Zardoz (2 page)

Zardoz demanded food, demanded grain, and still delivered weapons for the unending but changing fight against the Brutals. Now, however, prisoners were to be taken, with the net and rope. Only a few could be killed, in ritual reenactments of the old times. Zardoz was Mighty, Unending, Unanswerable. Zed for all his passionate belief felt strange doubts, as did his newfound brothers.

In the acts of worship—the capture, the kill—Zed now felt uncertainty. Dare he talk to the others? Dare he share his doubts?

As he stood before the mighty head, as he had many times before, stunned as ever by the presence and the might of Zardoz, he heard a whisper from within his skull that Zardoz was not all he seemed but less, and more, than the stone face which faced him now. Much time would pass before Zed could unravel the fears and questions that were rising in his mind; clues and help would come from unexpected quarters…there would be time…there would be times.

The Cavern

At first it was a rustling, then it was a dry sifting sound, and then low like rain, liquid but insistent.

Zed could hear again. His eyes opened and he was surrounded by blackness. His mouth opened but he could make no cry. He was suffocating, drowning, deep inside a well. He struggled. His arms slid smoothly through the granules that pressed him down. His gun arm pushed through into clear air above. The gun rose first, pulling the arm and body up into life again.

As the seeds that had surrounded him cascaded from his body, Zed found himself within a stone vault, domed, ancient, and glittering. It was lit by the sparkling glow of two orbs. The corn still spattered from him as he turned to view the interior that had swallowed him. His eyes became accustomed to the darkness, and forms grew from the light and dark. Above him, rank on rank, stood chrysalis-like forms; beneath them, worn stone steps tumbled down to where he stood.

Between him and them were littered piles of produce from the land: corn, root-crops, fleeces.

The entrance to the cavern, a low, rough-hewn long doorway, was not far from him. Outside clouds and mist were scudding by. He was adrift, floating through the air in the flying stone head of Zardoz. He had entered the mouth like a morsel of food and now stood like some errant thought within the brain space of the monstrous head.

And on the wall near him was a handprint. Man was here. It was a sign, a signature of authorship.

Quickly climbing up the stone steps he moved toward the figures above him. The walls were cold and damp and glistened with sparkling lights. The light from the two illuminated globes gleamed off the stone as he passed. Rainbow pools of light danced before his eyes as he steadily walked upward, his gun leading. At the top, his path was blocked. Rows of blank, unseeing naked bodies gazed out through huge fetal sacs. They were neither alive nor dead, though all bore marks of violence. They seemed to guard the vast cave. Were they bodies saved from some battle? Had he himself been among them and escaped? His mind was not yet steady.

He passed by these blind apparitions to the circles of light, and gazing through the cracked and shining transparencies, he perceived a landscape, miles below.

A moving landscape. He was flying, moving slowly through the air above the barren desolated earth he had helped create. Lost in the wonder of this picture he failed to hear the first footfall settle below and behind him, but turned before the second one had fallen. Looking down, he saw a figure moving to the cavern entrance directly beneath where he stood.

Zed turned, jumped, and landed catlike behind the figure who now stood nonchalantly leaning on the top lip of the narrow entrance, gazing down as Zed had done a moment before, looking at the passing of a fragmented, ruined city. The man turned and looked at Zed as if he had expected him, not alarmed, animate but serene. A plump, round face with a small beard below merry, sparkling eyes. Like the people in the transparent sacs above, he had an awesome disdain that cut through the bearded grin. He wore his strange and colorful clothes as if for inspection by a lesser being; condescendingly, casually. He had the look of a man who might vanish, or turn into a mischievous spirit; alien, elaborate, and deadly. And, overall, the frightening and persistent look of one who is assured to a point of unnatural supremacy.

Zed was unafraid; his gun floated up effortlessly to confront the smiling face. He fired. The body took the bullet well, barely moving as the metal passed clean through. It buckled slightly as the truth transmitted to its brain.

The head turned back to Zed; to plead perhaps?

“You! How foolish. I could have shown you…without me…you are nothing…so pointless.”

He laughed and fell. Caught in the slipstream, he hung for a moment. “How pointless!” he cried again. He danced one moment longer on thin air and then was lost without a cry.

Zed saw him fall like a brilliant dart into the clouds below, his cloak still fluttering gaily as if in mockery of his death.

The Vortex As Heaven

Zed still stood in the mouth, leaning against the upper teeth, mirroring the last position of his victim. Zed had taken the place of that body in more ways than one. He was the only aware being on the flying craft, all the rest were as dead, or about to be dead. He smiled at the thought.

He looked down with something of the triumph the man had earlier showed to him.

Zed allowed himself a faint smile. Things were progressing favorably. He still lived.

He let the wind whip at his clothing and the light rain beat against him. It ran from his body as it ran from the surface of the flying vehicle.

As it ran down Zed’s lips so it ran down the curved lips of Zardoz, and Zed looked out from that awful mouth-doorway, a minute figure. The gaping mouth, the glaring eyes floated serenely on, but they contained a new commander, Zed. Through the glowing orbs which had so frightened Zed as a boy, youth, and man, Zed looked down upon the cities of which he had been so afraid. Zed had pierced the God head. He was inside the hollow shell he had once so revered. From whence or how it moved, he knew not, but that it was false, he was certain. The love and reverence with which Zardoz had once filled him could no longer protect him, for he had found that his God was hollow as this ship. He was alone. His quest had begun.

The head floated on, gradually descending through the clouds into a valley cradling a lake. A fertile, green oasis in a black land. He flew lower and lower over fields that pleased him with their verdant exactness. Carefully laid paths and canals crisscrossed the neatly tilled land. Rows of fruit-bearing trees led the way downward. A profusion of blossom and color rose up to greet the head. The head circled slowly as if searching for a gap in an invisible wall, as if the valley were protected by more than high cliffs and mountains.

It sank down toward a cluster of dwellings, strange and elegant yet archaic. Zed did not look down on them; he had reburied himself in the grain at the center of the head.

With a strange hiss like the sighs of a thousand voices the head came to rest. Zed waited a moment, then ran to the mouth, leaped through, tumbled down the stony beard, and ran for cover as fast as his lightning reflexes and strong muscles would take him. There was no moment to look and wonder. He just had time to run, leap, and hide. The head had come to rest in a cluster of farm buildings, its mouth facing inward on to a courtyard, its eyes glaring down at the rooftops.

Gun first, he probed into the building in whose doorway he had sheltered. A strange and dusty interior. White dust everywhere. Long cones poured more dust into sacks. The smell of baking filled the air. Zed crept quietly along rows of freshly made loaves. He reached and picked one up, and as the mill ground corn into flour, the flour was mixed and cooked, all by some unseen hand. Zed tasted food for the first time in many days.

Only a bite, a taste. The bread was green. Bread—a slave food; green-magic! He touched the floury surface. He scanned the room as a hunter, detached and quick. The next moment he left the bakery to continue its automatic way. Almost soundlessly, he left as he had entered.

Zed was once again in a courtyard. The head had come to rest outside, the bakery was behind him. To his right, another building seemed to call him. It was a cottage, with two distended transparent domes in front of it, bulging breast-like, filled with plants.

Intrigued, Zed approached cautiously. On the roof were delicate silver vanes, turning into the sun, following its rays like a flower. Inside the cottage Zed gently prodded the dome doorways; they parted like lips.

Zed was within a womb of foliage, that itself contained many other transparent buds and growth points for infant plants. They lived in membranes that swelled and grew from floor to ceiling, each attached by tubings to other plants and sources of nourishment.

The wet earth in troughs crawled with life, teeming with worms and soft many-legged insects. A rotting sweet stench of decomposition pervaded all. The moist air seemed to close around him condensing on his body. Vivid blossoms hung before him. He brushed against thick leaves that seemed fashioned by a demon’s hand rather than grown from the soil. Spiky thorns clutched at him as he passed. Spheres within spheres contained other, greener growths wreathed in moist fogs.

Slime begat gases and nutrients for plants which in turn fed larger, stranger breeds, fulfilling some subtle biological plan. Seasons stretched on or speeded by in other tanks and casks.

Familiar wheat plants basked in unearthly violet lights while their naked roots floated in clear liquid. Some grain plants were monstrously tall, others fat and sleek with grass stems. The whole, a green menagerie of the exotic and half real, a universe in which he was the alien. All this was in step with a purpose. He was a lone mammal, adrift in their land. Notwithstanding this, there was human presence overall. The fine-tuned tubing, the delicately calibrated vessels, the scales, the bright bags of colored dusts, the clean and neat arrangement of the place—it all be-spoke a planner. All was complex and interwoven, yet it had been conceived and ordered. The lush vegetation was the result of countless plans and progresses—where was the creator of all this life?

Zed was enfolded and lost within the slippery midget forest of glass and plants. Its humid air oppressive, he groped for a door—an exit into air. He felt the walls, sniffing like a dog for its prey. He sensed his quarry lurked here. In some seclusion deeper than this, beyond these walls yet near at hand, was the man who had made all that.

His hands ran over the walls, searching. His cunning fingers found a crack. He pushed and a door creaked open, revealing a flight of steps. His hunter’s skill was bearing fruit.

The new room was quite different from the first. It was a jumble of strange bits and pieces, yet it seemed to have a life, a happier purpose than the places below. Drawings, plans, and toys were cluttered and crammed into the attic of the cottage. Zed picked up one box, and opening it, jumped back as a tiny toy popped out at him, then hung, limply suspended. Was it all a complex joke? Were they all in one vast game? He walked through a beaded curtain into another room, velvet curtains enclosed a painting – Zardoz! Zed leaped back as if discovered. Could Zardoz still see him? Was the God alive?

“Attention, attention, attention!”

Zed felt that he was not yet discovered, but knew the voice was near. It came from a mirrored box. Opening it, he saw a ring with a crystal stone. It was glowing with an inner light and the voice issued from it.

“Harvest produce report, submit surpluses and needs for inter-Vortex barter and exchange, year 2293, third harvest yield.”

As Zed toyed with the ring, figures began to float in the air before him, in red and green and white.

He reached out to touch them, remembering how he had tried to touch the gun of Zardoz in the same manner when a boy. The figures vanished and reappeared in ascending and descending order. Soap, leather, salt, barley, oats. The surplus of one Vortex could pass to another which had need of it. Numbers passed from one section to another. And all in midair, issuing from the ring. He moved his hand and caught the figures on his palm, compressing them down until one hand covered the other. He sent the images spiraling and shooting around the room. Then they vanished, and the air was still. Hunger pulled at him. His fast had been long.

“Meat,” he mumbled.

Meat appeared in midair,  transparent but real.  An image in thin air. He spoke again.

He could look into the ring and see the image still. He could project it onto the walls. He could command it.

“Who lives here?”

The face of the man he had killed in the flying head’s mouth appeared before him.

“I am Arthur Frayn – Vortex Four.”

“No!” How could this man come back to haunt him, to betray him? The face grew huge, until only a single eye filled the wall. It cartwheeled across the ceiling as Zed’s hand shook.

“I am Arthur Frayn, Vortex Four. I am Arthur Frayn, Vortex Four.”

The accusing voice continued, unhindered, remorseless, in its calm insistence, a mocking denial of its own death. Zed shook with fear, there was no end to this repeating answer. Zed’s question had begun an endless comment on his murderous action. He shook the ring, stamped on it, shouted for it to stop, but the voice droned on as if to drive him mad. In desperation he stuffed the ring under a cushion, to suffocate the image. But soon the voice came from under there, muffled but distinct.

“I am Arthur Frayn, Vortex Four…”

Zed was startled by newer voices, from outside the walls. Moving to the window he looked down and saw people unloading the Zardoz head of its membrane-covered bodies. They were all young and lovely. They carelessly threw the bodies onto wooden carts. One girl counted them off.

“Three from Vortex Eight. Four from Vortex Five.”

“Did you ever see such mangled limbs?”

“Some kind of rock fall in their quarry.”

“Liver malfunction…Myopia, left eye…”

Others helped unload the grain in which Zed had hidden. This they took into the bakery.