by Ian Watson
And all the echoes from around his plunging body warn of a perilous tunnel of heaped crags with razor edges!
Yet his tail drives him downward as fiercely as ever into the slit of the canyon.
Hitting one ledge of lava, crumbling it, driving knives into his hide, he ricochets towards another wall of fire…
He passes through veils of comb jellies, arrowworms and glassworms hanging in soft crystalline blankets; through schools of silver darters; then through brown medusae, red-worms and violet pteropods at the furthest reach of the light—but his eyes pay no heed to any of them; nor to any stray phosphorescences generating their own light down in the black below the light. And despite the precision with which his hardened wax prints every echo, tangible as the tooth buds in his lower jaw, prints every nodule sprouting from the bottom ooze, he still slams into this, jarring himself violently. He hangs a moment, brow buried in mud, before righting himself and pitching his way, half-deaf, through the narrow cracks between the cliffs, twisting right, twisting left, barely avoiding collisions.
• • •
Flight!
He was trotting in fear, stumbling over cold soft hummocks, bruising himself when he sprawled, but rising and trotting on breathlessly—till thin “fingers” whipped him to a halt…
A “voice” pursued him: arbitrary sounds approaching meaning, like waves on a shoreline, only to fall back in nonsensical jangle—“words” somehow associated with the joyful squirming of his body, with the “smell” of hair flowing under him like weed.
Was he fleeing from dying? But he had dying within him…
Perhaps he was fleeing from joy?
Yet how he fled, breaching on limbs he knows nothing of, performing for minute after minute the jumping dance upon the surface of the sea that always brings him crashing back below, in seconds!
He’d been able to balance in air, light and frail as a jellyfish…
Had that been his “soul”, then, before he existed?
If only they can penetrate the vortex of this madness! Or he will surely destroy himself.
• • •
He thinks of this Being in him as an Eight-Arms, after the model of the Eight-Arms he has seen nesting on cliffs, manipulating the world with their tentacles—and eaten up sometimes, catching them out in the open water. His relation to it is ambiguous. It feeds him mentally, he senses; yet manipulates him, hurts him too… It is Him, and Not-Him. He can’t feel the pure opposition that the Great Ten-Arms generate in him—who battle him physically in the seaworld deeps, whom he can physically defeat… The Eight-Arms in him is Another Self, along another axis of being. Every actual Eight-Arms that he chomps in his jaws and swallows down, he dedicates to it tactfully, propitiatingly…
• • •
He has cruised half his allotted time, has calmed and is registering more accurately where he is heading, when he rounds a buttress and there, head-on in the narrow canyon, finds facing him a Ten-Arm Intelligence, full-grown to his own length, and alert…
Four
On Monday afternoon, Paul Hammond unexpectedly decreed a half-day holiday from the hectic radio observations of the past few weeks for himself and Richard Kimble, and suggested they should drive down with Ruth and Baby Alice to watch the grey whales migrating north.
Richard regarded the invitation with some suspicion, being well aware of Paul’s lofty contempt for his amateur interest in whales—not to mention Paul’s likely awareness of Richard’s faltering, equivocal affair with Ruth Hammond.
As it turned out, though, it was internal politics he wanted to talk about—particularly Max Berg’s opposition to the histrionic manner Paul seemed set on announcing their findings in. Whales, and Ruth, were only sweeteners for the pill.
So they drove down the long, winding unmade road from the radio dish after lunch in Paul’s estate wagon, a Sierra, heading for the cliffs beyond San Pedro de la Paz.
The dish itself resembled a cross between a giant stylized ear and a pair of hands cupped for hallooing; and as they left a group of the local Mezapico Indians stood whistling up at it, nodding approvingly as echoes rebounded. That’s how to do it! their expressions seemed to say—as though the Americans had failed to bring the giant machine to life properly. It could move about in a restricted circuit, like a tethered goat—but it was dumb.
Their whistles were, in fact, how Richard had learnt that the grey whale migration was on. Since yesterday, the Mezapico had been whistling the news up the mountain. A wizened odd-job man had told him what it meant—and he mentioned it to Paul, hardly expecting this sudden picnic excursion to result.
Paul Hammond glanced at the Indians incuriously, dismissing them into the same limbo as the kites and vultures perched on the support spars of the dish—neither Indians nor wild birds made the least difference to the microwave radiation from the stars. His electric shock of hair swept back in the breeze of driving. It was grown just long enough, and wild enough, to signify inspiration without eccentricity. His eyes appeared bright and obsessive—but contrived to look wise too: as though he was wearing some sort of interior contact lenses, composed of sagacity—a kind of intellectual converse of cataracts. His firm ambery flesh belied his age—past forty. He does isometrics in the starlight before he comes to bed, Ruth had said sarcastically.
Traditionally, scientists have their Great Idea by the time they are thirty and spend the rest of their life building on it. Dr Paul Hammond had made his breakthrough somewhat tardily, at thirty-five, with his discovery of the colliding, smaller partner galaxy to our own, duly named Hammond, hidden beyond the dust clouds and stars on the further side of the Galactic core, and responsible for the periodic shudders running through the Miky Way, hitherto identified as gravity waves, and now regarded as a radically different phenomenon—Topological Catastrophe, or Hammond Waves. That had stirred up sufficient publicity worldwide, Richard recalled wryly—panic about colliding galaxies… Hammond became a household name, for a while. Now he seemed bent on making up for lost time and winning a double crown, and had left such local issues as galaxies far behind.
“We need to make a big splash with this one—toss a boulder in the pond! Look at the problem of funds for one thing, Richard. They’ve cancelled just about everything else. So many particle accelerators and space probes down the sink. We’ll show the bastards. The biggest breakthrough in basic knowledge of the universe. But I want to be sure we present a unified front. I need active backing from Max, not just some form of tacit consent.”—
The Sierra ground through Mezapico village, scattering chickens among the adobe huts, tin shacks, and slightly more substantial brick and tile buildings—among which were a shabby bar, a few shops and private dwellings of the richer peasantry, a lottery office and a police post. Some labourers were rebuilding the front wall of the latter, which one of the supply trucks for the telescope had swerved into a few days before. A row of iron bars grinned through the gap, behind which someone hunkered in the gloom wrapped in a sarape.
Old women stared at them blankly from faces as fissured as the cerebral hemispheres of the brain. Their skulls had split in the heat and been peeled off to hang as mementi mori in the little Mezapico church, whose tower shoved up its single bell at the street’s end: a solitary eyeball set in a long chalk face, surveying the baked, tattered village with resignation.
“Remember that day we went in there, Rich?” Ruth remarked moodily, while Paul wrestled to avoid a dog—she’d noted the quick smug look he gave her and Richard when he used the phrase “tacit consent”. “While I was pregnant… So damn greasy,” she shuddered. “Wax on the seats, everywhere. Like inside a honeycomb. I guess all the candle smoke settles.”
“I thought they’d been polishing the seats.”
“What on earth for?”
“Devotion? Like we arrange flowers in church?”
“Only there aren’t any flowers,” she laughed, “just sticks and thorns. What a dump.”
Richard gazed at the
bell as Paul drove towards it, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel impatiently. Its faint daily tinklings for Mass percolated up through the still air as far as the observatory. At least it could make some noise! While the great dish on the hill was a monument to deafness—clapper pointed rigidly at the sky in prosthetic erection… The church bell copied the radio dish in absurd, inverted miniature.
Naked brown children tossed pebbles at the estate wagon in a fitful way without bothering to take aim, to repay it for its cloud of dust. The village priest hovered outside his church, squinting dubiously at the vehicle and its passengers. For no special reason, not knowing the man, Ruth waved at him and shouted, “Hi there, buenas tardes!” Then the ruts and bumps got worse and woke Alice. The baby flushed pink, threatening a squall.
In the backyards of the last few buildings younger women were kneeling among wandering dogs and hens at waist looms—a couple of sticks stuck in the soil with the warp threads stretched between them—weaving bright zany zigzag cloth from threads others were spinning on hand spindles as simply constructed as the looms were—they were just crude shafts with wooden discs as flywheels. One fat lady with her black braids knotted up around the back of her head superintended the oil drums used to contain the dyes.
Baby Alice flapped her hands violently, banging them against the door handle, her mother’s body, Richard’s arm. They were sitting three abreast on the long front seat, at Paul’s insistence—he didn’t like having to talk over his shoulder to people.
“Gentle, Ally, gentle,” crooned Ruth, cuddling her daughter up against her shirt, making the button nipples of her small tight breasts stand out against the fabric as though she had the garment on inside out.
Alice seemed bent on maximizing every lurch and jolt of the Sierra in protest at the shaking around she was getting. She opened her mouth wide as a newly-hatched birdchick. But it wasn’t to cry. Or demand food. It was to yawn—implosively, in total abrupt boredom.
Ruth grimaced sidelong at Richard. One of Paul’s tricks, this sudden yawn. An active, functional yawn, it was—brisk as a cruel word, or a slap in the face. As used by Paul in meetings.
The hand-flapping, too, was a miniature of Paul’s gesticulations. Not to mention the few spiky curls of fair hair that Alice had. When Alice grew older and the rubbery yoghurt of her skin had time to tan a little, she’d be the perfect model female Paul.
Ruth had her own special facility for boredom—and had it in plenty, Richard reflected. Yet it acted more like a vacuum cleaner, perpetually sucking experiences into the same tight black bag.
Yet who could blame her? Translate it into a man’s terms. Up Alice’s age by twenty years. How would it feel for someone marrying this female version of Dr Paul? A constant put-down of the man’s ego. Alice would choose someone whom she could overwhelm when she grew up; who would worship her briefly; but never be brilliant enough for her, so that his job, whatever it was—insurance salesman, lab technician—would always seem derelict and deficient. Maybe he’d go out and get drunk and have furtive abortive affairs to make it up to himself, feeling curdled inside all the while; and even realize that she wanted him this way all along: an empty stage for her own dramas.
Ruth’s own hair-was black. Not jet-black or ebony-black or any such; but just plain black—though she’d worn it luxuriously long enough when she first met Paul. Recently, though, she’d cropped it to a spiky helmet. Shorn of the long hair, her face revealed its basic peaky character, that hadn’t been so obvious to herself before—though doubtless in retrospect it had always been apparent to the various TV agents and Drama School instructors who capitalized on her ambitions. Without enough character to be an actress, and without looks enough to star in commercials, her long, black, assiduously cultivated hair had woven a precarious bridge between two delusions—now she had cut it loose.
The road descended steeply now into Ciudad Juarez past flocks of goats, maize fields, cactus hedges. Ciudad Juarez was a larger town than Mezapico. Its church boasted twin spires and twin bells, with a spacious dusty square opening out before the church—the zocalo, a small shrub garden in its centre.
A handsome, cheeky-faced Indian youth was squatting on the check-tiled perimeter wall of his garden. He jumped to his feet as they drove round the square anti-clockwise, stuffed his fingers in his mouth and emitted a piercing series of whistles. Baby Alice swung her face in his direction and squealed in return twice, experimentally, soaring off the edge of the scale into inaudibility.
“He must take to me,” giggled Ruth, as the youth stood watching them while they receded through the dust. His loose homespun manta shirt and trousers were ragged, but a bright vermilion sash round his waist gave him a dandyish air.
“We’re reaching beyond the end of the universe, eh, Richard?” growled Hammond. “It’ll shake ’em. It won’t be just some galaxy called Hammond or some Hammond Waves this time—”
“You’re not kidding, the end of the universe,” Ruth commented bitterly, indicating the scrub, cactus and stony fields resuming immediately outside the town, a few bent figures hoeing in them.
“I mean the telescope has, obviously, Ruth. We’re past the limit of observable stars and galaxies—harking back to the time before they were formed, hearing the echoes of the Big Bang that’s supposed to have started it all—”
“Ah yes, your famous ‘Footsteps of God’—that’s what you call it, isn’t it?” Ruth nudged Richard. “See, I know the cues. Paul only has to mention ‘Isotropy’ or ‘Microwave Background’, and I salivate obediently in my head. Still, it isn’t the same as understanding the script—that’s a distinction Paul never seems to grasp. Where does God come into it? The way Paul’s carrying on lately, you’d think you were founding a new religion, not just stargazing! ‘This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper’,” she quoted. “Modern Verse Drama,” she apologized brightly. “I got a B for the course. On the other hand, what if the world begins with a whimper and ends with a bang?”
“You’d not make that remark unless you understood,” Paul pointed out in his unique blend of blandness and acidity. Richard wished fervently they could reach the sea a little faster.
“Did I ever tell you, Rich,” Ruth backtracked—whistling the opening bars of a song he was all too familiar with, “I was working my way through Drama School when I met Paul in that motel? Study life, that’s the Stanislavsky method, isn’t it? Someone in Theatre Arts said go work in a motel. I wonder if it was a joke. Meaning I could study being a receptionist—sort of perpetual understudy? Hey-di-hey, there I met Paul—thus the yarrow sticks fell!”
She said no more; but he knew the rest of the recital by heart. How Paul needed an understudy for a wife. How it said something about his manhood. Paul thought Ruth was good in bed—therefore Paul thought he was the really good one. But Ruth wasn’t much good as a lover. However, Paul didn’t notice—so this Laingian knot proceeded—because she couldn’t act being good at it well enough to expose him. So he was safe, and his self-esteem secure. This self-esteem carried him through his one-night celebrity stands—with girl research students auditing conferences, angling for scarce jobs. Still, he needed the security of knowing he was continuously good, back home—an illusion that he wouldn’t wish to be shattered by obvious good acting on Ruth’s part. Yet since Ruth was supposed to be some kind of actress, he could watch out for signs of acting, and when he didn’t find them—she not being good enough to produce them—that proved he was the active, sexy, stimulating one.
But what role did Richard think he was playing himself? Conducting this unsatisfactory, diffident, basically non-productive affair with Ruth? (For they had only, in truth, been to bed twice.) Maybe he needed the security of her evasiveness as surely as Paul needed the prop of her deficiencies. (He wouldn’t use a harder word.)
Evasions, deceits… What did they matter, after all? Paul had made the breakthrough here in Mezapico. That was real enough. The Footsteps of God would soon echo round the w
orld.
As the Sierra slid down a one-in-four gradient of loose stones, Baby Alice protested at Ruth’s overtight grip on her. A tiny simulacrum of Paul Hammond, she grunted and arched her back and flapped her hands. Then she squealed—repeating the high-pitched whistle of that Indian lad back in Ciudad Juarez.
“Why couldn’t you leave Ally with Consuela? You know this road’s lousy—”
“Leave Ally?” Ruth enquired in all innocence. “But I wanted her to see the whales.”
“You must be joking,” guffawed Paul. “At five months old she’d even know if one leapt right out of the sea in front of her? Besides, we’ll be hundreds of feet up a cliff, I gather from Richard.”
“It’s something to tell her when she grows up.”
“Tell her anyway. She’d never know the difference.”
“That’s not honest, Paul. I’m a poor liar…”
“As we’re all being so honest today,” Richard blurted, bitter at the discordant notes increasingly contaminating the whale migration for him, “that kid back there wasn’t wolf-whistling anybody, Ruthy.”
It was regretted as soon as said; for Ruth shot back angrily:
“How would you know?”
“There’s a whistle code,” he mumbled, hurt by the scorn implied in the “you”. “You find whistle codes in Turkey and the Pyrenees and here in Mexico. You saw them whistling at the Big Dish as we left, using it as a reflector?”
“I thought they were just having fun, making echoes,” she muttered, crestfallen, as Paul slewed round another bend to bring them in view of San Pedro de la Paz, last and largest of the towns on their road seawards. San Pedro sprawled a thousand feet below them on the coastal plain: tiled white houses and glittering tin shanties dominated by a Spanish Colonial church of some Baroque magnificence, if rather sugary in execution. The town spread out around a baseball-pitch-size zocalo before the church like a crowd of diffident paupers invited to a wedding reception at which there was only one course: the huge three-tiered wedding cake.