The Triple Goddess

by Ashly Graham

  ‘For rather a long time. Central, I believe, is keen for this Project thing to bear fruit before the end of the world renders it redundant.’

  ‘All I know, as Shahrazad did, is that the stories must continue.’

  Steerforth shook his head. ‘The suggestion, young man, though laudable, is impractical. A thousand more stories would require the retailing of fictive matter on Ward One for nearly a further three years, and there’s proof enough that the world will end in months not years, absent any positive contribution that our bodies might make to Central’s Project.’

  ‘A thousand and one is not a literal number, like ten, or a hundred, or a thousand. Shahrazad’s stories would have gone on indefinitely, if necessary and she were spared. Life is life so long as it lasts, with no proof required. Whether a river runs straight, or winds, or forms an oxbow lake by intersecting with itself to shorten its path to the sea, it follows its own secret destiny.’

  A spark of glee ignited in Steerforth’s belly. It must be clear to all that Sorias had gone over the edge. Now, as Speaker, it was incumbent on him to be charitable, for the wardniks knew only too well how great was the mental duress imposed upon them, and the toll it took.

  Steerforth looked around to assess the general mood; but the Impatients, their eyes empty of expression, were all lying on their backs staring at the stained-glass dome of the ceiling, passive and impassive.

  Sorias had not finished. ‘Regarding that rolling ball. As you may recall, the myth of the Minotaur contains the hopeful person of Ariadne, daughter of Minos, King of Cnossos. Ariadne gives a ball of golden thread to Theseus, so that he can find his way out of the labyrinth after he has slain the fearful beast. Ariadne herself had a golden crown set with gems, which at her death was set in the sky where the gems became stars.’

  It was nine o’clock. The door to the ward opened; not as it usually did, thrust open for the strutting Hugo Bonvilian 4285D by one of his entourage; but slowly, and only by so much as was enough to admit a slim unaccompanied figure in a tailored navy-blue dress with white piping.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

  How I wonder what you are!

  Up above the world so high,

  Like a diamond in the sky!

  Anne Taylor and Jane Taylor,

  Rhymes for the Nursery, “The Star”, 1806

  *

  Sister Gloria Mundy 2042M had lost none of her air of gravity, but she no longer had the air of a nursing sister. Nor did it seem that she would answer anyone who addressed her by her alphanumeric name.

  As she walked down the ward looking to neither left nor right, the Impatients shook off their torpor with a vigour that Speaker Steerforth had failed to induce in them, and sat up.

  When Gloria Mundy reached the end of the ward, she raised her arms before the windows in a grand gesture. Although the day had begun leaden grey, sunshine suffused the room; the iron stanchions inside the tall panes melted away; and, despite decades of disuse, the windows opened wide without a sound. The fetid atmosphere freshened, and was filled with the scent of flowers and the singing of birds.

  Gloria put both index fingers in her mouth and blew a piercing whistle out of the window. The sound was so powerful that every man on the ward found himself trying to remember whether, in his youth, he had been capable of producing one like it. Impatient Squamous whispered to his neighbour Squeamish, ‘Me, a two-fingered curl was as much as I could manage. It’s all in the bevel, you know, as the upper teeth and tongue force air downwards.’ Squeamish nodded.

  When she turned to face the ward, Gloria Mundy’s face was transformed by a smile, and instead of her uniform of hospital blue she was wearing a dress that matched the light so closely it was impossible to tell them apart…the material might have been reflective, or the brightness inherent in it, or perhaps the day was itself taking on the hue of the garment.

  The smile became a laugh, a silvery tone that irradiated the spirit of every man on his pallet. Hearts beat more rapidly, cheeks filled, and the extremities of numb limbs tingled as if with pins and needles. The cuckoo depression, which had grown and pushed so many recollections of humanity and love from the ward, flew out of the windows to seek its victims elsewhere. Stagnant, selfish, and fearful thoughts, even hatred of the oppressor, were replaced by a liquor that coursed through every dried-up vein, like the blood that flows into a butterfly’s wings when it emerges from the chrysalis, pumping them up by as much as sixty times in size.

  In a low mellifluous voice, Gloria Mundy said, ‘I am here for one reason only: to lead you on a journey. A final journey, to a place where there is no past or present or future. In the words of Guy de Maupassant, “Le voyage est une espèce de porte par où l’on sort de la réalité comme pour pénétrer dans une réalité inexplorée qui semble un rêve.” There you shall reside forever with your brothers and sisters of the world who have gone on before you.

  ‘But before I do so, before I can do so, each of you must relinquish your S-name and reveal yourself as you were at birth. You know your names, and now you must declare them.’

  Gloria walked to Squamous’s bed and touched his shoulder.

  ‘Charmed I’m sure,’ said Squamous nervously. ‘Been an admirer of yours for some time, miss. I’m Squamous.

  ‘But Squamous isn’t your name, is it?, not your real one.’

  Squamous gave Gloria first a blank and then a shifty look. ‘It is too. Squamous.’

  ‘Come on, try harder.’

  Even the birds stopped their noise to listen. Squamous began to shake. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and he looked first to the windows, as if he were contemplating jumping out of them; and then to the other end of the ward, as if he were contemplating making a run for it, or willing the Director to burst in and “Ho!” for his summary execution. But he did not move, and Bonvilian did not enter.

  Flatly he said again, ‘I have only one name, and it’s Squamous. Everyone here knows that. Guys, back me up here.’

  Gloria leaned over him. ‘That’s three times you’ve denied me. I know how difficult it is, but if we’re to move on you must declare it, for the others’ sake as well as yours.’

  Squamous sighed, then...‘Ben,’ he said. ‘It’s Ben, Ben Allenby. I’m fifty-seven years old and have…had...a wife, and three children. Their names were...I wish I knew what happened to them.’

  ‘Thank you, Ben Allenby,’ said Gloria. ‘Now everyone, you heard Ben. Follow his example and introduce yourselves.’

  One by one, Squeamish, Squint, Snot, Smallpiece, Spittle, Sarco, Spleen, Stink, Scrap, Scrag, Sputum, Sweeney, Syndrome, and Sick, cast off their designations and announced themselves by their proper names. As each person reassumed his birth identity, the resurgence of emotion that came with it felt like a kind of baptism in a warm incoming tide. The others cheered each announcement, most loudly when it was revealed that Sweeney, Syndrome, and Smallpiece were all called John and that their respective surnames were Black, Brown, and White.

  Syndrome added, ‘Actually, it used to be Barrington-White until I dropped the Barrington.’

  ‘And I prefer to go by Jack,’ said Sweeney.

  ‘Jack it shall be,’ said Gloria; and on they went around the ward. No one missed his turn. Even Steerforth, who to general surprise seemed affected by what was happening, announced in a quavery voice that he believed himself to be the former James Cruickshank, MBE, a retired bank manager and widower.

  ‘Forgive me if I behaved...I didn’t mean to be so…call me Jim.’

  Sorias was last, and when it came to him he wiped a hand across his forehead. ‘Anstey is my name, Edward Anstey. I was adopted as an orphan by a childless couple, both dead before the troubles, who lived in a bungalow on a housing estate. I haven’t the least idea where my story came from; or the things I said about its significance; or my premonition, miss...madam, about who you were...are...and that you were coming in.

  ‘I had no Aunt Jenny. To my
knowledge there neither is nor was a Dragonburgh castle occupied by Plantagenets, nor a Lord Huntenfisch. No witches, no B.J., no dragon. The best I can come up with is that it was we Impatients who suggested the Ingredients to me.’

  ‘You have no reason to be confused, Edward,’ said Gloria. ‘The story you told is a true one, as were the ones that went before.’

  The ward was dumb as Gloria Mundy again went to the end of the ward and raised her arms. The windows closed and became part of the wall. The scents and sounds from outside were gone. The light dimmed to darkness, a darkness not of night but one so dark that it was as if the sun had been extinguished and it would never be light again in the world.

  Doubting that he still existed, everyone touched his face and body.

  Gloria said in a pleasant voice, ‘Lie down, please’—and they all did. ‘Relax and feel your weightlessness.’

  As the former Slaves and Impatients did their best to obey, they felt their muscles dissolve, and their perceptive senses become elevated and enhanced to a degree that none of them had ever before experienced. Because sight was gone, hearing sharpened, and picked up the slightest noise—the intake and exhalation of breath, the rustle of a sheet.

  A glow, or effusion of muted light, appeared above them, which increased until the great dome of the ceiling manifested itself again: not as the Tiffany-style stained-glass dome of before, but a planetarium that was pierced by the light of many constellations.

  Gloria Mundy’s voice came again: ‘Behold the stars; there is nothing now between you and them.’

  But the lights were not quite as stars because they changed in colour, like myriad jewels sewn onto a great black cloth.

  ‘It is the Phoenix come to carry you aloft.’

  Then each person’s spirit rose through the dome, and was impaled upon the point of a star as if it were a shard of glass, so that it became one of the multiplicity of heavenly bodies.

  The star-studded Phoenix, like an exotic spaceship, climbed higher and higher, and the individual lights drew together until there was a single brightness no longer composed of many colours, but only of white; before the shining, which was as intense as the sum of all suns, vanished.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  It was early afternoon on Friday 13th April, 2033, the meteorites were visible on Central’s short-range systems, and in a few hours the thunderbolts from Zeus would be all over the world like ugly on an ape. In Miltonic language, the long and the short of it was that Earth, like Satan, was about to be “Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky |With hideous ruin and combustion down |To bottomless perdition.”

  The four horses of the Apocalypse were saddled, and their girths tightened in preparation for the great ride in response to the blowing of the last trump that heralded the Day of Judgement.

  As Nemesis stalked the Earth, half the world was on its knees praying like there was no tomorrow; the other half was either drunk or stoned, or both, and had been that way for months, wallowing in an orgiastic revel that made its Roman model seem ascetic. It was too late for solutions and last-minute reprieves, as from the falling sky the last droplets of Time were filling the bucket of oblivion to overflowing.

  Despite his early convictions, and the massive works that had been conducted under his aegis, as the grains of sand slipped through the waist of the hourglass, shortly to be turned over for the last time, Hugo Bonvilian 4285D was still wrestling with nothing more than abstractions and theoretical panaceas, and the occasional pancreas. Nature had shrugged off his efforts to master it, and left him foxed, frustrated, and fed-up.

  Although the Exeat’s Director had never ceased to exert his puissant brains in the great cause, every time that he thought he might be getting somewhere, the formulae that looked so impressive on paper and in the computer models proved impossible to translate into reality. Bonvilian’s investigations into the human microcosm, which he was convinced held the key to Creation, had yielded nothing. The early and promising additional insights that he gained into the human genome, the information encoded in the DNA within each cell of an organism, had proved illusory, misleading, deceptive. Despite the thousands of biopsies and transfusions and organic transplantations that had been performed at his instigation; and despite thousands more chemical analyses, induced mutations, cellular fusions and fissions, and twiddlings and fiddlings with nerves and neurons and axons and dendrites and synapses, the only ends reached were dead ones.

  Bonvilian was no closer than before to deconstructing the tick of temporality, to discovering the components of chronology. As a result, the great Project of rolling back the clock was no more, and there was no prospect of averting, halting, or reversing the forces of destruction; no anticipation of hearing triumphant cries of “Eureka!” ringing from the laboratories. There was no prospect of anything.

  The great dog Tempus was in the pound and about to be put down.

  Bonvilian’s last supervisor at Central, Augustus Boloch 9110A, had washed his hands of the boy wonder: no deus ex machina he. With the acquiescence of his supreme lord and master, 0001A, and his Fool, 0002A, Boloch had declared the Project dead and the Exeat’s Director—whose life, his all, his everything, that the Project had been—disgraced. The massive engine of research had sputtered and died, and the army of technicians that had cranked it were disbanded and had dispersed.

  At the desk in his office at the Institute, divested of his black Director’s coat, ex-Director Hugo Bonvilian exhaled deeply. He was composed as he devoted his last thoughts to Gloria Mundy, the girl whose fingers he so wanted to be interlaced with his as they danced the last dance together, before they went their separate ways into the incorrigible night.

  As elusive as she remained, Gloria was Hugo Bonvilian’s last remaining constant, his personal icon of immortality. If only Mankind had been made in her image, instead of Adam’s, and he sprung from her rib!

  Wherever Gloria Mundy was now, and whatever she was doing, the non-emeritus Director hoped that she might sense his empathy. How badly he wanted to believe that, at the last, she might know how much she had meant to him and meant to him now; and that failure had not diminished the sincerity and strength of the desire that had driven him to make her a gift of Eternity.

  No doubt, he thought, Gloria was at this moment passing the last hours of her life in the company of some pencil-neck who, however close that person thought he was to her and she to him, was ignorant of the Bonvilean gulf that lay between them, surrounding the island of her perfection and flooding and filling every contour and inlet of her body and mind.

  In case she and this interloper were now married—people who were about to be parted in distance or foreseen death often did decide to get hitched—Hugo Bonvilian recast himself as Sir Lancelot, and Gloria Mundy as Queen Guinevere. Whatever consolation her husband, that pusillanimous prevaricating pretender King Arthur, might be attempting to afford her at this moment, against the tide of fate was but a drawn pebble on the beach compared to the rock of Hugo Bonvilian’s devotional sympathy.

  “Greater love hath no man than this,” says St John, “that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Lancelot, the best knight in the world, had begged to differ, believing to fulfilment that he who loved the most would lay down with the wife at the end.

  Spurning the electronic equipment on his desk, Bonvilian opened a drawer, and removed from it a pad of foolscap paper and a silver fountain pen that had belonged to his father’s father. Unscrewing the top of a bottle of black ink, he filled the pen as scrupulously as if it were a hypodermic syringe, and wiped it with a Kleenex. He had only just shaken off a bad cold, and it was the last one in the box.

  Then, unhurriedly and without pause, he applied the nib to the page:

  Sitting alone

  In the Joyous Isle

  I think of you and him,

  And me and you,

  And jot down brittle

  Lines of loneliness

  That shiver like

  A la
nce in a tournament;

  Imagining my prowess

  As the Ill-Made Knight

  That never was matched

  By earthly hand.

  Pulling

  Up unscathed at the end

  Of the first pass, and sighting

  An apocalyptic stare,

  Steam-snorting with

  Eyes deep pitiless

  Wells of pitch, dark-

  Slatted by the helm

  I dress my spear

  For the last time

  And we hurtle together

  Like two wild bulls.

  His death bespoke

  Through clouds of dust

  From the final drum roll

  Of our hooves, I deflect

  His aim with my shield

  And smite him, thrilling

  Level through armour,

  Riving his pulsing

  Entrails as his misguided

  Wondering softness is borne

  Out of the saddle

  Slowly into the air.