Watson, Ian - Novel 08

by The Gardens of Delight (v1. 1)

  Sean reported what he’d heard, inside the cave of his head.

  “Be damned,” swore Austin.

  “In a sense,” agreed Jeremy affably. “Being damned is one way to God. Really, you’d be better off here. God’s got other fish to fry.” The flatfish which was still slowly flapping its way across the turf at a tangent to them raised its head and wheezed reproachfully. A shudder ran along its whole body, somehow lifting it off the ground so that for a moment it seemed to float before flopping back.

  “If God’s over in the west, in Eden, can we walk there? It shouldn’t take more than a few E-months!” Austin cracked his fingers grimly, as though snapping weeks off a wooden calendar.

  “There’s a valley between the Gardens and Eden. Not your ordinary valley—it’s miles wide and miles deep. There’s a scorching desert at the bottom, full of poison gas. No way down, no way across.”

  “Could we travel by air?”

  “Oh, He can’t have you flying around in starships. That’s incompatible. I thought you’d noticed you’d been switched off. There’s only one way of getting to Eden, my terrestrial friends. It’s called dying. By way of Hell. You don’t know the art of dying yet.”

  “Perhaps this . . . this Knossos man knows another way,” said Austin.

  “You don’t follow me. That is the way. Anyhow, why should it be important to God to meet you?”

  “Hell,” swore Austin. Now it was hard to tell whether he was swearing or referring to the Darkside of the world. “We’ve come all these light years! If you’ve found a superintelligent being here, my God!” But oaths were all ambiguous in the circumstances.

  It amused Sean to note the puzzlement on Austin’s face at the sudden drop-out of meaning which his words had suffered, and the frightening new increment.

  “We must find out the nature of this alien being,” said Tanya firmly. “First priority.”

  “Oh, you’ve come a long way,” conceded Jeremy. “On the other hand, God built a whole world for us. Your interests are rather secondary. Besides, do you want to take this news back to Earth? What then, eh? Guided tours? An invitation to God to send an ambassador? Contact on that level is ridiculously inappropriate. His terms are the only ones.”

  “But don’t you want to get out from under this power?” demanded Tanya.

  Jeremy simply gestured around the meadow. “Now you’re being ridiculous.”

  “But humans aren’t pets in some superbeing’s zoo!” “Let’s call it a nursery, then, shall we? Actually, we’ve all come a long way—from the first protoplasm. And we’ve all got a long way still to go, you included.”

  Loquela had grown restless. She flicked her fingers idly. “That’s all very well, this talk of meeting God—just like that. Fish would like to walk, and I believe they all will in time. A longish time. For now, surely it’s enough to know that He’s there, and in all of us. Make contact with that reality! Love It! Get rid of those silly rags you’re hiding in. How can you find anything while you’re in hiding?”

  She pressed her breasts up against Austin’s chest. She put her arms around his neck and hooked the ivory softness of her inner thigh around him.

  Austin leaned away, not so much intending to repel her as to avoid being pulled over on top of her. “Doesn’t Knossos wear clothes?” he objected weakly.

  “What he hides,” said Jeremy, “is hidden knowledge. He already knows—what’s hidden from us. Now get one thing clear, Captain: you don’t get any bad marks here for enjoying yourself. This isn’t any puritan God. Though it isn’t lotus land, either—we’re all busy learning something. Loquela’s quite right. Join in! We should have a welcoming feast. Or call it an orgy, if you like. We’re all, hmm, friends here.” Loquela, however, had already uncoiled herself from reluctant Austin. She beckoned to the three riders who had halted beside the ship and dismounted, setting the enormous blotched carp down carefully on its side so that it could admire, or wonder at it. The three young men walked over, appreciating the newcomers smilingly. They said nothing, though, but only waited like three nude squires.

  Their hair was a uniform brown thatch, and their bodies were tanned almost golden—polished gold coins to Loquela’s ivory currency. They had slim hips, and muscles that looked more decorative than functional—though they could certainly heave a carp that must have weighed a good deal, between them. Two of them were uncircumcised, Sean noted, but the third wasn’t, so the God mustn’t be fussy about that.

  “Hullo,” he said, “I’m Sean.”

  One of the young men inclined his head. “I’m Dimple. That’s Dapple. He’s Dawdle.”

  “Those are your names?”

  “Oh no,” laughed the young man. “Those are our mounts’ names. We don’t have any names yet, because we don’t know who we are yet—so how can we have names till we do?”

  “But you must have had names once.”

  “Ah, but those were the wrong names. So we forgot all about them. Well?” invited Dimple, looking at Muthoni slyly. He rubbed his hands up and down his chest with the engagingly simple sensuality of a kitten preening on a soft rug. He said rather a lot in this single word.

  “I do feel quite hot in this gear,” laughed Muthoni. “I think that fruit juice has gone to my head! I prescribe some liberty for us.”

  “Licence, you mean,” snapped Tanya. “I didn’t come here to be—kak pa-angliski?—gang-banged!”

  “Dejeuner sur Vherbe, ” mused Denise. “Only, this time the gentlemen don’t wear any suits!”

  Austin Faraday looked totally nonplussed.

  “What do you suggest?” Sean asked him quietly. “Lock ourselves up in Schiaparelli? Play cards for the next fifty years in a dead hull? Or live out the part, instead—till we know who scripted it, and why?”

  Muthoni was already parting her jumpsuit with a trim fingernail.

  “Very well.” Austin shuddered. “Those who would like to go for a, er, swim—they may undress. But otherwise—” He swallowed. His hands were busy straightening his own clothes, checking their integrity, as though by some sort of servocontrol this would overcome Muthoni’s action.

  But Muthoni let her jumpsuit fall around her ankles. She kicked her boots off along with the suit.

  “If the planet’s gone nudist, Austin, surely it’s rude to go round dressed?”

  “This is disgraceful,” said Tanya. “It’s . . . mutiny. Assert yourself, Captain.” She clutched herself, as though it was her breasts instead of Muthoni’s that were bare. Her jumpsuited legs quivered together tightly—a reluctant virgin at the Annunciation confronted by a beach-boy archangel, a gigolo Gabriel.

  “I used to assert myself a lot,” said Jeremy. “Just look at me now! And, do you know, I feel much better for the change? Really I do—-despite the occasional misgivings and resentments.”

  Earth, with its megapopulation, was—if not a puritan world—one at least where screens, veils, of whatever kind, between people were (or had been) the order of the day to prevent society from becoming a mere hive. This was true, at least, of the West and Euro-Russia, though not to such a degree in Muthoni’s Africa. Yet there were leisure zones, nudist solariums and such, for relief from the antiseptic screenedness elsewhere; and the six star-travelers had all seen each other hygienically naked on board Schiaparelli, besides. It wasn’t entirely the problem of nudity as such, thought Sean—nor even of the sexuality of this world (since Tanya could hardly be a virgin) but rather that she, and Austin, and Paavo too were refusing this world’s rules, refusing to admit what had happened to the colony on the flesh and blood, and bare skin level—as a subjective, opposed to merely an objective fact. It was this, coupled with the over-developed Earth phobia about too intimate personal contacts, except in the right places at the right times, that was sickening Tanya. On a highly organized Earth, too, other screens than clothes or—sometimes—masks must stand in the way, particularly data privacy screens, for the sheer preservation of the notion of a human individual; this was true to s
ome extent even in Russia. If a superior authority now said, ‘Let there be no screen between us’ it must be bent on driving all men and women mad—humiliating them, robotizing them. How could the whole planet possibly be a solarium? Free space—and labor—they had expected to find; never this leisurely nakedness.

  “We shan’t get anywhere by wearing character armor,” said Sean gently. “We just happen to have landed on a planet where a God, not a government, runs the show—something that sees right through you by its very nature. We’ve got to get under the skin of this difference.”

  “First step, show some skin.” Denise laughed. The berry juice had made her merry too; but she was proud of herself as well, with her outspaced golden hair. The great emptiness of the void had presented her with a gift of space itself: space to strip off in securely, amiably, anywhere. Her separation from the Earth and all its personscreens was measured now by the meter rule of her golden fleece, which she had never owned in a world where ass-long hair might tangle you up in others’ clothes and fingers and eyes.

  Muthoni snapped her briefs apart. She stretched her arms luxuriously. Now that she was naked the others seemed preposterously confined. Loquela, who had been studying how a jumpsuit opened with all the intentness of a cat upon a mousehole, now pounced. Her fingernails slid down a seal, parting Sean’s floppy husk, discovering his red-haired chest. She stroked it curiously. She remained at least as intoxicated by Muthoni’s skin, though. Reaching out her left hand to touch it, she purred again, “Nigredo.”

  “No, I shall remain dressed,” said Austin. “But suit yourselves.” He shrugged hopelessly. “Or unsuit yourselves.”

  Somehow Sean doubted whether character armor would remain intact for very long. Though if it did, it could only get more rigid—so that the eventual break might also snap the mind within.

  “Party time,” cooed Loquela.

  FIVE

  Loquela clapped her hands and gestured around the well- hung bushes, spotting her finger here and there. Dimple, Dapple and Dawdle trotted off to fetch fruit for the feast.

  Tanya sat down heavily, crossing her legs, anchoring herself to the ground. She was sweating in her jumpsuit and soon began wriggling about as though hairy worms were crawling all over her body inside it. Loquela reached to draw Paavo down and he crouched quickly like a skier about to speed off down a crowded slope, weaving his way between obstacles— mainly of other people—then hunkered down in a defecatory stoop, resting on his heels. He scratched his head repeatedly.

  Austin shrugged and sat down too, shoulders stiff, arms folded. Sean and the others sprawled, fitting themselves to the slight lumps and shallows in the spring mattress of the turf.

  The feast, or orgy, began decorously enough with the tasting of fruits—then of more fruits. In a moment of initial sobriety Muthoni remarked that the colonists had to be strict vegetarians, of course, if everything that Jeremy had said about evolving fishes and animals were true. One could hardly fry a trout for breakfast or roast a haunch of venison for supper! Indeed, the Gardens seemed quite innocent of fire.

  But a diet of fruit alone? The dietician in her was puzzled. Jeremy simply grinned, licked one of a bunch of dusty-velvety black grapes to a gloss with the tip of his tongue and offered it to her.

  And as they tasted fruit after fruit, they realized how unique—and satisfying because unique—each new one tasted, even though they had just tasted the meat of its twin a few moments earlier.

  Was there some neural anti-habituator enzyme in them—Muthoni wondered aloud—in addition to a balance of vitamins and proteins?

  Reviewing his own reactions, Sean realized that there was also a strong psychological component to each variety of fruit. Cherries were in some way thought-provoking (and indeed Muthoni was currently chewing a cherry)—whereas a pomegranate left him with a taste of reverence, or awe . . . This was a mind-feast, he decided, as much as a belly-filler and nerve-tuner.

  It was Denise (now also chewing a cherry) who remarked on the absence of noxious insects—on such a warm day, when their hands and chins and breasts were sticky with congealing juices . . .

  Besides the three squires, Dimple, Dapple and Dawdle, two women had joined the feast—one, raven-haired, who sang to herself in between bites; the other a freckled redhead with a tomboyish look to her who had run up carrying a strawberry the size of a basketball. She had sliced this briskly into soft pink steaks with a slim index finger. Neither this redhead nor the squires paid the slightest attention to any hints of Earth or enquired about the starship, though they did cast it wondering glances. It was as though they didn’t hear, or chose to forget what they heard immediately—just as the three squires had actively forgotten their own names. (While the dark woman simply sang to herself, wordlessly, as though it was important that she got her voice exactly right before she was prepared to say anything with it.) All through the meal, though, the redhead inched her buttocks closer to Paavo over the turf, till she was idly fingering the fabric of his jumpsuit as though it was a suit of chain-mail with each link a separate tiny lock to be unpicked by the keys of gentle touch.

  Just then, a trio of apes burst from the bushes and capered up to the feasting party, tumbling and somersaulting. Applauding gleefully, the Garden-people tossed pieces of fruit to the ape acrobats—who, however, paid no attention to these. There was mischief in their eyes. As soon as they had maneuvered close enough, each ape at the same moment snatched up one of the jumpsuits discarded by Sean, Muthoni and Denise and raced off at speed, trailing silver-grey banners back into the bushes.

  With a howl, Paavo rose.

  “Hey,” called Sean, “it doesn’t matter. We’ve got spares on board.”

  “Doesn’t matter?” Paavo raced after the simian thieves, crashing from view into the bushes. Sleekly, the redhead uncoiled herself and sprinted hot-foot after him.

  “I think they were making a point,” said Denise, unregretfully. She dangled her hair down over her breasts, teasing it around her nipples, as though this would be sufficient costume for her from now on. Austin looked away hurriedly, hastily converting the reflex into a studious inspection of the access ramp, in case other wild life were busy furtively pillaging the lobby of the ship. None was, though.

  The dark-haired woman whose voice was a song began helping Denise to arrange her hair in different cascades, down her spine, over her shoulders, in between her breasts, her wandering hands joined soon by stag-rider Dimple’s hands, then Dapple’s. Denise tensed briefly then she relaxed, closing her eyes and moving her own hands over their faces and bodies like a girl playing blind man’s buff, discovering them as she herself was discovered.

  Jeremy winked at Muthoni as Loquela commenced a closer investigation of her ‘nigredo’ skin with her lips and tongue. He began stroking Loquela as though this would set up a current that would attract Muthoni to him indirectly. Muthoni shifted uncertainly up against Sean, her eyes fixed widely on Denise succumbing to the medley of hands and mouths. Sean’s arm wandered around Muthoni’s waist and thighs.

  “Aphrodisiac,” she murmured, nibbling his ear lobe. “The gooseberries, I think. It’s sweet. Satisfy the belly, satisfy the body. And why not?”

  Her gaze dropped to Sean’s lap, where he was unfetteredly erect—as were the other men, Austin presumably included; only Austin was restricted by his jumpsuit and merely shifted about uncomfortably. Abruptly Tanya jumped up and fled to the access ramp, into the ship out of sight. Muthoni let herself be pushed over by Loquela on to Sean’s lap . . .

  Cicadas chirred excitedly. Presently Sean found himself involved not only with Muthoni, but Loquela too—and was that Jeremy’s hand? Somewhere Denise emitted a little cry.

  Squinting, Sean saw a pair of toads hop up, croaking and creaking like old floorboards—a couple of mobile leathery sporrans or cachesexes.

  “Our sexual juices attract them,” whispered Loquela. She licked his ear—a much used ear by now, since its first initiation as a magpie’s tympanum. “May
be toads are obsessed with physical love—or will be—but with you and me,

  Sean,” she cooed, “it’s a way of speech, this, isn’t it? On the day when we ever do conceive new children, frogs not toads will sing an anthem at our wedding. Their strings of spawn in water stand for the creative sperm. Ke-ke-kexx,” she teased the goggling, halted batrachians.

  The party rolled apart after a while and sat up, grinning at each other.

  At this point Paavo returned from the bushes, alone. His hands were empty, and his body was bare: he had lost his own jumpsuit. “Damned monkey! Damned hussy!” he cried as, nude, he fled up the access ramp into the ship, with scarcely a glance at the relaxing revellers, too bound up in his own dereliction was he. Muthoni burst out laughing. From inside the ship an outraged Tanya berated the Finn in Russian, continuing her tirade till he was safely clad in silver-grey again . . .

  Austin Faraday looked ever more remote and detached from events: a Captain absconditus. Jeremy regarded him with a wry sympathy. It wasn’t so much that discipline had collapsed as that there was no longer any context for Austin’s authority. This world had its own Captain, in Eden—who had switched a starship off and ordered revelry. Jeremy shrugged, and smiled lightly. Arguing with that Captain was no use. They would learn, they would learn.

  Jeremy sighed.

  Sean tapped him lightly on the arm. His eyes twinkled. “Surely not the post-coitus blues?”

  “Hardly! Not in these Gardens—though believe me, you can get quite ice-blue in Hell! No, it’s just remembering . . . what’s bothering Austin. Melancholy memories, for little old me. If I can’t forget where I came from, you see, I can’t quite arrive anywhere else ...” The cloud passed; Jeremy grinned raflishly. “Still, we all had a sweet little forgetting just now!”

  “I have decided,” began Austin, when Tanya and Paavo had rejoined them all in the open. He stood there, hands on hips, saying nothing more for a while after his great pronouncement.