Watson, Ian - Novel 08

by The Gardens of Delight (v1. 1)

  “A dream . . . projection?” Sean muttered to himself. “Proiectio? Is that it? What did old Carl Gustav say? ‘So long as the content remains in a projected state it is inaccessible . . .’”

  “Eh?”

  “Nothing . . . Just a thought.”

  Before he could expand on his thought, even to himself, three men and a woman jumped out of hiding from behind a boulder. They charged along the ditch, gibbering like a band of apes. All of them were armed with long cleavers, and all were naked—except for the leader. He wore clanking knight’s armor.

  The knight posted himself between the travelers and the fat woman. At once his companions started to hack at the half-formed dream-cow with their cleavers.

  “Stop that!” screamed Muthoni. She ran down at them with her pitchfork leveled, only to be intercepted by the knight. His breast-plate crashed into the tines of her fork, snapping off one of the blades and bending another. He swung his cleaver at Muthoni. She stumbled backward, parrying.

  Working feverishly, the knight’s troops sheared and hauled sections of the carcass off, leaving trails of gluey blood. Not to be cheated of his meal by their absconding, the knight directed one last hasty lunge at Muthoni and beat a quick retreat.

  The fat woman cursed volubly for a while. Then she subsided. A few bloody spare ribs attached to hide, and a hoof or two, were all that remained. She reached out a fat hand to pick up and examine these butcher’s remains, as though the wild band had actually brought them to her as an offering. Stuffing meat into her mouth, she began to gnaw.

  “I’d rather starve,” said Denise unsteadily.

  “Oh really?” laughed Muthoni. “It’s only her dream she’s eating. I wish I could dream up a bite to eat.”

  What kind of reality is this? Sean puzzled. Are there directions in Hell? Does it have separate parts? What sort of place could have no ‘separate parts’?

  Well, the answer seemed fairly obvious now. Hell was a zone which coincided indiscriminately with itself everywhere, where contents were indistinguishably mixed. The ego must be swallowed up in the darkness, the invisibility of this non-place. Why? To perceive the preconscious psychic life which made an ‘ego’ possible in the first place.

  So here stand I—Ego—amid a to and fro of psychic forces, where egos are incoherently acting out the old preconscious ways. He stood looking over the landscape ... of the subconscious. Lust, aggression, cannibalism, darkness. He and his three companions seemed to lead a relatively charmed existence within it, though. Relatively charmed.

  “Jeremy says we’ll have to carry him,” called Denise.

  “Mvivu! Lazy bugger!” Immediately Muthoni looked regretful. “If we could make a stretcher ...” She surveyed the wasteland. “Maybe back at those . . . factories.”

  Hell’s kitchens, she remembered . . . where people were cooked.

  Even with her damaged pitchfork, she could defend her friends! But she didn’t really want the pitchfork in her hands. It was too much like the enchanted broom that operated the sorcerer’s apprentice . . .

  “Tell me something, Jeremy,” said Sean. “If there’s a God in human form in Eden, is there a corresponding Devil in Hell?”

  Jeremy smiled thinly. “Always chasing somebody else, aren’t you? Someone who’s got the key to it all. You haven’t served time yet, friend. You’ve only just arrived.”

  “But we’ve been promoted. I’m nigredo. Why would that be?” (Muthoni darted a jealous glance at Sean.)

  “I don’t know, maybe He’s appalled by all this. Maybe He wants to wind up Hell, and plant His gardens all over. I don’t know what He’d do for light, though. Spin the planet on its axis? Pretty big, isn’t it—a God who can halt a world or spin it? Bye-bye, conservation of momentum.”

  “Does He ever visit Hell? Or ... is He here already? As the chief Devil?”

  “Yes, of course there’s one. Don’t you remember the chief—” Jeremy writhed in momentary pain “—devil in the painting? Sitting with a bird’s head, gobbling souls . . . shitting them into a pit through a bubble of fart.”

  “Why were you translated over here along with us, Jeremy? Do you know? You aren’t playing a double game, by any chance?”

  “How can I play any sort of game with three holes in my stomach?”

  “Answer me, Jeremy—or I swear we’ll leave you here.” “Oh, the merry unrestraint of Hell! Leave me by all means. Go on, leave me. I should starve in a couple of weeks. Unless someone eats me first.”

  “You’re damn well coming with us if we have to drag you,” said Muthoni. ,

  “So drag me. Treat me like a sack of potatoes.”

  Muthoni and Sean hoisted Jeremy between them. As a burden he was bearable. Though the heat didn’t help. Sweat laved their hands; every now and then an arm or a leg slipped from their grasp. Denise brought up the rear, guarding with the pitchfork.

  Flaring kilns, furnaces, broken towers and windmills with wings of flame were a center of insane activity: a town of the mad, of preconsciousness rampant. The town appeared to be under siege, across the bridge-causeway leading over the blood-dark lake. One naked band was trying to fight its way in, opposed by another naked band trying to fight its way out. So no one got anywhere. But this was not the only means of access. One could, for instance, easily have walked across open ground into the town. That was the way by which Muthoni had come bounding out. The causeway was simply the preferred route, preferred to the point of obsession. They too were heading, for some reason, toward the warring bands upon the causeway. There must be some advantage to be gained there! Why else did everyone compete? Reflexes are in charge, thought Sean; they rule the roost.

  Coincidentally, they all heard the cry of a rooster.

  “Trouble with the human race,” grunted Jeremy, reclining between them, “is that’s what it is—a race. Everyone’s so busy tripping each other up, no wonder they never win it!”

  “Win what?” panted Muthoni.

  “The race, dummy!”

  “You wouldn’t like a whip to crack over our backs, by any chance?”

  The strident call came again. “Cocorico! Cocorico!”

  The cockerel stood upon a steaming dunghill in their path, crowing bravely though no hens were anywhere about.

  Denise shifted the balance of the pitchfork. She bared her teeth. “Dinner!” she hissed. “That’s more like it.”

  “You must be kidding,” groaned Jeremy.

  “Put him down, you two. Spread out. If we’ve got to live off the land—!” Denise began to stalk the rooster, whose proud red feathers were a darker version of her own hair. It crowed defiantly at her. The tines of the fork might be damaged but they could still impale a fowl . . .

  “Go on, go on! Kill it!” jeered Jeremy faintly. “Shoot first, ask questions later.”

  Sean, Muthoni and Denise were all consumed by pangs of hunger now, actually salivating in anticipation. Ignoring Jeremy, they penned the cockerel in. The cockerel flapped his wings.

  At a cry from Denise, they rushed it. As the bird flapped off its roost she threw herself and her spear forward, spitting the bird neatly. Headlong she stumbled with her prize, plunging full-length into the dunghill. Heedless of the reek, she scrabbled along the shaft of the fork and wrung the bird’s neck.

  She arose, covered in wet brown dung.

  “Masai hair-style,” Muthoni mocked her. “All mud- plaits.” Denise slapped hands to her befouled locks in horror, dropping the fork and the slain cockerel—-both of which Muthoni snatched up.

  With an effort Muthoni controlled herself from running off with her prize.

  “How do we cook it?” asked Sean.

  Jeremy laughed convulsively upon the ground. He squeezed his belly to hold his blood and stomach juices inside the wounds.

  “None for you!” snarled Muthoni.

  “Heh heh, you’ve killed a cockerel. Even in Hell, on the very dungheap, it bravely cries out for illumination of the spirit! So you killed it.”

&n
bsp; “I said, how do we cook it?”

  “Plenty of fire ahead,” said Muthoni. “Hey,” she exclaimed, “why are we heading toward that bridge? It’s rush hour there. I came the other way. There was a kind of . . . kitchen. God no, I don’t want to see that again!” Absently, she began stripping plumage off the bird.

  “What’s wrong with a kitchen?” Sean asked her.

  “It’s what they were cooking. They were cooking people. Living bits of people.”

  Jeremy hooted.

  The bridge-cum-causeway looked quite impassable. People still fell off from time to time and swam for the shore, but this didn’t diminish the opposing throngs since the swimmers pulled themselves ashore only to race round and rejoin the tail of the queue. The people in the two crowds had lost their individuality. They just had to be in the thick of their own group. The clash on the causeway was rather like a grotesque sports event.

  “What a damned silly struggle!” exclaimed Muthoni. “If it’s so loathsome on the other side that that lot want out, what do the other lot want in for? Or is it just so hellish on both sides that any change seems for the better?” Unwittingly, she herself was alternating her weight from one foot to the other to relieve the scorching of the soles of her feet—a fact which Denise pointed out acidly.

  “Maybe they can’t remember what it was like a few minutes ago or a few hours ago? I’d nip back to the ice-fields for a cool-off, myself, if I didn’t remember how bloody cold it was there!”

  “Can you remember what you looked like a few hours ago?” Muthoni wrinkled her nose.

  “Merde. ” Denise inspected her rapidly drying coat of mire, and the straggle of her hair which was now like lengths of brown string. She slid down the bank to test the water then plunged in to wash herself.

  Attracted by her splashes, one of the displaced swimmers directed his strokes in her direction as though her patch of water must be particularly enviable. Once he had neared the shore, though, the attraction of the causeway overcame him.

  “You’ll miss your place!” he taunted Denise, torn between the fact that she still lingered there and his lemming yearning for the causeway.

  As the swimmer stamped out of the water, Sean collared him by the scruff of the neck. He was a skinny, carrot-haired fellow with a warty nose.

  “Why do you want to get across that bridge? The other people are all trying to leave, damn it!”

  “We must, we must! I was nearly across, till some bugger pitched me off.”

  “You’re all cancelling each other’s efforts out,” sighed Sean.

  A wily look came into the man’s eye. “So opposites cancel each other out? Is that it?”

  As Sean relaxed his grip, the fellow writhed free. He sprinted off along the strand, senselessly chanting, “Opposite bank, opposite bank!”

  Sean scratched his head. “You know, I believe they are actually learning something—through repetition and frustration, like maze rats. Only, they’re people. Perhaps people have to recognize the rat in them—and the reptile? Have their faces rubbed in it.”

  “Learning?” mocked Muthoni. “That doesn’t bring us any closer to a bite of roast chicken!” She swung the denuded rooster impatiently by the gizzard.

  “Their conscious mind is almost extinguished, don’t you see? So they can’t discriminate. That’s what the conscious mind does: it discriminates. The unconscious mind is quite indiscriminate. I’ve been wondering where I got this notion that Hell doesn’t have separate parts . . . Well, it doesn't. That’s why the other side of that causeway is the same as the side they’re on—a mirror reflection. But they’re wild to cross the bridge. Crossing a bridge is ... an act of development. But they just meet themselves coming back. So no one gets across. The harder they struggle, the more they cancel their own efforts out. They can’t think it through. They can’t think in paradoxes yet!”

  “A paradox skewered me,” Denise said brightly. “A unicorn is a fabulous beast, so it’s a paradox, isn’t it? Like the fish-on-land? Muthoni’s a walking paradox right now,” she added with a touch of bitchiness. “Piebald paradox!”

  Sean cut her off. “What we’ve got here are indistinguish- ably mixed-up opposites, frustrating and torturing everybody, like ice and fire side by side—and opposites are fused together in the Gardens, like—yes—the fish on land, or that hermaphrodite ... I wonder if Hell is really teaching these people to think in paradoxes, so that they can live in the Gardens?”

  “Accept God,” said Jeremy cryptically. Advice—or a comment on paradoxes?

  “I’m hungry.” Muthoni stamped one hot foot more emphatically than the other. She pointed. “I spy some fire, down past the causeway.”

  “Shall we follow our instincts? The analyzing mind hardly belongs in Hell.”

  “Different strokes for different folks,” said Jeremy, from the scalding soil. “Pick me up, will you?”

  Sean and Denise carried Jeremy between them now. Muthoni brandished the cockerel and the pitchfork.

  TWELVE

  The fire was an open hearth furnace, fueled by gas venting from the ground through a mass of coals and hot stones. It stood inside a broken brick enclosure. A machine-devil was busily hammering out swords and pikes and pieces of armor. It had an armored body itself and three steel tentacle arms, one of which had a hammer for a hand. A small camera, mounted on its crown, tracked them as they scrambled over tumbled bricks, having deposited Jeremy outside.

  A naked woman, chained to the furnace, was pounding a bellows contraption open and shut with one hand, modulating the flame, while with the other hand she pumped water into a long quenching trough. Sweat ran off her. Her hair had turned white. She was almost a skeleton.

  “You want weapons? Projectiles? We are working on a new line of projectiles.” The words emerged from a grille in the machine’s body. A metal tentacle snaked out and demonstrated a harpoon with wicked-looking barbs. “Projectile- proof armor?”

  “With a guarantee?” Muthoni asked it sarcastically. “After sales service?”

  “Caveat emptorretorted the machine.

  “Just what would we use for money?”

  “You work the pump. You instruct me about human life.” The hammer descended on a glowing breastplate. A second tentacle hauled it from the forge, dunked it into the quenching trough—which instantly steamed bone dry—and tossed it with a clang on to the armor heap. Frantically, the emaciated woman worked the pump to replenish the trough. Water spewed out of a pipe into it, presumably all the way from the lake.

  Denise hunched down beside the laboring wraith. “Sold yourself to the blacksmith, did you?”

  “I’m trading for a suit of armor!” the woman snapped. “What for?”

  “To protect my body, of course! To save my beauty. They won’t be able to rape me then. It’s happened a thousand times if it’s happened once. I’ll be safe.”

  “But . . . doesn’t she know what she looks like by now?” “What do you want with me? Get away! You’re interfering.” The woman lashed out at Denise; but the chain held her leashed.

  The machine tossed some junk into the fire pan and recommenced panel beating.

  “It learns about human life from her?” mused Sean. “Maybe it does! It learns illogic—the irrational. Obsession. Paranoia. Maybe it’s a fair exchange. Character-armor: that’s what she’s trading for. I wonder how she liked being naked in the Gardens? Maybe she sewed aprons of fig leaves ...”

  “Why not?” Muthoni scowled. “Why should people put on a nude lust show for God to gawp at? You psychologists get everything the wrong way round. What was the latest when we left home? Rape-therapy? Neo-Zen Assault Therapy? Equip yourself with all the traumas you haven’t got, because it’s an illusion that you haven’t got them. And if you know you’ve got them, then you haven’t . . . Q.E.D.: Satori.”

  Sean assessed the sweating crone. “It’s hard to remember what the fashion was two centuries ago. Self-hatred Integration? Pain-Pleasure Center Rerouting? I thought the Cope
rnicus colonists were better screened than that . . .”

  Denise laughed at him. “You need people who are slightly nuts for them to become colonists in the first place. Oh, there’s the pioneer spirit, to be sure! And obsession too. You need obsession to fire a colony. People who want to make a massive traumatic break. As well as good farmers and technicians, you need people who want their own way! Folie a plusieurs, Sean! We must all be slightly nuts ourselves, to take the long cold sleep. Don’t you even realize that? I was nuts. Earth’s such a filthy place for an ecologist. It’s an insult to my calling. Oh, but there must have been a lot of drole de types in the hyb-tanks. Not least of all Monsieur Knossos! You must have been nuts too, Sean! And here we’ve arrived on Nutsworld. Half of it’s a lunatic asylum in full swing, and the other halfs a therapy garden for the lobotomized.’’

  “You know, Denise, you could be right! Maybe the God had to build a Hell to burn out all the madnesses in people. But turn and turn about—like the armor, heated up then dunked in cold water to temper it!’’

  “Oh, so now you see symbols everywhere? Even in a smithy?’’

  “Well, it’s a symbol-landscape, isn’t it?’’

  “Do you need weapons or armor?’’ snapped the blacksmith impatiently.

  “We just want to cook this bird,’’ Muthoni told it. “Right in front of your hearth.’’

  The machine clicked and clucked. “I will permit this if you will each answer one question.’’

  “What if we get the answer wrong?” asked Denise cannily. “You cannot get the answer wrong! An answer is an answer. It cannot be a non-answer.” The machine hammered red-hot metal fretfully.

  “You could ask questions that we don’t know any answer to. You could ask us what this poor woman’s name is, for instance. Or what your own name is. Just for instance. Or how long is a piece of string.”

  “Why do you search for excuses not to answer?”

  Sean clapped his hands gleefully. “I’ll tell you. Because we don’t want to get trapped in a logical paradox. There now, that’s your first question answered! Two to go.”