Evil Water and Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  Not long after, some excrement hit him on the shoulder. Excrement usually falls well clear of the wall but some freak contour must have directed otherwise. Without comment Tumbler wiped himself clean on a nearby danglevine.

  We passed six more ledges, rested and ate a meal courtesy of the tribe clinging to the seventh, then climbed past fifteen more. We reached Chief-of-Chiefs Badbelay’s ledge in the early afternoon.

  The ledge was already crowded with a line of chiefs—and in the middle Smear was chanting out another of his stories about bizarre worlds. In this case: about people with suckers like a gripworm’s on their feet who lived on a huge ball afloat in a void. Smear was leaning quite far back to call his words past the intervening bodies.

  “Shit in your eye,” Tumbler greeted him grumpily as we two forced a space for ourselves on the ledge.

  “Aha,” responded Smear, “but up here, where would that crap fall from? Either another tribe of tribes clings immeasurably high above us—or else not. If not, why not? Why do no strangers ever fall from above? Because no strangers live higher up! Yet if our precipice extends upwards infinitely, surely other people must dwell somewhere higher up. Ergo—”

  “Unless those other people have migrated further along than us!” broke in Tumbler. “Unless they’re further to the left—or to the right, for that matter.”

  “The reason,” Smear continued suavely, “is that our precipice isn’t infinitely high. It has a top.”

  “The real reason,” growled Badbelay, “may simply be that we are the only people. All that exists is the precipice, and us.”

  “Maybe we’re the only people on the precipice itself. But maybe hundreds of tribes live on top—and every now and then they gaze down and have a good laugh at us.”

  “Why should anyone laugh at us? Are we not courageous and ingenious, persevering and efficient, compassionate and clever?”

  “Undoubtedly,” Smear replied, “but perhaps if we were fools, liars, cheats, thieves, and slovens we would have slid down to the bottom years ago instead of trying to cling on here; and we would have been living in rich pastures.”

  “So now it’s the bottom that’s our goal, is it?” challenged Tumbler, “Kindly make your mind up!”

  “I spoke by way of illustration. Obviously, with all our fine qualities, it is ever upward that we ought to aspire. We may reach the top within a single lifetime.”

  “Then what do we do?” asked another chief. “Sprawl and sleep?”

  The argument went on all afternoon.

  Eventually Badbelay gave his judgement. We would all migrate in ten days’ time—diagonally. Leftwards, as was traditional; but also upwards, as Smear had urged.

  “If we do find lush pastures leftward and upward,” explained Badbelay, “we can always steepen our angle of ascent. But if we run into difficulties we can angle back down again on to the time-approved route.”

  Some chiefs applauded the wisdom of this compromise. Others—particularly Tumbler—voiced discontent. Smear looked disappointed at first but then perked up.

  That night we slept in vine-harnesses on Badbelay’s ledge; and in the morning we all climbed back down again.

  *

  A couple of days later Smear paid another visit to our ledge—with apprehension written on his face.

  The rest of our tribe had already fanned out across the precipice, a-gathering. I myself was about to depart.

  “Tumbler! Loosepiton! Have you looked out across the void lately?”

  “Why should we waste our time looking at nothing?” demanded Tumbler with a scowl.

  Smear pointed. “Because there’s something.”

  To be sure, far away in the pearly emptiness there did seem to me to be some sort of enormous shadow.

  Tumbler rubbed his eyes then shrugged. “I can’t see anything.”

  I cleared my throat. “There is something, Chief. It’s very vague and far away.”

  “Rubbish! Nonsense! There’s never been anything there. How can there be something?”

  Tumbler, I realized, must be short-sighted.

  Smear must have arrived at a similar diagnosis. However, he didn’t try to score any points off Tumbler. He just said diplomatically to me, “Just in case, let’s keep watch, Loosepiton—you and I, hmm?”

  I nodded agreement.

  Whatever it was seemed to thicken day by day. At first the phenomenon was thin, then it grew firmer, denser. No one else glanced in the empty direction—until the very morning when we were due to migrate.

  Then at last some fellow’s voice cried out, “Look into the void! Look, everyone!”

  Presently other voices were confirming what the man had noticed. For a while minor pandemonium reigned, though Tumbler still insisted: “Fantasy! Smear has been spreading rumours. Smear has stirred this up!” Which was the very opposite of the truth.

  Bounce clung to me. “What is it?” Now that her attention had been directed, she could see the thing clearly; though as yet none of us could make out any details. All I could be sure of, was that something enormous existed out in the void beyond the empty air; and that something was changing day by day in a way which made it more noticeable.

  “I’ve no idea, dear Bounce.”

  “Migrate!” ordered Tumbler. “Commence the migration!”

  And so we began to migrate, leftward and upward; as did the tribes above us, and the tribes above them.

  Over the course of the next ten days the business of finding novel fingerholds and toeholds occupied a huge amount of our attention. Besides, we had our kids to shepherd, or to carry if they were still babies. Consequently there wasn’t much opportunity for staring out into the void. Splatty made the mistake of doing so while we were traversing unfamiliar rock. He forgot himself, lost his poise, and fell.

  On the tenth evening Smear climbed down to our camping ledge.

  “Don’t you recognize what it is by now, Loosepiton?” he asked.

  “There might be some kind of dark cloud out there,” allowed Tumbler, peeved that Smear was addressing me.

  “It isn’t any cloud, old chief—nor any sort of weird weather. Look keenly, Loosepiton. That’s another precipice.”

  I perceived … a faintly wrinkled vertical plane. Like a great sheet of grey skin.

  “It’s another precipice just like ours; and it’s moving slowly towards our precipice day by day. It’s closing in on us. As though it ain’t bad enough clinging on by our fingertips all life long … !” Smear crooked a knee around a vine for stability and held his hands apart then brought them slowly together and ground them, palm to palm, crushingly.

  The wrinkles in that sheet of skin out there were ledges. Without any doubt. The hairs on the skin were vines. My heart sank.

  “We oughtn’t to have migrated in this direction,” declared Tumbler. He was simply being obtuse.

  Smear gently corrected him. “We aren’t migrating into an angle between two walls. Oh no. That other precipice faces us flat on. And it began to move towards us before we ever started our migration. Or perhaps our precipice began to move towards it. The result is the same.”

  “We’ll be squashed between the two.” I groaned.

  To have survived bravely for so many years of hanging on by our fingernails! We had never railed excessively against our circumstances. Sometimes certain individuals took the dive of despair. But children were born and raised. Life asserted itself. We had hung on.

  All so that we could meet a second precipice head-on—a mobile precipice—and be crushed!

  This seemed a little unfair. A little—yes—hateful and soul-twisting.

  Days passed by. We had settled on our new cliff pastures. We explored the cracks and ledges. We wove vines. We foraged. We ate worms and beetles.

  All the while the approaching precipice became more clearly discernible as just that: another infinite precipice, limitlessly high and deep, limitlessly wide.

  As the gap narrowed pearly daylight began to dim dangerously.
r />   Smear had conceived a close affinity for me. “Maybe it’s just a reflection,” I said to him one day.

  “If that’s the case, then we should see ourselves clinging on over there. I see no one. If I could bend my arm back far enough to throw a chunk of stone, my missile would hit solid rock and bounce off.”

  Several people from upper ledges took the dive of despair. A few parents even cast their children down; and that is real despair.

  Yet consider the difference between taking the dive—and being slowly crushed to death between two walls of stone. Which would you prefer? Maybe those individuals who dived died peacefully from suffocation on the way down. Or maybe they did reach a bottom and were instantly destroyed, before they knew it, by impact.

  The remaining daylight was appallingly dim by now. The other precipice with its cracks and ledges and vines was only a few bodies’ lengths away. In another day or two it might be possible to leap over and cling on—though that hardly spelled any avenue of escape.

  I paid a visit to Smear.

  “Friend,” I said, “some of those ledges over there are going to fit into spaces where we don’t have ledges. But others won’t. Others will touch our own ledges.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe there’ll be a little gap left between the two precipices. A gap as big as a human body.”

  “Leaving us uncrushed—but locked inside rock?”

  “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  “See?” he cried. “With no light to see by? Yet I suppose,” he added bitterly, “it will be a different sort of world. For a while.”

  Different. Yes.

  Yesterday—though “days” are now irrelevant—the two precipices met.

  All light had disappeared but with my hand I could feel the inexorable pressure of the other rocky wall pushing forward—until from above, from below, from left and right there came a grating, groaning, crackling noise; then silence for a while.

  Nobody had screamed. Everybody had waited quietly for the end. And as I had begun to suspect some days earlier, the end—the absolute end—did not come.

  I was still alive on a ledge in utter darkness, sandwiched between one wall and the other.

  Voices began to call out: voices which echoed strangely and hollowly down the gap of space that remained.

  Yes, we survive.

  There’s even a little light now. Fungi and lichen have begun to glow. Maybe they always did glow faintly; and only now have our deprived eyes grown sensitive enough to detect their output.

  We can still travel about—along a ledge to the end, then by way of cracks up or down to the end of another ledge. We scarcely see where we’re going, and have to guess our way through the routes of this vertical stone maze. Also, it’s still possible to fall down a gap, which would cause terrible injuries.

  Yet in a sense travel is also easier nowadays. We can brace ourselves between both walls and shuffle upward or downward or left or right by “chimneying”.

  Perhaps I should mention a disadvantage which has actually stimulated travel. Excrement can’t tumble away now into the void. Stools strike one wall or the other.

  What’s more, the collision of the two walls destroyed a lot of vines; nor can lush foliage thrive in the ensuing darkness.

  Consequently we are ascending steadily, just as Smear once recommended.

  Instead of living one above the other, our tribes are now strung out in a long line; and all of us climb slowly upward, foraging as we go, eating all the available lichen and fungi, worms and beetles. Now we’re permanently migrating.

  Are we moving towards somewhere? Towards Smear’s mythical top? Maybe.

  And maybe that place is infinitely far away.

  The new kids who are born to us on the move will enter a world utterly different from the world of my own childhood. A vertical world confined between two irregular walls. A world of near-total gloom.

  They will live in a narrow gap which extends sideways forever, drops downward forever, and rises forever.

  How will Bounce’s child (who is also either mine or Smear’s) ever conceive of the old world which we will describe: that world where one precipice alone opened forever upon the vastness of empty, bright space? Will he (or she) think of it as a paradise which might yet exist again some time in the future if the two walls ever move apart? Or will the child be unable even to understand such a concept?

  Sometimes I dream of the old world of open air and light, and of clinging to the cliff. Then I awaken to darkness, to the faint glow of a few fungi, to the confinement of the walls.

  The other day Smear said to me, “We didn’t know how well off we were, did we, Loosepiton? But at least we survive, and climb. And maybe, just maybe, right now we’re well off—compared with some future state of the world which will limit us even more severely!”

  “How could we be more limited?” I asked in surprise. “What new disaster could occur?”

  “Maybe this gap will shrink to become a single upright chimney! Maybe that’ll happen next.”

  “Life forbid! It hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Not yet.”

  Meanwhile we climb upward. And upward.

  Amazingly Smear still tells his peculiar tales about imaginary worlds; and tells them with gusto.

  SKIN DAY, AND AFTER

  Nance stirred and yawned.

  “What day is it, Benny?”

  What a little-girl question! I don’t mean that my Nance looked anything like a little girl as she lay sprawled in the sheets with her red hair setting the pillow afire. But it was a seven- or eight-year-old’s kind of question. You know, when they’ve been counting the days till their birthday or some treat? They know what day it is, all right, but they need to be told just to put the icing on the cake.

  I stooped over her and whispered, “It’s Skin Day, Nance.”

  And she opened her eyes wide and sat straight up.

  “Watch out—we’d better get moving! I’m going to wear my sealskin bra and my leopard-skin pillbox hat. And, oh, the ocelot stole! And of course that neat little lambskin muff. And the tail, the tail! The Bengal tiger tail, springing out behind me!” She flexed her fingers, feline fashion.

  “Hey, no hurry. No one’ll be on the streets yet. Let’s fix some De-caff and boil an Urf.” I hurried off to the kitchen area, flipping on the TV en route, and spooned a good helping of De-caff into the pot, then popped a couple of Urfs in a pan on the back burner.

  Actually I was beginning to prefer Urfs to real eggs, even though I was a registered Carnivore myself. I’d been getting dissatisfied with the Bootleggs we bought now and then. Too many real eggs had those gluey jelly bits in them that stuck to your teeth, and the yolks were generally paler and smaller than the synthetic sort. Since an egg wasn’t really meat, I didn’t see that any particular principle was involved; an egg, a philosopher might have said, is not a chicken. Still, a Carnivore had to watch out for his frontiers being eroded, so I did still fork out a dollar each for a Bootlegg occasionally. If no eggs got laid, after all, where would the chickens come from?

  But anyway, it was Urfs for breakfast this particular Skin Day morning. Nance never did put her name down as a Carnivore, so I didn’t feel as though I were shortchanging her. She would join me in a steak, to be companionable; but always she would want hers well done, not rare and bloody the way it ought to be. Personally I was a Carnivore, and Smoker, and Anti-Kids, and Anti-Nuke, the max you could sign up for. Nance was only Skins, and Save the Rain Forests (I suppose because jaguars breed there) and Smoker (too), but she seemed happy enough with her trio. We got on well together, especially on Smoking Day.

  Anyhow, Nance was in the shower by now, where I could hear her stinging herself all pink and fresh so that she could really revel in the touch of those animal skins.

  And the pre-News commercials were on.

  “Cherchez le Obster! Five-star flavour. Five-star texture. But nobody boiled it alive! Nobody made it scream! Remember: le Obster
!”

  This annoyed me quite a bit: all these snippets of bastard French that the synth-food biz was laying on us. What was it last week? Burf: the latest false beef. It sounded like somebody belching. We weren’t all that close to the Quebec border. I guess the manufacturers thought this added a swanky touch of gastronomy.

  I was wondering whether to cancel my Anti-Kid registration and sign up as an Anglo-Saxon Supremacist instead. Then I could shoot up to Montreal on a day trip and wander round insulting everyone by speaking English. But presumably half of Canada would be doing that on the day, so I just wouldn’t stand out in the crowd. And that wasn’t the point of special days at all, at least not to my way of thinking.

  Anyway, the pot of De-Caff boiled just then, and so did the Urfs. I fixed some toast and cut it into fingers to dip with, the way Nance liked it. “Soldiers’, she called them. She’d been Anti-Military before she switched to Save the Rain Forests, and she enjoyed biting soldiers’ heads off. I took our breakfast through to the other room just as the News was starting—and as Nance emerged from the shower wrapped in her towel.

  “Hi there, citizens. This is Cal Garrison, and today’s Skin Day, so just you watch out for all those Palaeolithic types wearing their cavemen clothes—”

  Nance pouted. “What a nerve. He’s got no concept of elegance. Just look how he’s dressed: T-shirt and jeans.”

  “Yes, Folks, it isn’t exactly Nature-Hating Day, but it’s the next best thing—for those who can afford it. And as I see it, only the stinking rich can doll up in animal skins—”

  “That just isn’t true,” she said. “Why, that ocelot stole I picked up was an absolute—”

  “I mean, any citizen can go trample the flowers in a park—”

  “He’s just trying to whip up feeling,” I pointed out mildly, “so the day’ll really shine.”

  “—all the cruel exploiters of lovely furry animals, who think God’s creatures are put on earth for us to adorn ourselves. All the rare tigers in the forests of the night and the noble Polar bears and cuddly seal pups and hoppity bunny rabbits—”