Sunstroke: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

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

Synopsis

This second collection of Watson's short stories further demonstrates his seemingly inexhaustible imagination. In 'The Thousand Cuts' the entire human race finds its consciousness blanked out for varying periods, but life seems somehow to have gone on in the missing days, and indeed, previously intractable problems have moved towards a solution. In 'Sunstroke' a doctor blinded accidentally during the voyage to a seemingly benign new world becomes gradually aware of disturbing changes afflicting her sighted companions. These stories, and many others, confirm Watson's place in the forefront of contemporary SF writers.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 190

Sample

1

SOMETHING WENT TERRIBLY wrong with my rebirth. There’s no doubt about it now, thirty days into the new life. Somehow the categories of time and space are cross-wired in my infant brain. Duration of days and extension in space have interchanged, and I read the world awry. How else can I explain what is happening to me—thirty rooms as I am into this seemingly endless building …

If synaesthesia is the word for confusion of the five senses—so that the colour yellow sounds like a gongbeat, or a vinegary taste rubs the tongue with sandpaper—what is the name for this terrible malaise? Syndimensionality?

Perhaps Fitzgerald’s Syndrome, after my own name? To the discoverer belongs the honour of naming, they say. … But how do I communicate this discovery? Where and when do I communicate it—when ‘where’ is ‘when’, and ‘when’ is ‘where’? If I’d crashlanded alone on an unknown and empty planet, what use would there be in christening it ‘Fitzgerald’s World’? I may as well settle for Syndimensionality.

But why? Why did it happen?

I’d followed all the prescribed meditation patterns to scaffold my mind against the shock of sudden awakening in this blank putty infant body. I’d practised self-enhancement and ego-strengthening, gestalt-awareness and psychic integration. (Indeed, it’s to this heightened mental discipline that I owe my ability to remain sane and observant under these vastly altered, unpredicted circumstances.) And it all went off, in the main, as I’d been led to believe. My seventy-year-old body was wheeled by the service-robot into the isolation chamber. (I’d had a mild heart attack, and could have had a new heart, surely; yet my body was obviously passing its prime. Why linger longer? Why risk if?)

Isolation, then: no living being could be near me now, no man or woman, bird or beast, insect or plant. The chamber itself was surrounded by a great electrified Faraday Cage of copper coils, to keep at bay the vital radiations of other life, lest the life field of any other living thing interfere with mine at the moment of Changeover. I would be robot-tended in isolation for seven days after Change-over while I ‘firmed’ my new self—a generous enough safety margin.

The robot was a stainless steel drum rolling on silent rubber wheels, with two flexible arms and a variety of nozzles, teats, hidden drawers and trays. As it manoeuvred my naked body underneath the scanner, I brooded on the details of the scanning process and what it would shortly do to the me-ness that is my individuality, my unique pattern, or if you prefer it, my soul …

(You? Where are you? Is there any ‘you’ observing me as I pass from room to room, from day to day? By the end of another week will you have come up with the formula for freeing me from this crazy progression? If so, I suppose you shall have the honour of christening my syndrome. You’re welcome to it.)

“Rebirth,” explained Astralsurgeon Dr Manzoni, “was an outgrowth from early matter transmission failures …”

“Yes, yes,” said I, impatient to pass the portal into the Institute and begin preparing for Change-over. In my next life, I decided, I wouldn’t concern myself with business affairs in the least. I would be a pentathlete, competing in the sports of the five worlds, letting the physical side of my nature bloom. I would inherit handsomely enough from myself after the thirty per cent levy to the Institute for rebirth and fostering to the age of five, legal majority for the reborn; and I was looking forward to those first five years as a paradise regained of play and exuberant imagination. The Institute has much to offer the young reborn, to amuse the years of early growth: a thousand and one nights and days of tape-simulated fairyland, not to mention all the bodybuilding amenities of playgrounds and shoreline.

“It’s necessary to remind you,” my Astralsurgeon said gently, “just as it will be necessary for you to remind yourself who you are, to recall your old existence in the new body. Don’t take any of it for granted, Mr Fitzgerald. We need you to understand what will happen to you perfectly. Haste only hinders you.”

So I relaxed. Actually, there were quite a few details I’d forgotten or didn’t know.

Dr Manzoni was tall and silver-haired, with a long thoroughbred nose on which were balanced, of all things, spectacles. I wondered whether these were simply a personal affectation or whether they served some other, professional, purpose. Whether, perhaps, those lenses rendered my life field—my very soul—visible to him, so that this interview was conducted not with ageing flesh and blood but with the essential energy pattern of Robert Fitzgerald. …

The room itself was Islamic in design, with receding planes of symmetry in mosaic and tile, and pastel-toned. It bespoke permanence within change, the regeneration of forms, pattern, gentleness. The window—a stone grille of hexagons and star shapes—opened on the blue Mediterranean-lapped Tunisian sands. Naked boys and girls were romping there under the patient eye of an attendant dressed in the lilac, phoenix-crested robe of the Institute. Those were reborn ones, almost ready to leave and resume their adult lives again. Or new lives entirely, I reminded myself. Or new ones. Whatever they chose.

How carefree was their play! Yet patient too, savouring the future … Not rushing madly into deep waters. How delightful it would be when sexuality came round again. I imagined myself briefly as some girl-child a hundred years old, with all the knowledge of an old lady, yielding to her first choice of lover in the second life … Well, I would not be a girl, of course; but sexual fulfilment obviously came earlier to a reborn girl than to a boy.

Patience. I listened to Manzoni.

Rebirth was a spin-off from matter transmission which had proved, in the event, wildly expensive as a means of shifting anything from A to B, if A was any further than a few metres from B. So the dream of hopping instantaneously around the globe from booth to booth had soon evaporated. However, it evaporated for another reason too: in all the early tests with live animals, only dead bodies arrived at B.

The vibrational scanning method converted mass into energy, back again into mass, almost instantaneously. (For all atoms vibrate to a tune; the ‘symphony’, the manifold fugue, may be a chair—or a rose or a human being.) Yet in that instant, when mass was entirely patterns of energy, the mass could be shunted to another, nearby location in resonance with the scanning beam. A paperweight or a pencil shifted position, intact; but a mouse or a beetle arrived intact, yet lifeless.

It transpired that a ghost was left in the scanner: a pattern which did not reconvert into mass, since it had not strictly speaking been mass in the first place—though it had been present. A method of capturing souls had been found.

Before long, the researchers found they could reattach this ‘astral’ pattern to the body, retransmitted back from B to A. The perfected method nowadays is to capture the astral pattern—the bioplasmoid soul, with all its memories and thoughts, beliefs and desires—on brief ‘hold’, while the old body is shunted a few metres sideways into cremation (so that there’s no resonant envelope of old familiar flesh around to pull the soul); then to shunt in the tabula rasa of a dummy body, android flesh grown at an accelerated rate in vitro from one’s own DNA under the constant focus of one’s Kirlian aura field, recorded on entering the Institute and constantly updated. In a very real sense one is simply re-entering at a much earlier stage. The bioplasmoid soul adjusts to its smaller envelope with relative ease.

“The soul, after all, has a hunger for the flesh,” smiled Dr Manzoni.

I thought of the two vivid young reborns who had been at the exit-party I held in Amsterdam before flying down here to this shoreline south of Sfax. Tonio Andreson and Julia-Maria Geizenstein were only eight and nine years old metabolically, and such a sparkling, witty couple. They were in love with life and with each other (though touchingly they could do little about this yet). We admired them with friendly, tender anticipation of greater happiness to come. They would honeymoon, they hinted, out by the rings of Saturn. They were every fairy tale come true. I was, I realise, half in love with Julia-Maria myself.

Outside, a stork was flapping its white way towards its nest atop a spike of Roman ruin invaded by the sands. Appropriate!

I nodded and asked appropriate questions. And so I entered the Institute, to learn the disciplines of rebirth.

So, a few weeks later, I lay alone and naked under the scanner.

A sudden lurch … A tearing sensation, as of a bandage being torn free from deep inside myself: from inside my heart and lungs and belly.

I plummeted down a deep well into darkness, at the bottom of which was suddenly brilliance, reflection, identity: myself.

And I was lying where I’d been lying before, except that the chamber seemed much larger. It blurred; my eyes weren’t properly adjusted to it. I cried out my first breath.

My tongue explored a toothless mouth. I was a thing of rubber; muscles were hardly there yet, to be commanded. My hand flapped across my face. Then I relaxed.

It would have been nice to hear the voice of Dr Manzoni greeting me by intercom. I would rather have liked some congratulations. But no voice said anything. I did need privacy to stabilise myself, to grow firm. I concentrated on this, till I slept.

When I woke, I was in another room: an amorphous, aquarium-like cube of opaque green glass tiles. The service-robot stood by the cot I now lay in. It fed me warm milk and washed me and blew me dry and wrapped flannel round my midriff, then retired to a corner. My body-idea of myself still slopped out far beyond the boundaries of my shape. Phantom arms and legs hung over the sides of the cot. I felt a little like a plucked, trussed chicken, lopped and trimmed. But I accepted this gladly—gradually reeling in my body-idea to the new, reduced dimensions. Likewise I gladly accepted my sudden incontinence; and the silence and isolation.

I slept, I woke, I sucked milk, I meditated. After a long while the indirect lighting, which came from nowhere in particular but was simply present, began to dim. Night-time. Again I slept.

When I woke up again to false daylight, to my surprise my cot was in another windowless room, this one chequered red and green.

So it has gone on ever since for thirty days—through thirty rooms. I read rooms as days now; they must stand for days. Turning my head one way, I see the door to tomorrow’s room standing slightly ajar; the other way I see the door to yesterday shut tight. I think it’s that way round, but it’s always night and I’m asleep or very drowsy when the robot wheels me through the door.

Green room, red room, golden room; tile, brick, plastic—always different yet identical in their emptiness, their indirect lighting, the absence of windows.

I suppose I must seem autistic or psychotic to an outside observer, exhibiting a total failure of response. They must be all around me now that the first seven days are long past: Dr Manzoni, my psychic integration tutor Mme Matsuyama, the Institute Administrator Radwan Hussainy, the nurses, worrying, trying to reach me. But I persist in seeing only another impossible new room, empty apart from my attendant robot.

Syndimensionality: time and space have twisted … Yet I live, I breathe, I suck liquids, I flex my little fists, I squeak (still struggling to fit the words around my tongue), I look this way and that attentively. All memories of the old life are intact.

“Where are you all? Show yourselves, dammit!”

I cry, then stop myself crying. Be firm, soul of Robert Fitzgerald, reborn man!

On. On.

2

I AM FIVE hundred rooms old now, give or take a few: a teetering toddler—precocious enough, though that’s only to be expected since I’ve been through this all before. My service-robot, dumb waiter supreme, still feeds me—solids now, as well as liquids—and washes me down and cleans up my messes. (Where does it get all the food and drink from? Where does it send the messes to? Hyperspace? In what dimension of experience is this happening?) My cot got left behind a few rooms back, and now I sleep anywhere—a feral child. Today’s room is rococo, with ranks of gilded plaster putti to support the ceiling …

Every night the robot moves me on to the next room in its flexible arms, cradling me. Yet really it’s a very neutral thing; there’s no sense of menace, or camaraderie, about it. I’m not tempted to call it Fred or Charlie.

And today, in full ‘daylight’ and of my own free will, I toddle to the door that stands ajar, heave it open and stumble through into tomorrow’s room. It’s a larger room than previous ones, an empty Moorish Alhambra. The dumb waiter follows me. Behind, as though drawn magnetically by its metal rump, the door shuts quietly and finally with a faint tick like the hand of a clock moving on. When I toddle back and try to push it open, there’s no way.

On I toddle into the next room—a huge mock-igloo. The box of tricks rolls after me, the door clicks shut. And on into the next, the next, the next. Egyptian tomb, Greek temple, and log cabin. Click, click, click.

So this is possible. Suppose, on the other hand, I refuse to move on?

I stay put. I stay and stay. The light dims and brightens at boring day-long intervals five times in succession. I breakfast, lunch and dine a total of fourteen times in that log cabin. On the fifth night, having stockpiled as much sleep as I can during the day, I sit up in the darkness like some tot hooked on midnight TV, watching even when the set is off. When I’m almost nodding off, my dumb waiter rolls over and lifts me gently. Time has caught up with me. Time to move on. I kick and squirm, but into the next dark room it bears me bodily; the door clicks shut.

Next night, I try even more vigorous evasive manoeuvres, dashing and ducking and rolling in the darkness. But it shepherds me; it corners me with ease. Onward I’m borne.

What is at the end? Is there some final room housing God seated in judgement, God the big hotelier?

Or will there be a mirror, wherein I see myself approaching, old man by the time I reach it, having entirely recapitulated my life like some absurd spoof on ontogenesis: I who cheated that final room of life by rebirth?

Am I only a reflection of my soul, a secondary ghost trapped in the circuits of the astral scanner? I beat on the walls with my toddler’s fists. “Let me out!” Does some red light blink on a scanner console in the dimension of Tunisia?

Perhaps I am the true soul, doomed to wander these rooms for as long as the android flesh—of which I inhabit the metaphysical analogue over here—lives out its whole new life over there, possessed of an analogue soul, a mere reflection of me? Is this true of all reborns? Perhaps my dumb waiter is a kind of corpus callosum of the soul: a bridge linking one soul-hemisphere amusing itself on Earth with this other soul-hemisphere which is myself and is stored in Purgatory. (And what if Robert Fitzgerald over there enjoys his second life so much that he opts to be reborn yet again …?) Is there any way of communicating across this bridge? I’ve tried words; my waiter is truly deaf and dumb. Shall I rap out morse code on its metal flanks? SOS—Save Our Soul. Shall I stuff a message up its cleaning nozzle? Written with what? On what? Blood and skin? For a while Monte Cristo-like fantasies of escape, or at least of message smuggling, flourish—then wither away. I am here; and the only way is forward.

Forward, then, as far as my toddler’s legs will carry me!

How many rooms can I travel in a day? Fifty? A hundred?

Alas, when I have toddled through twenty different rooms (Byzantine, Art Deco, geodesic dome …) I realise that my robot is no longer following. It lurks, two rooms back. Two doors stand open, though not the third behind; that’s shut tight. Which makes me anxious in case a door suddenly shuts in my face, cutting me off from my source of food and drink. I shall have to go back and try to figure out the reason for its inertness.

The door won’t let me pass. Invisible elastic holds me back, a soft resistance growing firm as steel the harder I shove against it.

I have to wait.

And wait.

Comes night, I lie down to sleep, thirsty.

Comes another day, and still my dumb waiter stays where it is. Comes night, and some time during it, while I hunch around my hollow belly, throat dry as sticks, the robot rolls forward into the room next door; for it’s there in the morning, and the door beyond has shut.

There it stays, out of reach, through the next awful day till night falls when it rolls in beside me at last to feed and succour me in the dark.

If I had toddled on a few rooms further, unawares … Can a soul starve? Can it die of thirst? Here, apparently, it can. So I am limited to ranging no further than eighteen rooms ahead …

Oh rat in the maze, how soon do you learn the rules? This is a maze that only has one route, though, and that route is straight ahead. The rules here relate to finding one’s way through time.

As though to keep me occupied, furniture appears—at first sparingly but then, as my body puts on a growth spurt of its own over the next few hundred rooms, with increasing frequency. Before long, rooms are handsomely and even lavishly furnished. . .