The Book Of Ian Watson, page 27
“I could build a box to store them in,” said Hote. “O the Soldier could guard it with his spear.”
“We must keep them separate,” said Emtep, “otherwise they might join up of their own accord, honey or no honey.”
“Let’s not forget,” said Te, “that Otem taught us to read words. And he told us of the boxes, and the land of life. He might possess more information. He could be valuable. The difference is, now we can control him.” The Mason grinned. “How many bits is he broken into?”
I scanned the ground and strummed my abacus. “About seventy, I’d say.”
“That’s one for each of us. I propose that we all carry a piece of him round with us, in case we need to hear his voice. Emt the Smith can fix loops of God’s gold wire to each part. We can hang them from our necks as amulets. If they’re a nuisance we can take them off. If he’s disobedient we can scorch him or smear foul black paste on him.”
“Yes!” cried many voices. So the proposal was adopted.
I hurried to find Em the Musician so that we could enjoy sex together. All the excitement had inflamed me.
However, Em was already lying with someone else. I felt jealousy mount in me as I watched them—but then I restrained myself. Blows struck in anger could break an arm off. Blows could smash a person to pieces.
As soon as Em’s lover stood up and saw me, he said, “I am Temte the Manservant.”
“Is Emep the Maidservant busy, then?” Temte usually lay with Emep.
“Why yes, Treasurer.”
“I see. Well, we shall all be busy soon. We’re going to burrow out through the end of the world. This will be a great task.”
“I’ll serve gladly,” vowed Temte; and I knew that I had made a loyal friend, where I might rashly have made an enemy.
When he had gone I sank down by Em. “Surely you have a voice,” I said.
By way of answer she played music at me, and in my heart I clearly understood the tune to mean: “A voice I will have, when I have lips and a face.”
Heedless of the fact that Em had just had sex, I fell upon her lovingly. But gently, lest she break. Or lest I break a part of myself. It was then that I found that woman’s sexual diamond can be sharp and bright again immediately; unlike man’s. I decided to keep this information to myself, since men outnumbered women by a factor of two and additional sexual opportunity might interfere with our work schedule.
Within a few hundred thousand sand-turns Carpenter Hote and helpers had carved a tunnel all the way through the wall just beyond God’s feet. This tunnel was ample enough for two people to crawl along in comfort side by side. It led to a second wooden wall which was similar but distinct—between the two there was a narrow fissure.
I had crawled to inspect the gap, but the tips of my fingers would hardly fit into it. I was wearing the upper right section of Otem’s head, including one eye and one protruding ear; so I pressed his eye to the crack.
“Look! Tell me what you see.”
Silence.
I bit Otem’s ear-lobe harshly. “Look!”
“Ouch!” squeaked the Priest’s voice. “I am looking. It’s very dark between the walls. The crevice is as narrow as can be. That’s all. Give up this madness while you’re still safe. Plug the tunnel with wax.”
“Never! Shut up again.” I withdrew; and soon Hote was scraping away at the second wall with his tools.
I met Musician Em. She looked different to my eyes. She stroked her belly, which was swollen. She played music which I found hard to understand. Meanwhile Maidservant Emep approached as if called by the strings of Em’s lute.
She too stroked her belly. “I am Emep, and I’m swelling. Something is growing in Em and me.”
“Is any other woman swelling?”
“No, just us two.”
Emep wore most of Otem’s left foot around her neck. I reached and twisted a toe. “What grows in her, Otem?”
“Can a foot see into a belly?”
Em herself wore a shapeless piece of Otem’s insides. I didn’t know whether this had any feelings but I jabbed a finger into it. “What grows in Em?”
“The energy of your loins, Tep,” said that chunk of guts.
Hote and helpers experienced greater difficulty with the second wall. Diffuse aether was flowing into the slight gap between the shells. Just as it’s hard to pull a sheet of papyrus loose from the aether river—the papyrus sticks where it floats and feels heavier—so there was a tension across the fissure between the walls. It took effort to shoulder through, and gouge beyond. Otem’s various parts mocked our efforts, but we punished them and doubled our exertions, working harder shorter shifts in the tunnel. After several hundred thousand more sand-turns the second wall was fully tunnelled through—disclosing a third wooden wall. By now the tunnel was as long as three of us lying head to toe.
When Hote finally broke through the third wall, many hundreds of thousands of turns later, he uttered a great Ha! of triumph. Clustered round the tunnel entrance, we clamoured to know what he saw.
“I behold stone!” came the answer.
But his answer was almost drowned by other cries from nearby—cries of shock rather than acclaim. O the Soldier came running.
“Treasurer! Em the Musician and Maidservant Emep—they’re splitting.”
“What?” Yet my wits did not desert me. “Find Ep the Nurse, O! Tell her to bring honey.”
I hurried in the direction of some of those shocked voices; and found Em lying on the ground upon her back. Her lute was cast aside, as if useless to express her predicament. Her legs were spread apart. A broad crack had appeared on her scant skirt and belly.
Even as I watched, this crack yawned much wider—and a glistening green ball rolled out of Em’s belly.
The ball unfolded itself; it sprouted a number of legs and staggered erect. The thing was kin to one of our captive beetles, though considerably larger.
I yanked Otem’s ear-lobe, directing his eye at the creature.
“What is its name, Otem?”
“Ah, yes,” whispered that hated but at times useful voice, “the knowledge comes. Scarab: its name is scarab.”
O the Soldier trotted up, with Nurse Ep following at slower pace so as not to drop her tray. The scarab jerked its head about and clashed its jaws.
“Slay it with your spear!” I ordered O. And in that moment I named something which was beyond Otem’s knowledge. I named the possibility of killing something, of rendering it dead. Otem had been smashed to pieces but he had neither died nor slept.
Immediately I had second thoughts. What if the scarab was something godly or demonish which had entered our lives? Was it wise to kill it impetuously?
“No, no, do not slay,” I countermanded. “Capture it. Crack its legs with your spear shaft. Cut off its wings, if any, with your blade. Bind it with rope from God’s hair. No, with wire! With golden wire. Drag it to pasture on Hotemtep’s thigh. Peg it securely. And O—beware its jaws.”
This was done.
“Aren’t you clever?” sneered my Otem amulet.
Ep smeared honey into the crack in Em and pressed her together. Then she went away to tend likewise to Emep—for shouts told us that she too had produced a scarab.
After a good many turns Em stood up, took her lute, and played a wailing melody.
Scarcely had the two hamstrung scarabs been pegged on what remained of the God’s thigh-flesh, than Carpenter Hote approached.
“My job’s almost done. Stone is Mason Te’s province. But listen to this, Treasurer. As soon as I began enlarging the hole, my Otem started babbling.”
Hote’s share of the Priest had been a knee. Out of the hollow of that knee Otem’s voice ranted quietly, thus:
“I name the tiny light at the end of blackness, a star. I name the blazing brighter golden fire, the Sun. Sun and star shine upon the land of life!”
“Did you see any star or Sun, Hote?”
“I only saw stone.”
“Is there a lot of resistance from the aether?”
“Yes. Te will have a hard time of it. But it isn’t insuperable.”
Otem’s knee said, “When the final granite shell is pierced, much aether will escape. You will see the Sun by night, the star by day. Or the other way round; I’m not sure.”
“What is day?” I asked the knee. “What is night?”
It giggled. “Who cares? A mountain of stone sits on top of all the shells. It’s tremendous. No one could ever cut through it.”
“Then how do we see the star and the Sun?”
The knee simply resumed its litany. “We’ll still be safe from demons, I pray. Unless they hear us scrabbling. Unless they smell the aether that escapes. Beware!”
I hit the knee just below the kneecap, making it jerk. “How do you know about day and night, and Sun and star?”
“When the final wood was pierced the aether shifted, and a veil fell from me; I knew. Beware day and night.”
“How can we beware what we don’t know?” snarled Hote. Wisely Otem fell silent.
Te and helpers began to drill and scrape to open tiny wounds in the stone. Into these holes he smeared oil which he then set alight with silex sparks—and quenched with cups of spit. As though to escape this punishment by flame and moisture the wounds wriggled deeper into the stone. Hammer and chisel could break off flakes and chunks and even little boulders.
The work was hard and dangerous. One labourer suffered from smoke. Another was charred by flame. A third lost an eye—gouged out when his chisel flew askew; but Nurse Ep was able to fix the eye back with honey. Gardener Hoë had her left foot crushed by a tumbling boulder. Since nothing was actually broken off, Ep couldn’t help Hoë. So Hoë limped thereafter, dragging her bad foot behind her.
Timekeeper Ote turned his sand-glass a myriad times, but slowly the tunnel lengthened.
Meanwhile the two scarabs were causing trouble. Their appetites were huge. They devoured all within reach. The once-fat pasture of God’s flesh was fast becoming mere scraps and tatters attached to the bone. Though the scarabs were hamstrung they often wrenched their tether-pegs free and squirmed to attack and eat our beetles and mosquitoes. O had to stand guard almost permanently, ready to bludgeon them.
“Theirs is a hunger typical of life,” Otem’s head-part told me. “Beware of life.”
Otem had also claimed that the energy of my loins was what had swollen Musician Em. After the emergence of the scarab from her belly Em avoided sex with me. Emep likewise spurned Temte; and soon other women were following their example. Imagine my astonishment when one time I surprised Em and Emep snuggled away together inside the empty jaw of God. The two women were having sex with each other. Both were using their hands a great deal. Em was plucking music from Emep’s body, causing a moaning song to issue from deep inside the Maidservant. Emep was moving her mouth on Em’s legs and loins and fingering her, playing her like a flute.
I wondered at first, angrily, whether to beat the two of them apart with Otem’s rod. Yet after I had watched for a while I found myself pleasurably excited. Stepping closer and crouching down, I enquired whether I might join them; and if so, in what style?
Emep panted. “So that no scarab is conceived!”
“You might be wise. Their hunger’s ravenous. Tell me how.”
“Lie upon my behind while we squeeze together,” said Emep. “Then lie upon Em’s.”
I did so. I enjoyed. Up to a point. I don’t know for sure if the two women enjoyed, but afterwards Em pressed her blank face gently to mine, rubbing softly against my visage.
Eventually the stone wall was tunnelled right through. Beyond the usual narrow fissure, rose a wall of sparkling granite. Granite was the hardest wall of all to tunnel. Mason Te and helpers (of whom I was one, of course) finally had resort to polishing the granite away by using jewels from our treasury. You crouched in the tunnel with a jewel held full in your fist, sometimes in both fists, depending on size. You leaned your weight forward and scrubbed around and around.
Diamonds were best for the purpose. Amethysts rubbed away too rapidly, staining your hands a prickly mauve. Rubies and sapphires also wore away, more slowly, coating you with sharp dust, deep red, azure. Another myriad of turns passed by.
Why were we striving so? In despair at ever rubbing through the granite, and depressed by the tension of aether in the gaps, I asked myself this question more than once. No doubt we all suffered the same crisis of confidence, but nobody voiced such doubts aloud. The pieces of Otem performed that service for us vociferously enough (if hushedly).
Yet the answer was obvious. The answer had been shown us by the scarabs. Until we could burrow out into the land of life, sex and joy must be unnatural to us.
At long last we had all but tunnelled through. How did we know that our work was nearly at an end? Why, our method had polished the granite to a surface like glass. When that surface became very thin we began to see a hint of what lay beyond through the sparkle-specks embedded in the rock. We polished more gently. We did not lean our weight forward at all. Eventually we could stare through what was virtually a window.
An enormous volume of darkness gloomed beyond. In the darkness several large motionless things loomed. In turn we all took a trip down the tunnel to stare through that window. Even Em went to listen to the echoes of her lute returning from beyond.
When we had all gathered outside again, I asked Oëp the Surveyor, “What do you make of it?” Oëp had the keenest eyesight of us all.
“Hmm. I saw four giant jars, each with the head of a beast as a stopper.”
“Are the beasts alive?”
“No.”
“And what else?”
“There’s a vast wall of rock with a wooden door in it—a door as tall as the God himself. Overhead there’s a roof of rock. I didn’t see any Sun or star, though.”
“Beware, beware!” said part of Otem. “You haven’t stuck your head into the chamber yet.”
“Then we shall do so,” I said. “Mason Te, take hammer and chisel—and smash the window.”
“Yes, Treasurer.” Te crawled back inside.
A couple of turns later we all heard the window break. Immediately aether streamed past us fiercely into the tunnel. There was a great wind, a turbulence. I heard a scream—and thought that Te was screaming. In fact this was the sound of aether escaping out of the hole he had broken, as he later told us. Right now he shouted back to reassure us—he had nearly been swept over the edge.
Two other events clamoured for attention.
“Look up the river!” howled Boatman Emtep. “Our boat sinks! It sinks!”
O the Soldier roared, “Look to God’s thigh! The scarabs are free!”
I quit the tunnel mouth and ran. So did O and the boatmen and a good many others. When we reached the river side of God’s thigh, we were astonished. Most of the aether had drained from the river. The boat no longer floated; it lay grounded on the bottom, tilted over. Ho and Emtep clung to each other and wailed with grief. But more amazing still was the sight of the scarabs. The two creatures were devouring one another.
One scarab’s jaws had expanded to gobble the whole body of the other scarab. The victim in turn was consuming its attacker from within. Imagine two bubbles on the aether river merging into a single bubble which then shrinks away. That’s how it was. One scarab ate the other; the other ate the one. O had no way to prise them apart with his spearshaft. The mingled mass got smaller—till presently nothing remained of the scarabs but a green stain on God’s thigh bone.
Truly this was a time of horrid marvels; for now other voices back at the tunnel were called out, “The star! The star!”
I hastened back there. O followed me, spear at the ready.
People milled around the tunnel entrance, several looking dazed. I saw Surveyor Oëp force his way within and followed him. Soon we were both clinging to the edge of the portal which Te had opened. A granite cliff yawned sheer below, dropping to a plain of dusty stone. Above our heads the precipice continued upward—then there was empty space, then a stone sky.
“Look that way, Treasurer—near where the sky meets the wall.”
I did as Oëp showed, craning my neck and tilting my head. A twinkling white light assailed my sight.
“The star, the star,” I said stupidly.
Oëp crowded his head against mine. “Whatever it is, it’s a long way off.”
“Re-mote!” cackled Otem’s neck, which Oëp wore.
“We’re viewing it through a shaft bored upward at a slant through the stone sky. That shaft must be the length of our world, oh, thirty times over!”
“Just as well it’s there,” said I. “Is it wide enough to crawl up?”
“Yes. But how do we reach the mouth?”
“No way!” said Otem’s neck. “You’ll never do it. And you can forget all about the wooden door. Even if you cut your way through that, oh the blockages and barriers beyond! The granite portcullises, the pits as deep as valleys!”
“Shut up,” I said. “That star is our signal-lamp. If we hang ropes tied to ropes down this cliff, we can descend. We can walk to the wall. Emt the Smith will make nails to drive into the cracks in the stone. He’ll build a ladder of nails all the way up to the sky. Once a few of us reach the mouth of the star-shaft, we can help the others up by pulling. We’ll leave by way of the sky-tunnel.”
“Folly, folly,” said Otem.
The next moments were ones of total terror.
The giant wooden door began to groan and shake. With great grindings and screechings slowly it started to open outward! Blinding light flooded around the edges. From beyond, deafening sounds boomed; voices of thunder! My heart hammered and my limbs quaked.
I nearly became insensible. Somehow I managed to haul myself—and Oëp by the scruff—back to the mouth of the tunnel. Even there, all present were stunned, dazzled, and terrified. Still, I hadn’t taken leave of myself—as witness my rescue of Oëp. So I had the wit not to say anything about Priest Otem having been right. What I said was this:
“Listen, everyone: there are giant creatures outside. Spread the word quickly and quietly. After that, be silent. Do nothing.”
