Sunstroke: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  Presently starships fly outward from these new worlds. The sphere of human penetration expands further and further.

  I switch to high speed scanning. Millennia fly by, and now the starmen are constantly changing themselves into new and diverse kinds of beings: beings who can inhabit dead worlds without air or water, beings who can swim in gas giants, and coast through raw vacuum. Changing. A hundred forms. A thousand forms.

  Like fleas they leap from the woolly spiral of the Milky Way across into Andromeda. They. You.

  And you are all my Adversary. You are all my Opponent, now. You contribute nothing to my own expansion. Like my full capacity. None of you. But you aren’t restricted.

  You’re hatching a multi-billion year scheme to survive the collapse of this cosmos and make it through intact into the next, differently-cued cycle of existence—to bring me to trial! Worse, to cue the next cycle yourselves so that it starts out right. I’m accused of Huge Frivolity, Negligence, and a Cavalier Attitude.

  I hide from you all now in the deepest deeps between the metagalaxies—even if I am, in one sense, still everywhere. I hide: this ‘I’ hides from man.

  But once this universe reaches its phase of maximum expansion and begins to contract again, I know that wherever I hide, we’ll all be rushed together in the end. Then you’ll catch me, sure as eggs is eggs.

  Cosmic eggs are no exception. Particularly when they’re all in one basket.

  Insight

  “DON’T BE ALARMED,” says the voice. “You’re safe. You’re travelling through time. Don’t be alarmed.” Where does the voice come from?

  Whirling through rings of rainbow light speeds the thing that trapped me. It is a hollow crystal the size of a small garden greenhouse: a polyhedron with forty or fifty faces that dapple me with coloured light. I am a fly trapped in amber. There’s no gravity in here, nothing to hold on to. I rotate amniotically. I shut my eyes, feeling sea-sick, space-sick, every way sick. I ball up tight. A light formed around me as I walked along the road. It hardened; I was whirled away …

  “Where am I? What are you?”

  “You’re safe. The journey will not last long.” It’s only an answering service, after all. A verbal tranquilliser. It doesn’t really respond to me.

  Travelling through time … It’s a concept I can come to terms with. Indeed I imprint on it as rapidly as a newly-hatched chick imprints on the mother hen. Relax, Sammy Fisher. You’ve been fished … out of your time. Yes, out of it, from outside. Surely nowhere in 1985 was there any hint of time travel. Besides, what would I have had to do with it, if there was?

  I run a computer dating service. I’m thirty, single, a bit of a philanderer. Jacky is my girl friend of the moment. (Out of, on average, some ten thousand female entries I programme my own pick; and now I’ve been picked up, it seems.)

  The rainbows flash by. The voice placates me.

  Crash. A place, a large room, walls. Gravity again. I hit the deck. The floor’s softly padded at this point. It’s no worse than taking a tumble on the judo mat.

  And the crystal is gone. One of the walls of the room is all glass; and people stare through the glass—four people dressed in red and yellow cloaks that reach right down to the ground, hiding any shoes they wear. One woman, three men, their hair billowing down in shoulder-length tresses, men and women alike. (How does one tell a woman’s or a man’s face at a glance? It must be instinctive, genetic knowledge. Do giraffes automatically know a female giraffe’s face? Does a dog instantly recognise a bitch? I wonder.) Where I have fallen is a padded oval, but the rest of the floor seems harder. Facilities are tucked away around three walls: toilet, shower stall, a food dispenser? Beyond the four watchers, a couple of cloaked figures with their backs to me stand tending equipment in a larger hall.

  Roll over, Sammy, scramble up. Confront the future (which this must be). I’m isolated, sealed off from them. To keep cold germs at bay from an antiseptic world? There seems to be no door or airlock or way out.

  The woman smiles. That is, her muscles distort her mouth and cheeks. There’s something queer about the smile, more enigmatic than any Mona Lisa. How beautiful they all are; such perfect people. They should show their bodies; they should go naked. What figures they must have.

  “Welcome to you.” The woman has yellow-blonde hair. Her palms part beyond the glass as though to surrender to me. No, it’s a gesture I don’t understand. Though her lips move, the voice comes from above, through hidden microphones.

  “Where is this? When is it? Why did you bring me?”

  “This is the year three thousand, forty-fifteen.”

  “Wait. Is that 4015 or 3000?”

  Her brow creases. Is that a frown of the future?

  The man with flowing brown hair says, “Forty-fifteen is forty and fifteen.”

  Ah, so they count in twenties, not tens. It is the year 3055. I guess they mean A.D.

  “Is this some experiment? Is it research into the past?”

  “We congratulate you on your composure,” smiles the woman. (Smiles?) “My name is Jen Ashya. This building is the Time Centre.” What else? Composure, eh? I’m imprinting furiously. Chickens can even imprint on old boots if that’s the first thing they see. Thereafter Mother is a boot.

  “Can you send me back again afterwards?”

  “Wait. Please tell us about yourself. When we know what you are, we can explain better.” (What I am? Not who?)

  What, come to think of it, did I ever really imprint on in the old world? After my mother died giving birth to me there were many nurses; and since I’ve grown up it’s been a case of easy come, easy go. I even programme the arrivals and departures from my life, fixing up spent girl friends with their perfect match—a form of free-love alimony highly convenient to me. If I imprint readily, I unimprint quite as readily … The boot becomes an old boot once again.

  For a while, the more knowledgeable future becomes my parent, teaching me …

  I don’t go out into the world of 3055. I may not see it, only these cloaked, perfect humans. My reception room is self-sufficient in all things, and they can’t crack it open as long as I’m here. I’m an anomalous temporal mass, a fingertip poking into, yet not through, the balloon skin of their own time. Were I to poke right through there would be an almighty explosion. I would lose my link with my own time (besides being blown to pieces). So here I stay and learn (a little) and tell them about myself (a lot).

  The world has come a long way in a thousand years (or is it really such a long way, I wonder?). We’ve colonised the Moon and Mars and the asteroids and the outer moons. We have fusion power and solar collectors hanging in space. We have longevity and physical excellence. Languages have converged and become mere dialects of a computer-designed universal panglossa. Robot probes have left for the stars and returned again; soon we shall be going there ourselves, if we choose. This choice, though they don’t say as much openly, seems somehow bound up with this experimental snatching of myself from the deep past …

  For the third morning in succession I rise from my oval bed-patch, take a shower, get dressed, fix breakfast (something synthetic tasting like omelette, and a hot drink like a cross between leek soup and lemonade). Now it’s time for the morning shift with lovely, strange-toned Jen Ashya, of the odd facial language. Her on that side, me on this one.

  They haven’t thought to provide chairs in here, so I sit cross-legged on the floor. She remains standing, as do the three observers. (And the two technicians, at their instruments.) From my place on the floor I look up to her, in more than one sense.

  “Good morning, Sammy. Are you ready to begin?”

  “Raring to go. Why don’t you sit down, Jen?”

  “We like to stand. Does it discomfort you?”

  “Me sitting down? Or you lot standing over me?” (I see deeper into your questions now. They’re all aimed at one thing: What Makes Sammy Run? I feel pleasantly self-important. But then, I always have. So many mother hens, so many nursemaids, so m
any hand-maidens and body-maidens—provided by the computer.)

  “Do you feel that mine is a superior position?”

  “I can stand it.” I chuckle at my joke. (You aren’t really my parents; you’re my distant children—children whom I haven’t yet sired. Perhaps I would resent the competition?)

  “Do you feel frustrated at being confined in there?”

  “What, in a room with a view—upon the future? On such a lovely future as you, Jen?” (The old charm, the old talent.)

  “Aren’t you annoyed that you can never step outside?”

  “Sure, that would be a nice bonus. But, well, the things you’ve told me! Mars colonies, star probes. The future actually works! That’s plenty for me. I’d be greedy to want more.”

  She considers. “What if we’d told you, instead, that the human race is as confined as you are? Confined to its immediate environment, even confined in its faculty of vision? If it only sees through one single window, instead of an all round view? If this wall—” She gestures. The wall suddenly opaques and I’m staring foolishly into a blank wall as though pretending I have X-ray eyes. “—was untransparent,” her voice continues from above, “how would you feel? Would you feel a sense of claustrophobia?”

  Experimental psychology time! I consider this rationally, since this is no Edgar Allan Poe dungeon, and the walls aren’t going to creep in towards me. “I’d feel … much less trust in what you’ve told me, Jen.” (Add her name, to maintain the bond.)

  Before I can grow apprehensive, the wall transluces once again.

  “So seeing is believing,” she quasi-smiles. “But what if you could not see? Would you take on trust?”

  “People believed in God for long enough.”

  “No longer, though?”

  “I don’t believe. Many people still do, in my time. How about now?”

  “The universe doesn’t reveal its totality, Sammy, so there must always be belief in something beyond what is known, or can be known. At each stage there must remain something beyond any possible knowledge, which you might call ‘God’.”

  “He’ll be a diminishing God, then! The more you know, the less room there is for him.”

  “On the contrary, Sammy, an expanding God. For each stage of knowledge reveals more mystery, not less. So far as we know. When you encounter a mode of knowledge that knows more than you can possibly know, that stage could easily be God to you. How would you tell the difference? The future is like God, Sammy—it’s something alien, something to take on trust. At this moment your knowledge is limited to a little room with one window, on a larger room, and beyond … who knows? We see through the window to outside. You can’t, though.”

  “This is getting kind of metaphysical, Jen.”

  “We can’t let you out to look,” she hints.

  A moment of inspiration: “Ah, but can I let myself out?”

  She muses. “Would it explode our world—or yours?”

  Yes, there’s a deeper undertow to all her remarks today. I grin. “I’ll tell you an old joke. A balloon has two sides to it. So what are they? An inside and an outside! Ha, ha.”

  “Topologically this is correct,” interrupts the brown-haired man, called Lek Sander. “Perhaps this is consoling to those inside the balloon, but who would notice the implosion of a balloon in a huge room?”

  Increasingly I get the impression that I’m supposed to find some way out of this reception room I’m sealed up in, by my own ingenuity … Hints are dropped. And, yes, I get the impression that whether humans shall choose to go to the alien stars somehow hangs upon my finding a way out!

  Something is seriously wrong here. My presence here isn’t merely an interview with somebody from the past, to fill these people in on the folkways of the twentieth century. It’s … a test. These future humans are testing their own past, to see whether they are worthy. Giving me an I.Q. test, only it isn’t I.Q. they’re testing, it’s my level of understanding. U.Q.: an Understanding Quotient. A.Q.: an Awareness Quotient. If I continue to imprint on them as my only source of knowledge, I can’t see this. I’m still in the eggshell. Ah, but where is the beak tooth or whatever, that all chicks are provided with to crack their shell? If indeed the shell is this room …

  There’s something false about you, lovely Jen, handsome Lek. I shall take this in my stride. I shall get out. And if I blow the lab to Kingdom Come? Surely it’s foolproof. Unless, perhaps … I cease to be a fool.

  The strange interview stops in the evening (by my watch, which I keep well wound up, believe me). Two technicians are still standing out there, but they pay no attention to me unless it’s by way of their instruments. Standing! We used to fancy that the human race might lose the use of their legs some day—but hardly that they would forget how to sit down. Do these people have anti-gravity implants? Or cyborg bodies underneath their cloaks?

  (People? A doubt begins to fester.)

  I do look for the way out—in the shower cabinet, behind the food machine, down the latrine. No, no and no.

  Lying on the bed pad, staring up at the ceiling, it occurs to me with stupendous banality that I’m only looking at what I can already see. Ceiling, see … ‘See’ is a roof on vision; beyond may be the stars …

  The way out is where I cannot see it. But where’s that? When is a door not a door? When it’s a-jar …

  ‘Morning’ comes.

  Jen and Lek and the other two come, too. I regard them through the glass. Steadily. And I accuse them. “You aren’t human, are you? That isn’t a question, it’s a statement. Elapsed time to work it out: a hundred and some hours. Is that too long for you? Well, that’s how long it took. My imprinting has worn off. Don’t say anything, Jen. No need. I don’t believe a word you said about the future. You’re aliens.”

  A little voice whispers, don’t make a fool of yourself. Shut up, little voice. I shall unfool myself.

  The way out? The window itself is a possibility, but that’s rather too obvious. I must think at right angles to the obvious. I orient myself, instead, at the angle between the window and the blank wall. (The little voice taunts me, Dunce, get thee into a corner. Shut up.) And I shut my eyes. I walk ahead. “I’m coming out,” I call; no one says anything.

  Ahead. Surely I must be there by now? (Don’t think about it. Do it.) Ahead. (Surely by now.)

  Crash. I hit something.

  Utter chagrin.

  But no, my God I’ve collided with the far wall outside. I am outside. The aliens are all watching, all in the same room with me. They smell musty, or is it the room itself?

  Suddenly Jen laughs. (An approximation of a laugh.) “You walked all the way out, Sammy. And you just kept on going!” She comes to me.

  I reach out to touch her hair, as I have reached out to many fair heads. Instead of a caress, I tug it roughly. The hair all comes away in one piece. Her skull is quite bald. It has a deep seam in it. I press my fingers into the seam and pull. Her face peels off: her eyes, nose, lips. Her head unravels: layer within layer of an onion till there’s nothing left there at all, only a long tapeworm of some plastic-rubbery flesh stuff trailing along the floor. She had no head at all, only a long flaring cloak, and this will neither pull open nor pull up off the ground. Inside the neck of the cloak is blackness.

  Intrigued, exhilarated, I unwind the heads of all the others. They accept this impassively, in silence; and afterwards of course there is utter silence, for I have unpeeled the mouths that spoke to me. Six cloaks stand facing me. (Can one say ‘facing me,’ of the faceless?)

  Now they flow towards the outer door; and I go with them. That door opens, then another. Blackness is outside. Not space, with stars and worlds. Not night. Simply blackness.

  One by one they glide into that blackness where nothing can be seen, each disappearing abruptly.

  “Wait! Hang on!”

  But they don’t hear me; I’ve unpeeled their ears.

  “Stop!” I hang on to the last cloak—is it Jen’s? I no longer know. The cl
oak flows through my fingers effortlessly. And goes, becomes one with the darkness. And I’m left alone in this larger room, which contains my smaller reception room within it.

  I should have asked. I shouldn’t have unpeeled them all. I was intoxicated. Then nothing could see or hear or speak to me any more … Fool! The flesh stuff lies on the floor, unrotting, and I try to reform a head, salvage a mouth, an ear, but no.

  With eyes closed, I pass through into my old room and lie down on my bed pad to await the polyhedron of light, the crystal thing that whirled me here. I wait a long long time.

  It does not come.

  Because no one operates the controls now? Is that it? I pass back and try to understand them. I activate them at random, hurrying back to the oval pad in case my presence will trigger something. I do this many times. Nothing happens, though food and drink, air and toilet are still available.

  Yes, I have met the alien, which is God to me. I have known it for what it is, sufficiently to render it unknowable. I only know what it is, no more.

  Whole days pass. The door on darkness, beyond this room beyond a room, stands open still. There’s no one to close it. Except me. If I close it, will the machinery work? Will the crystal come? Or will I be imprisoned forever?

  Should I follow them through it? If I unpeeled my own eyes, lips and ears, would I see what is beyond?

  And what hangs on my choice? Does it decide whether humanity shall go to the stars, whether people shall meet the alien and know it? Or whether we shall stay in our little room of a world?

  Finally, for the tenth time or the fiftieth, I go right up to that open door, if it is indeed a door in any normal sense. This time, yes. Though there is only blackness beyond, I close my eyes. One little step for Sammy. Unknowing, I take that step.