Sunstroke: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  “I love it too. Please leave us alone.”

  “Can the lover quit the loved one? Besides, your love conforms with ours. It was you, your own deep desire, which wound time back to its baseline. It wasn’t us, Johnny.” Liz examines her fingers as though they amuse her. She makes a cage of them. “This … constraint is very attractive to us. For where all possibilities are equal, none of them actually is. None truly exists. They are only waves of probability. But you exist. You have constructed a pocket of fierce deterministic causality. It’s formed by the nature of your consciousness. It’s embedded in the multiverse like a seed crystal. You have one true future—if we don’t make the tracks jump.”

  “Do you know our one true future?”

  She nods.

  “Then why alter it? Or is it no future at all? What is it?”

  “Ah, that delicate moment when you sell your soul!”

  “So that’s it, is it? You want to be paid? What with?”

  “Why, with the experience of what it is to be, Johnny.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We can infuse you, like a glass of milk drunk down and entirely digested, becoming part of every cell in your body, every nerve path in your mind. Passing down to your children, and to theirs. You’ll be unaware of it. Unaware of us, as will your children be, and theirs. It’ll simply be as though, suddenly, you have inherited a soul. You will know the one true future, and then you’ll be just as before: you’ll know it no longer, but you’ll set out to reach it. And you’ll become that future. And you’ll have got rid of us and of the changes—because we’ll be at one with you in that future, for ever more. But you have to open your heart and mind to us freely.”

  “And what happens if we won’t let you … incarnate yourselves in us?”

  “Inevitably we shall wrap your world in shrouds of possibility. Causality will ruin itself. Many time-lines will coexist. There will be chaos for you—until probability worlds become so multiplied that the winds of the multiverse can blow us away again. But for you it will be too late.”

  “So it’s tails we lose, heads you win.”

  “But you don’t lose. You gain your one true future. And we attain reality: your single reality.” Liz smiles. “Is your problem how you, as one representative, may possibly bind your whole race? At a distant enough time in the future, Johnny, as your genes mix and co-mix again, eventually you will be part of all of your kind. This is how a bargain with your single self binds everyone, in the long run. And this of course proves—”

  “—that we have millions of years ahead of us! So the future has to work out, or you couldn’t possibly make this offer? But … ah, have you offered this deal to other races out in space?” Other races, who may have refused—even at the expense of their own solid reality? Because the alternative was worse?

  “Perhaps there are no other beings, but yourselves? Perhaps there are only waves of probability elsewhere? Here alone is the seed crystal, found after long searching. Perhaps. Choose, Johnny. It grows urgent. Drink us down deep into you—or be haunted by shifting realities till your world becomes a kaleidoscope.”

  “God Almighty, what sort of choice is that? Get on with it. Immerse yourself in me. Yourselves, whatever you are!”

  Liz comes closer.

  “How better shall such knowledge be conveyed, than in a kiss? With this kiss I seal your own true future. A kiss that swoons you …”

  The one true future history of humanity. Yes, oh yes indeed. All that. But it’s the tragedy that most of all I understand. Their tragedy, and ours …

  For this single moment, this simple moment almost banal except for its rather weird surrounding circumstances, is the moment of creation.

  Why did we ever think that creation had to begin at the beginning? Creation does not—did not—occur fifteen billion years ago. Nor does it occur fifty billion years hence, when the universe swallows itself up and vomits itself out again. It occurs right here, right now. There is nothing particularly privileged about this moment a quarter or a fifth of the way through ‘time’, except that it is the one.

  Until now—but no longer—all cosmoses equally coexisted, each redeeming the other from random nonexistence by probabilistic interplay. No longer so. Now only one cosmos exists. Hereafter, one cosmos. Herebefore, one cosmos.

  Before, in the parallel streams of the multiverse, there could never be any such thing as a true beginning. But now there is one definite beginning. And because of this, there can be a definite ending too. At last a single universe is locked into place, into one reality. The flux is finished; the wave function of the multiverse has collapsed. Like undescended testicles the Godly essences of probability have now descended into existence, into being at last. They have found what they have been looking for since forever. Now they can die; they can cease to be—at last. Not yet, of course—but thirty or forty billion years downtime, when this single universe reaches its end and becomes nonexistent.

  That huge span of history—of our evolving glory, yes I can say that: the glory of our future proliferation and growth even beyond Andromeda, and beyond the local family of galaxies—is as nothing compared with … with the infinite realms of probability sustaining forever a multiverse, which now is no more.

  They have achieved absolute actuality through us, and so one day they can cease. They can die once our great future history—so much vaster than the paltry thousand year span granted to Faust—draws to its absolute finis. Now the universe is; and sometime ahead, it isn’t any longer.

  They are, in a sense—oh yes, I see now—ourselves, a mode of perception scattered across all the branching multiverse, a universal metaconsciousness. Now, that multiverse is no more. Creation is, instead: one solid, self-consistent creation. Which will cease. Forever.

  No wonder they—or it—spoke the language of macroprobability to us. It was what sustained them, and the ghostly multiverse. But now macroprobability is dead. The fluid has been crystallised in a shock wave, as multiverse collapses into universe—though on the quantum level microprobability still continues, until the end.

  The End.

  God, then, will have died, and achieved nothingness. Have I killed God by incarnating Him? God wished to die. Yes, I’ve drunk the milk of knowledge from Her lips …

  Life binds time. Life is rare. Rare as it is, other, wiser, alien races have been made this offer down the aeons. Though their reality fell apart—for a very long time, into terrible ages of chaos, of multiplicity, shifting world lines, till eventually it knit again into a semblance of the old causality—they all refused to accept, for the sake of true infinity and eternity. All, that is, except for us. And how we will be rewarded for it! Oh glory, oh woe.

  Dr John Farrer strolls the curving meadows of Celesteville, arm in arm with Maria Menotti, who is dressed only in brief shorts. Five kilometres above, curving forests hang over their heads. Sunlight pours through the thirty-klick long window panels, from the space mirrors. John and Maria come to a rustic chalet. Here they strap on wings.

  And briefly, so briefly that they are hardly aware of it, a curious event occurs. As they prepare to launch themselves aloft, a solitary flamingo beats by, swishing the air. And, for a timeless moment, for an immeasurable time, it halts on the wing. Before flying on. John’s heart thumps. No, it merely skipped a beat.

  Now John and Maria fly up too. They fly up. Most of the way towards the mid-axis. Then they lie back in the tropical air. They bask. They will make winged love soon.

  John preens himself.

  “There’s enough fuel tucked away in old Sol to last for almost ever. Billions of years is almost forever. Oh, we’ve come through! And long, long before forever we’ll be out among the stars—even among the galaxies!”

  “Such certainty,” Maria laughs. “And how soulful you sound.”

  “But I am certain. I do know. Somehow.”

  “Maybe we’ve already done it, in some alternate world?” she teases. “Gone out to the stars fifty
years ago!”

  “No,” says John, with entire conviction. “There aren’t any alternate worlds. If there were, you would have an infinite amount of time in parallel. The universe—no, the multiverse—would be never-ending. And obviously it isn’t. But I don’t think that need bother us.” He returns the mirrored smile of the sun. “Almost forever is fine by me!”

  He reaches for her. Daedalus and a lady Icarus make love, high above the man-made world. In actual fact they are falling slowly as they entwine; but so slowly that they have plenty of time. And though they do not know it, this is the moment of conception.

  Peace

  IT WAS THREE months after the arrival of the colony asteroid Exodus in orbit about Tau Ceti III, to become a tiny new moon, and the subsequent unfreezing and transfer of its hundred thousand passengers of all races down to the pre-selected colony site in the northern continent, that the colonists realised that they were not, after all, alone on the supposedly virgin world …

  Out in the newly ploughed fields of Agric B, beyond the grid rows of plastiform cabins, lay the wreckage of the alien monoplane with its pilot dead inside it.

  “The fuel cell broke down,” one of the engineers told Director David Habrin. “He—it—wasn’t trying to make contact with us. It was just looking. And it crashed.”

  One of the geologists held thin metallic paper maps recovered from the wreckage. “Apparently it came from the tip of the southern continent. That’s about two thousand klicks. It was navigating by landmarks, improvising as it went, so they aren’t any better established than we are, David.”

  “I know.” Habrin stared at the mountains in the distance, green with untooled quasi-timber. “This world was virgin a hundred years ago. The Genesis probe wasn’t wrong. No, these creatures came in the meantime—just as we did. It’s the only explanation. If they were natives, they’d be all over. If they were only an expedition from another star system, they’d be using better equipment than this airplane. This is first or second generation exploring—stimulated, no doubt, by the sudden arrival of our little moon in the sky.”

  “It’s unfortunate that it crashed,” observed Leila Habib, his social engineering deputy. “They might believe we shot it down.”

  “Misunderstandings can be cleared up. Now that we know they’re here, and where they are, we can return the remains to them … or at least some holographs of this mishap. We’d better put a long-distance plane together. We’ve got some negotiating to do.”

  “That’s surely premature,” said Mary Tshona, the land deputy. “It’ll take, oh, five or ten years to consolidate the area around Newton. We shan’t be expanding significantly for several decades. Presumably, them too. Contact needn’t happen for ages.”

  Habrin shook his head. “A stitch in time saves nine, is the moral in this situation. Right, Leila?”

  “We’ve no precedent, but it does seem sensible.”

  “No precedent? Of course we have precedents. Multiple occupancy always breeds conflict, unless you can sort it out at the very beginning and get everything cut and dried. We’ve solved our own coexistence problems by social agreement. It’s the same thing writ large.” Habrin looked down at the broken alien body. “What do you make of them?” he asked biologist Schmitt.

  “Fearsome.”

  The alien was taller than a man, with a light green hide the texture of crocodile skin. It was a biped, with four webbed fingers and toes. Its toothy mouth jutted forward snarlingly, beneath nostril slits. Its eyes were red, with oblong pupils. It was hard not to think of the creature as a ‘Croc’; indeed, the name had already caught on. The Croc was naked apart from a tool-belt—including a laser tube and a wicked knife—and a long black cloak, clasped round its neck.

  Habrin struck a statesmanly pose.

  “We’ll have to coexist with them in the galaxy. This won’t be their first, or their last, colony—though maybe, as of now, it’s their newest. We’ll have to share the available worlds, side by side, or one by one. It’ll take Earth twelve and a bit years to hear of this, and who knows how long before the two home planets get together—but we’ll need a sort of Treaty of Berlin of the sky. The two home worlds shall divide up the uninhabited real estate of the cosmic Africa equitably. Then there’ll be protocols and trade agreements, cultural exchanges, diplomats, courts of appeal, and interspecies law. A condominium of space is what I see: the beginnings of a genuine multispecies cosmic community. A great dream! It starts here, on Tau Ceti III. We aren’t going to be limited by the speed of light forever, you know. FTL is just around the corner. Experimentally, it was on ten years ago, from the pulse-burst records. And once that barrier’s gone, the galaxy will be humming.”

  “Maybe they’ve already got FTL,” observed Schmitt.

  Habrin shook his head. “No. This one’s from a slow-journey colony. They’d have FTL-ed in a whole lot more of their civilisation, otherwise. As would we. We’ve got a lot to say to each other. About the whole of the future.”

  The long-distance plane was flight-tested successfully two weeks later. On the night before departure to contact the aliens—an expedition which David Habrin had decided that he would lead personally, and historically—the Director lay in bed with Leila Habib: the Jewish man and the Arab woman, lovers.

  After untwining, David whispered in her ear, “We will repeat this miracle tomorrow. Of the coming together. Not of man and woman of different races—but of species.”

  Leila propped herself up. “I’ve been thinking, David—about what we human beings are. Because we’re going to have to learn to deal with an alien breed.”

  “Who appear repulsive to us. Threatening. That dead pilot did, didn’t he? It’s a reaction we’ll ail have to overcome.”

  “Yes, that’s the trouble—our reactions. Homo sapiens has the strongest capacity for reason of any animal—coupled, I’d say, with the strongest capacity for emotion. The problem is, how to get the two things to work together? Emotionally we cleave to our local group, which we can see and touch directly; so we all tend to reject the stranger. Yet civilisation bred a world of strangers, a world too big to grasp directly.”

  “Not here, Leila. Newton colony is perfectly graspable.”

  “For a while. Later, it’ll be different. And if FTL comes as you say, there’ll be the problem of grasping multitudes of worlds.” She hesitated. “I don’t know that human beings, biologically, can pull that trick. We’ve made sympathy with other people and other races into a rational thing—it’s reason alone that tells us that every person is our brother or our sister. But it should be an emotional thing. Only, it doesn’t work emotionally.”

  He winked. “With us, it does.”

  “True. Our emotions and our reason walk hand in hand. But when the rational and the emotional messages clash, David, then a person is torn apart. A kind of schizophrenia possesses him. It has happened enough times on Earth.”

  “So?”

  “So by acting rationally towards the Crocs, we might transfer our instinctive rejection of them into rejection of one another. We would plug the head of the volcano, but the lava would burst out of the sides.”

  Habrin laughed. “Better, then, if they were enemies?”

  “No, that would be disastrous, too.”

  Habrin nuzzled her. “You worry too much.”

  The plane circled Newton colony once, then headed south across savannah, feather-tree forests, and knobbly hills that gradually massed up into mountains, enclosing a high barren tableland. Beyond, as the ground fell again, they crossed forests veined with great rivers flowing towards the midway ocean. They crossed the sapphire seas for a thousand kilometres, till they reached the southern continent: a hotter land, of lush jungle interspersed with swamps. Dead volcanic cones rose over it, one or two of which still smoked faintly.

  Although they were guided by the map sheets recovered from the wrecked monoplane, the Croc colony was not immediately obvious—until they realised that, in their search pattern, they had already
crossed and recrossed it several times. For the jungle had not been cleared, but rather built out into from many different foci, like so many dispersed patches of undergrowth.

  The pilot shook his head. “No central planning. At this rate they could spread through half the jungle in a lifetime or two. But,” he grinned, “how could they hold it together? Chaos reigns.”

  At last they came upon a cleared zone, where a few parked monoplanes of the same alien design were dwarfed by the bones of a great gutted ship resting in the jungle like the ribs of a whale.

  Down they came to land.

  If one could—with difficulty—discount the blood-curdling appearance of the aliens, the expedition’s reception was hospitable. Accommodation was offered, and food, which Habrin’s team declined—politely, they hoped—in favour of their own supplies. There was much chattering and barking over the holographs of the wrecked croc plane, and then the computer-aided process of language exchange began, with some of the team struggling to master Croc, while other team members sought to instil Panglic. To the mild chagrin of David Habrin, the designated Crocs learnt more swiftly and smoothly, as though they were used to meeting strangers, though they gave no indication that they knew of any other aliens.

  Two weeks after the arrival of the team, the first meeting of what Habrin chose to call “substance” took place, between Habrin and Leila and a pair of naked Panglic-speaking Hraxlic—as the Crocs called themselves. Almost all of the Crocs went naked in the hotter, damper southern colony. Their hides seemed quite sufficient to ward off insect bites or thorn gashes, in the jungle habitat.

  “We offer sympathy to the family of the flier who died,” commenced Habrin.