The others
are all living out what are basically unconscious processes, and you won’t
convince me otherwise —whatever Loquela and the hermaphrodite and the rest of
them may say.”

 
          
“Well,
you’ve some idea of what’s going on too! So that makes four of us.”

 
          
“Seven,”
said Sean, “Maybe seven. Don’t forget Faraday and the other two.”

 
          
“I
hope they’re all right,” wished Muthoni. “I hope a lion hasn’t eaten them.
They’d be in Hell for years, running around in circles like tape loops.”

 
          
It’s
all very well for you, who can meet God,” snapped Jeremy, self-pity welling up
in him. “I haven’t. I missed him by a hair’s breadth this time. Do you know
something? I’m going to stick to you people like a
velcro
hook. I’ve said it before: you’re my luck.”

 
          
They
were walking across the savannah toward the cliffs when a leopard burst from
the grass and raced toward them.

           
“Oh no, dear
Lord!”
Jeremy slipped shamelessly behind Muthoni, a little boy hiding
behind his mother’s buttocks.

 
          
The
leopard skidded to a halt and paced around them, snarling.

 
          
With
a deliberate effort (so it seemed) it curbed its lip-curling, teeth-baring
aggression—automatic finale to its dash—and purred instead: heavy, deliberate,
wracking purrs. It rubbed itself in between Muthoni and Jeremy, prising the
once-Captain away from her. Once it had separated him, the leopard reared up,
planted its paws upon his shoulders, and began thrusting him steadily further
away from the trio. After dancing backward with it for a while Jeremy lost his
balance and sprawled in the grass.
The leopard sheepdogged
him, with a nip and a nudge.

 
          
“Go
ahead,” he wailed. “God doesn’t want me along. I’ll be waiting back at the
lake. You’ll come back for me? Promise you will!”

 
          
“Of
course we will,” called Denise.

 
          
“If
we can,” added Sean,
sotto voce.

 
          
Summoning
up his dignity, Jeremy scrambled back to his feet and loped off decisively
toward the lake. For a while the leopard paced him then it sprawled in the
grass and snoozed. Jeremy continued on his way; and they on theirs.

 
          
“Was
God operating that leopard?” wondered Muthoni. “What does He have against
Jeremy?”

 
          
“Anywhere
on this world we’re in God’s thoughts all the time,” said Denise, quite
reverently. “He must have other plans for Jeremy.”

 
          
A
voice spoke from out of the clear air.

 
          
—“In My thoughts all the time
. . .” an
echo,
except
that there was nowhere yet for the words
to rebound off; besides, the words were altered.

 
          
“Did
you hear that?” she cried.

 
          
—“To the hills, whence cometh wisdom ...”

           
“That’s what he said to me before.
Go to the hills. God!” called Sean. There was no answer; the words had slipped
away into tendrils of breeze. “This world’s like a huge recording! We’re
recorded. He can play us back, body and soul, from Hell to
Eden
. We’re part of Him and so is everyone else.
They’re all linked: people, birds, fishes . . . They’ve all drifted into a kind
of protoplasmic and psychic sink. We just haven’t dissolved into this sink
yet.”

 
          
“And Jeremy?”

 
          
“Jeremy
believes
in the God, when all’s said
and done.” “And we don’t?” sighed Denise.

           
“He exists—but what is He?”

 
          
“A
glob,” said Denise. “That’s what we’ll find in the hills. An alien
glob, that
dreams things into existence, and swallows
existence into its dreams. We’ll find something that’s been hunkering here for
eons on a barren world, but couldn’t change anything or create anything because
it hadn’t got any pattern.
Until people came.
Then it
made them a world full of alchemy to suit
Knossos
.
Full of gnostic
knowledge and a Devil and a God.
Because people can’t
do without God.
‘Awe’ is part of our programming, isn’t it, Sean, from
the first crash-bang of thunder? And if there’s superhuman Creation—as there
is—you’ve got to have a Creator, or the whole thing’s illogical. But there’s
really a glob.”

 
          
Sean
scratched his head. His scalp felt itchy. “If people can’t do without a God,
and if Captain Van der Veld-that-was was his own God to himself—but a
false
one—then he really needs the God
to exist outside himself, doesn’t he? Now he does. Even though God teases him
like Abraham, demanding sacrifices—and everything on faith. He’d be destroyed
if he—”

 
          
“ .
. .discovered a glob. What do we tell Jeremy when we
discover one? We’ll pat him on the head and tell him of course there’s a God.
Even though it’s a glob.”

 
          
“Let’s
find out.”

 
          
A
blue-waistcoat hill rose up soon in a smooth metallic stone cuirass. It was the
obvious place to head for. From the open neck of the hill a marble spire with a
pepper-pot top rose up high into the sky. The bottom stone button of the
waistcoat was undone— a blue boulder lay to one side. A vent led into the
hollow belly of the hill . . .

 
          
Within
the hollow hill was a cathedral nave of cool blue stone. Massive pillars rose
from floor to roof. It was a building but at the same time it was a natural
grotto. It was both, either— indistinguishably. Morning light spilled down from
the opening in the arched, ribbed roof through which the spire rose up, as
massive as a sequoia sprouting from the stone. Even though they spoke in
whispers, a tide of voices flowed up and down the nave, a hidden murmuring
choir.

 
          
At
the far end of the nave should be the altar . .
.of
the alien God. Something was indeed there: a rock, a boulder. They walked
slowly down the nave toward it. The faint slap of their bare feet beat like
wings around the high vaults.

 
          
The
cathedral stood empty, waiting for what?
For worshipers?
Hardly! Everyone already ‘worshiped’ the God by being what they were outside,
by their mesmerized striving.

 
          
Sean
shivered. Being in here was like being in hyb again. It was as though he’d been
shrunk down to a microscopic scale and set loose in a coldsleep cabinet
belonging to some absent giant. Outside
lay
the
world—which wasn’t a ‘real’ world, but the dream world of the giant’s
unconscious projected into reality. But the giant had absconded. Here they were
mites, below the level of the projection.
Almost; not quite.
Was there a level below even this? A crypt, where Denise’s all-powerful glob
hunched, projecting the world and the God and the Devil—unable to
tell
them what it was, yet wanting them
to find out?