Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (7 page)

 
          
The land rolled
greenly toward misty
blue hills where it appeared to evaporate into the aqueous sky. In Earth terms
it did just that, for the horizon was closer than any Earth horizon. However,
this didn’t mean that they hadn’t a long way to walk; the land merely seemed to
change more rapidly than any Earthland. Soon the spire of the starship was lost
to sight.

 
          
Sean,
Muthoni and Denise strode along easily, led by Jeremy the once-Captain. Though
the newcomers’ feet were newly bare, as indeed were their bodies, turf and moss
were as soft as the soles of their feet still were. Briar patches and hedge
tangles were easily skirted; and as they skirted them, veering now left now
right, thickets and tree clumps seemed to form the plan of a vast open maze
with many alternative paths running through it.

 
          
Down
one curving pathway, lined by orange trees laden with ripe glossy fruits
waiting apparently for ever to be plucked by hands or claws or beaks—and with
no carpet of rotten, molded rind beneath—strode a snooty camel with a great
blue concave metallic leaf balanced like a scallop between two woolly-thatched
humps. The boat was full of people. Bare arms and legs stuck out, waving and
kicking, as though they were trying to unbalance the leaf-boat to escape from
it, or perhaps the opposite: to keep it from sliding from its precarious
eminence.

 
          
Along
another bridlepath, between osiers and golden broom, they saw a brown bear
lurking. The bear stood up promptly on its hind legs and squinted at them,
swaying about,
then
it turned and ponderously began to
dance. It danced slowly away down the grass path, waggling its rump as though
inviting them to join in a conga.

           
They chose another way, unbeset by
beasts, at least for a little while.

 
          
“Tuck-tuck
-tuck!’
’

           
The frantic clucking came from a
mossy dell. A rill ran through the dell into a fat green pool and out again as
though the stream had swallowed a bottle that had stuck in its neck.

 
          
A
red hen, as large as a sheep, was shifting to and fro fussily on a clutch of
football-size eggs. One of the eggs had just hatched. A full-grown mallard
drake was waddling away, quacking, to the water. While the mother hen clucked
in consternation, a second eggshell erupted underneath her and a second
mallard—a brunette female, this one—squirmed her way out. She seemed more
inclined to stay with the mother, though the drake had already launched himself
clumsily into the bottleneck pool.

 
          
“How
can a hen hatch a duck?” cried Denise.

 
          
“A
duckling,” Jeremy corrected her. “I agree that the drake already has his adult
plumage—but you just wait till he’s full grown!”

 
          
“It’s
impossible!”

 
          
“Mother
Hen obviously thinks so too. She’s still . . . stuck in what she is. Her
hatchlings aren’t, though. The drake is a bird of knowledge already, you see.
He takes to the water
I
right away. His sister only
has the capacity for knowing the water, as yet.”

           
“But—”

 
          
“Ah,
you can believe your eyes, Denise. No cuckoo-duck switched Mother Hen’s eggs
when she wasn’t looking. Beings really are transformed into one another.”

 
          
“But—”

 
          
“Him.”
Jeremy
tapped his nose wisely.
“He’s
the
transforming agent. Of course, a lot depends on the readiness of
whoever
or whatever is transformed. Even a duck’s karma
counts. You see, a creature here is free from its instincts—in the old sense of
the ruling programmed patterns. Instincts have become . . . overt,
comprehensible,
malleable
. All creatures are similarly
privileged. A hen can have the will to alter. Even a fish can.
If it can conceive of alteration.
And it
mil.
Alas, that’s all that Mother
Hen has done—
conceive
it!
Ah, but
it’s a step in the right direction—or perhaps I should say a step in the
leftward direction.”

 
          
“Huh?
Hein?”

           
“Leftward is the wise way,” murmured
Jeremy, and

 
          
marched
straight ahead out of the dell, in apparent
contradiction of this sentiment.

 
          
Presently
the woods and shrubs thinned out as the land rose to a crest around a valley—an
amphitheater of turf with a pool at its heart. The pool was perfectly circular,
its sides as neat as if they had been cut with a compass and trenching tools,
and the water was a particularly brilliant blue.
A band of
animals and people milled around the pool, at a discreet distance.

 
          
“It’s
the Cavalcade!” exclaimed Sean, staring down.

 
          
“Ah,
you do remember?”

 
          
“Me
too,” nodded Denise.

 
          
“You’ll
find many such cavalcades, my friends. They spring up spontaneously in the
appropriate places.”

 
          
Women
waded and swam in the pool itself. A few of them were
negresses
,
one of whom held a ball or giant cherry upraised in her hand. She tossed it
into the watery throng as though into a water polo team. White egrets and black
ravens flew about and perched upon the women’s heads and shoulders. The pool
was full of women, but no men intruded.
Around the pool, at
that circumspect distance, circled the cavalcade of males.
They rode on
the backs pf bears and boars and goats, on horses and camels, on oxen and
stags. One man rode a spotted cat with its tail stiffly erect: it was a lynx as
large as any pony. A griffin stepped around the circle too, with its wings
folded underneath its rider’s thighs. A white unicorn pranced there, stabbing
its narwhale horn into the air. The air almost crackled with electricity
running between the male riders and the women in the water. While the women
waited, swam, or played ball with the big cherry, trying to catch it on the
crowns of their heads and balance it there for a moment, the riders circled and
recircled the pool, building up potential.

 
          
“What
is it you remember?” asked Muthoni. “What’s going on down there?”

 
          
“They’re
acting out Bosch’s painting—the ride around the pool. Good lord, they
are
it. And anticlockwise, anticlockwise
all the time—always turning to the left hand. Sinister,” said Sean softly to
himself.

 
          
“What’s
sinister about it?” asked Denise. “It just looks like they’re getting ready for
a sort of sacred orgy. Well,” she giggled, “orgies can be
fun.”

 
          
“It
does tend to draw you into it, doesn’t it? I could rush off down there right
now myself, leap on the back of a stag or a goat and really work myself up!
Only, I fancy we’re a little late for this one. All the rides are taken, and
they’re half-way worked up already. The carousel’s spinning—too late to leap on
now.”

 
          
“There’s
a goat down there with no one riding it, Sean. I could do with a swim, myself.”

 
          
“Uhh-huh.
That spoonbill’s booked the ride. Who knows who he
is—or was?”

 
          
In
fact, Sean realized that they had already wandered some way down from the brow
of the hill without noticing it. Stopping short, he caught Denise by the wrist.

 
          
“Yes,
it’s
very
involving. Like a
whirlpool! Like all the rest of this world! Everyone we’ve seen—apart from friend
Jeremy here—seems so utterly drawn into it.
Submerged.
Absorbed.
But no, what I meant by sinister wasn’t
that.
It’s the fact that they’re all
turning to the left—from their point of view.”

 
          
“They’d
crash into each other if they were going both ways.”        
•

 
          
“Ah,
but it’s the sinister direction—the direction that’s traditionally to be
distrusted!
The gauche way.
And I’m sure it’s that way
in the original painting too—but that’s pretty remarkable, if Bosch saw the
left as the real direction of psychic growth ...”

 
          
“Oh
I see! The right hemisphere controls the left-hand side—and it’s the right
hemisphere that’s intuitive, isn’t it?—whereas the left hemisphere, which is
rational, controls the right hand?”

 
          
“Right!”
Sean smiled broadly. “And there, in a word—the one
word ‘right’—is the whole propaganda war that the left side of the brain has
been waging against the right hemisphere ever since the left side invented
language. ‘Right’ is good, ‘left’ can’t be trusted. A lot of primitive people
only used to eat food with their right hand—they wiped their arses with their
left. Oh, there’s been a real smear campaign going on for hundreds of thousands
of years, with the left-brain having the first word and the last word! But here
they ride toward the left—the intuitive, holistic way.”

 
          
So
this neurological fact had projected itself into objective behavior here, mused
Sean. And so the Cavalcade was a physical re-education of the body’s footsteps
and gestures —toward the left-hand way.

 
          
Was
Jeremy left-handed? Were the other colonists? It just didn’t show up where
there were
no pens to scribble with, nor
tools to
wield! Remembering the style of Loquela’s loving— and Jeremy’s—Sean decided
that the colonists were pretty well ambidextrous by now.

 
          
Which
hand
did
they wipe their shit away
with?
he
wondered. This was no medieval dunghill,
though—pools and fresh streams abounded. There were no insects, either, no
flies.
Perhaps no germs?
Maybe dirt wasn’t dirty here.

 
          
“I
wonder if ‘God’ can only really reign if He suppresses analysis—if He tips the
scales in favor of the dream side of the mind . . . ?”

 
          
While
Sean was brooding along this ambidextrous vein, a solitary person who had been
standing downslope watching the cavalcade—apparently impervious to the attractive
electricity it was generating—turned and noticed them. The person strolled up
the slope.

 
          
Person.
Neither man, nor woman; but both.
A hermaphrodite: both
he
and
she
at once, fully sexed in both
respects with a woman’s breasts that were pert and upturned with sultana
nipples, and penis and testicles attached, doglike, to the lower belly over a
coral slit of female pubes. The person’s face was no ambiguous either-or, but a
confident both-and. As the hermaphrodite scanned them, for a moment it seemed as
though two independent, coexisting sets of facial muscles were responding at
once to the nakedness of male and female, simultaneously desiring and
rejecting. But then Sean realized that this was largely his own reaction: at
once matching himself and bonding with the male, while desiring the female and
so spurning the male competitively. Yet the woman was already appropriated by
the male and wedded to him, who was the same person. The hermaphrodite’s
appearance spoke at once to his own outer sexual identity and to the shadow
feminine in himself, calling, wooing—and rejecting both as incomplete and
alienated from one another. This was a paradox person, whose opposites neither
cancelled out nor flew asunder in contradiction. Instead, they balanced like an
acrobat upon a ball.
As the hermaphrodite person balanced
springily upon the balls of his/her feet . . . (And he/she had been regarding
the efforts of the women in the pool to balance the cherry ball upon their
heads with detached amusement . . .)

 
          
“Have
you seen
Knossos
lately?” Jeremy hailed the hermaphrodite.