Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (27 page)

 
          
Stone
steps run up the western face of the pyramid. There are handrails on both
sides, and the wind is light. But there are one hell of a lot of steps! By the
time we’ve hauled ourselves up, unmasked, to the stone crow’s nest, my thighs
are aching. Rene is puffing audibly. We recover to vertigo, and a fabulous
view.

 
          
Darshanor
points westward. “Behold, the Eye.”

 
          
A
chasm bites down through several thousand metres of the mountain chain, a
valley in the sky, and through that chasm looms a mottled orange glow—the limb
of the gas giant brooding hugely, as if it has fallen upon the world.

 
          
“Mask
yourselves, Starborn.”

 
          
We
do as he bids.

 
          
The
solid world dissolves. The whole glory of the gas giant shines through it, band
upon roiling, storm-torn band. I’m falling into that great bloodshot eye! The
rail! The rail’s still clutched tightly in my hand.

 
          
The
wellspring regards its moon child across four hundred thousand kilometres of
space.

 
          
Energies
reach out to embrace its moon. Its gravitational field? Its magnetosphere? Or
something else?

 
          
“It’s
alive! That goddam gas globe is alive! ” swears Ritchie. “The . . . Eye ... is
alive,” he calls out to Darshanor.

 
          
“No.
We tap the powers of this membrane zone, but the life is here. Continue
watching. We’re all in resonance now. Your perception will be modified.”

 
          
I sense other energies within—beyond—the gas
globe, energies that emanate through it from elsewhere, outside reality. They
are the energy fields of High Space. They are powers and operators,
hypernumbers that exist like angels or Principles. Imaginary qualities which
must exist, or the world could not exist. Yet they can't ever be found and
counted in the world themselves.

           
And
l see a million fingers, too, reaching into Menka-Getka, saturating the world
as the angelic—the imaginary—precipitates into existence as actual tendrils
that take root within our flesh: subtle filaments that are all one substance in
Askatharli space.

           
“It is beyond life, Starborn. There
is the realm of the Shaping. But it intrudes into the cosmos at this point, at
the wellspring, and becomes one with us. The will is always ours, Starborn. Or
yours. Or that of any other race that links to it.”

 
          
I
hear . . . whispers in my mind, like interference on a radio set. I’m
drawn—surely we all are—with an erotic yearning. Yes, I sense the yearning of
the others: a lustful itch towards transcendence—which requires us to fuse
with one another: the knower with the known.

 
          
The
giant lambent world aches on my eyes. But it isn’t exactly the physical gas
giant that I’m seeing, I slowly realize. It is the ideal gas giant, something
in High Space that is also located at this point in the physical universe, some
huge body whose sense organs we have become—something which tunes us through
the golden hairs!

 
          
No,
we simply tune into it—and through it, into Askatharli!

 
          
It
aches. I pull off my mask of vision. There are the mountains again, and that
deep cleft, and the orange gas-arc.

 
          
Tomorrow
we must ride to the Hole in the Hills—which isn’t that mountain cleft we can
see from here, but something else. Even that cleft is high up steep cliffs,
unscaleable. Into Menka we must ride, and over the Sands of Memory to meet our
deaths and overcome them. Must. Must.

 
          
We
climb slowly down the hundreds of steps. Going down is a harder business than
climbing up them.

 
          
Back
on
terra firma,
we shake our legs
out. “Phew!” pants Peter. He grins and clasps my hand—not to hold himself up.
No, in triumph. Soon, soon, our apotheosis.

 
          
We’re
hardly half-way across the open space between the base of the pyramid and the
smaller ziggurat, when a fierce scream tears the sky apart.

 
          
Two
cone-shaped craft are racing down the sky towards us, trailing thunder. They’re
burning bright!

 
          
“Ablative
shields,” cries Ritchie. “Re-entry hoods!”

 
          
The
two craft are breaking up in flight. Behind the glowing shells egg-pods tumble
out—dozens of bomb-shapes tossed down at Darshanor, and us!

 
          
“Down!
Get down! ”

 
          
Abruptly,
gossamer parachutes wrench free and the pods fall more slowly, but still very
fast. They’re not bombs. They’re . . .

 
          
A
Getkan shouts at us, “The Group-ones!”

 
          
Those white-hot shields
don’t even hit
the ground. Something snatches them in mid-air. Something squeezes them, like
a fist closing. They’re imploded—erased from the sky.

 
          
Some
way off, a couple of masked Getkans swing their mirror-shields to bear upon the
falling pods.

 
          
“They
did that! ” exclaims Ritchie, as we hug the dirt. Other heroes are racing from
the ziggurats.

 
          
A
melee of energies electrifies the air. Demon shapes spring into being in
mid-air, erupting against one pod then another, tearing them apart, gobbling
the pieces. Chimaera creatures, spinning berserkers!

 
          
Samti-menVao
is running, now, from the pyramid towards us. Other heroes converge, to protect
us.

 
          
One
pod, then a second, hits the ground. Immediately they split open, each
disgorging an insectoid from out of a mass of whitish jelly. “Deceleration
gel,” breathes Ritchie.

 
          
The
creatures orient themselves at once. In bounding leaps they reach the two
closest Getkans and tear them apart with their serrated fore-arms, only to be
destroyed themselves a moment later by dream-demons coalescing around them, as
terrifying as the insectoids themselves. By now another dozen pods are down,
split open, warriors disgorged.

 
          
If
only we were closer to the ziggurat! We daren’t move. The battle is happening
everywhere, at random. No! From each new nearby pod the insectoids are heading
for us
, tangling with any Getkans and
dream-demons in their way. It’s just that most pods have fallen too far off and
their occupants are wreaking random diversionary mayhem, as if they only count
their fighting lives in seconds!

 
          
Crump
. A pod hits the ground thirty
metres from us, rocking and tossing us. Gel spews out of it—bearing with it the
beast it cushioned. This one has two legs twisted out of shape. Still, it rears
and casts about in a moment and heads for us. Is that really myself screaming,
or somebody else? I’m scrabbling away, stumble-running. I grab Peter’s hand,
hauling him with me. The others are scramble-scattering too, while Samti howls,
“No! All stay together!” With that beast at our throats in a moment? It’s the
battle for
Pilgrim
all over again,
only this time the awful sight of it isn’t hidden. An unmasked Getkan crashes
into us, bringing us down together in a tangle. That wasn’t any accident! He
trips and arm-locks us. We’re wrestling, trying to fight free. “Stay! Stay! ”
he shrieks—in pain? Have we broken something?

 
          
The
monster that was heading for us is already scattered piecemeal. A harpy-like
green thing with huge claws and a broken wing is stamping on the gobbets,
cawing in triumph. It fades and vanishes, dissolving back into the imagination.

 
          
All
the pods have fallen. Presumably. Many, out of sight. A number of Getkans lie
dead. In a wide perimeter around us lie remains of Group-ones, some still
thrashing their stings. Demonic ghosts are still phasing in and out of
existence, mostly out.

 
          
Suddenly
they’re all gone. There are only the broken-open pods exuding gel, and tom
insectoids, and a few dead native bodies. The whole mad skirmish must have been
over in two minutes, or three. And we live. All six of us. We live.

 
          
The
Getkan who pulled us down has broken three of his long thin fingers. He moans,
and hunches over them.

 
          
Shaking,
we rise. We regroup—shocked, euphoric, then ashamed. But what else could we
have done?

 
          
The
Getkan with the broken fingers staggers erect and walks off slowly towards one
of the ziggurats, ignoring us.

 
          
“They
almost reached you,” says Samti, bringing two fingers together, then snipping
them like scissors. “Your revenge will be sweet for all of us, when you become
heroes yourselves and reach out through your prisoner friends to call
dream-demons there. We’re so happy we have saved you. Those who died have
merely gone into Askatharli, to live again.”

 
          
“Mightn’t
the Group-ones try again?” pants Ritchie.

 
          
“Out
on the Sands of Memory? Oh no. Besides, they’ve lost many of their zombie
units. They’ll need to breed more of them as replacements. They knew you were
here, Starborn. Thus the channel does exist—back to them! ”

 
          
“They’ve
shot their bolt.” Ritchie grins. “Yeah, we owe you. We’ll repay.”

 
          
Already
the mess of crashed pods, parachute gossamer, gel and insectoid corpses is
beginning to be cleared up, and the Getkan dead borne off for shaving and
disposal.

 
          
“A
bolt has been shot,” nods Wu. “But does it lock them out, or lock us in?”

 
          
“How
can you say that? When they’ve laid down their lives for us! ”

 
          
“Ah,
lives which they cannot lose, Amy.”

 
          
“I
hope we can end ours as bravely! ”

 
          
The Hole in
the Hills is a dead
straight tunnel many kilometres long, carved out long ago. It is tall; it is
broad; it slopes gently ever uphill. A massive ancient engineering feat! (More
accurately it is a modern engineering feat—however, the ‘modern’ is in the past
now and the ancient has returned . . .) The trimmed rock glows with a
phosphorescence that is perhaps natural, perhaps artificial, affording a soft
blue submarine light. Half a kilometre into the tunnel, we pass a rhaniq-cart
returning from Menka with a hero riding the beast. The cart holds barrels of
glittering sand ... We wave; we pass.

 
          
“Suppose
it is a storage system?” muses Rene. “Untold trillions of silicon chips
scattered about all over Menka, able to be imprinted . . . with
thought.
Bathed in the light reflected
from the Eye of Menka . . . light vibrating in one direction only . . .” He
falters. “I can’t put my finger on it. It’s as if something keeps on sliding my
finger away.”

 
          
There’s
a subtle current in this tunnel. A pressure differential between one side of
the mountains and the other? Or is it something inside us, this pressure? So
that the unthinkable is indeed unthought... Whatever is Rene saying?

 
          
“If
askas—souls—are all only sub-programmes—believing in their own sovereign
existence, and yet able to be assembled into some overprogramme which they
can’t recognize . . . And if this overprogramme gains energy and an enhanced
existence, the more subprogrammes that enter into it. . .” He yawns.

 
          
I’m
sleepy too. It’s so calm here. The march of the rhaniq is a soothing massage .
. . Monotonous, the tunnel, really. Dreamy, the blue light.

 
          
Dreamy.

 
          
A
bull session is going on in the mess room. Captain K and Heinz and Zoe and I
are listening to Salman hold forth.

           
“But don’t you see, there’s a higher
spatial level—of creative thought, of pure potential. This is High Space,
hyperspace. We’re taking a short cut through it right now: a sort of magic
carpet ride. The angels that came to Earth are from this higher level— from
what we call the ‘Presence of the Masterhood’,
hadrat al-rububiyya.
This might be a bit difficult to explain to
the Joint Space Authority, no?” Salman grins, winningly. “It isn’t accessible
to the objective tools of the lower world, the world of sensory experience
which we call
mushahada”

 
          
“But
a machine does exist,” objects Heinz. “Surely the High Space drive is a genuine
machine?”

 
          
“It
isn’t one that we could ever have made. It’s been . . . inserted into our
reality. It’s like a tool formed by an angel out of its own substance. But we
mustn’t think of an angel as a ‘person’, just because we rationalize angels
that way. It’s a portion of the essence of the higher level.”

 
          
“A
good job Madame Wu isn’t listening in!” I chuckle.

 
          
“Ja,
it’s an anomaly,” agrees Heinz. “A kind of perpetual miracle, held in being by
a powerful force—which uses us to maintain the solidity of the engine. We’re a
channel, a transducer for higher forces. But what’s the gradient between a
momentary apparition and one that remains in existence for a very long time? We
don’t have the physics to discuss this.”

 
          
“We
have ourselves,” insists Salman. “We have subjective tools.”

 
          
Captain
K smiles, no doubt visualizing a paranormal technology emerging from this
expedition. “Maybe it is as the poet said of Russia? ‘You can’t understand
Russia with your mind; you can only believe it!’” (
Grigory
, / know
you! I have
been
you!)

 
          
“We
must derive field equations,” nods Heinz, “for the ‘as if structure—a tensor
analysis of how your ‘angelic’, archetypal level is translated into the
actuality of events, from the coordinates of one system to the other. But it
has to be done outside ordinary waking reality.”

 
          
Ordinary
waking reality.

 
          
Suddenly
I realize. Where and why and how.

 
          
“Listen
to me, all of you! This has already all happened! It’s happening again, outside
time—in dream space for me, in memory space for you. Heinz, Grigory, Salman:
you’re all imprisoned in memory space together. You aren’t
en route
to God’s World at all. You’re
already there! You’re in space in the God’s World solar system. You’re
prisoners of some giant alien insect things with a collective mind—and they’re
probing your minds and memories! I’m down on God’s World, but I’m in touch with
you too—because we’re all fundamentally
one
:
one
in the ultimate Imagining! My
God, those insects have just tried to kill us all to stop us getting where
we’re going. You’re in terrible danger now.”

 
          
“This
is madness,” frowns Heinz. “First we attack ourselves, thanks to friend
Jacobik—”

 
          
“Don’t
evoke him! He might come.” If he isn’t already lurking close. . .

 
          
“Wait,”
Captain K says calmly. “Be calm. Concentrate. Do you remember Samarkand,
Salman?
We met there.
This is all
true. You spoke about veils. There’s a veil over our eyes!”

 
          
Salman
holds himself rigid. “Yes ... I do! I remember it! Grigory, we’re already using
these subjective tools. We
are
them.
Our memories have become a language. Veils? Grigory—the Veil Being! Satan!” I
think that’s what he says. Something of the sort.

 
          
Heinz
drags at his beard. “Is this true? Maybe we can’t communicate directly with
these aliens, because of concept differences. So they have to use
us
as the means of communication.”

 
          
“Communicate?”
I cry. “They’re the
enemy.
‘There’s a
War in Heaven,’ don’t you remember? ‘Come to God’s World, come to success.’
You’re in their hands—or their claws. They’ve just tried to kill us. I’m
free—riding through God’s World. So is Zoe. But Zoe here is only a reflection.
A persona, a construct of your memories. See, she’s silent. Frozen. She can’t
enter this dialogue. She has no place in it.”

 
          
Zoe
laughs out loud. “Like hell, Amy! Oh, like hell. I’m here too, just as you are.
We’re somewhere in that long hole through the hills, on rhaniq-back, right? And
we’re inside the Group- ones’ experiment, right on the inside. Can we wake
these people, Amy? Can we help them take over the real
Pilgrim
? Or is it too soon? We have to wait, don’t we, till we can
call on the powers the Getkans used yesterday?” She glares round the room. “If
only you could all open your eyes! ”

           
Captain K clears his throat. “You
came here by abnormal means, Dove. A power. What is it?”

 
          
“Oh,
that
.” Zoe and I exchange glances—for
in this dream and memory space no golden integument covers us. Zoe is black
again, and I’m plain cream. She grins broadly. They know nothing about the
symbiont.

 
          
“It’s
like hair, like golden threads. It grows out of our skin, all over us ...” I
tell them about the golden down and the shared dreams, about the wellspring of
Creation, and the miracle of God’s World. I tell them about Darshanor, and the
Sands of Memory that we’ll soon tread, and of our dyad-deaths which will
transform us.

 
          
Salman
looks scared. “ ‘If the seal is taken away from the treasure chests of this
lower world, nothing of what God kept in them will remain—everything will be
transported into the other world.’ Grigory, the
Harxine
—”

 
          
“Other
worlds are joining the network, Salman dear. The Getkans know very well how to
keep the foundations of the world intact.”

 
          
“Look.”
Heinz points at the autochef. The screen has lit up.

 
          
‘Greetings, humans. We are the Harxine
Paracomputers. You are in group memory space, with mind-visitors. They are
under censorship-control of the Veil Being, but they cannot strike at us ; yet.
Soon they will be able to, and you must sadly be terminated at that moment,
unless they can break through the veil of their own volition. Our Group-ones
are now programmed for this termination. We shall deeply regret this. We only
hold back, rashly, now out of respect for your lives/

           
Captain K swings round. “Dove?
Denby?”

 
          
Zoe
looks shocked, confused. But I know. It all floods in. It all comes together,
appallingly. And it can all be taken apart again, and the pieces hidden away—at
the insidious will of the entity that broods over God’s World and the other
worlds it has enmeshed! Captain K and Heinz and all others will be snuffed out
because of what we’re going to do. And Earth will be sucked into the
hyperspatial embrace of this rogue angel . . .

           
“Iblis,” whispers Salman. “Who
undoes Creation. We must die, Amy, we must die. The Harxine are more important
than our few lives.”

 
          
Zoe
has to have all this explained to her ...

 
          
“Dying
is the key, isn’t it? You said we must die, Salman. But dying is just what
we six
can’t do! Death is denied—so the
knowledge of living beings, the souls of living beings aren’t reprocessed back
into the final ground of Being. They’re caught up in this standing wave,
instead. The Veil Being.”

 
          
“It
may still be an evolutionary development,” injects Zoe sourly.

 
          
“No!”
cries Salman. “Never. Your Getkans are just . . .
units
in this metabeing—used by it! Against the world, against
reality.”

 
          
Where
is our expert on death, now? Jacobik’s
tulku.
I need you
.

 
          
“The
point is,” says Heinz, “do we face a material system or a wholly immaterial
one? One which we can only fight in our .. . imagination? It seems to be both.
It precipitates into the world— into your bodies. It affects the crystal
structure of those sands. And its point of origin is somehow associated with
the gas giant. I wonder what the Harxine theorize about this?”

 
          
He
approaches the alphabetic keyboard of the autochef— which Jacobik once misused.
(Or has he done so yet, at this memory point, now twisted off the memory track
entirely into a new mental space where we can meet and plan?)

 
          
Captain
K stays his hand. “No, first we must make sure that Dove and Denby—or one of
them at least—
remembers.
They must
see through this damn veil, back down there. If it’ll allow them to. Perhaps .
. . They’re already in a very strange altered state of consciousness, but
possibly I can hypnotize them. I am a good mesmerist. Maybe I can imprint a
hypnotic command to recall this information. It isn’t erased in the ordinary
sense, if we’re to believe Dove. It’s still available, to the general
imagination—where the main, immaterial part of the Veil Being exists as
part of everyone
it has processed. It’s
just locked away. We must try to find a key that will unlock it. A trigger. It
must be something . . . shocking. Alerting. Something that operates too
vividly and basically for it not to allow them to seize this knowledge and make
it utterly a part of them.”

           
“Death comes as a shock to most
people,” remarks Salman. “Death! Yes. The moment of death, the moment of
transfiguration. Hang the key there.”

           
“
Tod
und VerklarungV
’ exclaims Heinz. “Death and transfiguration into this new
state—which is when they’ll try to attack the Harxine through us! We can
bargain with the Harxine now. They’ll have to let us live till Amy or Zoe is
transfigured— because that’s when the key will turn.
Your
key, Captain.” “Bargain away,” says Captain K. “Do it.
Otherwise, no hypnosis.” Actually, he’s lying. I can see that—read it in his
face, but neither the Harxine nor the Group-ones would be able to read it. He
wouldn’t sign away the Earth—which we’ll yield up to the Veil Being, unless we
realize. Not just for the sake of a few more hours of life. It’s to make
utterly sure that this plan goes through, and that the Harxine don’t destroy
him, and it, prematurely.