Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (6 page)

 
          
“In
a sense,” agreed Jeremy affably. “Being damned is one way to God. Really, you’d
be better off here. God’s got other fish to fry.” The flatfish which was still
slowly flapping its way across the turf at a tangent to them raised its head
and wheezed reproachfully. A shudder ran along its whole body, somehow lifting
it off the ground so that for a moment it seemed to float before flopping back.

 
          
“If
God’s over in the west, in
Eden
, can we walk there? It shouldn’t take more than a few E-months!”
Austin
cracked his fingers grimly, as though
snapping weeks off a wooden calendar.

 
          
“There’s
a valley between the Gardens and
Eden
. Not your ordinary valley—it’s miles wide
and miles deep. There’s a scorching desert at the bottom, full of poison gas.
No way down,
no
way across.”

 
          
“Could
we travel by air?”

 
          
“Oh,
He can’t have you flying around in starships. That’s incompatible. I thought
you’d noticed you’d been switched off. There’s only one way of getting to
Eden
, my terrestrial friends. It’s called dying.
By way of Hell.
You don’t know the art of dying yet.”

 
          
“Perhaps
this . . . this
Knossos
man knows another way,” said
Austin
.

 
          
“You
don’t follow me. That
is
the way.
Anyhow, why should it be important to God to meet you?”

 
          
“Hell,”
swore
Austin
. Now it was hard to tell whether he was
swearing or referring to the Darkside of the world. “We’ve come all these light
years!
If you’ve found a superintelligent being here, my
God!”
But oaths were all ambiguous in the circumstances.

 
          
It
amused Sean to note the puzzlement on
Austin
’s face at the sudden drop-out of meaning
which his words had suffered, and the frightening new increment.

 
          
“We
must find out the nature of this alien being,” said Tanya firmly.
“First priority.”

 
          
“Oh,
you’ve come a long way,” conceded Jeremy. “On the other hand, God built a whole
world for us. Your interests are rather secondary. Besides, do you want to take
this news back to Earth? What then, eh? Guided tours?
An
invitation to God to send an ambassador?
Contact on that level is
ridiculously inappropriate. His terms are the only ones.”

 
          
“But
don’t you want to get out from under this power?” demanded Tanya.

 
          
Jeremy
simply gestured around the meadow. “Now you’re being ridiculous.”

 
          
“But
humans aren’t pets in some superbeing’s zoo!” “Let’s call it a nursery, then,
shall we? Actually, we’ve
all
come a
long way—from the first protoplasm. And we’ve all got a long way still to go,
you included.”

           
Loquela had grown restless. She
flicked her fingers idly. “That’s all very well, this talk of meeting God—just
like
that.
Fish would like to walk,
and I believe they all will in time.
A longish time.
For now, surely it’s enough to know that He’s
there
, and in all of us. Make contact with
that
reality! Love It! Get rid of those silly rags you’re hiding
in. How can you find
anything
while
you’re in hiding?”

 
          
She
pressed her breasts up against
Austin
’s chest. She put her arms around his neck
and hooked the ivory softness of her inner thigh around him.

 
          
Austin
leaned away, not so much intending to repel
her as to
avoid being
pulled over on top of her.
“Doesn’t
Knossos
wear clothes?” he objected weakly.

 
          
“What
he
hides,” said
Jeremy,
“is hidden knowledge. He already knows—what’s hidden from us. Now get one thing
clear, Captain: you don’t get any bad marks here for enjoying yourself. This
isn’t any puritan God. Though it isn’t lotus land, either—we’re all busy
learning something. Loquela’s quite right. Join in! We should have a welcoming
feast. Or call it an orgy, if you like. We’re all, hmm, friends here.” Loquela,
however, had already uncoiled herself from reluctant
Austin
. She beckoned to the three riders who had
halted beside the ship and dismounted, setting the enormous blotched carp down
carefully on its side so that it could admire, or wonder at it. The three young
men walked over, appreciating the newcomers smilingly. They said nothing,
though, but only waited like three nude squires.

 
          
Their
hair was a uniform brown thatch, and their bodies were tanned almost
golden—polished gold coins to Loquela’s ivory currency. They had slim
hips,
and muscles that looked more decorative than
functional—though they could certainly heave a carp that must have weighed a
good deal, between them. Two of them were uncircumcised, Sean noted, but the
third wasn’t, so the God mustn’t be fussy about that.

 
          
“Hullo,”
he said, “I’m Sean.”

 
          
One
of the young men inclined his head. “I’m Dimple. That’s Dapple. He’s Dawdle.”

 
          
“Those
are your
names?”

 
          
“Oh
no,” laughed the young man. “Those are our mounts’ names. We don’t have any
names yet, because we don’t know who we are yet—so how can we have names till
we do?”

 
          
“But
you must have had names once.”

 
          
“Ah,
but those were the
wrong
names. So we
forgot all about them. Well?” invited Dimple, looking at Muthoni slyly. He
rubbed his hands up and down his chest with the engagingly simple sensuality of
a kitten preening on a soft rug. He said rather a lot in this single word.

 
          
“I
do feel quite hot in this gear,” laughed Muthoni. “I think that fruit juice has
gone to my head! I prescribe some liberty for us.”

 
          
“Licence,
you mean,” snapped Tanya. “I didn’t come here to be
—kak pa-angliski?
—gang-banged!”

 
          
“Dejeuner sur Vherbe
, ”
mused Denise. “Only, this time the gentlemen don’t wear any suits!”

 
          
Austin
Faraday looked totally nonplussed.

 
          
“What
do you suggest?” Sean asked him quietly. “Lock ourselves up in
Schiaparelli?
Play cards for the next
fifty years in a dead hull? Or live out the part, instead—till we know who
scripted it, and why?”

 
          
Muthoni
was already parting her jumpsuit with a trim fingernail.

 
          
“Very well.”
Austin
shuddered. “Those who would like to go for
a, er, swim—they may undress. But otherwise—” He swallowed. His hands were busy
straightening his own clothes, checking their integrity, as though by some sort
of servocontrol this would overcome Muthoni’s action.

 
          
But
Muthoni let her jumpsuit fall around her ankles. She kicked her boots off along
with the suit.

 
          
“If
the planet’s gone nudist, Austin, surely it’s rude to go round dressed?”

 
          
“This
is disgraceful,” said Tanya. “It’s . . . mutiny. Assert yourself, Captain.” She
clutched herself, as though it was her breasts instead of Muthoni’s that were
bare. Her jumpsuited legs quivered together tightly—a reluctant virgin at the
Annunciation confronted by a beach-boy archangel, a gigolo Gabriel.

 
          
“I
used to assert myself a lot,” said Jeremy. “Just look at me now! And, do you
know, I feel much better for the change? Really I do—-despite the occasional
misgivings and resentments.”

 
          
Earth,
with its megapopulation, was—if not a puritan world—one at least where screens,
veils, of whatever kind, between people were (or had been) the order of the day
to prevent society from becoming a mere hive. This was true, at least, of the
West and Euro-Russia, though not to such a degree in Muthoni’s
Africa
. Yet there were leisure zones, nudist
solariums and such, for relief from the antiseptic screenedness elsewhere; and
the six star-travelers had all seen each other hygienically naked on board
Schiaparelli
, besides. It wasn’t
entirely the problem of nudity as such, thought Sean—nor even of the sexuality
of this world (since Tanya could hardly be a virgin) but rather that she, and
Austin, and Paavo too were refusing this world’s rules, refusing to admit what
had happened to the colony on the flesh and blood, and bare skin level—as a
subjective, opposed to merely an objective fact. It was this, coupled with the
over-developed Earth phobia about too intimate personal contacts, except in the
right places at the right times, that was sickening Tanya. On a highly
organized Earth, too, other screens than clothes or—sometimes—masks must stand
in the way, particularly data privacy screens, for the sheer preservation of
the notion of a human individual; this was true to some extent even in Russia.
If a superior authority now said, ‘Let there be no screen between us’ it must
be bent on driving all men and women mad—humiliating them, robotizing them. How
could the whole planet possibly be a solarium? Free space—and labor—they had
expected to find; never this leisurely nakedness.

 
          
“We
shan’t get anywhere by wearing character armor,” said Sean gently. “We just
happen to have landed on a planet where a
God
,
not a government, runs the show—something that sees right through you by its
very nature. We’ve got to get under the skin of this difference.”

 
          
“First
step, show some skin.” Denise laughed. The berry juice had made her merry too;
but she was
proud
of herself as well,
with her outspaced golden hair. The great emptiness of the void had presented
her with a gift of space itself: space to strip off in securely, amiably,
anywhere. Her separation from the Earth and all its personscreens was measured
now by the meter rule of her golden fleece, which she had never owned in a
world where ass-long hair might tangle you up in others’ clothes and fingers
and eyes.

 
          
Muthoni
snapped her briefs apart. She stretched her arms luxuriously. Now that she was
naked the others seemed preposterously confined. Loquela, who had been studying
how a jumpsuit opened with all the intentness of a cat upon a mousehole, now
pounced. Her fingernails slid down a seal, parting Sean’s floppy husk,
discovering his red-haired chest. She stroked it curiously. She remained at
least as intoxicated by Muthoni’s skin, though. Reaching out her left hand to
touch it, she purred again, “Nigredo.”

 
          
“No,
I shall remain dressed,” said
Austin
. “But suit yourselves.” He shrugged
hopelessly. “Or unsuit yourselves.”

 
          
Somehow
Sean doubted whether character armor would remain intact for very long. Though
if it did, it could only get more rigid—so that the eventual break might also
snap the mind within.

 
          
“Party time,” cooed Loquela.

 
          
Loquela clapped her
hands and gestured
around the well- hung bushes, spotting
her
finger here
and there. Dimple, Dapple and Dawdle trotted off to fetch fruit for the feast.

 
          
Tanya
sat down heavily, crossing her legs, anchoring herself to the ground. She was
sweating in her jumpsuit and soon began wriggling about as though hairy worms
were crawling all over her body inside it. Loquela reached to draw Paavo down
and he crouched quickly like a skier about to speed off down a crowded slope,
weaving his way between obstacles— mainly of other people—then hunkered down in
a defecatory stoop, resting on his heels. He scratched his head repeatedly.

 
          
Austin
shrugged and sat down too, shoulders stiff, arms folded. Sean and the others
sprawled, fitting themselves to the slight lumps and shallows in the spring
mattress of the turf.

 
          
The
feast, or orgy, began decorously enough with the tasting of fruits—then of more
fruits. In a moment of initial sobriety Muthoni remarked that the colonists
had
to be strict vegetarians, of course,
if everything that Jeremy had said about evolving fishes and animals were true.
One could hardly fry a trout for breakfast or roast a haunch of venison for
supper! Indeed, the Gardens seemed quite innocent of fire.

 
          
But a diet of fruit alone?
The dietician in her was puzzled.
Jeremy simply grinned, licked one of a bunch of dusty-velvety black grapes to a
gloss with the tip of his tongue and offered it to her.

 
          
And
as they tasted fruit after fruit, they realized how unique—and satisfying
because unique—each new one tasted, even though they had just tasted the meat
of its twin a few moments earlier.

 
          
Was
there some neural anti-habituator enzyme in them—Muthoni wondered aloud—in
addition to a balance of vitamins and proteins?

 
          
Reviewing
his own reactions, Sean realized that there was also a strong psychological
component to each variety of fruit. Cherries were in some way thought-provoking
(and indeed Muthoni was currently chewing a cherry)—whereas a pomegranate left
him with a taste of reverence, or awe . . . This was a mind-feast, he decided,
as much as a belly-filler and nerve-tuner.

 
          
It
was Denise (now also chewing a cherry) who remarked on the absence of noxious
insects—on such a warm day, when their hands and chins and breasts were sticky
with congealing juices . . .

 
          
Besides
the three squires, Dimple, Dapple and Dawdle, two women had joined the
feast—one, raven-haired, who sang to herself in between bites; the other a
freckled redhead with a tomboyish look to her who had run up carrying a
strawberry the size of a basketball. She had sliced this briskly into soft pink
steaks with a slim index finger. Neither this redhead nor the squires paid the
slightest attention to any hints of Earth or enquired about the starship,
though they did cast it wondering glances. It was as though they didn’t hear,
or chose to forget what they heard immediately—just as the three squires had
actively forgotten their own names. (While the dark woman simply sang to
herself, wordlessly, as though it was important that she got her voice exactly
right before she was prepared to say anything with it.) All through the meal,
though, the redhead inched her buttocks closer to Paavo over the turf, till she
was idly fingering the fabric of his jumpsuit as though it was a suit of
chain-mail with each link a separate tiny lock to be unpicked by the keys of
gentle touch.

 
          
Just
then, a trio of apes burst from the bushes and capered up to the feasting
party, tumbling and somersaulting. Applauding gleefully, the Garden-people
tossed pieces of fruit to the ape acrobats—who, however, paid no attention to
these. There was mischief in their eyes. As soon as they had maneuvered close
enough, each ape at the same moment snatched up one of the jumpsuits discarded
by Sean, Muthoni and Denise and raced off at speed, trailing silver-grey
banners back into the bushes.

 
          
With
a howl, Paavo rose.

 
          
“Hey,”
called Sean, “it doesn’t matter. We’ve got spares on board.”

 
          
“Doesn’t
matter?”
Paavo raced after the simian
thieves, crashing from view into the bushes. Sleekly, the redhead uncoiled
herself and sprinted hot-foot after him.

 
          
“I
think they were making a point,” said Denise, unregretfully. She dangled her
hair down over her breasts, teasing it around her nipples, as though this would
be sufficient costume for her from now on. Austin looked away hurriedly,
hastily converting the reflex into a studious inspection of the access ramp, in
case other wild life were busy furtively pillaging the lobby of the ship. None
was, though.

 
          
The
dark-haired woman whose voice was a song began helping Denise to arrange her
hair in different cascades, down her spine, over her shoulders, in between her
breasts, her wandering hands joined soon by stag-rider Dimple’s hands, then
Dapple’s. Denise tensed briefly then she relaxed, closing her eyes and moving
her own hands over their faces and bodies like a girl playing blind man’s buff,
discovering them as she herself was discovered.

 
          
Jeremy
winked at Muthoni as Loquela commenced a closer investigation of her ‘nigredo’
skin with her lips and tongue. He began stroking Loquela as though this would
set up a current that would attract Muthoni to him indirectly. Muthoni shifted
uncertainly up against Sean, her eyes fixed widely on Denise succumbing to the
medley of hands and mouths. Sean’s arm wandered around Muthoni’s waist and
thighs.

 
          
“Aphrodisiac,”
she murmured, nibbling his ear lobe. “The gooseberries, I think. It’s
sweet.
Satisfy the belly, satisfy the
body.
And why not?”

 
          
Her
gaze dropped to Sean’s lap, where he was unfetteredly erect—as were the other
men, Austin presumably included; only Austin was restricted by his jumpsuit and
merely shifted about uncomfortably. Abruptly Tanya jumped up and fled to the
access ramp, into the ship out of sight. Muthoni let herself be pushed over by
Loquela on to Sean’s lap . . .

 
          
Cicadas
chirred excitedly. Presently Sean found himself involved not only with Muthoni,
but Loquela too—and was that Jeremy’s hand? Somewhere Denise emitted a little
cry.

 
          
Squinting,
Sean saw a pair of toads hop up, croaking and creaking like old floorboards—a
couple of mobile leathery sporrans or
cachesexes.

 
          
“Our
sexual juices attract them,” whispered Loquela. She licked his ear—a much used
ear by now, since its first initiation as a magpie’s tympanum. “Maybe toads are
obsessed with physical love—or will be—but with you and me,

 
          
Sean,”
she cooed, “it’s a way of speech, this, isn’t it? On the day when we ever do
conceive new children, frogs not toads will sing an anthem at our wedding.
Their strings of spawn in water stand for the creative sperm. Ke-ke-kexx,” she
teased the goggling, halted batrachians.

 
          
The
party rolled apart after a while and sat up, grinning at each other.

 
          
At
this point Paavo returned from the bushes, alone. His hands were empty, and his
body was bare: he had lost his own jumpsuit.
“Damned monkey!
Damned hussy!” he cried as, nude, he fled up the access ramp into the ship,
with scarcely a glance at the relaxing revellers, too bound up in his own
dereliction was he. Muthoni burst out laughing. From inside the ship an
outraged Tanya berated the Finn in Russian, continuing her tirade till he was
safely clad in silver-grey again . . .

 
          
Austin
Faraday looked ever more remote and detached from events: a Captain
absconditus
.
Jeremy regarded him with a wry
sympathy. It wasn’t so much that discipline had collapsed as that there was no
longer any context for Austin’s authority. This world had its own Captain, in
Eden—who had switched a starship off and ordered revelry. Jeremy shrugged, and
smiled lightly. Arguing with
that
Captain was no use. They would learn, they would learn.

 
          
Jeremy
sighed.

 
          
Sean
tapped him lightly on the arm. His eyes twinkled.
“Surely not
the post-coitus blues?”

 
          
“Hardly!
Not in these Gardens—though believe
me,
you can get quite ice-blue in Hell! No, it’s just
remembering
. . . what’s bothering
Austin.
Melancholy memories, for little old me.
If I
can’t forget where I came from, you see, I can’t quite arrive anywhere else
...” The cloud passed; Jeremy
grinned
raflishly.
“Still, we all had a sweet little forgetting just now!”

 
          
“I
have decided,” began Austin, when Tanya and Paavo had rejoined them all in the
open. He stood there, hands on hips, saying nothing more for a while after his
great pronouncement.

 
          
Paavo
was sulking now. He felt he should have enjoyed himself more freely and
leisurely in the bushes with the redhead—but one
couldn't,
on an
alien
world, even if humans did walk around blithely naked here!—so he resented her
and he resented himself, and wanted to be a little way back in time, but the
time had already passed and soured. And he couldn’t
believe
how unconcernedly Sean and the two women had amused
themselves (according to Tanya, who had refused to
watch
any more) while he was away doing his duty by them, risking
his skin for their clothes! Why hadn’t they come looking for him when he was
away so long? That was
precisely
why
he hadn’t felt free to relax, to let go. So he felt justifiably cheated. Doubly
so! The redhead must have been in cahoots with the ape that slipped in and
stole
his
suit. Probably she was up
some tree right now, giggling, committing bestiality with it! If he could find
that tree, say tomorrow when he was ready for her again, he’d show her. She
owed him.

 
          
“I’ve
decided that a party of three should set out as soon as possible. Captain Van
der Veld can guide you.” Austin was already addressing Sean, Denise and Muthoni
as though who should compose the party of three was already a foregone
conclusion—chosen not by him, but by the world, a choice which he
rubber-stamped with as good a grace as possible.

 
          
“You
will try to find this man called Knossos, and make some sort of contact with
the God or alien superbeing who presides over things. I’d recommend your
heading, in the first instance, towards one of those peculiar stone towers with
the ‘aerials’ on them. Those who remain behind can conduct local forays to
gather data ...”

 
          
Austin,
for his part, had no wish to become another dispossessed, wandering Van der
Veld.

 
          
While,
for their part, Tanya and Paavo clove to the skirts of
Schiaparelli
as though they had just been whelped by the ship and
were as yet unweaned. Though Paavo did look up and rub his hands at the
prospect of gathering very local data . . .