The Jonah Kit

by Ian Watson

  As he strode away up the lava spill, for the first time in years a haiku formed itself spontaneously in his mind, calming and ordering his thoughts…

  In a whale’s eye

  The glaze of a T’ang bowl—

  Reflected!

  Twenty-Eight

  “So much for Paul’s big breakthrough!” smirked Ruth.

  Nonetheless she was visibly shaken by the sight of that windrow of corpses littering the strand below the cliffs.

  Wild dogs were worrying the sun-high flesh and stinking blubber, which the Mezapico Indians had been hacking at all morning to so little effect, whistling shrilly to each other along the shore in frustration as much as in excitement. That so much should come ashore, after such dearth! It seemed an insult. A malicious joke.

  Father Luis said they blamed the telescope. The great mirror had mesmerized the sea.

  Ruth recalled Richard Kimble’s flippancy, uttered near this very spot, about attempting to whistle whales ashore. It had been his flippancy, hadn’t it?

  Of course it had. She hated the memory of him. His stupid quizzical face. Blinking. Puzzled. Paul had brushed Richard away like a fly as soon as his buzz had become even mildly annoying. Then what did he do but go tamely to feed Paul’s devil message into some computer they’d rigged up out of whales’ brains!

  These bodies on the beach were his responsibility, as surely as if he’d whistled them on shore with his own fingers stuffed in his mouth. He was guilty through and through. How she loathed him.

  Gianfranco Morelli and the Priest stood by her, gazing down.

  Finally, Morelli shouted in protest:

  “This isn’t even real! It’s the final damned illusion of that bastard.”

  “How do you mean, not real?” Father Luis enquired incredulously.

  “Oh, maybe real for us! But not real for them. No, not for the whales, the really intelligent ones.”

  “Unreal for them because they’re dead?”

  “No, Father. Reality branches into so many possible universes. That is what Physics proves. We argued about this before.”

  “I remember. But I don’t see—”

  “The observer chooses his own branch. The result is the consensus reality we all inhabit. The world as we see it about us, and far out into space. I suppose only the mad are excluded from consensus. Even they are held here physically by the pressure of so many other minds agreeing on the form reality should take.”

  “We lock them up,” muttered Ruth.

  “No! By ‘held here’ I mean that they don’t disappear into alternative mad universes, because of the pressure of everyone else’s thoughts upholding this one. But now we have chosen to embrace Paul Hammond’s insane anti-universe. Chosen passionately and greedily, to salve our own despair. But the whales—ah, the whales—they had a choice to make too.”

  “They chose the road less travelled by,” quoted Ruth nostalgically, recalling a poem she read in high school. An allegory of life, the teacher had said…

  “No, it is we humans who choose the byroad,” Morelli contradicted. “Those chose the highroad of sanity and a healthy universe.”

  “You call suicide a sane healthy pastime?”

  “They haven’t committed suicide, you little fool! They didn’t choose the Hammond branch. They refused it. For them the universe branched a different way. To a positive world.”

  “For Chrissake what are all those corpses?”

  “Ruth, those have subtracted themselves by choosing another reality. Yet we still live in a rational world, it seems, so we have to rationalize their disappearance. They have to seem to die. That is reality for us: their rotting bodies. Truth is, they have escaped. Who knows, from their point of view, but that this whole planet is now purging itself of humanity? Even now in their universe they see us racing into the sea to drown ourselves! They are nosing our bloated bodies round all the coasts of their world!”

  Ruth recoiled.

  “You’ve flipped.”

  “He’s a good man, but misguided,” Father Luis chided. “The whales really came ashore to help us. They redeem us with their sacrifice. See—”

  Laying a frail hand on Ruth’s arm, he turned her to face in the direction of San Pedro de la Paz. The upper tiers of the well-icinged church sparkled above tin and tile roofs. And—

  “Jesus wept, they’ve broken through,” she whimpered, overcome by a throb of terror, and excitement.

  Cars, trucks and bikes were emerging, racing in their direction, towards the cliffs…

  “No, Senora Hammond, I imagine the authorities have deliberately let them through. To see this with their own eyes.”

  Using his hold on her arm to balance himself, he knelt down in a rickety way.

  “Now I can pray once more. I feel a clarity in my soul. These creatures are the saints of our day, returning to this land after how many thousand centuries? Precisely when we need them and their death, to restore our souls to us.”

  “So this is your version of the Second Coming?” sneered Morelli. “God help us, don’t you understand, we are left all alone!”

  The Priest started to cross himself; changed his gesture halfway through, from a cross to a simple fish sign scrawled in the air: twin curves, forming a pointed head at one end, an open tail, at the other.

  “Icthus,” he intoned, “was the old private name for Christ. The Greek word for fish. The letters spell out his name—‘Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Saviour,’ in Greek… do you see? The fish redeems us…”

  “There’s not a fish in sight! They’re bloody animals, whales!” The Italian sputtered incoherently; and meanwhile the mob advanced…

  “The shape is the same,” Father Luis observed blandly, tracing the fish scribble more confidently to right and left, fitting it over the bodies that lay below. “Fish is only a word. A swimmer in the sea. Yes, this is a kind of second coming, you’re right. How unexpected!” But his beam of joy faded as he had to concentrate on the sheer physical effort of clambering to his feet again. Half-way through the creaky manoeuvre, Morelli grasped him or he could have slipped to his death over the edge.

  “It wasn’t really necessary, I would not have fallen, now.”

  “You’d land on a whale and bounce back up again miraculously,” jeered Morelli.

  Then the first vehicles were pulling up beside them, disgorging their dusty, tattered passengers. Some with cuts and burns, amateurishly dressed with torn linen. Hard to tell under all this dirt who was peasant, who was bourgeois, who was tourist from over the border. Apart from the vehicle registrations, and styles and ages. Trucks with barred wooden sides, clapped-out Cadillac taxis from the City, Dune buggies and VWs: all looked as if they’d driven here through a stony hailstorm. A few bulletholes pocked their doors. Windscreens had been shattered.

  Then came the gang of Satan’s Slaves, revving their chopped hogs to the cliff’s very edge, spraying dirt over in bravado. Morelli glanced at them nervously, but they paid no special attention to him; the role of pack leader had devolved upon the epauletted shoulders of a podgy youth with boils, some missing teeth, and a squashed nose, who plainly didn’t recognize Morelli or remember Danny’s threat. His epaulettes were plastic Tarot cards, that fluttered from his shoulders like tiny sprouting wings as he rode.

  All along the clifftop people were gazing down mutely on the Indians trying to flense these whales with ridiculously small sickles and knives. Becoming aware of their silent audience, the Mezapico whistled ever more shrilly along the beaches, and it seemed that the very last breath was squealing out of the recumbent monsters.

  “This time,” said Father Luis, “Golgotha isn’t a hill. The crucifixion is on the seashore. See how they all ignore the hill and the telescope? Though they fought tooth and nail to reach it, they’ve forgotten it. This is the greatest wonder. So I say yes, the whales have redeemed us. Tell me—” He addressed the nearest spectator, who happened to be wearing long hair, with a torn orange kaftan flapping open from heavily-bel
ted jeans and tanned shirt. “Why did the soldiers say they let you come?”

  The American hippy wouldn’t take his eyes off the bodies on the beach.

  Father Luis asked a second man, wearing a dirty business suit, the tie torn open at his neck, somehow without dislodging his paste jewellery tie-pin. But he said nothing either.

  The third man he asked was a peasant wrapped in a dingy ochre sarape. This one replied in a vague, hypnotized tone:

  “Why, to see the whales walk on the land, Father. They say it is happening all over the Earth, since we told lies about the stars. So they came out to see for themselves.”

  Contemptuously Morelli spat down the cliff. His spittle vanished into thin air; the gesture went unnoticed.

  Father Luis traced the sign of the fish with two powerful sweeps of his index finger.

  “Those are our intercessors,” he explained to the man, “who intercede for us with Him. This is a miracle, this thing which men’s eyes witness today across the world—to bring faith back amongst us…”

  “It’s a bloody ambiguous miracle,” mocked Morelli. “Carnage.”

  “Aren’t miracles all essentially ambiguous, my friend? Miracles represent a suspension of natural law, they can hardly be cut and dried.”

  “But faith in what, Father?” enquired the peasant cautiously.

  “Faith in reality! Those have sacrificed their reality, so that we can believe in this world once more, and care about her. Our world.”

  The plump Satan’s Slave had been scudding his bike closer in silence with his boots, during this exchange, listening.

  Producing a pack of Tarot cards out of his leather jacket, he slapped it face down on his fuel tank.

  “Choose,” he challenged Father Luis.

  The Priest regarded the cards dubiously, then gestured at the beach.

  “What need is there? Our fortune is told.”

  “I’ll pick a card,” Morelli volunteered. Before the Slave could agree or disagree, he had whipped a card out of the centre of the pack and flipped it over.

  The Page of Cups.

  The picture showed a man holding a chalice out of which a fish reared up into the air to inspect his face. Behind the man lapped ocean waves…

  The Angel gazed at it a long while. Then he wrenched the Devil cards from his shoulders and flipped them out over the cliff. Two bright plastic pictures rotored down like sycamore seeds till the void of air swallowed them as totally as it swallowed Morelli’s gob of spit.

  The plump boy pulled a tattered interpretation manual from his top pocket and thumbed through to the Page of Cups.

  “Listen to this. News, a message is what it means. So you’re right on the ball, priest, that’s our message all spelled out.”

  Some bodies, dwarfed by height, were still immense enough; particularly one sperm whale corpse. The Mezapico were toy matchstick creatures, by comparison.

  Morelli snatched the Tarot manual away from the Angel. His face darkened as he read it.

  “Liar! You listen to me. You only read part of this. It says also ‘it is the pictures of the mind taking form’. And if it’s facing you the card signifies a true message, but if it’s reversed—and I chose the card, and it doesn’t face me!—then it signifies artifice and deception. It means a phoney message. A lie.”

  He tossed the grubby little book down on the ground, for the fat boy to retrieve. His finger stabbed the air.

  “Those are only images of the mind. They seem real—cut them and they bleed—but they aren’t real toothed whales. Those have extracted themselves from this reality of ours. They branched elsewhere. Those bodies are all just phoney rationalizations: ways of explaining to ourselves how the whales can have disappeared into a non-Hammond universe! Lies made visible! Mankind’s collective hallucination!”

  The Angel was attempting to slot the fish card into a tuck of leather on his shoulder.

  “Man,” he growled, “are you crazy! Are you fucking nuts!”

  Gently, baptismally, Father Luis helped secure the card to the boy’s jacket with a safety pin, produced from somewhere in his robes, mumbling a few words in Latin.

  The Italian turned and trudged away from the entranced crowd, heading in the direction of Mezapico Mountain, out across the desert…

  Ruth waited a while, till he had walked a couple of hundred yards, then climbed into the Sierra and drove after him.

  “Want a ride, Gianfranco?”

  She coasted alongside him, while he marched obsessively onwards, ignoring her.

  “Gianfranco! What are you going to do?”

  Cactus scraped the flanks of the estate wagon…

  He halted so abruptly that she drove right past him, missed his reply, and had to back up.

  “I suppose, kill him,” he repeated.

  “If you walk all the way there, you’ll be too tired for anything,” Ruth said amiably. “So hop in.”

  “Do you have a tool kit?”

  “I guess.”

  “Tyre irons? Jack handle? Pickaxe—that’s how they got Trotsky.”

  She nodded, uncertainly.

  “Have to be one of those then.”

  He fixed her with a lopsided grin.

  • • •

  “Okay? No objections?”

  By the time they got back to the Observatory, though, Dr Paul had already flown out, bound for the Andes. Consuela handed Ruth a hastily scribbled message from her husband, telling her to follow on with Alice…

  Soldiers lounged about the base of the Big Dish.

  As soon as Morelli, in a fury, started hurling parts of the Sierra’s tool kit up at the vultures perched on the spars, they moved over and arrested him.

  Ruth departed to pack a suitcase for herself and baby.

  In her room, bed littered with clothes, she re-read Paul’s note thoughtfully.

  Ruth—

  I’ll be working at the Andes Dish for six months. We’re fixing it so that Max takes over the daily running of this place. Hire a couple more staff. I’ll still be Director in absentia. Life should be calmer higher up in the hills.

  You’ve been under strain lately. Me too. Bad influences—need I enumerate? Kimble. Morelli. If you feel you need a rest, Ruth, Max can arrange a clinic in Oakland for a time—I’ll look after Ally, till you’re calmer. It might do you good. On the other hand, if you feel up to it, follow on. Your choice.

  This note’s a bit of a rush—Max can fill you in—I’m being ushered off the premises by a full colonel! The Powers-that-be find my continued presence somewhat corrosive, it seems.

  Bests,

  Paul.

  Yes, she would follow on, damn him. Into the even higher, emptier Andes.

  There was a brief postscript…

  p.s. Pity the whales took it so hard. We must have really blown their fuses!

  Twenty-Nine

  Orlov dumped the latest telex reports on Kapelka’s desk, then lounged against the wall: a spiv on a street corner, his coat dragged round him against the draught. The seats were taken by Katya Tarsky, Richard Kimble, Tom Winterburn. Herb Flynn was away examining Sakhalin’s first beached whale, which had come ashore on the other peninsula, at Ul’yanovskoye.

  Kapelka dreamt briefly of a quiet appointment counting the remaining sturgeon in Lake Baikal, calmly attending at the bedside of the dying… Alternatively, the authorities might leave him here, in this surly spot, on a reduced budget, scribbling fisheries reports.

  Yet again, who knows, maybe this whale disaster served some arcane purpose of the politicians? So that he might after all find himself occupying a prestige appointment at the Science City of Academgorodok, as he’d always hoped, carrying on his work of modelling minds. True, there was no other intelligent species to map the model on to, now, except the human one.

  Maybe, one day, in outer space…

  Still, the dog might leap either way.

  “Well?” he sighed at Orlov. “So it goes on?”

  “Still coming ashore. Africa,
Australia, South America, all over. None of the toothed whales will be left alive in a few days apart from a few captive dolphins. The only reason it isn’t over already seems to be the distances some of them are having to travel to reach any land. Why don’t the Gadarene swine just dive and drown themselves?”

  “They must wish us to see?” conjectured Kapelka. “No news from Jonah, Katya? He may know why this is?”

  A silly question. She would have told him immediately.

  “We have tried very hard,” Katya replied stiffly. “It would have pained him not to answer.”

  Such an alien death, for an alien motive, she thought. So soon after the transcendence of the Thought Star, to destroy himself! What was the meaning?

  “He must have been one of the first ashore,” she said. “Somewhere in California. The panic radiated from the Star he was in.”

  “Such mindless panic,” muttered Kapelka. “And yet, who are we to say it was mindless? When it obviously took the highest intellectual ferment to arrive at it! The baleen whales still scoop up krill and plough the seas like grazing cows, broadcasting this same sound round the planet till every last toothed whale hears it. Would we humans act thus on a song?”

  Orlov, from his street corner, whistled some bars of the Internationale.

  “I guess,” Tom Winterburn suggested soberly, “we might commit group suicide with bombs or biological weapons. But never all of us singly and individually by choice. This song doesn’t just stir emotions like the Internationale or the Marseillaise. It mimics reality. It’s a—what d’you call it, Professor?—a yantra of some new, fearfully compulsive knowledge.”

  “But knowledge of what?” Kapelka demanded. “Of the universe as viewed by this man Hammond? I very much fear it was simply their first true knowledge of us—of this race they share the planet with: Humanity, no less. Suppose that you were a Jew trapped in Nazi Germany—”

  “I should fight!” snapped Orlov.

  “If you were a blind Jew? If you only knew how to sing?”

  “I should emigrate. To propagandize.”