Watson, Ian - SSC (9 page)

 
          
One
thing Amberson was wrong about.
The biggest thing of all.
The thing that has given me my present role, more hated than Amberson could
ever have dreamed as he uttered his curse upon me.

 
          
For
Considine’s Sunspot was not going to close up, ever. It carried on expanding,
taking in more acres hour by hour.

 
          
Far
more than the ozonosphere had altered in those chemical mutations of the past
few hours. The pall of dirt that had blanketed the Earth so many years was
swift to change, whatever new catalyst it was that had found a home in the
smog; now, starting at one point and spreading outward, the catalyst preceding
(swimming like a living thing—Snowflake’s “childish” nightmare!) on a wave
front from the point of light, the changed smog yielded to the hard radiations
of the naked sun.

 
          
I
was right—which is the horror of it—I was right. Tezcatlipoca is alive again,
but no friend to man. Nor was he ever friend to man, but cheated and betrayed
him systematically with his magic and his song, and his stink. Tezcatlipoca,
vicious bear, hideous giant coming head in hand, bounding jaguar, using me as
focus for his flames, as plainly as he used Marina (my lost love!) for his map.

 
          
Considine’s
Sunspot spreads rapidly from one day to the next, gathering strength,
sterilizing further areas of the country, burning the earth clean. Algae beds
consumed faster than they can be covered over. Fuller domes shrivelling,
flimsy-fabricked.
Buildings in flames, so brittle.
The asphalt motorways blazing fifty-mile-long tinder strips.

 
          
So
let me be Priest of the Burning World then, since it is what I foretold and
since, strangely (is it so strangely in these fear-crazed times?), the cult of
Tezcatlipoca has revived, at least its ceremonies have, blood sacrifices
carried out in the polluted zones beyond the encroaching flame front, in vain
hopes of stemming it—oh, they only add fuel to the sun’s fire!—with their
cockerels and bullocks stolen from the zoo sheds . . . and people too, captive
and volunteer—beating hearts torn out by far more expert hands than mine,
tossed blindly at where the sun burns its way toward them. And, what no one
will volunteer for, the flame kindled in the darkness on someone’s writhing
scream-torn body, to impress the god of fire—Xiuhtecuhtli—oh yes, modern
scholarship is on our side! And after further scholarly researches (did not
witchcraft almost win a World War?) babies are cooked alive, eaten in honor of
Tlaloc, god of rains and springs, who waters the earth. Outlaws and inlaws,
bandits and wasps— we are all in this together, now.

 
          
My
fate, Wandering Jew of the burning roads, is to lurk outward and ever outward,
casting around the perimeter of Sunspot Considine, buggy rationed and fueled
free of charge, with hatred, meeting up with my worshippers, torturers,
meteorologists (has not meteorology absorbed all the other sciences?), time and
again overcome by a craze of words bubbling from Tezcatlipoca’s lips—taunts,
demands, tricks and curses fluttering through my mouth from elsewhere, like
captive birds set free, like the souls of his victims escaping into the sky.

 
          
And
I ask:

 
          
Why
me?

 
          
And:

 
          
Why
you, Marina?

 
          
How
I love you, in retrospect, having held your beating heart within my palm!

 
          
And
the sunspot that bears my name, great tract of flameland seared into the world,
pre-Cambrian zone of sun-scarred earth sterile except for the bacteria lying in
waiting for some million-year- to-come event—do you realize that logically the
whole world will bear my name one day, if the sunspot expands to embrace it,
though no one will be here to use the name—of Considine’s Planet (as it may be
known to the ghosts upon it)—why am I not allowed to drive in there and die?
But the mad sun god will not allow it, while yet he holds me dangling on a
string, jerking my vocal chords as it amuses him. Since I plucked her heart out
I am his creature utterly. As she was mine, and earlier still as I was hers. So
it rolls around.

 
          
Once
I was a free man, sun hunter, outlaw.
Now a potential
planet—and a slave.
The empty gift of omnipotence! Considine’s
world—naked
preCambrian
of some future society of
insects, perhaps!

 
          
Marina.

 
          
Whose
heart I felt
flutter
in my hand.

 
          
Thy
blood like milk for me has flowed, hot as iron pouring from a furnace!

 
          
Marina and Considine.

 
          
Eve
and Adam of the world’s end, our non-love brought life to its close, victim and
executioner of the vanishing smogscape—which we all long for nowadays,
passionately, and would sacrifice anything, or anyone to bring it back to us.

 
          
This tale is for the sun god, Tezcatlipoca,
with my curses, and for you, Marina. . . .

 
          
Starwood.
Imagine. It comes in very small slices.
Approximately this, by this, by this.
(Quick
gestures with the hands.)
They trade it out at Point Q which is to say
at the intersection of reality with a mathematical equation—an idea more than a
place, though we can both reach it. They ask whatever they want for it: ten
kilos of a rare transuranium metal, the last surviving Botticelli, a few dozen
beautiful boys and girls. Then they abolish the equation and vanish into
oblivion (which is to say: into reality, somewhere else in the Galaxy or
Magellanic Clouds), to reappear with another few slices of the wood after 1.23
terrestial years— maybe this says something about their home planet, or maybe
nothing—probably it’s a random number. No way of tracking them. No way of
tracing the Starwood world. They tell us it isn’t anywhere near their home
system, anyway . . .

 
          
Starwood.
Just a single slice—sufficient
for a stool.
Or throne.
Whether you’re monk or
monarch or whatever.
But a very rich monk, need I say!
Such as the head of the Japanese Yakuza Order. . .

 
          
A
single slice—and if I’d stolen for ten years or worked honestly for 500, I’d
still only have been able to travel to Point Q as a tourist to gawp at the
building . . .

 
          
Starwood—they’ve
told us this to prove its rarity—comes from a quirk of a planetoid called
Toscanini, with an orbit the same as a comet’s ellipse. Toscanini rushes in
from the chill of deep space, soaks up the sunshine at perihelion for a few
brief days then zips away again for long years in the icebox of far-out.

 
          
It
ought to be no more than a ball of rock, too cold for any life-form to take
root on for most of its orbit, then baked sterile in the oven. But life, once
seeded, is ingenious. Toscanini has
an ecology
of
trees that quarry metals from the rocks. Not just any metals—super-conducting
metals that carry electrical activity on forever at the few degrees above
absolute zero that the planet’s surface reduces to through most of its flight.

 
          
Those
trees on Toscanini live through the years of the freeze, powered by organic
batteries that never run down. At perihelion, when the trees are being baked in
the star’s heat, they soak up the energy to power their batteries; then while
the planet is scooting away through deep space again, the trees put out their
shoots and saplings and new growth rings, radiating the surplus energy they’ve
stored into the immediate vicinity to nourish them. It’s such a life-enhancing
energy that the whole Toscanini wood would be suffocated under tons of
parasites if the planet didn’t rush close enough to its sun to scour it clean
of competition . . .

 
          
Why
“Toscanini” for a name? I’ve heard it said that their starship captain who
first found the world and its strange organic metal trees had a taste for Earth
music, and a sense of humor, and recalled a “super conductor” from centuries
ago . . .

 
          
But
the remarkable thing about Starwood is this. If you sit on it, it radiates its
energies into you. And it rejuvenates any human being. A properly cut and
tailored piece of Starwood recharges the mitochondria (the powerhouses) in the
cells. It tones up the brain waves. It balances the Yin and Yang. A
chess-player squatting on Starwood is unbeatable. A philosopher can work out
the universal truths in his head. A businessman can build empires. It’s the
ultimate conditioner. Hair grows back—even brain cells regenerate. The
impotent recover their virility. The immune system can eat up any cancer,
however metastasized. But they can only harvest mature trees—for a large enough
cross-section of the superconductor circuits—and the trees grow back so slowly
there on Toscanini, so they say.

 
          
(Pardon
me if I sound like a promotional tape. Truly, they have no need to promote
Starwood vulgarly. And the likes of
I
, no means of
buying it . . .)

 
          
Even
so, I’d hardly have dared try to steal the Grand Monk of the Yakuza’s stool
from under him, hadn’t I found I had a cancer, inoperable, irreversible,
metastasizing plaguefully through me. Then all thoughts of virility and playing
chess and planning the perfect crimes washed out of me, leaving me with the one
glaring imperative: to save my life by the most risky theft of all.

           
The Yakuza are Buddhist monks,
somewhere on the martial side of Zen—enlightenment through archery,
swordsmanship, and other death-arts. They are also, each and every one, part of
the great gangster fraternity underpinning whole commercial empires: the
Benevolence Company. Yet a Jakuza is as earnestly philosophical as he is deft
at protecting himself as he is potentially thuggish, in the old strict meaning
of the word.
A paradox.
But Zen is a bird’s nest of
paradoxes, and the Yakuza are no exception. So the Grand Monk, sitting on his
heap of gold and Starwood—which he has fought his way to, through blinding
enlightenments of backstreet duels and assassinations, is also author of one of
the great works of religious thought of this age: The Way
of the Milky Way
—a fine, wise book.

 
          
But
at least I could get to see the Grand Monk, to consult him on a point of
philosophy, if I laid enough bribes “along the way’’ and a large enough cash
donation to the Benevolence Company at his feet.
All quite
in order.
All quite normal.
The
same as a personal audience with the Roman Pope, amongst his Swiss guards.

 
          
He
would be guarded, of course. The Yukuza being martial craftsmen, in this age
that means solid state circuitry as well as the old perfect equipoise of mind
and muscle ... I hadn’t realized all the implications, though. It was worse,
far worse than I’d expected and I had to go through with it, when I got to the
point. My weapons had an expire deadline on them. I’d arranged it that way, so
that I shouldn’t just mumble something about philosophy and then back out . . .

           
A crazy, mad venture, in retrospect;
but then, at the back of my mind, I thought I’d be safe forever if only I
toppled him from his Starwood stool and squatted there myself, however briefly.
An almost mystical, magic obsession!

 
          
I
had, of course, also planned escape routes.

 
          
I
had, of course, watched all available tapes of the Grand Monk in audience with
“parishioners”. Counted and recounted the small team of swordsmen attending
him. Always
three,
and only three.

 
          
I
had, of course, expected a battery of sniff- snoops and scan-screens, on the
way to him . . . They wouldn’t fight guns with swords—even if I had seen one
tape of a Yakuza deflecting highspeed pellets with his sword’s edge, after an
hour’s meditation on the stool . . . My weapons were undetectable. I’d stolen
the specifications for them two years before from an eccentric inventor far
away, whom I’d afterwards had to strangle. I was fairly sure they’d work. I’d
saved them for this day.

 
          
My
nerve and flesh grenades were woven of poly-ice—the alternative coherent form
of water that can be tied into knots like wire as soon as it spins out of a
freezer’s capillary tubes. These were hidden in a row down my lapel, like a
jewelled decoration. The index and middle fingers of both my hands had thin
woven ice capsules implanted in them with ice lenses primed to emit one single
beam of laser fire if I cocked my finger and pointed it.

 
          
Within
three hours after manufacture I had to use these weapons before they grew
incoherent, and used themselves on me. As I walked into the Grand Monk’s room,
I had just thirty minutes left . . . As I say, I had no choice but to proceed .
. .

 
          
The
Grand Monk had a fat, poachy white face, with eyes sunk deep in hoods of milky
flesh. He must have been 150 years old with an infantile yoghurty complexion.
His thick red and blue brocade robes tied with a white cord thick as a
bell-rope, and his white linen cap, I recognized well enough from the tapes.
His suite, too, furnished with stern luxury.
The
tatami
matting with its black borders.
The few scrolls.
The picture-window set to display a
misty flight of geese through an emptiness intruded upon by a few
gravity-defying cliffs. Data bank within arm’s reach of the stool he sat on,
entirely enveloping this in his robes . . .

 
          
The
stool, the stool is under
that
mass .
. . !

 
          
I
was intoxicated. I could already feel it healing me, invigorating me—emanating
through his body and clothes ... He had his bare flesh pressed to the Starwood,
under that red and blue brocade, I had no doubt . . . white buttocks in interface
with the metal tree of Toscanini in a reversal of entropy, as though a living
star
defecated
energy into him ... He
disgusted me already. I could smell his flesh sizzling . . .

 
          
Something missing.

 
          
The
three swordsmen!

 
          
Something else present.

 
          
A
great dog . . . !

 
          
I
stared at the creature. It sprawled, twice the size of a wolfhound, behind his
stool, chin on its paws. Its nostrils flared, its ears pricked back, its tongue
lolled out to taste me, a single eye opened to regard me. And its paws were
human hands, with steel claws.

 
          
The
eye shut, and the other eye opened.

 
          
It
began to blink in sequence, rapidly.

 
          
One
eye shut, one eye open.

 
          
Its
sides were armored like a rhino’s. Its body rippled with hauser muscles of spun
steel, as it stretched itself. I shrank into a solid knot of ice, inside.

 
          
“The
cyb-hound,” intoned the Grand Monk.
“A fresh product of the
Benevolence Company.
But you came to ask about philosophy, not to buy
protection.”

 
          
I
held my donation slackly, wrapped in the correct scarlet ribbon, tied such and
such a way.
(Quick gestures with the hands.)

 
          
The
proper procedure was
,
I should lay it in front of him
on the empty wooden tray there— within half a meter of those grafted hands with
metal claws!

 
          
I
hesitated briefly.

 
          
I
understood the rapid on-off blinking of the dog’s eyelids well enough now . . .
This surgical intersection of body and machine lolling there was impregnable to
any ordinary sword, gun or grenade. My finger lasers would have to hit the
beast direct through the eyes to short out its cyb- brain! And the eyelids
would be high-reflective steel.
Which was why its eyes shone
like mirrors as it shut them and a nictitating barrier shot across.

 
          
Almost impossible.

 
          
I
had twenty-six minutes before my woven ice uncohered and ravaged me.

           
So I laid my donation, carefully, at
the Grand Monk’s feet, squinting under his robes sleazily at the feet of the
stool, like some young virgin boy standing under a transparent stairway to
squint up skirts; and engaged the Grand Monk in talk . . . about what I
remembered from The Way
of the Milky Way.
(It was a completely crazy venture, I knew now, but what choice had I?)

 
          
His
hooded eyes regarded me pertly.

 
          
The
cyb-hound’s gaze flickered at me. And it dragged itself slowly upright,
savoring my fear with its tongue on the very air. . . I’d painted my sweat
glands over with a monomolecular filter, to fool the normal anxiety sniffers .
. . but I couldn’t block its animal sense for the essential taste of the
situation, enhanced in the womb-vats, and souped up in the Yakuza craft-shop,
so I imagined. (And all my imaginations only made matters worse. I wasn’t a
true assassin, only a skilful thief . . . and I believe even an assassin would
have been bested by this beast . . . Not that any group or organization would
have dreamt of assassinating the Grand Monk. I was mad, I realize now . . .)