Zardoz (14 page)

He had to solve the mystery, but sensed there was one piece missing, another gift perhaps.

Consuella quietly walked into his room. She strode up behind him as he sat with his back to her—deep in thought, too lost in the unraveling of his puzzle to listen for a footfall.

She carried a long dagger at her side. His neck came into reach as she continued to close in on him. His head bent forward. She raised her knife hand until the blade flashed above her head. At last he saw her, reflected in the globe, but did not move. The knife hovered above him, whether stopped by her own hand or some other agency he could not tell. He made no move. He would let fate decide. She could not strike.

She spoke at last. “I have ached for this moment.” She tried to prolong her instant of joy, but it somersaulted over into remorse and defeat. He turned to look at her.

She dropped her hand down. The knife fell to the floor. She followed it to his feet.

“The hunt is always better than the kill.” Zed put down the gun which he had held before him.

She looked up at him.

“In hunting you, I have become you and I have destroyed what I set out to defend.”

“‘He who fights too long against dragons, becomes himself a dragon’—Nietzsche.”

“I am not like the others. I would fill you with life and love.”

She took off her communicator ring and put it on the third finger of his left hand, the finger on which all Eternals wore it.

With this gesture, she resigned her position in favor of his, joined him in action, and awarded him equality with her. She recognized his powers. He looked at her, then at the ring and back to her again before he spoke, savoring the gift, the gesture, and all its meanings.

“You have given me what no other gave—love. If I live, we will live together. Go now.”

His mind returned to the tabletop in front of him; the revolver, the gemstone, the crystal ball.

Now a new gift—Consuella’s communicator ring—was set beside them and he was lost in new thoughts. She stood, shut out by him, then turned and was gone. The velvet hangings that made a door and concealed Friend’s living quarters moved slightly as she passed.

Outside there were other voices, bayings and shouts in the darkness. She called to them in the voice of their commander.

“The Brutal is not here. I was mistaken.”

A respite.

Zed picked up the diamond and brought it close to his eye. It was many-faceted, cut by an expert to allow for maximum reflection and refraction. Someone had cut this stone from a dull pebble, to reveal its present shape. He picked up the crystal ball and held it between him and the gem, the globe acting as a magnifying glass.

“Refraction of light… infinite…”

White light could be broken into many other kinds of light, into many colors, some of which man could not see, all of which could bounce inside this most shiny and hard of all objects. The toughest, most everlasting form could only be destroyed by one of its own kind grinding into it. It was the most reflective and refractive of objects on Earth, made from carbon, one of Earth’s most common elements. Carbon crushed with immense pressure miles underground had been formed into this diamond, the key to his search.

He looked into the communicator ring and spoke to it.

“Tabernacle, what are you?”

It lit up, glowing softly, but no pictures came, only the voice.

“Not permitted.”

“Where are you?”

“Not permitted.”

“Do you know me?”

“I have your voiceprint, Zed, and your genetic code, but only fragments of your memory.”

He held up the diamond for the ring to see.

“Tell me about the crystal transmitter.”

“I cannot give information which may threaten my own security.”

Zed looked from the crystal to the ring and spoke in answer to his own question.

“Brain emissions refract low wavelength laser light passing through the crystal in the brain. They are a code sent to you for interpretation and storage. Yes or no?”

The Tabernacle paused before it spoke, an uncharacteristic hesitation, a change in its smooth process.

“Not permitted.”

Zed continued to describe the nature of the Tabernacle, trying to lead it into the open, into a confrontation.

“A receiver must be like a transmitter. I think you are a crystal. In fact, this one. This diamond.”

He held the diamond closer to the ring.

“In here is infinite storage space for refracted light patterns.”

He waited for the reply. It came at last in a form that betrayed humanity and humor.

“You have me in the palm of your hand.”

“But you could be elsewhere?”

The Tabernacle could move across space, projecting its information from one base to another. In this way, if one diamond were attacked and crushed it could fly safely away before the end. There might be thousands of gems within the Vortex. An attacker could never destroy them all, even if he could find them, for many would be buried. Yet the entire Tabernacle had flown into the diamond which he held in his hand. He had drawn it from its lair. Many refuges were all around for the light that knew everything. The battle-proper would now begin. It could destroy him, and there was no guarantee that even if he died the light that was the Tabernacle would be obscured, dimmed, or extinguished.

The space within the diamond was crowded with millions of wavelengths, from all the spectrum and beyond; waves of energy—from dark radio light up to the blinding white light of the sun—shimmered and were buffeted inside the tiny glacial container. At last he could see inside it as Avalow had predicted. He was here, pitted against the entire wisdom of the Vortex. It had chosen to be with him. It could have lain far away, safe and sound.

“Yet I choose to be here.”

“Why?”

“To confront you. Already you have learned to see my light wavelengths in the diamond. Now you will try to erase the reflections and destroy me. Your aim is to destroy me, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Would you kill God?”

“Such vanity.”

“I am the sum of all these people and all their knowledge…”

The battle was beginning. Zed could feel the seductive pull of the creature as it tried to lure him on.

Its voice broke into two, then three, and then a dozen, then a hundred. The Tabernacle began to plead for the Immortality of all the people that were and ever had been. Their voices lifted in a begging chorus, pleading, entreating him.

The diamond glowed with revolving colored lights that danced hypnotically before Zed’s wide staring eyes.

“I am all-seeing. I am everywhere and nowhere. That had often served as a definition of God.”

The symphony of voices multiplied into countless choirs playing to Zed alone in some weird cloud-swept hall. The colors in the diamond reached out and enveloped him in skeins of light that swirled about him, binding him in color.

“Would you destroy us and all that we are?”

Zed’s own voice startled him. It sounded like a man from another time, but it pulled him from his dream and into danger.

“I must.”

The visions hesitated but continued in their rising cadences.

“Would you not be part of us, joined to us, a light shining to the future? Love us, cherish the truth…”

All so seductive, Zed’s resolve was weakening; he was slipping, dissolving into the stone. Then he shouted, “No!” and all the beautiful illusions vanished sharply.

The Tabernacle had tried tenderness. Zed had not expected that kind of attack, but had survived it welL What would it try now, how would it next venture out of the stone to fight him?

That was his mistake. The diamond did not venture out to him. It plucked him down into itself. Like a pike reaching up from the bottom of a river to take a moorhen chick that looks up to the sky for its attackers, it came from the least expected direction, swiftly and surely, its jaws snapping shut around its prey.

The diamond had vanished from his hand. Zed looked up to the enclosure in which he sat. Everything felt different. He ran across and touched the walls. They were changing. They were hard and glassy. The illusion of the room dissolved as he beat on the shiny panels that once had been exits into Friend’s underground province.

There was just a hard shiny interior all around him. Either the Tabernacle had grown around him, or it had shrunk him down to a microscopic size and swallowed htm whole. It did not matter which, for both were equal in their finality. He was still whole and functioning, but so was the Tabernacle. The possibilities could drive him mad before the battle started. He closed his fears shut, checked his gun. That was solid enough. If they battled in a dream or in reality, there would be only one being at the end of it.

The Tabernacle spoke again.

“You have penetrated me.”

Zed waited for the walls to move in on him, for ghosts to leap out of thin air. He did not think to look down.

The End of A Beginning

The whole room was in black glass, the floor slowly opened and he fell deeper into the center of the diamond. He had just been in one tiny facet of the surface. He was sliding through all the many other facets to the middle of the stone. He would be surrounded by an infinity of reflected light, trapped forever in a three-dimensional maze of ice and fire.

There was no fingerhold, he clawed at space and sometimes jarred off buttresses that loomed from the inky blackness and then vanished once again.

He tumbled over and over in black space, lost and doomed.

He tried to think himself upright and stable, and in doing so, found that he was on his feet.

Beneath his feet the blackness became a flat glass floor, substantial and supportive. So—the Tabernacle was reading his ideas, trying to destroy him with illusions, but falling back, giving in, giving ground. If he could disbelieve what he saw, he would survive, but he must erase the reflections and destroy; mere survival was not enough. He must still get to the real center of the storehouse.

He pushed on, solidly believing in his quest for the true and living center of the stone. Most of all he revived the passion in his mission. Light grew around him and he found himself in a new pattern of spaces, each one bounded by mirrors that flickered with light.

The floor stretched flat and on forever. The ceiling, likewise, and the walls had the same quality of glassy stillness that buzzed with low light pulses.

He groped among the unbalancing screens, for each one looked as though it were a corridor, and each corridor looked like a screen. He crashed into them and stumbled from wall to wall, but on and in. He felt it was only quite a small volume, cunningly engineered to seem vast. His calm center was stable. His central mind was still.

Whether fantasy or reality, this room would be the last battleground.

Figures appeared in the distance, then all around him: May, Consuella, Friend, Avalow, somehow apart from him, unreal but by his side. He touched one as it ran behind the surface of a screen. It was an insubstantial image, and as he touched it, it slowly wiped away. There were more. Consuella and May came close. He made himself erase their beauty, though it hurt him more than he could stand. He heard their agonizing cries as they were rubbed out. Now if Consuella died, dead she would remain, May too. He clenched his teeth and carried on, regardless of the cries for help. Friend fell, then the Renegades and Apathetics, one by one. All fell away into the final darkness. Their loves and hates, their precious minds, the storehouse of the best brains of the centuries, all consigned, like him, back to the real-time from which they came. The voices and sounds jumbled and rose into an uproar like a whirlwind battering on his ears. They could not fight him back. His heart was cold, his mission near its end. At last they were still.

The Tabernacle spoke. “We are gone. You are alone.”

Then he saw his final opponent, one to match him well and equally.

It was himself. His own memories and times spent here were now coming back to him. His chance for immortality and harmony within the Vortex was rerunning. The reflection advanced up to him, gun in hand. Zed ran, backing away from the final confrontation, colliding with mirrors and walls. He was routed by his own person, his returning past.

His calm middle mind came into his consciousness, soothing his desperation. Why was this the final phase? The Tabernacle would save its best chance till last. If he could win here, all would be over.

Zed was real, the other Zed he saw was a flat image, brilliant in its construction but false, only a colored copy in light.

Zed must face himself. If he could face the truths about himself, he would be free. His past deeds, his true person—if he could stand and take them, it would be finished and he could go forward. Not as he had been, but as he now was.

Why hadn’t the Tabernacle killed him with a bout of energy? The answer was clear. It could not take life, but it could dissolve his wits until he destroyed himself. Suicide was the Tabernacle’s only weapon. It could drive him mad and lead him to self-destruction, but it could not pull the trigger.

Was Zed about to kill himself if he shot at his own reflection? Could the Tabernacle have convinced him that
he
was just a mirror image? If he pulled the trigger, would he stop the bullet and be killed?

If he shot the gun at his reflection, could it be that the bullet would cut into his own self?

The Tabernacle could not kill. It must have been a prime directive at the inception of the Vortex, that was sure. Now—what process was the Tabernacle using to drive him to self-destruction?

It must be a perversion of a method it had once used for good. It must be one based on a meditation method, evolved to assist the Eternals to see themselves as they really were.

This was true.

Around him more and more memories from his past came up to haunt him.

Once again he rode and killed. He fought with Consuella and May in the place of weaving. The Renegades dashed at him. The Apathetics drew his life from him. All rushed him at once on the multiple mirrors that enclosed him.