Sunstroke: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  Nightmares

  Now the day is over,

  Nightmares drawing nigh;

  Shadows of the evening

  Steal away our sky …

  THEY CIRCLE THE world widdershins, keeping to the dusk and darkness, shunning the full Sun: the terrible shapes, the world riders, the nightmares. They eat up all the stars, so that we are alone in the universe with only the Sun for company and the ghostly daytime Moon. If they had come a few thousand years earlier, there would never have been astronomy or cosmology at all—or only a cramped cosmology of terror.

  What are they? Some deep space, cold-seeded life form, incomprehensible to us, creatures of formaldehyde, hydroxyl … Perhaps. They secrete a radio-acid that cuts us off instantly from any satellite we launch. We see them by what they hide, but we know them not. (Radio—and radio astronomy—are dead pigeons. We can’t even listen to the stars.)

  Perhaps they cannot escape from the lee side of Earth into which they plunged for shelter, robbing us of the stars? Perhaps they are the victims, and not us? Yet we feel victimised. The sheer rolling, convulsive darkness that precedes the night! One senses the movements in it—the tentacles, the mouths, the dark eyes—rather than seeing anything positive. Fear invades our dreams, and we waken to worse fear—to claustrophobia, to the wet strait jacket drying round the mental patient, suffocating him; to the sensory deprivation box, where any horror hallucinates itself. That is our night-time.

  At last we are ready to burn them off the world’s backside, and see our stars and galaxy again. …

  We’re launching by day, so we’ll have half an hour in space before our orbit takes us round into nightmare. We could hardly transfer to deeper space to unfold Sunflower on our very first orbit. There are too many systems to check; we’ll be cut off from Houston and the help of any ground computer by the radio blanket.

  The most massive payload lift there’s ever been! And here we four, who will see the stars again today, lie waiting on our control couches: Russell, Calvin, Emil and I.

  “I wonder if they’re all still there?” quips Russell. “The stars, I mean? The universe?”

  It’s a queasy joke, though. What proof is there that the rest of the universe is still there? Apart from the massive probability that it still is. … There have been suggestions, apparently seriously intentioned, that we may no longer be in the same universe as before, that the nightmares have draped themselves across the sky to stop us from seeing something, that they are a sort of temporary wallpaper thrown up around the room of Earth while the walls are being removed—and new walls will be in their place when they wind up again and retire. Perhaps the universe has always been an illusion, a mere projection, a trompe l’oeil, which our telescopes have been pursuing too hard, overloading the data resources of the illusion. Perhaps we’ve been chasing the distant galaxies away too fast and furiously for convenience. …

  Strange religious and exotic metaphysics flourish at such times.

  Needless to say, none of us is anything less than hardline rational and pragmatic, which is why we find Russell’s joke embarrassing. There’s a job to do. We’re going to focus the Sun’s rays on those cosmic leeches and burn them off—if they hate the great light so much.

  But we will all be blind men soon, after our half-hour’s renewed spectacle of stars—save for the cabin lights. Will we even see our own cabin lights? Do steel walls and thick windows necessarily stop the black nightmares from perfusing through?

  The last phone line jerks away. So it’s all automatic now, the launch; no way to halt it.

  T minus sixty seconds, and counting. But no external voice will count for us; already we’re separated from the Earth by an utter silence.

  T minus fifty-nine. …

  We go. We rise, we are crushed and squeezed. T plus, T plus.

  We fly free. Our weight vanishes. …

  The stars are there! All our old familiar stars in their old familiar patterns!

  Greetings to Arcturus, Spica, Regulus … Although we can’t tell anyone back home that you’re still there.

  Now there are only twenty minutes to the terminator—which terminates so much more these days. …

  “Here we go—!” The terrible shapes seem quite tightly humped about the Earth. They don’t tail out into deep space, in Earth’s umbra, but hug close.

  If all else fails we can whip the horses’ eyes. …! So sang an old rock group, The Doors; my son is an aficionado of such things. What did that line of song mean to The Doors? Suddenly it means a lot to me. We will whip their eyes with sunlight, those mares of night!

  We pass through the nightmares. We continue to see each other and our instruments and the cabin around us. Nothing perfuses through. Yet outside there is nothing, either. Plain nothing: as thick as treacle to the eye, though obviously as thin as vacuum, since nothing slows us, since we don’t ablate in burning flakes of chaff.

  Light dawns again; sunlight and the stars. Our orbit is unperturbed; our state of mind, sane.

  We prepare to eject ourselves into Sun orbit, trailing the Earth.

  “Supposing Sunflower doesn’t work?” murmurs Emil. “It isn’t the full force of day we’ll be shining on them. …”

  “Maybe they’ll get the message anyway, and piss off,” snaps Calvin. “A wink is as good as a nod.”

  How much daylight do we hope to beam back upon the world? A millionth of one per cent of what the daylight side of the world receives. … Yet it may still be enough, focused upon much smaller areas of the nightmare side. We will be a mini-Sun to anyone who can see us down there. … But we may simply punch a hole, an eye in the hurricane of darkness. The nightmares may simply stream around this open patch, roiling and coiling. That won’t help anyone to see the stars; they’ll only see a second day.

  Our nightmares must be photophobic—must hate light. (Mustn’t they?) From up here, their nature remains as ambiguous as ever: darkly clamped around dark Earth, beings of anti-light (though not of antimatter—there’s no wild aurora of particle annihilation), unanalysable entities fused into a hemispherical mass, yet conveying the sense of separate beings densely packed—octopoids of space, many tentacled, yet gaseous and thin, tying multiple knots around each other, oozing, streaming, clotting … so utterly deep-sea dark. We can’t fathom their nature. Pray Heaven (the Heaven of Vega, Sirius and Aldebaran) that we can drive them off!

  T plus 82 hours; we’re ready to deploy. Russell drifts beside the Earthward window, surveying our home pool of darkness and the blazing Sun beyond, dampened by the light-reactive glass. This is the Great Moment. Emil places his finger upon mine, upon the GO switch. It is a sacrament.

  “Go,” commands Russell. …

  Already my instruments tell how successfully we are deploying the hundreds of square kilometres of monomolecular fabric of the Sunflower mirror. (The effect will be the same as a solar windsail for us; we’ll tend, from this moment on, to be pushed more and more off course. Here is where we might be lost forever, our skeletons slowly pushed towards the nearest star. Yet the solar wind is what shapes our mirror; we need it. Ten thousand tiny sunpower units in the mirror web will hold us in solar orbit, pressing back against the Sun as we pace the world. The whole business is very delicate.)

  “It’s okay!” I call. “A couple of power units aren’t responding, but the rest are … perfect.”

  Easy now—blindingly easy—to see how well the great mirror spreads out around us, with us as the tiny spider at the heart.

  A little later, Calvin—at the telescope—cries, “I can see through! I see Hawaii!” Which is where we are focusing all our reflected light right now, upon the darkness over the islands.

  Russell, taking the wider view, exclaims in surprise. “They’re quitting! I mean really quitting. The darkness has a different quality all over, I swear. Can’t you see? They’re flowing to the edge of day. They’re bunching at the terminator. They’re really travelling.”

  “I can see city lights all over th
e West Coast now. Portland, L.A. … There’s Mexico City. Everywhere’s coming clear at once. But how? It only ought to be Hawaii. It’s too much.”

  Russell panics. “We’ve driven them round to steal the day! There’ll be no light on the day side. They’ll freeze the world. This can’t be. They hate light Don’t they?”

  “Maybe they’ve only been asleep the last five years,” murmurs Emil. “Now they’ve woken up. It’s their daytime. Feeding time. … If they feed on light.”

  We try to radio Hawaii. No contact is possible; the radio blanket stays in place.

  Then, half an hour later:

  “The Sun!” cries Calvin. The Sun flowers. It blooms terribly, as we hide our eyes. White brilliance bursts beyond our darkened glass.

  “Sol has flared,” says Russell clinically. “It hasn’t blown up. This isn’t a nova—not quite a nova. But enough of one. Perhaps a threefold increase in output. Enough to burn the Earth clean of life, except the deep seas. And those would be damn deep with every inch of ice melted!”

  And our nightmares, whom we thought we chased away—with that pinprick—are all round on the day side now. They’ve put themselves in the way as a shield. What are they, who have saved us? What wonderful beings?

  They haven’t saved us personally. Just everyone else on Earth. We four are lost, in the glare of light and radiation. We hunch down behind as much bulky equipment as we can. The particle flux will reach us before long.

  It’s hot.

  The refrigeration, such as it is, is full on. We expected to need warming, not chilling.

  So hot.

  *

  Still alive, for a little while. Yet sick, so sick. The air’s full of floating filth, Russell floats foetally, exhausted by vomiting; Emil in coma; Calvin delirious.

  We parted from the great mirror web. We let the Sun’s fierce wind whip it away from us. Even so, to Earth there’s no returning. Our computer’s memories are scrambled by the radiation, and we’ve lost other systems too. In any case, we are already dead. Sick unto death. So we will follow a great ellipse of our own that will take us round the Sun for a few centuries before dropping us into the furnace.

  While the Earth lives, sheltered from the glare, not by nightmares but by the most wonderful dreams one could ever have conceived: those shapes who came to save Humanity by hiding the sky, the terribly bright sky.

  After four days, the glare abates; the Sun calms down. I drift by the window, watching as well as I can, as the window lightens to a clearer transparency once more. A finger’s push propels me; if we weren’t in free fall I doubt I’d have the strength to drag myself about.

  Calvin raves and mumbles, bumping up against a bulkhead; I haven’t the power to secure him.

  As I watch, the nightmares rise at last. I see them rise from the day side of the Earth in a great fluid concave dish the size of half a world. On the inside this dish is dark, pitch black. On the outside it is burnished bright, aswarm with living light. How beautiful it is, that bowl of night and day. Now everyone must know its true nature: the protector entity. Gathering speed, it rushes away sunwards, to bend back into the deeps. An angel bowl, angelic light. They have drunk the death of the Earth, in a miracle, that the human race may live on. How can we repay them? How can we find them again one day? I do not think it’s God, exactly, that bowl of dark and light, only a very wonderful swarm of beings. Perhaps his angels: demons whom he cast down from the high sky to the lower sky, who now rise, redeemed. …

  No, simply space-beings, hardly comprehensible to us.

  Will we dare go out into space again, after this? Oh, yes, we must, to catch up with them and learn their nature. This must be our whole purpose from now on, our very existence.

  The bright-dark swarm spins further away. After a while I prod myself towards the radio, concentrating on not dying just yet.

  The blanket effect, that kept the particle flux from Earth, is gone along with them.

  “Do you read me, Earth? This is Sunflower, do you read me?” Pray that the radio isn’t ruined, as we are ruined, bodily.

  Ten seconds, fifteen.

  “Sunflower, we read you, signal strength two—” Static crackles.

  “We’re dying, Earth. … But that doesn’t matter. Did you see?”

  “Oh, yes! You chased them off—you really did it. You’re great guys, wonderful men. God, but it’s marvellous, we can see the stars again! You chased the damned things off at last! Are you all okay?”

  Suddenly I realise: they don’t know. They’ve no way of knowing that the Sun flared up. That was all hidden from their eyes, or there’d have been no eyes to see, no minds to know. Didn’t the Moon reflect the flare-up? No … it was a crescent Moon, hidden from Earth too by the shield of spacebeings. If anyone saw Mars or Jupiter brighten … then they’d know. But who would be manning an observatory after five years’ darkness, and worrying about Mars? When the nightmares shifted to darken the day, all minds would have been on that and that alone.

  They don’t even realise we’re dying, our signal is so weak.

  “You don’t understand. … You didn’t see what really happened. None of you. They saved us all. The Sun—” But I can hardly speak. I’m trembling-weak and overcome with nausea. “The Sun flared up. … They absorbed it all, they masked it, that’s why they came and waited all these years—for the moment. …”

  Calvin drifts closer, rambling incoherently and noisily; his eyes are open, but he doesn’t know who I am. I hope they can tell my voice—such as it is—from his.

  “Do you hear me, Earth?”

  Seconds pass by. And I understand now that when that bowl of darkness and light sped away, they only saw the darkness fleeing, not the light. They saw it in full sunlight, from the day side. Only I, from our vantage point out here, could see the bright side of the shield. …

  “You saved us,” the voice says again. “You great men. We’ll get the bastards one day. We won’t be caught twice. They’d have killed us all. It wasn’t enough to steal the night, eh? They tried to steal the day as well. Thank God for you out there.”

  Now I’m too weak. I do vomit, what little of it there is in me. A mist of bitter liquid drifts.

  “Sunflower, come in please?

  “Sunflower, this is Earth. Are you guys okay? Is anything wrong?”

  On we drift, on we drift, while Calvin raves and shouts me down.

  They don’t know the wonder. Only the nightmare, put to flight at last. Horror is their only truth.

  I can’t see anything very clearly any longer. The radio doesn’t seem to work.

  Oh miracle, that flew away unseen. Oh lost wonder.

  But now the day is over, night is drawing nigh. …

  Returning Home

  THANK GOD, THE runway was clear. An Aeroflot crew had apparently touched down just moments before a radiation bomb went off overhead. But the pilot’s nervous system had lasted long enough for him to steer his plane off the concrete on to grass—unless he had merely swerved.

  Anyway, our landing was a pushover. As well it needed to be, with upwards of thirty million displaced Americans pushing behind us. There were two hundred of us packed into our plane—with a second Ilyushin to follow some hours later.

  Most wonderful of all, there was no reception committee of Chinese waiting for us. So those Canadian bastards hadn’t been lying, after all. The Chinese hadn’t flooded over the frontier to fill up this spur of the Soviet Union. And yet, somehow we hadn’t believed that the Chinese would. It was as if the spirit which impelled us had promised us this land, and preserved it for us.

  Leaving Group Red at the airport the rest of us rounded up some buses, got them going, and drove in convoy into downtown Khabarovsk—ending up outside the Far East Hotel in Karl Marx Street, which seemed as good a place as any to billet ourselves temporarily.

  There weren’t too many shrivelled mummies in the streets. The streets themselves were reasonably clean and neat. The human animal seemed to prefer to
die in its burrow, if it could get there in time. …

  I’d just told Hank Sullivan to take a fatigue squad round the hotel to clear all the bodies they found into a single room, and was getting the others organised, when Mary cried out:

  “Greg, come over here!” She was waving the hand set of an old-fashioned-looking telephone, further down the lobby.

  I hadn’t been meaning to bring Mary in on the first flight. Strictly the two hundred of us were a technical spearhead, and Mary wasn’t a sailor or mechanic or locomotive driver. But she was a fine survivor—and if dishing up fish and chipmunk stew, or nettle and mushroom soup without a single pot or stove isn’t a technical accomplishment, then I don’t know what is. Or what wonders she could work, given the run of a Soviet kitchen. So when she’d insisted, we’d compromised by leaving little Suzie in good hands up in Magadan for later delivery, and Mary came along as our provisions officer. She was still looking fairly gaunt—as were we all—and her blonde hair had all grown out a mousy brown. But I loved her even more dearly, after all that we’d been through.

  “What is it?”

  “The phone works, Greg!”

  I ran to her, while everyone turned to watch us, and it was then—when I got my hands on that phone and heard it humming—that it really all came home to me: we had won through.

  Because the goddam lovely old phone was receiving power—no doubt from some hydro-electric scheme that was still churning out electricity automatically.

  “Hey, Billy Donaldson!” I called across the lobby. “Get your ass behind that check-in desk, and find another phone along there. Call out your number.”

  Hitching up his Soviet army greatcoat, red-headed Billy stepped over the assorted wizened corpses in their crumpled, dusty suits and dresses, careful not to soil the garments with his boots.

  As the first pioneer group to cross the Bering Strait, we’d all got rid of our bark and straw boots and our stinking dog- and cow-hide coats as soon as we reached the first Soviet outpost. The other scraggy survivors still converging on the tip of Alaska, this summer after the War, would have to wait just a little longer for proper clothes …