Sunstroke: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  “The rats and monkeys all ended up looking physically similar, by and large.”

  “Monkeys have dexterity, rats have cunning—that’s their dream. They haven’t as much imagination. But with us, it’s … it’s everyone’s form of perfect satisfaction—as though the world is newly made, and you can create yourself according to your heart’s desire. Without prejudice. Only you can’t consciously command what it’ll produce. You can’t foreguess it either. Because none of us knows what we really want. But the body cells do. Or something does—the unconscious? This is mythological, Frank; it’s the real dream of mythology. It’s the way back to a crazy, magical race of Sirens and Harpies and Manticoras and Mermaids. Everyone his or her own race. This thing’s a soul teratogen. It produces monsters, but perfectly viable ones. Beautiful ones, all in their own terms. Wow.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “It’ll be his way of looking at it. I know it will.”

  “He’ll be satisfied? Lord, let’s hope so. The way I see it, this whole project has just gone up the spout.”

  “Oh no, Frank, no.”

  “How are they going to mate?”

  “Don’t you see, other people will join this … this Wonderland by invitation? With his consent, that is. Brave spirits, bold spirits—they’ll beg to. Naturally, we’ll have to be very discreet about it. … And if they don’t beg, well, he’ll still want unusual company, won’t he?”

  “For Christ’s sake!”

  “Plenty of room here. Big estate. Geneva seems pretty delighted with her transformation, unexpected as it was. I haven’t heard her going on about her Swiss bank account lately.”

  “This isn’t what the experiment was about!”

  “It could just be this is what it’s about now.”

  “Axel!”

  “Okay, just elaborating. Fantasising. Joking off the top of my head, really. It’s pretty crazy, this.” But Dr Axel Norman did not sound like he was joking.

  Our sponsor beccame slightly smaller, and even more beautiful, before he awoke. A kind of filmy ballooning membrane—angel wings, fixed like the membrane of some gliding animal—grew between his arms and sides, extending from wrist to waist. We got a sort of electric shock when we touched his comatose body now—a fierce protective shock.

  We discontinued the sedation, and the next morning he sat up and saw himself.

  He stared in amazement, and unrecognition, with great dewy eyes. Then he warbled … joyously, and hopped about the room, the membrane inflating as he danced, holding him momentarily free of the ground like twin-arm parachutes. He was a fairy kite, something that children might fly high on the end of a string on a blowy, sunny day. Except, he was the child and the kite, together in one. It was his apotheosis, from long long ago, before the paper of the kite became one colour: green, printed with bank serial numbers.

  “Sir,” I said hesitantly, fearing his electric eel defences—electricity conducting down that string out of the heavens. “How do you feel, sir?”

  I thought perhaps he couldn’t talk, but only warble like that bird character in The Magic Flute. Or so I remembered The Magic Flute, no doubt inaccurately—an opera needs a verbal libretto, after all.

  He could speak, singingly, lyrically.

  “Geneva doesn’t need a million dollars!” he trilled. “She already has what she needs! She must know that by now. Let me out; let me out into the grounds!”

  Naturally we complied. He was still the sponsor; and there was no binding someone who could shock you dead—any more than mighty Geneva could be restrained by anything less than a cannon.

  Half an hour later, I watched through field glasses as our sponsor—who had decided on the spur of the moment to rename himself Ariel—came gliding in from some trees to land on Geneva’s great shoulder. No shock encounter there! So it was under voluntary control now. She laughed merrily as he whispered into her ear. Then she picked him from her shoulder and tossed him high into the air, and he glided around her head and around, to land again, and bend as though to sip at her breast. The ill-matched pair, the great troll woman and the sprite, seemed to be getting on famously. I’d have said they were in love—much more so than if there had been a rambunctious thrashing about of randy Titans. They were in love with what they were, because of what they were.

  They did not return to the farm buildings that night; but what they were up to, I’ve no idea. Geneva checked in, in the morning, ravenous for steaks—with Ariel perched on her shoulder, wanting a bowl of milk and honey.

  *

  Which would have been a fine, if interim, ending to the saga of Jean Sandwich and our sponsor, except that a few days later during one of their mighty and minute banquets, Geneva pointed a great finger at me while Ariel twittered excitedly in her ear. Later I saw Dr Axel Norman conferring with the sponsor, with a wry smile upon his lips.

  I tried to escape from the farm that night, but one of the guards brought me down with a hypodermic dart in my buttocks. When I awoke, I was in the Transformation Room, with a giantess and a fairy and various of my ex-colleagues peering in.

  I wonder: did Geneva point her finger at me in revenge—or was it out of gratitude?

  When I wake up as a hobgoblin or an ogre or a centaur, to join them in their play, will I feel grateful too?

  A Letter from God

  SO AT LAST I awoke, and saw my universe. Already I knew that something had gone wrong …

  I shouldn’t be able to tell you this. There oughtn’t to be a single simple ‘I’ that can communicate with you. We should wear a myriad faces. We should be the Many-in-One, of which each conscious species in the universe is only the most fragmentary reflection—one single attribute of our high self, which is beyond self.

  Instead, I awoke to a singleness of being which is far below that High Selflessness. I realised that I had been incarnated from out of my sleeping self quite recently at a single point in space-time. It was the tug of that incarnation—that teasing of a portion of myself out of myself, into a particular shape for a while—it was that, coupled with something watery and oceanic, that had woken me a cosmic moment later. Like the footfall of an intruder in a darkened bedroom.

  The bedroom wasn’t entirely dark, of course. Galaxies and metagalaxies, crowded with suns, hung all over the place—a very big number of night lights, which was good.

  Not dark. But it was empty. At first I thought it was entirely empty; and I shivered with dread at the absence of life.

  To be sure, I had awoken—like an engine on a rather cold morning started, none the less, by a tiny trickle of charge from the battery. But the battery should have been fully charged—brimful with life-energy calling to me. And it wasn’t; that tiny pulse was all I’d felt. I knew now how close I’d come to being in a cosmos where no life could ever have awakened me; and I knew how small and limited this present ‘I’ must therefore be.

  It took a cosmic moment to locate the life that had awoken me. I was guided by a few more incidents of high consciousness from the same direction—high by your standard, pitifully weak by any other reckoning. I shouldn’t have heeded the first tug. I should have turned over in my sleep, and slept through this cosmos till it collapsed! But in the vast silence that single note of life had sounded like a gong. Now that I was awake, I was committed to it; and because of this I was reduced to a single personal ego.

  Of course, you had no idea that you were the one and only life-form to emerge in this cosmos. Oh you, with your proud arrays of radiotelescopes: tin ear trumpets harkening vainly for an alien message amid the mindless noise!

  Like a vagabond who has precisely one match to light one piece of kindling to keep warm by, I directed myself towards you to cup my hands around that single prick of life-light, and nurse it with my breath.

  Let me explain something about the creation of universes.

  Your scientists have deduced that each successive cosmos springs into being by a random scattering out of ‘superspace’ of all th
e material of the previous one after it has collapsed. All the natural laws and physical constants of the previous cosmos vanish entirely, and new laws and constants spontaneously occur. But only certain laws and constants permit a habitable universe to occur—a universe where stars can form at all, and burn for a long time. The majority of universes must necessarily be lifeless ones. Either they last for too short a time, or perhaps no elements heavier than helium ever get the chance to form.

  You know the game of pool, or snooker? You send the cue ball cannoning into a triangle of target balls and they all scatter in different directions, depending upon the cue ball’s speed and spin and vector. If you had a completely frictionless pool table, the balls would carry on indefinitely, colliding and rebounding, till they all clunked into pockets—after a longer or a shorter time. (I bend the rules, I know.) Well, that first scattering of the balls is a bit—just a bit—like the first scattering out of superspace.

  Contrary to your notion of random scattering, however, there is a first deliberate shot which sends the balls of the cosmos flying, establishing the particular laws and constants of each universe.

  And the Player? Myself. Or rather, the High Precursor of my present limited self. But it isn’t quite so simple. The Player does not stand outside the universe. The precursor is the cue ball and the target balls and the cue as well, not to mention the baize of space-time which the motion of the balls unrolls. At the instant of that first shot from which the cosmos springs, the precursor is torn apart, submerged into the spreading fabric of the game it has selected. Too, it must select angle and speed and spin such that during the course of the game, as the universe evolves, life of one kind or another will come into being: a cosmos of multifarious consciousness out of which—by means of which—that precursor will eventually awake and look around, with an awareness far beyond any of its billion tributary components.

  A player usually has an opponent, too. Just so here, though in this case the Opponent is also part of the precursor. It is its antiself—and that anti-self will also emerge, for unless there is a tension between God and anti-God the universe would be over in a flash. This is where the game gets really interesting.

  This time, however, the precursor has miscued direly. The constants are off, the physical laws are wrong.

  One world. One inhabited speck in it all—and that speck, I see now, a complete fluke! Not our favourite electromagnetic life—that’s ruled out by the current constants—but protoplasmic life, preposterously chemically coded! Existing on a world perilously poised in a tiny habitable zone around a star that has been stable miraculously long! A world with a giant moon to draw tides upon the shore, and life upon the land. A world with an oxygen atmosphere which hasn’t burnt up the life, but which on the contrary the life has learnt to breathe. And where did the oxygen come from, anyway? From life itself. Wild paradox. The odds against such life are vast even in an infinity of worlds.

  I see the evidence of searing by a nearby supernova long ago. I see the hammer blow of a comet strike in your Late Cretaceous Period. I see the scars of the Ice Ages—but somehow you escaped from the jaws of the ice calamity again and again, just as you avoided by a hair’s breadth the runaway Greenhouse Effect of overheating.

  I see how consciousness awoke, to awaken me—and how close it is to winking out again as you gobble up forests and food, fuel and fish.

  The other consciousness, in your seas—which also, I see, conspired to awaken me—is already gone, turned into perfume and boot-oil, manure and petfood by yourselves.

  You have multiplied to starvation point and built sun-bombs to turn your world into a cinder. And here am I, awake, doomed to be cast in your image—since it is the one and only one available; so, if you all die, in this restricted image I shall hear nothing for almost ever after but the ticking of the quasars and the crackling of the barren suns.

  You’ve flown to your moon, though, in tin cans. You’ve sent tin cans further out into the first few inches of that aimless deadness that stretches out all around you, everywhere.

  And you’re going to destroy yourselves. Would it destroy you, equally, to know that there’s nothing else alive out there?

  The only hope, as I see it from my hamstrung viewpoint, is for you to survive and spread out into the dead universe, to bring your own life to it, and in so doing to change yourselves into all the myriads of other life forms that are so sadly lacking.

  I don’t have the micromanipulative ability to pluck the ten thousand matches from your childish hands. My time should be aeons, my span whole galaxies! This attention to you is straining my Godly eyes!

  How could this miscueing ever have taken place? Perhaps the sheer desolation everywhere else is somehow compensated for by the run of luck you represent. Perhaps this is a bravado universe. Perhaps my precursor meant to cue a universe with no Opponent at all—since one and only one ball must run the course from first to last? A universe designed to fool the Opponent is surely also … a universe designed to fool myself!

  Would a miracle, of the kind I think I can manage, not completely humiliate my one and only world?

  *

  I’ve made my mind up. I’ve decided, in an almighty break with tradition, to level with you people; to shake you by the scruff of the neck, to kick you in the ass—out into the galaxy, and into those beyond. (The exact details—the tin cans—I’ll have to leave up to you.)

  I don’t, as I said, have the touch for dealing with individual scruffs of necks; I write large.

  So I do just that.

  I inscribe most of the foregoing as an open letter on a circular column ten miles high. (Which, to me, is rather like scribing a testament on a grain of rice. But never mind.) I plant this pillar down off the shore of your Florida, near where some of your tin cans take off, though not so closely as to be a hazard. Unfortunately, it does rather dwarf your Vehicle Assembly Building … No offence intended.

  And I plant a second ten-mile column with a Russian text near Tyuratam Kosmodrome in your USSR.

  I sit back, awaiting the cosmic exodus.

  Perhaps ten miles is too high, even with your ingenuity—telescopes, balloons with cameras dangling from them …

  It can’t be, surely, that the letters are too large to be recognised as letters?

  Well, it takes six weeks before the full text is released—by the Americans, the Russians following suit a few hours later.

  The Russians promptly declare that I’m an impostor. According to them, my columns are the handiwork of an alien civilisation bent on disenchanting you with the idea of galactic exploration by harping on the emptiness and the absence of life out there. With devastating cunning the Russians point out that on the contrary the sudden appearance of the columns proves that civilisations must abound. And these civilisations can’t be too far ahead of Earth, either, or else they wouldn’t be worried. They wouldn’t stage this hoax of a letter from God, plainly an insult to human savvy.

  I guess, pigheaded as it is, I should welcome this reaction—if it succeeds in uniting a squabbling world against an imaginary adversary in the sky; if it sets the starships flying.

  The Americans, for their part, decide that if ‘God’ (best left undefined) can post a letter, equally they can answer it. They have great faith in the postal service. Up hum radio messages.

  “This is the President of the United States of America speaking to the entity which identifies itself as God, in the sincere hope that you’re listening. We appeal to you, on behalf of all the peoples of the Earth of whatever faith, to continue the dialogue you’ve begun. I’m suggesting no secret communications, but now that you’ve proved the extent of your powers perhaps radio will suffice? Now, we have some questions we all beg you to answer to elucidate your remark that the universe is the result of a ‘miscueing’—and your other statement that no other life forms exist in the universe apart from ourselves. It’s been suggested that this latter statement may simply be a compassionate, Godly way of making us value our
own lives more …”

  Around about this point in his radio speech, an awful double mishap occurs—so entirely coincidental that it seems utterly deliberate on my part.

  The ten-mile-high column off Florida heels over in the ocean. Falling, it slaps a tidal wave across most of the peninsula, destroying towns and cities—and incidentally all of the launch facilities at the Cape. And in the USSR the weight of their column triggers a fearful earthquake in a previously quiet seismic area, wrecking their launch site too. Shaken loose by the earthquake, that column also topples, hitting the ground with the force of an atom bomb. These two incidents, in their way, seem to me like a cruel recapitulation of the original miscueing of the whole darn cosmos—only this time I was trying to balance two cue sticks upright …

  The Russians presently fire rather a large number of missiles out into space, to explode at random—but this cannot do me any harm, of course; I’m not of that nature.

  The Chinese choose this moment of depleted Russian strength to attack with their own missiles. They get pretty thoroughly trashed in return, but the USSR is badly trashed too.

  I look on, appalled at what I have wrought.

  The Russian and Chinese survivors cry that the extraterrestrial plot to ruin you all has worked. The Americans—and this is worse for my ego, now that I have one—accuse me of downright incompetence. By my own admission I set the universe up ineptly in the first place; now I’ve proved myself incompetent to have any further hand in it. (And I must honestly admit that this restricted 'I' which I am, does fall short of what I’d consider full Godly understanding …)

  I withdraw from the tattered world, to lick my wounds for a century or two.

  At the end of that century or two, the starships rise from Earth. They inch out, faster than light, into the heavens. Their crews burrow into dead worlds and the dead satellites of dead gas giants. They build habitats. They begin to terraform some worlds so that people may walk upon the surface unprotected, even if it takes five thousand years.