by Ian Watson
If the Atlantic can be swum successfully, why not the wider yet warmer Pacific?
This is what I propose to raise adequate aid to save the peoples of the Sahara: the Great Pacific Swimming Race!
The drought in Africa continues. The Sahara expands year by year. We have ample time on our side to organize this even more challenging international competition. I can already see the route in my mind’s eye: either from Baja California via the Northern Equatorial Current to the Philippines (only 8,700 miles), or else from Punta Pariñas in Peru by way of the Southern Equatorial Current to New Guinea (about 9,200 miles). The shorter route would take round about 310 days, which does not seem wholly unreasonable—it’s well within the confines of a single year.
Obviously shark cages will need to be used. These should be specially designed so that they’re huge, giving each swimmer a sense of perfect freedom and space. How silly to swim the wide Pacific inside a little cage! I foresee giant cages twice the length and breadth of an Olympic swimming pool, and a hundred yards high (in case of giant waves), jutting ahead from the bows of each support vessel. Oil-rig technology is quite capable of manufacturing and fitting these.
Over a period of 300-plus days the field of competitors is likely to spread out rather more than in the Atlantic. Even the leading swimmers might be half a day or a whole day apart from each other. Might this lessen the keen interest of the world audience? I very much doubt it!
I have a dream. Why should the whole waistline of the world not one day be circumnavigated by swimmers?
THE WIRE AROUND THE WAR
Today as usual hundreds of buses from all over the country are converging upon these fields and narrow lanes. A marshal waves our own bus on to a parking place at the head of a long line of other buses decorated with peace posters. After three hours of travel we can disembark and stretch our legs beside golden cornfields ablaze with poppies.
An invasion of poppies! Maybe the poppies are a nuisance to the farmer, but they’re a beautiful nuisance.
As journeys go, ours has been quite short. Further up the lane I spot a small party of Africans in tribal robes. Beyond them, some Buddhist monks in saffron cloth.
But wherever in the world we marchers come from, you might say that the longest journey begins right now—with the walk to the wire. Beyond which, space undergoes a change. From which, not everyone returns.
“Alicia! You forgot your sandwiches!”
It’s Mark, swinging my rainbow-ribboned knapsack. Mark’s a physicist, so he understands a little of events beyond the wire.
“Oh … I was just going to have a pee. Hang on a moment, will you?’
Actually, till this moment I hadn’t thought of emptying my bladder; though it’s a sensible idea. There’s a little copse of quivering aspens behind the bus, which other marchers are using for the purpose.
By the time I rejoin Mark, Sandra and Jack have unfurled our banner with its white dove swooping across a sky-blue background, a broken rifle clutched in one claw like a snapped twig.
Fronted by the banner, the thirty of us set off up the lane past all the buses which arrived before. Several times we detour on to the verge to let a new bus nose its way through. Away across the cornfields we can see another long line of buses parking on another lane.
From here to the wire is a good two miles, and the lane is crowded. Soon I find myself munching a tuna sandwich. I don’t quite recollect deciding I was hungry, or diving my hand into my knapsack. It’s almost as though I want the sandwich out of the way. Well, it’s easier to carry food in your tummy than slung over your shoulder!
The others start to sing. We Have Overcome …
A marshal cycles by, tinkling his bell in accompaniment.
“How many here today?” calls Mark.
“We reckon thirty thousand.”
“Will we even get close to the wire?” I ask.
The marshal laughs. “Oh yes. You’ll touch it. Everyone will. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?” He cycles on.
Our party overtakes a young fellow pushing a wheelchair in which an old, wrinkled, joyful woman sits with a thick brown rug over her knees even though the weather’s warm. As our banner-bearers bunch together to pass by, our linen dove hunches its wings and dives for a moment like a hawk. How the old woman smiles and claps her hands at our song. And joins in, quaveringly.
We in turn are overtaken by a striding churchman in grey flannel suit and purple singlet with dogcollar. Maybe’s he’s a bishop. He wears his pectoral cross slung upside-down.
“Look, Mark!”
What a host of marchers stream ahead; and how slowly we make our way. But right across the very next field—of oats—I can see arc-lights, towers, and a long barrier shimmering with rainbow colours, lancing out occasional flashes where razor-wire twists sunlight.
An ugly black helicopter is lumbering up from close behind the wire. From very close. It looks like a flying bathtub with rotors at both ends; and it must be big enough to carry an armoured car inside it. All we hear, even so, is the distant clang of bells and clash of tambourines and shrill of whistles sounded to ward it off.
“That’s a Chinook,” says Mark.
The chopper only reaches a height of fifty feet before it banks over on its side and heads away inward—shrinking ever so fast. Within a few seconds it’s no more than a tiny smut of soot.
I find I’m finishing off my second sandwich of salami and tomato.
And here we are, right next to the wire.
Mark and I, and thousands of others in a line two or three deep stretching away into the distance.
Behind us, ripe oats.
Ahead, death and destruction, all the engines and personnel of doom.
First of all there are coiled bales of ordinary barbed wire, shoulder-high, impaled upon steel stakes. Then there’s a twelve-foot-high barbed wire fence topped with tangles of razor-wire which could slice gloves, boots, and flesh into shreds. Finally there’s an inner fence which is just as high. We all reach to touch the outermost wire at least once.
Beyond the triple barrier are runways, fuel trucks, F-111 fighter-bombers, giant Galaxy cargo jets, and sunken silos. Missile transporters trundle slowly about. Radar dishes swivel. Military police speed about in jeeps. Choppers poke their snouts through the air with lazy menace like questing sharks.
Obviously this area is an American base. But is it in Britain or Sicily or Turkey, or in America itself? Who knows in which country the original is sited?
At first glance the base looks jam-packed with hardware and personnel. But this is something of an optical illusion: “a compression effect”, as Mark calls it. Also, the size of objects diminishes rapidly. A Galaxy jet a bit further away looks no bigger than a gnat.
Here in the real world outside the wire, a mile is a mile. Inside, distances obey a “negative exponential curve”—which means that whole bases and battlefields get compressed into a strip of space which we, from here, would only take to be a few yards wide. A few feet. A few inches. Deep in the interior a nuclear explosion would throw up a mushroom cloud no bigger than an actual field mushroom sprouting from horse dung in a pasture.
As we head slowly around the wire the American base shimmers into a Soviet base with different uniforms, different planes, different rockets pointing at the sky. Maybe this next base is located in East Germany or in Mongolia. But here it is, as well. Here is its double, its “analogue”, busily functioning away—while somewhere else the original base hunches frozen and inert, wrapped in Sleeping Beauty slumber. Nothing moves in those quiet places of the Earth where no one goes. All the deathly activity has been translated inside the “event horizon” of the wire—into the circles of hell within.
“See: American and Russian and all other war bases are connected topologically,” says Mark. “They share the same linked space.”
“And we keep them glued together inside, don’t we? It’s the pressure of our presence that pens them in. And the bells we ring. And the
songs we sing.”
“And something else too, Alicia.”
“Yes. Something else.”
Within: steel and concrete, tanks and warheads. Without: oats and corn and poppies and happiness.
There’s a long queue at the first of the telescopes.
“Shall we wait?” he asks.
“Yes, Mark. I want to see.”
Sandra and Jack and the banner move onward.
In fact it’s only a quarter of an hour till I get my turn at the eyepiece. Through it, I spy depth within depth, airbase within airbase, camp within camp, death within death, as far as the lens can pierce.
“Could those soldiers ever burst out through the wire?”
“Not while we’re here, Alicia. Not while he’s here.”
Not while he’s here. Our god-child. Our devil-child. Our prince of peace.
I say child. Yet what is childish about our prince—apart from his age? Apart from the fact that he was originally wheeled here in a stroller through chocolate mud four years ago—when there was only a single war base newly built behind the wire. When he was only two years old.
Now all the war bases of the world are here, securely fenced in.
His mother was an ordinary peace protester, Sarah Gardner. Recently divorced. A social worker. He was a toddler, Tommy Gardner. And he reached out from his stroller and grasped the wire.
A Christ child was born in Bethlehem. The years rolled by and the world witnessed the Crusades and the Holy Inquisition and the torture and burning of witches and heretics, and pogroms and infernos and holocausts, and a hundred wars of religion, and the manufacture of fifty thousand nuclear warheads to defend the faithful from atheism.
Perhaps it had to be the devil’s turn to be born as man, to save the world. Maybe only the devil could be bothered or concerned enough. Maybe only the devil understood evil and madness and stupidity well enough. Not God but Satan. Not Allah but Iblis.
Yet not without some sacrifice. Last time, the Christ child sacrificed himself to save mankind. This time, it’s up to us to make the sacrifice ourselves.
Willingly. Oh so willingly.
We continue on along the outside of the wire for a further mile. Two miles.
“There he is!”
Up on a stout wooden platform just above the heads of the crowd sits our devil-child, our hope, our bliss. Who was once the toddler Tommy Gardner. Who is now altered utterly.
At that particular point the barbed bales are piled high so that the platform thrusts right into them. Steps lead up to it. Ten minutes more, and we’re near them.
One of Tommy’s great ogre hands brushes the sharp barbs as you might stroke a cat. His other clawed hand is open and empty.
He’s horned and bloated and huge—the size of a young elephant. His great violet eyes blink monotonously at the wire. The eyes of an octopus? His mouth is a giant horny beak.
He’s a gross fat Buddha mated with Beelzebub. He’s a beast-human. He’s the greatest ugliness in the world; and yet he has an eerie grandeur. So therefore the dais around him is thickly strewn with flowers: with poppies, musky white lilies, spikes of pink lupin.
He starts to nod his inhuman head. His empty hand begins to flex open and shut.
And a yellow-robed monk mounts the steps to the platform, his palms together in blessing. His skull is shaved bald, though his face is young; he can’t be much more than twenty.
The monk bows his head. Our Tommy grasps him gently round the waist. Tommy’s claw-hand completely encloses the young man’s midriff. For a while the crowd falls silent, and the silence spreads. No gongs beat, no whistles blow. Then our devil-child hoists the monk aloft. The beak gapes; Tommy pops the offering in. Gulps; and swallows.
And the crowd breathes out a sigh like wind rustling through wheat. Tambourines clash, and bells clang—as rainbow light blushes along the wire.
“How soon till he feeds again?”
Mark shrugs. “An hour or two. Could be three. It varies.”
“Next time he feeds, I’ll be the one.”
There: I’ve said it. At last I have allowed the thought to surface.
Mark gapes. “What?”
“Next time—”
“But … Alicia, you can’t be serious!”
“Why shouldn’t I feed myself to him, if I wish? And if he wants me? Someone has to feed him willingly. Do you think it’s too vile a payment for peace? One life every few hours—so that untold millions of people can survive? And fields and forests and beasts and birds?’
“Of course not. Of course,” answers Mark in confusion.
Our prince of peace has hardly ever spoken. But in the beginning he told us why he must take us to him one by one, absorbing our flesh into his flesh. The power of his mind maintains the prison of the wire, but he needs to channel the energy of our own souls into it.
And why not indeed? In the old days we who campaigned for peace sacrificed our comfort, our freedom, sometimes even our lives. And sometimes we made headway for a while. Then the momentum of war would sweep onward. Nowadays our sacrifice is always of life itself—as regards the person who makes the sacrifice. But this sacrifice is completely effective.
“When did you decide?” asks Mark.
“Now. Earlier. I’m not sure.”
“But there’ll be other people here who are eager to … Willing to, anyway!”
“I’m the person who feels willing. Me, here, right now. Maybe no one else is willing just at this moment. But I am. And because I am, in another few hours somebody else will be willing.” I even laugh. “That somebody else doesn’t need to be you, Mark. Don’t think of it! You carry on considering the physics of this thing. The topology of space inside the wire, okay? Maybe you’ll make some wonderful, vital discovery—just in case our prince ever grows tired, or goes away. That’s your path. Mine is up these steps.”
I ease my way closer, with Mark at my shoulder.
“Be happy,” I tell him. “Don’t feel sad. Don’t feel guilty. Think about connectedness.”
“I thought we were connected. You and I.”
“Yes we are. And we’ll always stay connected, forever after.”
“You’ll be dead.”
“Better little me, than millions burned in a fireball.”
There’s really nothing more to say. Any other talk would now be trivial. So we stand together inside our own silence, Mark and I, while around us songs are sung, and gongs go bong, and bells clang and tinkle.
An hour passes, then most of another hour.
Till once again our prince begins to nod his head and to grope with his empty hand.
Mark stays below when I ascend the steps, on to the rafts of poppies and crunchy lupins.
Tommy is so close to me now. So large, so monstrous. His body smells oddly of fish-oil, though the dominant smell is the musk of lilies. I’m afraid yet not afraid. Maybe my fear is my courage.
He notices me. His violet eyes regard me. Not exactly with compassion but rather with a deep, calm, soothing vacancy. Within him is all the violence in the world, which he annuls and neuters.
I wonder: within the boundary of the wire, is time the same as it is for us? Is consciousness the same? Some of those soldiers who are trapped in the collapsed geometry of that zone perhaps never wished to be soldiers; perhaps hated being soldiers. Do they grieve that an incomprehensible hell has closed about them? Or do they simply go about their military business in a species of trance, repeating the same activities day after day, unaware that everything has altered? I don’t know. Perhaps I soon will know.
Tommy’s free hand moves towards me. His grip is so light, yet so unrelenting. He lifts me upward, headfirst to his gaping beak. I see a red cave, a dark throbbing tunnel opening downward.
And I don’t die.
I flash with brightness. Rainbow colours wash my senses. I taste gold and silver and steel. I am extended. I am the wire; the wire is me.
I sense the presence of my prince in the way a wave se
nses the whole ocean. I sense the thousands of souls preceding mine—the young monk and all the others—as a fish senses the other fish swimming in a vast shoal. Or as a bird senses the rest of its flock. Bird or fish are only one little individual mind. Yet at the same time each is the whole of the flock. How else could a shoal all dart in the same direction at once? How else could a flock swoop or soar?
Together we are the circuit of the wire. I’m at once a little part of it, yet nevertheless all of it.
I’m at peace; yet it’s a peace which pulses like a beating heart, a peace like the breeze upon a mountain top, a peace like the rolling, powerful sea.
War is compressed within me like a tumour which is frozen, like a cancer paralysed. Or like an oyster’s pearl.
Tommy lets us glimpse the future reflected in this pearl. Or perhaps, timelessly, the future has already happened—so that we sense events which have occurred already outside the wire, or are occurring even now.
Within fifty years the first alien beings are joining us in the wire. They have come to Earth, or else human beings have reached the stars; I’m not sure which. Maybe Mark found a way to connect Earthspace to Starspace. At first these aliens arrive out of curiosity; then presently as pilgrims. I believe Tommy is the size of a blue whale by now. Yet his hands still reach out, one to strum the wire, the other to accept the visitors who offer themselves to him.
And our flock, our shoal, always grows.
And the wire gleams bright.
WHEN IDAHO DIVED
“Gather round, elders, wives and juniors! Gather round, brothers and sisters of the tribe! Listen to the tale of how I piloted the sand submarine named Idaho down to the deep cave of treasure and bones.
“So you have heard it all before? Well, you will hear it once more …”
In the century following the end of the world, when skies were always grey, when plants grew flimsily, when birds fell from the air, when even the rattlesnake lost the voice in his tail, when wild dogs were our food, and we were theirs, the last tribe of the family of man made its way out into this desert land. For all the rest of the earth had become a deadly desert, but here, where the dunes roll and the salt-pans glisten, was merely desert pure and simple: clean desert as it had always been.