Miracle Visitors

by Ian Watson

  “Still, you do know how to fly choppers, don’t you? From the Air Force.”

  “Like hell I do. I flew fighters. We weren’t all nuts on choppers then.”

  “Drop the bar. Let it fall right there.”

  Shriver retained the crowbar, though he let it dangle uselessly between two fingers. “Captain, cover me if you like. I must see inside. I beg you.”

  One eye still on Shriver, Dorris stooped to lift a piece of bent metal: it was a number plate.

  “Call Barstow, Tom.” Dorris read off the number. “Get it fed into the computer.” He tossed the plate down again. “Okay,” he said. “You lever the hood open. Just don’t reach inside, right? Keep your hands in sight. I’d like to see what you’re so anxious to see.”

  Sweating, Shriver forced the crowbar in and twisted up part of the hood.

  “One crushed engine?”

  “Not really.” Shriver grinned. “Take a look at it.”

  “You move away first, hmm?”

  Shriver walked off.

  “Not too far!” Dorris squatted down and peered under the hood.

  Within, was not an engine, certainly, though what exactly it had been was hard to say. Fused, crushed glass, knobbly as malachite, was there; and a dark green glue that might have been oil; and bundles of coppery hair like mattress stuffing. Dorris reached in, teased out some glass and hair. He sniffed it, wrinkled his nose and dropped it.

  “Shit, it’s like a trashcan in there.”

  “That’s an alien gravity-drive, Captain!” shouted Shriver.

  The top of Dorris’s nose went white. “Do you think you’re funny? You tear out the real engine and stuff in all this filth! How did you get the car here? I don’t see any tracks.”

  Tom called, “Barstow say a new Thunderbird with those plates was stolen near Cheyenne six weeks ago.”

  “Brand new, now look at it. What kind of sick mind?” Dorris Sicked a fly off his fingers.

  “If there aren’t any tracks…” said Tom.

  “Winched down from a chopper? How do I know! This isn’t drugs or anything. It’s some kind of publicity stunt!”

  Controlling himself, Shriver insisted, “This—was—a—space-craft—rebuilt—by—aliens! Aliens who are lying dead right now on the backside of the Moon. Right at this moment, in the ruins of their starship.”

  “Oh yes, we’ll just fly up there and check that out. Do you think we could get up to the Moon and back for lunch, Tom? You make me sick, Shriver. Is there really any guy called Deacon? Aren’t you making him up too? Which of you two jokers stole this car, anyway? Oh sorry, forgot you were given it by aliens. What do they call themselves?”

  “The Gebraudi—they’re from the star Eta Cassiopeia,” said Shriver, nodding in Michael’s direction as though he was one of them.

  “Tom, send out an APB for some aliens looking like elephants. Did you get the name? Oh dammit, I’m forgetting, they’re on the backside of the Moon. Better send the APB to NASA.”

  “All it needs is one lunar orbiter, NASA could take films, and get real evidence—”

  “Sure, a fine way to spend a hundred million tax dollars! I was joking, you know. How much have they spent so far proving that flying saucers don’t exist?”

  “NASA haven’t spent a penny, just the Air Force—that’s the tragedy. But astronauts have seen them! And filmed I them. And Air Force pilots, and even police! It always gets played down.”

  “What a pity if they weren’t there on the Moon. I’d have I to book you two instead.”

  “Oh now, we didn’t steal it. I was in London six weeks ago.”

  “So was Mike here!”

  “Are we ever going to look for John Deacon?” asked Michael. “He’s been out all night. It’s getting hot again. He hasn’t had anything to eat or drink since yesterday.”

  “You wring my heart. Don’t worry, the other chopper’s still out burning up fuel. Tom, I want photos of this wreck—then we’re flying these two wise guys back to Barstow.”

  The radio came alive again; Tom ducked back inside.

  “They’ve found him, Captain Carl! He’s okay—surprisingly okay.”

  “Is he indeed? Well tell them to stay right where they are!”

  Thirty

  Deacon accepted the controls and piloted the UFO. It went where he willed. He wore the craft like a suit of clothes. (Where was Khidr now? Khidr was within him.)

  When had this sequence of events begun? As the question shaped itself, he re-entered the ordinary world from the extraordinary side, darting down upon his own back garden in Granton, some way back in time…

  A Sheep Dog bounded up to him. He stretched out his hand to ruffle the dog affectionately—and his hand sliced through its neck like wire through cheese.

  “No!” he cried. Too late he jerked and bobbed away. Shop’s whole head had been drawn in to him already, and absorbed.

  How?

  He realized, with a chill, that this was actually happening. It was the very event, taking place that night in the garden—but caused much later on, caused now, as though up until this very moment the event had been its own cause… Events do happen in succession, Sheikh Muradi had said, yet this isn’t always the succession that men see. Impossible to pin down cause and effect within the event itself; only in an altered state could one grasp the true sequences…

  So instead of “how”, he now demanded: Why?

  And the Khidr within him whispered: if you intervene from a superior point of knowledge, you cannot leave the world unchanged. Were it not for heedlessness, the world would, not remain in being! When the world knows itself perfectly, there is only: Void, the zero state—the state from which the whole universe of things and living beings whirlpools forth; the state where nothing is written.

  He whirled away, cross-time.

  He sensed a complex flow of patterns, not in space but in space-time, shifting, knotting together, untying, binding. Events existed as nodes of these dynamic patterns. The universe was freely self-determining, for all events were thoughts; and everything contributed thus to the general maintenance of existence—every microbe, every plant, every stone. Naturally, later events must be able to cause earlier events—or else, he saw, there would be no evolution, only random combinations; nor would there be a unified space-time. Yet if minds became aware that all events were thoughts…

  The possessors of knowledge must be careful. They could work miracles. They could delete tumorous growths from the body, or magnify the number of loaves and fishes, or whirl a pair of shoes from Baghdad into the midst of the desert to fall upon a robber’s skull and crack it They a could misshape reality, too. His control was still imperfect…

  When you investigate something, you change the nature of what you investigate. Impossible to intervene without altering reality. Physicists knew that well enough; they called it Indeterminacy. It was proof of the living texture of events and the ability of those who saw this to become—within their limits—conscious thinkers of reality.

  Yet there was a plus and minus factor at work too, he saw. When you inject higher-order knowledge, something must change within the lower-order reality or be lost to it, to compensate. The trick was to make the loss the least negative one possible—to create merely mystery, not damage. UFO intrusions all too often scared the wits out of people, maimed them, slew animals, stole flesh and blood. “You had to pay the Devil…” But really, the UFO wisdom was an awareness of the universe thinking itself, causing itself, evolving itself.

  Briefly he grieved for Shep, Yet Shep wasn’t lost. His being had merely re-entered the Void.

  Deacon imagined a Klein bottle of events embedded in four-space, space which its own shape defined; from the viewpoint of ordinary sequence it crossed back upon itself irrationally…

  Time was simultaneous within the Void; time was tied into a knot. This was how the laws of form which allowed life and mind to arise could in turn arise out of these latter, later organized patterns. Hadn’t the al
ien Bonaparte said as much to Michael with his talk of UFO events possessing a different, higher time sequence? One which couldn’t be proved within the lower sequence of events?

  Still searching for his own place in this, Deacon probed towards his earlier self. He found himself sitting at a desk with a cassette recorder, and struggled to address himself; but the task of embedding a higher viewpoint into the cause and effect sequence that was the viewpoint of Deacon-then screeched, grated, tore through the magnetic tape of Michael’s seduction and UFO flight, erasing precious evidence.

  Again, he tried.

  What he said to himself-then passed through a shape-scrambler, through a topological transformation as he stepped down from the higher pattern to the lower. The information shifted in register, tone and content:

  “You—mustn’t—ask—questions—about—flying—saucer—beings. You—must—accept—” Words failed. He became a flying monster, glaring at himself through the window from outside.

  He broke off, flew further along the timeline of connections, and was drawn down, still learning, on to Granton Common…

  Clad in Khidr-green, he warped himself askew to forestall a more fearful warping of the girl whom he would contact. He took upon himself an alien image, and twisted it yet further; to safeguard the one he would meet. One shoulder hung low, the other jutted high. One arm thrust way out, the other clubbed up tight. Drifting out of the woods, he barely kept contact with the ground. A pair of swans fled, so as not to be consumed. He dared not frame words this time—did not know them—and could only make slow, languid gestures.

  Suzie Meade’s face twisted. She fell. She tore off her shoe and flung it at him, to ward him off… He snapped away, having merely frightened the wits out of her. Yet in the wider network of connections, this event disconnected Suzie from Michael; so that Michael was free to meet the Gebraudi, and so to open Deacon’s mind. Suzie would recover, he saw. His precautions had been moderately successful. Michael could even recover her, though there would be a fee to pay…

  Even so, Suzie’s recoil from sanity split his own mind wide open for a while. He dissociated into two idiot figures dressed in Air Force blue, inquiring after her health. In this divided state, his Id sported. Sexual impulses surfaced: a lust for Suzie which he hadn’t realized. Ribald seaside postcard thoughts ran through the two sides of his mind: a text of innuendoes through one side, pictures of tits and buttocks through the other. So he/they insulted her—and might have assaulted her. She shut the door on them.

  Yet in the wider network the event drove her to his house, on the very evening that Shep died, thrusting Michael yet further into the zone of miracles, where Deacon waited: still binary, but more purposeful, to save Michael when younger from a fatal crash on a steep hill as he rode home—which Michael must forget, that minus in Michael’s memory balancing the plus of life preserved…

  Finally, he landed the saucer on Swale Moor, drawn down there by Michael’s imminent arrival. Sexual impulses were still present; now they focused upon Michael. He had given him life, after all—by saving him. He could still only beckon and broadcast emotionally his need to convey knowledge. He was split three ways now, his emotional self resident in dumb Luvah, with binary aid from the same Tweedledum and Tweedledee mutated into slant-eyed Space People, claiming now that they were from the Pleiades rather than the Air Force: telling lies and offering assistance—at once presenting plus and minus. Here he modified the boy’s life, giving and injuring at the same time-commencing a sequence that would finally lead to higher understanding. The boy forgot it—minus—else his life would have been twisted too far askew for his life and Deacon’s ever to converge.

  He flew away from him, bobbing over the ripples of the dark moor, then, in sudden sunlight, over the ripples of the sea beyond; he whirled upwards into darkness, to hide himself…

  What of the aliens whom Michael must meet, more recently in the network of events, on that same moor? What of the Gebraudi? Deacon directed himself towards them.

  They weren’t from Eta Cassiopeia, he felt sure, any more than Luvah was from the Pleiades. Despite their claim to lay siege—for the most benevolent motives—to the “hostile Unidentifieds” of Earth, they must be a UFO event themselves. Yet somehow he couldn’t reach them in the event network.

  But of course! They must necessarily be a higher-order UFO event: a second stage pattern influencing the first and lower stage, at the very time when this first stage was about to integrate itself into his own consciousness! At the very time when he became able to operate within it! They were part of a higher pattern, still inaccessible. Necessarily they had to seem separate from Earth’s UFOs—walled off from them unknowably. Of course they must vanish from existence, as soon as they had fulfilled their necessity.

  Who guided them? How did they arise? He didn’t know. Nor, he suspected, could he know. They were a higher stage of unknowability—and it was necessary that there should be one.

  As he simultaneously reached for them and acknowledged the need for them to vanish, he found that the UFO-craft was no longer in the darkness close to Earth. It had leapt away from Earth, It was commencing a descent upon the Moon. It was pressing down, erasing. He spread his arms like wings. The elastic craft felt vast, and massive. It had already practically erased the alien base, he remembered—the memory came from a tangent of events which he hadn’t yet actively explored; but it was there. Now the craft descended once again to expunge all witness of the base.

  But he was a witness of the base! He was on the Moon, himself, in the Ford Thunderbird, staring up appalled at the Cloud of Unknowing that was descending. Again he fissioned. He was both on the Moon, and over it.

  He must escape—or be erased. In the craft, he chased himself; and he was in the car that flew away…

  How “real” were the Moon and the alien Moonbase? If events in the “real” world were all thoughts—processes by which the universe thought out its own reality—and if one learnt to think of these events as thoughts; if one grew aware of the universal thought processes rather than the “events” which were their language—why then, the landscape of action would become symbolic: a “virtual” landscape directly manifesting symbols—rather like dream imagery, yet operating not privately within one’s own personal consciousness, but instead publicly and collectively, just as the Thunderbird flight to the Moon had been a shared “virtual” experience.

  So there could be false events (which were still valid), imaginary landscapes (which were nevertheless true), and imaginary beings which were actually symbolic entities, yet which interacted, apparently authentically, with human personnel…

  When the “viewpoint Ego” had drifted through the alien ship and up into the Biomatrix to rejoin it, hadn’t Michael said he guessed that he was caught up in some higher, symbolic thought process, using apparent reality as its mode of thought? And been, scared into accepting it as wholly real… for otherwise, how could he return to the world he knew?

  What, then, of the fate of Helen Caprowicz, crushed to death in her car on the Moon within this symbolic reality? Holding fiercely to the image of the crushed Pontiac with that naked human arm thrust out, sandwiched between metal, Deacon enlarged his perception of the event network associated with that car, reaching behind the symbolic reality to the event-thoughts in the real world…

  While he chased the fleeing Thnnderbird, hunting after a car which sped along a highway that was at once upon the Earth and also out in space, he hunted a silver Pontiac too in the traffic stream.

  He caught a glimpse of the driver’s face: a woman’s. Her jaw jutted. Her hair was brown and bobbed. She wore an old suede jacket She was driving on minor roads through forested hills and mountains, past lakeside communities. Big Moose, pointed a road sign.

  She speeded up, accelerating round a bend just as a tractor was hauling a long timber trailer out from a forest road; trimmed treetrunks blocked the whole way. She braked and skidded under them; the hood of the Pontiac jammed ben
eath. A restraining cable snapped. The timber load shifted. One tree, then a second, slid sidelong on to the car. Window glass shattered in a spray of ice crystals. A bare arm jerked out of the gap, jacket sleeve torn away, fingers grasping then relaxing.

  (But Helen wasn’t dead. Further along the event network he saw how she lay recovering in a hospital bed. Still further along, she seemed to stand wrapped up warmly atop a mound of bulldozed snow, hand in hand with a blond man who also had a long jaw, and a grin full of ice-teeth, watching in arctic darkness as a rocket flamed skywards from a launching pad, lighting up snowfields and pine forests…)

  The image of her out-thrown arm fused with the same image seen upon an arctic backdrop of the Moon… and as it fused, two streams of traffic fused; and Deacon overhauled the Thunderbird trapped in a desert.

  He descended on the Thunderbird—the miracle vehicle no longer needed in that form—to change its form, to crush it.

  He escaped through the scrub, and the night.

  Once more he hunted and found himself: a solitary figure standing on a dark and waterless lake, as though waiting to be ferried across. The craft hovered. Mind-lines joined. And the craft leapt forward from night to daylight…

  He set the craft down neatly in the desert The hatch opened wide… to an ordinary world. He was aware of a separate Khidr once more taking the controls. Leaving Khidr to his task, he leapt down into the scrub beside a cone-shaped hill. In the east the sun was already well risen.

  He breathed in deeply of the sweet sagebrush air as the saucer rose and rapidly shrank from sight, not so much flying away as becoming a point source, resorbed into the world. From its spin he had picked up a great charge of energy.

  He couldn’t know entirely; so the world went on. A few ants scurried through the dirt, perhaps tasting him on the breeze. A grasshopper sprang away. He glanced at his hand; the flesh was stained faintly green, as though he’d been crushing plants for their moisture. So he stood, back in the world again, in the Mojave Desert; and the whole world was a simulation, a perfect fiction. A book that actually was blank. Nothing wrote it, but itself; and how this could be was the greatest mystery. For if he could read it properly he knew that all the words would disappear.