Evil Water and Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  Sores sprouted on our bodies, and strange thoughts moved inside our minds: strong dreams and nightmares. The sicker we became and the thinner with hunger, and the more we glowed in the dark with fever-heat such as only the rattlesnake was able to perceive in earlier times, the more so did the minds of some of us children grow fierce with new senses; and of all I was the fiercest, though my legs were rickety and my chest was patched with red spiders’ webs.

  In those days, children pointed the way to safe pools and edible roots, pulling their puzzled ailing elders by the hands. And I pointed farthest of all, deep into the desert, which seemed a wild and foolish way to walk; but it was clear and clean to me.

  The journey was too late for all but one of the grown-ups of the last tribe of people; but we children knew which of those who fell were safe to eat, and which parts of which ones: the liver of one, the brain of another, the heart of a third. What parts we did not eat fell to the lot of the mongrel packs on our heels; and many hounds died of what they ate, or became enfeebled and could not follow us onward.

  Only seven of us arrived here: six children, and young Gabriel’s Grandad whose eyes had melted many years before when a sun suddenly rose in the north. Gabriel’s Grandad never seemed to know how to die—as though this was a skill he had lost along with his eyesight.

  And so we came at last to this dry valley in the very heart of the belly of the desert, where we found to our joy this metal village where in later years you were bred from our loins and now dwell.

  What a person knows with full familiarity, a person cannot see with the eyes of fresh perception; so I will say how our home seemed to us when we first arrived; and how it sounded to the ears of Gabriel’s Grandad.

  Side by side along the valley floor stood seven mighty cylinders, all jet-black, with winged towers on top of each to enter by. These are our long-houses now.

  When we told their shape and size and structure to Gabriel’s Grandad, he answered madly that they were called submarines; that they were made to swim beneath the seven seas—a sea being a pool of salty water as wide and as deep as the sky.

  You’ve never seen such a thing as a sea, my tribe. No more have I. So what were these mighty vessels, which Gabriel’s Grandad said were made for swimming beneath the seven seas, doing here standing in a line in middle-desert? Had the great winds of the end of the world, of which our parents had talked, picked those submarines out of the pool called the Pacific and carried them here and set them all down so neatly together?

  “Not so!” wheezed Grandad. He recollected—so he claimed—that submarines had been buried in this empty desert many long years ago, to get rid of them safely without harm to fish or water. They were “active”, he said, and their activity could rot a man’s testicles. The great winds of the end of the world must have uncovered them all, so that the seven submarines appeared like a village planted on the valley floor. Or perhaps other winds since had done the work, funnelling down and scooping out our valley.

  We advanced. By piling up sand in a ramp for several hours, then using blind Grandad as our ladder, we were able to scramble up on top of one of the submarines and gain access by way of the “cunning tower”, the clever high entrance door. We descended and explored the crowded darkness within, which wasn’t as dark to our eyes as it might have been to our dead parents’ eyes; besides, mushrooms and fungi glowed on furniture and tubes and walls.

  We found shelter. We found food: those fungi and mushrooms. We found water. We had found our new homes.

  We traced the word-shapes that our ancestors once used, and which we discovered within this submarine and the others, upon Grandad’s palm; and he told us the names of our new long-houses: names such as Kentucky and Idaho.

  But Grandad wasn’t able to tell us a great deal. It was as though those words told him what he had forgotten, namely how to die; and he did so soon after. So we ate his best parts.

  Yet Grandad’s best parts did not last long, nor for that matter did the fungi and mushrooms growing in our seven fine sanctuaries. We ate our way through the lot; and hungered again, and our minds grew fierce.

  It came to me, in this glowing state of being, that Grandad had been mad these many long years, and that what he had said about the origin of these “submarines” was nonsense. He was of the old days; he had no vision. It was obvious to me that these great hulls had dived, for they were of the right shape to thrust themselves sinuously through other matter with as little hindrance as could be. But though our ancestors were crazy and caused the end of the world, no one could have been crazy enough to carry these vast hulks for the weeks and weeks (or even years) it would have taken to bring them here, just to pile sand over them. Nor could any possible wind have borne them all the way from the Pacific Pool. Therefore the submarines must have dived right here, down through the sands of the desert; and here was their real home and harbour. Rocks jut out of the desert, but the great pools of sand in between might sink as deep as the core of the world.

  And why should these vessels dive down through this part of the desert if there was not something rich and rare beneath to seek?

  Grandad had mumbled at times concerning the caves that men had dug during the last days before the end of the world, before the false suns burned and the wild winds blew and the sky became grey for years: caves filled with meat and drink, with forever-food and fresh water. The people of old must have dived to such caves in these submarines, down through the sand and the earth to the deep safe places.

  And maybe our ancestors weren’t all dead! Maybe we weren’t the only remaining tribe of man! Maybe deep below our feet lived men and women who could be our new parents or servants, or new brothers and sisters.

  Could a submarine take us down below the ground to the caves of our ancestors?

  Oh that was a wild and glowing time, a hungry time, a yearning time, a time of bright visions and fierce wishes; especially for me.

  And as I sat there alone within Idaho, starving, I conceived—not as you conceive, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters; but I conceived within my mind. I conceived a power such as never before nor ever since has been conceived.

  I went to the room in the midst of Idaho where there are seats to sit in and many handles and little jutting metal fingers to push and pull and twist. I sat me down. The power burgeoned within me. I grasped handles. I snapped the metal fingers up and down. And Idaho awoke.

  I know you do not fully credit this, my juniors. I know that you whisper behind my back that this is simply a “myth” of how we came to be as rich and prosperous and populous as we are today; and how many do I count of us here today, crowded into this mighty steel hall of the self-same Idaho? This hall, which Grandad named the “missile compartment”? Nigh on two hundred souls! Oh I know that your voices buzz behind my back; for I hear them buzz, saying that all our forever-food and other riches were already stored here in Idaho and its six companions when we children first arrived. But I tell you: it was not so! It was just as I say!

  Idaho awoke under my hands. Idaho moved. Idaho tilted and dived, down through the sand, down through the earth.

  After a while Idaho levelled off, and travelled. I know not for how long. Time had stopped.

  Eventually Idaho also stopped. Its metal heart quit thumping, its lungs ceased to pant softly, its blood no longer pounded.

  I climbed up through the cunning tower and discovered that Idaho was at rest in a huge stone chamber many times its size, where lights burned brightly. The mouths of several well-lit tunnels led away, but Idaho was too huge to have entered the chamber by any of these mouths. Yet behind Idaho the chamber wall was flawless—apart from ancient marks of cutting and chiselling. Nevertheless Idaho had slipped through.

  Many things were stored in that first chamber; and many more things in other chambers, to which the tunnels led. There were enormous stocks of sealed forever-food, boxes of fine garments, stores of seed, barrels and bottles of drink, tools, knives and axes, neat bundles of stitche
d bound paper covered with meaningless word-shapes, enigmatic devices of all shapes and sizes wrought in metal and glass.

  I found many skeletons, too, the bones of our ancestors lying about on the floors. But though many still had leathern skin and muscle-string and hair attached, these bones did not whisper anything to me.

  A month and more I must have spent in filling Idaho with the plunder of these chambers, enough to last us many lifetimes. I sensed that my small band of sisters and brothers would not starve in the meantime, however long I took; for did I not say that time stood still? Yet while I worked I also feasted and slept and put on weight.

  Finally I retired back into that room in the midst of Idaho and felt for the power again; and the power duly came to me.

  Idaho carried me and my cargo back. Idaho rose and surfaced once more here in our desert as though it had never been away.

  My brothers and sisters fed; they drank. A tiny lump of forever-food fills the belly wonderfully, does it not? Presently we increased and multiplied.

  And that is how it was, when Idaho dived.

  So you have heard all this before? And you wonder why, if this was so, the power has never come to me a second time and Idaho has never dived again?

  Listen, elders, wives and juniors, sisters and brothers of the tribe! I am old; and until now there was no need for the power. Yet I feel that the power is near me once more. I feel it waiting for my hand to grasp it.

  I tell you that there is nowhere else in this world for us to live except here amidst these sands. Yet now that the all-grey skies of yesteryear have cleared, the sun beats hot upon us by day, the moon shines cold by night. Every day it is too cold and too hot. And I know that two hundred mouths, even the little mouths of our golden babes held in your arms as you hear me, will gobble many lifetimes of forever-food before many more years pass by. What then, my tribe, what then?

  Do you challenge me to dive Idaho down again underneath the earth to the same chambers of plenty? Do I hear that?

  The power, oh my tribe, may only be used once in one direction.

  But it can be used again—in another direction!

  Consider the sun by day, the moon by night! Those are places afloat in the sky, of fire and of ice. Consider the thousand smaller twinkling lights in the black sky, which first showed themselves to us when the sky-blanket fell into threads!

  The power tells me that we must go to one of those lights in the sky! Idaho will take us all up there, to fields of green and to bubbling streams, to plains of skipping game-beasts and pools of fat fishes. It will take us all to a new living-place, as once it took me to the caves of treasure and bones; and it will take us timelessly.

  Do not doubt! For here you are all gathered together; and did you not know that the cunning tower is closed? Nothing will leave by it now, not even a breath of air, till I say it is safe.

  Now I shall go to the room of handles and metal fingers, to steer us to a star.

  Let me through! Do you not feel the floor beneath our feet begin to tilt? Upward, yes a little upward!

  Let me through, I say!

  Why are you all staring at me so? Why are you hemming me in so tightly? What is this harm you mean me? What folly is this, what madness?

  I repeat: the power is upon me! This is the time! Can you not feel Idaho quivering to rise? Do you not wish to tell your babes’ babes the tale of how Idaho flew—to a star in the sky?

  You are fools, fools. Alas, my tribe, you are fools.

  And now you will eat my brain and my heart and my liver. But first of all you will eat my tongue, which spoke to you, saying all these things.

  ON THE DREAM CHANNEL PANEL

  I had always regarded myself as a vivid dreamer, but even I was amazed when my dreams were interrupted by the advertisements.

  I was climbing by rope-ladder up the outside of a lighthouse to catch an airship due to depart from the top—all in my dream, of course—when the scene suddenly blanked out and cans of food were dancing round me to jolly musical accompaniment, mainly percussion.

  The labels showed some peculiar fruit or vegetable, which at first I took to be maize but then decided looked more like a hairy banana; and a moment later the tops of the cans ripped off of their own accord, and the contents emptied out, steaming, on to floating plates—so those must have been self-heating cans, only no one had put self-heating cans on the market just yet. Stripped of their hairy yellow skins, the insides of the “fruits” seemed more like frankfurters.

  A choir of disembodied voices sang out gaily, “Pop a can of kallopies!” And there was I back on the rope-ladder again. The dream continued …

  “Have you ever heard of a tropical fruit called a kallopie?” I asked Phyllis when I got to school the next morning. Phyllis teaches Geography.

  “You can get all sorts of imports at the Third World Food Centre,” she said. “Okra, yams, breadfruit. Maybe you can get whatever it is there.”

  “But have you ever heard of them?”

  “No,” she admitted. “What are they? Where are they from?”

  Not from the Third World, I thought; just from the world of my dreams. But since when did dreams have commercial breaks in them?

  I pursued this line of thought. It so happened that the commercial TV networks had been blacked out by strikes for the past week; and while I hardly regarded myself as the kind of TV addict likely to suffer from withdrawal symptoms, maybe without knowing it I was. Were we not all conditioned, to a greater or less degree, by advertising? Wasn’t it a sad fact that commercials were often better made than the programmes? Hence my subconscious felt obliged to offer a substitute …

  Admittedly this was a far-out hypothesis, but it led on to the thought that if I, a fairly selective viewer, was hallucinating advertisements in my dreams, how much more so must many of the school kids (TV addicts all of them) be feeling the strain?

  My second class that day was Current Affairs; so I decided that we would discuss the role of the mass media. Who knows, maybe I was the first adult to notice this quaint phenomenon, of advertising-dreams?

  After a while I asked the class, “Do any of you ever dream about watching TV? For instance, how about last night? Think back!”

  Alas, no one could recall anything. Still, that wasn’t at all unusual. So I set my class a simple project: to keep pencil and paper by their beds and note down the first thought in their minds when they woke up. For this is an infallible way of remembering dreams. However absurd or random, and eminently forgettable, that first thought might seem to be, nevertheless once capture and fix it, and like a string of silk scarves emerging by magic from a conjuror’s sleeve, in its wake dream after dream would spill forth from amnesia into the light of day.

  My own dreams were broken into again that night. As I lay abed in my little bachelor flat, enjoying some wonderfully Byzantine spy story of my unconscious mind’s devising, suddenly there came a commercial for koozels—which were apparently a crunchy snack wondrous to the taste buds.

  The next morning I was supposed to be teaching that same class the history of the French Revolution; but I checked up on the assignment first.

  About half of the class had done as I’d asked, probably because of the novelty value; so I put it to them, “Did any of you have a dream interrupted by some sort of advertisement—like a commercial on TV?”

  And the jailbait of the group, sexy fifteen-year-old Mitzi Hayes stuck her hand up. She alone.

  “A voice was trying to sell me something crunchy and delicious.”

  “Called what, Mitzi?”

  “A noodle.”

  General hilarity erupted; the rest of the class were sure she was japing me.

  “Think, Mitzi.”

  “No, a koozel: that’s what it was!”

  “Anyone else?”

  “No one else.”

  So I quickly switched over to the topic of Robespierre, determined to avoid the teacher’s trap of asking young Mitzi, when school was out, to a coffee bar to
discuss her sleeping activities. …

  What I did instead was place a small ad in the local newspaper: “Koozels or kallopies? Anyone who dreams of these please reply Box 17 in confidence.” And for good measure, digging deeper into my pocket, I placed similar small ads in four national newspapers.

  Within a week I had eleven replies. Remarkably, most were from Appleby itself; and none was from further away than twenty miles.

  So the twelve of us—discreetly excluding Mitzi—got together at my flat one evening the following week.

  We were a retired dentist, an antiquarian bookseller, a ladies’ hairdresser, a butcher, a hamburger cook, a shop assistant, a secretary, an unemployed plumber, a garage mechanic, a middle-aged lady medium, a postman, and a teacher (myself). So we constituted ourselves the “Dream Channel Panel”, with myself as Chairman, and tried to puzzle out what the explanation was, and who we could complain to.

  Max Edmunds was our dentist; and in his opinion some scientific laboratory in this very average—and thus ideal—town of Appleby had been funded by big advertising money to build a prototype dream-transmitter which could interfere with the brain waves of sleeping people and insert messages. He pointed to the restricted radius of replies I’d received, as evidence of a local source. At present only mock advertisements for imaginary products were being broadcast as tests; but soon it would be the real—and dangerously invasive—thing.

  To date, by the way, another half a dozen products had paraded themselves before us in our nightly fantasies, besides repetitions of kallopies and koozels; and these had all been exotic and implausible foodstuffs: such as kalakiko, a powder which when sprinkled on a slice of bread promptly sprouted luscious brown mushrooms; humbish, an oily liquid which seemingly congealed a pint of water into lobster in aspic; and ampathuse, sparkling golden wine in self-chilling flasks … But why go on? The TV dispute was over by now; the dream-advertising wasn’t.