Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (20 page)

 
          
“Yeah.
Killing apart, these insects are really our buddies?” The Ritchie-doll sounds
only faintly ironic. He was, after all, a military pilot once. He understands
pre-emptive strikes.

 
          
“The
term is inexact. They are our agents, controlled by us with the permission of
their home-hive intelligence—”

 
          
So
this is what Gus’s lips were mumbling when we watched Ritchie’s ‘dream of the
real’ inside the pyramid: the words of a superintelligent machine. But we saw
only one side of this weird double-exposure. There was another side to it—a strange
dimension of the psyche that our friends are all trapped in,
for their own sake
.

 
          
Don’t
the Getkans know why the Group-ones and their ‘machine lords’ are here? How
can
the Getkans possibly know this, and
still remain so implacably opposed to them? The answer is that they aren’t
allowed
to know.

 
          
If
this Veil Being does exist, then we are within it already, here and now! This
Heaven is its body.

 
          
How
can we turn our backs on Heaven? Who would want to? I can’t bear the threat of
it being snatched away from me.

 
          
But
Satan’s World ... a black hole sucking at the roots of reality, sucking in
souls to feed itself! While those computers are balancing the odds of . . .
killing our friends, or sending a strike force against us, for our own sake!
Maybe this is all quite literally in Ritchie’s imagination! Maybe none of it’s
true.

 
          
The
Gus-doll makes a steeple with his fingers. “The Group- ones are severely
limited beings—automata in small numbers, who only achieve real sentience in
large collective groups. This is why they are ideal to assist us here. They are
immune. Our current agents have been adapted for life in space by their home-
hive—which has bred many other types for a whole range of ecological niches.
These Group-ones are vacuum-adapted, but they can certainly tolerate a landing
on the surface of Getka!”

 
          
“Look,”
hisses Wu.

 
          
Beyond
the scene that Ritchie has conjured appears a shining .. . vacancy. It’s a
bright hollow, a kind of whirlpool. It wanders slowly down the walkway towards
us: a sort of mobile nothingness, yet curiously positive, intent on . . . what
we’re being shown by the mind-dolls. A rope of purple vine dangling from the
pergola touches it, vanishes, then exists again as though the hollow has tested
it, judged it innocuous, and reinstated it.

 
          
The
hollow touches Ritchie’s projection.

 
          
We’ve
woken early. It isn’t even
midnight
‘morning’ yet. Something woke all six of
us—though our two Getkan friends sleep on, through in the other room. A noise
in the night? We strain our ears, but it’s all completely quiet.

 
          
In
whispers, like children in a dormitory, we speak of our trip through Heaven: of
the great
maidan
, the dream
sculptures of quasi-living beings, the horses we conjured up.

 
          
“Maybe
we all fell off! ” laughs Ritchie.

 
          
Surely
there was something else. What it was, I’ve no idea. Nor he. Nor any of us.

 
          
Never
mind. Soon we’ll dream again. Soon we’ll be back in Heaven.

 
          
Mounting a rhaniq
is easier for Getkans
with their long legs than for us, even though the gawky beasts kneel down,
folding their double-jointed stilts of legs forward like flamingoes.

 
          
We
are hoisted judderingly aloft, higher than the top of any camel’s hump. The
reins describe an arc higher still to the rhaniq’s sheeplike mouth. They tap
the skinny neck like tacklines against a flexible flagpole. A rhaniq’s back
easily supports two riders, one behind the other upon a double saddle.

 
          
So
we ride out of Lyndarl through the umbrella-leafed boskage southwards towards
the sea on four rhaniqs.

 
          
It’s
a hot cloudless day. Rhaniqs are docile enough to ride, once they know your
smell, though inclined to be a little skittish. The impacted fat of their
backs acts as a rubbery shock absorber.

 
          
The
road is wide, paved with ancient weathered flagstones which must once have made
up a perfectly smooth surface. Weather action and invading roots have cracked
and tilted them, though overgrowth is shrivelled back as though it has been
sprayed recently. It seems that more traffic goes by river.

 
          
“Symbiosis,”
muses Ren6, riding pillion to Zoe. He holds up his palm to the sun, staring at
the golden hairs. “I wish I had an electron microscope! So these little
filaments form a symbiosis between the realm of existence and the realm of
essence? It’s still hard to accept.”

 
          
“Which
is why it had to happen to us, before we would understand,” I suggest.

 
          
He
brushes his moustache. “So much for Chance and Necessity! Yet I wonder, what
is the necessity of this golden stuff? What does it get out of the
relationship?”

 
          
“How
many angels can dance on the end of a hair?” grins

           
Peter, glancing back at me. He
perches like a child on our forward saddle, between my knees.

           
“A selective tropism towards highly
evolved life. But why not towards all life?” Ren6 seems to challenge me.

 
          
“Because
our
imaginations are closest to
Askatharli, Rene— and Askatharli is imagination-space. Rhaniqs and birds and
fish only ‘pray’ by being at one with nature. But we pray through our desire
for a higher plane. Birds and beasts can’t do that. They can only be themselves.
We can be something else. Our lives yearn for the Other. Well, here it is on
God’s World.”

 
          
“Yet
they don’t have a religion,” says Zoe. Her black skin is fuzzy and tawny today.

 
          
“Because
this leakage from the beyond is physically present as a fact of life.”

 
          
“Hmm.
The mystics of Islam—who were some keen thinkers! —denied that people could
have any direct knowledge of God or the beyond. Neither the individual nor the
world could exist if that happened. The world would disappear.”

 
          
“Which
is the reason for the bond-beloved system, Zoe. The aska of the dead person is
linked to the living mind. And it happens through this symbiosis—which has no
real existence outside its symbiotic role. It yields a conscious entry point.
Your mystics had no such physical reality to contend with. It seemed impossible
that people could enter that kind of mind-space and still be ordinary living
mortals.”

 
          
“My
mystics said that Creation is safeguarded by a seal.” “Actuality supersedes
theory, Zoe dear. You said that God couldn’t be defined. So how do you know
what is impossible? There can be a world of revelation too. There is. We’re in
it.” Rene shakes his head. But nothing will free him now; nor us. We who drink
the milk of knowledge cannot vomit it back into the cup. Why should we want to?

           
“It shouldn’t become tangible or
concrete in this world,” pursues Zoe. “Yet it seems that it does ... I guess
you could call this ‘angel-hair’! Angels, you know, have no individual
existence according to ‘my’ mystics. They aren’t variants within a species.
They have no numbers, no distinctions . . .”

 
          
“So
each of us becomes an angel. Every Getkan is his or her own angel.”

 
          
“This
road’s very old,” says Wu loudly. “How old? A thousand years? Five thousand?”

 
          
“Getka
has
no history, Wu.” Can’t she
understand? “It only has parahistory: worlds sculpted out of possibility, in
imagination space. That’s where their history is acted out.”

 
          
This
world is paradise—far from mechanistic, data-ridden, overcrowded Earth. I begin
to sing, as we ride down this timeless stone road, inventing a French
chanson
as we go along.

 
          
“Sur le monde de Dieu

           
Huit
amants et leurs anges d’or...”

           
We could be medieval knights and
dames riding towards the Holy Grail. Only, no knight or lady ever rode a giant
skinny cross between a camel and a giraffe, armed with laser rifles, knowing
that the grail was theirs already. Ren6 laughs. This image may become our
collective dream, come
midday
sleep. We’re getting more proficient at the
shared dream, though there are still mysterious empty lapses, at least for me
...

 
          
Wu
barges her rhaniq into ours rather rudely.

 
          
“Ancient
highway, and not many travellers,” she says sharply. “No wonder their
population is small—so many of them are
dead
.
It’s quite surprising there’s any population left! Of course there has to be
some population base to sustain the golden life. If I had tweezers, could I
tear this out, hair by hair? If we’d worn the planet suits would it still have
infested us?”

 
          
Rene
frowns. “It isn’t airborne or waterborne. It simply emerges into existence
where there’s higher imagination. So they say.”

 
          
“So
they become missionaries,” puzzles Zoe.

 
          
Wu
regards the old worn empty road. “Perhaps the burden of angelhood becomes too
much for them? So they share it around. Or are they forced to do this, from
outside—without knowing that something forces them?”

 
          
Eridani
climbs the sky, insulting our increasing sleepiness, burning our tired eyes
like a spotlight of interrogation. Of course we only need to call a halt, and
lie down to sleep, to be wrapt in the radiance of that other plane—beyond and
within and
beneath
that alien sun up
there.

 
          
As
we do presently.

 
          
Unloading
and hobbling the rhaniqs, we camp in the forest,

 
          
Samti
and Vilo put up with our
midday
sleep routine even though it will slow the
journey down. So will their own all-night-long slumber slow down ours ...

 
          
The world is
locked in Winter. Young
larch and pine, cedar and silver birch bow low. They are frozen rigid and
heaped with bales of snow. Yet the sun shines brightly and the forest crackles
with light as our
Volga
drives the score of kilometres from one
zone of the
Science
City
to the next.

 
          
A
bus rocks past in the other direction. The driver’s window is electrically
heated; however, the rest of the bus is a long box of frosted breath. At
precise intervals finger-thawed peepholes show, as though the side of the bus
has been neatly raked by bullets.

 
          
“But
the Committee, Grigory Arkadievitch! ” nags Ludmila Boltz, a hearty wench new
to our Paraphysical Research Unit.

 
          
“Yes
indeed, the Committee.” I nod, only half listening. Soon it will thaw. Before
long there will be mauve and yellow cowslips in these woods. Goat bells will
tinkle. Mosquitoes will whine in our ears as Summer wears hotly on:
zizz-zizz
. . . Can’t you already hear
their irritating hum? It is one note hidden in the thrum of our car engine.

 
          
No
doubt it is the mark of a people who are still in many respects psychologically
primitive that spontaneous committees should emerge on all possible occasions,
to solve problems by collective instinct. We Russians proceed on the unvoiced
principle that true solutions must already exist (platonically, as it were),
and only need to be brought into being by group intuition. Yet isn’t this precisely
how we at the laboratory will evolve the methodology needed to harness the
human mind? Whereas the American parapsychology laboratories tend to be
rational, objective machines, like their magnificent computers which process
the data. Here, the quasi-mystical intuition of a truth just waiting to be
grasped makes that truth extremely hard to quantify; while there in
America
the problem seems to be the opposite one—
their rational marshalling of the facts drives the evasive truth into hiding.
It’s the old problem of the wood and the trees! We Russians see the wood, they
see the trees.

 
          
And
just how is this combinatory vision of ours possible? Simply because we have
always believed in an
a priori
overlaw: whether it is Winter, or the endless forest, or the Czar, or even the
Party. There has always been some higher authority, whether human or elemental.
Whereas the Western democracies are constantly on the brink of individualist
dissolution. Those are centric fugal cultures which will tear themselves apart
sooner or later. Hence our strength—and our weakness. It’s as Grandmother said:
‘Magpies in a flock are stronger than tigers in single file.’

 
          
Our
weakness, too. The overlaw prfesses down as well. One must speak carefully;
it’s second nature to. A suzerainty prevails, existing eternally like a force
of nature.

 
          
“Yes,
the Committee!” I, Grigory Kamasarin, sigh.
(He
. . . No: /!)

 
          
At
which point a sharp bang sounds, and then another. The crack of a rifle, the
smack of a grenade. A plume of snow flies into the air ahead of us. A young
tree rears. Our driver brakes, skidding the
Volga
, then he slams his foot upon the
accelerator. Another young larch which has been doubled up all Winter long,
pinned to the ground by ice, wrenches upwards percussively, tossing white balls
across the road. The larch quivers erect, shaking itself free of snow.

 
          
(Winter’s
end has come too suddenly! It’s as though segments of two separate though
similar car journeys, taken at different times, have juxtaposed themselves; as
though a stylus has jumped across the record from one track to a later track
where the same theme happens to repeat itself with only minor orchestral '
variations ...)

           
Clap a gloved hand on the young
driver’s shoulder. “Don’t : worry,
tovarich,
it’s just the thaw! ”

           
In the driver’s mirror, from this
angle but no other, appears a tiny apparition. The inside of a submarine? No;
stars shine unwaveringly in the jet darkness beyond a long window ... Is it a
morgue? A punishment asylum in the
Arctic
?
Bodies float, wrapped in strait-jackets, their heads imprisoned in glass
bottles.

 
          
Heads
in aspic! Wires are fastened to their skulls, tubes and cables to their bodies.
How do they float like that? Slowly they turn, and bump one another. Are they
in free-fall?

 
          
A
dog-sized scorpion or crayfish drifts into view, touching them, testing them,
as though some edible monstrosity has crawled off the plate to paralyse, then
feast off the diners . . . Its ministrations knock them about, though they tend
to settle back on to the deck. (What deck?)

 
          
It’s
a thought-scene . . . The simple-minded peasant girl we have at the laboratory
sees thought-scenes form and dissolve before her eyes as though a miniature TV
screen appears in mid-air. They show scenes far away or long ago, or else
iconic images of her emotions and her moods. An erratic, uncontrollable talent
is hers: the intrusion into visible reality of her symbolic thought processes,
so real to her that they become cognita in the outside world . . . Though
really they belong somewhere in her visual cortex.

 
          
Am
I picking up the trick from her? Is this some parody vision of the Soviet
committee mentality? Some dream-language image of the suzerainty of an
all-powerful transconscious force that knits people together without their
being able to do a thing about it?
What
is it?

 
          
As
Ludmila prattles on, and the car swishes through the snow...

 
          
“
Tovarich
, I can’t see behind,” the
driver complains peevishly, verging on the abusive.

 
          
(“No,
but I can! I can see behind the world!” But the words won’t come out. They
simply do not belong here in the
Volga
car
in this segment of time ...)

 
          
Another
tree explodes, off to the right. As I jerk my head aside the image vanishes
from the mirror.

 
          
“Why
yes, Ludmila Ivanovna—” I settle back in the upholstery; and the conversation
runs on, to schedule.

 
          
I
wake. I haven’t dreamt at all. It’s a blank.

 
          
No—that
isn’t true! I’ll swear I was in someone else’s dream . . . but whose? It wasn’t
a dream of Heaven .. .

 
          
It
wasn’t even a dream, but a
reliving.

 
          
Now
it’s gone. There’s only a hollow in me, an emptiness. So disappointing! The
golden tendrils aren’t long enough yet; I’m not yet properly adjusted ...

 
          
The
stars shine down. Stillness, quiet, warmth.

 
          
Must
sleep. Must dream.

 
          
Mulla
Kermain has a round, merry moon face cratered by childhood smallpox—whose
ravages make his face look even more like the moon’s. When he smiles these
dimples all pucker, and rills run between them.

 
          
Six
of us sit here in the Mulla’s room: three from the
madraseh,
the theological college; three from the university. Since
the Revolution, the two kinds of education have converged. The ideal science
graduate is no longer a free-thinking pseudoWesterner; he is a
Moslem
scientist. Ironically, we have a
Westerner in our midst: Mike Farley, the bearded American Negro, ex-engineer,
convert to Islam. He supports himself by teaching English to students in the
Science Faculty, amongst whom myself, Salman Baqli.

 
          
The
Mulla’s room is a modest one, though the floor is carpeted—turfed, almost—with
a richly-knotted scarlet and viridian weave. Crested hoopoes, long-tailed
parrots and peacocks merge themselves into curlicues of leaf and petal.
Outside, the humped earthen roofs of the bazaar lie like a huge grey sow upon
her back, with rows of swollen breasts nippled with air vents upward to the
sky. The whole beast, of packed earth, transmutes presently into glazed
terracotta and polychrome faience, flowing transfigured into the gold-tiled
dome of the mosque. Pigeons coo outside the window, their voices hiding in the
murmur of the city as the woven birds hide in the wool upon the floor.

 
          
“It’s
still hard to conceive of oneself as a symbol,” remarks Said Bekhtiar, our
mathematics student. “The physical world, perhaps, considered as an interaction
of energies. Or one’s behaviour, even. But one’s very
mind
, one’s own self?”

 
          
“Ah,
but it isn’t
one's
self, Said. It is
God’s self. We must carry ourselves back to the principle which we all reflect.
The universe is the mirror of God. God looks in it to see Himself
by means of those
who are looking for
Him. Our physical eyes can’t see this symbolic landscape, though. They only see
what they have learnt to see. Only the eye of the imagination perceives that
landscape. If we all saw the epiphany—the appearance of God—with our ordinary
eyes, this would bring madness and social disorder.”

 
          
“If
the centipede stopped to think about how it walked,” grins Mike Farley, “it
could never take another step! ”

 
          
The
moon face crinkles, in appreciation. “We see the epiphany through being what we
are. God needs a subject that reflects Him, just as we need to be the
reflecting subject. Here is a
transconscious
relationship, of which our ego is merely a portion. Which is why the holy Imams
speak in the plural when they bear witness to this—to emphasize the existence
of a celestial counterpart to Man ‘in the second person’.

 
          
“I
shall tell you a secret, my friends. The Lord may easily be the image of a
loved one, correctly understood—just as the Lady Nizam was to Ibn ’Arabi in
Mecca. This is convenient for man. He cannot know his own self-directly, but he
can know the whole of the Other, as imagined in himself. In this way a dialogue
is possible between two beings
who are
each other”

 
          
I,
Salman Baqli, cup my chin in my palm. “Suppose there was a race of beings
somewhere in the universe who weren’t distinct from each other, as we all are.
Suppose they were all identical, like ants. Only, highly evolved into the
bargain. Well, they couldn’t conceive . . . Otherness, could they? The style of
their suzerainty would be submission
to
themselves
—to a group of identical minds, wouldn’t it? This would be their
only Lord.”

 
          
Why am I asking this? How does it come into
my mind? Does it even belong to me? Who am I who asks it?

           
“They would be like a mirror placed
against another mirror,” nods the Mulla, “containing apparent infinity and
eternity, yet in the thinnest slice of space imaginable. Perhaps if a machine
could create life, this would be the kind of life it must create . ..

 
          
“Let
us drink some tea,” he invites. Rising, he busies himself at the chrome
samovar. On the brass-bound chest beside it are plates of butterscotch and
figs.

 
          
I
too rise, to pace the little room. On one wall is a gilt-framed colour photograph
of the Chamber of Salutations in the shrine of Imam Reza: a kaleidoscope of
veined white marble, chandeliers, and a silvery, mirror-crusted vault that
fractures molten light...

 
          
The
glass of the picture frame reflects back, not the Mulla’s room, but a steel
chamber adrift with bubble-headed mummies. Outside, is the blackness of death
pricked by points of light.

 
          
“What’s this?"

           
The others are all frozen, as though
they’ve been switched off—except for the Mulla. The city is silent; even the
voices of the pigeons are still.