Maelstrom (9 page)

Of wit and deftness Lokele had plenty. He needed education. He needed socialization. His family and his culture had been destroyed; the bureaucracy had failed him. Blake wondered if and how the Athanasians would pick up the pieces.

Bruni was German, broad-shouldered and blond. She’d been living in Amsterdam for the past two years because work-shelter there involved little or no work, but she’d become bored and moved to Paris.

 

“Would you like to tell the other guests how we met you, Bruni?”

 

“That pimp tried to force me to work for him, but I refused.

 

“You said, ‘No thank you’?”

 

“I broke his arm.”

 

“And when his big friends tried to help him?”

 

“I broke their knees.” She said it without humor, her arms crossed, staring at the floor.

 

In fact the Athanasians had whisked her out of the way of the police, who thought they were responding to a riot.

Bruni’s anger was held on a spring catch, and in discussion it sometimes exploded into insults and obscenities. But it was clear enough what Bruni wanted; she wanted simple love. Blake wondered how the Athanasians were going to give her that.

And when it was Guy’s turn. . . . “I am from Bayonne, the Pays Basque. My parents speak the ancient tongue, but I did not learn it. I was not home much because I was with the circus.” The circus, as subsequent confession revealed, was a cheap carnival that worked northern Spain, and while with it, Guy had learned a great many ways to cheat. “I was very good at telling fortunes, but they arrested me for that in Pamplona and I had to spend a week in their filthy jail before they sent me back.” His post-deportation adventures, getting from the border to Paris, were intricate but not interesting, he claimed, but he expressed a confused desire, inspired by the pseudo-Egyptian hocus-pocus of his fortune-telling act, “to learn the true language of the ancient Egyptians. For I have heard that the Basques are the descendants of a colony of Egyptians. . . .”

At which earnest pronouncement, everyone nodded politely.

In the few days Blake had spent in the Basque country before coming back to Paris, he had prepared this cover story as carefully as he could. If the Athanasians bothered to check, they’d find that there really was a disreputable little carnival with a clandestine “Egyptian” fortune-teller–Blake had encountered it on a previous trip to the continent–presently in Catalonia, if it had kept to its flexible itinerary. Blake hoped that denials of Guy’s existence on the part of the carnies would be taken by any interrogator as convenient lapses of memory.

Blake sat through two weeks of these discussions, playing his role with as much skill as he could muster, watching the others play theirs, observing the techniques of Jean and Jacques and Catherine. Group leaders have their agendas, and Blake was impressed by the united purpose of these three, their skill in shaping the eclectic talents and temperaments of the guests toward acknowledgement of a common goal–the goal Jack Noble had expressed to Blake a year ago as “service.”

Each night after supper there were classes. Three nights a week these involved the entire group, and one of the leaders would talk about the aims and methods of the Athanasians. The language was mild, the message as radical as it had been for centuries: humans were perfectible, sin did not exist, the just society–“or Utopia, or Paradise as we sometimes call it”–was a matter of inspiration and will. Hunger would be eradicated, war was a fading nightmare. What was needed was Inspiration. Will. Service. The reward was Freedom, Ecstasy, Unity. Light. These principles were embodied in the ancient wisdom of many cultures, but one source was most ancient. . . .

Other nights of the week there were private instructions, held in the guests’ own cubicles or in one of the empty offices of Editions Lequeu upstairs. During Blake’s second week, Lequeu himself reappeared and casually offered to teach Blake to read hieroglyphics. An offer that may have been made out of idle curiosity quickly turned serious when Lequeu discovered a ready and gifted pupil.

They worked in a small conference room, spreading out the beautiful hand-colored codexes and the holo reproductions of wall carvings on a well-worn table. Lequeu not only knew the sounds, the syllables, the idiograms–he spoke the language. But he cautioned Blake that no one knew how it really sounded. “The last native speakers of ancient Egyptian were the Copts, the Christians of Egypt,” he told Blake. “I am very much afraid that by the end of the 19th century they all had died. Who can say what transformations their language had already undergone?”
Under Lequeu’s tutelage Blake quickly learned to sound out texts in hieroglyphs, in the corresponding hieratic script, and in the later, bastard-Greek demotic. “Guy, you have a gift,” he said, smiling, “and perhaps you will soon find in the texts the secrets you have mystically divined must be there.”

Lequeu disappointed him in only one matter: “I regret that there is no connection whatever between the Egyptians and the Basques–your ancestors were living in the Pyrenees ten thousand years, maybe more, before the first pyramid rose beside the Nile.”

Thus the Athanasians tangled Guy and the others in a net of dependencies: food, clothing, shelter, friendship, cooperative labor, the gentle stripping away of ego defenses, the subtle substitution of a common goal. They neglected nothing. Before Lequeu began his lessons in hieroglyphics, Blake’s evenings had been administered by Catherine; he’d been there only a week when she announced that the night’s lesson would be held in his cubicle. She brought no books.

The yellow reading lamp beside the bunk emphasized the pitted blocks of raw limestone that were the basement’s outer wall. Catherine’s hair was liquid in the light; her clinging dress molded her bold figure, until she began to pull the dress away.

Blake could not pretend aversion or even surprise. But as Catherine’s gray eyes and swollen lips descended toward him, as her cool and expert body joined his, Blake felt a passing shiver of anger, dissolving into sadness. There was another woman he loved, who cared deeply for him, but who had never allowed him more than a child’s kiss.

After Guy had spent three weeks as a guest of the Athanasians, Catherine told him he had been chosen to learn the deeper mysteries.
VI

Suddenly “Guy” was on the street again. They’d fixed him up with an ID sliver and enough credit to buy clothes and rent a room of his own. They’d even arranged a job for him, as a superped messenger. He was expected to show up at weekly discussion groups, held in the same room on the courtyard, but beyond that he was free.

It was a test, of course. What would he do with his freedom? How thoroughly had they managed to bind him to them?

Blake made Guy into a model apprentice. He aped Pierre’s style and wore a high-collared black jacket and tight black pants. He lived in a tiny
chambre de bonne
in Issy and went to work conscientiously every day, moving swiftly through the crowded streets on his electric bike like a black shadow, silent except for frequent horn-bleats. He spent his spare time in bookstores and museums, pursuing a new hobby. He was always early to the weekly discussions. He avoided contact with anyone outside the Athanasians, in person or by phonelink.

At the first weekly meeting, Salome’s face was familiar, and Lokele’s, but the rest were strangers. He didn’t know what had become of his other fellow guests, and he thought it better not to ask.

“Hello, Guy,” Catherine murmured that first night, but she did not look at him. She waited until he sat down, and then she sat far away. When she repeated this behavior at the next meeting, he asked her why she was avoiding him.

“Be patient,” she said. “Soon you will be called to a great undertaking”–she smiled thinly–“and if you succeed, I promise we will be united forever. . . .”

One evening two months after he’d arrived in Paris, Blake delivered a package of drugs to a pharmacy in the Sixteenth. The stern pharmacist told him to wait, went into his office a moment, then emerged with an envelope. “For you.”

Blake took the envelope without comment and waited to open it until he’d ridden his superped a few blocks. The note inside said,
“500 hrs. demain matin, La Menagerie, Jardins des Plantes. Seul.”

In late summer the light creeps into Paris long before sunrise, and the sky to the east was a clear, pale applegreen behind Sacre Coeur’s ugly goat’s-udder dome. In the west, the edge of the full moon was creeping down behind the dark foliage of the Jardin des Plantes’ huge old trees.

The gates of the Menagerie were closed, but as Blake was chaining his superped to the iron fence he saw a man emerge from the tiny gate-house; judging by his size and walk, it was Pierre. The gates swung open with a screech and Blake went inside.

The zoo was old and small, built by kings in a romanticizing past; the cages were of fanciful wrought iron and the animal houses were built of imitation rubble and mud piled up between unshaped tree branches. The effect was supposed to be primitive, exotic. Low brick buildings with tile roofs squatted in the shadows of huge chestnuts and planes.

Blake followed his shadowy guide past a bronze statue of a leaping black youth, dressed like an Indian, playing the panpipes to charm a snake. The statue was inscribed “Age de Pierre.” The Stone Age. Perhaps taciturn Pierre had been inspired by it–certainly the name suited him. Pierre stopped beside the statue and handed Blake what looked like a velvet bag. “Put this on.”

It was a hood. Blake dragged it awkwardly over his head and Pierre pulled it straight down over his shoulders. In the pitch darkness Blake was instantly sensitized to the sounds and smells of the zoo. Nearby, birds were screaming in an awesome cacophony of barnyard and jungle. Growling cats stalked in their cages, impatient for their morning meal.

Blake thought of Rilke’s panther, its will benumbed behind a thousand bars–and beyond the bars, no world. Pierre took Blake by the arm and urged him forward. Blake stepped out as boldly as he dared. They walked a long time, silently. The asphalt path gently sloped, down and up and down again. The temperature of the air dropped as they walked among groves of trees. Blake felt a slight breeze. The path turned to gravel underfoot, and he could picture crumbled yellow limestone. The animal smells drifted away. There was a scent of herbs– he recognized sage and thyme, but the rest was a fragrant sachet–and a little later the heavy perfume of Mediterranean pines.

“Get in.”

 

An electric car, parked somewhere on the grounds . . . Blake slid in, and it started with a quiet hum and drove off slowly. The ride lasted perhaps twenty minutes. Blake didn’t know if Pierre was still with him or not.

 

The car stopped. “Get out.” Pierre was still with him. “Step down. Steep stairs. Keep walking down until I tell you.”

The steps were of brick or possibly stone, something smooth and cool. Pierre let go of Blake’s arm, but his footsteps stayed close behind. Two sets of shuffling footsteps echoed from the walls of a tunnel, as if they were descending into an old Metro station.

At first the air was cool, but after a hundred or so treads on this seemingly endless stair, Blake felt the air stirring and growing warmer. Somewhere far away, a heavy door closed.

The heat was dry; the air got hotter. A distant whisper became a steady sigh, and then a fluttering roar. Blake kept walking down at a steady pace, but he suddenly stumbled as he tried to drop his weight onto a flat floor. Pierre had failed to warn him that the stairs were ending.

Blake waited a moment, expecting to feel Pierre’s hand on his arm, but there was nothing. The oppressive heat and the blast-furnace roar had covered Pierre’s silent departure.

 

Blake tugged off the hood and dropped it at his feet.

He stood in blue light at the base of a round cement tower, as big as a silo. Its upper reaches were invisible in the darkness far above. Behind him were the stairs down which he’d come, a dark passage now barred by an iron gate.

The silo was an air shaft. Warm wind, sucked down from above, blew toward the massive stone portal in front of him; through it, orange light flickered in a hypostyle hall of columns shaped like bundles of papyrus reeds. On either side of the opening stood massive seated statues. They were in the Egyptian manner, but each had three jackal heads–an 18th century conflation of Anubis and Cerberus, fanciful, anachronistic, yet imposing.

By the dim blue light that seeped into the shaft he could make out hieroglyphs carved in the stone lintel. With his new skill at reading Egyptian he recognized that they were meaningless, or at best arcane. Centered below the hieroglyphs, however, was a short inscription in French:
Ne regardez pas en arriére.
Don’t look back. He walked slowly forward. As he approached the threshold, flame belched from the jaws of the jackals, and a booming bass voice made the air tremble:
“He who follows this route alone and without looking back will be purified by fire, by water, and by air; and if he can master the fear of death, he will leave the Earth’s bosom, will again see light, and will be worthy of admission to the society of the wisest and brav est.”

Blake heard this solemn invocation with a mixture of apprehension and amusement–apprehension because he wondered just how far the Athanasians were prepared to go to “purify” him, amusement that they had the humor to mock themselves. The sentiments and flowery phrases, like the architecture, were straight out of the Age of Enlightenment.

Ostentatiously he marched forward into the hall of columns. His steps were bold, but his nerves were jangling.

The heat and the roar increased. At the far end of the hall was a double-doored gate of wrought iron, the decorative work so thick with spikes and curlicues that little could be seen in the interstices except a bright, wavering gleam of orange. The hot gates smelled of the forge; as Blake approached he could make out a word, shaped in the voids of the iron strapwork, radiant with an orange light he realized was a distant wall of flame:
Tartarus.

Another step. The gates groaned and swung open and Blake, forgetting his pose, gasped at what he saw. He was looking into an enormous domed pit, filled with flames. Its floor was a circular lake of fire, twenty meters in diameter; in the center of the lake stood a bronze statue, the figure of a bearded man caught in mid-stride with legs apart, left arm forward, right arm upraised. In each fist he held a forked thunderbolt. Fire jetted in spurts from his eyes and mouth; his face was stretched in a horrid grimace. This, surely, was the god Baal.