"Billy!" Poised on the brink, Annie pleaded with me, but I couldn't take the step. Then her face seemed to shut down, all her caring switched off, as if it, too, had been a light inside her, and she jumped, disappearing from sight with a sodden splash. She did not resurface, and I knew she must be dead, killed by the shock. When I understood that, I didn't much care which way I went to hell.
Behind me, the grunting evolved into a piggish squealing. Two of the animals had begun to fight, batting with their enormous paws, mauling each other, trying to bite with mouths that opened into pink maws the size of loading bays. I watched their incompetent white battle for a second, unconcerned, empty of awe, of fear, of all feeling. I saw the mountains beyond, the sky whirling with sparks, and it seemed I could see all the way back to Yonder, the tree full of hobos, the green river, the jungle, the gorge where Euliss had died. But I could no longer see the world. It was like smoke in my memory, its images dissolving, or already dissolved. Alone and cut off from all I had known, I had little use for life. For no better reason than it was where she had vanished, I jumped into the river after Annie.
· · · · ·
What is it we think when we are born? After the shock, the stunning light, the sudden absence of comfort and warmth, the alarming sense of strange hands, the pain of the umbilical knife … what apprehension comes to stir the first wordless concern, the first recognition? I think it must somehow resemble the thought I had when I woke in a ferny hollow with Annie and three others: I yearned for the vague particulars of the creature inside whom I had been carried to that place, whose knowledge of the place was in me, albeit cloudily realized as yet. A creature whose skin might be a river or the interior of a black boxcar, and whose geography incorporated Yonder and places of even deeper strangeness. A vast, fabulous being whose nature was a mystery to me, but for the fact that it engulfed the world like a cloud, a heretofore unobserved atmosphere, nourishing the earth as an oyster nourishes a pearl, and extracting whomever it might need for its purposes. A great identity whose presence had been unknown to everyone; though certain saints and madmen may have mistaken it—or recognized it—for god, and those who dwelled long years in the solitudes might on occasion have sensed its sly, ineffable movements beyond the sky (old Euliss Brooks might have been one such). A cosmic monstrosity who had strained the stuff of my mind through its own substance, purifying and educating me toward an end I could not yet perceive. Before I opened my eyes and learned that Annie was there and all the rest, I realized I was as different from the Billy Long Gone who had jumped into the river as he had been from the man who had climbed drunkenly aboard a black train in Klamath Falls. Smarter, calmer, more aware. I had no clear memory of where I'd been, but I understood that Annie had been right—this was a test, a winnowing, a process designed to recruit a force of considerable measure from among those who lived on the edges of things, from loners and outcasts, and develop them into … what? That I was not sure of. Pioneers, explorers, soldiers? Something on that order, I believed. But I did know for certain that those who failed the test became part of it, transformed into beardsleys and worse, and those who survived went on to take part in some enterprise, and I knew this because the creature who brought me to the hollow had imprinted that knowledge and more on my brain.
The hollow was spanned by the crown of a tree with a thick grayish white trunk and milky green leaves. The sky was overcast, and the air cool like summer air at altitude, carrying an undertone of warmth. I felt no weakness, no fatigue—in fact, I felt strong in all my flesh, as if newly created. I looked at the others. Apart from Annie, who was just beginning to stir, there were two men and a woman. One man, lying on his back, eyes closed, was dark, lean, bearded. Dressed in a fatigue jacket, blue pin-striped trousers that must have belonged to an old suit and were tucked into his boots. Next to his outflung left hand were a small backpack and an automatic rifle. The other two were asleep in an embrace. Brown-skinned; tiny; wearing rags. Mexican, I thought, judging by the man's Aztec features. I picked myself up, went over to the bearded man, and examined his rifle. Words in the Cyrillic alphabet were incised on the housing. To be on the safe side, I pocketed the clip.
I checked on Annie—she was still asleep—and then scrambled up the slope of the hollow. When I reached the top I saw a city sprawling across the hills below, surrounded by forest on every side. On the edges of the city were new shacks and cabins carpentered from raw unpainted boards and logs. The buildings farther away were older, weathered, but not many were larger than the buildings on the outskirts, and they were only two- and three-stories tall. It was like a frontier town with dirt streets, but much bigger than any I'd ever heard of. A shanty metropolis. People were moving along the streets, and I made out animals pulling carts … whether oxen or horses or something else, I could not say. But the city was not the dominant feature of the view. Rising from its center, vanishing into the depths of an overcast sky, was an opaque tube that must have been a hundred yards in diameter, and along it were passing charges of violet light. It was half-obscured in mist—perhaps the mist was some sort of exhaust or discharge—and this caused it to appear not quite real, only partially materialized from its actual setting. I knew, in the same way I had known all else, that the violet lights were men and women going off on journeys even more unimaginable than the one I had taken, traveling through the branching structure I had glimpsed back in the valley (the tube was merely a small visible section of the structure); and that the city was the place to which they returned once they accomplished their tasks. Knowing this did not alarm or perturb me, but the implication it bred—that we were still inside the thing that had snatched us from our old lives—was depressing. Understanding had become important to me, and I had believed I would eventually come to an understanding that would satisfy my need for it. Now it was clear that you were always in the midst of something too big to understand, be it god or cosmic animal or a circumstance that your mind rendered into a comprehensible simplicity … like a god or a cosmic animal. I would never be able to climb up top of any situation and say, "Oh, yeah! I got it!" For all I knew, we could be dead.
I heard a noise, saw Annie scaling the slope toward me. She gave me a hug and took in the view. "Well," she said. "I was right."
"I never doubted it."
She put an arm about my waist and squeezed. "You lie."
We stood looking across our new home, calm as house buyers checking out a property, and I was actually starting to think where it was we might settle—would it be better on the edge or downtown close to the tube?—when our three companions came to join us atop the rise. The Mexican couple glanced at Annie and me timidly. They stared impassively at the vista; the woman crossed herself. I was surprised that she retained the traditions of her faith after having traveled so far and learned so much. Maybe it was a reflex.
"English?" the bearded man asked, and Annie said, "American."
"I am Azerbaijani." He squinted at me and scowled. "You take my bullets?"
I admitted that I had.
"Very smart." He smiled, a clever, charming smile accompanied by an amused nod. "But rifle is broken. Bullets no good."
He gazed out at the city with its central strangeness of opacity and violet fire. I wanted to ask if he had ridden a black train to some Azerbaijani halfway house and how he had traveled the rest of the way, and what he thought was going on; but none of it was pressing, so I joined him in silent observance. Considering the five of us, the variance of our origins, I thought I was beginning to have a grasp of the mutability of the unknowable, of the complexity and contrariness of the creature god machine or universal dynamic that had snatched us up. And this led me to recognize that the knowable, even the most familiar articles of your life, could be turned on their sides, shifted, examined in new light and seen in relation to every other thing, and thus were possessed of a universality that made them, ultimately, unknowable. Annie would have scoffed at this, deemed all my speculation impractical woolgathering; but
when I looked at the tube I reckoned it might be exactly the kind of thinking we would need wherever we were going.
The sun, or something like a sun, was trying to break through the clouds, shedding a nickel-colored glare. The Mexican woman peered at each of us, nodded toward the city, and said, "Nos vamos?" Annie said, "Yeah, let's go check this out." But the Azerbaijani man sighed and made a comment that in its simplicity and precision of vocal gesture seemed both to reprise my thoughts and to invest them with the pathos common to all those disoriented by the test of life.
"These places," he said musingly, then gave a slight, dry laugh as if dismissive of the concern that had inspired him to speak. "I don't know these places."
IAN WATSON
Born in England in 1943, Ian Watson graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1963 with a first class Honours degree in English Literature, followed in 1965 by a research degree in English and French nineteenth Century literature. After lecturing in literature at universities in Tanzania and Tokyo, and in Futures Studies (including Science Fiction) in Birmingham, England, he became a full-time writer in 1976 following the success of his first novel, The Embedding (1973) which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and, in France, the Prix Apollo; and The Jonah Kit (1975) which won the British Science Fiction Association Award and the Orbit Award.
Numerous novels of sf, fantasy, and horror followed, and eight story collections. His stories have been finalists for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and widely anthologized. From 1990 to 1991 he worked full-time with Stanley Kubrick on story development for the movie A.I., finally directed by Steven Spielberg, for which he has screen credit for Screen Story. He lives in a small rural village sixty miles north of London. In Fall 2001 DNA Publications issued his first chapbook of poetry, The Lexicographer’s Love Song, and in Spring 2002 Golden Gryphon Press will publish his ninth story collection, entitled The Great Escape.
The Thousand Cuts, by 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 PEACEFULLY.
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.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 64
