We know, you see—all of you must know it as well as I do— that our brains are capable of entertaining other lives, other memories, other beings. Maybe they’re all put there by neuroworms, or some equivalent technology, but nature has its own technologies, doesn’t it? What human and alien artifice can produce by design, DNA can usually produce by natural selection, given time and the right challenge. We’re already full of nature’s neuroworms. How can we be sure that they’re all really us, and that none of them are conduits to alien experience? It’s unlikely, I know—but once you’ve been an instrument in an alien investigation, eight hundred million years downstream and somewhen unspecifiable, you can’t help wondering.
I can’t, anyway.
I loved Lili. I loved being with her, and I loved her. I loved her childhood, her adolescence, her children, her Lili-larva. I loved her happiness. I still treasure her happiness, whenever I can obtain a glimpse of it. I’m glad I haven’t forgotten her—although I did, for a while, and it wasn’t easy to piece her back together again, fragment by fragment, dredging her up from my dreams, sorting her out, and making her coherent—but I’d done it once and I did it again, and I take immense satisfaction in that. Michelangelo’s David would be proud of me, I think, and the aliens and monsters too. I’d like to think that it helps to prove that we humans aren’t quite as pathetic, incompetent and wretched as we might seem, within the great scheme of things, to creatures who can see that scheme, and arc making headway in understanding it.
I’d like to think that some day, eight hundred million years from now, Lili will catch an occasional fugitive glimpse of me, in the deepest recesses of her dream-memory. I’d like to think, too, that she might contrive to be just a little bit happy that I was once alive. I know that she won’t have any particular reason to be happy about that, but why shouldn’t she? We’ll be together for a little while, after all, and togetherness is good, isn’t it?
Even we think that togetherness is good—and we don’t have any reason to think so that’s anywhere near as good as Lili’s, do we?
<
* * * *
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Clearing Up Misconceptions
“I thought you were going to put your hand up,” Milly said, when Steve put the car in gear and pulled away, with his eyes on the rear-view mirror, in which he could see Walter Wainwright politely opening the passenger door of his Renault Megane for Janine. Steve hadn’t done that for Milly, and had never done it for Janine in all the time they’d been going out—not even in the first flush of sheer infatuation.
“I think I would have put my hand up if you’d put yours up,” Steve said—honestly, so far as he could tell. “I only hesitated—but then, when you didn’t put your hand up, I got stuck in the hesitation. I suppose you got caught in the same sort of trap.”
“No, I just chickened out,” Milly said, appropriating the petty virtue of admitting her fault frankly.
“I’m sorry,” Steve said, defensively.
“It’s okay,” Milly replied, claiming the additional petty virtue of generosity. “I was supposed to go first—that was the deal. When 1 didn’t put my hand up, you must have thought I was pulling a fast one on you. And it wasn’t just me, was it? You were thinking about Janine, too. Even though you’re with me now, you’re always looking at her.”
“Given that we sit side-by-side while she always plonks herself down in the green armchair,” Steve said, his defensiveness edging towards paranoia “that’s a simple matter of geometry. Should I complain because you’re always looking in her direction instead of turning your head through ninety degrees to stare at me?”
“Women are allowed to look at one another,” Milly said. “It’s a completely different emotional experience. Anyway, I’ll have another go next time—at putting my hand up, I mean—whether you do or not, I mean. I am ready. I wish I had done it today, then I wouldn’t have to follow Megan. Her story was much better than mine. I know that the group’s the most supportive support group anyone could ever hope to find, but my story’s not nearly as good as most. I’ve tried to dress it up with philosophizing, the way Megan did, but I’m no good at that sort of thing, and I can’t alter the actual events, can I? That would be cheating. It’s just my luck to have an experience that wasn’t as neat, or pretty or delicate as other people’s. On the other hand, that’s me all over—-bloody typical.”
She stopped then, quite abruptly. Out of the corner of his eye, Steve saw her blush. He’d never seen her blush before; three years’ experience as a traffic warden had rendered her pretty much embarrassment-proof. He realized that she thought she’d revealed too much of herself, not merely in what she’d just said but in her failure to volunteer to tell her story. It was, he thought, the failure of her resolve that she was condemning as “bloody typical”, as well as all the respects in which she thought that she couldn’t quite measure up to Janine.
“Mine lacks literary polish too,” he said, trying to help her out. “Megan obviously did a lot of work on hers before she ever showed her face at AlAbAn, and people like Arthur and Neville have honed theirs by continual repetition. There’s a sense, of course, in which they’re all simply made up, but there’s a more important sense in which they’re not, in which they really are given to us, as they are, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. It would be cheating to switch things around or invent things in the interests of more dramatic tension or smoother development. No matter how mad we all are, there’s a profound method in our madness. The collective unconscious isn’t the kind of thing that has motives or makes purposive plans, but there’s still a sense in which we’re instrumental. We have parts to play.
For once, Milly was prepared to join in. “Megan’s right,” she said. “We’re not entirely ourselves. We might not have huge worms inside us, wearing us like smart cockleshells, but there are still things in us that aren’t really us—things we can’t command and can’t control. Emotional incontinence.”
“I think it might go further than that,” Steve said, reflectively. “The limited empire of reason is part of the human condition. The bits of our minds that we think of as us have always had to battle against impulses from elsewhere—animal spirits, the passions, the id, whatever you want to call them—but this is something different.”
“This?” Milly echoed, not quite getting his drift.
“Alien abduction,” he said. “AlAbAn. The way our stories intersect and overlap. Something else is going on.”
“Of course it is,” Milly said, with a wry smile. “We’re being abducted by inquisitive aliens—probed and analyzed and put to work on all kinds of weird tasks in other times, and maybe on other planets. No wonder we’re not quite ourselves. We’re probably infested with all kinds of escaped neuroworms from a multitude of future eras, whose cross-breeding will produce even more monstrous varieties. Maybe that’s why we’re about to become extinct. It probably has nothing to do with global warming and the release of all that trapped methane—we’re going to be eaten up by parasitic worms from the great swamps that sprawl all over the time-stream. Now that’s a better story by far than the one in my experience. If only I could work that into a tale to tell....”
“Maybe that’s why they’re so interested in us,” Steve said, going with the flow. “Maybe we’re not just the first manifestation of Earthly intelligence. Maybe we’re also the first species to have been destroyed by time-traveling researchers. I have to teach the second-year A-level students about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. I don’t really understand it myself, but what it boils down to, so far as I can see, is that the act of observation affects that which is being observed. In physics, that comes about because very tiny things are very sensitive to the interference that any process of observation involves, but there’s a similar problem affecting the observation of entities that are aware of being observed. The time-travelers may be changing us simply by virtue of all the ways in which they’re trying to observe us—including turning some
of us into instruments of self-observation. Maybe it’s not just us; maybe the same thing will recur all along the time-stream, with every species that becomes interesting being warped and then obliterated by the interest it attracts. You’re right, Mil; that’s a much better tale than the one I dredged up from my so-called recovered memory. If we could make a story out of that—or two stories, to tell at consecutive meetings....”
“It would be cheating,” Milly finished for him.
“Yes, it would,” Steve agreed.
“Not that...,” she began and then stopped.
“Not that we can claim the moral high ground,” Steve finished for her, “when it comes to cheating on our friends and lovers.”
Milly was blushing again, but Steve kept his eyes on the road. “See,” he said, after a slight pause. “Wireless telepathy isn’t all that difficult. We need to get the tales we have out into the open, don’t we? In one sense, we have all the time in the world, but in another...we don’t. I’ll make you a definite promise. I will put my hand up next week—and the next. If you go first, I’ll be right behind you, and if you change your mind again...then I’ll lead the way.”
“I won’t change my mind again,” she said. “I’m really not that sort of person.”
He knew that she wasn’t telling the exact truth, but he also knew why she’d said it. She was reminding him, in what was supposed be a subtle fashion, that he was that kind of person, and couldn’t deny it.
“It’s a definite promise,” he repeated. “No going back. We might not be any happier afterwards, mind—but maybe there are more important things than happiness.”
Milly didn’t reply to that—but then, Milly didn’t know what a big thing it was for him to make that concession, even if she did suspect that he was thinking about Janine, and not so much about happiness as sexiness. In his heart of hearts, though, Steve couldn’t help wondering whether, once he and Milly had both got their secrets out into the open, it might somehow become easier to trade Milly in for Janine than it was just at present, when they all had so much to hide.
They had just reached the outskirts of Salisbury when Milly suddenly grabbed at her coat pocket. Steve didn’t understand what she was doing, at first; then he realized that she must have switched off her mobile’s ring-tone so that it wouldn’t disturb the AlAbAn meeting, but had left the vibrate function activated in case someone wanted to get through to her urgently.
“Hello, Mummy?” Milly said, when she had got the phone out and had read the name of the caller from the display. “No.... Oh.... Yes.... No.... Yes...first thing in the morning. I promise. Yes.”
“Bad news?” Steve asked, as she let the hand holding the phone fall back into her lap.
“Daddy’s had another stroke,” Milly said. “He’s just been taken into hospital. He might die.”
“Oh,” Steve said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said.
* * * *
Steve and Milly had had plans for Friday and Saturday evenings, but they all became redundant when Milly had to take the train to Bath first thing Friday morning, not knowing when she’d be able to return. Steve was able to gladden Rhodri Jenkins’ heart and rake up extra moral credit by actually volunteering to stay on after hours on Friday afternoon. He set out to follow exactly the same schedule thereafter as he’d followed on the Wednesday, except that he bought fish and chips instead of cooking for himself. He’d barely settled down at his PC desk and picked up his headphones, however, when his doorbell rang.
Steve couldn’t help feeling a flutter of hope that maybe it was Janine, who had decided at last that they really ought to have a serious talk, and see if they could patch things up. When he opened the door, though, that faint flicker of hope turned instantly to ashes. It wasn’t Janine; it was her friend Alison.
Alison was dripping wet, because it was raining heavily outside. She had no umbrella and she was bare-headed. Her raincoat was soaked, and so was her almost-blonde hair, which seemed almost grey in the dull light. Her blue eyes weren’t bright at present; they too seemed almost grey, in harmony with her dismal attitude.
Steve froze, holding the door defensively, as if he were facing a charity-collector or a pair of neatly-dressed Mormons.
“Is Milly here?” Alison asked.
“No,” Steve said, bluntly.
“Oh,” Alison said. “Only, I’ve been round to her place, and she’s not there. Janine said that she might be here.”
That cleared up the mystery of how Alison had found out his address—as a schoolteacher, of course, Steve wasn’t listed in the telephone directory—but it still left a lot of questions unanswered, none of which Steve dared ask.
“Well, she isn’t,” Steve said. He realized, though, that the brusqueness of his tone, which was only significant of his own embarrassment, might suggest to Alison that he might be lying, and that Milly might have sent him to the door with instructions to deny that she was there when she really was. It was for that reason that he added: “She had to go to Bath. Her father had a stroke. I don’t know when she’ll be back.”
“Oh,” Alison said, again. “Right. I left her a voicemail, you know, ages ago—twice, just in case she deleted it without listening to it the first time. She still won’t return my calls. I don’t want it to end like this. I don’t suppose, by any chance, that you’d be willing to have a word with her?”
“About what?” Steve said, utterly confused.
“About the situation. It’s unfair. You must see that. It really wasn’t my fault.”
“What wasn’t?” Steve asked, helplessly.
He watched comprehension dawn on Alison’s face. “She hasn’t told you, has she?” she said. “She hasn’t told you what actually happened?”
“I have no idea that you’re talking about,” Steve confessed.
“I didn’t shop her to Janine,” Alison said. “Not deliberately. It was an accident. I had no idea you and she were together, that night in the Pheasant. I had no reason to doubt that Janine would be along any minute, and if I had thought something was going on, I wouldn’t have phoned Jan to tell her. In fact, when Janine phoned me half an hour later, I automatically assumed that she was phoning from the Pheasant, because Milly had told her that she’d seen me, and that we’d talked again about getting together for one of our nights out because I’d had to rule out the previous Tuesday. I assumed that Milly was there with her. I didn’t mean to let the cat out of the bag. I didn’t know there was a cat in the bag, and if I had, I wouldn’t have let it out—but I didn’t, so I did, by accident. It wasn’t my fault. It really wasn’t. Milly won’t listen, though. She blames me. Did she tell you about the letter?”
Steve shook his head, dumbly.
Alison shook hers, because she was on the brink of tears—an impression assisted by the raindrops clinging to her slightly puffy cheeks. “Look,” she said, “Can I come in? I can’t talk about the letter on your doorstep. It’s too...can I come in?”
Steve opened the door fully and stepped aside. Alison came in, and sat down on the settee. Steve pulled one of the dining chairs away from the table and perched on it awkwardly, keeping the bulk of the coffee-table between them. This was, after all, Alison the Slut, who had a dark history of screwing Milly’s boy-friends. She didn’t look much like a scheming temptress at the moment, however—not with her wet hair plastered to her skull and the collar of her blouse soaking wet—and Steve believed everything she’d said about the way in which Janine had found out, entirely accidentally, that he and Milly had been together in the pub on that fateful night.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Steve asked, because that was the sort of thing people were supposed to ask when other people came into their homes.
“No thanks,” Alison replied. “Milly wrote a letter to the Town Hall—addressed to the Town Clerk, of all people, although it got passed around quite a bit. It was about me and Mark, and a few other people working for the council I’d previously had
relationships with. It gave details. Luckily, most of the details were false, because I’d embroidered the tales I’d told Janine and Milly, and that made most of the rest potentially deniable. The allegations were dismissed as malicious or unprovable, so no formal action was contemplated, let alone taken. I haven’t lost my job, and neither has Mark—but even so, it was extremely embarrassing. It got back to Mark’s wife...and one or two of the other wives too, all of whom believe that there’s no smoke without fire. You can’t imagine what it’s like to become the Scarlet Woman of Salisbury throughout the local government system.”
Steve thought briefly about Tracy and Jill and practically being sent to Coventry, but he realized that the comparison must be rather pale. Alison worked at the hub of the civic community, along with hundreds of other local government officials and God only knew what else, in actual corridors of power. He really couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be cast as the Scarlet Woman of Salisbury in circumstances like those; being cast as the Roaring Boy of the city’s second best comp obviously didn’t come close.
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 28