Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (3 page)

 
          
“Copernicus
would have rejected this
world if it had nights and days as long as years,” said Tanya acidly.

 
          
“Maybe
they had no choice?
Degradation of ship systems?”

 
          
“An aerial?”
Paavo shook his head. “Broadcasting on what
frequency? The air waves are dead.”

 
          
“Maybe
it’s some kind of psychotronic radiation generator?” blurted out Denise.
“Maybe it taps natural energies and broadcasts them? Biological energy,
expressing itself in this riot of life forms! There were experiments along
those lines on Earth long ago before we spread so much
merde
around. Yes, maybe that’s how they produce those enormous
berries and fruits out there. If they’ve found out how to do this, it’s worth,
oh, coming any distance. You don’t see evidence of farming and cultivation
because it’s going on on a psychotronic level.
In direct
contact with nature.”

 
          
Tanya
laughed derisively. “I don’t know about broadcasting energy to the berries,
but it’s had a wild effect on the birdlife! Is that thing a finch down there?
You do realize, even in this gravity, it’s far too big to use its wings? Oh,
it’ll need giant berries to eat. It’s a wonder it doesn’t gobble up people too,
like worms!”

 
          
Denise
blushed. “Maybe the beacons broadcast, hmm, benign harmonies?”

 
          
“You
know, it all reminds me of something,” said Sean. “That rock.
The whole landscape.”

 
          
The
landscape itself wasn’t the only puzzle, of course. This planet was slightly
smaller than Mars, yet it held an Earthlike atmosphere. It must be far denser
than Mars or Earth—rich in heavy elements, a superb industrial lode—since the
surface gravity was fully three-quarters that of the Earth’s. Somehow the
climate was temperate, even though the world was apparently rotation-locked to
its sun
(an implausibility
at this distance). Not only
was it temperate, with a mere twenty- degree temperature gradient from the
poles to the equator on the dayside, but the darkside had those extensive hot
patches. Even if that was evidence of extensive vulcanism on the darkside,
though, there was no sign of volcanoes along the three giant rift valleys which
stretched neatly all the way from pole to pole down the eastward and westward
terminators between day and night and two-thirds of the way across the
dayside—forming a great divide. Apart from this great divide, the dayside
terrain was remarkably regular. And it was all land: rolling hills and meadows
interspersed with lakes and rivers and streams. No seas. The great dayside
divide could have been a thin pole-to-pole sea, but it wasn’t. So where was the
water reservoir? And where was the atmospheric circulation pump?

 
          
Dayside—itself
divided geographically into one-third and two-thirds by the great divide—was
neatly embraced by the eastern and western terminator rifts almost as though
the dayside was confined inside a frame . . .

 
          
The
contents of this frame—the landscape—were the telling clue. As Sean stared
out, a black head and a golden head emerged from the crack in the
pomegranate-bell—still dazed by the starship’s descent, perhaps newly recovered
from unconsciouness, but protected by the tough skin of the fruit. The unicorn
danced toward them, fencing the air, feinting with its long white horn. The
negress’s
breasts bobbed as, reaching out, she tossed a
raspberry the size of both her fists at the advancing beast. The berry spitted
on the tip of its horn, and the unicorn reared up, shaking its white mane, and
pranced round the pomegranate on its hind legs, its forehooves clicking
together as though applauding. Then, with a flick of its long tail, it was
gone, tottering precariously through the bushes still on two legs, a tall white
ghost.

 
          
“Doesn’t
it remind you?”

 
          
“Remind?”
cried Tanya. “How can an alien
planet forty- five light years from Earth remind us of something? Oh, I’ll
grant you that they’ve spread terrestrial plants and animals around to a
remarkable extent, and in superfast time, albeit mutated and distorted ... Or
do you just mean the style of that tower they’ve built?”

 
          
“No.
Muthoni almost got it right before. It
is
a garden. It’s the
hortus deliciarum—the.
Garden of Earthly Delights.”

 
          
Muthoni
misunderstood him.
“The Garden of Eden?
Do you think
we’ve found the Garden of Eden?” She laughed boisterously. “Oh, man. So God
transported Adam and Eve from his assembly line here across forty-five light
years? He could have parked
Eden
a bit closer to Earth! Don’t be corny, Sean. Those are human colonists
outside. This is Target Three.”

 
          
“Mad,”
snapped Tanya.
“But what a remarkably banal vision of the
universe, too!”

 
          
“He
means it figuratively,” said Denise, excusing at the same time her own
psychotronic flights of fancy.

 
          
“No,
I didn’t say
Eden
.
I said this is the
Garden
of
Earthly Delights
.
Quite literally.
And the
Garden
of
Earthly Delights
is the name of the central panel of a
painting.”

 
          
“Oh no!”
Denise, at any rate, knew it and remembered it.
“The Hieronymus Bosch painting?”

 
          
“The very one.
It all fits, doesn’t it?
The
naked human lovers, the giant birds and fruits, the big land-fish.”
Sean
tapped the photoprint.
“This tower.
There’ll be others
too.
Lots of them.
Bosch only showed a few kilometers
of landscape, but this is spread out across the whole hemisphere as far as I
could see.
Unless, of course, we did just happen upon part of
the world which they’ve made over into this scene.”

 
          
“You’re
saying that we’ve landed in a
painting?”
mocked Paavo. “We didn’t fly through a black hole into another reality. We’re
still in the ordinary universe!”

 
          
“Is
the universe ordinary, Paavo, old friend?”

 
          
Muthoni
frowned. “If our hair and nails carry on growing in hyb, maybe our brain cells
carry on dying. Maybe we’ve woken up stupid, like old folk, with our minds
wandering.” “Landed in a painting,” muttered Paavo. “That’s too absurd even to
call absurd. The Tau Ceti colonists didn’t arrive in the midst of Canaletto’s
Venice
or a Dali
world,
did they? Leaving aside the sheer impossiblity of terraforming even part of a
hemisphere in the time they’ve had, the colonists who came here weren’t a bunch
of biomanipulating art historians. They were farmers and technicians.”
“Nevertheless,” said Sean, though Muthoni’s remark worried him. Maybe they
were all dreaming now, while wide awake? Dream-deprivation always caught up
with people. It would even well up into waking consciousness. Were they
actually wide awake, yet catching up on an eighty-seven year backlog of
frustrated reveries? Were they imposing dream imagery upon this world—which was
really something quite different? He strained to see something else outside: a
factory chimney, say, belching smoke. Or furrows planted with maize and barley.
But no.
The Gardens remained.
Lush,
but somehow tended.
Riotous, but at the same time
neat— composed.
An exuberant
parkland,
inhabited by a weird menagerie of beasts.
And naked people.

 
          
“Well,
I don’t know your painting,” said Tanya. So she couldn’t be
hallucinating
it. “There must be some other reason for the giant birds and fish and the way
those people are carrying on outside. Maybe this is the planet’s mental ward?
A new form of psychotherapy?
Something for people who can’t
adjust to an alien reality? Give them something even crazier as
therapy—familiar imagery, but wildly exaggerated? Deliberately distort
familiar things to drive them out—to alienate the old world? Come on, Sean, you’re
the psychologist. This is what you’re here for. How about it? Those birds and
beasts could be, well, robots or android things.”

 
          
This
was indeed why Sean was present on the ship: to understand any clash between
the old archetypal Earth- inherited imagery, the myth pathways of the old
world, and the new psychological channels which must presumably be formed if
the colonists were to become inhabitants rather than mere visitors—the
archetypes of alien experience for an alien world. But
could
age-old archetypal patterns alter in this way? Could they
adjust themselves? Could new and appropriate mythic symbolism really arise?
Perhaps, as Tanya suggested, the chief psychologist of the colony ship
Copernicus
really had hit on this
solution: the exorcism of the ancient dream-paths by grotesque and manifest
exaggeration. Yet why choose Bosch’s dreamlike—and often nightmarish— imagery?
And how was it physically possible?

 
          
“Paavo,”
said Captain Faraday, “try to get someone on the radio. The Governing Council
or the Central Committee or whatever else they’ve come up with. Tell them we’ve
landed up here in this . . . park. They must have seen us coming down from one
of those towers or whatever they are.”

 
          
A
few moments later, the Finn swore softly.

 
          
“The
radio’s gone dead now. Our equipment’s packing up. There’s no power. Okay, I’ll
run a computer check.”

 
          
Paavo
tapped keys. However, now the cathode screen stayed blank.

 
          
“I
don’t understand.
Nothing.”
He shivered. “The
computer’s just shut down. But it can’t have done. It’s self- diagnosing.
Christ, it has shut down though.”

 
          
“Don’t
panic.”
Austin
licked his lips, which seemed to have
gummed up. “Test out the orbital boosters.”

 
          
“How
can I do that, if the computer won’t accept instructions?”

 
          
“Bypass
it. Set up an ignition sequence. We aren’t going to blast off into the blue
without trajectories. Just set one up, Paavo. Mock it up.”

 
          
“The
board’s dead,” reported Paavo a little later.

 
          
“So,”
said
Austin
. “Either there’s some program in the
computer we know nothing about—which would be a damn fool trick to play on us .
. .”

 
          
“Or
else something from outside has shut us down,” concluded Denise, Primavera hair
aswirl about her jumpsuit.
“The same something that nudged us
over to land here?
Superior technology?
But
whose?”

 
          
“I
think the time has come,” said Sean slowly, “to ask those people outside. If
nothing works in here, we haven’t a great deal of choice.”

 
          
Muthoni
had been checking the various life support systems.

 
          
“We
can breathe, we can eat.
Can’t cook anything, though.
The power to the lift and hatches is still on. At least we can descend normally
without having to torch our way out and shin down nylon.”

 
          
“Just
suppose we
have
landed in this
painting,” said
Austin
, “which someone has wrapped around the planet—is it all like this?
One big garden?”

 
          
Denise,
too, was visualizing the triptych by Bosch: those three panels only the central
one of which depicted the
Garden
of
Delights
. She was scared.