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

domes shrivelling,
flimsy-fabricked. Buildings in flames, so brittle. The asphalt motorways blazing fifty-mile-long tinder strips.
                 So
let me be Priest of the Burning World then, since it is what I foretold and
since, strangely (is it so strangely in these fear-crazed times?), the cult of
Tezcatlipoca has revived, at least its ceremonies have, blood sacrifices
carried out in the polluted zones beyond the encroaching flame front, in vain
hopes of stemming it—oh, they only add fuel to the sun’s fire!—with their
cockerels and bullocks stolen from the zoo sheds . . . and people too, captive
and volunteer—beating hearts torn out by far more expert hands than mine,
tossed blindly at where the sun burns its way toward them. And, what no one
will volunteer for, the flame kindled in the darkness on someone’s writhing
scream-torn body, to impress the god of fire—Xiuhtecuhtli—oh yes, modern
scholarship is on our side! And after further scholarly researches (did not
witchcraft almost win a World War?) babies are cooked alive, eaten in honor of
Tlaloc, god of rains and springs, who waters the earth. Outlaws and inlaws,
bandits and wasps— we are all in this together, now.
                 My
fate, Wandering Jew of the burning roads, is to lurk outward and ever outward,
casting around the perimeter of Sunspot Considine, buggy rationed and fueled
free of charge, with hatred, meeting up with my worshippers, torturers,
meteorologists (has not meteorology absorbed all the other sciences?), time and
again overcome by a craze of words bubbling from Tezcatlipoca’s lips—taunts,
demands, tricks and curses fluttering through my mouth from elsewhere, like
captive birds set free, like the souls of his victims escaping into the sky.
                 And
I ask:
                 Why
me?
                 And:
                 Why
you, Marina?
                 How
I love you, in retrospect, having held your beating heart within my palm!
                 And
the sunspot that bears my name, great tract of flameland seared into the world,
pre-Cambrian zone of sun-scarred earth sterile except for the bacteria lying in
waiting for some million-year- to-come event—do you realize that logically the
whole world will bear my name one day, if the sunspot expands to embrace it,
though no one will be here to use the name—of Considine’s Planet (as it may be
known to the ghosts upon it)—why am I not allowed to drive in there and die?
But the mad sun god will not allow it, while yet he holds me dangling on a
string, jerking my vocal chords as it amuses him. Since I plucked her heart out
I am his creature utterly. As she was mine, and earlier still as I was hers. So
it rolls around.
                 Once
I was a free man, sun hunter, outlaw. Now a potential
planet—and a slave. The empty gift of omnipotence! Considine’s
world—naked preCambrian of some future society of
insects, perhaps!
                 Marina.
                 Whose
heart I felt flutter in my hand.
                 Thy
blood like milk for me has flowed, hot as iron pouring from a furnace!
                 Marina and Considine.
                 Eve
and Adam of the world’s end, our non-love brought life to its close, victim and
executioner of the vanishing smogscape—which we all long for nowadays,
passionately, and would sacrifice anything, or anyone to bring it back to us.
                 This tale is for the sun god, Tezcatlipoca,
with my curses, and for you, Marina. . . .

            SITTING ON A STARWOOD STOOL
     
     
                 Starwood. Imagine. It comes in very small slices. Approximately this, by this, by this. (Quick
gestures with the hands.) They trade it out at Point Q which is to say
at the intersection of reality with a mathematical equation—an idea more than a
place, though we can both reach it.