The Gods Look Down Page 10

  Then he saw the children.

  They slowly approached the machine and gazed at it in silent wonder. The light made pale ovals of their faces and their eyes were large and glistening dark; he saw their toes curled tensely in the sand. The boy murmured something and the girl sought his hand and held it tightly. There was nothing in them that suggested fear, only a deep and breathless curiosity holding them transfixed, their minds open and receptive like the beaks of young birds.

  The girl pointed at him and he felt the vision shimmer and slide away: her small oval face became a shadow which moved distantly in his consciousness, a diffuse patch of darkness floating about like the after-image of a bright light on the retina of the eye. The machine will not harm them, he thought, its power is beneficent and life-creating. It will protect them against the force of evil …

  He was standing on a cloud. Far below the desert resembled a dried-up river-bed streaked with many colours following the direction of the prevailing wind. His eye focused on an encampment and like the lens of a camera zoomed in and picked out details of habitation: the encircling huddle of black tents flapping stiffly, the camels grazing on the resilient thorn bushes, a scrawny rib-thin dog sniffing and cocking its leg, a group of children playing a game with stones, the smoke of cooking fires fanning this way and that with the wind and swirling over the camp until evaporating like mist in the wide open spaces beyond.

  The people were suddenly caught up in a panic. He couldn’t understand why – until he saw the sphere of light approaching. It came and hovered over the camp, perfectly round and motionless, an orb of intense brightness; and the people fled out of the tents and ran haphazardly in every direction, some of them carrying children, others fighting to get free from the struggling mass, feeling themselves to be in a nightmare where constricting forces bind physical action and make progress impossible despite the most strenuous effort.

  The orb of light was malevolent in its stillness and inscrutability: a great glowing eye watching them, biding its time, waiting for – a signal? – a command? It hung suspended above the encampment, casting no shadow, and from it came a single narrow beam of pure light which swept in an arc across the desert, scorching a path through the people as they ran so that they were held in mid-stride, poised, static, and fell slowly like grey effigies into the sand. Again the beam came round, and yet again, carrying out its methodical task, sweeping in circles until nothing human remained: only calcified shapes wrapped in brittle robes crumbling away into the desert to be sculpted by the wind into shapes and contours and ripples of dust.

  He had watched all this from above, missing nothing, seeing every detail; yet it didn’t involve him and he knew very well that he was powerless to intervene. He was a spirit without form or substance, an abstract consciousness looking on dispassionately. He was a phantom in the air.

  The narrow beam of light began to search for something else.

  It scanned the desert and then swung upwards into the sky like a probing rod of white heat, sweeping rapidly in an ascending spiral, and he began to be afraid. Sooner or later it would intersect with his world-point and he would be caught in its merciless blinding glare and turned to stone. He didn’t believe this to be possible and at the same time he was in deathly fear of his life. The intelligence guiding the beam knew he was there somewhere and knew also (as he did) that there was no escape.

  The beam can’t harm me, he tried to comfort himself, and knew in the same instant that it could. If it found him, which was inevitable, the dreadful power contained in that pure white light would melt his bones and turn his brain to ash. His fingernails and toenails would fall away like flakes of snow. His eyes would explode in his skull and he would cease to be.

  The beam of light found him.

  It filled his eyes and penetrated the empty sockets into his head, eating up the soft grey interior. He began to think – he attempted to think – but there was nothing left to think with. Curiously enough the operation was painless. He supposed this was because there was no brain available to receive the impulses from the burnt-out fragment that had been his body. Instead there was a soft persistent voice calling his name and he came to in the room on the second floor of the PSYCON residential annexe on Earth IVn.

  Everything was suffused with a greenish light, even the woman who stood in the middle of the room, softly calling his name. His first thought was to look for the chart on the desk, afraid that the wind might have snatched it away, but contrary to what he remembered the full-length sliding window was shut and bolted. And stranger still the desk was clear of papers: somebody had been in the room while he slept and taken them – including the structure analysis chart.

  The woman said, ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘What’s happened to everything? What have you done with my work?’

  The woman came nearer. She was incredibly beautiful; flawless. The green light made her lips look black and her dark hair was gilded with a green halo. When she spoke her voice was very soft, barely a whisper. He strained to hear.

  ‘Did the dream frighten you?’

  ‘Did I call out?’ he said.

  ‘You’re safe now. You were taking part in someone else’s dream. It wasn’t meant for you.’

  He tried to sit up. It seemed as if the room was under water and the pervading greenness pressed down on him like liquid, suffocating his movements. He said:

  ‘Whose dream?’

  ‘The patient on the floor below. You must be receptive to other people’s thought waves. He was having a nightmare and you became involved. It wasn’t intended.’

  ‘Intended by whom?’

  ‘My father.’ She stood at the bedside and smiled with her black lips, keeping her mouth closed. ‘Dagon,’ she said quietly in response to his look.

  ‘I didn’t know he had a daughter.’

  ‘He has many daughters.’

  He struggled to understand. The green light pressed down on his eylids. He’d picked up the patient’s brainwaves from the floor below? ‘He was having a nightmare and I became part of it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What made him dream of those things?’

  ‘They filled his head with the texts and now he lives permanently in that world. He sees and experiences in his mind all the things contained in the ancient scriptures. He no longer inhabits the real world.’

  She gazed down at him, her face without expression, and he was vaguely surprised to see that there wasn’t a line or a wrinkle on it. He imagined that her skin would be smooth and hard to the touch, warmed just sufficiently to room temperature. Her beauty was functional, the features set in perfect symmetry, her figure proportioned to classical measurements and standards. There was nothing wrong or missing or out of place and yet she exuded no human warmth or vibrancy of spirit.

  He asked her, ‘Why has your father sent you here? Is it because of the dream?’

  ‘He didn’t send me.’

  ‘Then why have you come?’

  ‘You are the only one.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Who can destroy him.’

  Again he tried to sit up. ‘Why should he be destroyed?’ It was an effort to form the words.

  ‘For what he has done,’ she answered.

  He said, ‘You’re his daughter and you want him killed?’

  ‘The line of Dagon has been cursed throughout all the ages,’ she said in the same soft whisper. ‘My father tried to create a new species from the remnants of the past. Once he was a great and powerful ruler and his line would have prospered but he sought to create in his own likeness the perfect human being: the Protoplast. He failed and tried again, failed and tried again, many times, and his children have had to suffer, sons and daughters alike, through all the generations. He will try again and he must be stopped; Dagon’s line must be terminated for the sake of all those in the future yet unborn.’

  ‘And why do you come to me?’ he said.

  ‘There is no one else. The secr
ets of the past are inaccessible to all but a few. You have the power to go back in time and seek out the evil and destroy it.’ She looked at him, her eyes huge and dark, and repeated, ‘There is no one else.’

  His limbs were heavy and the green light seemed to press him down like the pressure of being underwater. His gaze swam randomly about the room as if control of his faculties had been taken over and he was powerless to direct them.

  She said quietly but with great emphasis, ‘He must be destroyed.’

  He said, ‘How do I know you’re his daughter?’

  She smiled without the faintest trace of humour and the black outline of her lips parted and inside the hole that was her mouth he saw a metal grill from which issued the softest whisper, ‘I’m what remains of his daughter.’

  He stared as she reached up and removed the wig of dark hair to reveal a smooth thermoplastic shell which shone with green highlights. She unzipped her dress and let it fall to the floor to show that underneath she was naked: her breasts were two perfect concentric spheres, hard and unflaccid, made in the same mould; her sexual organs were delineated with a craftsman’s precision, each detail exact to the nearest millimetre, according to specification.

  He lay back, unable to move, the green light crushing him down, and she came to pieces before his eyes: an assemblage of parts which had been engineered to fit neatly together and interlock into a walking breathing facsimile of the human form. She was less than the sum of her parts, for when totally separated she lay like a dismembered doll around the room, arms and legs resembling broken limbs from a marble statue, hands discarded like a pair of solid plastic gloves, the torso a grotesque stunted parody of the female figure, lacking all sexuality. Her head rested beside him on the covers, bald as an ostrich egg, the eyes open and looking at him steadily and the black lips gaping so that from the grill came the incessant whisper, ‘He must be destroyed. He must be destroyed. He must be destroyed. He must be destroyed …’

  He struggled to sit up and the head rolled off the bed and on to the floor, breaking into several large pieces, and Queghan woke at the noise. The green light had gone and the bedside lamp lay shattered on the floor. He felt cold night air on his wet face and in the moons’ light he could see that the sliding window was open. The papers on the desk had been scattered by the wind and lay all around the room.

  *

  Queghan spent three days at home with his wife and then returned to his office on Level 17 at MyTT. It was little more than a monk’s cell whose triangular window was on the southern slope of the pyramidal structure with the flattened apex which housed the administration section, laboratories, the Psycho-Med Faculty and, in the labyrinthine basement, Archives. Twelve hundred people worked in the complex, a roughly equal division of labour between those engaged on pure research projects, and the rest – hardliners – whose function was to innovate and develop the hardware necessary for the investigation and exploration of mythic events and experience in all their diverse forms. Much of this was centred on the TFC Lab where manned injection into Temporal Flux Centres had first been planned and successfully carried out.

  Queghan had been the injectee. He was the only man on the nine planetary and five planetoidal states to have survived the experience and returned to tell the tale. The story of that first major triumph – known as Project Tempus – was now regarded as one of the classic papers of Myth Technology.

  For most of the morning Queghan wrote up the notes of his visit to PSYCON. He wanted the Director to have as complete a picture as possible of what had taken place, and the notes together with the tapes and structure analysis chart would, he hoped, provide it. The mytho-logical interpretation of the mythic experience still bothered him: he felt instinctively that he had overlooked a vital step, an apparently insignificant though essential element in the structure. Here he was relying on the Director to conjure up the missing piece, to somehow bring cohesion and sense to it all.

  But what would Karve make of an interpretation whose central element indicated the probability of two Saviours? In broad terms virtually anything was possible when considering the mythical past, but it still had to obey the rules of self-consistent logic; there had to be an inner structure which ‘made sense’. Perhaps he would dismiss the whole thing, regarding it as a mildly interesting though futile exercise and not worth the trouble of further investigation. There was also the dream, and Queghan couldn’t decide how much of it – if any at all – was pertinent to the inquiry. The patient had suffered a series of violent nightmares, it was true (Milton Blake had confirmed this) and Queghan might have paid more attention to the dream if it hadn’t been for the fact that Dr Francis Dagon was childless. He didn’t have a daughter and Blake told him frankly that Dagon was incapable of having children – something to do with a genetic imbalance which would have made any hereditary genes unstable and not suitable for reproduction. The mythographer thought it wise not to complicate matters by mentioning it to Karve, who, as it turned out, was more than a little intrigued by the notes and tapes, and in particular the structure analysis. He spread the chart flat on his desk and scanned it carefully through his polarized bifocals, his wispy grey hair straggling his forehead, and muttered the one word:

  ‘Heteromorphosis.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Karve regarded him absently, sucking at one of his back teeth as though something was lodged there. He said, ‘Theoretically quite feasible.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Queghan said patiently. He waited for the Director to return to the land of the living.

  ‘Don’t you think so?’ Karve inquired.

  ‘I might if I knew what it meant.’

  ‘Dissimilar in form. An organism which changes at different stages in its development. It also has the subsidiary meaning of an abnormal structure or shape, differing from the norm; deformity.’

  ‘How is it relevant in this instance?’ Queghan asked.

  Karve became quite excited and his voice moved up a tone as if preparing to deliver a favourite lecture. ‘Didn’t it occur to you which element carries the central symbolism in the analysis? You’ve hardly mentioned him: Angel. Why do you suppose he was deformed? He embodied within his physical structures the mytho-logical meaning of everything that happened – you’ve overlooked the prime symbol, Chris!’

  ‘I had an idea it might be something like that,’ Queghan said faintly. He was frowning at his own obtuseness.

  Karve went on, ‘The figure of Angel is a cipher which combines the two main elements of mythic experience: Biblical history and the genetic process. His name and the half-formed “wing” on his back are physical manifestations of the symbolic content. I’m surprised you didn’t see it at once.’

  ‘So am I,’ Queghan said with chagrin. He shook his head and pressed the palms of his hands together, supporting his chin.

  Karve was smiling, his eyes alert above the bifocals. ‘There’s a pattern here, Chris. For instance, an organism which adopts a new form at different stages of development might well represent Dagon past and present.’

  ‘You mean reincarnation?’

  ‘Nothing so crude. We’re dealing here with symbolic manifestation, not metapsychical phenomena. It would be wrong to think of Dr Francis Dagon as someone who’s popped up from the 13th century Pre-Colonization like a bit of shopworn magical fakery. Heteromorphosis occurs in all known life forms – think of the stages a foetus goes through during gestation – and it might be that an organism can appear and reappear over a period of several thousand years. People who can recall previous lives, for example, aren’t so much reincarnations of their past selves as present-day manifestations of an ongoing process of evolution: the same mytho-logical meaning in a new form.’

  ‘We’re back to Jungian consciousness.’

  ‘We are indeed,’ the Director agreed happily. He smoothed the chart as one might caress an object of great sentimental value, his eyes glancing over it as if trying to take in everything at once.

 
Queghan said, ‘How do you suppose genetic mutation comes into this?’ It still wasn’t clear to him how the various strands of meaning could be woven together to make up a cohesive mythological structure.

  ‘I’m not sure, there isn’t enough information here to say. It could be …’ Karve inclined his head as if judging the weight of his own words ‘… that the alchemist, Dagon ben Shem Tov, is himself a manifestation of a past existence. Maybe going back over two thousand years to long before the birth of Christ.’

  ‘Yet in one sense that conflicts directly with the evidence. Dagon ben Shem Tov insisted that a Saviour had never appeared on Old Earth. The reference in the tapes is explicit: he’d never heard of Christ.’

  ‘And he was supposedly transcribing the ancient traditions of Judaism,’ Karve mused. ‘Now what would those traditions be concerned with if not the coming of the Saviour? The Jews didn’t believe that Christ was the Son of God, but they can’t have written a history of their people without at least mentioning him.’

  ‘It seems to intrigue you,’ Queghan said.

  ‘It does intrigue me. I think we should follow this through and see if we can’t investigate the mythic experience more fully. It’s a pity that Dr Dagon isn’t more co-operative.’

  ‘Co-operation isn’t his strong point.’

  ‘Do you think he was really sceptical about the evidence in the tapes or was he afraid you were probing too deeply?’

  ‘You mean afraid that I was about to steal all the glory? Perhaps he was jealously guarding his academic reputation.’

  ‘It’s possible. If he can produce a totally original interpretation of The Book of Splendours it would throw new light on the entire Judaeo-Christian tradition, rewriting history almost. All the old superstitions explained, the dogma and ritual made explicit for the first time. If he’s been working on this for years you can understand his reluctance to share it with others.’

  ‘He approached Blake to help him,’ Queghan pointed out.