Watson, Ian - Novel 16 (3 page)

 
          
It
all made sense.

 
          
The
Euphrates
made a return journey, too. Once well out
of sight of the city and the southern Babylonian estates, the bulk of the water
was filtered and cleaned and pumped through underground pipelines back to its
source some twenty miles north of
Babylon
. From there, topped up with extra water
from Gila

           
Bend
, the river recommenced its course down
through verdant
Babylonia
.

 
          
Alex
was aware that visitors should never allude to this arrangement, nor to the
buried nuclear power source which would run the pumps automatically for at
least the next fifty years. Citizens of
Babylon
ignored the origin of the
Euphrates
; forgot it. According to the laws of
Hammurabi, the penalty for broaching the forbidden topic was enslavement to a
temple on grounds of blasphemy. Or worse: the Greek visitors had been told that
an offender could legally be executed.

 
          
Thus
actually the broad
Euphrates
flowed all the way from distant
Armenia
, and onward down to the sea.

 
          
Ami mad?
wondered Alex momentarily.
Are we all
mad, who come here?

           
No! The pretence regarding the river
was a logical lunacy. It aimed to challenge the greater lunacies: of time,
decay, decadence, and the death of civilization. It was only one item in a much
greater pretence; a pretence so grand that it readily became reality.

 
          
Enough
said, regarding the false
Euphrates
.
The true
Euphrates
.

 
          
Was
Alex mad? Or would he be mad only once he became a Babylonian?

 
          
No.
He had been mad previously. The rest of the world was mad. It had been mad for
years, waiting for the end.

 
          
Now
Alex would be sane.

 
          
And
now the hovercraft had arrived at its destination. The road of concrete had
disappeared a while since, giving way to a road of dirt.

 
          
In
the lee of the outer walls below the looming citadel, the craft settled on its
skirts. Its engines died. The dust swirled and settled. The passengers
disembarked.

           
An avenue led onward and inward,
tunnelling between wall and citadel. Down this avenue they could see the more
massive inner walls pierced by the Ishtar Gate. But before they could proceed,
a squad of soldiers spilled out of a guardroom and barred the way with spears.
These were local soldiers, robed and bearded; not Macedonians.

 
          
‘What’s
wrong?’

 
          
‘Their
corporal’s counting us,’ said Deborah. ‘That’s all.’

 
          
It
wasn’t quite all. Even when the corporal had finished totalling the new
arrivals, his men still blocked the way. The corporal glanced impatiently along
the avenue. Soon a small group of Greeks, no more than half a dozen, hastened
into view, shepherded by a couple of spearmen. The Greeks trotted along the
avenue, then headed for the waiting hovercraft. The soldiers all dropped back
into shelter, though otherwise none of them acted as though the
twentieth-century machine existed. The craft quickly roared to life,
reinflating its skirts and whipping up clouds of dust which covered all the
waiting visitors.

 
          
They
had arrived neat and clean, but now, as the craft swung round and departed,
suddenly they were as travel-stained as though they had walked the whole way to
Babylon - across all of Asia Minor, Cilicia, Cappadocia, down through
Mesopotamia.

 
          
‘Shit,’
one voice said loudly in English - and a soldier’s spear jerked as if to impale
the word. For English was a dead language; it hadn’t yet been born.

 
          
The
corporal stepped forward. ‘Now you enter Babylon, Gate of God,’ he called out
in Greek.

 
          
The
newcomers had to stop once again outside the Ishtar Gate, not because of
soldiers but simply to admire.

           
The massive inner wall of baked
brick rose impregn- ably from the steeply sloping scarp of a deep canal- moat
lined with burnt brick and bitumen. A bridge of removable planks led across to
the gate, its towers gorgeously enamelled and decorated. At top and bottom were
friezes of rosettes like spinning chariot wheels. In between, against a bright
turquoise background, beasts in glazed, moulded brick stood out one above the
other: white and blue bulls with yellow horns and hooves, and dragons.

 
          
The
dragons’ bodies were covered with scales. Their hind legs were those of a bird
of prey; their forelegs were feline. Tails were tipped with scorpion stings;
heads sported the double horns of the Arabian viper. Mane and scaly claws and
forked tongue were a golden brown; the rest was creamy white. The dragons
stepped forth proudly, quivering with alertness; though at the same time they
looked somewhat peabrained.

 
          
Alex’s
thoughts were sharp and clear. They were as luminous as that brickwork. He felt
that he ought to perform a sacrifice of thanksgiving to some long- forgotten
resurrected god. To Shamash, perhaps, whose sun beat down. It would only be
polite.

 
          
‘Rejoice,’
said Deborah. ‘We have come.’

 
          
She
sounded like Philippides after his marathon run to Athens when the tide of the
Persians had been turned, a hundred and sixty-odd years ago now. There were
already so many layers of history; of rise and fall . . .

 
          
So
many layers. For Babylon the Magnificent, the Babylon of Hammurabi the compiler
of laws and builder of canals, fell to the pugnacious, greedy, uncultured (and
perhaps maligned) Kassites, who let the city fall into neglect. After a while
that first
Babylon
was totally destroyed by the Assyrian
Sennacherib. His soldiers killed every man, woman and child in the city,
smashed the houses down, and even diverted a major canal to flood the ruins.

 
          
Less
than a hundred years later, the Chaldeans - who destroyed the overstretched
Assyrians with Persian help - rebuilt Babylon as their own capital. Before
long the city, under Nebuchadnezzar, was even more splendid than ever.

 
          
Yet
curiously, these Chaldeans failed to quite live in the present. Certainly their
intelligentsia - priests and scribes - failed. Amidst sumptuous new palaces and
temples, and even as they were building astronomical observatories to study
the planets and the stars, they were also digging nostalgically in the old
ruins for clay books and record tablets. With these texts as their guide, the
Chaldeans began affectedly to copy the past in dress, speech, and custom.
(Perhaps that was why, according to some Greeks, King Nebuchadnezzar had tried
to collect and destroy all old records!)

 
          
Soon
the Persians, former allies, attacked and overthrew the Chaldean Empire;
slowly Babylon crumbled away into ruins and wreckage. Or more exactly, Darius
the Great adorned the city; then his heir Xerxes taxed it savagely to pay for
his Greek wars, eventually sacking and wrecking the city when it rebelled. But by
the time of Darius III Babylon was back in business.

 
          
Presently,
Alexander of Macedon overthrew the Persians (and put a torch to the winter
palace of the Persian kings). But then something new in history happened.
Alexander conceived the dream of ruling the whole world. He unified the
Macedonians and Persians; the first world empire was organized with a common
language and a common economy, centred upon
Babylon
. Babylon rose again as capital of the known
world.

 
          
Briefly,
oh so briefly. For in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar Alex’s namesake lay
a-dying, at the age of thirty-three.

 
          
This
was the end of Babylon yet again; the last days of rekindled glory. Rise and
fall. Rise and fall. And final fall. Ahead, dust and ashes; and the unknowable
future.

 
          
What
future? The future of Rome, currently a town of no great note. The future of
Byzantium. The future of the Holy Roman Empire. Of the Spanish Empire. The
British Empire. The Third Reich. The Stars and Stripes.

 
          
Dust
and ashes. Buried monuments. Bones. Amnesia.

 
          
Meanwhile,
what rough village in the Congo or the South Seas or Patagonia was slouching
towards the future to become the new capital of human life?

 
          
Which
indeed? - when there was no room left in the world for new golden hordes to
gather, no lost forsaken hills for barbarians to sweep invigoratingly down
from?

 
          
Where
was the new birthplace of power and splendour? Could there be such a thing?
Must the latest Babylons - of New York and Moscow, Tokyo and Peking - make way
in their turn? And if so, make way for what?

 
          
What
were the dynamics of decline and fall? Where was the elixir of immortality?
How, as the years rolled by, could the present be perpetuated into the future
so that change did not sweep away all that one knew? What did the social psyche
know which the futurologists knew not?

 
          
To
answer such questions was
Babylon
rebuilt in the
Arizona
desert and rekindled with life, gloriously poised on its final
precipice with Alexander forever dying of a fever in the palace.

           
Had the history of
Babylon
happened in quite the order that Alex
remembered? Maybe; maybe not! He had trouble sorting it all out in his head. So
many ups and downs, before the final downer. Undoubtedly the sequence was more
complicated.

 
          
That
didn’t matter. Babylon had been rebuilt synchronously, simultaneously, with
the city of Hammurabi and the city of Nebuchadnezzar and that of Alexander
coexisting in time. Here in the rekindled Babylon the great buildings of all
the different epochs occurred together.

 
          
Thus
the city questioned time itself; time, the reaper of human dreams.

 
          
Babylon
was no Disneyworld. It was no utopian archology. It was no experimental
community which wilfully turned its back on the twentieth century in fanciful
pursuit of an ancient lifestyle. If it were merely one of these, would the
American government have underwritten the huge initial cost, equivalent to that
of a manned space station? Would it have exempted Babylonia from state and
federal law?

 
          
Space!
Perhaps the future Babylon, the new centre of civilization - if any - would be
in space . . . one day, with the people of the asteroids and moons as the new,
rich, vigorous barbarians. While earth itself would be a ruin.

 
          
In
the meantime Babylon was the most ambitious, most important project regarding
the future of civilization as one knew it.

 
          
Perhaps.

 
          
And
perhaps the university at Heuristics was a monstrous folly and its
Babylon
a different sort of folly; more akin to the
follies built by rich English gentry in their landscape gardens in the eighteenth
century? Though much vaster; and not merely a fagade, but a fully functioning
ancient city.

 
          
Was
the autumn of a culture marked by vast, capricious building projects? By
exercises in architectural metaphysics, designed to stem the tide of time? By
schemes reeking of immortalist religious yearnings masquerading as something
else? (Call this the Ozy- mandias Syndrome!) Was Babylon the psychic salvation
of the American dream, or the very symbol of its decay?