Zardoz (11 page)

Like people stricken with palsy, they were no threat, they were immobile.

There they stood, still lost in some subaquarian fog, moving toward him so slowly that he could perceive no motion of life as he panted hoarsely for breath, gulping in the air they barely breathed. He turned his back on them, pushed his face into the stone wall which stuck wetly to him, and scraped his cheek around to look with one eye into the square outside. Consuella and her band were searching for him in the courtyard.

Turning, he saw that the Apathetics had advanced like animate deadly plants, somehow inhuman but man-like still. In the forefront was the girl he had embraced, fondled, and then thrown down in disgust. She opened her mouth and tried to speak. Horrifyingly they were all trying to touch him in a spidery, floating way, their arms like seaweed undulating in a deep sea current.

Hooves clattered on the cobblestones behind him. Consuella and her troops now filled the square. A crackling of fire joined the clatter of their horses’ hooves. She was burning the buildings, blindly smoking all the small game into the open in the hope of catching the man-killer.

The Apathetics in the houses were pitched or driven out, under the legs of the hunters’ horses.

Consuella had a regal, martial air which Zed now found himself admiring. Her hair flew back as she spurred her horse. The hunter, now turned quarry, recognized himself in his pursuer, and was pleased.

The girl behind Zed reached out a hand and took a silver drop of perspiration from his neck, then put it to her lips. A tremor ran through her body. Zed glanced back at them. They pressed more closely to him, watching the girl’s body change. She passed the sweat on to another pair of lips, a man’s; he too tremored at the touch and passed it on again. Others took her touch and so a ripple grew into a wave that passed from the center to the edges of the crowd.

Smoke drifted in from the burning houses. The girl kissed Zed on the lips. “We—take—life—from—you.” She turned and kissed a girl next to her, who kissed another, then they continued, kissing men and women in a second wave. The energy transmitted through them, melting the frozen limbs and heating their joints and muscles. Some began to moan as life restirred their blood. They clung leech-like to his body, wetly pressing their mouths to him, drawing out his essence through his skin. Like vampires on a struggling victim, they sapped him and he tottered, waited, fell almost, then lurched back, feeling for the magic leaf Avalow had given him. Incredibly, they were taking his life away. After all the dangers he had overcome he was to die at the hands of these lifeless creatures. His fingers touched the crumpled leaf and he withdrew it, raised it to his gasping mouth, swallowed it, then fought for air.

The Eternals worked closer to his hiding place, attracted by the rising noise as more Apathetics fought for his person. They were becoming charged with his powerful psyche, and it rose within them and out against their sickly reason, into action. Zed felt his life returning from Avalow’s potion, felt it burn through emptied channels, down thickening veins to his extremities. His life recharged again. He had survived once more. Consuella and two other horsemen clattered into the stone-flagged room and bayed out as they saw him. Zed turned and stumbled through another exit, overturning a cart to stop them following out into the courtyard, through the gate from whence he had come, swinging it shut, and—back into the forest, hounded still.

He glanced over his shoulder as he ran and saw the renewed Apathetics and Consuella’s group collide in conflict.

Some were trampled, other Apathetics pulled Eternals from their horses; smoke rolled across his field of view, flames rose behind him as he ran.

The Vortex was fighting itself. It might be the first moments of a holocaust that would wreck it, if he lived to feed the fires.

Zed stumbled, lurched, and fell into a staggering run, his body kept going by his will and Avalow’s knowledge within the leaf.

Daytime was sinking with his spirits. He was fading like the sunlight that caught him horizontally as he ran through the woods. His mind was failing. Just to keep going, but where he went was in some other’s hands, or none.

In the darkness he heard strange singing and music. Little lights bobbed ahead of him like will-o’-the-wisps dancing in a marsh, and just as eerie, strange, and frightening.

The lights were carried by the Renegades, their heads bloated and grotesque in the lights. He swayed and saw they were wearing masks and fancy dress, perhaps in celebration of the burning of the buildings. They shrieked and danced and cackled around him. He was too tired to fight now. They had him.

An old man prodded at the slack figure. “It’s him! It’s him!”

One dressed as death bent over Zed’s fallen form.

“None of them could catch him—but he falls into the hands of the poor old Renegades.”

Zed spoke in a whisper, up into the ring of faces enclosing him. “Death! I can bring death to you all! Find Friend! Take me to Friend!”

“What’s he say?” an old woman asked.

“Shut up!” another answered.

Zed tried to see them as they had been. These wrecks were once the best of Vortex life—vigorous, alert, and brilliant. They were the only people now who might help him through. If they could just raise the veils of senility and see him as a mirror image from their own past.

They gnashed and twittered over his head in some un- known private quarrel and debate.

He closed his eyes.

He came back to the present time after a spell in total darkness, a dreamless crypt, to find that he was walking. He felt his strength returning with each stride. The little lights still danced around him. Now he was part of the procession which had stumbled upon him. He walked with death. He was her bride.

The sly Renegades had dressed him in an old bridal gown, a veil covered his face. Through the lacy gauze he saw sharp patterns of new light. Fire on torches carried from one bonfire to another. Flames licked and fed around him. All the population were giddily drunk with old memories of violent times refreshed by fire.

Passions were erupting through the still and stoic modes that had once held the Vortex firm. Stupefied with excess, they reeled around him, as if the world were being tilted back and forth, shaken at its core.

Through this welter, the Renegades led their stately, wicked little march. Death had Zed’s arm, he patted it, and grinned up through the patterned net. Zed saw an old sparkle in the young eyes, flaring in the crumpled face; times remembered, deeds done.

Zed looked about him with mounting horror. The gaps were widening, the implosion would occur. Some Apathetics had trapped an Eternal in the bushes and were stoning him to death, their laughter drowning his screams. Couples made passionate love to each other in the light of fired houses where trapped people raged. Madness reigned.

Young and old laughed, danced, killed, and made love with a mindless hysteria that shook even Zed, who had lived through, led, and initiated worse deeds himself. Could he be weakening in his resolve to destroy, to kill the center of the state?

An old man bent down to two ex-Apathetics who rolled in each other’s arms.

“It’s a miracle. We’re Apathetics.”

He crackled, “Tell us how. Please. We want some too.”

Still in love-throes, the Apathetic explained, “We started chasing the Brutal. We got excited. We saw someone. We thought it was him.”

“It wasn’t, but we killed him, anyway,” added her partner.

“Then we felt desire,” the first explained. The infectious violence had stirred dead sexual longings.

Zed glanced up to a tree silhouetted in a rocket-flare that burst and briefly hung before it fell, to start a low fire in the fog-damp woods. A body had been crammed into a forked branch, like a big cat’s killing. Eternals hurrying past were caught in the pale red glow of the flare, their shapes picked out with guns and swords, and they all hunted only him.

Death clawed Zed’s hand in his.

“Look at all the excitement you’ve caused—you naughty girl.”

Dawn was breaking on a vastly changed Vortex. Dusk had left the Vortex sitting orderly in its light, smug and secure. Now the Vortex of the dawn looked a hundred years forward into the ruin of time’s hand; or could the place have been ravaged by a brutal senseless army of the night? Looted, raped, and ravaged, the fabric of the commune burned, but the steel heart still beat safely underground within the inviolate pyramid. The dead would rise again as surely as the sun. Doubles of these corpses, breathing lightly and smiling, would rebuild the chaos into the once-stable hell that smoldered here.

Death and bride approached the house in a stately parody of a marriage march. Consuella, her horse turning and wheeling, shouted orders. Zed saw her, martial, proud, and beautiful. Then he, too, felt the return of the old martial rhythms within him. He was recovering. He was back.

Consuella spoke up, her voice exciting him to combat. As she stirred her soldiers, so he, too, was roused to fight. “Your task is to secure all arms and weapons. Cut off food supplies. Work house to house. East to west down the valley. If you find the Brutal destroy him immediately. He’s trapped. It’s only a matter of time.”

And you’re trapped, too,
he thought as he looked up at her.
You and I are both locked together like two poisonous scorpions in a green bottle.
He reconsidered. No, she was the head of a wolf and he was a secret deadly insect in her hide, who would bite into her veins a paralyzing poison while he drove her mad with irritation.

The system fought itself. He had been “seen” a hundred times that night and “killed” a dozen more. Old feuds were being settled in the name of law and order. If he could only strike one lasting blow to the vitals—to the brain—all would be his. This damage about him now, fearful though it was, was only on the surface. He must get underground to face his final dragon.

Consuella turned her horse, wheeled, and nearly rode over Zed, who stepped back to let her gallop by. He felt the whisk of her whip as it cut down on the flank, smelled the steam rise from the horse, and she was gone. A ringing clatter in the street hung for a moment, then was spent like the gray wall of smoke that rose a hundred feet over all the Vortex! A death veil, suspended in mid-air.

“Friend! Friend!” Death took Zed’s hand and led him to the man standing before the doorway of his workplace. Zed smiled at his ancient colleague in a resigned way. Despair haunted Friend’s features, but his masklike face could not conceal a deep delight in what went on.

“Kiss the bride, dear Friend. Kiss the bride.”

He let himself be shouldered, nudged, and worried up to Zed by these mad old infants. Death lifted up the veil, opened his eyes wide, and barked a new laugh back at Zed’s strong face.

“You did well,” Friend whispered. “I will take the bride. Death comes closer for us all. Find May. Tell her Friend needs her.”

The limping procession turned away, aping the exit of the troops.   Friend gripped Zed’s arm and led him through the doorway of the museum and down into its maze-like heart.

May picked her way through the serried ranks of statuary toward them. The monumental clutter of Friend’s cavern looked neat now compared to the slaughter and rapine of the surface above. Zed’s gun hung from her fingers, low against her body. She stepped out into the living area, the unfamiliar weapon balanced in her hands. Her finger ran along the barrel and down to the chamber and the bullets as she looked at them both in turn.

“Friend, I cannot sanction this violence and destruction.”

“It’s too late, May. There’s no going back.”

She pleaded with him, with the revolver as a pivot and a threat.

“Don’t destroy the Vortex. Let’s renew it. A better breed could prosper here. Given time…”

“Time! Wasn’t eternity enough?” said Friend.

Zed spoke at last. “This place is against life. It must die.”

His words fell with a terrible finality. May trembled, wavered, then passed the gun to Zed as a token of her agreement.

“I have my followers. Inseminate us all, give us your seed. In return we’ll teach you all we know, I'll give you all I have. Perhaps you can break the Tabernacle—or be broken.”

Friend clasped May’s hand and joined it with his in Zed’s. A triple pact. A triangle against the circle of the Vortex.

Friend: “An end to Eternity!”

May: “A higher form.”

Zed: “Revenge!”

Exchange of Powers

The three conspirators stood in the center of Friend’s arena, the curtained place leading off into countless passages that looped and struck out into rows of memories.

Statues, paintings, badges, costumes, weapons, jewelry, bric-a-brac—solidified moments from the past. Friend had had a near-insuperable task, but had made inroads into the accumulation of centuries within which he lived. He had made passages through piles of crates. Simply moving them into related groups had taken many years. Then the opening of the crates, the cataloging of the contents and the correlation, all this long before he could draw conclusions from this collection of monuments to man’s diversity. These conclusions from the past, gleaned from the evidence of long ago, what of them? Perhaps that was why he had become so cynical, so despairing.

However, here would be a good place to teach Zed, and Friend would make a good teacher and a better guide through the sum total of the past. They were underground, behind stout doors, well-protected at the center of a maze.

May and her women were the objective teachers. Each one was a messenger and communicant with a special branch of knowledge. Individually they would give Zed weapons of knowledge with which to fight the dragon. Physics, chemistry, mathematics, linguistics, philosophy…each woman, in turn, had insights that branched out in other realms, with which to arm him for the battle, to help him hunt the Tabernacle down.

Like Zed in the Vortex—a needle in a haystack—so, too, the Tabernacle was hidden in the finite volume of the community.

A half-sphere extending from the highest point of the force field—circular like the peripheral edge of the land and Vortex—was Zed’s and his quarry’s ground. The Eternals hunted him—he hunted the Tabernacle.