Sunstroke: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  “Sure there was a lot wrong then. Basically it was that creep Neuman being in command. But that’s Euro-politics for you. Well, we’re far from Earth now. We can make our own politics here. And our own world. Six people is three times better than Adam and Eve.”

  “Is that what I am now: breeding stock?”

  “There isn’t a lot else you can be, is there?”

  “Maybe you’re right, Witold … Maybe you’re right after all. Look, why don’t we start right away? Come up inside the ship with me. Sigrid won’t be jealous, will she?”

  “Hell, I’m in charge, not her.”

  “Come up, Witold. I always … admired you.”

  “Okay. Why not?”

  And up we ride, his arm around my waist, squeezing me.

  “Your cabin, or mine?”

  “Mine, Witold. Please.”

  He leads me to it, lustfully.

  “Hey, it’s dark in here.”

  “I like to do it in the dark, darling man.”

  Curiously, in view of my blindness, the logic of this passes scrutiny. Perhaps he thinks I’m ashamed of my scarred face.

  I hope he doesn’t notice the hypodermic syringe, as I palm it. He should still be half blinded by the change from the brightness outside to the darkness within.

  While he paws me I kiss him, to be sure exactly where he stands.

  “You’re a knock-out, Mary.”

  Oh yes. Oh yes indeed. One down, five to go! If only I’ve got the right drug in the syringe.

  If only it isn’t a stimulant.

  The Thousand Cuts

  THE PETRUSHKA RESTAURANT was a large dim cellar, with theirs the only table occupied. Ballets Russes murals writhed dimly on the walls: exotic ghosts.

  As the waiter unloaded the chilled glasses of vodka, Don Kavanagh observed, “I don’t think Russian restaurants are very popular these days.”

  “That’s why we came,” Hugh Carpenter said. “Bound to get a table.”

  “Don’t blame me,” said the waiter. “I’m a Londoner, born and bred.”

  “Maybe there’s a good sketch there?” suggested Martha Vine, who was the ugly sister of the team. “You know: restaurants run by the wrong sort of people? Such as an Eskimo Curry House … Or, wait a minute, how about a slaughterhouse for vegetables? Wait, I’ve got it: protests at vegetable vivisection! Turnips with electrodes plugged into them. Artichokes forced to smoke forty a day.”

  Hugh dismissed the notion, and the waiter, with the same toss of his head. The whole sparkle of their TV show relied on cultivating a blind spot for the obvious.

  “Not quite mad enough, darling.” He cocked his head. “What’s that?”

  Don listened.

  “A car back-firing.”

  “That many times?”

  “More like gunfire,” said Alison Samuels, shaking her impeccably corn-rowed red hair; she was beauty, to Martha’s beast.

  “So it’s somebody gunning their engine.” Hugh grinned triumphantly. “Okay, where were we?”

  Soon after, sounds of crashing and breakages, a woman’s scream and incoherent shouting came from the upstairs vestibule of the Petrushka …

  “This isn’t one of your practical jokes, is it, Hugh?” asked Martha anxiously, quickly. “Tape recorder upstairs? Is it?”

  “No, it damn well—”

  At which moment, two brawny men wearing lumber jackets crowded down the stairs, thrusting the waiter, who was bleeding from the mouth, the manager and his beige-blonde receptionist ahead of them. A third skinny man in a windcheater stayed up top. All three men were armed with machine pistols.

  “Stay where you are!” The armed man’s accent was southern Irish. “You three, get to a table and sit down!”

  The manager, cashier and waiter did so, quickly.

  The moment of silence that followed was broken by the approaching wail of a police siren.

  “I take it,” said Hugh loudly, “that we are all hostages, in yet another bungled terrorist escapade?”

  “Be quiet, you!”

  Out of the corner of his mouth, Don murmured, “Hush, You’re likely to get murdered in the first few minutes. Then rapport starts building up. Just … meditate. Do nothing.”

  “Zen and the art of being a hostage, eh?” Hugh only whispered softly. He sat as still as a Buddhist monk.

  A police loud-hailer spoke, close by …

  “Don’t come any nearer!” cried the skinny man. “We have hostages in here! We’ll kill them!”

  Lumber jacket number two ran to the kitchen door, kicked it open …

  Hugh’s tongue moved inside her mouth. His finger traced the cleft of her buttocks.

  He pulled away instantly. He was naked. As was Alison. They were on the bed in his Chelsea flat. Outside was bright with June sunlight.

  Alison gazed at Hugh, wide-eyed.

  “But,” she managed to say.

  “But we’re in the Petrushka, Alison … I mean, correct me if I’m crazy, but I wasn’t aware that I’m subject to bouts of amnesia! I mean … how the hell did we get here? I mean, you can tell me, can’t you?”

  “Hugh, I … I can’t tell you anything. We’re in the restaurant. Those IRA men are … at least I suppose that’s what they were. But we aren’t. We’re here.”

  Hugh sat up. Dumbly he stared at a newspaper lying on the yellow shag-pile carpet.

  The headlines were: PETRUSHKA SIEGE ENDS PEACEFULLY.

  He read the story, hardly understanding it. But he understood the accompanying photograph: of himself with his arm wrapped round Alison’s shoulders, both of them grinning and waving.

  “Just look at the date! June the ninth. This is next week’s newspaper.”

  “So we’re in the middle of next week.” Alison began to laugh hysterically, then with deliberate irony she slapped her own cheek. “I must remember this trick next time I visit the dentist’s … Why can’t either of us remember a bloody thing?”

  “I wish I could remember us making love.”

  Alison started to get dressed, from her scattered clothes.

  “I always wanted us to get into bed,” Hugh went on. “It was one of my big ambitions. I suppose it still is! We must have been celebrating our freedom. Our release. Mustn’t we?

  “Gas,” he decided suddenly. “That’s it. They must have used some new kind of psychochemical, to knock everybody unconscious or confuse us. This is a side-effect.”

  He studied the newspaper more carefully.

  “Doesn’t say a thing about gas. It says the police talked the gunmen out. I suppose you can muzzle the press a little … no, this was all too public. The story has to be true as written.”

  His telephone rang.

  Hugh hurried naked into the next room to take the call.

  Alison was sitting at the dressing table concentrating on braiding her hair, when he returned. He noticed how she was trembling. With shock, yes. His own body felt hollow and his skin was covered in goose bumps, though the air was warm.

  “That was Don. He … he reacted very rationally, for a clown. Very quickly. He’s in the same fix as us. But so is Sarah. So is his wife.”

  “I’m aware that Sarah’s his wife.”

  “So then I tried to phone Martha. But I can’t get through. Suddenly all the lines are jammed. I tried to phone the police. I even tried to call… I tried to call the goddamn talking clock. Can’t get it either. Everybody is phoning to find out what the bloody time is! It isn’t just us, Alison. It’s got nothing specifically to do with the Petrushka. It’s everybody.”

  “Where’s your radio? Switch it on.”

  “Kitchen.”

  Hugh fled, still naked, and she followed his quivering rump.

  A punk rock band were singing:

  “… they’ll bomb yer boobs!

  they’ll bomb yer brains!

  they’ll bomb yer bums!”

  The song faded.

  The dee-jay said, “So that was the latest track from The Weasels. Hot stuff
, eh? Like, radio-active … and that’s what a radio’s supposed to be: active. So I’m carrying straight on, even if you’re all as confused as I am. That’s right, all you out there in listener land, none of us here in the studio has any idea how we got here today. Or how it got to be today. But if you’re all feeling the way I’m feeling, I’ve got this word of advice for you: stay cool, and carry on doing what you’re doing. Keep on trucking that truck. Keep the traffic moving. Cook the lunch, Ma Jones, and don’t set fire to the pan—the kids’ll be home soon. And now to help you all, here comes a track from an old group, Traffic: ‘In a Chinese Noodle Factory’ …”

  Hugh tuned across the dial. One station had simply gone off the air: on others only music was being broadcast.

  “Try long-wave,” urged Alison. “Abroad.”

  When he picked up a gabbled French language broadcast from Cairo, he realised with his rusty French that whatever had happened, had maybe happened world-wide.

  And during the rest of June, and July and August, the effect repeated itself a dozen times. None of the subsequent ‘Breaks’ lasted as long as the first one had. Some swallowed up two or three days, and others only a few hours. But there was no sign that they were winding down.

  Nor was there any conceivable explanation.

  Nor could people exactly get used to having their lives repeatedly broken at random.

  For this was not simply like fainting or falling asleep. When awareness resumed—and who could promise that it would, next time?—all of the world’s activities were found to have flowed on as usual. Air lines had jetted to and fro between London and New York. Contracts had been signed, and babies born. Newspapers had been printed—and at last the newsseller’s cry of ‘Read all about it!’ was literally true, for how else could anyone find out in detail what had happened? A woman would find herself locked in a police cell; but the police would have to consult their records before they could break the news to her that she had murdered, say, her husband—which raised strange new questions about guilt and innocence …

  Distressing it was indeed, to find oneself suddenly at the controls of a Jumbo jet heading in to land at an unexpected airport, or lying in a hospital bed after a mysterious operation, or running, running down a street … for what reason?

  “What if we find ourselves in the middle of a nuclear war, with all the sirens wailing?” asked Martha. “I can’t stand it. It’s driving me mad.” She poured herself another glass of gin.

  “It’s driving everybody mad,” said Don. They were in Hugh’s flat. “It’s like that old Chinese torture.”

  “What, the water dripping down on your skull till it wears a hole in it?”

  “No, I mean the Death of a Thousand Cuts. I always wondered if the poor victims died from loss of blood. But it must have been from the accumulated shock. One painful shock after another. One you could survive. A dozen you could survive. But a thousand? Never! That’s what’ll put paid to the human race. This is the Life of a Thousand Cuts.”

  “Good Heavens,” said Hugh, “you’ve got it.” He rubbed his hands briskly. “Cuts: that’s brilliant.”

  “It means we’re like robots,” went on Don, ignoring him. “We don’t need consciousness. We don’t need to be aware. A bird isn’t aware. But that doesn’t stop it from courting and raising young and migrating. Actually, it helps. No swallow with self-awareness would bother flying all the way to the tip of South Africa and back every year.”

  “Do you mean that we’ve evolved too much self-awareness, and it’s a dead end?” asked Alison.

  “And now we’re going to become robots again, and the world will run a lot more smoothly. Only, we won’t know it. Any more than a sparrow or a mouse knows. They just are. Martha, you mentioned nuclear war. But have you realised how smoothly the Arms Limitation Talks are going all of a sudden?”

  “That’s because both sides are more scared of an accident than they’ve ever been.”

  “No, it isn’t. I’ve been checking back. All the significant advances have occurred during Breaks.” Don chuckled softly. “Break-throughs, during Breaks! And remember too: the Petrushka siege ended peacefully—during a Break.”

  “During a cut,” Hugh corrected him.

  “The Petrushka thing could so easily have ended in a bloody shoot-out, with the restaurant being stormed. But it didn’t happen that way. I don’t care how bloody-minded our terrorists were. Or the authorities.”

  He was driving his red Metro along the elevated section of the motorway into Central London, in fast heavy traffic. Some way behind, in the driving mirror, a white Volkswagen failed to overtake an articulated lorry. The lorry rammed it, skidding and jack-knifing. As following traffic slammed into it, a ball of flame rose up.

  “Bloody hell.” Briefly Don glanced at the calendar watch he had thought to equip himself with in the aftermath of the first Break, before stocks ran out. “Two days, this time.”

  Alison was sitting next to him. Hugh was behind in the back seat. No sign of Martha. He hoped she was still alive.

  “For Christ’s sake, get us off here!” begged Alison. “It’s a death trap.”

  “More like a bloody buffalo stampede! Why don’t the idiots slow down?”

  Somehow, Don reached the next exit ramp safely. The ramp was crowded with vehicles descending. Horns blared. Wings and bumpers scraped and banged.

  “Mustn’t forget what we were talking about,” Hugh reminded him, over his shoulder. “The Life of a Thousand Cuts.”

  “There’ll be a thousand cuts in the paintwork of this baby …”

  “Stop at the nearest pub, Don. We have to talk before we lose the continuity.”

  “About cuts,” said Hugh, cradling a double Glenfiddich.

  The bar of the Duke of Kent was packed, but remarkably hushed as people waited for the filler music on the landlord’s radio to stop, and the first hastily assembled news to take its place. Many people were not drinking at all, but merely waiting.

  “You mentioned the Death of a Thousand Cuts, and of course those were cuts in the flesh with a knife. But what do we mean by cuts?”

  “A film,” said Alison. “Editing. Switching scenes.”

  “Good girl!”

  “I’m not a girl. Girls are twelve years old or less.”

  “Okay, sorry.”

  “That’s why I wouldn’t ever go to bed with you before.”

  “Okay, okay, I prostrate myself. Now, that’s it exactly: the editing of a film—the cutting from one scene to the next. You don’t need to see your characters drive all the way from A to B. They just leave, then they arrive. Otherwise a film would last as long as real life. Or the Director would be Andy Warhol.”

  “As long as real life used to last …”

  “Quite. And what if reality itself is really a sort of film? A millennia-long Warhol movie with a cast of billions? Suppose: as holography is to flat photography, so to holography is … solidography. Suppose the world is being projected. It’s a solid movie—of matter, not of light. We’re an entry in the Cannes Film Festival of the universe. But …” He paused emphatically.

  “… are we the completed masterpiece? Or are we the rushes on the cutting room floor—of reality? Because suddenly we’ve lost our own sense of continuity. Two days drop out. Three days drop out.”

  The elegiac Elgar on the radio halted.

  “Shushl!” hissed a roomful of snakes.

  “… is the BBC Emergency Service, and I am Robin Johnson. The date is September 1st. The time is one twenty-five in the afternoon. The most recent Break measured approximately fifty hours. At the Helsinki disarmament talks preliminary agreement has been reached on the reduction of …”

  “Come on, we can read all that stuff later.”

  But Don did not yet start the engine of the Metro.

  “Wouldn’t it rather spoil the natural flow of this film of yours if all the characters suddenly became aware that their lives are just a fiction?” he asked.

  “Maybe �
� this is a very subtle, artistic touch? Maybe the Director has suddenly gone into experimental cinema? He was making a realistic film before. But now he’s into New Wave techniques: meta-film, like a French director.”

  “I still say we’re all really living robots. But we never knew it before. Now we do.”

  “But that isn’t a decline of awareness,” Alison pointed out. “That’s an increase in awareness.”

  “It’s a bloody decline in our sense of control over what happens in the world. The important things are all happening off-stage. They’re happening off everybody’s stage. Look at this progress in Arms Control—you heard Robin on the news.”

  “Maybe,” said Alison, “God has decided to cut reality, and re-edit it? Because it wasn’t working out. Or it didn’t work out the first time. The world-film bombed out, literally. We’re in a remake of the film of the world.”

  Hugh teased her.

  “Maybe these Breaks are for advertisements? Only, we can’t see them any more than the characters in a film can see the commercials!”

  “Rubbish. When you have a commercial, the film just stops. Then it starts up again from the same moment.”

  “In that case, you’re right: something must be editing reality.”

  “How can I possibly say ‘yes’ to that? But I can’t say ‘no’, either. Lord knows, reality needs editing.”

  An ambulance wailed by, bearing someone from the motorway pile-up. A police car raced the other way, blue light flashing on its roof.

  “It’s the Thousand Cuts,” said Don. “And it’ll drive us mad with stress. Like rats in an electrified maze. Our awareness will go catatonic. We’ll become a planet of zombies—a world on autopilot. Like the birds and the bees.”

  He started the engine. Driving out of the car park of the Duke of Kent, he turned left because it was easier to do so, before remembering that he had no idea where they had been heading. He slowed, to let another ambulance race by.

  And suddenly Hugh began to laugh.

  “I’ve just got it! Don’t you see: we’ve got a way to test my idea. We may even have a way to communicate—with the Director himself! Listen, we’ll do a special show. Don’t worry, we’ll be able to get this one scheduled quickly—and we’ll get blanket publicity for it too. We’ll do a show about editing reality. We’ll make a film within The Film—a film about that Film. I’ll package this as a great morale-booster—which indeed it might well be! We’ll get the whole country laughing at what’s happening to us. Country? Hell no, with a show like this we’ll cop the lot: America, Europe, Israel, Japan. We’ll do it, too, my hearties. This is going to keep people sane during the Thousand Cuts. Governments are going to back this one.