Watson, Ian - SSC (16 page)

 
 
          
miracle
, this atrocity, this terrible event is too small and
simply protoplasmic, too tadpolelike. Where is the amazement? Where is the
awful revelation of loss? And this is why I know now, with absolute
certainty, that
my soul does indeed swim there in the bowl.
Lost to me utterly; so utterly that not even a thread of awe or a spider’s
strand of sickness unto death can connect me to it.

 
          
Such
is the nature of real loss, irreparable total loss; no possible attachment remains.
So it is true that I am soulless; for there it is.
Just that
and no more.

 
          
While
Mary rinses plates, I sit patiently watching it as it turns, and turns,
limbless, eyeless, brainless, mouthless, turning nevertheless, occasionally
ducking and bobbing in its tepid water in the bowl.

 
          
My soul, oh my soul.

 
          
Auroras
flickered overhead: dancing spooks tricked out in rose and violet and orange
veils, only vaguely held at bay by the daylight, returning every night in
their full . . . should one say glory?—yes, it was glorious ... or rage?—yes,
it had been rageful. Every night, sheets of mocking pseudoflame put all buf the
brightest stars to flight, preluding that not so distant day of the Nebulosity
when the whole visible universe might be reduced to a few dozen light years in
volume and the art of astronomy die, except for chance glimpses through vents
in the swirling skirts of thin, bright gases.

 
          
They
rode a military halftrack driven by a soldier called Kruger, hosted by the vulgar
Major Woltjer.

 
          
“
Did not ought
to have been Sirius!” Woltjer glared over his
shoulder at the four passengers, accusing them of incompetence—though they
weren’t astronomers or physicists.

 
          
“This
here is Smitsdorp Farm we’re moving onto now.” His eyes lingered on Andrea
Diversley—pressed too tight up against the Indian geneticist, with her arm
round his waist. Such shameless affront to his Afrikaner principles in the
presence of other whites! His gaze raped and whipped the Englishwoman for it.
Yet apartheid was such an unimportant thing nowadays, when you came to think
of it!

 
          
“
Did not ought
to have been! What do you think, Miss
Diversley?”

 
          
“True,
Major
, the Dog Star played a dog’s trick on us.’’

 
          
“Well,
did it not so?”

 
          
Smitsdorp
Farm seemed to be recovering its grass cover adequately by contrast with
barrens they’d passed.
Far too adequately perhaps, here and
there.
These patches would have to be looked at later—and the soil, the
grubs, the insects, the micro-organisms. Right now, their route was towards
the low hills where some of the irradiated seeds that had been stored in the
open and sown in control strips had produced some exceptionally high yields,
but might be genetically unstable or even nutritionally undesirable.

 
          
Woltjer
tried his best to shame her into untwining from the Indian; but she only
shrugged.

 
          
“It
isn’t my field of study, Major.”

 
          
Tired
of twisting his neck round, he stared ahead over the rolling ravaged acres of a
farm that would never support grazing herds again.

 
          
“Scientists!”
he snapped.

 
          
So
what did he mean by that?
wondered
Simeon Merrick,
who was sitting behind Andrea and her Indian next to the taciturn, defensively
chauvinistic Swede, Gunnar Marholm. That sci- !
entists
of any breed whatever bore some responsibility for events in the interior of
the Dog Star?

 
          
Disaster.
Yes. But amazingly, in the event, it hadn’t been
Mankind’s doing, After so much scaremongering about nuclear warfare, the
running down of resources, overpopulation and pollution—all kinds of doom
sketched out for the nineteen eighties—disaster, when it had come (as everyone
obscurely sensed it must: that was one constant in everyone’s calculations),
came wholly unpredictably, from a source wholly external to Mankind’s affairs.

 
          
Yet
how could it be external? Was it not an illusion to think of it as external?

 
          
What
hath Man wrought, that God in his Wisdom should permit—no, engineer!—this
cosmic event? That He should so dislocate the order of the heavens and the
order of life on Earth?

 
          
What
hath Man wrought, ten years ago, that should finally tip the scales of God’s
estimation? Simeon hunted back through the decade before for some exemplary
evil—that eluded him.

 
          
What
earthly events could have prompted the terrible explosion of the Dog Star, as
absurdly shocking to the astronomers as it was to this Afrikaner soldier
Woltjer? What sequence of sins? Perhaps simply too many people had stopped
believing in God?

 
          
Ridiculous!
No single event or set of events could decide God’s mind. (Yet, recall the
Cities of the Plain, Simeon, remember
Sodom
and
Gomorrah
! Those had reached a crucial point,
attained a critical mass of sinfulness—they had gone too far!)

 
          
Surely
the modern God was no such petty dictator, petulantly setting fire to a star
to scourge his sons and daughters?

           
It just had to be the whole trend of
human history; of accumulated sin.
Sins such as
South Africa
itself.
Sins of exploitation and
segregation.
And yet, and yet, fretted Simeon, wherefore Dear Lord Thy
choice of this special moment in time? And why wasn’t it the Whites who had
died? Why wasn’t it the rich and powerful
who
perished? Why was it the Blacks, the Browns and Yellows?
The
poor, the wretched of the Earth.
Why was it they who disappeared? Why
was it the Major Woltjers of this world who came through—going down the deep
mines which their wealth came from, for the first time in their lives, and
sheltering there, while above ground the black miners took the peak dose of
8,500 roentgens, and died? The same pattern was repeated all over the globe.
The embarrassing querulous voices of underdevelopment were stilled forever. It
was the developed peoples of the world who had the resources and the
technology to survive. The “Cleansing Operation” he’d heard the supernova
referred to in Jo’burg by men like Woltjer.
Cleansing
operation.
All political and moral embarrassments cleared away by the
charged particles that followed on the heels of that flare of light, which
itself gave only the briefest months of warning.

 
          
The Clean Up.
Why?

 
          
And
still Woltjer was angry at Andrea’s tenderness to this Indian, who’d had the
impertinence to survive, and who now accepted these white liberal caresses with
such greedy nonchalance.

 
          
“
Did not ought
to have been!”

 
          
“No,
indeed,” Gunnar Marholm said brusquely, to silence him. “It did not, but it
was. So are
we
to blame, somehow? Is
science? Don’t you know that it all happened several times before in Earth’s
i
history? Look in the geological
record, man! You’ll find mass exterminations of fauna there.
A
probably acute dose of 500 roentgens every 300 million years.
A single
dose as high as 25,000 roentgens once since pre-Cambrian times. Agreed, it was
an unfortunate star to explode.
Being so near us.
Giving such a high peak dosage.”

 
          
Simeon
looked out of the window at the recuperating earth. The blessed sight
of renewed
¹
chlorophyll
. But amongst and around,
lay a hundred skeletons of cattle, tattered hide still clinging on white bones.

           
And scattered among them were human
skeletons. Kruger drove the halftrack right over them, making no effort to
detour.

 
          
“The
universe doesn’t owe us a living, Major,” murmured the Swede.

           
Yet how the Lord had helped those
who helped themselves! Oh yes indeed, those who had helped themselves to the
fruits of the earth all along had had their great granaries to hide in from His
wrath—and hide successfully they did!
Sweden
had done all right out of the Clean Up too,
with over ninety per cent of her population saved. Not that
Sweden
, to be fair, could be accused of having
“helped itself” compared with the other developed countries. The record was
honorable. Was this why Gunnar Marholm acted so icily chauvinistic?
wondered
Simeon. Because he felt his own people’s survival
to be tainted by that of the real pirates of the globe, who weathered the storm
a shade less successfully than social democratic Sweden, to a lesser degree of
antiseptic perfection? Yet still magisterially successful beside
India
, with only one half of one per cent of her
people saved; or
Nigeria
, with one tenth of one per cent!
Britain
, prime ex-colonist, saved 52 per cent.
American saved 54 per cent, mainly whites. While this
South Africa
they were now riding through scored 80 per
cent—all of them Whites since no non-White was considered to be a South
African, by definition.

 
          
The
Swedes, after all, were Whites. They were whitewashed with the same brush as
Britain
,
America
,
Germany
and
France
.

 
          
The
Lord helps those who help themselves. The meek and the poor are burnt like
chaff.

 
          
Is
God then illogical?
Inconsistent?
Yet surely it
couldn’t be that it had nothing to do with God? From this thought Simeon
recoiled. God could neither overlook, nor could He commit illogic or evil.
There must be a Purpose.

 
          
One
half of one per cent: no,
India
hadn’t done at all well. Thus the caresses
of the English woman, guilt that could only assuage itself by her surrender to
Dr. Subbaiah Sharma as slave to his erotic demands . . .

 
          
“Geological
record, Gunnar?’’ argued Simeon, worried and upset—while the halftrack crunched
over the bones of those Zulu or Xhosa people. “The only comparable event we
really know is the
Bethlehem
supernova—the star of the Magi which God kindled to tell us of the
coming of his Son. Now there comes this second.’’

 
          
“
This second
what?
Second Coming?
Ha! A

 
          
random
accident. Let it have happened fifty years ago and
only the merest remnant of the human race would have pulled through, if any. As
it is—” “Yes?” cried Andrea, hugging Dr. Sharma to her, twisting the knife in
her conscience. “And as it is?”

           
“As it is,” shrugged Marholm—for
they had been through the argument before, “assuredly hundreds of millions
survived.
Maybe as many as five hundred million.
The
populations of the developed countries, by and large . . .

 
          
“All
the statistics aren’t in,” he reminded her. Sharma laughed. His presence: a
walking corpse’s, a ghost’s—a living reminder of the forever dispossessed.

           
“It seems that the meek haven’t
inherited the earth after all, as your Bible promised, except as this bonemeal
around us!”

 
          
Andrea
hugged him, loving him for the whole abruptly terminated agony of
underdevelopment. She herself had weathered the cosmic storm down in Goblin’s
Pit near
Bath
, in the Wansdyke Commercial Deposit, as a
Priority
A
Survivor, class of Agricultural Botanist.

 
          
“But
hell,” blurted Woltjer, just when it seemed the matter was losing its momentum,
“it did come as a kind of blessing,
let’s
be honest. I
mean, population problem’s solved! We don’t need to worry about squeezing
ourselves off the planet. Using up all our resources. See what I mean?” “Oh
yes,” cried Sharma. “Yes I do see, Sir. Was it not generous of us three billion
people to move aside out of your way?”