Watson, Ian - SSC (4 page)

 
          
MY RETICENCE IS SOLELY TO KEEP THE WORLD ON
TOLERABLY STABLE TRACKS SO THAT 1 CAN TRAVEL BACK ALONG THEM. I TELL YOU THIS
OUT OF COMPASSION, AND TO PREPARE YOUR MINDS FOR THE ARRIVAL OF GOD ON EARTH.

 
          
“He’s
insane. He’s been insane from the start.” “He’s been isolated in there for some
very good reason.
Contagious insanity, yes.”

           
“Suppose that a madman could project
his madness—”

 
          
“He
already has done that, for decades!”

 
          
“—no,
I mean really project it, into the consciousness of the whole world; a madman
with a mind so strong that he acted as a template, yes a matrix for everyone
else, and made them all his dummies, his copies; and only a few people stayed
immune who could build this VSTM to isolate him—”

 
          
“But
there isn’t time to research it now!” “What good would it do shucking off the
problem for another thirty-five years? He would only reappear—”

           
“Without his
strength.
Shorn.
Senile.
Broken.
Starved of his connections
with the human race.
Dried up.
A mental leech.
Oh, he tried to conserve his strength.
Sitting quietly.
Reading, waiting.
But he broke! Thank God for that. It was vital to the future that he went
insane.”

 
          
“Ridiculous!
To enter the machine next year he must already be alive! He must already be out
there in the world projecting this supposed madness of his. But he isn’t.
We’re all separate sane individuals, all free to think what we want—” “Are
we?
The whole world has been
increasingly obsessed with him these last twenty years. Fashions, religions,
life-styles: the whole world has been skewed by him ever since he was born! He
must have been bom about twenty years ago.
Around 1995.
Until then there was a lot of research into him.
The tachyon
hunt.
All that.
But he only began to
obsess
the world as a spiritual figure
after that.
From around 1995 or 6.
When
he was born as a baby.
Only, we didn’t focus our minds on his own
infantile urges—because we had him here as an adult to obsess ourselves with—”

 
          
“Why
should he have been bom with infantile urges? If he’s so unusual, why shouldn’t
he have been born already leeching on the world’s mind; already knowing;
already experiencing everything around him?”

 
          
“Yes,
but the real charisma started then!
All the emotional
intoxication with him!”

 
          
“All the mothering.
All the fear and
adoration of his infancy.
All the
Bethlehem
hysteria.
Picking up as he grew and gained
projective strength. We’ve been just as obsessed with
Bethlehem
as with
Nazareth
, haven’t we? The two have gone hand in
hand.”

 
          
(Sign Ten) I AM GOD. AND I MUST SET YOU
FREE. I MUST CUT MYSELF OFF FROM MY PEOPLE; CAST MYSELF INTO THIS HELL OF
ISOLATION.

 
          
I CAME TOO SOON; YOU WERE NOT READY FOR ME.

 
          
We
begin to feel very cold; yet we cannot feel cold. Something prevents us—a kind
of malign contagious tranquillity.

 
          
It
is all so right. It slots into our heads so exactly, like the missing jigsaw
piece for which the hole lies cut and
waiting, that
we
know what he said is true; that he is growing up out there in our obsessed,
blessed world, only waiting to come to us.

 
          
(Sign
Eleven
) (Even though the order of the
signs was time-reversed from his point of view, there was the sense of a real
dialogue now between him and us, as though we were both synchronized. Yet this
wasn’t because the past was inflexible, and he was simply acting out a role he
knew “from history”. He was really as distant from us as ever. It was the
looming presence of
himself
in the
real world which cast its shadow on us, molded our thoughts and fitted our
questions to his responses; and we all realized this now, as though scales
fell from our eyes. We weren’t guessing or fishing in the dark any longer; we
were being dictated to by an overwhelming presence of which we were all
conscious—and which wasn’t locked up in the VSTM. The VSTM was Nazareth,
the setting-off point; yet the who Je world
was also Bethlehem, womb of the embryonic God, his babyhood, childhood and
youth combined into one synchronous sequence by his all-know- ingness, with the
accent on his wonderful birth that filtered through into human consciousness
ever more saturatingly.) MY OTHER SELF HAS ACCESS TO ALL THE SCIENTIFIC
SPECULATIONS WHICH I HAVE GENERATED; AND ALREADY I HAVE THE SOLUTION OF THE
TIME EQUATIONS. I SHALL ARRIVE SOON & YOU SHALL BUILD MY VSTM & I SHALL
ENTER IT; YOU SHALL BUILD IT INSIDE AN EXACT REPLICA OF THIS LABORATORY,
SOUTHWEST SIDE. THERE IS SPACE THERE. (Indeed it had been planned to extend
the National Physical Laboratory that way, but the plans had never been taken
up, because of the skewing of all our research which the VSTM had brought
about.) WHEN I REACH MY TIME OF SETTING OUT, WHEN TIME REVERSES, THE
PROBABILITY OF THIS LABORATORY WILL VANISH, & THE OTHER WILL ALWAYS HAVE
BEEN THE TRUE LABORATORY THAT I AM IN, INSIDE THIS VSTM. THE
WASTE
LAND
WHERE YOU
BUILD,
WILL NOW BE HERE. YOU CAN WITNESS THE
INVERSION: IT WILL BE MY FIRST PROBABILISTIC MIRACLE. THERE ARE
HYPERDIMENSIONAL REASONS FOR THE PROBABILISTIC INVERSION, AT THE INSTANT OF
TIME REVERSAL. BE WARNED NOT TO BE INSIDE THIS LABORATORY WHEN I SET OUT, WHEN
I CHANGE TRACKS, FOR THIS SEGMENT OF REALITY HERE WILL ALSO CHANGE TRACKS,
BECOMING IMPROBABLE, SQUEEZED OUT.

 
          
(Sign Twelve) I WAS BORN TO INCORPORATE YOU
IN MY BOSOM; TO UNITE YOU IN A WORLD MIND, IN THE PHASE SPACE OF GOD. THOUGH
YOUR
INDIVIDUAL SOULS PERSIST, WITHIN THE FUSION. BUT YOU
ARE NOT READY. YOU MUST BECOME READY IN 35 YEARS’ TIME BY FOLLOWING THE MENTAL
EXERCISES WHICH I SHALL DELIVER TO YOU, MY MEDITATIONS. IF I REMAINED WITH YOU
NOW, AS I GAIN STRENGTH, YOU WOULD LOSE YOUR SOULS. THEY WOULD BE SUCKED INTO
ME, INCOHERENTLY. BUT IF YOU GAIN STRENGTH, I CAN INCORPORATE YOU COHERENTLY
WITHOUT LOSING YOU. I LOVE YOU ALL, YOU ARE PRECIOUS TO ME, SO I EXILE MYSELF.

 
          
THEN I WILL COME AGAIN IN 2055. I SHALL
RISE FROM TIME, FROM THE USELESS HARROWING OF A LIMBO WHICH HOLDS NO SOULS
PRISONER, FOR YOU ARE ALL HERE, ON EARTH.

 
          
That
was the last sign. He sits reading again and listening to taped music. He is
radiant; glorious. We yearn to fall upon him and be within him.

 
          
We
hate and fear him too; but the Love washes over the Hate, losing it a mile
deep.

 
          
He
is gathering strength outside somewhere: in
Wichita
or
Washington
or
Woodstock
. He will come in a few weeks to reveal
himself to us. We all know it now.

 
          
And then?
Could we kill him? Our minds would halt our hands.
As it is, we know that the sense of loss, the sheer bereavement of his
departure hindwards into time will all but tear our souls apart.

 
          
And yet. . .
I WILL
COME AGAIN IN
2055, he has promised. And incorporate us, unite us, as
separate thinking souls—if we follow all his meditations; or else he will suck
us into him as dummies, as robots if we do not prepare ourselves. What then,
when God rises from the grave of time,
insane?            .

 
          
Surely
he knows that he will end his journey in madness! That he will incorporate us
all, as conscious living beings, into the matrix of his own insanity?

 
          
It
is a fact of history that he arrived in 1985 ragged, jibbering and
lunatic—tortured beyond endurance by being deprived of us.

 
          
Yet
he demanded, jubilantly, in 1997, confirmation of his safe arrival;
jubilantly, and we lied to him and said YES! YES! And he must have believed us.
(Was he already going mad from deprivation?)

 
          
If
a laboratory building can rotate into the probability of that same building
adjacent to itself: if time is probabilistic (which we can never prove or
disprove concretely with any measuring rod, for we can never see
what has not been,
all the alternative
possibilities, though they might have been), we have to wish what we know to be
the truth, not to have been the truth. We can only
have .
faith that there will be another probabilistic miracle, beyond the promised
inversion of laboratories that he speaks of, and that he will indeed arrive
back in 1985 calm, well-kept, radiantly sane, his mind composed. And what is
this but an entree into madness for rational beings such as us? We must
perpetrate an act of madness; we must believe the world to be other than what
it was—so that we can receive among us a Sane, Blessed, Loving God in 2055. A
fine preparation for the coming of a mad God! For if we drive ourselves mad,
believing passionately what was not true, will we not infect him with our
madness, so that he is/has to be/will be/and always was mad too?

 
          
Credo
quia
impossibilis; we have to believe
because it is impossible. The alternative is hideous.

 
          
Soon.
He will be coming.
Soon.
A few days, a few dozen hours.
We all feel it. We are
overwhelmed with bliss.

 
          
Then
we must put him in a chamber, and lose Him, and drive Him mad with loss, in the
sure and certain hope of a sane and loving resurrection thirty years hence—so
that He does not harrow Hell, and carry it back to Earth with Him.

 
          
This tale is for the sun god, Tezcatlipoca,
with my curses, and for you Marina—whom I never knew enough to love—with
apologies and blessings, somewhat tardy . . .

 
          
Have
you ever screamed at your nurse to go away—to leave you in peace—and hated her,
as bitterly as you’ve ever hated anybody? And begged her, as you never begged
anyone in your proud life before?

 
          
Ten
of us lay in the ward in the plastic webbing imprisoning us, yet only three of
us really counted, Shanahan, Grocholski, and me, for we were the only
presidents. Yet a big
haul
for them, indeed, three
presidents! How cleverly the hospital distinguished between us and the
ordinary runners: the extra dose of nerve sensitizer in the syringe, the
absence of any opiates. We hung on the raw edge of pain, gritting our teeth as
the taps were spun and at times—when our bloodstreams burned like second
nervous systems on fire in our bodies, and it seemed like we were being roasted
on a gridiron, from our insides outwards—at such times we let go and screamed.
Whereas when the runners were being drained they moaned but did not need to
scream. Mixed in with their quarter-pint soup of drugs (anti-shock,
anti-coagulant, vitamins, iron) they received the opiates that let them still
catch the idea of pain, but be somewhat glassed off from it—while we three were
locked up in bright tin boxes with the howl of a thumbnail on slate a thousand
times amplified. The nerve sensitizer wasn’t merely sadistic, but meant to aid
the nurse monitoring the effects of the milking on our bodies; the opiates
were supposed to block off the worst of the sensations arising. I might say
that according to the compensation laws we should have all had opiates. But
that’s how they ran a punishment ward.
Idiot thinking.
Shanahan, Grocholski, and I—we didn’t hold each other’s occasional screams and
pleas against each other. The pain just happened to be unbearable.
As simple as that.
In the eyes of the runners our agony
confirmed our presidencies. The Aztec priests were tortured by the Spaniards
before their congregations. So the Aztec priests screamed and begged, when
their turn came? Their congregations still believed in them.

 
          
“You
scum of the earth!”
Marina
hissed as she jabbed our tethered buttocks with that cruel syringe, an
Ahab tormenting her own private whale over and over again. (But I did not know
her, did not know you as
Marina
yet.) “Do you know what will happen to you today? We’re going to take
so much out of you and for so long that your brain will starve for
oxygen,
you’ll be half way to an idiot, a drooling
vegetable.”

 
          
“You
know that’s illegal, you bitch,” I snarled as you tickled my bare flesh with
the syringe anticipatorily making my nerves try to crawl away.

           
“Anyone may make mistakes,” her eyes
gleamed.

 
          
Only a scare, a put-on.
Panic.
She
wouldn’t dare.

 
          
“You
must be a pretty girl under that mask. Why do you hate us so bitter?”

 
          
“Why
give you the satisfaction of knowing?”

 
          
“You
gave me the satisfaction of knowing just then—there’s something to know.”

 
          
And
the syringe hit my flesh hard, at that, and dug in.

 
          
The
hot-acid gruel washed into me. My veins now lava-flows cursed with a
consciousness of their own heat and motion. The exquisite agony of being emptied
out. The pain of my tortured body racing to make more and more blood as the
metabolic drugs goaded it on.

 
          
And
under and around this pain, the fear that as life-blood flowed out through the
taps, my brain was starving and impoverished, on the brink of becoming the
brain of an animal, a toad, a stone—

 
          
“Bitch!”
I screamed.

 
          
Out
through one set of pipes flowed my rich blood, in through another the miserable
substitute fluid that my body raced to build upon. And Marina (whom I did not
know as
Marina
yet) danced the empty syringe before my
eyes, to conduct the music of my torment—keeping an eye on the dials and
gauges but pretending not to. Why did she hate us so bitter? Well, I hated her
just as bitter! Why ask why. I knew it when I rode for the sun, I might end up
here if they found one single excuse to lay their hands on me.

 
          
Then
the pain got too bad to think about anything else.

           
No windows in the ward. What was
there to look out on? We were outside any Fuller dome, in this hospital.
The pollution crawling up and down the sides of the building, dark
grey to pitch black.
A general turbidity over the land: over the great
plains where the braves of another age and world hunted buffalo; on the
treeless hills, where it had long since snuffed out the pines; pressing soft on
the Great Dead Lakes, and, further out, pressing soft on the dark cesspool of
the North Atlantic. Pressing upon the superhighways where mostly automatic
traffic crawled and where we had hunted in our packs for that rare bird of paradise,
that dark orchid, the patch of clear sun—the “sunspot” that blooms mysteriously
amid the murk, shafts of gold piercing a funnel of light down to earth whereby
the clear sky could be briefly glimpsed and worshipped. Were not the deaths we
caused on the highways only petty sacrifices to ensure the coming of the sun?

 
          
And
the murk lay thickly on this hospital, Superhighway 31 Crash Hospital, Prison
Wing, in whose ward we swooned in pain as we gave up our lifeblood to
recompense the beneficiaries of this murk, authors of the forever eclipse of
the sun . . .

 
          
When
did I set out upon the sun trail? When did I drive down my own superhighway of
the spirit, choosing my own side of the split world, the zone of blood and the
sun? Oh these years of hunting for the sun—down ten times a thousand miles of
gloomy darkness, oily globules crawling on our windshields, eyes glazed by the
green gleaming radar screens of our sun buggies as we swung them, steering
blind, through the rivers of automated slave cars, slave trucks riding their
guide lines! Brains blazing with the data stream from Meteorology Central—the
temperature gradients, the shifting chemistry of the pollutants, the swirling
shapes of air turbidity, the cat’s cradle of contrails spied upon by the
satellite stations high above! (Have you seen a picture of the Earth from
satellite? The masked globe, in its gossamer spidery web of contrails, a mud of
many shades of brown ochre grey stirred slowly, punctured in several magic
shifting locations by the white walls of sunspots drilling their way to the
barren ground or the dead seas or the great photophobic anaerobic algae beds
(where, perversely, the light kills them) or the dots of Fuller domes where the
wasp world lives out its memories of middle class existence.) Grabbing the data
with our minds to make a gestalt of it that will lead us to the sun! These
years of hunting for the sun—and finding it! Being first to reach those clear
fresh zones of radiance, where the flash harvests green and bronze the earth,
and tiny flowers rage and seed and die within the span of thirty minutes.
Being the only men to see it.
To know that nature was still
fleetingly alive, in an accelerated abbreviated panic form, still mistress of a
panic beauty.
These years of discovering the sun and duelling
for it on the highways, and ever in the back of our minds somewhere awareness
of the Compensation Laws—the blood-debt to be settled.

 
          
“Hey,”
called Shanahan, as
Marina
came to him next in line with the syringe primed and loaded, a little
bit of machismo on his part. “Why not come for a ride in my sun buggy after I
get out of here? I’ll drive you into the deep dark countryside and we won’t
hunt for
no
sunspots either. What we’ve got to do, we
can do in the dark! Hey—but come to think of it—why not just come on a sun hunt
with me? Put a blush of real genuine sunburn on those delicate while limbs of
yours. Or could it be that you’re just a wasp that buzzes about a sundome for
her holidays, and never flies out?”

 
          
“Yes
I’m a wasp, this is my sting.”

 
          
And
she stung Shanahan’s quivering buttocks with the syringe, putting an abrupt end
to his taunts. He hung in the white plastic webbing, twitching with pain, fat
fly in a spider’s web that he couldn’t break out of.
Marina
spun the taps, spiderlike sucked him dry,
until he howled.

 
          
Till he screamed like ice, like thumbnails on slate.

 
          
And
Marina
—with what grim delight
you watched him writhing.

 
          
With
as much magic and mysticism in the hunt for the sun as there was meteorology,
remember how we met together to plot strategies, when our own sun club—Smoking
Mirror—first coalesced (later to be known as Considine’s Commandos)? And the
Indian runner, Marti, who said that his great great granddaddy had been an
Indian magician, who stayed with Smoking Mirror till one black afternoon he
pushed his buggy too fast, too wildly for a mere machine, down a highway
crowded with slave traffic, perceptions throbbing with input, idea associations
swarming, sense of time and space distraught—for he’d taken a peyotl pill to
commune with his magical ancestry.
Marti, who knew all the
sun myths of all the Indians, South and North, of the
Americas
.
Marti, who said the name we should call
ourselves by—Smoking Mirror—alias of the savage wealthy treacherous Aztec sun
god, Tezcatlipoca.
Marti, who wore the obsidian knife round
his neck on a leather thong.
The same knife (stolen
from a museum case) that the Aztec priests used to tear out the palpitating
hearts of the prisoners sacrificed to Tezcatlipoca.

 
          
When
we reached his smashed buggy and went out to it in our oxygen masks (we had a
few minutes before the patrols arrived from the nearest emergency point, with
their Compensation Laws to enforce on us, for the flanks of the highway were
strewn with the wreckage of the slave cars Marti had collided with) we found
the obsidian knife had turned, by a freak, as Marti struck the steering wheel,
and driven itself into his chest.

 
          
I
pulled it out and hung it in my buggy and never washed the blood off the blade.
We met the sun that day, the next day, and for three days after—blazing sun
spots drilling their way through the smog as we charted our crazy sad, angry
course of mourning and celebration of Marti’s spirit, across the continent,
till even Meteorology Central sat up and took notice of the wild unstatistical
improbability of our successes (a first sighting of a sunspot is a kind of
scalp, see? a new brave’s feather in our headdress) and the sun hordes came
tracking us from all over the land to batten on us, converging, duelling, crashing
towards us, driving our luck away—Tezcatlipoca would only reveal himself to
us, to praise Marti who had named us in his honor.

 
          
Only
after that when Marti had become history (though the dark-stained knife still
hung in my buggy) the new name Considine’s Commandos became known, and we
settled down to a long period of reasonable successes, but never so successful
as that one wild week after Marti died, sacrificed to the sun.

 
          
We
duelled on the highways with the other clubs, skittering through the slave
convoys where the wasps sat back in waspish disbelief with their windows
blanked, lapping up video reruns and playing Scrabble, hearing occasionally the
scream of tires from the impossible Outside, brief nightmare intrusion on their
security, banshees, werewolfs, spooks haunting the wide open Darks between the
Fuller domes.

 
          
One
club that even called themselves the Banshees we tangled with on the southern
highways, knowing them only by their radar blips, sneers and taunts over the
radio, till one day—or night, where’s the difference?—we all of us happened
into the same bar at the same time, and I was carrying Marti’s obsidian knife,
beneath my shirt, or I would never have walked out of that bar to drive again.
This time Marti had saved me, but the knife had other enemy blood on it now;
and Marti’s spirit seemed to disappear. At the cost of losing us the sun, he
saved me. For weeks we hunted.
For months.
And nothing.
We got to loathe the
midnight
roundup of the sunspot sightings from Met
Central. Things were beginning to fall apart.