Sunstroke: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  How many rooms can I travel in a day? Fifty? A hundred?

  Alas, when I have toddled through twenty different rooms (Byzantine, Art Deco, geodesic dome …) I realise that my robot is no longer following. It lurks, two rooms back. Two doors stand open, though not the third behind; that’s shut tight. Which makes me anxious in case a door suddenly shuts in my face, cutting me off from my source of food and drink. I shall have to go back and try to figure out the reason for its inertness.

  The door won’t let me pass. Invisible elastic holds me back, a soft resistance growing firm as steel the harder I shove against it.

  I have to wait.

  And wait.

  Comes night, I lie down to sleep, thirsty.

  Comes another day, and still my dumb waiter stays where it is. Comes night, and some time during it, while I hunch around my hollow belly, throat dry as sticks, the robot rolls forward into the room next door; for it’s there in the morning, and the door beyond has shut.

  There it stays, out of reach, through the next awful day till night falls when it rolls in beside me at last to feed and succour me in the dark.

  If I had toddled on a few rooms further, unawares … Can a soul starve? Can it die of thirst? Here, apparently, it can. So I am limited to ranging no further than eighteen rooms ahead …

  Oh rat in the maze, how soon do you learn the rules? This is a maze that only has one route, though, and that route is straight ahead. The rules here relate to finding one’s way through time.

  As though to keep me occupied, furniture appears—at first sparingly but then, as my body puts on a growth spurt of its own over the next few hundred rooms, with increasing frequency. Before long, rooms are handsomely and even lavishly furnished: with chairs and bureaux, tables and cabinets, chaise-longues and sofas, chests of drawers, armchairs and the occasional glorious bed …

  Even so, all chests and cupboards and desks are empty, not even lined with so much as a sheet of old newspaper. Bookcases hold no books. No paintings or prints hang on the walls—there are no representations of an outside world. Nor are there any clocks.

  Could the rooms get too crowded? This idea sparks off another: now that the rooms contain something, I can interfere with them! Tugging open the door from the 19th century salon I’m currently in, I discover a gorgeous Shinto temple interior beyond: in vermilion, black and gold, with green tatami matting, a coiling silver dragon on the ceiling, lions painted round the walls, and huge metal vases standing about holding tall metal lotus blossoms. I select a light lyre-back chair of ebonised wood from the 19th century and try to shove it through into the Shinto temple. No way can I do it. Invisible elastic thrusts the chair back. Not me, just the chair. Passing through the doorway myself, I try to drag the chair after me. Impossible. The chair only belongs in one room; it only exists in one.

  Does it cease to exist, once I have passed on and the door has shut? Is it transmuted and recycled into a stool or part of a sofa further ahead? The problem of rules is beginning to obsess me, generating a sort of perverse thrill in the midst of my predicament. If there are rules, and if I can learn them …

  The dumb waiter lifts the lyre-back chair aside and follows me through into Shinto-land; the door clicks shut. Farewell, chair.

  A library! Complete with library steps with leather treads.

  All the books are dummies, five- and ten-volume blocks of leather-bound, gold-tooled dummies. Enraged, I toss them upon the carpet. Ashamed of myself, I restore them tidily a little later.

  At least the spines bear titles—the first words that I’ve seen in years. Here we have A History of Silesia. Here, Mr Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities by R. M. Surtees, Sallust’s Jugurthine War and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire …

  Maybe, in a later room, when I’m supposed to be able to read (by the age of six or seven, say) books will have words in them? How damnably frustrating that’ll be, if I can’t carry them from one room to the next!

  Onward, onward. I am the Wanderer, homeless in this never ending home, a nomad with nowhere to pitch my tent for longer than a day.

  I brood on the great journeys of the past; on Marco Polo setting off for Cathay. From Venice, was it? Just imagine the problem of interpreters in those early days before world languages existed. Imagine his having to hire yet another new interpreter at every new language boundary. Imagine his arrival at the court of the Great Khan with a huge retinue of interpreters of a hundred nationalities and the Khan’s greeting passing back along that vast recursion, translated out of Chinese into Mongol into Manchu into Tibetan into Nepalese into Indian tongues innumerable into Farsi … eventually into Bulgarian, Serbian, and finally into Marco’s native Italian so that he can at last comprehend, simply: “Hullo there.” Oh chain of interpreters, oh chain of rooms. What did I do to deserve this? Was it the hubris of seeking another life? Perhaps if I pray, I may be let out?

  Onward, onward.

  I’m bigger and stronger now, strong enough to shove my dumb waiter about. One day, bearing in mind my brush with starvation many hundreds of rooms ago, I wheel it through the doorway into the next room. The door duly clicks shut. I propel the robot through another room and another room. I reach the magic number eighteen; I transcend it. Hilariously I shove the dumb equipment through twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two; still the doors click shut behind us.

  Now a pause, for safety’s sake, in case a door clicks open in the night and my robot rolls hindwards again, leaving me high and dry. But that doesn’t happen. The ground I have gained remains mine.

  Tomorrow, I negotiate sixty rooms.

  The day after, though, chambers grow vast. Rooms become endless halls lined with chairs, their carpets stretching off into the distance. Soon it’s a mad rush to reach the next door by dusk. I am Achilles of the wounded heel, chasing the victorious tortoise. I slow down, exhausted. It seems that I’m being taught the concept of infinity.

  Is that because I shunned the prospect of eternity?

  As if to reward this insight, there appears next day an oasis: a full-size indoor swimming pool complete with slide and springboard. I walk all round it, warily, on the lookout for something lurking in the water, some shark or octopus. But no, there’s nothing but water in the pool: still, clear water. Slipping in at the shallow end, I soon relearn the art. I swim one breadth, then another, before I stretch out tired on the side.

  Is this … a baptism?

  For a few days I camp by the pool, since I’m still way ahead of schedule, delighted by this amenity—then gradually repelled by the wet, cool blankness.

  The following room—the huge hall of a castle with baronial chairs, a long oak table and eerie suits of armour—is punishingly hot. A hint of Hell?

  This little boy treks on, through more temperate, ordinary rooms. Pool and hot castle were simply random fluctuations. In infinity, I suppose anything can happen once, or even an infinite number of times. Even the impossible.

  *

  Can an infinite series of events ever come to an end? Can there be no number greater than n? An n of rooms … Oh ghost of Cantor, help me. I am lost in a transfinite set—this suite of rooms.

  But it had a beginning, and there has been change and growth since then, as witness the arrival of furniture. And when I rushed my waiter hectically forward, didn’t my environment stretch itself after my first day’s gains to check me? So it responds; it reacts to me. Since it permits me to live—by generating such an immensity of rooms to house me day by day—isn’t it fair to say that it is actually benign? Rather than malevolent or merely neutral? Surely a vast effort is involved in sustaining my existence—so vast perhaps that no energy is left over for added frills such as real books or paintings, windows or views. If it can only provide one dimension of movement—namely forwards—maybe that’s the most it can provide, the alternative being … what? a frozen stasis? with no way to move, nowhere to move to? This place certainly does not imprison me, when it urges me to move onward, ever onward. Can one rea
lly be a prisoner, in an infinite prison?

  A deep sense of joy begins to stir in me. I exist. Room for my existence is provided: that is the meaning. Even though I tried to make my soul mechanical, I am provided for. Surely it is a mere machine-soul that is in the reborns, however vivid and superb their new lives seem. God is not cheated. For our sake He will not let us cheat with souls. Though I bankrupt myself in His eyes, I am here on soul-welfare, guaranteed this minimum income and security.

  God did not wind the world up in the beginning, so that it should run on and on automatically. Rather let us say He recreates it afresh every moment in the fourth dimension of time, which is therefore the dimension of creation. Here in this endless hostelry outside of time—in eternity—linear space becomes the dimension of creation instead; instead of each new day, each new room comes into being to sustain my soul’s existence. Pockets of new space are constantly added instead of new increments of time.

  Gladly I press on now, entering each new room freely at nightfall and staying in the appointed room all day long with no wish to rush vainly and prematurely ahead.

  Though I wonder what lies beyond these walls, at right angles to the one direction I can travel day by day? Is it mere nothingness—or the face of God? I still would like to know. Will there ever be a window?

  A window there is! But not the kind of window I expected. It isn’t in any of the rooms. No, it’s in myself—it’s in my sleep at night.

  Strange, but I do not seem to have dreamt till now …

  Till I wake up in a dream tonight, well aware that it is a dream and that I’m really lying asleep on a stately, padded chaise-longue in one of God’s rooms, yet vividly present at the same time on a Tunisian beach—the selfsame beach that I watched through that stone grille window of hexagons and stars long ago. Only, now I am one of the naked children myself. We are all reborn, and playing together on the sands, watched over by a lilac-robed woman whose name, I know perfectly well, is Odette.

  So wonderful: the sun, the sea, the shore! Grains of sand trickle through my fingers; I sift a seashell from the soft yellow grit. White foam edges the water. A lizard scampers. There’s laughter, giggling, and voices.

  My friends’ names are: Andrea, Juno, Yukio, Michel, Sven. I know them all intimately. We’ve been reborn and reared together. Right now I’m saying to Andrea:

  “—we are like shells, with the echo of the sea in them; little rooms that contained soft, flexible life that rotted away. We are the purified shape of that life, and the echo is the music of our souls—”

  I surprise myself. Have I chosen to become poet rather than pentathlete? Or has my long stay over here in the rooms spiritualised my emotions over there?

  No, actually I am playing at seduction, years in advance of any possible performance; and Andrea is pleasantly teased by it. Our juvenile libidos caress one another. I am, I realise, in love with her. As is she, with me. How courteously we court, naked tots on the Tunisian shore: happy Heloise and anticipative Abelard, awaiting my ungelding and meanwhile making a game of it.

  My tongue continues turning pretty words, while I listen in astonishment to myself. My limbs act out a delightful yet irrelevant charade. My lips kiss hers chastely. We perform a hopping, sand-scuffling little dance, a sort of parody gavotte with a dune for a dance floor.

  I know it’s a dream—a lucid dream in which I am wide awake. Yet it is also real. It is actually happening on that Tunisian strand. We are there together, Andrea and I!

  The next night, and every night for weeks, I join the same unfolding living dream. The moment I fall asleep over here, I wake up over there. For sleeping and waking hours in the two worlds coincide perfectly but oppositely. Morpheus in the Underworld, I am there as we stroll through the Institute gardens, holding hands. I am there as we make our plans; for we’re both wildly rich—our investments have prospered during our years of minority. Soon we will be off to Mars to power-ski the dunes of Hellespont, anticipating our adult physique by wearing cybersuits. I am there till I fall asleep at night in bed with Andrea, holding her chastely. Yet all the time I am asleep and aware of the fact.

  What pain if she’s there within herself too, the Andrea soul, unable to communicate from her own after-death dimension, while we both gaily play the game of life. What pain if she too is awake in her own dream, and like me cannot say a word about it.

  What greater pain if she isn’t awake at all, but still locked away!

  I fantasise that I can break through the ritual of the dream.

  “Andrea, I’m asleep!” I cry. “I’m on some after-death plane, in an Elizabethan room of massive oak beams and flagons and silver gilt Livery pots. There’s an open iron casket with the most incredibly complicated locks all across the inside of the lid and nothing inside it, and a gnarled oak coffer that’s empty too. I’m sleeping on top of that. Hard bedding, tonight! It’s been room after room ever since I was reborn: hundreds, thousands of them, all without windows or words or people in them. That’s where I really am. Are you trapped in rooms too, while all this goes on?” (Gesturing at the Mediterranean and the humps of the Institute behind well-spaced palm trees.)

  She stops and stares, open-mouthed. Suddenly she knows.

  Alternatively: she smiles, “Welcome. This is the secret we all share. Now you know it too.”

  Neither event takes place. The dream is inexorable. It ploughs on with remorseless gaiety towards nightfall back in the Institute, where I fall asleep … to awaken promptly to this hard coffer lid, to another enclosed day. My dumb waiter serves breakfast. I defecate in a corner. Its nozzle cleans the floor.

  In the evening I step through into a sterile, functionally designed office, windowless (for the window is within me), with an empty desk, empty filing cabinets, and a dead intercom.

  Tonight’s dream spans my penultimate day at the Institute, for my discharge has been approaching rapidly. I call in to see Dr Manzoni, visibly older now, to say goodbye. (Andrea will be discharged six weeks later than me. I shall wait for her not far away in the Club Mediterranee village, La Douce, on the lotus island of Djerba.)

  I lavish thanks upon the good doctor … while my other, mute mouth aches to cry out, “Manzoni! This isn’t how it really is! Not for any of us, I swear. It never has been. God—whatever He is … the metaprogrammer of reality—He holds us all in store, while we caper through the second life, merry as puppies. We’re held in separate rooms, great chains of them, on and on forever, to teach us infinity and eternity. But alone, always alone, because we’re still alive even though we’re really dead. We’re alive and dead—both! This reborn life’s a mockery. If the mock life wasn’t being dreamt, the rooms could open up … to the wonder, to the truth.”

  None of this does he hear. My lips merely burble thanks. I leave him, and seek out the Bursar to see to my assets.

  Had I woken up to this dream in the beginning, I understand that I’d have been wild to burst through the window into the puppet drama I’m enacting over there. (Would I even have realised which reality was the more authentic?) Now, not so. Life is simply a huge simulation—a drama set on a stage that is recreated every moment—sustained by the dreams of the soul; when the body dies, the soul awakens. Had I woken earlier—had the window appeared before—I could never have accepted this.

  Tomorrow night, as I sleep in a four-poster bed in the cool high stone room of a castle, I kiss Andrea au revoir at the Institute and board the helicopter which will speed me south to Djerba …

  3

  How delightful is Djerba: the scent of orange groves, the white beehive houses (menzels, they call them), the bazaars and Roman ruins, the sponge fishers, the flocks of flamingos. Naturally I yearn for Andrea to join me, but in no way do I let this yearning spoil the pleasures of the present moment, nor would she wish such a thing.

  What my psychic integration tutor, the lovely Hiroko Matsuyama, told me about dreams is quite true: dreams are my life now, consequently the need to compensate for what is missi
ng in life is far less these days. In common with all reborns, I hardly seem to dream at all, or promptly forget what I do dream. Dissatisfactions have been washed away by rebirth. Now is all.

  Yet there was one dream, recurring around the age of one to three months, which came back again the other night just before I quit the Institute: a dream of being fastened up in an endless succession of windowless rooms. When I told Mme Matsuyama at the time she said this was the common—one might even say archetypal—dream with reborns, and about the only noteworthy one. It was an obvious psychic symbol of ‘rebirth trauma’—for instead of being convulsively expelled, as from the mother’s womb at first-birth, one is locked up instead in isolation in a womb-room for rebirth. The physical limitations of the early months encourage this symbolism. As soon as the infant body became more mobile, the notion of enclosure would fade. As indeed it did—as though I lost sight of myself passing through door after door and getting nowhere—for about then the world really began opening up; at the same time I was judged ‘firm’ enough for really thrilling sensory tapes to amuse my leisure hours: dragon-chases, maiden-rescues, the whole promised fairyland. My imminent ‘expulsion’ from the Institute summoned up the dream once more. Subconsciously, I must have been slightly anxious—and wanted to stay! But only once. Nights are nirvana time again.

  Today, I think I shall arrange a flight inland to Blidet, to power-ski the high white dunes …

  How refreshed I awake in my private bungalow this morning in Djerba la Douce. My window looks out upon the huge swimming pool of the Club. A tall slim negress poises naked on the diving board. She leaps, she twists in a backward somersault, she cuts the turquoise water cleanly. What a great sight to wake to, ebony lady.

  From now on, I (and that’s we, as soon as Andrea gets here) will be waking in room after room with ever more enchanting views, in chalets, lodges, pressure cabins, undersea hotels, space stations, methane skimmers—around the Earth, on Luna and Mars, out by Jupiter and Saturn. There’ll be glories to be seen through every window when we wake, wonders that it’ll take us all our second lives to explore.