Sunstroke: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  So now, with one wing-flea position empty, the balloon-sled bounced out of camp, net folded neatly on it, the fleas ready to leap it into the sky at Buck’s signal. Perro scouted out ahead.

  The leap, when it came, brought down a whole cloud of highflying truffles—sufficient, in fact, for the two Zogs to return to Richclouds right away.

  Chapter Six: For the Love of a Zog

  BACK IN RICHCLOUDS, Fronswa and Perro sold their whole flea-team to a trio of tenderfoots who were bent on making their fortune even though the aerial truffle season was nearly over.

  Wearily, Buck and his team set out once again, the balloon-sled loaded with useless baggage and a second-hand net full of holes, through which most trapped truffles could escape.

  From the beginning everything went wrong. The three Zogs—a husband and wife and her brother—quarrelled all the time. They pitched camp incompetently. They were brutal to the team. Nor had they brought enough dried blood for the fleas. Worse yet, these Zogs were so feckless that often they did not even bother to mix the dried blood with water, let alone warm the mixture over a fire. They simply scattered it on the ground, dry as it was, for the fleas to nip up as best they could. The food was like gravel in their stomachs, and the team rapidly wasted away, first one wing-flea dying, then a second, till one morning not even the blows of the club could rouse the team from its apathy.

  As the brother Zog was belabouring the exhausted, starving Buck, there came a cry of anger from the forest.

  “If you strike that flea again, I’Il kill you!”

  Thus Buck, who by now had little love for Zogs as a species, met the one Zog whom he would love with wild abandon.

  This Zog was called Thorgon.

  Nevertheless, as Buck crouched by Thorgon’s fire a month later, once more a strong and healthy flea, he found himself dreaming back, far back, to a time before the generations of the circus, to a time long before the age of the domestic dog, back to a time when there were only untamed wolves, and beyond that still to a primeval time when his remote ancestors had been dinosaur fleas, riding Tyrannosaurus Rex into battle—shortly before the dinosaurs had crashed to the ground and the first flea of his line had leapt on to an inconspicuous furry little mammal on the forest floor and tasted hot blood all year round, and all day long.

  Fierce as his passion for Thorgon was, it only eclipsed and could not extinguish this other passion that had stirred in him first when he killed Saliva: the yearning to be free and wild as his ancestors on Earth had once been—the primal urge to become a feral flea himself.

  Thorgon would call. Buck would open his dozing eyes—upon Zoggish reality.

  Then Thorgon would chest-tumble Buck affectionately and Buck would nip Thorgon’s finger-tentacles fiercely enough to leave creases in them—but Thorgon knew that this was a love-bite.

  Came the day the following year when Thorgon breezed into a bar in Roundtown. Dozens of Zogs were sucking up trufflejuice from bowls and squirting it down their throats. Clubtrunk, a malicious Zog, dipped his trunk into Thorgon’s bowl and sprayed him in the eyes—whereupon Buck flew at Clubtrunk’s throat, nipping it till he was hauled away.

  “Your flea’s bitten me!” cried Clubtrunk. But a ‘netters’ meeting’, called on the spot, decided that Buck had been provoked; and his fame as a loyal flea began to spread.

  Came the day when Buck saved Thorgon from a whole pack of wolf-fleas, supporting all the injured Zog’s weight upon his own back as he jumped him out of danger.

  Came the day when Thorgon, drunk on Buck’s fame and on trufflejuice, boasted that his flea could leap a whole net unaided over the roofs of Nosewad City—what’s more, a net already loaded with a hundred truffles.

  The odds were three to one against, even though one of the spectators, after feeling Buck’s fine thruster muscles, offered a thousand truffles for the flea just as he stood.

  A net was piled with truffles, and Buck was harnessed in the traces. For a whole minute Thorgon embraced Buck, nuzzling the flea’s head with his own head, cursing him lovingly. Then he stood off.

  And Buck leapt.

  The assembled Zogs forgot to breathe as the great net soared upwards from the street.

  “Gad, sir!” spluttered the Zog who had admired Buck’s muscles, as the net sank out of sight over the roofs of Nosewad. “There never was such a flea before! I’ll give twelve hundred for him, gladly.”

  Thorgon was weeping and cursing with the love of Buck. “No, sir. You can go to the Earth, sir, and be damned.”

  Chapter Seven: The Leap into the Wild

  THORGON’S WINNINGS PROVIDED him with sufficient funds to realise the great ambition of his life. For somewhere far to the north of Richclouds, way out in the mountainous wilderness where tribes of savage Zogs still roamed, was believed to be a hidden valley which was the truffles’ birthyard—the motherlode of all truffles. Other Zogs, too, had dreamed of finding that valley, and all had failed in the attempt.

  Buying a team of strong fleas, whom Buck soon bit into shape, and loading the balloon-sled with sacks of dried blood and a fine strong net, Thorgon set out.

  They wandered for months. Sometimes they pressed on, almost nonstop, for days on end in vain pursuit of the source of some particularly dense stream of truffles floating overhead. Sometimes they camped for a whole week.

  At times when they camped, while Thorgon fished for zamn with his trunk, sucking his catch ashore—some to satisfy his immediate Zoggish hunger, others to dry or smoke for the next stage of the journey—Buck would blink by the campfire. And in the firelight the vision of a wilder world, on which his ancestors had ridden wolves and dinosaurs, asserted itself ever more clearly.

  Then Buck would rouse himself and leap away from the camp, over hill, down dale, sometimes into the very clouds, only returning after a whole day of jumping through the wilderness. Buck did not know why he did these things, but do them he must.

  One day, ranging far out, and high in the sky, Buck saw a female wolf-flea beneath him. He pursued her playfully as she tried to escape. No wolf-flea was as large as Buck. No wolf-flea could compete with him in leaping. Eventually she panted, exhausted, up against a cliff. Buck hopped to her in a friendly way, for he meant her no harm. As soon as she realised that he did not intend to suck her dry, they leapt together. Hanging on to a floating truffle, they supped. Jumping, they sailed through the sky to another truffle.

  Only reluctantly, and after a long time, did Buck heed his greater love—of Thorgon. He leapt back to camp and stayed at the Zog’s heels for days, watching every move he made, adoring him. But he had heard the call now, like a song from the sky.

  Finally, Buck leapt away again. Into the sky. Bounce. And over a hill. Up to a drifting truffle. On through a cloud to another truffle. …

  Buck’s body was in ecstasy. He was a flea tuned to the utmost physical peak. And from that peak, in the sky, he looked down on the wide world—as once he had looked down on the vanquished Saliva—and found it good.

  This time Buck was away for several days. When he jumped back at last, it was to find a trail of dead fleas with feathered arrows sticking through their bodies. Two of the team—the sub-leader and a wing-flea—had obviously put up a fight; their mouths were red with blood.

  A noise of howling and stamping came to his ears from where the camp had been. Hopping into a tree, Buck saw a band of twenty Zog savages dancing around Thorgon’s dead body. They were able to dance, since they were leaner and lighter than a civilised Zog, having no nets to trap large numbers of truffles.

  What happened next became part of legend. Fury blinded Buck to caution. Like an arrow himself, he flew straight through the air at the throat of the chief of the savage Zogs, tearing it out in one bite. Without pausing to suck a single drop of blood, he was on to the next savage, and the next—and they were dead too.

  Buck’s leaps were so speedy and so short that the savages had no chance of bringing him down with an arrow, though two savages shot each other in
the attempt.

  They fled. And Buck pursued them with contemptuous ease. He even allowed a single survivor to escape; and this survivor was to spread an awful warning, of the Evil Flea who had destroyed a whole hunting party, in a certain valley which would be avoided by all savage Zogs for ever more.

  His vengeance completed, Buck jumped swiftly back to Thorgon’s side. Lovingly he nipped his tentacles in farewell. Then he nudged the body down-slope into a pond so that no wolf-fleas should feast on his dead master. Thorgon lay heavily on the bottom of the pool, only his trunk rising up to the surface, beaded with bubbles of air.

  For an hour Buck drank from the savages he had killed.

  Then he leapt high into the air, heavy though he was with blood. He leapt so high it seemed he might have landed on a star. For he had killed Zog, the noblest prey of all.

  As he was coming down, a pack of wolf-fleas jumped into the valley, attracted by the scent of blood. As soon as he landed, they challenged him—and very soon the pack leader lay dead and the other wolf-fleas were licking each other’s wounds.

  From their midst hopped the very same wolf-flea that he had jumped with on that madly restless day not so long ago. She bent her neck beneath his mouth, and when he had nipped her once, accepting her homage, she threw back her head and howled at the three moons.

  The whole pack howled in chorus, and Buck howled loudest of them all (though a flea howl is not very loud, except to other fleas). The only surviving Zog was far away by now, but a spectator would have seen all the fleas dance, then, leaping time and again towards those ivory moons.

  At last, led now by Buck, the pack jumped out of the valley. And with that leader’s leap, away from the watery grave of the Zog he had loved almost beyond sanity, Buck Flea was free. And wild.

  In future years, even though every savage Zog kept well clear of the Valley of the Evil Flea (to which Buck alone returned, once a year in the springtime), their camps would be cunningly raided and their lookouts left drained of their blood, with flea dirt all around them.

  Sometimes the savages would see, leaping through the distant sky, one flea larger than any wolf-flea jumping higher than they could have believed possible. They would pull their trunks in and shuffle all four feet in fear.

  The Artistic Touch

  “HERE IS ONE Chaos.”

  Rollo Tustian offered a white egg-shaped object to the alien Procurator. In the fat end of the eggshell was a lens.

  The Procurator of Artistic Licence was a nimble, six-armed creature who resembled a large speckled crab. In common with all her race she had no legs, only arms. Accepting the offering in her fore-pincers, she squeezed it very gently. It felt far less fragile than an egg.

  Shutting her two ordinary eyes, she squinted through the lens with her third, artistic eye. At first she sensed great depth, into which she could fall for ever and for ever; and then she sensed no depth at all, as though there was only a two-dimensional skin of slime inside. Or a flat mist: the colour of nausea. Exactly what that colour was, she couldn’t decide.

  Puzzled, she returned the object.

  Tustian dropped it back into the pouch slung from his belt. Rummaging, he produced another ‘egg’, this one with a silver shell.

  “And here’s a different Chaos.”

  The Procurator squinted inside this one, too, but it looked identical. Perhaps. Feeling mildly sick, she shut her third eye and returned the egg to Tustian.

  And shrugged all three right shoulders.

  “I see no difference. They’re like the insides of rotten eggs, whisked up. Or like something underwater, in a foetid pond.”

  “Neither egg nor water, Procurator. Each shell contains a Chaos.”

  The Procurator picked at her mouth gristle with a claw.

  “But how can Chaos be a subject for art? Chaos is where there is no pattern—and art is a pattern-making process.” She gestured at the silver ovoid. “There’s nothing to experience.”

  “Ah, the art world has always reacted with a shiver of disgust to the truly new. Take the case of the Impressionists on Earth. They—”

  “I’m familiar with your art history, Tustian.”

  “Well, the art authorities couldn’t see the new pattern. They only saw ugliness. But this” and Tustian dropped the silver ovoid back into his pouch, “is something quite different—because there is no new pattern to be seen. None at all. Only Chaos. Different brands of Chaos. And this is my art. I create a genuine physical Chaos, and bind it in a shell.”

  The Procurator shrugged, using just one shoulder. The man was simply a hoaxer. He had managed to hoodwink patrons among his own species, and now he hoped to fool an alien species—one moreover noted for its rich aesthetic sensibility, due to that third, aesthetic eye. Presumably he regarded this as a challenge.

  If these things were Chaos, in the literal sense—which was impossible—then they couldn’t be any different from each other, as he claimed. How could one compare one chaos with another? Disorder couldn’t be compared with disorder. Chaos couldn’t have a plural.

  Those things were just rotten eggs. And Rollo Tustian was a smooth-talking charlatan.

  True, he was bold …

  Here he perched, up in her work node at a very high point of Great Web with thousands of hands of space beneath him—space cross-hatched by hundreds of strands of the city web, knotting periodically into studios, nipple points, office nests, hatcheries, playpens, aerial amphitheatres, music mazes; and every where, high and far, deep and yonder, hung and climbed and scuttled the People of the Web, six-armed legless beings with two ordinary eyes and a third eye which beheld beauty.

  Great Web filled up all the valley space between two mountain ranges to a depth of a full mile. To the east, beyond a pass, was the spaceport and aliens’ town, linked by an offshoot of the Web. Few aliens felt really at home in the Web, unless they were bird-forms or natural acrobats. Yet Rollo Tustian had ascended nonchalantly, never once losing his way nor his balance …

  One segment of Western Web shimmered with live-silk tapestry; another glinted with scintillations of thinly-blown glass. Chiming allegros came from the music maze beneath. Dancers festooned another volume of space; that dance had been going on for six years now, with artistes dropping in and dropping out, and still the maypole ballet pattern wasn’t complete. Elsewhere, whole crystallised configurations of the web were alive with all the lights of the spectrum …

  Fifty cubic miles of Great Web, dedicated to beauty!

  And one human being, with sickly little view-shells in his pouch.

  “Those things aren’t, by any chance, images of hyperspace which you made on the way here?”

  “Of course not! Hyperspace has a definite structure—or else there’d be no way through it from world to world. I repeat: each is a genuine Chaos.”

  “How kind of you to choose our world for your gallery.” The Procurator’s tone was sarcastic.

  Tustian simply laughed.

  “No choice of mine, I assure you! I boarded the first ship I came to, when the spirit moved me. For all I knew, it might have been heading right out of the galaxy.”

  “You arrived here at random? By chance?”

  “As random as Chaos, Procurator.”

  “How very remarkable that chance should have led you to perhaps the most famous of all worlds which patronise the arts!”

  The man jiggled his pouch, knocking the shells together.

  “Ah, but you see: there’s such a power of Chaos in here. The orderly universe inevitably thrusts me to the most convenient and appropriate place, to compensate for this. That’s how my career has proceeded by leaps and bounds. How do you suppose I found my way up here today so effortlessly, without even asking directions? Dear Procurator, the universe has to counterbalance what I create by giving me the most non-random of lucky breaks. Always. My next great conquest awaits me here, inevitably. Because I am here, rather than somewhere else.”

  “I would think that the universe could safe
ly ignore your activities.”

  “Ah, it dare not—and remain an orderly universe where the laws of physics apply throughout.” Rollo Tustian leaned forward precariously, holding on by one casual fingertip, as though daring the web to let him fall. Holding on with two left hands, the Procurator watched him nervously.

  “The patrons of my art,” said Tustian lightly, “all experience this same phenomenon, once they own a Chaos of their own.”

  “They find everything organised for their express benefit? They experience supremely good fortune? Ah, so those things are really lucky charms: amulets which somehow compel good luck!”

  “They work, Procurator, because the universe organises itself tightly around them to prevent what is inside from breaking out and spreading.”

  “Then you don’t need an artist’s licence. You need a sorcerer’s licence! Get yourself back down to the Sector of Superstitions over in aliens’ town, and apply there.”

  Tustian shook his head.

  “It is art. And it works best upon connoisseurs and artists—because, as you say, they organise beautiful patterns.”

  “Oh, now I see. We simply commission a lot of these things to hang in our Great Web, and as a natural reaction against Chaos we will succeed ever more perfectly in the pursuit of beauty? In that case, you have no art of your own. You’re a parasite.”

  “I am a catalyst … of beauty, order, perfection.”

  “And if I say no?”

  “Well, since I’m here now … I may tell you that there’s a limit to the amount of luck, serendipity and perfection that I can soak up myself. Yet an artist has to create—it’s like breathing, isn’t it? And I happen to create Chaos. Without patrons to absorb the beauty which the universe binds round my creations—why, that Chaos will spill over.”

  “Oh, so we’re obliged to patronise you, and admire your blessed eggshells, or else you’ll put a blight of ugliness upon us?”

  “Of disorder. I’m not threatening you, you understand? /didn’t ask to come here. I simply stepped on board the first ship—which of course was heading towards the centre of artistic organisation. The universe sensed that you could best marshal the beautiful order, to baffle my disorder.”