Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (29 page)

 
          
“What
was that monster?” I want to know.

 
          
“Ah,
the fetish creature was hers: mine: ours. No distinction now! We used it as an
illustration in one of our books on religion. That was an initiation idol from
the
Guinea
coast. It always held a morbid fascination for us. So we brought it to
life at last. We shaped the force of creation-destruction: the angel of
initiation, in its mould. All the forms of Gods and angels are here in
Askatharli: trace one way, one appears . . .”

 
          
“Does
she still smell a rat?” asks Wu.

 
          
Rene
only laughs. “Die—and see. Pass through death.”

 
          
Briefly
Samti-menVao rests a hand upon Rene’s shoulder, and drinks his happiness with
honey eyes. Ren6 shivers. “An alien soul touches my heart. The brush of a
bird’s wing.”

 
          
“Do
we bury Zoe?”

 
          
“In
sand? The sand will bury her body.” Rene kicks some of ! it with his foot.

           
“We can’t leave her lying there,”
protests Ritchie.

 
          
“She
isn’t lying there. She stands here facing you—she stands beyond. Anyway, it’s
your time to meet death now, not to scoop sand over a . . . log, like children
at the seaside.”

 
          
I
should remember something . . . Should Zoe have remembered something too?
Irrelevant thoughts.

 
          
Masked,
with the whole Eye of Menka radiating filaments of energy across the sands,
looming ghostly and enormous through the world which is a palimpsest, I take up
Rent’s discarded gun. Peter averts his gaze from Zoe’s body, to pick up her
gun. We turn our shields to face one another; we wait, we watch . . .

 
          
Till
the dust devil dances out again on that water sheet which is quite dry. Till we
turn our shields to face it, and draw it in to us. It advances, it clarifies.

 
          
Jacobik.
Yes, indeed!

 
          
At
any rate, it is a human form of the same height and build as Jacobik, dressed in
a
Pilgrim
jump suit, with the same
sharp voracious face, a face that is pallid and bare except where a curly black
beard crawls over chin and cheeks. A thought creature in his form, dredged from
my mind. His weapons? Bare hands, and a knotted cord. Assassin’s
weapons—ironically, for he was assassinated by such tools.

 
          
He
advances across the sands to a point midway between us and clicks his
heels—inaudibly—then bows sharply: to each of us. That lizard tongue flickers
over his lips, moistening them, wetting the dust of death.

 
          
“Franz?”
asks Peter uncertainly, foolishly giving Death the name of any mother’s son.
The golem waits in silence, flexing his killer’s cord.

 
          
“Do
we shoot him, Amy? He’s almost unarmed.”

 
          
“Do
you want
me
to shoot? Can’t you bring
yourself to?”

 
          
“Love—”

 
          
One
of us must die. The golem will see to that.

 
          
But
how? Do I shoot Peter accidentally—at the moment when he destroys the
pseudo-Jacobik? So that ‘each man kills the thing he loves’? That golem stands
exactly between us, poised between our levelled shields. Smiling now, twisting
the cord— and the cords of his lips.

 
          
So
I dip my shield. So I sidle one pace, then another, to the left. Jacobik stays
put. Three, four, five. Now Peter’s in the clear.

 
          
Only
now do I fire. And fire.

 
          
Nothing
happens. The rifle is dead.

 
          
Grinning,
the golem Jacobik swings round to face Peter and begins to walk towards him.

 
          
“My
gun’s dead. Shoot him! ”

 
          
Flash-glimpse:
up on the sandy rise, tall skinny golden Samti and gangling Ritchie beside the
lanky indifferent ginger rhaniqs. Ren6 in a world of his own. Little Wu
standing apart, her borrowed sword catching the sun. She shifts it to and fro
as though to semaphore a message down to me. She’s flexing it, testing its
balance.

           
“Mine won’t fire either!” (Dead—or
inhibited? By the High Space forces that surround us?) Peter stands uselessly,
pulling at the squat steel sausage ... as Jacobik extends his strangler’s cord
to arm’s length.

 
          
I
howl, to distract the killer, “A gun is a club, too! ” But Peter doesn’t hear,
he doesn’t realize.

 
          
Drop
my shield. Sprint. Oh God, there’s a violence in me.

 
          
Swinging
the laser, two-handed, I bring it down upon Jacobik’s neck ... as he reaches
for Peter, still pumping his trigger; as he loops the cord round his neck. The
golem Jacobik crashes into Peter, knocking him over, sprawling across him. Can
it be knocked wficonscious, when it only possesses a mockery of consciousness?
Its arms heave outward, pulling on the cord, while Peter writhes beneath,
kneeing upwards, tearing at its wrists. He’s wiry, he has the fear of death in
him, but its weight bears him down. If I had Vilo’s sword! The golem flops its
head from side to side, exposing Peter’s face to any further clubbing. His eyes
are bulging, his cheeks turn blue beneath the golden hairs.

 
          
Where’s
that
sword
, Wu? Oh put it in my hand!

 
          
Flash-glimpse:
she’s further down the slope. But not running to help, no. What’s she doing
with that sword? Sticking it in the ground! By the hilt?

 
          
Haul
Jacobik off? Can’t heave his weight! Pull his hands together? Too strong!

 
          
Strangle
him before he strangles my darling! The vile repetition of it! Cursed to
re-enact it. He grins, how he grins at me sideways, twistedly. He pants, “It’s
me,
Amy. Don’t be mistaken. My soul flew
to this re-enactment, and imitation of my body. This once, the dead come back
to life!
Resurrectus sum.
And
i
you know why—”

 
          
Cut
that talk off with my fingers! Squeeze it shut. Lie across him, break his
jealous embrace of Peter. Oh it goes on forever.

 
          
In
one moment, in the same moment, all things happen. Jacobik—Franz Jacobik,
mother’s son—relaxes into second death. Peter’s eyes roll up. His tongue juts
out, doggy on a hot day. His face is black beneath the gold. He twitches and is
still. A shout, “No!” from Ritchie, from the crater side—fury and anguish—jerks
my head aside. In an eyeflash, shutter moment, Wu’s small figure is tumbling
forward, driving—my God—the swordpoint through her eye right into her skull . .
.

 
          
A
coral morning
in
Prague
...

 
          
(“Jacobik? How?
^”
)

 
          
—Don’t
be horrified, Amy. Death is the doorway. But there’s a guard upon it. This is
the final slavery which no one notices who isn’t honed to the appreciation of a
genuine death. As a connoisseur of death I know this.

 
          
And
suddenly Franz Jacobik is no stranger any longer. He belongs. He is us. But
what manner of being are
we
?

 
          
(“You
never came all the way to God’s World, Franz. The gold never grew on you. You
died ordinarily. How could you get drawn in to this?”)

 
          
—I’ve
haunted you as no other ghost ever haunted a mortal. I’ve been your channel to
Grigory and Salman all along. Didn’t you realize this? The Veil Being ‘glues’
the dead to the living. This is what this dyad-bonding is—its way of glueing
itself to the world. Its glue was already beginning to stick way out in High
Space, just a little. This glued me to
Pilgrim
—and
to you. Enough for me to haunt you intermittently. But the censor has frozen
your memory—let me warm it with my hands.

 
          
(“Yes,
I must remember something!”)

 
          
—We
all must.

 
          
(“AH?”)

 
          
Momentarily,
wearing a quilted blue-flower jacket, I am helping the cooks of
East is Red
commune unload cabbages from
a bicycle-cart. ..

 
          
—To
die for the people, Amy, is weightier than
Mount
Tai
. I have died. For the people.

 
          
(“Wu,
too?”)

 
          
—I’ve
played a pretty trick in this game of heaven! We have a saying: Attack
downhill! What could be more downhill than

 
          
death?
Down the gradient of death into the lover who opens her arms to gather the
dying beloved in? I took the risk that if I yearned fiercely enough for you at
this awful moment I could join you in the aska-bonding and make something more
of this: not just a bourgeois marriage of two minds but a true community, a
cadre of the soul—not an instrument of seduction and sly oppression, but of
liberation and true solidarity. Together, Amy, we can start a prairie fire!

 
          
Momentarily,
a brass band plays in the
Princes
Street
Gardens
. Pigeons peck at crumbs. A green-eyed girl
with foxy Titian hair sits by us on the bench.

 
          
(“So
who was
she,
Peter?”)

 
          
—Och.

 
          
I
am I no longer. I am ‘we’. We notice, through our Amy’s eyes, that the golem of
Jacobik has melted back into the air already, back into Askatharli...

 
          
The key is death. At the moment of death.
And transfiguration. We. Shall. Remember.. . embers—

           
Embers flare up—and melt the ice.
Memory-space opens. Memory floods us. The Harxine Paracomputers! The death
sentence hanging over our shipmates if we channel dream-demons against the Harxine,
drawing on the energies of . . .

 
          
...
the Veil Being!

 
          
Something
tries to stem this flood and soak it up ... It still bursts through. It rises,
stabilising our quartet-self, glueing us as one. Didn’t the Harxine tell
Grigory that memory is stabilizing?

 
          
Something
built of dead souls owns this world. It’s a cosmic wind, a
pneuma
that breathes through us. It tries to suck this knowledge
from us. If only we had turf and tree and rock to cling to, not this shifting
mass of sand grains! We cling like leaves in a gale.

 
          
Why
am I on my knees? To whom? To what?

 
          
Purpose
flows in from Wu; and a death-love which is the other face of liberation, from
Franz; and a thirst for true sky- contact, shaman-force, anger at its betrayal,
from our Peter.

 
          
Dust
devils dance again across the mirages. A golden angel takes shape out there. It
strides towards us.

 
          
Upon
the ridge the rhaniqs bleat in fear. Our golden hair prickles too, enraged at
us.

           
It is an archangel of brass with
four arms and four wings, with a face of seductive androgynous beauty that
speaks to the eye of ancient faith in Peter, Franz and Amy-me. Momentarily— to
our Wu—it is an outsize living statue of Mao, whom she loathes and loves, then
it is a white-robed bearded Jehovah. Finally it becomes a searing pillar of
fire.

 
          
Here
is God: the presence of God, walking on His world.

 
          
And
it isn’t God at all. It’s a fraction of the Veil Being, whose existence is lent
to it by a billion dead and living souls, and by ourselves.

 
          
“i am that i am,”
says the fire with a
thunder-crackle voice.

 
          
“i AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE.”

 
          
—A
direct confrontation is more than I hoped for (remarks our Wu quietly.) Without
us, you’d have no existence, would you?

 
          
“who transgresses my bond-beloved law?”

 
          
—The
question is, how did you arise? (retorts Wu.)

 
          
“what are you, who oppose me?”

 
          
—We’re
a tetrahedron, four-in-one (says our Franz, to us alone.) The tetrahedron is
the most stable, fundamental of all structures! It’s omnitriangulated,
omnisymmetrical. Everything of the universe outside it balances everything
within. It’s the closest possible packing array. So it’s the energy
co-ordinating system of Nature itself. It’s how atoms are packed, how chemicals
co-ordinate, how the life-code is designed. But we’re a
psychic
tetrahedron now, co-ordinating reality and transreality,
life and death! Each sees the other. Each holds the other in his embrace.

 
          
The
fiery column wavers and dies down.

 
          
—Stay
here! (orders Wu.) We’re part of you, and you can’t go. Fire, burn bright, but
don’t you dare burn this fine Dove body of ours!

 
          
A
Chinese dragon-lion roars in the flames.

 
          
“you dare to interrogate the ancient of
days?”

 
          
—Not
so ancient as all that! Show your origin! Unveil it! We
are
you, so this knowledge is ours for the asking.

 
          
To
the eye of vision, appears:

 
          
the Eye of Menka—the gas giant looming up
above the horizon. And below the horizon too. Its nature unfolds...

           
Stormy
gas shells rotating around a rocky core. Lightning raging. Anhydrous methane
and ammonia giving rise to simple organic compounds and polymers that will
richly colour the clouds. Amino acids forming when these reactions hydrolise in
acid. Dust, drawn in from space as the gas giant sweeps out its orbit, salting
these clouds with minerals. The whole process of saturation with precursors of
life. The process takes much more time than evolution on its moon-child. We
witness it. We understand it. We draw on its memory of itself.

           
The
gas giant is primed for life, but only a weird quasi-life occurs in a
crystalline virus form—life which isn't alive yet which replicates itself by
high frequency electromagnetic resonance. It is a parasitism with no host to
express itself, forever poised on the threshold of life. It is an alphabet in
search of a language to express itself. And because of its sheer size and
interconnectedness, eventually it yearns and stirs—and captures, not life, for
there is none to capture, but the interface between the universe which is
imagined, recreated afresh at every moment, and the Imagining of it. It hovers
on the very boundary between non-existence and existence. Its own rogue
existence balances upon the ebb and tide of being: the breath of the cosmos, a
breathing swifter than any human breath, swift as the quantum flip of the
electron that ceases in one orbit to re-exist in the next. This quantum breath
is what the Veil Being breathes.

           
So
an entity is born yet not born, and it reaches out through High Space to those
who have been born nearby. It touches upon the sands of Menka, through them,
replicating itself here too. It creates golden tendrils out of the flesh of the
living beings who will become its subjects, glueing itself to them. Borrowing
their will and their thought, it maintains its existence upon that standing
wave; and it looks around, through their eyes, lending them vision.

 
          
The
flame column burns coldly.

 
          
—Every
soul caught up in this thing is halted at the first degree of death! (cries
Franz.) It can leach away all suspicions, and toss you Heaven and immortality
as a sop. A sop? No, that’s it’s very
essence.
False Heaven. Ego Heaven. But we can command this angel guardian. We’re more
stable than it is!

 
          
(“Command
it, like a genie?”)

           
—A genie in a bottle! What are
bottles made of? Glass. What’s glass made of?

 
          
—Sand!

 
          
“Godling,
you will burn smaller and fiercer, but without burning us. You will burn no
larger than this hand of mine. You will fuse the sands around you into a bottle
to hold you: a bottle with a seal upon it! You will make the bottle that we
imagine now. This little bottle, see?”

 
          
Our
golden down crackles as the angel tries to repel itself from us.

 
          
It
fails to. Its fire sinks down, a-brightening. A little ball of light spins sand
round itself in storm bands like a miniature Eye of Menka, melting a bubble of
glass.

 
          
A
small bottle cools. Inside is our genie, microcosm of the vaster entity.

 
          
Our
Amy’s hand picks it up.

 
          
Carrying
the bottle in our hand, we complete our journey up the dune. Ritchie looks
bewildered. Rene-menZoe nods his head blissfully, falsely transfigured, not yet
ready to be an enemy. Only Samti-menVao drinks us in, in shock or fear.

 
          
Abruptly
Samti draws his sword and attacks.