Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (15 page)

 
          
We
will meet these other aliens ... in reality? And the Getkans meet them ... in
their dreams?

 
          
“You
do resemble us,” Rene presses on, as a good biologist, dismissing the rest as
impenetrable rhetoric. “Remarkably so. Except for the body hair.” (At which
the Yarrish ‘drinks’, amused.) “And your thinner, taller build, but of course
that’s caused by the lower gravity. Isn’t it rather remarkable?”

 
          
“Starborn,
the Imagining—the shaping essence—descends through matrices of angel energies
to mould life proper to its world. It plays with forms so that life may in turn
imagine what the Imagining may be, and so become its Lord. Askatharli space,
through which you came, is the space of matrices before the world is born. It
is the Imagining. In this Imagining are certain archetypes which govern
worlds. Existence cascades down into low space from the wellspring. The same
experiment is reborn, reechoed. You are projections of us into your world,
while,” he drinks, “we are projections of you. No doubt there are many
wellsprings, but here is the closest one. It governs this part of the star
field. All Starborns shall learn to govern it in their turn by coming close to
it, as you came. And, by governing it, what is real and what is beyond reality
is determined. Elsewhere, no doubt, there are other wellsprings for other
beings.”

 
          
Is
this a creation myth, or the plain truth? The universe, imagined into being
from a higher plane, like a thought in the mind of God-the-Imagining, taking on
solid form ... as the High Space pyramid took on solid form at the promptings
of the Paravarthun from afar ...

 
          
The
Yarrish jabs his finger—no, his stump!—at Ritchie. “What’s your death name,
boy?”

           
“I haven’t got a death name. When
you’re dead, you’re dead. Our friends know that by now! (In spades,” he adds
bitterly in English.)

 
          
“They
know it—
nowT
’

 
          
“They
knew death. That’s what I mean. They experienced it. The end. Finish.” His hand
slices the air. “That’s my one and only name, sir. Ritchie Blue. I’m a space
pilot.”

 
          
“Pilot
through low space, but not through Askatharli space. You have broken the roof
of the sky together, yet you don’t know what you are, nor why you’re called
here.”

 
          
“Our
world doesn’t know where it is, these days, sir. There’s been real confusion
since the . . . since the askas appeared. The messages weren’t all that
explicit.”

 
          
But
of course, no, they wouldn’t be since they were in the language of vision, or
prophecy, sent down the waveguide of God-the-Imagining. The avatars were the
askas of the Paravarthun, as interpreted by us.

 
          
“Yarrish,”
says Zoe. “You speak of an Imagining, and we call this thing ‘God’. Is God
really here, more truly here, more centrally than in our own world?”

 
          
“Your
name is—?”

 
          
“Zoe.
It means life. My work is the nature of God: people’s beliefs.”

 
          
“You
who seek God do not know what God might be?”

 
          
“We’ve
put our Gods behind us,” Wu cuts in sharply.

 
          
“Just
as the Group-ones would deny, destroy and warp—and lock us up in mere matter.”
The Yarrish shakes himself. “You will meet the Tharliparan soon. He will see
your souls.” (Our askas!)

 
          
“He’s
the shaman,” whispers Peter, as if we haven’t already guessed it. “That’s what
the Tharliparan is. He’s the ‘plane doubler’. He’s in touch with the other
plane, from that island over there. It’s the double of this city, the celestial
ideal that corresponds to here. But he has to be a whole lot more than a
primitive shaman if there’s a planetary communications network too, and if the
whole lot of them can get through to us twenty- one light years away. He’s got
to be objectively what the old shamans just were in their heads.” Peter’s thrilled
by the prospect. Who wouldn’t be? “The Tharliparan hasn’t lost contact with the
sky, or with some other world. That’s how they communicate— through ... through
..

 
          
“Through
Heaven,” prompts Zoe. “A real objective Heaven? Whatever can it be?”

 
          
“You’re
the expert,” mutters Wu. “Expert on nothing.”

 
          
“Oh
no,” retorts Zoe. “Here, it’s
something
.”

 
          
“Two
persons who will be a hero are in Lyndarl at this moment.” (Who will be
a
hero? Ah yes, that’s the dyad usage.)
The Yarrish nods towards the g-string couple, Samti and Vilo. “Their death
names are menMoth and menVao.” Samti and Vilo stand up and drink us in
ceremonially. So now we are formally introduced at last—by way of their death
names . . . whatever death names might be. “You came down far short of
Darshanor, your proper target. Your need to become heroes is urgent, because of
your lost friends. You may travel with those two.”

 
          
“What
is a hero, Yarrish?” Peter asks.

 
          
“A
hero doesn’t merely dream-shape Askatharli. He can travel through it in his living
flesh. While his aska-beloved dwells there always.” The Yarrish rises suddenly
and slips away quickly through a high, half-open door. Our audience is over.

 
          
Our
day tutor Sereny turns to us. “Let us walk round Lyndarl to learn more names.”
Oh yes. More seed crystals, for our saturated dreams.

 
          
So
off we go presently to the dye works, the tannery, the weaving sheds, the
fields.

 
          
But
to no museum, nor library, nor art gallery; there are none of these. Nor
temples nor shrines. No doubt those are all in the pyramid on Menfaa island.

 
          
We
do pass a schoolhouse on our way. The children inside are already taller than
Peter. They crowd to the open door to watch us, but do not crowd out, as though
soon enough they will have a chance to meet us, but not here, not yet.

 
          
“What
do they learn?” we want to know.

 
          
“Concentration,”
says Sereny. “Shaping, Sculpture.”

 
          
Which
is ridiculous, in a town where there are no sculptures.

 
          
“Oh
yes. What do they sculpt? What with?” asks Wu.

 
          
“They
sculpt Askatharli. By night. With their askas. As you will learn to.”

           
“What else do you teach them?”

           
“How to wear masks. How to look into
mirrors.”

           
“You need to teach them how to look
in a mirror?” cries Wu. “They also learn about seeds and sewerage and ordinary
things.”

           
We pass a deathhouse too; Sereny
calls it that. No name is cut on the lintel.
There's no writing here.
(“We write in Askatharli.” Of course.)
“Not everyone may bond and become a hero. The world must carry on. Some die
here when they’re old.”

 
          
“I
thought you didn’t ‘die’,” says Zoe.

           
“We die, to live.”

           
“What happens to the corpses?” she
asks, changing her tack. They certainly have the word, though the sense is
something to do with ‘harvest’ and ‘soil for crops’.

 
          
“We
shave the gold from them, then put them in the fields.” “You keep the body
hair? Where? At home, in urns?”

           
“No. Things are made from it. After
the aska rejoins Askatharli, in that state it is an alterer, a leaven.”

           
“What sort of things?”

           
“Mirrors, masks ...”

 
 
          
Anvil clouds tower
over Lyndarl,
expecting the hammer of the lightning. Hot sticky wind gusts through the town.
Sky has turned purple with massive bruising before the expected blows are even
struck. Samti and Vilo have hurried out on some errand, leaving all their paraphernalia
piled on the sleep trees through in the other room.

 
          
“What
sort of damn battle do you send your troops to, two by two?” Ritchie paces the
room. It starts to rain: the first drops from a bucket that is soon about to
empty over Lyndarl. “Hell, they expect to die. They’re looking forward to it.”
He marches off through the washroom, into their room. He stares down at the
reflection of his bearded face in one of the shields. “Mirror, mirror on the
bed, what will happen when they’ve bled?” He brings a helmet-mask back with
him, batting it from hand to hand.

 
          
“I
might be sticking my finger in someone else’s pot of jam ... But what the hell!
How
do
you see out of these things?”
He licks his lips, teasing himself and us. “They won’t be back in this rain. Get
their fur wet.”

 
          
“Put
up your bright swords or the rain will rust ’em,” misquotes Zoe. “Put up your
blank masks ere the lightning flashes! ”

 
          
Ritchie
raises the helmet-mask above his head. “I crown myself—”

 
          
“Don’t.”
I’ve a feeling.

 
          
Wu
nods permission, though. She approves. Mockery is the grand leveller. In her
eyes we are all so vulnerable. The mantle of responsibility has fallen upon her
shoulders—with a few pleats of it upon Ritchie’s, who can be groomed to bear
them. A necessary gesture is this cocking of a snook. To disintoxicate us of
reverence for alien rituals. To mock those who have mocked Earth’s history. To
break the conditioning spell.

           
“—a hero of the hemisphere!” He
pulls the helmet-mask down. It looks like a tight squeeze.

 
          
And a hell storm rages through us all...

           
Were
naked in High Space, seeing it directly: intense in incoherence. Hideous
bubbling things live in this zone. Worm shapes burrow through the air,
ingesting it, squeezing it out. Living balloons of light suck and pump. We're
adrift in the bloodstream of some great beast of light. We're squeezed by
corpuscles and leucocytes that live and fight, mutate and absorb each other.
The world of walls and houses, roof and ground is a mere membrane through which
they swim at will. Space isn't empty at all but full of amorphous swarming
creatures, entities to which worlds and rocks and suns are transparent. . .

           
It
is the world that is transparent! It's still ‘here', but there's a zone beyond
the world—another order of reality, beyond reality—that now shows through:
another world that is utterly, sickeningly out of focus. Askatharli—which is
equivalent to ‘Heaven'? We can't tune in to it.

           
If
we knew how, we could see through the fabric of the world to the root imagining
of it—beyond the world, into pure imagining. But the two modes are
nauseatingly intermixed.

           
Our
poor body is skinned alive, peeled like an onion as the winds of light blow
through it. Eyelids are cut off with knives; in all directions is a solar
blaze. Our nerves agonise and pleasure at the brush of Being. Our head, our
helmet are forgotten. Forgotten . ..

           
In
a moment the hell storm abates.

           
Or the storm of Heaven. Heaven,
misunderstood, ungrasped, out of focus, must be Hell...

 
          
“Christ—!”

 
          
“Did
you see—?”

 
          
“Oh
yes!”

 
          
Ritchie
jerks about on the floor.

 
          
Rene,
first to reach him, prises off the helmet-mask. Ritchie’s mouth chomps open and
shut in spasm, drooling spittle but no blood yet. His eyeballs roll up whitely;
he stares up into the roof of his own head.

 
          
“Grand ma!
Pull something soft under his
head! ”

 
          
Zoe
thrusts a cushion beneath his head, while Rene contrives a cloth gag which he
forces between his teeth. Ritchie flops about interminably.

 
          
Eventually
he lies inert, breathing very softly.

 
          
Wu
peers gingerly inside the fallen mask. There’s nothing to be seen. Thunder
crashes outside—she almost drops the mask.

 
          
“An
astronaut with epilepsy? Hardly! The whole crew had a clean bill of health.”
Rene shakes his head—as much to dislodge after-images of the vision as in
denial.

 
          
“What
sort of thing is this? I thought it was only . . .” Wu too shakes her head. “It
must be a machine of some kind. I wonder if the storm, if the electrical
activity . . .?”

 
          
“Did
it synchronise him with the discharges in the sky? Like a flicker fit? Maybe
there are circuits we can’t see built into it.”

 
          
“The
hairs of the dead,” says Zoe quietly.

 
          
What
did we see? A sea of creation . . . Askatharli, energy entities. ..

 
          
Wu
licks her lips, shocked. She’s slowed down in her movements as if broken glass
lies everywhere invisibly. Stricken, she stares at her imperial protege, felled
on the bronzewood floor. “Poor boy.”

 
          
“We
must tell them. We need their advice.”

 
          
Wu
glares at me for this, as though I’m responsible for her debacle.

 
          
“Amy’s
right,” snaps Zoe. “Your pawn isn’t queened yet.” So she has noticed too . . .

 
          
“A
thought machine,” wonders Rene. “If there’s resonance— such as I take it that
we all experienced—maybe they already know about this mishap? Even though our
thoughts are not their thoughts.” He kneels by Ritchie again, checking pulse
and respiration. “He’s deeply unconscious.”

 
          
Peter
slides the screen window further open to allow more air inside, as though this
will improve Ritchie’s lung performance. The wind has dropped considerably. The
rain has stopped too, the storm aborted. Already scudding cloud is breaking up.

 
          
Fleetingly
a rainbow bridges the lake. A V-wing of bluebirds flies down it towards the
bald
cuesta,
hooting
hupoo, hupoo
as they chase their own
hue, which now vanishes . . .

           
Rene wipes Ritchie’s brow and
cheeks.

 
          
He
stoops
to peer closer.

 
          
“What
is it?”

 
          
He
stares at the palm of his own hand.

 
          
“Hairs,”
he whispers. “Tiny golden hairs. Little filaments, little cilia ...”

 
          
Here
on my own palms too ... A hint, yes—along the life line, along the heart line .
. . where there were never any hairs!

 
          
“Fur.
We’re sprouting fur. Like them.”

 
          
“No,”
cries Rene. “One alien species can’t possibly infect another one with physical
characteristics! ” A vain cry.

 
          
“Something
is infecting us. Something is planting golden cilia in our cells.” Something
which whispers to us in Getkasaali in our dreams . . . We strip ourselves, in a
flurry of clothes as though for an orgy, while Ritchie lies neglected.

 
          
Here,
there, as yet sparse and patchy, less than a millimetre’s growth as yet—a mere
fuzz ...

 
          
After
drinking in the pilot on his bed Sereny tells us, “Ritchie Blue must go to
Menfaa right away. If he wore another’s mask he is the body-slave of that other
person, though not her bond- beloved, for he hasn’t died nor were the two in
tune. His aska is lost in Askatharli.”

 
          
“What
are
these masks?” shouts Wu.

 
          
“Later!
We did indeed go into your ship, but we wouldn’t have played games pushing
buttons whose function we did not understand . .

 
          
(We
do not, for the moment, mention the golden fuzz. One thing at a time! Maybe
it’s only like a rash of spots or catching an alien cold. Maybe.)

 
          
Sereny
talks rapidly to Vilo.

 
          
“Now
you will see what the mask of a pre-hero can do, humans. Though not what it is
for. Not yet.”

 
          
Vilo
studies Ritchie, then lies down on the next bed in the same position. She
slides on her helmet-mask.

 
          
“Now
he is hers.” (Wu’s lips are tight with anger at all this.)

 
          
As
Vilo swings her legs off the low bed and rises, so rises Ritchie, every motion
copying hers—though his eyes are still closed and his face is void of
expression.

 
          
Wu
starts forward. But the blind pilot pays her no attention.

 
          
“Do
not touch him! This is faster than carrying him there on a litter. Vilo will
have to help the Tharliparan unbind him.”

 
          
“What
problems you do set us! ” exclaims Samti—not so much resentfully (I don’t
think) as condescendingly, as one might speak to a wayward child or a
chimpanzee that happens to be able to talk. Yes indeed, that’s it. Until we’re
able to manipulate Askatharli in the way they say they can, we’re a kind of
animal, pre-conscious automata. Once we can—and they know that we can, or we
couldn’t have heeded their call—we shall be full friends and partners in their
enterprise. Until then, they’re almost conditioned to resent us—just as they
loathe the Group-ones, almost irrationally (though, Lord knows,
we
have reason enough to loathe them!).
It comes out in their teasing. Yet at the same time they must lead us onward
and upward to their own state. There’s something strange in their altruism. But
perhaps not. No doubt human development agencies sometimes get impatient with
those they assist; and the Getkans are agents of a physical- spiritual
development.

 
          
Still,
I must protest. “Don’t treat us like babies, Samti. Like unformed things.”

 
          
Samti
drinks me, but in a more friendly way (I think). “Well, you fought yourselves
in Askatharli space, didn’t you? Then the person in your group who focused this
self-attack—your weapons master—became a focus for attack by one of you
who doesn't know this yet.
The killer
was aska-slave to the group as surely as Ritchie Blue is slave to Vilo now.
Only when you realize who killed the weapons master will you be truly unbound
of that. Those who are bound are not free beings. You’re like witless
Group-ones.”

 
          
“How
can we know who killed Jacobik?” I cry. Why, why, does he have to bring this up
now? “Most of our friends are dead —overrun! It could have been any of them,
and they’re
gone."

 
          
“They
are in you still, as you are in them. What is a person? Do you really know
this, Amy Dove? Is Ritchie Blue a person right now? He’s an aska-slave because
he didn’t know that he wasn’t yet a person. So he couldn’t become more than a
person.”

 
          
“Will
you go down to the quayside?” Sereny says to Vilo, using the partial plural.

           
“We’re on our way.”
Yikahebra
: one-and-a-half-we . . . They
count in halves because they may have to count half-persons; Ritchie’s only
half a person now ...