Watson, Ian - SSC (8 page)

 
          
And
a rabble of voices, from far and near, jammed the waveband.

 
          
Marina
clutched my arm.

 
          
“It
frightens me, Considine—who are they all? Where do they come from?”

 
          
“Some of the other half of the people in this land, Marina—just
some of the other half of the people.
The ones who
stayed outside in the dark.
The ones that weren’t
wasps.
The Indians vour ancestors would have understood. Spirit voices
they are—gods of the land.”

           
“Indians my
ancestors?”

 
          
“Yes.”

 
          
Green
blips swam by me on the radar screen— slave cars that I sped by effortlessly. I
paid no heed to the weather data. My gestalt, my mind-doll, was fully formed.
Its embodiment hunched by me in the passenger seat, the curves and planes of
Marina's body were the fronts and isobars and isohets of the surrounding
dirt-darkened land. A message, she had been placed in the hospital for me to
find, with pain the trigger to waken me to her meaning. So many forms a true
message can take—a circle of giant stones of the megalith builders, a bunch of
knotted strings of different lengths and colours \'7bthe quipu archives of the
Incas)—a human body if need be. If the human body becomes a world unto the
lover or the torturer,
may
not the world itself with
its dales and hillocks, its caves and coverts and cliffs, be a body? Marina, my
chart, on whom I read my destination!

 
          
“Now
you must take your clothes off, Marina, for you’ll soon be bathing in the
sun—we’ll soon be lovers.”

 
          
“My clothes?”

 
          
“Do
so.”

 
          
I
used the Voice of the Sun, the Voice from the Sky. And dazed she began to
fumble at her nurse’s uniform.

 
          
Her
nudity clarified my mind—I knew exactly where to turn off now, on to which
decrepit smaller road.

 
          
“Sun
hounds!” I sang. “Don’t miss the turning.”

           
Goosebumps marched across Marina’s
flesh and her nipples stood out in the mental cold of her life’s climax—the
dawning awareness that she had been inserted into life long ago and grown into
precisely this, and this, shape, as hidden marker for the greatest future
sunspot, burning spot of all burning spots that might start the clouds of
darkness rolling back across the land at last, burning away the poisoned
blackened soup from the Earth’s bowl in a flame-oven of renewal.

 
          
“Sun hounds!’’
I sang. “The Sun of Darkness is about to set.
The Sun of Fire comes next in turn. The men of this creation are to be
destroyed by a rain of fire, changed into hopping chickens and dogs.”

 
          
“Are
you mad, Considine?”
came
Amberson’s voice, nearer
now. “Look, I’m sorry I said what I did. I apologize. But, man—are you mad!”

 
          
Now
that I’d turned off to the east I was driving slower, yet the buggy rocked and
jolted over the broken-backed minor road, tossing us about like fish in a
scaling drum.

 
          
“It
bruises me!” cried Marina, shipwrecked, clinging to her seat.

 
          
Your
white nudity, Marina—and the Earth’s dark nudity to be
explored,
revealed!

 
          
“I
give you the sun, you hounds and runners and presidents of this land!” I hurled
the words into the babbling radiophone. And even Met Central was starting to
show excitement, for they were listening too, and beginning to feed out data
rapidly that vectored in on me and my position.

 
          
As
I stared through the windshield, the greyness ahead slowly lightened to a misty
white that spiralled higher and higher into the upper air. We could see fifty
yards, a hundred yards ahead. A great light bubble was forming in the dark. In
wonder and gratitude, I slackened speed.

 
          
We
stopped.

 
          
“Thank
God for that,” muttered Marina.

 
          
“Considine
here, you sun-hounds—you’d better come up fast, for I’m in the light-bubble
now, it’s rising, spiralling above, five minutes off the sun at most I’d say.
It’s big, this one.”

 
          
“Is
that the truth, Considine?” Amberson demanded.

 
          
“The truth?
Who’s nearest?” I called to the sun runners in
general.
And looked around.
My buggy stood on a
smashed stretch of road bandaging the blackened ground, at the base of a great
funnel of strengthening light . . .

 
          
“Maybe
I am.”
(Very loud, and breathlessly—as though running ahead
of his buggy to catch me up.)
“Harry Zammitt of Helios
Hunters.
I’m . . . coming into the fringes of it now. I see your buggy,
Considine.
The white whirlpool.
Up and up! It’s all
true. Considine—I don’t know how to say it. What you’ve done. Busting out,
hunting down the sun in a matter of hours!”

 
          
As
that first buggy bumped into the intensifying bubble of light, I piloted my own
machine off the road onto the black ground.

 
          
We
sat, watching the first rays of the sun burn through in golden shafts as the
last mist melted.

 
          
And
suddenly the day was on fire around us.

 
          
I
squinted up through dark glasses and my windshield at a sun that seemed greater
and brighter, a different color even, from any I’d ever seen before, steely
whiter—as if there was less separating me from the sun, that day.

 
          
“Out,”
I ordered Marina, leaning over her bare legs to flip the door-lock open.

 
          
She
stepped out obediently into the sunshine, while I gathered the obsidian knife
up by the thong from under my seat, dropped it in my pocket.

 
          
“But
it hurts,” she cried in surprise—the hopping chicken with burnt feet, exactly!
“It’s too hot.”

 
          
“Naturally
the sun is hot.”

 
          
Yes
it was hot, so very hot. The hard hot rays burning at my skin the moment I
stepped outside, hot as a grill, a furnace.

 
          
Harry
Zammitt moved closer in his buggy, and other buggies were rolling into the
sunspot now.

 
          
“Marina—you
must stand against the buggy— no, better bend your body back, sprawl backwards
over the hood, lie on it—but keep your eyes closed or you’ll be blinded.”

 
          
“You
can’t make love to me across a car,” she whined feebly, moving in a daze,
wincing as her body touched the heating metal. “It hurts.”

 
          
“It’s
a buggy,” said I. “Lie back, damn you, lover.
Across the hood
of my buggy.”

 
          
“You
animal, you primitive animal,” she mumbled doing just as I said, spreading
herself across the hood with her eyes screwed shut. For her this was the climax
that confirmed all her fears and lusts for such scum as myself. Oh Marina!

 
          
For
me the climax was different.

           
(Had I ever tried to warn you—had I?
Who was I now, Considine the human being, or Considine the Priest of the Sun?
Liar Considine, how you enjoyed being possessed—how you enjoyed the sanctification
of your torture, in order to achieve the torture of sanctity—
Marina
!)

 
          
I,
Considine, Priest of the Sun, snatched the obsidian knife from my pocket and
brought it slashing down into your chest.

 
         
A
pretty mess I made of you. The Aztecs must have had dozens of prisoners to
practice on. At one blow!
Monkeys
maybe. Maybe they
executed monkeys in the dark rooms under the temple pyramids. By the time I had
hacked through the chaos of smashed ribs, torn breast muscle,
flesh, that
had been your body and my guide—by the time I
had trapped the palpitating blood-sodden rag of your heart in my fist and
wrenched it free—by that time I was vomiting onto the black soil.

 
          
(Soil
that showed no signs of the flash harvest of grass and tiny blooms we all
looked for, though it had been sprinkled with blood—as was I.)

 
          
My
mouth putrid with bile, I turned, held your heart, Marina, high, dripping, to
the blazing hurtful sun that blistered my skin raw as a flayed criminal’s.

 
          
“What
are you doing, Considine!” screamed the Magnificent Amberson, plunging toward
me across the black earth—for he had finally got here, in the wake of some of
his followers—sheltering himself under a sheet of metal.

 
          
“Sacrificing,”
said I. “As the sun god requires.”

 
          
“Sun
god?” he snarled.

           
“Tezcatlipoca has been reborn in the
sky— surely you see?”

 
          
“Bloodthirsty
maniac—I don’t care about that—I can’t see anything up there! Where has the
ozone cover gone?”

 
          
I
turned to Amberson then blankly, still clutching the wet heart.

 
          
“What?”

 
          
“The
ozone layer in the upper air, don’t you realize it’s gone? Met Central is
shouting murder about it. The hard radiation is getting through. You’re burning
to death if you stay out here. That’s why there’s no harvest, you fool.
Scattering blood around isn’t going to help!”

 
          
I
dropped the heart on the ground, where it lay bubbling gently, tiny bubbles of
blood, into the unresponsive warming soil.

 
          
Amberson
snatched at me, maybe to drag me under the metal sheet with him, but I shook
him off and jumped into my buggy, locked the doors, opaqued the windows.

 
          
And sat trembling there with the obsidian blade freshly blooded in
my lap.

 
          
“Considine!”
cried voices over the radiophone.

 
          
“Considine?”
Amberson’s voice—he was back in his sun buggy.

 
          
“Yes,
I’m here.”

 
          
“Now
hear me, sun runners all, Considine led you here, and I admit I don’t know how.
But now maybe he’d like to explain why we can’t go outside without being
burnt, and where the harvest is?”

 
          
I
said nothing.

 
          
“No?
I’ll tell you. Anyway, it’s coming over Met Central. The ozone layer in the
upper air has finally broken down—the pollution has gotten to it and changed
it—and as the ozone layer just happens to be what filters out the hard
radiation from the sun, we had better get the hell out of here.
Reflecting—as we do—on the demise of the honorable sport of the
sun hunt.
From now on anyone who spots the sun is going to wish himself
a hundred miles away. So get going sun runners. And bugger you Considine. Let’s
all know this as Considine’s Sunspot—the last sunspot anyone ever hunted for.
A nice curse to remember a bloodthirsty fool by!”

 
          
Tezcatlipoca,
why had you cheated me? Did her blood not flow like milk to your satisfaction?
Was it because I botched the sacrifice so clumsily? Where the Aztec priest used
one swift blow of the knife to unsheath the heart, I used twenty. . . .