Watson, Ian - Novel 10 (21 page)

 
          
“Electricity
belongs to space, my dear, not to unspace. Let us exchange names, shall we? It
will make everything so much easier, since you people are beset by names for
everything.”

 
          
Which was something that Ananda had told Jim . . .

 
          
“I’m
Jim,” said Jim.

 
          
“Nathan,”
said Nathan.

 
          
“You
may call me Tulip.”

 
          
“That’s
a ridiculous name!” protested Jim. “You don’t look remotely like a tulip.”

 
          
“All the better to call me by!
Our true names are the
signatures of our being. A word cannot serve that purpose. But perhaps you’re
right . . . What name do you think best suits me?”

   
        
“Death’s-head
Hawkmoth.”

 
          
“Too much of a mouthful — like that ice.
How about . . .?”

           
“Al,” suggested Weinberger.
“Al the Alien.”

 
          
“How
about. . .
Lai?
Why not? Yes, Lai it is. Now, will you
tell me exactly how you came here, and why, and what conclusions you draw?”

 
          
“You
invented the cage, Nathan. You tell him.”

 
          
And
this Weinberger proceeded to do, while Lai remained standing with its whisky
glass clasped in one claw-like extremity, its other arm resting on the drinks
shelf. Occasionally, as it listened, it
freshened
its
own glass.

 
          
When
Weinberger was done, Lai divided what little remained of the whisky between
their three glasses. This time the angel did not bother to keep its distance.
It sat down on the end of the sofa, draping a thin arm around Weinberger’s
shoulder. To his credit, Weinberger did not flinch.

 
          
‘This
angel’s drunk,’ thought Jim. ‘What a situation: we’ve imagined ourselves a
drunken alien angel.’

 
          
“Now
then,” said Lai, “you’ve got everything inside-out and backside foremost, of
course. But to your credit, you did imagine a way to come here, and imagine a
‘here’ to come to. This makes us rejoice.”

 
          
With
its free hand, Lai toasted them.

 
          
“Cheers,
beings of ordinary life, who are still alive! So you think of the red creatures
as parasites that prey upon dying consciousness? You think that they haul
dying souls off into the crystal fog to fertilise those crystals? Now
why
would they do that, I wonder? What’s
in it for them?
Eh, Nathan?”

 
          
“They
feed off the emotions of the trapped souls. They eat the phoney events. That’s
their nectar. That’s their entertainment.”

 
          
“Then
who am I? I must be the ringmaster! Perhaps it is we angels who feed and amuse
ourselves, while they are only the messenger boys and go-betweens — the pimps
of the crystal brothel? The creatures, by the way,
are
our own artificial children. I might as well admit that right
away. Oh yes, we direct them.

 
          
“As
you guessed, if a human being dies very suddenly our messengers don’t get there
in time — swift as they are! They don’t home in on the pheromone of death,
which you — alone of all your kind — have correctly identified as the
psychochemical of dying. It does indeed alert other living creatures to an
impending death. But it plays a far more important role for the dying person
himself! It weans the dying spirit away from the shadows of the ordinary world.
It counteracts the attractions of the ordinary and familiar. The pheromone
disintoxicates
the soul — otherwise it
might simply linger on as an earth-bound ghost.”

 
          
“There
must be a hell of a lot of ghosts haunting
Russia
and
China
,” said Weinberger.
“Still
intoxicated.”

 
          
Lai
wagged an admonishing finger.

 
          
“Obviously
everyone who dies suddenly doesn’t automatically become a ghost — or your world
would have been packed out with ghosts long ago. Only a very small number of
sudden fatalities actually meet that fate. You see, the pheromone is an
evolutionary vestige from the time when your souls were less
coherent
than they are now. Many spirits
passed into the earth and trees and rocks back in earlier times. There is the
source of your earth-spirits, your earth magic,
your
Japanese
kami.
Etcetera.
The pheromone was an evolutionary development when your souls were relatively
weaker than they are now.

 
          
“Anyhow,
let us suppose that our little friends don’t get there in time. What happens
then?”

 
          
“It
would be better to dissolve into limbo,” said Jim, “than to carry on
indefinitely in some hell or purgatory.”

 
          
“Oh,
such lack of imagination! No wonder you could only come up with a rather large
hallway, in quite atrocious taste, for this encounter of ours. And earlier, you
shaped a world which wouldn’t even solidify properly. Though
that
, admittedly, was because you were
still alive. No doubt its failure to solidify saved you from its clutches.”

 
          
Emptying
its glass, Lai set it down noisily on the parquet floor.

 
          
“And
I wish there was some more of this whisky. Really, your sense of provisioning
is too poor — as witness your bold hike into the wilderness! Oh don’t worry, I
am only speaking flippantly. Really, I enjoy our conversation. It’s quite
unique. How I shall sing about it, how I shall dance it in unspace! Tush, do
you think that I speak as an impresario again? As an artist of a higher plane,
who sculpts with souls? I suppose it’s just as well there isn’t any more whisky
. . .

 
          
“Now
where — yes,
where
— do you imagine
that all those suddenly dead souls go, if our own little Deaths don’t grab them
and snip the umbilical cord and haul them off protesting? As I said, your souls
are relatively stronger nowadays.
Relatively.”

 
          
“If
they don’t become ghosts,” answered Jim, “and you say that the vast majority
don’t, obviously they must go into the crystal fog.”

 
          
“And
they don’t get through it, mister. They don’t make it. Very few even have the
wisdom or the insight to try. But those who do are doomed to failure because of
the sheer extent of the fog these days.

 
          
“I
use the word ‘days’ loosely, of course! Time is a little different here, you
realize? Days and hours belong to the realm of suns and worlds, and all the
other clocks of ordinary space. You actually came here in mere moments, though
as to the time you spend here . . .”

 
          
“We
couldn’t have spent more than an
hour
in that crystal we blundered into, but when we got back —”

 
          
“Don’t
blame me for your blunders! Ah, but I am being short- tempered . . . Blame it
on the booze.” The angel rubbed its forehead.

 
          
“Are
you telling us that all those little Deaths are hauling people
clear through
the fog — which would trap
them otherwise? The fog hasn’t got anything to do with you? It’s just something
in the way — an enemy?”

 
          
“Eggs-actly,
Jim. We are your bosom buddies, did you but know it. Of course it’s better that
you don’t know it. If you did, you’d be queueing all the way from birth to
euthanasia to avoid dying suddenly. You characters do everything to excess on
that little world of yours. You would abolish your species.
Far
better that some are lost than that there are no more new folk ever again.
’ ’ “We already came pretty close to abolishing our species.”

 
          
“In the late, great atom-splitting war?
Indeed. Oh, there
was a terrible boost to the opposition because of that damnfool war. The fog
grew so much greater all of a sudden. You’d already killed enough people in all
your recent wars to cause us grave concern, but this was the bloody limit. And
then our little Deaths couldn’t even keep up with all those who died slowly in
the aftermath, even though they rushed to and fro, working overtime. The number
of our little Deaths is based on average death statistics, you see — like one
of your old insurance companies,
hicV
⁹

 
          
Lai hiccuped.
The angel’s words were still fluent enough,
but it seemed to Jim that Lai was by now definitely supporting itself upon
Weinberger’s shoulder. Obviously whisky affected an alien angel powerfully; and
Lai had drunk the lion’s share of it. Would they find out the truth before Lai
succumbed to its effects? Or was that the whole point: they couldn’t find out?

 
          
Lai’s
hand patted Weinberger rhythmically a few times, like a metronome.

 
          
“Ah,
but your society of Good Death is a fine thing! Yes, we influenced it. We can’t
make direct contact with you living people, except in such rare circumstances
as these now, my buddies. But we influenced it imag-in-atively — though the
shock which opened your imaginations to us was your own doing. I refer to the
war.” “Don’t tell me that you’re responsible for Norman Harper’s output!” cried
Weinberger. “Don’t tell me you’re his muse!”

 
          
“A
very hidden muse . . . Otherwise we would sabotage our own plan, you see? If
people knew that there was a state beyond death, and that the alternative was
to be encysted like a fly in amber by the crystal fog, well, you might easily
euthanase yourselves away, eh?

 
          
Our
little Deaths could never cope with the demand. It would become a runaway
thing,
a hysteria
. You must be a very hysterical lot
or you wouldn’t fight wars.
Stands to reason.”

 
          
“Norman
Harper.” Weinberger groaned. “That . . . that twiddler of words.”

 
          
“Don’t
blame
us
for your low aesthetic
standards,” said Lai, aggrieved. “Harper’s popular, isn’t he? By and large, I’m
sorry to say, your imaginations are fairly meagre.
Though
acceptable, acceptable...
I guess that comes from living a world-bound
‘life’. So don’t blame yourselves. You do improve with keeping — once you can
grasp the possibilities. ‘Mind-wings
can
fly.’ Personally I would blame your deficient imaginations on the way that
commerce polluted your art for so long. You packaged the products of your
imagination like cans of peaches with pretty labels on them, and lots of syrup
inside. We, on the other hand, who inhabit a wholly imaginative realm . . . But
I should not boast in my cups.”
Lai’s foot twitched,
accidentally knocking over the empty whisky glass.
The angel glanced
down. “You do make some fairly decent liquor ... I think I’m going to sleep.”

 
          
“Don’t!”
cried
Jim.

 
          
The
angel’s red eyes looked distinctly bloodshot.

 
          
“To
think I shot Harper,” muttered Weinberger. “And now he’s stuck in some damn
crystal.”

 
          
“Some crystal
Parnassus
, perhaps?”
Lai patted the man consolingly. “So you
see, my buddies, your quest is an utterly mistaken one. You should surrender,
and die gently. Then you can come back here the usual way, shepherded by our
little Deaths, and get on with the real business.”

 
          
“And
what,” asked Jim, “might that be?”

 
          
“Tell
me, Jim old buddy, how did unspace seem to you? By unspace I mean the zone you
were in just before this rather empty vestibule took its place.”

 
          
“It
was like an infinite number of possible places — worlds, rooms, I dunno — which
all coexisted with each other. You could choose one. You could enter any one
that you —”

 
          
“Could imagine.”
Lai cut him off. The alien waved its free
hand around. “Since this is a sharing place, you can’t help but see doorways
to other possibilities. But you’ve put all those possibilities behind closed
doors, haven’t you? The picture frames should be your catalogue — your screen,
your window — but they’re all blank. Unspace, Jim, is the realm of the infinite
sharing imagination where you envision worlds and domains as an act of
creative genius. It is where you will never be alone, since all have access to
each other. It is where you give whole worlds to others, for adventure and
enlightenment and joy, and even for terror — which is a kind of fearful joy — and
others in turn give these to you. It is the ultimate place of free creative
energy, common to all beings. You would soon learn to open all those doors in
full awareness, till you had no need of doors at all — though you might like to
keep them on as a useful convention. Like a rhyme scheme.”

 
          
“What
are those pesky crystals, then?”

 
          
Lai
blinked at him, as though it was a very naive question.

 
          
“I
believe that evolution in your own little pocket of existence gave rise to the
predator and prey relationship? It generally does! How else could anything
evolve to any great extent, other than by competition? Why should you think
it’s any different after your worldly death? It’s just the same, old son. But
now the stakes are larger than life.
Much larger.
A
prey
who
gets caught is stuck in what you folks call
Hell.”