Miracle Visitors

by Ian Watson

  Was it possible for less complex life to die off and more complex life to survive? On Earth, it had been the dinosaurs that died out…

  Michael felt the pair of apples nudging in his pocket and realized how hungry he was. He took both out and offered one to Helen. She reached for it momentarily then shook her head, frowning at the screen. Famished, he ate one of the apples, getting rid of the core by standing it neatly on edge against the wall. The other he returned to his pocket. His watch, he noted, read 9:15; he had left the house around 6:00…

  (Was Helen Caprowicz conceivably lying asleep—sharing the same dream as he was—somewhere in upstate New York?)

  The particle flux from the supernova altered the climate drastically. Cyclones tore across the land. Snow fell. Swamps became taiga, slushy tundra. The platypus and proto-alien trudged through white wilderness, hunting scant vegetation.

  Some died of starvation. Nearer the equator, however, was more temperate land, carpeted with rubbery green mushrooms, where the pools and lakes were rich in algae. Patchily, mistily, the sun shone through. The platypus grazed dumbly on, unchanged, however the Gebraudi cranium began to enlarge. The grooves at the tip of its trunk-arm grew suppler; in time they became plucking analytical fingers.

  Eventually, culture dawned. Sprawling villages of roofless houses with thick walls and long gentle ramps arose. Vegetation grew everywhere, bred and tended by the elephantine gardeners. By night, towns were softly lit by phosphorescent moss and luminous algae in irrigation streams.

  Centuries flowed by.

  At last, an alien dipped an array of metal plates and wires into trays of chlorophyll and salted water. It recoiled, its starfish fingers stung by an electric shock.

  Another alien laid out arrays of green glass cells wired to a mechanism—which began, ponderously, to turn.

  “Here we have the first solar batteries,” explained Bonaparte proudly. “Chlorophyll yields up electrons to a metallic semi-conductor. Next you will see generated the first radionic waves—radiations which plants detect, which influence their growth and health.” Broadcasting antennae loomed over thriving alien fields. Inside botanical workshops, wires fixed to alien vegetables recorded the reactions of the plants to stress and noise, to music and vibration…

  “We begin to understand the nature of Primary Perception: the root sensations and energies of all living cells. We learn how energy patterns interact with matter.”

  On the screen, an alien with a tool kit strapped to its thigh was projecting “aura films” of the energy fields of different plants upon milky glass plates.

  “It is pattern that organizes all living matter, and ultraviolet rays that carry the patterning information from one cell to the next. Yet it is not only living matter that transmits. All the vibratory atoms in the whole universe—whether in living cells or in non-living cells—transmit information. So it is hard to say where the boundary is between life and non-life! Or even if there is any true boundary at all. Here our understanding of the living universe—a universe that is itself a living entity—really starts.” Bonaparte touched the keyboard, and images came more rapidly. Towns, then cities arose: green cities all of them. New machines and devices were put together: a melange of the organic and the inorganic. Biological sensors were built—and grown. Biomemory systems came into being: data etched in living cells…

  “The whole cosmos is vibratory—from galaxies to single atoms. Every molecule of matter broadcasts and receives on its own wavelength. Sensitive beings can perceive these broadcasts—”

  “Like dowsers, you mean?” chipped in Helen. “My grandad was a dowser. I guess I might have some dowser genes myself. I’ve a real knack for finding things that go lost. Is that how you picked on me? My vibrations?”

  Bonaparte made a circular gesture: of acceptance and inclusion of her words. “The natural currents of the world flow through the living body. The Unidentifieds follow these world currents. Certain patterns of relationships—certain shapes—can tap the currents too…”

  Now the screen showed pyramids and stone circles and great vegetation mazes on Gebraud, and canal mazes brimful with green water.

  “Don’t they say the Great Pyramid in Egypt has a special shape?” squeaked Helen. “A shape of power? On account of its proportions?”

  The alien’s fingers executed the same approving twist once more. Cosmic Mutt and Jeff, thought Michael—Helen and alien Bonaparte.

  “There are indeed patterns of power which draw corresponding cosmic energies towards them. We commune with these.”

  “There you have our UFOs, Mike!” grinned Helen. “These guys are way ahead of us.”

  Michael nodded, “So that’s what the saucer shapes we see in the sky are. They’re cosmic energy patterns—I’ll buy that. But I’ve met alien-seeming people, on board a saucer—”

  “You’ve been contacted by a UFO? Gee.”

  “And I saw something else that looked more like a pterodactyl!”

  “That’s spooky. Still, why not? I’ve read a bit about magic, Mike. Magicians were forever trying to conjure up powers—under the name of demons. These demons took all sorts of hybrid animal forms. A strong magician could command them to take a human shape that was easier to communicate with. But they’d try to change back and slip away. That’s because these powers are really higher-order forces, whereas we—”

  “We’re lower-order systems. So I was told. Garibaldi—I mean the pilot who picked me up—he was saying that.”

  “We only learn something from the Unidentified, Mike, if it presents itself in a reasonably identifiable way for the sort of creatures we are. It isn’t likely to appear purely human, because it’s something more. All the same, they can come spontaneously—because they’re necessary to us. It’s necessary to us. You don’t have to be a magician. You’ve proved that. So they came to you, looking like alien people, and something like a pterodactyl—I guess you couldn’t control it. I guess it just scared you. But you’ve been privileged! That’s why the Gebraudi picked you.”

  Bonaparte honked: “The Unidentifieds that work within the life-aura of a world can sometimes be seen as energy patterns in the sky, but when they come closer they will generally take on the shapes of that world. Indeed, the more in harmony you are with them, the more ordinary they may seem—though they still make their entrances and take their exits from your knowledge in extraordinary ways.”

  “If they look crazy,” added Helen, “that’s because we’re crazy—screwed up with fear and hatred and paranoia. It’s us who see them out of focus.”

  Michael took a deep breath. “Do you mean to say that UFO beings can look just like you, Boon-ap-aa…?” The name came apart in his mouth.

  Bonaparte’s hand rotated; there was something mesmeric about the gesture. “On Gebraud, they must surely seem like us, if we are in true harmony,” agreed the alien. “Though I admit that is a generalization. Unidentifieds belong to all life on a world, not just to the leading species. So they may sometimes appear as hybrids if their message concerns our relationships with other life. They always choose the most appropriate form when you are sensitive to them. Usually it is an ordinary form: our own form.”

  The admission that UFO beings could well look just like these aliens from Eta Cassiopeia chilled Michael. Could the Phenomenon invent its own perfect alienness—out of all the human brooding upon extraterrestrial beings throughout the twentieth century?

  Bonaparte seemed to sense his alarm. “Tell me of your own meeting with the Unidentified, please?” the alien asked gently.

  So Michael described Tharmon and Luvah, and his impregnation of her—Helen nodding admiringly, while he talked.

  When he had finished, Bonaparte wagged its trunk in acknowledgement.

  “So they pretended to be from another world in the Pleiades—far from Gebraud, many hundreds of light years distant across the sky? A rich alibi! Yet that is the pattern on your world, from what Helen and the others have told us. You humans need such me
taphors to cloak the truth of miracles. Of course, these visitors spring from the mind of your own world—for their form is your own, a little out of focus. Even these ones hurt you a little, since you are so resistant to the miracle on your world.”

  “You mean that they weren’t—how shall I put it?—a ‘bad’ UFO force?” asked Michael, puzzled.

  “The aura of your world is sick, but there is still a continuous spectrum between good and bad. Good and bad light are mixed together—even in the same encounter. Your world, alas, is fast moving towards the dark end, yet this particular encounter was still bright, it seems to me—though not unmixedly so, as you discovered.”

  “But why did I have to mate with Luvah? Was that good—or bad?”

  “That was to produce a more perfect man. It is a noble metaphor. Your seed goes into a blank template and makes another, more perfect You. That is the true meaning of this. But the more perfect man should really be you yourself. Obviously there is no baby imitation of you, safe elsewhere out among the stars. You yourself must do the work.”

  “It’s like alchemy,” said Helen, thrilled. “Alchemists weren’t really trying to change lead into gold; they were trying to change themselves. If they did change themselves, power would be theirs—access to a higher order of experience, with magical-seeming powers—but that wasn’t the main aim, ever.”

  “A more perfect You is what the Unidentified aims for,” agreed Bonaparte. “A transmutation.”

  “But we’re too confused, Mike, too blind. So you failed and forgot it all, and you got your body burnt like a clumsy apprentice. Still, you wouldn’t be here at all if you hadn’t started out on the road. The Gebraudi can show us how to carry on. With their help we can transform Earth’s aura—and ourselves.”

  Michael had been feeling increasingly uncomfortable for the past ten minutes. Edgy, awkward, tight.

  There was, he realized, a perfectly simple physical explanation.

  “Excuse me, Bonaparte—I mean Boon-ap-aat… I must go to the toilet right now. I’m sorry if this keeps you locked up in that suit any longer than need be—”

  “My suit is self-sufficient. Do not concern yourself. I will show you where to go. Helen, will you please serve food and drink for yourselves?”

  Lumbering upright, Bonaparte led Michael through a maze of screens to another temporary room set against the main dividing wall. It was transparent to the blue-green hall. The floor was inlaid with a carpet of green moss. On the other side of the glassy main wall he noticed an identical patch. Beyond, an alien was helping seal one of its comrades into a space suit. Their two trunks co-operated like a man’s two arms.

  “Do you see how we help each other in our clumsiness? As in our mating, so in our work! We are cripples. We must perform in harmony—in peace and love. Thus our awkwardness becomes our joy.”

  “What do I—?”

  As though on cue, the unsuited alien of the pair made its way to the other green moss patch. It straddled its short hind legs, while its fingers plucked thoughtfully at tools in its leg belt A steamy cascade poured down on to the moss; to be soaked up.

  When Michael also had watered the moss, he smelt the tang of Christmas trees and fallen pine needles…

  Chimes sounded through the dome.

  Bonaparte reached for the glassy cartridge in its leg pouch, as the other aliens were doing on the far side of the wall. The glass block remained in the other room, however, still plugged into the screen. Bonaparte lowered its tentacle, instead, to touch the patch of moss; and stood silent. For a while no alien moved.

  The same chimes rang out again. Bonaparte withdrew its arm.

  “Communion. Harmony,” the alien honked. “Do you see how any living green matter can serve as symbol for the Biomatrix? Now Helen must surely have your food ready. Can you find your way? I will rejoin you soon.”

  Eighteen

  The Sheikh’s assistant proved to be a skinny youth with wire brush hair and ears that protruded rather. His eyes were large, soft like a deer’s, the eyelashes luxurious. He was wearing a black leather jacket.

  His eyes met Deacon’s. Smiling intoxicatedly he walked over and introduced himself, in slightly hesitant English, as Salim Fouad. To Deacon’s astonishment, he kissed his hand. The information clerk glared at them.

  “You’re part of a miracle, Professor Deacon,” the youth murmured, drawing Deacon, outside to where a ten-year-old Mercedes stood under the portico. The driver wore a long white robe and skull cap.

  “A miracle? That’s one way of putting it! I don’t even know how I got here.”

  “ ‘Not knowing why you came, nor how—like infant humanity.’ You’re perfect!” The youth blushed. Was it proper to say that someone was “perfect”? They drove off just as a flower seller was rushing forward flourishing pink roses. The youth almost looked ready to buy some as a bouquet…

  “This is Republic Square,” Salim said conscientiously, assuming the easier role of guide. His initial hesitancy had been less a matter of language than decorum. “Our Revolution is celebrated here every twenty-sixth of July. Thousands gather. Many tents! That’s Abdin Palace—it’s now the Ministry of Land Reforms. Our Sheikh is highly contemporary, you know!” he added. He made Muradi sound like a piece of furniture. “Other brotherhoods fail to adapt to modern times. This is the time of science—I personally am a civil engineer.” Salim flushed again. “That’s to say, I’m training to be one.”

  Turning right, they drove up a broad straight thoroughfare lined by tall ugly lamp-posts. “Port Said Street, this: a canal flowed here a hundred years ago.”

  When they left Port Said Street, turning left, Deacon saw domes and minarets covering a hilltop in the distance.

  “Yet there is another science too! The threefold science—of Man. We say that it consists in a science of ordinary knowledge, then in a science of extraordinary knowledge: of unusual inner states. That’s your special work, isn’t it, Professor? That’s why you’re part of the miracle… Sidi Muradi explained your work just briefly before he sent me.”

  Deacon nodded.

  “That’s right. Normal psychology—then the altered states of consciousness. What’s this third science?”

  “Ah, that is the science of true reality, that lies beyond the other two. The other two are hollow without it. So the real work lies in seeing how all three sciences need one another. I think you’re verging on the third science too? The science beyond ordinary human knowledge?”

  Deacon shook his head, as if to dislodge some water from a buzzing ear. The gesture reminded him of some other time, but he couldn’t pin it down.

  “The Sheikh will see if it’s so,” Salim promised. “Even if you and I don’t. He’s been visited—” the youth’s voice sank to a whisper—“by Khidr, the Unseen Guide. Do you understand who Khidr is?”

  “Yes I do! You mean visited metaphorically?”

  “I don’t know that word.”

  “What you’re saying is a picture. A symbol. Like a piece of poetry—not an actual event.”

  “No! I saw it happen. I was there. It’s the great event of my whole life. Over that way,” Salim waved a hand northward, “is the city gate we call Bab Zuweyla. Where criminals were put to death long ago. It used to be named Bab al-Mutawalli because of a saint who lived there. He could lift himself through the air at the speed of thought. He could be in Mecca or Baghdad instantly with no sense of passing from here to there. Though of course today we have aeroplanes, by which you travel,” Salim hinted.

  “Yes we have aeroplanes—” And unidentified flying objects that supposedly accelerated to ten thousand miles an hour in a single second, that were said to vanish from sight and reappear out of nothing. Was there really a “third science” to explain those?

  “It was near Bab al-Mutawalli that we met Khidr—”

  Through crowded streets the Mercedes crawled up to the open gates of a mosque. Inside Deacon glimpsed a flaxen desert area parched by sunlight, with black-shadowed cre
nellated arcades around it. Passing by, they entered a jumble of ancient houses and zigzagging alleys. After several minutes of maze-threading the old Mercedes halted outside a whitewashed, shuttered building.

  • • •

  The rooms in Muradi’s house were unornamented save for calligraphies printed on cloth and carved in wood, and bright arabesque carpets yielding layer below layer of interlocking pattern, as though the floor led down and down, tier below tier.

  A lunch too large to finish was served, of mutton kufta, rice, spiced vegetables. Sheikh Muradi ate sparingly, Salim hardly at all.

  “I’ve no idea how I got here,” Deacon said again. “No passport, ticket or money. It’s as if I was just picked up off the street in England and set down here on that bench by the Nile—”

  “Money is no problem, John. As to a hotel, you shall stay in my house, I insist. I agree that the passport is a nuisance. You will have to visit your embassy. Of course I shall vouch for you to our own officials, but you must accept some embarrassment. How can one explain what lies beyond explanation?” Adjusting his glasses, Muradi peered at a text on the wall behind Deacon’s head as though it was an optician’s chart—which it was for him, perhaps, in a spiritual way, whatever he could read in it representing a quality not of eyesight but of insight.

  On the last occasion that Deacon had met him—in London two years earlier, at the time of the lecture series—the Sheikh had struck him as urbanely cosmopolitan, if personally austere. His urbanity was the politeness of soul of some undisclosed, non-political prince. It had seemed like Renaissance virtù, belonging not to State but rather to states of mind. Deacon had thought of a sixteenth-century Pope of power and authority, but one whose statecraft operated entirely within the sphere of a relationship with the Infinite—a relationship which wasn’t private, but communal, social, shared with all human beings, yet visible to his eyes alone. Muradi had said then that God makes metaphors for men: which are their lives. He seemed to live his own life as though what most people saw as facts and absolutes he saw as metaphors for another sort of event, occurring in another way entirely. Life’s events were shadows cast by another species of Being, even though they were perfectly solid shadows. He saw through the trapdoor depths of the carpet at the same time as he stood upon it firmly.