Watson, Ian - SSC

by The Very Slow Time Machine (v1. 1)

  “Sun hounds!’’ I sang. “The Sun of Darkness is about to set. The Sun of Fire comes next in turn. The men of this creation are to be destroyed by a rain of fire, changed into hopping chickens and dogs.”

  “Are you mad, Considine?” came Amberson’s voice, nearer now. “Look, I’m sorry I said what I did. I apologize. But, man—are you mad!”

  Now that I’d turned off to the east I was driving slower, yet the buggy rocked and jolted over the broken-backed minor road, tossing us about like fish in a scaling drum.

  “It bruises me!” cried Marina, shipwrecked, clinging to her seat.

  Your white nudity, Marina—and the Earth’s dark nudity to be explored, revealed!

  “I give you the sun, you hounds and runners and presidents of this land!” I hurled the words into the babbling radiophone. And even Met Central was starting to show excitement, for they were listening too, and beginning to feed out data rapidly that vectored in on me and my position.

  As I stared through the windshield, the greyness ahead slowly lightened to a misty white that spiralled higher and higher into the upper air. We could see fifty yards, a hundred yards ahead. A great light bubble was forming in the dark. In wonder and gratitude, I slackened speed.

  We stopped.

  “Thank God for that,” muttered Marina.

  “Considine here, you sun-hounds—you’d better come up fast, for I’m in the light-bubble now, it’s rising, spiralling above, five minutes off the sun at most I’d say. It’s big, this one.”

  “Is that the truth, Considine?” Amberson demanded.

  “The truth? Who’s nearest?” I called to the sun runners in general. And looked around. My buggy stood on a smashed stretch of road bandaging the blackened ground, at the base of a great funnel of strengthening light . . .

  “Maybe I am.” (Very loud, and breathlessly—as though running ahead of his buggy to catch me up.) “Harry Zammitt of Helios Hunters. I’m . . . coming into the fringes of it now. I see your buggy, Considine. The white whirlpool. Up and up! It’s all true. Considine—I don’t know how to say it. What you’ve done. Busting out, hunting down the sun in a matter of hours!”

  As that first buggy bumped into the intensifying bubble of light, I piloted my own machine off the road onto the black ground.

  We sat, watching the first rays of the sun burn through in golden shafts as the last mist melted.

  And suddenly the day was on fire around us.

  I squinted up through dark glasses and my windshield at a sun that seemed greater and brighter, a different color even, from any I’d ever seen before, steely whiter—as if there was less separating me from the sun, that day.

  “Out,” I ordered Marina, leaning over her bare legs to flip the door-lock open.

  She stepped out obediently into the sunshine, while I gathered the obsidian knife up by the thong from under my seat, dropped it in my pocket.

  “But it hurts,” she cried in surprise—the hopping chicken with burnt feet, exactly! “It’s too hot.”

  “Naturally the sun is hot.”

  Yes it was hot, so very hot. The hard hot rays burning at my skin the moment I stepped outside, hot as a grill, a furnace.

  Harry Zammitt moved closer in his buggy, and other buggies were rolling into the sunspot now.

  “Marina—you must stand against the buggy— no, better bend your body back, sprawl backwards over the hood, lie on it—but keep your eyes closed or you’ll be blinded.”

  “You can’t make love to me across a car,” she whined feebly, moving in a daze, wincing as her body touched the heating metal. “It hurts.”

  “It’s a buggy,” said I. “Lie back, damn you, lover. Across the hood of my buggy.”

  “You animal, you primitive animal,” she mumbled doing just as I said, spreading herself across the hood with her eyes screwed shut. For her this was the climax that confirmed all her fears and lusts for such scum as myself. Oh Marina!

  For me the climax was different.

  (Had I ever tried to warn you—had I? Who was I now, Considine the human being, or Considine the Priest of the Sun? Liar Considine, how you enjoyed being possessed—how you enjoyed the sanctification of your torture, in order to achieve the torture of sanctity—Marina!)

  I, Considine, Priest of the Sun, snatched the obsidian knife from my pocket and brought it slashing down into your chest.

  A pretty mess I made of you. The Aztecs must have had dozens of prisoners to practice on. At one blow! Monkeys maybe. Maybe they executed monkeys in the dark rooms under the temple pyramids. By the time I had hacked through the chaos of smashed ribs, torn breast muscle, flesh, that had been your body and my guide—by the time I had trapped the palpitating blood-sodden rag of your heart in my fist and wrenched it free—by that time I was vomiting onto the black soil.

  (Soil that showed no signs of the flash harvest of grass and tiny blooms we all looked for, though it had been sprinkled with blood—as was I.)

  My mouth putrid with bile, I turned, held your heart, Marina, high, dripping, to the blazing hurtful sun that blistered my skin raw as a flayed criminal’s.

  “What are you doing, Considine!” screamed the Magnificent Amberson, plunging toward me across the black earth—for he had finally got here, in the wake of some of his followers—sheltering himself under a sheet of metal.

  “Sacrificing,” said I. “As the sun god requires.”

  “Sun god?” he snarled.

  “Tezcatlipoca has been reborn in the sky— surely you see?”

  “Bloodthirsty maniac—I don’t care about that—I can’t see anything up there! Where has the ozone cover gone?”

  I turned to Amberson then blankly, still clutching the wet heart.

  “What?”

  “The ozone layer in the upper air, don’t you realize it’s gone? Met Central is shouting murder about it. The hard radiation is getting through. You’re burning to death if you stay out here. That’s why there’s no harvest, you fool. Scattering blood around isn’t going to help!”

  I dropped the heart on the ground, where it lay bubbling gently, tiny bubbles of blood, into the unresponsive warming soil.

  Amberson snatched at me, maybe to drag me under the metal sheet with him, but I shook him off and jumped into my buggy, locked the doors, opaqued the windows.

  And sat trembling there with the obsidian blade freshly blooded in my lap.

  “Considine!” cried voices over the radiophone.

  “Considine?” Amberson’s voice—he was back in his sun buggy.

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Now hear me, sun runners all, Considine led you here, and I admit I don’t know how. But now maybe he’d like to explain why we can’t go outside without being burnt, and where the harvest is?”

  I said nothing.

  “No? I’ll tell you. Anyway, it’s coming over Met Central. The ozone layer in the upper air has finally broken down—the pollution has gotten to it and changed it—and as the ozone layer just happens to be what filters out the hard radiation from the sun, we had better get the hell out of here. Reflecting—as we do—on the demise of the honorable sport of the sun hunt. From now on anyone who spots the sun is going to wish himself a hundred miles away. So get going sun runners. And bugger you Considine. Let’s all know this as Considine’s Sunspot—the last sunspot anyone ever hunted for. A nice curse to remember a bloodthirsty fool by!”

  Tezcatlipoca, why had you cheated me? Did her blood not flow like milk to your satisfaction? Was it because I botched the sacrifice so clumsily? Where the Aztec priest used one swift blow of the knife to unsheath the heart, I used twenty. . . .

  One thing Amberson was wrong about. The biggest thing of all. The thing that has given me my present role, more hated than Amberson could ever have dreamed as he uttered his curse upon me.

  For Considine’s Sunspot was not going to close up, ever. It carried on expanding, taking in more acres hour by hour.

  Far more than the ozonosphere had altered in th
ose chemical mutations of the past few hours. The pall of dirt that had blanketed the Earth so many years was swift to change, whatever new catalyst it was that had found a home in the smog; now, starting at one point and spreading outward, the catalyst preceding (swimming like a living thing—Snowflake’s “childish” nightmare!) on a wave front from the point of light, the changed smog yielded to the hard radiations of the naked sun.

  I was right—which is the horror of it—I was right. Tezcatlipoca is alive again, but no friend to man. Nor was he ever friend to man, but cheated and betrayed him systematically with his magic and his song, and his stink. Tezcatlipoca, vicious bear, hideous giant coming head in hand, bounding jaguar, using me as focus for his flames, as plainly as he used Marina (my lost love!) for his map.

  Considine’s Sunspot spreads rapidly from one day to the next, gathering strength, sterilizing further areas of the country, burning the earth clean. Algae beds consumed faster than they can be covered over. Fuller domes shrivelling, flimsy-fabricked. Buildings in flames, so brittle. The asphalt motorways blazing fifty-mile-long tinder strips.

  So let me be Priest of the Burning World then, since it is what I foretold and since, strangely (is it so strangely in these fear-crazed times?), the cult of Tezcatlipoca has revived, at least its ceremonies have, blood sacrifices carried out in the polluted zones beyond the encroaching flame front, in vain hopes of stemming it—oh, they only add fuel to the sun’s fire!—with their cockerels and bullocks stolen from the zoo sheds . . . and people too, captive and volunteer—beating hearts torn out by far more expert hands than mine, tossed blindly at where the sun burns its way toward them. And, what no one will volunteer for, the flame kindled in the darkness on someone’s writhing scream-torn body, to impress the god of fire—Xiuhtecuhtli—oh yes, modern scholarship is on our side! And after further scholarly researches (did not witchcraft almost win a World War?) babies are cooked alive, eaten in honor of Tlaloc, god of rains and springs, who waters the earth. Outlaws and inlaws, bandits and wasps— we are all in this together, now.

  My fate, Wandering Jew of the burning roads, is to lurk outward and ever outward, casting around the perimeter of Sunspot Considine, buggy rationed and fueled free of charge, with hatred, meeting up with my worshippers, torturers, meteorologists (has not meteorology absorbed all the other sciences?), time and again overcome by a craze of words bubbling from Tezcatlipoca’s lips—taunts, demands, tricks and curses fluttering through my mouth from elsewhere, like captive birds set free, like the souls of his victims escaping into the sky.

  And I ask:

  Why me?

  And:

  Why you, Marina?

  How I love you, in retrospect, having held your beating heart within my palm!

  And the sunspot that bears my name, great tract of flameland seared into the world, pre-Cambrian zone of sun-scarred earth sterile except for the bacteria lying in waiting for some million-year- to-come event—do you realize that logically the whole world will bear my name one day, if the sunspot expands to embrace it, though no one will be here to use the name—of Considine’s Planet (as it may be known to the ghosts upon it)—why am I not allowed to drive in there and die? But the mad sun god will not allow it, while yet he holds me dangling on a string, jerking my vocal chords as it amuses him. Since I plucked her heart out I am his creature utterly. As she was mine, and earlier still as I was hers. So it rolls around.

  Once I was a free man, sun hunter, outlaw. Now a potential planet—and a slave. The empty gift of omnipotence! Considine’s world—naked preCambrian of some future society of insects, perhaps!

  Marina.

  Whose heart I felt flutter in my hand.

  Thy blood like milk for me has flowed, hot as iron pouring from a furnace!

  Marina and Considine.

  Eve and Adam of the world’s end, our non-love brought life to its close, victim and executioner of the vanishing smogscape—which we all long for nowadays, passionately, and would sacrifice anything, or anyone to bring it back to us.

  This tale is for the sun god, Tezcatlipoca, with my curses, and for you, Marina. . . .

  SITTING ON A STARWOOD STOOL

  Starwood. Imagine. It comes in very small slices. Approximately this, by this, by this. (Quick gestures with the hands.) They trade it out at Point Q which is to say at the intersection of reality with a mathematical equation—an idea more than a place, though we can both reach it. They ask whatever they want for it: ten kilos of a rare transuranium metal, the last surviving Botticelli, a few dozen beautiful boys and girls. Then they abolish the equation and vanish into oblivion (which is to say: into reality, somewhere else in the Galaxy or Magellanic Clouds), to reappear with another few slices of the wood after 1.23 terrestial years— maybe this says something about their home planet, or maybe nothing—probably it’s a random number. No way of tracking them. No way of tracing the Starwood world. They tell us it isn’t anywhere near their home system, anyway . . .

  Starwood. Just a single slice—sufficient for a stool. Or throne. Whether you’re monk or monarch or whatever. But a very rich monk, need I say! Such as the head of the Japanese Yakuza Order. . .

  A single slice—and if I’d stolen for ten years or worked honestly for 500, I’d still only have been able to travel to Point Q as a tourist to gawp at the building . . .

  Starwood—they’ve told us this to prove its rarity—comes from a quirk of a planetoid called Toscanini, with an orbit the same as a comet’s ellipse. Toscanini rushes in from the chill of deep space, soaks up the sunshine at perihelion for a few brief days then zips away again for long years in the icebox of far-out.

  It ought to be no more than a ball of rock, too cold for any life-form to take root on for most of its orbit, then baked sterile in the oven. But life, once seeded, is ingenious. Toscanini has an ecology of trees that quarry metals from the rocks. Not just any metals—super-conducting metals that carry electrical activity on forever at the few degrees above absolute zero that the planet’s surface reduces to through most of its flight.

  Those trees on Toscanini live through the years of the freeze, powered by organic batteries that never run down. At perihelion, when the trees are being baked in the star’s heat, they soak up the energy to power their batteries; then while the planet is scooting away through deep space again, the trees put out their shoots and saplings and new growth rings, radiating the surplus energy they’ve stored into the immediate vicinity to nourish them. It’s such a life-enhancing energy that the whole Toscanini wood would be suffocated under tons of parasites if the planet didn’t rush close enough to its sun to scour it clean of competition . . .

  Why “Toscanini” for a name? I’ve heard it said that their starship captain who first found the world and its strange organic metal trees had a taste for Earth music, and a sense of humor, and recalled a “super conductor” from centuries ago . . .

  But the remarkable thing about Starwood is this. If you sit on it, it radiates its energies into you. And it rejuvenates any human being. A properly cut and tailored piece of Starwood recharges the mitochondria (the powerhouses) in the cells. It tones up the brain waves. It balances the Yin and Yang. A chess-player squatting on Starwood is unbeatable. A philosopher can work out the universal truths in his head. A businessman can build empires. It’s the ultimate conditioner. Hair grows back—even brain cells regenerate. The impotent recover their virility. The immune system can eat up any cancer, however metastasized. But they can only harvest mature trees—for a large enough cross-section of the superconductor circuits—and the trees grow back so slowly there on Toscanini, so they say.

  (Pardon me if I sound like a promotional tape. Truly, they have no need to promote Starwood vulgarly. And the likes of I, no means of buying it . . .)

  Even so, I’d hardly have dared try to steal the Grand Monk of the Yakuza’s stool from under him, hadn’t I found I had a cancer, inoperable, irreversible, metastasizing plaguefully through me. Then all thoughts of virility and playing c
hess and planning the perfect crimes washed out of me, leaving me with the one glaring imperative: to save my life by the most risky theft of all.

  The Yakuza are Buddhist monks, somewhere on the martial side of Zen—enlightenment through archery, swordsmanship, and other death-arts. They are also, each and every one, part of the great gangster fraternity underpinning whole commercial empires: the Benevolence Company. Yet a Jakuza is as earnestly philosophical as he is deft at protecting himself as he is potentially thuggish, in the old strict meaning of the word. A paradox. But Zen is a bird’s nest of paradoxes, and the Yakuza are no exception. So the Grand Monk, sitting on his heap of gold and Starwood—which he has fought his way to, through blinding enlightenments of backstreet duels and assassinations, is also author of one of the great works of religious thought of this age: The Way of the Milky Way—a fine, wise book.

  But at least I could get to see the Grand Monk, to consult him on a point of philosophy, if I laid enough bribes “along the way’’ and a large enough cash donation to the Benevolence Company at his feet. All quite in order. All quite normal. The same as a personal audience with the Roman Pope, amongst his Swiss guards.

  He would be guarded, of course. The Yukuza being martial craftsmen, in this age that means solid state circuitry as well as the old perfect equipoise of mind and muscle ... I hadn’t realized all the implications, though. It was worse, far worse than I’d expected and I had to go through with it, when I got to the point. My weapons had an expire deadline on them. I’d arranged it that way, so that I shouldn’t just mumble something about philosophy and then back out . . .

  A crazy, mad venture, in retrospect; but then, at the back of my mind, I thought I’d be safe forever if only I toppled him from his Starwood stool and squatted there myself, however briefly. An almost mystical, magic obsession!