Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (5 page)

 
          
“Oh,
you’ll find out.
He
should like them.
He has a sense of elective affinites.”

 
          
“Whoever
or whatever ‘He’ is, they sure need a psychologist here,” confided Muthoni.
Aloud, she said to Sean, “I’m thirsty. How about fetching the others? As the
man says, a steel hull isn’t going to make much difference. And while you’re
about it, bring a canteen with you.”

 
          
“If
you’re thirsty, just help yourself off any bush,” said Jeremy. “Or else there’s
a pool through the hedges there. I promise you won’t get poisoned or doped.” He
waved breezily. “Who needs hallucinations, when you’ve got this for a reality?”

 
          
A
naked woman, who’d been watching with a faint anticipatory smile upon her
face, advanced towards them now. (Naked, yes, but the clothed crewpeople were
the curiosities . . .) She had little round breasts like fruits, and her body
was particularly white, the white not of pastiness but of milk or ivory. Her
long damp hair was drying back to a strawy yellow. As Sean turned to walk back
up the access ramp, she pouted and assessed Paavo instead. Muthoni it was,
though, whom she walked up to and kissed lightly upon the cheek.

 
          
“Nigredo,”
laughed the woman. She made ironic sheep’s eyes at Muthoni, who stepped back.

 
          
“What
did she call me?” she asked Jeremy, as though he was their interpreter.

 
          
Jeremy
ignored the question. “Take your pleasure as you will,” he said instead.
“So long as you don’t cause hurt.
Not strenuously, at any
rate. The strenuous hurt, the hurt that is serious, belongs in Hell.”

 
          
“What
does ‘nigredo’ mean?”

 
          
The
naked woman clapped her hands delightedly. “I’m Loquela. Hullo there. Why
are you all
dressed up? Beware, you’ll turn into beasts or
lure bad beasts to you.” It was hard to say whether she was teasing or serious.

 
          
“These
are called clothes,” explained Paavo loftily. “One wears them on board a
starship when one’s not in coldsleep.”

 
          
“We’ve
been naked in our ice boxes for eighty-seven years,” added Muthoni lightly. “It
makes a pleasant change.”

 
          
“Oh,
so the cold got into your bones, my dusky beauty! Is this a . . . starship,
then?” Loquela sounded vague about it, though. The name seemed to lack any
precise reference in her mind.

 
          
Sean either forgot
about Muthoni’s
water-flask or else he took Jeremy at his
word
. He
reappeared, emptyhanded, shepherding the other three members of the crew.
Denise gazed around the lawns of the meadow with open delight, Tanya with a
certain sulky trepidation as though the God Sean had spoken of might step out
from behind a bush to accost her, and Austin with as authoritative a stance as
he could muster. Noticing Sean’s omission, Loquela promptly ran to a bush and
returned with a redcurrant the size of a melon which she presented to Muthoni.

 
          
The
Kenyan woman hesitated briefly,
then
bit into it. Red
juice spurted and stained her silver-grey jumpsuit. “Oh God, that’s beautiful.
Mzuri sanaV
’ She passed the berry to
Denise, who tasted it then offered it in turn to Austin, who ignored it.
Loquela seemed enchanted by Denise’s golden tresses; she fondled them, though
her full admiration was reserved for Muthoni’s jet-black skin.

 
          
“Captain
Van der Veld?” asked
Austin
. “I mean, you
were
Captain
Van der Veld? What
do
I mean?”

 
          
“Just
call me Jeremy.”

 
          
“What
is
this world, Jeremy? Who’s this
‘God’ you were telling my people about? An alien superbeing—is that it? Have we
finally met up with an alien intelligence?”

 
          
Jeremy
cocked his head. “Obviously God is alien, in the sense that we can’t know Him.
He’s beyond the level of our present understanding, don’t you see? But we
strive, we reach upward. Even the fish do that, don’t they? He
helps
us, Captain. I suppose it
is
help—though it sometimes works in,
let’s say, devious ways.”

 
          
“But
what
is
this God? That’s what I want
to know. Is he, well, localized?
In one spot?
Or does
he, er, reach out—to the rest of the universe? I mean, if he’s
the
God, he’d have to be everywhere,
wouldn’t he?”

 
          
Sean
suspected that the chain of command aspect was worrying
Austin
almost as much as whether there was a God
or a superbeing, or indeed whether the two must needs be the same thing. So
Austin
mainly wanted to know the limits of the
God’s authority. Well, it was a practical first step . . .

 
          
“You’re
asking me to define our God? Ah, that’s what we’re busy doing all the time.
Helping Him define Himself too, I fancy! To answer you literally, He’s
everywhere hereabouts by extension—and in
Eden
in particular.”

 
          
Though
it wasn’t the first step Sean would have taken. Perhaps it might be better to
know one’s own limits first—and the limits of these amnesiac, sybaritic
colonists ... Or rather, what they thought they were learning by forgetting
their Earth-assigned role and making merry in this paradise.

 
          
Three
men had ridden into the meadow, side by side, on three proud stags. Between
them the men were carrying a great lugubrious carp, blotched pink and white.
Its pectoral and pelvic fins were too small for it to be able to haul its own
weight across the ground. In any case, it was an up-and-down fish; it would
have tumbled over . . . Did the God help these people, as they helped the fish?

 
          
A
magpie flapped down just then, to perch at the top of the access ramp. It
cocked its head at them as though eavesdropping, then flipped its tail
impertinently and shat messily on the shining metal. Jeremy glanced at it,
then
searched the perimeter of the meadow warily.

 
          
“This
world couldn’t have been like this to start with,” said Paavo firmly.

 
          
“To start with?
It’s always the start here.
The beginning.
Our new beginning.
Oh, it was like this when we landed—so far as landscape goes. The birds and
beasts and fis^ came later, out of the pools and the caves, out of the shells
d
the rock-towers. Of course,
they’d
been taken from our ova stores.
How long it took to
lay
on I honestly don’t know,
though I think only a short while. This planet’s rather small, and it doesn’t
rotate, you know.”

 
          
“So
we noticed,” said
Austin
.

 
          
“It
oughtn’t to have the atmosphere or the gravity it does have.”

 
          
“We
realize that.
So this God actually terraformed an unsuitable
world for you—in a matter of hours?”
Austin
wiped his brow. “What
is
He?” There was a note of capitalization in his voice now. “You
told Sean He has a beard. Does that mean that He looks human?”

 
          
“Well,
I haven’t met God. Few people have apart from the clothed man. He has a human
form, yes. Now, that is.
A beard.
Pink
robes.
He reigns in
Eden
, but his senses are everywhere. You see, He’s particular
and
general. It’s my opinion that we
defined God for Himself as we arrived, and now we’re all trying to evolve to a
stage where we can understand what we specified.”

 
          
“So
we have a superbeing . . . who was sitting here, doing what? Looking for some
way to define itself? A being with the power to transform a whole world, the
power to create . . . What did this being evolve from? How? Is it a single
being?
Or one of many?”

 
          
Sean
squinted aloft. The sky was no longer quite cloudless; some rain was drifting
down in sheets from a solitary anvil cumulus, though falling nowhere near this
meadow. The cloud reminded him of a watering can.
Overhead,
swallows and swifts of ordinary size darted and veered in a swarm, as one
creature. They swooped about a tiny, child-like body with long blue wings. He
spotted another of these imp-birds —then a unique kind of flying fish: it was a
long sage-green torpedo with wings which seemed to float upon the air as though
the air was water. It looked rather like an earthly shark, fitted with long
wide insubstantial whale flippers. One of the imp-birds darted around it as it
slowly sailed the air.

 
          
Sean
pointed. “What are those up there?
Cherubs?”

 
          
“Sprites,”
replied Jeremy.
“Metamorphs.
Evolving
phases.”

 
          
“Phases of people?
Or what?”

 
          
“Maybe, maybe not.
I’m not up there, am I? And there’s a
skyfish, look.”

 
          
The
flipper-shark banked lazily, following some unseen aerial stream as the sprite
landed on its long back. With
its own
wings widespread
the sprite stood erect, on tiptoe, balancing like a surfboard rider—and was
borne away.

 
          
“Does
this superbeing have a name?” asked
Austin
.

 
          
“If
He has a particular name, He hasn’t told us. You know, asking His name seems a
bit ridiculous.
Unlike asking
yours
, Athlone!”
Jeremy gave a wicked grin. “The clothed man
could possibly answer you. He’s His confidant. I’m just His fall-guy. Or so it
seems at times.”

 
          
“Does
the
planet
have a name?”

 
          
“Gardens,
Eden
and Hell—that’s all we call it. Depending
on where you are.
Three worlds in one.”

 
          
“Oh,
and I suppose we have a trinitarian God!” jibed Tanya.
“How
original.”

 
          
Jeremy
peered at her. “Perhaps He’s a dialectical God: thesis, antithesis and
synthesis?”

 
          
“Give
me strength!”

 
          
“He
will. And that’s the sun up there. It had a number, didn’t it? Can’t recall
what it was.”

 
          
“4H
. . . Oh never mind,” said
Austin
. “Whatever He is, He’s switched our ship off. Does He have messengers—those
flying sprites? Can we get in touch with Him?”

 
          
Jeremy
looked, instead, at the magpie perched on the ramp. “Birds are messengers.
Birds of death, birds of life.”
“Caw,” said the magpie.
“Caw-caw.”
It preened its feathers, ducking its black beak
under a ruffled wing.

           
“The difficulty is sometimes in
understanding the message.”

 
          
“That bird is intelligent!” creid Denise.
“It’s listening to
us.”

 
          
“Well,
it isn’t dumb.”

 
          
“Caw
, ”
the bird agreed. A glossy eye emerged from under its
wing.

 
          
“Can
you communicate with it?”

 
          
“That’s
really the clothed man’s bird. He has the hot line to Him.”

 
          
“Who’s
this clothed man?” interrupted Sean. “Is
he
human? Or is he another person in your holy trinity?”

 
          
“He’s
the Mystery Master. I think he knows what’s going on—or he’s a few stages ahead
of us in finding out. That’s his Great Work. So far as I know he was one of the
colonists— frozen in hyb, so we never met before. He gives his name out as
Knossos
now, so I guess he was a Greek. Perhaps he
was the original Cretan liar?”

 
          
Jeremy
approached the magpie. The bird bounced from foot to foot. It turned its head
from side to side, fixing its right eye upon him and then
its
left, triangulating. Perhaps its left eye saw things differently from its
right.

 
          
“Is
Knossos
nearby? He is, isn’t he?”

 
          
“Caw.”

 
          
“Should
these people try to find him?”

 
          
“Caw caw.”

 
          
“Will
he find them?”

 
          
“Caw.
Caw."

           
“What does God want them to do?”

 
          
Abruptly
the magpie launched itself at Sean. Sean only flinched momentarily, though he
did shut his eyes tight. The bird’s claws gripped his shoulder. Gently it
inserted its beak into his ear, as though in search of ticks. Its throat
rattled. The noise reverberated in his ear, vibrating his ear-drum, and he
heard blurred words where before he only had heard a bird call.

 
          
(“Find
God?” croaked the voice. “Want to? Have to learn how to, first! Stay here
instead?
Pleasant.
Yes? No?”)

 
          
The
magpie withdrew its beak and launched itself off his shoulder, unbalancing Sean
as it flapped up into the air. The bird rose and circled and came to rest high
up on top of the starship, where it was only a tiny black blot. Flapping its
tail, it shat another stain then took off and away.

 
          
Sean
reported what he’d heard, inside the cave of his head.

 
          
“Be
damned,” swore
Austin
.