Sci Fiction Classics Volume 2

by Vol 2 (v1. 3) (epub)

  (50) Sarah Boyle imagines, in her mind's eye, cleaning, and ordering the great world, even the Universe. Filling the great spaces of Space with a marvellous sweet smelling, deep cleansing foam. Deodorizing rank caves and volcanoes. Scrubbing rocks.

  (51) INSERT SEVEN. TURTLES.

  Many different species of carnivorous Turtles live in the fresh waters of the tropical and temperate zones of various continents. Most northerly of the European Turtles (extending as far as Holland and Lithuania) is the European Pond Turtle (Emys orbicularis). It is from eight to ten inches long and may live a hundred years.

  (52) CLEANING UP AFTER THE PARTY.

  Sarah is cleaning up after the party. Gum drops and melted ice cream surge off paper plates, making holes in the paper tablecloth through the printed roses. A fly has died a splendid death in a pool of strawberry ice cream. Wet jelly beans stain all they touch, finally becoming themselves colorless, opaque white flocks of tames or sleeping maggots. Plastic favors mount half-eaten pieces of blue cake. Strewn about are thin strips of fortune papers from the Japanese poppers. Upon them are printed strangely assorted phrases selected by apparently unilingual Japanese. Crowds of delicate yellow people spending great chunks of their lives in producing these most ephemeral of objects, and inscribing thousands of fine papers with absurd and incomprehensible messages. "The very hairs of your head are all numbered," reads one. Most of the balloons have popped. Someone has planted a hot dog in the daffodil pot. A few of the helium balloons have escaped their owners and now ride the ceiling. Another fortune paper reads, "Emperor's horses meet death worse, numbers, numbers."

  (53) She is very tired, violet under the eyes, mauve beneath the eyes. Her uncle in Ohio used to get the same marks under his eyes. She goes to the kitchen to lay the table for tomorrow's breakfast, then she sees that in the turtle's bowl the turtle is floating, still, on the surface of the water. Sarah Boyle pokes at it with a pencil but it does not move. She stands for several minutes looking at the dead turtle on the surface of the water. She is crying again.

  (54) She begins to cry. She goes to the refrigerator and takes out a carton of eggs, white eggs, extra large. She throws them one by one onto the kitchen floor which is patterned with strawberries in squares. They break beautifully. There is a Secret Society of Dentists, all moustached, with Special Code and Magic Rings. She begins to cry. She takes up three bunny dishes and throws them against the refrigerator; they shatter, and then the floor is covered with shards, chunks of partial bunnies, an ear, an eye here, a paw; Stockton, California, Acton, California, Chico, California, Redding, California Glen Ellen, California, Cadix, California, Angels Camp, California, Half Moon Bay. The total ENTROPY of the Universe therefore is increasing, tending towards a maximum, corresponding to complete disorder of the particles in it. She is crying, her mouth is open. She throws a jar of grape jelly and it smashes the window over the sink. It has been held that the Universe constitutes a thermodynamically closed system, and if this were true it would mean that a time must finally come when the Universe "unwinds" itself, no energy being available for use. This state is referred to as the "Heat Death of the Universe." Sarah Boyle begins to cry. She throws a jar of strawberry jam against the stove, enamel chips off and the stove begins to bleed. Bach had twenty children, how many children has Sarah Boyle? Her mouth is open. Her mouth is opening. She turns on the water and fills the sink with detergent. She writes on the kitchen wall, "William Shakespeare has Cancer and lives in California." She writes, "Sugar Frosted Flakes are the Food of the Gods." The water foams up in the sink, overflowing, bubbling onto the strawberry floor. She is about to begin to cry. Her mouth is opening. She is crying. She cries. How can one ever tell whether there are one or many fish? She begins to break glasses and dishes, she throws cups and cooking pots and jars of food, which shatter and break, and spread over the kitchen. The sand keeps falling, very quietly, in the egg timer. The old man and woman in the barometer never catch each other. She picks up eggs and throws them into the air. She begins to cry. She opens her mouth. The eggs arch slowly through the kitchen, like a baseball, hit high against the spring sky, seen from far away. They go higher and higher in the stillness, hesitate at the zenith, then begin to fall away slowly, slowly, through the fine clear air.

  The End

  Reprinted by permission of Pamela Zoline © 1967 by New Worlds.

  The Thousand Cuts

  Ian Watson

  The Petrushka restaurant was a large dim cellar, with theirs the only table occupied. Ballet Russe murals writhed dimly on the walls: exotic ghosts.

  As the waiter unloaded the chilled glasses of vodka, Don Kavanagh observed, "I don't think Russian restaurants are very popular these days."

  "That's why we came," Hugh Carpenter said, "Bound to get a table."

  "Don't blame me," said the waiter. "I'm a Londoner, born and bred."

  "Maybe there's a good sketch there," suggested Martha Vine, who was the ugly sister of the team. "You know, restaurants run by the wrong sort of people. Such as an Eskimo Curry House — Or, wait a minute, how about a slaughterhouse for vegetables. Wait, I've got it, protests at vegetable vivisection!"

  Hugh dismissed the notion, and the waiter, with the same toss of his head. The whole sparkle of their TV show relied on cultivating a blind spot for the obvious.

  "Not quite mad enough, darling." He cocked his head. "What's that?"

  Don listened.

  "A car backfiring."

  "That many times?"

  "More like gunfire," said Alison Samuels, shaking her impeccably corn-rowed red hair. She was beauty, to Martha's beast.

  "So it's somebody gunning their engine." Hugh grinned triumphantly. "Okay, where were we?"

  Soon after, sounds of crashing and breakages, a woman's scream and incoherent shouting came from the upstairs vestibule of the Petrushka —

  "This isn't one of your practical jokes, is it, Hugh?" asked Martha anxiously. "Tape recorder upstairs? Is it?"

  "No, it damn well —"

  At that moment two brawny men wearing lumber jackets crowded down the stairs, thrusting the waiter, who was bleeding from the mouth, and the manager and his beige-blonde receptionist ahead of them. A third man stayed up top. All three were armed with machine guns.

  "Stay where you are!" The armed man's accent was southern Irish. "You three, get to a table and sit down!"

  The manager, cashier and waiter did so, quickly.

  The momentary silence that followed was broken by the approaching wail of a police siren.

  "I take it," said Hugh loudly, "that we are all hostages in yet another bungled terrorist escapade?"

  "Be quiet!"

  Out of the corner of his mouth, Don murmured, "Hush. You're most likely to get murdered in the first few minutes. Then rapport starts building up. Just — meditate. Do nothing."

  "Zen and the art of being a hostage, eh?" Hugh whispered. He sat still as a Buddhist monk.

  A police loudspeaker spoke, close by —

  "Don't come any nearer!" cried the upstairs man. "We have hostages in here! We'll kill them!"

  Lumber jacket number two ran to the kitchen door and kicked it open —

  Hugh's tongue moved inside her mouth. His finger traced the curve of her hip.

  He pulled away instantly. He was naked. So was Alison. They were on the bed in his Chelsea flat. Outside was bright with June sunlight.

  Alison gazed at Hugh, wide-eyed.

  "But," she managed to say.

  "But we're in the Petrushka, Alison — I mean, correct me if I'm crazy, but I wasn't aware that I'm subject to bouts of amnesia! I mean — how the hell did we get here? I mean, you can tell me, can't you?"

  "Hugh. I — I can't tell you anything. We're in the restaurant. Those IRA men are — at least — I suppose that's what they were. But we aren't. We're here."

  Hugh sat up. Dumbly he stared at a newspaper lying on the yellow shag-piled carpet.

  The headlines were: PETRUSHKA SIEGE ENDS PEACEFUL
LY.

  He read the story, hardly understanding it. But he understood the accompanying photograph of himself with his arm wrapped round Alison's shoulders, both of them grinning and waving.

  "Just look at the date! June, the ninth. This is next week's newspaper."

  "So we're in the middle of next week." Alison began to laugh hysterically, then with deliberate irony she slapped her own cheek. "I must remember this trick next time I visit the dentist's.— Why can't either of us remember a bloody thing?"

  "I wish I could remember us making love."

  Alison started to dress.

  "I always wanted us to get into bed," Hugh went on. "It was one of my big ambitions. I suppose it still is! We must have been celebrating our freedom. Our release.—

  "Gas," he decided suddenly. "That's it. They must have used some new kind of psychochemical to knock everybody unconscious or confuse us. This is a side effect."

  He studied the newspaper more carefully.

  "Doesn't say a thing about gas. It says the police talked the gunmen out. I suppose you can muzzle the press a little — no, this was all too public. The story has to be true as written."

  His telephone rang.

  Hugh hurried naked into the next room to take the call.

  Alison was sitting at the dressing table, concentrating on braiding her hair, when he returned. He noticed how she was trembling. His own body felt hollow and his skin was covered with goose bumps, though the air was warm.

  "That was Don. He — he reacted very rationally, for a clown. He's in the same fix we are. After Don hung up, I tried to phone Martha. But I can't get through. All the lines are jammed. I tried to phone the police. I even tried to call — I tried to call the goddamn talking clock. Can't get it either. Everybody is phoning to find out what the bloody time is! It isn't just us, Alison. It's got nothing specifically to do with the Petrushka. It's everybody."

  "Where's your radio? Switch it on."

  "Kitchen."

  Hugh fled, still naked, and she followed his bouncing rump.

  A punk rock band was singing:

  — they'll bomb yer boobs!

  they'll bomb yer brains!

  they'll bomb yer bums!

  The song faded.

  The deejay said, "You've just heard the latest track from The Weasels. Hot stuff, eh? Like, radio-active — and that's what a radio's supposed to be: active. So I'm carrying straight on, even if you're all as confused as I am. That's right, loyal listeners, none of us here in the studio has any idea how we got here today. Or how it got to be today. But if you're all feeling the way I'm feeling, I've got this word of advice for you: stay cool, and carry on doing what you're doing. Keep on trucking that truck. Keep the traffic moving. Cook the lunch, Ma Jones, and don't set fire to the pan…the kids'll be home soon. And now to help you all, here comes a track from an old group, Traffic. It's called, In a Chinese Noodle Factory —"

  Hugh turned across the dial. One station had simply gone off the air; on others only music was being broadcast.

  "Try short-wave," urged Alison. "Abroad."

  When he picked up a gabbled French-language broadcast from Cairo, he realized that whatever had happened, had maybe happened world-wide.

  Before the end of June, and during July and August, the effect repeated itself a dozen times. None of the subsequent "breaks" lasted as long as the first one had. Some swallowed up two or three days, and others only a few hours. But there was no sign that they were winding down.

  Nor was there any conceivable explanation.

  Nor could people get used to having their lives repeatedly broken at random.

  For this was not simply like fainting or falling asleep. When awareness resumed…and who could promise that it would, next time?…all the world's activities were found to have flowed on as usual. Airplanes had jetted to and fro between London and New York. Contracts had been signed, and babies born. Newspapers had been printed…and the newsdealers' cry of "Read all about it!" was now an imperative, for how else could anyone find out in detail what had happened? A woman would find herself locked in a jail cell, but the police would have to consult their records before they could break the news to her that she had murdered, say, her husband…which raised strange new questions about guilt and innocence.—

  Distressing it was indeed, to find oneself suddenly at the controls of a jumbo jet heading in to land at an unexpected airport, or lying in a hospital bed after a mysterious operation, or running down a street — for what reason?

  "What if we find ourselves in the middle of a nuclear war, with all the sirens wailing?" asked Alison. "I can't stand it. It's driving me mad." She poured herself another glass of gin.

  "It's driving everybody mad," said Don. They were in Hugh's flat. "It's like that old Chinese torture."

  "Which, the water dripping down on your skull till it wears a hole in it?"

  "No, I mean the Death of a Thousand Cuts. I always wondered if the poor victims died from loss of blood. But it must have been from the accumulated shock. One painful shock after another. One, you could survive. A dozen, you could survive. But a thousand? Never! That's what'll destroy the human race. This is the Life of a Thousand Cuts."

  "Good heavens," said Hugh, "you've got it." He rubbed his hands briskly. "Cuts! That's brilliant."

  "It means we're like robots," Don went on, ignoring him. "We don't need consciousness. We don't need to be aware. A bird isn't aware. But that doesn't stop it from courting and raising young and migrating. Actually, it helps. No swallow with self-awareness would bother flying all the way to the tip of South Africa and back every year."

  "Do you mean we've evolved too much self-awareness, and it's a dead end?" asked Alison.

  "And now we're going to become robots again, and the world will run a lot more smoothly. But we won't know it. Any more than a sparrow or a mouse knows. They just are. Martha, you mentioned nuclear war. But have you realized how smoothly the Arms Limitation Talks are going all of a sudden?"

  "That's because both sides are more scared of an accident than they've ever been."

  "No, it isn't. I've been checking back. All the significant advances have occurred during breaks." Don chuckled softly. "Breakthroughs, during breaks! And remember, too, that the Petrushka siege ended peacefully…during a break."

  "During a cut," Hugh corrected him.

  "The Petrushka thing could so easily have ended in a bloody shoot-out, with the restaurant being stormed. But it didn't happen that way.—"

  Don was driving his red Metro along the elevated section of the motorway into Central London, in fast heavy traffic. Some distance behind, a Volkswagen failed to overtake a large tractor-trailer. The tractor-trailer rammed it, skidding and jackknifing. As following traffic slammed into the wreckage, a ball of flame rose up.

  "Bloody hell!" Don glanced at the calendar watch he had thought to equip himself with in the aftermath of the first break, before stocks ran out. "Two days, this time."

  Alison was sitting next to him. Hugh was in the back seat. No sign of Martha. He hoped she was still alive.

  "For Christ's sake, get us off here!" begged Alison. "It's a death trap."

  "More like a bloody buffalo stampede! Why don't the idiots slow down?"

  Somehow, Don reached the next exit ramp safely. The ramp was crowded with vehicles descending. Horns blared. Fenders and bumpers scraped and banged.

  "Mustn't forget what we were talking about," Hugh reminded him, over his shoulder. "The life of a Thousand Cuts."

  "There'll be a thousand cuts in the paintwork of this baby …"

  "Stop at the nearest pub, Don. We have to talk before we lose the continuity."

  "About cuts," said Hugh, cradling a double Scotch.

  The bar of the Duke of Kent was packed, but remarkably hushed as people waited for the filler music on the landlord's radio to stop, and the first hastily assembled news to take its place. Many people were not drinking at all, but merely waiting.

  "You mention
ed the Death of a Thousand Cuts, and of course, those were cuts in the flesh with a knife. But what do we mean by cuts?"

  "A film," said Alison. "Editing. Switching scenes."

  "Good girl!"

  "I'm not a girl. Girls are twelve years old or less."

  "Okay, sorry."

  "That's why I wouldn't ever go to bed with you."

  "Okay, okay. I prostrate myself. Now, that's it exactly, the editing of a film…the cutting from one scene to the next. You don't need to see your characters drive all the way from A to B. They just leave, then they arrive. Otherwise a film would last as long as real life. Or the director would be Andy Warhol."

  "As long as real life used to last —"

  "Quite. And what if reality itself is really a sort of film? A millennia-long Warhol movie with a cast of billions? Suppose, as holography is to flat photography, so to holography is — solidography. Suppose the world is being projected. It's a solid movie made of matter, not of light. We're an entry in the Film Festival of the Universe. But —" He paused emphatically.

  "— Are we the completed masterpiece? Or are we the rushes on the cutting room floor — of reality? Because suddenly we've lost our own sense of continuity. Two days drop out. Three days drop out."

  The music on the radio stopped.

  "Shush!" hissed a roomful of snakes.

  This is the BBC Emergency Service and I am Robin Johnson. The date is September the first. The time is one-twenty-five in the afternoon. The most recent break measured approximately fifty hours. At the Helsinki disarmament talks, preliminary agreement has been reached on the reduction of —."

  "Come on, we can read all that stuff later."

  Don had not yet started the engine of the Metro. "Wouldn't it spoil the natural flow of this film of yours if all the characters suddenly became aware that their lives are just a fiction?" he asked. "Maybe this is a very subtle, artistic touch. Maybe the director has suddenly gone into experimental cinema. He was making a realistic film before. But now he's into New Wave techniques…meta-film…like a French director. I still say we're all really living robots. But we never knew it before. Now we do," Don concluded.