Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (24 page)

 
          
Smoky dawn : ash
on the deck. Water
undulates, smooth and oily, crusted with grey scum. No wave breaks or foams.
Dead fish float by, their bellies upwards. The sun is hardly visible, a lemon
ghost. Someone has lit a bonfire out at sea. A brazier glows and sparks atop a
black cone thrust from the glutinous water.

 
          
“Christ,
that’s a volcano popping off!” Ritchie treads footprints in the ash.

 
          
“The
world’s bonds are loosening,” mutters Wu.

 
          
“More
likely its bowels. We’re in the way of the crap.”

 
          
“It’s
eerie,” says Zoe. “What’s there to be scared of, though? If we die, we just
enter Askatharli a little sooner. A tearing away of cataracts from the eyes. A
shedding of surplus baggage— fears, worries, self-defeating reflexes. A
liberation.”

 
          
“We
don’t become heroes if a volcano smothers us! We don’t bond.” She hasn’t
thought of that. “We don’t keep one foot in the world. We can’t do anything
about
Pilgrim
then, or the Earth.”

 
          
“At
least that cone’s getting rid of its surplus energy,” says Rene. “If it stopped
sizzling and smoking, then we should worry. It may just thrust up a new
island.”

 
          
Radanty
stands in the bows, helmet-masked, staring over the sea though not towards the
smoking cone. (And now he is Radanty-menSiri, dyad.) His (their) crew watch
him, as all our golden down begins to lose its sheen, overlaid by a dirty grey
integument of smuts from the world’s combusting innards.

 
          
Peter
touches one of the crew—Karptry—lightly on the arm, a child touching its tall
parent for reassurance. “What’s he looking for? The right course to set?”

 
          
“They
look for a miracle,” says the sailor. “Surely there will be one. You are our
precious guests, Starborn.”

 
          
A
dead seabird floats by. Its wings, matted with cinders, outspread upon the
surface span a full two metres. The fire that singes the sky fades as the rain
of ash falls more heavily. Our footsteps are a centimetre deep and more. Eyes
sting; we squint. Nostrils and throat are raw; breathing becomes painful. One
would rather not breathe. Below deck the air might be better, but we stay. We
try to breathe through damp cloths. Peter begins coughing. Now the sun has
vanished completely. North, south, east and west are all one, directionless.

 
          
“Dear
God, Whoever, Whatever,” prays Zoe, her voice muffled, pained and embarrassed.
“We’re being suffocated . . .” She shakes her head. “We shouldn’t pray
for things.
That isn’t prayer. Real
prayer is in the act of living.”

 
          
“Like
the flower turning to the Sun, the source of light,” I say. There’s no source
of light; the sun has disappeared. No air to breathe, soon.

 
          
“Praying?”
Wu’s grey ghost, her voice wheezing emphysemi- cally. “There’s a technology for
that, Zoe. He has his prayer mask on, hasn’t he? Or don’t you believe in our
skipper’s talents now? Dreams are one thing, my dear. Dream worlds.” She
coughs. But Zoe points.

 
          
For
in the east a thin column of golden light glows, filtering through the murk.

 
          
An
angel walks across the viscous water towards us. A golden being. It comes.

 
          
“Do
you see—?”

 
          
Yes,
we all do.

 
          
We
see what people saw at all those separate loci of beliefs on Earth, cascading
down the spectrum from epiphany—the showing forth of light—into an embodied
reality.

 
          
This
apparition doesn’t take on the appearance of Christ or Mohammed or Amaterasu.
This is an avatar of the Getkans, summoned from Askatharli by the prayer—the
command?—of Radanty-menSiri. It is tall and spindly. Its tapering face is
Getkan, though the large eyes look like golden glass. Amber down torques round
its body in spiral tattoo patterns, patterns of forces. Its sex is
unresolvable.

 
          
“Here
is menSolda,” whispers sailor Karptry. “He will protect at sea, if one can
invoke him.”

 
          
“But
what is he?”

 
          
“He
is a force, a form, which we draw forth from Askatharli. He is an essence. He
does not exist of his own volition, only if we summon him into being. Many such
forms can step into this world. But we must not summon too many such forms, or
the world unhinges and the sky falls.”

 
          
The
shining being stands untouched by the sea, untouched by the fall of soot, upon
the waves.

 
          
“Who
calls me?”

 
          
“menSiri.”
It is Radanty’s voice.

 
          
“What
is your will?”

 
          
“Safe
conduct. We carry Starborns to the greater shore.” “There is a price. To
balance the world.”

           
“Name it.”

 
          
“A
death. An aska shall enter Askatharli now, by his own hand.”

 
          
Radanty
menSiri turns round to his crew. “A miracle must be balanced, must it not?” His
voice sighs—or perhaps simply wheezes because of the foul thickening air. “I
myself am already aska-bonded. Who freely offers to be translated into
Askatharli, to live forever in the sculpted dream?”

 
          
“Human
sacrifice. We can’t allow this,” hisses Wu. “Nonhuman sacrifice,” says Rene. He
coughs, filth in his throat.

           
“How can it be sacrifice when
there’s no death, only translation?” Zoe mumbles.

 
          
“One
fewer person in the world afterwards! ”

 
          
Samti
steps forward. “We are journeying to become a hero. But we can bond here, now
that you’ve summoned menSolda. We’ll be better guides for the Starborn, then.
You need crew for the ship as surely as the world needs crew.”

 
          
“That
is truly your wish?”

 
          
“V’rain!”

           
“A pre-hero dyad is here,” Radanty
menSiri calls out hoarsely over the bows. “They make the offer.”

 
          
“Accepted.
Let it be.”

 
          
The
golden being soars on a graceful trajectory up on to the deck. Radanty bars its
way, unafraid, while Samti and Vilo fetch their helmet-masks and mirror shields
and swords. The two unsheath those swords from their glassy scabbards. They
touch the tips together. Radanty moves us all back with outspread arms,
clearing an arena on the foredeck, perhaps four metres by six. The ash is grey
sawdust, waiting to soak up spilt blood. (Though how will it be spilt? By the
angel, or by them? This is what awaits w^!)

 
          
Into
the arena step the dyad. They turn slowly, swords pointing outward.

 
          
“Goodbye,
my heart.”

 
          
“Welcome,
lord of my heart.”

 
          
They
take a few long paces away from each other. Turning, shield reflects shield.
Suddenly the golden being dances in between them, whirling in pirouette. The
shields glow with its radiance. The extended swords crackle with an arc
discharge. And the golden being changes—becomes more solid, kicking up the
fallen ash; and
horrible.
What the
eye of death, the eye of fear and loathing sees is an armoured, scorpion-like
biped with claw arms a-clacking, and a visor face with bead eyes and a
bristling slash of a mouth, and a swinging sting-tail dripping acid into the
ash that burns and sizzles.

 
          
It’s
their vision of a Group-one, stripped of extra legs, its exoskeleton formalised
into greaves and cuissarts, into living armour!

 
          
Its
poison tail—an exaggerated sting—lashes from side to side. The creature spins, stretching
out its arms, its claws wide open. Its claw feet click like castanets.
Spinning, it leaps one way and then the other. Slowly Samti and Vilo circle it,
their swords poised, sparkling with a discharge of energy. It moves too fast
for either of them to face it. They both face it. It is everywhere at once, all
around itself.

 
          
With
a sudden cry they both rush in, their blades swinging, slashing at grooves on
its belly and its back. Their swords slice through the armour. Ichor
effervesces. The devil screams, like a hiss of steam escaping from a valve. The
sting tail, swinging round still, impales Vilo in her side, burying deep. The
impact jerks the creature to a halt, and throws her off her feet. She cries
out—a brief keening paean, cut off short as she falls to the trampled dirty
deck. But already the thing is losing its horror form. Samti cries out too—in
shock? in joy?—completing her death song.

 
          
He
lowers his hands, as the slain horror dissolves back into golden light: into
the angel called menSolda ...

 
          
“We
are Samti-menVao now. That is our name!”

 
          
“It
is paid. There is balance.” The golden being expands, diffusing upwards and
outwards till it bestrides us all and the whole ship too. We’re within its body
now, and as it extends ghostly arms above the junk we can breathe again. The
rain of ash and cinders is deflected. The air clears in a bubble around us all.
Slowly, then more swiftly, the ship picks up speed, cutting through the oily
murk. The sails belly out in a fierce breeze which whips across the ship from
nowhere into nowhere, a wind which only exists within the golden ghost’s
embrace . . .

 
          
The
horror is purified. The miraculous is all around us. Death has been slain, and
we are saved.
There is no death
,
though a body lies upon the deck, bloody and soiled.

 
          
Samti-menVao
stares out from our protected bubble into the gloom, seeing what, through whose
eyes? We shall know. We shall know.

 
          
The
port
of
Pyx
: sickles of stone slice at the corn of
sandbars. In the estuary, silver waders dip and uphead again like an army of
automatic toys powered by the simple motion of filling up and emptying out.
Scoop-nets and bottle-traps, staked across the shallows, perform that same
filtering process more passively for the Getkans. The sea flows inland here,
with tall thin boatmen twisting the upright oars of skiffs like gondoliers.
Half-a-dozen large junks ride at anchor at the dockside. Among serried white
buildings, the inevitable pyramid marks the waterfront.

 
          
Upland
, range the ridges and ripples of a larger
antique city buried under grass and scrub. The far horizon is mountainous—
pink, mauve and violet in the evening light: breasts of the world which suckle
Darshanor far away across the intervening barrens.

 
          
The
golden ghost is days gone, the decks sluiced clean of ash and Vilo’s blood. Her
body, shaven of its hairs, was committed to the ocean with only slight
ceremony; it was only the envelope of her aska, reborn now in her lover’s
heart—who dreams and broods, adjusting to her influx into his consciousness.

 
          
This
evening, sailing in slowly, we watch Pyx define itself across the darkening
water of the bay, and undefine itself as the light fails. We shall not
disembark until tomorrow morning.

 
          
...
in the distance, faience shimmers against a violet sky. Mathematically pleasing
cupolas—squares of mosques becoming domes in a visible mapping from planar into
spherical geometry— bear the eye of faith away into another, more comprehensive
dimension, one that renders the actual sky amorphous, vapid, a mere rag of blue
silk. The needles of the minarets are ridgepoles stabbing holes in its mothy
fabric instead of supporting it. They sustain another invisible sky.

 
          
“There’s
no sky, really,” remarks Mulla Kermain. “The sky’s an illusion. There’s only
blackness, filtered through veil upon veil of increasingly denser air till it
seems as intensely blue as that dome over there. Rise up through the veils, my
friends, seeking Heaven—you will find yourself in blackness and emptiness. The
only place to look upon will be the world down below you.

 
          
“Consider
the Descent of Being. The Imagining yearns to know itself through the medium of
what it has imagined. So it descends from the realm of absolute, non-manifested
light which is forever invisible to us—”

 
          
“Like
the vacuum of space?”

 
          
“Indeed,
Salman. It descends through the veils of cherubic energies which have no
individual free existence of their own, into this manifest world which contains
the infinitely varied presences of God. At each level there is set a seal. Only
the Imagining holds the key, or the manifest world would flow back into it
immediately ...”

 
          
We’ve
come to
Isfahan
: the Mulla, Mike Farley and I. We’re
standing inside the pavilion halfway along arcaded
Khaju
Bridge
. The waters of the Zayandeh pour through
the narrow arches and wash over the ancient stone foundations. People sun
themselves on the steps between the open sluice gates. And I dream of space . .
. Where better—what vantage point more comprehensive?—for the geoscientist
than space, where the eye and the camera eye encompass the whole world in a
glance?

 
          
“But
we need to go above the world, sir, to see the whole pattern of it.”

 
          
After
a few moments Kermain nods. He wasn’t considering man-made satellites circling
invisibly beyond the blue veil of the sky! It’s all only a metaphor to Mulla
Kermain. To me it is the hope of a career—the chance to hitch myself up above
the world, to see the world more accurately. His analogy falls apart. I feel
disillusioned. Has Kermain any real place in my existence? Yes! For I must be a
Moslem
scientist. I must understand
these things perfectly—or space will never be mine. What we really need, to
spur an Iranian space commitment, is ... is the voice of Allah or of an angel
speaking from the sky, commanding it.

 
          
(Has that happened?)

           
“Let me put it this way, Salman.
‘You’ cannot enter the supra- formal world and articulate it as a man, any more
than the angels—the angelic possibilities, the ideal realities—can achieve
individual reality except relative to man. That is man’s glory. Which is
incidentally why the angels failed to see the intrinsic superiority of Adam.
They could conceive nothing superior to their own ideal essences.”

 
          
Mike
Farley raises an objection. (This American’s trajectory in life—quitting
engineering to pursue his soul—seems to pass mine at this point, travelling in
the opposite direction!)

 
          
“But
Iblis revolted. He refused to worship Adam. He refused to subordinate himself
to the achieved creation. How could he do that if he had no independent
existence? Didn’t he even veil the truth from the Prophet himself once by
presenting a false revelation to him? How could he do that?”

 
          
“Until
Gabriel corrected the Prophet, yes. You see, God is so great that He can adopt
limits without being limited by them.”

 
          
Mike
Farley speaks somewhat automatically, as though reciting words which aren’t his
own. “Could Iblis misinform the world? Or
another
world? Not this one, because he hasn’t done that except for the single incident
with the Prophet. But could God let him misinform a whole world, and still not
be limited by that . . . well, blinding ... of His creation? Could Iblis
present himself
as
a God, or God’s
representative, somewhere out in the universe? Could Iblis open the seal on the
beyond? Could he suck reality into the ideal realm where his own existence
belongs? Could he do this, to wash away the foundations of reality, from the
higher realm?”

 
          
As
water washes through the arches of the bridge, depositing ochre silt
downstream, I try to imagine a flood of unmanifested being—of archetypal
energies, of angelic pre-existence—entering the world through open sluice
gates; and the world losing shape and form, till Iblis is satisfied that he has
washed away the foundations of reality.

 
          
“Surely
Iblis would cease to have an independent will, then, Mike? If he
did
undermine the world! Could he accept
this? Or would he hold the created world together, just so much?” (A snap of
the fingers.) “Enough for himself and the world to survive? Wouldn’t he be
forced to take care of the world?”

 
          
The
Mulla glances back into the pavilion with its bland faience dome. “There used
to be inscriptions in here. Did you know that? Also, some rather erotic
illustrations. They shocked later eyes so much that everything was erased,
words and all! One text, if I remember, read: ‘This world is a bridge, to be
crossed. Weigh well what you find on your way across. Evil surrounds goodness
everywhere—and is stronger than goodness.’ What that really meant was that evil
veils goodness, in the same way as Iblis tries to veil the truth; and
furthermore that there
must
be veils.
Because, if God were seen nakedly, the world must vanish. I think that is why
Iblis was able to draw a veil across the Prophet’s eyes. A veil allows the
world to be. ‘The world is its own veil.’ ”

 
          
A
woman, all of her body and half of her face veiled in her
chador
, pauses close to us to look downstream towards the aqueduct.
How ruled she is by the need to veil her lips! As though she might speak
secrets, and destroy a man? But she doesn’t
know
those secrets. The veil that rules her stops her from knowing enough of the
world. It distances her from that knowledge, except for her own restricted
female zone of it . . .

 
          
One
day I, Salman Baqli, shall tear through the veil of the atmosphere and see the
whole world entire. I hope.

 
          
That
fold of cloth moves as though alive, finger-held before her lips. Could a veil
become alive, I wonder? Could the veil that hides God’s face achieve a will and
existence of its own and pull itself aside, unveiling not God’s face but a
false ‘ideal’ face—an angelic face which is a lie, with lips which will swallow
the world?

 
          
Why
do I ask?

 
          
Where
does this quest come from?

 
          
—Do
you hear me, Salman?

 
          
No
one spoke. Was it the voice of the water rushing over the stones? And yet, no,
1
spoke it.

 
          
—Salman!

 
          
My
knuckles tighten on the stone balustrade, this day in
Isfahan
(—as Grigory’s knuckles tightened!). . .

 
          
(Grigory
. . .?)

 
          
—Hear
me, Salman!

 
          
Is
it the voice of God? Or the voice of an angel?

 
          
—You’re
being replayed, Salman. I’m with you, in my dream. I am you.

 
          
Time
has halted. Mulla Kermain and Mike Farley stand as still as statues. All the
Peugeots, Volkswagens and Mercedes, and all the luggage-piled buses and
battered lorries churning along Kemal-Uddin-Israel Avenue over there, are
suddenly stuck in a traffic jam. Even the Zayandeh river no longer spills forth
across the stone foundations, breaking into lines of spume. Yet there is still
spume, and there is still breaking water. Only, it poises endlessly. I alone
can move. Is it safe to move? I flex one finger. The motion sends a ripple
running along that avenue of motionless vehicles, bending and distorting them.
Somewhere in the distance a truck seems to disappear. Only by holding still can
I maintain their solidity and the blue geometry of the domes on the skyline and
the straight needles of the minarets. So I too freeze, I hold the moment.

 
          
“They
say that one visits
Isfahan
to dream . . . Who are you, in my mind?” (I dare whisper, at most.)

 
          
—You
don’t know me yet, in the time where you are. This isn’t real time. It’s only a
. . . mode of cognition, a re-enacting of memories. Keep still and listen—

 
          
“I
intend to.”

 
          
—You’re
on board a starship with seven other people. You’re all held captive by insect
things and their machines. Your waking consciousness is being suppressed by
them. They’re using you as probes—playing you back to build a model of the kind
of mind that can enter the superconscious realm beyond reality. The seven
others are Grigory Kamasarin, Heinz Anders, Neil Kendrick—

 
          
“The
names mean nothing to me.”

 
          
—How
could they? Foolish of me. This memory is of another time. Try to remember
them: Kendrick, Trimble, Vasilenko, Li, Matsumura. Oh, and there’s the ghost of
Jacobik.

 
          
“A
ghost?”

 
          
—Yes,
ghosts exist. We others escaped to the world we were called to: God’s World,
circling the star 82 Eridani. That’s where we are now. We’ve altered. Become
more than we were. We can enter the realm beyond the world. We’re travelling to
our deaths now, but we won’t die. We’ll be reborn in the flesh of those we
love, as dual beings. I promise you we’ll find a way to unlock your prison,
then destroy those jailors who have you trussed up in cocoons. And then we’ll
open a gateway to Earth, and carry our new power back there. We’re all part of
one another, Salman, but on a different level of being. Your captors are all
part of one another on the mundane level. They can’t reach the other level because
of this except by using you. I’m asleep on God’s World. I dream you, Salman. I
dream your memory-space while you lie locked up in
Pilgrim.
I’m Amy Dove. Trust me!