The Dreaming Dragons Part 16

'We are teetering on a knife edge,' the general says. He goes to a percolator, pours steaming coffee into two china cups. 'Nuclear deterrence is finally about to join chain mail and castle walls. _Any_ edge might tip the balance, revive the madness. You think the Russians aren't still smarting? They'd love to claw back their empire.' He adds abruptly, 'Do you remember the Foxbat incident in the mid-seventies?'

'I had more important things on my mind in the mid-seventies, General.'

Sawyer grimaces. 'Soviet fighter-bomber ended up in j.a.pan. We had its avionics stripped within days. When our own Tomcat went off the flat top into the wide blue sea, we spent a small fortune raising it before the Russkies could pay us back in kind, like the Chinese did in 2001 when our EP-3 came down in Hainan. If any bloc'd had a Mouse, it could have learned as much as it wished without the risk of diplomatic incident, just by asking him.'

The anthropologist is shocked into immobility. Slowly, his coffee spills into the saucer. 'My G.o.d,' he says. 'You want to use him as a spy. Is that all you see?'

'No!' Sawyer's left hand cracks down on the front of the desk. 'I want desperately to prevent him from ever being used as a spy. We are not ready for absolute access to all the dirty little secrets of the world. End of communism or not, the world is still rotten with mad tribalisms and old vengeance. The nukes still stand poised in many silos. We are not ready. Obligatory honesty is the one virtue the world cannot tolerate. Not one stone standing on another, our fields sown with salt....' He takes a deep breath between clenched teeth. 'Alf, this is hardly the best circ.u.mstance to talk about such a dismal topic as the state of my soul, but what I have to say concerns you and Mouse and a decision I have to take very soon.'

He picks up the small volume once more from the desk. 'Alf, are you a religious man?'

'I -- Uh, I imagine I might be cla.s.sed as a humanist agnostic. That is, I wors.h.i.+p at no church and I enter 'No Religion' on the Census form, but I guess when it comes down to it I believe in the G.o.d who put the Big Bangs in the universe.'

Sawyer smiles faintly. 'Son, your theology is a little out of date. You should talk to Fedorenko and his pal Lennox Harrington. Gluon theory has made a small alteration to cosmology: the hypothesis they're running this year is the Big Bag theory.' He opens the book. 'Alf, this Bible came to me from my grandfather. My father scorned the old man's belief, thinking ridicule a fas.h.i.+onable att.i.tude to adopt, and his life was a sad empty thing to behold, as sad and empty as the lives of the children today. Are you familiar with the story of Abraham and Isaac?'

Mouse gazes down on his uncle, sees Alf's annoyance and growing fear. 'I'm more familiar with the myths of the Murinbata and Ngularrnga aboriginals than those of the Hebrews.' When the general looks at him in silence, he adds with hostility, 'I've heard the Leonard Cohen track.'

'Bear with me, Alf. Chapter 22 of Genesis records that G.o.d said to Abraham, "Take thy only son, thy beloved son Isaac, with thee to the land of Moria, and there offer him to me in burnt sacrifice on a mountain I will show you." And they rode off with their servants, stopping at the foot of the mountain, and Abraham took his son up the slope. "They went on together," the Old Testament tells us, "'till they reached the place G.o.d had shown him -- "'

'For Christ's sake, Sawyer,' Alf says angrily, 'I don't want to hear this bloodthirsty, simple minded -- '

'Dr Dean, indulge me for a moment.' The general lowers his eyes once more to the book. ''And here he built an altar, and set the wood in order on it; then he bound his son Isaac and laid him down there on the altar, above the pile of wood. And he reached out, and took up the knife, to slay his son.''

Alf is on his feet, his hands on Sawyer's collar. 'You b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' he says in a high, impa.s.sioned voice. 'You sanctimonious b.a.s.t.a.r.d. A walking bomb -- so you've decided to defuse him, have you? A formal bullet in the head for potential treason? Or a nice clean injection from a veterinarian?'

At last the general's restraint wears thin; with an incisive, savage upward chop of both hands he frees himself from the wild man's grip and pushes him back heavily into his chair. Breathing hard, he says, 'Dr Dean, I'll let your grotesque performance pa.s.s just this once. Try anything like that again and I'll have you in solitary confinement so fast you won't have time to puke.' More calmly he regains his own seat. 'I pray to G.o.d that Mouse will not come to harm, that you and he can be returned to the outside world speedily, sound in body and spirit. Alf, this morning at three o'clock your ward left the room where you were both sleeping, made his way undetected to the Vault, and entered the zone.'

The colour leaves Alf's face; he sags. 'The Vault? You say he's in the Vault?'

'No. He came out immediately, unharmed. Do you understand what this implies?' The general picks up his book again. "Isaac, too, was spared in the moment of his father's test. And when it was done an angel of the Lord said to Abraham: 'I know now that thou fearest G.o.d; for my sake thou wast ready to give up thy only son." Listen, Alf. G.o.d told that righteous man, "I have taken an oath by my own Name to reward thee for this act of thine, when thou wast ready to give up thy only son for my sake. More and more will I bless thee, more and more will I give increase to thy posterity, till they are countless as the stars in heaven." Do you see, Alf? As the stars in heaven! "Thy children shall storm the gates of their enemies."' Reverently, he closes the book.

Cringing, shaking violently, Alf says, 'You'll send Mouse back into the Vault. My G.o.d, you really will.'

Sawyer is not offended. 'Alf, we must have those bodies retrieved. The need is imperative. We have pathologists standing by for postmortems, neurologists who can determine the degree of effectiveness of the arg-enkephalin defence. I have already told you that this decision had harrowed my soul. Now I realise that G.o.d has directed me to the answer. He alone is the giver of life, and He will take it back in any manner He chooses.' Sawyer's hand lingers on the book. 'This may be His final test for us, and He shall reward obedience to His divine will by blessing the nation whose sons do His bidding.'

Mouse, hovering, sees his uncle lean forward, sees in the tension of his muscles and the constricting flares of his aura the unbearable anguish of the man.

'You're going to kill the child because you want him dead. He frightens you, and your canting hypocrisy gives you a convenient set of skirts to cower behind. You're not doing it after instruction from G.o.d. I don't know if a direct command from the voice of G.o.d would justify a child's murder,' he says, hands gripped trembling on the arms of his chair, 'but you'll be doing it for _your_ reasons.'

'For my beloved nation,' Sawyer tells him.

'Oh yes, for patriotism and knowledge and power and greed. It's the way of old men, eh? You l.u.s.t after death, you send your children off to die in wars you've made in your guile and voracity -- ' Alf Dean is close to hysteria. 'Isn't it time to stop, now, while we're still just part of _human_ history? Don't you understand that the thing down there is a gate into something bigger than your pathetic, b.l.o.o.d.y-minded G.o.d?'

'That's enough!' White-faced, the general rises to his feet. 'I will not listen to this puerile blasphemy. You sicken me, Dean. You represent everything vile and ign.o.ble in this disintegrating culture.' Shouting, he summons his aide. 'Get this black son of a b.i.t.c.h out of my sight.' He glances at the clock on the wall. 'And get the Vault technicians on their toes. The boy goes in at midday. That gives them a little over ninety minutes to have their instruments ready.'

So you see, the dead tell Mouse, it is always the same, those who love are always too late and too weak, power is the domain of the blind and deaf; we have shown you a judgment wrought not in this moment, not on these princ.i.p.als, but in all the history of a living species, so that now you know who you are and what you must do: Yes, Mouse says, going to his insensible body, sinking once more into the demarcations of mortality, and he opens his eyes to the dim gaslight of the sick bay, the rage of his maturity like the rus.h.i.+ng of a great wind within his breast, the dormant spark of his consciousness rising out of the embers of two million years of waiting humanity, the hot gusts of its sudden brilliant incandescence buffeting him, drawing in his breath to cry from the depths of his single ident.i.ty, 'It is begun!'

He rises from the bed and walks unnoticed through the midst of the medical staff, the soldiers in the corridors, technicians cursing at their balky mechanisms, and enters the general's office. 'Come with me,' he tells the startled man, and turns without another word to find his uncle. 'Alf, we're going down to the Vault,' he explains to the sick man, helping him get to his feet. An aureole of power brings them without protest in his wake, autumn leaves tumbling obediently to the change of time, Sawyer's teeth bared, his eyes wide and staring, Alf numbed in shock, and they make their way down the steep slope to the wall of invisible fire and through it, to the lip of the echoing cavern.

'Follow me,' says the young man. 'The Soul Core will not harm you.'

They enter the ten circles of light that guard the Resting Place.

'The realities of metaphysics can only be approached,' Mouse explains, 'through the intermediaries of symbols. Here is the domain of humanity, the tribunal of the dead and living, the image of your heritage from the earliest brutes who found fire and stone and projected from their desperation the first flickerings of consciousness.'

From deepest b.l.o.o.d.y jasper they advance to jacinth, the orange pall of a moon moving into the world's shadow.

'Pi-Ioh rules this realm of Angels, the damaged ones who came before humanity and suffered exile. You share their seed, though they abandoned your world before the second coming of consciousness. It is their base you found on the moon, their point of departure for the stars.'

At the third circle, a topaz glow touches their faces.

'Here are the Archangels, the custodians of genetic advance to perception and memory; their liege is Thoth, Pi-Hermes.'

A tremble of generative power comes with the brightening of sardonyx.

'Suroth commands the Princ.i.p.alities, who capture the sun's energy in living cells and bring forth the oxygen which fuels all consciousness.'

In the gold of chrysolite they find the sun itself, fusing the light breath of s.p.a.ce to the spinning, heavy building blocks of matter.

'Here is supreme beauty, the great Virtues whose head is Pi-Rhe.'

They lift their hands against the swelling glory, the golden-green effulgence of chrysoprase.

'The sixth circle is the reign of justice, of those n.o.ble Powers who bend the knee to Ertosi, whose arms wield the sword.'

Now the light is sheerest emerald, spirit and matter brought together in life knowing itself.

'True knowledge is love,' Mouse says. 'Pi-Zeus is father of life, and his servants are the Dominations.'

Sawyer falls to his knees, clutching his heart, in the cascade of beryl radiance. The boy lifts him, leads him through the eighth circle.

'The dead pa.s.s backward through the mystery of Time to the centre of reality. These are the Thrones, commanded by Rempha, lord of the dimensions beyond s.p.a.ce.'

At the ninth circle, they blaze in the searing blue of sapphire, the purest glory of the star Canopus.

'We approach our destination. Here is a profound mystery, the deepest archetypal ideas of this world's consciousness. They are the Cherubim, lances of light in their hands, under the guidance of Intelligence.'

'Mouse, please, no,' begs Alf, palms pressed into his eyes, and: 'I -- _can't_ ...' shrieks Sawyer.

'The tenth circle,' the young man says inexorably, thrusting them forward into the violet, the incomprehensible ultraviolet of absolute amethyst, 'is the realm of the Seraphim, the veil of eternity, the Cloud of Unknowing, the edge of the expanding universe where one-over-_tau_ becomes infinite.'

Howling in the intolerable cosmic splendour, they lurch through the tenth circle. Darkness enfolds them. The flesh has not peeled from their bones, stripped by the las.h.i.+ng X-rays at the perimeter of the universal singularity. Tears cover their wet cheeks, blur their slowly restored sight. Above them, immense and enduring, hangs the white curve of the Vault's central Sphere. In his resonant, childishly unbroken voice, with the mien of a Druid, Hieronymus Dean tells the two adults: 'Bow your heads. You stand in the Presence of the Tabernacle.'

And the dead man hoots with silent laughter: Jesus, Mouse, he says chidingly, throttle back a bit on the ba.s.s pedal, you'll have Sawyer throwing a psychotic episode; here, permit me to borrow your larynx for a moment.

Mouse releases his body, and when he speaks his voice has deepened, taken on completely the tone of Bill delFord.

'You'll have to forgive the boy, gentlemen, he's just discovered the joys and excesses of Wagnerian adolescence and it's gone to his head.'

The general reels away, his right hand twitching in a cruciform gesture. Alf merely sways, blinking slowly.

'For Christ's sake,' says Bill's voice, irascibly, from the young man's mouth. 'Is there anybody there? One knock for yes, two knocks for no.'

'You utter the Name?' Sawyer shrieks. 'Unclean creature.' He blunders into a transparent, charged barrier; all his scant hair lifts, in a parody of fright, from his scalp.

'If you'd prefer to talk to the Man Himself,' Bill's voice says with peppery scorn, 'I could arrange it, but we'd have to patch the conversation through a translator unless you speak fluent Aramaic.'

'Antichrist!'

'Pull yourself together, man, or I'll have you dismantled under the provisions of the Shoddy Constructions Act of 4004 BC. Oh good grief, Hugh, he was right about his combat nerves -- he's just p.i.s.sed himself again. Sawyer, it's a good thing we're a Rogerian, empathic, non-judgmental G.o.d. Though I confess my fund of positive regard for you is becoming increasingly conditional.'

'Mouse,' Alf says, seizing the young man's broad shoulders, 'stop it. Stop it. This is sheer sadism.'

Calm eyes meet his accusing, fearful gaze. Mouse says in his own tones, from the centre of his newly found ident.i.ty, 'I'm sorry, you're right. They don't realise their own force. It's only a few hours since they died, you see. In many ways they're wiser than I am, but they're like men drunk for the first time.' He stoops beside the general, who lies curled in his own stink, the four fingers of his right hand jammed in his mouth. 'I am not the Antichrist, Joseph. Stand up. I have no intention of punis.h.i.+ng you further. Believe me, General, I'm sorry we humiliated you.' With a sweet, wry smile he adds, 'I'm only human.'

'I wish I could believe that, Mouse,' Alf says. He steadies Sawyer as the man gets totteringly to his feet. 'Why have you brought us into this terrible place?'

'I'll show you.' Mouse touches the pink-grey folds of their cortical rinds, bypa.s.sing sense with a complex pulse of long frequency radiation.

They stand, it seems, under the smoky brilliance of tropical noon, hot swamps stretching torpid before them. There is a thras.h.i.+ng; a huge fin-spined reptile, long tailed and narrow shouldered but the size of a fully grown lion, is tearing at the slow, blundering beast it has dragged from the fetid water. Somehow they know that they are displaced in time as well as s.p.a.ce, that the equatorial sun glares down not on some distant planet but on Southwest America, as it was 270 million years in the past. Blood pours from the opened side of the ma.s.sive Diadectes; it dies without complaint as the spined Dimetrodon lunches on its flesh.

'This is Permian Earth,' Mouse tells them, bringing their knowledge into precise focus. 'All the continents are welded into a single gigantic ecology. Glaciers cover India, southern Africa, Antarctica, Australia, while life thrives in western Europe and America. Half the world is locked into winter, empty of living creatures, for these reptiles take their heat from the sun. In the long nights of the glacial lat.i.tudes, only the smallest of them can find sanctuary in hibernation, buried in insulating mud. But twenty million years later -- '

Snow is melting to a filthy slush, crystals of ice chiming as the wind breaks them from low, dead branches. They huddle from the chill, rays of reflected light spearing their eyes. A small, hairy creature scurries across the snow, a Moschops, more mammal than reptile in its trotting gait.

'The therapsids have evolved endothermy,' Mouse tells them. 'No mammals exist yet on the earth, but these reptiles have catapulted in a genetic explosion to the beginnings of warm blooded dominance.'

'Take us back!' Sawyer screams. 'I don't believe -- _What are you doing to me?_'

'I am showing you the history of consciousness,' the young man tells him gravely. 'There's no reason for alarm, we're safe from the animals. This is a -- call it a reconstruction.' For an instant, they are back in the cavern of the Vault, the sphere's enormous curve looming above them. Then they seem to be standing on the fine white sand of a Jura.s.sic sh.o.r.e. Blue ocean surges gently; the long necks of plesiosaurs lift gracefully from the buoyant water, snap down to scoop fish from the shallows.

'We have moved forward almost a hundred million years,' Mouse says. 'The polar ice has long diminished. All the world is mild. It'll be eons before such a paradise comes again. Now the dinosaurs truly rule the world, though the first mammals have found their modest homes in the ecology.' They flash into snows once more, under the purple sky of southern spring. On the horizon, citadels of ice tower to the sky. At their feet, though, the light covering of snow is crossed with the deep tracks of heavy reptiles. 'Now that the breakthrough to endothermy has been consolidated, deep Gondwana has been thoroughly colonised by the descendants of the early warm blooded therapsids and thecodonts.'

'Mouse,' Alf says incredulously, 'Are you saying that the dinosaurs were not cold blooded after all? I thought that guy, that biologist, uh -- '

'Albert Benett. John Ruben. They and their colleagues were in error.'

'So why did the saurians die out when the glaciers returned?'

'That was not the reason,' Mouse says. 'The temperature of the ocean dropped only slightly between the Cretaceous and the Cenozoic. The difference could _not_ affect the dinosaurs, since most of them did possess homeostatic temperature regulation.'

Again, he strokes their brains; awareness expands convulsively. The ectothermic animals, they understand, are those which depend for the stability of their metabolism on the vagaries of weather as much as on the energy released from the food they consume. With the leap to warm bloodedness, high basal metabolism replaces this utter dependence upon the benevolence of climate. Chemical activity in the cells soars by four times; heart, lungs, muscles surge in endurance. The cost is defrayed to the supporting ecology -- endotherms are greedy, of necessity, gulping down twenty or thirty times the ma.s.s of food required to sustain their slower cousins. Thermal loss becomes a larger threat, to be countered by the selection of genes for insulation -- feathers, hair.

'My G.o.d,' Alf breathes, with abrupt, acute insight. 'The Plumed Serpent. The feathered dragon in my dream.'

'Yes,' says Mouse.

Eighty million years flicker in a grey haze; they look out across a late Cretaceous vista of howling blizzard, darkened sky. A troop of small, drenched figures moves, bent, against the frozen wind. Stone knives are clenched in their three-fingered hands. Rude garments cover their heads and shoulders. The figures at the rear of the group drag several slaughtered animals through the snow. Sawyer gasps, strangling: the man in the lead has turned, and in the failed light the lips of his muzzle peel back from long, sharp teeth in a bark of command; it is suddenly, mind-wrenchingly evident that he is not a man at all.

'But this is -- the earth?' Alf cries.

'It is,' Mouse says. 'Pangea has long since broken up, the continents are slowly drifting apart into their present locations. India is moving on its plate toward collision with Asia. There are lemurs in the tropics, but their kin will never develop into human beings. We are standing near the northern extremities of Antarctica. Australia has still not fully fractured away. You are looking at the first intelligent beings brought forth from the loins of our world.'

The dinosaurs stump through the snow with the stolid patience of all primitive hunters. Even the tallest of them stands only as high as the general's shoulder.

Sawyer whirls on the young man in triumph. 'Lies,' he says, his eyes dilated in the gloom. 'A fabrication to tempt my faith! I am not deceived. Look at their skulls. They can't possibly be intelligent, their cranial capacity doesn't exceed 500 ccs. I am not an ignoramus, Father of Lies.' Incredibly, he smirks. 'Try to be consistent.'

'Even in your own terms,' Mouse says wearily, 'you d.a.m.n yourself in your pride. Look now.'

He transduces their perception to the astral spectrum. The icy landscape is whipped away. Pale lights glow where the dinosaurs trudge, plasmoid globes of red and violet. Streamers of luminance web the aura, linking them in a shuttling loom of shared awareness. Beyond the group, the sky is hazy with a dome of s.h.i.+mmering filaments.

'These creatures,' Mouse explains, 'are roughly equivalent to _h.o.m.o erectus_. They make simple tools, they know the use of fire when they can find wood in this appalling territory, they share a rudimentary language. But far more profoundly, they have taken the step to collective ident.i.ty.'

Alf whispers, in astonishment: 'A true social _gestalt?_ You mean they share a single consciousness?'

'They const.i.tute a collective unconscious,' Mouse corrects him. 'Individually, they are less intelligent than chimpanzees. But their brains are sufficiently complex to perform the crucial duties of an organ for intelligence: the transduction of percepts to the collective biocomputer, and the return interface of concepts and will to their expression in individual behaviour.'

Day returns. Now they view a warm valley cut through stupendous glaciers. From the icy hill where they stand, a panorama of cl.u.s.tered stone structures is visible in the midst of huge-leaved trees and fat, browsing reptiles, floating artifacts moving with purposeful grace above the boughs, brightly plumed bipedal reptiles taking their ease in civic clearings, a faint skirl of alien pipes reaching up in s.n.a.t.c.hes to the hill. Stooped, furry, apelike creatures scurry among the intelligent dragons.

'We are at thirty million years. This is no longer entirely a reconstruction. The scene we view is the enhanced trace memory of an Ancestor who lingered for a moment upon this spot.'

'Those apes -- '

'Archaic pongids. They are the root stock of _h.o.m.o sapiens_ as we know it; today, their princ.i.p.al non-hominid representatives are the orangs, the gorillas, and the chimps. Hylobatids -- today, the gibbons and siamangs -- diverged from the primary monkey lineage at about this time.'

Sawyer says, 'This is insane. The map on the moon is only five million years later than this, and there's no slightest trace of a reptile civilisation.'

'Wait,' Mouse says. He s.h.i.+fts to the astral spectrum. Radiance is a lacework of ineffable energies, the arterial map of an entire culture, each individual the synaptic nexus of a thousand contacts. They behold a hierarchy of connection that brings tears bursting to their eyes.

'It's -- lovely,' Alf says. The general is silent, his fingers close, and relax, and grip once more, nails pressing deep into palms.

'We are close to the centre of the mystery. What you see is a symbolic transformation of a ceaseless ebb and flow of information, an exchange of information from brain to brain mediated by low frequency fields of about 500 cycles per second and a millionth of a watt in strength. For _Saurus sapiens_ at this point of cultural evolution, each living nervous system is a single integrated circuit in a vast biocomputer running millions of shared-time programs. Joseph, you have had experience with electronics -- do you see the cultural implications that shaped the evolution of this species?'

'Noise,' the general says, his eyes glazed. 'Intensity reduction. Impossible. Impossible. If these beasts were a hive with a single compound intelligence, they would be penned into a niche ten or twenty kilometres across.'

'Just so,' Mouse says. 'For the dinosaurs, there was no Magellan. At a distance of 10,000 kilometres from the centre of their community, their channel to the collective repository of functioning intelligence would be slashed by 99 per cent. They would be reduced to the status of animals -- worse, for in their evolution, their specialised instincts had been abandoned. The saurians had a saying as old as language itself: 'The Nesting Place and the Resting Place are one.' It was not piety alone; the principle was a recognition of their absolute mutual dependence, the imperative of their territorial confinement.'

'Telepathy...' Sawyers says softly. 'What tacticians they must have been.'

'No,' says Mouse sharply. 'War would have been an abhorrence to them, had they been capable of conceiving such a thing. Do you amputate part of your own brain? More: the saurians were pure carnivores. As _h.o.m.o sapiens_ developed an incest taboo to contain the terrible possibilities of perennial s.e.xuality, _Saurus sapiens_ evolved a virtually infrangible prohibition on intraspecific killing.' He glanced at them carefully. 'To cement this taboo, they extended their carnivore habits in a striking, paradoxical ritual.' He pauses. Alf looks at him, aghast.

'They ate their dead,' the anthropologist guesses. He turns away, revulsion in his face.

'By consuming those they had lost,' Mouse declares with pa.s.sion, 'they affirmed the sacred dignity of each individual's life. No flesh is so sweet as the meat of one's own kind. When a species is obliged by instinct to eat of its dead, it is faced time without number with the final test of its own mortality.'

'Satan,' Sawyer says joyously, 'you convict yourself out of your own mouth. No crime is so foul, so unspeakable as cannibalism -- no, not even parricide and incest. And you praise these loathsome beasts!'

Mouse regards him. 'Do you recall the greatest sacrament of your faith, Joseph? "Take, eat, for this is My Body. Drink, for this is My Blood."' Sawyer's face becomes a cold mask.