Sacrifice of Fools (12 page)

An orange Volkswagen campervan is parked on the Hold side of the road. The interior lights are on; figures move behind steamed-up glass and in the darkness underneath an awning erected against the open tailgate. Bass blast: dunh dunh dunh dunh dunh dunh dunh duhduh dunh. Divine architecture junkies. God is the best addiction of all. But the dynamics of the sacred space work unpredictably on the human nervous system. It’s not always the face of God you see. They find them in the river sometimes, churned up with the plastic beer glasses in the jet-wash from the car ferries, or down on the mud flats with the shore birds mincing around them. Heart failure. The eyes. You can’t describe the look in them, the last thing they saw. But the kids keep coming in their campers and caravans and tents and little wet encampments smelling of piss, wood smoke and wet wool. Hungry for the face of God.

Maybe that’s the look in the eyes of the next-morning wash-ups.

The loading dock is a shell. The sacred space is constructed inside, a building within a building. Gillespie’s senses slip off the web of wooden beams and live-polymer sheeting. Its geometry eludes him. As soon as he sees it as
this
it changes shape to
that.
Dimensions shift with every step he takes towards it: the sacred space grows bigger than perspective allows, the loading dock dwindles until it seems smaller than the object it contains. The emotional resonances extend outside the space. He can feel his balls tighten, his belly tense, his breath grow short, the quarter-inch of stubble on his head prickle as he approaches the chamber. Something wonderful. Like Christmas to a child. With snow, like when Stacey was three and it was pure wonder.

Andy Gillespie’s never known the subtle movement of spirit dwelling in a temple or a shrine. He’s never stood awed and silent beneath the ancient lights of Christianity’s cathedrals. But he knows that whatever you might feel there is only a shadow cast by what is contained here. A place for experiencing God. There are angels in the architecture. There are sick buildings and healthy buildings and buildings that make you feel at peace and buildings where you feel agitated the moment you step into them but do not know why. Buildings that make you feel vulnerable and vertiginous, buildings that enfold and nurture you like a placenta. The first stone tombs of the Shian are thirty thousand years old. Enough time to learn to build so skilfully that every nuance of architecture and decoration and geometry and lighting and the subtle movements of air stimulate your senses into a perception of the divine.

A Shian arrives around a corner of the sacred space. Smell of a female. A second sniff: an
old
female. She is dressed in a long skirt split to the thigh and a silk blouse. It is cold in the loading dock but the blouse is open. Her nostrils are circled with white make-up.

‘You are Andy Gillespie.’ The nostrils flare, identifying him. ‘I know you from the Welcome Centre.’

‘Thetherrin Harridi?’ he asks. The old Outsider tilts her head back in confirmation. ‘I’m afraid I don’t remember you.’

‘We all look alike. Eamon Donnan is at the focus. I will take you to him.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb anything.’

‘It is nothing. He is at the stage of searching for a
hahndahvi.
This requires that he spends much time in the focus. Your presence will not trouble him. He will be glad to see you. You loved each other once.’

The enforced intimacy of prison is a kind of loving.

‘I will take you by the north door. The effect is less there, but you would be advised to close your eyes to minimize the disorientation.’

‘I had a couple of big vodkas just before I came.’

Without speaking, the Outsider leads Gillespie round to the north door. She opens it. They pass through into the sacred space.

Two big hits of vodka blur the edges of Gillespie’s senses, but the lift into God-consciousness makes him want to fall on his hands and knees. It’s here. Every good thing. Every moment of awe and wonder and beauty and mystery. He is floundering in
numen.
He breathes it in; it is everywhere and nowhere, like all good gods should be. Infinite and intimate. Terrible and wonderful. All those paired contradictions that divinities maintain so effortlessly.

It’s only because of the alcohol that he is able to look around him to try to see how the trick is done. It is very good. When he looks at the walls straight on they seem to stretch away for ever, but on the edges of the fields of vision they curve intimately around the space so that it is both very much larger and very much smaller than it looks from outside. The light is at once directional and unfocused; shadows shift, clouds of tiny flames appear, swirl, vanish. Tongues of fire. In the centre of the space is what he can only describe as a globe of woven light. A stained glass window made of fire. There is a shadow in the light, a seated figure.

As Gillespie walks towards the figure, the walls move across his peripheral vision, stealthily opening up planes and dimensions. Invitations to strange rooms and niches. He pauses, shakes his head. There is something in it.

‘Above the range of your hearing,’ Thetherrin says. ‘The space modulates the passage of air through it into sound.’

But he felt it. It was a sharp, sudden sense of loss and freedom. A great divorce. In one of the chambers in the corner of his eye he glimpses a kneeling figure
—
human, Outsider, he can’t tell. It’s wrapped in a shit-coloured coat. It beats the floor with a fist. He hears weeping. He turns, but the walls have closed.

He knows instinctively that it would have been very different entering through one of the other doors.

The illusion is seamless. That is because it is not illusion. A real magician can do all the same tricks as a conjuror. It would have been an illusion if Gillespie had seen the face of God, but the Shian do not believe in gods. Their
hahndahvi
come out of themselves. The sensations of the sacred space come out of themselves, from that fold of the mind that holds the faculty for spiritual experience. God is within. God is in the chemicals. Twelve vodkas, a tab of LSD, eight hours’ dancing on MDMA: thou also art God. Like those people who have near-death experiences where they fly towards a great white light and see the faces of their loved ones and angels. Oxygen starvation of the visual centres of the brain. Chemical heaven. God doesn’t make us. We make God. The answers aren’t out there, waiting for the right question to be asked in the right way with the right degree of faith and self-deprecation, then
maybe
they might get an answer, provided you accept that
No
is a valid answer from an omnipotent deity. The truth is in there, among the heroes and the villains, the lovers and the rogues, the thieves, fools and pretenders of the
hahndahvi.
This light is my own.

Jesus.

‘I will leave you here,’ Thetherrin says at the edge of the central globe of lights. He turns to thank her but she is gone. Swallowed by the numinous. Gillespie steps through the curtain of light, into stillness. At the centre, all influences come together and cancel each other out.

‘Andy.’

‘Eamon?’

He doesn’t recognize the voice. It’s high, accented. It doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t sound like he remembers. He doesn’t recognize the figure kneeling on the meditation stool. It’s dressed Shian fashion, wrap-over jacket, leggings and boots: the formal hunting garb that the Outsiders on earth wear only on ceremonial occasions. Its hair is cut Shian fashion: shaved into a central crest, dyed red. A hand is offered, palm up. The Shian way. It has five digits.

Gillespie licks it. Eamon Donnan doesn’t taste human any more.

‘Yeah.’ But Donnan tilts his head back, the Shian way.

‘Jesus, you look like Robert de Niro in
Taxi Driver.’

He laughs, but doesn’t return Gillespie’s smile. He blinks slowly.

Suddenly, Gillespie finds he wants to seize Eamon Donnan and shake him. In the still centre of this spiritual space, he wants to shake all this stupidity and play-acting out of his prison friend. What do you look like? he wants to shout into his face from a distance of very few centimetres. Do you think you are one of them? Do you think that because you shave your head and wear the clothes and speak the body-talk and smell of their food that you are one of them? You can’t even sit on their stool because your legs are too short and your hips are the wrong shape and your joints are in different planes, and you think that you can dream their dreams and give a home in your head to their archetypes? You look stupid. You look as stupid and undignified as those thin white boys who shave their heads and put on saffron robes and dance about in Cornmarket on Saturday afternoons singing
Krishna Krishna
and everyone laughs at them and wonders what kind of a god makes you dress like a dick. You look like a dressed-up chimpanzee. You look like a monkey at a tea party.

He wants to say all this and shake this thing in front of him back into the Eamon Donnan he knew. But he does nothing. He doesn’t know why this angers him so much. He doesn’t like to think that he is jealous that Eamon Donnan has found the courage to do and be what he desires most.

‘Good of you to see me,’ Gillespie says lamely. He declines the offer of an empty stool and squats down to sit uncomfortably cross-legged.

‘Hey, you know… Any time.’

‘How long do you have to stay in here?’

‘I don’t have to stay anywhere. I want to stay here.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Five days. I think the
hahndahvi
will be coming soon. I’ve seen things, on the edges of my dreams.’

‘How does that work? I thought you had to have the dream language passed on in the womb.’

‘Yes, normally. But Thetherrin reckons that because I have
—
we have
—
the structure of Narha imprinted, the dream language could be grown around that grammar. They’re both language-like structures, they both share the universal grammar. The sacred space stimulates archetype formation in the subconscious, and they crystallize around the language structure. This is the first English I’ve spoken in six months, Andy.’

‘We can talk Narha if you like.’

‘It’s all right. But watch your dreams, Andy. You got given it too. What are you here for, Andy? Not pretty talk about linguistics.’

‘You know.’

Donnan shrugs. Human shrug. ‘Everyone knows. No one’s talking about anything else. What have you been told?’

‘They aren’t talking to me. They won’t say anything to me. But they’re split; right down the middle. Even the Nations are split. Goes all the way down to the Holds. Even this one, I think. Most of all this one, maybe. If the Harridis are divided, everyone is divided.’

‘I didn’t think they would tell you anything,’ Donnan says. ‘You’re a threat.’ He sits back on his contemplation stool. The illumination from the veils of coloured lights shifts. He looks very alien. His eyes are the most alien.

‘Me? The Welcome Centre? Humans?’

Donnan, by saying nothing, implies all three. And more.

‘Can you think of anywhere more typically human than this country?’ he says. ‘They know they’re an experiment. Some think your Harridis and their movement for integration into human society is premature.’

‘You’re telling me Shian could have done this to their own kind?’

‘If they won’t tell you, I can’t tell you. What do the police think?’

‘They think I did it.’

Donnan looks at Gillespie. A long look, that Gillespie can’t read because it means two things in two languages of looking.

‘They think I’m the link man in a weapons-running operation to the paramilitaries. They think the Welcome Centre found out, and I kept them quiet. They’ve someone following me. This bitch. She’ll be out there now, in the rain.’

The silence at the heart of the sacred space is palpable. Gillespie hears his voice speaking in it: flat and dull and lifeless.

‘The police are fools,’ Eamon Donnan says.

‘They’ve got a man in from the university. Some Shian expert. Littlejohn.’

Donnan blinks his eyes slowly. A smile. Gillespie leaves him space but he does not speak.

‘He thinks it’s some kind of psycho,’ he goes on. ‘Serial killer. The police don’t want to hear that. They want a quick result. A serial killer has to strike again before they can begin to get a pattern.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I agree with Littlejohn.’

‘Littlejohn knows nothing,’ Donnan says. Then, in Narha:
— Littlejohn is a fool.

− Am I a fool then, too?
Gillespie asks.

− You don’t know what you’re saying.
Donnan snaps back into English. ‘The police, Doctor Robert Littlejohn, you: you don’t know anything. The rules are different, Andy. You don’t even know what pitch you’re playing on, let alone where the goals are. Leave it, Andy.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Playing fucking Andy Hero again, isn’t that it? Just like in the Maze. You couldn’t stop it happening then, you can’t stop it happening now. And you cannot live with that. Hand the man his staff and stones and give him a pair of tights and a big black cape to dress up in and watch him leap from rooftop to rooftop. Play-acting Andy. You aren’t the Masked Avenger. You see all this stuff about defending rights and personal commitment to pursue justice, but the Shian Law isn’t the Lone Ranger. There’s a price to it. Maybe you won’t pay it this case, maybe not for ten years, twenty years, but every Shian lawyer knows that in the end it will cost them everything. Justice isn’t free.’

‘You think I don’t understand this?’

‘I think you don’t understand that there is no word in Narha for
guilt.
Shian lawyers don’t take cases because they can’t bear feeling guilty.’

His friends say there are many unexpected things about Andy Gillespie. One is that you never know what he is going to do until he does it. Another is that, for a broad man, he moves very fast. Almost as fast as a Shian. His left hand is clutching a fistful of soft jacket, his right drawn back to strike, before Eamon Donnan can throw himself off the contemplation stool to safety.