Grimus - By Salman Rushdie Page 0,118
conjunction with one another, as functions of one another. Destroy the Rose, and you destroy our link with the Dimensión-continua. We cannot survive that.
—Grimus misused the Rose, remembered I-Eagle. The blinks are proof that it is both damaged and being stretched to breaking-point. We cannot continue to use it as Grimus did.
—The Gorfs made the Rose to link the Dimensions, cried I-Grimus inside me. Break it and you break us. Dota could not conceive of a Dimension without an Object.
—But he said that he could conceive of a Dimension-dweller devising such a Concept, said I-Eagle.
Then the I-Grimus ceased to reason with I-Eagle and flooded me with thought-forms. The Rose enables you to travel, said the forms, and showed I-Eagle a thousand beautiful worlds, a thousand universes to explore. The Rose enables you to learn, said the thought-forms, and revealed a hundred new sciences and a hundred new art-forms, the cream of the infinite galaxies. You have one life, Said the thought-forms. With the Rose you can enter into, and become, a thousand thousand other people, live an infinity of lives, and acquire the wisdom and power to shape your own. And they showed I-Eagle some of the people Grimus had watched and understood, showed the vicarious joys and agonies of countless lives. And one day, said the thought-forms, when you have done all you wished to do, been all you wished to be, you can pass this supreme gift on to another, choose the moment and manner of your going and give the Phoenix a new life, a new beginning.
But I-Eagle had seen too much on Calf Island and outside it, seen too much of the way I-Grimus had ruined lives for the sake of an idea. To I-Grimus ideas, discoveries, learning; these were all-important. I-Eagle saw the centuries of wretched wandering that preceded my arrival, saw the people of K reduced to a blind philosophy of pure survival, clutching obsessively at the shreds of their individuality, knowing within themselves that they were powerless to alter the circumstances in which they lived. The combined force of unlimited power, unlimited learning, and a rarefied, abstract attitude to life which exalted these two into the greatest goals of humanity, was a force I-Eagle could not bring himself to like. I-Eagle saw its effect on Virgil Jones, on Dolores O’Toole, on Liv Jones, on Bird-Dog, his sister even though they had long been estranged. No, I-Eagle thought, the Rose is not the supreme gift.
Then all discussion, whether rational or thought-formal, ceased, and the I-Grimus within released upon I-Eagle the full force of his formidable will. Media saw me (us) stagger and lurch as the war raged within, and she grasped my hand.
Perhaps that was what turned the tide towards I-Eagle. I was not alone. Media was there. Media, one of the many whose lives he had distorted. Media, one of the many to whom I-Eagle felt responsible. The guilt of recent events was still there. I was fighting for the island. He was fighting for himself. And he lost.
Outside, Peckenpaw and Moonshy ransacked the house.
I, I-Eagle, spoke to Media. The I-Grimus had receded within me, a throbbing pain in the back of my head.
—I intend to destroy the Rose, I-Eagle said. I won’t pretend there is no risk. It could unmake us all.
—Grimus’ machine is not worth saving, she said. Do it now. Perhaps it is better to be dead than to live in fear of… this.
I-Eagle nodded and receded once more into my mind, finding the I-Grimus, forcing him to reveal the secrets of the Rose. He was unwilling, knowing why I wanted them, but he was beaten. I found the knowledge within him, and made a setting. Then it was a question of Conceptualization.
First, I-Eagle dismantled the Sub-dimension; that was the easy part. I made a picture grow in my head, a picture of Calf Island as one thing, Grimushome on the peak, the steps leading down to Liv’s outcrop. No Gates, no barriers. I knew when it had worked. It was, in a way, like setting an Inner Dimension. After a while one knew it was there, fixed, as one had thought it. For a moment I was lost in admiration of this Object, so incredibly complex, so incredibly simple. Then I collected myself and set about the harder task.
I began to re-create Calf Island, exactly as it was, with one difference: it was to contain no Rose. I had decided that this was a better alternative than physically breaking the Rose. Less risky, in view of what had happened after Deggle’s attempt.
It was now that the I-Grimus made its last attempt. It showed me something I had forgotten it knew: the coordinates of my Dimension, to which he had expelled Nicholas Deggle so long ago. The meaning was simple: if I chose not to destroy the Rose, I could go back to my own world. I-Grimus preferred to go, with I-Eagle, far away from the Rose, perhaps never to find its counterpart in my Dimension, rather than see it destroyed.
I-Eagle cannot say I was not tempted; but then there was Media again, Media and the rest of them, depending on me.
—O, hell, I said aloud. What would I do there anyway?
And the I-Grimus had no tricks left.
I used him. He had shaped the island in the first place, so he knew it best. I drew his knowledge out of him and used it. It seemed like an eternity, but thought-forms move quicker than anything ever known, so it was actually over very soon.
I stood in the secret room with an awe-struck Media, looking down at the coffin of the Stone Rose.
It was empty.
The Rose had gone, and we had not.
The man who had been Flapping Eagle and was now part-Eagle, part-Grimus, was making love to Media, who had been a whore and was now his mainstay, when the Gorf Koax, who had transported himself to the peak of Calf Mountain, sensed something wrong.
The mists around the island.
The mists which circled and shrouded.
The eternal, unlifting veils.
The mists were growing thicker. Slowly, slowly, they were descending, closing in upon the island on all sides, closer, closer, a dense grey fog now, closing, closing.
And they were not mists.
Deprived of its connection with all relative Dimensions, the world of Calf Mountain was slowly unmaking itself, its molecules and atoms breaking, dissolving, quietly vanishing into primal, unmade energy. The raw material of being was claiming its own.
So that, as Flapping Eagle and Media writhed upon their bed, the Mountain of Grimus danced the Weakdance to the end.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of nine novels: Grimus, Midnight’s Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize and the “Booker of Bookers,” for the best novel to have won the prize), Shame (winner of the French Prix du Meilleur Livre étranger), The Satanic Verses (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (winner of the Writers Guild Award), The Moor’s Last Sigh (winner of the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (winner of the Eurasian section of the Commonwealth Prize), Fury (a New York Times Notable Book), and Shalimar the Clown (a Time Book of the Year). He is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and four works of nonfiction—The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, and Step Across This Line. He is the co-editor of Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writing.
A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Salman Rushdie has also been awarded Germany’s Author of the Year Prize, the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the Mantua Literary Award. He holds honorary doctorates at five European and two American universities and is an honorary professor in the humanities at M.I.T. He has been awarded the Freedom of the City Award in Mexico City, and holds the rank of Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters—France’s highest artistic honor. His books have been translated into thirty-seven languages.
2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1975 by Salman Rushdie
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This work was originally published in 1975 in the United Kingdom by Victor Gollanez Ltd. and in 1979 in the United States by Overlook Press, Woodstock, N.Y
This edition published by arrangement with the author.
The author would like to thank Messrs. Faber & Faber for permission to quote from “The Four Quartets,” T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems 1909-1962, and from “Crow’s Playmates,” Ted Hughes: Crow.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Rushdie, Salman.
Grimus: a novel/Salman Rushdie.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-52911-4
1. Indians of North America—Fiction. 2. Seafaring life—Fiction. 3. Immortalism—Fiction. 4. Mortality—Fiction. 5. Islands—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6068.U757G7 2003
823’.914—dc22
2003058824
v3.0