Star Matters

by David John West

  The usual modus operandi of Gayan guides would be to work with and through existing talented earthly individuals, helping them with developing their theories and revelations, or even originating these ideas if needs be. As such, Cambridge University was fertile ground for the introduction of facts about how the Universe originated and revealing its workings. This approach was core to helping developing cultures learn essential truths without wasting decades and centuries on wild goose chases or indeed being diverted into Zarnha ideologies, where obeisance to Omeyn MuneMei’s technology was the ultimate goal.

  Doctor McGregor’s appearance and personal style allowed him easy access to the discussion groups, both formal and informal, that explored these matters. His own subject matter expertise was around development of advanced marine animal cultures that by their very essence were excluded from technological developments, as they could not work in seawater. Doctor McGregor was aware of many such advanced marine cultures and saw the same capabilities in whale cultures here on Earth. However, scientific advancement could only be assimilated at a certain rate and Earth-thinking needed much development before such ideas of marine cultures communicating would be possible. Understanding how the visible Universe worked needed to come first before more arcane ideas could be slotted on top of this basic understanding.

  Doctor McGregor decided to introduce Joe to Professor Kitteridge, who was his main person of interest at Cambridge, for introduction of these new ideas to develop human culture. The story of the mystery Zarnha surveillance perturbed Doctor McGregor and he wanted to ensure some kind of backup strategy via Joe and his team.

  Professor Kitteridge was even now world famous for his research and published work that made his cosmology advances more digestible by the media and thence the general public. This had made him famous and like all the scientific giants of history his advances could only be explained by his genius, a convenient way of explaining his extraordinary quantity of successful theoretical and practical advances in a mystical way, thereby cementing Kitteridge in the same category of historical genius as Einstein and Da Vinci; a living treasure indeed.

  Professor Kitteridge himself was not so easily hoodwinked by his eerily capable advisor, Doctor McGregor, as the general public. He was an independent and detailed thinker that had indeed initially attracted the attentions of the Gayans and he was deeply intrigued by them planting these exciting ideas in his mind to be published. He was a frail man physically and his enforced rest allowed him to spend most of his waking time on academic ideology. He was not a vain man which meant that he was aware that some of his colleagues and notably Doctor McGregor had been the source of most of his original ideas. Strangely for an academic, Doctor McGregor was not interested in claiming these ideas as his own and would indeed shy away from the idea of claiming personal credit, running contrary to the natural aspiration of most academics who were encouraged to publish papers to justify their funding and professional development. This situation was of course ideal for Kitteridge’s own development and he had indeed become famous across the developed world in popular media as well as academic culture as a result.

  Professor Kitteridge’s underlying modest nature meant that he was cognisant of McGregor’s rich vein of scientific guidance that amounted to hugely more than friendly support and being a sounding board for Kitteridge’s ideas. Blowing smoke up my ass was the way he thought of it in a kindly way when he mused on the relationship to himself. Doctor McGregor’s claims to be only interested in the esoterics of largely untestable whale vocalisation and cultural development was at odds with his capability to provide sweeping insights to thinking on all topics but especially Kitteridge’s own field of astrophysics. As a result Professor Kitteridge had taken reciprocal interest in Doctor McGregor and had been collecting information on his personal activities. Kitteridge believed that all knowledge was composed of patterns that could be understandable if you collected enough data and could analyse that information in the right way.

  So it was with great interest that Professor Kitteridge entertained a casual visit in his rooms at St John’s College from Doctor McGregor and a first-year undergraduate who was also interested in developed civilisations of higher animals, especially in a marine environment. As always Professor Kitteridge was conscious that Doctor McGregor was at least of an intellectual level with himself, something that seldom happened with other people in normal life. He recognised that Doctor McGregor could easily hide a huge intellect behind the larger-than-life comical expression he cultivated. He suspected this but could not imagine why Doctor McGregor was reluctant to show it. Surely the ageing doctor was way beyond youthful inclinations to modesty?

  Professor Kitteridge was approachable and likeable hence widely used on the more highbrow television and media aspiring to educate the great unwashed, but most people would be incapable of holding an academic conversation with him. When they met, Joe contributed little to the conversation with the senior doctor and professor, despite Professor Kitteridge inviting him to do so. He got the same frustrating feeling as with Doctor McGregor that this undergraduate was much more highly capable than he seemed. Professor Kitteridge decided to add Joe to his data collection and analysis. This was easier to do than it may sound as actually the Cambridge University scientific community was smaller than it first appeared and Professor Kitteridge had established his intelligence-gathering over a very long period. It was now very well established and recorded in a relational database with advanced query capabilities. Professor Kitteridge liked to examine all aspects of his life with scientific methodology.

  Joe and Doctor McGregor strolled back together down King’s Parade after the Professor Kitteridge meeting. Joe suggested, “He clearly suspects a lot is going on in your relationship with him, Doctor McGregor. I would say he is ready for the next big stage. You must know that yourself. Is he ready for Revelation? In fact if you don’t reveal your purpose then it could turn him against you if his curiosity turns sour and he develops worries and dark thoughts against you. Charlotte is very good at these things and she says you can wait too long on a step, as well as obviously doing it too early.” Joe and Doctor McGregor used their earthly names in public, protection against surveillance, part of the immersion in their current life.

  “He is an exceptionally good man, up there with the earthly geniuses I have worked with in the past,” said Doctor McGregor. “It is good to get your agreement on the next critical step with Professor Kitteridge. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see you here to help me. It is a good life; I am not complaining, but it can get so lonely sometimes… ”

  SEVENTEEN

  Joe was in the science lab for physiology practical when he received the dismaying news. His dissection of a frog’s leg to test the nerves with mild electrical currents was not going well. His frog was expiring and he preferred to be researching live animals in their home environment rather than working in the lab on their live anaesthetised form, but this practical experiment was a requirement for the course curriculum.

  It was a sudden vertiginous feeling of loss that assailed him first. He knew that feeling well from down the ages. He had felt the blow of loss of fellow Gayans down the ages. On medieval battlegrounds long past he had felt the invisible sword blows that felled his colleagues as he charged into action on horseback, swinging a broadsword either side of his charger’s galloping head. Otherwise the ending of one of his Gayan colleague’s corporeal life was a rare event as it was for people of Earth. The red thread connecting him to Doctor McGregor was abruptly severed as he was working in the laboratory and left hanging there, limp as the drugged frog leg he was working on. All he could do was wait on further news. The next thing he was aware of was a communication coming in on his mobile phone. It buzzed to let him know there was news on the Gayan messaging app – they would use whatever native technology was available and the mobile apps on Earth were surprisingly well developed and ahead of other communications available loca
lly. He checked his phone and received the news that Doctor McGregor’s body had expired seemingly through natural causes alone in his Queens’ College office that afternoon.

  Joe’s sense of loss was not the same as for other Earth people who would grieve the loss of his spirit forever; Joe was aware that this was not the loss of Doctor McGregor’s eternal soul but it was the end of this incarnation that he knew so well. Worse still, the physical presence of Doctor McGregor would not be with him and his colleagues any more in the immediacy of this lifetime and his close relationship with Professor Kitteridge was key to their plans. He wanted Doctor McGregor’s local help for himself, Charlotte and Daniel; that help would now be lost and this would hamper their work at this critical time. Then there were all the formal farewells and ceremonies of a human soul passing through to be endured. Joe finished his practical class and walked home in a dismal mood.

  Christopher heard the tragic news later that same afternoon and came looking for Joe and Charlotte to assuage his need to talk about it and to gain some comfort from sharing in the immediacy of their reactions. He could not find his friends however as they had earlier decided to meet up with Daniel to discuss Doctor McGregor’s loss away from the eyes of the city centre in a remote pub in the quiet village of Whittlesford away from the university part of the town. They settled down in a quiet corner. Joe bought pints of ale for himself and Daniel and a Sauvignon Blanc for Charlotte.

  The tone was subdued. This was the second time that the Zarnha had broken the treaties and killed to protect their earthly operations in two generations for these Gayan colleagues. It was not so personal for them as the Californian murder of Alron as Robert and the adventure on Braganza that had terminated Keeran as Darryl and Amily, but it was another hit from the Zarnha that Gaya had received again without retribution.

  “They are getting bold – or desperate,” Joe said quietly. “It pretty much proves that the spectral vision I saw made the connection between us and Doctor McGregor and brought their sanction on him. I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  “That much is agreed, Joe,” said Alron. “We have to believe that they are aware of all of us. We won’t be so easy to take out. Also they can’t risk starting an alien serial killing scandal in a city this small. It would have cops crawling everywhere and that would slow them down as much as us.”

  “There’s plenty they can do without killing us,” observed Charlotte. “I don’t think they will risk causing death other than ‘accidents’ but they could allow for a disappearance or two as society here just doesn’t seem to notice abductions very often. I just think it pushes us to work quicker, which was our plan in any case.”

  “OK, let’s step up a gear without taking any risks ourselves,” said Joe. “We pick up the Professor Kitteridge project seamlessly and conclude that quickly. Then we get on with our job so it’s all done by this time next year. Right on time for the end of the first Baktun age of humans on Earth. As it needs to be!”

  Later in his bedroom back at Queens’ College Joe woke from sleep to sense that Doctor McGregor’s invisible spirit was with him. It was that brief opportunity a soul gets to visit key people in their lives soon after passing on from their body. Doctor McGregor’s essence was there in his room and he reached out to Joe with warmth as he explained that the Zarnha had come for him that afternoon when he was taking a tea break alone in his office. Omeyn MuneMei had realised their covert surveillance of his activities was blown when Joe had seen their Ghola agent in a form she had previously believed was invisible. She had taken immediate action to eliminate Doctor McGregor as his usefulness had ended and potentially he could have been a big threat to their strategy. This underlined that Omeyn MuneMei also was aware that things were reaching a climax in their competing campaigns here on Earth. Her precipitate action was proof of this.

  Zarnha abductions of humans and subsequent physical examinations in their laboratories had given them very good understanding of human physiology and they had many ways to cause death apparently by natural causes. In this case they had taken the simplest tactic of breaking into his office, drugging the academic and then blocking Doctor McGregor’s airways bringing on heart failure. Doctor McGregor was of an age and physical appearance that meant it would be no surprise that such a heart failure would be seen as a natural cause of death and another ageing academic consigned to history. Doctor McGregor counselled Joe to be careful; the Zarnha clearly had new capabilities especially to surveil their targets and they probably now knew that Joe was also active in the same community of interest in Cambridge. They would likely know the who but not the why and would want to find out before deciding what further action to take. They had terminated Doctor McGregor and that in itself was a contravention of the Epsilon treaty technically carrying destructive threat to their home world but Omeyn MuneMei was ever pushing the boundaries of that ruling in the knowledge that the ultimate sanction would not be justified for hidden crimes against individuals. Joe said his farewells in return and wished Doctor McGregor well until they would meet again and then he felt the benign presence of Doctor McGregor move on – at least for now.

  After his fleeting visit with Joe, Doctor McGregor set about his other farewells to people most important to his old life. This of course included Professor Kitteridge, who equally woke in the night to feel the presence of Doctor McGregor saying farewell, though he had no ability like Joe to speak soul to soul with his old friend. Despite this, Professor Kitteridge felt deeply that Doctor McGregor was conveying a sense of loss that they had unfinished business and there was hope there too that this could be remedied. When his farewells were spent, Doctor McGregor was captured by Gayan warpwave and he set off on a long planned private adventure before he was recovered to planet Chamarel by the wisest Gayan ancients, the Worders, where his next incarnation would be determined.

  EIGHTEEN

  Doctor McGregor had surrendered himself to the superior forces of the Zarnha back in his office at Queens’ College when it became clear they had superior forces. He was too old to run and too weak to fight. They had appeared in the guise of foreign language students covering their strangeness by adopting the aspect of young people from a different country that disguised their otherworldliness. They were dressed in black, wearing bright sneakers and backpacks in attempted disguise, their appearance oriental at cursory glance, their sensitive eyes shaded with complex goggles concealed as dark glasses. Four Zarnha had filed into his office, androgynous and indifferent, nodding their heads to record the minutiae of his surroundings. Doctor McGregor knew at once their true origin and that there would be no reasoning with them. He remained calm however as he could only believe they were there to communicate something or at worst abduct him.

  In the event there was no communication and Zarnha abductions were invariably executed at night. Three of them surrounded his chair while the other laid out materials from its backpack. They used some kind of needle to immobilise him as they were not wearing their breathing helmets that prevented them using airborne drugs. Prior to administering the fatal dose they held his mouth and nostrils closed. McGregor was paralysed by the drug dose; unable to struggle he saw their awful purpose and he relaxed into it ensuring his demise was painless. His Gayan soul departed as his breathing stopped, floating free of his earthly body. Looking down he saw his body lying face up on the floor seeming strangely older than he had thought of himself in life. The four Zarnha assassins incongruously swarmed over his relaxed body, presumably unaware of its separation from his soul speculating on them from above. His view gained altitude of the scene as he ascended up and through the building floors until he could no longer see any sign of himself and the Zarnha fused into a single spiderlike form over him.

  He drifted for a while. He visited his lovely home and said goodbye to Tabitha who turned her head and followed him around, speaking with him all the while. He remained there during the hours of daylight then when it was time to go he select
ed the living people he wanted to visit and called on six of his closest colleagues in their sleep, including Joe and Professor Kitteridge. Professor Kitteridge had not heard the news as yet as he had been at the Astrophysics laboratory all afternoon and evening. He woke and felt the presence of his old friend but knew no more than that until the morning’s news, then he had cause to ponder the occasion, seeing it as entirely personal and not something he would discuss with others. Doctor McGregor had also called on Joe who was the only visitee to recognise the meaning of the moment and welcomed his friend as he truly was. He communicated his farewells and warnings to Joe. There could be no vocalisation of course, Doctor McGregor manifesting solely-soul, but he could converse telepathically with a spectrum of Gayan subtleties unavailable in the construction of physical speech in words.

  Beyond his brief obligations to his farewells to the living he flew high and free under the vault of the night-time stars. He had the opportunity to take some time out here on Earth for a long planned trip before reporting back to the Worders of Dawn on planet Chamarel. He used that time to enact his desire to visit with sperm whales in their natural environment here on Earth. It had been a continuing frustration that he could not observe whales in their natural habitat deep in the ocean with the limitations of his human frame. His theories on the whales’ communication could not be verified by direct observation simply because the human body he was fettered with was useless for undersea work below the top two or three metres without recourse to mechanical submarine contraptions that were just too conspicuous and slow.

  He had none of these problems now his Gayan soul had peeled away from the late body of Doctor McGregor. This left only the Gayan spirit known as Duncan. Now he could manifest back to the prime of his life, he had shoulder-length black hair in piratical ringlets and wore loose pants and jerkin as if he were recently marooned on a desert island. He smiled thinking of his early days as a young lecturer in zoology at Cambridge University on finding his lectures were crowded out with students, mostly women from other disciplines, coming to hear the engaging and handsome speaker. And he had restored his perfect even white teeth that he displayed by smiling broadly as he flew around the Earth in the inky blue aurora of the mesosphere to the seas off the great barrier reef to the north east of Australia. As he descended in the daylight of the far side of the planet to the shallow seas he could see many sperm whales in pods of up to thirty or so individuals, mature and young, playing in groups on the surface, engrossed in their own special community. The cetacean culture across the galaxy remained enigmatic and pervasive. Much more spiritually advanced than any human race, which typically relied on technology for transportation, the cetaceans had spread their DNA in the earliest ages with their own water as comets thundering across the heavens that aquaformed any receptive planet they collided with. The transported DNA would provide the building blocks to evolve the giant whales and the frozen ice would provide the oceans for them to thrive.