PROLOGUE - SPRING 2240
the father of lies
Why was I so frightened in my dream that I awoke? Did not a child carrying a mirror come to me?
“O Zarathustra,” the child said to me, “look at yourself in the mirror!” But when I looked into the mirror I cried out and my heart was shaken: for I did not see myself, I saw the sneer and grimace of a devil.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1885 the father of lies
The bee climbed the outside of the flower’s bell, lifting and dropping in the air, its jointed legs grasping the rim, the flower swaying beneath its weight, its delicate, translucent wings half-raised in balance. Ben watched. Close by, only inches from his face, the flower gaped, blood red above the rich, dark green of its leaves. Its scent was sweet, intoxicating. It had drawn him as inexorably as the bee. His hand, outstretched to touch, had paused and now rested near the flower’s base, almost cupping the petals. Leaf shadow fell across his hand, moving gently with the wind’s movement through the branches of the tree above, forming a gauze upon the fair, hairless skin. He glanced up, hearing music. A haunting Dowland melody. Lute and voice. Sighing, he looked back. The lawn was damp. Moisture had soaked through the thin material of his trousers. He watched the bee pull itself up onto the flower’s rim, then tilt forward, down into the dark red mouth. Encased, the insect’s body seemed suddenly huge, the perspective of the bell abruptly changed, grown vast and yet filled by that presence at its heart. The insect moved, its antennae searching frantically, erratically, like a blind man in a strange house, yet at the centre of that great furred body there was a perfect stillness.
And the colours. Ben shivered, drinking in the colours. The richly golden “fur” of the bee - a yellow-gold slashed through with black, the same blackness that was at the flower’s heart. Intensities of red and gold and black. Primal. And all about him in the garden, innumerable, overpowering shades of green. Colours enough within the green to frame another spectrum. How the universe once was. Vivid. A sensory explosion. Ben stood, the memory stored, and as he looked about him he was aware suddenly of the underlying silence, of that perfect realm of nothingness that underpinned the Cosmos.
A blank sheet. His eternal starting point.
In the morning light the garden seemed renewed. Long beds of flowers bordered the gentle slope of the lawn, alive with flaming tips of perse, cerise and cadmium; colours he loved for their precise shadings, for the way they varied from the primaries. Gazing at them, he felt a profound satisfaction, his eyes tracing their gradual ascent until he found he was staring at the vine-hung back wall of the old thatched cottage.
The music changed. From the dark interior of the house came the beautiful opening strains of the Seventh Symphony, the second movement - the Allegretto. Smiling, he went inside.
“Coffee?”
Ben turned, looking across the shadowed length of the dining room, past the silent, standing shapes of the dark oak table and tall-backed wooden chairs, to where Meg stood in the doorway to the kitchen. Smiling, she drew a strand of her long, dark hair behind her ear, and in his mind he saw his mother standing there, the gesture, like the outward form of both women, identical.
“Yes,” he said softly. “I’d like that”
Ben watched her turn and vanish into the kitchen, then went across and sat in the armchair by the latticed window. His workbook lay where he had left it earlier, on the floor beside the chair. He reached down and set it in his lap. It was no ordinary book. This was a big, square, leather-bound book, its large white pages filled with all manner of colourful symbols and strange, shorthand notations, as if it had been written by some ancient alchemist or archimage. Underlying the whiteness of the paper was a faint, grid-like structure, while at the top right-hand corner of each page was a number, drawn in bright vermilion ink.
Built into the arm of the chair in which Ben sat was what at first glance looked like a painter’s palette. It held Ben’s pens -special pens which he had made himself. Taking one, he paused, staring fiercely into the air, as if fixing one of the dust motes that drifted in the beam of sunlight from the nearby open window, then began to write.
For a time he worked, conscious of some vague, not-to-be-articulated shape to
the thing on the page before him. Page S.627b: 67-80. That red ink notation in
the top corner of the page provided the context in which he worked; a precise
reference on a much larger and more complex grid, most of which he held within
his head.
Returning to the room, Meg set down the coffee on the low table next to Ben, then took a chair across from him, watching her brother work. After a time he put the pens away, closed up the palette and looked up at her. He was still handsome. Clean shaven, his hair neatly trimmed, he seemed far younger than he actually was. And no youth-enhancing drugs kept him that way. In fact, he scorned their use, preferring the lines of approaching age to the smoothness of the jaded-young. Rumours abounded of some secret potion, but Ben Shepherd was young by nature.
“Your coffee ...” she said.
He stared at it a moment, observing its surface, the way the light fell on the dull, coated liquid, then looked up at her again, smiling, his eyes, which seemed forever full of seeing, studying her features as one might study a familiar landscape.
“Has Catherine called?”
Meg shook her head. Ben’s wife was rarely here these days, and even when she was, it was never a comfortable arrangement But that was scarcely Catherine’s fault She was what Ben had made her. If she chose to spend her days elsewhere, that was as much Ben’s fault for neglecting her as hers for finally abandoning the relationship.
Catherine had loved him, almost as much as she herself loved him, but in the end her patience had worn thin. So it was. And yet she herself remained. Until death. His sister-wife.
Ben was watching her now; waiting for her to ask him. Finally she succumbed.
“How’s it going?”
“Poorly,” he said, his eyes not moving from her face; gauging her, all the while appraising her. This - this unnatural watchfulness of his, this intensity of vision - was what disconcerted most people. She was quite used to it; after all, she had endured close on fifty years of being watched by him. She had nothing to hide. But others feared to meet his gaze. Some tried to brazen it out, but most of them simply wilted before that fixed and iron stare. It seemed to them that such an excess of seeing was not simply unnatural but, in a way, super-natural. To encompass so much; to see so coldly and so clearly - through to the bone, as Ben so often said.
And in a sense they were right It was unnatural.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “I thought things were going well.” “Ifs something in the story itself,” he said, and for the briefest moment his eyes seemed to look inward; then they resumed their fierce, acquisitive gaze. “Something that no clever games with surfaces and textures can eradicate. A basic design fault, you might say.”
At that he laughed, but at the same time his right fist was clenched, and she, almost as watchful of him as he was of her, noted that and read its meaning. He looked down at the workbook in his lap and shook his head. “I mean to give it up.”
“Ben?” Meg almost stood, she was so surprised. She leaned forward, staring at him. “But you can’t. You’ve spent so long on it’ You can’t just discard it because of some momentary sense of disaffection! Persevere. Ride out the storm. You’ll feel different in a month.”
But even as she said it, she saw that her words were having no effect He had decided. In those few moments, tinkering with his notes - in the length of time it took a cup of coffee to grow cold - he had decided to abandon eight years’ work. It was all there in his face; the determination to make a break with it To start something new.