Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (16 page)

 
          
“We’re
coming along too,” says Peter.

 
          
“I
certainly am,” says Wu. “He’s my responsibility. I allowed it.”

 
          
“You
shall all come. The time is right.” Sereny reaches out and touches briefly,
with his fingertips, the faint down upon Wu’s cheek. She flinches.

 
          
The empty ‘town’
on Menfaa island is
simply a set of connexions in implied space. Its courtyards are mere
punctuation. No bird could find a roosting ledge in its hollow towers, which
are empty shells. The maze-paths between the arcs of walls are cambered and
guttered so that not even rainfall should fill them. Yet there’s no
horror vacui
about the place. This
notional nowhere simply
is.
Ritchie,
stepping along with blind eyes, seems like its perfect inhabitant.

 
          
A
paved bailey surrounds the white pyramid. Window slits pierce the stone facing
irregularly, all in the lower part.

 
          
Its
vestibule is closed off from the interior by a number of screen doors, while a
broad cantilevered ramp curves up to the level above.

 
          
When
Sereny calls out, one of these doors opens and the Tharliparan emerges. He’s
blank-masked, dressed in a white tunic.

 
          
His right hand is missing.

           
“Yarrish! You’re the same person,
aren’t you?” (Unless they go in for ceremonial amputation!)

 
          
The
mask non-regards me. “Here, we are the Tharliparan. Is it time?” he asks
Sereny. Sereny says yes, but explains about Ritchie.

 
          
“Such
misfortunes of one’s own making!” sighs the Tharliparan. “But at least this
proves that it is time. You have become sensitive to Askatharli. Gestation is
over. Now the task of the hero can begin.”

 
          
Ren6
stares at his palm as though to read his fortune in the tiny golden
hair-leaves, but Wu, determined to clarify the echelons of responsibility,
says, “So as Yarrish you run the town council. What exactly do you do as
Tharliparan?”

           
“We link with the beyond.”

 
          
“You
get your instructions, through this pyramid, from elsewhere? From a central
organization? Located in that place you mentioned as being our proper target:
Darshanor?”

 
          
“No,
no. The Yarrish presides in the town—and the people agree or disagree with
him.”

 
          
“With
yow.”

 
          
“The
Yarrish is simply my personal self: this single flesh you see.
We
—who are the Tharliparan—are a dual
being, a dyad: myself and the aska of my beloved who has gone into Askatharli
and is still with me. We bonded as a hero, out at the boundary between Getka
and Menka—as you too will bond. It is better that it happens there, for the
ordinary world must carry on. One of us returned into this ordinary world. The
other, who was killed, thus entered the extraordinary world. Now we link the
two realms. To a Yarrish, there must correspond a Tharliparan— just as this
world reflects the other world and symbolises it. As Menka is reflected in
Getka, so is Menfaa in Lyndarl. We built the walls and paths outside to remind
ourselves that there is something which we cannot ordinarily see, yet which is
symbolised in what we do see. The city of
Lyndarl
is the place of signs, not here.”

 
          
“But
Menka is dead,” objects Rene, looking up from the chart on his hand.

 
          
“Death
is not dead. Beyond death is Askatharli where all our acts have their
prototypes. Menka is full. Menka is part of our world—the other side to it—but
Menka is also all around us. Think of it, rather, as Askatharli. Because of the
physical condition of our world, with one side empty, we tend to teach
children, to begin with, by this simple analogy. We embody this analogy on
Menfaa island.”

 
          
“If
Askatharli is ‘imagination-space’,” says Zoe, “the place of the Imagining; and
if the Imagining is ‘God’, so that really we’re speaking about what we call
‘Heaven’, and you are linked to it right now—”

 
          
“Any
hero is linked to it. This link strengthens everyone’s capacity to exist in
Askatharli when they sleep, detached from ordinary consciousness of the world.”

 
          
“Then
you have proof of the survival of the . . . aska, the ‘soul’.”

 
          
“Proof?
We have experience. My bond-beloved experiences this now; so I do too
—we
do. I am both here, and there—
though ‘there’ is not a place; it is beyond places.”

 
          
“But
how? How?”

 
          
“We
have the means, because we are so near the wellspring.”

 
          
“They
have a technology of souls,” whispers Wu. “A science of some kind. These
helmets have something to do with it. They’re psychic recorders, transmitters,
I don’t know what. Maybe they even
create
the soul. What a tool for controlling people: the illusion of survival! It’s a
theocratic technology— lamaist
Tibet
run by a scientific priesthood. They want
to spread their authority to other species, other star systems. Why should
they? Apparently they have the tools to do it, but what do they gain?”

 
          
“This
is our science of the beyond,” says the Tharliparan, as though reading her
soul. “My bond-beloved sees your doubts. We make it available so that other
worlds may see beyond themselves, into the Imagining. So that the mirror may
return the reflection to its origin.”

 
          
Peter
shivers with excitement. (As do I.) “Shut up,” he snaps at Wu.

 
          
“As
to how, we wish this to be explained to you by a hero of an alien race who has
become part of this experience. We shall go up.”

 
          
“What
about Ritchie?” clamours Wu.

 
          
“We
must hunt his aska in its dream. Up above.”

 
          
My
skin prickles as we mount the ramp. There’s an electricity— and a kind of
surface tension that affects not my body but something else: my very ability
to mount the slope.

 
          
Now
we’re through, in a large softly-lit chamber, quite empty apart from a further
cantilevered ramp sweeping upwards to the floor above. Its four walls slope
inwards, blankly. Light comes from the floor itself: a luminous, glassy expanse
divided by thin strips of tiles and surrounded by a perimeter pathway. Each
floor panel is large enough for several people to stand on. They look fragile,
like sheets of ice, though there’s nothing visible through them, only light
itself.

 
          
“It’s
like High Space,” whispers Peter. “The gloaming. Brighter though.”

           
I slide one foot out on to the
nearest of them.

 
          
“Walk
out, Amy Dove,” encourages the Tharliparan. “Look down. The light here is the
light of Askatharli, the light of the Imagining. Here is the place of the
coherent dream, sculpted in Askatharli.”

 
          
“Don’t,”
warns Wu. I ignore her.

 
          
“Now
you are in a place where the rules are those of the imagination,” comes the
Tharliparan’s voice. “You are in image- space, here on this level of the
pyramid.” He pitches his voice to say hidden things to me—to address something
in me which responds as the chick in its shell responds to the heat of the hen;
as those alien heliotropes outside the caravanserai respond to the sun and its
hidden course behind the world to next day’s dawn. The language has a life of
its own; in the roots of the words nest other, true meanings.

 
          
“Images
seen in mirrors, Amy Dove, are intermediate realities. These are mirrors of the
shared imagination, windows into Askatharli. So the ordinary eye sees nothing
in them.”

 
          
“Windows
into . . . Heaven?” exclaims Zoe, somewhere.

 
          
“We
are sculptors of the dream: the dream more real than the world, though it needs
the world to sustain it. You are clad in Askatharli life, since your arrival;
this links you to imagination- space.”

 
          
“Life?
You mean these hairs on our skin?”

 
          
He
grips my wrist—with no fingers! with no hand! With his shorn-off right hand he
holds me firm.

 
          
At
his (at
their
) aska-touch, my vision
rotates. Below me, outside, is Menfaa. Immediately the empty lanes become
thronged thoroughfares, as the island expands hugely. The roofless walls mutate
into palaces. The courts of emptiness are crowded amphitheatres. The dry
alleys are sapphire canals afloat with junks and ornate houseboats. The city
must hold at least half a million natives.

 
          
They
ride horned, tusked creatures through the streets. They fly on garuda birds
through the sky. They picnic, they trade, they copulate, they dance. They spar
with swords. In arenas they fight bone-frilled beasts: dragons, basilisks. In
the streets they themselves walk as beasts, transmuted into harpies, sirens,
fabulous aliens.

 
          
“This
is one dream we inhabit when we climb the sleep-tree,” says the voice. “The
waking hero sees it through the mask. Move on.”

 
          
Held
in the invisible grasp, I must.

 
          
And
Menfaa vanishes. In its place is a new Menfaa: a city of devotion, miracle.
Translucent pagodas arise. Thin spires with helices of circling steps. Arched,
transparent mazes are trod by golden pilgrims.
Crystal
trees sing out vibrations of fractured
light. Bubbles float by, bearing along ancient, grotesque Gods. Images? Or the
very Gods alive? Inside the bubbles they cause miracles, they create life and
destroy it: elephantine Gods, reptilian Gods, Gods who are swarms of gnats, and
crystalline hypershapes, and plasma spheres ...

 
          
Beings
of light walk on a plain. They conjure waterfalls from the clouds, they command
rivers to flow up into the sky.

 
          
Music
reaches my ears: a music filling all the spaces in the missing-music that we
heard when Samti and Vilo sailed to Menfaa on that blood-sailed junk.

 
          
“Move
on.”

 
          
Here
is a city of horrors: siege and pillage, rape and fire. The victors set out
torture instruments in the streets. These victors are naked, furless Getkans.
On their instruments they stretch their golden victims. They flay them and
dissect them, till skinned-rabbit bodies quiver on the racks. The unpeeled
epidermises, stripped from them like body-gloves, inflate and dance mockingly
in the hot air over slow fires. Presently the victors haul down these golden
body-gloves and dress in them themselves. Now they become the vanquished
inhabitants, labouring over tormented, naked enemies—they seem to have
switched roles. The victors slacken the racks and wash the tormented nude
bodies with ointment. Upon the flayed flesh golden hairs begin to sprout—a
harvest of hairs, till all are golden. The maimed and broken rise from amidst
the cruel instruments, restored.

 
          
“Do
you see this, Peter?” I cry to him, somewhere. Somewhere else.

 
          
“This
is a cruel dream,” whispers the Tharliparan. “Yet it has great meaning.”

 
          
“Is
it
real
?”

 
          
“It’s
an event in the space of the imagination. A sculpted dream by a master, which
we can all share if we dare to, when we climb the sleep-tree.” The missing hand
hauls me back from it. The scene rotates out of my plane of vision. I’m back
with the others. The floor mirrors are vacantly luminous, without content.

 
          
“Ritchie
Blue will stay here in the hall of the dream. We will see where his aska
wanders. You will climb up above, to meet the Paravarthun.”

 
          
“This
floor, and your masks, are energized ... by the hairs of the dead?” puzzles
Rene.