Sun King

In his dreams he is not alone and he is alone. There are people with him, a crowd really...he feels their fingers brush his skin and their touch causes the hair on his arms to prick. He is not alone. But he cannot see them--his eyes are gone--he cannot hear them--his ears are seared off--he cannot call to them--his tongue is a mangled stump. He is alone.

In his dreams.

A mechanical jingle penetrates the shadows that are folded around his brain...ears...he has ears...and eyes and a tongue...he remembers, he wakes.

Aden Toutley opens his eyes.

Today, he thinks, it's today. Seventy-seven point two years and a few hours and some seconds, and another second, another, another. The alarm silences as his fingers grope across its buttons.

He gets out of bed, yawns, stumbles drowsily to the toilet, relieves the urgency in his bladder. He goes three, sometimes four times a night now. Up and down, up and down--it's not good for muscles and bones, all that up and down. His joints ache, but today he ignores the pain, he lets it wash away from him. Seventy-seven point two years. Today he starts to sing a song.

They were all singing the song. Their voices drummed the gentle curves of the chamber, bounced back and echoed. It was a mess of voices and the lyrics were the same, over and over, but no-one cared. Some people wore garlands of marigolds that had been grown in the subterranean greenhouses, others carried sunflowers.

Somewhere in the crowd a voice called out, "Negative two degrees. Get ready, in ten," and they all cried out the numbers...counted down..."nine...eight..."

Aden was seated above everyone, looking down on dyed hair and bald patches, woolly frizz, shorn heads. He wore a plastic crown and he was above them all because he was on a sort of seat that the adults called a litter.

The doors opened, cold air rushed into the tunnel, there were a series of indrawn gasps, a laugh, a giggle. Aden had time to wonder why the sun which was always gold or yellow in art and on screen was instead blue.

Someone hissed at him, "Your line!"

A child stood up on the litter, he waved his hands at the glowing door. The light was icy and crystalline. "The dawn!" said Aden, "Go forth to the dawn!"

There. He'd said it. The Sun King had proclaimed the dawn. Tradition was satisfied.

They all cheered.

The food goes down quickly today. Aden spoons his breakfast almost too fast, nearly swallows it the wrong way, coughs and slows himself down. He still has the small fake gold crown, and although it doesn't fit any more, he still dusts it off and takes it along with him.

As he walks he sings. He can't remember all the words--though he knows that the lyrics were simple--his voice moves slowly, thoughtfully, through the melody. Although he thinks of it as a happy song, it comes out all wrong and is weedy with sad notes.

He stops at Room 120A, just as he always does, and checks on the two hectares of cultivated garden that he has managed to maintain. Water...good. Soil pH...good...nitrogen...good...zinc...potassium...iron...all the concentrations are in the right range, but then again, they almost always are. Meanwhile his instruments hum and chirp, all good, they sing, all good. Sometimes he thinks the machines look after him too well. He feels guilty. They work and work and he does nothing. There is a lull in his thoughts. What was he meaning to do? He is getting old. He knows it. Do the machines? Would they mourn him?

A pause. Beyond the garden is a wall of green vegetation--edible fruits and vegetables that have run wild and become a tangled Eden-land without the serpent, without God, without the Adam or the Eve, all of it rich under artificial light, succulent under artificial rain. Sometimes he goes fruit-picking in the wilderness garden, but no, he thinks, no, actually, he hasn't done that in a while. The vastness of it, all that unwanted vastness carved out of rock and full of food. It frightens him and makes him sad. So he doesn't go into the wilderness-garden much any more.

The boy saw the world for the first time and he laughed. There were hills, rocks, dust, whirls of grit and above it all there was a sky of bruised colours pocked with a few dimming stars. A green-blue sunrise was scorching distant mountains until they looked drenched with copper.

He stared at the colours and barely noticed when someone said, "We gotta let you down now, Aden, the weight's a bit much and the play's over."

He was helped to the ground and then watched as people danced, jumped and chased around, their breath ghosting the air.

Then something tiny buzzed past his nose.

"What was that?"

His mother was near, she pointed, "The temperature is rising. Life! Aden, look...life!"

What seemed to have been rocks a moment ago were filling with hairline cracks, splitting open--things stirred under the pebbles--fronds began to unfurl--small creatures were beginning to crawl from muddy holes.

There was another movement. Aden snatched at it, cupped his hands and stared. It looked like an insect, sort of...or a flying crab? Except that it had feathery hair and five blinking eyes.

"Isn't it amazing," said his mother. "In a week this will all be a jungle, in two months a savannah, in five months it will be scorched to dust and all the eggs and seeds will be buried deep, waiting."

He nodded while staring at the creature.

"You should let it go, dear. It's been waiting seventy-odd years for today. Let it have its day."

So he did.

Aden talks to himself as he walks, stiffly, down metal corridors. He remembers and he talks and he remembers and it's all the same to him. Sometimes he talks to the whirring and buzzing artificialities that attend to everything. Once, long ago, he used to dance with the cleaning droids for company--only they didn't really dance. They just bobbed and twisted and wove in a tireless effort to avoid running him down.

Laughter catches in his throat. He thinks about the past a lot and laughs about it a lot too. Maybe it's the habit of a crazy man? Maybe he doesn't much care. Not after so long.

The great doors shut automatically when the temperature rose too high. He thinks about whether the doors will open automatically too--he thinks that they will, but he isn't sure. He is at the door now. What does the ext-temp read? -5 degrees Celsius. Not much longer to go.

He tries singing the bits and snatches of the sun-song that he remembers, then gives up. Twice he puts on the crown, twice he takes it off again--it feels odd, too small and too plasticy on his bald head. It was all just a silly game anyway, a half-tradition that someone thought of and someone else thought was fun.

-2 degrees Celsius.

There is a beeping.

Light, stunning, icy blue light spills in. The doors are opening.

A young boy runs off to play with the other children.

A friend cries, "Sun King! Sun King!" but he isn't sure if it's a taunt or a cry of delight. He was picked randomly, after all, it could have been anyone who got to wear the gold crown. And everyone's voice is too full of unbridled things to make harshness sound harsh.

One of the girls is looking out into the blue-grey-black haze.

"Look," she says.

And the children do.

Out in the world above the air is as chill as Aden remembers. He notices how the air issuing from his lungs is making phantoms in the sunlight. In the distance, the angry sun sits, dim and painfully still, electric blue and warty--scarred--ceaseless--filling up the horizon.

He ran back to his mother, tugged at her sleeve and made urgent noises.

"What is it, Aden?"

"There are people coming. Over there."

"No there aren't. There's only one other colony, remember, and their generators failed thirty years back. Before you were born."

"We think their generators failed," said another adult, a friend of his mother's.

Another voice, an old woman spoke, "No, he's right. Skiffs. Three of 'em. Look. There, there and there. Moving fast, too."

People gathered, wondered aloud and waved.

Aden was waving too when the first ship soared overhead, banked, fired its brakes and settled towards the ground.

"Still no radio contact?" said his mother.

Another adult said, "No. Nothing."

She turns to Aden. "Come on, let's go inside for a bit."

"Why?" says Aden.

An old man sits on a rock, stares at the dawning sun, the sun that dawns every seventy-seven point two years, dull and blue.

They hurried into the complex, his mother nearly having to drag Aden along.

"Why?" he said over and over, "Why?"

Then they heard the first of the strange sounds...electric cracks...and then...far off...sounds of voices raised.

An old man sits alone.

The boy was lifted up and pushed into a metal hole. He was told to "be quiet," told, "wait until I come for you," told, "don't go anywhere," told, "be silent, Aden, be utterly silent."

Then his mother fixed the plate back over the hole and darkness came.

An old man sits alone.

The boy crawled deeper into the shadows. He listened to more of those electric zthunks and hisses. He listened to the harsh voices, the screaming voices and the tromping of feet. He doesn't understand.

An old man sits alone.

His mother doesn't come back for him. When he was too hungry to sit in the shadows any longer, Aden crept out of his hiding place, walked the corridors, found them empty. Eventually he made his way to the door and peeked outside. The ships were gone too. Everyone was gone.

An old man sits alone.

Christopher Johnstone is usually found in Melbourne.