Read Online Watson, Ian - Novel 08 by The Gardens of Delight (v1.1) - Free Book Online

stag or a goat and really work myself up!
Only, I fancy we’re a little late for this one. All the rides are taken, and
they’re half-way worked up already. The carousel’s spinning—too late to leap on
now.”
                 “There’s
a goat down there with no one riding it, Sean. I could do with a swim, myself.”
                 “Uhh-huh. That spoonbill’s booked the ride. Who knows who he
is—or was?”
                 In
fact, Sean realized that they had already wandered some way down from the brow
of the hill without noticing it. Stopping short, he caught Denise by the wrist.
                 “Yes,
it’s very involving. Like a
whirlpool! Like all the rest of this world! Everyone we’ve seen—apart from friend
Jeremy here—seems so utterly drawn into it. Submerged. Absorbed. But no, what I meant by sinister wasn’t that. It’s the fact that they’re all
turning to the left—from their point of view.”
                 “They’d
crash into each other if they were going both ways.”        
•
                 “Ah,
but it’s the sinister direction—the direction that’s traditionally to be
distrusted! The gauche way. And I’m sure it’s that way
in the original painting too—but that’s pretty remarkable, if Bosch saw the
left as the real direction of psychic growth ...”
                 “Oh
I see! The right hemisphere controls the left-hand side—and it’s the right
hemisphere that’s intuitive, isn’t it?—whereas the left hemisphere, which is
rational, controls the right hand?”
                 “Right!” Sean smiled broadly. “And there, in a word—the one
word ‘right’—is the whole propaganda war that the left side of the brain has
been waging against the right hemisphere ever since the left side invented
language. ‘Right’ is good, ‘left’ can’t be trusted. A lot of primitive people
only used to eat food with their right hand—they wiped their arses with their
left. Oh, there’s been a real smear campaign going on for hundreds of thousands
of years, with the left-brain having the first word and the last word! But here
they ride toward the left—the intuitive, holistic way.”
                 So
this neurological fact had projected itself into objective behavior here, mused
Sean. And so the Cavalcade was a physical re-education of the body’s footsteps
and gestures —toward the left-hand way.
                 Was
Jeremy left-handed? Were the other colonists? It just didn’t show up where
there were no pens to scribble with, nor tools to
wield! Remembering the style of Loquela’s loving— and Jeremy’s—Sean decided
that the colonists were pretty well ambidextrous by now.
                 Which
hand did they wipe their shit away
with? he wondered. This was no medieval dunghill,
though—pools and fresh streams abounded. There were no insects, either, no
flies. Perhaps no germs? Maybe dirt wasn’t dirty here.
                 “I
wonder if ‘God’ can only really reign if He suppresses analysis—if He tips the
scales in favor of the dream side of the mind . . . ?”
                 While
Sean was brooding along this ambidextrous vein, a solitary person who had been
standing downslope watching the cavalcade—apparently impervious to the attractive
electricity it was generating—turned and noticed them. The person strolled up
the slope.
                 Person. Neither man, nor woman; but both. A hermaphrodite: both he and she at once, fully sexed in both
respects with a woman’s breasts that were pert and upturned with sultana
nipples, and penis and testicles attached, doglike, to the lower belly over a
coral slit of female pubes. The person’s face was no ambiguous either-or, but a
confident both-and. As the hermaphrodite scanned them, for a moment it seemed as
though two independent, coexisting sets of facial