The Book Of Ian Watson by Ian Watson

Author:Ian Watson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780575114852
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2011-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

I still haven’t written a story called “Down the Mine”; but here is one of the stories which spilled out like lava, and became the starting point for a novel, Deathhunter …

A Cage for Death

Ralph Hewitson’s Thanatoscope was the ultimate product of that strange man’s obsession with death. Thanatology is, of course, the study of dying, and Hewitson’s machine was intended to enable us to see, and ideally to “trap,” Death itself. Or himself. Ralph Hewitson always took it very personally that he or anyone else should have to die.

No doubt all of us go through this stage of horror and affront when we are children. Then we file the trauma away in the back of our mind. We lock it up in the mental lumber room, and it creeps out again only in our last days. Sometimes it remains as offensive as ever, but increasingly nowadays—thanks to the Thanatology Foundation’s centers across the land and the re-interpretation of dying as an altered state of consciousness—it is transfigured into a friend, an intrinsic part of oneself, the keystone of the arch of life.

Hewitson, however, kept intact the old animist vision of some invisible thief of life. His Thanatoscope—his deathwatch device—was to be the tripwire camera, and cage, that surprised Death himself.

True, some scientific testing of death has been conducted in the centers in addition to the psychological studies and therapies—but only in the sense of weighing the body before and after death to see whether any tiny weight loss occurs, as of a departing soul, or using aura photography to try to record this departure on film. None of these fringe investigators have ever tried to demonstrate the converse occurrence: the arrival of Death as an active force.

Hewitson was a tall, black-haired man with a slight permanent stoop as if he never trusted doorways to be quite high enough to let him through.

“I wonder whether Death’s doorway will let me pass when my time comes,” he said to me one day, darkly humorous. “Or will I get stuck in it? Halfway in, halfway out? You know, I’ve been thinking that zombies could simply be people who get stuck in that door. Their conscious mind has gone through, but the automatic mind gets left on our side of it, running the body mechanically.”

“You mean the autonomic nervous system, don’t you, Ralph?”

“Do I? Do I?”

I’d come to the Sixth Street Thanatology Center only three months earlier from Neo-Theology College after majoring in Death-of-God counseling, and it was something of a shock for me to find someone who—if he plainly didn’t believe in God—nevertheless firmly espoused the doctrine of death incarnate. But I had taken a liking to his black jokes, which seasoned his obsession with a dash of pepper.

No doubt this was the way he performed in his own counseling of the dying—he made death seem something of a farce, a Marx brothers’ comedy. That approach could probably work wonders with some people. I’ve met them. They hate to be contemplative about their demise.

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