He was in a tolerably good mood, though, considering that there were still two days to go until the weekend; he survived computer club without losing his serenity and went home, having already caught up with his marking, to cook himself a substantial plateful of sausages and chips, delete all the spam from his email inbox and spend a lazy evening catching up with postings on YouTube—which he did in perfect safety, there being no blurred cliffhanger climaxes on view.
Steve couldn’t help wondering, occasionally, what Janine might be doing, now that she was no longer being educated in survival techniques, but he didn’t let the thought torment him too much. He didn’t have bad dreams either, when he finally went to bed.
* * * *
Steve spent the following Wednesday evening—the one before the next AlAbAn meeting—at Milly’s flat. The vague plan they had both had in mind for the evening was a Marks & Spencer’s ready-made meal hot out of the microwave, with a bottle of Merlot, a cursory chat about the various hassles of the day—in which Milly’s abusive road-users would beat Steve’s abusive kids hands down, as usual—and then sex, before Steve went back home so that they could both spread themselves out to sleep instead of jostling for position in the inadequate space available in Milly’s single bed. As things turned out, however, the agenda somehow got turned around, so that they had the sex first, and then lay in bed, mildly exhausted but unable to sleep, for an hour or so before Milly could pluck up the energy to switch on the microwave and pull a couple of plates out of the cupboard.
Steve knew that it wasn’t really lust that had dragged them into bed ahead of the other items on the agenda. Even though their relationship had become less strained since the evening when Neville had told his story, Milly had not got over feeling guilty about having stolen her best friend’s boyfriend, nor had Steve stopped regretting that he had been a culpable accessory to the crime. They both missed Janine, who was still refusing to speak to either of them, although they had both tried to reinstitute contact. Steve knew that Milly was only pretending that her lust was urgent in order to cover up her other feelings, just as he’d earlier pretended that the urgency of his own lust excused what he’d done. He still didn’t need Viagra, though; he appreciated every opportunity that presented itself to lose himself in that kind of emotional incontinence.
It wasn’t just the timetable of their evening that was turned on its head. Instead of exploiting their easiest conversational resource while they were eating, by laying into the horrific habits of pupils and drivers with their usual sadistic glee, they were somehow drawn to tackle the most difficult. They returned, for the first time since the aftermath of the previous meeting, to the topic of their untold stories—not to give away any actual details, but to resume discussion of the necessity of getting around to telling them.
“I don’t want to keep putting it off any longer,” Steve said. “When I said that I wouldn’t be ready till January, it was just cowardice speaking.”
“You can talk,” Milly said. “I’ve probably been to more meetings without spilling the beans than anyone else in this history of the organization, even if it has been going since before I was born. That’s cowardice.” Steve observed, though, that although there was shame in her voice, there was a certain perverse pride too. “I’m not sure why I’ve been such a coward,” Milly went on. “In a way, it’s not like me at all. It only took me three weeks to confess everything at the Eating Disorders Group. I suppose I was a lot better at vomiting things up in those days. Maybe, if I hadn’t got that straightened out....”
“It has nothing to do with that,” Steve said. “It’s a totally different matter. You were just waiting for the right moment. I can understand that—but I don’t want to put it off any longer. I’ve got what I needed from Sylvia Joyce, and I don’t have any real excuses left. I’m certainly not going to wait for Janine to get bored and go away. That really would be cowardice. Tomorrow, when Walter calls for volunteers, my hand is going up.”
“Mine too,” Milly said. “We’ll let Walter decide which of us goes first.”
Steve frowned slightly at that, because he knew that Milly must know, just as well as he did, what would happen if Milly and Steve both volunteered to tell their stories. Walter would be certain to give priority to Milly, partly because of the length of time she’d been in the group and partly because his old-fashioned politeness would oblige him to operate on the principle of Ladies First.
“You don’t have to do that, Mil,” Steve said. “I don’t mind going first, if you’d rather.”
“Why would I rather you went first?” Milly countered.
“No reason,” Steve said, “but if you did...I wouldn’t want to push you into something you’re not quite ready to do “
“I know that,” Milly said. “Nor would I.” She didn’t repeat what Steve had said about not waiting until Janine had stopped attending meetings, but it was obvious that something of the sort was on her mind. If Milly’s tiny kitchenette had been large enough to contain a metaphorical elephant as well as the breakfast-bar at which they were eating, Janine would have certainly filled the role, even though she was a good deal slimmer than Milly now that Milly was eating regularly and hardly ever throwing up at all.
“Would you rather go first?” Steve asked.
“You’ve only been coming for a few weeks,” Milly observed, instead of answering. “That’s normal. There are some who want to get it over with as quickly as possible and blurt it out at the first opportunity, but most wait to see how things go and hear a few stories, so that they can reassure themselves that their own experience isn’t going to sound significantly sillier than anyone else’s, and that the listeners are going to treat them with extra-thick kid gloves. That’s only sensible—but I was convinced of all that nine months ago, and I still haven’t put up my hand. That’s silly. If I keep on this way, Walter will get even more suspicious. He probably thinks I’m some kind of snoop, doing research for a book or something.”
“Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations,” Steve suggested. “You’ve read all about Roswell, now read all about East Grimstead. If anyone’s inviting suspicion of that sort, it’s more likely to be me than you. I’m a science teacher, after all—I’m supposed to have a vested interest in debunking.”
“As a science teacher, though,” Milly pointed out, “you’re not expected to be literate. Science teaching isn’t what it used to be back in dear old Neville’s day, is it?” She paused for a moment, and then said: “You aren’t, are you? Thinking of writing a book, I mean. You’ll have to change all the names—including yours.”
“No, I’m not,” Steve said. “You’d be a useful mine of information if I were, I suppose, after all those meetings—but if I wanted to do the job properly, I’d have to con Walter or Amelia into telling me all. I couldn’t bring myself to do that. That would require true journalism cynicism, which I don’t have.”
“Think of all the stories they must have heard, though, in almost forty years!” Milly said. “If only they’d kept some kind of record— what an archive that would be! Maybe they have. Maybe Walter’s insistence on not writing minutes is just a bluff, and as soon as he gets home every Thursday night he whips out his fountain-pen and writes down every word. Maybe Amelia’s got a hidden mike somewhere in the sitting-room, and a cupboard full of tapes. I can’t believe it, though. If they’re not honest, nobody is. They’re honest, I’m sure of it.”
“And we should try to follow their good example,” Steve said. “Whichever of us goes first, I think we’re both ready, I hope I’m ready, at any rate. For someone who suffers from emotional incontinence, you know, I can be quite hesitant at times.”
“Whenever you have to cross a bridge, for instance,” Milly supplied. Steve didn’t take it as an insult. He took it as a jokey casual remark.
“And whenever I need to be regressed,” Steve added. “I have to take myself in hand, don’t I? I have to grit my teeth and get on with it.”
“Me too,�
�� Milly said. “As I said earlier, let’s both throw caution to the winds, and let Walter decide. He might pick you. Maybe it would be better if I did go first, though—I might have to spend more time in Bath over the next few weeks. It’s not impossible that I might even have to miss an AlAbAn meeting or two, if things go from bad to worse.”
“Why, what’s up?” Steve asked.
“Probably nothing—but Dad seems to have had a mini-stroke, and Mum’s terrified that he’s working up to a big one. He’s had high blood-pressure for ages, but he hates taking his beta-blockers. He says they take all the zest out of life. When she nags him, it only makes him dig his heels in. She thinks he’ll listen to me, but she’s wrong. Just because I’m his darling daughter doesn’t mean that he’s going to take my advice—quite the reverse, in fact. Anyway, nothing terrible has happened yet, but I thought I’d best warn you that it might. We’ll be in the run-up to Christmas soon, and that always piles on the stress within the family.”
“Mine are the same,” Steve admitted, “although Dad’s as fit as a fiddle. They’ll be badgering me to go home, I dare say, but I’m going to put my foot down and say that I can’t go. I won’t say that I intend spending it with you—they’d just start nagging me to bring you with me.”
“Whereas my lot will want me all to themselves, and would react with horror if I said that I wanted to bring a guest. Still, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it—if it’s not too high or wide.”
“Metaphorical bridges,” he assured her, “are no trouble at all.”
He meant it at the time, but he couldn’t help remembering it wryly when the moment came the following evening, and neither he nor Milly raised a hand. In the event, the only person who moved a muscle, after an unusually protracted pregnant pause, was a woman who looked to be in her early thirties, who introduced herself as “Megan”.
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* * * *
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Purpose of Life
I was one of the lucky ones, in the sense that the ones who abducted me took the trouble to explain what they were doing, and to reassure me that I’d be perfectly safe.
I did spend some waking time on an operating table, but I wasn’t shackled and there were no needles or unbearably bright lights. I don’t even remember the worms—they’d done that while I was still asleep—although it did make me feel sick when the android told me about them. I think I’m right in calling him an android, although he might have been a robot—I’ve never been entirely clear about the difference between them. Anyhow, he was the spitting image of Michelangelo’s statue of David, right down to the delicate marble complexion and the...well, let’s just say that although they’d animated him, they hadn’t given him any clothes to wear.
I never saw the aliens themselves—just the David they’d built to act as a go-between, to explain what they were going to do to me, and why. I think he was telling me the truth, though; if the aliens had wanted to be dishonest, they wouldn’t have let David tell me about the worms.
It’s a cliché, I know, but the first thing I said when I woke up was: “Where am I?”
David was already standing there, waiting beside the operating table. The lighting was soft, so it wasn’t immediately obvious that he was a statue, especially as he was able to move and talk, but he couldn’t exactly pass for human either.
“You’re in a research facility,” he said. “We need your help. We’re sorry that we couldn’t ask nicely, but there are very powerful reasons why we have to be extremely discreet. We’ll have to play some slight tricks with your memory, I’m afraid, before we send you home, but we will send you home, safe and sound. In the meantime, you’ll have quite an adventure. If you can get into the right frame of mind, you’ll find it very interesting. If you remember it at all, you’ll remember it as a dream. Whether you remember it will probably depend on how good you are at remembering dreams; some people are, and some aren’t. It won’t be a horrible nightmare, though— nothing that will leave you with post-traumatic stress syndrome.”
“You’re just a puppet, aren’t you?” I said. “You’re fronting for aliens who are so horrible to look at they don’t think I could bear it.”
“The fact that you’ve jumped to that conclusion suggests that you could certainly bear it,” he said. “We’re not that horrible—but we’re a long way from human. That’s why we had to recruit you, I’m afraid. We can’t set up an immediate mind-link with the subjects in whom we’re interested. We could do the necessary preliminaries step-by-step, but as we’ve already done the laborious groundwork on the human species, it’s a great deal less time-consuming to use you as an intermediary, exploiting the basic physiological similarity between you to transpose the subject’s mental experiences into your brain, and read it off from there.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, pulling out another one from the cliche-supermarket.
“I apologize for my incompetence,” David said. “All we want you to do is to lie down in a bed, quietly, and go to sleep. In the bed next to you there will be another person, who looks very similar to you—I don’t just mean that she looks human, but that she looks like you. The resemblance is really quite uncanny, considering that she’s from eight hundred million years downstream. In the fullness of time, all kinds of fragmentary patterns repeat, some more often than others. We’re interested in that process of repetition, of course, but we’re even more interested in the slight variations.
“What we want to do is to make a record of this other person’s mind—her memories, her life-story. In time, we could tune our apparatus to do that directly, feeding information from neuroworms embedded in her brain into our own multiplexus, but it would take a long time and we’d probably need to analyze a couple of hundred subjects to make the basic calibrations. Fortunately, we’ve already been working on humans for the best part of a subcentury, and we have an abundant supply of expert neuroworms, which can read off the contents of a human brain with no difficulty at all—especially humans we’ve already decanted—so....”
“Hang on,” I said. “What do you mean, already decanted.”
“You’ve been here before, Megan. You probably don’t remember it, except maybe as a distant dream. That knowledge should help to reassure you that you won’t come to any harm. This time won’t be very much different from the last, and it will probably leave no more trace in your memory. This time, though, you’ll be working for us rather than serving as a subject yourself. It’s an oversimplification, but in essence, you’ll be reading the subject’s mind and we’ll be reading yours, because it’s a lot easier to set up that kind of indirect link than it would be to set up a direct one.”
“And what are neuroworms?” I wanted to know.
“Wireless telepathy is fiendishly difficult, exceedingly vague, and frequently unreliable,” David told me. “Good mind-reading requires actual neuronal connections. Inorganic wires are almost as inept as no wires at all. We use biological connectors—artificial neuronal constructs. They’re not really worms, but the resemblance encourages the terminology.”
“And you’re going to stick these worm-things into my brain?”
“We already have. Please don’t be alarmed. You can’t feel a thing, because there’s nothing to feel. We did it while you were unconscious because you might have found it mildly disturbing to feel them going up your nose, but there wasn’t any pain and there won’t be. We’ll connect them to the subject’s apparatus through your ear, so you won’t be able to see anything unpleasant.”
I have to admit that it was because I didn’t want to think too much about brainworms dangling out of my nose and my ears that my next question was: “Why?”
“We’re scientists, Megan. We study climax communities—the whole sequence, or as much of it as we can access. Upstream is mostly easy, but downstream is a different matter, because the boomerang effect doesn’t work both ways and the time police are more restrictive there. We’re trying to make sense of
the sequence. We’re trying to discover whether there’s any direction to Earthly evolution—whether it has any kind of long-term objective or purpose, or whether it’s just a series of arbitrary explosions of adaptive radiation, in which self-conscious intelligence is merely an occasional and entirely haphazard by-product.”
I didn’t understand much of that, either, but it would have been a waste of time to say so. “That’s why you took me the first time?” I said, trying to stick to what I did half-understand. “You were learning about humans. And because you’ve already learned about humans, you think you can use me again, to help you learn about some other almost-human race that’s evolved somewhere else.”
“Very good, Megan. You’ve got it. It’s somewhen else rather than somewhere, but that’s a trivial difference.”
“So when I asked where am I, I should have asked when am I?”
“Not exactly. You’re still in a research facility. Actually, the when of here and now’s a little difficult to specify in calendrical terms. I’m afraid there’s no point my trying to explain the subtleties of the relativity of space-time and matter to a human. The eight hundred million years separating you from your apparent twin is measurable, though. In one sense, that’s trivial too, because even complex entities are bound to be replicated, given time enough, and DNA’s possibilities aren’t by any means endless, but in another sense...we really don’t know yet whether there’s an underlying pattern, or whether there are only pseudopatterns generated by the play of chaos. Then again, in one sense we have all the time in eternity to play with, but in another, we’re in something of a hurry. We’re going to move you now, and get you hooked up. I hope that I’ve told you enough for you to make sense of your experience, because making sense of it is what we need you to do. Either way, we’ll chat again before we send you home.”
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