The Jonah Kit

by Ian Watson

  The mood of frantic use of the sea appalled Chloe mildly, as the car rocked along, alternately braking and accelerating till she felt like a gangster on a heist. The open comic books on the stalls revealed flash images of jagged red and black drawings of raped women, robot monsters, pistol whippings…

  It all seemed so picturesque the last time she visited this port: a bewilderment of colours, shapes and smells. It was sinister now. The atmosphere violent, anxious and furtive—as if these ships might be setting out on their last fishing trip, and after that was… Hadn’t there been riots only weeks before, about the steep rise in mercury levels of the Pacific tuna? The porters that spun those steaming blue corpses on their way to the markets were handling contaminated material. They only wanted it off their hands… they gashed the fish the way gangsters in the comic books gashed their molls, with sharp gaffs in place of razors.

  • • •

  Chloe Patton, at twenty-six, a dumpy blonde with short curly locks, hated the name Chloe and infinitely preferred being called Miss Patton. “Chloe” was the quintessential Disney goldfish, all fat and fins.

  Alas, swimming around in the dolphin pens with face mask and flippers on, in her bright red dotty bikini, she gave precisely this impression.

  Chloe enjoyed a beautiful rapport with the dolphins of San Diego. Maybe her cetacean charisma sprang from her contours—the sense they had of her in the water as a comic rubbery toy. Or maybe it was her guilelessness, for she hardly enquired where her dolphins went, after they’d been trained to wear snout harnesses and poke long spikes into a target; and clamp magnetic discs on to squares of different alloys. Distantly she was aware of the electrodes being implanted in their brains and in the brains of killer whales; that tiny surges of current could induce a transcendental mental experience, a thousand orgasms—or the agonies of Hell. But these were only expedients, to speed up the learning of their games. Teaching aids. Few dolphins seemed to bear a grudge afterwards, though one or two surly individuals deliberately lost their appetite every year, and died… She mourned them sincerely.

  At college she’d studied the cetacean brain microscopically by Golgi and silver impregnation techniques, without ever asking where the slides came from. She’d been the darling cheerleader of her football team, rubbery curves jouncing pneumatically as she pogoed up and down—while others held rallies against “The War”, a topic she preferred not to think about. She approached cetacean psychology with the same cheerful bounce, her own cute brain only very recently stained by a few uncertainties; these might easily be confused with the first faint streaks of hysteria at finally realizing that she was sexually a comic animation, beloved of dolphins perhaps, but only fancied by old men, by kinky men, by men with something wrong with them—like Herb Flynn.

  Herb’s face was red and bobbly with a plague of eczema blemishes. He wore a straggly confusion of beard and tangled sideboards to cosmetize this. The harvest of hair still sprouted out of a livid, blotched soil, however. His room at San Diego was packed with jars of skin lotions. He never took to the water, staying in the operating theatre and laboratories where the electrode inserts and post mortems were carried out… Never having seen him with even his shirt off, she wondered whether his whole body was undergoing a perpetual acne attack. At nights she dreamed that all his skin was infested by a host of tiny jellyfish, their sting cells leaving welts on face and body alike…

  The thought of going to bed with him… the idea of those pink welts crawling off him in the dark and investigating her! (It would have to be in the dark, she was sure—to prevent her from seeing.) Dolphins, nudging her round the pool like a beachball, playing with her, squealing at her, riding her on their rippling laminar backs, were infinitely sexier. Herb had taken one special favourite once and cut it up, out of jealousy. She hoped this trip wouldn’t throw them together too violently. Herb was contact-adhesive, with all his welts and suckers…

  “I’ve been thinking this business over very carefully,” Tom Winterburn said, scratching the tip of his thin bluish nose, which protruded almost far enough for him to see its end without going cross-eyed, “and if it involves anything at all I’d say there has to be some kind of ‘transplant of consciousness’ effect…”

  “Which is just another way of avoiding using the phrase ‘mind-transfer’, Tom,” Flynn responded glumly, thinking of all his stereotaxic maps of dolphin brains. Sensation centres here, motor controls there… Such complexity, even on the conditioned reflex level! “What’s a ‘mind’, anyway?” he demanded. “It’s simply a particular brain in operation. The working mode of the brain. If a brain exceeds the thousand gram threshold level, we can posit a ‘mind’ as the working mode instead of just a bundle of automatic instinctual programmes—as Lilly did. But that doesn’t demonstrate a mind or separate it from the body, except semantically. The rest is sheer mysticism. Do you suppose the Soviets have achieved some breakthrough on the astral plane? A disembodied mind, that can be physically re-embodied? The dream of religions down the ages? I think it highly unlikely.” He halted a moment. “Alternatively, do you mean an actual brain transplant? It’s been done on a crude level from monkey to monkey. I guess it could be done with a human being, though the adult human brain’s much bigger than a kid’s. The skull would have to be surgically enlarged. There’s no sign of that on Nilin. Why use a kid at all? Surely there should be enough adult cretins in mental hospitals…” He petered out, as the suggestion sounded unacceptable, put in those words.

  “Maybe it’s a problem of adjustment?” suggested Winterburn. “Brain and body are too well integrated beyond a certain age? So you need a young host.”

  “But that hasn’t been done! That kid still has a kid’s brain in his skull. It’s his own original brain matter… Anyhow, the whole notion of transplanting a human brain into a whale’s body is ridiculous! The human brain simply isn’t designed to operate a whale anatomy. It would be like expecting a monkey to fly a jumbo jet.”

  “Their choice of a cosmonaut?” Enozawa queried. “Significant?”

  Flynn shook his heavy, flushed head. An ape’s pink matted bum, the Japanese thought to himself.

  “On the contrary! That only goes to show they had nothing better to do with a crippled spaceman! Otherwise they’d have saved him for the whale job, not squandered him on the kid!”

  The Toyota swung away from the shore along the causeway towards the island, negotiating its way by fits and starts through the knots of day trippers who were marching towards the lava beaches, aquariums and other sideshows.

  From across the bay, occasional oily smells wafted from the whale yards. A smoke cloud of gulls milled about—ducking, diving, snatching, in an amorphous woolly blob, which the sharp island peak cut off from view as it rose up before them.

  “I wasn’t thinking of actually transposing brains,” Winterburn explained. “Why do they have that computer at Ozerskiy? I mean, at Nagahama,” he offered the Japanese with a pucker of the lips—a bar-girl offering some rice-cracker knicknack. Enozawa acknowledged the gesture evasively. It struck him as offensively patronizing.

  “That computer has a massive capacity. Now, no computer yet can match the capacity of the human brain. But perhaps this one’s equal to a stripped-down version—to an abbreviated mathematical model of mind? The Nilin boy and his Muzhik talk in terms of printing minds, don’t they? We took it to mean they’re printing new information into a brainwashed subject. But what if we take it literally? In that case the Russians have devised a workable mathematical scheme for describing the processes we sum up as ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’. You yourself said, Herb, there’s no such thing as ‘mind-in-general’—only the behaviour of a particular brain. So it’s a particular individual they must make a model of. They need a Nilin. Preferably someone with a well co-ordinated intelligence and a fairly tough mentality!”

  Flynn shook his head disbelievingly.

  “When the obvious answers have all been ruled out,” persisted the naval attaché,
“the impossible answer must be the right one.”

  “You sound like that lunatic Hammond!” Flynn shot back at him, with a venom that astonished Tom Winterburn. “Well, I mean to say! Almost his exact words. The impossibility of reality, the reality of impossibilities. Our new faith, so it seems!”

  “I haven’t really been following the news from Mexico. Too wrapped up in this thing, I guess—”

  “Lucky you!”

  Chloe fluttered nervously. San Diego was so close to the border. Not a day’s drive away from that barricade, and the orgy going on before it. Closer still to Tijuana, Madsville of the old days, now deliriously re-infected. The moment she’d stepped outside the guarded perimeter of the Undersea Center she’d felt she was deserting sanity. Felt vulnerable. Out in the open. Exposed. The frenzy of the Japanese quayside did little to allay her fears. They too had altered: from the picturesque to the appalling… The San Diego Center, whatever Herb did in his labs, was a pure Disneyland oasis beside the world that began at its gates.

  The whole planet seemed to be descending into a dark oceanic cleft in a flimsy bathysphere.

  The daily news was bad enough: the war in New Guinea, the starvation in Africa. Anthrax. Radioactivity. Now this Hammond man popping up again with his horror story from the edge of the Universe…

  However hard she tried to thrust such things aside, they seemed always to come bouncing back again, as if some gremlin was playing ping pong inside her head.

  “Something ought to be done about that Hammond, Tom! He’s a menace. A plague. He’s the big epidemic W.H.O.’s been scared of. Only it broke out in Mexico in a fellow’s mind, not in Africa. We’d be better advised doing something about him. Take a detachment of Marines down there, maybe. Whales can wait—”

  Enozawa sucked in his breath sharply. After making so much fuss about keeping the Russian child! With the Japanese Foreign Ministry issuing bland obfuscations to the Soviet Embassy, at the same time as the Resources Ministry were circulating increasingly tetchy memoranda about the delay. Consensus, precarious at the best of times, was as ill-balanced currently as a novice first time out on the practice mat. The only factor restraining the powerful Resources Ministry was this still ill-defined threat of some Soviet-programmed leviathan, or fleet of them, whose function remained a mystery. If it was only a threat to American submarines, what affair of theirs was that?

  This Hammond though… A disconcerting man! A nobel laureate was a kind of samurai of science, wasn’t he? A samurai was accustomed to confronting blackest night and finding the flame of honour burning in its depths, as the high point of all his days: that mystical moment when he stretched out his hand to take the seppuku dagger. Seppuku had been ridiculed for decades, till Mishima once more made glorious that moment when the great man faces nothingness… Americans hadn’t the strength in their stomachs to confront nothingness. Most Americans. This Hammond was the exception. The reaction of ordinary Americans to him proved it.

  Enozawa relaxed against the black leatherette, calmed by clear images of Yukio Mishima on that balcony at Ichigaya Barracks. He had witnessed it, at least! Acting properly nowadays, he could erase the shame of his own past slovenliness.

  “It mightn’t be necessary to transfer the physical brain, you see,” the American Captain was saying. “If a math model of sufficient complexity could be built up and superimposed, by some imprinting procedure… I guess this would have to be electrical—”

  “We are here,” announced Enozawa, as the car ahead pulled up at the end of the causeway. A cobbled pathway led on from here up to the top of the island between lines of souvenir stalls.

  • • •

  Corals and dried seaweeds; whelks bubbling in their own juices over charcoal grills; turtle shells and fishing rods, pennants, ray guns, mother of pearl caskets… Orville Parr stared about him anxiously as he did his best to shepherd Georgi Nilin and Mikhail hygienically up this narrow, jostling tourist tube. Surges of claustrophobia assaulted him, far worse than on that day at the zoo. He would have to apply for a transfer. He couldn’t hold out much longer in this country.

  “Why couldn’t we arrive by sea?” he whined to Gerry. “The Whale Institute can’t possibly get their supplies this way. What is this, an obstacle course?”

  Chloe, overhearing him, felt that she knew what the poor man was feeling. The frenzy of those quaysides visibly infected the Japanese holidaymakers. They seemed angry and impatient as they tramped up the cobble path. A jostling indignation, almost indecent haste, showed in the way they seized souvenirs off the stalls, as though those were likely to turn to trash in their hands, and thrust crumpled thousand-yen notes across the counters—money which might fall to cobwebs a moment later…

  Parr stared at the two drivers, a burly pan-faced couple, squashed into shiny black shoes and shiny Tetoron suits, climbing the tube with the blankly receptive eyes of some fish waiting to gobble indiscreet flies. Their hands hung slackly from their wrists, rigid as boards now they were off the steering wheels.

  “Are your chauffeurs armed?” Parr demanded. Fucking two-faced snoopers, he cursed inside himself.

  Enozawa thought it was a vulgar query, and disdained to answer.

  Gerry Mercer saw a black plastic sperm whale and dropped back to buy it. A wrinkled old woman with a bright gold tooth in the centre of her mouth dunked it in a bowl of water, held it up and squeezed the sides to show him how it worked. The whale spouted a single jet of water at a forty-five degree angle. Then she passed the very same dripping toy over with a grin. Jerry held it uncertainly behind his back, not knowing where to put it now. It would soak his coat pocket. He sensed he’d been made a fool of by the woman, subtly.

  The stubby white lighthouse at the peak of the island turned out to be a restaurant. Beer crates lay piled up outside its door—and an oil drum full to the brim of dying, broken lobsters. The shells had been stripped off their backs for the foamy living flesh to be diced and eaten raw. The husks of the beasts still lived vestigially. Their feelers quested the air slowly for oblivion. What remained of their snapped legs flexed in and out in a parody of motion.

  As they filed past they stared down into the drum, the Americans with feelings of queasy alarm at the marine Auschwitz enacted in this trash can, the Japanese with a bland Buddhistic censorship of the notion of pain, Mikhail sheltering the boy from the sight, hauling him up against his body with an immense hand.

  From the top of the lava cone here, the view of the bay, distant whaling sheds and gull clouds resumed. That oily whiff was on the air again, intermittently.

  To their right sprawled the buildings of the Institute, jutting out into the waters, with—of course! cursed Parr—their own landing stages. There was even a dock with sluice gates big enough to accommodate a full-size baleen whale. Gantries with winches ran out over the dock, extending far back under cover of a huge shed.

  Steps cut into the solid lava led down to the Institute from the restaurant. Steps led out, too, on to the main lava flow, which fanned out into the bay some way: crimped, bobbled and crinkled as a black lace petticoat. Holidaymakers stood about stagily in various frozen attitudes, clutching cameras, fishing rods, artists’ easels, baseball gloves. Occasionally they flickered into activity, pitching a ball, casting a line, or shifting an easel around; then froze once more. The lava was difficult to negotiate smoothly; however, their behaviour made every action seem totally disconnected, like a quantum leap.

  Sixteen

  A motorcycle gang with SATAN’S SLAVES painted on their fuel tanks in phosphorescent glitter had arrived at the barbed wire fence and were wheeling about, revving their engines and scattering dust. Tired soldiers watched them through binoculars from under the makeshift sunshades they’d run up on top of the half-tracks, while the off-duty soldiers sprawled dozing on camp beds in the three open-bottomed marquees.

  Ruth and Morelli watched them too, sitting in the Sierra parked on the Mezapico side of the military vehicles.

  Richard ha
d left his binoculars in the glove compartment. Morelli used them to read off the Slaves’ name.

  “See the worshippers gather, Ruth!” he exclaimed, with a grim note of vindication, triumph almost.

  Sexuality stirred in Ruth as she stared at the motor cycle gang. She visualized the blond newsman as one of them, his crewcut grown long, green forage cap discarded in favour of a Nazi crash helmet; the scar on his cheek, result now of a raking with a cycle chain during some rumble of Angels…

  But the helicopter that ferried in more soldiers, to match the build-up of pilgrims on the other side, had borne the blond man back to the City with some of the other newsmen.

  A series of vivid cartoon stills of him raping her in Angel gear presented itself to her imagination. She closed her eyes to concentrate on the vibrating humiliation of it. The presence of the impotent, fiery Italian in the passenger seat beside her enhanced her fantasy. He was so much more poignant an escort than Richard Kimble. Gianfranco knew; he just couldn’t. His intense dammed-up energy wound a web of searing mental electricity around her that cocooned her for the time being from Paul’s new Promethean countenance…

  Relaxing, she re-opened her eyes.

  Morelli was staring at her intent, pinched, sweat-flushed face with revulsion and fascination.

  Suspiciously she sniffed the air. At the height of her fantasy, she could have sworn she’d detected a tang of the blond newsman’s shave lotion… Gianfranco was wearing a splash of it. Her barbecue boyfriend had complained about the aerosol can disappearing from his luggage. So Gianfranco had stolen it? How comical! An inner laugh rocked her, giving her fantasy one last glorious twist. Where that man had been giving off the appropriate male musk for her, however, the Italian seemed to be wearing antiseptic.

  Those Satan’s Slaves must stink of sweat and grease and marijuana and dried jissom—she was sure!

  • • •

  The Angels wheeled, scattering dust.