The Gods Look Down Page 9

  ‘Because, according to the tapes, Dagon ben Shem Tov said a rather curious thing: he said that many prophets from the time of Kish onwards had foretold the coming of the Saviour but that no such Saviour had ever appeared.’

  ‘As far as he knew, that is,’ Blake qualified.

  ‘Exactly. As far as he knew. Doesn’t it strike you as very strange that a man of his intelligence, a philosopher-scientist, shouldn’t know of the existence of Christ? And Daneri also said that no record of the Saviour was known to them: they knew of the prophesy and nothing more.’

  ‘How do you explain it?’ Dagon asked. His curiosity had gradually overcome his apparent hostility to the mythographer’s thesis.

  ‘I don’t think I can in terms that you would find acceptable. I can deal with it mythologically by supposing Dagon ben Shem Tov to be inhabiting an alternative past in which Christ was never born. Yet he also speaks of creating a Saviour in his own likeness which would seem to indicate—’

  ‘The founding of a false religion,’ Blake said excitedly. ‘Now I begin to see.’ But just as suddenly as the light of understanding had dawned in his eyes it dwindled again. ‘If Dagon ben Shem Tov inhabited an alternative past how will it help if we study the records of our own history? Surely the two are completely separate, they don’t relate to each other?’

  ‘Again, we must refer to the tapes. Dagon ben Shem Tov speaks of the Qabalah which I assume is the medieval equivalent of the Kabbalah. He also mentions the Ark of God which is referred to often enough in the Judaeo–Christian Bible. So there are points of similarity between our history and theirs. The two pasts – if that’s what they are – intersect at certain points and share the same events, perhaps even the same people. What we have to look for is evidence in our own history of these points of intersection, and looking for the “Saviour” of a false religion wouldn’t seem a bad place to start.’ He glanced up and said without irony, ‘Unless Dr Dagon has a better idea.’

  Dagon smiled bleakly, a ghost passing fleetingly across a lighted window. The implant in his chest made a hollow sound as he drew breath. ‘It occurs to me to wonder how much of the information in the tapes is strong enough to support such an investigation. As a Myth Technologist you will of course have complete faith in your own methods, but your faith might not be sufficient to sustain my belief.’

  Milton Blake said, ‘Chris was invited to participate in this experiment at my personal request; he doesn’t have to justify his methods to you or anybody. If you don’t want his help why don’t you say so and we can save ourselves a lot of time and effort?’ He had spoken his mind at last but it irritated him that he’d given way to the impulse. He curled his fists and pushed them into the pockets of his lab coat.

  The mythographer stood up and his height seemed forbidding in the small soundproof room. A defective light fitment in the ceiling jarred the silence with its persistent drone. He looked down at the half-man in the parachair.

  ‘I can understand your reluctance, Dr Dagon. As a hardline scientist you require proof in the accepted scientific mode. Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on your point of view – Myth Technology doesn’t and cannot function by those rules. It is by definition a metaphysical science and deals with those areas of inquiry not accessible to Aristotelian logic. You ask for positive proof that the information in the tapes is objective fact and not subjective fantasy – but in fact it’s the latter which has the most value. As a mythographer the only thing I have to offer is my “gift” for mythic projection, and that, it seems, is the one thing you wish to discount.’ He stood before the display console and folded his arms. ‘And if I did offer proof wouldn’t it be subject to the same doubt, the same distrust? You don’t accept Myth Technology as following accepted scientific procedure and therefore everything I say is liable to be suspect in your eyes.’

  ‘Though you say it most persuasively.’ Dr Francis Dagon bowed his head slightly. He went on in his soft inflectionless voice, ‘I have been trained to proceed slowly, step by step, and to verify each step before proceeding further. Yours is a different discipline and one I find hard to accept. However, some of your guesses – intuitive insights, whatever you care to call them – suggest one or two possible approaches that hadn’t occurred to me. Further study of the Judaeo-Christian Bible, as you suggest, might shed new light on the subject.’

  ‘You know,’ Milton Blake said, hardly concerned to hide his annoyance, ‘you talk as though mythic projection was an everyday commodity of little practical value. Are you aware of the risk involved? Do you realize—’

  ‘I was present during transmission,’ Dr Dagon said curtly. ‘I saw everything that happened.’ He made the smallest of movements with his rounded shoulders. ‘Everything appeared to be under control.’

  Queghan looked down on him: the lines around his eyes and mouth were especially pronounced, the planes of his face almost angular from the overhead illumination. ‘Is it possible to genetically alter the reproductive process? I’m thinking in particular of a single artificial cell which could be persuaded to reproduce itself into a living organism.’

  ‘If you mean is it possible to alter the structure of a cell under controlled conditions, the answer is yes. It would depend, of course, on the nature of the cell – with bacteria it’s a fairly simple operation. Once we have the basic enzyme we can provide it with the conditions necessary for continuous replication. Does that answer your question?’

  ‘Not altogether,’ Queghan said. ‘Molecular biology isn’t my field but I seem to recall that it’s possible to insert fragments of DNA into other chromosomes and reproduce a chain of identical genes. Is that so?’

  ‘The method is known as cloning. And yes, it can be done. The end result would be to produce a species of identical units, each a carbon copy of the original cell. I’ve done some research myself on plasmids, the subunits used in the process.’

  ‘So I believe.’

  ‘Is your interest in cloning general or specific?’ Dr Dagon asked. The electronic discs of his eyes sought out Queghan’s face and tried to decipher its expression.

  ‘Has this ever been done outside the laboratory?’

  ‘Not that I know of—’ He checked himself and qualified this by saying, ‘Of course research is proceeding all the time and perhaps there are certain techniques which would make this possible. Though whether anything above the level of a bacterial cell could be reproduced outside the laboratory, I very much doubt.’

  ‘What is it, Chris?’ Milton Blake asked. ‘Something in the tapes?’

  ‘Dagon ben Shem Tov spoke of altering, living tissue. Now presumably he wouldn’t have the facilities of a fully-equipped genetic engineering laboratory to hand so there must have been some other method – one that didn’t depend on laboratory techniques and conditions.’

  Dagon made a sound which might have been a disparaging laugh. ‘Not to mention the means of transferring the specimen two thousand years into the past.’

  ‘He had the means,’ Queghan said. ‘The Aleph.’

  ‘Very well – for what purpose? Even supposing it to be possible, why should he want to interfere with history?’

  ‘You made the suggestion originally: he was a god from space and time.’

  ‘By which I understand you to mean an extra-terrestrial intelligence?’

  ‘It was your idea,’ Queghan reminded him gently.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Dagon dismissed it at once. ‘I only happened to mention it in the absence of any other theory which might explain the existence of a machine in the Biblical era. A whimsical fancy, nothing more.’ He said this in the manner of someone repeating an old threadbare excuse, rushing through it to get it out of the way. He operated the parachair and swung it towards the door. ‘I’ll follow up your recommendation to investigate the comparative texts of that era. You never know. I’ll keep you informed.’

  ‘I’d appreciate that,’ Queghan said. He began to unbutton the collar of his jacket. ‘Before you go, Dr
Dagon …’

  Dagon halted the parachair and swivelled it into the room. He raised his head and watched as Queghan opened the jacket and pulled it aside to reveal his left shoulder: just below the collarbone there was a pale indentation in the shape of the letter Q: the flesh was silvery like the healed stigma of a brand.

  ‘Well?’ The ceramic spheres stared straight ahead.

  Milton Blake said, ‘You wanted positive proof that mythic projection works – now do you understand?’

  ‘It isn’t all subjective fantasy,’ Queghan said, buttoning his jacket. ‘There’s quite a bit of objective reality too.’

  *

  The two moons formed pretty crescents in the night sky of Earth IVn, the smaller one fainter and higher as though following its pompous companion at a respectable distance. Together they sailed blithely on towards morning, serene and eternal above the man-made planet.

  In his room on the second floor of the residential annexe (some of the patients occupied the first floor, including the man who had been driven insane by a combination of STP and the Neuron Processor) Queghan sat the desk near the open window; he was working on a mytho-logical structure analysis of the tapes and by his left elbow was a neat stack of processed pages which comprised a complete verbatim transcript of the mythic experience. The chart itself was spread out in front of him, marked with signs, symbols and indices in different colours. He planned to return to MyTT in the morning – there was no point in staying any longer – though the concealed mysteries of the tapes still bothered him and wouldn’t let him rest. It seemed strange that Dr Francis Dagon should have quite arbitrarily decided that the information was of no practical use in his researches: he had been keen, according to Blake, to elicit the mythographer’s help, so why this abrupt volte-face? He had seemed almost anxious to discontinue the inquiry.

  Queghan rested his elbows on the desk and gazed out at the cloudless night sky. Who was Dr Francis Dagon and what was his connection with Dagon ben Shem Tov? The similarity of names was too coincidental to be taken for granted, it unsettled him and set his mind on edge. He couldn’t accept it as the play of mere chance and neither could he come to terms with Dagon’s obstinate refusal to accept the tapes as admissible evidence. Had they revealed certain things which he would have preferred to have kept hidden?

  Another element which added to Queghan’s sense of frustration was the futile and rather petty gesture of showing Dagon the Q symbol: the act of a precocious child wanting to impress the grown-ups and score a point with his cleverness. And it was likely that Dagon didn’t even appreciate the significance of it – how the mark on his left shoulder had, in the paradoxical manner of mythic projection, been the cause and not the effect of the branding. But then Dagon’s mind obeyed the inflexible rules of scientific dogma, the ‘logic’ of centuries from which even now men were struggling to free themselves. In mytho-logical terms there was nothing odd in the occurrence of an effect before its cause: time did not progress in linear fashion, one discrete step at a time, but in the jargon, ‘by paradigmatic association’. By analogy it was like a story in which the separate events happen not one after the other but simultaneously, so that the beginning, middle and end are located at the same world-point, one upon the other as it were: the end implicit in the beginning and vice versa.

  This was the purpose of the structure analysis chart in front of him. By separating the mythic events and classifying them into signs, symbols and indices he should be able to construct a semiological graph which would interpret the various elements in terms of objective historical fact. He did this out of a sense of personal interest, for it seemed likely that Dr Francis Dagon would be as unimpressed by the analytical nature of Myth Technology as he was by its methods of investigation and data gathering.

  The predominating symbol, it seemed to Queghan, was the Aleph. It was the source of power, the agent of transmutation, and the means whereby the Master Adept could communicate with the past – all of these things in a small glowing sphere which existed in its own spacetime continuum. Where had it come from? Was it an artefact of a super-intelligent species who had the ability to roam through time … an artificially-created Temporal Flux Centre which to a primitive civilization would seem to perform ‘miracles’? Queghan felt intuitively that the Aleph was not so much a material object as a metaphysical concept, a physical manifestation of mind-stuff which Dagon ben Shem Tov could conjure up, quite literally, out of thin air. And did this mean that the Master Adept was himself capable of passing through the temporal barrier into another dimension of spacetime – say back two thousand years to the Biblical era?

  Queghan recalled the words of the Master Adept, like the faint chimes of a distant bell … in one form or another I have lived throughout all the ages of mankind. I have lived in the remote past and I shall live again in the far future. He found the relevant passage in the transcript. Was it to be taken as a statement of literal truth or as metaphor? Had Dagon ben Shem Tov actually been alive in ancient times and had he ‘created’ a Saviour as he claimed he was able to do? If so there was possibly a reference to such an event, either in The Book of Splendours or in the Judaeo-Christian Bible. Dr Francis Dagon had said he would seek such a reference but Queghan had his doubts.

  Again he studied the chart in front of him, wondering which of the many diverse elements held the clue he was seeking. The mytho-logical analysis of symbols and signs was complex and open to different interpretations and he could have done with Johann Karve’s help, for it was he who had devised much of the terminology. In several places the line which should have traced a symbol back to its source-meaning ended abruptly; in the other places the line altered direction and connected two symbols which didn’t appear to have any relation. Many lines radiated from the Aleph, forming a web of tracery like the skeletal pattern of a living creature, holding the whole thing together.

  For an hour or more he worked on it, marking off the boundaries of subjective/objective experience and classifying each of the elements with its mythical or symbolic counterpart. One of the elements was Saviour and Queghan was disturbed to find that he couldn’t allocate to it a precise location on the temporal grid-scale unless he put it in two positions – one in the sector marked ‘Time’, the other in ‘Minus Time’. Now Minus Time could mean one of two things: either it was an event, object or person composed of anti-matter or it was a strong indication that an event, object or person had a high ratio of probability – in other words might or might not have existed. This ‘state of probability’ was an undefined and indefinable region (limbo) where nothing could be said to happen or not happen, to exist or not exist. Its reality was irrevocably and ultimately unknowable. (Johann Karve had called it ‘A cosmic enigma wrapped inside a metaglactic mystery.’)

  The dilemma facing the mythographer was to decide whether his interpretation was correct, and, supposing it to be so, how to account for the probable existence of two Saviours, one on either side of the spatio-temporal interface. And just as odd – in fact Queghan was totally perplexed by it – was the fact that the mythic projection of the period in which Dagon ben Shem Tov had lived contained no Saviour at all: on the one hand there was no record of the coming of a Saviour and on the other he had two of them. Queghan spent a moment working out the mytho-logical equation, which turned out to be quite simple:

  Queghan wasn’t unduly surprised by this. The force of evil was as necessary as the power for good – the one could not exist without the other – and he pushed it aside and concentrated on the second possibility, which was more intriguing.

  To suggest that a person or thing existed in ‘a state of probability’ was tantamount to saying that they inhabited another stratum of spacetime. This could be in the future or in the past, and if it was in the past it could be regarded as history as it might have been – an alternative scenario which conceivably could have taken place. In this instance the chart indicated that the probability ratio was high (a factor of 7) which meant that it was more li
kely than not to have happened.

  There was still, of course (there had to be) the element of doubt, of indeterminacy, though this was the strongest evidence so far that Dagon ben Shem Tov had somehow managed to reach back and influence the mythic events of an alternative past. Just what those events were and in what kind of past they had taken place was a mystery waiting to be solved.

  7

  Dreamscape

  Solid rock enclosed him on all sides: there was no way out.

  With curious omniscience he knew that he was inside a mountain on a desert plain and there was a storm raging outside, whipping up the sand to a stinging haze which moved like smoke across the face of the sun. He thought uneasily, It will obsure all the symbols and signs and indices – why didn’t I close the window in case the chart gets blown away? He was annoyed at his absent-mindedness and feared that they might chop off the lower half of his body if the chart was torn or damaged in any way. His wife said from nowhere: ‘If only you’d planted the Tree of Life as I asked you to none of this would have happened. You can’t blame me. Now you’ll rot before they find you and serves you right.’

  The machine made a sound and pulsed light. It was in the centre of the chamber, illuminating the walls with a ghostly irradiance. He looked around him at the rough lava-rock which tapered to a dome high above, the light glowing and fading so that the chamber seemed to be approaching and receding, the walls shifting fluidly to the pulse of light. He looked at the machine: it was familiar to him and yet he knew he’d never seen it before. The sound it made rose and fell with monotonous regularity. He thought, Will they ever find it here? How can they interpret it as a sign and a symbol if it remains hidden in the rock?

  There’s a reason why it’s concealed in this way, he told himself – and yet the reason evaded him, hovering on the periphery of his mind. It was frustrating to know it was there and not be able to recall it. The machine had to be protected, he knew that much, but from whom? And who was expecting a sign?