The Jonah Kit

by Ian Watson

  They spoke of the valleys of the sea that Jonah would be swimming through: the contour lines marked out for him in jellyfish and squid instead of conifers and maples.

  And they spoke of Man, reconstructed by the Star. What was the texture of Jonah’s consciousness now? Apprehension, plus prehension: a new skyscraper with firm new windows on reality—along with the, old human ones—a four-dimensional building, almost.

  And through the alien windows, with the Thought Star’s help, a different insight upon Hammond’s bleak cosmos surely could be gleaned. When the Star grasped the new data thrust into Jonah’s mind at the crucial moment—when it surveyed the symbolic theorem of space-time culled from holes in the edge of the universe, there would come into being a fresh view, with fresh observers. Fresh participants.

  Thereafter, such possibilities of an embassy of minds on the deep symbolic level! Of a general grammar of existence for the Earth-and-Sea. Of Homo Physeter, new mental breed swimming the oceans. Of Physeter Sapiens striding out of the sea bringing ocean music to a needy, desiccated land… They rhapsodized somewhat, as they walked. Many possibilities lay open, on that chilly autumn day, on the Russian island.

  Katya halted in the lee of a spruce copse, where snow lay a few inches thick, porous and poachy from half melting. Kneeling, she pressed mushy tubes in it with her fingertips as though hunting for something. But there was nothing underneath except the brown mud with which her fingers emerged, stained.

  “Pavel never saw the sea or the trees or my own face,” she told him. “But his ears brought him all the world. He could play any wind instrument, almost—flute, clarinet… He played the clarinet professionally for Irkutsk Symphony Orchestra, then jazz saxophone in a student club in the city. He made a few public recordings with the orchestra. Not solos, but I have them in my room, I can pick him out. Though he never would play here on Sakhalin, even when I found a flute. Because he had to leave music behind, he said, to become a musical instrument himself! I have a privately made tape of him playing jazz out on Lake Baikal in a boat. Friends recorded it. It’s so mournful, that horn across the waters, as though he is sighing that he will soon slip underwater himself and be reborn as a water beast. Then music and body will be one, but then no humans will ever hear him properly or understand him. Only through our machines and symbols.”

  To Richard it sounded very much as though she was reciting the plot of some Russian ballet. As though she too was playing a part, not perfectly authentic. A copy, herself, not the original. Maybe there wasn’t any such Russian ballet. Still, the account rang a small alarm bell in his head. He couldn’t take it quite on trust.

  Perhaps it was the fault of telling it in a foreign language. Perhaps her words would have sounded sincere and unsentimental in Russian. What leeway was there, after all, for phoney romanticism or pretension on Sakhalin between the cold and the computers? Yet what a tragic romantic this skinny girl seemed, for all that, under the functional blue overalls that might have held a spanner in them, and the heavy military-style coat. Computer programmer as ballerina! He wondered what the Russian for “soulfulness” was. Probably sobornost covered it. Yet he liked her for this, despite his mental quibbles. Whatever else, at least she was fighting to be a real person—no mean feat. So few ways to be real, so many to be unreal.

  Ultimately he felt that he trusted her. So he could put up with what sounded like false notes. In her naive, hurt way, she was utterly charming. Her emotions, still raw and valid. He—though he acknowledged this aspect only briefly—had met someone as emotionally maladept as himself: who had experienced the shocking, the cruel and the beautiful, and embodied them. So he felt at ease with her. And knew what must happen between them, soon. Never before had he possessed such a clear foreknowledge of precisely how another nervous system would respond to his own, without evasions, without fumbling guesswork.

  “Do I sound childish to you?” she enquired suddenly, reading his expression. Her tongue darted out to lick those full, waxed lips, so curiously dry: small red fish, flicking up against a barrier that was melting, melting. “Am I silly? Infatuated?”

  “I wish,” he hesitated. “I wish I’d been in the position to feel the same. You had sobornost with Pavel, didn’t you? Now he has it with whales. I feel so envious. I’ve only been able to stand and watch, from a distance… from clifftops…”

  Her eyes shone. The little red fish had almost melted its way through.

  She held up her muddy fingers and placed her palm against his, splaying her fingers and rotating her palm till their two hands composed a star of fingers in the air. Swivelling her hand, she gripped his wrist tightly, and pulled him into the copse. He raised his free hand to ward off the saplings slapping his face, but Katya restrained him.

  “Let them stroke you. Shut your eyes so they don’t hurt.”

  So the saplings became caresses, albeit harsh ones.

  Then she halted him, to stroke his face with her muddy fingertips and touch the hot marks the twigs had left. He reopened his eyes; quickly, playfully, she whipped off his glasses and hung them on a branch.

  “How do you see without them?”

  He could see her face quite clearly, in fact. And all the trees. It was long sight that he was poor on. (So become an astronomer, my son, and hearken to the light years…!) Ultimately, perhaps, he wore glasses more as a kind of personal window-pane. Yet, at this moment, he might have been lost in a weedy aquarium tank with her.

  “I see a green thought in a green shade,” he quoted whimsically. “ ‘Annihilating all that’s made, to a green thought in a green shade.’ A seventeenth-century Englishman wrote it. Paul Hammond annihilates all that’s made, and leaves us here alone, like this. I guess green thoughts are what whales think under the sea.”

  So then his tongue searched for the little red fish of hers. And her thick greatcoat made a soft bed for them.

  The flesh of his back shivered, exposed to the air, but his chest and belly and thighs were warmed.

  • • •

  Lying wrapped in her coat, with his lighter coat pulled over them, they stared up through spruce branches at a sky glazing over again with impending rain.

  “You purr like a cat when you make love,” she said. “That’s nice. I think I am… what’s the word the priests use? … unghosted, unhaunted now.”

  “Exorcized?” Richard spelt it out. “It means ‘unghosted’.”

  “We made love the last time, Pavel and I, on winter snow out there. A bright blue day, very still. I know that’s from a new snowfall, but…”

  So that was what she’d been probing the snow for. Some crystal imprint, long melted!

  “It was the very day before the scanning. He was saying good-bye to his human body, together with me. It was so beautiful, Richard, his last rhythm as a man. But then he got scared when he’d said good-bye, that way. Terrified. He fled through these trees. The branches whipped him to a halt. His eyes wept, blind…”

  “So I’m only his ghost for you.”

  A great disappointment and disenchantment swept over him.

  “Oh no, not that—nikagdal Never!” She caught hold of his wrist again and mimicked the Star with their fingers. “See? I’ll show you what Pavel is now, when we go back. You’ll understand.”

  As they pulled their clothes on, fumblingly assisting each other, as she might have helped blind Pavel, it occurred to him that people generally said something like this, about the other being bound to understand, when the very thing they feared, and knew positively, was that the other person could never possibly understand, in a thousand years.

  Rain mixed with sleet chased them down the slopes to sparse Ozerskiy’s huddled smoky houses. Collars turned up, they fled from a thousand stinging darts fired at them from the hills where they’d been lovers.

  From those woods where his sperm had acted as the psychic douche for the girl!

  Yet as they ran down the valley together, she turned her head and smiled such an open, radiant smile a
t him that he thought instead: from the place where I set her free…

  He returned her smile. For it’s surely something to have set a fellow human being free. Liberation—a revolutionary act! Would that Italian Morelli have any objection to that way of putting it? He’d been the revolutionary lover before a landmine made him the embittered voyeur of other people’s folly.

  The squall passed over and out to sea. They shook the water from their coats and hair like otters, before the verandah of a large wooden house; then mounted the steps on to the covered walk. They passed two barred, shuttered windows. The third looked into a gaily decorated nursery. Plastic rockets and space stations hung on elastic from the ceiling. Piled on the wooden tiles were other, apparently functionless toys made out of twisted wire and string, guts of clocks, bent spoons, buttons. A poster painting of Salyut in Earth orbit had been half ripped from the wall. Only the upper, unreachable part still clung there. The missing half was being crumpled and uncrumpled monotonously and expressionlessly by the child sitting bolt upright on his bed. His fingers flexed of their own volition, in and out, in and out. Crumple, uncrumple. Nothing else about him stirred.

  Georgi Nilin.

  Behind the next window a gaunt shaven-headed figure in striped blue pyjamas and a woman’s cotton twill dressing gown occupied a bathchair.

  His fingers fiddled with his penis through the flaps of the gown, and saliva glistened on his chin. This room was stark and undecorated, though some music was playing from a tape recorder. He betrayed no reaction to the song, except insofar as his head was bent that way.

  One song ended, another began. Richard had thought Tchaikowsky or something cultural would have been in order. But no.

  “Soviet pop songs.” Katya shrugged. “That’s Ludmila Zykina now. It doesn’t matter what the sound is! We’re only afraid if the room is quiet, he’d be so totally alone. Even if he understands nothing, maybe the presence of the noise is a comfort. See—” She pointed, her expression an amalgam of disgust and tenderness. “He is playing with himself, so maybe he’s content. Though I doubt he can feel very much sensation. The painkilling drugs numb him. He didn’t look like that before the scanning,” she added quickly. “Not… when we… you know. But he has degenerated since then.”

  So hard a task to reconstruct the Pavel Chirikov he had once been from that figure in the bathchair! Richard slapped imaginary plasticene on his cheeks, and sprouted him a full head of hair. But it didn’t work. The resulting image was merely grotesque. Pavel’s immune system even rejected cosmetic repairs—a total immunity, his now: to his body, to the whole world. Starveling idiot beggar in a woman’s gown, they left him and returned past Nilin’s window, where the boy was still crumpling the poster. It was with a shared sigh of relief that they stood on the drying grass again.

  But while they walked towards the main research block, glancing back they noticed a figure appear at an upstairs window of the wooden house, to watch them…

  “So they’ve let him return already!”

  “Who?” Richard’s glasses were still slightly streaked by rain; vision was wobbly. “He looks familiar.”

  “Mikhail the attendant! Yes, he dejected with Nilin, didn’t he, Richard?” She laughed bitterly. “What games Orlov plays!”

  She shrank inside herself, withdrawing a mental pace or two from him. Her tongue licked nervously. The barrier was back.

  “So the defection was a game then? Yet Jonah isn’t a game!” He nearly added, “is he?”, but stopped himself in time; it would be a fatal remark.

  She said nothing. He might as well already have said it. Have cast doubt.

  All along, this rusty nail had been waiting to drive itself through their feet and poison their sobornost You couldn’t race hand in hand down Russian valleys, carefree as lovers, for long! She must have known this far better than him, he reflected. She’d lived under these conditions all her life.

  Kapelka met them as they re-entered the main building; nodded to Richard knowingly, or was it sympathetically?

  “There shall be another Zvezdaja Mysl two days from now,” he announced. “Jonah will congregate with the six other whales quite near your San Diego, so you can observe it all. When Jonah is locked in the Star, our trawler transmits the Hammond Theorem to them. To them, through his consciousness. It’s being encoded now. Our own government seem just as anxious for a solution, Dr. Kimble! Some dissidents in Eastern Europe… It’s in Pravda today.”

  Tailing off, he touched the girl briefly on the arm.

  “Pavel will prove himself, Katya! A proud moment.”

  Twenty-Five

  They swim through a sea where a Wailing One sings the warning song describing the Destroyers of Sound, (Word) and (Hand).

  Disruptor is not a true glyph; but a null-glyph, the first such to be formed. It carries prohibitory inflections; for it disrupts the clear vibrations of the fluid universe. With DISRUPTOR there springs up a wall of razor reefs in the sea of mind, hard and cutting—enclosing no mirror of insight, instead cutting meaning into the world through the agency of a (steel) instrument… This is a mutant growth in the sound womb—sticking out spiky limbs such as those that all true foetuses should retract back into the bud, after that courtesy nod to evolution. Arms with five tiny arms at their extremities, with five suctionless suckers more rapacious than any Ten-Arms’ suction pads, lay hands not only on things, branding stinging welts on them, but reach into the mind itself, twisting sound into (words) tough as (steel) and equally implacable…

  Disruptor seizes hold of the ever-vibrating waves whose interactions pattern out the shapes of Being, and hammers them into (tools) to turn round and peer at themselves. Those are (words). Those are (hands). Yet they only measure themselves, describe their own solid, rigid isolation.

  Disruptor, lacking the STOP-inflection, might well harden, oil wax into a glyph that never melts into another greater glyph. A glyph of bone; of stone; of (steel).

  Oh, proto-arms can be heard by his Kind budding in the wombing mother, while they click-scan her; yes. Terribly, once or twice, they fail to ungrow again. Then an awkward, hampered thing is born with meaningless, crippled limbs hanging off it; maybe to drown right away; maybe to thrash through seas more slowly, dive less deeply for a shorter life. Lately, more such buds have been sprouting longer, as queer traces taste the seas…

  Tastes put there intentionally by (hands)… they now realize.

  His Kind are keenly aware of their own evolution retold in the wombing; the glyph recapitulator pulsed by a Female Star after fertilization is a shape which the foetus may copy, in growing. A pup begins life with a glyph of his growth ranged round him, magic, mimetic, to help him take his proper place in the evolution towards Greater Glyphs that still lie far beyond, far away ahead in time.

  The glyph representor has raised up the ghost of another life in another Being-mode. It rose through the lattice of this one’s mind in disconnected drops of knowledge, to make a waxen dummy, and now he wants to send a message to someone, to link hands across the air…

  But the pulse from the sky, hurling itself willy-nilly at the Eight-Arms in him till all its arms are dancing, numbering, has told him the next Star is critical for (Humanity).

  There is a question, that (hands) and (words) demand an answer to.

  His guardian drops behind.

  He swims ahead to meet the Two, and the Four.

  While the Click-Whistlers hush the Singing Ones, before snuffing their own whistle-chatter into silence…

  Twenty-Six

  Once more predictions were rife that the San Andreas fault line was about to split open and slide half California into the sea. In many people’s minds Hammond’s Proof had fatally weakened the bonds of matter: almost as a direct physical consequence of its pronouncement. The world grew insubstantial and treacherous around them. Indeed, a series of small earthquakes—tremblers—nudged the ground beneath their feet for a week. The Corps of Engineers were pumping thousands of tons of water into
deep porous rock as part of their Quake Defusing Programme, and small shocks such as these had been foreseen, though inadequately publicized, perhaps for fear of causing fear. Now the world seemed to rock on its hinges, and many people’s mental world rocked too. There were enough believers—or disbelievers—of an apocalyptic cast of mind these days, not only to welcome Hammond’s Proof (a “Proof” now, courtesy of the Media) as vindicating their own manias and anxieties, but to send tens of thousands of them trooping from the Los Angeles area and from San Francisco towards Mount Palomar, as to a sacred place that would not be overwhelmed, imitating the disastrous Mezapico pilgrimage on a vastly greater scale. A millenary movement was under way, in the mind and on the ground. By the time state troopers had sealed off the highways leading to the area, repeating the same mistake as their Mexican counterparts, there were already an estimated fifteen thousand people penned within the area, and perhaps twice that number outside. The official roadblocks and picket lines did not last long, and ended bloodily…

  Thus the Hot Days began. Though it was autumn. Perhaps it had seemed the autumn of the World for long enough, with only winter looming ahead, empty of heat and food, work and commodities. Thus people flared up, themselves, to recapture something precious and amorphous: the texture of their lives. Or to commemorate its loss, its gigantic negation.

  And this was only in California, where Chloe Patton was once more. She didn’t particularly care to know what was happening elsewhere in any other states or countries.

  Yet she was perhaps the first person to realize that anything was going wrong out there at sea…

  Safe in the refuge of the Naval Center, marines guarded her—and the installation—from the effects of what news commentators were by now predictably referring to as “the new Hammond Wave”, of shock, hysteria. But, from returning sailors—and many simply hadn’t come back when the base hooters recalled them—she’d woven a nightmare picture of the frustrations and anxieties being discharged, in and upon the city of San Diego itself: the hippy saturnalia in Balboa Park, the trashing of the El Cortez Hotel by cycle gangs after a college youth playing sniper fired into them from the moving stairway high above the sidewalk, the running battles in the downtown area between gangs and sailors and military people and “American Revolutionaries”, erupting through the bars and ballroom dancing schools.