Free Watson, Ian - Novel 08 by The Gardens of Delight (v1.1) Page B

the alchemists! He could have
done so. Alchemy can be mapped on to his inventions—and then they mightn’t be
inventions at all, but a hidden code for a secret science or prescience. The
superbeing seems to have made the connection, and this world’s built around it! Bosch and alchemy.” He whistled. “In
the twenty-fourth century. What a crazy revival.”
                 “But
it isn't the twenty-fourth century
here,” Jeremy flapped his hands dismissively, looking a little like the
flustered hen.
                 “You
can’t grasp this world if you think of it as being the twenty-fourth or
whatever. You’ve got to get away from that, hmm, starship Earth-time of yours,
out into the Gardens to realize. The day goes on forever, the sun never sets, it’s always the beginning. Twenty-fourth century ?
Phooey. The time is now. Or else it’s
the year several million or several billion of our evolution, depending on what
stage you count from—but that’s uncountable time. The one time it isn’t is
Space Year whatever!”
                 “But why?" fretted Sean, conceding
the point. “Why a Boschian alchemy world? Out of all possible ways of responding to a shipload of
colonists.”
                 “God
knows.” Jeremy didn’t say this dismissively, though. He winked: he meant it.
                 “And
Knossos, our mystery man, knows what’s going on. He has a hot line to the God.”
                 “Maybe
you’ll have one as well, Athlon , ” chuckled Jeremy. “Or you, La Roche.”
                 “I
think ... I think,” said Sean, “that your superbeing
may well have fished all this obsession out of the mind of Knossos—and made a
kind of compact with him. If this ‘God’ scanned the minds of all your crew and
your hibernating colonists and settled on one single vision of reality as way
out as this—”
                 “As fundamental, Sean,” Jeremy corrected
him. “You’ve admitted that. It’s something deep and ancient.”
                 “Okay,
it’s true. Well, Knossos must have been a very strange and powerful man. An
alchemist—a secret savant— leaving twenty-first century Earth on board a
starship with his faith intact? Getting a place on board the Copernicus in the first place! With all
the screening there must have been!”
                 “Even
a God has to have interests,” suggested Denise pertly. “Maybe it suited Him
this way. Knossos was the only person on board who actually had a faith. So the
God made it come true. Perhaps God had no choice? Perhaps, in a sense, Knossos
captured Him? What sort of world
might it have been otherwise?” Denise shivered. “Barren rock. A dead place. God brought it to life for the Copernicus. And He could only bring it to life if He could discover
some sort of context for transmuting dead matter into a living existence? Well,
he found that context in Knossos.”
                 Sean
spat out another cherry stone. Somehow he doubted it would take root, out there
on the open velvet sward. “He did a neat job, anyway. Let’s go and see whether
that tower really is a piece of alchemical apparatus for distilling . . .
people.”
                 “You’ll
only find that out,” said Jeremy, “if you’re prepared to be distilled
yourself!”
                 As
they marched up the flank of the meadow, the name Knossos echoed in Sean’s head
like the clip-clopping of a horse upon a metalled surface. The hermaphrodite
had denied that Knossos was a Greek . . . Sean experimented with the name,
pronouncing it this way and that. Suddenly he let out a whoop.
                 “Knossos
isn’t his real name at all!”
                 “Well,
I know that ” said Jeremy impatiently.
                 “No,
I mean it’s a mispronunciation—a typical alchemical smokescreen. His real
name—or rather