Watson, Ian - Novel 08

by The Gardens of Delight (v1. 1)

  “You might be, too.”

  “Oh, what have they done to us?”

  “Well, I can tell you who ‘they’ are, for a start. I can tell you what this world is. And why. As field trips go, you could say that our own was a roaring success.” Yes, the roar of the lion that had killed him, the roar of the furnaces of Hell . . .

  Austin Faraday was only paying scant attention. The projection of the planet—this gnostic, Boschian, alchemical projection—and the mind-horde instrumental in it, and Heinrich Strauss the hierophant and joker of the pack, were quite beyond him now. Faraday listened, but he did not hear. Abruptly his knees folded under him. He slumped into Sean’s arms. He’d passed out—into a sleep of exhaustion, a sleep of the deprived.

  Sean hauled his body into the open, spacious airlock. Which had become a Robinson Crusoe camp, with ration packs scattered around and a plastic water tank hooked up to a sterilization unit, and for defense a laser rifle and a hypodermic dartgun lying on bedding cannibalized from the bunks upstairs.

  Kicking the guns aside, Sean laid Faraday on the bedding and stripped him of his useless filter mask. He removed the power cells from both the guns and tossed them through the hatch, far across the greensward.

  He checked the elevator. Inoperative, now. No entry to the rest of the ship.

  With a sigh, he went back to the open hatch.

  At the far end of the meadow, a clothed figure stood watching. Knossos raised his hand in mock salute. Or perhaps it was genuine. Corvo the magpie fluttered above the man’s head, cawing jubilantly.

  My traitor, my brother . . .

  But how could Strauss possibly be a traitor? What he was instrumental in doing here was only the same thing as Sean had been primed to do in a different way. Alien worlds could never be second Earths. They wrought a change, a transformation. If Strauss was correct in saying that the true deep purpose of the whole colonization adventure was indeed transformation—which here on the Boschworld could be guided by projecting symbols of transformation directly into the outer world!—then Sean must perhaps stop fighting himself . . .

  A blur of colors—of green and yellow and red—darted from the trees and flapped about above his head. A parakeet.

  He laughed aloud. Long ago in Ireland there had been an Order of the Nuns of the Holy Paraclete. For a long time, because his error was never corrected by his parents, whom it amused, Sean had remained convinced that the black-robed nuns, bereft of all plumage themselves, worshipped at the shrine of a sacred parakeet . . .

  Here, now, was his own personal Paraclete: his holy ghost incarnated from out of the mind-horde.

  This, then, was the dry baptism of the Christ in himself, of the perfected being to come, the transpersonality. It wasn’t Piero della Francesca’s pastel vision of it, though. Here was an exotic bird from out of the Tropic of Bosch.

  Sean raised his hand. With a gay screech the parakeet landed on his knuckles, wrapping claw-rings around them. It cocked an eye and pronounced, in a guttural throaty little voice, “Hullo.”

  “Hullo yourself.”

  “The Work, the Work,” it urged him. Fluffing out its gaudy feathers it pecked about in its wingpit, though there were no fleas or lice on the planet. Perhaps the parakeet had dandruff. Idly he scratched at its neck with his free hand as he walked down the ramp back into the Gardens.

  A few years later—in so far as one was conscious of years— Sean was passing near the meadow where Schiaparelli had come down. He detoured to inspect the site.

  No bright steel starship stood there now. Neither was there a rusty hulk. Instead, a dark blue tower rose from the middle of the meadow. It was a fusion of six slender hexagonal marble columns, with perhaps a seventh as the central core. Or maybe steps spiralled up around a hexagonal shaft within; if not, then one of the outer columns would be hollow. High up, a railless platform encircled the tower, and two figures pranced there acrobatically. One was black, the other white. They performed callisthenics, heedless of the sheer drop. Some way above their heads, the fused columns attenuated into a pink lozenge with a harpoon point. Squinting, Sean confirmed what he already sensed spectrally. The two acrobats were Muthoni Muthiga and Austin Faraday.

  “Halloo!” he called.

  His parakeet, whom he had christened—whimsically— Archie (the bird was an Archie-type), flapped up and away, screeching to attract, or to distract their attention. The two figures halted in midstep. They stared down and waved back to Sean. Then they cartwheeled away in opposite directions around the platform, to arrive at a face-to-face handstand. In this position, upside-down, they made slow but buoyant love.

  Sean applauded. He called Archie back down to him and sent the bird off in search of aerial transport, then he walked to the base of the tower and circled it till he found a marble slab that tilted at his touch to become an access ramp. He walked up the counterbalanced ramp—which closed behind him—into the central core of the tower, which was indeed hollow. Steps spiralled overhead, around the inner hexagon, faintly lit (though brightly to his hypersense) by sunlight suffusing through the pink glans of the summit.

  He mounted, till he came to the place where a control deck might have been, had this been a starship. He stepped out through an oval opening on to the vertiginous platform which might have been the deck, extruded.

  Austin and Muthoni were still poised in their slow erotic asana. Sean patted Muthoni merrily on the inverted rump, and she grinned up at him, while Austin contrived a wink. They toppled backward, uncoupling, rolling smoothly to their feet.

  “Come to a Cavalcade, old friends? There’s a gathering by the Solvent Lake beyond the Hill of Hermes.”

  “Can we fly?” asked Muthoni eagerly.

  “Why not?”

  Austin paced to and fro exaltedly. Schiaparelli no longer existed, and Earth was so far away, that noon-day. He hardly remembered Earth at all, but he would have to forget it somewhat more. It would, Sean saw, soon be time for him to die voluntarily and sojourn in Hell a while. Muthoni caught Sean’s look; she nodded, regretfully, then instantly cheered up.

  Presently a flying shark, ridden by a merman, glided through the sky led by the squawking parakeet. Nosing up to the platform, it swung around until one fin-wing lay across the whole width of the platform. The merman sat gazing blankly ahead.

  They boarded the merman’s back, and the shark cast off. Soon they were sailing along a few hundred feet above the dips and rises of the Gardens. Muthoni clasped Sean around the waist, and he could feel the wedge of Austin’s hands in the small of his back clasping Muthoni likewise. Austin wouldn’t, of course, forget absolutely; but Earth would become his uterine life, his prenatal existence. His consciousness would be of other things.

  Sean extended his perception, and the Gardens became a curving, multi-planar map like the lattice, though full of content. Sparks burned at nodes in the mesh of human life and mind-horde life, each one presenting a little rainbow spectrum, zebra-striped by its own unique absorption lines of knowledge.

  The entire pattern still eluded him, and there was an occasional nagging sense of something missing from it, or from himself—something forgotten or overlooked—yet he was sure it would come clear in time. Of time there was still plenty. The sun stood still at its zenith in the sky, warming his skin through his tunic and directly warming the naked flesh of his friends, marking time forever, for the present . . .

  —We've really brought them to life, Beautystars!

  —Brought ourselves to life, elemental one!

  —No, this projection has achieved autonomy. Integrity, authenticity. I’m sure of it!

  —They may have behaved in this manner. / Grudgingly / Can we ever be sure? Item, surely there was more subtle interplay between their cerebral hemispheres, sinister and dexter, than they realized?

  —Therefore, elemental one I A hint of sarcasm / through feedback we evolved a more refined probability-model. We inserted the arrival of a starship. Our Beautystar elemental ‘Athlon’ ha
s performed impeccably. His influence upon the whole projection will be to reintegrate these loose ends in their psychology.

  —In so doing he develops a different vector from our elemental *Knossos’. 1Evolution’ is purposive to Knossos. To Athlon, evolution is basically a laying down of psychic strata which the weathering of time will re-expose, demanding reintegration. Athlon realizes—at least occasionally—that his Hell-born hypersense is allied to the old limbic immediacy of perception which must now be linked to neocortical understanding.

  —I agree that Knossos’s vision is the more exciting.

  —And the more uncertain! But only on a scale of uncertainty! All we know of their actual ‘unconscious' processes is what they were able to describe encyclopedically—or symbolize in the ‘artwork’ they transmitted. Item, the concept of a guiding meta-being—a ‘deity’—is deficient. We are already a proper meta-being. Our elementals in the ‘deity’ and ‘antideity’ roles suffer discomfort.

  —You feel anguish at our own arbitrary origin, elemental! Who are we to praise ourselves? If the sense of ‘deity’ evolved naturally deep in the ‘human’ mind it may be a correct reflection of an aspect of reality. We must appreciate this.

  —I say there is anguish in the projection!

  —You refer to Hell? Undoubtedly there is a vein of masochism in their curiosity-gratification system. Their brains work by pleasure plus pain, do they not? A dual mechanism! The neurological data demonstrated this.

  —Item, Athlon has not discovered the pattern nested within the pattern, even though he intuited our own origin! Is this necessarily impossible, while he remains a ‘man’? Or are our embodied elementals over-simplified, over-constrained?

  —This is not a game with a single winning move! The ‘Work’ is constantly opening up genuine new heuristic strategies. Which we shall surely apply subsequently!

  —I misdoubt the ‘Work’. Many other possible projections of ‘man’ could be achieved from the given data. For instance, we could project the martial search for ‘beauty’ in their Nippon culture . . .

  —We have time to explore all the possibilities. I still contest that the ‘Work’ is the most potentially rewarding. I would even go so far as to assert that we owe this to the memory of the ‘man’ Strauss who inserted data on this rare invention ‘alchemy’ in the transmitted mega-bits. Here we have a tool we can apply to ourselves and our dilemma. This alchemy complements our transformational play magnificently.

  —We cannot apply it to other heuristic alien animations!

  —Because we haven’t mastered it yet. Alchemy is a strategy of understanding. Their symbols for it are quite peculiar, we all agree. (Not to them, no doubt, arising as these symbols do from their unconscious processes!) They are such alien beings. Still, I believe they would recognize themselves. I submit that we have simulated them authentically. 1 vote for continuance. We owe it.

  —To ourselves, though?

  —Duty, Beauty stars, is the defeat of anguish! We must never assume that alien life-forms arise and communicate their knowledge merely to amuse us. There have been eons of mere amusement already. During this eon, let us be serious. We may discover something to be serious about. I repeat, this projection has attained autonomy. It has developed real goals. If it achieves those goals, elementals, we may surprise ourselves—quite as much as our own existence surprises us in the first place!

  —But how can a flawed simulation—a fiction!—achieve a goal greater than we already are? At root it is imperfect. We, on the other hand, are perfect. We are the end-point, to begin with! We can be anything. We are free of the struggles, the parochial ‘histories' of planetary beings!

  —So why do we continue to bind up our minds in lesser existences? Because, noble mind-horde, we must build constraints for ourselves. We mustn’t make mistakes that prevent us from making further mistakes, or we will cease to exist. If we are initial arbitrary perfection, Beautystars, we are perfection in search of error. The mistake is our tool. All of our worlds have been mistakes, because they are only approximate. As is this one too. Its flaw is that it isn’t a perfect simulation—and that is our saving grace, our noble achievement. Because it is flawed, it gives us a history—a history of error. Hell is the biggest error in that world. It is error supreme.

  —Yet if the alchemy succeeds—the transmuting of everything into everything else, without constraints!—and the world becomes all Gardens . . .

  —It will not, I think. Hell will continue to govern Paradise, retarding it and advancing it at the same time. The Millennium will be a little late this year. Our embodied elementals must be able to go on making creative mistakes in the right direction. Thus, one day, we will have made enough mistakes to understand ourselves, and survive our own miraculous existence.

  —We must consider the imperfections of our projected world more deeply! Any ordinary material object or entity can conform to how things are in nature without bothering about it—whereas we have to bother! So we can only project an almost-perfect world, with almost-perfect rocks, plants, beasts and people. Actually we are topping it up all the time—so that the aerial sharks can fly, and fish can walk, and trees produce fruit without insects to fertilize them. Oh, we could revise the beasts, introduce insects, but that isn’t the point. I maintain that other imperfections would necessarily appear. With respect,

  Beautystars, this world hasn't—and cannot have—achieved autonomyIhomeostatis. I deny this. And this is very important.

  —But we are perfect. / Insistence /

  —No! The necessary imperfections of the projected world must teach us that this isn't so. There is a level of organization beyond us that we cannot even recognize. The limits of the projection prove that there are limits to us, too. Our limit is in not knowing this.

  —Specify!

  —Item: what is the Void, which energizes us? What might an absence of Void ‘be'? Item: where is the life in the universe, whose signals we have animated? Elemental Knossos deduces that it has moved on, shifted its organization level. This is hidden from us, and our only way of inferring this is through the imbalance in our imperfect projection—not with our own free intellects, Beautystars! Our elemental Athlon is quite right to accuse our elemental God of agnosticism—of riot-knowing. Because this is the truth, if we were not blinded by our own small power. We are to the natural-life that evolved dynamically as are the questing machines in Hell to the analogue humans of the projection! The aesthetic balance of the projected world proclaims that truth about us, if we can realize it. Paradox: because this is beyond our realization, yet still declares itself through the projection, it is so. There is a further level of organization to find, which perhaps by its nature is unfindable.

  —Mere hypothesis! There is a real universe, of which we are the sport.

  —But what is ‘reality'? What is the Void? What is time?

  —Continuance, Beautystar-consensus?

  —Continuance!

  But the dialogue of self with self continued . . .

  Out in space, other linked elementals of the mind-horde continued, with a trivial part of their beings, to track the various points of origin of the small number of similar encyclopedic transmissions from alien sources which they had intercepted over the past mega-eon. One elemental in particular monitored the location of the ‘Earth’ point, a thousand parsecs away, though no further transmissions were expected from that quarter. Why should they be, when a world had already exerted itself to send out so much of its culture, biology and purposes coded in data-bits? So it paid that point in the Void very little, though adequate, attention. The majority of its attention it focused upon events in the Gardens of Delight, and Hell, and Eden, where the embodied mind-horde danced in alien dress the complex, irrational calculus of existence, constraining itself, making mistakes, seeking a solution . . .

  The aerial shark flew on, with the merman on its back and upon the merman’s back in turn the three people— resembling the archaic image of the world resti
ng on the back of an elephant who stood in turn upon a tortoise . . . though what did the tortoise stand on? However, that image did not belong to this projected world; Sean dismissed it from his mind.

  Presently the shark glided lower toward a vale enclosing a perfectly round pool already crowded with sporting women. Around the pool at a discreet distance slowly rode a band of men pacing their assortment of steeds. The backs of several of the beasts were still unoccupied. Time enough for Austin to land and mount—a griffin, a unicorn or a boar—and for Muthoni to run to the water before the circle of animals accelerated.