What puzzled Steve even more than Janine’s presence was the attitudes of the other people gathered in the room. He remembered only too well what had happened in the days leading up to the swearing of his oath that he would never date anyone at work again, no matter what. He’d only been going out with Tracy for a matter of months, and it had been a relatively casual thing, but when he’d split with her in order to have a whirlwind affair with Jill it was as if World War Three had suddenly broken out in the staff room. Fully eighty per cent of the other staff-members had “rallied round” Tracy, to the extent of staring at Steve and Jill as if they were green snot on a grubby handkerchief, and even the twenty per cent who were determined not to desert Jill, either because they were her special friends or because science teachers had to stick together, had made it pretty clear what they thought of Steve’s wayward character. Then, of course, he’d split with Jill, and the entire staff-room had found him guilty of his war crime and sentenced him accordingly— except for Rhodri Jenkins, whose position as deputy head compelled him to keep lines of communication open.
There was nothing like that at AlAbAn. The other members of the support group obviously felt that their responsibility to be caring and sympathetic extended far beyond matters of alien abduction. There were no disapproving stares, no curled lips, no snide whispers. Everyone was exactly as polite to Steve and Milly as they were to Janine. The only people in the room whose expressions gave the slightest evidence that a major shift in intimate relations had taken place were Steve and Milly. Even Janine seemed serenely comfortable in her green armchair, chatting away to Amelia Rockham as if she had never been anything but unattached, until Walter Wainwright had completed the formalities and it was time for the one of the members to relate an experience.
This time, it was “Danny”. He’d attended the previous three meetings, having joined the group not long after Steve, and had apparently been a lot quicker than Steve to decide that this was as safe an environment in which to tell all as he was ever likely to find.
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* * * *
CHAPTER TEN
Errand of Mercy
This happened a fair while ago but I never tried to talk about it before. I’ve lived most of my life over the other side of the plain, in Warminster, so I grew up with UFO talk. When I was a kid, I reckon I was just about the only one in my class who’d never seen one and didn’t have an idea about them. I wasn’t even one of those smartarse skeptics who lectured people about optical illusions; I just didn’t take part.
I went through my twenties the same way, never giving much of a thought to the fact that I was living in the world’s number one UFO hotspot. I suppose you might think it ironic that almost as soon as I took a step up in the business—I’m a plumber by trade—and moved to Salisbury, I was taken. Not that I remembered it at the lime, mind; I’m one of those people who got the memory back much later, in a series of disjointed flashbacks that had to be pieced together like a jigsaw before I got a grip on the whole thing.
It might be have been more sensible, I suppose, just to accept that my mind had made most of it up in an attempt to make sense of a couple of meaningless dream-images. I thought so for a long time, but lately...well, let’s just say that it’s been on my mind quite a bit while I’ve been fixing taps and installing boilers, and I figured that maybe the time had come to get it out in the open. It’s not that I want to be rid of it, even if I could, but...well, I know that most of you are veterans at this lark, so you probably understand what I mean better than I do.
At any rate, it happened, one dark and moonless night. I woke up for no reason I could figure, went to the window and opened it wide. It was a senseless thing to do, given than it was mid-January. The blast of cold air set me shivering madly, but the tractor beam grabbed me almost immediately. Rumor has it that most people see lights, but I couldn’t see anything. It was pitch dark, and I just moved into the heart of the darkness, as if I were being swallowed by a black hole. I must have blacked out myself—for a matter of minutes, I thought, when I first began to remember, or maybe days, although I’ve now concluded that it might well have been years, or even centuries.
That might seem ridiculous, I guess, but having heard what some of you have said about being put back into your beds after a matter of minutes even though you’d lived through weeks while you were gone, I’ve given the matter much deeper consideration. If you can spend a week on an alien starship and then get returned a few seconds after you were taken, there can’t be any reason, in principle, why you couldn’t be away for much longer and still get back in good time. I didn’t age much while I was away—not to any extent I could detect—but I reckon the aliens might be able to fix that too, with their advanced medical techniques. They certainly fixed me up well and properly in other ways.
When I woke up, I was in a space-suit. I call it a space-suit, even though I was never actually required to wear it in outer space, because calling it a diving-suit would be even more absurd. It might be better to call it a cold-suit, but that wouldn’t give you much of a visual image, whereas calling it a space-suit will put the right sort of picture into your heads. In any case, although I can’t actually be sure that the surface where they put me to work was completely airless, any air it had must have been very thin indeed, and I’m pretty sure that it was extremely cold.
I don’t know much about the way the suit was kitted out internally, but it must have had mechanisms for supplying food and water, presumably intravenously, as well as air, and some provision for soaking up various bodily wastes. At the end of every shift the aliens would change all the various canisters strapped to my back and sides, but I never got out of the suit, even when I got into my hammock to sleep.
There was nothing much else to do apart from work and sleep. There was nothing to stop the workers talking to one another, although we had to touch helmets to make ourselves heard, but I never found another one who could speak English. Although our visors allowed us to see out easily enough, it wasn’t so easy to look through two of them to see into the interior of another helmet, but I figured out soon enough that my co-workers weren’t even human. They were all built on the same model—two legs, two arms, six feet tall, give or take a couple of feet—but when it came to faces it was like a crowd scene in some TV sci-fi series. The alien slave-drivers wore suits too, and we could see as much of their faces as we could of one another’s. They didn’t look particular nasty—no fangs or anything of that sort—but they weren’t handsome and they certainly weren’t friendly. They didn’t fraternize with the unhired help.
Some of you have had experiences in which the aliens took the trouble to explain to you what they were doing, but they probably only do that if they need to. The ones that kidnapped me didn’t go in for explanations, although they could synthesize English well enough to give out orders via some kind of microphone in the suit’s helmet. From the moment I went to bed that first night to the moment I got up the next morning, maybe ten or a hundred years later, I never had a genuine conversation with another living soul. I certainly tried to engage my suit, or whoever was transmitting to its speaker, in meaningful dialogue, but it was hopeless. I asked a million questions but none was ever answered.
“Where am I?” I’d say.
MOVE FORWARD, the suit would say.
“What is it that you want me to do?” I’d asked, when I wanted to create the illusion that we were communicating like normal people—but I knew that when it replied, telling me where to go or what sort of action I had to perform, it was just issuing a command. If I didn’t do as I was told, it would repeat the order once, and then it would use the whip.
I always thought of it as the whip, although I guess it must have been some kind of electrical device to stimulate the pain centre in my brain. Whatever it was, I learned very quickly to do as I was told without any undue delay.
When I say that I was gone maybe ten or a hundred years, I don’t mean that I was conscious of working t
housands or tens of thousands of shifts. My best guess is that I worked a couple of hundred, maybe ten hours apiece. Allowing for sleep time, that probably means that I was actually on-site for about half a year—but I had to be taken there, you see, and brought back. My guess is that the journeys took a long time. I don’t have any idea where we were, but it certainly didn’t look like the Earth we know and love. My theory is that when I was taken I was put into some kind of suspended animation chamber, maybe frozen down to within a couple of degrees of absolute zero, so that I could be shipped to another system, maybe ten or twenty light-years away—but that’s just a guess. The suit never told me where I was, or why we were doing what we were doing, or why the people who needed to get it done had to raid a dozen or a hundred different worlds to get their slave labor when they could have got the whole crew from just one.
That’s all it was: just slave labor, sheer drudgery. Most of you might have been taken because the aliens wanted to study you, or extract something precious from your biochemistry, or whatever, but they only wanted me for the strength of my arms. They didn’t even want me to do any plumbing. Maybe they also wanted my patience, and picked me because I was the kind of person who could be patient, laboring in poor light, all alone.
Not many people could have gone through what I went through, I suspect, without going completely crazy from the isolation. I’m not claiming to be absolutely sane myself, but I’m not claiming, either, that any difficulty I might have in forming relationships of late is due to having being sentenced to six months to a year of hard labor on another world, without ever being able to exchange two meaningful words with another living soul. All I’m saying is that I came through it in better shape than some people would have. I did my time. I survived.
Sorry, I’m rambling a bit. What you want to know is what the place was like and what I had to do there.
Well, it wasn’t what you might call a picturesque environment, but it could have been worse. The planetary surface was very uneven—a mess of crags and ditches—but there weren’t many sharp edges. It was mostly rock, in various shades of grey, with a liberal topping of white ice, but there were streaks and splashes of rust-red color. In addition to that, there were the plants, which were almost all silver while they were closed, although the colored edges of their folded-up petals often showed through in streaks and whorls. There didn’t seem to be any liquids on the surface, but it was obvious that it hadn’t always been that way. All the ice must once have been liquid, and there must have been wind and rain to erode the rocks and hollow out rivers—but that must have been a long time before. Now, everything was still and fixed and seemingly dead—except for the plants and a few very tiny things that could scuttle or wriggle around in the hollows and crannies.
The plants weren’t numerous enough to form clumps, let alone forests. Sometimes I had to walk fifteen or twenty miles in the course of a shift to collect enough to fill a hamper. They weren’t so rare, though, that I ever failed to get my quota, even when the elevator took me to one of the less promising outlets and the directions the suit gave me took me into barren territory.
By day, the plants opened up, unfolding their leaves to catch the sunlight. For that reason, we worked mainly at night, when they closed themselves up into ovoids or warped cubes. They weren’t easy to gather even then, because their stems were hard to break, but they were brittle enough to snap if you chopped them hard enough in exactly the right spot. There was a knack to it, which was one of the few things the suits couldn’t communicate directly. Whoever was controlling the whip had to be lenient for a week or two while I got the hang of it. Eventually, though, it got so I could crack the stems first time, without causing any supplementary damage.
Mostly, I used a tool that was like a cross between a sickle and a crowbar. Occasionally, I was given something different for another job, but most of us—the slaves, that is—were schooled in the use of a single implement. The ones who worked down below had a variety of different ones, including some that looked far more suited to a plumber’s specialist skills, but those of us trained for surface work didn’t do much else but gather plants.
Most of the plants were structured like angular lettuces, with lots of layers of leaves, but the leaves were more like metal than flesh—flexible, the way a spring is flexible, but not soft. Whatever color they wore on the surfaces that caught the light, the undersides of the leaves were always paler and shinier, which is why they looked silvery when they were furled up. The light-gathering surfaces had a mat finish; some were so dark as to be literally black, but most were dark red or dark green. Blues and purples were uncommon, but not unknown. Sometimes you’d find a mixture of colors in a single specimen, just as you’d occasionally find a more complex shape, but most of them were all one color, variegated in slightly differing shades, and fairly symmetrical in shape. When we worked hy day, while the petals were fully opened, the suit would usually instruct me to look for specimens of a particular shape or color, which would have been harder to spot by night, but it didn’t seem to me that the aliens counted any of them more precious than the rest. I think they were just trying to make sure that they got a more-or-less balanced selection down below.
Down below is where we sent or took our harvests when we’d filled our hampers. That was what the whole operation was about: taking plants from the surface into caverns deep beneath the surface, through artificial shafts. There were shafts designed to carry elevators and trains as well as pedestrian traffic, and shafts packed with all manner of machines deeper down. Down below, most of the work was done by machines, although the aliens still needed slaves with hands and legs to undertake trickier tasks and trickier journeys.
I didn’t spend much time down below—three shifts out of four I didn’t spend any time at all there except for the journeys from and to the dormitory—so I’m sure that I only got to see a tiny fraction of the aliens’ below-surface operations, but I saw enough to be sure that they were re-settling the plants in crop-fields a long way beneath the surface, near enough to the core of the planet for me to be able to sense a difference in gravity. The caverns were artificially lit, but they seemed to require hundreds of glaring electric bulbs to provide the kind of energy that was provided on the surface by the sun.
Why were the aliens doing it? Well, they certainly didn’t see fit to tell me, but I eventually figured it out, with the aid of the plants.
The plants didn’t talk back when I talked to them any more than the aliens did, and I can’t even say for sure whether they had thoughts as well as feelings, but I’m perfectly sure about the feelings. I didn’t imagine them.
It wouldn’t have been surprising, I suppose, if I had started having delusions born of isolation, but I didn’t invent the plants’ feelings, or my growing sensitivity to them. It didn’t happen immediately, but I hadn’t been laboring all that long when I first began to realize that I could sense the plants’ pain when their stems were broken, just as surely as I could sense the lighter gravity when I was down in the caverns. Once I was convinced that it was their pain that I was feeling—which felt quite different from the pain of the whip, even though I knew that it was the same to them—I began to sense their other feelings too. I never sensed a thought—not, at any rate, any thought that I could translate into words—but that only helped to convince me that my sensitivity was real. If it had been a delusion conjured up in answer to loneliness, I’d surely have imagined that they could talk to me as well as communicate their feelings.
There wasn’t any significant difference, so far as I could tell, between the way the plants felt pain and the way I felt it, even though their pain didn’t feel the same to me as my own pain did. I guess pain doesn’t vary much from one species to another—not, at least, the kind of pain that’s associated with a sharp break. The other feelings did differ, though, not just from my feelings but between plants of different shapes and different colors. I can’t say that I could identify all the feelings, but I could feel the dif
ferences between them.
I translated those differences into shades of human feeling, although I’m pretty sure that plant feelings must be different from human feelings. Pain must be pain, whoever and whatever you are, but all the other emotions entities can feel must surely be different. Not that I’m saying that plants don’t love one another, you understand, or don’t feel fear and anxiety and regret—but I figure that plant love is likely to be markedly different in kind and texture from human love, and plant anxiety from human anxiety. I figure, too, that there must be some plant emotions that are utterly alien to human sensation, and vice versa. I translated their feelings into human love, anxiety and so on, because that was the only vocabulary of emotion I had, but I’m pretty sure that there were differences and distinctions that I couldn’t catch, which didn’t apply to pain in anything like the same degree.
If the familiar plants that surround us—Wiltshire plants, I mean—were able to feel, they’d probably feel just as differently from those alien plants as they would from us. Most of the plants we know disperse their pollen on atmospheric winds, or employ insect vectors, which rely on that same atmosphere to sustain their flight. Their fertilized seeds likewise tend to rely on the movement of wind, water or animals to discover and reach new places in which to grow. All their sensuality must be bound up in those processes, reflective of their particular uncertainties. On that alien world there was no wind to speak of and very little in the way of animal life, none of which could fly; that world’s plants had to use different methods to introduce their pollen to one another and dispatch their seeds to colonize new ground.
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 20