Watson, Ian - SSC Read Online Free PDF Page B

Grocholski, and I—we didn’t hold each other’s occasional screams and
pleas against each other. The pain just happened to be unbearable. As simple as that. In the eyes of the runners our agony
confirmed our presidencies. The Aztec priests were tortured by the Spaniards
before their congregations. So the Aztec priests screamed and begged, when
their turn came? Their congregations still believed in them.
                 “You
scum of the earth!” Marina hissed as she jabbed our tethered buttocks with that cruel syringe, an
Ahab tormenting her own private whale over and over again. (But I did not know
her, did not know you as Marina yet.) “Do you know what will happen to you today? We’re going to take
so much out of you and for so long that your brain will starve for oxygen, you’ll be half way to an idiot, a drooling
vegetable.”
                 “You
know that’s illegal, you bitch,” I snarled as you tickled my bare flesh with
the syringe anticipatorily making my nerves try to crawl away.
                “Anyone may make mistakes,” her eyes
gleamed.
                 Only a scare, a put-on. Panic. She
wouldn’t dare.
                 “You
must be a pretty girl under that mask. Why do you hate us so bitter?”
                 “Why
give you the satisfaction of knowing?”
                 “You
gave me the satisfaction of knowing just then—there’s something to know.”
                 And
the syringe hit my flesh hard, at that, and dug in.
                 The
hot-acid gruel washed into me. My veins now lava-flows cursed with a
consciousness of their own heat and motion. The exquisite agony of being emptied
out. The pain of my tortured body racing to make more and more blood as the
metabolic drugs goaded it on.
                 And
under and around this pain, the fear that as life-blood flowed out through the
taps, my brain was starving and impoverished, on the brink of becoming the
brain of an animal, a toad, a stone—
                 “Bitch!” I screamed.
                 Out
through one set of pipes flowed my rich blood, in through another the miserable
substitute fluid that my body raced to build upon. And Marina (whom I did not
know as Marina yet) danced the empty syringe before my
eyes, to conduct the music of my torment—keeping an eye on the dials and
gauges but pretending not to. Why did she hate us so bitter? Well, I hated her
just as bitter! Why ask why. I knew it when I rode for the sun, I might end up
here if they found one single excuse to lay their hands on me.
                 Then
the pain got too bad to think about anything else.
                No windows in the ward. What was
there to look out on? We were outside any Fuller dome, in this hospital. The pollution crawling up and down the sides of the building, dark
grey to pitch black. A general turbidity over the land: over the great
plains where the braves of another age and world hunted buffalo; on the
treeless hills, where it had long since snuffed out the pines; pressing soft on
the Great Dead Lakes, and, further out, pressing soft on the dark cesspool of
the North Atlantic. Pressing upon the superhighways where mostly automatic
traffic crawled and where we had hunted in our packs for that rare bird of paradise,
that dark orchid, the patch of clear sun—the “sunspot” that blooms mysteriously
amid the murk, shafts of gold piercing a funnel of light down to earth whereby
the clear sky could be briefly glimpsed and worshipped. Were not the deaths we
caused on the highways only petty sacrifices to ensure the coming of the sun?
                 And
the murk lay thickly on this hospital, Superhighway 31 Crash Hospital, Prison
Wing, in whose ward we swooned in pain as we gave up our lifeblood to
recompense the beneficiaries of this murk, authors of the forever eclipse of
the sun . . .