Watson, Ian - Novel 08

by The Gardens of Delight (v1. 1)

  Out of all the myriads of empty desks only his was occupied. By him. (Somewhere there lurked a paradox, or two . . .)

  He scratched his head. As a boy, he had lots of curly red hair, closely tangled. The hairs hadn’t separated out yet like galaxies flying apart, leaving empty space.

  Desks. How archaic. Even if they did have type keys recessed into them, and a set of headphones and a printout slot . . . Archaic knobbly knees. Archaic hair. Archaic boy!

  Puzzled, he stood up. The invisible floor existed between the desks too, not merely under them. For a while he wandered about among the empty desks on that particular plane (no way to reach any of the other planes) then seated himself at another identical desk. Perhaps it was the same one. He couldn’t tell.

  He decided that he was sitting an examination, so he pulled out the little earphones on their stalk and slipped them over his head.

  A voice promptly began speaking at a rapid dictation speed. Automatically his fingers danced over the recessed keys. Paper began to extrude from the printout slot. He realized that it was his own voice dictating to him, but he had no knowledge of the text until he read it. For the voice didn’t tell him the story; it merely operated his motor system—his typing reflexes.

  Thus (while still typing automatically) he read . . .

  First Epistle:

  The Seventh Sun of a Seventh Sun

  In a certain nebulosity there hangs a sickle-blade of six suns, wielded by a mighty seventh sun; and this seventh sun resolves itself on closer inspection into the most impressive multiple star system in known space. It consists of a perfect octahedron of bright white O-type suns which all revolve in harmony around a common center of gravity, this center of gravity—almost lost amid the blaze of light—being a smaller K-type sun, the seventh. One world alone attends this seventh sun: a gem of a planet, where it is never night.

  (The whole ensemble of suns might have been towed into place by some long-dead super-race, bent on re-arranging the cosmos into crystalline, gyroscopic propriety . . . )

  Here, on this world of the seventh sun of the seventh sun, miracles of healing take place; and occasionally the very opposite—miracles of diseasing. (As though the super-race had focused power particularly in this place . . . )

  To this world—named Gold, for its brightness and its wealth as well as for its parent sun’s place at the center of the eight-faced stellar polyhedron, such a shape being (as you know) the crystal structure of gold—there came the hybernat- ing sickness ship from the constellation of Pavo with several thousand cases of cancer and brain fever, etcetera, on board . . .

  Sean tore off the printout sheet, halting the dictating voice. What did it mean? That he was the seventh son of a seventh son, exceptionally blessed with luck? He was Irish, to be sure, but this was the first he had ever heard of any brothers!

  A long-dead super-race . . .

  A planet called Gold (only one letter away from ‘God’) built by them . . . towed into place . . .

  A hybernating ship with all those sick souls on board . . .

  From Pavo the Peacock (Paavo . . . ?)

  Clues, acrostics, absurdities!

  He threw the sheet on to the invisible floor, where it remained.

  His voice spoke to him again. He typed, automatically.

  Second Epistle:

  ‘O Magnify the Lord!’

  “Why should we magnify the Lord?” Herr Professor Heinrich Strauss asked himself one day, and promptly began to grind and polish the largest lens the world has ever seen and build the largest tube and supports to accommodate it. “Either the Lord must be very far away, or else He must be very small—quite minuscule, in fact!”

  On second thoughts, he converted his optical device into a telemicroscope: an instrument which combined in one instrument the opposite functions of the telescope and microscope. It could observe phenomena which are so large and so close at hand that nobody else notices them (such as the whole wide world, which his machine reduced to the size of a grain of sand), as well as those which are so very far away that they’re situated right around the curve of the whole cosmos, directly behind the observer’s own head.

  One day, while watching the back of his own head right around the bend of the cosmos several billion light years away (he was using tachyon-light) the Herr Professor observed a tiny figure dancing and waving to attract his attention. Cranking the magnification up by a few more logarithmic notches, he was delighted to realize that this must be God that he was at last observing . . .

  Herr Heinrich Strauss? There was indeed a microtelescope —or telemicroscope—somewhere! But where? “Am I in it at this moment?”

  Sean tore the sheet free, balled it up and dashed it across a few desktops.

  His own voice addressed him again. His fingers heeded it.

  Third Epistle:

  The Chicken Saviour

  I came across a last outcropping of this medieval view of the world in my youth, in the form of the following tale. We had at that time a cook from the Swabian part of the Black Forest, on whom fell the duty of executing the victims from the poultry yard destined for the kitchen. We kept bantams, and bantam cocks are renowned for their singular quarrelsomeness and malice. One of these exceeded all others in savagery, and my mother commissioned the cook to dispatch the malefactor for the Sunday roast. I happened to come in just as she was bringing back the decapitated cock and saying to my mother: “He died like a Christian, although he was so wicked. He cried out, ‘Forgive me, forgive me!’ before I cut off his head, so now he’ll go to heaven. ” My mother answered indignantly: “What nonsense! Only human beings go to heaven.” The cook retorted in astonishment: “But of course there’s a chicken heaven for chickens just as there’s a human heaven for humans.” “But only people have an immortal soul and a religion,” said my mother, equally astonished. “No, that’s not so,” replied the cook. “Animals have souls too, and they all have their special heaven, dogs, cats, and horses, because when the Saviour of men came down to earth, the chicken saviour also came to the chickens . . .”

  God as a chicken? Cluck-cluck . . . Preposterous! Yet the story his voice told him seemed more familiar, this time . . . Ah! It had been written down by Carl Gustav Jung! In Psychologie und Alchimie. Perhaps ... In a world of alchemical transformations, what was not possible? Even a chicken Christ. One might indeed become a bird, if that was the only way that one could fly ... Or flap one’s wings, at any rate. (Shutting his eyes, he saw a flock of assorted birds soaring up through a Hauptwerk—a Great Organ—making rainbow music in its pipes . . . ) If God could be a chicken, then perhaps He must be a chicken some time. He had no definable nature, yet nature tried to define Him . . .

  Was Denise’s transformation into birds genuine and lasting? Or was that only what he had seen as she was projected forth? People couldn’t really be transmuted into birds and beasts—at least not routinely—or the world wouldn’t be as full of people as it was! It might be scantily populated in one sense, yet surely there were more people than could be accounted for by the colonists and frozen ova of the Copernicus. Perhaps, though, birds and beasts were transmuted into people . . . The unicorn and the leopard, the heron and the shrike, certainly seemed to have purposes and motives beyond the merely animal . . . Because they were evolving? Because they embodied ideas? Or because they already were consciously aware actors in the Bosch masque? If so, who were they all?

  Sean tore the epistle free and this time folded it and slipped it into his breast pocket.

  That voice again!

  Fourth Epistle:

  The God of the Singularity

  God is very singular because there is only one of Him, just as there is only one universe at any one time. But perhaps there are other coexisting universes? In which case we do not inhabit the Universe, consequently our universe may only embody part of God. Why not, then, several separate parts of Him?

  Schoolboy logic! Sean groaned and crumpled up the paper. The voice continued,
unperturbed, but saying something slightly different.

  God is very singular because He can emerge from a naked singularity in space-time. On the grounds that anything, but anything, may so emerge, then God too may emerge from a naked singularity given time. Let us suppose that a naked singularity generates God, as equally it may toss out a can of beans or a monkey wrench or an exfarquib (an arbitrary name for an alien object unknown to us). Thus, perhaps, the universe produces a God for itself quite naturally rather than the other way about: rather than God producing a universe. If the universe is thus stranger than God can conceive—though it can conceive Him arbitrarily—then that’s a funny old do. The God needs a quiet place to listen to the music that made Him, far from the static of other natural life forms . . . Then along come life forms, willy-nilly, docking like a hospital ship or a ship of refugees, prevailing upon the creativity He has been endowed with . . .

  Sean wrenched the Fourth Epistle from the slot. He tore it up and flicked the pieces about. For a while they clung to his desk like horseflies. Finally he got rid of them all. “Am I the bloody stochastic monkey? Doomed to generate endless strings of nonsensical statements about God, only one of which can possibly be true? Or can they all be true?”

  “Ahem,” said the Voice.

  Fifth Epistle:

  The Worshipful Aliens

  Lilliput and Brobdingnag are not, in fact, two separate countries at all but the very same one. In this land of Lillibrob (sometimes called Putingnag) people are bom very tiny (though fully formed) and continue growing all their lives long until they reach giant size. All of their organs expand in the process, not least their eyes—which, as a result of this expansion, become less and less capable of focusing effectively. The expanding eye progressively distorts the world out of focus, although habit and familiarity mask what is actually going on.

  Thus it was that the young identical twins called Sooner and Later (so named since the birth of one had preceded the birth of the other by a few minutes) perceived the arrival of the Aliens in a far more exact, though necessarily more childish manner than their elders.

  Consequently they realized that the visiting Aliens were to be worshipped. Not traded with. Nor welcomed. Nor repelled. Nor interrogated. Nor copulated with. But worshiped. This was the correct mode of intercourse of alien being with alien being. Indeed, the inhabited galaxy was actually an immense church whose members all worshipped one another—as the giraffe might worship an elephant as a prodigy, an epiphany of strangeness and otherness, if only it had the wit.

  The enormous adults of Lillibrob (or Putingnag) couldn’t perceive this strangeness, so poor was their eyesight. The Aliens looked to them like rather normal, familiar creatures.

  Unsurprisingly, the Aliens quit Lillibrob very rapidly— pursued only by the prayers of the twins Sooner and Later.

  However, as Sooner and Later grew older and larger (their eyes expanding in the process) they forgot what they had really seen. The trouble was, Later forgot about it a few minutes later than Sooner; which led to an irreconcilable quarrel between the twins, which they rationalized as concerning priorities in their inheritance rights . . .

  “Oh God,” moaned Sean, letting the printout flutter away. “I’m getting worse. I’m regressing. Devolving.”

  He quit the desk in despair and wandered the infinite plane of other empty desks. All empty except one! On that one lay a book, bound in maroon leather, tooled in gold.

  He approached it circumspectly.

  Stamped upon the cover the title read: Projector’s Manual.

  He flipped it open to the title page.

  WORLD PROJECTION UNIT

  OPERATOR’S MANUAL

  Department of Architectonics

  Beautistar Cluster

  B. C. 1,500,000

  B.C.? Before Christ? Beautystar Cluster?

  He looked further into the book, but it was printed in an inscrutable script. The script wasn’t blurred or evasive, as in a dream. He merely had no reference points for it.

  Why, then, a title page in English? So that he would at least know what he was looking at?

  Had some super-race constructed machines which could transform energy into solid material objects on a planetary scale, maintaining whole projected environments for their builders, great material holographs keyed to the thoughts of the builders . . . ?

  Had one of these living machines been washed up on the barren shores of 4H97801 with no makers to animate it? Or maybe the makers had all died, or else mutated into something else. Or even been absorbed, by some voluntary or involuntary counterflow, into the projection machine itself. Into the lens.

  That was Muthoni’s notion! The idea of using the God as terraforming equipment! Still, it could be true. ‘In My thoughts, all the time . . .’ Perhaps the thought had been insinuated into them. Now it surfaced once more, though in a parody form, here in this interior space of . . . the lens, the superbeing lattice . . .

  What, actually, was Architectonics? Architecture, with a whiff of tectonics: building up a planet’s crust with new landscape? Yes, architecture sliding into the reorganization of the whole environment. But it also meant, didn’t it, the systematic arrangement of knowledge? So that by arranging one’s knowledge in such and such a way one achieved the power to transform a world—so that it would reflect that knowledge!

  Had the force behind the God been ‘built’ by aliens? From somewhere called Beautystar Cluster? Or had the God emerged spontaneously, as the Fourth Epistle stated?

  It had tried to communicate with him, through quirky parables. Their very quirkiness insisted that they were either sheer absurdity—or else metaphors for the true state of affairs.

  He saw, with surprise, that he was no longer a schoolboy dressed in short trousers and blazer. He had become a grown man again. He was no longer naked but clothed. He hid knowledge within himself now. He was dressed in the same kind of tunic as Knossos favored, though it was of the same silver-gray color as the Schiaparelli jumpsuits. His scalp itched. He scratched—and his fingers tangled in hair. Tight, wiry curls. He tore a single hair free. It was crinkly—and rusty red.

  Could the Beautystar aliens have become perfect beings? Were they actually here, and did they—through the God they had (perhaps) built for themselves—welcome the arrival of Copernicus? As something dynamic. A new start. Because perfection meant . . . that the world stood still, like a fly in amber.

  So human beings spelled salvation? Thus the Devil (and the God) did indeed worship the human newcomers just as the Fifth Epistle suggested! While, at the same time, as the Third Epistle said, humans were really still at the level of chickens and the bearded, pink-robed Deity in Eden was only ... a chicken saviour, faintly puzzled at this circumscribing of his role, an event which the Beautystar aliens might actually welcome—as an escape from the God they had generated, an escape from static perfection into process and activity and events!

  “Of course!’’ he shouted at the empty lattice. “You aren’t in here any more, are you, perfect ones? You’re all out there in the Gardens or Eden dressed in bodies. Maybe not in Hell, though? You’ve left that to the robots. That’s a human place. You’re the rest of the population! You’re the fish and the birds, the mermen, the winged sharks, the lion and the unicorn! You could be some of the human beings too! You’re relishing us! Enjoying our rich, strange psyches! Our struggle to evolve!

  “Aren’t you? Aren’t you?” he challenged.

  He thumped the nearest desk with his fist, hitting it with such force that the legs folded up under it. The desk sank smoothly into the floor, leaving only a faint notional mark.

  A shockwave radiated out. Like toppling dominoes, like a house of cards, all the other desks began to fold up and become mere marks on the plane. And as it lost its content of desks, so the plane itself—and those above, and those below—began slowly to deform. The planes folded in on themselves around him, into some hyperdimensional shape— which perhaps represented geometrically some ar
cane Number of Reality?

  He had accused, he had challenged. The collapse of the lattice seemed to be his only answer. But just as the hypershape folded around him, deforming the space occupied by his own reformed adult body—in a painless though disconcerting way, his own length and breadth and height vanishing in the process—a voice that, for once, was not his own spoke up.

  TWENTY-THREE

  He was nowhere, in the midst of nothing. A nacreous light illuminated this nothing without, however, suggesting near or far, or up or down. He thought he was wriggling his arms and legs, trying to orient himself. Then he gave up. He had no arms and legs, although his nervous system still thought that he had. His hand in front of his face simply wasn’t there. The collapse of the lattice, he thought, had deprived him of an outside. It was as though the projection of reality had been switched off. Now he was only a dot, a point, dimensionless.

  And a voice spoke to him.

  Reprogramming him? By sensory deprivation? He had no choice in the matter, since there was no other matter present.

  “Nowhere isn’t nothing, Sean. Nowhere is the Void. Listen: there is more energy locked up in a single fingerspan of Void” (and now he had at last a sensation of fingers, gripping . . . nothing) “than there is in all the suns and radiation in the whole universe. Particle pairs spring into being from this nowhere constantly, of their own accord. But given enough release of energy, anything whatever can appear: configurations of particles corresponding to a sapphire, a tree, a grand piano . . .