Watson, Ian - Novel 08

by The Gardens of Delight (v1. 1)

  “It could be such a beautiful ecology all over. Gardens everywhere—with people all conscious of the magic processes at work. But it has to end, doesn’t it? The patient has to be cured?”

  “Reintegration is the name of the game. But what follows reintegration?”

  “Do you think it could be paradise, for ever? An earthly paradise? Maintained by the superbeing and people together?”

  “We won’t find out by kicking our heels here.”

  Muthoni flipped an imaginary coin. Since it was imaginary she had already made her mind up. “Tails I lose. Down I go.”

  Denise glanced back round the empty cathedral. She licked her lips. “I’ve never met a glob. I suppose I ought to see what one looks like. And I don’t fancy being left alone. I remember a certain unicorn!”

  “Denise, that’s your image: the glob. Don’t force God to be a . . . glob. Don’t force It to be anything at all. Let it show us what it is.”

  They descended into the cleft in Indian file.

  TWENTY-ONE

  They edged, crablike, down the steep crack, lowering themselves pace by pace. Sean’s heartbeat thumped back and forth between the sandwich of rock; or could it be the heartbeat of Denise’s ‘glob’ somewhere deeper underground?

  Still descending, the fissure turned a sharp corner, doubling back underneath the cathedral. Phosphorescence lit their way.

  Just as the encroaching walls were threatening to squeeze them to a standstill the passage zigzagged then opened into an undervault: a long, high crypt eerily lit by the same phosphorescence. Toward the far end of the crypt, a massive stone column thrust into the roof; it was the base of the cathedral spire. Channels ran up through it, fluting its sides, organlike —a petrified bundle of huge hollow nerve fibers.

  A round pool floated at the base of this organ-tree, its surface faintly oily, exactly level with the floor of the crypt so that the pool seemed like a part of the floor though of a different substance. A lens. A flat jelly eye set in the socket of the floor. The organpipe trunk was its optic nerve . . .

  The urge to biologize is overpowering, thought Sean, trying to see what was actually there.

  If that was a lens, and there was the optic nerve, then where was the brain? Up in the emptiness of the cathedral— in that hollow skull? Or out in the open air, in the sky, in the whole world? In the physical God, and the physical Devil, and all the creatures? In Knossos? Here was simply a point of focus ... a focal point. Ah, everything was inside out! But, in a projection, everything would have to be . . .

  Denise’s ‘glob’? No word fitted the ‘pool’.

  They discovered they were holding hands to keep in touch with each other in the sudden enormity of the crypt after the squeeze of rock. Released from the strait-jacket of the stone they breathed in deeply. Like three children or a trio of lovers they approached the brink of the pool.

  Down they gazed into its brimful depths—or perhaps shallows: hard to say which, for the faint light bent and twisted in its jelly. Motes and tendrils and lozenges of light swam hither and thither: bubbles and threads of yellow, green, orange.

  Kneeling, Sean placed his free hand flat upon the surface but the surface resisted his pressure. His palm slid across the oily membrane and he almost fell, but Muthoni’s grip held him. Despite its phantom internal structure, the pool was all one thing: whole, entire, within its monomolecular skin.

  “It’s a water bed,” decided Denise. “Do we jump on to it? Do we make love? Do we conceive the perfect being?”

  Sean shook his head. “No, it’s a lens. An eye. But what does it see?”

  Muthoni let go of Denise’s hand. Kneeling too, she jabbed her index finger at the pool. The skin dimpled beneath her fingertip, but still it did not break.

  “It’s a single thing,” she whispered. “It’s one single cell. See, those are the lysosome particles—enzymes, down there. And mitochondria, there—the energy bodies. A lake of viscous cytoplasm. Protein ribosomes. Vesicles. Golgi bodies. Look down there in the center: there’s the nucleus with the chromosomes—and nucleoli.”

  “No, it’s a pupil,” Sean contradicted her. He sketched with both hands. “Around it is the iris—and the humor. Those stone tubes up there are ... a kind of optic nerve—a telescope, reflecting the world down into it.”

  “Rubbish. It’s a single cell—magnified.” Muthoni stared up at the organ pipes rising above their heads, passing through the roof above where they must become internalized within the towering spire. “This place is a huge microscope, that’s what! Those are the tubes. The eyepiece is the opening into the sky, high up above. Here’s the object stage. It’s God’s microscope, for peering into a cell made huge. But it magnifies the cell in reality, not just in our eyes. This is the template cell for all the creatures on this world. It’s the basis, the plan of all the life here. An Earth-evolved cell—based on the Earth pattern.”

  “So God isn’t even a glob,” giggled Denise, in a brittle way. “He’s a great big protozoon.” She slapped the membrane. “I’ve never made it before on top of a bag of DNA.”

  Whatever was Muthoni seeing in this eye? wondered Sean.

  “It’s the ur-cell,” she went on. “God has turned into this. All his other parts spring from here—and He’s part of everyone by now. Damn it all, how can we speak to a single cell—which is our own kind of cell, anyway?”

  “We should go back and ask the God,” suggested Denise. “The mouthpiece. The Christ.” She felt a surge of love for the pink-robed figure. “What happened to the crucifixion? Is having to be in the world—any world at all—enough of a nailing down?”

  “This isn’t canonical Christianity,” said Sean. “Remember that. It’s gnostic alchemical evolutionism. Symbolically, Christ is the perfect man. The successful alchemist would assume the place of Christ. ‘Christness’ would replace the man’s earlier personality. Knossos may have become equivalent to Christ, having crucified himself in stone in Hell. You see, man redeems himself in the alchemists’ system and becomes the Christ—the perfect man. The God whom we—or rather whom Denise and I—met is the ‘perfect man’ aspect of It.”

  “How can He be perfect if He wants us to help Him?” asked Muthoni.

  “Because He has fallen too—into the world. It’s only an approximation here: the search for perfection, because it isn’t . . . reality. It isn’t Darwinian evolution, as you said, Denise. It isn’t the real universe. It’s an idealization. Even so, there’s a creature with God-like power behind it all. If It hadn’t been equivalent to a God, this could never have happened.”

  “Back to paradox, eh?” Muthoni jabbed the membrane again. “So what’s this?”

  “A lens. The eye of the world telescope. God’s eye.”

  “Blah. I told you it’s a cell. On a microscope slide.”

  “It’s a jelly trampoline,” laughed Denise. “The springboard this world takes off from, where this world is dreamed and procreated. You can talk about ‘Him’ and ‘It’ till you’re blue in the face. Oh, pardon me—you’re a bit blue already! Funny old phosphorescence.” She sounded tipsy. Hysterical. “Aren’t you going to do something? This world is for fun. It’s a sport. It’s His game. So here’s one in the eye for the glob!”

  Before Sean or Muthoni could stop her, Denise had launched herself out in a belly dive.

  A convulsion of light welled out of the pool as she hit it with her full weight: a writhing of insubstantial, spectral photic tentacles—rose and violet, orange and green.

  Denise . . . burst, fractured, multiplied. She became a hundred interpenetrating images of herself: a solid holographic image of herself snipped into a hundred separate parts all of which contained the same total information but with less definition, less exactitude. For just a moment she was legion. Then abruptly, in place of a hundred conflicting replicas of her, was: a milling flock of birds. Finches, nightingales, buntings, larks, goldcrests. The birds burst upward, as though sucked by a gust of wind, up into the many tube op
enings of the organ-spire, up through them and away.

  The surface of the lens was empty. The living, sentient holographic lens, realized Sean, which projects the actual reality of this world! The whole surface of the planet could be contained in it, in scrambled coded form. It wobbled and was still,

  “She’s gone.” Muthoni gaped. “It split her up. The way It's been split up—into a million lower things. What do we do?” “It’s in Bosch, you know, in the pattern! The birds of life flying out of the holes in a spire . . . returning on foot into the egg-cave eventually. She’ll come together. She must. ”

  “In time for the millennium? Has she got to evolve back into Denise first? Don’t you care, man?”

  “She’ll be all over the land—everywhere at once. An ecologist’s dream . . . that’s what I tempted her with.”

  “I want Denise back! God, give her back!” shouted Muthoni. Her voice echoed in the crypt.

  “Maybe He wants Himself back. Itself. Whatever. I know what this projection is all about—it’s about reintegration. Of the psyche. Ours—and His. The two mesh together. And the method is a kind of holographic projection: of solid actualities, not just images you can walk right through. Of symbols into existence. But the power—the energy—required for that! Where can it possibly come from? I don’t understand that, but I do understand the psychological process of pro- iectio. In some weird way, proiectio—the projection of the unconscious on to the outside world—has met up with a physical means of realizing it! I’m going to try and make a bargain. No, not a bargain exactly. A gift, of knowledge. I’m going to try and—”

  “If I had a scalpel,” scowled Muthoni, “I’d take it to this cell—”

  “So? Whoosh: everything rushes out of the world? The projection vanishes? Leaving what? Barren rock? Everybody dead? More likely you’d just damage His eye so that He sees things askew, till it can repair itself. There’d be plague in the Gardens. Disease. Ugliness. War. Spilling over from Hell.” “But it turned her into birds!”

  “Beautiful birds ...”

  “Dumb, speechless birds!”

  “They’ll sing. They’ll celebrate existence. They’ll reintegrate into Denise. It was just a demonstration—of Its own predicament.”

  “Birds, indeed! You really do want to be the second Knossos, don’t you? But Sean, we’re an expedition from Earth! From Solspace. Remember? This is a human colony— not some psycholab for your amusement. A whole lot of human investment and faith and hope went into this.”

  “I’m doing my job, Muthoni. With due respect, I’m the only one of us who is. Though obviously I can’t speak for Austin or Tanya or Paavo. But I doubt whether they’re making much headway. I’ve got to come to grips with Him—or It—through the projection, which projects the ‘God’ we met too! And we mustn’t forget that there’d be no colony here at all without this projection. Whether it seems magical or magnificent or malign is quite secondary to that simple fact.”

  “I don’t call this freakshow a colony. Is Denise doing her job too, nesting all over the place, twittering in the bushes, laying eggs? Sean, it’s almost better that there isn’t any colony at all than this hamstrung superbeing’s playground with people as His toys in it! Or the Herr Professor’s toys!”

  “Almost better? Something’s better than nothing, old girl.”

  “How could we report this back to Earth as a success?”

  “But it is a success—in its own terms.”

  “So why did Big Daddy switch off Schiaparelli?”

  “Maybe He’s drawn to life and its dreams inexorably. He could affect Earth too. So He raised a cordon sanitaire around Himself. You’re talking scrambled, Muthoni. We have to work through the projection. All the life on this world, all the landscape, is a sort of holographic projection—into which our own psyches fit as a collective hologram. That’s how we can die and be reborn elsewhere. That’s how we can mutate, change color, whatever. He's the laser light that says ‘Let

  There Be Light’ to all this. This is the form His being takes; He can project ideas into existence. Though what His own inner being is, well . . . somehow I have to see that with His light, on His wavelength. I have to see the light itself, not what it illuminates, not the worldwide hologram it projects.” A thought struck Muthoni. “Do you know, if we had a projector that could wrap a solid terrestrial reality around some of those mudballs in the sky, we could go anywhere and settle anywhere! Is that what you’re thinking? That we could use Him as a terraforming machine for new colonies—if we could learn how to control the projection? The way that Knossos focuses it? Then this wouldn’t be a disaster at all. What a marvelous secret to take back to Earth.” “Depending on fluxes in the collective imagery.”

  “Plenty of work for an endopsych, eh? Monitoring the collective psyche? Tuning the projections? Licking the whole world into shape! I guess it would require some kind of symbiosis with the ‘God’: the projector-being. Even so ... Do you think that’s what He’s afraid of? Is that why he switched off the Schiaparelli? Or was that Knossos’s wish—so that he could keep the secret to himself?”

  “You’re thinking too far ahead. The thrust of evolution should put an end to projection, in the psychological sense, when everyone realizes that what’s outside there is actually inside themselves. That’s ‘The Work’: to reunify what has descended, or projected. Symbolically it ought to happen when the birds fly back together to the evening of the world.” “Denise—

  “No, not Denise’s birds. I mean all these birds that are avians on the one hand, but also ideas: darkened wisdom— the raven; spiritual resolve—the cockerel. And so on. It all ought to end.”

  “You mean we can’t use this power? Once we all know how to use it, we’ll be Gods instead? Without a solid world? That’s what Jeremy said, isn’t it? ‘If we were all divine Gods and sat together at table, who would bring us food?’ In that case, what substance could we have?”

  “Keep talking. We’re sorting it out. Remember that this crypt is probably part of the projection too! I don’t know whether the lens is. Or if it’s the origin of the projection. But we’re certainly projecting ourselves onto the lens.”

  “Denise did that all right! Literally.”

  “You see a microscope with a magnified Earthlife cell down here. I see—a telescope was wrong—it’s a projector.

  And what we do with it determines what it does with us. What Denise did . . . well, she’s always been absorbed by ecology—almost mystically so, in her heart; now the ecology has absorbed her. As you say, she projected herself into ! it.”

  —‘In My thoughts all the time . . . ’

  The voice sounded weaker, more remote this close to the center of things here beside the lens.

  “He’s listening to us,” whispered Muthoni.

  “Of course we’re in His thoughts. We’ve died and been reborn. He’s projecting us. Until we died, we couldn’t become a full part of the projection, could we? We were just visitors. We couldn’t really participate. But now we do. You know, Denise once told me that there was some metascientific theory going around in the old twentieth century to the effect that the whole universe is a sort of holographic projection of a God’s thoughts. When you subdivide a hologram further and further the picture doesn’t cease to exist, but it does get fuzzy. Maybe that’s why fundamental particles become indeterminate, when you divide the universe further and further. Maybe a God does dream the universe, projecting it into being. Or it dreams itself. If that’s so, could the superbeing of this Boschworld have evolved His consciousness to perceive this as the reality? Could He have been exploring how existence is? Could He be a reflection of something that projects the universe—but within the universe? Maybe He was a holy hermit, brooding here for eons. Then along came our colonists with their kitbag of symbols and their secret hierophant, Heinrich Strauss, ticking away like a time bomb among them . . . and He had to give everyone life, a landscape, a world—because He knew how to—and that was the psychic material w
aiting to be projected. That would be quite a cosmic joke upon Him! He’s led us this far instead of absorbing us into the scheme straight away— because he hopes.”

  “He certainly doesn’t expect us to use Him as a terraforming machine!”

  “I’m going to try and give Him something: awareness of what’s going on in the projection. My awareness of it. I’ll project that into him. Then we’ll see. Will you come with me, Muthoni?”

  She looked around. “Where?”

  “Into God’s eye. Into the lens. Like two consciousness filters.”

  “Jump into that cell? You’re crazy. It’ll spew you out as a swarm of bees or a cloud of butterflies or something!”

  “It isn’t aqueous humor in the eye, but aqua nostra. Here it is: the alchemist’s dream.”

  He slid one foot on to the membrane; Denise’s belly-dive wasn’t his style. The lens upheld his partial weight, quivering under him. He transferred his full weight to the surface. His arms semaphored to balance him. He pitched one way then the other. Suddenly, both his feet slid in different directions. In a manner which he barely had time to recognize as undignified, he sprawled headlong on to the lens.

  Light lashed his eyes . . .

  TWENTY-TWO

  Young Sean was wearing short trousers and a school blazer. He had knobbly knees. His fingers picked idly at a thread in the stitching of his breast pocket. The blazer pocket bore a badge, a crest of crossed spaceships on it. It had a Latin motto below it: lPROlECTlO Young Sean had a project to undertake . . .

  He sat, he discovered, in the midst of an immense threedimensional lattice of empty desks. They stretched above, below, in all directions. He was aware of the existence of a floor; though it wasn’t visible, his feet rested on it, as did the feet of his desk and of all the other desks on this particular quasi-infinite plane. Other such ineffable planes were stacked above and below, quasi-infinitely.