“There he is,” said Goodrich half-dazzled, half-confused. “I thought I was dreaming but there he is.” There was a long pause as he stared at the pinnacle or needle of rock he had seen before and which now came back into view as Knife’s taxi swung or rattled on its ribbon of road.
“I need to fill up,” said Knife as if he had not heard or had misunderstood Goodrich. “Time for petrol.” He drew up and got out of the car. Goodrich stepped out too, stretched his legs, tried to look elsewhere, think of something other than the climber he had seen. After a while Knife said: “The tank’s full. And I’ve checked on the radiator. We’re ready to go….”
“There’s a man or something or other up there,” Goodrich cried. He spoke with an effort as if the words were torn from his lungs; closed his eyes as if it had been a strain to see. Perhaps it’s the atmosphere, he thought, the place is saturated with depressed memories. Everything’s too rare or too hot. Or perhaps it’s that damned opium. “There’s a creature up there,” he insisted. The words bled in his mouth. “In that needle of rock.” Knife waited like a stone designed by Marsden, a walking stone, a talking instrument, a guide into the future. Goodrich felt sick, a blend of nausea and embarrassment, the taste of robot hallucination. Then Knife cut the air with his hand, spoke softly: “Didn’t you see him before?”
Goodrich opened his eyes. “I saw him a little way back.”
“But you said nothing.”
It was no business of mine, no business of mine at all, Goodrich almost blurted out but he controlled himself and explained: “I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all.”
“And now?” asked Knife.
“He’s there.”
“Good for you, Mr. Goodrich,” applauded Knife. “It would astonish you if I were to tell you how many people pass through right here in the shadow of this rock and look the other side. As they would on the pavement of a great city when a poor devil drops at their feet.”
“Are you suggesting…?”
“I am suggesting you have scored one for the road, Mr. Goodrich. Good shot, sir,” said Knife. His voice was so riddling and soft it was impossible to tell whether he was stating a fact or recording a miracle of science, a miracle of compassion. “Except that here — unlike a pavement in a great city — here on this road to Namless — the poor devil up there is a rare kind of robot with which the Director-General has begun his experiment.”
“Robot!” Goodrich was half-astonished, half-prepared for this.
“But of course,” said Knife. “It’s a miraculous refinement of the dinosaur of ages (the collaborative nexus of sex and love, striking man and risen-up god) — the roof of heaven in our mouth.”
Goodrich did not reply but looked up again at Marsden’s ascension robot outlined against the sky. It’s funny, he thought, I think of her now, my poor mother. She used to wear that odd oppressive perfume, a slightly burnt odour at the foot of the cross on Sundays in church.
Knife was silent. And soon they drove off (or pitched, it seemed, on their ribbon of road) into an oppressive landscape, a rickety sensation of perfumed, burnt spaces within a cathedral of rocks.
*
Before nightfall they drew up at what seemed a wrecked farmhouse. “We shall spend the night here,” said Knife. “The road is primitive so I doubt whether we’ve done more than a couple of hundred miles.”
Goodrich was glad to get out, stretch his legs again. The setting sun blazed upon the rim of a mountain in a ripe canvas painted TROPICAL: a magnificent ripeness of colour or rain of perspectives or climax of a waterfall in a majestic furnace. Yet from another angle that canvas seemed to shed on the stage of earth MEDITERRANEAN distinctions of individuality which invoked in each mound or thing its own separate sun or soul, redness was the delicate soul of red, greenness the delicate soul of green, purple was royal purple, blue was the essence of blue, diamond was cutting diamond, pearl was buried in pearl. Within these two extremes of tropical ripeness and mediterranean individuality, sky and earth seemed to revolve into a globe upon which the sun sank forever for those souls now departing this life into the wilderness of the Pacific they had always longed for (as their nameless scene, their nameless place of greatness), rose forever for others who set sail never to return from the wilderness of the Atlantic they had always dreamed of (as their nameless scene, their nameless place of greatness), buried its god forever in solipsistic nights of the Amazon, skimmed like Freya’s hair forever in solipsistic days of the Arctic.
The wrecked farmhouse stood like a charmed shell in itself, mediterranean and individual, though bathed in a curious glow as if it had been uprooted and would swim, at any moment, towards the tropical canvas of heaven and towards some waiting soul to be ferried from one extreme to the other. There were pools of light like individual blinds in the cracked glass of window-panes. As Goodrich drew closer he observed the mutilated façade resembling now an Indian blanket woven into all weathers and colours, the map of an alchemical robot. Then suddenly he was confronted by another dimension of accumulating effects — the ravages of uprising and repression, a gaping eyeless room from which — his nostrils began to quiver involuntarily — a dying, still-burning (it almost seemed) odour came.
“I think perhaps,” said Knife, “it’s best to bed down out-of-doors. We have blankets in the house. There’s a woman on the premises.”
“A woman,” said Goodrich astonished.
“She comes and goes,” said Knife.
“But how — on what?”
“Ass-back. Horse-back. Mule-back.” Knife shrugged.
It occurred to Goodrich that on his long journey that day — an immensity it seemed to him now — he had seen a few wings circling far overhead but not a foot on the ground.
“There are animals around,” said Knife as if he read his thoughts. “That’s how a hidden population travels. We’re lucky to come on wheels.”
The great curtains of tropical night were descending upon the Director-General’s mediterranean stage. In the western sky it was steel, a steely avalanche raged. In the eastern sky it was dark, a mysterious avalanche descended and a kind of perfume came from the stars. Goodrich’s nose wrinkled involuntarily (as it had when he sensed the burnt room in the farmhouse) and he wondered if, by any chance, the woman of whom Knife had spoken had returned and stood somewhere in the darkness. He discerned her already with sensuous eyes on the tip of his nose. Then Knife came out of the farmhouse with an armful of wood. This he arranged on the ground, applied a match, fanned the flame. “That’s better,” he said at last. “By the way there’s no sign of the woman. But if she’s around she will come out sooner or later. Now for some food.” He set up a rude tripod, hung a pot over the fire into which he poured water, rice, peas, vegetables. Then he opened a can of beef, emptied it into a pan. Goodrich followed the preparations as if they were a ritual harvest, a harvest of food and fire within man and nature, the smell of food and the smell of flesh, cosmic essences, cosmic drama. Conquest of the stars in the roof of one’s mouth. An army marches on its stomach to recruit posterity, and birth is a trauma of subsistence.