Sunstroke: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  We’ve settled them in Vladivostok itself, and here in Khabarovsk, and down river at Komsomolsk, and along the railroad line as far out as Chita and Ulan Ude and Irkutsk on the shores of Lake Baikal, and up around in Bratsk. Some have even got as far as Tomsk and Novosibirsk.

  Of course, everybody has to work damn hard, each according to his or her capacity. But we’ve all put on weight at last—or fat, at any rate. And we’ve put on a different style of clothing too, now that the Siberian winter’s here at last. We stride, or waddle about, bundled in long thick coats, with fur hats on our heads, and ear muffs.

  We’ve managed to re-establish a money economy—and we are having to use these darned kopecks and roubles.

  We drink vodka and sweet champagne, since that’s what the distilleries turn out. We eat black bread and pickled sturgeon and red cabbage and such, since that’s what appears on the shelves these days.

  I’m stamping up and down the platform in Khabarovsk Station, waiting to meet the ‘9.35 pm’ train from Irkutsk. Mary, whom I’ve begun calling Mariya lately, has a very useful and quite easy job as a conductress. (Little Sasha’s in the crêche; we’ll collect her presently.) There’s snow on the tracks; and the air is full of white flakes.

  Like a storm of souls blowing about …

  And here she comes now: the pride of Russia—headlamps aglow through the blizzard.

  By my watch it’s exactly 4.35 am. As usual, the train’s exactly on time.

  That’s Moscow time, of course. The whole Trans-Siberian line has always run according to Moscow time. We haven’t gone as far as Moscow just yet, but this fact reminds us of Moscow and the West, awaiting us.

  The Rossiya glides to a silent halt.

  Mariya lets down the steps of her carriage, and the passengers stumble off, their breath clouding the air like so many mobile samovars. They’re clutching cardboard suitcases and huge food packages tied with string. As soon as Mariya’s replacement has clambered on board, she herself descends.

  Beaming, though shivering somewhat in her railway uniform, she waddles to me.

  “Grigori! Grigorooshka!”

  Ghosts …

  Suddenly I’m terrified—as though the snow has abruptly parted, right up to the heavens, and I have seen the skull of the Moon rushing down to Earth to crush us.

  For when the first atomic bomb exploded at Hiroshima, many people’s silhouettes were etched into walls, as though the shadows of the dead were photographed by the fireball …

  And everything around us—railroad engines, oil refineries, lumber mills, dams and turbines, bakeries and distilleries—is likewise imprinted invisibly by the radiation with all the Soviet dead. I know (for a fleeting moment) that every building and machine and thing we use is alive—possessed. Locomotives, gastronoms, buses and tractors, offices and ice cream carts and rouble notes all tell us what to do, and the way to do it. The whole environment, of Russian making, sucked up their souls for safe keeping; and now they have entered us, like dybbuks. Why else the craze among us for Russian words and phrases, and the way these seem to well up, and link up, almost spontaneously?

  That’s why no Chinese came here. The land didn’t want them. It wanted us—so that we could have a long time to repent.

  Only, there aren’t enough of us yet, to go round. So we’ll have to work hard to build up our great nation …

  This brief waking nightmare fades as soon as Mariya crushes me in her stout arms.

  Drawing back, she peers at me, concerned.

  “Shto svami, Grigorishka?”

  “Nothing’s the matter, Mariya. Nichivo!”

  Further down the train, the driver leans from his cab.

  “So long, there!” he calls along to my wife. “Dasvidaniya, Tovarich!” Goodbye, Comrade.

  America is as wild and empty, and far away, as it was a hundred thousand years ago before any Asians first traversed the Bering Strait, to roam the American plains as Indians. America is a forgotten country. Mother Russia is our land, and we are hers.

  Goodbye, several hundred million dead souls. Goodbye, and hullo.

  Mariya links arms with me, and off we march. Like two puppets on a stage. But no strings dangle from the station roof, directing us. By now the strings are in our muscles and our nerves. And in our minds.

  Bud

  TPLUS 300 days. The deep space probe’s interior is rather cramped on account of the exercise equipment and the massive shielding against Jupiter’s radiation belts. Portholes are all masked at present. Across one viewscreen bulges giant Jupiter itself. The other screens show numbers of the many alien vessels gathered here, some as large as minor moons.

  The astronaut glances round his den. He has papered any free space with smuggled centrefolds. Too late to take them down now; besides, he couldn’t bear to.

  A camera eye watches him, hooked to the two-way video communicating with the nearest alien vessel. He sighs. He presses the call key. The screen snows with static, which resolves into an amorphous, bulging shape. It extrudes something like an eye upon a stalk and bats a hastily convened eyelid at him.

  “Bud?”

  “What is it, Sexy? We’re busy.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

  “You called me, we didn’t call you. So what’s wrong with the name? The Sexies of Earth. What a planet! Do you wish me to call you Earthman? How banal. Lots of beings live on some Earth or other.”

  “It isn’t as though you find us attractive. That’s obvious enough. I mean, maybe you’d care about what’s going to happen to us if you did. It’s just so … teasing. Here am I cooped up in a space capsule months from home, months from any human contact.”

  “You’ve got your pin-ups.”

  “Damn it, Bud, everybody on Earth is listening in.”

  “So I’ll shut up. I said we’re busy.”

  “No! Please. Listen, if we’re such a funny planet surely we ought to be studied. Preserved, protected—something like that.”

  “Well, you never know, it might catch on.”

  “What might?”

  “You know what.”

  “Don’t be so damn devious!”

  “I thought you wanted me to be more discreet?”

  “You’re impossible!”

  “We think you’re pretty improbable yourselves. Lusus naturae: a joke of nature. Anyhow, some of you ought to survive. Should be a good test of your reproductive abilities.”

  “You could evacuate a few million of us. You’ve got ships and ships out here.”

  “I told you, we’re busy.”

  “Okay, I realise this is a kind of religious thing with you—”

  “Which makes you rather an irreligious thing, right? A whole planet of snails and sparrows and sperm whales and monkeys thrashing around in rut, penetrating each other, laying eggs and babies and things. Right here in this lovely system where the Budworld swims. I may tell you frankly, quite a few of us felt like putting you out of your misery to start with. But we’ll let nature take its course.”

  “Could we go through this in a bit more detail, Bud? According to our biologists asexual reproduction ought to lead to extinction in the long run. How do you get any evolution? Any variations? New species?”

  “Extinction, eh? You should talk. It seems to us that sexual reproduction is a sort of perpetual extinction—over any decent span of macrotime. And the obsessions it produces! Really!”

  “I oughtn’t to have let you scan the capsule.”

  “I thought you didn’t want that mentioned on an open channel? What’s the matter? Are you missing it?”

  “Honestly, it isn’t such a big thing, Bud. I can do without.”

  “Oh? Then why do you have your religious images plastered on the walls?”

  “Those aren’t religious images, they’re … Oh, never mind.”

  “Whatever a being takes deep in space with him is a religious image.”

  “I wish they’d sent a woman. If we’d known all this was going t
o happen—”

  “A woman? For you? So you could have spent your time in rut, doing that, out here right up close to the Budworld? That would have brought swift retribution.”

  “No, a woman by herself. A female pilot. They’re not so interested in, well, I mean, they don’t look at things the same way.”

  “Don’t look at pin-ups? I had the impression that their lives were even more wrapped up in sexual being. Or being sexual.”

  “Surely we’ve got a right to our own way of doing things? That’s how we all evolved. Blame nature, not us.”

  “Lusus naturae. The exception proves the rule.”

  “You’re well up on the folk wisdom today.”

  “My job, Sexy. To keep you out of our hair, while we get on with the real business—of witness. We’re quite charitable, you know. This is just latrine duty for me. I pulled it for a spot of insubordination to the Chief Bud.”

  “You’ve become very idiomatic, if you’re not all that interested.”

  “Think nothing of it. Your troubles will soon be over.”

  “They aren’t troubles!”

  “Can you honestly say that?”

  “Sure, we have problems. Deer do, rats do, gorillas do, spiders do, we all do.”

  “How much time you all waste on it! No wonder you’ve got nowhere in the universe after millions of years. Changing your species every five minutes. Even your present civilisation is all sublimation, according to your priest Freud.”

  “We oughtn’t to have beamed you so much data.”

  “Then we’d have had nothing to talk about. I suppose it’s my own perversity that makes me bother—as witnessed by insubordination to the Chief Bud.”

  “Think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?”

  “Sexy, I’m four point three billion years old, bud by bud to the Nth. How long do you lot live? Oh, forget it!”

  “In all that time you ought to have accumulated a bit of wisdom and compassion. That’s the trouble with you. You’re much the same as you were back in the beginning. You don’t evolve.”

  “We spread, friend. We spread. And all the other species in the Pancivic are budders—using the term species loosely. It’s the way. Listen, life in the universe is this way: and I’ll only tell you once more. The whole universe is alive. It’s one huge living thing: galaxies, stars, worlds, the lot. You just live too short a time to notice the rhythms of this life. And one of these rhythms is the flow of our sort of life over worlds and between them. Every single atom in the universe senses the cosmic flow, so that life comes together—gets it together—by a simple clumping of most any kind of matter: a conglomeration. As soon as there’s a clumping, the cosmic mind-field flows into the clump, splits into it; and that life clumps bigger, so you get an organised being—mentally organised, but it doesn’t need any specific shape. Any shape’ll do. Any shape’ll become any other shape. We’re all amorphous. We don’t spend our time trying on different suits of clothes for millions of years on end and having to wear them willy-nilly even if the sleeves are too damn long or the boots are too heavy to pick up. We choose whatever form we like. And life spreads itself around by splitting, growing, splitting and so on. It’s a simple universe, and this is the way things are in it. Life’s simple too. You’re the most perversely complicated, damaged things we’ve ever come across. A perpetual one-off experiment. You’d think the universe was a complicated place, the way you’re set up.”

  “Perhaps it’s more complicated than you think, Bud. Perhaps we can see that and you can’t. Perhaps we’ve evolved to grasp that knowledge.”

  “Perhaps pigs have wings.”

  “So you could be a winged pig if you wanted to?”

  “Right. A new form, for the hell of it. Whereas you’d have to spend half a million years chasing pigs over fences or mating them with buzzards to arrive at that sublime foolishness, and be locked in it. Life multi-adapts at will. Real life does. Some of us don’t think you’re really alive at all. You’re a sort of world-wide construction set for building ridiculous specialised machines. Perhaps some bud fixed your place up as a joke or a playground. Everything’s so incompatible with everything else. Unstable situation! We never expected to find you messing around in space.”

  “Never expected? Do you mean you’ve visited Earth before?”

  “No, the Budworld. We were here for the last budding—oh, what, about three millennia ago? When you got your second planet budded out—the hot white one.”

  “Venus.”

  “Sure, when Venus budded out of the Budworld. That’s how little worlds get born.”

  “Which is what the Great Red Spot is. A new world.”

  “You do need telling a lot of times.”

  “But there’s no room for any more planets near the sun. Gravitational inhibition—it’s a law of physics.”

  “You made the law, so you tell the Budworld that. It’s Budworld’s family after all. Oh, there’ll be room. A bit of elbowing around and they’ll all fit in. You’ll see—or maybe not. Maybe Mercury will become a moon of the new one.”

  “What about the Earth, for Chrissake? What about our home?”

  “Oh, it’ll fit in too. A bit nearer the sun, a bit further out. Maybe it’ll even get detached and go a-wandering. Leave home, as it were. Planets do.”

  “Frozen solid. No air. No seas.”

  “Now, if you were real life you could adapt to that. Shape-shift. Become frost-giants or ice-beasts. But the way you’re set up it would take a million years. You know, this sort of thing’s going on all the time—planets birthing and bumping each other over, novae and supernovae, stars diving into dust clouds. Speed the universe up, and it’s a wow. Real life has to put up with that. You’ve been living a sheltered life down here.”

  “So how long have we got?”

  “We reckon the Red Spot’s due to bud out any day now. It’ll take, oh, a year or so for the new world to slide down the gravity gradient sunwards to find its place. We’ll stick around to see where it ends up.”

  “But is it definitely going to hit us, Bud?”

  “Hit you? No. Not exactly. It’ll have built up a lot of repulsion charge. It’ll just cannon off you, still some way out. Probably flip your world over. North-South reversal: change of night sky when the murk clears. Push your world into a new orbit. That sort of thing. It can’t miss you entirely, if that’s what you’re hoping. Major planets are all lined up this year. Auspicious birth, eh?”

  “What can we do? As a friend, please—”

  “That’s up to you. What I’d suggest is, if you’ve only got one card in your hand you’d better play it and keep on playing it, even if it is a joker.”

  “What kind of suggestion is that?”

  “I guess you’d call it a Saturnalia. Only you got the name wrong … Better to call it a Jovenalia. Or a Budworldia.”

  “It sounds more like a can of beer.”

  “That could help out, too.”

  T plus 750 days. He still thinks in Mission time, though he splashed down three months ago. Since then, he has enjoyed the favours of many young ladies, which he feels is only his due. Here is one more of them, in his hotel room. She has red hair.

  “What did they look like, honey? You’re the only man who ever got close to them.”

  “I was just in a parking orbit. Not all that close to them. Hell, I don’t know what they looked like. Anything and everything. Blobs. Pretty shapeless.”

  “At least you’re in shape. Considering all the zero-gee. You did the exercises.”

  “And you’re … Hey, do that again.”

  “Feel good?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Doesn’t it make you feel sort of good that we can do something they can’t? Well? Doesn’t it make you feel kind of proud? I wonder, are all the rabbits and whales and butterflies and ostriches and frogs in the world up to it too, right now? I guess it must be a pretty flat existence for those blobs, considering. I mean, who likes splitting in half?”
>
  “Who indeed? We’ll show them.”

  By now, the mass that has split from Jupiter—the erstwhile Great Red Spot—is larger than the Moon itself, outside the window. Incandescent, it lights up the whole night sky and the city. In the bedroom their bodies are lit up too.

  Survival reaction, he thinks in a detached moment; then he forgets about thinking.

  All over the Earth, billions of creatures are enjoying themselves. And each other. Furiously.

  The Milk of Knowledge

  “YOU CAN’T GO home again,” said Thomas Wolfe, back in the twentieth century. “You can’t relive the past.”

  Wise words.

  Unfortunately, wrong.

  For the past can recapture you. I am forty-one years old. I ought to be living out in Celesteville, our European space colony at the L-4 libration point. Its existence means that we are safe at last. Safe. If the whole chaotic Planet Earth goes smash, at least Celesteville will survive—as will Skytopia over at the L-5 libration point.

  But it isn’t the year 2090 any longer. It’s 2063 again, and here I am back on Earth in Greater Birmingham, Europa, in my dead parents’ tower-slot. They’re alive. I’m fourteen years old. Just as I used to be, once upon a time …

  Twice upon a time, now! Time has looped back. My mind has fled back down my lifeline into younger flesh, dispossessing my fourteen-year-old self. I’m imprisoned in my own past.

  Is this a miracle? Can there be horrible miracles as well as kindly ones?

  Whatever could have happened in 2090 to cause this? I can only think that I died—so suddenly that I didn’t even notice dying. I died, and was reborn. And who’s to say that a person must be reincarnated later on in the future? Why not in the past, in his own past? Maybe the Sun exploded in a nova, and every single creature died, every host of souls, so that now there is only the past to be reborn in!

  But according to the Infoscreen this world of 2063 AD scrapes along as ordinarily as ever. A few billion people have not suddenly woken up all over this pox-ridden globe—preincarnated, or deincarnated, or whatever one can call it. I dare not interrogate the Infoscreen in so many words about this possibility, though, or it would diagnose me as insane. I would be taken away for drug and shock treatment.