Free Watson, Ian - SSC by The Very Slow Time Machine (v1.1)

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?”