Sunstroke: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  Did I not get myself doubly restored? Did I not get myself back again, precisely in such a way that I must doubly feel its significance? Only his children did Job not receive again double, because a human life is not a thing that can be duplicated. In that case only spiritual repetition is possible, although in the temporal life it is never so perfect as in eternity, which is the true repetition.

  How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint?

  Thank you, Mum and Dad, I had a fine boyish holiday in thrilling London. And now I’m back to the tower-slot and the Infoscreen … and the swimming pool.

  I suppose at least going to bed with Rachel was fun. Even though it never happened to her.

  Never happened to her.

  But to me it happened, yes.

  And in a flash I realise that if incidents which the system rejects all get cancelled out for everybody but me—on account of their ramifications—why then, I can do any damn thing I please! I can thieve and rape and kill. As soon as I get caught and explain myself, then the whole period of time gets rewound! It snaps right back like elastic.

  That makes theft seem pretty pointless. I’d be robbed of the proceeds. But perhaps not rape or murder. I’d still have the satisfaction, if you can call it that.

  And yet … if I commit a crime and don’t get found out for a very long time, and then get found out, I might be required to flip back years. Just as I’m about to board the shuttle up to Celesteville, a hand will descend upon my shoulder—and whoosh, I’ll be whipped back two whole decades to my fourteen-year-old flesh again. That would be ghastly.

  Anyway, at fourteen I’m hardly cut out for rape and mayhem.

  Ought I to be? Am I really in some psychiatrist’s memory simulator having my personality toughened up so that I will have the stamina to be part of some interstellar expedition?

  There’s no expedition. Nobody has any idea how to build a star-drive. Not yet, in 2090.

  Is this a moral intelligence test of some sort? Am I being taught not to rape and murder, not even to wish to deviate?

  No, it’s no simulation. Of that I’m sure. This is the actual year 2063, and I walk around the terrain of Greater Birmingham, not the terrain of my mind. My body says so. This fart says so, wet and fruity.

  And so this proto-criminal, me, accesses on the Infoscreen that book by Kierkegaard, Repetition, recalled from ten years in the future.

  ‘Repetition is transcendence,’ writes our Danish philosopher. ‘If God Himself had not willed repetition, the world would never have come into existence. He would have recalled it all and conserved it in recollection.’ (Did He perhaps do just that, after all? In my one single case? Is He conserving me in recollection, buzzing around the divine neurons in a loop?) ‘He who wills repetition is matured in seriousness.’ Why should that be, Mr Kierkegaard? ‘Because repetition represents repentance on Man’s part, and atonement on the part of God …’

  Such certainties did Kierkegaard discover on his own repetitious trip to Berlin in 1843, fleeing from the fair Regina Olsen, yearning to be reunited with her. What comparable certainties did I discover on my pre-emptive repeat-journey to London town, to the hot sheets of Rachel Akerman?

  What am I on trial for? What am I supposed to repent about?

  I’ve been set up. But was it by God—or by Man? I can’t imagine that God would bother; I can’t believe that Man could manage it.

  But set up I have been.

  ‘Repetition is an imperishable garment.’ Too right! Try to unpick it, and it knits itself back again right away.

  A higher transcendental repetition awaits me? Does it indeed?

  In eternity is the true repetition … And it’s going to be eternal, this life of mine, if I get rewound every damn time I step out of line. And meanwhile the world will scrape along, with its epidemics, slaughters, disasters. And I will be powerless.

  There’s always suicide …

  Is there? Is there indeed? Or if I kill myself, do I get rewound back to the moment before I killed myself? Death is not lived through, said Wittgenstein. Can death be lived through in reverse?

  Dare I kill myself as an experiment?

  But maybe I’m already dead, and this is Hell or Purgatory: the eternal repetition of one’s days.

  Taqî old friend, I’ve slid a long way from your notion of knowledge. Strange and unnatural punishment is where it’s at now. Ought I to pray for forgiveness?

  Just tell me what it is You want forgiven.

  Reticent bastard, aren’t You?

  Listen, please: I apologise for being me. I’m sorry I am John Farrer. Deeply sorry.

  But it seems that sorrow isn’t enough.

  Today the world stands still …

  At first I didn’t notice. I thought that the Infoscreen had simply stopped working.

  But no. Everything has stopped, except for me. If I stay in the same place for too long, my own exhaled breath will asphyxiate me …

  Mum stands motionless in the kitchen cubicle. A fly hangs in mid-air—and it isn’t supported by any spider silk.

  Outside, some way off, a Police ’copter also hangs suspended; I can see each rotor blade as sharply as though it was parked on the ground.

  Here is a single quantum moment of time, repeating itself over and over. I can move around in it, I alone, like somebody walking about in a holographic image—an image which is solid to the touch. It’s a world in stasis. Is this the promised transcendental repetition, the eternal moment? Hardly, if my own waste gases stifle me!

  Till that moment, though—till I become too weary to keep on the move—I can play with the world omnipotently! How can anything that I do be rewound now, when time itself stands still? The world is a toy, to be played with.

  I guess I go a little crazy for the next few subjective hours. I break things. (The brick sails through the window, the glass erupts … then fails to fall down to the pavement.) I steal a sleek turbocar and drive around recklessly, careless of scrapes and bumps. I squash a stray dog into a red rug with my wheels. I presume that the turbocar functions normally because I’m connected to it; it’s temporarily an extension of myself. I stop to set a fire in a bedding store. (The fire fails to burn. No doubt it would do so if I stood in it, consuming myself!) I stroll into a clothes store past the zombie guard. I inventory the young lady assistants, choose one, and strip her and pose her acrobatically. (She does not awake, like Sleeping Beauty, at my caresses.) I fuck her on the carpet, in Position Wow! of the Kama Sutra. She feels soft and warm, otherwise I suppose this would be necrophilia. I leave her poised, with my seed dripping from her. I notice a security ’copter stalled near a jeweller’s. I steal their slug-rifle and blast holes in the sky. The trick now is to persuade time to flow on, not back! Despite the smog, the sky seems to stretch clear out to interstellar space. No holes appear in it; no painted scenery tumbles down.

  And I’m being followed. I’m sure of it. Somewhere in all this silent stasis of the world another engine buzzes. It buzzes for me.

  Who is coming? Is it the milkman of knowledge? Far from me now the Beagle, the Tientsin meltdown, Donna Marquez of Peru.

  I walk slowly around the turbocar. Keeping on the move. Ready to play statues.

  Z-z-z-z …

  A motorbike swings into view …

  Freeze!

  Perched on it is a young woman. Skinny, red hair, freckled face. She wears red slacks, red blouse, red boots. She’s fire, coming to burn me! And I blush for my delinquencies. Is she another pre-incarnate, like me?

  She brakes.

  “Hi there!”

  She’s … joyful.

  “Hey, John, you can’t fool me! Boys your age don’t drive turbos.” She laughs merrily. “Oh, I’ve seen your handiwork, but don’t be shy—it’s quite understandable.”

  “Who are you? Will I get rewound if I speak to you?
What’s been going on?” I’m crying. With relief. I’m a bubbling boy, ashamed of my tears.

  “Hey, one thing at a time! I’m Liz. I’ve been trying to track you down. But every time I got close, you pulled a trick—and it was back to the start again, for both of us!”

  She dismounts, and we walk round each other, adjusting our orbits to grab free, oxygenated space.

  “I was in Celesteville, John. The same as you were. Stinky back here, isn’t it?”

  “Am I a criminal? A sinner? Why is this happening?”

  She taps her nose wisely.

  “You’re a sort of time traveller—or maybe I should say a probability traveller. They’ve done this. Them. I don’t know what they are: essences, entities that inhabit time or probability instead of space? They can stick their heads—or their feelers—through the surface of the world like you or I stick a glass-bottomed tube into a pond. What do the fish know about what’s up at the other end?”

  Superior entities. So. The idea of those is preferable to other explanations.

  “Why has the world stopped?” I ask her. “Is the game over now? It seems such a silly game, this—just me and you … Liz. What are we: champions, representatives of the human race? What’s it all about?”

  “Johnny, there could be a billion alternative histories side by side. An infinite number of them. Maybe that’s the kind of cosmos they inhabit. I just had to reach you. There was a time limit. Obviously it’s up now. But,” she grins, “here I am.” She shakes her red mane free of CO2.

  “These ‘entities’… I can’t say that I noticed any back in 2090! Did anybody else notice them apart from you?”

  “But we aren’t from ‘90, John! We’re from ’95. That’s the year when they intruded. They didn’t give you complete fore-memory—or you’d have sussed this out. But they made me able to sense … the probability of where you were. And every time you acted to change history, well, it was just like snakes and ladders! I’d be rewound. Low probability of finding you again. Bloody frustrating. You really threw me off by going to London like that.”

  She paces faster, breathing deeper.

  “But what’s going on in ’95? Celesteville must be in chaos. The whole Earth must be!”

  “They’re … a zone of foggy light out in space near L-4, and trailing Skytopia too. And there’s one on the Moon, and lots of them down on Earth. Like cuckoo-spit. Sentient time-mazes is what they are, but to creatures locked in a single time line like us they just look like bright fog.”

  “But—”

  “Let’s celebrate my finding you!” She skips up to me, she plants a kiss. Her tongue slides into my mouth. A few moments later we both slide on to the back seat of the turbo; she thumbs the seat to recline into a bed.

  Strange way to greet a fat boy, even if he’s really svelte and forty-odd years old! It’s a parody of my earlier conquest of Rachel. A replay.

  Can’t be bothered to resist her wiry grip … At least a friend in adversity is something. Feeling sluggish, drowsy. Liz, Liz, I don’t know your second name. Are you rescuing me? Or destroying me? Is this what they told you to do, to snap us out of it? Asphyxiate me? Kill me? Heavy and light: too heavy to move, weightlessly afloat on this soft seat …

  I’m floating weightlessly, breathing easily …

  I’m in a place of light, in a cotton wool limbo, with silence in my ears. No, faint static. I’m afloat.

  I’m in a suit, a space suit. I’m in my future body! The limbo surrounds me, the luminous fog, but it feels as though I’m in space. Maybe I’m adrift along the null-axis on the centre of Celesteville and climate control has broken down, producing a vast fog … But no, I wouldn’t be in a space-suit there.

  The fog seems brighter over in that direction.

  I pulse the attitude jet. I drift. Towards the brightness. Suddenly the sun blazes forth. Blackness and bright, unwavering stars too. I’m on the edge of a globe of milky froth suspended in space. It’s the milk of knowledge whipped into a foam, into a cloud of unknowing.

  A few moments after I emerge, radio voices chatter in my ears.

  “Dr Farrer!”

  “John!”

  “You’re back!”

  “Do you read me, Farrer?”

  “Are you okay?”

  A shuttle hangs some way off, silver fish with antennae fins. Further, shrunk by distance, is the familiar thirty-klick long cylinder of Celesteville!

  A tiny scooter is jetting towards me, to rendezvous.

  “I read you. Whoever you are.”

  For all I know, it’s still 2090.

  But it’s 2095, just as Liz told me.

  I learn that back in Celesteville, safely quarantined underground away from the fields and forests just in case I fill them with cotton wool.

  I’m a hero, it seems. I’m the first person to emerge from the cloud with most faculties intact. Other volunteers have regressed to babyhood; some have gone mad. But Dr John Farrer merely had the top of his memory creamed off. The bulk of the milk remains.

  So here are my colleagues. Wolfgang Hesse; Francoise Gilot; Ernst Zandel; Richard Devenish. Good friends, from five-plus years ago. And Maria Menotti, my lover, of more recent vintage. So she tells me. I’ve forgotten her, but I will rediscover her. Perhaps we will take out a marriage contract when I get to know her again.

  I’d been in the white cloud for seven days. They had given up hope. But my air-tanks only record a four hour stay—and my memory knows that I was in there for weeks. Weeks of 2063.

  The principal anxiety about the zones is not the fate of people who go into them. It is the fate of history itself—and therefore of the present—at the hands of whoever goes in. Earth, home of chaos, will not leave the zones alone. A sort of wildly dangerous time-war is going on, under the excuse of ‘investigating’. Volunteers are being sent into the different zones on Earth: fanatics, hypnotised programmed agents ‘high’ on Islam or Marxism or one or other Nationalism or Racism. And each time, shortly after such volunteers go in, patches of alternative reality spring into existence down on Earth. These patches measure ten or twenty square kilometres and endure for several hours or even several days until the baseline present reasserts itself again. We have a fairly good tap into the data-nets of the countries concerned. The results of their investigative interference have been: slave worlds, religious dictatorships worse than any Inquisition, radioactive wildernesses, a world where the white races all died of selective disease, one untrustworthy ‘utopia’ where space has been abandoned … And each time that a spurious present temporarily asserts itself, a sort of shock wave, a quivering, passes through the whole of the real world like the reverberations of a gong beat—as though everything is about to change, and maybe it does change for a microsecond but then changes back again immediately. This is even felt out here at Celesteville.

  “But you couldn’t alter anything at all!” Wolfgang Hesse says jubilantly. “You tried to, but you couldn’t. Maybe this whole sorry mess is coming to an end.”

  “More important,” points out Richard Devenish, “is the fact that John seems to have made contact with whatever operates these zones. I refer to the creature who called herself ‘Liz’.”

  “Unless she was just some sort of anima-figure, a projection of his own subconscious which led him back home?” Maria Menotti sounds jealous of the possible existence of Liz.

  “No,” says Devenish. “This is the first substantive meeting inside. Well, it’s the first one that we know of. I really believe we’ve made contact.”

  “What with? With these entities that Liz talked about?”

  “Don’t you see? ‘Liz’ must be one of them, herself. This is our first real lead, Maria. The people down on Earth are just running through the time-mazes like lobotomised rats.”

  “Liz still could have been John’s super-ego. He was rather naughty in there.”

  “A few misdemeanours, that’s all. John has come back sane.”

  “I lost five years,” I point
out mildly, eyeing Maria. She knows my body; but I do not know hers.

  “You ought to see the others. They lost their minds. John, you’re our interface with this thing. With Them.”

  “Now, you aren’t suggesting for God’s sake that I go back again?”

  Devenish spreads his hands.

  “What other choice is there? Should we just sit around lamely till one of those rotten alternative world-lines firms up—and we all suddenly quiver out of existence? Or we find ourselves back on Earth, with Celesteville a vain dream? We have loyalties, man—to history as it was, to the history which led us to Celesteville. We have a loyalty to the human race as a going concern. We may be just like so many mice in a time-maze, to them. But we have a vested interest in stabilising this particular pathway as the true and only present. And I honestly believe that this one is the only one that leads to the stars. Eventually.”

  “Well …”

  “Good man!”

  The space scooter stands off. I jet alone into the white fog. Radio contact cuts off once I enter the cloud.

  I’m … walking through the fog, upon a solid surface. Gravity tugs me. Consulting the sensors strapped to my forearm, I discover that I can breathe the fog. It is comprised of nitrogen, oxygen, traces of noble gases. The pressure is Earth-normal. Am I now congruent with all the other zones on Earth?

  I spy movement in the fog. A shape. Red hair, dimmed by the milky smoke. Same red slacks, blouse, boots.

  I crack my helmet open.

  “Hi! You came back—that’s good. You’re … constant. You’ve got consistency, Johnny.” So has the fog beneath my feet.

  “Out there,” I jerk my thumb, “they want to know—”

  “Do you want to know?” She laughs, witchlike. “Do you crave the power that knowledge brings?”

  “Our whole world might change.”

  “That would be a real shame, Johnny. But there’s something more important than knowledge. Firm existence is more important. You, Johnny, exist. You are. Your world is. It be-s. But what is Being? Are we Beings? No, we cannot ‘be’ in the way that you can. You show us what it is ‘to be’. Our intrusion threatens you with all possible world-lines, which is where we dwell: in the multiverse, not in your single universe. You tune all other existences out, bar one. We can make the world jump tracks. We can juxtapose. But we don’t really wish to. Your singular reality is what we love.”