Watson, Ian - Novel 16 (24 page)

 
          
‘Who
is this Gupta? What does he know?’

 
          
‘I
... I got to know him at Kamberchanian’s inn. I had no chance to tell him about
the palace, thanks to Praxis.’

 
          
‘Why
should you be wanting to tell your Gupta about the palace at
that
particular point, when you had
ample opportunity earlier on?’

 
          
‘I
. . . um, one of the fighters told me to turn up at the palace tomorrow.’

 
          
‘So
you hoped Gupta would go there instead - to explain your current predicament
and beg Aristander to bail you out?’

           
‘Something like that. I wasn’t
thinking too coherently.’

 
          
‘Bail
you out?’ Brusquely Thessany shook her head. ‘He would love to have an agent
placed here, if I’m mixed up in this, as I obviously am. His men will come
seeking you, fishing for information.’

 
          
‘No,
they won’t. Aristander doesn’t know I’ve become your slave. Gupta knows - but
he doesn’t know anything about Aristander.’

 
          
‘I
think a court futurologist might manage to deduce your presence here, given the
limited number of possibilities. And here’s where you’ll stay - indoors.’ As
though she had only now noticed the servants still loitering in the chapel
doorway, she screamed at them: ‘Get about your work, you lot! Aren’t we ever
going to eat tonight?’

 
          
Praxis
shoved at the cook, the maidservants. They fled across the courtyard, giving
Thessany a wide berth.

 
          
‘You,
Praxis: come and see me later!’

 
          
The
change from whisper to scream almost deafened Alex so that he hardly heard what
she murmured next.

 
          
‘What?’

 
          
‘I
said: so, thanks to you, Aristander knows I have the scroll.’

 
          
‘He
doesn’t know what’s in it.’

 
          
‘No.’

 
          
‘Neither
do I. Has it occurred to you that the mage might have given Moriel back a blank
scroll, if he could lay his hands on such a thing?’

 
          
‘Why
kill someone to steal a blank scroll?’

 
          
‘To
eliminate a potential nuisance. To scare you off.’

 
          
‘Same
scroll. I put secret marks on it. Good thinking, though.’

 
          
‘Thanks.
What’s in the scroll?’

           
‘So that you can try and tell the
palace, given half a chance? Not likely.’ Thessany did a double take. ‘What
makes you think
I
know what’s in the
scroll? Mori was knifed before he could report back to me.’

 
          
‘You
wouldn’t have gone there in person for the handover unless you had swallowed a
big chunk of bait already. Up in your room earlier on - that’s before you heard
about the palace - you didn’t deny that you knew.’

 
          
‘True.’

 
          
‘Let’s
hope you were told the truth about the scroll.’ ‘Oh, I believe so! No one would
have concocted ...’ She shook her head. ‘How could I feel safe telling you?’
‘I’ve no wish to tell the palace. It’s for
me
that I want to know! Don’t you see, I’ve been ... in bondage to that scroll
ever since I arrived in Babylon? It’s been controlling me, making me do this
and that.’ He laughed giddily. ‘It almost seems appropriate, with the damn
thing in your charge, that now you should be controlling me!’

 
          
A
smile hesitated on her lips. ‘A scroll that controls . . . What a fine
description.’

 
          
‘Yes?
In what way?’

 
          
She
wouldn’t explain. Nevertheless, she seemed to soften. ‘I never dreamed you’d
managed to meet the king . . .’ She spoke gently. ‘Tell me about him.’ Sensing
that this was bait of a kind, Alex related every detail about the dying king in
his bedchamber. She listened attentively, as though he were a favoured factotum
telling a bedtime story to a little girl.

           
At the end of his tale she said,
‘It’s music for the wild dance of this city; that’s what our little scroll is.
It’s the score.’

 
          
‘You
said “our” scroll,’ he remarked gently.

 
          
‘Ours.
Yours and mine. Everyone’s. Babylon is a great big brothel - and we are whores,
all of us.

           
Dressed-up, painted, performing
whores. It isn’t just at Ishtar’s temple or in one of those striptease parlours
that one’s a whore. You are. The king is. I am. All the time. So will my father
be, if he has to dance to someone else’s tune.’

 
          
Smells
of lamb were now drifting across the courtyard from the kitchen. Mama Zabala
appeared in her doorway and called out into the darkness impatiently: ‘Alex the
slave! Hurry up!’

 
          
‘You’d
better go and do some slaving,’ Thessany said. ‘I must talk to Praxis about
making sure you don’t sneak out; and that nobody sneaks in to bother you.’

 
          
She
said this, however, as though taking Alex into her confidence.

 
          
In
which a whipped dog wishes he were
 
invisible

 
          
Beneath
the fig tree Alex tossed and turned on his straw pallet amidst loosening
blankets. As dawn began to dim the stars he woke shivering, rolled the warmth
of wool tighter around him; and worried. He told himself that it was rarely a
good idea to worry about anything whatever in the small hours of night or early
in the morning, when the body is sluggish and the mind a prey to pessimism. But
his mind preferred to fret about what Thessany had said in connection with the
scroll, though she may have spoken fancifully.

 
          
In
what sense were the denizens of Babylon all whores? In what way was the city a
brothel?

 
          
What
is a whore? A person exploited by others. Sexually. But not always. A person
used. Allowing herself to be used; or himself. Often with little choice in the
matter. Forced into it. Then accepting the situation, coming perhaps to relish
it.

 
          
People
came gladly to Babylon. Did they come principally - had Alex? - so that they
could live out fantasy roles in a conceptual brothel given massive shape and
substance? Here in a zone where future laws and morals and customs had been
abolished?

 
          
Was
Babylon his own brain-brothel where he submitted himself - willingly? - to
impoverishment, slavery, entrapment, humiliation? Where he sought to initiate
himself into ancient wisdom by suffering traumas which stripped away the
unfunctional modern self, the self which could not survive? What was the real
logic of the events which had happened to him? Were they accidental, or did
they happen according to some invisible design? Some program? A program which
matched the city with his psyche?

 
          
Did
that scroll from the future, in some strange way, really control him? Like some
precious dream talisman which forever slips through your fingers, like some
dream book which you can never manage to open and read, did it exist not as a
key to his situation but as a tangible symbol of that situation? Did the scroll
represent
some program which was
operating his Babylonian delirium?

 
          
He
stared through the dark branches of the fig tree at the fading stars in the
sky, then at the dimly windowed walls around the courtyard, gradually emerging
from obscurity and becoming visible again; and this thought came to him:

 
          
What if I’m not a person of flesh and blood
at all? Not a being of nerve and saliva and semen, but a ghost - a copy of a
person called Alex Winter?

           
The idea seemed oddly familiar, like
a long-lost memory, as though he had known this once and then been forced to
forget it.

 
          
Why
build a whole city of Babylon in the Arizona desert at such enormous expense
when you could simulate it instead? When you could program a fuzzy- logic,
self-steering computer capable of carrying out billions of operations per
second?

 
          
Where
would such a computer be located?

 
          
Under
Babel? No, because Babel would be part of the pretence.

 
          
At
Heuristics. At the University of the Future, tucked away underground in some
dust-free, steady- temperature, protected environment.

           
What if such a computer did not
merely monitor Babylon, but actually generated Babylon and its inhabitants
within its circuits?

 
          
Perhaps
there was a city of Babylon in the desert miles from Heuristics - but it was a
holographos
of a city, a complex
interacting evolving
holographos
projected
there so that the experimenters would not have to rely merely on print-outs or
animated graphics but could stroll around inside the
holographos
observing events, unobserved themselves, the unseen yet
solid haunters of a ghost city, a city of dreadful light, which was ghostly
except to those ghost citizens within it who were of the same frail substance.

 
          
How
far had computers advanced? Could they simulate human consciousness? And if
one consciousness, why not many?

 
          
What
year had he really left Oregon and come to Babylon? Had several years been
edited away? Was it later than he thought - and he the volunteer or victim of
some fascist government think-tank? Was the question meaningless, because he
had
never
existed outside of
Babylonia, or the university? Not this particular version of Alex.

 
          
Could
Deborah somehow discover the answer when she went to the Underworld after her
year as Marduk’s holy whore? Trying to contact her then might be like a living
person trying to contact the dead to enquire about an afterlife!

 
          
Maybe
Alex could never lay his hands on the secret of the scroll. Never, by
definition, if the scroll was no more than a symbol, an internalized symbol, of
the program which governed him.

 
          
And
maybe Babylon wasn’t concerned with survival at all! Maybe Babylon was all
about consciousness instead. Maybe
Babylon
was a computer programmed to achieve
consciousness - to become a living being by intuitive symbolic leaps, using as
its data its internal persons, its whores of the mind who were copies of real
persons, models.

 
          
Shivers
racked him, and he rose.

 
          
Everything
he had just thought about was insane. How chilling to imagine that things
weren’t real; yet in a stupid way, how comforting! Lunatics must feel both
frozen and consoled by their rejection of reality. Yet eventually all richness,
all depth would leach away till their lives were a diagram, a sketch of life.

 
          
To
warm up, Alex jogged round the courtyard half a dozen times; then, recalling
Nabu, he did some press- ups. The exercise invigorated him. Soon there was
colour, and warmth.

 
          
Mama
Zabala popped her head out of the kitchen door. 'Slave!’ she bellowed amiably.
'Fetch water!’

 
          
He
ran to oblige, glad to be occupied; purged of anxiety.

 
          
The
scroll? It might prove a key to gaining his freedom from Thessany; but he
wasn’t sure that he wanted to be free from her yet.

 
          
As
if to confirm Alex’s new mood, while he was heaving his second bucket of water
from the butt, the doorkeeper limped into the yard and gave him the once-over,
nodding significantly to let him know that he was guardian of the exit. That’s
one white slave who’s going no place on his ownsome. No, Missee Thessanee!

 
          
Then
Alex remembered the curtain in the chapel. What was there in the blackness
behind it? A niche to accommodate a
holographos
projector, linked by magic cord to the temple over the way? Or more? An actual
hidden route into the lion’s den . . . ?

 
          
Alex’s
day was full of domestic circumstances, none of which amounted to an event. In
chapel that evening the black curtain remained closed. Eventually Alex dossed
down under the fig tree, telling himself,
mantra-like:      
till midnight till midnight till

 
          
midnight. . .

 
          
He
slept.

 
          
He
awoke at an hour which certainly felt like midnight - the sparkling
constellations overhead were no clock for him, no timepiece of a thousand
jewels. Creeping from the comfort of his blankets he bunched these to resemble
a sleeping figure, then trod softly to the chapel door.

 
          
Just
inside, as he recalled, there was an oil lamp on a shelf. His fingers searched;
he struck a stinking brimstone match and lit the wick. The chapel became feebly
visible.

 
          
More
lights? No. But he took several spare matches in case a sudden draught
extinguished his lamp.

 
          
He
wasted no time examining the mechanism which had tugged the curtain aside,
simply lifted the fabric and stepped behind. He was in a deep alcove, with a
flight of stone steps at the back leading steeply down. A glint of glass in the
wall suggested part of the
holographos
system. Ignoring this, he descended twenty steps, counting each one. He found
himself in a round-arched tunnel disappearing into darkness on a downhill
gradient. The floor was hard earth.

 
          
Now
let’s see. The south wall of Marduk’s ziggurat must be a thousand or so cubits
from where he was standing; though maybe crypts or catacombs extended outward
under the temple grounds. Hard to be sure, but this tunnel seemed to be heading
somewhat in the wrong direction.

 
          
After
walking a while he came to a door of solid iron blocking the way. This door had
a curious lock, like a combination lock for the yet uninvented bicycle, built
into it. Four little inset iron wheels were embossed with the letters of the
Greek alphabet. The wheels rotated easily enough, not needing oiling from the
spout of his lamp.

 
          
So
what was the right combination?

 
          
He
tried bits of the name Marduk and bits of the name Thessany; without result.

 
          
Did
Thessany know the combination? Maybe she knew it without knowing that she knew.
At evening prayers she would chant a whole string of names. Marduk had at least
fifty names cataloguing his various virtues. Why not one of those? A short
one. A four-letter one. After all, Marduk had to be able to remember the magic
word.

 
          
He
held the lamp up and stared into the flame, to put himself into a responsive
state of mind. The flame danced as he breathed, blanking out the iron door,
taking him back to the chapel where this same flame had burned amidst its frail
friends. The tunnel walls were the chapel walls. Keeping the lamp at eye level,
he knelt down and mumbled till fragments of the hymns emerged, and names.

 
          
The
charm which lulls . . . sweet life restored . . .
Tutu
is life renewed!’

 
          
Casually,
so as not to break the charm, he dialled tau upsilon twice; in vain.

 
          
Wasn’t
there another name just like that? Damn it. Oh yes.

 
          
‘Mutter
curses . . . power of words . . . spellbinding . . . this is Tu, Tu, Tu . . .
This is
TukuY

 
          
Alter
the second tau to kappa.

 
          
Click.

 
          
The
door yielded to his push.

 
          
His
lamp did little to light a much larger arched brick tunnel. Marduk’s corridor
joined this at an acute angle. Alex’s nose and ears told him of the rustle of
dirty water, and soon he stood at the brink of a stream running down a channel
in the centre. The effluent, or canal spillage, might be any depth, but it was
a trivial jump across. From the other side he considered angles and directions.
If the large tunnel ran on in a straight line it would eventually reach the
river about where the river left the city; and it would
come
from under the grounds of Marduk’s temple. He walked that way,
shielding the lamp flame, and soon came to an iron door just like the other
one, even to the combination lock. The tunnel still continued, presumably
towards the bowels of Babel.

 
          
Setting
the lettered wheels to spell
tuku,
he
tugged the door open.

 
          
A
corridor led him to a black curtain of heavy wool, which he shifted slightly to
peep round.