Somewhere East of Life. Brian Aldiss
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people like the author to whom you refer, truth lies in mystery, for others in clarity. We have the science of medicine now, but prayer used to be the great clarifier. The old Christian churches used to serve as clarifying machines.’
‘You mean they helped you to think straight in what you might call “this doleful jeste of life”.’
‘I’ve just got to get a millimetre further in.’
They continued to walk in a darkness the extent of which Burnell could hardly comprehend.
‘Anyhow, you’re good company,’ Maté said, affectionately. ‘Is there anything I can do for you in return?’
‘More oxygen,’ Burnell said. ‘It’s hot in this …’ Uncertain between the words ‘chair’ and ‘cathedral’, he came out with ‘chairch’. ‘As a chairch architect, I’ve visited most of the cathedrals in Europe – Chartres, Burgos, Canterbury, Cologne, Saragossa, Milano, Ely, Zagreb, Gozo, Rheims …’
He listened to his voice going on and on. When it too had faded into the distance, he added, ‘But this is the first time I’ve ever been in a hot and stuffy cathedral or chairch.’
‘I’ll put this match out. There are new ways. What we medicos call neural pathwise. Your friend Kafka – personally I’d have lobotomized him – he said that “all protective walls are smashed by the iron fist of technology”. Whingeing, of course, the fucker was always whingeing. But it’s the tiny little fist of nanotechnology which is smashing the walls between human and human. In the future, we shall all be able to share memories and understandings. Everything will be common property. Private thought will be a thing of the past.’
Burnell laughed. He had not realized that Maté was such good company. To continue the joke, he said, ‘In that connection, Jesus Christ was pretty au fait with nanotechnology. You remember? That resurrection of the body stuff? Strictly Frankenstein stuff. Dead one day, up and running the next.’
Maté professed himself puzzled. They halted under a statue of Averroës. He had heard of Frankenstein. It was the other great Christian myth which puzzled him. This was almost the first time Burnell had ever encountered anyone walking in a cathedral who had never heard of Jesus Christ.
Since the man was interested, Burnell tried to deliver a brief résumé of the Saviour’s life. The heat and darkness confused him. He could not recall how exactly Jesus was related to John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary. Nor could he remember whether Christ was his surname or Christian name.
‘I see, so they hanged him in the end, did they?’ said Maté. ‘You’d be better not to remember such depressing things.’
It seemed sacrilegious to mention the name of Jesus in such a place.
The cathedral was constructed in the form of a T, the horizontal limb being much longer than the vertical, stretching away into the dark. The weight of masonry pressed down on Burnell’s head and shoulders. Great columns like fossil vertebrae reared up on every side, humming with the extreme messages they carried. In defiance of the laws of physics, they writhed like the vital parts of the chordata, click-clack, clickety-clack, climbing lizard-tailed into the deeper darknesses of the vaulting overhead. He could feel them entwined up there.
Burnell and Maté had come to the junction of the great T. The vertical limb of this overpowering masterpiece sloped downwards. Burnell stopped to stare down the slope, though it was more sensed than seen. Instead of imagining that hordes of women were passing by in the gloom, he giggled at Maté’s latest joke; the demon claimed not to have heard of the Virgin Mary either. He was now sitting on Burnell’s shoulder in an uncomfortable posture.
‘The devil’s about to appear,’ he said. ‘Hold tight.’
‘The devil? But you hadn’t heard of the—’
‘Forget reality, Roy. It’s one of the universe’s dead ends …’
‘But would you happen to know if this is Sainsbury Cathedral?’
At the far distant end of the slope, the sallopian tube, a stage became wanly illuminated. In infinite time. The. Pause. Stage. Pause. Be. Pause. Came. Pause. Wan. Pause. Lee. Pause. Ill. Pause. You. Pause. Min. Pause. Ay. Pause. Ted. Trumpets. It was flushed with a dull diseased Doppler shift red.
Funebrial music had begun, mushroom-shaped bass predominating, like a Tibetan at his best prayers.
For a few eons, these low levels of consciousness were in keeping with the old red sandstone silences of the Duomo-like structure. They were shattered by the incursion of a resounding bass voice breaking into song.
That timbre! That mingled threat and exultation!
It was unmistakable even to a layman.
‘The devil you know!’ Burnell exclaimed.
‘I’d better shove off now,’ said Maté.
‘Hey, what about those playing cods?’ But the man had gone.
Until that moment, the devil had been represented only as a vocal outpouring roughly equivalent to Niagara. Now he appeared on the wine-dark stage.
The devil was ludicrously out of scale, far too large to be credible, thought Burnell – even if it was disrespectful to think the thought. In the confused dark – weren’t those lost women somehow still pouring by? – it was hard to see the devil properly. He was an articulation, and approaching, black and gleaming, his outline as smooth as a dolphin’s, right down to the hint of rubber. Nor was the stench of brimstone, as pungent as Maté’s cigar, forgotten.
He advanced slowly up the ramp towards Burnell, raising the rafters with his voice as he came.
Striving to break from the networks of his terror, Burnell threw out his arms and peered along the wide lateral arm of the cathedral.
‘Anyone there? Help! Help! Taxi!’
To the left, in the direction from which they had come, everything had been amputated by night, the black from which ignorance and imagination is fashioned. Towards the right, however, along that other orbit, something was materializing. A stain of uninvented liquid. An ox-bow of the Styx. Light with its back turned to the electromagnetic spectrum.
‘Help! My hour is almost come!’
The devil still singing was approaching still.
Atheist Burnell certainly was, in an age when no courage was denoted by the term. But too many years had been spent in his capacity as church custodian for WACH, investigating the mortal remains, the fossils, of the old faith of Christendom, for something of the old superstitions not to have rubbed off on him. He also had some belief in the Jungian notion of the way in which traits of human personality became dramatized as personages – as gods or demons, as Jekylls or Hydes. This singing devil, this bugaboo of bel canto, could well be an embodiment of the dark side of his own character. In which case, Burnell was the less likely to escape him.
Nor did he.
Burnell took a glutinous pace or two to his right. He began to begin to paddle towards that dull deceitful promise of escape. Violet was the vision reviving there. Fading into sight came a magnificent Palladian façade: a stream of perfection that scarcely could brook human visitation. Doric columns, porticoes, blind doorways. No man – however worthy of this unwedding cake – was there to answer Burnell’s gurgle for help.
If the burrow to the left represented the squalors of the subconscious, to the right towered the refrigerated glory of the super-ego.
Still Burnell swam for it, convulsing his body into action.
‘Mountebank!’ he screamed as he went.
But the black monster was there, reaching out a hand, reaching him. Now Burnell’s scream was even higher, even more sincere. The thing caught him by his hair. Snatched him up …
… and bit off his head.
Blanche Bretesche was drinking steadily. She was