“Wow.” Muthoni flapped her hand before her face as though to divert the air he-she had blown at her, in case it was a conjuration. “Is that guy demented!”
“‘Demented’ merely means ‘out-of-one’s-mind’,” said Jeremy. “Actually, he is out of it. He’s into another state of mind. And another state of body: a paradox one. I agree that the course he’s set himself seems an extreme one. I wish I knew if people do really turn into birds, or if the birds and beasts are all just ‘principles’, essences incarnated from our ova banks . . . But no, they’re evolving—so they must have bird and beast personalities of their own!”
“You’re mad too. The superbeing has demented everybody.”
The cavalcade was reaching its climax now. The beasts galloped round, egged on by their riders’ heels and by rump-slapping. A goat cannoned into a griffin, into a horse, into a unicorn. Of a sudden all the animals skidded to a halt in a lather. The riders leaped from their backs and sprinted toward the pool of ladies. Egrets and ravens flapped their way into the air to avoid the splashing, churning bodies. The pool foamed . . .
“No, this isn’t madness,” said Sean. “It’s something a lot stranger. And coherent. If you’ve got the key.”
“As you have, Athlonsmiled Jeremy.
Sean shook his head numbly. “I’ve got to think about this. I’ve got to get it right. Come on, we must bypass this valley or we’ll end up . . . submerged in enchanted waters. Mesmerized.”
Most people are generally mesmerized all their lives long by instinctual programs, he reflected. His own past life, before he had been ‘submerged’ in the hyb-tank, seemed like an automatic, mesmerized routine now: his childhood in Ireland, his psychological studies at Dublin and Chicago, his career with EarthSpace . . . Here the mesmerism had simply become overt—obvious and directed, by a superior guide. To what end? That everyone, .having gone deeper into mesmerism, should gradually become unmesmerized . . . But first one must submerge oneself. He resisted submergence, at least in this particular pool, at this particular time.
“Come on.”
‘Athlon’: he had, of course, known somewhere at the back of his mind of this secret sense of his name in another language. There must have been some time when he had found this out, and when it had amused him. Then he had disregarded it. Or had he really? His own psychological studies—seen one way—could be interpreted as a form of “The Work’: of psychic integration . . . Had he programmed himself to undertake them because ... No! On the other hand, he must have been aware of this link, subliminally at least . . .
Denise, he truly believed, was innocent of any hidden meaning to her name. ‘Rock’, for her, was simply part of nature: an ecological base. Yet a vein of Earthmagic ran through her . . .
“‘Come on,’ indeed! Wake up, Sean! We’re waiting for
SEVEN
“It’s Alchemy,” Sean explained. “That’s what’s going on ; here—living alchemy. This whole planet’s being run on alchemical lines—and somehow there’s the power available to make this alchemy work! Isn’t that right, Jeremy?”
They sat eating cherries—food for thought—at the foot of an open meadow that ran up to the great pink and rose-red cromlech which was their destination.
A cromlech it was indeed, but an enormous one, well over a hundred meters high. Its flat table-top of stone rested upon four giant granite legs that were honeycombed with little caves. Crystal tubes jutted from the mouths of some of these caves, while more crystal tubes stuck up out of the table-top like organ pipes—and above rose the stretched onion-dome spire, towering perhaps two hundred meters higher up into the sky. The base of that spire was blue-veined marble, but the upper reaches became a flush of pink granite. Out of the table-top there also grew that curving agave leaf—a leaf of stone?—a hundred meters or more from its axil to its tip. On its ascent the leaf transfixed an enormous burr, or nut husk. A feathery willow tree presided over the table-top too, rooted in a tent-shaped lean-to of pink stone. Thus stone became vegetation, and vegetation became stone, while marble became granite: transmutations were at work . . .
The whole structure reared up like a great petrified pink elephant, bearing a fossilized howdah on its back with a full-sized tree for a frond-fan.
A tiny figure was climbing up the agave leaf, using the saw teeth along the edges as his stepladder. He was naked, not clothed, so unless the mysterious Knossos had stripped for action it couldn’t be he . . .
“Well, you can’t just come out and tell a bunch of technoscientists from Earth that—I mean, can you? Not right away,” said Jeremy defensively. “But you’ve figured it out . . . Athlon old buddy. I didn’t expect you to, quite so soon. It’s alchemy, all right.”
Sean plucked another bunch of cherries from a bough which was simultaneously in blossom and in fruit. He sucked the flesh and spat the stones far out, wondering whether new trees would spring up there in time, invading the lambent green of the meadow. Or not? Orchard and meadow were quite distinct. One ended; the other began—just here.
“Alchemy?” cried Muthoni. “You mean that business about transmuting lead into gold? Stuff like that?”
“Or transmuting people?” asked Denise, eyes shining. Her hair was already spun into gold . . . “And plants and beasts too?”
“Exactly!” Sean nodded. “That’s what alchemy was really about deep down. It was about the search for the perfect human being—the evolution of a higher being from any species, I suppose. Manufacturing gold was just a smokescreen—only, all the retorts and alembics and distillation methods of the alchemists happened to give rise to ‘genuine’ chemistry so the real hidden meaning of what the alchemists called ‘The Work’—the Opus, the . . .” (he squirmed) “the Athlon—got channelled off into a bankrupt mysticism. This planet is an alchemical one. The superbeing has reinstated alchemy as a going concern.”
“So where are the laboratories?” asked Muthoni.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if that cromlech-tower up there is one piece of apparatus—and all the other rock-buildings too. But don’t you see, this whole world is the laboratory? Someone’s laboratory. And the substances being transformed aren’t lead or tin or mercury—but living beings! That cavalcade was riding round the bath of rebirth. These are ancient symbols. Carl Jung wrote several superb works about the archetypes involved. Some power—‘the God’—has actualized them . . . and Knossos must have been obsessed by them! Here they’re all out in the open. They’re in the landscape itself. That’s why they called you ‘nigredo’, Muthoni. ‘Nigredo’ is the first stage of ‘The Work’—a darkening process. I happen,” he swallowed, “to know a bit about this because of the connection with Jung.”
Muthoni threw up her hands. “You said that this world was landscaped after that Dutch painter Bosch! You said this was his Garden of Delights.”
“And it is! There’s a lot of very strange symbolism in old Hieronymus’s pictures. Nobody really knows where he got it all from. Out of his own head, or from folklore—or from some secret mystical sect, or from astrology ... or from the alchemists! He could have done so. Alchemy can be mapped on to his inventions—and then they mightn’t be inventions at all, but a hidden code for a secret science or prescience. The superbeing seems to have made the connection, and this world’s built around it! Bosch and alchemy.” He whistled. “In the twenty-fourth century. What a crazy revival.”
“But it isn't the twenty-fourth century here,” Jeremy flapped his hands dismissively, looking a little like the flustered hen.
“You can’t grasp this world if you think of it as being the twenty-fourth or whatever. You’ve got to get away from that, hmm, starship Earth-time of yours, out into the Gardens to realize. The day goes on forever, the sun never sets, it’s always the beginning. Twenty-fourth century? Phooey. The time is now. Or else it’s the year several million or several billion of our evolution, depending on what stage you count from—but that’s uncountable time. The one time it isn’t is Space Year whatever!�
��
“But why?" fretted Sean, conceding the point. “Why a Boschian alchemy world? Out of all possible ways of responding to a shipload of colonists.”
“God knows.” Jeremy didn’t say this dismissively, though. He winked: he meant it.
“And Knossos, our mystery man, knows what’s going on. He has a hot line to the God.”
“Maybe you’ll have one as well, Athlon, ” chuckled Jeremy. “Or you, La Roche.”
“I think ... I think,” said Sean, “that your superbeing may well have fished all this obsession out of the mind of Knossos—and made a kind of compact with him. If this ‘God’ scanned the minds of all your crew and your hibernating colonists and settled on one single vision of reality as way out as this—”
“As fundamental, Sean,” Jeremy corrected him. “You’ve admitted that. It’s something deep and ancient.”
“Okay, it’s true. Well, Knossos must have been a very strange and powerful man. An alchemist—a secret savant— leaving twenty-first century Earth on board a starship with his faith intact? Getting a place on board the Copernicus in the first place! With all the screening there must have been!”
“Even a God has to have interests,” suggested Denise pertly. “Maybe it suited Him this way. Knossos was the only person on board who actually had a faith. So the God made it come true. Perhaps God had no choice? Perhaps, in a sense, Knossos captured Him? What sort of world might it have been otherwise?” Denise shivered. “Barren rock. A dead place. God brought it to life for the Copernicus. And He could only bring it to life if He could discover some sort of context for transmuting dead matter into a living existence? Well, he found that context in Knossos.”
Sean spat out another cherry stone. Somehow he doubted it would take root, out there on the open velvet sward. “He did a neat job, anyway. Let’s go and see whether that tower really is a piece of alchemical apparatus for distilling . . . people.”
“You’ll only find that out,” said Jeremy, “if you’re prepared to be distilled yourself!”
As they marched up the flank of the meadow, the name Knossos echoed in Sean’s head like the clip-clopping of a horse upon a metalled surface. The hermaphrodite had denied that Knossos was a Greek . . . Sean experimented with the name, pronouncing it this way and that. Suddenly he let out a whoop.
“Knossos isn’t his real name at all!”
“Well, I know that ” said Jeremy impatiently.
“No, I mean it’s a mispronunciation—a typical alchemical smokescreen. His real name—or rather his title, not the name he was bom with—isn’t Knossos. It’s Gnosis. That’s Greek for ‘knowledge’—‘occult, hidden knowledge.’ Just twist the sound a little and you get the Cretan lie. He’s the hidden king of this world, all right—given his divine right by the superbeing; and the name of the game ... is knowledge.”
Jeremy eyed the great cromlech rising up ahead like a fossil pachyderm, a stone tree that burst into actual foliage at its crown. He sighed wistfully. “You see? You do know, Athlon —more than me.”
“It’s a place in Ireland,” repeated Sean lamely.
“That’s always been your purpose, hasn’t it? Knowledge. Now you’ve found the right place to fulfil that purpose. As did Knossos. Thanks be to God.”
“He’s only a superbeing,” said Muthoni.
“Only? Only?” Jeremy giggled.
“I mean, he isn’t God—The God.”
“What Muthoni means,” said Sean, “is that ‘God’ is something abstract and universal. God is an idea, a principle —which we humans seem to have an instinctive feeling for deep in our psyches. When you decouple all the other mental sub-systems—by trance or meditation, say—there isn’t just nothing left, there’s an oceanic sense of deity. Your superbeing can’t be that God—though that’s what He’s playing at being, because of this instinct of ours.”
“What’s the difference? He has all the attributes of God. What do you know about God, anyway?” Jeremy wagged a finger at Muthoni. “Watch out, lady, you’ll lose your nigredo. You’ll be reduced to buck private. Or maybe even rabbit!” He wriggled his nose clownishly.
“One of God’s attributes being the habit of punishing folk in Hell? I don’t think I like this God. He’s capricious. This world is a caprice.”
“Maybe the whole universe is a caprice? Have you thought of that? I wonder if our God wholly knows what He is?” said Jeremy lightly. “Maybe He’s a bit of a caprice too.”
“But you can’t have an ignorant God!”
“Ah, so now you want Him to be omniscient? You can’t have it both ways, lady. Either He’s God or He isn’t—though in so far as God is a paradox, maybe that isn’t true either ...”
“Being, superbeing! If this alien is part of natural reality, we can understand what part He is.”
“But what if you can’t understand? Unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
“Unless you transform yourselves alchemically . . . You could, of course,” added Jeremy, “just enjoy yourselves, on the other hand. Have fun. Have a ball. It is fun here, you know. In the Gardens. You might find you were transforming yourselves faster by having fun!”
Sean grinned crookedly. “Was God crucified on the cross so that we could have fun? As the old joke goes ...”
“Ah, that God may have been crucified. This one never was. This is a fun God.”
“So what is Hell doing in the other hemisphere?” asked Muthoni. “Is that fun?”
“It’s instructional,” said Jeremy, sounding hurt. “You don’t like His gardens? You want to be instructed?” He shook his head. “No, it isn’t a question of being fried if you don’t want to have fun in His gardens. Don’t you see, it’s all part of the alchemy? Well, you don’t see yet. But you will. Sean sees. Don’t you? And Denise sees a bit too.”
“And you?”
“Oh, I see lots of things. I’m the witness. Whether I want to be or not.” Jeremy’s mouth drooped. Sadness overwhelmed him momentarily—the great sadness of the clown.
Tall thistles surrounded most of the base of the cromlech, forming a barrier impenetrable to naked flesh. Robins and sparrows cheeped simple-mindedly among the thistletops. Pulling out tufts of fluff, they fluttered off with this gossamer bounty to feather their nests elsewhere. Goldfinches as large as cassowaries thrust their bulk through the spiky thicket, their beaks probing for prizes more substantial than fluff— without, however, effectively stamping out paths.
As the travelers approached, a flock of chattering blackbirds streamed out of a cave in one of the stone legs. The birds swooped around and into the grotto between the legs, swerving above the one clear route that led through the thistles as though mapping it out for them: a narrow winding path where unaccountably no thistles grew. Following this path, the four of them presently entered the grotto.
They found a phosphorescent pool—and saw, on the other side, a second pathway snaking out through the thistles beyond, by way of more greensward into a flower-wood of laburnums trailing crocus-yellow tails, walls of white magnolias, flame trees, tulip trees. A few monkey-puzzle trees towered above the rest like eerie watchtowers made of thousands of bent knives, many rusty but mostly patina- green.
Crystal tubes grew down like stalactites from the roof of the grotto into the greenly glowing pool. Most of these tubes entered the water at a variety of angles, shallow or acute. Some ended above the water level or over the stone shore, clean-edged and hollow. Some were thin, some vast; but all were hollow, even though in some cases the hole inside was large enough to crawl into while in others there was only the thinnest capillary bore. Most were single tubes, though some bulged into flasks and funnels, or branched into one another. Up and down all those that touched or entered the pool, water was pumping. The whole crystalline ensemble looked like a distorted church organ made from laboratory equipment, an organ which had sprouted out of the stone roof as an apparatus for recycling the glowing water of the pool.
A blackbird was flapping in
side one of the larger open tubes. The rest of the flock must already have swept smoothly up the tube and through the roof to emerge above the stone table-top; but this one was confused. Its wings battered the glassy walls. Exhausting itself, it crumpled up and slid back down the tube with a scrabbling of claws and flapping of feathers and fell into the pool. It burst free in a shower of spray, offended and bedraggled, and flapped away out of the grotto by the ordinary route.
“Hauptwerk,” said Jeremy proudly. “The Great Organ— the Chief Work. If only you had wings too!”
Sean squinted up the broadest and least sharply inclined of the tubes, which looked marginally negotiable on all fours. And a face peered down at him from above: a face with a long, slightly bulbous nose, and a mouth downtumed at the corners—more meditative than lugubrious, with a widow’s peak of brown hair on the brow. Sean caught sight of clothes: the neck of a brown tunic.
“Knossos? Is that you?” he shouted up the speaking tube. “Hey, wait!”
A magpie ducked into view beside the man’s head. It perched upon his shoulder: a second, beady, sleek-feathered head. The bird eyed Sean and cawed, but Knossos didn’t say a word—unless the bird was speaking for him. The man’s face drew back and disappeared.
“Damn!” swore Sean. “Well, he’s up there and he can’t get away.”
“He could come down through the caves,” said Muthoni. “He’s got clothes on, hasn’t he? The thistles wouldn’t bother him.”
“Good thinking. Denise, back the way we were. Muthoni, out the other side and cover it. Jeremy, you wait here in case he slides down one of the other tubes. I’m going up. I’ll find him.”
Muthoni and Denise hurried out of opposite ends of the grotto, as instructed, and Sean crouched his way into the tube. His palms and knees gripped the glass effectively enough—if it was glass, which he rather doubted. Wedging his back against the upper wall of the tube, he gained purchase. He moved one palm up, then one knee, inching his back up as he did so; then he repeated the procedure. Again and again. It strained his neck to look ahead; on the other hand it upset his sense of balance to look back down the tube—besides, his testicles dangled ridiculously, seeming to have grown inordinately long and vulnerable. So he stared at his hands.
Watson, Ian - Novel 08 Page 6
