Zardoz (7 page)

These pretty, peerless enemies of his had youth, strength, and intellect forever. They had been matched and chosen as had he, they were like gods to him, but he could see their empty centers. He could see them as they really were, hideous, depraved, and wanton; superficial parasites upon a blighted land.

This tribe was long gone into a fall, but it did not show—yet. It was still awesome in its power but so much less than it had been. He would prise open the cracks that run through it, then wedge them farther, till he split the whole apart. If he had time. Time…time was running by his side against him in a race for his own life or all their deaths.

This recollection and review whirled through his mind as he stood gazing at the group. Outnumbered he was, but he was a warrior, used to battle and fierce conflict. He loved a contest to the death. All the protagonists here assembled, even the magic ring creature, were not fighters; they had not the ways of killing. Even if they had the knowledge in their heads, it was not felt, it was against their mode, their principle of passive, slow, safe living. Why learn to fight when you cannot die? But Zed knew all the ways of war.

Consuella was conducting this investigation. He must be careful as she would use this chance to speed him forward to the lip of death. It was an unhappy fact that she was enemy. She was fine, strong, and determined—a worthy mate for a chieftain like himself.

Everything here must be turned to his advantage.

Every foe could become his friend.

Consuella was his deadliest enemy, yet she could be subverted.

Where Zed had stood before to entertain the commune with his life-memory, now he stood again.

Friend was in the forefront of the audience and May was in attendance as Consuella began her lecture.

“Penic erection was one of the many unsolved evolutionary mysteries surrounding sexuality. Every society had an elaborate subculture devoted to erotic stimulation.”

The audience was bored but looked sleepily at their new toy, Zed, with mild interest.

Onto the giant screen flashed a succession of bizarre sexual pictures. The couplings of ages, funny, sad, extraordinary, all heaving in various degrees of beauty depending on the time and culture from which they came. The watchers gave no sign of arousal; it was as if they had been formed sexless and inanimate long years ago.

“…But nobody could discover how this—became this.”

Consuella poked her long pointer at the screen as a flaccid penis appeared there. She rapped it and it rose to full erection. Someone yawned, another scratched his nose and looked into the garden beyond the room. Only Friend was intent upon the experiment Consuella was oblivious to them, as she warmed to her project.

“Of course we know the physical processes involved, but not the link between stimulus and response. There seems to be a correlation with violence—with fear. Many hanged men died with an erection. You are all more or less aware of our intensive researches into this subject.”

One or two shifted uneasily under her gaze as if in memory of some past public humiliation.

“Sexuality probably declined because we no longer needed to procreate. Eternals soon discovered that erection was impossible to achieve and we are no longer victims of this convulsive, violent act which so debased women—and betrayed men.”

Could this be true? thought Zed. Were they all so far removed from their true selves as to be just empty containers for their intellect? Had their skins’ surface atrophied into a numbness? Could they not feel the inner quickenings of pleasure, loss, union?

“This Brutal—like other primates leading unselfconscious lives—is capable of spontaneous and reflexive erections. As part of May’s studies of this creature we are trying once again to find the link between erotic stimulation and erection. This experiment will test autoerotic stimulation of the cortex leading to erection.”

May flashed a glance at the crowd in response to Consuella’s words. A few stirred in anticipation; perhaps they recalled Zed’s life-projection and hoped for something as exciting now.

Consuella passed the communicator ring over Zed’s head and body and a line appeared on the screen, slightly oscillating, a visible reflection of Zed’s sexual pulse. The watchers’ feet shuffled as they leaned forward, the better to see the screen.

He was turned to face the screen.

Images began to appear there.

Images which began to drive him.

Every imaginable aspect of sexual woman appeared before his eyes, and some aspects that he could not have imagined. Incessantly, in sequences and cadences, they flashed before him.

Remembering his reasoning before the lecture started, he realized that he must not act as predicted—the longer he could confuse them, the longer he would live.

May came over to him, and she began to massage his body.

The imagery grew in intensity, but he perceived a mechanical background to all the picture sequences. There was an organization in them, they were clever repeats. He watched the line of his own response moving across the pictures like a ripple on a pool, steady and calming. He focused on the line—its evenness, its orderliness.

It was a projection of himself. In contemplating its quietude, he was feeding back still more calmness. The women behind the line grew in sensual ardor and convolutions. He held steady on the white, line in front of the heated writhings.

May grew more attentive. He forced himself to breathe more evenly. He could recall some of the visuals. They were rerunning the program, a reedition, but a rerun. He was steady. His body was stabilized from within. He was holding the Tabernacle back, contesting its power.

May signaled to Consuella. She walked between Zed and the screen. He looked back at her, unafraid. She would not dare to strike him in public, during an experiment, and so lose face.

It occurred to him that the Eternals all thought him to be as rugged as his exterior, a tough and active animal with no powers of thought.

It did not occur to them that he could reason.

Consuella proudly stood before him, and gazed right into his eyes. Behind her the screen had blanked of images except the line relating to his sexual pulse. That continued to trace an unwavering line.

Zed flicked his glance from her to the line and back. A thought crossed his mind and issued across his face in a brief smile. He could control his body. She still stood there.

Zed produced the desired erection for the benefit of the audience.

“Consuella’s done the trick herself!” said Friend. They giggled, laughed, and applauded.

Consuella was the object of the Brutal’s affection!

Consuella could produce “the reflexive erection,” she was no better than the captive primate!

He smiled sweetly at her. Consuella flushed, enraged; but did he detect the shadow of envy crossing the face of May?

Consuella watched Zed sleep in his cage. She spoke into her communicator ring.

“The Brutal is now in the fourth hour of unconscious sleep. It is astonishing that Homo sapiens spends so much time in this vulnerable condition, at the mercy of its enemies. Is there any data on sleep patterns of primitive people?”

“Is that a priority request?”

“Yes. I will now test its working response to danger stimuli,” Consuella said.

She reached through the cage, her hand like a talon, toward the deeply sleeping Exterminator.

Zed’s hand appeared, grabbed her wrist. He was instantly awake and alert. She gasped at the physical contact. He released her.

“Does it please you to sleep?”

Zed remembered he had seen no beds here, nor yet any person sleeping.

He nodded. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“I have dreams.”

As she searched his face for meaning the Tabernacle voice began to answer Consuella’s earlier question.

“Sleep was necessary for man when his waking and unconscious lives were separated; as Eternals achieved total consciousness, sleep became obsolete and second level meditation took its place. Sleep was closely connected with death.”

Zed looked up at the night sky and its tiny points of light high above the rooftops.

Dancing glowing clusters of light. Spheres that rolled and spun. Darkness from which came spots of harmony. An enveloping warm blackness through which swam a curiously organic architecture.

“You. Your genetic structure. Your life chart.”

May’s voice.

They were below ground again, deep within the pyramid, worshiping at the Tabernacle. May spun out a web of scientific litany before the screen, a homage to the rings master. She had scanned Zed’s body deeply with her communicator ring. At her command it had painlessly probed and captured Zed’s design. His skin, blood vessels, muscle fiber, then deeper and smaller, into the cells and beyond them even into their components. Finally, his essential particles, the smallest plan within him had been projected onto the screen—for May’s benefit and the eye that saw and projected for her. Might it not also record him for its own use? Did it scan all the incoming information and select the principal and most important for further use—as a line of defense and possible attack?

Using his military mind, Zed knew that whatever lay at the end of the invisible threads that led to, and joined up with, the center—the mystic spider web axis—was a silent, dormant king, plotting carefully for a confrontation and ultimate battle, its Armageddon.

Was it filing away his innermost thoughts as well as his physical details? To be sure, it might have most of him on file by now, but not his soul. Not yet, not ever.

“Look.”

His eyes continued to follow the patterns as they ebbed and flowed before him. He struggled but could not decipher the images on the screen.

“You’re a mutant. A second, maybe third generation. Therefore genetically stable.”

The sentences came from her deliberately, slowly, as if they were thoughts confirmed and made real by her vocal admission. Like entries in a long-kept book. She was underlining and ticking off suspicions that had been written at the time of his arrival.

“Enlarged brain, total recall. Your potential is…”

She became speechless. Her arms raised as if to encompass smoke that grew and filled the room. She shrugged. She could not find words.

“Your
breeding
potential…”

“Breeding?” inquired Zed, leaning up on the slab.

They both paused, conscious that May had exposed a soft flank to him with those words. She looked at him with a frown, now on the alert.

“Arthur Frayn…”

He blankly looked back. His mind skipped a thought or two, then slid back to its shock point. Breeding—he could breed in the Outlands, it was his sacred right. Zardoz had decreed it so. He had felt it was a just and true reward for his superiority over others. He could only mate with those women who were as well-formed as he, no mutant female could he inseminate, no wild-witch creature could be his, only those of the design prescribed by Zardoz. Then the nagging doubt gnawed through and he felt the sickness that was Frayn’s involvement. Was Zed just another life-form for Frayn to toy with? Had his love actions been part of a great gardener’s plan, just a careful planting in the spring season, watched over from afar? Could his killings have been just the pruning and weeding for the same distant farmer?

Was he just a single barbed flower in a field of other special blossoms? Might he not be as grotesque as the mutants he abhorred? Was he not as strangely designed and perfected as they? They were the offspring of the random oneness that was life. Was he the product of a willful human reason—Frayn’s? He must not betray these sentiments even to himself or he would weaken, and she would seize on them, securing them for her own use.

“How did you get into the Vortex? What is your purpose?”

He knew that she wanted him, however powerful she was. Her objective interest was aroused by his potential. Her body craved his.

“You’re mentally and physically vastly superior to me or anyone else here.”

Her eyes flickered. Zed sensed she was torn between the threats she saw and the potential she had uncovered. They were the same.

“You could be anything. You could do anything…”

She wavered, then made her move.

“You must be destroyed.”

Did she really feel this? If so, would she carry out her threat, and when?

“Why?” he said evenly.

“Because you could destroy us.”

He breathed deeply. “As you have destroyed the rest of life? Can you unknow what you now know—about me?”

She thought deeply, then replied: “For the sake of science I will keep this knowledge from the others for the moment, keep you alive. But you must follow me, obey me, be circumspect, make no disruption, quietly do whatever work is given you. I will watch over you.”

The meal rattled on as usual. All the Eternals were present. The evening light spilled from the mirror table back up onto their faces; it sparkled through the crystals set upon the surface.

The room was warm and friendly, the food simple but good. Like an elegant rich family, they bantered and teased as they ate; too spoiled to really understand anything outside themselves; too inward-looking ever to see themselves simply and clearly. Nonetheless, they presented a pretty picture to Zed as he assisted Friend, whose turn it was to serve the meal.

Zed never ceased to wonder at the elegance and fine detail of the place. The clothing, the cutlery, the shining skeins of cloth in the farther room; their beauty was confounded by the lack of appreciation in its owners. They acted as if it were their due. They looked but didn’t see.

He moved easily, carrying the potatoes to and from the steaming kitchen, glad to be alive, fully mobile, able to move even in the humblest capacity. He was functioning. Still alive.

Friend did not take to his chores so readily. Perspiring and irritated, he bit his lip and carried on.

Zed performed bis instructions to the letter. Each person approached from the left, a slight bow, the offering of the course; more? Removal of any dishes. Quietly, humbly, in rotation, each attended like the other, equally.