Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (13 page)

 
          
“As
soon as we can ask the right questions. It’s coming along fast. We’re even
mumbling it in our sleep.”

 
          
Wu
eyes him oddly. “Are we? Are
wel”

 
          
“Maybe
I was just dreaming. I’m sure I dream in pidgin Getka-saali. Dreams seem pretty
dense here, even if I do forget them straight away. There’s a whole new world
to process! ”

 
          
She
ignores his dreams. People always ignore others’ dreams. “There has to be a
world government with this common language,” she insists. “A world
organization. But who does the organizing? And
howl
It seems incredible without rapid transport or radio . . .
Who
needs
a world language with such
limited communications? So therefore, they aren’t limited. We just can’t see
them.”

 
          
“They’re
inside the pyramids,” nods Ritchie. “Got to be.” Voices are coming close . . .
“Paravarthu amra
—” (‘They go—’) Voices
speaking in the strange dual, dyadic form of the verb. A faint hiss of runners,
a smack of sliding door against its jamb. And the screen door on the other side
of the washroom slides back suddenly:
thock.

 
          
A
Getkan steps through, naked but for sandals and a bright scarlet g-string, as
though there is a line of blood around his hips and a pool of blood upon his
loins. He holds a long curving naked sword.

 
          
Ritchie fumbles for
the trekpack
containing the L-27s, but checks himself in time.

 
          
“Mensaalriti
,” announces the native
calmly. A formula greeting: ‘may our words be binding/permanent’. In fact the
sword isn’t naked. It is sheathed in a transparent scabbard, a glassy frond;
and the Getkan’s hand merely rests on the brass pommel to push it clear of the
doorframe. There’s a pack on his back, too, held by tawny shoulder straps that
blend in colour with his hairs. Perched on this, like a second head, is a helmet-mask.
A round shield hangs down.

 
          
The
native ‘drinks’ us in for a while, then turns to unhitch the pack and dump it
in the other room upon a sleep tree. So shiny is the material of his shield, it
is a mirror.

 
          
He—yes
indeed, he must be a male—has a companion. She calls the same greeting out to
us. She, yes, for breasts raise twin hummocks among the golden hairs of her
chest. She wears a scarlet g-string too. It looks as though they’ve both been
sliced in half with one swing of a giant blade, so that now they could be
lifted apart and their torsos replanted on the other’s midriff. Perhaps the
effect appeals to them?

 
          
Rene
awakens with a shiver; or rather makes up his mind to be awake rather than
asleep. Relaxing the phoney stasis of his body, he props himself up on his
elbow.

 
          
The
pair kick off their sandals, discard their g-strings and step back into the
washroom naked.

 
          
“That’s
a woman,” hisses Ritchie.

 
          
“A
male too,” observes Wu.

 
          
We
all (save for Zoe, who still sleeps through it) stare with varying degrees of
tact and untact—if tact, indeed, is called for; it seems not.

 
 
          
Hot
water steams off the tiles. With soft burbling chuckles the pair rub the
aromatic liquid soap into foam upon each other, becoming skinnier and darker
with the lanking of their down till they look like two outsize stretched
rabbits. The down covers even their genitals: the female’s cleft inwards, the
male’s a dark knuckle with a thin pipe of an organ. To them, no doubt, we would
seem to have preposterous solitary bushes of hair signalling the presence of
our sex!

 
          
When
it’s done, they towel each other briskly and step out into the hot sun. Sitting
on the washroom doorstep, they stretch their limbs—which look as though they
have already been stretched upon a rack! Gazing towards the island, they let
their fur dry off. After a period of contemplating Menfaa they return to their
room. As an afterthought, they close the door.

 
          
“Swords,
indeed! ” Ritchie smirks.

 
          
“Perhaps
they came for a contest of some sort,” suggests Rene.
“Le Sport?”

 
          
“They
look more like warriors to me,” says Wu.

 
          
“This
community is hardly militaristic,” retorts Ren6.

 
          
“Why
did they chose a room round here, so close to us?” I wonder. “Curiosity? Best
view of the island?”

 
          
“Yeah,
they sat staring at it,” agrees Ritchie. “Just for a pretty view—or is that
their destination? Are they aiming to fight something over there? Is that why
the island’s deserted?”

 
          
“Theseus
and the Minotaur?” I catch his drift. “We must learn the lingo better! And
right now we must sleep. These days, these huge days! ” Utterly exhausted, I
strip to my briefs and lie down. Wu lies down to sleep naked, Ritchie watching
her, then turning over abruptly on to his stomach.

 
          
But
my sleep is disturbed by voices, and the ‘pock’ of screen doors in the
distance, and a rhaniq blaring somewhere in the inner courtyard. Ritchie is
lying with Wu under a hairy blanket. They’re whispering. “Such long lines of
parallax converge,” she says, “to measure the really very narrow angle between
us.” (A metaphysical conceit
from her
?
Is this how she woos a spaceman, speaking to the astrosextant in his soul? But
of course I missed the earlier foreplay of words. If there was any; if.) “I
have to tell you something, my brave cadet.” I listen, embarrassed. It would be
more embarrassing to betray that I can hear. Rene snores, masking any
alteration in my breathing, but the light is bright—I’m sure they must see me
carefully keeping my eyelids shut. “Did you feel desire for Li too?”

 
          
“Urn—”

 
          
“Tell
me the truth.”

 
          
“Christ,
she made my balls ache. But you, my God, I never thought you—”

 
          
“Would
empty them? We have an old saying, Ritchie: ‘Before you beat the dog, be sure
to learn its Master’s name.’ So it is with Li. As usual there is a power
struggle in
China
. History teaches us Chinese the lesson of submission. Actually, history
is all myth in
China
, and politics is a sort of religion. The rehabilitation of Maoism was
a faith rekindled—to order. Do you know that I’ve never been allowed to write
the history of the Communist Party? Why not? Because it would have to be
rewritten! Our rulers—amongst whom we must number myself— care not a sparrow’s
fart for history. That old warrior avatar appearing in Tien An Men Square
horrified them. The past! How we hate the past. ‘The current of history is
irresistible.’ What a fine cliche! And what does it mean? Nothing at all.
There’s only the present for us—in case people realize how very much the
present recapitulates the past. The real reason that I, as a loyal jailor of the
past, was sent on this expedition was to study this trick of annulling the
sense of history. Li for her part was sent to discover the physical technique,
the control agent. Instead of alien brainwashing, you see, there could be human
hands directing the affair? We have to find it, my Ritchie, so that we can
prevent
this from occurring. I’m a
cupboard—is that the word?—reactionary. Which is their word, but they do not
realize it applies to me. I adore historical truth—which is why I’m so clever
at insinuating it, while nominally concealing it, as is my active role.”

 
          
Is
she telling the truth? Or is this all a double bluff, to recruit Ritchie to her
side now that Wu has lost her comrade Li? Is she simply buying Ritchie with her
body?

 
          
“Two
against a world, Ritchie. Along with some travelling companions, who sorely
need leadership. As in Shih Nai-an’s epic of the
Water Margin.
Favourite reading matter, did you know, of the God
Mao? Mao, who would be resurrected materialistically if Li and the others had
their way. The wrong avatar materialised in Tien An Men Square. But they have
their hopes. ..”

 
          
Halfway
through the long afternoon we all wake properly, to a strange distant music out
on the lake. An atonal violin wail, a tetchy drum beat, the low moaning of
horns and the strident creak of huge grasshopper legs a-twitch. It is a missing
music— an incomplete music. It might become hauntingly beautiful, but only part
of it is being played. Therefore it remains tortured and yearning, frustrating
on the ear, as if the stone bluff is meant to echo back a counterpoint to fill
it up and make it whole. The music pauses and steals away. Yet its silences are
not pregnant punctuations. They are mere emptiness, into which subsequent
phrases keen and hoot as air into a pocket of void . . .

 
          
Empty,
too, is the newcomer’s room; the door is slid half open. Missing are they, and
their helmet-masks and shields, though not their packs—those still lie on the
sleep trees.

 
          
Dressed
again, Wu harkens. The music seems to speak to her, eerily. “The power of
emptiness! Sometimes the best painting is three-quarters empty . . . But what
does the hollow here imply?” She shivers. “That it all should be empty? Yet
can’t be?”

 
          
Out
on the lake rides the red-sailed junk. Still bleary-eyed, and in his shorts,
Ritchie steadies binoculars on the windowframe.

 
          
“They’re
out there, standing on the poop, our two warriors.
Yowl"
He shoves the glasses aside. “Damn near blinded me with
that shield! ”

 
          
Rene
takes the glasses from him. He stares more circumspectly. “Everybody is
masked—the musicians too. Surely it can’t be a sacrifice? Ritual victims aren’t
likely to be armed.”

 
          
Ritchie
rubs his sore eyes. “Depends what they’re up against.” “Perhaps,” suggests
Peter, “each is the victim of the other? One of them must lose and die?”

           
That’s nonsense. “They were so
loving—so caring.” (As Wu and Ritchie were so caring in bed, this noon-night?)
“Anyway, they left their packs behind.”

 
          
“Maybe
they don’t need them any longer, love.”

 
          
“Should
we take a look in those packs?”

 
          
“Forget
it,” Zoe tells Ritchie. “Would you like them to take a peek in yours? Teacher
will be coming soon.”

 
          
Much
later, the two warriors return to their room, unsacrificed, unwounded, their
bright swords still clean within their sheaths. They glance in at us aloofly,
as though human aliens hardly concern them compared with some other strangeness
which they have recently encountered, or else must before long grapple with. We
aren’t so far along the road as they are.

 
          
When
it’s dark I take Peter to my bed. (If Wu can seduce Ritchie at high noon . . .)
Zoe follows suit a while later, slipping quietly in with Rene, though they
aren’t particularly quiet after that. Yet Wu and Ritchie sleep apart as if
intent on camouflaging their newly consummated relationship—as though they fear
that their secret pillow talk might be reconstructed by us other lovers from
the clues of sighs and pantings, and evidence on one kind of congress lead to
the revelation of another, of the political kind. Or else they’re simply
drained of the tension we still feel.

 
          
How
we discharge that tension, how we ground it in each other! It’s been so long.
And why so long? Piety to fallen comrades? That we should amuse ourselves in
this way, while ... (don’t think of it)? Or reluctance to admit, by mating,
that we are marooned: a microcolony far from home among the lanky golden ones?

 
          
This
night, I dream not of Peter in my arms but of vile Jacobik wearing an alien
helmet mask which hides his face. Yet I recognize him because his mask and his
face are actually the same: both a blank—the blank of death. In my dream he
hangs by the neck from a long rope inside an empty doorless hollow pyramid. He
oscillates towards me and away like a pendulum. He has claws instead of arms: insectoid
claws that clutch at me. In my hand I hold an alien sword. I strike at him with
it. He rebounds from the blow, swinging closer to me on his next pass, gripping
me at last. And I hack at the rope that holds him,
Vhomme pendu.
I sheer through it. Yet he does not fall away. He
simply hangs and crumples like a dry puffball. Clouds of whining imp-gnats
burst from that dried husk which must be many months mummified. I slash at them
uselessly with my sword as they fly about me. The waft of its passage through
the air pitches them clear of the blade. They thrum in my ears, confusing me,

 
          
till
I’m only the still point of the flashing blade, mechanically switching through
the air—an insane reaping machine, an automatic scythe.
Till l am he.
Death the Reaper.

 
          
The
buzzing becomes words: words stacked upon words, which fly into my ears, into
my head (or are there already)— words of the Getka-saali speech ...