by Ian Watson
“We have five humans helping us already. We gave them all flying cars. We invite you to be number six.”
“But what for? What am I supposed to do?”
“Help us understand the Unidentified, of course! Help us to take its pulse, and guide your knowledge of it. For you are part of it, but you know nothing of this—and your ignorance is making it a malign and dangerous force. Don’t you want to understand it?”
“I suppose I do. Of course I do!”
“We will show you what it is, but we need your help. We fear for our own lives here.”
Michael felt baffled. Was this a UFO contact, or wasn’t it? Here was a seeming “alien” who declared that UFOs existed and wanted them analysed and who moreover was scared of them.
“We come from a heavy world, of high gravity. Hence our bulky bodies. We had to learn to tame gravity, to leave our world. This car now generates a constant internal one-G field in flight, for your comfort. It is easily steerable by point gravitational and repulsion sources. Quite fast, too! We can reach your Moon in two hours.”
Time looped back; Michael sat in Deacon’s office again, listening to Barry Shriver outline the wholly imaginary design of a flying saucer propelled by gravity… The material was already in his mind.
Shriver had said it was the uniquely logical way to fly. So it could be true.
“There’s no air in space. Cars are a bit leaky, aren’t they?”
“It only looks like a normal car. Thus it will run normally on your roads, using a miniaturized engine powered by reaction mass. The design was highly inefficient before. But the exhaust pipes are really blocked, and the whole body is airtight—for flight It is even proofed against radiation. The air conditioner stores enough air for four humans for six hours. This replenishes itself whenever the airtight doors are opened—”
Alien elephant-tortoise as used car salesman… It radiated such helplessness and trust. Michael found he was standing by the open door now. Abruptly the creature squirmed about in agitation.
“An event is about to happen. It may not be pleasant now that I am here. Leave your riding machine. Get in!”
Michael stayed where he was.
The creature lurched sideways. Its arm snaked out further than he could have expected, knocking the door wide open. Its starfish hand seized him by the wrist, pulling him.
“Sorry, sorry,” it bleated. It hauled him inside, sprawling him across the passenger seat. It whisked the door shut behind him. Its fingers played across the dashboard. As Michael snatched at the door handle, and found it locked, the creature jerked the steering wheel back with an audible snap. The wheel tilted freely like a joystick.
“Ground mode to flight mode,” it honked informatively.
From the radio-tapeplayer jutted a block of glass filled with something green and soupy, like pond slime. The radio dial pulsed with red light. One of the stereo speakers in the back of the car was emitting a shrill panic whistle which was growing steadily louder…
A huge foot pressed forward, quite daintily, on to the accelerator pedal. The Thunderbird quivered and hummed; then jumped into the air, tilting at the clear sky. (But with no sense of tilt!) It sped upwards. (With no feeling of acceleration!)
A gleaming disc was slewing towards them out of the south—while the stereo speaker shrieked. The creature spun the wheel, spinning the moors below, and tugged it right back, racking the car up in a tight turn till they were heading straight up, with the Yorkshire landscape standing on end in the rear window. (Yet “down” was still underneath the chassis of the car.)
The bright disc darted from side to side behind them, then suddenly split into ever smaller blobs of light, a rain shower, dispersing. The whistling noise cut out; the radio dial stopped pulsing with red light.
“We are safe,” sighed the alien creature. It caressed the green glass cartridge stuck in the tapeplayer, sacramentally. “Do you know Tunguska? In Siberia? Do you know of the great explosion there? That is where we lost our first expedition. Your Unidentifieds destroyed it.”
Michael clung to the passenger seat; though if he shut his eyes for a moment all sense of motion disappeared and they might have been sitting still.
“You’re a… real alien—?” he whispered.
“They caught our friends in space, on the way in—those jealous, violent energies. We picked up a single tight-beam signal from our ship years later, so we knew that your own human technology was far too simple on its own—at that point in time—to have destroyed us. Our human helpers have told us of the Tunguska mystery. The millions of felled trees. The bright skies around the world for three years. That is where we lost our friends—no doubt about it. We could guess how. The Unidentified! What a danger if we were right! Of course I am a real alien!”
“Where… where are we going?”
“To your Moon. Round the far side. It is safe there, masked from the senses of the Unidentified of this world. There is its blind spot—except when humans orbit the Moon. Then it can make itself apparent.”
Blue darkened to indigo, then to purple and black. Stars prickled alight. Sunlight scalded the left hand window, but instantly was cooled and diluted by the glass.
Michael twisted round. Flocks of cumulus dotted England and the North Sea, for it wasn’t such a clear day from a higher viewpoint. He saw Ireland and its sea too, then the Atlantic beyond. The glowing, violet-on-blue camber of the Earth’s horizon swelled up; then the curve was cut, far out across hundreds of miles of ocean, by the foggy darkness of the westering terminator. An anticyclone coiled its woolly spiral, this side of the darkness.
Then they were in space. Michael stared, in wonder. Black void, raw Sun, jewel stars unwinking. Bright Luna hung in its last quarter, a sickle of mercury cupping a dark rock ball. Outside the windows was vacuum, cold and radiation.
“You say that hostile ‘energies’ attacked your friends—and these energies are what UFOs are?”
“They are friendly energies, if you can harmonize with them! To call the Unidentifieds of your world wholly hostile is too simple. They still bring some insight to you, as well as folly and malice—but it is blended in confusion, and the trend now is hostile.”
“But we humans cause the UFOs?”
“All living beings and every living cell in a world’s ecology sustain the Unidentifieds of that world. An inhabited world, you must realize, is alive as a whole. There is a world mind—a vital planetary aura. It is one unified entity, evolving down the aeons. We call it ‘Whole Planet Life’. The web of all living relationships sustains this higher collective existence. It is greater than the sum of its parts; yet its parts influence its nature. The aura can grow sick, and insane, if the parts grossly fail in harmony.”
“I can appreciate ecology, but… to say that the world itself is a living being! Surely ecology is just about how different, separate things relate? Trees and rivers and the atmosphere… food stocks… The way cities and industry affect these. Pollutants and so on.”
“Your mechanical ecology is only that. This is far from true ecology. Trees all seem to be separate things on a mundane time scale, yet the forest is really an evolving entity, in larger time. Cities evolve from villages and towns over centuries, like blobs of protoplasm growing towards something ever more complex. Cities are alive too, for they are the work of life as surely as an anthill or a honeycomb. They put out veins and nerves—roads, canals, telegraph, power lines. If you speed up the picture of a city’s growth over a millennium and compress it into minutes—then you will get the right idea!
“Yet individual beings within the system cannot really know this directly. For I speak of higher-order systems of organization: of higher-order patternings. Lower-order systems cannot fully grasp the Whole of which they are the parts. Logic forbids. It is a natural principle. Which is why, when the processes of the Whole do show themselves, it is as unidentified phenomena—as intrusions into your own knowledge that can be witnessed and experienced but not rationally k
nown: neither analysed, nor identified. Such intrusions are inestimably important. They are the goad towards higher organization. They are what urges the amoeba to evolve towards a higher life form. They are what spurs mind to evolve from natural awareness, and higher consciousness from simple mind. They are the very dynamic of the universe.”
“Do you mean to say you’re plagued by UFOs on your own planet?”
“ ‘Plagued’ is the wrong word entirely!” The alien tapped the green glass cartridge protruding from the stereo. “We have biological instruments to help us read the Unidentified. This is one such. It is in phase—by way of our bio-satellites in orbit—with the parent Biomatrix up in our ship on Far-Side. Perhaps we found this understanding easier since we are herbivores not carnivores. Plant life precedes animal life, do you see.? Plant life possesses the undifferentiated information network from which all animal nervous systems finally spring. The vegetable world possesses Primary Perception. Through this can be sensed the Unidentified. By this means we are in harmony. But yes, the Unidentified is certainly with us on our world, so far away.”
The alien tilted the Thunderbird over on its side, rotating the starfield. It gestured.
“If you draw a line from the Andromeda galaxy to your own Pole Star, where that line crosses the central plane of our own galaxy—where it cuts across the thick star river—is the constellation you call Cassiopeia, There is Gebraud, our home. Eta in Cassiopeia—the alpha star of the pair. Your own sun we see in your Southern Cross. It lakes light eighteen years to reach our home from here. We learnt of the Siberia horror in 1926 by your calendar. We waited for knowledge—for an intuition from our own Unidentifieds—for over ten years. Then we slept in cold another forty years to reach here.”
“It seems crazy, sending a second expedition here when your first one was wiped out!”
“Our Unidentifieds indicated that we should.”
“You speak as if they’re Gods! As if a planet is a sort of God!”
“And your God may be going mad… Yes, to a lower-order system the higher-order system effectively seems to be a God. Yet this is not really the case. Whole Planet Life is simply a superior hierarchy. Beyond it lie still other hierarchies, still higher levels of programme and form-fulfilment of the cosmos. We must scan and heal your world’s God-programme. If we fail, be warned: a higher programme may yet erase you! But perhaps not soon enough! For the lordly programmes of Galaxy-Beings unfold over long millennia. The harm which might happen in the meanwhile—locally for you, for us, for other nearby worlds—could be vast and fatal. You will understand all this better on the Moon.”
Michael felt a chill of suspicion. These veiled threats of doom, these half-promises of salvation: didn’t they only amount to a new twist in the same old game? Was he really heading towards the Moon at all, or actually lying bemused in a halted moment of time on a Yorkshire moor, his mind undergoing programming with false experiences from somewhere outside human knowledge?
Clouds shrouded Europe; further south, the ochre land-mass of North Africa was entirely bare. The Earth was growing imperceptibly smaller every minute, shrinking at the rate of motion, perhaps, of an hour hand on a wrist-watch: a process too slow quite to follow, yet at the same time certainly happening.
“You have not told me your name,” remarked the alien gently.
“It’s Michael.”
“Greetings, Michael. I am Gar-boor-oold-ee.” The name dragged out, as if on a tape being played too slowly. It sounded a bit like “Garibaldi”. So Michael settled on the name of the Italian patriot, discarding all the alien cadences. This tactic made it easier for him to take in the name; it fended off the shock of alienness.
“May I call you Garibaldi please? It’s easier.”
“If you wish. If it helps.”
“How fast are we flying, Garibaldi?”
“Two hundred and twenty thousand k.p.h.,” honked Garibaldi briskly. “E.t.a. is one hour and thirty minutes.” Its single arm rested inertly on the steering wheel.
Surely he was involved in a hallucination—the most massive one yet, outdistancing by far Luvah’s simple seduction of him and the subsequent skimpy, jerky flight to London. But this time there were no gaps in the scenario, no betraying lurches.
“Will you tell me about your world?”
“Later—on the Moon. You will see a film from the memory of the Biomatrix. I am only your pilot.”
Could these aliens really be just conjured-up puppets of the Phenomenon? Tulpas? Part of the Phenomenon which it had cashout of its own enigmatic being, charged with the task of probing and opposing and examining itself? Fall guys, whose very grotesqueness forced them to seem genuine?
The nearer to the Moon they got, and the further they receded from the shrinking Earth, however, the more genuine it all seemed—as though he really had escaped from a crazed world-mind into one of serenity and clarity…
On sped the Thunderbird.
Sixteen
The river shimmered: brown-bronze, with a catarrhal patina of green. Eau-de-nil, thought Deacon vacantly as he sat on a stone bench looking over a low parapet wall. It was a dusty bench; he felt dusty too, begrimed… Was this the Thames? Was the long bridge the river passed under Vauxhall Bridge? Or Lambeth Bridge?
A red and white single-decker bus crossing the bridge, with passengers hanging out of the door, dispelled that possibility. Those buildings over the water were what—hotels? Obelisks rose from the fat end of the bridge. Beyond, jutted a… minaret. A small wooden boat with a lateen sail drifted from beneath the bridge, its helmsman hidden by a hooped canvas awning.
Laughter burst upon him. Looking round, he took in the knobbly trunk of… a palm tree, then a flag pole with a fluttering tricolour in red, white and black with green stars on the white band. Which nation’s flag was it? He had no idea.
The laughter came from a family party squatting on arid grass. They were peeling boiled eggs in the shade of a huge morose banyan tree, practically a grove in its own right, so many thickening rooted suckers had it let down. He saw a score of adults, old folk, young children and adolescents… curly black hair, toothbrush moustaches, long-lashed liquid eyes. Teeth flashed, and freshly laundered shirts.
Atop a building, the squiggle of a roof sign nudged the sky… in Arabic. Eau-de-nil—water of the Nile! He sat a few’ moments longer watching those picnickers peel their eggs, waiting for memory to flood back and explain all this to him. But nothing came, so he emptied out his pockets. He found loose change (all English money), car keys, his house key. His wallet yielded a driver’s licence, cheque card, library tickets and three English pound notes. A passport? None. If he was staying at one of those hotels over the water, they might have kept his passport at the desk, to register it. He squeezed at a hotel memory, but none materialized.
Rising, he walked past the banyan tree, catching a reek of rotting fish, and on towards the bridge; and for the first time noticed soldiers. Two of them lounged on guard outside a wooden sentry box, dressed in coarse grey uniforms and crumpled bonnets, their rifles held loosely by the muzzle, the butts resting on the pavement. The two guards eyed him vacantly, with detached resentment. He hesitated, scared that it was somehow illegal to walk past them. However, the bridge was open to traffic; pedestrians wandered over it. A wailing noise suddenly keened out over the rooftops, from loudspeakers.
Sirens. War…
The guards leaned their rifles against the bridge parapet and unrolled threadbare mats across the pavement. They knelt on these; they bowed in prayer.
Feeling guilty, he hurried past them.
The guards might pray, but none of the traffic had paused. He spied a clock: noon. His own watch read ten o’clock. Then a bus came by with a signboard clipped above the radiator grille. It read, in English: 16: Giza Pyramids.
So it war Cairo… A bus route to the Pyramids. Was he supposed to visit those?
By whom, supposed?
Another family party trooped past, carrying more ran
ksmelling fish with them. As they stared, he pretended to be admiring the river. Some houseboats were tethered along the bank, all in desolate condition except for one where a party was in progress on deck. Fireworks started popping. Small boys scampered.
The soldiers finished their prayers. He must look like a saboteur now, reconnoitring the piers; he hurried on.
Interminably long, the bridge. Upstream, a plume of water burst forth from the middle of the river, rising higher than the buildings. Not a bomb or shell, though. The fountain continued spouting, from a low mushroom-shaped disc set in midstream, somehow hinting at missiles which hadn’t yet fallen on the city…
On 24 October 1593 a Spanish soldier was standing guard in Manila in South-East Asia. Next day, supposedly, he found himself on the other side of the Pacific in Mexico City… In May 1968 Dr Vidal and his wife set out in their Peugeot from Chascomus, Argentina, to drive south. They ran into a wall of fog and blacked out. When they woke they were on a strange side road; in Mexico. Two days had passed… Remembering Barry Shriver’s tales and forgetting Sandra Neilstrom’s derision, Deacon shivered in the warm air. How many days were missing from his life? What year was it, even?
Was this what came from wondering about help beyond comprehension? This absurdity? This joke?
Help, and hindrance, beyond comprehension…
The puzzle fell into place.
Ali Ibrahim Muradi, contributor to Consciousness: Ancient and Modern, lived right here in Cairo. Deacon had even made a wish: in his own room at the University! If only Sheikh Muradi were still in the country! However: Mohammed and the mountain… He had come here to see him.
• • •
Fronting the Corniche, graciously dowageresque, stretched the long balconies of the Semiramis Hotel. Further north, its back turned on the riverside thoroughfare, rose the Nile Hilton. Probably he would do better there. Crossing the Corniche, he made his way round to the main doors of the Hilton, A great portico of florid mosaics jutted out heavily, fronting a large busy square.