Watson, Ian - SSC (13 page)

 
          
So
I, Hiroko Chiyoda, had little difficulty making my way up the Narrow Road to
the Deep North, as did the poet Basho before me: through the Tohoku Region,
across Hokkaido island, then on to Russian Sakhalin with its densely-wooded
southlands and bleak northern tundra; thence by fishing boat across the Sea of
Okhotsk to the city of Okhotsk itself (though Basho never came so far).

 
          
There
in
Okhotsk
sadly I had to linger a long time working
in a grim Russian beerhall (or Peev-noy
Bar
as they call them).
Earning my living other ways too.
Yet always thinking of Love, whatever! The War to our westward was followed by
nuclear explosions in the Arctic Ocean. Maybe the Other Russians were trying to
blast their way through the Wall in retreat? Nobody really knew. But as
radioactivity spread through all the East Siberian Sea, travel was forbidden;
and I would have to wait for the radiation to disperse before I went further
north. I thought: if radiation can penetrate the Wall, so can the outpourings
of Love! Over the next few years I almost became a native of Okhotsk, except
that I never could forget the Stendhalian “pursuit of happiness”. I, Japanese
Hiroko, dwelling in Okhotsk among rough seamen, an amorous egoist biding my
time, yearning for my soulmate . . .

 
          
After
his year in the Ruhr factories producing machine tools, Obi Nzekwu succeeded in
being transferred to the meteorological station on the island of Spitsbergen,
thanks to his knowledge of trigonometry; and shivered through one long winter,
till, on a late spring morning, as migrating birds settled down to land from
Sweden and points south, he stole a plane equipped with skis instead of wheels
and headed forbidden- north . . .

 
          
At
last travel became possible again and Hiroko Chiyoda, through her connections
with a certain Party dignitary in Okhotsk (and fluent now in Russian) became
cateress on a Soviet icebreaker stationed, somewhat impotently, in the estuary
of the Indigirka River facing Arctic waters. The
Marshal Grechko
was of the latest design (of seven years previous),
with helicopter and spotter plane on board.

 
          
The
Western War had seemingly ended in a stalemate, with Korea reunified from the
North, the Chinese occupying the whole Khamorovsk area as far north as the Amur
River, and Greater Japan helping the shattered Soviet hold the line to the
north of them, while in the far south, with the help of the Darwin Australians,
she was building overspill cities along the Timor Sea. (These suppositions she
gleaned from her friend in the Party, just before joining the
Marshal Grechko
.)

 
          
Six
months later, while they were cruising north of Faddeyev Island, having
familiarized herself with the workings of a spotter plane and even flown out
over the sea once with the Lieutenant-Navigator who’d become her new ami, she
took off at dawn, alone, humming a lullaby about a cat.

           
The pursuit of happiness possessed
her once more.

 
          
Something
was black, at last, in the distance in all this white of ice. A spot, no more,
at first, so that Obi rubbed his aching eyes doubtfully, afraid it was an
illusion brought about by staring too long. Then he sensed the closing in of
the great Barriers on either side—sensed, more than saw, at first. Air pressure
rose sharply and there was sudden turbulence—resistance, even, from the sky.
Soon auroral effects were visible in a V-shaped wedge ahead, and he actually
saw the translucent sky- high walls tinted with a faint blush of rose, a hint
of violet,
a cellophane
amber. However the plane was
bucking and yawning too dangerously to trust it any further. Taking a last hard
look at the (by now) black cone, he set his machine down on to the snowfields,
bumping and bouncing over ridges to a halt. When he climbed out, he could still
see the cone, but illusion twisted it into a tiny black man’s face seen through
the wrong end of a telescope, set in an immense bundle of white clothing. It
wouldn’t come clear. He couldn’t judge distance properly so that it could have
been any way away or any size. Besides, those auroras were playing tricks with
the periphery of his vision, spooks lurking in an invisible forest behind
glass trees whose height was awesome. He felt scared, but set out, goggled and
wrapped—the air pressure mounting, forcing cold oxygen into his
lungs, that
at least invigorated him.

 
          
Obi
passed one ditched, abandoned airplane, then another. Snow had drifted over
them, hiding them, and he wondered why it hadn’t hidden that black cone
similarly. Scooping snow off the wing of a plane, he watched it wander back
along the ground as though magnetized. How many ridges and hummocks hid
vehicles of one sort or another, camouflaged by snow?

 
          
Doesn’t
the Polar ice-cap float on the sea beneath? Doesn’t it swing round slowly?
Shouldn’t these planes have drifted south (for everywhere was south from
here)—in some direction or other? Were the Barriers holding the ice-cap locked
in place?

 
          
He
wondered, but came up with no answers except that the black thing ahead must be
the Alien Apparatus.
The Doomsday Device.
The Machine.

 
          
It
was a full cone intruding upon all the Barriers.

 
          
Yet
its base looked so irregular: indented and uneven.

 
          
Segmented
too, a set of rough wedges arranged in a circle.
The top half
of a black fruit, broken up and put together again carelessly, with gaps.

 
          
A Machine?

 
          
Why
not? Why assume that all machines have to be gleaming steel and aluminium?

 
          
But
then Obi saw what the mound was.

 
          
Bodies.

 
          
Piled up fifty feet above the snow.

 
          
A separate wedge for each segment where the Barriers converged.

 
          
Bodies.
That had scrambled over each other, to reach through
and made a pyramid of
themselves
.

 
          
Bodies, which the snow left alone.

 
          
Obi
touched one with his gloved hand. It came away covered with a fine black grit.
The body was frozen hard. Even its clothes were sheets of steel. He tugged at
it, to see its face, but it was too tightly locked to all the others that had
climbed the slope before it—and, indeed, become the slope.

 
          
Cautiously,
Hiroko set foot on the forty-five degree incline of rigid, gritty corpses.
Whatever fate had overtaken them, she was sure would spare her. The cone shape
reminded her so strongly of Mount Fuji, and even the black ash covering it was
so reminiscent of a miniature Fuji, that she felt an instant surge of affinity
with the mound, as if it belonged to her, had been waiting for her steps alone.

 
          
Something
had electrocuted them. Something had shocked them to death. Something that
deposited this volcanic grit as a byproduct . . .

 
          
She
climbed to the summit.

 
          
And
there found a man whose face was black standing looking at her.

 
          
She
thought he’d just been killed—electrocuted, blackened—and hadn’t fallen yet.
Then he grinned at her, and she realized that he was
Love:
the black prince of her quest.

 
          
He
said something. His lips moved but she heard nothing. His hands gestured that
he couldn’t hear her, either. Impatiently, both people thrust their way into
the final shimmery gap where all the segments met.

 
          
She
felt her shoulders pinched; had to turn sideways, to force her way a little
further. The glassy walls pressed painfully on her chest and back.

 
          
He
too elbowed towards her strenuously, like someone swimming through thick jelly.
Reaching out his hand to her.

 
          
Abruptly,
briefly, both people seemed to become pseudopods—protoplasm flowing out, and
through each other’s streams. There was a twisting lurch of the guts. An
instant in which his heart brushed
hers,
and their
heartbeats meshed.

           
Then, a moment of discontinuity and
she found herself standing with her back to him, staring down the far side of
the cone.

 
          
At
the same instant as Hiroko, Obi swung round crazily. Both stared horrified
across the glassy gap that still separated them.

 
          
She
started screaming at him. In Japanese, Russian, English, French. He howled
English and Ibo and German at her. They only heard the noise of their own
voices.

 
          
Already
the walls were shimmering and squeezing at them. Air pressure became
intolerable: an irresistible pillow forcing them back down the body mountain,
to lose sight . . .

 
          
Obi
ran far out on to the snow fields: far enough out to be able to see past the
cone to the far side, where she should be by now. He halted, ice aching in his
lungs. Only the cone and the white field round it were visible: no sign of any
Japanese girl. He waited half an hour—an hour—till he had to walk away, or
freeze.

 
          
He
fled through the curiously magnetic snow, hunting for a buried airplane or
snowmobile, wondering what segment of the world he was in now . . .

 
          
Hiroko
had halted near the base of Mount Fuji. Taking her gloves off, she numbly
fumbled a cigarette lighter from her pocket.

 
          
So
electric, the air! So tinder dry! So combustible!

 
          
She
flicked the lighter . . .

 
          
The
Walls shimmered briefly—acquiescently, appreciatively.

 
          
Adrian
Rosen returned from Thibaud’s sleep laboratory with a stronger presentiment
than ever that he was about to develop cancer. He wasn’t so much anxious about
this, as simply convinced of it as a truth—and certain, too, that in some as
yet ill-defined way he was partly in control of these events about to take
place inside his body . . .

 
          
“
It’s
obsessional,” Mary Strope grieved. “You’re
receding—from me—from reality. I wish you’d give up this line of research. This
constant brooding is vile. It’s ruining you.”

 
          
“Maybe
this recession into myself is one of the onset symptoms,” Rosen meditated.
“A psychological swabbing-down and anaesthetizing before the
experience?”
He lit another of the duty-free Gitanes he’d brought back
from France and considered the burning tip. The smoke had no time to form
shapes, today. It was torn away too quickly by the breeze, which seemed to be
smoking the cigarette on his behalf—as though weather, landscape, and his own
actions concurred perfectly. The hood was down, the car open to the sky.

 
          
They
sat in silence and watched the gliders being launched off the hilltop, this
red-haired, angular woman (fiery hair sprouting upon a gawky frame, like a
match flaring) and the short burly man with heavy black-framed sunglasses
clamped protectively to his face as though he had become fragile suddenly.

 
          
The
ground fell away sharply before them, to reappear as the field-checked vale far
below. The winch planted a hundred yards to their right whined as it dragged a
glider towards it and lofted it into the up currents, to join two other gliders
soaring a mile away among the wool-pack clouds. As the club’s Land-Rover drove
out from the control caravan to retrieve the fallen cable, Rosen stared at the
directional landing arrows cut in the thin turf, exposing the dirty white
chalk—in which the ancient horse, a few miles away, was also inscribed. Beyond,
a bright orange wind-sock fluttered. Pointers . . .

 
          
“You
don’t even inhale,” Mary snapped. “You could give up overnight if you were
really worried.”

 
          
“I
know. But I won’t. I’m seeing how near a certain precipice I can edge before .
. . the lip gives way. It needn’t be lung cancer, you know. It needn’t have
anything to do with cigarettes . . .”

 
          
How
could he explain? His smoking was only metaphorical now. Cigarettes were a
clock; a pacemaker of the impending catastrophe. In fact, he was fairly sure
that it wouldn’t be a smoker’s cancer at all. But it sounded absurd whenever he
tried to explain this.

 
          
Then,
there were the dreams . . .

 
          
Rosen
stood before the blackboard in the seminar room of the Viral Cancer Research
Unit attached to St. David’s Hospital and sketched the shape of catastrophe
upon it with a stick of squeaky chalk that reminded him irresistibly of school
days and Algebra lessons . . . The difficulty he’d had at first in
comprehending x and a andb ! His childish belief that they must equal some real
number—as though it was all a secret code, and he the cryptographer! But once
presented as geometry, mathematics had become crystal clear. He’d been a
visualizer all along . . .

 
          
On
the blackboard was the cusp catastrophe of Rene Thom’s theorem: a cliff edge
folding over, then under itself, into an overhang impossible on any world with
gravity, before unfolding and flattening out again on a lower level. The shape
he’d graphed was stable in two phases: its upper state, and its lower state.
But the sinusoidal involution of the cliff would never allow a smooth
transition from the upper to the lower state; no smooth gradient of descent,
in real terms. So there had to be discontinuity between the top and the bottom
lines of the S he’d drawn—an abrupt flip from State A to State B; and that was,
mathematically speaking, a “catastrophe.”

 
          
(There
is no gravity in dreams . . .)

 
          
He
waved a cigarette at his colleagues: Mary Strope, looking bewildered but
defiant; Oliver Hart wearing a supercilious expression; Senior Consultant
Daniel Geraghty looking frankly outraged.

 
          
“Taking
the problem in its simplest mathematical form, is this a fair representation
of the onset of cancer?” Adrian demanded.
“This abrupt discontinuity,
here?
Where we fall off the cliff—”

           
Rapping the blackboard, he tumbled
Gitanes ash and chalk dust down the cliff. The obsession with this particular
brand had taken hold of him even before his trip to France, and he’d borrowed
so many packs from the smoking room downstairs (where a machine was busily
puffing the fumes from a whole range of cigarettes into rats’ lungs) that Dr.
Geraghty complained he was sabotaging the tests and Oliver Hart suggested
flippantly that Adrian should be sent to France tout
de suite,
Thibaud-wards, if only to satisfy his new
craving ..
.                                                                             
.

 
          
“I
suggest that, instead of a progressive gradient of insult to our metabolism,
we abruptly flip from one mode to the other: from normal to malignant.
Which is perfectly explicable, and predictable, using catastrophe
theory.
Now, the immune system shares one major formal similarity with
the nervous system. It too observes and memorizes events. So if we view the
mind—the superior system—as a mathematical network, could it predict the onset
of cancer mathematically,
before
we
reach the stage of an actual cellular event, from this catastrophe curve? I
believe so.”

 
          
He
swivelled his fist abruptly so that the stick of chalk touched the blackboard,
rather than the cigarette. Yet it still looked like the same white tube. Then
he brought the chalk tip screeching from the cliff edge down to the valley
floor.

 
          
Their
eyes saw the soft cigarette make that squeal—a scream of softness. Adrian
smiled, as his audience winced in surprise.

 
          
“But
how can the mind voice its suspicions? I suggest in dreams. What are dreams
for, after all?”

           
“Data processing,” replied Oliver
Hart impatiently.
“Sorting information from the day’s
events.
Seeing if the basic programmes need modifying.
That’s generally agreed—”

 
          
“Ah,
but Thibaud believes they are more.”

 
          
Oliver
Hart was dressed in a brash green suit; to Adrian he appeared not verdant and
healthy, but coated in pond slime.

 
          
“For
example, to quote my own case, I am approaching a cancer—”

 
          
Deftly,
with slight of hand, Adrian slid the cigarette off the cliff edge this time,
amused to see how his three listeners braced themselves for a repeat squeal,
and shuddered when it didn’t come.

 
          
“I
shall have the posterior pons brain area removed in an operation. Then I can
act out my dreams as the slope steepens towards catastrophe—”

 
          
Mary
Strope caught her breath. She stared, horrified.

 
          
“Enough
of this rubbish, man!” barked Geraghty. “If this is the effect Thibaud’s
notions have on you, I can only say your visit there was a disaster for the
Unit. Would you kindly explain what twisted logic leads you to want part of
your brain cut out like one of his damn cats?
If you can!”

 
          
“If
I can . . . No, I couldn’t have it done in France itself,” reflected Adrian
obliquely. “Probably it’ll have to be in Tangier. The laws are slacker there.
Thibaud will see to the arrangements . . .”

 
          
Mary
half rose, as though to beat sense into
Adrian
; then sank back helplessly and began crying,
as Geraghty bellowed:

 
          
“This
is a disgrace! Don’t you understand what you’re talking about any more, man?
With that part of the brain destroyed there’d be no cut-off in signals to the
muscles during your dreams. You’d be the zombie of them! Sleepwalking may be
some temporary malfunction of the pons—well, sleepwalking would be nothing to
the aftermath of such an operation! Frankly, I don’t for one instant believe
Thibaud would dare carry it out on a human being. That you even imagine he
would is a sorry reflection on your state of mind! Stop snivelling, Mary!”

 
          
“Adrian’s
been overworking,” whimpered Mary apologetically, as though she was to blame
for his breakdown, whereas she had only been offering love, sympathy, comradeship.

 
          
“Then
he shall be suspended, pro tern. D’you
hear
that,
Rosen? No more waltzing off to France, making fools of us.”

 
          
“But
I shan’t be living long,”
Adrian
said simply. “You forget the cancer—”

 
          
“So
there, we have located it,” Jean-Luc Thibaud had declared proudly, “the
mechanism that stops nerve signals from the dream state being passed on as
commands to the body. Essentially the pons is a binary switching device. The
anterior part signals that dreams may now take place, while the posterior part blocks
off dream signals to the muscles . . .”

 
          
Thibaud
seemed a merry, pleasant enough fellow, with a twinkle in his eye and the habit
of raising his index finger to rub the side of his nose, as though bidding for
cattle at some country auction. His father was a farmer, Adrian remembered him
saying. And now his son farmed cats, not cattle.

 
          
“Thus
we can remain relatively limp during our nightly dance with the instinctual
genotype which psychologists so maladeptly label the unconscious mind . . .”

 
          
A hall of cats.

 
          
Each
cat was confined in its own spacious pen, the floor marked off by a bold grid
of black lines like graph paper. Lenses peered down, recording every movement
the animals made on video tape.

 
          
Most
cats were alseep, their eyes closed.

 
          
Most
cats were also on the move.
Scratching.
Spitting.
Arching their backs.
Lapping the floor.
Fleeing.
Acting
out their dreams in blind mute ritual dances of flight, rage, hunger,
sexuality ..
.

 
          
And
a few, a very few, were only dozing, not dreaming. These didn’t move. They
hadn’t drifted far enough down the sleep gradient yet. Soon they too would
rise, and pace, and fight. Soon they too would lap the floor and flee.
Till they dreamed themselves to death, from sheer exhaustion.
It was tiring work, dreaming, down on Thibaud’s cat farm.

 
          
From
each cat’s shaven skull a sheaf of wires extended to a hypermobile arm, lightly
balanced as any stereo pick-up, relaying the electrical rhythms of the brain to
be matched against this dream ballet taped by the video machines.

 
          
“And
still I am dissatisfied, M’sieur Rosen!

           
Still, we see only the genetic
messages for the most basic activities being reinforced. That’s what this is,
you realize?
A genetic reinforcement.
Errors creep in
from one cell generation to the next. Too many
errors,
and—pouf
!
An error catastrophe.
Death.
So dreams strive to reinforce the
purity of the genotype—like the athlete trying to keep himself fit by
exercises.
Dreams are error correction tapes manufactured out of each
day’s new experiences. But gradually we begin to dream out of the past, as the
years go by. Increasingly we scavenge yesteryear. Soon, we are scavenging
yesteryear’s dreams themselves— using bygone, frayed correction tapes. We lose
the capacity to make new ones. We dream vividly of childhood and it seems we
are re-entering paradise as we sleep. Alas, that’s all too true. We’re about to
leave the world, literally—for the cold clay of the cemetery.”