Дэймон Найт - Orbit 6

The secret geographies and histories of the American Society and the Atlantis Society and such are esoteric lodge-group things, symbolic and murky, forms for the initiated; they contain analogs, and not realities.

The ecumene must grow, of course, but it grows inwardly in intensity and meaning; its form cannot change. The form is determined from the beginning, just as the form of a man is determined before he is born. A man does not grow by adding more limbs or heads. That the ecumene should grow appendages would be as grotesque as a man growing a tail.

— Diogenes Pontifex, World as Perfection

August Shackleton guffawed nervously when his wife was sliced in two, and the half of her swallowed by the crocodile; and his hand that held the Roman Bomb trembled. Indeed, there was something unnerving about the whole thing. That cut-off screaming of Justina Shackleton had something shocking and unpleasant about it.

Justina had once gone hysterical at a séance when the ghosts and appearances had been more or less conventional, but August was never sure just how sincere her hysteria was. Another time she had disappeared for several days after a séance, from a locked room, and had come back with a roguish story about being in spiritland. She was a high-strung clown with a sense of the outrageous, and this present business of being chomped in two was typical of her creations.

And suddenly they were all explosively creative, each one’s subjective patterns intermingling with those of the others to produce howling chaos. What had been the ship the True Believer , what had been the slippery overhanging bole, had now come dangerously down into the swamp. They all wanted a closer look.

There was screaming and trumpeting, there was color and surge and threshing mass. The crocodile bellowed as a bull might, not at all as Shackleton believed that a croc should sound. But someone there had the idea that a crocodile should bellow like that, and that someone had imposed his ideate on the others. Unhorselike creatures whinnied, and vivid animals sobbed and gurgled.

“Go back up, go back up!” the black man was bleating. “You will all be killed here.” His face was a true Mummers Night black-man mask; one of the party was imagining strongly in that stereotyped form. But the incongruous thing about the black man was that he was gibbering at them in French, in bad French as though it were his weak second language. Which one of them was linguist enough to invent such a black French on the edge of the moment? Luna Boyle, of course, but why had she put grotesque French into the mouth of a black man in contingent Africa?

“Go back up, go back up,” the black man cried. He had an old rifle from the last century and he was shooting the crocodile with it.

“Hey, he’s shooting Justina too,” Mintgreen giggled too gaily. “Half of her is in the dragon thing. Oh, she will have some stories about this! She has the best imagination of all of us.”

“Let’s get her out and together again,” Linter suggested. They were all shouting too loudly and too nervously. “She’s missing the best part of it.”

“Here, here, black man,” Shackleton called. “Can you get the half of my wife out of that thing and put her together again!”

“Oh, white people, white people, this is real and this is death,” the black man moaned in agony. “This is a closed wild area. You should not be here at all. However you have come here, whatever is the real form of that balk or tree on which you stand so dangerously, be gone from here if you can do it. You do not know how to live in this. White people, be gone! It is your lives!”

“One can command a fantasy,” said August Shackleton. “Black man fantasy, I command you to get the half of my wife out of that dying creature and put her together again.”

“Oh, white people on dope, I cannot do this,” the black man moaned. “She is dead, and you joke and drink Green Bird and Bomb and hoot like demented children in a dream.”

“We are in a dream, and you are of the dream,” Shackleton said easily. “And we may experiment with our dream creatures. That is our purpose here. Here, catch a bottle of Roman Bomb!” and he threw it to the black man who caught it. “Drink it. I am interested in seeing whether a dream figure can make incursion on physical substance.”

“Oh, white people on dope,” the black man moaned. “The watering place is no place for you to be. You excite the animals and then they kill. When they are excited it is danger to me also who usually moves among them easily. I have had to kill the crocodile who is my friend. I do not want to kill others. I do not want more of you to be killed.”

The black man was booted and jacketed quite in the manner of a hunting store outfitting, this possibly by the careful imagining of Boyle who loved hunting rig. The black Mummers Night mask was contorted in agony and apprehension, but the black man did drink the Roman Bomb nervously the while he begged them to be gone from that place.

“You will notice that the skull form is quite human and the bearing completely erect,” Linter said. “You will notice also that he is less hairy than we are and is thick of lip, while the great ape to the left is more hairy and thin of lip. I had imagined them to be the same creature differently interpreted.”

“No, you imagine them to be as they appear,” Shackleton said. “It is your imagining of these two creatures that we are all watching.”

“But notice the configuration of the tempora and the mandible,” Linter protested. “Not what I expected.”

“You are the only one of us who knows about tempora and mandible shape,” said Shackleton. “I tell you that it is your own imagery. He is structured by you, given the conventional Mummers Night black mask by all of us, clothed by Boyle, and speeched by Luna Boyle. His production is our joint effort. Watch it, everyone! It becomes dangerous now, even explosive! Man, I’m getting as hysterical as my wife! The dream is so vivid that it has its hooks in me. Ah, it’s a great investigative experience, but I doubt if I’ll want to return to this particular experience again. Green perdition! But it does become dangerous! Watch out, everyone!”

Ah, it had become wild: a hooting and screaming and bawling wild Africa bedlam, a green and tawny dazzle of fast-moving color, pungent animal stench of fear and murder, acrid smell of human fear.

A lion defiled the watering place, striking down a horned buck in the muddy shallows and going muzzle-deep into the hot-colored gore. A hippo erupted out of the water, a behemoth from the depths. Giraffes erected like crazily articulated derricks and galloped ungainly through the boscage.

“Enough of this!” Mintgreen Linter, frightened, took the lead out of it, incanting: “That the noon-time nightmare pass! The crocodile-dragon and the behemoth.”

“We abjure them, we abjure them,” they all chanted in various voices.

“That the black man and the black ape pass, and all black things of the black-green land.”

“We abjure them, we abjure them,” they chanted. But the black man was already down under the feet and horns of a buffalo creature, dead, and his last rifle shot still echoing; he had tried to prevent the buffalo from upsetting the teetering bole and dumping all the white people into the murder swamp. The great ape was also gone, terrified, back to his high-grass savanna. Many of the other creatures had disappeared or become faint, and there was again the tang of salt water and of distant hot-sand beaches in the air.

“That the lion be gone who roars by day,” Luna Boyle took up the incantation, “and the leopard who is Panther, the all-animal of grisly mythology. That the crushing snakes be gone, and the giant ostrich, and the horse in the clown suit.”