by Jack Dann
“Perhaps it's the surrounds….”
“Just believe that the voices are strong here,” Roberta said. They stopped near the dolmen. Scattered rocks looked like the skeletal remains of a giant or a great fantastical beast conjured up by the elements and the play of shadows and wan moonlight. The converts were moving silently as specters now, gathering around the dolmen. They all looked like old men and women; even the boutades were hunched over, as if the foul, salt-heavy atmosphere had anesthetized them and they were gradually falling asleep on their feet. They seemed to fill up the night like cobblestones in a road.
“It's what happens inside you that's important,” Roberta continued. “If you can feel something profound, does it matter what triggers it? Does it matter if it be the holy words of a prayer, the play of light through a window, or a plastic bauble sparkling on the ground? You must try to believe in what happens around you. Let yourself be focused into a trance; forget your left brain and your rational world. Live in the inside of things tonight. If you want to find your wife, you'll have to play along.”
“Isn't the hook-in enough?” Mantle asked.
“No, you're dealing with Criers, remember? Our ceremony is a gathering on both sides like—on a mundane level—a seance. Those who have crossed into the dark spaces gather to accept you. Without a ceremony, they might reject you as an intruder; or hooking into the dying Crier might take you to places you have no desire to go, the edges, the dead places where you would be lost. Of course, there is always the chance…”
“That building looks like a tomb,” Mantle said, feeling a chill. He was looking at the dolmen, which was a circular affair about three meters in diameter and four meters high. It was surrounded by a parapet of ocher-stained paving stones. Large rectangular stones jutted out from the ground around it like grave markers.
“It's both a tomb and a temple,” she said, almost in a whisper, as if she too were about to fall asleep. There was something palpable in the air, a silence, a straining, an anticipation of what was to come.
“Then a Screamer is inside?” Mantle asked. “When do we go inside and hook-in?”
“Pretre is making him ready,” Roberta said, as if annoyed at being interrupted from a conversation that only she could hear. “These people around us”—and Roberta made a gesture with her arm—“have been purifying themselves here for days without food or drink, and they will not even be able to plug-in. But many will hear the voices, see into the dark. This ceremony is for them, too.”
Now that Mantle was so close to possibly finding Josiane, he felt empty, as if it didn't really matter, as if none of this were real. It began to rain lightly, and then the rain turned to mist, which smoked on the ocean like steam from a demon's cauldron.
Yes, Mantle thought, trying to fight down the chill of fear, it's all typical: the spooky surroundings, the temple, the ritual, the bicameral paradigm, all here. But rational thought could not assuage Mantle's anxiety, which came from that part of his being that felt kinship with darkness and superstition and intuition. It was because of the darkness inside him that he was here.
The crowd began to chant, first in whispers, then louder, Aria amari isa, vena arniria asaria, over and over, chanting louder now, and faster, then lower and slower, waiting to become possessed by dead Screamers, waiting for the gifted to become the vessels of the gods and pour out their incomprehensible words, the words of fire and wind.
Mantle was subvocalizing in time with the others. He caught himself and said, “Christ, are they speaking in tongues now?”
“Are you upset at being affected even a little?” Roberta countered. She was alert as a taxkeeper.
“This is a ragpicker's religion. Take a little from this religion, a little from that, mix it up for yourself. The Japanese would appreciate this.”
“How does a Jew who is part Indian rationalize his prejudices?” Roberta asked. Mantle felt his face become warm, and he flashed back to Joan writing a dossier on him for Pretre. “If you want a healthy and successful experience with the Crier,” Roberta said, “then you must stop being critical and loosen up. Or do you want to get lost forever inside our temple?” Her smile conveyed only irony.
Mantle noticed the statues scattered around the ruins between the gnarly, high-hatted olive trees. Now—all at once—he could see them, as if a subliminal engineer had been at work here. All the statues were alike: smooth stone heads entirely without features except for those created by shadows. He now noticed that the boutades and older people next to him were fingering small figurines, but he could not see them clearly; he guessed that they were smaller versions of the big smooth-faced statues.
The chanting became white noise to Mantle, as primordial and eternal as the surf churning behind him.
“Don't you find it difficult to accept the worship of idols?” he asked, genuinely curious; but a note of sarcasm had crept into his voice.
“I don't find it difficult,” Roberta said, “but, then, I have heard them speak.” Mantle groaned. “Would you feel better if I told you that the statues are merely devices for narrowing my consciousness?” She paused, then asked, “Do you believe that man has a soul, a divine spirit?”
Sensing a trap, Mantle said, “I don't know. Being a Jew, I've never given it much thought. Jews just die, they don't worry about heaven or the state of their souls.”
“But Indians do,” she said, flashing him a smile, giving him no escape this time. “All modern religions presume a soul, as did the ancients. It's God's breath, a speck of eternity carried within us. But what poor vessels we are to carry eternity! We sweat, shit, get sick, die, decompose. If even we can have a soul, flimsy flesh creatures, how much easier, how much more plausible, that perfect stone would be the vessel for the divine. It's virtually changeless, can be sculpted into the most beautiful forms, cannot be defiled by human passions, and is much more enduring than any flesh.”
“Do you actually believe that?”
“I don't need to,” Roberta said. “I look upon the stone and see it speak; I hear the Crier just as I hear you.”
Jesus! Mantle said to himself.
“And Jesus to you,” Roberta said, smiling.
The worshipers, the old people and boutades, the children, the townsfolk and well-kept men and women—these representatives of different classes and cultures and styles—were all shaking and crying and sweating and praying and singing in tongues, passing between consciousness and trance, seeing into the dark places, the dead places, without hooking in.
“Let it happen,” Roberta whispered.
Mantle listened for what seemed only a minute, transfixed by the pounding, persistent Aria ariari isa, vena amiria asaria: nonsense words that somehow meant something if only he could find the rhythm, if only he could focus his mind….
His thoughts were like sparks in the wind. He had not been sucked into a trance: he could still analyze and categorize and look ahead with dread and longing to the imminent hook-in.
The music seemed to be all around him; he was being carried along on the accented and unaccented syllables of the Aria, which was as precise as poetry, but without sense—at least without sense for the analytical left hemisphere of his brain.
He was drifting in slow-time. His mind was clogged with incomprehensible words. Roberta read my thoughts, Mantle told himself, feeling a rush of anxiety which at the same time seemed somehow isolated from him. But that was so long ago, he thought.
He tried to shake himself loose from the mock-Screamers around him.
“Have you dusted the air with hallucinogens?” he asked Roberta.
“Would that help you?”
“That's no answer,” Mantle said, looking around, trying to keep everything in focus. He looked at the idols and saw that they had faces now. Perhaps it was the face of the Screamer in the tomb. A large stone near the dolmen had a woman's face. It was Josiane's—it seemed to move, to stare at him. The image was inside the stone and perfectly three-dimensional. He blinked, and it dis
appeared.
“That's a cheap fucking trick,” Mantle said.
“What's that?” Her voice rose in rhythm with ariari isa.
The images on your idols: they're laser-projected. Are you using a full complement of subliminals? Very sophisticated for such a primitive ceremony.”
“Just let it happen,” Roberta said, looking intently at him as if he were one of the stone idols.
“Bullshit,” Mantle said. Only an instant had passed. His mind was clear now. The rain, which had begun to fall again, felt good on his face. It was tangible and real.
Mantle and Roberta had been talking to each other in time with the rhythm, intoning downward at the end of each phrase, ending in a groan, then up again. Even Mantle's thoughts followed the rhythm, the rhythm of glossolalia, of fiery tongues, the same rhythm that could be found all over the world, from the Umbanda trance ceremonies in São Paulo to the Holy Rollers in Binghamton.
He had been trapped, duped. Now he was scamming down again into the hollow metallic regions of his subconscious, to the places he feared, that he only visited in his paintings, that he had shut off and bricked over since his bum trip on enlightenment drugs. There was no enlightenment, just bare metal. His skin was clammy and he was beaded with sweat.
“There is dust in the air, isn't there?” he asked angrily. “Sonofabitch!”
“We didn't ask you to come here,” Roberta said. “You've no right to anger, no matter what we do. You're using us. This is our ceremony.” She was spitting her words now, or did Mantle only imagine that? Damn their drugs and subliminals, he thought. “We did not contract to take you by the hand and explain our service, point by point,” she continued.
“Don't give me any holier-than-thou shit,” Mantle said. “Your friend Pretre is already blackmailing me.” The drugs isolated him, and he was afraid of being alone, of feeling that only he was real, that all the others were shadows. “I don't want to be drugged when I plug-in.” He imagined that the mist had turned into veils which, in turn, were hardening like polymerized plastic around the laser-projected image.
“You want to find your wife and regain your memory,” Roberta said. “What does it matter how you do it, straight or stoned? You should care only for the result.” That said quickly, a glissando.
“Why did Pretre choose you to be my guide?” Mantle asked softly, changing the subject, leading her to safer ground. He knew that he needed her, for she alone was substantial; the others were shadows, ghosts—he thought that if he could keep her nearby, he could hold onto his thoughts and sanity even through the drug dust.
“Joan Otur was to be your guide; I was to help her as I could.”
“It was my fault about Joan, she—”
“I'm sure she's fine,” Roberta said, drawing nearer to him. Pretre must have told her what happened, Mantle thought, but he accepted her closeness and comfort.
“Why should Joan have needed help?” Mantle asked. “There's no one helping you.”
Roberta smiled and said, “Actually, Joan wasn't much further along in the church than you are. Her own problems kept her back.” Then she said, “I lost my husband, just as you lost your wife. And I suffered amnesia too.”
“And that's why you joined the church?” Mantle asked. “To find him?”
“I attended a hook-in under the pretense of joining the church. Like you. But I joined the church out of belief.”
“Did you find him?”
She shivered and said, “Tonight, I will meet him.” Mantle could feel her close up; still, he pressed her. “And your amnesia—have you regained your memory?”
She ignored him and stared in the direction of the tomb. Mantle was alone now and vulnerable. The worshipers were quiet, waiting, twitching and swaying to an imagined rhythm as if they could see cloven tongues of fire and the rushing wind of holy spirits. Everything was quiet, or, rather, bathed in white noise.
Then Pretre stepped out of the tomb: an impressive figure, his face smeared with ashes or perhaps dirt. Standing naked outside the dolmen, he might have been an Olmec priest without cap and cape, or the gray bishop of Carthage, or a Judaic prophet, or an Indian Pejuta Wicassa. For an instant, he was all these things; then he was just another zealot, a foolish, potbellied upside-down man trying to return to a child's primitive world of authority.
Mantle saw him clearly, saw him as visionary and fool, one overlaid upon the other; and he was embarrassed for him and embarrassed for himself—and for Roberta and for all these worshipers who imagined that they could shake off their culture like a damp blanket. He felt sorry for them all, felt sorry for the mist and drug dust and idols and olive trees and transpods, for the very rocks of Cap Roux.
Sorry for the rocks?
And with a jolt, he realized that the drugs had taken him again.
He fought to hold himself together. He took Roberta's hand, hoping she would not pull away. She squeezed his hand in return, reassuring him. She seemed alert, unaffected by the hallucinogens, and the contact helped to clear Mantle's head. Or was that clearness itself a dangerous illusion?
“He's waiting for you,” Roberta said softly, as if she were speaking directly to Pretre and not Mantle. She unzipped her clothes and stepped out of them. She looked chunky in clothes, but, naked, she was taut and well-muscled; only her overly large breasts broke the illusion of smooth lines. “Come on. Quickly,” she said, turning to Mantle. “Get undressed.”
“Why?” Mantle demanded, mouth full of brambles, and words spoken not conforming to the words in his head. For a second he thought he was speaking to Joan.
“Just get undressed.”
But Mantle made no move to disrobe. Although he felt that public nudity was as natural as skin, he was suddenly shy and embarrassed.
“When you took your vision-quest, you went naked, as you must now,” Roberta said. “Humble yourself; loosen your mind.” Mantle's face burned. Damn Joan for telling them everything. He remembered sitting in the vision pit and dreaming of thunder beings and the mystery of the holy Cabala; he had been eighteen then. The vision-quest had been real, authentic; this ceremony was a sham. But no, that was bullshit, too: the vision-quest had been a last attempt to hold onto childhood before his passage into civilized adulthood. He had hallucinated then, as he was hallucinating now; and that was all there was to either ceremony. But he didn't believe that either, did he? Inside, in the fearsome cellars of his mind, he believed in the old vision and all the spirits he had seen.
Even now he believed.
Mantle didn't really care that this ceremony was a sham, a paste-together of other cults and religions; what bothered him was that it was heretical. By participating, by taking off his clothes and plugging in, he was forsaking his old gods and accepting new ones.
He undressed clumsily, dropped his clothes in a heap, and walked through the crowd to the tomb. The worshipers closed in behind him.
Roberta was waiting for him, and he followed her into the tomb, which was evenly lit and seemed larger than it had looked from the outside, no doubt an effect of its ziggurat-like structure. The stone walls were bare, and there were cracks in them large enough to see through. In the center of the room, beside the large and weather-worn console of the psyconductor, was the Screamer: a middle-aged man with a long, sallow face; gums drawn over even, capped teeth; and pale blue eyes that might have been piercing at one time but now were glazed. Mantle had the absurd notion that the eyes were porcelain, that he could have painted on them or tapped them with his fingernail without producing a single blink. The Screamer, who must have once been affluent to afford such a pretty set of teeth, was naked. Mantle could not help but notice that he had lost most of his pubic hair (and most of the hair on his head, although he was not completely bald) and that he had a formidable erection.
The other participants, looking skeletal and chicken-skinned, stared down at the Screamer, who was still alive and breathing shallowly. Mantle shuddered as he watched: they were all waiting for the Screamer to die.
There was a hospital smell in this room. Mantle felt miles removed from the ceremony and the crowd outside; years removed from the drug-induced euphoria of glossolalia. He was in a waiting room, simply that, waiting for a man to die so he could hook-in and then go home with a few memories to fill up his empty life.
“Where's Pretre?” Mantle asked.
“Outside with the other Criers,” Roberta said in a whisper. “He'll be back in time.”
We're vampires, he thought; Roberta smiled as if she had read his mind. “Shouldn't we plug-in before he's dead?” Mantle asked. “Help him over, so to speak?”
“We can't help him until he's dead. And then he's going to help us.”
Mantle looked at the Screamer. Fuck him, he thought. If the man had wanted privacy, he would have died alone. Curious, this hatred he felt for the dying man. He wondered about that. Perhaps it wasn't so strange, after all. He was going to invade him, screw his mind, which was more physical and sensual than if he were engaged in a simple act of necrophilia.
He could imagine himself doing just that, debasing himself. He had reason: to find Josiane. But Joan—he could not imagine her sinking herself into the mind of a corpse. But she was going to do it for the church.
He felt a rush of hate for Joan, and desire.
With a long sigh, the Screamer died.
SIX
Paris was below them.
But for the dymaxion dome of the Right Bank, Joan would not have been able to distinguish Paris from its suburbs. A city had grown over the city: the grid of the ever-expanding slug city had its own constellations of light and hid Haussmann's ruler-straight boulevards, the ancient architectural wonders, even the black, sour-stenched Seine that was an hourglass curve dividing the old city. Like silver mold, the grid had grown over Paris, even filled the dome, as if it were a Petri dish. Extending over the Seine and across the Left Bank, it would eventually grow around the dome itself and bury it.
But tonight, from the air, the dome looked like a child's transparent toy filled with specks of light. Indeed, the city seemed to extend forever, a great black field piled high with diamonds.
