Zardoz (15 page)

The Tabernacle was a teacher, inevitable, benign. A force for good, in spite of its own survival directive, a monument to its designers. More and more memory images came up. One central one! Zed the Exterminator, lean, brutal, deadly. He faced the new Zed, a man filled with knowledge that held compassion and disgust at killing. Zed had to pull the trigger into his own reflected face, or the old Zed might shoot him first.

He slowly raised the gun until it pointed at the eye in front of him. He squeezed the trigger.

The images grew more violent and eager to overwhelm. Then the percussion cannoned off the walls like thunder, the reverberations echoing and reechoing through the halls. The bullet pierced the glass, blood oozing from the crack. Zed watched his own past dying. The Exterminator fell with the shattered glass into a pile of mirror shards at Zed’s feet.

Within Friend’s museum chaos reigned. Consuella’s group had long since left, but there were other Eternals, undisciplined and heady with looting and destruction. They laughed and shouted as they wrecked the treasures, like drunken soldiers pillaging a defeated city. They ruined and desecrated the priceless objects, smashing and ripping in a mad reversal of all reason. And still they searched for Zed.

“He’s here somewhere. Search everything!”

“Smoke him out!”

Deadly, hungry fires began. They cut into the dry atmosphere with relish, cracking and leaping from timber to timber; consuming crates and paintings, tapestries and costumes, faster and more completely than the mob.

In Friend’s quarters, Zed was slumped over the little table. The diamond was in his hand, the globe in front of him, the ring beside it, the gun in his right hand, spent cartridges around it. May and the others started forward to him. They had watched Him through the time of battle as his body had been racked with tensions while his mind fought the Tabernacle far from their gaze. Then he had fallen forward. Smoke sneaked into the room, voices followed. Friend shook Zed.

“They’re here.” Zed did not move. Friend spoke to the others.

“Take him to the east door.”

They dragged him off away from the looters, but those from which they ran were only one party. Friend and May’s women were backing into another group, just as deadly, and moving in from the eastern door they sought. They would all surely die. They had been seen and recognized. The attackers advanced, grinning, and shook their weapons, ready to destroy.

Friend looked to Zed for help, then sighed.

“It’s too late, he’s finished!”

Consuella stepped out of the shadows. May looked at her bitterly. Consuella shook her head and stepped up to the limp body of Zed, gently kissing his eyes, infusing love. Zed awoke, got to his feet, conscious and alert. He faced his aggressors. His hand stretched out to them in defiance. They halted.

He spoke to his followers.

“Stay close to me, inside my aura.”

The attackers slowly began to retreat as Zed advanced. Smashed statues sprang back to their pedestals and were remade exactly. Torn paintings mended themselves. The mob fell back, running backward with the weird certainty they would not fall.

They ran back up the east staircase, Zed following, the diamond held high. The others close to him were amazed at what they saw. Zed had reversed time.

Then suddenly time snapped forward again and the mob ran down the steps as they had done once before, they smashed the statues and the paintings just as they had done before, exactly as they had done. Then they passed the ending of their time-reversal and found themselves sheepishly confronted by thin air.

Zed and his party were safely aboveground, breathing fresh air again underneath the sky.

Friend, May, Consuella, and the rest surrounded Zed and looked at him in wonder. To have reversed time and led them through it was beyond even the furthest abilities of Avalow.

May and Consuella embraced as May bid her good-bye and went to prepare for her departure.

Friend cautiously approached Zed, as if he were a different person from the one he had taught and known. The master was now the pupil.

“Can you tell us how things stand? What next?”

Zed looked at him as if he heard a far-off voice.

“An old man calls me. The voice of the Turtle is heard in the land.”

Then he walked to the place of the Renegades.

Zed stood beside the bed of the leader-Renegade, the man who had begun this experiment that was the Vortex. He was weak and spoke softly.

“I remember now how it was.” The Tabernacle having been destroyed, the memory of its construction had now returned to him.

Zed held the diamond before his rheumy eyes. The old man fixed upon it and nodded.

“We challenged the natural order. The Vortex is an offense against Nature. She had to find a way to destroy us. Battle of wills. So she made you. We forced the hand of evolution.”

He wheezed into a near laugh that became a death rattle in his throat. His eyes stilled. Zed closed them with his hand, then stood silent for a moment before the dead scientist. So, Nature had evolved him to undermine and vanquish this place. The founder of the Vortex had just died—Zed had won.

“A good death,” he said, in homage. His peace was broken by cries of joy from Friend, who had just realized that a natural death for a Renegade meant the Tabernacle had ceased transmission.

“You did it!” he cried delightedly.

The man who had played death stepped forward to see for himself. “He’s dead,” he said to the other Renegades who crushed around to see. Then they heard a rushing noise from high above, the head was falling.

The massive and enormous stone head that had defied gravity for so long had finally given up the unnatural struggle. It was plunging to Earth, the wind screaming around it.

Those gathered in the Renegade hotel saw it flash past the windows. There was a rumble as the ground shook, then the crashing sound waves hit them.

The Tabernacle was well and truly defeated. Things had come to an end. The wonderful beginning that had been the Vortex was slowing to a halt.

If the head no longer flew, if the aged could now die, the wall around the Vortex must no longer stand.

Zed strode across the lawns away from the dying rebels and toward the house. It smoldered but still stood erect. The sun bounced off the domes that surmounted the contemplation room, but as he looked at them, they flashed full of fire and vanished into air and smoke.

A strange unearthly voice called him and all the survivors. It was Avalow. Zed, like the rest, picked his way over the wounded who littered the lawn to a silver pool close by the house. Set among palm trees and flowers it was just in sight of the black Outlands against which the Vortex had so long stood safe and unafraid. Avalow was at the center of the pool as if she had just walked over the water to attain her central place. She sang and beckoned them all to join her. Eternals, Renegades, Apathetics wound their way to her. Disheveled and limping they came. May and her women all on horseback waited in a lane nearby; they were clothed for travel and hard weather. Pack mules brought their baggage. Zed looked up at May.

They waited at the foot of the giant tree, the ancient cypress, in which Zed had first seen the Eternals meditating, only a few short days before. The house seen in the background through the branches, the lawns, and the strolling people had had the calm and promise of an everlasting golden age. The peace that reigned over them had seemed quite certain for a thousand years.

Now, all was changed. The house still stood, but was in ruins. The smashed windows gazed out like skulls’ eyes on scenes of desolation. The lawn was littered with the wounded. A battle had raged here. A civil war had rent this city-state to ruin.

The artificial equilibrium that had been established here between the Vortex and the outside had suddenly swung back in favor of a natural order. This artificial Paradise, inset in the real world, making its surroundings the poorer because of its presence, had been swamped, flooded back into the Outlands. Now all the goodness that had been artfully stored here would be redistributed back into the places from which it had been stolen. May and her women would set out. Her caravanserai stood fretting in the shadows of the tree, horses’ hooves pawing at the litter of pine cones and needles. Zed took May’s hand.

“Ride east. You will pass through the wall in safety.” He handed her the diamond which had been his key. “Let your sons and daughters look into it.”

May tried to speak, long forgotten emotions rising up in her. Her pulse quickened. She was torn between duty and feelings of more than love for this stranger who had smashed all that had been her life, yet refurnished her with passions and new purpose.

“What will become of you? Will you go back to your people?”

Zed shook his head.

She wanted to leap down by his side and never leave him. Behind her the column of horses moved restlessly. Just as Zed could never rejoin his tribe, so she had to lead this expedition into the wilderness to begin a new race. They were committed. He could never again be with his people—until death might unite him in some spirit world, if such existed. She had to spearhead a new tribe that she would never see. They were both in mortal time. The seconds ticked life away. Forward, always toward the ending of their lives. They shared a moment of mutual sadness.

Zed broke in on the silence. “I’ve come too far. There’s no going back for me.”

He walked up the bank, past the tree, and toward the silver pool.

May jerked the reins and her column trotted away into the ending of the Vortex and the beginning of the Outlands, and new life.

Zed did not look back. His army was attacking from the western edge and thus would miss May, if she was lucky. If they were not all wiped out, they would have a hard winter to survive alone; a brief time before the birth of their children; then greater risk as they would be doubly vulnerable. But some would not bear children, and they all had had two hundred years of study and exercise to prepare them for this time. They were the strongest and most clever people of their age. They were many. They would be a match for natural hardship. Zed envied them. They would be the first to land from this ship. The first explorers to set foot on a new Earth. A tiny party scratching a bridgehead on a hostile planet, with only will and knowledge to help them. But what an iron will and what massive knowledge!

Zed was nearing the pool’s edge. He could see Avalow standing on a pedestal in the center. Magically, she was dry, having reached the stand in some miraculous way. A last demonstration of her sublime powers.

Her call continued.

Around the corner of the house, as if in answer to her, came the last remnants of the armed searchers, still wild for Zed’s blood. They saw him and began to cheer and run at him, in a desperate last charge.

Consuella moved forward from the group of watchers by the pool and raised her hand. They halted, recognizing her authority. “That’s useless. It’s all over,” She waved them back. They fumed, then, crestfallen, joined the people at the pool’s edge.

Friend called to them: “The Renegades are dying like flies!” He delighted in the progress of death, like an invisible bailiff claiming his dues with spreading swiftness.

Consuella spoke to them all, pointing at Zed. “He’s not to blame. We destroyed ourselves.”

The remaining weapons clattered to the ground from the Eternals’ hands. Avalow’s chant grew, and they were drawn closer to its power. Arthur Frayn plucked at Zed’s sleeve as if to impart a witty piece of gossip to him, which he had saved up to this moment.

“That’s truer than you know, Consuella. And here I would like to claim some credit if I may.”

They looked at him in surprise and disbelief. He was delighted by their attention and savored it.

“You see, our death-wish was devious and deep.” He turned to Zed. “As Zardoz, Zed, I was able to choose your forefathers. It was careful genetic breeding that produced this mutant, this slave who could free his masters.”

He made a sweeping gesture that included all the Eternals and ended with a bow. Then he pointed at a familiar figure in the crowd. “And Friend was my accomplice!”

He laughed in pleasure at the discomfiture of his watchers. They were too dazed with fighting and pillage to attack him in revenge. They were beyond all feelings of bitterness now. Arthur turned his impish attention back to Zed.

“Don’t you remember the man in the library?”

Zed recalled the dim face and overlaid it with the grinning one before him. The memory and the present intermeshed, fading into one person.

“It was I who led you to the Wizard of Oz book.”

Zed’s face was stony.

“It was I who gave you access to the stone. It was I! I led you! I bred you!” Arthur almost hugged himself with delight. He would have clapped himself on the back if he had been able.

Zed swiveled to face him. “And I have looked into the face of the force that put the idea into
your
head.
You
are led and bred yourself.” Zed had seen the force that led them all. All were designed; the will made them separate, but their oneness joined them.

Arthur and Friend were delighted. The irony of Zed’s statement filled them with laughter. They looked at each other and spoke like twin children blurting out a secret.

“We’ve all been used!”

“And reused!”

“Abused!”

“Amused!”

By now the song of Avalow had permeated the group so secretly, so surely, that they were all part of her song. The melody rose. A farewell chorale of praise and pain, a last celebration of their powers, a greeting for their new, last life. The Eternals moved into their familiar single mind and talked at a deep level, as one creature. For the last time, their minds entwined, their souls joining into a communion.

Zed could not be part of their sublime happiness. He stood alone and looked west.

Avalow led them. She drew their music to a peak, then effortlessly spun it into one single note of her own, releasing the others from their meditations and melodies until she alone had the single sound, then this too faded into silence.