Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (28 page)

 
          
“The
old loyalties are hooks, Sean. Go and unhook yourself.”

 
          
The
spire of
Schiaparelli
beckoned Sean
brightly now. Perhaps only his own resistance—or the continuing resistance of
Austin, Paavo and Tanya—was maintaining its concrete existence within the
planetary projection? It could alter, he thought—fearfully, yet with a thrill
of excitement. It could be absorbed into the projection, become a cromlech or
some other apparatus of this world of transformations . . .

 
          
“I
shall certainly go,” he said. Corvo the magpie dipped low and shat derisively
upon his tunic.

 
          
“Hey,
Austin
!
Captain!”

           
The access ramp still jutted down on
to the turf. Where the main jets of
Schiaparelli
had spouted fire, the sward was long since healed, a brighter apple-green. The
landing jacks were clustered about with flowers: marguerites and cowslips.
Forget-me-nots bloomed in their shade like specks of sky, and convolvulus
twined up the steel.

 
          
Attracted
by his shout, a small brown bear lumbered into the meadow. It swayed upright on
to its hind legs and peered myopically at him; whereupon it didn’t seem quite
so small after all. The bear strutted forward, clapping its forepaws
rhythmically as though out to bust his head.
She:
it was a she-bear. He thought it was Tanya Rostov, transformed
into a comic though dangerous Russian bear for having adopted such a bearish
attitude to the Boschworld . . .

 
          
“Tanya?”

 
          
Yet
it wasn’t
quite
her. No, but it was
still a creature in resonance with her!

 
          
Halting
and swaying, the bear said something glutinous and growly m what he thought
might be Russian.

 
          
“I
can’t understand you!”

 
          
People
didn’t genuinely change into birds and beasts; that was the province of the
subdivided mind-horde. Yet it smelled of Tanya still.

 
          
Laughter
cackled from the bushes. Tanya herself skipped out, naked. Mad? The Russian
woman was daubed with mud and leaves. She looked like an infantrywoman in
camouflage gear, though it was only really make-up over her bare skin.
Whistling shrill phrases from
Petrushka
,
she started to dance. She executed an
entrechat
,
a
pas de chat
and a pirouette. The
bear danced clumsily, grotesquely, doing its best to copy her. Tanya halted.
Hands on hips, she stared feverishly at Sean.

 
          
“My
little bear—she’s well trained, isn’t she? She can even speak ventriloqually!
Oh what a lovely world this is! It’s magic, like a painting of Chagall’s. Soon
cows will fly!”

 
          
She
danced some more, her ballet choreographed to random phrases of Stravinsky: a
parody of the yogic, Pythagorean acrobatics of others in the Gardens.

 
          
She
halted, panting. “If only there was some
wodka
to go with it! Of course,” she added furtively, “if I let
her
off the leash of my mind she might turn on me and tear me to
pieces.

 
          
I
think. Therefore I dance.”

 
          
Tanya
had vehemently rejected the planet. Consequently the world—the alien
mind-horde—let her control a little part of itself, with more and more effort
on her part . . . until she reached snapping point. Madness preceded
reconstruction. This was the beginning of
her own
descent into the unconscious. She was being set up for Hell, for the dark
gulag of the other hemisphere. When she relaxed and her resistance wavered,
that bear would despatch her there just as the lion had despatched Sean and the
unicorn Denise. Superficially the scene was gay: a gipsy fair. Or at least
mock-medieval: a

 
          
St. Vitus’s dance.
Obviously there was no communicating with
her, no warning her. She and the bear—her anti-soul— were bound together like
the poles of a horseshoe magnet. She would have to harrow Hell in her own way,
plant the seed of her new self there.

 
          
Whistling
ebulliently, she danced some more while the bear parodied her dance steps,
grunting and snuffling.

 
          
“Who the Devil—!”

 
          
Austin
Faraday stood at the top of the access ramp, dressed still in his
Schiaparelli
apparel. He wore a
filter-mask across his nose and mouth.

 
          
“Athlone!
You’re back. Good God, you’ve grown hair—or is it
a wig? That’s one of our
uniforms
,
butchered about! Ah, those
wicked
apes . . .”

 
          
“Does
it matter how I’m dressed?
Compared with the fact that I’m
back!”

 
          
Austin
Faraday patted the flanks of his own jumpsuit comfortingly. Formerly they only
wore jumpsuits; now Faraday exalted them into uniforms. The Captain stiffened,
as though Sean ought by rights to snap a salute. Meanwhile the bear and mad
mud-daubed Tanya capered on in their
Ballet
Russe
. . .

 
          
“Where
are Muthiga and Laroche?”

 
          
“Muthoni’s
heading back. Denise is, er, still investigating the ecology. Where’s Paavo,
for that matter?”

 
          
“Kekkonen?
Bah. He is a sexual pervert. You might find him feasting and copulating
anywhere.
With anything.”
A shudder ran through
Faraday. “Mr. Kekkonen,” he corrected himself stiffly, “is currently absent on
a field trip.
In the vicinity.”

 
          
Sean
walked up the ramp as Tanya whistled out
a shrill
piping-on-board.
Sean slapped his Captain sharply across the cheek. “
Austin
! Snap out of it!”

 
          
Tears
started into Faraday’s eyes. Then, luxuriously, amazingly, he wept—and leaned
upon Sean’s shoulder for support.

 
          
“Sorry,
Sean . . . What have they done to us? I’m sure it’s in the fruit and the water.
Cumulative stuff.
I’m on ship’s rations. You must have
been poisoned by now. You’ve been taken over. Go away!”

 
          
Sean
raised his hand again. Faraday flinched. “You’re right, I’m being hysterical.
It’s relief, Sean, sheer relief. That’s what it is.” He giggled. “You’ve come
to relieve me. I thought I’d lost you. You’ve been gone so long.” The Captain
squared his shoulders. “I’ve been holding things together, though. As best I
could.
Trying to keep awake as much as possible.
Popping pep pills.”
He looked haunted. “In my dreams
Schiaparelli changes
,
”
he whispered furtively. “Can’t let a ship change into a stalagmite,
can we? I swear I’m holding the damn ship together—by strength of will!”

 
          
“You
might be, too.”

 
          
“Oh,
what have they done to us?”

 
          
“Well,
I can tell you who ‘they’ are, for a start. I can tell you what this world is.
And why.
As field trips go, you could say that our own was a
roaring success.” Yes, the roar of the lion that had killed him, the roar of
the furnaces of Hell . . .

 
          
Austin
Faraday was only paying scant attention. The projection of the planet—this
gnostic, Boschian, alchemical projection—and the mind-horde instrumental in it,
and Heinrich Strauss the hierophant and joker of the pack, were quite beyond
him now. Faraday listened, but he did not hear. Abruptly his knees folded under
him. He slumped into Sean’s arms. He’d passed out—into a sleep of exhaustion, a
sleep of the deprived.

 
          
Sean
hauled his body into the open, spacious airlock. Which had become a Robinson
Crusoe camp, with ration packs scattered around and a plastic water tank hooked
up to a sterilization unit, and for defense a laser rifle and a hypodermic
dartgun lying on bedding cannibalized from the bunks upstairs.

 
          
Kicking
the guns aside, Sean laid Faraday on the bedding and stripped him of his
useless filter mask. He removed the power cells from both the guns and tossed
them through the hatch, far across the greensward.

 
          
He
checked the elevator.
Inoperative, now.
No entry to
the rest of the ship.

 
          
With
a sigh, he went back to the open hatch.

 
          
At
the far end of the meadow, a clothed figure stood watching.
Knossos
raised his hand in mock salute. Or perhaps
it was genuine. Corvo the magpie fluttered above the man’s head, cawing
jubilantly.

 
          
My
traitor, my brother . . .

 
          
But
how could Strauss possibly be a traitor? What he was instrumental in doing here
was only the same thing as Sean had been primed to do in a different way. Alien
worlds could never be second Earths. They wrought a change, a transformation.
If Strauss was correct in saying that the true deep purpose of the whole
colonization adventure was indeed transformation—which here on the Boschworld
could be guided by projecting symbols of transformation directly into the outer
world!—then Sean must perhaps stop fighting himself . . .

 
          
A
blur of colors—of green and yellow and red—darted from the trees and flapped
about above his head.
A parakeet.

 
          
He
laughed aloud. Long ago in
Ireland
there had been an Order of the Nuns of the
Holy Paraclete. For a long time, because his error was never corrected by his
parents, whom it amused, Sean had remained convinced that the black-robed nuns,
bereft of all plumage themselves, worshipped at the shrine of a sacred parakeet
. . .

 
          
Here,
now, was his own personal Paraclete: his holy ghost incarnated from out of the
mind-horde.

 
          
This,
then, was the dry baptism of the Christ in
himself
, of
the perfected being to come, the transpersonality. It wasn’t Piero
della
Francesca’s pastel vision of it, though. Here was an
exotic bird from out of the Tropic of Bosch.

 
          
Sean
raised his hand. With a gay screech the parakeet landed on his knuckles,
wrapping claw-rings around them. It cocked an eye and pronounced, in a guttural
throaty little voice, “Hullo.”

 
          
“Hullo yourself.”

 
          
“The
Work, the Work,” it urged him. Fluffing out its gaudy feathers it pecked about
in its wingpit, though there were no fleas or lice on the planet. Perhaps the
parakeet had dandruff. Idly he scratched at its neck with his free hand as he
walked down the ramp back into the Gardens.

 
          
A
few years later—in so far as one was conscious of years— Sean was passing near
the meadow where
Schiaparelli
had
come down. He detoured to inspect the site.

 
          
No
bright steel starship stood there now. Neither was there a rusty hulk. Instead,
a dark blue tower rose from the middle of the meadow. It was a fusion of six
slender hexagonal marble columns, with perhaps a seventh as the central core.
Or maybe steps spiralled up around a hexagonal shaft within; if not, then one
of the outer columns would be hollow. High up, a railless platform encircled
the tower, and two figures pranced there acrobatically. One was black, the
other white. They performed callisthenics, heedless of the sheer drop. Some way
above their heads, the fused columns attenuated into a pink lozenge with a
harpoon point. Squinting, Sean confirmed what he already sensed spectrally. The
two acrobats were Muthoni Muthiga and Austin Faraday.

           
“Halloo!” he called.

 
          
His
parakeet, whom he had christened—whimsically— Archie (the bird was an
Archie-type), flapped up and away, screeching to attract, or to distract their
attention. The two figures halted in midstep. They stared down and waved back
to Sean. Then they cartwheeled away in opposite directions around the platform,
to arrive at a face-to-face handstand. In this position, upside-down, they made
slow but buoyant love.