Watson, Ian - SSC (10 page)

 
          
“In
The Way
of the Milky Way
you say—”

 
          
“Yes?”

 
          
And
the cyb-hound launched itself at me . . .

 
          
Which is the true horror of it.

 
          
For
the Grand Monk’s robes parted as he shifted, cross-legged, on the stool, and I
saw his raw flesh in contact with the wood of Toscanini; I drank in the wood
vicariously, voyeuristically— and saw the location of the knot in it.

 
          
Like wood from most worlds, Starwood has
knots
where the branches have been lopped off the main trunk section . . .

 
          
As
I say, the stool’s superconductor rings leak star energy slowly upward into the
bodily metabolism. Yet knots in the wood are secondary circuits. They have to
be sealed off, or would upset the balance of the energy release. Thus ergs and
ergs of power are locked up in a knot—ergs that can be released abruptly, all
at once, in a tight jet along the line of the former branch, a hundred times as
ravenous as a finger laser.

 
          
Of
course, it ruins the wood. The stool’s as spoilt as a cracked bell, afterwards
. . .

 
          
The
cyb-hound’s front paws were off the ground now, and it hung in mid-air. (How
time slowed down, as though the very glimpse of star- wood immortalized that
moment!)

 
          
I
cocked the index and middle fingers of my right hand and flexed them at the
knot, shattering the woven ice.

 
          
And
shut my eyes.

 
          
And danced to the left of the room.

 
          
Already
phantom steel-clawed hands were rending my ribs out, and steel-fanged claws
drinking my neck dry . . . !

 
          
Except
that . . . they didn’t reach me.
Didn’t touch me.

 
          
Only
a blinding light turned my shut eyelids to pools of blood . . . that abruptly
darkened, in a howl.

 
          
I
looked again.

 
          
For
another long, frozen second the cyb-hound hung between me and the stool—black
body eclipsing a blaze of light.

           
The knot had micro-novaed. A plume
of star energy was spearing the dog’s hide. Burning, melting its armor flesh.
Shorting out its electronics.

 
          
I
retained a retinal image of the dog shape silhouetted against the world, long
after the body crashed to the mat . . .

 
          
“His left hand too!’’
I heard the blinded Grand Monk
squealing, his brocade on fire. And there were others in the room.

 
          
And
truly I felt no pain as, with a flicker, a swordsman cut off my fingers, and
batted them towards a waste chute with the flat of his blade while they were
still falling, barely detached from my hand.

 
          
I
wouldn’t have used them anyway, now.

 
          
The
wood was ruined. I only wept.

 
          
And wept.

 
          
Later,
I wept more, intoning these words to atone for the Starwood spoilt—as ruined as
a last T’ang porcelain vase thrown from the fortieth floor to the pavings.
Intoning, and weeping. Weeping and atoning.

 
          
Worse,
was when they forced me on to the stool itself, and I felt waves of unbalanced
nausea radiating upward from it, for hour after hour . . .

 
          
For
day after day, while I died, and died . . . and the stool kept me alive through
all these deaths, fingerless, cancerous, malign metabolism fed by the energy of
the far star that feeds the Toscanini trees, which I had so sickened and warped
. . .

 
          
For week after week.

           
For month after month, until, my
cancers in perfect harmony with the disharmony I brought about, I am pure,
perfect, deathless cancer. A living tumor, chained to this cross-section of
the steel tree in the Yakuza Temple.
Atoning.
For I
realize that the Way of the Milky Way is truly the Way of Starwood—the living
energy of stars passing into Man . . . And Starwood is the Way of Enlightenment
in Agony, for me, sitting bound on this broken block.

 
          
Sometimes,
the Grand Monk, wearing black lenses, comes down into the Temple to talk to me
about my mental progress, and observe my vast, metastasized, pullulating body.

 
          
His
retinas are growing back quickly now that the Benevolence Company
have
traded for a fresh slice of Starwood out at Point Q.

 
          
He
tells me they gave the last surviving Piero
della
Francesca in the world for it.

 
          
Starwood.
Imagine.
Comes in such small
slices.
Approximately this, by this, by this.
(Quick gestures with two stumps sprouting ten tumors—soft red boiled carrots .
. .)

 
          
I
am even sitting on some.

 
          
The
Japanese astronaut Yamaguchi waited while the masked officials unsealed the
130-acre Shinjuku Gyoen Park, the sole remaining open space in the Tokyo
megalopolis. They lifted the warning barriers aside, broke the seal on the
padlock,
inserted
the ceremonial iron key. The corroded
wicket swung open. The analogue of Mars lay before him.

 
          
Almost, but not quite.

 
          
For
the main gate opened into the European- style court, designed by a Frenchman,
Henri Martinet. This gravel court, flanked by the tall knob- bled skeletons of
dead trees, sloped uphill at an angle of ten degrees before leading out on to
the open tableland of the park proper, effectively blocking this off from view.

 
          
“Remember,
the first hundred meters are the easiest, Yamaguchi,” the familiar voice of the
Mission Director warned him over his helmet radio, stiff and formal with the
seriousness of the occasion, the tipsy camaraderie of the farewell party
forgotten, as it should be. “Don’t be deceived,
It
looks just like a road. But it’s a road to nowhere . . .’’

 
          
A road?
Yamaguchi looked around him. Yes, the stretch of
scattered gravel certainly did resemble a torn-up road or under-road somewhere
in the City. And the tall knobbly trees, they would be utility poles branching
with insulators, surge diverters, cross arms ... or perhaps the fifty-meter
tall steel screws which scooped out the ground before piles could be driven for
new buildings. The rows of dead trees stood ready to rip holes in the earth, to
hammer in the pins for buildings, and more buildings—cancelling the absurdity
of empty space with objects, with meaning.

 
          
The
Space Agency officials stood back, keeping their eyes fixed on Yamaguchi to
avoid looking at the expanse of the European Court sliding uphill at an angle
of ten degrees towards—nowhere.

 
          
He
stepped through the wicket and his boots crunched the gravel as he started
uphill.

 
          
And
a voice whispered in his mind, as he remembered the Code of Behavior.

 
          
“This is the day for you to commit
hara-kiri. The weather is fine and the day is auspicious. May you be able to
commit hara-kiri without any
difficulty

           
At the top of the slope he paused
and gazed ahead. The dead trees here formed a wide arc surrounding the final
zone of gravel. Beyond this lay a desert of dry white crab-grass, smooth and
uniform, opening out in all directions away from him, pushing the massed
buildings of the City absurdly far away, creating an impossible bubble of space
in the very midst of the City. The sheer pressure of this space! It could hold
back all those millions of tons of steel and concrete without faltering!
Yamaguchi walked out across the final zone of gravel, and thought he heard it
vibrate like a tight-stretched drum. But it was only
his own
blood drumming, pounding. Telemetry would be recording his leaping pulse on a
graph outside the park for the benefit of Space Science.

 
          
Then
he stepped off gravel on to the desert of grass itself and the crunch-crunch
sound of his boots vanished, leaving only the booming of his blood, and the
distant booming of the City, coming from far away, yet meshing with his own
blood and comforting him, for he was a man of the City. He walked on over the
springy turf, sending no radio messages now and receiving none. The Code said:
‘‘Whenever any conversation is
attempted
by the hara-kiri performer
,
Tut your
mind
at rest’ is the stereotyped response
usually
given; indulgence
in
conversation might only serve to disquieten the
mind .
.
,fl
Telemetry alone would monitor his progress and
his physical and mental state.

 
          
The
sun shone down weakly through the smog out of the blue of outer space, transforming
the desert's surface of white grass into a vast gently- curving convex mirror.
. . .

 
          
He
wasn’t conscious of having climbed any significant incline since leaving the
shelter of the European Court, yet suddenly he seemed to be above the world, perched
on this convex mirror which began to turn beneath him. Now the City seemed
equidistant from him on all sides, though he had only penetrated a short
distance into the park. He seemed not to have moved any nearer to his goal—that
far horizon of buildings with red and white checked balloons floating over them—yet
the
European
Court
, when he glanced back, had shifted into the remote distance. His eyes
were not playing tricks on him, he knew. It was just that judging such great
distances as these was outside the present experience of Man. His hours in the
simulator did not help him much, though they doubtless staved off nausea.

 
          
The
background boom of the City was the grinding of the globe as it turned beneath
him like a giant’s clockwork toy. He felt dizzy. Then perspective did begin to
play tricks on him. The scene leapt in at him, then bounced away. He was a
giant perched on a tiny globe, terrified of falling off into endless space. He
was a mouse scurrying across an immense plain while overhead an invisible hand
groped for him from the sky. He felt a desperate need to take cover in the
tunnels of the City. A moment later he was a giant again, dwarfing the City at
the end of the plain, terrified that gravity might be turned
off.
In free fall he would float up into
the endless sky. Every human being in the City was close enough to something to
hold on to, but not him. There were only a few dead saplings a hundred meters
away. Or was it a thousand meters?

 
          
The Code of Behavior said: “Hara-kiri is not
a mere suicidal process; it is a refinement of selfdestruction and none can
perform it without the utmost coolness of temper and composure . . .”

           
Why then was Yamaguchi running,
stumbling along in his thick rubber boots and bulky suit, panting like a dog on
a hot day while they witnessed his humiliation through their remotely
controlled telescopes slung from those distant balloons?

           
He ran to the nearest tree. Like a
dog he felt compelled to urinate against it. Of course, the urine flowed into a
special bag strapped to his thigh. There was no risk of it running down his
leg. Still, he imagined that it was running down his leg, and felt ashamed.

 
          
“A hara-kiri performer should tuck his
sleeves beneath his knees to prevent himself from falling backwards . . .”

           
Without the weight of his spacesuit
he would float up into the sky; without his spacesuit’s all-enveloping
life-support system he would fly apart explosively.

 
          
The
small white sun beat down through the haze on to this dead bent tree, casting a
shadow that could be used to tell the time if he stayed here long enough. The
silence was a huge blob of clear jelly that conducted only a faint throb from
the distant City, the fading rhythm of his own existence. . . .

 
          
At
last, torn between shame and fear, Yamaguchi trudged off in a direction chosen
at random, perhaps retracing his steps, but most likely not. He had lost touch
with the horizon now. It mocked him with its faintness, equidistance,
similarity.

 
          
Soon
the sun was shrinking and the smog haze closing in. The neon signs that had
sprung to life over the City only made the desert seem darker and more hideous.
Yamaguchi almost walked past the flat disc set in the grass without noticing
it.

 
          
It
was a tree stump sawn off flush with the ground, with a wire handle fixed to
it.

           
But, of course! There had to be
something underneath the Park! Subterranean passages, underground factories,
transit tubes. If the Park was just something laid on top of part of the City’s
body, like a mat, then there was nothing to be afraid of. The City was here as
well as there. He could raise this lid. Discover a ladder leading down to
safety. How many lids there must be, concealed about the
park.
He would never have seen one had he marched in a straight line from gate to
gate. But he had wandered off course. It was just an illusion that he was
outside
the City trapped in some obscene
bubble of unnatural force!

 
          
The
bulky spacesuit prevented him from bending over or kneeling down. However, he
had a telescopic probe in his instrument pocket for taking soil samples, which
he now took out, extended, and hooked through the wire handle.

 
          
The
tree-stump wasn’t
heavy,
it was only a few centimeters
thick.

 
          
Underneath
was a small pit with cement walls, leading nowhere. At the bottom of the pit
sat a steel globe with knives and shears and clippers sticking out of it like
arms. As the fading light struck its sensors, it appeared to move slightly.
Shears to snip tentatively.
A knife to
rotate.
He had stumbled on one of the robot-gardeners in its nest.

 
          
The
shock of encountering life—or what appeared to be life—in this wilderness,
made him drop the telescopic probe, and run, anywhere. . .

 
          
And
now the desert spread around him desolate and absurd, becoming a black void as
the sun disappeared.

           
Before exhaustion overwhelmed him he
located another tree, took the umbilical tether from his instrument pocket,
and, fumbling with his clumsy gloves, fastened one end of the cord to his waist
and the other to the tree trunk. Carefully, so as not to damage his suit, he
lowered himself to the ground, paying the cord out slowly.

 
          
Later,
as Yamaguchi slept fitfully, the Moon rose, and the robot-gardener, fully alert
now, climbed out of its cement pit and rolled towards the astronaut, tracking
him by his body-heat.

 
          
When
it reached him, it extruded its sharpest knife, plunged the blade through his
suit and into his abdomen. Without a moment’s delay it dragged the blade
across his belly from left to right, then, turning the knife in the wound, made
a brief upward cut.

 
          
As
Yamaguchi thrashed about in hideous pain, fastened within the cumbersome
spacesuit, the robot raked him over on to his belly and extruded a long curved
sword with a shining blade. Swiftly the sword slashed through his neck, a
little below the plexiglass helmet.

 
          
The Code said: “It is considered expert not
to cut the head completely off in one stroke, but to leave a portion of uncut
skin at the throat...”

           
Yamaguchi had failed; nonetheless he
met an honorable death.

 
          
Back
at the Space Agency Center outside the Park, beyond the court designed by Henri
Martinet, now locked and sealed again, the telemetry officials noted the
termination of life functions, as well as the sudden surge of readings just
before the end.