Watson, Ian - Novel 08

by The Gardens of Delight (v1. 1)

  “Is that really what those machines are? The spawn of Copernicus? Why should the God want to dismantle and evolve the Copernicus computer elements?”

  “I know that ‘devils’ are supposed to be liars! But. . . maybe the God cares about anything that can try to comprehend Him? On the other hand, we created machine intelligence so maybe we’re responsible for it now. It shares our fate.”

  “We didn’t make it as intelligent as that—even if Copernicus did have a more quasi-alive computer than Schiaparelli/” “No, we didn’t—but He’s optimizing it, just as He’s optimizing us. The machines are a . . . projection of ourselves, so they have to be here. They aren’t machines of loving grace, though. They’re devil-boxes.”

  “Machines of what?”

  “Loving grace. There’s some old poem—a vision of a cybernetic future as a meadow full of animals and humans ‘all watched over by machines of loving grace.’ The machines have got rather detached from the meadow, though.” “Because we never really trusted them? Only used them, the way we always used nature? Or we could have made them really intelligent—even superintelligent by now? Didn’t somebody develop all the schematics for an independent self-programming machine brain?”

  “Eugene Magidoff? That was long ago. Nobody could follow up his work.”

  “Because no one was allowed to! Man has to be the crown of creation. You’re prejudiced, my dear psychologist. They’re getting their chance now—the chance we denied them. Maybe the God is just and good.” She bit her lip. “It’s all heresy, though.”

  “What’s heresy?”

  She struggled with herself. “The idea of evolution for everything—even for fishes and machines—in the sense of advancement. I’d dearly love it to be true—oh, my fantasy’s out of the closet now, mon ami. But strictly I have to admit it isn’t scientific. Darwinian evolution isn’t about advancement. That suggests that amoebae and fishes are somehow insufficient—just the lower rungs of a ladder. Darwin’s evolution is all about sovereign variety—sufficiency unto the ecological niche. Whereas here,” she beamed, embarrassedly, “the theme is advancement. Because there’s a God presiding. As soon as you introduce a presiding God you must believe in a tendency toward Him.” She shook her head. “But it isn’t scientific—which is why Jeremy was shy of telling us at first. Maybe a God can’t be scientific, though!” “Because He’s a paradox?”

  “But if we start believing that, how can we ever get to grips with what He is? I’m . . . torn two ways.”

  “The ice of science and the fire of faith?”

  She shrugged. They were steadily approaching the inhabited war zone. Abruptly the frozen tundra ended, becoming desert: baked earth, dingy in the darkness but perhaps genuinely red if enough light shone upon it. A swampy ditch divided the zones of hot and cold. As they waded through this

  ditch, the temperature soared. Their wet feet sizzled on the dark red soil as they stepped out. Here was pain again: a different, hot-plate kind of pain. Sean felt impelled to hop from one foot to the other. Yet the soles of his feet neither burned nor charred. It only felt as though they did. He did his best to switch off the sense of pain; unfortunately he didn’t quite know where the switch was.

  Hell’s kilns lay ahead.

  TEN

  However, it was to be Muthoni who found them. It was she who hunted them.

  A new and violent person, she walked out of a place of fire with a pitchfork in her hand. Inspecting this more closely, she discovered that the tines of the fork were surgical scalpels. Blades for healing by cutting. Slicing, reshaping, discovering and correcting the infirmities within. Making a new person of someone by means of a blessed wound . . . They reminded her as well of barbecue skewers, another means of transforming flesh: from raw into cooked, from nature to culture, a higher stage . . .

  She found herself in a strange amalgam of hospital and kitchen: a surgeon’s kitchen. A blue-faced hag with the belly of a plucked turkey sat complacently turning a skewered man upon a roasting spit. The same fire heated a cauldron of water. In it, protesting and gasping, there floated the parboiled, bodiless heads of men and women. Yet actually it was only by virtue of the heating of the water—by virtue of the convection currents—that these heads were saved from sinking to the bottom of the pot and drowning. So Muthoni reasoned to herself. Therefore the blue hag was doing them a service—it was she who had set the cauldron there for stock to ladle-baste the man she was roasting.

  This victim turned and turned indifferently, cranked round by the hag’s claw-hand. He wore an expression of patience and endurance—even of concentration. If Muthoni had been worrying about this, his expression must have seemed at odds with the torment he was surely suffering . . .

  Some sly harassment of the hag’s kitchen work came from a second, fat-faced cook who wore a red neglige and a lace mantilla. She kept on thrusting a huge frying pan into the fire. Inside the pan a severed hand slid about, flexing its fingers; a dismembered leg which was trying to kick its way out of the fat; and a severed head rocking about from side to side, its ears wagging and its eyeballs rolling appealingly as though this was its only means of communication.

  “Ha!” cried Muthoni. And, “Ha!” again. She dug her fork into the frying pan. She stuck the tines through the eyes of the severed head, hoisted it up and ran off. The slut in the neglig6 screamed abuse after her.

  “Bring him back, you half-and-half! Cheater! Pander! He’s my man!”

  (‘Why am I doing this? Does the surgeon nurse a secret desire to dismember people?')

  Self-questioning was lost in a bilious intoxication. Heaving her fork, Muthoni tossed the head a long way off. The head bounced and rolled to a halt. Somehow, then—maybe by contracting the neck muscles or waggling the ears—it began to rock blindly back towards the open-air kitchen, lurching inch by inch. The slut whistled for it piercingly. As it lurched closer, Muthoni intercepted it. She kicked it on its way again with the side of her foot. The slut howled louder. “You half-and-half!”

  And only then did Muthoni pause to pay attention to herself. Her body felt strong, strong as a lioness’s, with the lasting power of a cheetah or a leopard. But, like a leopard’s, it was spotted. It was a piebald black and white. Howling with rage, she set out to find whoever had stolen her nigredo from her—to find who wore her skin. The devil in her was roused. She’d slice that stolen skin off with the scalpels and graft it back on to herself! The operation couldn’t possibly hurt her. She was invulnerable—except for the leprous white patches on her. Those stung a little: weak skin, more sensitive to the furnace heat—paltry putty stuff.

  (‘Hey, this is fun. You thought you got punished by devils! Like Hell you do.’)

  (‘Stop it, Muthoni! Think!’)

  Ignoring both voices in her head, she bounded towards a hillock from where, perhaps, she could spy out the land. Her eyes had accommodated rapidly and she saw everything that she bothered to concentrate on as though through a lightenhancing nightscope.

  But plaintive mooing distracted her. In a ditch below the hillock an articulated white maggot of some bulk lay squirming, stretching and contracting.

  She focused. It was ... a singularly fat recumbent woman. And she was giving birth to the white maggot . . . which was: a full-grown cow. The cow oozed from her, as though boneless, inflating into a balloon of flesh that lay floppy and soft, mooing, quaking and bellowing.

  Ah, wait now! This called for real, obstetric attention! That cow wasn’t birthing from the fat woman’s cunt. It was flowing, like some inflatable plastic foam, out of the back of her skull—becoming a living cow in the process. The shuddering mass of woman and cow were fused together like Siamese twins at the head.

  Aha, she could see the problem now. They were stuck together, weren’t they? They couldn’t get apart. That’s why both of them lay flopping and moaning down there in the ditch.

  Muthoni leaped down nimbly. Sliding the scalpel of her pitchfork down the back of the woman’s skull, she began s
licing, shearing away the putty mass.

  “Don’t steal my dreams away!” the woman screamed. Too late, though. The bulk of the cow flopped free. The beast staggered to its feet. It scrambled up the bank of the ditch. Lowing disconsolately, it galloped away.

  The fat woman sat up, eyes bleary with rheum. She rubbed her head. “What did you do that for? Devil!” She spat. “I’ll have to dream another one now.” And she lay back down again upon her tires of fat.

  Muthoni kicked her; the woman’s fat wobbled vastly. “What do you think you’re doing, fatso?”

  The woman glanced at her slyly, almost coquettishly. “Don’t imagine for one minute you’re seeing the real me! Let me tell you I’m beautiful. I can remember that! I’ll not forget it quickly. Never.”

  “So that’s your dream, is it? Beauty?” Muthoni jeered. “You just dreamt a cow—a fucking great ugly heap of cow!”

  “How can I see what I’m dreaming?” whined the woman. “It comes out from behind me! A cow? You’re lying. Jealous bitch! I know it was beautiful—because I am. That’s why you chased it away. I’d done it! Almost done it. I could feel it was a beauty.”

  “Sorry,” said Muthoni. “I’m afraid your imagination’s run away—without you!”

  The woman screwed fat eyelids shut, blanking Muthoni out in concentration. A ghostly little blob—something ectoplasmic—began to emerge from the back of her skull, oozing out and inflating like bubble gum. Muthoni pricked it derisively with her pitchfork. The fat woman beat a tattoo of frustration on the ground with balled-up fists.

  “Thus she apes the manner in which God separates the world from Himself,” said a voice. “She makes a mockery of this, for she knows not what kind of death she died. But she’ll surely learn—as soon as she can free herself of her fancies and see them for what they really are.”

  The speaker’s naked body was a sickly blue hue. In all other respects, however, he was . . .

  “Jeremy! You bastard, you ran out on us! You left us to be tom to pieces. You call yourself a Captain?”

  “Now wait a minute—”

  “Coward! Runaway! Mwoga! Mtoro!”

  Enraged, Muthoni sprinted up out of the ditch. Hefting her pitchfork, she drove it deep into his belly. Jeremy screamed and fell backward, off the blades. Clutching his punctured stomach, he lay moaning.

  Disregarding him, Muthoni raced up the black hillock again to spy out the land.

  “Aha!” she cried.

  Ultraviolet ice lands stretched beyond the area of baked infrared earth. Treading tenderfooted across the hot soil, toiled two little figures. One had a golden mane. The other was a black man. Despite his thieved coloration she recognized him instantly.

  “Marizi! Thief!”

  Piebald Muthoni confronted them. There was fresh blood on the blades of her fork. She waved it about. She sketched figure-eights in the air. Infinity signs.

  “Sean hasn’t stolen anything,” protested Denise.

  “So now you’re his accomplice, are you? I thought so. He’s stolen my skin, that’s what.”

  “Don’t be silly, Muthoni.” Muthoni poked the fork towards Denise. Denise retreated swiftly.

  “You see, you’re guilty!”

  “Don’t be so bloody paranoid!”

  “Hush,” whispered Sean. “The old lizard and limbic brain is having a field day.”

  “Are you calling me a lizard, you false nigger?”

  Sean sat down patiently on the hot soil. It seared his buttocks. He crossed his legs for protection, though now the base of his scrotum burned.

  “Muthoni,” he said gently, “doesn’t some little voice whisper inside you, ‘Why am I carrying on like this?’ Doesn’t some little voice whisper, 'Stop carrying on like this’? Your old hindbrain and midbrain are acting their aggressions and lusts and jealousies. It’s the beast in us all: the reptile drives and the primitive paleomammalian limbic system. This is what’s going on in Hell. The old brain is back in control: the brain where our nightmares come from, and all the instinctual bite-programs that make us torment others—and torment ourselves in the process. But God’s letting us work it out, if we can. We’re privileged to carry on thinking—so that He can think about it all, too.”

  “How saintly,” she sneered. “How sanctimonious. I have a score to settle with you, baby, on account of this leprosy on me!”

  “But why do you have a score to settle?”

  “You led us into that ambush.”

  (‘Did I? My blood was roused . . .*) “Look here, Muthoni, if nigredo is a state of mind, why then, you haven’t lost it all, have you? You’re partially aware of this. God’s tattoo is on you. Some of you is still . . . well, the color of the first stage of The Work, as Jeremy called it.”

  “Oh, I dealt with Jeremy! Snivelling coward. I poked him like the pig he is.”

  “He’s here?”

  Muthoni gestured hillockward with her fork. Slowly she looked down the fork to the blood on the blades. “Oh my God, I stuck this in him. I thought it was fun.”

  “I imagine it was fun, for the old reptile or paleomammal in us. Or if not fun exactly, gratifying. It isn’t fun any longer. We can all have that sort of fun here—sado or maso—till it really goes sour. Till it ferments into something else. ”

  “That poor woman back there in the ditch . . .”

  “You’ve really been wreaking mayhem, haven’t you?”

  “It seemed . . . right. It still does, damn it!” She advanced on Sean but then she bit her lip and stuck the prongs of her fork into the soil instead.

  “Possibly you’ve never really analyzed your life, Muthoni?” he ventured. “Not deeply. Denise hasn’t either. Few people have. Oh, we always find such fine reasons for what we do! But they aren’t the real reasons. So people work evil, on the automaton level. Lack of knowledge is evil, Muthoni. Lack of understanding is. For us, anyway. Of couse, for a dinosaur or a tiger it’s plain survival. Hell’s where that evil can come out into the open so that we can know it. The machines here: they’re automata too—automata trying to become something more. Valiant machines—struggling, but haying to do evil to become more than mere automata.”

  “I didn’t see any machines. Unless a frying pan’s a machine.”

  “You will.”

  Muthoni groaned. “So what do we do? Go round doing good? Or let it all hang out? Like de Sade? Till we know what ‘it’ all is?”

  “We find purpose in evil. We reconstruct ourselves. We get reborn. We seek the seed of unity.” Though Sean was far from sure . . .

  “Reborn? Where, in Eden?” asked Denise.

  “I don’t know. I suppose, if we know, that determines where. In the meantime we have to harrow Hell. We might find that seed of unity in the Hell-ground we harrow.”

  “I don’t want to harrow Bosch’s Hell.” Denise whimpered. “It’s one hell of a place.” She began to laugh hysterically.

  “Jeremy might be able to help us. Muthoni, you said Jeremy . . . you said you—!”

  Muthoni tossed her head. “He’s back there. Round that hillock. I was . . . beside myself. I might have killed him! Maybe I did!”

  Sean’s backside was roasting now. He stood, and laid a black hand on her piebald arm. “We’ll go and see.”

  “Should I bring the pitchfork?”

  “Maybe we’ll need it,” he nodded. “Devils a lot wilder than you could be prowling around.”

  ELEVEN

  Jeremy still lay where Muthoni had left him, clutching his belly, keeping very still. She examined the wound she had made.

  Denise asked lamely, “How do you feel?”

  Jeremy glared at her. “I’m hurting.”

  “Will he die?” she whispered.

  “Not from this,” snapped Jeremy. “It’ll just gouge me for a long time. Especially when I eat or drink! And I’m getting damn thirsty right now.”

  His own lips and throat were parched, Sean realized. He’d been ignoring this aspect of pain . . .

  “
Do we still have to eat and drink in Hell?” butted in Muthoni before Sean could make a fool of himself with the same question.

  “When you can find stuff to eat and drink! These are bodies. Bodies need energy.”

  “Oh, I thought ...”

  “You thought wrong. We aren’t fed by magical infusions.”

  “But what is there to eat? There isn’t even a blade of grass. Does fruit grow in Hell?”

  “Hell’s carnivorous, dear. You’ve got to catch something and kill it. Or barter.”

  “Barter?”

  Jeremy ground his teeth together. A spasm passed. “Nice serviceable bodies you’ve got, eh? You’ll find plenty of, what d’you call them, polymorphous perverts in Hell. Now go find me a chunk of ice to suck on, huh? It’s either ice or hot water or blood. Avoid the local wine. Releases your inhibitions. If you’ve got any.”

  “You know, I really am very sorry,” said Muthoni.

  “Well, well. And so am I! I suppose you did come back before some rooting pig or cannibal devil found me . . . Where’s that fucking ice got off to?”

  “I’ll get some,” said Muthoni.

  The piebald woman departed with her pitchfork—soon to be an ice-cutter—in the direction Denise indicated to her.

  She returned a while later, on the run, holding some nuggets of ice which hadn’t yet succumbed to the heat. They all sucked them gratefully, though presently Jeremy writhed as the liquid flowed into the leaking acids of his punctured stomach.

  Mooing resumed in the ditch. By now the fat woman was attached by the back of her head to another flabby half-sized cow. And though it had never chewed the cud, either, its breath reeked—even from where they were—as though it was on the point of decomposition. The fat woman hummed happily to herself.

  “She said it’s her dream, her beautiful dream,” explained Muthoni.

  “Beautiful?” cried Denise.

  “She can’t see what it really looks like. I don’t think we’d be doing her any favor if we told her.”