Watson, Ian - Novel 08 Read Free Page B

descent, perhaps newly recovered
from unconsciouness, but protected by the tough skin of the fruit. The unicorn
danced toward them, fencing the air, feinting with its long white horn. The negress’s breasts bobbed as, reaching out, she tossed a
raspberry the size of both her fists at the advancing beast. The berry spitted
on the tip of its horn, and the unicorn reared up, shaking its white mane, and
pranced round the pomegranate on its hind legs, its forehooves clicking
together as though applauding. Then, with a flick of its long tail, it was
gone, tottering precariously through the bushes still on two legs, a tall white
ghost.
                 “Doesn’t
it remind you?”
                 “Remind?” cried Tanya. “How can an alien
planet forty- five light years from Earth remind us of something? Oh, I’ll
grant you that they’ve spread terrestrial plants and animals around to a
remarkable extent, and in superfast time, albeit mutated and distorted ... Or
do you just mean the style of that tower they’ve built?”
                 “No.
Muthoni almost got it right before. It is a garden. It’s the hortus deliciarum—the. Garden of Earthly Delights.”
                 Muthoni
misunderstood him. “The Garden of Eden? Do you think
we’ve found the Garden of Eden?” She laughed boisterously. “Oh, man. So God
transported Adam and Eve from his assembly line here across forty-five light
years? He could have parked Eden a bit closer to Earth! Don’t be corny, Sean. Those are human colonists
outside. This is Target Three.”
                 “Mad,”
snapped Tanya. “But what a remarkably banal vision of the
universe, too!”
                 “He
means it figuratively,” said Denise, excusing at the same time her own
psychotronic flights of fancy.
                 “No,
I didn’t say Eden . I said this is the Garden of Earthly Delights . Quite literally. And the Garden of Earthly Delights is the name of the central panel of a
painting.”
                 “Oh no!” Denise, at any rate, knew it and remembered it. “The Hieronymus Bosch painting?”
                 “The very one. It all fits, doesn’t it? The
naked human lovers, the giant birds and fruits, the big land-fish.” Sean
tapped the photoprint. “This tower. There’ll be others
too. Lots of them. Bosch only showed a few kilometers
of landscape, but this is spread out across the whole hemisphere as far as I
could see. Unless, of course, we did just happen upon part of
the world which they’ve made over into this scene.”
                 “You’re
saying that we’ve landed in a painting?” mocked Paavo. “We didn’t fly through a black hole into another reality. We’re
still in the ordinary universe!”
                 “Is
the universe ordinary, Paavo, old friend?”
                 Muthoni
frowned. “If our hair and nails carry on growing in hyb, maybe our brain cells
carry on dying. Maybe we’ve woken up stupid, like old folk, with our minds
wandering.” “Landed in a painting,” muttered Paavo. “That’s too absurd even to
call absurd. The Tau Ceti colonists didn’t arrive in the midst of Canaletto’s Venice or a Dali world, did they? Leaving aside the sheer impossiblity of terraforming even part of a
hemisphere in the time they’ve had, the colonists who came here weren’t a bunch
of biomanipulating art historians. They were farmers and technicians.”
“Nevertheless,” said Sean, though Muthoni’s remark worried him. Maybe they
were all dreaming now, while wide awake? Dream-deprivation always caught up
with people. It would even well up into waking consciousness. Were they
actually wide awake, yet catching up on an eighty-seven year backlog of
frustrated reveries? Were they imposing dream imagery upon this world—which was
really something quite different? He strained to see something else outside: a
factory