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

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