Watson, Ian - SSC

by The Very Slow Time Machine (v1. 1)

  “Your blood has saved two lives already, Considine—that must please you.’’

  “Marina,’’ I hissed before she had a chance to stick the syringe in me, “Marina, it’s only a role in our game that you’re playing, don’t you realize? In our Sunhunter’s game! For sure it’s our game, ours, not yours!’’

  She held the syringe back, letting me see the cruel needle.

  “You know the name of the game, Marina? No, of course you don’t, in your white sterile uniform and your plastic waspish life, how could you ever know? But if you’ve really got Indian blood in your veins, that might help you understand. . .” “What’s there to understand, Considine? I see nothing to understand except you’re scared of a little pain.”

  “Not scared,” I lied. “The pain, the savagery— has to be. You have to hurt me, it’s your destiny. Day by day you sacrifice me to the sun, my priestess!”

  While she still hung back from me, listening in spite of herself, I told her something of Tezcatlipoca—of the giant in an ashen veil carrying his head in his hand, of the pouncing jaguar, of the dreadful shadow, of the bear with brilliant eyes. Of how he brought riches and death. Of the blood sacrifices on the last terrace of the temple. I told how Marti’s knife had turned against his own bosom and how the sun had greeted us in splendor every day for a week thereafter. She went on listening, puzzled and angry, till the anger overcame the puzzlement in her, and she thrust the syringe home . . .

  But of Tezcatlipoca the trickster I hadn’t told her—nor of his deadly practical jokes.

  How he arrived at a festival and sang a song (the song the prisoners were taught to sing) so entrancing that all the villagers followed him out of town, where he lured them onto a flimsy bridge, which collapsed, tossing hundreds of them down into the rocky gorge. How he walked into a village with a magic puppet dancing in his hand (the dance the prisoners were taught to dance) that lured the villagers closer and closer in their dumb amazement, till scores of them suffocated in the crush. How he pretended to be sorry, told the angry survivors that he couldn’t guarantee his conduct, that they had better stone him to death to prevent more innocent victims succumbing to his tricks. And stone him to death they did. But his body stank so vilely, that many more people sickened and died before they could dispose of it.

  As I lay there wracked with pain, these stories spun through my head in vivid bloodstained pictures, and my mind sang the song that led the sun’s victims onto the bridge, and my body danced the twitching dance that suffocated the survivors, and my sweat glands and my excrement stank them to death.

  How would I, Considine, sun’s Messenger, lead and dance and stink Marina out of this bright-lit ward, into the darkness that was my home?

  When a doctor made his rounds of the blood dairy, he remarked how roughly I was being treated.

  “Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg!” he twinkled, to Marina. No doubt nurses had broken down on this hateful job before.

  I smiled at her when he said that, for after a time assuredly the victim and the torturer became accomplices, and when that happens their roles are fast becoming interchangeable. I grinned the death-grin of Tezcatlipoca as he lay dead in the village and stank the villagers into vulture fodder for a joke. . . .

  So the Doctor thought she might try to assassinate me, snuff me out! Surely the least likely outcome of our duel, by now.

  The sacrifice was always preceded by a period of great sensual indulgence—a recompense for the pain to be suffered. Yet this victim here, myself, was tied down, bound in white plastic thongs, while his tormentor hung over him day by day replaying a feeble mimic spearthrust into his body, spilling his blood but replacing it again. Day by day it hurt rackingly, yet death never came. What could come? Only freedom—reversal of the sacrifice—overwhelming pleasure— triumph—and the sun! My pain-wracked grin glowed confident, drove wild anguished discords through Marina’s heart.

  “Be careful, Nurse—this one’s metabolic rate is far too high. He’s burning himself up.”

  “Yes, yes,” murmured Marina, distractedly, fleeing from me across the dark plateaux of her heart. . . .

  And, when more days had passed and I felt invincible in my agony, I commanded:

  “Come to me, Marina.”

  Does the male spider command the female spider to come to him with her ruthless jaws? Does the male mantis command the female mantis who will wrench his head off with her sawblade elbows?

  “Marina.”

  She came to my side, under the bemused gaze of Shanahan and Grocholski, who had given up trying to understand, and, unblessed by the presence of Tezcatlipoca in their skulls, were glad enough to lie back in their plastic webs relaxing from those first few days of machismo, happy enough that the heat was off them. They kept quiet and watched me wonderingly as I suffered and commanded.

  “Marina.”

  “Yes, Considine?”

  “The time’s approaching, Marina.”

  “Time, Considine?”

  “There has to be a climax. What climax can there be? Think!”

  “I’ll make it easier for you. You can’t drain me dry. Can’t . . . terminate me. What satisfaction would there be in that? Who would you turn to then? To Shanahan? Grocholski? Look at them. Lying like slugs in their beds—great torpid bullies. What satisfaction would there be? Sure, Grocholski is a bastard, he’d pull your teeth out one by one with a pair of pliers. But has he any . . . spirit? Has the sun god whispered in his ear?”

  Marina turned, watching the two presidents lolling in their white webs, shook her head—as though she understood the question.

  Turning, she whispered:

  “What climax, Considine?”

  ‘Til tell you tomorrow Marina—unless you can tell me before then. Sleep on it Marina, sleep on

  She came to me in the night like a sleepwalker— Lady with a Pencil Torch, whose beam she played over the webbing till she located the release tag, and there she rested her hand but didn’t pull it yet-a-while.

  As she knelt there bereft of her mask, her face level with mine, I gazed at her, not as avenging fury and priestess, but briefly as another human being passing in the dark. She knelt poised at the mid-point of a transformation in her role, for a brief time quietly happy in the lightening of the burden, the falling away of the robe of one office before the assumption of the next.

  This pause must have lasted you an eternity, Marina.

  I watched the long high planes of your cheeks in the backwash of light off the plastic webbing, the hilltops of your cheekbones, sharper now in the contrast of dark and bright—and your eyes dark pools beyond the cheekbones, in shadow— and kept my peace.

  Tezcatlipoca took the form of an ashen-veiled giant carrying his head in his hand and searched for the sunspot where he could be himself, the sun. The sight of him in the dark made nervous people fall dead with fear, the way the wasps in their slave cars shivered at our banshee wail as we passed them by on the highways, invisible, vindictive, reckless. Yet one brave man seized hold of the giant and held on to him—bound him in white plastic webbing, in spite of his screams and curses. Held him hour after hour till near morning when it was time for the sun to rise. Then the ashen giant began promising the brave man wealth and even omnipotence to let him go. At the promise of omnipotence the brave man agreed and tore out the giant’s heart as a pledge before he let him go. Wrapping the heart up in his handkerchief, he took it home with him. When he opened it up to look at the heart, however, there was nothing but ashes in it. For the sun had already risen, and in his new omnipotence broke his promise and burned his pledge.

  Take heed, Marina, hand on the release tag— take heed of the sun when he is free. You hold my heart now in your handkerchief, blood drips into your bottles through the mesh, safely. The heart is not yet ashes.

  Her hand touching the webbing, her Indian face divided by a watershed of light ... at this brief pause in time could I have afforded a little pity, a little affection . . . ?r />
  “Is it time . . . ?”

  She whispered into the darkness from which the sun must rise—for the sun is time itself (or so I thought then) so far as our twenty-four hour clocks knew, so far as the circadian rhythms of our bodies are aware.

  What else is time, but the sun in the sky? But this is the Age Without Time—for the travellers over the blackened prairies, for the wasp refugees in the Fuller domes!

  At the end of every fifty-two years, the fires were all quenched throughout Mexico, and a fresh fire kindled on a living prisoner’s chest—to keep time on the move. What fire shall be kindled in whose chest, to bring Time back into the world today?

  “Yes, it’s time to kindle the sun.”

  Marina’s breast rose and fell convulsively as she pulled the tag.

  Plastic thongs slid off my limbs in four directions at once like frightened snakes and I slipped to the floor, free of the pain hammock, knocking aside the sanitary facilities which she’d forgotten to remove, with a noisy clatter that alerted Shanahan. He craned his head against the tension of the web, as I sat massaging life into my limbs.

  “Considine,” he called softly. A worried Marina flashed the pencil of light across his face, and he blinked blindly at us.

  “Considine, get me out of here—please!”

  “Put him back to sleep, Marina.” (Quietly.) “It’s not his time for release—Tezcatlipoca isn’t with him.” My feet prickling intolerably with thawing-out frostbite.

  She crept towards Shanahan, dazzling him with her pencil of light; injected him with something, while he imagined his web was being undone. By the time my legs were fit to stand on, he was calm again.

  She gripped my arm to steady me, helped me dress.

  “Your car’s in the ambulance sheds.” “Buggy,” said I angrily. “Sun buggy.” “There’s so much I have to learn.”

  “There isn’t much,” I assured her—and this, alas, was honest—as we slipped out of the ward toward the darkness of freedom.

  “What is the sun really like?”

  “A ball of incandescent gas . . .”

  Of course Marina hadn’t seen the sun. Except as a baby, long time ago, forgotten, maybe. Models of the sun were all. Hot yellow lamps hanging from the eggshells of the Fuller domes, switched on in the morning, switched off again at night. If a sunspot had ever bathed the hospital, she wouldn’t have seen it through the solid walls.

  As we crept into the ambulance sheds, she began to cough, grating explosive little coughs that she did her best to stifle with her hand.

  A dull orange glow from standby lighting pervaded the gloom of the sheds, where half a dozen of the great sleek snub-nosed ambulances were parked and a number of impounded buggies— beyond, light spilling from a window in the crew room door and the sound of muffled voices.

  We climbed into my buggy—the key was in the lock—and I ran my hands gently over the controls, reuniting myself with them.

  Tezcatlipoca’s jaguar stenciled on my seat radiated confidence strength suppleness and savagery through my body. . . .

  Marina sat limply in the passenger seat looking around my world, stifling her cough—but the air was cleaner in my buggy, would get even cleaner once we were on the move.

  “Who opens the doors?”

  “We have to wait for an ambulance to leave, then chase it out. How soon till we see the sun, Considine?”

  “Sooner than you think.”

  “How do you know?”

  “What is the sun, Marina? A blazing yellow ball of gas radiating timelessly and forever at six thousand degrees Centigrade, too bright to look upon. A bear with bells on his ankles, striped face, blazing eyes. A magician with a puppet dancing in his hand. A smoking mirror. A giant in an ashen veil with his head in his hand. A G-type star out on the edge of the galaxy around which planets and other debris revolve. Your choice.”

  “I’ve seen movies of the sun—maybe it’s no big thing after all.”

  “Oh it’s big, Marina-—it’s the climax.”

  Then a siren went off in the shed, shockingly loud, and the lights came up full.

  The ambulance crew spilled from their room, zipping their gear and fixing their masks as they ran. They took an ambulance two along the line from us.

  Its monobeam flared out ahead, splashing a hole bright as the sun’s disc on the door. Its turbines roared.

  And the door flowed smoothly, swiftly, up into the roof.

  As I started the buggy’s engine a look of fear and terrible understanding came over Marina’s face—sleepwalker wakening on the high cliff edge. She tore at the door handle. But naturally it was locked and she couldn’t tell where to unlock it.

  “Marina!” Using the voice that cuts through flesh to the bone. “Quit it!” A voice I’d never used to beg or plead with in the hospital. Authority voice of the Sun Priest. Obsidian voice. Voice that cuts flesh. Black, volcanic, harsh.

  Her hand fell back upon the seat.

  The ambulance, blinding the smog with its monobeam, sped through the doors—and us after it, before the doors dropped again.

  Great Tezcatlipoca, Who Bringeth Wealth and War, Sunshine and Death, Sterility and Harvest! For Whom Blood Floweth Like Milk, That Milk May Flow!

  The smog so thick outside. Even the great eye of the ambulance saw little. Undoubtedly they were relying on radar already, as I was—and wondering, doubtless, what the tiny blip behind their great blip represented, Remora riding on a shark ... I dropped back, not to worry them.

  When we got to the highway entry point, I took the other direction.

  Whichever way I took, I knew it led to the sun.

  Two hours down the highway, Marina sleeping on my shoulder, bored with the monotonous environment of the sun buggy (green radar no substitute for video), radio crackling out data from

  Met Central revealing total disarray among the air currents, turbid gas blowing everywhichways, absurd peaks and dips in the nitrogen oxides, crazy chemical transformations—a scene in disarray awaiting my touch, and what I brought it was the body of Marina, magnet to the iron filings of the everywhichways polluted sky.

  Two hours down the highway, piloting with ever-greater certainty, careless of pursuit, I picked the radiophone up, tuned to the Sun Club waveband. . . .

  Nearby, voices of some charioteers of the sun. “Considine calling you. Considine’s Commandos. Smokey Mirror Sun Club. I’m heading straight for the sun. Anyone caring to join me is welcome. Vector in on my call sign . . .”

  My voice woke Marina up, to the babble of voices answering over the radiophone. “Considine?’’

  “How did you get out?’’

  “How do you know? Man?’’

  Who had ever dared call a hunt into being among sunrunners other than his own? How great the risk he ran, of shame, revenge, contempt! How did I know, indeed!

  “Where are we?” yawned Marina. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re hunting for the sun—I’ve cried fox and I’m calling the hounds in.”

  “Whose voices are those?”

  “It hasn’t been done before, what I’m doing. Those voices—the cry of the hounds.”

  “Considine, I’m hungry. Is there anything to eat in the car?”

  “Hush—I’ve told you, buggy is the name. No eating now—it’s time to fast. This is a religious moment.”

  A louder challenging voice that I recognized broke in on the waveband. The Magnificent Am- berson’s.

  “Considine? This is Amberson. Congratulations on your break-out—how did you do it?”

  “Thanks, Amberson. I got a nurse to spring me.”

  “A nurse?”

  “She’s with me now—she’s part of it.”

  “Hope you know what you’re doing, Considine. You really meaning to call a general hunt?”

  “A gathering of the tribes. That’s it, Amberson.”

  “Sure your head isn’t screwed up by loss of blood? The weather data is chaos. Sure you haven’t bought your way out of
there by offering something in return—say, a gathering of the tribes in a certain location?”

  “Screw you, Amberson—I’ll settle with you for that slander after I’ve greeted the sun. Sun hounds, you coming chasing me?”

  And a rabble of voices, from far and near, jammed the waveband.

  Marina clutched my arm.

  “It frightens me, Considine—who are they all? Where do they come from?”

  “Some of the other half of the people in this land, Marina—just some of the other half of the people. The ones who stayed outside in the dark. The ones that weren’t wasps. The Indians vour ancestors would have understood. Spirit voices they are—gods of the land.”

  “Indians my ancestors?”

  “Yes.”

  Green blips swam by me on the radar screen— slave cars that I sped by effortlessly. I paid no heed to the weather data. My gestalt, my mind-doll, was fully formed. Its embodiment hunched by me in the passenger seat, the curves and planes of Marina's body were the fronts and isobars and isohets of the surrounding dirt-darkened land. A message, she had been placed in the hospital for me to find, with pain the trigger to waken me to her meaning. So many forms a true message can take—a circle of giant stones of the megalith builders, a bunch of knotted strings of different lengths and colours '7bthe quipu archives of the Incas)—a human body if need be. If the human body becomes a world unto the lover or the torturer, may not the world itself with its dales and hillocks, its caves and coverts and cliffs, be a body? Marina, my chart, on whom I read my destination!

  “Now you must take your clothes off, Marina, for you’ll soon be bathing in the sun—we’ll soon be lovers.”

  “My clothes?”

  “Do so.”

  I used the Voice of the Sun, the Voice from the Sky. And dazed she began to fumble at her nurse’s uniform.

  Her nudity clarified my mind—I knew exactly where to turn off now, on to which decrepit smaller road.

  “Sun hounds!” I sang. “Don’t miss the turning.”

  Goosebumps marched across Marina’s flesh and her nipples stood out in the mental cold of her life’s climax—the dawning awareness that she had been inserted into life long ago and grown into precisely this, and this, shape, as hidden marker for the greatest future sunspot, burning spot of all burning spots that might start the clouds of darkness rolling back across the land at last, burning away the poisoned blackened soup from the Earth’s bowl in a flame-oven of renewal.