Bedlam Planet (12 page)

May the god Soma, he who is called the moon, liberate me!

Charnel-house moon, the abode of the dead, where crushed corpses lie intermingled with shattered fragments of metal, plastic, glass, ceramic, bone …

Indra is Svargapati: see the dome of heaven, lit with the jewels that flowed from the mouth of Bali whom he slew. Those that were his bones are diamonds and his marrow emeralds; from his blood sprang rubies, drop by drop; his teeth were pearls, his blue eyes shattered into sapphires beyond the power of man to count, his very flesh turned translucent as crystal. Indra is Meghavahana, and the clouds pile in the west, ready steeds for his riding. Indra is Vajri, thunderer.

And the storms will come.

May the god Soma, he who is called the moon, give me release!

The first to die: Yama, king of the dead, lord of the reservoir of oblivion. Garlanded with skulls, the stems of lilies threaded through the empty sockets of their eyes, his mouth a mockery of a human smile—that great gaping grin, wide as a gate, through which all men created take their way …

The instant of Agni: the striking of fire. “First cut the wood of the Sami tree, then make a wand with the
wood of the tree Asvattha. By turning one against the other you will make fire.” Thus the Gandharvas. This done, the creation of Agni, who was cursed to eat all things for telling the truth.

May the god Soma, he who is called the moon, make me free!

Pledged that he would not attack with weapons of wood or stone or iron, nor with anything wet or dry, neither by day nor by night, Indra yet struck down the demon Vritra. Vishnu incarnate in a cloud of foam was his club, at the moment when the sun cut the horizon. Thus he turned preservation to destruction. Ponder this, O Born of Woman, and learn that all things are one.

Filled with divine fury, Mother Kali struck down her husband, trampled him in the midst of the heaping corpses. By this she was made ashamed, but nothing changed. The mother that gives birth shall also inevitably destroy; Vishnu the preserver shall be made a killing tool; the moon that is the holy cup of soma shall be drained, and Kali-Durga shall reign, and Yama, in the age of Shiva, who destroys all things. For all things are
maya.
The wheel turns. In every dimensionless point of the universe there may be found an Enlightened One.

Helpless with wonderment under the failing moon, Parvati Chandra looked at herself. She touched her breasts and made to strike a gash across one’s underside, covering the other, because it seemed somehow wrong to know that there were two. “Durga, my sister,” she murmured, and wondered about the death which must come forth from her womb. Blood ran down dark from the tip of the finger whose sharp nail she had used to mark herself.

Also …

The giddiness overtook Tai Men while he was asleep, so that his trained awareness fought a losing battle all the way up the shivering tunnels from unconsciousness towards the peak of wakefulness. At one point knowledge and experience were precisely poised, but he was not yet in command of his faculties; he could know, but he could not act. When he was able to, the action he took was merely to stagger from his bunk, through the door of his room, and out under the palace floor of the August Personage of Jade.

The Heavenly Master of the First Origin was long gone to his deserved retirement, leaving to fend as best they could those awkward, clumping creatures whom his successor had made from clay and carelessly left in the rain, so that when the breath of life was wished on them, some went halt, some were blind, some ugly and deformed. This was a matter for which there would be a calling to account at the end of the divine year; meantime, from an infinite distance, the Celestial Master of the Dawn of Jade of the Golden Door looked on benevolently, wishing them well in their brief span before the inception of his reign.

Beyond that he had no interest in them. They might do as they chose.

To the moon, as it is prescribed, on the fifteenth day of the eighth month: a sacrifice in the form of fruit. Perhaps this is what the Divine Hare takes, there in the palace of the moon, and makes with it the elixir of immortality. Yet to live long without wisdom does not mean happiness. Witness the discomfiture of I, the Excellent Archer, who once saved the world in the very long ago, whose wife the most beautiful of all created women is under the protection of the Hare, the patron of those men who will have no commerce with women. He had the elixir first, for his shooting of the nine fierce suns that threatened to bum the world, and by it lost his wife.

Thirty and three are the levels of Heaven. One may ascend by virtue and aspire to be a god oneself, but to become a god is not assurance of eternal bliss. There is a reckoning. There is a calling to account.

Do not fail. The laws are strict. There is no celestial compunction about dismissing those who prove inadequate. There is only the benign authority of the August Personage of Jade, who gives and takes impartially according to what you have deserved.

The Second Lord may come upon you in any of two and seventy guises, eager in the business of his emperor. His dog may rend you like an evil spirit. Do what you must without resentment; that way freedom lies, and no fear.

In the palace of the moon resides the most beautiful of women, Chang-O who was once the Excellent Archer’s wife. It is not reported that she and her husband had children. She sits and drinks the elixir of immortality with the Hare. It is improbable that her new protector will father children on her. It is said, discreetly behind lacquered screens in cool halls of marble where such important subjects may fitly be discussed, that the Hare has no urge in that direction. It is said that this is why men take no part in the sacrifice of the autumn equinox, of fruit to the full moon. They are afraid for their virility. They will not risk the certainty of dutiful children against the hypothesis of everlasting life.

Tai Men, who had made the sacrifice of fruit under the moon, sat weeping on a rock beside the road, and could not be consoled for the loss he had not suspected before it was too late.

Also …

In sleep where he was building beautiful imaginary
cities, organically conceived like the densest natural jungle, yet substantial and efficient like a single vast machine, there was Daniel Sakky, the big dark man whose thews and muscles made it seem he could himself have heaped up the high towers of which he dreamed, instead of tracing them in delicate shadowy forms on the input board of a computer and leaving quiet metal machines to give them solidity.

Still three-quarters immersed in his visions, he wandered out across the raw new ground of Asgard, at first puzzled, growing little by little more afraid.

Masks of straw and wood daubed with coloured mud lending them a repellent, awe-inspiring aspect, the old wise men sat and explained the universe. Under the thatched roof of the hut no outsider might enter on pain of magic sickness, the drums spoke with a supernatural voice. On that spear the blood of a leopard not yet dry, glistening in the wan flame of a mystic fire; the skin of the beast shrouding the spindly limbs of the oldest and wisest of all them who spoke, to symbolise what naked weakling man could do by power of thought and magic.

But the voices uttered warnings against arrogance.

Once the people wanted to know, “What is the moon?” And one said, “We shall climb to it and see.” He took a pole and a pole and a pole, and lashed one to another and sank them in a pit in the ground. Then he took a pole and a pole and a pole and climbed to secure the new ones to the first ones. After him came others, curious, eager, inquisitive. Pole after pole tied with bands of creeper, leather thongs from the hide of the hippopotamus, braided plaits of hair from the mane of a lion, very strong, very potent magic. They climbed and they climbed and still they were not at the moon, and one day the poles broke and they were all hurled to the ground and many were killed. So they never did know what the moon was, and many wives wept.

A wrinkled hand fumbled in a medicine-bag and sprinkled ghost-herbs on the fire. Inhaled, the smoke of them brought visions.

Men die, but the people of the moon do not. Why not? It will be told. Once Libanza called all to come before him, he the very powerful, the sorcerer above heaven whose hearth-smoke is the stormcloud, whose speaking drum utters the thunder when he beats it, whose knife flashes the lightning as he turns it this way and that. He said, “Come! Be quick! Attend me!”

At once the people of the moon came, running, and Libanza was pleased. But the people of the earth came walking, slowly, complaining to one another, and Libanza was angry. He said to the people of the moon, “You shall not die! You shall rest two days a month, and no more.” He said to the people of the earth, “You shall rest every day, and you shall die forever, knowing because you have seen that the people of the moon only rest and rise again after two days.”

Breathe deep the smoke that clogs the space below the roof. Marvels and mysteries shall be made plain: truth about life, truth about death.

By the rivers and on the forest paths, there you shall meet
Mokadi;
in the high places of the hills when you grow giddy with the thinness of the air, you shall know the spirits of the ancestors are by. In all the places where your forefathers have trod, there they are dead and there they are buried. Sometimes they are angry, for it is hard to be a ghost. But propitiate them, make offerings, play music and dance to give them pleasure, for it was they who bought you this, clear ground, fat herds, much game to wet your spear. Thanks to them you sleep with your wives and children under a good sound roof, you wear a gown of many-coloured cloth and when it is a festival day you drink much palm-wine until you laugh and laugh.

Remember those who became ghosts that we might build this village.

The voices died. The smoke blew away through the chinks under the eaves. The hands of the drummer ceased, and the blood of the leopard was dry.

Heir to all this, Daniel Sakky composed himself cross-legged at the brink of the stream, where there was heavy dull clay in quantities, and set himself to forming figures of men and women as though he, like Massim-Biambe, could inject into their substance
tchi.
He bowed sometimes to the devil-mask of the moon, for that too had been bought for him by those who turned to ghosts.

Likewise …

Dreams as from, the penumbra of the
Ragna Rökkr,
that night from which the gods themselves shall not awake, troubled the sleep of Ulla Berzelius. Her lithe tanned limbs sprawled to the four corners of her bunk, a thick tress of fair hair wound over her mouth and trailing across her breast, she dreamed of strangulation and woke to see, through the window, the moon three parts gone in the jaws of Fenris Wolf.

In the day when evil dreams shall come to trouble the sleep of the Aesir, it shall go hard with Earth:

All the cunning amassed by Father Odin, wisest of the Aesir, was of no avail. The black crows Huginn and Munin, thought and memory, brought him news of all that passed in all the worlds: Niflheim, Muspelheim, Jotunheim, Utgard, Midgard, Asgard … At the price of an eye he bought the secrets of Mimir, sitting by his well under the middle root of Yggdrasil, and at Mimir’s death he conjured the giant’s head to make it speak to him still, and answer all his questions.

It was to no avail.

By subtlety he stole the blood of Kvasir from the giant Suttung, which the dwarfs had mingled with honey and placed in the cauldron Odrerir. Whoever drank of it should be a bard and a skald, should understand and speak of all things to the delight and wonder of the worlds. So fierce was the chase as he fled in the guise of an eagle that Suttung’s heart burst asunder, following him.

No more, however, did that theft avail.

Nine days, nine nights, wounded with his own spear, Odin hung on the trunk of Yggdrasil and none came in to answer to his calls. Starving and clemmed with thirst, on the ninth day he saw runes on the ground, and read them aloud, and was made whole and young.

But no more did that free him from the destiny of death.

As much fascinated as terrified, Ulla walked across the island, heedless of where her feet were carrying her, her eyes fixed on the moon as it slipped into the maw of the wolf.

Likewise …

Head spinning like a centrifuge, Kitty Minakis drew in her small arms and legs tightly against her body, eyes wide and staring into nowhere. A form of knowledge was upon her; she needed to rise and share it, it being far too huge for a single mind to encompass. Trembling, she set out and found no one. Alone, in dark, on this small knob of ground enclosed by the illimitable waters.

Girdled by rivers—Acheron, Cocytus, Phlegethon, Lethe, Styx—it was a dark country, full of ill boding. There no flowers grew, but gloomy black poplars, and willows which never bore fruit. There the ground was carpeted with asphodel, the plant of ruined cemeteries, long forgotten by the children of those who had been interred. There only the wan light of the moon was to be seen, and no birds sang.

There in the Grove of Persephone the many-headed dog Cerberus came fawning, to lick the feet of the new arrivals, wagging his horrid tail. But let him once get the scent of death from a passer-by, and from then on for ever that person should not pass again. Seeing the fearful hound who blocked the way back to the sweets and delights of Earth, the dead drank gladly of the waters of Lethe, and forgot.