Whores of Babylon, page 23
‘Ah, the Lord Gibil who built the pyre?'
‘The same, sir.’
‘And you would have sacrificed your life to stop a mad beast from spoiling this ceremony . . . What shall I give you in return? Ask anything.' As Muzi hesitated, the king added, ‘You must ask. Modest refusal will only anger me.'
Muzi scratched his neck, then pointed at Alex and the officer. ‘Well, sir, your man there seems to have grabbed a slave of mine. I would like to have my slave back.’
‘This man’s in custody, Majesty,’ protested Alex’s captor. But already Aristander had turned away, distancing himself from events.
The king flushed. ‘Is that your request?’ He scrutinized Alex, pursed his lips. ‘A slave, a one-time runaway, whom you already own?’ The king’s gaze lingered long.
‘I may own him, sir, but right now your man has him. He’s my wife’s favourite slave. That’s my request, Great King.’
‘What did the slave do?’ asked Alexander. But before the officer could answer the King held up his hand. ‘No! That doesn’t matter. The request is granted. The slave is pardoned. Release him.’ And the king turned away.
‘You lucky bastard,’ hissed the officer, before propelling Alex briskly at Muzi.
Muzi said nothing till they were midway through the throng between the dead elephant - with its own little funeral pyre now guttering on its back - and the place Alex had been abducted from.
Then he halted Alex forcibly. ‘So why did I help you out - when you’re screwing my wife?’
‘Master?’
‘Think I’m a fool? Not as big a fool as you imagine. Let me tell you something, boy. I saved your bacon from whatever roasting it was gonna get because I’ve been studying Thessany and you. Oh, I’ve seen her attitude to you: all this pretence of couldn’t-care-less, and you’re-just-a-menial. I’ve seen through it. But more, I’ve been studying her ways - with quite a lot of admiration, I might add. Then there’s my dad, who admires her too. He wants you to screw her, doesn’t he? That’s what all this dragging you around with us was really about. You’re my dad’s insurance policy to keep Thess satisfied.
‘Well, I’m damned if I’m going to screw up this little game - ’cos I’m learning games now, and I want Thess to play this one just as far as she pleases. Surprised you, eh? This game for sure has one thing going for it: it lets me take off hunting with the boys. But that ain’t the most important. The most important is, it amuses Thessany - and I’d hate for her to be bored or unhappy. I sincerely mean that. I guess my dad feels that way too, specially now that he’s getting such hot business tips from her.
‘Listen: one day Thess is gonna learn to love me, in her way. Then she’ll realize that I knew all about this caper; and she’ll love me twice over.
'Nor am I kicking up any piles of shit while she’s pregnant. But I’ll tell you one thing, fellow.’ Muzi held Alex by the throat, firmly though not too constric- tively. ‘If anything goes wrong for Thess or my dad, or if that Indian fakir or you create any smartass Marduk-style capers which drop shit on our house, then I’ll strangle you personally. Yeah, capers like whatever prompted that officer to collar you; and what was all that about, eh?’
‘A misunderstanding,’ croaked Alex.
‘You can dip your cock - till the day comes when Thess admires me sufficient that I can cut it off of you. But you’ll keep your nose clean in other respects. Got it?’ “
Alex gurgled, ‘Yes.’
‘Listen: I just became a guy of some note by giving that old elephant a fatal headache. The king might have been a bit put out that I didn’t ask for a title or something. But now he knows me. I intend to keep his respect, honourably.’
Muzi released Alex. ‘Right oh, slave; back to your mistress/
How right Muzi was; and at the same time how wrong. Right about the lovers; wrong about Lord Gibil knowing. Right about a conspiracy; wrong about a Marduk plot. Wrong about the family honour when his own dad was about to rob . . . correction, about to clean up gold which would otherwise have gone to waste.
In a way the situation was pathetic. Here was Muzi trying to join in on intrigue, as he viewed it. Instead he produced a parody of intrigue. He was an oaf of honour.
Yet for the first time Alex felt respect for Muzi; respect mixed with fear, not least fear of where the clumsy apprentice subtleties, the would-be guile of an honourable man, might lead.
Really, this was all Gibil’s fault for the way he had let his son grow up: as a sort of mental virgin, a worthy innocent. Maybe that was because Muzi was indeed rather stupid; if brave-hearted. Unfortunately he wasn’t sufficiently stupid to survive unscathed and unbewildered. He had begun to think for himself.
Or maybe it was Gibil’s fault that his son’s initiation into the business of life was so long overdue; because he had treated Muzi in this manner not out of indulgence, nor even out of contempt at the contrast between father and son, but so that the son should redeem the father. Muzi should be exempt from the finaglings which had brought Gibil riches; the family heir should not inherit wickedness (or its kid brother, unscrupulousness). Yet without a certain wicked streak, how could Muzi ever steer the family fortune? So therefore he had to be initiated. This process had been left far too late. In the matter of the proposed robbery Muzi’s education was still being neglected.
The money baron required a prince with unsoiled paws to succeed him. That was the real reason why Gibil had readily agreed that Muzi should be excluded from the scheme to steal the gold. Gibil had decided that his daughter-in-law was perfect for the role of wicked anti-conscience to his son.
Alas, Muzi already possessed a conscience and a sense of destiny of his own.
Or did he? Was that really so? Perhaps Muzi’s wish for princely respect was precisely what his own father had implanted in him.
And maybe this whole sorry imbroglio was Thessany’s fault for playing lioness games with her young husband’s emotions.
Thessany, Gibil, Gupta and Alex revisited the scene of the cremation late the following afternoon, by which time the brick core would have cooled.
Gibil drove the party out in a big four-wheeled carriage. As procurer of the pyre Lord Gibil had a perfect and logical excuse to inspect for any structural damage which the intense heat might have caused that core, which was going to be clad in white marble to the eternal memory of Hephaestion. Equally, Lord Gibil must needs dissociate himself utterly from any pilferage, should Gupta be caught staggering away with ingots of gold. This might present a problem, given the involvement of Gibil’s own daughter and his daughter’s slave . . .
Gupta pointed out reassuringly that no one else - save for the bribed architect - knew anything about ingots being there. Maybe there weren’t any! Or not as many as expected. Maybe the gold had been vaporized by the furnace heat and deposited as faint gilding on the city wall and adjacent rooftops.
If caught, said Gupta, they should swear that all along they had been intending to return the gold secretly to the palace, as a loyal gift of which the king must never hear; but hadn’t wanted to raise false expectations at the Treasury. The treasurer would surely be delighted and relieved; and wouldn’t blab.
When they arrived, by way of the Marduk Gate, they found perhaps a score of sightseers ambling in the vicinity of the blackened ziggurat, its tiers amorphous with drifts of carbon. Soldiers stood guard. Other soldiers might be sleeping in several military tents nearby, where the standard of King Alexander flew: a simple purple pennant on a spear stuck in the ground, the butt a carved pomegranate.
On Gupta’s instructions Gibil brought the horses round in a circle and halted them so that the carriage was just out of sight of the soldiery round the corner of the eastern wall. Alex hammered in a peg for the reins, and the four accomplices walked boldly to watch from the corner.
Soon they had mapped out the routine of the soldiers. At each corner of the extinct pyre a guard was stationed. Every three or four minutes a soldier would set out for the next corner clockwise, taking about a minute to reach it. For thirty seconds or so there would be two guards on that corner and none on one of the other three. Then the ‘relieved’ guard would proceed onward, clockwise; and so forth.
Gupta drew a grid in the sandy dirt and x-ed in different combinations of single soldiers, couples, and empty stations. He stared for a while, then stood and erased the pattern.
‘Better than I hoped for! We should have regular blind spots. Rotating the guard doesn’t keep the chaps on their toes at all. It accustoms them to novelty. Let us proceed.’
Lord Gibil sauntered off, swinging a walking stick pompously to distract attention. He headed for the remains of the elephant, a hummock of huge bones and torn hide which several cats and curs and carrion birds were quarrying. The good meat and offal had already been carted off.
Thessany, being in an advanced state of pregnancy, would stay with the cart. Alex took a couple of leather bags. Gupta donned a many-pocketed patchwork coat of nondescript confusing monochrome materials - he looked like a mass of clotted cobwebs. He and Alex wandered idly towards the ex-pyre.
The south face was in shadow; that was where the different ducts debouched into brick moulds, hidden behind what one hoped were still loose bricks.
Gupta halted, close by the city wall, and with his heel carved a circle in the soil. ‘Here’s the psychological boundary point - between guards ignoring you, and feeling curious. Don’t pass beyond. When I go, sit down in the circle with your back to the pyre.’
The westering sun was dazzling except in the immediate lee of the blackened brick mass. (Gibil had suggested an approach under cover of darkness, but Gupta had poured scorn. What would they be doing lurking outside the walls by night?)
The soldier at the south-east corner left his station and headed for the south-west corner. Gupta jigged his limbs and his coat of confusion, dislocatingly, and . . . what did he do next? What did he become? His shadow flitted away from Alex, who quickly sat down facing the opposite way.
Minutes passed: ten, fifteen, an age.
Then: ‘Open a bag!’
Ingots descended.
‘Now the other.’
More bars of gold.
‘Go; and come back.’
Scrambling up, Alex heaved a bag in each hand towards the carriage as fast as he could. He tumbled the contents in for Thessany to cover with straw.
Three trips later, Gupta’s voice said, ‘Don’t come back.’
This time Alex simply dumped the bags in the carriage, then unpegged the horses and climbed aboard.
They waited.
‘Thess?’
‘What?’
‘I once heard it said that the whole universe exists only as a thought in the mind of a god. It’s a pattern like a holographos - real to us, imaginary to the god. People who become aware of this can work what seem to be miracles.’
‘Like Gupta becoming invisible?’
‘Something like that, but what I’m thinking is . . . has it ever crossed your mind that maybe the whole of Babylon, us included, exists only as a pattern in the mind of some piece of tekhne at the Akademia of the Future? How could we tell if that was so? When we possessed the little scroll - when you called it a control scroll - I thought for a while that maybe it was part of what controls our reality. I thought it was a part which somehow had materialized inside Babylon - the way a god might reach into the world he imagines, and insert a miraculous object. I thought that maybe Babylon is a holographos visible to all the Akademics; and right now maybe they’re stepping right through our ghosts, observing how we steal the gold!
‘And maybe only an invisible man or woman can spy them watching us. Only someone who is full of clarity and detachment. Only someone who can trick the eye and mind.’
Thessany knit her brows. ‘That . . . sounds like a most delicious kind of intrigue. But Alex, what’s this Akademia of the Future you’re talking about? Is this some secret society Gupta has told you of?’
‘The Akademia at Heuristics, Thess.’
‘At where?’
‘I know it’s against the law to mention it! Surely we two can talk about it privately?’
‘If I only knew what we were supposed to be talking about! I’ve never heard of a place called Heuristics; or of this Akademia!’
‘But Thess . . . ! Look, you came to Babylon with your dad - what is it, five, six years ago? Where do you think you came from?’
‘I. . . yes, we did come from elsewhere. From another country, I forget which one. How remote it seems.’ ‘You came from America.’
‘I’ve never heard of such a place.’
Alex shivered despite the heat. ‘Thess . . . something has altered. Something in you; something in the city. Something has been changed.’
‘Of course I’ve changed. I’m pregnant.’
‘I don’t mean . . . ! Answer me this: where did the piece of tekhne in the temple come from? And the one in your chapel at home?’
‘Some Greek scientist crafted those. Aristotle ... or was it Archimedes? Maybe it was Archimedes. With a name like Archimedes his ancestors must have been princes of the Medes, and magi. No, I think it must have been Aristotle, the king’s tutor.’
Alex gripped her hand. ‘Thess! Think of Greeks: thousands of Greeks arriving as visitors! How do they get here? They come in a tekhne carriage that floats on air. The carriage comes from Heuristics.’
She laughed lightly. ‘I think the strain of our current exploit is telling on you. Lots of Macedonians and other Greeks came with Alexander’s armies and settled here in the city. But not recently.’
‘They arrive at the Ishtar Gate every day in that hovering carriage.’
‘You have my leave to go and stand at the Ishtar Gate for a week to try to spy this strange device. You won’t ever see it. There’s no such thing. People come to Babylon in coracles, with donkeys. Or on foot, or on horseback.’
‘Are you being honest with me, Thess? You aren’t teasing?’
Again, she laughed. ‘You're teasing me.’ A puzzled frown crossed her face. ‘I seem to remember . . . some kind of dream I had. Something like this fancy of yours. No, it eludes me. Dreams always do. They don’t mean much.’
Something had indeed shifted in the pattern of the city and its people, but it hadn’t shifted in Alex ... He remembered how he had once suspected his own sanity. Had he once, in fact, been mad? A visionary who dreamed of the distant future?
No. He struggled now to recall the tekhne of that future. If Thessany wasn’t japing him - and she certainly didn’t appear to be - then surely what had occurred was that sometime during the past half-year the pattern of the city had reached completion. Before, fresh information, fresh personae were still being input into the system. Personae had to be interfaced compatibly. Each carried a kind of key to open the locked city and fit into it. The city pattern had to be able to accept the influx. Now Babylonia was full up. The keys - logical connections to what went before - had been deleted.
Not from Alex, though. He still knew. He still remembered.
Why not from Alex? Was he a sort of cursor, a mobile marker threading the web of Babylonian life? Maybe he had merely been overlooked.
Had others been overlooked? How about Gupta, the invisible man?
Or was the explanation simply that the city had by now accumulated more than a half a decade's worth of events? Babylon’s processing capacity had begun to overload? Unnecessary memories had been dumped; or stored?
But not his.
In Thessany’s womb a foetus was thinking foetal thoughts, hearing mysterious sounds of unknown speech vibrate through the drumskin of her belly. Child within mother: one dawning new consciousness, taking up extra space in the pattern of Babylon . . . Therefore the mother had lost part of her memory? Could that be why Thessany had forgotten America except as a faded, irretrievable dream?
Perhaps all these explanations were true, and together summed up to the change which had occurred.
Could his love, who carried his child, be persuaded to remember what she now, to his horror, denied?
‘Here I am!’ Gupta, in his dingy cobwebs, hauled himself aboard, laden with more ingots.
The gold seemed stupid: fool’s gold. The real gold wasn’t any function of this feat of invisibility which Gupta had just pulled off, this hidden act of stealth. The really golden prize would be to see what was invisible. To behold what had vanished. To spy the secret onlookers.
Maybe there were no invisible onlookers strolling amidst the Babylonian ghosts, admiring, amused, intrigued by their antics. In that case the golden prize would be to perceive the tekhne-mind which was the true god-creator of Babylon: the mind which contained analogues of human beings whose originals lived out their lives elsewhere in places such as Oregon and New York and Calcutta.
‘All’s done that can be. Let’s collect your father.’
Thessany flicked the reins. ‘Gid-up!’
‘Gupta?’
‘What is it, Alex?’
‘I’m troubled.’
‘I need to relax. Tell me later.’ And Gupta commenced a breathing exercise.
In the disposition of the gold Alex played no part. It was another seven days before he could get a chance to talk to Gupta alone, at the end of the Indian’s weekly visit to train Thessany in subtle arts - a week during which worries about Muzi almost succeeded in distracting Alex.
Muzi had noted with the keenest interest the mysterious excursion undertaken by the four on the day directly after he had both saved, and challenged, Alex. Yet he pressed no questions upon Alex, nor in Alex’s hearing did he press any upon Thessany, or upon his father. (Lord Gibil now radiated contentment, with the merest thread of anxiety attached.) However, Muzi watched like a hawk and harked like a hare.
Alex had decided not to tell Thessany what Muzi had said to him, particularly since what he had told her while they were waiting in the carriage had struck her as so fantastical. In the house he avoided meeting her eyes and tried to be inconspicuous, cultivating his own version of invisibility, even though such behaviour was susceptible to a number of false interpretations.
