Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (22 page)

 
          
“Amy!
” cries Peter, sleep-confused.

 
          
“Samti
raped her,” snarls Ritchie. “Samti raped Amy. Vilo froze her with that damn
helmet.” He scrambles.

 
          
“No,
I haven’t been raped! Samti
saved
me.
Jacobik was trying to possess me, to be my bond-beloved. Samti thrust himself
in the way—the closest way he could! ”

 
          
“That
is true,” says Samti—no alien now, to me.

 
          
“So
now we must believe in ghosts,” says Wu softly. “Jacobik’s ghost. . .”

 
          
Peter
regards me dully, with a jealous eye, as we eat. But is it jealousy of Samti—or
of Jacobik, whose aska still lives on, drawn along inexorably in our wake? A
shade fluttering along in a limbo of suspended death—which is the gift of God’s
World, reaching out to us even then in High Space. The gift? In Jacobik’s case,
the curse!
Das Gift:
the poison.

 
          
Now
that the moment of shock is past, I remember ... a boy in
Prague
, a boy with a catapult, slaughterer of
pigeons and doves. It was his only way of loving them. If each man kills the
thing he loves, does each man love the thing he kills? There’s a hideous,
magnetic fascination—of his north pole, for my south. He isn’t—
wasn't
—just a killer, and an utter
bastard. He was Death’s own self-appointed agent. In his own twisted way, he
had a vision. A false one. For here, ‘Death, thou shalt die.’ And yet: why is
there any death in the universe, if the living mind can link directly with
Askatharli, if we can tread the paths of Heaven while alive?

 
          
I
could have . . . saved him? Healed him? I, who dealt the wound? Perhaps, if he
hadn’t leapt on me so suddenly, out of his own desperation . . .

 
          
“Ghosts,”
repeats Wu glumly.

 
          
We
have to believe in ghosts ...

 
          
“What
is a ghost,” I ask Peter, “but an aska: the mental pattern of a living being
that has been absorbed back into the general imagination, but which still stays
bonded to something in ordinary reality? If it gets imprinted on some place or
thing, why, there’s your typical ghost. But if it’s bonded to a living person,
that’s
possession.
It can be one’s
own personal daemon. We can arrange for this kind of possession, here. You can be
my daemon, Peter. I can be yours.”

 
          
“Can
be?”

 
          
“Will
be! This is what the old shamans
knew, isn’t it?” Mollified, he nods. “The shaman can only express himself by
being possessed. Only after being taken over by a genie does the shaman become
a . . . genius.” He laughs harshly. “But it wasn’t ghosts of dead people that
possessed the shaman . . .Yet, wait! I’m wrong.” (Now his spirits revive.
Perhaps it’s partly thanks to the food—we’re breakfasting on spiced dough balls
and boiled roots, washed down by
lariz.)
“Surely this is what the whole
tulku
system in old
Tibet
was about—the reincarnation system! The spiritual entity that coexists
with a living person—which the Getkans call the aska—this could attach itself
to someone newly born, if rapport was strong enough, even if it had spent years
hanging loose on the after-death plane—”

 
          
“The
Askatharli plane, right.” I encourage him—guilty at my infidelity? No: guilty
at my horrid
fidelity
—to Jacobik!
“That’s where Jacobik still wanders, Peter. That’s where we visit Heaven in the
shared dreams. But here on God’s World the dead person’s
tulku
can attach itself to a fully matured person who’s still
alive. He can be her daemon guide and power source. Or she can be his. It’s
like having someone reincarnated in you while you’re still yourself, in the
world.” (Hurry to me, Peter, before Jacobik gets here first!)

 
          
“That’s
what the old Tibetan culture was all about,” nods Peter. “Once upon a time.” He
raises his hand, still clutching a slice of sweet boiled root, to forestall
Wu’s protests. “In
Tibet
it was a matter of religion and magic. But
here it’s a physical fact, because of this golden symbiont that roots into our
very flesh. This golden hair is the cellular material of the daemon—an actual
physical intermediary.”

 
          
“Why
should Jacobik choose you?” asks Zoe quietly. She cleans her bowl and licks her
fingers, cat-like.

 
          
“Because
. . . it’s a soul for a soul ... I killed him.” I weep. My bowl falls. “We all
killed him, but I was the channel for it.”
“You!”
Peter starts up, then sinks back bemused.

           
“I don’t remember this in my
personal memory. It’s in my imagination that I know it. I imagined the scene in
his cabin— and it was
true
. I was
possessed by you all in High Space, but it had to be
me.
Because Jacobik and I were so opposite to each other that we
belong ... oh God, we belong. The Jacobik
tulku
must be the thing that’s waiting for me out at the boundary. Out at the
place where one out of two must die. He’s my daemon.” Peter shakes his head
disbelievingly. He comes, now, to put his arm around me and dry my tears upon
his golden down. Salt beads glisten on his skin like dew.

 
          
“Samti
and Vilo will meet their own devil too.” I know it now. “It will kill one of
them physically. Then the dead one’s
tulku
can thrust aside the negative demon and save the living partner. Then the
‘genius’ of Vilo or Samti can be reborn in the other, with one foot in this
world and one foot in Askatharli. This is how it has to be with us too. That’s
the reality of this world—the wonderful awful reality.”

 
          
“What
news to carry home!” mocks Wu. “Let us reappoint the lamas in
Tibet
.” Oh, Wu, you might mock the Maoist
revival, but you are with him in your heart!

 
          
“Once
we know that there’s no death, and that the imagination that dreams the
universe is wide open to us, how can we turn our backs on the new reality?
This’ll
save
the world, Wu. We were
becoming soulless machines.”

 
          
“Like
the vile Group-ones?”

           
“Yes! Theirs must be the last word
in sour grapes.”

           
Rene tugs at his moustache. “It’s a
big universe,
amie
—a boundless one.
The opposition obviously disagree with this version of the truth.”

 
          
“Bah,
they couldn’t even see us when we visited them. Hey, what else happened on
Pilgrim
?”

           
“You and Jacobik just vanished.”
Ritchie burps. “The whole dream began breaking up after that. Getting vague. We
did get as far as the door of the control deck, though. It was the same as you
saw in my dream, back in Menfaa. Or as you told it to me! Those dirty insects
are picking over our people’s brains, just as if they’re a set of tools for
them—memory-units they’ve plugged into some computer.” He looks surprised. “Now
why the heck should I say that? I dunno.”

 
          
“We
must ride on,” interrupts Samti. “We two have waited patiently while you slept
the
noon
away.”

 
          
Soon
the rhaniqs crouch for us again, double-jointedly upon the turf.
 

 
          
Two
days later
we top a last rise to
discover Thlax, our seaport destination, a thin stone sickle around a
sheltered bay fifteen to twenty kilometres away. The sun sinks very slowly,
casting long shadows over the land. A tiny white pyramid stands on a headland,
with its mundane counterpart nearly hidden in the town—pharos not for this
world nor for that sea. Vilo is hungry to sleep and dream. We too want to
sleep,
and see
. We will camp here.

 
          
Here
is a ridge of knuckles skinned to the bone dividing the inland forests from the
coastal scrubland. Thlaxwards, oddly, the land is poorer, only sparsely
vegetated. Also, the ground is rumpled and ridged in a curiously serpentine
manner except for one huge flat ‘field’, kilometres away to the west. We
wouldn’t notice this so much but for our elevation, and the perspective of
evening shadows.

 
          
Ritchie
sweeps that rumpled plain below with binoculars.

           
“Be damned if that isn’t the remains
of a city underneath it all! A genuine great big city. Be damned if it didn’t
have an airport too. See that flat area? I’ll swear it’s been deep in concrete
once. So deep that it hasn’t been broken up in all this time.”

 
          
“A
spaceport, even?” suggests Wu, stroking her golden down distastefully.

 
          
“What
need would they have—?”

 
          
“Remember
the siege city, Amy,” says Rene. “A memory, perhaps, of a time when all Getkans
were not clad in gold? When a war was fought between those who symbiosed and
those who didn’t? Or hadn’t yet? But soon it absorbed everyone. Even though the
naked Getkans ‘skinned’ the others, they soon put on their skins and wore them?
Maybe it all changed, once. And before that there were cities and airports.”

 
          
“Of
course it had to happen once. I mean, at a particular stage in their
evolution—a particular threshold. Long ago.” The time doesn’t bother me.
“That’s what the dream symbolises—that coming into their heritage, close to the
wellspring. That opening up of imaginative space. The beginning of conscious
resurrection. Was it traumatic? Well, maybe it was. It will be for us too.”

 
          
“But
if they’d already built cities, much larger than any today —except for those
that are in their dreams? What kind of stage were they at already, if that’s
so? Still too primitive? Hardly!” Peter frowns. “I’d have thought the primitive
mind would be more in key with Askatharli. Sky-contact—the sense of an intimate
contact with the beyond; it’s something from the primitive past on
Earth—something which the last shamans looked back on nostalgically. It was a
talent progressively
lost
. It was
something deep in a Golden Age of the imagination which withdrew further and
further . ..”

 
          
“Yet
here the Golden Age is now,” whispers Zoe. “Subsequent to the age of steel and
city and machine? Does time flow backwards?”

 
          
“They
aren’t interested in time,” I remind her. “The most important part of their
lives is lived outside time, in imagination space, dream space. Time isn’t. . .
flowing. Not for them.”

 
          
Wu
turns to Vilo and Samti. “What was that place down there —between this hill and
Thlax? Something is covered over.”

 
          
Our
pre-heroes peer across the land.

 
          
“Ruins,
perhaps?”

 
          
“How
old?”

 
          
“How
should we know?”

 
          
“Are
there many such ancient ruins on Getka?”

 
          
“We
are an old people. Time stretches back till it meets us, coming the other way.
Bones of ancient beasts lie in rocks, so bones of ancient buildings are quite
natural too. They’re not so important. If they’re of importance, they still
exist in Askatharli. Shall I see?” Samti reaches into a pannier for his
helmet-mask. He fits it on his head.

 
          
“It
is a grand dream,” he announces in a muffled voice. “A fine rich city. We shall
walk in it once we climb the sleep tree. Already the early sleepers and the
dead of Thlax rejoice along its avenues and boulevards. They change it. They
add new beauty to it. Even when its stones are dust, this will be so. All
remains, for the imagination to perfect. What it symbolised, you see, has been
carried back to its origin.” He slides the helmet-mask off.

 
          
“Ancient
ruins, of a modem city?” sneers Wu. “When all cities today are cuckoo-clock
villages. Here lies
Shanghai
, here lies
San Francisco
! Something has drained the reality from the world. Something
sufficiently cunning not to cut off its source of nourishment. Something
hungry for fresh pastures! ”

 
          
“That’s
nonsense! ”

 
          
“Why
is it nonsense, Amy?”

 
          
“You
can’t
allow
it to be the truth—the
wonderful truth it is.” “I simply ask a few historical questions.”

 
          
“I’d
like to ask a few too,” agrees Rene, though apologetically. “Before we’re
wholly gilded by
their
truth.”

 
          
On
the down slope, below the knuckles, we make camp. A blood-stained sky hangs to
the westward. Streamers and banners feather out across the hills and forest
horizon over the darkening sea. The world is at peace. The enemy in space seems
puny: flies infesting a few balls of rock far away. I can hardly wait to sleep,
and slip into the shaping dream ...