Watson, Ian - Novel 10 (15 page)

 
          
Without
the infra-red creature to follow they were lost in this shifting
three-dimensional maze. They had no way of telling where Death’s roost lay, or
in which direction the exit from the maze existed, if indeed there was any
exit. The white light might be in any direction, or in all directions. Around
them the jostling of the crystal domains seemed to go on forever. Now that they
had lost their impetus the two men concentrated on avoiding those crystals which
pressed slowly towards them. And they concentrated on not getting separated
from each other.

 
          
“Up
there!” cried Weinberger, pointing.

 
          
Another
red blur came
arcing
this way and that towards them.

 
          
It
was yet another Death. And this Death held something struggling in its beak.
A worm?
No, it was one of those wriggling brown things — and
now Jim had no doubt what it was.

 
          
It
was a human soul: a wormlike miniature of a person. It had a human face, and it
wriggled. It was like something that had crawled out of the top of the spinal
column. It was like a sperm, writhing its way through the maze . . . until it
met the great egg of a crystal and bored its way inside. But this soul wasn’t
free to swim. Death was bearing it along to the destination chosen for it. How
that soul struggled! How impotently, how ineffectively! If it fought free of
Death’s beak it could perhaps swim right through the maze, to bliss and unity.
But Death held it tight.

 
          
‘Our
soul’s like a worm,

 
          
And
a bit like a sperm,’ thought Jim, in a Norman Harper way.

 
          
There
came a brief flurry of red creatures, darting and dipping through the crystals
like a flock of swallows. Each carried a single worm in its beak.

 
          
One
of these Deaths veered close to the two men, and for a moment Jim clearly saw
the face of the worm it had captured. It was that of an elderly woman. Her
little eyes bulged in horror and surprise.

 
          
Those
Deaths flashed by with their prey, which they would thrust into some crystal to
ferment it into an intoxicating, toxic world which they would sip on like wine,
growing drunk on the soul’s deranged dreams.

 
          
The
two men chased after the flock of Deaths. But the Deaths were all flying by
slightly different routes. As Jim and Weinberger tried to chase them all at
once, and still remain together, they collided. Their reflection bodies
tangled.

 
          
The
mixing felt like a breathing in of warm smoke by their arms and legs and
torsos. There was
a stickiness
to it, as if the smoke
was suffused with honey.

 
          
Before
they could fully pull apart, a diamond crystal swung in

 
          
their
way. It drew them to it at the same time as it slowly
bore down on them. If they had not been pulling at cross purposes they could
still have steered clear . . .

 
          
They
hit it. They broke through its face, like two divers through a pool. Then they
were inside the jewel.

 
          
At
once the whole crystal fog vanished . . .

           
In
its place,
was a world . .
.

 
          
And
the world was a place of blue mossy glades with clumps of feathery white trees
stuck in the ground around the glades like so many goose-quill pens. The
landscape was all blue and white. The ocean and icebergs of Weinberger’s
scene-screen had been transformed into moss and trees — the same colours, but
different forms.

 
          
A
sun was about to rise. Already, the spillover of light gave the cool dawn air a
pearly hue. Some stars were still visible in the sky. Their winking lights were
faintly ruby and topaz and sapphire. Those stars must be the other crystals, by
now infinitely far off.

 
          
This
world seemed curiously empty. It was incomplete — merely sketched in. Even the
trees looked as though they had just been poked into the surface. But at least
it held no obvious threats — unless it threatened to starve them of food, or
variety; it was simply quiescent.

 
          
“Compared
with those others it’s fairly pretty,” said Jim as they stood looking around.
“But there isn’t a lot to it, is there?”

 
          
“That’s
because we didn’t put enough into it! We couldn’t, because we’re still alive.
Or maybe we cancelled out each other’s wishes? If it’s normally a case of one
dream-world per soul, well, with two of us involved either you’d end up with
bizarre paradoxes, or you’d get something like this — a sort of minimal limbo.
At any rate, there isn’t very much for Death to get itself excited about here!”

 
          
The
sun rose suddenly, flooding the world with white light. That sun was far away
and considerably smaller than the Sun seen from Earth, more the apparent size
of Venus. But it was incomparably brighter. After the first blinding glarffce,
which left afterimages dancing like ball lightning among the trees, it was
impossible to look even briefly in its direction.

 
          
Jim
and Weinberger set out hastily for the closest shade. Their ability to fly had
vanished.

 
          
As
soon as they took their first steps across the blue moss, however, the whole
surface began to ripple. With each footfall it rose and fell like a waterbed.
The ground was merely a coating over liquid — as though it had not yet had time
to set firmly.

 
          
Weinberger’s
foot broke through the moss. He stumbled, recovered himself then bounded on in
great ground-hugging strides which somehow kept him ahead of the holes which
his feet punched in the surface. Arriving at a feather-tree he clung to it.

 
          
Jim
reached another nearby tree and clutched it. The two men stared at each other
across a strait of the deceptive moss.

 
          
“Whoever
dreamed this up?” shouted Jim. “How do we
go
anywhere?”

 
          
“Run,
and hope for it?”

 
          
“There
could be
things
under the moss.
Hungry things.”

 
          
Together,
they had created this world.
(Or, as Weinberger suggested,
cancelled out each other’s dream.)
But to the extent that this world
must partly be Jim’s own creation, it occurred to him that it was all very well
illuminated and enlightened up above, yet was actually hollow and deceitful,
with no real solidity, but only treacherous amorphous depths. In the same way
as
his own
world of good death and oceanic peace was
hollow — and had always been so?

 
          
He
rejected the idea. This world was frail because he wasn’t truly dead; nor was
Weinberger. That was all.

 
          
“We
could try rolling,” suggested Weinberger. “We’d spread our weight that way.”

 
          
“Rolling
about like self-propelled logs?
But where to?”

 
          
Maybe
the water under the skin of this world was indeed the ocean of unity and peace?
If so, Jim couldn’t see it for what it actually was because of all the blue
moss . . .

 
          
“We
have to find somewhere more substantial, Jim!”

 
          
And if they did?
If, by searching for firmness, somehow they
enforced firmness on this world?

 
          
“Then
we’d be really trapped! Don’t you see? This is no place for us. We’ve got to
get
out
of here — right out.”

 
          
“Just
show me how, and I’ll be right behind you. Meanwhile, how about rolling over to
this tree?”

 
          
“No,
you come over here.”

 
          
“Chicken.”

 
          
Both
men laughed. Then they laughed again, rejoicing briefly in their ability to
laugh.

 
          
As
the tiny, white-hot sun climbed higher, sweaty heat came in the wake of the
intense light. The feather-trees began to furl their foliage around their thin
trunks. Before long the two men were sheltering behind mere spikes of a girth
hardly greater than one of Weinberger’s scrawny legs.

 
          
And
Jim thought: if they were to die here, of heat-stroke and thirst and
exhaustion; if the silver threads which bound them to Egremont were to snap —
would this world suddenly take on a more solid face? Would the waters recede —
or evaporate — to reveal hard lands beneath?

 
          
That
silver cord!
Of course.

 
          
He
tried to twitch it so that he could reel himself back to the waterbed in
Egremont. He felt a slight lessening of his weight, but nothing else happened.

 
          
As
the sun burned ever more fiercely, the moss turned brown, at first in isolated
patches, then everywhere. As it shrivelled, it broke up to reveal pools, then
open rivers of blue water.

 
          
The
moss must simply be a growth of the night — a twelve hours’ wonder of fecundity
which repeated its life cycle every night between dusk and dawn. Now it had
spored or done whatever else it did. Crisped by the sun, it decayed.

 
          
Slowly
the spikes of the trees began to tilt and bob and float free. Most still
balanced precariously on their underwater root-mats, but others keeled right
over. Maybe the ‘trees’ were nothing more than hairy stalks or filaments of the
blue water-moss. Maybe there was only one kind of plant life here after all . .
.

 
          
Like
sailors lashed to masts, the two men clung to their frail sanctuaries.
Inevitably, and quite soon, their weight bore the furled trees over, dipping
lower and lower.

 
          
Jim
felt resigned. This was the ocean, after all. And they were going to drown in
it. He was going to drown again.

 
          
Weinberger
whimpered. He had never drowned before.

 
          
Both
men were sinking into the water: thigh deep, waist deep. . .

 
          
‘Peace,’
thought Jim. Relaxing his grip upon the tree, he raised both arms above his
head and let himself go under.

 
          
And
felt
himself
wrenched back violently by the scruff of
the neck, like a rubber ball on elastic . . .

 
          
Noel Resnick,
Alice Huron, Ananda and
Somebodyson clustered around the open cage door, staring in at the waterbed.
The glass walls were transparent. The entry side was hinged wide open. Sally
Costello moved away, clutching an empty hypodermic syringe.

 
          
“Good
morning to you both,’’ said Resnick tartly.

 
          
“I
hope you had sweet dreams?” enquired
Alice
. Her chin jutted as she peered through the
wire mesh above the door, not deigning to stoop. She looked down her nose at
the two men as though inspecting them through an old-fashioned lorgnette.

 
          
Jim
sat up.

 
          
“Dreams?
No, not
dreams
...”

 
          
Beside
him, Weinberger sat up too.

 
          
“Visions, perhaps?
And you, Client Weinberger, I trust that
you feel closer to the noble art of dying?”

 
          
Ananda
laid a restraining hand on
Alice
’s arm, while Resnick shuffled about, looking embarrassed.

 
          
Weinberger
blinked at Alice and the Master; then he simply laughed.

 
          
Alice
nodded to Ananda, acknowledging the growing
pressure of his hand. She stepped back, impatiently clunking the rings on her
fingers together.

 
          
Resnick
gestured at the clothes draped over the two chairs.

 
          
“Would
you two care to get dressed?” To Somebodyson he said, “When Client Weinberger
is
ready,
kindly escort him to his room.”

 
          
“What
time is it, Noel?” Jim asked. He had left his watch in his jacket pocket.

 
          
“Going on for eleven.
That’s
eleven a.m.
, in case you’ve completely lost track of
time.”

 
          
“Damn
it, that means I’ve missed ...”

 
          
“Correct.
Not that a couple of missed appointments are —”

 
          
^“
—
a matter of life and death?” put in Weinberger, acidly.

 
          
‘‘Even though I seem to recall that it was you, Jim, who was going
to concentrate on everyone alike!”

 
          
“You
promised not to interfere,” said Jim. “You gave me your word.”

 
          
“Did
I? Yes, I suppose ...” Resnick looked unhappy.

 
          
“The
point is,” butted in
Alice
, “you’ve been in here for about twelve hours. And it looked as though
you were going to stay here almost for ever — till you wasted away.” She cast a
derisive glance at Weinberger in his vest and shorts.

 
          
“So
don’t blame Sorensen,” said Resnick quickly. “He’s halfway through his second
shift by now. He gave you a lot of time.”

 
          
Sorensen
yawned dutifully.

 
          
“But
it isn’t up to a duty attendant to decide —”

 
          
“Be
reasonable, Jim. As
Alice
says, you were going to stay here for ever.”

 
          
“Like
Sleeping Beauties,” said Sally Costello sweetly.

 
          
“Bewitched, entranced.
Right.”
Resnick smiled gratefully.

 
          
The
two men scrambled out of the cage and began to pull on their clothes. Promptly
Alice Huron sat down on one of the vacated chairs. ‘Sitting in judgement,’
thought Jim. Resnick gripped the back of the other chair and pivoted about that
fulcrum from side to side, like a nervous lion tamer.

 
          
Any
notion of privacy had obviously disappeared, so far as Alice Huron was
concerned. Now that Weinberger had been led away, she questioned Jim
relentlessly, while Resnick bobbed about, allowing it.

 
          
“A
dangerously interesting set of fantasies,” she said at last. “Just what the
hell did you expect, taking Neo-H with that nut?”

 
          
“Truth,”
replied Jim coldly.
“The truth.”

 
          
“And
do you really think you found the truth? Did you discover the secret master
plan of Death, about which nobody else knows one blue damn?”

 
          
“You
found that place because you looked for it,” said Ananda gently. “But it was
indeed no-place, an illusion of your mind. You were both
alive,
Jim. Had you been dead, there would have been no such
illusion. A philosopher once said, ‘Death is not an experience in life; death
is not lived through.’ Nor did you live through death, my friend. Nor did you
come back to life. You were alive all the time. So how could you know anything
about death?”

 
          
Jim
shrugged.

 
          
“Nothing
is known about death, because
death is nothing,” went on Ananda. “It is no-knowledge.
Which
is why there is nothing to fear, or to know.
”

 
          
“You
were
conditioned
by Weinberger,” said
Alice
firmly.

 
          
“That’s
all too likely,” nodded
Resnick
. “I think it’s high
time you dismantled this nonsensical device
. ”
He
rocked his chair about violently as though he wanted to pitch it through the
glass walls, smashing them and buckling the filigree cage for ever.

 
          
Ananda
disagreed, however.

 
          
“It
isn’t a nonsensical device. No, I wouldn’t say that. On the contrary! It
amplifies the sense of death as something to experience. So it is a means, a
pathway. Oh, it is most certainly the wrong path if you tread it in that
direction — into the fantasy projections of your own mind. But perhaps it is
the right path when you retrace your steps, back into yourself — and see
yourself revealed as an illusion too.”

 
          
“Pretty
words
! ”
snapped
Alice
. Yet Jim darted the man a glance of thanks
— if indeed Ananda was trying to help him; and Jim believed that he was.

 
          
“Have
you got any more Neo-H tablets?” asked Resnick, sounding casual.
Falsely casual.

 
          
“No,”
Jim lied. In fact there were half a dozen tablets in his pocket.
He avoiding smoothing his coat down or doing anything similar to
betray himself.

 
          
“I
wonder,” began
Alice
. But she was not wondering whether Jim was lying. “I wonder: Client
Weinberger’s vision of death has given him the glimpse of a path, as Lama
Ananda says: a pathway through to safety and salvation. If Client Weinberger
doesn’t get ‘captured* — if he dies ‘surprised* — then he’s safe. In his
opinion!
Right?
So I wonder whether we should not,
with his consent, arrange for him to die by
surprise?
For him not to know the moment?
For it to
come suddenly — as suddenly as a gunshot?
We might make a bargain, Noel.
If Client Weinberger will make public atonement — arrange his peace with the
world — then later, at some time unknown except to . . .” She hesitated.

 
          
“Except
to Dr Menotti?” asked Sally sharply.

 
          
Alice
shook her head. “Ordinary euthanasia is too
‘slow’.”

 
          
“Except
to the assassin,’’ said Resnick bluntly. “Who would that be? Jim?
Yourself?
Will you, Alice, leap out pointing a gun and pull
the trigger?’’

 
          
“Where
is the gun, by the way?’’ asked
Alice
.

 
          
“I
handed it over to a Peace Officer,’’ Jim told her. “I was close to Weinberger
at the ceremony. Everyone else seemed paralysed.’’

 
          
“You
do
have a lot to do with all this.
You didn’t, by any chance, bring the gun from Gracchus in the first place, to
slip into Weinberger’s paw?’’

 
          
“Don’t
be absurd!”

 
          
“So
the gun’s locked up in the Octagon. That’s a shame.
Perhaps.”

 
          
“We
can’t start shooting people,” said Resnick faintly. “What sort of good death
would that be?”

 
          
“ ‘If
any word of this got out,’ ” sneered
Alice
.

 
          
“Frankly,
you sound like an
agent provocateur
,
even to suggest it,” Jim said gladly to the woman.

 
          
Alice
inclined her head his way.

 
          
“Oh, very clever.
Now you all listen to me. Weinberger won’t
die, except by surprise. We’ll take that as read. So if that’s his idea of a
good death, well, why shouldn’t we in this one instance oblige?”

 
          
“It
could be interpreted as revenge,” Ananda pointed out mildly.
“Tit
for tat.”

 
          
“Oh,
but / don’t put forward any claim to do the deed. I’ll tell you who ought to do
it by any natural logic. Noel already named him as the prime candidate — and
that’s Weinberger’s own trustworthy guide, the same guide who nursed that
man’s fantasies into full bloom!”

 
          
“Once
it has bloomed, the flower can wilt,” said Ananda. “Not before.”

 
          
Alice
ignored Ananda’s aphorism, if indeed it
amounted to such.

 
          
“Since
the guide in question seems to have swallowed this whole rigmarole,” she went
on, “you can bet that he would shoot straight and true! For his client’s sake,
he’d have to!”

 
          
“He
would be setting a terrible precedent,” said Resnick. “The role of guide as
friendly mediator, and the role of the euthanaser should be kept quite
distinct.”

 
          
Jim
flared up.

 
          
“I
would be setting a precedent? Me? As though I even suggested this, let
alone.
. .! Phew. A precedent, indeed! Precedents! I'd say
that we’re all getting just a bit too bureaucratic hereabouts. The time was,
when a man who had just been miraculously cured would have merited some kind
of.
. . oh well, nevermind! Okay, he’s still a murderer. And
the time was, too, when even a murderer — who was out of his wits at the time
of the killing — would have just been isolated from society till such time as
he could be eased gently back . . .”

 
          
“.
. .
on
to the motorway of murder,”
Alice
finished for him.
“As
though he only had a flat tyre that needed changing and patching up.”