Watson, Ian - SSC

by The Very Slow Time Machine (v1. 1)

  It was to be our quest. There was some sense of chivalry about it, in spite of the burning taxis and the fires spreading to the wooden houses. We’d both been students of European Literature at the University, as well as lovers, and here was the impossible love quest given to us in the very heart of Greater Tokyo (strictly speaking, the petro- chemical-infested bay area—since the Wall came into being on the outskirts of industrial Funa-bashi). We seized this task gladly, as a gift!

  I did, at least. I believed Ichiro. Alas—or is it really alas?—there’s only the gift, the pure idea of the quest itself, to believe in, since he deserted me flimsily and callously after a few minor problems of travel arose, on his side . . .

  Really, I don’t care! I lost my love the day the Wall came down, but didn’t lose Love itself. I am, like Marie-Henri Beyle (better known as Stendhal), “in love with Love.” Someone will meet me where all the Walls meet. He will be the one who deserves.

  Ichiro’s excuses! Outside Otawara, our last meeting: the city on my side, paddy fields and vegetable patches on his . . . We stood on the useless rainway tracks, scribbling wisps of words in the air, and he said he was being drafted into the army. Did he mean the Self-Defense Force? No, he said Army and sounded proud of it, quite changed from his former pacifist self into an old-style classical soldier. What did he say all the young men were in the army for? A war between China and Russia, no less. Shanghai, Mukden, Changchun and Harbin, together with the North Koreans, were fighting an alliance of Seoul, Vladivostok, Manila and the Great Japan. He seemed to have fallen right back into the 1930s! Our own Japanese-Australian-Siherian Co-Prosperity Alliance is far more modern and civilized. I shrugged off his “patriotic” excuses, and hurried on north. We had the freedom to pursue our lives the way we wanted to in our democracy.

  So I, Hiroko Chiyoda, had little difficulty making my way up the Narrow Road to the Deep North, as did the poet Basho before me: through the Tohoku Region, across Hokkaido island, then on to Russian Sakhalin with its densely-wooded southlands and bleak northern tundra; thence by fishing boat across the Sea of Okhotsk to the city of Okhotsk itself (though Basho never came so far).

  There in Okhotsk sadly I had to linger a long time working in a grim Russian beerhall (or Peev-noy Bar as they call them). Earning my living other ways too. Yet always thinking of Love, whatever! The War to our westward was followed by nuclear explosions in the Arctic Ocean. Maybe the Other Russians were trying to blast their way through the Wall in retreat? Nobody really knew. But as radioactivity spread through all the East Siberian Sea, travel was forbidden; and I would have to wait for the radiation to disperse before I went further north. I thought: if radiation can penetrate the Wall, so can the outpourings of Love! Over the next few years I almost became a native of Okhotsk, except that I never could forget the Stendhalian “pursuit of happiness”. I, Japanese Hiroko, dwelling in Okhotsk among rough seamen, an amorous egoist biding my time, yearning for my soulmate . . .

  After his year in the Ruhr factories producing machine tools, Obi Nzekwu succeeded in being transferred to the meteorological station on the island of Spitsbergen, thanks to his knowledge of trigonometry; and shivered through one long winter, till, on a late spring morning, as migrating birds settled down to land from Sweden and points south, he stole a plane equipped with skis instead of wheels and headed forbidden- north . . .

  At last travel became possible again and Hiroko Chiyoda, through her connections with a certain Party dignitary in Okhotsk (and fluent now in Russian) became cateress on a Soviet icebreaker stationed, somewhat impotently, in the estuary of the Indigirka River facing Arctic waters. The Marshal Grechko was of the latest design (of seven years previous), with helicopter and spotter plane on board.

  The Western War had seemingly ended in a stalemate, with Korea reunified from the North, the Chinese occupying the whole Khamorovsk area as far north as the Amur River, and Greater Japan helping the shattered Soviet hold the line to the north of them, while in the far south, with the help of the Darwin Australians, she was building overspill cities along the Timor Sea. (These suppositions she gleaned from her friend in the Party, just before joining the Marshal Grechko.)

  Six months later, while they were cruising north of Faddeyev Island, having familiarized herself with the workings of a spotter plane and even flown out over the sea once with the Lieutenant-Navigator who’d become her new ami, she took off at dawn, alone, humming a lullaby about a cat.

  The pursuit of happiness possessed her once more.

  Something was black, at last, in the distance in all this white of ice. A spot, no more, at first, so that Obi rubbed his aching eyes doubtfully, afraid it was an illusion brought about by staring too long. Then he sensed the closing in of the great Barriers on either side—sensed, more than saw, at first. Air pressure rose sharply and there was sudden turbulence—resistance, even, from the sky. Soon auroral effects were visible in a V-shaped wedge ahead, and he actually saw the translucent sky- high walls tinted with a faint blush of rose, a hint of violet, a cellophane amber. However the plane was bucking and yawning too dangerously to trust it any further. Taking a last hard look at the (by now) black cone, he set his machine down on to the snowfields, bumping and bouncing over ridges to a halt. When he climbed out, he could still see the cone, but illusion twisted it into a tiny black man’s face seen through the wrong end of a telescope, set in an immense bundle of white clothing. It wouldn’t come clear. He couldn’t judge distance properly so that it could have been any way away or any size. Besides, those auroras were playing tricks with the periphery of his vision, spooks lurking in an invisible forest behind glass trees whose height was awesome. He felt scared, but set out, goggled and wrapped—the air pressure mounting, forcing cold oxygen into his lungs, that at least invigorated him.

  Obi passed one ditched, abandoned airplane, then another. Snow had drifted over them, hiding them, and he wondered why it hadn’t hidden that black cone similarly. Scooping snow off the wing of a plane, he watched it wander back along the ground as though magnetized. How many ridges and hummocks hid vehicles of one sort or another, camouflaged by snow?

  Doesn’t the Polar ice-cap float on the sea beneath? Doesn’t it swing round slowly? Shouldn’t these planes have drifted south (for everywhere was south from here)—in some direction or other? Were the Barriers holding the ice-cap locked in place?

  He wondered, but came up with no answers except that the black thing ahead must be the Alien Apparatus. The Doomsday Device. The Machine.

  It was a full cone intruding upon all the Barriers.

  Yet its base looked so irregular: indented and uneven.

  Segmented too, a set of rough wedges arranged in a circle. The top half of a black fruit, broken up and put together again carelessly, with gaps.

  A Machine?

  Why not? Why assume that all machines have to be gleaming steel and aluminium?

  But then Obi saw what the mound was.

  Bodies.

  Piled up fifty feet above the snow.

  A separate wedge for each segment where the Barriers converged.

  Bodies. That had scrambled over each other, to reach through and made a pyramid of themselves.

  Bodies, which the snow left alone.

  Obi touched one with his gloved hand. It came away covered with a fine black grit. The body was frozen hard. Even its clothes were sheets of steel. He tugged at it, to see its face, but it was too tightly locked to all the others that had climbed the slope before it—and, indeed, become the slope.

  Cautiously, Hiroko set foot on the forty-five degree incline of rigid, gritty corpses. Whatever fate had overtaken them, she was sure would spare her. The cone shape reminded her so strongly of Mount Fuji, and even the black ash covering it was so reminiscent of a miniature Fuji, that she felt an instant surge of affinity with the mound, as if it belonged to her, had been waiting for her steps alone.

  Something had electrocuted them. Something had shocked them to death. Something that de
posited this volcanic grit as a byproduct . . .

  She climbed to the summit.

  And there found a man whose face was black standing looking at her.

  She thought he’d just been killed—electrocuted, blackened—and hadn’t fallen yet. Then he grinned at her, and she realized that he was Love: the black prince of her quest.

  He said something. His lips moved but she heard nothing. His hands gestured that he couldn’t hear her, either. Impatiently, both people thrust their way into the final shimmery gap where all the segments met.

  She felt her shoulders pinched; had to turn sideways, to force her way a little further. The glassy walls pressed painfully on her chest and back.

  He too elbowed towards her strenuously, like someone swimming through thick jelly. Reaching out his hand to her.

  Abruptly, briefly, both people seemed to become pseudopods—protoplasm flowing out, and through each other’s streams. There was a twisting lurch of the guts. An instant in which his heart brushed hers, and their heartbeats meshed.

  Then, a moment of discontinuity and she found herself standing with her back to him, staring down the far side of the cone.

  At the same instant as Hiroko, Obi swung round crazily. Both stared horrified across the glassy gap that still separated them.

  She started screaming at him. In Japanese, Russian, English, French. He howled English and Ibo and German at her. They only heard the noise of their own voices.

  Already the walls were shimmering and squeezing at them. Air pressure became intolerable: an irresistible pillow forcing them back down the body mountain, to lose sight . . .

  Obi ran far out on to the snow fields: far enough out to be able to see past the cone to the far side, where she should be by now. He halted, ice aching in his lungs. Only the cone and the white field round it were visible: no sign of any Japanese girl. He waited half an hour—an hour—till he had to walk away, or freeze.

  He fled through the curiously magnetic snow, hunting for a buried airplane or snowmobile, wondering what segment of the world he was in now . . .

  Hiroko had halted near the base of Mount Fuji. Taking her gloves off, she numbly fumbled a cigarette lighter from her pocket.

  So electric, the air! So tinder dry! So combustible!

  She flicked the lighter . . .

  The Walls shimmered briefly—acquiescently, appreciatively.

  IMMUNE DREAMS

  Adrian Rosen returned from Thibaud’s sleep laboratory with a stronger presentiment than ever that he was about to develop cancer. He wasn’t so much anxious about this, as simply convinced of it as a truth—and certain, too, that in some as yet ill-defined way he was partly in control of these events about to take place inside his body . . .

  “It’s obsessional,” Mary Strope grieved. “You’re receding—from me—from reality. I wish you’d give up this line of research. This constant brooding is vile. It’s ruining you.”

  “Maybe this recession into myself is one of the onset symptoms,” Rosen meditated. “A psychological swabbing-down and anaesthetizing before the experience?” He lit another of the duty-free Gitanes he’d brought back from France and considered the burning tip. The smoke had no time to form shapes, today. It was torn away too quickly by the breeze, which seemed to be smoking the cigarette on his behalf—as though weather, landscape, and his own actions concurred perfectly. The hood was down, the car open to the sky.

  They sat in silence and watched the gliders being launched off the hilltop, this red-haired, angular woman (fiery hair sprouting upon a gawky frame, like a match flaring) and the short burly man with heavy black-framed sunglasses clamped protectively to his face as though he had become fragile suddenly.

  The ground fell away sharply before them, to reappear as the field-checked vale far below. The winch planted a hundred yards to their right whined as it dragged a glider towards it and lofted it into the up currents, to join two other gliders soaring a mile away among the wool-pack clouds. As the club’s Land-Rover drove out from the control caravan to retrieve the fallen cable, Rosen stared at the directional landing arrows cut in the thin turf, exposing the dirty white chalk—in which the ancient horse, a few miles away, was also inscribed. Beyond, a bright orange wind-sock fluttered. Pointers . . .

  “You don’t even inhale,” Mary snapped. “You could give up overnight if you were really worried.”

  “I know. But I won’t. I’m seeing how near a certain precipice I can edge before . . . the lip gives way. It needn’t be lung cancer, you know. It needn’t have anything to do with cigarettes . . .”

  How could he explain? His smoking was only metaphorical now. Cigarettes were a clock; a pacemaker of the impending catastrophe. In fact, he was fairly sure that it wouldn’t be a smoker’s cancer at all. But it sounded absurd whenever he tried to explain this.

  Then, there were the dreams . . .

  Rosen stood before the blackboard in the seminar room of the Viral Cancer Research Unit attached to St. David’s Hospital and sketched the shape of catastrophe upon it with a stick of squeaky chalk that reminded him irresistibly of school days and Algebra lessons . . . The difficulty he’d had at first in comprehending x and a andb ! His childish belief that they must equal some real number—as though it was all a secret code, and he the cryptographer! But once presented as geometry, mathematics had become crystal clear. He’d been a visualizer all along . . .

  On the blackboard was the cusp catastrophe of Rene Thom’s theorem: a cliff edge folding over, then under itself, into an overhang impossible on any world with gravity, before unfolding and flattening out again on a lower level. The shape he’d graphed was stable in two phases: its upper state, and its lower state. But the sinusoidal involution of the cliff would never allow a smooth transition from the upper to the lower state; no smooth gradient of descent, in real terms. So there had to be discontinuity between the top and the bottom lines of the S he’d drawn—an abrupt flip from State A to State B; and that was, mathematically speaking, a “catastrophe.”

  (There is no gravity in dreams . . .)

  He waved a cigarette at his colleagues: Mary Strope, looking bewildered but defiant; Oliver Hart wearing a supercilious expression; Senior Consultant Daniel Geraghty looking frankly outraged.

  “Taking the problem in its simplest mathematical form, is this a fair representation of the onset of cancer?” Adrian demanded. “This abrupt discontinuity, here? Where we fall off the cliff—”

  Rapping the blackboard, he tumbled Gitanes ash and chalk dust down the cliff. The obsession with this particular brand had taken hold of him even before his trip to France, and he’d borrowed so many packs from the smoking room downstairs (where a machine was busily puffing the fumes from a whole range of cigarettes into rats’ lungs) that Dr. Geraghty complained he was sabotaging the tests and Oliver Hart suggested flippantly that Adrian should be sent to France tout de suite, Thibaud-wards, if only to satisfy his new craving .. . .

  “I suggest that, instead of a progressive gradient of insult to our metabolism, we abruptly flip from one mode to the other: from normal to malignant. Which is perfectly explicable, and predictable, using catastrophe theory. Now, the immune system shares one major formal similarity with the nervous system. It too observes and memorizes events. So if we view the mind—the superior system—as a mathematical network, could it predict the onset of cancer mathematically, before we reach the stage of an actual cellular event, from this catastrophe curve? I believe so.”

  He swivelled his fist abruptly so that the stick of chalk touched the blackboard, rather than the cigarette. Yet it still looked like the same white tube. Then he brought the chalk tip screeching from the cliff edge down to the valley floor.

  Their eyes saw the soft cigarette make that squeal—a scream of softness. Adrian smiled, as his audience winced in surprise.

  “But how can the mind voice its suspicions? I suggest in dreams. What are dreams for, after all?”

  “Data processing,” replied Oliver Hart
impatiently. “Sorting information from the day’s events. Seeing if the basic programmes need modifying. That’s generally agreed—”

  “Ah, but Thibaud believes they are more.”

  Oliver Hart was dressed in a brash green suit; to Adrian he appeared not verdant and healthy, but coated in pond slime.

  “For example, to quote my own case, I am approaching a cancer—”

  Deftly, with slight of hand, Adrian slid the cigarette off the cliff edge this time, amused to see how his three listeners braced themselves for a repeat squeal, and shuddered when it didn’t come.

  “I shall have the posterior pons brain area removed in an operation. Then I can act out my dreams as the slope steepens towards catastrophe—”

  Mary Strope caught her breath. She stared, horrified.

  “Enough of this rubbish, man!” barked Geraghty. “If this is the effect Thibaud’s notions have on you, I can only say your visit there was a disaster for the Unit. Would you kindly explain what twisted logic leads you to want part of your brain cut out like one of his damn cats? If you can!”

  “If I can . . . No, I couldn’t have it done in France itself,” reflected Adrian obliquely. “Probably it’ll have to be in Tangier. The laws are slacker there. Thibaud will see to the arrangements . . .”

  Mary half rose, as though to beat sense into Adrian; then sank back helplessly and began crying, as Geraghty bellowed:

  “This is a disgrace! Don’t you understand what you’re talking about any more, man? With that part of the brain destroyed there’d be no cut-off in signals to the muscles during your dreams. You’d be the zombie of them! Sleepwalking may be some temporary malfunction of the pons—well, sleepwalking would be nothing to the aftermath of such an operation! Frankly, I don’t for one instant believe Thibaud would dare carry it out on a human being. That you even imagine he would is a sorry reflection on your state of mind! Stop snivelling, Mary!”