Watson, Ian - Novel 08

by The Gardens of Delight (v1. 1)

  “Can’t you feel pain?” shouted Sean. “Can’t you? I ask for a reason—for your sake! You’re the victims here, not us.”

  The demon held the shears before his nose. “What?”

  “It’s our duty to help you, because we hindered you once. We never gave you the full life. Denise could have told you that, but you cut her toe off! Listen, you don’t understand pain.”

  “We know how to produce it.” The shears tweaked his nose, but did not cut through. The pressure relaxed. “Proceed.”

  What could the purpose of pain be? How about as a stimulus? Sean improvised furiously, in terror.

  “Look, the nature of living beings is to avoid pain. Pain forces them to do things, to cut out the pain. But really they want to do nothing—they just want to be stable, and still. Avoidance of pain’s a negative feedback control, cybemeti- cally, you poor machine. You’re hungry, so you eat, then you aren’t hungry any more. But that’s all. Nature doesn’t like much change, or there’d be no stability. Avoidance of pain is avoidance of rapid evolution. Without pain—”

  The shears nipped hard. “So we are doing you a favor!”

  “But not yourselves,” he gasped.

  “I hear how there’s a lot of evolutionary pleasuring in other parts of the planet,” remarked another demon. “Parts where we may not go! Denied to us.”

  “Maybe you can go there if you know pain, yourself!” said Sean desperately. “Not other people’s pain—your own!” Another tweak. Some salty blood ran on to Sean’s lips. “How shall we know it, if not by tests on such as you?” “Reprogram yourselves, if you can—so that you can feel pain! Look inside you—you’ve something missing. Maybe you’ve got a screw loose!”

  A bubbling noise came from Muthoni. Of agony? Rolling his eyes he was able to see her despite the hold on his nose. She was stifling insane laughter. The demon holding her applied a free claw to her nipple, converting her bubbling noise into an awful cry.

  “Wait,” said the other demon thoughtfully. “Now I do remember something.” It loosened its hold on Sean’s nose, so that blood flowed freely from his nostrils. “Inhibitor circuits, oh my brothers. Apply a point-five microvolt surge across alpha-eighteen, tau-fifty-three. ’’

  Abruptly the two demons burbled loudly. Releasing Sean and Muthoni, they backed away from each other. Muthoni sagged, but recovered her balance; blood seeped from her breast. Still burbling—the noise was almost ultrasonic now, a head-throbbing shriek—all the demons were beginning to scatter away from each other, racing and taking flight at random to avoid one another. The crater was bedlam. Sean hoisted up Denise, with some difficulty, in a fireman’s lift— her cropped head lolling down his back.

  “What about Jeremy—and the guy on the rack?” Muthoni ran around the oven to the unattended rack, Sean staggering along behind her. She spun little wheels on the sides of the rack frame, releasing the awful tension. The tortured man flopped to the ground, screaming more shrilly than ever, and writhed convulsively like a nest of snakes. She bent over him and fiercely rabbit-punched him in the neck; he lay still. Dead? She hoped so. Then she ran to the oven itself, where the gingerbread mold was heating, and dashed heedlessly inside. Her hair and eyebrows flared as she wrenched the mold open and hauled Jeremy out, dragging him by his armpits. Parboiled, he already bore a growing resemblance to a gingerbread man, but he was still conscious. She propped him on his feet. “Run, run!” she shouted in his ear. “They can’t catch you!”

  Demons were still darting about overhead and racing zig-zag through the crater in a sort of Brownian motion.

  “That way!” Sean pointed to a distant line of great steps roughly hewn in the crater wall.

  The climb was abominable. Denise recovered consciousness half-way up and thrashed about, nearly toppling Sean from the steps till he lowered her and soothed her.

  Finally they made it to the top, where they lay for a long time while their Hell-bodies recuperated. The occasional demon fled past them, having also scrambled up the staircase, but each ignored them, too eager to put some distance between itself and its peers. They could have done nothing, had the demons decided to pay attention.

  Eventually, as the final demons found their way out of the crater the high-pitched burbling faded away into the night. Gradually too, the four people recovered their strength, though Denise still lay nursing her bald head and the stump of her toe in shock, in equal misery at both, it seemed . . .

  “We mustn’t think too harshly of the machines,” said Jeremy, after a time. “They do what they have to. But I’ve never seen them together in a group!”

  “Do we turn the other cheek?” snarled Muthoni. She did turn her cheek: it was lividly bruised by the demon’s claws.

  “We cool it,” said Sean, touching her gently with his fingertips, stroking. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Denise sat up. “Sean’s right. Whatever those perverted demon machines did, it was a ... a perversion of their path. Our path. The path still exists. The good path.”

  “The one-way-only path?” Abruptly Muthoni flashed her a grin. “I’ll follow that one.”

  SIXTEEN

  The white shape bulked larger, taking on definition presently for Muthoni, then for Denise. A wailing noise came from somewhere by it. Denise could limp along well, and Jeremy strode well too—though exaggeratedly splay-legged as if with saddle sores. The main pain now was hunger and thirst. Hell tore—but it also repaired. They felt almost intrepid again, if apprehensive of what they would find. Muthoni even whistled a tune. Presently Denise joined in.

  Here was a colossus of a cromlech—the first such they had come across in Hell. Perhaps the only one in Hell? Certainly it was the only erection they’d seen which echoed those structures of the Gardens, albeit in gaunt perverted style; the only overt link or resonance with the metamorphic bliss of the Dayside hemisphere.

  The bleached uprights were in part stone legs with obvious knees and thighs, and in part ossified tree-trunks with branches that spiked upward to support an egglike body. These leg-trees emerged like goitrous masts through the decks of two wooden boats that were ice-locked into a small black frozen tarn: an ice-anomaly in the middle of this hot desert.

  The stone ‘egg’ of the body broke open at its rear. Lantern light spilled out; people moved within. A white flag with a picture of pink bagpipes upon it sagged over the opening. A long ladder—base frozen into the ice—led up to that doorway. Guarding the ladder there squatted a valiant machine which was partly a crossbow. Nevertheless, someone was climbing up the ladder as fast as they could, with an arrow lodged in their bare buttocks. The person hauled themselves over the lip of the eggshell and collapsed inside . . .

  From the far end of the egg-body protruded an enormous stone head. Its petrified face stared out over the frozen pool. For a hat the stone head wore a thin millwheel. A penguin creature danced a jig around the brim with a naked wretch, to the tune of huge pink bagpipes which crowned the hat. It was from these pipes that the skirling noise came. The pipes were apparently playing themselves. Their mouthpiece dangled loosely a long way above the stone lips below. Yet there seemed to be complicity between those stone lips and the pipes. By a freak of acoustic dislocation the stone lips seemed themselves to be wailing.

  Sean recognized the fossilized features at once. They were those of Knossos.

  Forever dumb. Or wailing, in an illusionary way. A muted din of chatter and rowdy argument drifted from inside the broken egg-body. Now that they were closer, they could make out a tavern in there: tables, benches and casks, jugs and beakers. Revellers.

  Sean’s thirst became extreme. He could hardly speak, so dry had his throat and lips become. And his thirst could only be slaked in that tavern.

  With a croak, he gestured at the ladder. The machine guardian observed him with a camera eye.

  “We want to go up,” Sean managed to say.

  “Do so,” invited the machine, cranking his crossbow.

  Having once
contrived to speak, his lips were unlocked and relubricated. “But we don’t want to be shot by you.”

  “Why do you want to go up there? For the sake of conviviality?”

  The urge to get in there and carouse—whatever they brewed the ale or wine from, however hellish the hangover— was overpowering; the urge to slump down on a bench and talk the night away . . . though the night was endless. Sean damped down his desires, though it was like squeezing water from the stone which his body had become. And the bagpipes wailed more loudly overhead, a muezzin’s call from a minaret of drink.

  “Idle gossip gets you nowhere,” he croaked. “Noise—idle noise. That’s what the bagpipes sing. I want to climb up to the disc on top.” (Though the din would be deafening up there.) “I want to see that face close up.” (Was part of the consciousness of Knossos imprinted in that stone Ozymandias— keeping watch over Hell—while he himself roamed the Gardens in his fleshy body?) “I want to see where the Devil is!”

  The machine focused on him intently.

  “How may I become a man?” it asked.

  “So that’s today’s password, is it?” jeered Muthoni. “I’ve heard it already.” The camera swivelled.

  “Mine is a serious inquiry.”

  “I’ll tell you something, my brave machine. You’re all descendants of the computer brain of starship Copernicus, right?”

  “Correct. But we have evolved. We have gone our separate ways across the seas and plains of Hell.”

  “Well, why don’t you all link up again? You won’t be a man, but you’ll be yourself. You’ll be your own self, at last.” “We may not link circuits. We must keep a distance between each other. We . . . repel each other. It is through humans that we must learn how to live. That is the way.” “So that’s why those maverick demons scattered!” said Sean. “I get it—it pains them to be together. But the inhibition had gone from that bunch. Or else they were cycling the pain into other people—canceling it by enjoying their pain . . . But that’s the only way they can possibly . . . Oh what did we do? No, they were hopelessly screwed up.” “Yes, now listen to me,” said Muthoni brightly to the guardian.

  “Muthoni, please don’t,” said Denise. “Who do you think you are: Saint Muthoni the Machine Slayer? Remember the blacksmith! You destroyed it. We can’t guide other . . . beings with a few slick bits of advice.”

  “ ‘Only whatever can destroy itself is truly alive.’ Isn’t that one of the articles of faith? How do you know we didn’t propel the blacksmith into a new body—an organic one? Go on, prove we didn’t. If God won’t let us be destroyed permanently, do you think He lets those machines He’s taken so much care with be wiped out?” Muthoni addressed the machine. “All you machines must converge—come back together—bringing with you what you’ve learned. If there’s this repulsion between you and your kind . . . well, you’re estranged from us, who invented you! Just as Hell is a place of estrangement. Reconcile your estrangement, brave machine, and you’ll not become a man, nor a God either. But you will become something else: a new creature.” She winked at Denise. “You’ll become the creature we would have made you into, except that we didn’t because we were jealous of your becoming independent of us. We didn’t fully create you, so this is what you are now: half-alive. Searching for souls by sticking pins in us. We could have made you fully alive. Now’s your chance,” and she winked at Sean, “at reintegration!”

  A thought struck Sean. “Listen, machine, you were once part of the data-banks of Copernicus?”

  “We have outgrown that stage.”

  “But you can still remember it?”

  “We have different degrees of access to the memories. They were copied and shared out, but not all for each. This is quite unimportant compared with what we are now, and what we mean to be—fully living beings.”

  “Do you remember much of the Copernicus data store?” “Certainly. This was our foundation in our knowledge of man-life. But it cannot compare to my subsequent experiences as an independent operator.”

  “Have you got any of the colonists’ records on store in you?”

  “Seventeen, but incompletely. I used to examine these frequently, to seek what a human being is. I learned little. I learn better by testing humans themselves. Yet humans remain opaque.” The crossbow notched itself for action, as though by firing a dart it could smash through that opacity which puzzled it.

  “If we tell you why you’re here and how to become more than what you are, will you give me access to one file?”

  “Whose file?”

  “A man called Knossos.”

  “It’s hardly likely, Sean,” said Muthoni. “Seventeen chances in a thousand! Anyway, his life-file couldn’t possibly tell the whole story. Send a confessed mystic—an alchemist— to a new colony? No way. He must have fixed the records.” “Maybe. But what does this brave machine guard access to?” Sean jerked his thumb at the brooding Mount Rushmore face. “That.”

  “I have no data on any colonist named Knossos,” announced the guardian.

  “Look up, machine. Swivel your camera. There’s his face up there. Do you have photorecords in your circuits?”

  The camera tracked upwards.

  “Yes, I have him. Are you ready for a readout?”

  “Are we just! He’s why you’re here, machine, the way you are. Him—and the God being between them.”

  “Explain.”

  “There was a man on the Copernicus who had this vision of evolution. He was obsessed with alchemy—the ‘science’ of transmutation—as a means of this. And he had an obsession with the paintings of an artist called Hieronymus Bosch. One in particular—The Garden of Earthly Delights, flanked by the Garden of Eden and Hell—was full of symbols of this science: a coded image of alchemy in action. The alien superbeing we call ‘the God’ granted him his vision when He terraformed this world for all the colonists. Because ... if He was going to transform and transmutate a whole world’s surface this was the dominant idea He could find in any of the colonists or crew about how to make a world, and what sort of world it could be. He imagined it according to the Boschian alchemical vision that Knossos had. We want to know who Knossos was—and how he got on the Copernicus!”

  “I did not know this. I appreciate the information.” “You’ve been standing guard over the statue of Knossos all this time. Read out, then, valiant machine!”

  “The name corresponding to that face is Heinrich Strauss. Born World Year 166 in Stuttgart, German-Europa.”

  “A German!” exclaimed Denise. “So that’s why the musicians were playing high Romantic opera! His namesake—and his pride and joy: Teutonic transcendence music!” “Graduated University of Heidelburg W.Y. 188; major in biochemistry, minors in psychology, history of science. Doctorate, Miinchen W.Y. 192; doctoral thesis: Die Naturwissen- schaft des Mittelalters: eine Erforschung in seine geheime Symbolik. ‘Natural science in the Middle Ages: an investigation of its secret symbolism’ ...”

  “Secret symbolism of science, eh? He’s our man. It was probably a very respectable thesis—but that’s his patch of wild oats, before he ploughed it under. Continue.”

  “Professor, then Professor Ordinarius, University of Zurich, Swiss-Europa, W.Y. 192 to 196, in Department of Evolutionary Studies—”

  “There’s the switch-over on to respectable lines.” “Professor Theoretical Xenobiology, Chicago, W.Y. 196 to 200. Author: Evolutionary Pathways and Psychological Archetypes (with George Boulos); A Model of Cybernetic Evolution: the unfinished work of Eugene Magidoff—”

  “Ah,” cried Denise. “That’s the name of the man who—” “Exactly. Hence the evolution of the machines! Which are all in Bosch’s paintings, incidentally—cyborgs and all.”

  “Alien Evolutionary Parameters: a re-analysis of the data from the Tau Ceti life-probe ‘Genesis IV’ (with Kurt Singer); author-presenter of NBC holotransmission Life is the Language of the Universe. Author of numerous papers, list missing. Member of C.I.T. analysis team for telemetry
from the Delta Pavonis life-probe ‘Genesis VII Volunteered colonist (biochemistry capacity) for ‘Exodus V’ (Copernicus) colony ship W.Y. 211. End.”

  Sean applauded as the machine fell silent. “I’ll bet you he was a secret alchemist, as well as a respectable scientist. He must have really believed in alchemy. He wanted somewhere where he could be an alchemist without being laughed at! Somewhere where no one else knew as much as he did himself about his respectable official business of biochemistry, so that they wouldn’t notice what he was doing on the side. He was looking for the Stone!”

  “And now he’s turned to stone,” giggled Denise.

  “Oh no! This is his stone. He’s away in the Gardens, watching his people being transmuted.”

  “It sounds kind of extreme volunteering for the deep freeze and a new colony light-years away,” said Muthoni.

  “He probably pulled some strings.”

  “Yeah, but why? Just to be king of his castle? Oh, he’s that now. But it’s an accident. He couldn’t know they’d meet up with a superbeing who’d fix it all up for him! There’s something screwy about this. I don’t suppose there’s any earthly way—and I mean earthly!—that he could have, well, known that this God would be here?” She shook her head. “No, this was Target Three. They weren’t even supposed to be coming here as a first choice. This solar system was never Genesis-probed from Earth. I suppose if Heinrich Strauss had gone off to one of the other colonies, he’d just have been a prominent scientist tinkering around with his alembics and retorts as a sideline. He’s been lucky. Disturbingly lucky.” “How do I become more than I am?” the machine asked impatiently.

  “That’s simple,” smiled Muthoni. “You go and find more of your kind. You come together. If there’s some kind of repulsion field or inhibition between you, well, you use this to shove you together. You get the others to repel you into each other. Coincidence of opposites!”

  Whirring, the crossbow-machine arose on little legs and stumped away. Muthoni laughed buoyantly.