by Ian Watson
‘Melt it, while there’s time. Put a flame to it.’ Did Dobey mean that literally? The dead body in question might be mine? Unbelievable.
‘I’ll explain to her parents,’ promised Miss Perry. I darted a look to accuse her of treachery, of delivering me into the hands of an enemy. When she frowned at me, lips pursed, I realized that betrayal was far from her intention. Supposing I set out by bus around any and every old town, accepting the touch of grateful multitudes, I might presently turn into a prig who thought she was a saint. By going initially with these scientists I would have a check on me. My ‘innocence’ would be tested -the better to confirm it. I nodded.
So did Collyweston. ‘I don’t imagine she’ll be with us long. She’ll need to move on. City’s a useful place to start. Yes, I see that. I’d feel privileged.’
‘You’d lend the weight of your authority?’
‘For what it’s worth, Doris – compared with her own.’
‘A child!’
‘The bearer of the world. The masthead of humanity, bringing back the fire that’s been stolen from us.’
How confusing this image was of myself as a sort of blazing boat. My hair wasn’t even red, it was fawn. I couldn’t help but giggle. Dobey was right on target in that respect: I was still a young girl. Collyweston darted a quizzical glance at me, as if perhaps he had been fooled. I smiled at him, and held my world high.
‘I’ll need to mix with all sorts of people, won’t I? Takes all sorts to remake a world. Eventually I might need to mix with everyone alive.’
At last Iris Ackroyd revealed some of what she’d been thinking. ‘I should like to accompany you on your travels for a while, Joan – to observe and record, so that there’s a true chronicle.’
‘Me too!’ offered Imbow. ‘We could be a kind of uncle and aunt to you – look after your welfare, make arrangements without interfering with your own decisions.’
Iris Ackroyd shrugged. She didn’t view me as a substitute niece nor necessarily a saviour either. She would be my, watchdog, whilst back at the university Collyweston enthused about me, and Dobey tried to stonewall him and denounce me as a fraud or worse.
What with all the equipment they had brought in vain, plus my world and myself as extra cargo and passenger, we were crowded in that minibus as we bounced towards the city through the darkness with ‘Uncle’ Imbow at the wheel, our headlights often picking up potholes too late to avoid them. The alien moon was due to fly over our part of the land at ten, so we stopped in the car park of a country pub to stretch our legs, refresh ourselves – letting the other customers touch the world – and wait on the weed-cracked tarmac to watch the transit. Our own ancient moon, three-quarters full, spilled dull milk across fields, pubs, trees beyond. Sky was cloudless, night breathless; likely there’d be a late frost.
Duly at ten, the gleaming white moonlet climbed up across the black, star-studded sky; and a spark leapt from it, arcing away before hanging and brightening. As Earth’s camber cut off the sunlight reflecting from space, the sparkle vanished. I could still see a faint glow in the same position, like an afterimage. But it lingered: a reddish spot. That was no afterimage. Nor did it move -which meant that whatever-it-was must be falling directly towards us!
‘It’s noticed,’ muttered Collyweston, as though we shouldn’t raise our voices.
‘Dear God,’ exclaimed Imbow. ‘Let’s take cover.’
‘If it intends to destroy her, what cover could we possibly take, man?’
‘If it wants to harm her,’ Dobey said. ‘Maybe she’s doing its work very nicely, thank you. Maybe it’s after the doubters: me and Iris.’
‘Me?’ asked Ackroyd archly.
Dobey headed towards the pub door, then hitched her shoulders and paused to watch.
The object wasn’t larger yet seemed more substantial, as if a giant balloon was sinking rapidly, approaching closer but also shrinking as denser air pressed upon it.
‘Rubbish, Doris,’ called Collyweston. ‘It wants to nip her in the bud, that’s what.’
Now the thing was like a ruddy, angry boil on somebody’s neck. Was it a flake off the alien moon? A ship? A bomb? I held my world defiantly above my head, towards it, willing my world to protect us and shelter us somehow. The oven-glow swelled to eclipse a pool of stars, and hung above us.
Of a sudden the pub was a heap of tumbled stones. Broken bones of rafters jutted amidst stumps of walls.
Almost immediately the building was intact again, as before. The red disc pulsed, lighting the car park eerily -a car park no more, but only a shrubby heath with no sign of a building in sight. Car park and pub returned. Forest crowded about us – for moments. A waste of water hemmed us in, where we stood on a weedy hummock of mud. A towering shape crashed through ferns which were the size of trees, screeching, teeth biting at the stars. Battle erupted: mounted soldiers wearing weird plumed helmets wielding curved swords. How fiercely I clutched my world overhead as a shield – in that car park outside that pub. The boil in the sky vanished; the shining white alien moon dipped below the horizon.
As we drove on towards the city, Collyweston rejoiced.
‘It tried to force you on to another world-line, Joan. It tried to expel you, but it couldn’t! Not even this early in the game. So we’ve won, already we’ve won. Just provided –’ He hesitated.
‘Provided,’ said Imbow, ‘that she spends the rest of her life carrying her world to everywhere on Earth, this country, every country, till sufficient millions of people have touched it, till it weighs as much to her as the real planet. Are you up to it, Joan? Summer and winter, well or sick?’
‘If I don’t,’ I mumbled, ‘it’ll hurt me.’
He misunderstood. ‘I don’t think they can harm you now. They might try other tricks, but surely they played their best card first. Let’s just take care when their moon’s in the sky.’
‘You fools,’ cried Dobey. ‘Can’t you see what a mock attack this was? What a feeble, deliberate failure? Oh yes: to convince the natives that their last hope is the true one, so that they’ll tamely lay tens of millions of hands on this world of hers, instead of burying it in a deep pit! Surely there were more devastating ways of attacking?’
‘How could there be?’ Collyweston asked her. ‘Missiles: is that what you mean? If they used missiles, why, so could we – against them. You know why we can’t. Therefore neither can they. They could only try to jerk the world-line, Joan’s world-line and ours to unravel it from the rest. To pull it loose and tie it to a different universe.’
‘You’re wrong!’ I shouted at Dobey. ‘You are, you are! I know my world.’
‘It won’t let you stop, will it?’
‘I shan’t let myself stop. If it takes me all my years.’ Penny piece after penny piece, till all were spent, the price to pay for our freedom.
‘At least you’ll get to see the real wide world,’ she sneered, ‘even if none of us ever sees yours until it’s too late. Until it shows its true colours, with all our millions of selves mirrored in it, captured in it.’
The spires of the city rose black against the stars as John Imbow steered us into the dim suburbs.
Next morning when the frost had melted I went with John and Iris to the city bus station to hold my world out to everyone who passed, and soon to everybody who came intentionally.
Joy lit my heart as if the sun in the sky was shining through me. Energy coursed through the muscles of my arms, my wrists, my fingers as if I was being nourished by the sunlight. I felt that Mum and Dad must surely sense my happiness from twenty miles away, and must be grinning too, for how could they have lost me now? They too had touched my world, indeed had been the first. Whilst I held my world, I held Mum and Dad in my embrace, and everybody I’d grown up with in our camp, likewise thousands of others; and eventually I would hug tens of millions of people, and they me, all by a simple trustful touch. We would all have joined hands, to strike the sky. Our reach would be enormous, and gentle, and strong.
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Also by Ian Watson
Novels
Under Heaven's Bridge (1981) (with Michael Bishop)
Black Current
1. The Book of the River (1984)
2. The Book of the Stars (1984)
3. The Book of Being (1985)
Mana
1. Lucky's Harvest (1993)
2. The Fallen Moon (1994)
Other Novels
The Embedding (1973)
The Jonah Kit (1975)
Orgasmachine (2010)
The Martian Inca (1977)
Alien Embassy (1977, 2006)
Miracle Visitors (1978)
God's World (1979)
The Gardens of Delight (1980, 2007)
Deathhunter (1981)
Chekhov's Journey (1983)
Converts (1984)
Queenmagic, Kingmagic (1986, 2009)
The Power (1987)
The Fire Worm (1988)
Whores of Babylon (1988, 2004)
Meat (1988)
The Flies of Memory (1990)
Hard Questions (1996)
Oracle (1997)
Mockymen (2000, 2004)
Collections
The Very Slow Time Machine (1979)
Sunstroke: And Other Stories (1982)
Slow Birds: And Other Stories (1985)
Evil Water: And Other Stories (1987)
Salvage Rites: And Other Stories (1989)
Stalin's Teardrops: And Other Stories (1991)
The Coming of Vertumnus: And Other Stories (1994)
The Great Escape (2002)
The Butterflies of Memory (2005)
The Beloved of My Beloved (2009) (and Roberto Quaglia)
The Book of Ian Watson (1985)
Ian Watson (1943 – )
Ian Watson was born in England in 1943 and graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a first class Honours degree in English Literature. He lectured in English in Tanzania (1965-1967) and Tokyo (1967-1970) before beginning to publish SF with “Roof Garden Under Saturn” for the influential New Worlds magazine in 1969. He became a full-time writer in 1976, following the success of his debut novel The Embedding. His work has been frequently shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula Awards and he has won the BSFA Award twice. From 1990 to 1991 he worked full-time with Stanley Kubrick on story development for the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, directed after Kubrick's death by Steven Spielberg; for which he is acknowledged in the credits for Screen Story. Ian Watson lives in Northamptonshire, England.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Ian Watson 1989
All rights reserved.
The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11479 1
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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