Watson, Ian - SSC by The Very Slow Time Machine (v1.1) Read Free Book Online Page B

his briefcase up but all the
passengers were watching video and had their windows opaqued. He got scared and
leapt off the road into the sludge. However the sunspot was coming to a close
now. The blue sky misted over and soon he was all alone in the darkness with cars
zipping by on one side and a hand clutching down his throat for his lungs as
the pollution flowed back, his eyes watering onion tears. And in the darkness,
doubly blinded by tears, he wandered further and further away from the road
into the sludge. Even the noise of the cars seemed to be coming four ways at
once to him. But now it was dark again the sludge was coming together, shaping
itself into fungi two feet high, and amoeba things as big as his foot, and wet
mucous tendrils like snots ten feet long that coiled and writhed about. . . and all kinds of nameless nightmares were there
in the darkness squelching and slobbering about him . . .So he went mad, I
guess. Or maybe he was mad to start with.”
                 A
few runners, a few of the ghettopeople applauded, but Marco looked disgusted at
her butting in—though our mouths had been full while she was doing the
talking—and Marti expressed his annoyance at what he thought of as her sloppy
nursery horror-comic world, preferring his horror neat like raw spirit, and
religious and classical—and as we drank off our tart metallic beer (solution
of iron filings) to wash the burgers down, he dwelt on the how and when of the
Aztec sacrifices to the sun.
                 ‘‘Oh
handsome was the prisoner they taught to play the flute and smoke in a neat and
elegant fashion and sing like Caruso. After a year of smoking and singing and
playing the flute, four virgins were given to him to make love to. Ten days
after that they took him out onto the last terrace of the temple. They opened
his chest with one single slash of a knife. This knife.” (He whirled the obsidian blade on the thong from around his neck, where he’d
hung it when he left the buggy, flashed it at us.) “Unzipped him, tore out his
heart!’’
                 How
strange, and remarkable, that the heart- blood of the Aztecs’ prisoner flowing
for the sun should become our own heartblood pumped into storage bottles and
refrigerated with glycerol at this hospital! A sacrifice of ice against a
sacrifice of fire—both harshly painful—the one lasting as long as an iceberg
melting, the other over and done with in a flash of time!
                 Waking
up weak-headed but set in my purpose, growing sharper with each hour, I shouted
for you to come to my web-side, as Shanahan and Grocholski stared at me bemused
and grumbled to one another about this perversion of machismo. “Nurse!’’
                 And
you drifted to my side, green eyes agleam, hate crystals in your Indian skull. '
                 “What
is it, Considine?”
                 “Mightn’t
you hurt me a bit more if I knew you were a person with a name? A nameless
torturer never had much fun. Wouldn’t you love to be begged for mercy by
name—the way he called you by name , with emotion—the
emotions of fear and anguish, if not of love? The victim begs to know his
tormentor’s name.’’
                 “So
you’re a victim, are you?”
                 “We’re
all victims of this dirty world.”
                 “No,
you’re not victims, not you people. You’re here to pay because you made victims
of other people. So that the lives of your future victims may
be saved, by your own life-blood.”
                Almost as an afterthought, you added
softly: “My name’s Marina, Considine.”
                 “Ah.”
                 Then
I could let my forced attention unfocus and disperse into the foggy wool of
fading pain . . .
                 And
when she came again to plunge the bitter drugs into my body and spin the taps
that recommenced