Watson, Ian - SSC

by The Very Slow Time Machine (v1. 1)

  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.

  Would have done, maybe, if we hadn’t been cracked wide open, by the day that brought the Compensation Laws down on all our heads.

  “You know what I’d do to that bitch if we were out of these plastic cocoons,” Grocholski growled. “That bitch” was around the corner preparing our meals. “I’d rip off her sweet white mask and sweet white uniform, hook her up to this marvel of medical science and drain her whole damn bloodstream while I raped her as cool and clinical as you like, and put no liquid back in her but my seed—what’s one fluid ounce to eight pints of the red stuff?—and I’d leave her hanging here in the web for her friends to find like veal in a slaughterhouse.”

  Vicious sentiments, Grocholski. But Grocholski had performed just as nasty as that—as cool and clinical, I had heard, though I hadn’t met the man before the hospital threw us together here in the ward. He had pulled a girl’s teeth out with pliers, one by one, for trying to walk out on him . . .

  Vicious enough to bring Marina out, so genuinely distraught that she ripped off her white gauze mask and let us take a look at her full face for the first time—beautiful, I thought, amazed, though I hardly dared let myself admit it—not Barbi-dolly or Bambi-cute, but strong with a warp somewhere in it, maybe in the twist of the lips, that gave her the stamp of authenticity—being unlike the million other stereotypes from the same mold. And her green eyes blazed, till they boiled with tears that evaporated almost as she shed them, so hotly angry was she.

  “I don’t believe in any heaven. For you vicious beasts killed my man. My heaven was here on Earth! But now I believe in hell. And I know how to make a hell for you. Nobody will get any opiates from now on. Nobody. Thanks to your politeness.”

  “Hey,” protested a runner from his white webbing. “You don’t have the right to deprive us— that’s illegal!”

  “Isn’t your people’s philosophy outside the Law?”

  I tried to tell her then, because suddenly I wanted her to know.

  “We do have a code to follow, the same as you—it’s a different code, is all . . .”

  You didn’t hear me, Marina, or you didn’t seem to. For Shanahan was shouting:

  “They always used the Indian women as torturers! The girls made the best!”

  So he’d noticed, too, how high your cheek bones were, though masked and hidden partly by your rounded cheeks, the skin not pulled so tight—sealskin over a canoe frame—the way it had been with some Indian girls I’d known, riding for the sun with us, recognizing—and that was what I wanted you to understand, Marina—how we were the new buffalo hunters of the darkness, the new braves and warriors of the polluted darkened highways.

  Then things got noisy in the ward. The act of freeing your mouth from the mask’s embrace had freed all of our mouths too—but not so much for taunts and obscenities, for a while, till it turned ugly again, but for pointed remarks directed at a real and sexy—if hostile—woman.

  With the mask off you became more real, and though we still hated you, we couldn’t dismiss you as a perfect plastic wasp girl anymore. At least I couldn’t. You’d graduated to the status of an enemy.

  Marina stared round the ward hotly, at the devils hanging in hell in their plastic wrappings, waiting helplessly to repay their debts to society—and made no move to put her mask back on.

  She even answered a question.

  “Why do I do this? I volunteered. It’s not a popular job, dealing with your people. I volunteered, so I could hurt some of you the way that I’ve been hurt.”

  “How have you been hurt, Princess?” yawned Grocholski.

  “Didn’t you hear her saying we’d killed her man, Gr’olski?”

  You gazed at me bitterly, yet in your unmasked gaze was a kind of salutation.

  “How did it happen?”

  “How do you think you kill good men? You ran him down in the dark, deliberately, while he was tending at an accident.”

  “Did you see it yourself?”

  “Wasps can’t see to fly in the dark,” jeered Grocholski, carrying machismo further into the zone of his own personal viciousness.

  “That’s how I know,” Marina told me icily, ignoring Grocholski, who was thrashing about in his web simulating laughter. “Talk like that. Attitudes like that. Oh, he could see you coming on the radar screen before he stepped out of the ambulance. He could see. But he stayed out on the road to rescue a woman caught in a burning car. He was still foaming it down when you ran him over. You dragged him half a mile. They wouldn’t let me see him, he was so smashed.”

  “Wouldn’t let you see him?” Grocholski caught out of what she said—but he didn’t press the point.

  And I wanted her to know—to really understand, inside herself—what we people had, when we weren’t being vicious beasts—how we were the real authentic people of our times, facing up to the dirt and dark outside instead of hiding in Fuller domes, hunting down the last glimpses of the natural world—the sun, the sky! How we were the last braves, the last hunters—how could I get that through to the Indian in you smothered in the plastic waspish flesh?

  “The ambulance man saw it all on radar—how you changed course at the last moment, to hit him, out there on the road.”

  “Ambulance man probably hated us anyway— tell any sort of lie.”

  “Do you,” in that frozen voice that I yearned to melt, “deny you run men down just for kicks?”

  “You’re not so kind yourself, are you? Why not ask yourself deep down what you’re doing here torturing us—whether you aren’t enjoying it? Revenge? A long revenge, hey! Something you’re spec
ializing in?” (Dared I say it yet—and expect you to accept at least a little bit of it—if not immediately, then later maybe when you were alone, lying awake in bed and worried because something had gone astray in your scheme of things?) “You’re interested in us beasts. You took this job to be near us. Like a zoo visitor watches the tigers. Smell our musk, our fear, our reality.” Marina’s hand cracked across my face, so hard my whole body rocked in its white cocoon.

  I swallowed the taste of blood in my mouth and stared hard at her, whispered:

  “True, it’s true, think about it.”

  A look of horror came into her eyes, as she quickly pulled the gauze mask over nose and mouth again.

  I suppose the Compensation Laws worked our way too. How else could it be, in a split society?

  They bought our tacit support for the maintenance of “civilized” life—the deceits that otherwise we’d have done our best to explode, us sunclubbers, saboteurs, ghettopeople, all of us outlaws (whom it’s plain ridiculous to call outlaw when full fifty per cent of the people live outside of wasp society). And the wasp world could only blast us out of existence by turning its own massive nuclear artillery upon itself—so, in return for the relative security of its slave superhighways, our own relative freedom to roam them. If the wasp world put too many feet wrong, explosives would go off in its highway tunnels, gatherings of the tribes pull down a Fuller dome, a satellite shuttle plane blasting off be met by a home-made missile with a home-made warhead on it. And if we put too many feet wrong (taking wasp lives with our sun buggies was one way) and if they caught us, there would be a blood debt to pay, hooked up to their milking machines, where we were not supposed to be hurt too much, or die, or get brain damage, but just repay, repay society. For they need red blood like vampires need it.

  So I began working on your mind, Marina.

  As for the others, well, Grocholski’s thoughts were of tearing his enemies’ teeth out with pincers, he knew nothing about minds. A king—but a stupid king, like many kings who must have triumphed over the stupidity of their subjects by a greater and crueller stupidity.

  Shanahan was a subtler sort of president, had some idea what we stood for, could put it some way into words. Yet he couldn’t see his way clear, as I could, into this woman’s soul with all its possibilities.

  And you worked on my body, Marina.

  Neglected your promised cruelties to the others. Still treated Shanahan and Grocholski like dirt, but carelessly, indifferently, reserving your finest moments for me.

  And I tried to grit my teeth through the pain and not scream out meaningless noises or empty curses, but always something that would drill the hole deeper and deeper into you—as the sun drills through the smog—till the protective layers were undercut and the egg of myself could be laid in your heart.

  “Milkmaid with buckets of blood in your yoke, why not believe me?” I winced, as Marina thrust the gruel of drugs into the tender parts of my body. “We’re hunting for something real in a dirty world—the dirt you wasps have spread around, till there’s such a pile you have to hide yourselves away from it.”

  She drained the blood from me till I fainted, green eyes boring into me, doting on my pain. . . .

  The Myth of the Five Suns—how brightly Marti told it one day after a long fruitless race for the sun that took us near five hundred miles across the plains, till we pulled in tired and restless at a service area run by ghettopeople with their hair like head-dresses, like black coronas around eclipsed suns.

  “Five worlds there were,” said Marti, the pupils of his eyes dilated to black marbles, his tight brown skin over small sharp bones like a rabbit sucked dry by ants, wizened by the desert sunshine that he had smarted under in his dreams. “In the first World men swam about like fishes under a Sun of Jewels. This world perished in a flamestorm brought about by the rising of the second sun, the Sun of Fire. The fishes changed into chickens and dogs that raced about in the great heat, unwilling to pause for their feet were burning. But this Sun of Fire died down in turn, gave way to the Sun of Darkness, whose people fed upon pitch and resin. They in their turn were swallowed up by an earthquake and a Sun of Wind arose. The few survivors of the Sun of Darkness became hairy dancing monkeys that lived on fruit. But the fifth sun was the Sun of Light— the one the ancient Mexicans knew. Which sun are we under now, can you riddle me that?”

  “Sun of Darkness,” answered one of the ghettopeople. “Here’s your pitch and resin to eat.” Dumping our plates of hamburgers, which may have been made from oil sludge or algae—so perhaps he was right in a way.

  Then Snowflake—of the snub nose and blond pigtails, with her worry beads of rock-hard dried chestnuts on a silver chain—who was riding with Marco in his buggy—wanted to tell a story herself, and Marti let her go ahead while we were consuming the burgers.

  “There was this waspman, see, whose slave car broke down on the highway miles from town, and quite by chance in the midst of a sunspot. He’d lost all sense of time on the journey, watching video, so when the car stopped he thought he’d reached hi's destination—especially when he opened the car door and saw the sun shining and a blue sky overhead, like at home in the Fuller dome. He got out of the car, too busy with his briefcase to notice that under that sun and that blue sky the land stretched out black and devastated, a couple inches deep in sludge. An area where some light-hating plants had taken over, see, which had the trick of dissolving if the sun came out ...”

  “What?” cried Marco, indignant.

  “Shut up, this is a story! At that moment the power came on in his car again and away it whisked, leaving him standing there on the road. Other cars zipped by on either side. He waved his arms at them and held his briefcase up but all the passengers were watching video and had their windows opaqued. He got scared and leapt off the road into the sludge. However the sunspot was coming to a close now. The blue sky misted over and soon he was all alone in the darkness with cars zipping by on one side and a hand clutching down his throat for his lungs as the pollution flowed back, his eyes watering onion tears. And in the darkness, doubly blinded by tears, he wandered further and further away from the road into the sludge. Even the noise of the cars seemed to be coming four ways at once to him. But now it was dark again the sludge was coming together, shaping itself into fungi two feet high, and amoeba things as big as his foot, and wet mucous tendrils like snots ten feet long that coiled and writhed about. . . and all kinds of nameless nightmares were there in the darkness squelching and slobbering about him . . .So he went mad, I guess. Or maybe he was mad to start with.”

  A few runners, a few of the ghettopeople applauded, but Marco looked disgusted at her butting in—though our mouths had been full while she was doing the talking—and Marti expressed his annoyance at what he thought of as her sloppy nursery horror-comic world, preferring his horror neat like raw spirit, and religious and classical—and as we drank off our tart metallic beer (solution of iron filings) to wash the burgers down, he dwelt on the how and when of the Aztec sacrifices to the sun.

  ‘‘Oh handsome was the prisoner they taught to play the flute and smoke in a neat and elegant fashion and sing like Caruso. After a year of smoking and singing and playing the flute, four virgins were given to him to make love to. Ten days after that they took him out onto the last terrace of the temple. They opened his chest with one single slash of a knife. This knife.” (He whirled the obsidian blade on the thong from around his neck, where he’d hung it when he left the buggy, flashed it at us.) “Unzipped him, tore out his heart!’’

  How strange, and remarkable, that the heart- blood of the Aztecs’ prisoner flowing for the sun should become our own heartblood pumped into storage bottles and refrigerated with glycerol at this hospital! A sacrifice of ice against a sacrifice of fire—both harshly painful—the one lasting as long as an iceberg melting, the other over and done with in a flash of time!

  Waking up weak-headed but set in my purpose, growing sharper with each hour, I shouted for
you to come to my web-side, as Shanahan and Grocholski stared at me bemused and grumbled to one another about this perversion of machismo. “Nurse!’’

  And you drifted to my side, green eyes agleam, hate crystals in your Indian skull. '

  “What is it, Considine?”

  “Mightn’t you hurt me a bit more if I knew you were a person with a name? A nameless torturer never had much fun. Wouldn’t you love to be begged for mercy by name—the way he called you by name, with emotion—the emotions of fear and anguish, if not of love? The victim begs to know his tormentor’s name.’’

  “So you’re a victim, are you?”

  “We’re all victims of this dirty world.”

  “No, you’re not victims, not you people. You’re here to pay because you made victims of other people. So that the lives of your future victims may be saved, by your own life-blood.”

  Almost as an afterthought, you added softly: “My name’s Marina, Considine.”

  “Ah.”

  Then I could let my forced attention unfocus and disperse into the foggy wool of fading pain . . .

  And when she came again to plunge the bitter drugs into my body and spin the taps that recommenced the sacrifice of blood, she murmured, eyes agleam with the taunting of me: