Sunstroke: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  It seems I am unique in my predicament. So I shall keep quiet about my uniqueness for the moment.

  My body image feels all wrong. I can still sense myself extending beyond my present feet, beyond my present hands: someone taller, slimmer, healthier. But I’m crushed into a short, tubby mass like somebody who has been stuffed into a suitcase.

  I must remember how to be normal, here in 2063.

  Milk for breakfast, today being Fourthday. (Oh the beautiful herds of Guernsey cows grazing on the meadows of Celesteville!) My Mum smiles caringly as she empties the pack of milk into my plastic beaker, shaking out every last drop. She realises that I’m overweight. Many people are overweight. She is, too. But it isn’t from any surfeit of riches. It’s because we only get junk food most of the time. My Dad, exceptionally, has managed to stay slim by playing squash at the Leisuredome. My Mum and Dad will both be very slim at the end of next year, from endless diarrhoea, when the Epidemic of ’64 arrives. Soon they’ll be skeletons. (Mum, Dad: dear strangers! How can I save you?) Dad keys in the early morning news on the Infoscreen. It’s the Indonesian Crisis, all over again. (‘Don’t worry,’ I want to say. ‘It’ll pass. We’ll scrape through this one. Then the next one, then the one after. I’m afraid that you personally won’t survive it. But I will. The world will—unlikely as that seems, right now in 2063.’)

  “Drink up, Johnny.”

  Mum microwaves some junk sausages. Offal and sawdust.

  Obediently I drink … and taste something of the flavour of Celesteville. Not much, but something.

  “A newsflash just in from the Viennese Free State reports the assassination of Chancellor Karl-Heinz Kraus by Greater Europa extremists. Details follow. EuroGov Brussels entirely dissociates itself …”

  “Oh God,” says Dad softly. “Not him.”

  (‘It’ll pass, Dad. I know it will.’)

  I drain my beaker.

  Milk. Like … the milk of knowledge …

  I came across the story in Celesteville once, when I was accessing at random through ancient literature. It was in the works of a twelfth century Arab philosopher, Ibn ‘Arabi.

  Once there was a man named Taqî ibn Mukhallad who experienced a dream-vision of the Prophet Mohammed, and in this dream the Prophet presented Taqî with a cup of milk to drink. Now, Taqî believed this to have been a true vision of the Prophet. But just to verify it, when he woke up the next morning he forced himself to vomit. He threw up enough fresh, sweet milk to fill a cup. But that milk signified knowledge. If Taqî had stopped to think more deeply about his dream, he would have realised this. By doing as he did he obtained a little physical proof, but he deprived himself of a great knowledge—equal to what he had drunk …

  Poor Taqî.

  Shall I vomit up my own milk of knowledge? Shall I tell?

  If I tell, surely I can change the world! I can show everyone the way through. I can save the cosmonauts who will crash on Mars. I can forewarn the world of the Epidemic of’64, and the Beagle crisis of’69, and the Tientsin reactor melt-down. I can warn of the Great Beast: Donna Marquez, the ‘Divine Marquise’ of Peru. I can save a million martyrs from pain and death. I can save hundreds of millions of human beings from epidemic and catastrophe …

  If I can forewarn. It will be difficult for a fourteen-year-old boy. The chances are that I would be shocked and drugged back to my senses—or, when my first prophecy came true, I would become the prisoner of EuroGov, the exploited oracle in a cage, the target of kidnapping and assassination.

  And would I really change the world, as I imagine? Once I had changed one thing, wouldn’t all future events change subtly as well? If I vomited up all the milk of my knowledge of twenty-seven years, how could that very future which I was trying to improve ever come into being? A paradox. The milk gone sour, in the udder.

  When you come down to basics—if you can put aside the agonies of the coming years—survival is the main thing. And the world does survive. It scrapes through—till 2090, at any rate. That would seem enough of a miracle today. Celesteville. Skytopia. Might I not derail that future? If I wasn’t simply taken away for therapy …

  So I keep the milk down. I need a plan. But I can’t think of one.

  Come on, Taqî, help me out! If I’m a Time-Messiah, somebody should have told me why!

  My own Screen chimes loudly, through in my bed-slot. It is five minutes till school-time. Though there are no schools as such, now that education is computerised.

  There must be a reason. (Mustn’t there?)

  I’m powerless—with such power over the destiny of the world. And using my power might wash it all away. And how do I get to use it in the first place?

  “Don’t be late, Johnny.”

  But I am late. I’m twenty-seven years later than anybody else in this world.

  “Güten Morgen, Johnny!” announces my Screen with a personalised impersonality. “Heute wir …” Today we begin with German.

  Followed, I sincerely hope, by French. I speak these two Eurotongues really fluently now. (‘Now’ being later on in time. Orphaned by the Epidemic, I will go to Ruhrstadt as a ward of EuroGov—and thence eventually I will blast off to the paradise of Celesteville. Once it has been conceived. Once it has been built.)

  In fact, I speak French and German all too well. ODA—the Ongoing Diagnostic Assessment—compliments me on the sudden improvement in my accent and fluency. Then an hour later it suggests tartly that I have been concentrating too much on languages at the expense of Biochemistry—at which suddenly I am a cretin. I try to keep my proficiency in Maths down to the expected level. But then, when it’s time for French, it’s hard to hobble my tongue. And ODA has a nose for these things. ODA stinks: kids used to aerosol that on the walls. I am praised, and warned again.

  I will have to hobble my tongue—until I have a plan.

  I was no swimmer then; but now I am.

  The education rules insist that we scattered schoolboys come together for a communal splash at the Leisuredome, overseen by a doddering old supervisor and a hulking sadistic lifeguard. What a nightmare this used to be for me, what an ordeal of the fat flesh! All the crashing bodies, the pullings underwater, the strip-thefts of swim-gear. How many times was I the victim, running flabbily around with my balls bobbing, begging for my trunks while they were tossed from hand to hand? I used to think of suicide. My only chance of safety was to be the fat mascot of one of the school gangs—even if they frequently took it into their heads to play cruel games with their mascot. I had to clown it for them, tears in my eyes. But the tears looked like swimming pool water.

  But this afternoon I cleave the chlorinated blue. I leap from the diving board. I sound like a whale. My mind remembers, and my body obeys. Needless to say, my untuned muscles will scream about it afterwards. Not yet, though. Not yet.

  My gang stare, amazed.

  I laugh.

  “It’s the triumph of the will!” The fools don’t know what I’m talking about. Of course not.

  This won’t do, though. One petty triumph isn’t enough.

  Just to get things straight I start compiling a chart of the future. A future history.

  Two wretched days later, I give up. The problem is insuperable. This would take me six months, and by then I’d be half mad. Anyway, when exactly did the Tientsin reactor melt down? Was it ’75? Or ’77? Or ’79? When was the Imam Birjandi murdered? When was the nuking of Haifa? Who did kill Cock Robin?

  Taqî, this never was your kind of knowledge.

  When I was fifteen (that’s to say, next year) I spent a few days with my Aunt Lisa down in London just before the Epidemic struck. She was friends with an American woman … now what was her name? Rachel. Yes, Rachel Akerman. She worked in the US embassy as an information officer. She was a downright randy lady, Rachel, though I didn’t realise that, except in retrospect. Aunt Lisa and I went to a party in Rachel’s flat in the same tower—and there I got drunk for the first time. I puked afterwards.

  If I cou
ld ride the monorail down to London when I was fifteen, why not when I’m fourteen? After all, I’ve matured a lot in the last week—even if I do feel myself sliding back from the cool aplomb of Celesteville into a naïveté of the earlier flesh. If I can contact somebody in the American embassy … Can I possibly trust my fellow Britons? Containment is the name of the game in these islands. Oh, bless that Epidemic for shunting me to Ruhrstadt as an educational refugee. If we hadn’t been so badly hit by the Epidemic I would never have got out. I would never have got off the surface of this planet. Of course, Ruhrstadt was lousy enough—though more orderly, need I say—and I can’t possibly trust the Germans of this period either. As for the Russians and Chinese, British security police control all the comings and goings in and out of their embassies. The terrible secret that I know—the cause of the Epidemic—can, I think, only safely be told to one group of people, or else missiles might start flying …

  Fourteen is a decent enough age to save the world, isn’t it? Why, that kind of thing’s the stuff of adventure stories on the Screen every week. Though usually the heroic boy co-operates with the security forces …

  Incredibly, it comes off. Aunt Lisa will put me up. Mum and Dad will give me enough credit to let me go down to London for the mid-spring schoolbreak.

  So down the monorail I presently bowl, reading a financial paper like some rich son of the Eurocracy—though I hardly look the part. Too fat. Too cheaply dressed. (Financiers, what things I could tell you!) Next year—that’s to say, twenty-six years ago—what I was reading on the monorail train was Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme, trying hard with my adolescent inexperience to fathom the amorous sentiments of Fabrizio del Dongo locked up in his tower, peeping out at his love. My own view of sex at the time was very much from a high tower too. Or else it was a thing of fear and humiliation at the swimming pool. The tweaking of the balls. Jerking off underwater.

  The American bald eagle spreads its wings for me. Skytopia!

  It’s quite easy to go upstairs and buzz Rachel’s door after Aunt Lisa has phoned her.

  I go in.

  “What would you say, Rachel, if I told you that I know the future? If I told you that there’ll be a worldwide epidemic next year, which will spare the West Coast of America for reasons as yet unknown? But your best president in years will die because he’s in the East, which means in turn …” I can go on for quite a while; and I do. I hope I have my facts in the right order; it’s all so long ago.

  Rachel laughs. (She has large wet lips.)

  “You’re really weird. You believe all this!”

  Soon, I’m making real progress. I may be a fat slob of a schoolboy here; but up-time in Celesteville I'm distinctly sympathique.

  “Would you care for a drink, Johnny?”

  “Just so long as it isn’t gin.” It was gin that I got sick-drunk on at her party; the experience inoculated me against gin for ever more.

  “Is that some private joke?”

  Sure thing. I won’t vomit gin this time. Just milk.

  “Have you got access to the CIA desk, Rachel?”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “Let’s just suppose you have. Now, how about dropping in on them tomorrow? Tell them you met a weird guy who described a fascinating satellite codenamed Beagle.” When the scandal breaks in five years’ time, revealing a direct connection between the covert automated DNA experiments on board the Beagle, and the Epidemic … well, there’ll almost be a nuclear war. The name Beagle won’t mean Charles Darwin any more. “Just mention the name, and say that there’s going to be a little bit of an epidemic of mutated cholera. Cold climate cholera. That ought to make them sit up. Oh, and you might add that if I tell anybody else there’s quite likely to be a little cloud of radioactive dust in space—and you know what that could start.”

  “This sounds like a spy movie.”

  “Doesn’t it just?”

  “You’re looking at me, Johnny.”

  “Here’s looking at you. A cat can look at a queen.”

  “Like a cat who’s found a bowl of milk.”

  “Purr.”

  Success! Relief! Back downstairs in bed I review Rachel’s body and my plan of action. These two are superimposed. Here is a cusp, her breast, which is also the cusp where history either flows along its original course or else suffers a sudden discontinuity on to a different plane of events.

  Orgasm of the flesh: orgasm of events exfoliating from this point! I suppose vomiting is a sort of orgasmic reflex too: a spasm of the muscles which spills something out of you. The congruence between sperm spilling from one tense organ and the milk of knowledge spewing from my gizzard occupies me for a moment. I’m sated, relaxed and gratified.

  Day Two, of the new dispensation. I spend the day wandering round London.

  In the evening I slip upstairs. More milk of knowledge and more sperm flow into Rachel. My ally, my bemused mistress—to whom I am suddenly a juvenile Rasputin—has done as she was bid. I love her for it. Energetically, I caress her cusps.

  They come: two burly silent types—the sort who walk along beside motorcades—and the brain of the trio, a slice of American Gothic, Huffstickler by name. He’s bespectacled (a funny old anachronism, even in 2063), and wears a herringbone suit with a tie knotted tight enough to rejoice a hangman. Huffstickler must throw a strangled tie away every night.

  “Miz Akerman tells us you’re interested in satellites. She said something about—what was the name, now?—something called a Beagle. We were just wondering—”

  “I’ll bet you’re wondering. Now hear this very carefully: Beagle is going to malfunction soon and it’s going to vent some of your cold cholera, which is going to drift down on to Japan. Not many people will realise for another five years just what it was that killed a few hundred million people, including your President Greenberg. But when the information does leak out—and information always does leak—you are going to have to do some fancy footwork and pay out one hell of a lot of GNP in compensation. Or get nuked.”

  Huffstickler inspects his manicure. Abruptly he looks up; his eyes pin me like a butterfly …

  He inspects his nails again.

  Again?

  Nonsense vomits from my lips. Huffstickler gabbles some gibberish back at me. Suddenly I rush backwards to the door. How can I run backwards? Help me! It isn’t me who rushes in reverse—this is being done to me! I’m accelerating. Blurred scenes flash backwards. No way to control this mad hindward roller-coaster! I vomit my breakfast. Resorb my excrement. The darkening of the dawn—and I die, no I dream—then the lightening of the previous night. Whoosh, goes yesterday, in flickers of London. Faster. Insane.

  How long, how long? I’m riding down into a black hole where time turns inside out! Borne along, borne along.

  Slowing, I’m slowing. I’m in Rachel’s flat, for the first time. I’m naked in her bed, resorbing sperm from her flesh into mine! Resorbing the milk of knowledge!

  I’m dressed, I dribble drink into a glass.

  Lurch.

  Time tips forward again …

  “What would you say, Rachel, if I told you … ?”

  “Told me what, Johnny?”

  “Nothing, nothing! I’ve got to be going.”

  “But you just arrived.”

  I flee from the room, a foolish boy, shamed. I vomit into Aunt Lisa’s washbasin, as though I’ve already drunk Rachel’s gin next year.

  The milk of knowledge I could not spew up. As soon as I tried to, I was … rewound. Back to the moment before I initiated the series of events.

  Are there rules to this game? Are there ethics? ‘Thou shalt not consort with one side at the expense of the human race at large’? ‘Thou shalt not use thy power for fornication’?

  Who says so? Whose rules are they?

  Exhausted, I creep to bed.

  Day Two again. This time I approach the reception desk at one of the TV stations. Public information for the benefit of all …

  I get passed
upstairs—more as a joke, the silly season arriving months ahead of time. But as soon as I meet an actual news editor who begins to listen and make notes, flip: time winds me back again. Downstairs. I rush out of the TV station without approaching the reception desk, scowled at now by a suspicious guard.

  At least, this time, I only lost twenty minutes. If it can be called losing time, when I gain it back again.

  Yet I was able to tell the woman on the desk. Just as I was able to tell Rachel. Can I make private communications, but not public ones?

  So who do I make them to? A psychiatrist?

  Ja, yours is a most complex and integrated delusional system. Pardon me vile I open up your skull …

  Oh Taqî, you never had this sort of trouble!

  I try to phone the Government Ombudsman. Surprisingly, I get through. Presently the phone-tokens spit themselves back into my hand, unphoning him, leaving me where and when I was.

  Again: I call at the Pan-Arab Cultural Centre. Maybe they have Sufis employed on their staff—lords of hidden chains of cause and effect, who are also viziers of the practical world. Sufis are supposed to understand such things. Ibn ’Arabi was a Sufi.

  And it seems that I’m in luck. They know the tale of Taqî, at least. And perhaps I have had a vision of the future, equivalent to his vision of Mohammed. Three hours, four, pass by while they put out feelers. They are being very delicate about the whole thing. I scoff desert dates; how yearningly the taste reminds me of Celesteville. I sip thimbles of real coffee, which my young palate marvels at and which my memory greets with joy.

  Meanwhile events echo down the years, cascading about me.

  And suddenly, with no warning, the world winds back. No-o-o-o-o … I howl down the hindward hours. I turn my steps away from the Cultural Centre. No wise Sufi saved the day. No sheikh baled me out.

  Back home again.

  Quote for the day (from S. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 1843):