Part 13 (1/2)

'We are gathered,' the many voices chanted, though some continued their sobbing, 'to rejoice in the Translation of our comrades.'

'The Nesting Place and the Resting Place are One.'

'Where the children are made,' the people murmured, calming now under the ritual, 'the discorporate congregate in their wisdom.'

'Where the s.e.m.e.n and ova of Consciousness are joined, the Flesh is brought forth. Where the Flesh pa.s.ses away, the Consciousness of the Dead is born into Eternal Life.'

'The Flesh returns to the Flesh,' the people said, in the twilight of the night season, 'and the Spirit goes on in the Spirit.'

'Our sorrow is right and proper,' Anokersh told them, 'for our comrades have gone away from us. Yet they go only to await us. Their Spirit has not perished, even as their Flesh shall not perish. Let us find joy in our grief, for as we revere the bones of their death they shall comfort and guide the blood of our life.'

Lesser Sacerdotes took up the antiphony as Anokersh stepped forward. Diitchar carried the golden bowl, placing it carefully as the dead ones' kin lifted the bodies, their poor singed feathers flaking away in the dim air, and carried them in turn, reverently, before the knife and the vessel. The blade slashed, opening the necks. Blood, ruby-red, held from clotting by the medic's postmortem injection of heparin, gushed into the deep bowl, misting in the chilly air. Anokersh felt his own pulse quicken as he gazed at the splas.h.i.+ng libation. His mouth filled with a spasm of saliva, and his belly quailed, as always, in a contraction of incipient nausea. With abrupt insight he recognised the emotion as an a.n.a.logue of the dizzy faintness that took him, took them all, when any attempt was made to grapple with the problem of the feral pongids. A spearing migraine burst above his eyes. The insight was lost on cross-currents, swirling eddies that evaporated -- He forced his attention back to the corpses before him. Drained of blood, they lay once more on the stainless steel of the catafalques. Plaintive, the ancient chants closed their dying fall. How inappropriate it is, he thought, so far from the true Place of Birth and Re-birth. A pitiful sham. He felt, in that moment, abandoned, forsaken. We are the instruments of a great purpose, he rebuked himself. We have no rights of complaint.

Soon the dead would speak, resolve his doubts. He momentarily caught the clouded eye of the Intercessor, swaying in her filmy cloak, half-deranged already by the sacred drugs. Swiftly he moved forward into the crowd pressing to the biers. It was shameful, an abrogation of tradition, that all the craft's crew were not here, yet the exigencies of their plight precluded it. At the perimeters, watch officers must stand at their posts, governing the slow pongid sentries. Others still must remain on duty in Control, lest the ferals somehow seize this opportunity to redouble their mischief.

'People of the Mission,' he said, 'we come to do homage to our brothers, who pa.s.sed from our midst defending the integrity of _The Soul_. For Ghine do Lod and Thall huj Salder, death has been more than Translation, it has been their glory. Now we do them the final honour, recalling as we eat and drink in their memory those last moments when they faced without fear a foe more terrible than Nature's mute forces -- ' He choked, and in silence took from Stezna do Nen the heavy surgical lancet. It buzzed against his thumbs as he activated the rapidly vibrating blade.

Standing by the body of Ghine do Lod, he had a sudden image of Rhiona's brutalised hands, the excised fingers. Was it a parody of this sacred rite? Trembling, he thrust the image aside and addressed the corpse. His first incision slit the downy skin of the belly from groin to neck. Stezna, and Jik huj Lod -- the dead male's clan-kin, Anokersh noted distantly -- stood to either side of the catafalque in ceremonial robes; they reached forward and peeled the opened skin from the body, exposing the layer of subcutaneous fat which gleamed dull yellow under the auroral sky.

Two clean strokes continued the incision from the neck, across the deep ribcage, to lay back the skin of each arm along the scaly ventral undersurface. Two more extended from groin to taloned feet. As his acolytes eased back the burnt skin, shrivelled and hard in patches where the feral's energy blast had seared it, Anokersh deftly took the surgical knife through tendons and gristle, severing muscles from the powerful slas.h.i.+ng weapons of the feet. He placed the dismembered feet in a silver vessel brought to him by his spouse, and moments later added the relaxed, bloodless hands.

In the cold breeze, plasma oozed from the raw flesh, sticky under his fastidious touch. Jik and Stezna, familiar with surgery, swiftly rolled the skin to the corpse's muzzle. At Stezna's muttered reminder, Anokersh incised the scalp; freed, the pelt came away and was folded gently over the jointed extremities.

The chief medic pa.s.sed a power-saw to Anokersh. A diapason of grief rose from the gathering as the Director trepanned the skull. A stench of burning bone moved on the air. Anokersh slid his thumbs into the cranial cavity, and drew forth the small double-lobed brain; it came out with a moist, sucking sound and slipped into a waiting vessel.

The sheet of banded muscle tugged at the vibrating lancet as he bent back down over the belly, slicing into the abdominal wall. Stripping back the muscle, he removed one by one the internal organs: the ma.s.sive looping intestine, the kidneys, liver, heart, the pink sponge of the lungs. He took particular care with the gall bladder, lest he rupture it, loosing its bitter green fluids.

Eviscerated, the corpse was almost unrecognisable. Litanies soared and fell, ambiguous voices. Anokersh completed the paunching, taking the bright specialised instruments from Stezna and laying them aside slick with dark juices. He butchered the carca.s.s, then, jointing the limbs, carving the flesh delicately away from the bones in long strips and slices. The final disposition of the spinal cord, the ribs, the pelvic girdle, he left to experts: the bones must, where possible, remain inviolate.

At last he rose. The mortal remains of Ghine do Lod lay all about him, piled raw in the sacramental vessels. An acolyte fetched him scented water; he washed his hands, shaking slightly from the tension, and turned to the corpse of Thali huj Salder.

The quivering pitch of the wake tightened even further when finally he put aside the hot knife and once more dipped his aching hands. In the consummation to come, the dismantled dead would speak, make utterance from that pinnacle of illumination which the quick might never attain unaided. The sighing, half exhalation of exhausted pain, half exaltation of expectant mystery, broke again and again against that tension like the indigo waves of the numinous, icy holorama. Anokersh lifted his arms and sang: 'In this Place of love and terror let us lose ourselves.

'As each of us speaks in the common tongue, 'Each is a syllable of the Great Utterance.

'We commend to the Parents the lives of these newly dead, 'Ushering them into the Womb of eternal delight.'

In the swift blurring of his perceptions, the echoing multiple overlays, Anokersh heard the ma.s.sed voices join his in the invocation; one voice, not his, not Diitchar's, not maimed Riona's, not any of the several voices of those strong figures bent toward him in the dusk: 'We ask as a People, each clinging no longer to the isolation of the finite ego-self, for the blessing and wisdom of that mult.i.tude-made-One gone before us to beat.i.tude.'

And a single voice once more, his, yet in the streaming lambency a voice speaking from no fixed place, no single throat, as he bowed to the golden bowls, the silver vessels and distributed the raw gobbets of flesh, the succulent meat of their brothers: 'Let us eat and drink of our comrades, Ghine and Thali, that as their cells mingle with ours the ancient covenant of Peace shall be affirmed, to take life neither in hot anger nor cold calculation, and the wisdom of the discorporate Spirit announce itself in our midst.'

Hungrily, in an elevation above greed or revulsion, Anokersh tore at the strips of tepid meat with his carnivore's rending teeth, gulped at the sweet feast, sent his snout again and again to the salty liquid. With enormous tact, then, he drifted back from the banquet, his tongue seeking the last of the blood adhering at his mouth, and awaited the benediction from the Intercessor's lips.

When she spoke, it was in a high strange quaver, drug-slurred, an utterance to the One People from the pseudo-soul mapped in the Ancillary Core.

'Life returns on its way into a mist, its speed into its quietness again: existence of this world of things and men renews ultimately their never needing to exist.'

She choked, spittle at her lips. 'Again knowledge will study others, wisdom is self-known and muscle masters brothers; self-mastery is bone; content may never need to borrow, ambition will wander blind, and as vitality cleaves to the marrow leaving death behind. The universe is deathless because having no infinite self it stays infinite. Clarity has been manifest in heaven and purity in the spirit. Consciousness has no death to die.' The Intercessor sagged; her feathers drooped, her tail jerked spastically. Strong hands, her clan-kin, took her at the armpits and held her erect.

The Director looked into her foggy eyes and asked gently, through her: 'Do we speak with Thali huj Salder, with Ghine do Lod? Tell us, comrades, was your Going-Hence a good voyaging? Are you sojourners in bliss?'

Her eyes reeled. Syllables stammered. Anokersh felt cold, colder than the chilly, contrived breeze. The dead took up his physical dread and spoke it aloud from the Intercessor's clattering jaw: 'A a a cold a k k k cold coming we had of of of it. Just the worst ti time of the year for a j j journey.'

Thali's widow screamed. This was not the way of it. All the dead were at rest, among beat.i.tude, dandled in the temporary peace of the Ancillary Core, awaiting their reconciliation with the Race when the Mission's voyage was done, when at last in the completion of that million-year epic the protective gluon s.h.i.+eld might be let down, opening once more the Soul Core to the delirious flux of universal consciousness. Yet the Ancillary Core was diseased, Anokersh knew with horror, as he had always known and denied; their temporary haven, their greater extension, their life was run amok. He laid his hands on the fragility of the Intercessor and shook her. 'Tell us of beat.i.tude,' he demanded desperately. 'Speak to us of your Pa.s.sing-Over.'

She threw back her head and howled like a mindless pongid slavey.

'We are running to the Children's Orientation Centre,' she cried shrilly. 'Yes, we hear it ahead of us. It looms. O Parents of All, it burns with a fiery nimbus. A power cable, torn from the wall, is in its hand. Sparks fly in a scorched cascade. Heat blooms from its touch. We are on fire, we burn, we burn. It turns away. The hull is melting. We are dead. Oh Thall, I can't move. There is no pain, Ghine. Can we be Translated? I didn't know it'd be so cold. What's the humming? I can't hear you, Thali. Everything is so dark and cold. That terrible buzzing, that screaming saw. Are they eating us already? But I'm not dead. _I'm not dead!_'

Anokersh stood aghast. The dead were lost, trapped in their terminal agonies. Never before had he witnessed a post-mortem communication from anyone who had died brutally, in pain, without the comfort and the songs of their companions. Those who had vanished into the cancerous Core zone and not returned had been beyond reach of the Intercessor; he had a.s.sumed that they were not yet Gone-Hence. Now he saw another, more appalling possibility. Had they perished in this agony, caught in a loop of meaningless loathing? But the Old Ones, the Parents of all, were sketched in the Ancillary Core. Surely they would reach out, guide and comfort the dying -- Silence fell. Stezna do Nen glanced up from the diagnostic float which monitored the Intercessor. He scowled at the Director, but said nothing. When the female spoke again, all the harsh shrillness was gone. Her voice came with a tranquillity near to woodenness.

'We move in the Birth Ca.n.a.l. The light is deepest red. We float. There is small resistance to our contractions. Ah! The bodies lie below us, ahead of us. Alas, the plumage is in sorry array. Communications, give me a private channel to Diitchar rhal Lers. How strange, it's leaking. Dii, edge back and go through the shaft. We leave the shaft. Here the light is golden. Ah! Ah! Are you the Parents? How sweet, how warm. Such light! It flows, it gusts, it is a wind, there is a fine taste of blood. We have come home.'

The terror slowly ebbed from Anokersh. Head lolling, body rocking slightly, the drugged female hung in the arms of her clan-kin. Aurora shook the sky. Diitchar took his hand and squeezed it tightly. Abruptly, the somnolent female jerked up her head and stared directly into his eyes.

'Confusion is here. We must not rest. Anokersh huj Lers, there is peril to the Mission. Other voices jabber. Do you see? Attention must be paid! Knowledge will study others. At the interface. Corrosion is here. Our tongues are bound. One has said to you, you have no future. The jabber must be stilled. See to it.' Then the blinding potency was gone from her gaze; she slumped utterly, and Stezna was at her side with an injection jet.

Little enough remained of joy, of harmony, of rea.s.surance in the ceremony. With a stubborn loftiness Anokersh saw it through to the end -- the farewells to the departed, in formulae ill-wrought to suit those restless, minatory beings, the reminders to the living-in-flesh of their Mission and the gift they bore, a benefice locked away from their collective reach, the final sacramental partaking of the last shreds from Ghine's and Thali's bones, and the consignment of those dull pale remnants to the cryogenic mausoleum -- but panic gnawed at him, reduced him untimely to the isolation of his ego-self, stole the charity from his words.

'Mistress,' he said urgently to Diitchar as the gathering dispersed uneasily, 'we must go down at once to the feral.'

'I know it.'

At last he dared admit the truth to himself. 'The wild simians have found more than sanctuary in the crystal ma.s.s. They have broached the resonance. The computers have been in error.' His words stumbled at the blasphemy: 'The souls of another species have intruded within the Ancillary Core.'

His spouse turned her golden head. 'I have known this since the creature first spoke. They possess intelligence. They have evolved.'

'First we must hear what Riona can tell us.'

The artist T'kosh huj Nesh had taken his spouse back at once to the Recuperation bay at the ceremony's end. Initial exhaustion and the stress of the Going-Hence had brought her near to incoherence. She rested on a null sleeper under soothing solar panels. Questioned, she could recall little. She trembled at the gateway to hysterical fugue. Only fragments of her ordeal remained, and those she resisted: blurred endless periods of vague horror; stark images of crooked, humped, bloated monsters whose ancestors had once been pongid slaveys -- fanciful images that hinted more at nightmare than truth, for the selection pressures shaping the pongid they had seen must have been ferocious; running, tripping, torn by the blade-edges of the s.h.i.+mmering crystal Core. And among the nettles of that awful time were other people, others who had been stolen into the prismatic jungle. Sane or insane? Riona could not remember. For her, the boundary was too immanent....

Stezna do Nen woke the creature for them. Anokersh leaned close to its flat face as the induction currents brought its cerebral rhythms accelerating up from the nadir of coma to the rapid flutter of alert awareness. For a second time he felt shock as the blue eyes opened to pierce his soul with their intelligence. The pongid turned its head aside with distaste.

'Take your rancid breath away. I smell the blood of your kin, and it sickens me.'

Anokersh brought up his arm deliberately and slapped the creature with tremendous anger. The sound of the blow was unbearably loud, and pain closed his thumbs across his palm; the Director came close to cringing from his action. Blood gushed from the creature's nostrils, brighter in this light than the blood he had drained from the corpses of his brothers.

'You shall speak only to answer us, animal.' His fury returned, and a gross, unfamiliar l.u.s.t worked from his belly to his groin in a wave of heat.

The beast snarled. Its teeth were square and flat. Along its scalp, bristles rose. It said nothing. Foam-padded steel left it barely s.p.a.ce to breathe.

Diitchar, with cold sardonic contempt, said: 'Animal, do you have a name?'

'If I were an animal,' the creature told her with equal scorn, 'I would have a name like Frizzle, or Rutter, or Muncher. Do you take me for one of your mute, pathetic monkeys? My name is my own, and of no importance to you. I do not think you will mistake me for a snake.'

For all the barbarous slurring of his speech, the beast's diction was comprehensible. Anokersh was filled with an incredulous loathing, tinged with curiosity.