Watson, Ian - Novel 08

by The Gardens of Delight (v1. 1)

  Paavo was sulking now. He felt he should have enjoyed himself more freely and leisurely in the bushes with the redhead—but one couldn't, on an alien world, even if humans did walk around blithely naked here!—so he resented her and he resented himself, and wanted to be a little way back in time, but the time had already passed and soured. And he couldn’t believe how unconcernedly Sean and the two women had amused themselves (according to Tanya, who had refused to watch any more) while he was away doing his duty by them, risking his skin for their clothes! Why hadn’t they come looking for him when he was away so long? That was precisely why he hadn’t felt free to relax, to let go. So he felt justifiably cheated. Doubly so! The redhead must have been in cahoots with the ape that slipped in and stole his suit. Probably she was up some tree right now, giggling, committing bestiality with it! If he could find that tree, say tomorrow when he was ready for her again, he’d show her. She owed him.

  “I’ve decided that a party of three should set out as soon as possible. Captain Van der Veld can guide you.” Austin was already addressing Sean, Denise and Muthoni as though who should compose the party of three was already a foregone conclusion—chosen not by him, but by the world, a choice which he rubber-stamped with as good a grace as possible.

  “You will try to find this man called Knossos, and make some sort of contact with the God or alien superbeing who presides over things. I’d recommend your heading, in the first instance, towards one of those peculiar stone towers with the ‘aerials’ on them. Those who remain behind can conduct local forays to gather data ...”

  Austin, for his part, had no wish to become another dispossessed, wandering Van der Veld.

  While, for their part, Tanya and Paavo clove to the skirts of Schiaparelli as though they had just been whelped by the ship and were as yet unweaned. Though Paavo did look up and rub his hands at the prospect of gathering very local data . . .

  SIX

  The land rolled greenly toward misty blue hills where it appeared to evaporate into the aqueous sky. In Earth terms it did just that, for the horizon was closer than any Earth horizon. However, this didn’t mean that they hadn’t a long way to walk; the land merely seemed to change more rapidly than any Earthland. Soon the spire of the starship was lost to sight.

  Sean, Muthoni and Denise strode along easily, led by Jeremy the once-Captain. Though the newcomers’ feet were newly bare, as indeed were their bodies, turf and moss were as soft as the soles of their feet still were. Briar patches and hedge tangles were easily skirted; and as they skirted them, veering now left now right, thickets and tree clumps seemed to form the plan of a vast open maze with many alternative paths running through it.

  Down one curving pathway, lined by orange trees laden with ripe glossy fruits waiting apparently for ever to be plucked by hands or claws or beaks—and with no carpet of rotten, molded rind beneath—strode a snooty camel with a great blue concave metallic leaf balanced like a scallop between two woolly-thatched humps. The boat was full of people. Bare arms and legs stuck out, waving and kicking, as though they were trying to unbalance the leaf-boat to escape from it, or perhaps the opposite: to keep it from sliding from its precarious eminence.

  Along another bridlepath, between osiers and golden broom, they saw a brown bear lurking. The bear stood up promptly on its hind legs and squinted at them, swaying about, then it turned and ponderously began to dance. It danced slowly away down the grass path, waggling its rump as though inviting them to join in a conga.

  They chose another way, unbeset by beasts, at least for a little while.

  “Tuck-tuck -tuck!’ ’

  The frantic clucking came from a mossy dell. A rill ran through the dell into a fat green pool and out again as though the stream had swallowed a bottle that had stuck in its neck.

  A red hen, as large as a sheep, was shifting to and fro fussily on a clutch of football-size eggs. One of the eggs had just hatched. A full-grown mallard drake was waddling away, quacking, to the water. While the mother hen clucked in consternation, a second eggshell erupted underneath her and a second mallard—a brunette female, this one—squirmed her way out. She seemed more inclined to stay with the mother, though the drake had already launched himself clumsily into the bottleneck pool.

  “How can a hen hatch a duck?” cried Denise.

  “A duckling,” Jeremy corrected her. “I agree that the drake already has his adult plumage—but you just wait till he’s full grown!”

  “It’s impossible!”

  “Mother Hen obviously thinks so too. She’s still . . . stuck in what she is. Her hatchlings aren’t, though. The drake is a bird of knowledge already, you see. He takes to the water I right away. His sister only has the capacity for knowing the water, as yet.”

  “But—”

  “Ah, you can believe your eyes, Denise. No cuckoo-duck switched Mother Hen’s eggs when she wasn’t looking. Beings really are transformed into one another.”

  “But—”

  “Him.” Jeremy tapped his nose wisely. “He’s the transforming agent. Of course, a lot depends on the readiness of whoever or whatever is transformed. Even a duck’s karma counts. You see, a creature here is free from its instincts—in the old sense of the ruling programmed patterns. Instincts have become . . . overt, comprehensible, malleable. All creatures are similarly privileged. A hen can have the will to alter. Even a fish can. If it can conceive of alteration. And it mil. Alas, that’s all that Mother Hen has done—conceive it! Ah, but it’s a step in the right direction—or perhaps I should say a step in the leftward direction.”

  “Huh? Hein?”

  “Leftward is the wise way,” murmured Jeremy, and

  marched straight ahead out of the dell, in apparent contradiction of this sentiment.

  Presently the woods and shrubs thinned out as the land rose to a crest around a valley—an amphitheater of turf with a pool at its heart. The pool was perfectly circular, its sides as neat as if they had been cut with a compass and trenching tools, and the water was a particularly brilliant blue. A band of animals and people milled around the pool, at a discreet distance.

  “It’s the Cavalcade!” exclaimed Sean, staring down.

  “Ah, you do remember?”

  “Me too,” nodded Denise.

  “You’ll find many such cavalcades, my friends. They spring up spontaneously in the appropriate places.”

  Women waded and swam in the pool itself. A few of them were negresses, one of whom held a ball or giant cherry upraised in her hand. She tossed it into the watery throng as though into a water polo team. White egrets and black ravens flew about and perched upon the women’s heads and shoulders. The pool was full of women, but no men intruded. Around the pool, at that circumspect distance, circled the cavalcade of males. They rode on the backs pf bears and boars and goats, on horses and camels, on oxen and stags. One man rode a spotted cat with its tail stiffly erect: it was a lynx as large as any pony. A griffin stepped around the circle too, with its wings folded underneath its rider’s thighs. A white unicorn pranced there, stabbing its narwhale horn into the air. The air almost crackled with electricity running between the male riders and the women in the water. While the women waited, swam, or played ball with the big cherry, trying to catch it on the crowns of their heads and balance it there for a moment, the riders circled and recircled the pool, building up potential.

  “What is it you remember?” asked Muthoni. “What’s going on down there?”

  “They’re acting out Bosch’s painting—the ride around the pool. Good lord, they are it. And anticlockwise, anticlockwise all the time—always turning to the left hand. Sinister,” said Sean softly to himself.

  “What’s sinister about it?” asked Denise. “It just looks like they’re getting ready for a sort of sacred orgy. Well,” she giggled, “orgies can be fun.”

  “It does tend to draw you into it, doesn’t it? I could rush off down there right now myself, leap on the back of a stag or a goat and really work myself up! Only, I fa
ncy we’re a little late for this one. All the rides are taken, and they’re half-way worked up already. The carousel’s spinning—too late to leap on now.”

  “There’s a goat down there with no one riding it, Sean. I could do with a swim, myself.”

  “Uhh-huh. That spoonbill’s booked the ride. Who knows who he is—or was?”

  In fact, Sean realized that they had already wandered some way down from the brow of the hill without noticing it. Stopping short, he caught Denise by the wrist.

  “Yes, it’s very involving. Like a whirlpool! Like all the rest of this world! Everyone we’ve seen—apart from friend Jeremy here—seems so utterly drawn into it. Submerged. Absorbed. But no, what I meant by sinister wasn’t that. It’s the fact that they’re all turning to the left—from their point of view.”

  “They’d crash into each other if they were going both ways.” •

  “Ah, but it’s the sinister direction—the direction that’s traditionally to be distrusted! The gauche way. And I’m sure it’s that way in the original painting too—but that’s pretty remarkable, if Bosch saw the left as the real direction of psychic growth ...”

  “Oh I see! The right hemisphere controls the left-hand side—and it’s the right hemisphere that’s intuitive, isn’t it?—whereas the left hemisphere, which is rational, controls the right hand?”

  “Right!” Sean smiled broadly. “And there, in a word—the one word ‘right’—is the whole propaganda war that the left side of the brain has been waging against the right hemisphere ever since the left side invented language. ‘Right’ is good, ‘left’ can’t be trusted. A lot of primitive people only used to eat food with their right hand—they wiped their arses with their left. Oh, there’s been a real smear campaign going on for hundreds of thousands of years, with the left-brain having the first word and the last word! But here they ride toward the left—the intuitive, holistic way.”

  So this neurological fact had projected itself into objective behavior here, mused Sean. And so the Cavalcade was a physical re-education of the body’s footsteps and gestures —toward the left-hand way.

  Was Jeremy left-handed? Were the other colonists? It just didn’t show up where there were no pens to scribble with, nor tools to wield! Remembering the style of Loquela’s loving— and Jeremy’s—Sean decided that the colonists were pretty well ambidextrous by now.

  Which hand did they wipe their shit away with? he wondered. This was no medieval dunghill, though—pools and fresh streams abounded. There were no insects, either, no flies. Perhaps no germs? Maybe dirt wasn’t dirty here.

  “I wonder if ‘God’ can only really reign if He suppresses analysis—if He tips the scales in favor of the dream side of the mind . . . ?”

  While Sean was brooding along this ambidextrous vein, a solitary person who had been standing downslope watching the cavalcade—apparently impervious to the attractive electricity it was generating—turned and noticed them. The person strolled up the slope.

  Person. Neither man, nor woman; but both. A hermaphrodite: both he and she at once, fully sexed in both respects with a woman’s breasts that were pert and upturned with sultana nipples, and penis and testicles attached, doglike, to the lower belly over a coral slit of female pubes. The person’s face was no ambiguous either-or, but a confident both-and. As the hermaphrodite scanned them, for a moment it seemed as though two independent, coexisting sets of facial muscles were responding at once to the nakedness of male and female, simultaneously desiring and rejecting. But then Sean realized that this was largely his own reaction: at once matching himself and bonding with the male, while desiring the female and so spurning the male competitively. Yet the woman was already appropriated by the male and wedded to him, who was the same person. The hermaphrodite’s appearance spoke at once to his own outer sexual identity and to the shadow feminine in himself, calling, wooing—and rejecting both as incomplete and alienated from one another. This was a paradox person, whose opposites neither cancelled out nor flew asunder in contradiction. Instead, they balanced like an acrobat upon a ball. As the hermaphrodite person balanced springily upon the balls of his/her feet . . . (And he/she had been regarding the efforts of the women in the pool to balance the cherry ball upon their heads with detached amusement . . .)

  “Have you seen Knossos lately?” Jeremy hailed the hermaphrodite.

  The hermaphrodite’s voice, in response, was almost song-like: a spoken song, stylized though without undue affectation.

  “He passed by, oh, at the prelude to the cavalcade—with his magpie scouting around. Who are these three? They look like original clay—unresolved. Beautiful—though about to be shaped. What they’ll become is only an idea in their minds as yet, I’d say.”

  So Jeremy introduced the star-travelers, Denise first of all.

  The hermaphrodite savored her name. “So. A woman called Dionysus? May you have your wish to alter! Laroche . . . Ah, the stone. Yes, that’s certainly how you may alter. Seek the stone, the rock!”

  “We’re heading for that rock tower over there,” she nodded. “That’s where Knossos must be heading too. The Greek man—the one who’s in the know.” (Said by her, mainly to confirm that they were hunting the right man. Jeremy looked mildly wounded.) Beyond the next hill crest, visible to them but not to people of the cavalcade, rose the spire of a pink tower with a bulbous tip resembling one of the onion domes of the Kremlin, but elongated into the sky and accompanied by a curving, serrated rose-red antenna like a long agave leaf . . .

  “Ah, that is not the stone. Yet it is on the way there.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Denise whispered.

  “Hush,” muttered Sean. “I’ve just realized.”

  “Well, what?”

  “You’re not going to believe me.”

  “Try me.”

  But Jeremy was already introducing Sean by name.

  “Athlone,” mused he-she. That person’s eyes brightened. “Hie opus, hie labor est, ” he-she sang out. “ ‘This is the work, this is the labor!’ Knossos will be delighted when you catch up with him. He’ll appreciate a Greek word like that when he hears it, even if you do mispronounce it, and even if he wasn’t ever really Greek.”

  “Wasn’t he?” said Denise.

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “How do you mean, mispronounce?” asked Sean.

  “Your name, man.” Coming from this hermaphrodite, the word ‘man’ seemed more than an impatient familiarity. It was almost an accusation—of being partial, a half-person. “Athlon: that’s the way to say it. Don’t you know what it means? Don’t you know what its meaning must make you? The Great Work. The Opus.”

  “It’s a place in Ireland,” said Sean uncomfortably.

  “It’s the Greek word for The Work!”

  “What work?” interrupted Denise.

  Sean ignored her. “That’s pure coincidence.”

  “What is a coincidence? It’s a coming together. I am a coincidence—of opposites, who nevertheless belong together. Coniunctio Oppositorum! And who is this nigredo lady?”

  “This is Muthoni,” Jeremy said.

  “Yes, now I can tell you what a nigredo is,” whispered Sean to her. “God almighty, this man Knossos is responsible for something! If it’s all his doing

  “Best be on your way,” advised the hermaphrodite, “or you’ll never catch him till nightfall.”

  “You see, there’s no night here,” explained Jeremy superfluously. “Night reigns over Hell.”

  “Make a change from all this sunshine,” said Denise airily.

  “He means that if you don’t catch him here you’ll have to die and go to Hell first.n

  “It’s so hot in parts of Hell that people’s hair can all fall out,” laughed the hermaphrodite, eyeing Sean’s bald pate.

  “I should worry,” said Sean.

  “It might grow back as feathers. You’ve the makings of a splendid owl: full of earthly intelligence, which is fine for ordinary science . . .No, no,�
�� ‘herself interrupted ‘himself. “He’d be an egret or a stork. His urges are for higher, whiter things. He’s Athlon: he’s the Work. Yes, I can just see him as a stork. Not one of your ordinary egrets down there in the pool.”

  “I’ll be damned if I’m going to turn into a bird for your amusement,” snapped Sean.

  “Yes, you’d be damned.” The hermaphrodite giggled. “Quite true.”

  Jeremy chewed his lip. “Is it really true, Double-one, that people are transformed into birds, if they have to devolve before they can re-evolve?”

  The hermaphrodite folded his/her arms across those pert breasts and winked. “Maybe, maybe not. Everyone’s course is special to them.”

  “But have you ever been a bird or a beast? It’s said that people become birds and beasts but I’ve never actually met anyone who—” He broke off. “Of course, I seem to be immune,” he said sadly.

  “Hey,” cut in Muthoni, “is this some sort of racist utopia? ‘Higher, whiter things’? Why should the color white be so special?”

  “You misunderstand me, fair nigredo.” Unfolding his arms, the hermaphrodite bowed to her, breasts bobbing. “The nigredo is an honorable estate. You see the ravens perched upon the shoulders of the ladies down there?”

  “Yeah. Blackbirds.”

  “Ravens. Those are birds of wisdom: a wisdom beyond the ordinary senses. Yet that wisdom has become darkened and has to be reconquered, do you see? This darkened wisdom has the color nigredo. It is the first stage of one route to wisdom. Do you see how some of the women down there are nigredo too? They are a little further along that path than their white sisters. Consequently ravens ride them. When the egret darkens, it is rehatched as a raven. Don’t tell me that you’re only mocfc-nigredo? You may need to become white before you can become black again!”

  “You’re mad,” said Muthoni. “Go copulate with yourself.” The hermaphrodite grinned. “Oh, I do intend to. Believe me. One day I shall fertilize myself and give birth to myself. Then the work will be done for me, and I shall be perfect.” He-she made a circle of thumb and forefinger and blew through this little hoop mischievously; then the hermaphrodite scampered away into the shrubbery.