Sacrifice of Fools

by Ian McDonald

  What kind of seduction has gone on here, Eamon? What have you let them do to you?

  ‘Do you know where he’s gone?’

  ‘I do. Before he left on his gensoon, he had been expressing an interest in the hahndahvi. He had been experimenting, unsuccessfully, with psychotropic substances to try to simulate the effect of the dreaming. He felt he could not properly be a member of our community without being able to dream; therefore we advised him to go to a sacred space and place himself under the tuition of the warden. We have heard that the human nervous system is susceptible to sacred space architecture; this might have the effect of stimulating Eamon into the dreaming state.’

  The Shian religion makes eminent sense to Andy Gillespie. If something with no gods, no theology, no ritual, can be called a religion. Belief system. Except you don’t need belief for this. No faith, either. It comes to you out of the unexplored regions of your head every night when you click over into dream state. Every culture that understands the importance of dreaming has made up systems of interpretation, but the Shian have purified it into a language. The Narha of the unconscious. Learned in the womb, like Narha: foetuses curled up among the words and spirits. Freud, Jung, all those interpretation of dreams, collective-unconscious people, they would have loved it. The Shian dream the same dreams. They see the same things. They speak a common tongue of archetypes and dream landscapes and symbols. Signs and signifiers. While they are still folded in the womb, they have ten thousand of these archetypes folded into their skulls: the hahndahvi, the Guiding Ones. Like casting the bones, or reading the leaves, or that Chinese thing that means whatever you want it to mean. Something Ching. You have a problem, you sleep on it, the right hahndahvi comes out of your collective unconscious and gives you the answer. No pissing around with coins or yarrow stalks or genuine plastic runes, no rituals, no smells or bells or making yourself pure and good and holy. Clear, unequivocal, the right answer. Every time.

  What’s most sensible to Andy Gillespie about the Shian dreaming as a religion is that no one is ever going to kill anyone else because they have a different dream.

  ‘So you sent him to a sacred space?’

  ‘Yes. I can tell you exactly where he is gone. There is only one in this part of Ireland. It is in the Queen’s Island Hold, in Belfast, where you have just come from. He is under the tutelage of Thetherrin Harridi, the current warden of the sacred space. I regret you have had a fruitless journey, Mr Gillespie. A simple phone call would have saved you time and wealth.’

  Gillespie recognizes the root of the expression, it’s a Narha idiom; the fruitless journey, the unlucky hunt. No prey. All covert, tucked down in the undergrowth. Gone to earth.

  Yeah, that’s about it.

  ‘What I need to say to him, I need to say face to face.’

  ‘Then you will have to go to Queen’s Island to say it. Do you wish to stay and take an evening meal with us? An intimate friend of Eamon Donnan’s is a most welcome guest at Peace in the Valley.’

  Gillespie recognizes another Narha thought underneath the words ‘intimate friend’. He means ‘lover’. But not in the human sense. In the Shian sense, of love without sex.

  ‘Thanks, but I’ve got a bus to catch.’

  ‘I will have one of the tractors take you down into the village, Mr Gillespie.’

  In the stableyard the Group Four people are getting ready to go. They’re wearing a lot of heavy armour for a Shian Hold way out in the glens of Antrim.

  ‘What are they at?’

  ‘Oh, that is one of our profit-making operations,’ Genjajok says. ‘It seems that self-sufficiency is not enough to be a member of human society, we must subscribe to the profit economy. Thus we are manufacturing stasis coffins, which we keep in the stable block. There must be over a hundred now.’

  Gillespie finds the image of eight million Shian sleeping away sixty years objective/six subjective (and relativistic time contraction is just another thing about the World Ten Migration he takes as read) in stasis coffins chilly and sinister. As if they really were dead and have come back to life like vampires, an invasion of the undead floating down upon the earth. Step off the space elevator, find your coffin, in you get. Feeling like a little doze, and you wake up thinking, that was the best sleep I’ve had in years and all the people you left behind are sixty years older. Or dead.

  ‘What do you do with them?’

  ‘We lease them to Group Four Securities to keep prisoners in.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘It is a most efficient system. It is vastly cheaper to keep a criminal in stasis than in prison, it ameliorates overcrowding, as your Joint Secretariat seems intent that every human male under the age of thirty spend some time in prison, and there is no possibility of escape, nor are there any problems of discipline, or of drug trafficking or prisoners being corrupted by others. Or rape, Mr Gillespie. Would you like me to show you?’

  ‘Urn, no. Thanks.’

  Jesus. That’s protecting society with a vengeance. But they couldn’t do it to long-sentence offenders. They’d go under and come out to find they hadn’t aged but the world was ten, fifteen, twenty years older. Their wives, their girlfriends, their parents. Their children. Childhood wiped out in a single sleep. Jesus, that’s cruel and unusual. But they wouldn’t be a day older. Everyone else would be old, but they’d be young, strong. Is that a punishment or a blessing? It’s a shit world where the crims needing protecting from society. And how would it have been for you, if instead of taking you in the big blue van through the gate of HMP (Cellular) Maze, some private security clowns in paramilitary uniforms had brought you up to this farm and stuffed you into a box and sent you to sleep for two years? No Eamon. No Narha, no great gift of language. But the bad thing wouldn’t have happened either. You’d all have slept in your cold boxes and woken up no different from when you went in. Eamon Donnan wouldn’t be trying to turn himself into a Shian; you’d just be another unemployable ex-con, orbiting in towards the gravity of the old boys, the old ways, the old places. But someone that no one saw, some invisible killer, would still have gone into the Shian Welcome Centre on University Street and killed five people with five maser shots and then cut up their bodies with a knife.

  ‘Whole new meaning to “suspended sentence”,’ Gillespie comments.

  The Peace in the Valleyers turn out to wave Andy Gillespie off in the tractor. They all smile the human smile. They have it very good, but he’s not convinced. Truth is in the chemicals. I can smell it in the wind. I can smell it off you like sex. You’re as scared as the rest of them.

  The taxi drops him under the third light on Queen’s Quay Road. It’s as close as the driver will go to the sacred space. He gives Gillespie a look, like he’s a transvestite, or a terrorist of the wrong colour, or a celebrity he personally doesn’t find particularly entertaining. I don’t like you. I don’t like what you’ve paid me to bring you to.

  He doesn’t like Gillespie’s money.

  ‘Don’t take animal money.’

  ‘They haven’t had animals on since it went decimal. That’s Dun Scotus. Ancient Irish scholar.’

  ‘Don’t take punts.’ He exaggerates the Irish word into a small mockery. Phunts.

  ‘We got joint authority, haven’t you heard?’

  ‘Not in this taxi we don’t.’

  Gillespie opens his wallet like a mouth.

  ‘Dun Scotus or fuck all.’

  The driver takes the Irish twenty. Tips of fingers, like it’s printed in liquid shit. Gillespie asks for all the change. Thank you. Fucker. The taxi throws a U-ie inside the cone of light from the third street lamp. Gillespie turns up his collar against the cold drizzle. His jacket is silvered with fine droplets. They float and eddy in the sodium light like spirits. Dreaming is all around. You move through two worlds as you walk along this wide, wet, empty road towards those white arc lights. Every step sends clouds of hahndahvi twisting away, like the veils of mist that swirl in behind you as you pass. As real, as toucha
ble and touching to them as this physical world. Ordered dreams; places and faces that you can visit night after night because you can trust that they will remain the same. Not like human dreams, where people you love wear bodies that are strange but familiar. Trustworthy dreams. Faithful dreams. How would that be? Dreams that don’t lie when they whisper you the way to success and the path of fulfilment, and when you wake up you find that the golden key to the universe is pancakes should not be pissed on by robins and wolverines.

  And this place, under the white arc lights, where waking and sleeping meet. Unseen is seen. A building for meeting God. A holy place that works, every time, without fail, or faith. A divinity machine.

  Gillespie breathes in the cold, damp air through his nostrils. It’s beginning. He can smell it. A faint, salty tang. A little jizz in the atmosphere, a little jolt of pheromonal electricity. Like a change in climate, the season is coming.

  The sacred space is on the edge of the Shipyard Hold, a disused Harland and Wolff loading dock with its front open to the water, like an old man taking a slow piss in the river. It doesn’t look very holy on the outside. True holy places never do. Holiness is always within. Outside holiness is no holiness at all.

  An orange Volkswagen campervan is parked on the Hold side of the road. The interior lights are on; figures move behind steamed-up glass and in the darkness underneath an awning erected against the open tailgate. Bass blast: dunh dunh dunh dunh dunh dunh dunh duhduh dunh. Divine architecture junkies. God is the best addiction of all. But the dynamics of the sacred space work unpredictably on the human nervous system. It’s not always the face of God you see. They find them in the river sometimes, churned up with the plastic beer glasses in the jet-wash from the car ferries, or down on the mud flats with the shore birds mincing around them. Heart failure. The eyes. You can’t describe the look in them, the last thing they saw. But the kids keep coming in their campers and caravans and tents and little wet encampments smelling of piss, wood smoke and wet wool. Hungry for the face of God.

  Maybe that’s the look in the eyes of the next-morning wash-ups.

  The loading dock is a shell. The sacred space is constructed inside, a building within a building. Gillespie’s senses slip off the web of wooden beams and live-polymer sheeting. Its geometry eludes him. As soon as he sees it as this it changes shape to that. Dimensions shift with every step he takes towards it: the sacred space grows bigger than perspective allows, the loading dock dwindles until it seems smaller than the object it contains. The emotional resonances extend outside the space. He can feel his balls tighten, his belly tense, his breath grow short, the quarter-inch of stubble on his head prickle as he approaches the chamber. Something wonderful. Like Christmas to a child. With snow, like when Stacey was three and it was pure wonder.

  Andy Gillespie’s never known the subtle movement of spirit dwelling in a temple or a shrine. He’s never stood awed and silent beneath the ancient lights of Christianity’s cathedrals. But he knows that whatever you might feel there is only a shadow cast by what is contained here. A place for experiencing God. There are angels in the architecture. There are sick buildings and healthy buildings and buildings that make you feel at peace and buildings where you feel agitated the moment you step into them but do not know why. Buildings that make you feel vulnerable and vertiginous, buildings that enfold and nurture you like a placenta. The first stone tombs of the Shian are thirty thousand years old. Enough time to learn to build so skilfully that every nuance of architecture and decoration and geometry and lighting and the subtle movements of air stimulate your senses into a perception of the divine.

  A Shian arrives around a corner of the sacred space. Smell of a female. A second sniff: an old female. She is dressed in a long skirt split to the thigh and a silk blouse. It is cold in the loading dock but the blouse is open. Her nostrils are circled with white make-up.

  ‘You are Andy Gillespie.’ The nostrils flare, identifying him. ‘I know you from the Welcome Centre.’

  ‘Thetherrin Harridi?’ he asks. The old Outsider tilts her head back in confirmation. ‘I’m afraid I don’t remember you.’

  ‘We all look alike. Eamon Donnan is at the focus. I will take you to him.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb anything.’

  ‘It is nothing. He is at the stage of searching for a hahndahvi. This requires that he spends much time in the focus. Your presence will not trouble him. He will be glad to see you. You loved each other once.’

  The enforced intimacy of prison is a kind of loving.

  ‘I will take you by the north door. The effect is less there, but you would be advised to close your eyes to minimize the disorientation.’

  ‘I had a couple of big vodkas just before I came.’

  Without speaking, the Outsider leads Gillespie round to the north door. She opens it. They pass through into the sacred space.

  Two big hits of vodka blur the edges of Gillespie’s senses, but the lift into God-consciousness makes him want to fall on his hands and knees. It’s here. Every good thing. Every moment of awe and wonder and beauty and mystery. He is floundering in numen. He breathes it in; it is everywhere and nowhere, like all good gods should be. Infinite and intimate. Terrible and wonderful. All those paired contradictions that divinities maintain so effortlessly.

  It’s only because of the alcohol that he is able to look around him to try to see how the trick is done. It is very good. When he looks at the walls straight on they seem to stretch away for ever, but on the edges of the fields of vision they curve intimately around the space so that it is both very much larger and very much smaller than it looks from outside. The light is at once directional and unfocused; shadows shift, clouds of tiny flames appear, swirl, vanish. Tongues of fire. In the centre of the space is what he can only describe as a globe of woven light. A stained glass window made of fire. There is a shadow in the light, a seated figure.

  As Gillespie walks towards the figure, the walls move across his peripheral vision, stealthily opening up planes and dimensions. Invitations to strange rooms and niches. He pauses, shakes his head. There is something in it.

  ‘Above the range of your hearing,’ Thetherrin says. ‘The space modulates the passage of air through it into sound.’

  But he felt it. It was a sharp, sudden sense of loss and freedom. A great divorce. In one of the chambers in the corner of his eye he glimpses a kneeling figure — human, Outsider, he can’t tell. It’s wrapped in a shit-coloured coat. It beats the floor with a fist. He hears weeping. He turns, but the walls have closed.

  He knows instinctively that it would have been very different entering through one of the other doors.

  The illusion is seamless. That is because it is not illusion. A real magician can do all the same tricks as a conjuror. It would have been an illusion if Gillespie had seen the face of God, but the Shian do not believe in gods. Their hahndahvi come out of themselves. The sensations of the sacred space come out of themselves, from that fold of the mind that holds the faculty for spiritual experience. God is within. God is in the chemicals. Twelve vodkas, a tab of LSD, eight hours’ dancing on MDMA: thou also art God. Like those people who have near-death experiences where they fly towards a great white light and see the faces of their loved ones and angels. Oxygen starvation of the visual centres of the brain. Chemical heaven. God doesn’t make us. We make God. The answers aren’t out there, waiting for the right question to be asked in the right way with the right degree of faith and self-deprecation, then maybe they might get an answer, provided you accept that No is a valid answer from an omnipotent deity. The truth is in there, among the heroes and the villains, the lovers and the rogues, the thieves, fools and pretenders of the hahndahvi. This light is my own.

  Jesus.

  ‘I will leave you here,’ Thetherrin says at the edge of the central globe of lights. He turns to thank her but she is gone. Swallowed by the numinous. Gillespie steps through the curtain of light, into stillness. At the centre, all influen
ces come together and cancel each other out.

  ‘Andy.’

  ‘Eamon?’

  He doesn’t recognize the voice. It’s high, accented. It doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t sound like he remembers. He doesn’t recognize the figure kneeling on the meditation stool. It’s dressed Shian fashion, wrap-over jacket, leggings and boots: the formal hunting garb that the Outsiders on earth wear only on ceremonial occasions. Its hair is cut Shian fashion: shaved into a central crest, dyed red. A hand is offered, palm up. The Shian way. It has five digits.

  Gillespie licks it. Eamon Donnan doesn’t taste human any more.

  ‘Yeah.’ But Donnan tilts his head back, the Shian way.

  ‘Jesus, you look like Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver.’

  He laughs, but doesn’t return Gillespie’s smile. He blinks slowly.

  Suddenly, Gillespie finds he wants to seize Eamon Donnan and shake him. In the still centre of this spiritual space, he wants to shake all this stupidity and play-acting out of his prison friend. What do you look like? he wants to shout into his face from a distance of very few centimetres. Do you think you are one of them? Do you think that because you shave your head and wear the clothes and speak the body-talk and smell of their food that you are one of them? You can’t even sit on their stool because your legs are too short and your hips are the wrong shape and your joints are in different planes, and you think that you can dream their dreams and give a home in your head to their archetypes? You look stupid. You look as stupid and undignified as those thin white boys who shave their heads and put on saffron robes and dance about in Cornmarket on Saturday afternoons singing Krishna Krishna and everyone laughs at them and wonders what kind of a god makes you dress like a dick. You look like a dressed-up chimpanzee. You look like a monkey at a tea party.