Sunstroke: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  The Procurator wrenched at her carapace, to massage the flesh beneath. She had an itch. Really, she should flip this man from the web for his impertinence. He should fall to his death.

  Yet somehow, she thought, he wouldn’t. And maybe his eggs would break. Or whatever they were.

  “So the possession of Chaos forces one to perceive more and more pattern to existence,” she mused. “I’m not actually considering granting you a licence—”

  “Ah, but you will. Within the hour,” said Tustian confidently.

  “Yet on the other hands,” she went on, waggling a few, “it might be an amusing frivolity: a dash of discord to set off the supreme harmonies of our web.”

  Tustian smiled.

  “Not so supreme as all that, or the universe wouldn’t have sent me here.” He gazed out across Great Web in the direction of the mirror sculpture sector where waterfalls of light cascaded, ever shifting, more splendid than any water or flower garden in nature. “There’s room for improvement, I’d say. There’s space for much more beauty.”

  The Procurator hardly hid her chagrin and offence.

  “Just how do you put Chaos into these shells, preposterous man?”

  Tustian chose his words.

  “Call mine a psi-talent if you will—but would you ask a musician to describe a tune, so that its tunefulness is apparent? Within me, I sing disorder: the disorder of the infinite set of Chaos out of which the universe randomly occurred. But it isn’t a song. It is no-song.”

  The Procurator waved all six arms at him, almost losing her balance.

  “Art is a godly, creative act!”

  “Yet Chaos creates your God-universe, where the standards of art apply. Among the infinities of Chaos, one Chaos became so utterly disorderly through random flux that it was no longer chaotic at all: it was this universe, of life. It was bound to happen some time. Oh, the universe is God, randomly born, tied in a loop from beginning to end like a snake giving birth to itself, but this artistic God is only singular. Whereas Chaos is plural. I am the voice of Chaos.”

  “So you’re greater than God and the universe? Yet you lay tiny rotten eggs.”

  “Tiny, in the way you see them. Actually, each one surrounds the universe, from within.”

  The Procurator held on tight. She felt paralysed.

  “I judge,” she said numbly, “that you would be far better occupied laying your eggs here, than roaming wild among the stars. You might found an anti-religion of disorder. The frustrated artist becomes the messiah—it has happened before. Oh, we shall absorb you. Our beauty will soak up all your so-called Chaos, and show it up for what it is: emptiness, nothing at all.”

  Rollo Tustian glanced at his wrist-computer.

  “Within the hour, I said. Within the hour it is. Where do I set up my studio?”

  Sixty years later, the ageing Procurator hunched in her work node high on top of Great Web, by now merely the little inner heart of Greatest Web which covered the whole world with a deep fabric of light, beauty and splendour in all the thirty-six aesthetic modes.

  The past ten hexades had witnessed the ultimate High Renaissance of this world’s art, over which it had been her pride to preside … to begin with, and then her anxiety. And then her fear. And now her despair.

  Nowadays there was nothing but perfect art on this world, and the world was dying unawares. Nowadays the world was only supported from outside: by energy beamed from beyond the atmosphere, by foodstuffs grown off-world, by supplies manufactured elsewhere.

  And its art was locked into perfection. Deadly perfect.

  Yet only she could see how deadly perfect all this was. Petitioners wondered why she had apparently become an enemy of art, refusing new licences arbitrarily from time to time despite the most shining proof of worth. But such refusals were only drops in the ocean, and in any case she was only Procurator of Great Web. One’s work could find favour elsewhere.

  Nevertheless, a queue of applicants wound down the web, awaiting an audience. Great Web was still the prestige place to work.

  Surefootedly, queue-jumping them all, came a human.

  It was many hexades since she had last seen Rollo Tustian. The fact that he was still alive did not particularly amaze her, since her own species was relatively long-lived—yet surely he should have altered in appearance? By now her own shell was the dark walnut hue of the Fall of Life, and would soon be turning jet-black.

  “You look exactly the same,” she said, bewildered, doing nothing to scoot him back down to the tail of the queue. In fact, the sight of him looking so youthful—or, at least, identical with what he had been—reminded her yearningly of the time, hexades ago, when all had been well with the world.

  Rollo Tustian chuckled.

  “It must be a lucky diet for me, here. Or maybe it’s the abundance of so much beauty! I told you there was room for improvement, didn’t I?” But then he looked sad. “That isn’t so, any longer, Procurator. The sponge is full. It can’t soak up any more. I must move on, or my mind and body will suffer from disorder. So I came to say goodbye.”

  “Beauty has beaten you at last—driven you away. Thank Beauty, for that!”

  “Not at all. You don’t even believe that yourself. Oh, I’ve heard of your eccentric, spasmodic attempts to stem the tide. We once had a king on Earth called King Canute.”

  “You devil. Why did you come here to destroy us?”

  Tustian gestured out across the dazzle of Great Web. His arm circled the horizon. Greatest Web began in all directions, entirely covering the mountains, growing across the whole land surface of the world, on and on. Beyond where the eastern mountains were once visible, a constant stream of shuttle craft ascended and descended, bringing in food concentrates and the raw materials for more art. The People of the Web were obsessed blindly by beauty.

  “How could you possibly call all this ‘destruction’?” he asked her ironically.

  “But it is.”

  He nodded wistfully.

  “How many examples of Chaos have you made here?” she demanded.

  “Six hundred and sixty odd. This world has been my oyster. I have been its irritant. And here are the wonderful pearls. It’s time for me to leave, before I become irritated myself.”

  “You don’t need any exit visa from me.”

  “No, but I need someone to say goodbye to. Someone who knows.”

  “So where will you go?”

  “I’ve heard of a Beautyworld somewhere in Ursa Major, where they sculpt the living environment itself. Perhaps I shall go there. The first ship out will carry me in the right direction—I feel it in my bones.”

  And without another word he went skipping down the web.

  The Procurator drew herself up painfully and stared across Great Web for a long time, sick with the beauty of it.

  At last, clasping all three sets of hands across her undershell, she let herself fall down, down, down.

  She had, as they put it among the People, lost her grip.

  A century later a solitary space yacht hove into orbit for a while around the world of the aesthetically inclined People of the Web. Under viewer magnification the world was a wonderful confection. It was also uninhabited.

  “Perfection is Chaos,” announced Tustian to the flight recorder. He owned his own yacht now. It went, at random, where he chose.

  He took a blue shell equipped with a lens, held it to his eye and began to will Chaos to form inside it. And of course Chaos had no form. Yet it was a new and different Chaos, for all that.

  There was only one universe. Even though it was a dauntingly large universe, it could not hold out for ever. Tustian was a patient person.

  On impulse he took the newly-completed Chaos over to the disposal chute. He ejected it out into space, down towards the surface of the world. He didn’t imagine it would burn up or burst on impact—there was too much pressure of loveliness down there.

  He shook his head in mild annoyance.

  “Gilding the lily, th
at’s all!”

  Yet he felt sentimental about his many decades—or local hexades—on that world.

  Later, the yacht pulled out of orbit and set course towards some other world which would give Tustian a further lease of life—and be repaid with the Midas gift: the perfect artistic touch.

  The World Science Fiction Convention of 2080

  WHAT A GATHERING! Four hundred people—writers, fans and both magazine editors—have made their way successfully to these sailcloth marquees outside the village of New Boston.

  We know of another three people who didn’t make it, and the opening ceremony includes a brief ‘In Memoriam’ tribute to each of them, followed by one minute’s silence for all. For Kurt Rossini, master of heroic fantasy—slain by an Indian arrow on his way from far California. For Suzie McIntosh, whose amusing woodcuts (sent down by trade caravan from Moose Jaw last summer season) adorn the programme booklet—killed by a wolf pack outside of Winnipeg. And for our worst loss, lovely Charmian Jones, acclaimed Queen of Titan in the masquerade at the last Worldcon three years ago in Tampa, whose miniature is worn close to many a fan’s heart from the Yukon to Florida Bay—murdered by Moslem pirates during a kidnap raid on Charleston while she was passing through. (Could she have survived seraglio life in North Africa, and even become a bit of a queen there? No! Cut off from the slow percolation of fandom’s lifeblood? Never! She defended her honour bravely with a short sword, and died.)

  Some dozen others with attending memberships haven’t arrived, either. We hope that they’re just late—held up by contrary winds or a broken wagon axle. No doubt we will learn in six months or so when their personalzines travel the trade routes.

  In the bar tent, around the still, at the ox roast, and in the art tent with its fine embroideries and batiks based on the Old Masters Delany, Heinlein, Le Guin, we greet old friends and colleagues and swap our travel tales. And I thought that my own journey from South Scotland on foot, on horseback, by canal longboat, and finally for five weeks by sailship across the stormy Atlantic (our mortars loaded against raiders) was eventful enough! But compared to some of the others’ experiences mine was a cake run: Indians, Badlands, outlaw bands, mercenaries, pietist communities that close around one like a Venus fly trap, Army Induction Centres, plague zones, technophile citadels! I was even two and a half weeks early and managed to arrive with the manuscript of a new novel in my knapsack, penned on the sailship in between working my passage, all ready for bartering to ‘Monk’ Lewiston, head of Solaris Press of Little New York.

  The new novel is called The Aldebaran Experience and is about a starship journey from the Luna Colony through metaspace to an alien planet orbiting Aldebaran. It is, though I say it myself, an ambitious exercise in what the critic Suvin once called ‘cognitive estrangement’—but one can’t really convey the breadth of the book in a couple of lines; besides, here isn’t the place—though I did appear on a foreign writers’ panel to discuss my own by now well-known earlier novel The Film-Maker’s Guide to Alien Actors (Neogollancz Press, Edinburgh) dating from only four years ago. (Ah, the speed of publication and distribution in our SF world!)

  On this panel, along with me, were the Frenchman Henri Guillaume, whose tale of mighty computerised bureaucracy and subjective time distortions, The Ides of Venus, is still winning acclaim for its originality—a definite step beyond the Old French Masters, Curval and Jeury; and the Mexican Gabriel Somosa—an exciting encounter; and my fellow islander Jeremy Symons, whom I last met in the flesh at our biennial thrash Gypsycon ’77 all the way down in Devon—his The Artificial Man had been a hot contender for this year’s Hugo award ever since the nominations started trickling along the trade routes and over the ocean two years ago.

  But I should describe the highlights of this wonderful get-together under cloth in New Boston. Frankly, that panel was rather ho-hum. Poor Jeremy had come down with some allergy working in the bilges, which affected his throat, and his voice would hardly carry to the back of the marquee. …

  Highlights, then: The Film. Yes, indeed, as advertised in the flyer a year ago, a film had been found! And what a film. Craftsmen built a hand-cranked projector whose light source was the sun itself, focused by an ingenious system of lenses and mirrors from outside the marquee; and six times during the Boston week we stared, enthralled, at the flickerings of an original print of Silent Running, praying that rainclouds would not dim the light too much. Let me not hear any sarcasm about the appropriateness of the title, since no way could anyone activate a soundtrack. We were all enchanted.

  The Auction: oh, this was an experience. There was an Ace Double on sale! And an original SF Book Club edition of a Larry Niven collection. And, yellow and brittle with age, issues 250 to 260 inclusive of Locus. As well as much interesting and historic stuff from our own early post-Collapse era, such as a copy of a handwritten scroll novel (from just before we got hand presses cranking again) by the great Tessa Brien—part of her Jacthar series. The copies of Locus went in exchange for a fine Pinto pony—the Alabaman who bid his mount for them was quite happy to walk all the way home. But the Ace Double (Phil Dick’s Dr Futurity backed by The Unteleported Man) went for a slim bar of gold.

  Then there was the Solaris Press party where Henri Guillaume, high on Boston applejack, attempted to dance the can-can, endearing himself to everyone—a few quick sketches were ‘snapped’ of this, and there was even a watercolour for barter by the next morning.

  And The Banquet, of spiced rabbit stew, followed by … The Hugo Awards: the carved beech wood rocketships for the best work in our field over the three years ’75 to ’78. First, for the best fanzine, scooped by Alice Turtle’s Call of the Wild from New Chicago; then for the best story in either of the bi-annual magazines Jupiter or Fantasy, won by Harmony Friedlander for her moving Touchdown’ in Jupiter four years ago; and finally the Jong-awaited novel Hugo, going to Boskon’s Guest of Honour, Jerry Meltzer (as expected, by everyone except Jeremy Symons!), for his cosmos-spanning Whither, Starman?

  But I think it is Jerry Meltzer’s Guest of Honour speech that I shall most treasure the memory of. The speech was entitled, ‘Some Things Do Not Pass’. From the very beginning of it I was riveted, reinvigorated, and felt my life reaffirmed.

  Jerry is pushing sixty now, which is quite a miracle now that the average life-expectancy is down to forty or so. He has lost an ear to frostbite and wears a coonskin cap at all times to cover his mutilation. He’s a raftsman on the Missouri.

  Surveying the marquee full of four hundred faces, he smiled—wisely, confidently. He spoke slowly.

  “Some things do not pass. Some things increase in truth and beauty. Science Fiction is one of these. I say this because Science Fiction is a fiction: it is a making, a forging of the legends of our tribe, and the best legends of all humanity. Now that research and probing have ceased”—he grinned dismissively—“we can indeed freshly and freely invent our science and our worlds. SF was always being spoilt, having her hands tied and the whip cracked over her head by scientific facts. They’re gone now—most of those blessed facts, about quarks and quasars and I don’t know what!—and there won’t be any more! It’s all mythology now, friends. SF has come into her own, and we who are here today, we know this. Friends, we’re Homers and Lucians once again—because science is a myth, and we’re its mythmakers. Mars is ours again, and Saturn is, and Alpha C—and lovely Luna. We can read the Grand Masters of yore in a light that the poor folk of the Late Twentieth could never read them in! I say to you, Some Things Do Not Pass. Their loveliness increases. Now we can make that mythic loveliness wilder and headier and more fabulous than ever. This is the true meaning of my Whither, Starman?”

  He spoke till the Con Committee lit the whale-oil flambeaux in the tent, and then he talked some more. At the end he was chaired shoulder-high out into the meadow underneath the stars. And just then, what must have been one of the very last dead satellites from the old days streaked across the sky like a comet tail, burning up as it plung
ed towards the Atlantic to drown fathoms deep. Maybe it was only an ordinary shooting star—but I don’t think so. Nor did anyone else. Four hundred voices cheered its downfall, as Jerry threw back his head and laughed.

  With a gesture he quietened the crowd. “My friends,” he called out, “we really own the stars now. We really do. Never would have done, the other way. Dead suns, dead worlds the lot of them, I shouldn’t be surprised—dead universe. Now Sirius is ours. Canopus is. The dense suns of the Hub are all ours. All.” His hand grasped at the sky. It gripped the Milky Way, and we cheered again.

  Two mornings later, after many perhaps overconfident goodbyes—“See you in ‘83!”—I walked down into New Boston to the harbour along with my compadre Jeremy—who was somewhat hung over and weaved about at times—to take ship next week or the week after for Liverpool. I wouldn’t need to work my passage back, though. I’d bartered The Aldebaran Experience to ‘Monk’ Lewiston for a bundle of furs, much in demand in our cold island.

  In a year or so I’ll receive my free copy, hand-printed in Solaris Press’s characteristic heavy black type, by way of some sheep drove up through the Borders. If Monk is fast in getting it out and the trade routes are kind, who knows, it might just get on the ballot for ‘83—to be voted at the fishing village of Santa Barbara, way across the Plains and Deserts and Badlands.

  Can I possibly make it to Santa Barbara? Truth to tell, I can hardly wait. After this year’s wonderful thrash, I’ll be on the sailship—and I’ll board those stagecoaches, come Hell or high water.

  I nudged Jeremy in the ribs.

  “We own the stars,” I said. “You and I.”

  Sunstroke

  THE EXPLODING FLASK seared my face, and I am blind. That was forty-three days ago, now.

  Physician, heal thyself? I surely could, if we had an organ bank on board. I could warm up a new pair of eyes out of liquid nitrogen, and programme the operating table. But nobody back at Luna Base expected that I would need to replace whole organs—any more than they included a warehouse of spare parts for our Lyrebird. Spare capacity is built into the ship: backup systems, fault analysis. Alas, spare capacity isn’t built into human beings. I can’t see through my fingertips or the end of my nose.