Watson, Ian - SSC (22 page)

 
          
“Sacrifice?
Oh, they are doing something, certainly, the
demons. But who knows what?”

           
“What are those pipes for?” she
whimpered.
“In his face and his behind.”

           
“Stop him exploding as they heat him
up,” I said, ever the practical engineer. “Let the hot air out.”
Managing to sound tough, but equally appalled, to tell the truth.

 
          
The
fire glowed, they turned the spit, slapping on fresh clay as the first coat
hardened.

 
          
And
we watched what had once been a living alien being transformed slowly and
methodically into something far more alien and hideous— something which we, in
our rashness, had glibly classified among “works of art” not so long ago. At
what stage in the cooking process the poor tortured being inside that clay case
ceased to be alive, I do not know. I only hoped it was soon, but I feared not,
given the elaborate precautions to prevent early asphyxiation; as I now saw
those pipes also to be. At least we were spared, by the ship’s solid hull, from
hearing the being’s screams.

 
          
The
cooking went on for half an hour, till the circular statue was completed to
their satisfaction; then they doused the fire, and let the thing cool.

 
          
When
it had cooled enough, a triumphal procession of the Clayfolk hauled it away on
a stalactite pole, down along the Road of Statues.

 
          
“I
suppose we have a history of human sacrifices ourselves,” muttered Rhoda.
“People being cooked in bronze bulls and burnt at stakes ... I guess if dawn
is the only fixed point in their world it’s only predictable they’d worship it
pretty fiercely.”

 
          
“Worship?
You do leap to conclusions, Rhoda.”

 
          
“Do
you have any better explanation? It certainly isn’t a fertility rite!”

 
          
“I
shall apply my fertile imagination to what it is. Lamas may slip in, where
squawk boxes fear to tred, eh?”

 
          
Which was perfectly true.
As the human race rapidly found
out in its explorations among the stars, the alien wears many garbs—which
sociomathematical disciplines, the like of Rhoda’s, couldn’t necessarily
always penetrate. Usually she did well enough—and Lob found his time taken up
tidying phonemes and smoothing out kinks in her algebras of alien world views
(being a trained ethnomathematician, as well as a lamaist magician)—and only
occasionally asked Lob to help out with a trance insight when she ran up
against some hopelessly alien cultural pattern. But this time she had run into
a stone wall right at the very start, with a vengeance: a stone wall with
precisely one stone in it!

 
          
Lobsang
was an adept in the Tibetan
chod
ritual,
where the celebrant offers himself up body and soul as a banquet for alien
demons and imagines himself devoured by them, and a proficient in the various
maps of hell-worlds and paradise-worlds oftheBardo
Thodol
, the Book
of the Dead.
So
very remote from earthly reality, Lobsang could shortcut his way, via
such psychic netherlands, into alien mindscapes that resisted Rhoda’s science;
seeing all forms of being, from his Tibetan heights, as mere fluxes in the same
universal illusion. If there was a wall here, then he would burrow under it:
fearlessly, with peace of mind. The Tibetan
chod
banquet was a more gruelling, gruesome business than this cooking of the
dayman, the way Lob had described it! The sense of one’s bowels being torn out,
one’s veins sucked dry,
the
marrow spooned from one’s
bones by demons! To experience all this—and believe it to be literally
happening—yet observe it all with perfect composure . . . Lob was well prepared
psychologically.

 
          
So,
when the Clayfolk flocked back to the village to resume their peaceful,
softly-flowing tasks, Lob went out there with us, right to the patch of ground
before the hearth, and drew a white mandala outline on the mud with an aerosol
spraycan—he called the shape a
kyilkhor
in
his native Tibetan. Entering his magic diagram, he squatted down cross-legged.

 
          
The
Clayfolk flowed around the lines of the
kyilkhor
,
touching gently, murmuring that word of theirs. Lob began chanting to himself
in Tibetan, a monotonous sing-song refrain to lull himself into a trance:

 
          
“Zab-cho
shi-hto gong-pa rang-dol lay bar-doi tho-dol chen-mo cho-nyid bar-doi ngo-tod
zhu-so . . .” he sang, with superb breath control, his eyes staring wide behind
his faceplate, not seeing us at all though we knew he would return briefly,
between wave peaks of the trance, to report the situation as he saw it . . .

 
          
‘The
shapes flow, the colors change, the world walks backwards,” sang Lob after a
while in English, staring at us sightlessly.

 
          
“Yet
we are thinking beings. We make, we build. Yet this world flows to and fro in
madness. All we can say is that a thing is, for the time that it is. Not what
it is, since it may not be again.
A hand, a shadow, a color.
We must put a thing into itself and see how it fits. Then it is, and
other things
are. The fitting of a thing
into its own shape is the shape of our agreement. The puttingof oneself into oneself
is the Making, at the

dawn
. . ."
 
 
         
“That’s why the dayman is tortured?”

          
 
“We feel astonished by our agreement,” Lob
chanted on.
“The sheer possibility of agreement on anything.
But should we give thanks to the lights in the sky that we are in agreement?
Shall we make gods? Is that what this is, this putting of oneself into oneself?
No, it is the prevention of a god! One is a hero, who fits into oneself. If one
did not fit into oneself, every dawn, there would be no rules. If one says
something different every day, is that a
rule?
Pain stops the world, in a cry. The cry is the picture of pain. Thus the pain
pictures the world . . .”

 
          
Then
Lob was swimming through alien waves again, seeing us, he later told us, from
their viewpoint. What delighted them most was our inflexible similarity. We
were three heroes, baked into our suits. Our ship, a single random object,
meant nothing compared to our three suited selves. Yet as soon as we uttered
noises, we outraged them. However fervently they corrected us we failed to make
the same sounds twice running. As heroes, we affirmed the being of the world;
yet denied it by our every word, so that, in effect, we cancelled ourselves
right out for them. We no longer had existence, in their eyes. So they ignored
us.

 
          
Of
course, this was only Lob’s Bardo-vision version—his own effort to fit things
into themselves so that they made sense! We could feel free to take it with a
pinch of salt.

 
          
“Chen-mo
cho-nyid bar-doi ngo-tod zhu-so,” chanted Lob; then with a great bound he
skipped out of the magic circle and hustled us back to the ship urgently, to
tell us more of the way he saw the Clayfolk as seeing things, before the
intuitions slipped from his grasp.

 
          
We
stood by the window, watching Clayfolk molding clay with variable numbers of
extruded fingers, their bodies bobbing and undulating in the orange mists.
While we watched, the gasgiant planet rose to join the sun in the sky, and
there were double shadows in the village again that appeared to cast light, not
mask it: then not long afterwards the gasgiant set again below the same
westward horizon, casting the day backwards towards morning.

 
          
“Don’t
we torture the world into categories, in our own way?” grinned Lob lopsidedly.
“With words and symbols—English, Tibetan, Syrian . . . They must be the noblest
logicians in the universe, these. Number can hardly exist for them, yet they
affirm series. Cause constantly cancels logic out because they can’t see into
outer space to know the true causes of these strange effects. Yet they affirm
logic. They deny the very evidence of their senses for the sake of it. Only
thus is culture possible for them. Only thus can there be rules from day to
day, and any form ol time-binding. Yet they can’t
speak
about theii world, because to do so destroys logic.”

 
          
“An
intelligent species must use language ol some sort to be classified
intelligent! What are these, then?
Automata?
Is this
just an illusion ol culture out there?
The pots.
The huts.
You say - they’re logical beings.”

           
“Ah, but strictly they aren’t so
much
logical
beings, as logic
personified, Rhoda. They’re propositions, essences. They can’t afford language
here, it’s too destructive.”

 
          
“Then
they’re not intelligent compared with us.”

 
          
“We
seem like nothing to them, Rhoda. They are reality perpetually reasserting
itself in the midst of the ocean of becoming.”

 
          
“They’re
zombies.
And ghouls.
You’ve let your imagination run
riot this time, Lob.”

 
          
“Certainly
it’s in my imagination. It’s because I have internalized them in my trance,
that’s why it’s true. They have group sensitivity, you see.
Empathy.
They share their hero’s pain. Pain’s the only concept we really
have
to communicate urgently, to stop
it, don’t you see? Only in this way can a name arise, of necessity, with its
own internal truth. Then they can safely apply its truth to everything.

 
          
“But
they can’t name this world any other way, except by fitting themselves into
their own shape; the world into its own shape, by extension. Really, it’s the
same with the universe at large. Only we never dare acknowledge it. What is a
universe? I ask myself.
One thing, by definition.
The
totality of all there is. There’s nothing to compare it with. All you can do is
put the thing into itself and see what it fits. They’ve got the right idea. We
must attend the next dawn cooking, to hear it for ourselves.”

 
          
“Too
tricky,” warned Rhoda. “They may want to bake us this time.”

 
          
Lob
shook his head.

           
“We’re quite safe, we’re invisible
now. Only Clayfolk make heroes. Only they can fit into themselves. We failed.’’

 
          
So,
despite Rhoda’s qualms, we were present at
j
the village hearth during the next dawning when the Clayfolk swarmed to
greet the light; in this instance, light from a simultaneous rising of the sun
in the north-west, and gasgiant in the southeast. Amid purple mists and binary
shadows we invisibles watched the spit put to use again; a dayman folded over
it, the fire kindled, the clay slapped on by many fingers, the pipes stuck in
his mouth and nostrils and his rectum. I held Rhoda’s hand, to comfort her.

 
          
That
cry of pain came again and again
through !
the
clay pipes stuck in the being’s mouth, as he ; turned,
and baked, inside the clay suit: and we heard that selfsame glottal slobbery
bark as had assaulted our ears since we first set foot on the Clayworld.

           
“I name this reality, Pain,’’ sang
Lob. “
We standi at the place where the only real word is
given, utterance.
It is the compact of agreement. It affirms What-Is.”

 
          
Then,
in a more conversational tone, jerking his thumb at the avenue of bent-over
statues, he added: “That isn’t really a road at all. Essentially it doesn’t
lead anywhere; it just leads.”

 
          
“A
road must go some place!”

 
          
“Why,
Rhoda? That isn’t a highway,
it’s
aruJe, a series. And
its statues aren’t statues, they’re definitions. Each is a fitting-into-itself.
But I don’t advise we pursue the Clayfolk out along it, we mightn’t find our
way back so easily . . .”

           
After a time the cry died away into
a sigh that might have been simply the natural passage of air through that
thing on the spit. However the Clayfolk had already taken the word up, and were
repeating it over and over, gesturing at everything in their world.