Evil Water: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

In his fourth short-story collection, Watson again demonstrates the extraordinary scope of his imagination. The title story has ancient witchcraft meeting complacent modern suburbia in a tale of spine-chilling horror, while 'When the Timegate Failed' casts an unexpected light in the dangers of space travel and man's powers of self-delusion. Alien matters of a different kind crop up in 'Windows', in which mysterious artefacts found on Mars prove to be something of a problem for their chic human owners. Evil Water is a highly inventive collection which is a delight to read.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 224

Sample

Doubtless it is one of life’s typical ironies that a man with defective eyesight should have spent many long years studying the history of artificial lighting. However, my friend John Ingolby was also a prominent churchman. By the time his book appeared John was well advanced in the hierarchy of the Church of England. He was Bishop of Porchester.

Now, at this time the Church was in a certain amount of disarray. On the one hand it was waning due to apathy. On the other, it was beset by fundamentalist evangelism which seemed unpleasantly frantic and hysterical. Between this Scylla and Charybdis a new liberal theology was being steered which it was hoped would inject new life and modern, humane thought into a seemingly dying institution.

Not, however, without resistance!

Already one new bishop—who publicly denied the doctrine of the virgin birth—had been enthroned amidst scandal and protest. Within two days of his enthronement, the venue—an ancient cathedral, finest example of Gothic architecture in the land—was blasted by lightning and its transept gutted by fire. Reportedly the bolts of lightning came from out of a clear sky; so fierce were they, that the lightning conductors were overloaded.

Immediately the popular press pointed gleefully to the hand of God Himself as source of the miraculous lightning; and some traditionalist clergy endorsed this explanation of the meteorological hazard. The cathedral had been polluted by such an enthronement; here was God’s sacred reaction. Yet God, of course, was also merciful. Having first set His house ablaze, He then permitted the massed fire brigades to quench the flames and save the majority of the edifice.

Liberal-minded churchmen issued statements explaining the fire as a coincidence, and deploring popular superstition. The same cathedral had, after all, been severely damaged by fire thrice already during its history—the most recent occasion, a hundred years earlier, being incidentally a case of arson provoked by another theological dispute.

Yet the noisiest single critic of the new bishop from amongst the ranks of ecclesiastics bitterly denounced such pussyfooting explanations. In disgust he publicly quit the English church and embraced the Greek Orthodox communion. The Greek Orthodox Church, as its name implied, was a staunch guardian of doctrine, ritual, and liturgy.

Some months later scandal struck again.

A radical-minded dean and lecturer in theology had been hired as presenter for a major new television series called The Quest for God. As the date for screening the first episode drew near, this dean revealed in interviews that he did not believe in an afterlife; nor in the Resurrection of Christ; nor for that matter did he even accept the “objective” existence of a God. “God” was a personal construct of the moral consciousness of humanity, said he.

A wave of protest arose.

And of course that first instalment of The Quest for God was blacked out nationwide by a lightning strike …

Of the industrial kind. TV engineers seized this opportunity to protest certain changes in their duty rosters.

The industrial dispute was soon settled; and two nights later the TV network transmitted the blacked episode in place of a football match. But by now newspaper headlines had trumpeted: Lightning Strike Blacks Atheist Dean. Even though the smaller print below explained the nature of this particular bolt from the blue, editorials in bolder black type suggested that God may move in a mysterious way His lightning to direct.

Such publicity hugely swelled the viewing figures for a programme which many people might otherwise have felt disposed to ignore; so much so that the “atheist” Dean was obliged to preface his second prerecorded appearance one week later with a brief personal statement in which he quipped endearingly that if God did not exist, He could hardly have thought of a better way to draw the nation’s attention to the quest for Him.

It was in this fraught climate that John Ingolby’s book was published, surprising me (for one) by its title—then by its angle.

Religion and the History of Lighting: that was the title. The last word is quite easy to confuse with “lightning”; and indeed the printers had done so at least a dozen times during the course of three hundred pages without John—with his poor eyesight—noticing the slight though substantial difference whilst he was correcting the proofs. However, this is a mere incidental irony. The primary shock of the book came from the manner in which, like some seventeenth-century metaphysical poem, it yoked together two apparently disparate things: a scholarly history of artificial lighting—and theological insights.

I admit that my first reaction was that an exuberant editor had persuaded John to rewrite his whole volume, giving it a new commercial slant.

Let’s be honest. Suppose you happen to be an aficionado of beer-mats, then their history is a consuming passion—to yourself, and to a few hundred other like-minded enthusiasts. However, your History of Beer-Mats must inevitably lack the kind of popular charisma which sells a million copies.

Likewise with the history of lighting.

Blazing sticks in Neolithic caves; grease and wick in a bear skull; Phoenician candles of yarn and beeswax; Roman tallow lamps; Elizabethan lanthorns; candles of spermaceti scented with bay-berry; rushlights; Herr Wintzler’s lighting up of Pall Mall with gas; Welsbach’s incandescent mantle; De la Rue’s dim electric light of 1820; Sir Joseph Swan’s carbonized cotton filaments; Humphrey Davy’s carbon arc; Edison at Memlo Park; mercury vapour; neon; acetylene. … Fascinating stuff! Yet how many of the general public would wish to read three hundred pages about it?

John set the tone from the very outset. “We wanted light,” he wrote, “so that we should not feel afraid. …” He went on to parallel advances in religious awareness with the developing technology of artificial lighting: from early shamanism to paganism, from the “light of the world”, Christianity, to medieval mysticism, from the Dark Ages to the modern enlightenment of radical theology. He suggested a direct link between the two: with lighting influencing religious beliefs, and religious beliefs influencing the technology of light.

John made great play with the fitful glimmering of candles and the haunting, soul-like shadows which flitted around rooms as a result; with the smokiness of oil lamps and the bonfires of the Inquisition; with the softly restful, comparatively brilliant glass chimney lamp of Swiss chemist Aimé Argand which climaxed the Age of Reason; with the clear steady paraffin lamp of Victorian pragmatic Christianity.

He harvested a rare crop of quotations to prove his point, from such authorities as Saint Augustine and Meister Eckhart, Jakob Boehme and Kierkegaard, Tillich and Hans Küng. His chapter on medieval stained glass and the visionary cult of the millennium was masterly, and prefaced—anachronistically, I thought at first—by this famous passage from Shelley:

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity …

Then the finale to the chapter completed the quotation (which not many people know beyond its first two lines); and I understood.

… Until Death tramples it to fragments.

And what of late twentieth-century lighting—not to mention fibre optics, laser beams, and holography—and the new radical, atheistic, afterlifeless theology?

And what of the future?—a future which John saw as lying in the harnessing of “cold light”: the bioluminescence of bacteria, the phosphorescence of fireflies and the fish of the abyss, which generate an enormous amount of chemical light with minimal energy input, and without heat? What of the cold light of the next century which must surely follow on from the bright yet hot and kilowatt-consuming light of our present era? What of the theology of that?

My first assumption, as I say, was that the publisher had prevailed on John to jazz up his volume.

My second assumption, when I delved deeper into John’s religious musings, was that he had decided to throw his cap into the ring of radical theology; that he had chosen to run up his colours as one of the avant-garde of the Church.

Or had he? Or rather, on whose behalf was he running up his colours?

During the many years that I had known John—since college days, a time of life when brainstorming sessions are quite common—he had never to my knowledge spoken heatedly about the validity of the virgin birth, or of Christ’s dead body walking around, or of the afterlife, or of a God in Heaven; or any of the crunch points of the new clear-vision theology which was even then taking shape. Indeed I felt that John had entered the Church largely as a reliable career—one in which he thought he would excel, since he was a good Latin and Greek scholar, but one in which his actual belief was nominal.

Let me be more specific. John did not doubt his vocation; but nor did he question it. He was more like a younger son of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries to whom becoming a clergyman was a matter of course; and like several such who became better known as naturalists or geologists or amateur astronomers John had his own parallel, genuine passion—namely the history of lighting.

John’s father had been a vicar. His uncle was a bishop. The step was natural; advancement was likely. Without a doubt John was good-hearted; and was to prove excellent at pastoral duties. Whilst at college he involved himself in running a boys’ club, and in serving hot soup to tramps of a winter’s night. However, he seemed uninterested in theological disputes as such.

Could it be that John was deeply traditional at heart—and that his book was in fact a parody of the new rational theology? A spoof, a satire? Was he intending to pull the carpet out from under the feet of the church’s intellectuals—like some Voltaire, but on the other side of the fence?

Had he been so annoyed in his quiet way by the new trends in theology that he had sacrificed to God all of his private research work into the history of lighting—his consuming hobby—so that by using it satirically he could defend the faith?

Would he watch and assess reactions to his book, then announce that Religion and the History of Lighting was in fact a holy joke? One intended to demonstrate the credulity of unbelief? To show up the trendy emptiness of today’s scientific theology?

Or was John Ingolby entirely innocent of such guile? Was he a true innocent: the stuff of saints and geniuses and the dangerously naïve?

Or was he simply short-sighted and afflicted with a species of tunnel vision which had compressed his two diverse occupations—the Church, and the history of lighting—absurdly yet persuasively into the selfsame field of view? Maybe!

At any rate, in the wake of the cathedral fire and the televised Quest for God the publicity department of John’s publisher dangled his newly-minted book under the noses of the media; and the media gladly took the bait.

Here was more “new theology” from a bishop; more (apparently) rational probing of “superstition” as a kind of slowly vanishing shadow cast by improving human technology, a function of blazing brands and paraffin lamps and neon and lasers; and an analysis of mystical insight as an analogue of candlepower and lumens—with the possibility, thrown in, of new illuminations just around the corner.

And did not Bishop Ingolby’s book have something to say (at first glance) about holy lightning? Lightning which suddenly was humanized—into the sodium-vapour lamps on motorways, the neon strips over shop fronts—by the deletion of a single letter, “n”, like the removal by a clever trick of an unknowable infinity from an equation?

Yet—to reinject a note of mystery—did not the possibility of cold light remain? Here, John’s fancy soared poetically.

The newspapers excelled themselves. Bishop Ingolby was a debunker—and should be defrocked forthwith! Bishop Ingolby was a scientific mystic, striving to yoke technology to divinity! He was this. He was that.

Certainly he suddenly became notorious. Religion and the History of Lighting sold a lot of copies; a good few, no doubt, were read.

T-shirts appeared bearing the icon of a light bulb on them, and the legend: S.O. & S. Switch On, & See. (With a punning undercurrent of Save Our Souls.) These T-shirts seemed as urgent and arbitrary as their sartorial predecessors which had instructed people to RELAX! or FIGHT! or BREATHE!

Switch on, & See. But see what? See that there was nothing in the darkness of the universe? Or that there was everything? Or that there was something unforeseen?

Thus, by way of prologue to the strange and terrible events which happened subsequently. …

The “Bishop’s Palace” in Porchester is, in actuality, a large Georgian house set in modest grounds of lawn and shrubbery standing midway between the railway station and the ruins of Porchester Castle. The west wing of the building was devoted to the administration of the diocese. The east wing was John’s own domain, where the domestic arrangements were in the hands of a housekeeper, Mrs Mott, who arrived every morning bright and early and departed every evening after dinner; for John had never married.

Most of the domestic arrangements were Mrs Mott’s province: cookery and cleaning, laundry and such. The lighting styles of the various rooms in the east wing were John’s own choice; and it was in this respect that one half of his palace resembled a living museum.

The kitchen was lit by electric light bulbs; the small private chapel by massive candles; the dining-room by gas mantles; the library by brilliant neon strips. Innumerable unused lighting devices stood, or hung, around: Roman pottery oil lamps, miners’ safety lamps, perforated West Indian gourds designed to house fireflies. …

When I arrived to visit John at his urgent request on that early November evening several months after publication of his book, the whole of the east wing which met my gaze was lit up in its assorted styles, with no curtains closed. As I walked the few hundred yards from the railway station, a couple of anticipatory rockets whizzed up into the sky over Porchester and exploded, showering orange stars. This was the day before the country’s children would celebrate the burning at the stake of the Catholic Guy Fawkes for trying to blow up a Protestant Parliament—an earlier religious feud. John seemed, meanwhile, to be conducting his own festival of light.

I …

But I haven’t mentioned who I am, beyond the fact that I was at college with John a good many years ago.

My name is Morris Ash, and I am a veterinary surgeon turned homeopathist. I live in Brighton, and cater to the more prosperous sectors of society. My degree was in Biochemistry, and I had originally thought of going into medical research. A certain disenchantment with my fellow human beings—coupled with dawning ecological awareness of the soaring world population and the degradation of the natural environment—had shunted me into veterinary studies.

I had done well in my profession, though I never practised to any great extent rurally with sheep and horses and cows, which may seem a contradiction (of which life is full). I had become an up-market urban vet, a doggy doctor, a pussy physician, renowned among my patients’ owners for my compassionate bedside (or basket-side) manner.

Twenty years on, I had five partners working with me (and for me), and was more of a consultant in difficult cases than a routine castrator of tom-kittens. My thoughts turned once more to biochemistry and to medical research, but with a difference: I interested myself in homeopathy, in the theory of treating disease by means of minuscule, highly diluted doses of substances which would ordinarily cause disease. I began to investigate the possibility of treating animal ailments likewise, and within a few years I was supplying a wide range of home-made homeopathic remedies to the pets of my clientele, should the owners prefer this approach—and a gratifying number did. Homeopathy worked startlingly well in a number of recalcitrant cases; and word of my success spread quickly. I soon found that I was treating my erstwhile patients’ owners homeopathically, too—though not, I hasten to add, for mange or distemper!

Now, there’s nothing illegal in this. You need no medical qualifications to practise as a homeopathic doctor; and it’s a curious fact, as I discovered, that a good few human beings would rather have their ills tended to by a vet than by an orthodox doctor.

A doctor is often cursory, reaching quickly for his prescription pad to scribble upon it in illegible Latin. A doctor is frequently inclined to treat his human patients as examples of blocked plumbing, or as broken-down cars—this is the common complaint by patients. Whereas a vet must always fondle and gentle his patients (or else the vet is likely to be scratched, bitten, and kicked). A vet seems more sensual, more full of curative love. He is seen to cure—to a certain extent—by a laying on of hands, whereas a medical doctor metaphorically jabs a fist into you.

Also, people might prefer to confide in a vet because his trade isn’t viewed as a mysterious Freemasonry. A vet has no cryptic knowledge or secret records.

Finally, the doctor appears to have the power of life or death over you; yet he will never exercise the power of death mercifully. Indeed the law forbids him to do so. Death can only come after a long, humiliating, and dehumanizing process of medical intervention which often seems experimental to the wasting patient and his relatives. The vet does possess the power of instant death. He can give lethal mercy injections to distempered puppies or crushed cats. Yet it is the instant mercy of th. . .