The Gardens of Delight

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

In The Gardens of Delight Ian Watson boldly lands a starship within the hallucinatory terrain of Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, a medieval masterpiece which enchants and horrifies all who see it, for the picture shows what looks to be a paradise of pleasure yet it also displays a terrible hell of torments. And so the ship's psychologist, Sean Athlone, and two women companions explore the luxurious landscape of giant fruits and birds and strange towers and naked celebrating people, in quest of the godlike alien intelligence that has transformed a planet according to Bosch's vision, populating it with the colonists from a previous starship.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 224

Sample

THE SKY WAS a cloudless forget-me-not blue. High in the zenith there appeared a fan of incandescent gas which became a neat tongue of fire as the starship sank down through denser air. Thunder rolled across the hills and meadows. For a while this disturbed the festivities of the people and the beasts. As the shining torpedo fell more slowly, unfolding its landing jacks tipped with delicate antennae, they wondered whether it might not be some new kind of metamorphic spire lowering itself from the empyrean, even though Hell’s fires poured from its anal vent. The flames incinerated a few flying sprites who wandered too close.

From his vantage point on top of a knoll a naked man watched the starship sink down into a meadow. The fires were quenched underneath it in billows of steam as though the grass itself had extinguished them, rising up as mist. Which cleared. And all was still.

Many other naked men and women saw the starship land, too, but only this naked man knew it for what it was. Only he saw the sleek ablative lines of human manufacture.

Once the thing was silent and its fires were out people and creatures resumed their former pursuits. However, a few of them did at least redirect their pursuits in the direction of the new phenomenon–which is slightly less than saying that they rushed to inspect it. Its meaning would no doubt become apparent, but for the moment that was still sealed to the world, a secret without obvious entry point. In due course a wise owl–or a goldfinch, who was good at teasing things out–might give a clue to its meaning.

The naked man thought that he alone saw the landing of the starship for what it was.

However, a clothed man watched too, and knew. He stood, shading his eyes, on the balcony of a rose-red branching tower away to the south: a stone tree with translucent marbled ducts tunnelling up through it, standing astride a river that ran into a lake.

The clothed man pursed his lips and grinned.

A magpie perched on one of the spiky stone-leaves that crowned the tree-tower like a giant fossil yucca. The bird ruffled first its white feathers then its black feathers and launched itself into the air.

The clothed man called after it. “Too big for your beak, Corvo!”

“Caaaw,” it crowed back at him, circling.

He laughed. “Go to it!”

The magpie flew on its way.

The bird would reach the meadow where the starship had landed long before the naked man arrived. Though the naked man wasn’t running there; he was only making his way wistfully in that direction.

Loquela emerged from the pool, bedewed. Wisely, she’d dodged the thunder of that silver, fire-shitting thing’s descent by diving underwater and holding her breath. She was puzzled but not frightened. Shaking herself, she waded ashore, stepping over large pearls resembling clutches of eggs–perhaps their insides would soften presently from the mineral state into yolk and albumen.

An ape capered and gibbered at her from the bank. It clapped furry black hands to its little ears then somersaulted to indicate that the world had just turned upside down for it.

A large lung-cod, with glazed eyes and a cedilla hook of flesh beneath its chin like an inverted question mark, wheezed at her from the bank. Had it just laid those pearls? No, it was still gravid, swollen with roe. The cod must have taken something of a sonic battering from the new arrival. Straining at its weight, Loquela picked it up and humped it into the pool, then washed her hands clean of fishy mucus in the water. Further off in the blue water the merman she had been sporting with earlier–or rather teasing, since its erect penis could only be accommodated by cupped hands–was still thrashing his long arching tail in some distress at the shock of sound. The nigromerman had a smooth helmet of a head, a hard fleshy visor with the beaver firmly closed. “Well enough armoured. I’d have thought!” Waving goodbye to him, Loquela ran light-foot over the turf, her little white breasts bobbing like lychees, to the high hedges. She ducked her way through, startling a pangolin which had curled up in a ball of sharp jutting scales and was just on the point of unwinding back into an enormous fir cone again. Perhaps it had been shocked into a ball–or perhaps the noise had woken it up. Pangolins were nocturnal sleepers, though here where there was never any night they had to make do with the shade of hedges and thickets.

On her way through the hedges she plucked a giant blackberry with both her hands and bit into its juice-cells till the sweet liquid ran down her chin. The drink excited her, filling her veins with sugar, energy, and anticipation.

In the large meadow beyond, a few casualties lay about on the turf. Mainly they were giant fish. A smell of charring wafted. Slow creatures! A wonder that they could move overland at all. But this was how they evolved, straining upwards towards the condition of legs, or even wings. People often took pity on them and carried them. As indeed some human refugees from the meadow were doing now, bearing a great red mullet between them. They laid the fish down on the turf so that it could see the amazing silver tower. The mullet’s eyes gaped glassily upward, observing what was towering into the air as foggily and as out of focus as people see things underwater.

A white giraffe had fallen in flight, doing the splits, wrenching itself apart. A shrike–the bird of violent death– already was perched on the horns of the wheezing, dying animal, calling urgently. A mocking bird laughed at it from somewhere. Quickly Loquela ran to the stricken beast, clutching her dripping blackberry. A goldfinch as large as Loquela herself hopped from the bushes–it could hardly fly! The goldfinch accepted the blackberry from her in its beak and thrust the fruit at the floppy prehensile lips of the camelpard, cracking more juice cells, squirting refreshment and peace.

Above, over black burnt earth, rose the sleek metal tower. The landing jacks had ruptured through the turf down to bedrock, as though the world was a mere skin and a thin skin at that. Assessing the excellent uprightness of the tower–which the mullet must surely envy–a man and a woman who had been carrying the fish proceeded to perform a perfect handstand, face to face, and in that precarious position, upside-down, they made sweet love. The position appealed to Loquela. She looked around her for a partner, though it occurred to her that the ideal partner might be this silver tower itself. No hint of flames came from it any more, though a little heat still radiated from the vents and nozzles at its base, creaking as they cooled. Before long all the heat had dispersed, and the two handstanding lovers had reached their inverted climax, after which they fell neatly apart: a four-armed upside-down quadruped which suddenly fissioned into two equal beings who could walk upright at last.

The lovers beckoned her with lazily caressing hands, inviting her into their twosome, but she shook her head. She felt too intense, too urgent, for their gently choreographed afterplay. With understanding smiles the lovers sat down languidly on the lawns together, heads touching, hands now entwined. A toad appeared and hopped about them presently, chanting ‘brek-ek’. The woman fed it a large daisy and it wandered up to Loquela with the flower dangling out of its mouth, as a love-gift. Laughing, Loquela flopped the toad up on to her head. She walked this way and that, balancing the toad, till finally it manoeuvred the daisy stalk behind her ear. With a triumphant ‘brek!’ the toad launched itself away, landing on the turf and bouncing along in diminishing leaps, a leathery bag playing ducks-and-drakes across the green. Twiddling the flower behind her ear, Loquela waited for the silver tower to disgorge its secret and engorge her with it.

IN FACT, THE starship was several hundred kilometers from the target area which Paavo Kekkonen–their pilot and systems engineer–had set for the computer. At the last moment, too late to abort their entry into the atmosphere, the Schiaparelli had drifted uncontrollably, lateral jets firing. Plainly enough this was a technical malfunction. It merely felt as though some external force had closed an invisible hand around them, up where space met air, and shifted the ship brusquely over to a new entry point. The six people on the starship were considerably relieved. To have come so far, for so many years, then crashed… That was unthinkable. So, each in their own way, they avoided thinking of this, concentrating instead on the world outside.

“Well done, Paavo,” said Austin Faraday. “We’ll check the trouble out later. In all other respects, a copybook landing. So this is where they got off at: Target Three!”

The geologist-captain swept back white hair. Though he wasn’t old–unless the eighty-seven years of coldsleep were added to his own natural forty-two years. He was a pure blond, with a peroxide mane which had continued growing very slowly in hyb; as had all their hair and nails, in the same way as hair and nails carry on growing for a while from a dead body in a coffin. The six of them had all been in coffins, as though dead, these many years: three men and three women. Austin, Paavo and Sean Athlone; Tanya Rostov, Denise Laroche and Muthoni Muthiga. All that time their hair and their nails had continued growing out of their quasi-dead bodies at a pace which would have shamed a snail, yet which over eighty-seven years produced wild manes of hermit hair and crazy talons.

They had already trimmed those talons with some difficulty on emerging from hyb. Such long curiosities–sharp thin scimitars of horn! They hadn’t disposed of those. No, they had stowed them away providentially like pious Chinese peasants. Spaceman’s nails: they might present those to the Smithsonian Institute, if the Smithsonian still survived on their return. Or perhaps they would auction them, as the earliest astronauts had auctioned first day cover lunar postage stamps. If anyone was interested in auctions, or astronauts, on their return. This was the longest journey yet: of forty-five light years by spacestress drive, measured on the yardstick of the human nail.

On awakening, and recovering, Paavo had joked that this growth effect might set a natural limit to human proliferation through the galaxy. Unless hyb-sleepers were unthawed for a periodical manicure and haircut, by the time the computer awakened them at journey’s end they would be stifled by their own hair, unable to move because of the interlocking nest of toe and finger nails. He thought of calling this the Poe Effect.

Theirs was the longest journey, but one other equalled it, they now knew: that of the Exodus V ship, otherwise known as Copernicus, whose route they had retraced past two solar systems which betrayed their promise. The Copernicus had definitely landed here, beneath this yellow sun which only bore a number: 4H (Fourth Harvard Catalogue) 97801.

Denise, their French ecologist, stared down through binoculars out of one of the crystal portholes. Her hair was a Primavera golden fleece, which she hadn’t trimmed at all, waking to find herself so beautiful at last. Her face alone was a pert, buttony affair which could hardly bear that weight of beauty.

“Yes, they’re here. Target Three. But… all naked? And whatever are those huge fish doing on land? They seem to be some sort of pet. And the animals! Wherever did they get them from? My God, I can see a unicorn. It’s a real unicorn!” She hurried to the computer.

Green words ran across a cathode screen.

EXODUS-V “COPERNICUS” CARRIED ON BOARD FERTILIZED OVA OF DOMESTIC ANIMALS, FISH & FOWLS. ANIMALS AS FOLLOWS: COW, DOG, GOAT, HORSE…

She cleared the screen.

“They must have had DNA matrices on file too,” suggested Muthoni, their Kenyan doctor. Her slim black face was haloed in a bush of wiry darkness. Her skin wasn’t chocolate or coffee or khaki, but raven black. She had the long thin nose of a carving and full lips which pressed forward, firm and smooth as polished wood. “They’ve been playing with bioforms. Changing them, adding new touches. Look at that white giraffe over there. Look at those horns on its head. That isn’t an earthly giraffe. They’ve been mutating creatures from the matrices. They’ve made the whole planet into a park–a garden. A wonderland.”

“Naturally.” Tanya Rostov, the Russian agronomist, nodded sarcastically. She was a dumpy brunette. “Of course the very first thing that colonists do on a new world is to landscape everywhere effortlessly, then toss their clothes away and start on genetic manipulation in vitro as an art form. Presumably behind the nearest bush! They don’t, of course, produce farms or factories or anything of that sort. They just snap their fingers. Hey presto, Paradise.”

“It must have been Paradise here already,” said Denise, “and… well, there was no need to struggle. The idea suggested itself: utopia.” She laughed nervously.

“So now they perform handstands to welcome us.” Austin frowned. “I’m afraid Tanya’s right to be sceptical.”

“Maybe we just landed in the middle of their nature reserve–or naturist park,” suggested the Frenchwoman. “A leisure zone?”

“It looked the same all over, from what we could see on the way down: meadows, lakes, parkland. On this side anyway. Nothing so vulgar as a town or village. Why isn’t it boiling hot here, eh? This planet doesn’t revolve–or if it does it’s so slowly we can’t tell the difference. Apart from the question of what could possibly cause rotation-locking this far from the sun, with no moon in the sky, it should be bloody hot here and the dark side should be frozen solid–which it isn’t.”

“You said there was vulcanism there,” pointed out Paavo. His own mane of hair had been trimmed to a pageboy style by Muthoni. The Finn had never liked long hair. Once, eighty-seven years ago, he had been an ardent skier and hated hair flying across his goggles. However, the trim which the Kenyan woman had given him struck him as overly gaminesque and cute. “We all spotted the fires there.”

“A few volcanoes don’t warm a frozen backside,” said Tanya.

“It should be worse than any Arctic over there,” agreed Austin.

“Oh, there are cold spots, yes! But damn warm areas too, right alongside them. As I said before, it’s a hot and cold mosaic. Absurd. Ice and fire.”

Sean Athlone had simply been standing, drinking in the landscape insatiably, unable as yet to focus anywhere analytically for very long–because the vista rang so many little bells in him (though he was no neobehaviourist). The Irish psychologist had come out of hyb with a red Rip Van Winkle beard down to his knees, now trimmed back to a neat vandyke. He wore no flaming crown of hair upon his head, though; his scalp was as thoroughly bald as ever. Prematurely so, but he had never chosen to have his scalp rejuvenated. He had been unreligiously brought up, yet he had surely compensated for that later on, his bald pate becoming a holy vessel to him: a ciborium, well polished by his palms, containing the special material for communion with the psychological laity. His beard burned under his chin like a flame heating and distilling the contents of the old ancestral brain atop the spinal column, causing its contents to ascend into consciousness.

“So what maintains this fair climate?” Tanya asked. “With the sun always at high noon in the sky?”

“It’s morning and afternoon in other areas,” said Denise foolishly.

“Permanently. Maybe they have damn long nights lasting a year or ten years! Do they migrate en masse? Hibernate?”

Sean’s eyes roved. He took in the rich baize of the greenery, spotted here and there with white and yellow flowers like pool balls, bowers of giant berries, spying a deersized finch with golden bars on its wings and a carmine harlequin mask around its beak, then an orange pomegranate husk the size of a diving bell resting near the boskage with a jagged break in its side, and especially two erotic gymnasts so casually and joyfully naked even in the presence of the starship and the dead victims of the landing. He was conscious of a swelling in his flesh which had already thawed out but not really awoken yet–not till now. Yet it was a curiously innocent excitement that filled Sean as more people spilled back into the meadow to get on with what they had been doing before the ship landed, in sublime–yes indeed, sublime–disregard of the starship in their midst. No, not disregard either. They simply seemed to regard a starship as other than what it was: something akin to one of those strangely baroque citadels of rock which he had glimpsed during the final stages of the descent. Those formations had appeared to be partly natural and partly sculpted or built; also–somehow–partly organic, growths of mineral matter. Perhaps those were the people’s homes, castles, keeps? But how had they come into being? Maybe Sean alone had noticed them.

None of the curious rock towers was visible from where the starship now stood. However, Sean held a printout photo of one loosely in his hand, taken during descent. The others hadn’t seen it yet. Somehow it was a photo of something already in his head, a photo of a dream, as though someone had built an archetypal image he already knew from somewhere else.

“We could try asking them,” he said.

Austin Faraday shook his head. “We didn’t travel for eighty-seven years to run out and throw our clothes off just because the water looks fine.”

“Take a look at this.” Sean held out the photo which he’d been keeping to himself, he realized, as though to him it particularly belonged. “I caught a glimpse of several structures like this on the way down–just briefly. I managed to key in on this one. It’s telephoto from about five thousand metres up.”

The colour print, slightly blurred by the vibration of the descending starship, showed a blue rock rising among neat bushy trees. The rock opened into tulip petals or blue lettuce leaves. From this mineral rosette serrated pink spires arose, and what looked like twin blades of stiff curving grass–as tall as sequoias if he’d got his scale right. Those blades converged above the pink spires to support a hoop, a perfect circle high in the sky. A forked tree trunk in the shape of a dowser’s wand bisected the spires, too, as though tossed there by some fearful storm; yet the outcome of the storm was serenity and balance.

“That isn’t a natural formation,” said Austin softly. “Or is it?” He sounded doubtful.

“It’s a building,” affirmed Denise. “Probably their factories and whatnot are underground. That would follow, wouldn’t it, if the winter night lasts an extremely long time? It looks almost armoured, though I suppose it’s rock. Immensely strong. Contoured to resist any weight of ice. Maybe it retracts into the ground? Closes up like a flower? That loop at the top looks like an aerial of some sort, and the,” and she giggled, “the divining rod could be an aerial too.”

“Copernicus would have rejected this world if it had nights and days as long as years,” said Tanya acidly.

“Maybe they had no choice? Degradation of ship systems?”

“An aerial?” Paavo shook his head. “Broadcasting on what frequency? The air waves are dead.”

“Maybe it’s some kind of psychotronic radiation generator?” blurted Denise. “Maybe it taps natural energies and bro. . .