The Gods Look Down Read online

  ‘So we must ask ourselves what actually did take place? Are the events frozen in time, waiting to be discovered – or are they in a plasmic state, shifting, nebulous, unsettled?’ Dagon ben Shem Tov smiled at his own inner vision. ‘We can, if we wish, alter those events and guide them in new directions … and do you know how this can be achieved? Can you guess?’

  ‘The Aleph?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Dagon ben Shem Tov. ‘The Aleph exists outside of time. It is not bound by the forces which sway ordinary mortals and their petty lives. The history of that era is yet to be written – do you understand? – it is yet to be decided. I have the power, Daneri, to influence those events, to decide what shall be and not be. But you must believe, you must have absolute faith in the power of the Aleph to change the past. It can be done, it is possible, but you must believe.’

  ‘I – I want to believe,’ Daneri said. He was in anguish. ‘But I lack understanding. I cannot see how these things are possible. The past is fixed – how can we alter something which is dead and gone, no longer existing?’ He was looking at the Master Adept with a mixture of uncertainty and trepidation.

  ‘Is it proof that you require?’ said the other softly. He lightly touched the heavy ring which adorned the index finger of his right hand. ‘Do you need to witness a demonstration?’

  ‘I’ve seen the gold,’ the young man said hastily, not wishing to offend. ‘Meria told me that the Aleph had the power of transmutation and I’ve seen the result for myself.’

  Dagon ben Shem Tov fluttered his pale hands. ‘What is gold? I take a lump of lead, alter its inner structure and I have a bar of gold. All things have the self-same constituent parts; tampering with the structure of matter is child’s play, a jester’s trick. But tampering with the past, with the structure of time – that is a trick worthy of the gods!’

  Daneri leaned across the table which was littered with manuscripts. He said in a breath, ‘You have succeeded in this?’

  ‘I have made progress but there have been some unfortunate setbacks …’ His dark eyes became hard and unyielding. ‘Did Meria also tell you about Angel?’

  ‘She said that the Aleph was the cause of his deformity.’

  ‘It was the cause of him. Angel is the result of an experiment which didn’t succeed. He was to have been the archetype of a new species.’

  ‘You created him?’

  ‘The Aleph created him. As I have said, all things are made up of the same constituent parts, and just as I can produce gold from base metal so it is possible to alter the structure of living tissue. The problem is not how to do it but how to succeed in creating the perfect specimen. Angel was the first abortive attempt; he is the result of an error of metabolism which can be corrected.’

  ‘What is the purpose of this new species – the archetype you speak of?’

  ‘To propagate the earth,’ Dagon ben Shem Tov said with a gentle smile. ‘What else?’ He seemed quietly amused at the naivety of the young initiate. ‘Have I not said that the history of ancient times is yet to be written? Do you still not understand? The first book of the Qabalah is complete, the second will be finished soon, in four or five years, and it’s in the third book that the Saviour will emerge to lead his people. Isn’t all this clear to you?’

  ‘But a moment ago you said that we don’t know for sure whether a Saviour appeared on earth as foretold by the prophets.’

  ‘Therefore,’ said Dagon ben Shem Tov with a wave of his hand, ‘I shall create one. I will create him in my own likeness and he will rise up and claim the Ark of God for himself and his followers. Do you doubt any of this?’

  ‘I doubt nothing that you say,’ Daneri replied with total conviction. ‘If you said you could walk on water I would believe it.’

  ‘Such cheap theatricals are for religious fanatics suffering from delusions of grandeur,’ Dagon ben Shem Tov said dismissively. ‘However, you would not be human if you didn’t require proof of some kind, a demonstration of the art of metaphysics.’ He raised his right hand and doubled it into a fist so that the heavy bronze ring, representing the sign of the Qabalah, was pointing upwards: the dull rich gleam of the metal formed a cluster of reflections on the moulded plaster ceiling. The young man was transfixed.

  The Master Adept stared at the ring and with each passing moment his eyes were becoming heavier and heavier until they were almost closed. He was entering into a state of self-induced trance, not unlike the calm which precedes the onset of an epileptic fit. His lips moved soundlessly and then he mumbled something which Daneri strained to catch. His face was very pale, like a death-mask, and again his lips moved and this time Daneri heard him say quietly yet distinctly, ‘The seventh shelf. It appears on the seventh shelf …’

  The young man saw it at once: on the seventh shelf of the cedarwood book-case behind Dagon ben Shem Tov’s chair: a small glowing sphere, the radiance coming from within, floating clear of the shelf as though held suspended by some mysterious force. It was of no earthly colour – none that Daneri could put a name to – and yet shone with an intense luminescence that seemed to draw the eye inwards, ever deeper into the depths as if pulled irresistibly towards the true and perfect centre of all things.

  ‘You do see it,’ said the Master Adept, his eyes now open, expressionless. ‘You see the Aleph before you: the one sustaining source of energy and life in the universe. Now do you believe?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Daneri, quietly and with great respect. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced. If it was a trick it was one that would be worthy of the greatest magician of all time. But this wasn’t a trick, he knew absolutely; the presence of the Aleph was enough to sweep all doubt aside.

  ‘Watch closely,’ said the Master Adept, and as he obeyed Daneri saw the inner brilliance fade away to be replaced by dense and utter blackness, as if a hole had been made in the fabric of reality. It was deep and fathomless and in it he saw a multitude of visions, a million disparate entities as though space and time had been drawn together to meet at a certain point, the absolute cosmic centre. He saw visions of the present and the past and the future: all the ages of mankind contained in the tiny sphere which floated above the seventh shelf.

  ‘Now you see and now you understand,’ said Dagon ben Shem Tov.

  ‘I understand and I believe. Everything is as you said it would be.’

  ‘And do you see how the Aleph, existing outside of time, has the power to change the past? The events of long ago are not dead, not frozen in eternity; they are waiting to be written. We shall write them, you and I, we shall—’

  He rose swiftly to his feet, his eyes wide and vivid, as the tall crooked man with the misshapen head entered the room and came for him. An enormous hand reached out and grasped Dagpn ben Shem Tov around the throat, the thumb and curved fingers encircling his neck in a death grip and raising him bodily off the floor. Daneri, unable to move, watched as the deformed giant tightened his hold and the head of the Master Adept filled up with blood, his face darkening and his empty open mouth gaping soundlessly. In a sudden flurry of panic Daneri leapt out of his chair and struck Angel repeatedly on the half-raised ‘wing’ which protuded from his back; it was like a child scolding a kitten; with his other hand Angel swung round and hit him once so that he went spinning and took the chair with him and ended up tangled with it in a corner.

  The Master Adept’s eyes were cracking under the pressure. The whites were turning crimson, and Daneri, still shaken, the room spinning, saw him raise his right fist and press it gently into Angel’s left shoulder, just below the collarbone; though he couldn’t comprehend what happened next for the man loosened his grip as if branded with a hot iron and uttered a mangled cry of pain. There was the smell of seared flesh – sweetly cloying to the nostrils – and the man with the deformed wing fell to his knees, weeping and trying to comfort himself.

  Daneri said (was about to say), ‘How …?’ but Dagon ben Shem Tov shook his head wearily, his left hand massaging the marks on his throa
t. His right hand, Daneri noticed, was spread out on the table, the ring which adorned it glowing molten white as if it had that instant been cast in the mould.

  6

  Diverse Mytho-logical Speculation

  Dagon swivelled his head so that the light sensing arrays glittered like diamond chips. He sucked air through the respiratory implant and said, ‘I wanted answers to my questions and instead we’re faced with a new set of riddles. The purpose of the machine is as obscure as ever.’

  Milton Blake was by nature a calm man, not given to emotional outbursts, but there were certain things which roused him to anger, callous behaviour and ingratitude being near the top of the list; now he was on the verge of losing his temper and he might have done so if Queghan hadn’t remarked, with a placidity that was quite amazing, ‘Perhaps we know more than we suspect. The tapes are open to many levels of interpretation – so far we’ve taken them at face value.’

  ‘Do they reveal the purpose of the machine?’ Dagon asked coldly.

  ‘Not that I can see.’

  ‘Do you know its purpose?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then no progress has been made. Complete waste of time.’

  Blake kept his voice low and steady, under tight control. ‘You talk as though none of this information meant anything. Do you believe that? Do you think it’s worthless?’

  They were in one of the PSYCON soundproof labs with an audio-visual display linked to the VTR facility: for the third consecutive time they had watched and listened and made notes on the tapes produced during Queghan’s period of transmission. The quality of reception was excellent, though Dr Francis Dagon had remained resolutely unimpressed, and Blake was annoyed because he knew that Dagon didn’t regard the experiment as genuine or scientifically valid. He had more or less admitted this in commenting that mythographers were blessed with unusually vivid imaginations, to which Queghan had smiled charmingly and thanked him for the compliment.

  In response to Blake’s question Dagon said, ‘If I thought the information totally without value I shouldn’t be here. My point is that the experiment has not elicited the information we were seeking. But it would seem I’m in a minority of one.’

  ‘What about the Aleph?’ Blake said. ‘Isn’t that a piece of vital information? The Kabbalah makes no mention of it as far as I can recall.’

  ‘Perhaps because it never existed,’ Dagon said blandly.

  ‘You saw the tapes.’

  Dagon sucked at the air. ‘What I saw?’ he said, ‘was the visual interpretation of a neurological landscape. Our heads are filled with a million images and impressions which do not necessarily correspond to reality. How do we determine what has a basis in the real world and what has not? Fact or fancy, that seems to be the nub of the dilemma.’

  ‘So the whole thing was imaginary,’ Milton Blake said, nodding his head rapidly. His face, dark and handsome, was sullen with anger. ‘That’s your considered opinion.’

  Queghan said, ‘Much of it had the quality of mythic experience that one would expect: medieval setting, mad alchemist who believes himself to be immortal, attractive wilful daughter, young novice come to learn the dark secrets of the magic arts. It only lacked a laboratory in the cellar with bubbling liquids and flashing blue sparks.’

  ‘You’re forgetting a prime ingredient,’ Dagon said. Something gurgled down below and he waited a moment. ‘The shambling idiot of enormous strength who tries to destroy his creator; the stuff of pulp fiction.’

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten him,’ Queghan said, looking at Blake.

  ‘Then I take it that you agree – the tapes are only of marginal interest? If we don’t know what’s valid and what isn’t how can we proceed?’

  ‘It depends on which scientific point of view you subscribe to. To a Myth Technologist the tapes are a source of valuable research data: the information is all there if we care to interpret them in the appropriate way. However, if you find the whole thing of no practical value …’ He looked away from Dagon, his face austere and composed. He felt no need to sell the uses and benefits of mythic projection to a non-believer.

  ‘I’m prepared to listen,’ Dagon said, as if conferring a favour. ‘Myth Technology isn’t my field, I know very little about it. But perhaps it has a contribution to make.’

  Milton Blake was infuriated by this smug complacency. It took an effort of will not to say what was on his mind. He looked at the mythographer, whose expression was unperturbed, and was saying in a quiet, even voice:

  ‘We can approach the data in one of two ways, either as an accurate representational account of the events we saw, the people involved, and their actions as depicted in the tapes; or we can put them to semiological interpretation.’

  ‘Semiological?’ Blake said.

  ‘The theory of how signs and symbols convey meaning. It’s the process by which myths and legends are formed and become part of the collective consciousness of a race. I’m suggesting that if we regard the tapes as a mixture of fact and fable we might come near to understanding them.’

  Dr Francis Dagon operated the parachair and backed it away from the display. Under the concealed lighting his skin had the taut dead pallor of synthetic material. He said, ‘Let’s begin with the Aleph. Is that an historical fact or a metaphysical symbol?’

  ‘It could be both. Metaphysical symbols are the concentrated expressions of underlying reality, metaphors of intrinsic meaning which might not be capable of being expressed in any other way. The Aleph is a good place to start. On one level it’s part of the Kabbalistic ritual, a cipher which stands for the source of divine power. Now we can either assume that it’s an imaginative device, with no basis in reality, or that it actually existed. If it did exist then the people of the time would have no words capable of describing it – in the same way that the texts describe a machine in anthropomorphic terms because they lack a technical vocabulary. If this interpretation is correct the Aleph can be only one specific object: a Temporal Flux Centre.’

  ‘Is there any real evidence to support that?’ Blake said.

  ‘The transmutation of base metal into gold. It could only be achieved by nuclear interaction at a very high energy level, either in a particle accelerator or surrounded by the conditions which exist inside a Temporal Flux Centre.’

  Dagon said, ‘A Temporal Flux Centre being …’

  ‘A Black Hole,’ Blake said.

  ‘But surely a Black Hole – or Temporal Flux Centre as you call it – is a body which occupies astro-physical space. How could it appear on Old Earth in the 13th century?’

  Queghan shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Theoretically there’s no limit to the size of a Temporal Flux Centre: it can be as large as the universe or as tiny as a single atom. There are mathematical models which encompass both extremes. The Aleph, in modern technological parlance, is and can only be a point of infinite spacetime curvature. Which might also explain one or two other interesting ideas contained in the tapes.’

  Dagon said sharply, ‘What are they?’

  ‘One of the main characteristics of a Temporal Flux Centre – as its name suggests – is that time is altered, held in stasis. In practical physical terms a Temporal Flux Centre occupies zero space and is independent of temporal flow.’

  ‘Yes of course,’ Milton Blake said with some excitement. ‘It exists “outside of time”, occupying another dimension.’

  ‘It’s one explanation.’ Dr Francis Dagon sounded grudging in his acceptance of the idea.

  ‘The only one that fits all the known facts,’ Queghan said. ‘Dagon ben Shem Tov believed he was capable of altering the past in some way, and the only object in the universe not bound by time in the conventional sense is a Temporal Flux Centre. If he was able to control it perhaps he could, after all, “tamper with the past” as he claimed. The question is …’ Queghan looked for a moment at at the blank display ‘… which past was he referring to?’

  ‘There are more than one?’ The ceramic spheres turned in the
ir sockets and settled on him. Had they been able to display a guarded scepticism they might have done so.

  ‘In the mythological sense, yes; any of which could have – might have – existed in a specific spacetime continuum.’

  ‘Might have but didn’t.’

  ‘We don’t know that,’ Queghan said. ‘The probability of their existing is what matters. It’s a concept of quantum theory but I shan’t bore you with the details.’

  ‘Concerned with the Principle of Indeterminacy,’ Dagon said, and noting the mythographer’s expression said, ‘I’ve done some background reading on the subject. But you don’t say how this so-called tampering took place, if it took place. Or why it was necessary. What could be gained by it?’

  ‘These are questions I can’t answer, but perhaps you can.’

  ‘I don’t see how.’

  ‘As a scholar of ancient texts you should be able to say whether there’s any reference, relating to that period of Biblical history, where a particular religious sect attempted to lead the people astray. It would be about the same time as the appearance of the machine, give or take a couple of hundred years.’

  Milton Blake felt that he’d lost the thread of Queghan’s reasoning. ‘Why a false religion?’ he asked.