Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (25 page)

 
          
“I’m
here in
Isfahan
... yet I’m really years ahead in time, and
out among the stars?”

 
          
—Yes!
I dream Captain Kamasarin’s memories too. But there’s something . . . something
insufficient. I can’t recapture your memories when I wake up. I forget them.
There are awful blanks! But we’re in touch. We just need time and practice.

 
          
My
fingers press down on the stone balustrade. They don’t sink into it, but the
whole world ripples. She is me, and I am her—yes, as Ibn ’Arabi was in
suzerainty to the Lady Nizam.

 
          
Something
prompts a question. “How close are you to your destination, Amy Dove? How close
to this rescue?

 
          
—Maybe
ten days. We’ve sailed over the sea to a port called Pyx. Darshanor—the
boundary city we’re heading for—is five or six days away. Then we’ll go beyond,
into the other hemisphere of Menka where we’ll come into our new powers.

 
          
‘Look
round,’ I tell myself ...

 
          
I
turn my head cautiously towards the bland faience dome, bereft of moral texts
and scandalous illustrations.

 
          
A
text
is
there! It glows, it moves. It
ripples across the curve of the glazed wall.

 
          
‘You are in memory-space, Salman. Correct.
And you have a mind-visitor—’

           
—I’ve seen this before! My God, with
you and Grigory in
Samarkand
!

 
          
“Of
course!”

 
          
—This
is the blank! This is what gets stripped away and hidden! Ritchie knew this
too! It gets brainwashed out of us. Oh God, they aren’t brainwashing
you
at all—the machines and their insect
allies. They’re trying to save us all. They warned us.

 
          
‘Correct. We are the Harxine Paracomputers,
with the Group- ones as our agents. We are all in grave danger of the Veil
Being achieving a backlash of power from the humans on God's World through the
humans on this ship. We do not know its inner workings, though it has been our
study for many years. It may ignore us, and invade your world immediately
through the bridgehead you'll provide it with. Or it may try to destroy us
first, because the humans on God's World will be impelled to wish this. We
cannot risk this. We must ready our Group-ones to terminate you humans whom we
hold. It will be a tragic decision for us, whose prime programme is to uphold
life. We must also ready our Group-ones, enshipped near God's World, for a
suicide strike against the six travellers. Be warned, mind-visitor. Do not
carry on to Darshanor. We know exactly where you are, and will be, now. Realize
the truth. Though the Getkans can not realize it. With all their borrowed
powers, they are blind.'

           
—Why don’t you drop a bomb on us
now? Or drop one on Darshanor?

 
          
*We cannot kill masses of living things! We
must not—it is against our master programme. The most that we can do is order
some few beings to be .. . excised surgically. Even this is terrible. In any
case, it is impractical. Mass weapons can be turned against us by Getkan heroes
who draw on the energies of the Veil Being. Safer to use the least weaponry, so
that the threat seems small to them and to the Veil Being.'

           
A whirlwind tugs myself away. (But
which ‘self does it tug?) A fierce suction pulls me back, down to a lower level
of existence, into myself. Something vast and amorphous veils the words, veils
my Ups and eyes. It sucks, darkens, and erases.

 
          
Erases
. . . what?

 
          
I
don’t know.

 
          
Nothing.

 
          
What’s
this nothing I’m fretting about?

 
          
Nothing
is nothing. Not a thing.

 
          
Peacefulness.
The peace that passes ...

 
          
.
. . understanding. I only understand this peace.

 
          
Peace
before waking.

 
          
Actually,
I’m awake already. On board ship, in the
Bay
of
Pyx
. Midnight-day has dawned, thickly dark in
our cabin. Ren6 snores. The others still slumber in their bunks. They still
dream.

 
          
What did we dream?

           
It’s gone. Again I didn’t dream. Or
if I dreamt, where is the memory? Lost. Hidden. Stolen. A seal has been placed
upon it.

 
          
We’re
summoned to the waterfront pyramid by the Tharliparan of Pyx. Three of his
Getkan peers await us, up on the multifloor that links all the pyramids.

 
          
We
are warned. The Paravarthun sense that the vile Group- ones have engineered
some sort of channel to us, through the prisoners on
Pilgrim
. They’re spying on us through those instruments of stolen
psyche. It’s their most successful penetration yet. The sooner we reach
Darshanor, the sooner we can turn this channel against them.

 
          
Otherwise,
all is sweetness and light.

 
          
As
we walk back to the Pyx caravanserai, past sea shrikes spiking their catches on
reeking salt-thorn bushes to rot down for their young, Peter gestures grandly
towards the distant mountains. “The road to Darshanor is the stairway to the
sky! ” he proclaims.

 
          
Something
has eaten my dreams away. Something that oversees us. Something that’s anxious
we should hasten to our destination. ..

 
          
Destination
equals destiny.

 
          
Stairway to the
sky indeed! It’s just
that, once we leave the fertile coast behind. There are broad treads of land,
increasingly barren and lifeless. Periodic ‘risers’ of worn cliff-lines wind across
the whole terrain, broken by crumbling gullies. They form immensely wide steps
which lead slowly upwards, as though some giant long ago terraced the landscape
to cultivate stones or perhaps colours, since the rocks are often vividly
yellow, ochre, coppery, ruddy. Surely they deserve more ornate names for their
hues: orpiment, gamboge, cinnabar! At times we ride beside shallow
pebble-lakes: mosaics of lilac and pillarbox red, of pistachio green, jet black
and orange. During the long sunsets and sunrises this dead land is jewelled and
prismatic—while the far mountains flush pink and gold.

 
          
Small
settlements exist along the road to Darshanor, spaced out at a full day’s ride
one from another. Since this means two of our shorter ‘days’ we camp in the
wilderness as well. What do they live on in these settlements, apart from their
dreams? On desert succulents, which spread thin glaucous pads at dawn to osmose
the dew, then ball up tight. On the fat rhizomes of plants that are barely
visible above the ground. On porridge of seed- pods. On spiced eggs of penned
ground-trotters, fed on composted thorn grass. On roast lizards, on giant
insects. On dried fish from Pyx (we carry bags of it ourselves, to pay our
way). On feather-leaf tea.

 
          
Water
wells up in dips of this wilderness, through the pebble mosaics. So there is
life, where at first there seems to be none at all. Rene happily explores the
web of desert life, wherever we camp.

 
          
Traffic
there is too on the road. A dyad of pre-heroes overhauls us while we settle
down to
midday
sleep. Solitary travellers return the other way, aglow with achievement and
apotheosis. A few more dead souls have passed into Askatharli, in rapport with
the living. The road itself, now broken and stony, overblown with dust, was once
a mighty highway . . . That a technology exists ahead of us which can beam
images and even solid objects over the light years seems such a contradiction
of the reduced living circumstances in between. Yet paradoxically the sheer
plod of the journey grinds us into belief, into acceptance. It must be so. It
has to be.

 
          
At
night, the wilderness dances with flickering lights which caper along the
ground, leap overhead, set faint fire to the horizon. It’s merely a magnetic
effect, thinks Rene, nothing to do with that technology ahead of us. That
technology operates upon another wavelength.

 
          
Day
by day we ride higher. The mountains, which for so long have merely humped upon
the horizon, are suddenly closer. It happens abruptly, as though all this while
they have been pulling away from us, stretching the terrain elastically. Now,
one morning, they have snapped back towards us.

 
          
Slowly
the range of mountains parts, sheltering a high plateau in its arms, backed by
other peaks. Our road up to this tableland through the escarpments is
gentle—graded and embanked. Samti- menVao dreams along with us of sleek
electric vehicles gliding up and down the rejuvenated pristine highway. We ride
one of these up on to the tableland to an ancient festival of rhaniq racing, and
fencing, pageant and magical conjurations, wine and love. In the morning we’re
back down below again, still facing the eroded climb.

 
          
“Why
did you give up all
that
?” demands
Wu, vexed. “That
high point
: the highway, the electric vehicles . .

 
          
“We
didn’t give it up,” Samti answers, puzzled. “Nothing is gone. We still have it
all, much improved on what it was.” He taps his golden brow. “It demanded too
much from everyone. And from the world.”

 
          
“If
this world is near a ‘wellspring’, why wasn’t the spring always welling forth?”
she asks. “How could it just switch on, one day?” It’s a question that we’ve
all tried to ask before.

 
          
It
isn’t a question that has meaning. History has yielded up to metahistory. The
tenses of the verbs are all subtly wrong. No longer does there exist an instant
prior to the revelation. Samti doesn’t know what Wu means. Even less does he
know it since his death-bonding!

 
          
Appears
Darshanor, in long mid-morning when we breast the scarp—irrigated fields and
orchards, a desert richly blooming; a necklace of artificial lakes with fairy
rings of domed greenhouses bubbling around them; some hectares of solar panels
forming a bright sea with stylized wave ridges. Isolated squat towers stand
about apparently at random.

 
          
“Those
must be the entry ramps to the undercity,” Samti supposes. For much of
Darshanor is underground. His finger inscribes arcs of guessed-at subterranean
streets, bent as if by some overwhelming point of central gravity.

 
          
That
point certainly exists: it is The Pyramid. At least a dozen subsidiary
ziggurats and pyramids surround it, but the towering white structure at the
centre of Darshanor is vaster than any Egyptian pyramid, a shining mountain
quadrilateral. Even so, it must weigh lighter than any pyramid of
Egypt
, for it contains space within—and space
beyond space, the internal space of all those other pyramids scattered across
Getka.

 
          
A
kilometre north of the cultivated zone rest other shapes which may once have
shone, but are now pitted skeletons. Spaceships! Their remains. Vectored here
by their High Space pyramids, then abandoned.

 
          
A
starship park. A metal knacker’s yard.

 
          
At
the other end of the world lies Darshanor’s twin city of the boundary, called
Shabeet. From Shabeet, ‘relocating’ themselves from Shabeet’s pyramid to that
of Darshanor, have stepped the Tharliparan of that twin city together with a
pair of ambassadors from another star. They have come to observe our
initiation. Samti-menVao tells us this after our
noon
siesta, which we spent in one of the
smaller ziggurats, a-dreaming. Darshanor is where local dreams and alien dreams
converge; it is a swirling, miraculous, multi-species city, crossroads of the
stars.

 
          
Rested
and fed, we walk to the great pyramid.

 
          
In
a vestibule of white pillars, from which a cantilevered ramp spirals upwards,
we wait with the Tharliparan of Darshanor, until the other Tharliparan comes
down, accompanied by our old acquaintance the Zeraini barrel being. It extends
the micromanipulators of its hand towards us, fluttering them as though in
greeting. It is followed by two small faery things, looking like pets of the
Getkans, wearing breathing filters over large deltoid heads with big black
eyes. Thin, brittle, four-armed beings, these, with furled gossamer wings.
Their bodies are a-ripple with feathery membranes. Perhaps they winnow the air
of their world for aerial plankton and krill. Perhaps those are secondary
‘breathers’ for flight . . . Their bodies are golden with the same down as
ours. They carry deltoid helmet-masks and mirror shields.

 
          
“These
are the Dindi,” explains the Tharliparan. “In our gravity they cannot quite
fly. Once, they came in one of the ships that he outside the city. The
Askatharli engine guided them here, as it should have done you. Now, of course,
they need no ships...”

 
          
They’re
quite charming. Not pets, no. Independent intelligences. Their voices are a
sibilant whistle. They caper around us.