Sunstroke: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

“No need,” said the Croc, looming over him. “No family. All family. Pain is spread among all. It becomes very small.”

  “We are two different species, sharing the same world. Just as, one day, we shall share the galaxy. There must be no misunderstandings, no mistakes. We propose a pact of everlasting peace between our two peoples. We propose mutual consultation, and an exchange of representatives.”

  “Why?” barked the Croc.

  “So that we can get on together amicably. So that we can work out any problems that occur between us. So that these problems will not occur, in the first place. There should be a team of your people attached to our settlement, and a team of ours to yours. We call such people ambassadors. In this way, we can form the basis of a common understanding which will one day be copied, on the large scale, throughout the stars.”

  The Croc hissed. “You want to exchange hostages?”

  “You mean ‘hosts’,” Habrin corrected the alien. “Guests and hosts. But if it seems too soon to you …”

  “Soon indeed. But as you wish.”

  “We should draw up what we call a protocol. A form of words to govern relationships between our people.”

  “As you wish. We will write our names on this thing.”

  “So may I leave three of my team here? And may I welcome three of your people to our colony? We would be honoured.”

  “I see.” The red eyes gleamed.

  “Something’s wrong,” said Leila to David as they flew back towards Newton. In the back of the plane sat three Panglic-speaking Crocs, cloaked against the cooler climes of the northern continent.

  “Nonsense. We’ve just laid the foundation stone for brotherhood.”

  “That business about hostages …”

  “A language error, that’s all. Kurosawa, Rubadiri, and Bentley will sort out all that kind of stuff at their end, as they get better grounded in Hraxlic.” Habrin smiled, at pronouncing the name of the alien language. “I shall look forward to their radio reports with great anticipation. Of course, we’re setting up the same facilities for their three, at our end. As soon as we know each other a bit better, I’ll send a pulse-burst to Earth.”

  “I still don’t like it.”

  “That’s your instinct speaking, which you have to overcome.”

  “I wonder what their instincts are—about us?”

  “They didn’t seem to have any set reaction.”

  The plane landed at Newton Field as the sun was setting, and they drove into town to the Admin complex, which rose high above the grid of cabins and bubble-domes.

  As they were entering the building, a tech threw open the door of the Com-room and ran out.

  “Sir! Bentley is on the radio! They’ve killed Rubadiri and Kurosawa! They butchered them!”

  The com-tech stared at the three aliens, bewildered. “They did! The Crocs did! They walked into the fine new embassy they presented us with and cut Rubadiri and Kurosawa down with laser shots. Then they just walked out again. Bentley’s going crazy.”

  Habrin ran to the Com-room. Then, hesitating to leave Leila with the aliens, he cried to her to come too. The com-tech himself ran out of the building into the permoplast street, shouting.

  “Bentley, this is David Habrin. What went wrong? What’s going on?”

  “Christ, Dave,” babbled the voice, statically. “They’re dead. The fucking Crocs are coming back now. They’ve got fucking knives this time. They’re—” Something screamed. The link went dead.

  There was shouting outside. Habrin ran back to the Com-room door. Armed men and women crowded the Admin entrance. The three aliens stood in a huddle, watching rather impassively.

  “Wait!” cried Habrin. “Don’t do anything! Your people have just killed ours,” he called to the aliens. “Do you understand?”

  “We understand exactly.”

  “But … you couldn’t know it would happen! It must have been a terrible mistake.”

  “There was no mistake. Now it is our turn. But the pain is shared—it will only be small, for us.”

  A woman with a rifle cried, “Are you Crocs saying that you deliberately murdered three of our people?”

  “With deliberation. It is inconvenient, on a new world. We have much to do, but if we must do this, then we shall do it.”

  “But we made a peace pact!” screamed Habrin. “A treaty of brotherhood!”

  “Exactly,” said the alien, advancing on him, teeth snarling. As it reached for him, the woman shot it. The other two aliens turned to face the small mob, pulling out tubes from their tool-belts.

  “Stop it!” ordered Habrin. “Freeze!”

  But the aliens did not freeze, though the humans hesitated. Selecting their targets calmly, they lasered three, four of the crowd before they were shot themselves.

  Later that night a monoplane from the south flew over Newton and dropped cling-fire and sticks of shaped explosive which scythed neatly through twenty suburban cabins.

  The war had begun, against the devil Crocs.

  It was to be a slow war, of hit and run, on account of the distances involved. It was further complicated for the human colonists by the open target which Newton presented, compared with the dispersed, jungle-webbed alien settlements. Yet there was no letting it ease off, since the Crocs pursued it with a vengeance, continually sending in small attack groups, either to hit from the air or even to land or bail out, rampaging through parts of Newton and environs, giving no quarter, nor taking any, till they were all cut down. It became obvious that the aliens would either have to be exterminated—a prospect more difficult than appalling, now—or else so subdued that a decent peace could be imposed by force.

  It was in the third month of the war that the FTL scout-ship arrived from Earth.

  “FTL doesn’t equip me to help fight a war,” said the chief pilot Maria Vivaldi, to David Habrin. “But we’re certainly going to have bigger FTL ships soon, that can carry heavy weapons in. And supplies. The best thing you can do is rein in tight, defend Newton, put colonisation on hold—”

  “It is on hold, damn it. Already.”

  “—while I get back to Earth, and tell them. Then we’ll damn well force these creatures to keep the peace, here and everywhere else we find them. I guess they’ll have pulse-burst their own home planet, but we’ve more than got the edge with FTL. Years of edge. Decades. They’ll regret it.” Maria Vivaldi was a hard talker, and a hot shot.

  “Right,” nodded Habrin. “We’ll make a treaty with them that’ll stick—with FTL to back it up, and leapfrog it to them before they know we’re coming. But we must be just and honourable. There’ll still have to be a sort of condominium of space, because they’re obviously technologically up here with us. By hell, there’ll be peace. And harmony. I guess it must be an instinctive challenge thing with them—a squaring off like stags in rut. So we have to prove ourselves, then they’ll accept us peacefully. It can’t just be plain paranoid aggression, or they couldn’t have treated us hospitably to start with. They’d have seen red right away. Well, damn it, they do see red—but you know what I mean.”

  “Do you know what I think?” asked Leila quietly. “I believe we started it all.”

  Habrin turned on her. “We started it? We made a pact of everlasting friendship with them, and they responded by slaughtering our friends! You need a rest, Leila.”

  “But what if the Crocs, unlike us, have a natural instinct to live in peace with strangers? I’ve been thinking about this increasingly.”

  “Oh, have you? No one else has—particularly not our dead.”

  “Listen to me, David. You’re so hyped up on your broken vision of a peace pact. Your precious treaty of amity, which could become the basis of panspecies Cosmic Law. That’s a human thing. The Earth’s history is so full of treaties and agreements. What do they all really mean? Surely just that we agree to suspend our local emotional selves for some wider general goal—so long as it works to everyone’s benefit! If you really think about a treaty, doesn’t it o
nly signify that we shan’t quarrel and wage war—just yet? Suppose live-and-let-live is instinctive with them—not something imposed by law—because of their own genetic inheritance?”

  “All right, I’m supposing—out of sympathy for you.”

  “Well, isn’t a peace treaty in a sense a declaration of war?”

  “What?”

  “Isn’t it a huge delusion of ours that all men are brothers? And all sentient beings by extension? That isn’t what our hind-brain thinks. Isn’t it just the other side of the coin of our own deep in-group emotions? If one knew instinctively, as a given fact of existence, that all beings are one’s brothers, to make it an article of treaty would be really schizophrenic! It would be like laying down a law that says you must breathe. So our notion of peace is really a declaration of hostility. They read it correctly for what it is, and they oblige us—by attacking. That’s what we’ve really said to them.”

  “You’re psyched, Leila. You’re out of your mind.”

  “Am I indeed? I believe we offered them a formal contract of hostilities. Reluctantly, but perseveringly, they picked the gauntlet up. They can’t tolerate a formal peace pact because it offends their own deepest instinctive nature. It’s like legislating the speed of light. Only a lunatic would do it.”

  Habrin stared at his ex-lover in exasperation. Just as the coming together of the two alien races had failed, so too—by now—had his own congress with the Arab woman. Mad bint, he thought. Then he spurned the thought in horror.

  The door opened. A com-tech called to him urgently, “Sir, the line’s open to the Crocs! They want to speak to you!”

  Habrin hurried to the Com-room, pursued by the two women.

  “Probably they detected our FTL shock waves,” panted Maria Vivaldi. “If they recognise what they mean, well, they’re running scared!”

  Habrin grasped the microphone. “This is Director David Habrin speaking to you.”

  The radio barked. “This is the Hraxlic settlement Speaker. We are bored with this fighting. We are stopping it. Do you still want a peace treaty? Do you still want our names inscribed on a declaration?”

  Leila snatched the microphone away from Habrin. “No, we do not! We have learnt our lesson. A peace treaty with you would corrupt us. We never wish to sign a peace treaty or any other sort of treaty with you!”

  Habrin’s slap sent Leila reeling away. She whimpered.

  “Restrain her,” he shouted to spectators in the doorway. He caught up the microphone again.

  “This is Habrin. I did not say that, Speaker. One of my people lost her mind. Yes, there will be a treaty now—a treaty of everlasting peace between Human and Hraxlic. Because of your murder of our ambassadors we are not prepared to travel to your settlement, nor at the present moment could we guarantee your safety in ours. So I propose a meeting on neutral ground to conduct the negotiations, to establish lasting harmony between our two races. I suggest the southern shore of our own continent, which is approximately halfway between the Human and Hraxlic bases. Be warned, though. Let there be no treachery this time, for now”—he nodded meaningfully in the direction of chief pilot Vivaldi—“we possess new means of waging war. Having said this firmly, let me greet you as a sentient friend, who will soon be sworn to friendship, in a way that will shape the future history of many worlds.”

  Rather proud of his impromptu speech, David Habrin permitted himself a quiet smile.

  “That’s telling them,” applauded Vivaldi.

  “No,” called Leila, hopelessly.

  “We hear you,” said the Speaker’s voice. “You are a strange people. So then, be ready for us right away.” The contact ceased.

  A few hours later, David Habrin was standing out at Newton Field where the trim FTL scout-ship Surfboard was parked near a row of long-distance planes, all adapted as bombers. The peace negotiators were already on board one of these, awaiting Habrin’s permission to leave. He himself would not, this time, be going.

  “You can’t trust them, even so,” said Maria Vivaldi. “Just as soon as we get confirmation of the treaty, we’ll scoot back to Earth, and I guess we’ll start tooling up defences. We’ve started check-out procedures already. We’ll have bigger, heavier stuff here within six months. At the outside.”

  “It’s only sensible,” Habrin agreed. “Regrettable, but wise. Let us pray we do not have to use any heavier persuasion.”

  “Amen to that.” Still, Maria’s eyes glittered.

  In the hatchway appeared her navigator.

  “Hey, Maria, we’re getting crazy readings! As though there’s another FTL ship in the vicinity.”

  “Earth didn’t schedule two scout trips out to Ceti. There aren’t enough ships yet—”

  There came a crash in the sky. Above Newton hung a weird silver ship, oddly shaped like an alligator. It was large. Unbelievably, it hovered, standing on its tail.

  “Get us spaceborne, Toni!”

  “We can’t! It’ll take half an hour!”

  “Do it!” cried Maria, running to the hatch.

  Habrin hesitated, then he ran towards the long distance plane and scrambled on board.

  He slammed the hatch.

  “Get us airborne!”

  A few moments later the engine hummed alive, and the plane took off vertically. A few moments after that, the first explosion rocked Newton Field. Not a bomb. No, it was some kind of accelerated particle weapon, a particle which must be travelling near the speed of light, or more. For only after the explosion did he see the ionised track down the sky, and hear its thunder. Obviously the weapon must be improvised from the alligator-craft’s own FTL drive. The Shockwave tumbled their plane about. The plane tipped, but righted itself; and leaped higher.

  He stared down. Newton Field was devastated. The FTL scoutship lay broken on its side, burning fiercely.

  The alligator-ship swung its tail; and a second explosion rocked the city itself. Buildings burst open and blazed.

  David Habrin shook his head, numbly. He still could not believe that Leila Habib had been right.

  Meanwhile, the destruction continued.

  After a while, it really was peaceful.

  Jean Sandwich, the Sponsor, and I

  JEAN SANDWICH WAS not her real name. Her real name was Jean Sandra Norwich, but she had slammed two of the names together in bitter humour at her situation.

  She did not alter the spelling of her first name to make her point even plainer. As ‘Gene’ she might have been sexually confusing, and she was not in the least confused about her sex, nor about the fact that sex (in the broadest sense) had done her in—had hogtied her, condemned her to a ludicrous fate.

  However, it was not annoyance at sexual role-typing which inspired her sarcastic change of name. It was something much more basic. As one scientist had put it, “A human being is just a device used by a gene, to manufacture another gene.” Like a sort of comic book antihero, whirling around and stripping off her mundane disguise to reveal her secret nature, Jean Sandra Norwich became: a gene sandwich, the slice of meat imprisoned between the genes of her parents and the genes of her offspring.

  She went where she wanted, she spoke her mind, she showed all the signs of free will and of leading her own uniquely precious, autonomous existence—yet she knew it was all an utter illusion. She was sandwiched. For the genes had expressed themselves in exactly the same way in Jean’s daughter as they had in her mother. Jean had believed fiercely that she was an improvement on her mother—until her own daughter was born. She was sure she had pulled herself up by her own bootstraps—till her own stupid mother was repeated, out of Jean’s womb.

  The genes couldn’t have cared less for Jean’s creativity and sensitivity, for the things of beauty she had wrought in oils and fabric and clay, or for the creature of beauty and wit she had made of herself. Jean dreamed that a daughter of hers would outdazzle her as much as she outdazzled her own mother. “Irrelevant machine,” said the genes; and out of her squirmed another creature so lack
ing in sensitivity that she would be able to run through life, as Jean’s mother had, like a chicken with its head chopped off.

  Perhaps the genes, smelling the competition of an overcrowded world, had decided that sensitivity was out of place? Perhaps they had foreseen a nuclear war or an ice age, whereby life would be a matter of grubbing around for the next few thousand years? Jean might be best lean meat, but bread was the staple.

  While her daughter was still young and there was hope, Jean threw herself into imprinting love and humour, excellence and sensitivity into the palimpsest of her daughter. But the inflexible programmes were already written, and as her daughter grew up the writing showed through ever more clearly: the dumb vandalistic scrawl on the wall, which denied that there was any particular point in Jean’s own life.

  In her chagrin, Jean Sandra Norwich became Jean Sandwich.

  Oh, how lucky we were to discover her! For Jean was the ideal volunteer for the great experiment. She would join in our project with a passion that went far beyond the lure of earning one million Swiss-banked dollars.

  Indeed, she almost sought us out, though at the time she had no idea that we existed. Nor does anyone—apart from us ourselves, and Jean now, and of course our sponsor, originator of the millions of dollars. The whole matter is far too controversial not to be kept secret.

  Jean advertised herself, as it were, by a series of vehement articles in a newspaper under the byline of Jean Sandwich, in which she explained why she had walked out on her husband and her daughter, and railed against Nature’s deceits. She would do anything to pay Nature back for the trick it had played on her. But of course there was nothing that one could do! One of her articles even touched, plaintively, on the theme of DNA research; though of course, if a single egg from her ovaries could theoretically be removed and retailored to give rise, in a test tube, to something nearer to her heart’s desire, all the remaining eggs would still bear the same betraying message written in them—as would every damn cell in her whole body. Whatever miracle the DNA tinkers achieved in their laboratories, she would still be Jean Sandwich. Even so, she was fiercely on the side of human DNA experiments.