by Ian Watson
‘I’m not. I swear it.’
The situation was turning ugly, so I headed for the stairs and went down to the next level.
‘Hey, man.’
It was Barney. He was leaning against a wall, looking mad. But alive. His throat wasn’t grinning redly at me. I had seen him cut his throat.
Barney giggled. ‘You looking for me? Here I am. Surprise!’
Suddenly he jumped forward and gripped my wrist. ‘Here’s Barney, baby.’ He was solid, real.
I broke free and fled back up those stairs three at a time, towards the sound of angry voices.
In the meanwhile, Isbeth had arrived. She was arguing heatedly with my three witnesses.
‘Isbeth, Barney’s down below!’ I cried. ‘I watched him kill himself – and now he’s come back to life on another level!’
‘You’re wrong,’ shouted Martinez. ‘Barney made like he was killing himself – that’s what you saw – then he ran downstairs. That’s it. You were fooled.’
‘I saw the blood.’
‘You imagined it! Unless you’re in this with the bastard. And her, her too.’ Martinez faltered.
Barney had followed me. He came up the stairs, grinning maniacally, with that knife or a different one in his hand.
‘It doesn’t hurt much,’ he called out. ‘You go fuzzy. You all know what that’s like. Doesn’t last long. Try it out.’ He blundered forward, slashing the blade from side to side.
Isbeth and I escaped into the nearest room, which was full of mothballed tools and spare parts. She had slammed on the lights; I slammed the door and wrestled a crate under the handle. Outside we heard a scream.
Isbeth sagged. Gestured feebly.
‘Then this isn’t real, either. We’re in our sanctuary at last, but we’re still dreaming all together, dreaming we’re in our ghastly sanctuary. Oh, it’ll be ghastly soon. Our enemies won’t be mutants or ghouls or sharks. Our enemies will be ourselves. Each other. We’ll be a hundred rats in a maze, going mad, killing each other, coming back to life.’
‘No. Barney has gone mad, that’s all. No need for everyone to go mad.’
‘When we know there’s no reality? We’ve taken a wrong turning, Konrad. We have to get back to the computer on the starship.’
‘What?’ I thought she must have gone mad.
‘I mean it. We have to use the shaft to the surface. We have to get out into the ruins.’
‘But the radiation… it’ll cook us.’
‘We can’t die. Don’t you realize? As soon as we get up there, the mutants will appear. They’ll start hunting us. Then we’ll find our radiation pills. Our powerpoints. We’ll jump to Ghoul Castle.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘This place, Konrad, this huge nuclear survival shelter – it seems familiar.’
‘So it should be.’
‘The layout’s familiar, not the place itself. This isn’t any nuclear shelter. It never was.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘I keep thinking of the Moon. It’s as if –’ She fell silent, then said, ‘We’ll open up the shaft to the surface.’
‘Isbeth… when you crashed that program, things didn’t work out too well. If we bust this shelter open people aren’t going to like it.’
‘After the first shock they’ll be glad. It’ll be a whole lot better than going slowly, colourfully mad. Better than experiencing the thrills and spills of insanity. I’d rather play hide-and-seek with sharks and ghouls any day. Will you help me?’
I nodded.
‘If we get separated, Konrad… see you on board the Empire Topaz, hmm?’
True enough, when we got to the surface mutants soon appeared amongst the ruins of that great dead city. The creatures seemed twice as agile, twice as cunning as before. It was as if they’d only been in first gear earlier on, and now had engaged second gear.
The Moon, Isbeth’s Moon, a ghastly bloated orange of a moon, brooded permanently over the radioactive rubber we ran through, and before long we were meeting other people from the shelter who had made the same decision as us.
But there was worse to come. When I got killed for the third time in succession, torn astrally apart by mutants, and before I popped back to life somewhere else in the ruins, while I was ‘dead’ in a kind of grey inbetween limbo, a tendril brushed my mind. That’s the best way I can describe the experience.
Fleetingly, foggily, I remembered the Moon base: five sublunar levels sunk beneath the Mare Orientalis. I remembered our pastimes, all those interactive computer games we used to play to while away a tour of duty.
I remembered the approach of the aliens: two spacefaring beings like grotesque, beautiful, ornamental fish a kilometre long, two kilometres high, half a kilometre wide, wrapped round with convoluted sparkling sails and veils, shimmering with powers and forces that we couldn’t fathom. All contact with Earth from our transmitter on Nearside was disrupted, lost.
A glimpse: of my colleagues swaying, falling; shrivelling as if emptied. I remembered the terrible, sudden suction of myself… away. Of my mind, my soul, my person.
I think I know what we are now, and where we are. We’ve been collected by one of those aliens. Our minds have been taken. Not copies of us, not analogues, but our very selves, our psyches.
We haven’t been taken as scientific samples, nor specimens, nothing like that. How the tendril seemed to preen itself, as it touched me. How it seemed to admire itself. We have been taken as decorations – as psychic jewellery. Jewels in an alien angel’s wing. Just as light shifts within a gem, so our adventures scintillate. Ultimately, in a loop.
When the aliens brushed by the Moon and removed us, they wondered what would amuse us, what settings would display us to best effect; and they found in our minds what games we played obsessively. So now we live those games.
Probably there are other life-forms from worlds of distant stars captured psychically in the being of these aliens, to decorate them: other minds dreaming out their passions. Probably there are alien jewels too.
We’re on a starship, in a sense. The journey time may be hundreds of years. Thousands. There are no portholes or viewscreens as on the Empire Topaz. There are no glimpses of our fellow life-form victims – if any – but I assume they must exist. And there are no controls. Does the diamond ring guide the hand that wears it? Does the necklace cause the head to turn?
At least… not yet.
Perhaps the computer room of the Empire Topaz is the closest to an interface with the energy ganglia of this great alien. Maybe, maybe not. When I reach that computer room again, I hope with Isbeth at my side, maybe we can achieve something subtler, more ingenious than before.
The mutants may be faster. The ghouls may be more dangerous and the sharks less dumb and the fine ladies aboard the Empire Topaz more cut-throat. That’s reminiscent of the games we played on Moon Base too, with a learner level of difficulty and a professional level. I hope there are only two levels of difficulty!
Meanwhile, I awake from dream-mode all on my own amidst the glowing ruins. I urgently want a radiation pill. I think I sense that there’s one to the northeast.
A rustle. A flurry of rags. A heavy stumble. Already there’s a mutant nearby.
And the pocked orange moon glowers down on me, amidst a few lonely stars and a vast yawning void.
The Legend of the Seven Who Found the True Egg of Lightning
Chtolo, the First, died before the quest really got under way, but since his death marked the start of the quest, he should be counted as one of the seekers. Besides, this brings their total to seven, which is a more perfect number than six.
Chtolo, the First.
Mgwana, the Second.
Kampinga, the Third.
Laliani, the Fourth.
Madongo, the Fifth.
Angwinu, the Sixth.
Ntenga, the Seventh.
All in pursuit of the true egg of Lightning.
What’s this? You haven’t heard of the eggs of Lightn
ing?
Then maybe you come from some dismal distant country where the weather has always been dead, where the forces of meteorology were mute and motiveless.
A land where Thunder never actually spoke, but only rumbled like flatulent bowels. A place where Lightning merely flashed, with no fierce independent spirit of its own. Where Torrent did not sometimes flow uphill, trying to drag itself back into the clouds. Where Cyclone was simply a windy vortex wandering the countryside at random – not a corkscrew of air hunting and burrowing intentionally for treasure.
What sort of treasure?
The only true egg of Lightning.
Cyclones were never very intelligent in their search, but without a doubt they were vigorous about it. They tore apart anything which stood in their way, reducing huts and fishing boats to a snow of sticks, spouting streams into the sky, turning forest foliage into frantic flocks of green birds.
Why should the wind-giants seek their goal so violently?
They were so impetuous that if they did ever find the buried egg, they must surely career past it willy-nilly, unable to return and retrace their footprints of ravage. But this was the only way they knew how to proceed.
Why did they seek the egg?
You may well wonder who ever communed with such mighty winds to ask them this question. Whose voice could possibly prevail over that screaming clamour? Whose lungs were strong enough so that all the air wasn’t immediately sucked out of them? (With a result akin to pouring ox-hoof glue mischievously into bellows.)
None other than Ngana the Great.
Ngana’s voice was so loud that he could be heard clearly a mile and more away. If he shouted at a glacier, he could shatter it. He could pulverize an enemy’s brain to jelly.
So Ngana had himself chained by all four limbs to a dead termite mound (and his neck, by an iron collar). He hoped that one day the mound might be in the path of a wind-giant.
For four years he stood there stark naked, washed by the rain, dried by the sun. At night he slept upright in his chains. At dawn when his bowels had moved, the dung was duly removed from between his feet. During the day various of his fifty wives fed him and fanned him and sang to him. Every evening the sexual act was performed by one or another wife, who clung athletically to the termite tower, wrapping her legs around him and it.
Finally a wind-giant did rush toward Ngana, and he spoke to it with his vast voice.
‘Halt! What do you seek for, Cyclone?’
Cyclone tore the hair from Ngana’s head, but still he demanded an answer.
It tore the lids from his eyes, but still he insisted.
Finally it tore the genitals from his body.
‘What do you hunt for, Cyclone?’ he cried.
And Cyclone replied, ‘I seek the true egg of Lightning. I will dig it up and juggle with it perilously. The egg will bob up and down like a hollow gourd tossed upon a waterspout. The father-and-mother of the egg will shiver with fear and will dart to me. Lightning will beg me to set its egg down gently. I will make a condition. Lightning must intercede with Sky, to allow all wind to stand still forever and be at peace. For that is Wind’s dream.’
Naturally, if this dream were realized, it would spell doom to all beasts and people. If Wind stood still, none of us could breathe. We would suffocate in our own foul gases.
Fortunately we had little reason to fear that Wind would ever catch an egg. The more anxious and eager, the faster Wind raced.
Cyclone told Great Ngana more.
‘A fish spawns a million eggs, and only one survives. Thus does Lightning seed the earth a thousand million times over. Due to accidents of soil, magnetics, rain, and a dozen other circumstances, only one true egg will ever swell and one day be hatched by a second stroke of lightning in exactly the same spot – thus giving birth to a new sky, the colour of which will be green.’
After Cyclone passed on – carrying Ngana’s hair and eyelids and genitals away with it – his fifty wives flocked to the mound. They bound up his bleeding groin, while he told them of the true egg and the new sky. They smashed his chains and his neck-band with hammers and axes and carried him home to the royal hut, where he set unblinking eyes upon all the children he had sired during the past four years. A few were infirm, and he killed these with his voice. He summoned his wisemen, and spent the rest of his life in limping pursuit of the true egg, trying to read directions in the footprints of destruction scrawled upon the earth by Wind, taking as his map of clues the track of every twister over the savannah.
And so our tale of the Seven commences.
‘What difference would it make if the sky were a different colour?’ Mgwana asked Kampinga as they were setting out. Mgwana already knew the answer, but this was his way of asking for a tale to while away the journey.
The six age-brothers and one age-sister were setting out into dry bush to hunt for ostrich nests. They were armed with spears, and with bolos to tangle the legs of any fleeing ostriches. They hoped at least to bring home an ostrich egg, if not a parent. One ostrich egg would make a tasty omelette to feed many mouths.
Ahead, the bush stretched out aridly, tangled with thorns, punctuated by occasional termite towers. Behind, they could still see the widely spaced conical roofs of several hundred huts – a cone being the very best shape to attract Lightning. Already that season six members of the teeming community had been nobly incinerated, making six less mouths to feed, so that more babies could be born unaborted; thus the number of souls beneath the Sky could be increased.
On some far-off day, all the souls that could possibly be born would have been born. People would begin to give birth to beasts instead of human babies: to speechless foals, and ostrich chicks, and bush-piglets. Man would rejoin nature again.
Or so wisemen assured the people.
After each lightning strike and conflagration, before a fresh hut (of sticks and reeds from the lake beyond, plastered with mud) was built in a new location, the charred ground where the old hut had once stood was of course dug up, producing another pit and rampart, in the search of whatever Lightning had laid there. Sometimes this would be a diamond or a ruby, at other times a knob of quartz, infrequently a stone egg – though never anything which resembled the true egg of Lightning as described by Ngana the Great.
The town was pocked with a thousand such craters, as though boulders had bombarded it from the sky.
‘What difference if the sky were green?’ repeated Mgwana.
Kampinga surveyed the golden sky above the tawny bush.
‘If a green sky hatched,’ Kampinga said, ‘we should soon give birth to plants. And so would all the other animals. Our offspring would be ferns and cycads, orchids and aloes. The animal kingdom would rejoin the vegetable kingdom again. We would all return to our roots. Animals are just plants who tore up their roots and ran wild. People are just animals who stole souls from the sky, stood up, and spoke. It has all been a mistake.’
That day the Seven travelled far, away and away from the teeming town of cone-huts and craters and the wide reedy lake and the forest, out into the dry bush. By evening they had reached the verge of the Plain of Grass.
Here they lay down separately in the long yellow grass and swung their bodies round like tops, each to flatten a sleeping nest. Next they dragged tangles of thorns from the bush to corral the seven nests safely.
They ate dried tulapia fish and drank beer from their gourds. Then the six age-brothers retired to their nests. Their age-sister Laliani visited each nest in turn and in turn enjoyed each of the brothers, commencing with Chtolo and ending with Ntenga, before retiring to her own nest to sleep soundly.
Some hunting parties consisted of three sisters and four brothers. Others, of two and five. Occasionally, six sisters and one brother. Since perhaps the customs in your country are different, I should explain that if the sisters outnumbered the brothers then it was the men who went nest-visiting. Supposing there was only one man, tradition allowed him to divide his exertions between d
usk and dawn.
When the Seven rose in the morning, it was Chtolo who stumbled upon the discovery, stubbing his toe so that he yelled.
Chtolo parted some unbowed grass.
‘See here!’
‘What is it?’ asked Madongo.
Laliani laughed. ‘What does it look like? Surely someone’s genitals must have dropped off last night!’
The object was indeed that shape – potently so.
However, it was soon obvious to all their eyes that the discovery was as solid a piece of stone as any fossil in a eliff from the ancient days when birds still had fins, not wings, before the great lake emptied half of its creatures into the sky, thanks to the violence of the wind-giants.
Chtolo bent to pick the object up.
His hand gripped it.
That was when he fell dead, giving up his ghost with a scream of air.
In that scream the six who remained were almost deafened by the name Ngana.
So here were the petrified genitals of Ngana the Great.
As though from nowhere Storm brooded blackly far across the plain and some tongues of Lightning flickered.
‘A man cannot hold that thing,’ declared Laliani. ‘That’s because it contradicts his being. But I feel that a woman can hold it.’
Before any of her brothers could deter her, she plucked up the object. Maybe it was heavier than she expected, since she almost stumbled and had to bring both hands into play. Nevertheless she straightened up, holding it -not as if it were dead stone, but more as if it were a live toad. It pulled against her hands, turning them northward.
‘It points,’ Laliani said in wonder. ‘This must show the way to the true egg of Lightning. Brothers, we needn’t hunt for an ostrich egg now! Our prize shall be greater by far.’
So the quest began.
But first Chtolo’s body had to be propped upright against thorns in the hope that Lightning might notice and incinerate him. Afterward the hunting party set off northward in the direction of the now dispersing storm.
That evening, when Laliani visited Ntenga last of all in his nest of the night, she whispered to him after making love, ‘Now, shall I sleep with my head to the north? Shall I place Great Ngana between my legs and let him visit me, within?’
