Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (26 page)

 
          
He
tugged himself.

 
          
Sean lay on soft green turf.

           
The noon-high sun shone down from a
turquoise sky, unblazingly. Great blackberries hung wine goblets from the
hedges.
A red mullet as large as a seal gasped and
fin-paddled its heavy way across the sward.
Whistling, a naked woman
darted out of laurel bushes and gathered the fish up in her arms, in a slippery
phallic embrace to which it yielded gratefully . . .

 
          
Blinking,
Sean knew the Gardens.

 
          
He
knew, too, his own familiar limbs. He stretched them; he was once more himself.

 
          
But
he was still dressed in the same
Knossos
tunic, which he had presumed imaginary. It
had been projected here along with him.

 
          
There
existed aliens, who reanimated the dead, gone cultures of the galaxy with their
own essence . . . Because life was few and far between in time and space, and
seemed not to survive beyond a certain stage . . . What did the alien curators
hope to gain? It was an instinct with them. Like the bower bird, they were
decorating their nests with
objets
trouves
. . .

 
          
Just
as we regret the passing of the dinosaur, the dodo, and the whale . . . How
much more would we regret the passing of Canopians, Vegans, Aldebarians or
whomever, with all the insights they had gained? It gave the aliens meaning. It
gave them substance.

 
          
A silver
something shone above the trees. It was the tip of
Schiaparelli!
Sean scrambled to his
feet. Where were Muthoni and Denise? Denise: ah yes. The birds singing sweetly
in the trees ... He sensed Denise . . . elsewhere. Yes, he
was
a different person from before. If his ordinary senses had grown
preternaturally acute in the gloom of Hell, he acknowledged that he had
another sense now, a new sense, since he had been in the mind-horde’s lattice:
a sense of connection with this whole planetary projection. The sense was fuzzy
as yet. He didn’t know how to focus it. But even so: Muthoni was ... a panther
(or behaving like a panther) padding her way through the glades, homing on the
ship from a considerable distance.

 
          
He
focused his new sense some more. No, she was still a woman.
An
angry woman.
Hunting.
She’d been abandoned,
first by Denise then by Sean. She’d dived into the lens, sharp fingernails
poised like scalpels. The lens had projected her back into the Gardens. Where
was Jeremy? He was weeping (or biting his lip so as not to weep) beside the
fountain pool in
Eden
: everlasting witness—just as the aliens were witnesses, so they had
chosen him for this role. Denise had come . . . together, elsewhere. She was
bathing in a pool, around which circled a Cavalcade. The three of them were
bright sparks in a swirling galaxy that wrapped around the world, each with
their own unique spectral lines—their own configuration of knowledge absorbing
certain wavelengths of experience, transparent to others, which passed right
through them.

 
          
Knossos
, the clothed man, was . . .
nearby
. The other man clothed in
knowledge. He absorbed so much of it that his spectrum was barred with
darkness. But lines of light shone through, characterizing him: chinks in his
cloak.

 
          
Sean
slipped behind a bush, though presumably
Knossos
could winkle him out with his own variant
of the sense.

 
          
Presently
the familiar magpie flapped overhead, cawing. As
Knossos
himself stepped into the glade, glancing
speculatively from side to side, Sean darted out of ambush and gripped him by
the arm.

 
          
“Got you, Heinrich Strauss!”

 
          
Knossos
eyed Sean’s tunic up and down and grinned.
He made no effort to get away.

 
          
“Yes,
a little bird told me you’d been talking to the aliens.
Poor
old mind-horde.”
Knossos
shook his head mock- dolefully.
“So much power, so
little comprehension!
Culture parasites . . . Other cosmic life didn’t
disappear, don’t you know? It
perfected
itself. It moved on.”

 
          
“Oh
did it? I suppose you have a crystal ball?
A hot line to the
transcendental alien races?”

 
          
“I
don’t have one yet. But I will have one. So will
we
all. Even, the mind-horde can move on, then. Already they’re fish, flesh and
fowl. The process is well under way, thanks,” he smiled modestly, “to my
efforts and our presence here. So say I, at least!” He beamed at the red
mullet, in benediction, and blessed its lady attendant as she passed by.

 
          
“This
was intended to be a human colony.”

 
          
“Ah yes, true.
And why do you suppose that we got out into
the galaxy if it isn’t to transform ourselves into something alien, something
new? What do you imagine the true deep purpose of colonization is? Mere
Lebensraum:
more space for ordinary
activities? Ach, any new world will
change
Mankind, slowly but steadily, into another sort of being. The alien sunlight,
the alien biorhythms, the alien ecology . . . You can’t fit in to that without
altering. Here the process is simply accelerated, thanks to our hosts the
mind-horde.”

 
          
“I
suppose you knew all this in advance before you even took off from Earth.”

 
          
“Ah, sarcasm.
No, Sean, I’m not mad. How could I possibly
have known of the mind-horde in advance? I didn’t know what would happen here
in any detail. But here I struck
gold
indeed: the lapis,
aqua nostra.
It
was being misused; it was a misunderstood power. Did the mind-horde tell you
they were busily animating a race of sapient birds before we arrived?
Been doing it for a hundred thousand years at least.
Like
clockwork.
Round and round, over and over.
Well, that
got set aside—except in so far as some of the mind-horde involved in the
animation took on, shall we say, new plumage! They’d never had the living
spirit of a race to deal with before: all the fierce unconscious forces.
The spiritual dynamics.
They’d only had the outer shell and
their guess at the spirit, their simulation of it. All their artificial world
shells must be like that—unless some of them have achieved ignition, and
genuinely started to evolve.
Unless the simulation takes
them
over—something that our energy
friends really crave for, deep down, to give them some kind of existential
authenticity.
Because they didn’t ever evolve, as we
did.
They just
happened
one
day, full-blown and coherent, out of the singularity.”

 
          
“They
told me that the originals for these alien Disneylands of theirs have all
passed away. Apart from this mimic life of theirs, we’re
alone.”

 
          
“Another misunderstanding, caused by their lack of evolutionary
impetus!
Evolving races seem possessed by an urge to boost a message out
about themselves. ‘Hullo, this is what we are.’ They lay a radio egg. We’ve
done it ourselves. That’s when they think they might still have contemporaries
in the ordinary lonely universe. But it
is
lonely. When races realize their aloneness, they have to choose whether to stay
put as they are, and recede—or evolve into something
extraordinary,
outside the ordinary lonely universe. That’s where
the silent alien races have gone to.” He squinted up into the turquoise sky as
though he could see them clearly, beyond the sun, beyond the gulf of space.

 
          
“Oh,
come on! There’s
one obvious alternative—
colonization
.
If the galaxy’s lonely, fill her up. Colonize the whole damn
place.
As we’re doing!”

 
          
Strauss
shook his head. “Are we? Are we really? Too much space, Sean, too huge a
time-span! Besides, any races who go in for a colony program will soon discover
that colonizing alien worlds produces beings alien to themselves. They don’t
just reduplicate themselves elsewhere. Who will proceed with the investment,
then? They must either shut up shop or choose the extraordinary path instead.”

 
          
“As
is happening here?”

 
          
“Quite, Sean.
Gold!”
He polished his knuckles, an Aladdin summoning a
genie which had been at his command these two hundred years. The magpie
considered whether to land there, decided that it preferred a blackberry
instead.

 
          
“How convenient—for you with your views!
And what a bloody
coincidence! You’d think it was all fore-ordained, the way you’re talking. Your
personal destiny was just waiting for you out here. What if you’d volunteered
for a different
Exodus
ship instead,
eh?”

 
          
Knossos
patted his tunic complacently. He was
modestly in love with himself today. “On other colonies no doubt I bide my
time, watching the effects of the alien life rhythms. No doubt I shall play an
increasingly important role as time goes by—or else the colony will inevitably
go
kaput
as its alienness becomes
obvious. Oh, I’m there for a very good reason whichever
Exodus
ship it is.
Just as you’re here now, with
your own expertise.
Incidentally, that’s almost the same as mine: the
adjustment of our inherited archetypal patterns to a nonhuman framework,
nicht
so?
The currents
of the unconscious which, if they’re forced to shift, will compel man into a
new being.”

 
          
“What
do you mean, you’re
there?
This is
the only colony you’re on.
By chance.”

 
          
“Sean
Athlone, I am part of a
plan.
Or
maybe we should call it a heuristic strategy . . . But anyway I devised it. Now
listen to me. The administrator of each new colony is convinced that the colony
will survive because of his or her administrations.
Likewise
the principal sociologist.
Likewise the prime
psychologist.
But I am there too: the transmutator, the spiritual
alchemist. I’m hidden away among the other colonists, disguised as a rather
brilliant biochemist and xeno- biologist.”

 
          
“So
here you are. So you hid yourself away—and there’s precisely one of you.
There’s no master plan in that!”

 
          
“But
there is.”

 
          
“It’s
rank coincidence that you happened upon a place where you could come out of the
woodwork.”

 
          
“An
unbelievable
coincidence?”
Strauss grinned, rather lopsidedly. He surveyed the
heavens speculatively, as though linked to other islands of blue beyond the
darkness. “I am on all the expeditions, Sean, under one name or other.
Ticking away.
Biding my time.
Or biding my offspring’s time.
They cloned me, Sean, you
see.
Because star travel is alchemy.
Starships are the
spagyric flasks, isolating the essence of humanity, preparing it for utter
change. Alien suns are the athanors, the furnaces!”

 
          
“Cloned
you? But cloning’s banned. It was banned when you left. It was banned when I
left.”

 
          
“Cloned
me, and accelerated the growth and education of my clones. This, Sean, was the
secret. Under various aliases I was to be, you might say, the alchemical guide
of the colony—if the need arose, and I always knew it would as the colony
shifted register, transmuting humans into alien beings. They cloned me alone,
because there were always plenty of good administrators and such, but there was
only ever one of me—who had kept the faith! Of course, the public imagined that
a colony was a purely ordinary affair: a matter of transplanting
Middletown
or Metropolis to an alien world. But it
wasn’t ever going to be that way. Colonization as a way of shifting excess
people off Earth is ridiculous. More people are born every hour than can be
sent off in a year.”