by Ian Watson
Oil? The UFO thing that crushed his car had looked like an oil slick as it drifted off. Mischievous power source—dirty, contaminating, choking…
Or was it ink? A Rorschach blot? A thing without referent, with no ambition save for a subjective personal one. Whatever it looked like was in your own head. Unlike the reality of the car!
The air chilled. He heard a coyote yip sadly somewhere in the distance. Something undefined rustled and squirmed clear as he was just about to tread on it.
Half an hour later he cut on to an unpaved road running north-west through the scrub. Towards Daggett or Barstow. He trotted fifty paces down the dirt track on the count, switched to a fast walk for another fifty paces, trotted again. If he could hire a wrecking-car from one of the garages in Barstow. Or a jeep and trailer with a winch.
Then he realized that he couldn’t possibly do that. The recovery would have to be official, or else it would mean nothing. Were they all going to tell the same story? Damnable the way they’d been split up!
“John!” he called into the unresponsive night. “Mike!”
No answer came.
He ran faster for a while, scared of attracting Something Else. He should be in Barstow by midnight…
• • •
Michael heard the muted thump but had no idea what caused it. He looked back, saw nothing and ran on, dodging bushes. These soon thinned out, growing sparser and disappearing entirely as the land dipped into a dry lake. He paused on the lip of a shallow basin a mile wide, the day surface mazed with cracks in the partial moonlight, barren of vegetation. He was too scared to take advantage of the fiat play a. It was too open a terrain, too exposed. He began to run round the perimeter instead. A stitch ached in his side; he slowed to a walk, glancing round nervously now and then. He noticed a figure emerge on to the lake bed away to the east of him. It walked a little way then stopped and stared back. It stood quite still.
On to the blank playa, from the scrub to the south, drifted the black thing, at not much greater height than the man. Michael squeezed himself down behind a tiny shrub.
The figure down on the dry lake watched the oncoming black thing, too—awaiting it, with resignation, almost with indifference.
A great umbrella, it hung over him. Umbrella-like, it closed up, enfolding him. A pillar of darkness stood out on the dusky lake.
Squirming back from the shrub, Michael sprinted on, his side on fire.
Where are you, Suzie? he prayed. Be with me, let me be with you. He tried to conceive at what angle a line would enter the soil to re-emerge out on the other side of the planet in Sandstairs. The imaginary line became his compass needle. Forgive me, forgive me! He heard his shoes squeak her name, voice from a grave, noise of bereavement and desire. Love me, save me, you’re my magic. He refused to think what else he’d seen.
Finally he reached the highway. Rocking with fatigue and cold, he stood Sagging down a refrigerated truck. As the driver slowed with a hiss of air brakes, his legs buckled. Country music flooded from the cab.
I’ve got four kids
And one needs a spankin’
And one needs a huggin’
And one needs a changin’
And another’s on the way—!
When the driver bent over him, after first checking with a torch sweep that no one else was hiding in the bushes, Michael looked up into his face, managed to say, “Suzie,” once again and passed out.
• • •
John Deacon could trot no further; he didn’t even want to. He looked back at the bushy rim of the playa, still clutching his jacket in his hand, one sleeve trailing on the dry salty day, though it was chilly now and he should have put it on. The black shape drifted over the bushes. With all the time in the world, it floated towards him.
He was nothing. Not an individual, a personality, an ego; not an identity. That was all a dream and a mirage. Only this was real: the Void, He chuckled softly. At last he understood the Joke that had puzzled him so long, the irony that made itself known as consciousness approached awareness of the deep-down void.
The blackness hung over him, and he gave himself up to it. The void received him into itself, gently.
Twenty-Eight
There was nothing to be seen, yet one still saw: featurelessness. Nothing to hear, yet one still heard: stillness. Nothing to touch, yet one still felt: perfect balance, equilibrium. The Void was pure awareness. It was aware only of its own awareness—there were no objects of thought…
Death, he thought; I’ve died. This is being dead.
• • •
Instantly, in the moment that he thought “I”, a whirlpool sprang up around him: a vortex that resisted the Void, and contradicted it. This vortex separated him from his previous state, which was now uncapturable—though now he yearned for it. The vortex walled him off; it only possessed an inside surface.
It spun, and its spin generated time.
It spun, and its spin separated out all the hierarchies of existence: particle, atom, molecule; bacterium, animal, intelligence… turn upon higher turn of organization. He sensed that this miniature universe was the Universe in essence: that it contained all galaxies, all worlds, all living beings, all his memories.
Its umbilicus was everywhere at once, spinning vortex out of Void, drawing it back again. Particles constantly emerged, and returned. Minds too: all minds arose from the same Void-awareness, and rejoined it…
How long did this universe last? It was instantaneous, since its starting point and its vanishing point within the Void were the same timeless event. The white hole of emergence was the black hole of disappearance, around the turn of time. Yet within itself it enclosed aeons, tied up in this Moebius strip.
How did it sustain itself? By exclusion, by separation, by inaccessibility. By the split of subject from object, of observer from observed—which brought about cause and effect, and natural laws. By the indeterminacy of fundamental events. By the inaccessibility of light-years: whereby light, which allowed observation, at the same time denied it. By the inability of mind, which fostered knowledge of the world, to know itself except partially…
How did it rejoin the Void? By the very same process, For all these inaccessibilities caused a fierce suction towards ever higher patterns of organization, towards higher comprehension. So molecules became long-chain molecules, and these became replicating cells that transmitted information… till mind evolved, and higher mind.
The universe, he realized, was an immense simulation: of itself, by itself. It was a registering of itself, a progressive observation of itself from ever higher points of view. Each higher order was inaccessible to a lower order, yet each lower order was drawn towards the higher—teased by the suction of the higher.
When the universe simulated itself perfectly, then it could cease to be… as it was, indeed, always doing in the no-time which the whole vacuum fluctuation of existence occupied. The ultimate knowledge of the universe would be the universe itself; then subject and object would be one. Yet within time, meanwhile, the suction of the unknowable was a wind howling through the world so that the world could continue to change, and life evolve…
The vortex spun about him like a saucer. A flying saucer. This was the image of the Whole—which could not be known, yet which must constantly intrude into the world, as a goad to bacteria—and Men. This shape was an archetype, deep in the nature of being; it was the image of the whole vortex, casting its shadow. It was free from the laws of time and logic and gravity, for in the Void that it came from there could be no “law”…
Saucers and their kin did not intrude into the world, though, he realized. The world was actually within them.
As he realized this, the vortex firmed into a craft.
He wasn’t alone in the craft. A man in green stood at the controls.
His face was made of blades of grass, and leaves of trees, and scraps of vegetables. Deacon realized that he’d seen someone like him before: in an oil painting by the eccentric Gius
eppe Archimboldo, portrayer of the Four Humours and the Four Seasons in this style, hanging in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum… Here was a simulation man, to present this knowledge of how the whole universe must simulate itself, by means of mind evolving out of the primary awareness—rooted, in turn, in the Void-awareness out of which this universe arose…
Here was Khidr, pilot of the vortex saucer. The Unidentified One. He who existed yet did not exist He who was the necessary suction that compelled new organs of knowledge to come into existence, which he would then constantly evade.
Khidr wasn’t any human person. Nor any alien either. Nor even any Godlike future being from further up the turns of the spiral. He was simply a membrane: between evolving knowledge, and the nature of reality; an interface between higher turns of the spiral and the turn which an evolving being currently occupied.
“Why are you a vegetable man?” Deacon asked. But he already knew the answer. Khidr turned and grinned, greenly; and said nothing.
The walls of the vortex craft now sprouted portholes. They flew, inconsistently, over deserts, forests, seas and cities—as though Deacon’s re-entry point to normal cognition wasn’t quite pinpointed yet. As though he had to understand a little more before he could re-enter the world consciously.
“The Gebraudi were an invention, weren’t they?” he said.
The Gebraudi were miracles. Intrusions of higher-order knowledge into a lower-order system, namely the human mind, to draw it upwards. The alien was the miracle from now on: this was the message of the UFOs. And how Man needed the image of the alien, to help himself evolve, now that he had filled his world and there were no more “Here Be Dragons” zones upon the map!
“What did they tell us? That the whole universe is recorded within itself. That’s true. They had to seem alien, didn’t they? From outside. Or else they’d have harmed the world—distorted it They had to be crippled beings, ludicrous and under pressure—because we’re incomplete, and have to be. We can’t grasp this knowledge whole. It had to be the back side of the Moon too, didn’t it? For the same reason: there’s the blind spot, the image of unknowability. Then they had to disappear—just as you disappear! There’s no wreckage on the Moon, is there?”
So many questions—which, in fact, were all answers.
“It wasn’t you who took us there. It was ourselves: our own need—in our shared psychic life. Shared, because all separate minds are simply transmitters, vortices, out of the same void! You aren’t an angel or any such thing. You are us, Khidr—the psychic pattern we’re all part of.”
Khidr spoke then, amiably, with the same green grin. His teeth were artichoke leaves. Deacon didn’t recognize the language he spoke. It might have been Persian or Arabic or Sanskrit or even some alien tongue; it didn’t matter, for Khidr wasn’t denying what Deacon said. The fact that there was any answer was enough; it affirmed.
Deacon grasped further, “I’d be tempted to see you as some sort of Godlike being—except that your face is made of leaves and brussels sprouts! Because yes, you’re primary. You’re an essence of things.”
With grass hair, bunched sprout cheeks, translucent grape eyes, tapering tuberous chin, this being would have been a demon at any other time.
“I know why you’re green! I know why Khidr is the Green Man! You represent the Primary Perception, yes—but there’s more to it.” Deacon remembered Michael’s description of the twin halls in the “alien” dome in Tsiolkovsky crater: the one hall, for humans, lit by yellow “sun” light, and the blue-green hall of the Gebraudi drenched with “alien” radiance. And he remembered, too, the seminar on ordinary perception he used to teach once, before he turned his attention to extraordinary states of mind.
“The light from our Sun only looks yellow. It actually has maximum intensity in the blue-green part of the spectrum, doesn’t it? The majority of information comes through there. That’s where our eyes are the most sensitive. That’s the maximum information channel for human beings. That’s why we see you as green, or dressed in green. You are the maximum information channel! And it’s open now—within me.”
Khidr bowed, in acknowledgement. Deacon reached out his hand and laid it on the green-clad arm. The being’s hand was mango-skinned, its fingers were thick asparagus spears.
Khidr offered him the controls; he accepted them.
Twenty-Nine
The fat blond policeman swung a chair round and bestrode it. The chair back pressed ungainly clefts into his splayed thighs.
“I’m Captain Carl Dorris.” The name spilled out as one single word; the Captain had no intention of his surname being mistaken for a lady’s name, jokingly or otherwise. He’d suffered enough kidding in school about his name, besides being, a fat boy. When he joined the San Bernadino County Police he anticipated that would evaporate. Not so; it merely went on behind his back. Worse than being kidded, he hated the falsely innocent face.
Carl Dorris had brought in a quick-snack take-away of crisp bacon, scrambled egg and hash potatoes on a paper plate and a cup of coffee for Michael. As soon as Michael was more awake he ate hungrily.
Michael was lying in a camp bed in T-shirt and underpants under coarse grey blankets. The window—large enough, though with thin white bars—looked over railway yards towards some mountains. A diesel engine shunted to and fro, hooting.
Captain Carl Dorris roiled his tongue round the inside of his mouth between gums and lips. A boxer munching a rubber protector into place.
“You were fiat out. The doctor looked you over, but all you needed was rest. You mentioned a girl’s name to that truck driver.”
Michael gulped the coffee. He remembered his fervent mumbling as he tramped through the scrub. “She’s safe. She’s in England—”
“So what happened?”
“I—we, there were three of us, we had a car accident. We crashed—”
“Uh-huh, Mr Shriver did report the accident a while after you were brought in. He’s sleeping it off at the Astro Hotel. We sent a helicopter out at first light to hunt for this guy Deacon. No luck yet—we just heard it’s heading back for more fuel. So I’d like to know some more about this accident of yours.”
“What did Barry Shriver tell—?”
“Oh no.” The Captain shook his head. “What do you say?”
Michael took a deep breath. “When I say we crashed I actually mean we… crash-landed.”
“You were flying an airplane?”
“We were flying in a car.”
“Sure you were. A car with wings.”
“Oh, it didn’t need wings!”
Captain Carl Dorris sucked his gums some more. “You’ve not got tracks in your arms so what is this, acid? I’m trying to be patient, do you see? I’m broad-minded. Just don’t mock me, boy.”
“I’m not! This all happened because of… because of U-F-Os.” Defiantly, he spelt the word.
“What about them?” The tip of the Captain’s nose whitened. The chair creaked as he squeezed it between twin slabs of himself.
• • •
A larger ambulance helicopter flew in from Victorville later. Captain Carl Dorris escorted a chastened Michael and Barry Shriver, who’d appeared from his hotel on West Main Street, out to it.
“Don’t worry about all this,” Shriver whispered. “I’ve taken it to higher authority. It’ll soon be out of their hands.”
“Just show me where,” smiled Dorris icily. “One flying Thunderbird, please.”
“Aren’t we going to search for John Deacon?” asked Michael.
“Well now, he might just be where your magic car is, and we’ve not found that yet.”
“Maybe your other pilot didn’t recognize it,” said Shriver. “It did get crushed.”
“Sure. You all rolled on it. You’ve all been to the Moon—and I’m Santa Claus! I’d figure on illegal entry or drug smuggling if you weren’t already two hundred miles north of the border. Nobody could be so dumb as to be still stuck on back roads. Unless of course you
were flying—a light plane, and couldn’t even navigate. But you were an Air Force pilot once, hmm?”
The helicopter headed south-east over the service stations, motor lodges and stucco tract homes of Barstow into the desert. After a while Shriver saw the unmade road he’d come by the night before. The sky was clear blue, the desert sombre-toned.
• • •
Michael pointed. “There’s the dry lake. That’s where—” He swallowed, realizing some of the possible consequences if John Deacon’s body was indeed found battered to death in the clay.
“Where what, exactly?”
“I saw Deacon crossing it and the black thing was after him—”
“Circle around, Tom,” Dorris instructed the pilot; the Captain bounced his fingers on his knee.
Salt crystals on cracked clay twinkled faintly in the early sunlight. A tiny kit fox fled towards its den as they throbbed above it. Scurries of wind bowled tangles of weed along. Nobody was there on the playa, alive or dead. They flew on, following Shriver’s directions, till they found the wrecked car. Nobody was there either.
“Why should anyone haul a wreck out here to dump it?” wondered the pilot.
“Take us down, Tom. We ought to find the tracks of whatever hauled it here.”
“If we don’t, that means it fell out of the sky?” The pilot laughed uncertainly.
They landed.
Shriver was soon prising at the broken hood. The whole car had been reduced to a compressed, rumpled oblong as though fed through the rollers of a mangle or squashed by a mechanical crusher. But it had been done right here on the spot, since crystal granules of window glass littered the soil; unless, that is, someone had brought the glass here deliberately to scatter it… Wheels had all snapped off their axles. Two were impacted under the chassis, two were splayed out. As the pilot was climbing down to join them, Shriver bounded back to him.
“Have you a crowbar? I must see how the engine looks.”
“Mister, that engine just isn’t any more.” However, the pilot popped back inside and obliged him with a steel bar. “What’s that you’re giving him, Tom?” Dorris’s hand fell to his gun. Realizing, the pilot backed away from Shriver, who shouted angrily, “Dammit, I’m not wanting to hijack your helicopter! It’s the car I want.”