Zardoz (13 page)

The Renegades raged and ranted, sad remnants of their earlier glory.

As Zed watched, Friend dissolved them back to an earlier time; their faces and bearing changed, making them into more stately and proud creatures. The chief scientist was on a platform with the others; he faced them in the room.

“We seal ourselves herewith into this place of learning. Death is banished forever. I direct that the Tabernacle erase from us all memories of its construction, so we can never destroy it if we should ever crave for death. Here man and the sum of his knowledge will never die but go forward to perfection.”

The initiators of the place, the builders of the commune, had deliberately hidden all knowledge of the building of the life-lines, so it would be doubly secure against attack, even from themselves.

When they had built this place the times were desperate, the world and all its people sick with more than fear. The holocaust, like the returning Flood, had drowned all except a few, who, prepared like clever Noah, had floated safe on its crest in the isolation of the Vortex. But having sealed it tight against the storm, they’d locked themselves inside forever.

“It’s a prison! It’s a prison!” Zed cried. He was lying on the couch in Friend’s room while Friend, like a doctor-teacher, sat at one side sagely nodding among his clutter of past times and promises of moments yet to come.

Friend was relaxed as he counseled Zed. It was as if Zed were on a voyage undersea, with Friend afloat to help him when he surfaced and look down when he was swimming in the deeps and see him through the glassy stillness, distorted by the liquid of time’s change.

Zed pulled strongly through these places and absorbed all that he met. He was not a passive traveler, so much amazed by the newness of the sensation and so dazzled by the beauty of the sights that he became awash with mindless joy. He was proud, alert, and unafraid—like a captured barbarian chieftain being taken through the Imperial Capital. And he was like this in more ways than one, for he was in the center of all that he had fought but would not bow his head in homage, rather preferring to watch, learn, and wait for an opportunity to strike. Although outnumbered and enchained, his spirit was supreme. His clear eye never flickered in fear, always roaming over the new landscape, always learning.

He had perceived that the Vortex was a prison and the Eternals were locked inside its walls forever. If they behaved they could look forward to hundreds of years of the complex interplay between the men and women and the power groups. Slyness and remorse, wit and wisdom were constantly being replayed and reordered from their limited numbers. They were all in luxury cells. The disobedient were aged down into darker dungeons. Those who killed themselves were brought back to play the prison-game again. The weaker souls whose minds had seen the true conditions and lacked the will to change became sickly Apathetics, consigned finally to oblivion. Yet there was no jailer, just the process, the Tabernacle which ran this dread place. To think that Brutals had tried to gain entrance here, convinced the beauty they saw was real and so desirable!

This prison was most cruel in its complexity.

Friend interrupted his thoughts, reading them.

“It’s a ship. A spaceship. All this technology was for travel to the distant stars. That was why they developed extended life and the anti-gravity devices—the flying stone head.”

“Did you go?”

“Yes, another dead end. Some are still out there traveling into the void.”

This was another voyage that need not concern Zed’s present tribulation.

“I need time,” Zed muttered.

So it was an ark, set adrift to await the ebbing of the flood. It was planned to settle somewhere and restart the Earth, or if the waters never receded, to sail on forever, drifting helplessly, yet thriving within. Other ships had gone out to the stars, to perpetuate the problems of humanity on far-off planets. There was no knowing if they landed safely or not. If they had, they would still be faced with their own essential natures as well as the new problems of the fresh planet.

The reviving system which brought them back to life here was for spaceflight. If these ships were voyaging light-years, and they would have to get to the nearest stars, they would have needed this eternalizing machinery for its crews; all specialists, all parts of the ship’s control, bound each to each and all to the ship—by a Tabernacle.

The whole ship enclosed in a wall through which they could see but which would protect them from meteors and other bodies that might attack them—hence the force field around Vortex. The force drawn from gravity itself. This was how the head had flown.

The mediation, the communal mind—to keep them spiritually strong and bound together.

The zoo in which Zed had lived was to repopulate the island-planet on which they landed. Tough stock from which to breed new lines.

So—the Eternals were like monastic navigators, living lives of hard work and spiritual exertion, meditating and perfecting, their mental skills, until such time as they could land and colonize. This Vortex in which Zed now stood was the control. If this, the home model, was in decay before his arrival, then the others would be showing equal signs. The basic design was at fault, the flaws were inherent in the plan. The link was left behind here on Earth, a vehicle moving through space as fast as its brethren. An impermeable satellite, level with Earth’s surface—the time-ship Vortex.

Consuella’s guard smashed the battering ram into the door above. They hammered the wood against the barrier with rapid strokes, but down below the rhythm of the beat was infinitely slow and booming.

May and her women had elongated time for Zed. By speeding up their living rate, they flew through time like rockets, making the outside world seem sluggard. Nonetheless, Consuella’s troops were nearly through the door and there was little real-time left.

Avalow had entered through a secret path and stood before Zed. She gave him another token for his strength—a crystal much like the ones implanted in the Eternals’ foreheads long ago, but much larger. Offering it to him, she spoke:

“Now we have given you all that we are, one gift remains. It contains everything and nothing.”

In their minds they swam toward each other through the blackness of no-time. Jewels sparkled in the darkness, some a million miles away, of huge dimensions, others so small and close they brushed onto their skins like Stardust. Dewy opalescence, pearls of petals of emotion and experience slowly shed to show the ripe center of pure feeling, glowing from his touch to high horizons. Entwined as one they flew headlong trailing stars in their wake like a comet’s tail, over cliff-tops that yawned a thousand miles below their flying bodies. They interwove their limbs and climbed like one great bird soaring on the hot gusts of sweet desert air. It wafted them on perfumed breezes miles high above swaying violet plants that beckoned to them through an invisible sea, their tendrils of unspeakable lengths and complexity. The tendrils flowed with the essence of life and the fliers felt them, sudden scudding changes shuddering them back and forth. A melodious whistling from the great speed filled their ears and sang in to their hearts’ center. As they touched, they endlessly cavorted and spun in the current of ecstatic space. Penetrating and interpenetrating each other’s flesh, they glowed with each other’s touch. Delicate fingertip touches sent them up and out, the smallest movement a herald of great floods of sensation. Always they mounted upward to one supreme moment, which became in turn just the foothill peak of another, vaster range revealed by a parting in the cloud layer. Then this in turn was peaked and yet another height was calling, up and on to new snowy peaks of softness. Pleasures were almost painful, time stretching out and on. Avalow had been pure for three hundred years, now the inviolate child-woman was at last penetrated. Instants dilated to centuries of experience that wiped away all thought and drove behind memory in its intensity. Fondness, love, lust, insatiable hungers were quenched, then were renewed and replenished by unimagined fulfillments, yet welcome and familiar as new friendship. Cadences of pleasure undreamed-of, bodily sensations beyond imagining—yet always strong and certain, straight and shining in their intensity, moving into the divine whiteness of the sun’s center—a cold flame that consumed and renewed.

Zed was back in the liquid deeps once more. Avalow preferred the jewel as May had the gun. It lay in his palm.

“Look into it. You will see lines running into the future. You will make insight-jumps. When you can see into this crystal, then you will be ready. Only then.”

As he touched the crystal, it flared with light, burning his hand, and he was back in Friend’s room.

Zed looked into the gem and saw only his face, multiplied and quizzical. His other selves gazed back at him in an echelon, rainbow halations shining around his many faces, like haloes around a pantheon of rogue saints. But nothing more could he see in it; no clue.

His reverie was disturbed by a faraway voice.

“I have come for you.”

Zed jumped to his feet, gripping the revolver in one hand and the crystal in the other.

“Over here,” the voice cried, luring him on.

Zed crept toward the voice, down corridors of stone men and bronze women to a place of costumes, where wax figures waited, gorgeously attired, for a homage that would never come. Many figures stood about him, dummies clothed in costumes of the ages, kings and queens and courtesans. A jarring reminder to the Eternals of the Earth’s past. No doubt these had been intended to be preserved in a museum at some landing place; or perhaps it was just booty, looted quickly before the world fell into disorder and collapse; or maybe it was a reminder of the follies of power that had brought the world to this pass. The voice had come from among them. The dead faces looked the more sinister for their emptiness. Zed slid through, gun forward. A white-gloved hand touched him as he passed. Zed turned to face a tall figure, dressed in a top hat, cloak, and evening suit. He ripped at the bland face and pulled away a thin rubber mask.

“We’ve met before, I believe.”

The face was round and smiling, the small beard bobbing.

It was Arthur Frayn.

“Frayn!”

“Come now. My Brutal friends call me Zardoz.”

The smile faded. Zed looked into the eyes and they searched him with madness. Too late he saw Frayn’s hand fly up below his breastbone. Zed saw the knife blade vanish into his chest, but did not feel pain. The shock of knowing he was dying hit him like cold rain. Caught off-guard by a trickster.

“Revenge!” cried Frayn.

Zed gripped the knife as Frayn released the hilt, smiled, turned, and was gone. He pulled out the knife—the blade twanged back; it was a joke, a stage-knife. Another of Frayn’s games.

“Now we’re even.”

Frayn had reappeared at the end of the row of figures. He might be an illusion, so Zed thought, and cautiously watched him, still gasping from the shock of his mock death.

Arthur snapped his fingers and a glowing ball appeared in midair. He threw it from hand to hand, a spinning glass sphere.

“Would it have been worth while.

To have bitten off the matter with a smile.

To have squeezed the universe into a ball,

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead…’”

Zed was shaken. Zardoz had returned, and old fears throbbed through him. He trembled.

“Do you know the next line? It’s T. S. Eliot.” Zed replied.

‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all.’”

“Well done. Well done. You’ve learned your lessons well.”

“What will you tell me?”

Arthur laughed. He tossed the crystal ball to Zed.

“What do you see in the ball?”

Zed peered into it as he had the diamond. He saw no solution there.

“Nothing.”

“Then I have nothing to tell you. But I will show you tricks. Conjuring tricks.”

Colored skeins of silk appeared from his clothing and then from thin air. He plucked them like magic flowers, out of nothing. Flags and scarves flowed from nowhere, and all the time he laughed. Zed found himself smiling too. The absurdity of creation hit him. Arthur spoke.

“Good. You see the joke. One must see the joke! The cosmic joke!”

Frayn was gone, leaving Zed with yet another gift, or clue, a crystal ball, to join with the gem and his returned gun, to form a trio of aids.

Consuella and her companions were now inside the museum, raging throughout its depths. Zed was protected by the interior lines of defense that wove around him, the network of corridors and the gigantic area with all its strange occupants and forms. Friend had made a frightening maze that few could penetrate. The tunnel buffered Zed from his pursuers. The statues rocked as the group of maddened Eternals ran wild among them. One stone man tottered, fell, crashing to pieces. They yelled in delight, and took it for a signal, beginning to destroy the statue’s neighbors, until the pathway they were in was filled with broken fragments. They had covered their tracks behind them, so they became lost in the deepness of the vault, unable to find their way back to the entrance. The carefully preserved art treasures were being pillaged and vandalized like a desecrated tomb.

All this happened with great slowness—the statue falling forward was caught by the hands of slowed time and gently laid down onto the floor, where it slowly cracked, the pieces lifting out into the air with the beauty of a flower opening. The wreckers ran on pads of time softened from speed by the mind of Zed’s helpers.

He could still think of his gifts for just a little longer as the raiders closed in on him. Now they were splitting into small groups, ravaging like rats through the place that was once Friend’s preserve and only empire, scuttling through it, destroying all before them.

Zed sat in the center of Friend’s room, upon an upright chair. He faced a small table and looked calmly at the gifts he had received: the gun, the gemstone, and the crystal ball. The answer lay within these objects.