The Jonah Kit

by Ian Watson

  And it probably cost Paul some hefty string-pulling to arrange that military outing, too! But—Cecil B. de Mille? The soldiers obviously weren’t hired extras. Yet that they had, nevertheless, been procured for the occasion, with a touch of drama in mind, seemed all too plausible…

  “That roadblock,” he muttered apologetically. “Tell me more about it.”

  “You have to realize about crowd dynamics and popular movements,” Morelli expounded in a fervent didactic way. He was representing a French news agency, Richard saw from his press badge… but he seemed to be representing himself more than anything.

  “Four distinct groups interact down there, on account of this artificial barrier. The superstitious peasant, believing that scientists have proved the existence of God—but he isn’t sure whether this means the Devil rules the world, since God’s apparently been on vacation ever since he made the damn thing! The petty bourgeois, already threatened on all sides by the collapse of traditional values, and well enough informed to fear the coming years deeply. He’s motivated by class terror and greed—the usual pre-fascist mood leading on to dictatorships. Only, it could be manipulated towards a kind of Scientology. I’m using the wrong word. That’s a cult that already exists. I mean some hard-science equivalent to the peasant’s concept of ‘salvation’. That might offer the bourgeois a way out. Call it Scientism or Scientocracy—some power-bent mysticism of Science. Then the hippy Californians are gearing up for a repeat performance of the Altamont Festival to celebrate the new revelations, banging their guitars and their girls. They’re always hunting for a guru…”

  As Morelli talked, Richard kept visualizing the movie of The Ten Commandments he’d seen as a youngster. That was De Mille, wasn’t it? A clip flashed before his mind’s eye of Moses descending from the Mountain bearing the graven tables of the Law to the disconsolate Israelites, wailing and rioting in the scrub—and the face of Moses, with wiry silver hair swept back by the electricity of God’s presence, was the face of Paul Hammond…

  “The non-freak tourists, finally, represent the Middle-Am-erican bourgeoisie, even more betrayed and disenchanted by current affairs than their Mexican cousins. Bitter too at the shameful decline of their country. A chauvinistic upsurge of pride and dedication to something, however malignant, that revives the Spirit of Apollo will serve them. Ideally it should repolarize the scientific genius of the American people towards some abstract other-worldly goal, without the Vietnam taint attached to it. Technological, yes. But religious rather than political or military. The barrier functions as the crucible for these very diverse, yet representative ideological strains. Bayonets will be the stirring spoons. It’s a potent brew: the stuff of mania on a world scale!”

  How Dr Paul would have fluffed out his feathers to hear this analysis of the situation. Richard almost believed he’d parked the Sierra the careless way he had, impromptu roadblock-style, as a reflex conditioned by Paul…

  But while they sat drinking, the village priest peered in hesitantly.

  Abruptly he came into the pulqueria, with a curious little skip, as if crossing a narrow, very deep crevasse.

  His bald crumpled head seemed to have shrunken or caved in above the ears. It kept nodding from side to side like a detached skull perched loosely on top of his spinal column and only balancing there. Or as if tiny, invisible flies kept settling on it that had to be dislodged.

  “Dispenseme… one of you is from the, ah, thing on the mountain, yes?” Teeth half rotted away, into brown, stained gums…

  Richard identified himself doubtfully. The Priest looked so much frailer and more pitiable than when standing by his church the other day—a discarded puppet.

  “My name, ah, Father Luis. I have heard, you know, of your, ah, discovery of God’s absence. Deus absconditus…” He stuck a finger in that broken mouth and pushed at his tongue; nodded. “I understand the, ah, Mezapico way—though I cannot make the right sounds with my mouth. You have to learn from childhood. But they are whistling about the soldiers down there. And the crowds—”

  He gestured helplessly.

  “I have to know what it means… I have to tell my… children, something, to console them. To explain. They have nothing. To say that they are nothing…” The words died.

  “I have prayed that the, ah, silver thing up there would not…” He broke off; his words changed course. “I had a vision, you see. I have told this to no one. Not even to my superiors in San Pedro.”

  Wiping the sweat forcibly off his palms on to his trousers, the fat man began scribbling shorthand copy on a ring-back pad.

  Morelli hung on Father Luis’s words avidly, as if intent on memorizing them. The notion drifted through Richard’s mind that if the roadblock soldiers could be regarded as hired extras in this cosmic drama of Paul’s, why shouldn’t this old Priest have been primed to play a part too? But it was a ridiculous idea. Father Luis, with his stumbling enunciation and his shabby revelations, whatever they were? He’d been stuck in this desert of deprivation that was Mezapico, for years. Like some third-rate St Anthony, he had a chance to babble visions now. But he was just a sad, pathetic figure—a broken toy. How precariously his head nodded as he spoke his dribbles of speech!

  “One day I went up close to see it… I walked all the way there. When I reached it…” His cupped hands indicated the orientation of the Big Dish, angled as low as it would dip. “No one else, no other human soul alive. The whole world dead. Only carrion fowl. Sterility. Waste.”

  “The valley of dry bones,” glossed Richard promptly. It was all so derivative. What was it? Ezekiel—or Ecclesiastes? He forgot. But didn’t this prove that Dr Paul had no possible connection with the Priest? Paul, tricked out in his albatross, would have dreamed up a less banal tale to buttonhole travellers with, than an obvious Bible tract.

  “But what is special about that?” Father Luis exclaimed, staring hard at Richard in apparent denial of his suspicions. “It is all around us here. That was merely my mood. A mood is different from a vision—

  “Ah, my vision! The silver bowl hung tipped towards me. It was filled with light, a spoonful of the Sun. But instead of spilling out of the bowl this liquid hung… vertical. It defied the Earth’s pull. Its own pull was stronger. Have you seen a foundry? Watched the bowls of molten metal pouring out as lava from a volcano? Yet this molten light would not pour out! There was no heat, only light. Yet how strong this light was!”

  Clenching his frail fist, he set the finger joints crackling and trembling as though intent on making them fall to dust.

  “I do not mean that it blinded me, no—not strong in that way. But strong like…” His fist flapped limply, unable to conjure up the gesture again. “Sinews. A creature all of bright sinews. Every moment it drew in more muscles of light from the breast of the Sun. And that light-creature swam stiffly within itself, tensing its stolen fibres. But then its, ah, its grip upon itself became so fierce, so powerful… How greedily it wrapped itself in those fibres! Already it had sucked all the sinews of the Sun into itself, so that the Sun stood black beside me—drained as though by some terrible torture… not flaying but worse… all the muscles drawn out of the body like wires till the body is a useless inert mass blazing with agony.”

  “The reason for the Sun going dark,” Richard gabbled at the others, “is obviously all this staring he was doing at the reflection in the Dish with his back to the real Sun! The light receptors in the centre of the retina get jammed ‘open’—and the side receptors are only for detecting change and motion. There wasn’t any change, the way he was staring, so they switched off. So he got the illusion of staring vertically down a tunnel of light! You can duplicate the effect yourselves…”

  “Shut your idle chatter,” hissed Morelli.

  “Do you really angle your telescope directly at the Sun?” enquired the blond man, with amused incredulity. “No wonder it gets spots before its eyes!”

  Richard found he couldn’t work out what the respective positions of tele
scope, Priest, and Sun, must have been, when he came to think of it… The Big Dish couldn’t have been pointing directly at the Sun, the man was right.

  Ah—the old Priest was probably half blind, in any case! His hesitation before crossing the threshold into the bar was that of a man who couldn’t see anything inside the shaded room; who took the existence of a solid floor within on faith—though that faith had to be wound up like a piece of clockwork to activate it.

  Father Luis resumed with a disconsolate shrug. Not a shrug of tolerance or patience, however. Time had somehow ceased to exist for him; there was no context for patience or impatience to occur in.

  “The sinew-being… it started to consume itself, as it had already consumed all the fibres of the Sun. Torturing itself now, it sucked and gutted itself of light. The beast swallowed itself, and I couldn’t see a being any more. Nor anything whatever. I hung with my feet on nothing, then. My eyes beheld nothing. I was dying, I knew, being sucked into the void. But!” He popped his finger in his brown, eroded mouth again and pushed his tongue. This time he succeeded in summoning up a wheezing squeak, as he mimed…

  “Whistling was all around me, like calls of birds—snatching me back, building the world again. Three Indians whistling into the silver bowl, and the muscles of sound they blew, drew me back! They remade the world for me. So I could see it. Though it did not wholly exist, I also knew that. My faith changed then… It is the thoughts and speech of Man that make the world, not the thoughts of God. Man is not a thought in the mind of God; but the opposite: the world is a thought in Man’s mind. Please,” he begged, his head nodding in exhaustion as if he would go to sleep standing before them, “do not unthink the world. It is a poor, rotten desert, this, but it is a home of souls too…

  “So I am ringing the bell because that is the only way I can… whistle…”

  Morelli stared after Father Luis, entranced, as the Priest ducked abruptly back into the sunshine baking the street—plucked by the sinews of light…

  Richard shivered violently.

  But by then the CBS film crew had drawn up in their hired Range Rover and were blaring their horn impatiently.

  Thirteen

  How these ghosts from an unreal life mock him, make an idiot of him!

  Again he nuzzles up against a female of the harem; slides along her side, rubbing his hide against hers, caressing her with his flippers. How he yearns to dive beneath her, corkscrew round her, dance with her, thrash the sea together. How he aches to race and rear up out of the waters with her, balancing in each other’s clasp on the ocean before crashing back in spray and spume. How his penis sings to enter her in that fleeting climax as they stand upright on the waves together—he pulsing his love into her, as his Mother pulsed milk into someone resembling him once—and as he pulses signals into the air, to release that fearful itch!

  Orgasm was a less precarious balancing business once—with a less frenzied need to seize it on the crest of breaking, yielding waves…

  Orgasm was by way of a slow lying down together, twining of limbs he cannot understand, impossible touch of mouths and tongues. Hair flowed around him like seaweed, adhering, clinging…

  Thus he disregards the true message of his clicks, for the sake of a fantasy. Foolishly he ignores the hard bubble of flatulence in her belly—the swollen flesh in her womb—the hard knot deeper in her bowels that will perfume the sea when she voids it, which discomforts her now: all spelling out—unavailability! All these signs that he reads through her soft walls, echo-mapped upon his melon, he pays scant heed to—obsessed, frustrated—as much by the craving to know himself as by any urge to know her, sexually.

  His “fingers” had played, in darkness, upon an invisible body, indecipherable to him apart from by touch, and by the hard dull bark of “words”…

  The furious thrashing of the waves! The angry twisting! He disregards them. Discards the knowledge that she doesn’t care to dance on the sea with him.

  He only half hears the snare-drumming of threatening clicks—the tetchy, abrasive, exasperated challenge.

  Then the Great Bull lobtails and is hundreds of feet below, rising beneath him, not in love, but like a fist!

  The blow comes close to staving in his ribs. His flipper agonizes, as the Bull’s jaws seize it and wrench it this way and that; discarding it like offal, spitting it out contemptuously—an aching, living offal, still a living part of him, though he can only tell that from the pain…

  Into his brow is pulsed, in rage, the simplest, most babyish glyph of all: incongruence!

  He is a fool. A pup with half a mind.

  Fourteen

  Paul Hammond threw a triumphal barbecue party that evening, under the blaze of stars, for all the visiting newsmen and resident technicians, at which Ruth presided with a great lady air, Paul apparently having laundered and groomed her in Richard’s absence. She wore a dress he’d never seen before, or even imagined her capable of wearing. Inset with hundreds of tiny mirrors, it captured the firelight and lamplight in mockery of the stars above. Ruth was her own milky way, her own spiral galaxy spinning at a vastly speeded-up rate, as she moved about amongst reporters and cameramen who were getting steadily drunker—abetted by a Dr Paul who stayed cold sober, while he encouraged them to copy some of the orgy spirit of events down on the desert plain. From this mountain height, a bonfire that must have been huge indeed glowed far away beyond San Pedro on the road to the city—a winking orange star of the first magnitude.

  Once, they heard what might have been a rattle of gunfire, far away, trapped and amplified by the Big Dish. It could have been somebody trampling on dry sticks beyond the circle of light—an Indian, maybe, watching the party; or a vulture, stamping impatiently and clacking its wings for the lamb being roasted. The blond man was sure it was gunfire. After Asia, Africa and the Middle East, he should know how to estimate weaponry well enough, he boasted. He’d spent half his life as a connoisseur of gunfire, near and far, bearing the mark of his one mis-estimate on his cheek.

  That clicking crackle came in a moment of absurd stillness, when even the barbecue fire and the roast had fallen into a noise trough. Everyone had stopped talking all together. They might all have been waiting for the sound…wishing for it.

  After the second hour, when everyone was pretty well drunk, Ruth slipped away in the direction of the Hammond bungalow. Richard followed, tipsily, though he hadn’t been invited—a scab of lust in him tingling to be scratched, to banish memories of Father Luis and his mumblings. They’d left a furry deposit in his mind, as though he’d been unable to brush his teeth for a few days.

  Someone in the shadows was dogging his footsteps; drunkenly, he paid no attention.

  Blundering quietly into the bungalow, he felt his way along the corridor towards Ruth’s room. A faint light was showing underneath her door. Somewhere else in the house, presumably, Consuela was babysitting Alice; he didn’t knock before opening the door.

  The blond man was in bed with Ruth. Her dress lay on the floor, a discarded snakeskin with spangly scales…

  Supporting his bulk on one elbow, while his free hand clutched under her, the man’s buttocks pumped to and fro through the thin hoop of her legs. She lay like a ballet dancer in a cambré, passé position bent through ninety degrees at the hips, her nails raking the newsman’s buttocks while her other hand squeezed his scrotum gently, as if it was a plastic ketchup bottle…

  She opened her eyes briefly on Richard, then she closed them again as the hoop of her legs tightened round the man; only after a long interval relaxing and unlocking her companion.

  The blond man rolled off her lazily, and noticed Richard. He seemed unperturbed.

  “But why him?” Richard gasped, feeling more betrayed than a husband would.

  Abruptly, Ruth looked disgusted and tried to tug the sheet across herself ; but the man’s weight was on it. It only hid her legs and the dark rhombus of her crotch, leaving her breasts bare. She was staring past Richard, out of the doorw
ay.

  He turned, to follow her eyes.

  Morelli had followed him into the house. The Italian stood a little way back in the dark of the corridor. He moved forward now, as though invited by Ruth’s gaze. Ignoring the woman’s body, he stared only at her face—and even then, at her face as a formless unit, not at eyes or mouth. Her features might have been smeared into flat uniformiy by a stocking mask, his diffuse gaze implied.

  “Hammond’s high priestess, then, the temple prostitute?” he enquired softly. “It figures.”

  The blond man rolled over to secure a pack of Kools from his shirt on the floor.

  “Don’t pay any attention to him, Mrs Hammond. He’s just jealous because his balls got wrecked by an Arab land mine. He used to be the perfect trendy Marxist lady-fucker once. Don’t I know it! Sexuality and the class struggle, you should have heard him. But he’s reverted to a sort of pre-pubertal state since then, you see. Eh, Gianfranco? Catholic sin and all that—but still somehow missing the softness of Mother Church’s bosom?”

  Morelli took this exposure surprisingly calmly; or else, his private pain was instantly shunted off elsewhere, along a well-worn course. He just bowed drolly, and withdrew, leaving the two men alone with Ruth, and Ruth with her back to them, sobbing.

  “Fuck off!” she swore, facelessly. “Get out of here all of you! This isn’t a sideshow. I’m real. I hate you—”

  • • •

  Paul Hammond appeared at nine the next morning for the official news conference and filmed interviews in the shade of the Big Dish; calm and alert, conducting every word and gesture with inspired panache… To the various hangovers present, no doubt doubly impressive. Having descended from his mountain to revel in the plain by proxy the previous evening, he’d reascended to the empyrean. Down on the real plain, meanwhile, far away, a thin column of black smoke rose up for perhaps a thousand feet before meeting an inversion layer which squashed it out to the four points of the compass in the breathless air, creating a tall thin-stemmed fungoid tree.