Watson, Ian - SSC

by The Very Slow Time Machine (v1. 1)

  I had, of course, also planned escape routes.

  I had, of course, watched all available tapes of the Grand Monk in audience with “parishioners”. Counted and recounted the small team of swordsmen attending him. Always three, and only three.

  I had, of course, expected a battery of sniff- snoops and scan-screens, on the way to him . . . They wouldn’t fight guns with swords—even if I had seen one tape of a Yakuza deflecting highspeed pellets with his sword’s edge, after an hour’s meditation on the stool . . . My weapons were undetectable. I’d stolen the specifications for them two years before from an eccentric inventor far away, whom I’d afterwards had to strangle. I was fairly sure they’d work. I’d saved them for this day.

  My nerve and flesh grenades were woven of poly-ice—the alternative coherent form of water that can be tied into knots like wire as soon as it spins out of a freezer’s capillary tubes. These were hidden in a row down my lapel, like a jewelled decoration. The index and middle fingers of both my hands had thin woven ice capsules implanted in them with ice lenses primed to emit one single beam of laser fire if I cocked my finger and pointed it.

  Within three hours after manufacture I had to use these weapons before they grew incoherent, and used themselves on me. As I walked into the Grand Monk’s room, I had just thirty minutes left . . . As I say, I had no choice but to proceed . . .

  The Grand Monk had a fat, poachy white face, with eyes sunk deep in hoods of milky flesh. He must have been 150 years old with an infantile yoghurty complexion. His thick red and blue brocade robes tied with a white cord thick as a bell-rope, and his white linen cap, I recognized well enough from the tapes. His suite, too, furnished with stern luxury. The tatami matting with its black borders. The few scrolls. The picture-window set to display a misty flight of geese through an emptiness intruded upon by a few gravity-defying cliffs. Data bank within arm’s reach of the stool he sat on, entirely enveloping this in his robes . . .

  The stool, the stool is under that mass . . . !

  I was intoxicated. I could already feel it healing me, invigorating me—emanating through his body and clothes ... He had his bare flesh pressed to the Starwood, under that red and blue brocade, I had no doubt . . . white buttocks in interface with the metal tree of Toscanini in a reversal of entropy, as though a living star defecated energy into him ... He disgusted me already. I could smell his flesh sizzling . . .

  Something missing.

  The three swordsmen!

  Something else present.

  A great dog . . . !

  I stared at the creature. It sprawled, twice the size of a wolfhound, behind his stool, chin on its paws. Its nostrils flared, its ears pricked back, its tongue lolled out to taste me, a single eye opened to regard me. And its paws were human hands, with steel claws.

  The eye shut, and the other eye opened.

  It began to blink in sequence, rapidly.

  One eye shut, one eye open.

  Its sides were armored like a rhino’s. Its body rippled with hauser muscles of spun steel, as it stretched itself. I shrank into a solid knot of ice, inside.

  “The cyb-hound,” intoned the Grand Monk. “A fresh product of the Benevolence Company. But you came to ask about philosophy, not to buy protection.”

  I held my donation slackly, wrapped in the correct scarlet ribbon, tied such and such a way. (Quick gestures with the hands.)

  The proper procedure was, I should lay it in front of him on the empty wooden tray there— within half a meter of those grafted hands with metal claws!

  I hesitated briefly.

  I understood the rapid on-off blinking of the dog’s eyelids well enough now . . . This surgical intersection of body and machine lolling there was impregnable to any ordinary sword, gun or grenade. My finger lasers would have to hit the beast direct through the eyes to short out its cyb- brain! And the eyelids would be high-reflective steel. Which was why its eyes shone like mirrors as it shut them and a nictitating barrier shot across.

  Almost impossible.

  I had twenty-six minutes before my woven ice uncohered and ravaged me.

  So I laid my donation, carefully, at the Grand Monk’s feet, squinting under his robes sleazily at the feet of the stool, like some young virgin boy standing under a transparent stairway to squint up skirts; and engaged the Grand Monk in talk . . . about what I remembered from The Way of the Milky Way. (It was a completely crazy venture, I knew now, but what choice had I?)

  His hooded eyes regarded me pertly.

  The cyb-hound’s gaze flickered at me. And it dragged itself slowly upright, savoring my fear with its tongue on the very air. . . I’d painted my sweat glands over with a monomolecular filter, to fool the normal anxiety sniffers . . . but I couldn’t block its animal sense for the essential taste of the situation, enhanced in the womb-vats, and souped up in the Yakuza craft-shop, so I imagined. (And all my imaginations only made matters worse. I wasn’t a true assassin, only a skilful thief . . . and I believe even an assassin would have been bested by this beast . . . Not that any group or organization would have dreamt of assassinating the Grand Monk. I was mad, I realize now . . .)

  “In The Way of the Milky Way you say—”

  “Yes?”

  And the cyb-hound launched itself at me . . .

  Which is the true horror of it.

  For the Grand Monk’s robes parted as he shifted, cross-legged, on the stool, and I saw his raw flesh in contact with the wood of Toscanini; I drank in the wood vicariously, voyeuristically— and saw the location of the knot in it.

  Like wood from most worlds, Starwood has knots where the branches have been lopped off the main trunk section . . .

  As I say, the stool’s superconductor rings leak star energy slowly upward into the bodily metabolism. Yet knots in the wood are secondary circuits. They have to be sealed off, or would upset the balance of the energy release. Thus ergs and ergs of power are locked up in a knot—ergs that can be released abruptly, all at once, in a tight jet along the line of the former branch, a hundred times as ravenous as a finger laser.

  Of course, it ruins the wood. The stool’s as spoilt as a cracked bell, afterwards . . .

  The cyb-hound’s front paws were off the ground now, and it hung in mid-air. (How time slowed down, as though the very glimpse of star- wood immortalized that moment!)

  I cocked the index and middle fingers of my right hand and flexed them at the knot, shattering the woven ice.

  And shut my eyes.

  And danced to the left of the room.

  Already phantom steel-clawed hands were rending my ribs out, and steel-fanged claws drinking my neck dry . . . !

  Except that . . . they didn’t reach me. Didn’t touch me.

  Only a blinding light turned my shut eyelids to pools of blood . . . that abruptly darkened, in a howl.

  I looked again.

  For another long, frozen second the cyb-hound hung between me and the stool—black body eclipsing a blaze of light.

  The knot had micro-novaed. A plume of star energy was spearing the dog’s hide. Burning, melting its armor flesh. Shorting out its electronics.

  I retained a retinal image of the dog shape silhouetted against the world, long after the body crashed to the mat . . .

  “His left hand too!’’ I heard the blinded Grand Monk squealing, his brocade on fire. And there were others in the room.

  And truly I felt no pain as, with a flicker, a swordsman cut off my fingers, and batted them towards a waste chute with the flat of his blade while they were still falling, barely detached from my hand.

  I wouldn’t have used them anyway, now.

  The wood was ruined. I only wept.

  And wept.

  Later, I wept more, intoning these words to atone for the Starwood spoilt—as ruined as a last T’ang porcelain vase thrown from the fortieth floor to the pavings. Intoning, and weeping. Weeping and atoning.

  Worse, was when they forced me on to the stool itself, and I felt waves of unbala
nced nausea radiating upward from it, for hour after hour . . .

  For day after day, while I died, and died . . . and the stool kept me alive through all these deaths, fingerless, cancerous, malign metabolism fed by the energy of the far star that feeds the Toscanini trees, which I had so sickened and warped . . .

  For week after week.

  For month after month, until, my cancers in perfect harmony with the disharmony I brought about, I am pure, perfect, deathless cancer. A living tumor, chained to this cross-section of the steel tree in the Yakuza Temple. Atoning. For I realize that the Way of the Milky Way is truly the Way of Starwood—the living energy of stars passing into Man . . . And Starwood is the Way of Enlightenment in Agony, for me, sitting bound on this broken block.

  Sometimes, the Grand Monk, wearing black lenses, comes down into the Temple to talk to me about my mental progress, and observe my vast, metastasized, pullulating body.

  His retinas are growing back quickly now that the Benevolence Company have traded for a fresh slice of Starwood out at Point Q.

  He tells me they gave the last surviving Piero della Francesca in the world for it.

  Starwood. Imagine. Comes in such small slices. Approximately this, by this, by this. (Quick gestures with two stumps sprouting ten tumors—soft red boiled carrots . . .)

  I am even sitting on some.

  AGORAPHOBIA, A.D. 2000

  The Japanese astronaut Yamaguchi waited while the masked officials unsealed the 130-acre Shinjuku Gyoen Park, the sole remaining open space in the Tokyo megalopolis. They lifted the warning barriers aside, broke the seal on the padlock, inserted the ceremonial iron key. The corroded wicket swung open. The analogue of Mars lay before him.

  Almost, but not quite.

  For the main gate opened into the European- style court, designed by a Frenchman, Henri Martinet. This gravel court, flanked by the tall knob- bled skeletons of dead trees, sloped uphill at an angle of ten degrees before leading out on to the open tableland of the park proper, effectively blocking this off from view.

  “Remember, the first hundred meters are the easiest, Yamaguchi,” the familiar voice of the Mission Director warned him over his helmet radio, stiff and formal with the seriousness of the occasion, the tipsy camaraderie of the farewell party forgotten, as it should be. “Don’t be deceived, It looks just like a road. But it’s a road to nowhere . . .’’

  A road? Yamaguchi looked around him. Yes, the stretch of scattered gravel certainly did resemble a torn-up road or under-road somewhere in the City. And the tall knobbly trees, they would be utility poles branching with insulators, surge diverters, cross arms ... or perhaps the fifty-meter tall steel screws which scooped out the ground before piles could be driven for new buildings. The rows of dead trees stood ready to rip holes in the earth, to hammer in the pins for buildings, and more buildings—cancelling the absurdity of empty space with objects, with meaning.

  The Space Agency officials stood back, keeping their eyes fixed on Yamaguchi to avoid looking at the expanse of the European Court sliding uphill at an angle of ten degrees towards—nowhere.

  He stepped through the wicket and his boots crunched the gravel as he started uphill.

  And a voice whispered in his mind, as he remembered the Code of Behavior.

  “This is the day for you to commit hara-kiri. The weather is fine and the day is auspicious. May you be able to commit hara-kiri without any difficulty

  At the top of the slope he paused and gazed ahead. The dead trees here formed a wide arc surrounding the final zone of gravel. Beyond this lay a desert of dry white crab-grass, smooth and uniform, opening out in all directions away from him, pushing the massed buildings of the City absurdly far away, creating an impossible bubble of space in the very midst of the City. The sheer pressure of this space! It could hold back all those millions of tons of steel and concrete without faltering! Yamaguchi walked out across the final zone of gravel, and thought he heard it vibrate like a tight-stretched drum. But it was only his own blood drumming, pounding. Telemetry would be recording his leaping pulse on a graph outside the park for the benefit of Space Science.

  Then he stepped off gravel on to the desert of grass itself and the crunch-crunch sound of his boots vanished, leaving only the booming of his blood, and the distant booming of the City, coming from far away, yet meshing with his own blood and comforting him, for he was a man of the City. He walked on over the springy turf, sending no radio messages now and receiving none. The Code said: ‘‘Whenever any conversation is attempted by the hara-kiri performer, Tut your mind at rest’ is the stereotyped response usually given; indulgence in conversation might only serve to disquieten the mind . . ,fl Telemetry alone would monitor his progress and his physical and mental state.

  The sun shone down weakly through the smog out of the blue of outer space, transforming the desert's surface of white grass into a vast gently- curving convex mirror. . . .

  He wasn’t conscious of having climbed any significant incline since leaving the shelter of the European Court, yet suddenly he seemed to be above the world, perched on this convex mirror which began to turn beneath him. Now the City seemed equidistant from him on all sides, though he had only penetrated a short distance into the park. He seemed not to have moved any nearer to his goal—that far horizon of buildings with red and white checked balloons floating over them—yet the European Court, when he glanced back, had shifted into the remote distance. His eyes were not playing tricks on him, he knew. It was just that judging such great distances as these was outside the present experience of Man. His hours in the simulator did not help him much, though they doubtless staved off nausea.

  The background boom of the City was the grinding of the globe as it turned beneath him like a giant’s clockwork toy. He felt dizzy. Then perspective did begin to play tricks on him. The scene leapt in at him, then bounced away. He was a giant perched on a tiny globe, terrified of falling off into endless space. He was a mouse scurrying across an immense plain while overhead an invisible hand groped for him from the sky. He felt a desperate need to take cover in the tunnels of the City. A moment later he was a giant again, dwarfing the City at the end of the plain, terrified that gravity might be turned off. In free fall he would float up into the endless sky. Every human being in the City was close enough to something to hold on to, but not him. There were only a few dead saplings a hundred meters away. Or was it a thousand meters?

  The Code of Behavior said: “Hara-kiri is not a mere suicidal process; it is a refinement of selfdestruction and none can perform it without the utmost coolness of temper and composure . . .”

  Why then was Yamaguchi running, stumbling along in his thick rubber boots and bulky suit, panting like a dog on a hot day while they witnessed his humiliation through their remotely controlled telescopes slung from those distant balloons?

  He ran to the nearest tree. Like a dog he felt compelled to urinate against it. Of course, the urine flowed into a special bag strapped to his thigh. There was no risk of it running down his leg. Still, he imagined that it was running down his leg, and felt ashamed.

  “A hara-kiri performer should tuck his sleeves beneath his knees to prevent himself from falling backwards . . .”

  Without the weight of his spacesuit he would float up into the sky; without his spacesuit’s all-enveloping life-support system he would fly apart explosively.

  The small white sun beat down through the haze on to this dead bent tree, casting a shadow that could be used to tell the time if he stayed here long enough. The silence was a huge blob of clear jelly that conducted only a faint throb from the distant City, the fading rhythm of his own existence. . . .

  At last, torn between shame and fear, Yamaguchi trudged off in a direction chosen at random, perhaps retracing his steps, but most likely not. He had lost touch with the horizon now. It mocked him with its faintness, equidistance, similarity.

  Soon the sun was shrinking and the smog haze closing in. The neon signs that had sprung to life o
ver the City only made the desert seem darker and more hideous. Yamaguchi almost walked past the flat disc set in the grass without noticing it.

  It was a tree stump sawn off flush with the ground, with a wire handle fixed to it.

  But, of course! There had to be something underneath the Park! Subterranean passages, underground factories, transit tubes. If the Park was just something laid on top of part of the City’s body, like a mat, then there was nothing to be afraid of. The City was here as well as there. He could raise this lid. Discover a ladder leading down to safety. How many lids there must be, concealed about the park. He would never have seen one had he marched in a straight line from gate to gate. But he had wandered off course. It was just an illusion that he was outside the City trapped in some obscene bubble of unnatural force!

  The bulky spacesuit prevented him from bending over or kneeling down. However, he had a telescopic probe in his instrument pocket for taking soil samples, which he now took out, extended, and hooked through the wire handle.

  The tree-stump wasn’t heavy, it was only a few centimeters thick.

  Underneath was a small pit with cement walls, leading nowhere. At the bottom of the pit sat a steel globe with knives and shears and clippers sticking out of it like arms. As the fading light struck its sensors, it appeared to move slightly. Shears to snip tentatively. A knife to rotate. He had stumbled on one of the robot-gardeners in its nest.

  The shock of encountering life—or what appeared to be life—in this wilderness, made him drop the telescopic probe, and run, anywhere. . .

  And now the desert spread around him desolate and absurd, becoming a black void as the sun disappeared.

  Before exhaustion overwhelmed him he located another tree, took the umbilical tether from his instrument pocket, and, fumbling with his clumsy gloves, fastened one end of the cord to his waist and the other to the tree trunk. Carefully, so as not to damage his suit, he lowered himself to the ground, paying the cord out slowly.