“No, you wouldn’t,” he said. “Walter Wainwright explained why people don’t like listening to other people’s theories, and I’ve just learned by experience exactly what he meant. I’m a teacher, so I’m supposed to be thankful for any education that comes my way, and I’m trying to be—but there’s no reason why I should inflict my theory of alien abductions on you.”
“Okay,” she said. “So what happens next?”
After a long pause, and knowing that it was probably a stupid thing to do, Steve said: “What do you really think of me, Alison?”
“Really and truly?” she said. “No matter how much it might hurt?”
“Really and truly,” he said. “No matter how much it might hurt.” He was assuming, of course, that she meant that it might hurt him.
“I fancy you more than anyone else I’ve ever fancied in my life,” she said, “and part of me wants to take full advantage of this brief window of opportunity to get you into my bed, if only for one night—but the other part knows that it’s just your fortuitous looks and your accidental charm that attracts me, and that if I did trick you into the occasional bout of side-dish sex, thanks to my uniquely winning combination of slyness and sluttiness, it would only break my heart all the more violently in two every time you moved on again, whether it was to Janine, or Milly, or someone else entirely. So I’m not going to, no matter how much I presently might want to cling to you for as long as we both might live and bear all your children. It’s all about saving face, you see. Even I can do that, though I haven’t much to save.”
“Well,” he said, after another suitable pause. “That’s sanity, I guess.”
“And you see right through it, don’t you? You don’t think for a minute I could keep it up. You think that if you keep on calling, it’s only a matter of time before you’d catch me in a weak moment, and that once you’d broken my resolution you could have me any time you wanted, no matter what you might do in between times.”
Steve suspected that might be true, but he honestly didn’t think he was the kind of person who would behave like that, once it had been described to him in such brutal terms.
* * * *
Steve had his final appointment with Sylvia Joyce on the following Tuesday, at which he informed her that he’d related his abduction experience to the AlAbAn meeting before Christmas, and felt a little better for it. He also told her that he was coping much better with bridges, although he still got slight heebie-jeebies if he pictured the Avon Gorge in his mind’s eye and couldn’t yet know what might happen if he should attempt to board a plane.
“We really should try another regression,” the hypnotherapist told him. “Now that you’ve pieced together the abduction experience and brought it out into the open, we ought to be easily able to go deeper, to discover what lies beneath and behind it.”
“Nothing lies behind and beneath it,” Steve said. “It was a nightmare generated by my phobias. If you repeat the trick, you’ll probably find others—or produce others. I really and truly believe that there is no moment of trauma whose magical revelation will explain my phobias or whose abreaction will cure them. My phobias are just some random physiological accident that I have to learn to get along with as best I can. I’ve got enough to worry about without adding more supposedly-paranormal experiences to the list. I don’t want to start conjuring up imaginary childhood traumas, let alone exploring hypothetical past lives or making contact with the dead.”
“Why don’t you want to make contact with the dead, Steve?” the therapist asked, seizing on his throwaway remark like a hawk pouncing on an unwary shrew.
“Because I don’t. I have way too much trouble with the living,” Steve informed her.
“What do you mean by that, exactly?” Sylvia came back, inevitably.
“I mean,” Steve said, taking a very deep breath, in the expectation that he would need it, “that the girl-friend I had when I started this farce cast me aside like a worn-out sock because I slept with one of her best friends, and wouldn’t speak to me for weeks, but now looks as if she might condescend to get back together, provided I do penance for the sin for as long as we’re together. The said best friend hadn’t been my replacement girlfriend for much more than a fortnight when she started having acute pangs of guilt ill-befitting a traffic warden, and my attempts to help her work through said guilt pangs came to little or nothing, partly because she was distracted by her father’s terminal illness and sudden death and partly because she seems to have decided that she actually wants to give me back to my former girlfriend, in order that she can feel magnanimous. In the meantime, their other best friend has started playing mind-games with me of a kind I’ve never encountered before, and I have no idea how I ought to deal with it, or whether I can deal with it without inflicting a mortal wound on her, or me, or either or both of her friends. I’ll be back in the bear-pit with year eleven in a matter of days, on the long and lonely trail to GCSEs, with increasing course-work anxiety adding an extra layer of insanity to all the customary hormonal turmoil, until the exams finally bring the cauldron to boiling-point. My hypnotherapist, who was only supposed to be teaching me relaxation techniques so that I might be able to get on a plane one day without excessive chemical assistance, wants to delve into my psyche to see if there’s anything in there nastier than what she’s already excavated. To cap it all, I can no longer do my shopping in Sainsbury’s without looking pityingly at all the other poor sods pushing their carts, blissfully ignorant of the fact that the human race will be extinct before the end of the century, except for a few scattered groups who’ll make it into the twenty-second before the methane chokes them or they cook in their own rancid juices. Why, on top of all that, would I want to see dead people?”
“Do you think you might be depressed, Steve?” the hypnotherapist asked, tenderly.
“Of course I’m depressed. Anyone who was in my situation and wasn’t depressed would be off his head. If it wasn’t for....” He stopped, realizing that he’d let her get one up on him again.
“If it wasn’t for what, Steve?” she asked, beaming.
“That’s the worst thing of all,” he told her. “If it wasn’t for bloody AlAbAn, I’d have no bloody support at all. How pathetic is that?”
“It’s not pathetic,” she assured him.
“But they’re all completely crazy!” Steve protested. “And I’ve joined in!” He stopped again, knowing that he’d tied himself in knots. Hadn’t he spent the last few weeks figuring out a theory to explain why the AlAbAn members weren’t crazy at all, but were in fact enlightened souls who had actually contrived to find a precious glimmer of light in the darkness of the imminent future? Hadn’t he almost persuaded himself to believe it? And wasn’t he still hoping, bizarrely, that AlAbAn or his theory might somehow provide a means of sorting out his frustratingly tangled relationships with Janine, Milly and Alison?
“Look,” he said, not giving Sylvia time to needle him again. “Can we just do the relaxation thing one last time, okay? No regressions—let’s just mobilize some inner calm, if there’s any left to mobilize. If there is, I’m going to need every last little bit of it on Thursday night, if Janine gets to tell her story and I have to drive all three of the scheming witches back to Salisbury afterwards. That could be the big crunch, when it all gets sorted, one way or another.”
“Fine,” the hypnotherapist said. “You’re the client. It’s your privilege, and your choice.”
<
* * * *
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Wrath of Dark Time
It would be nice to think that it was all just a dream, but I’m not the kind of person who can take refuge in that kind of cowardly intellectualizing. It was every bit as real as this room, and he was every bit as real as any of the people sitting in it, even though I somehow contrived to forget about him for almost ten years. I only started to remember when I began coming to these meetings, and realized that some of the things that people were talking abo
ut were already familiar to me.
I wasn’t abducted; I just met a time-traveler. It happened in December when I was in year eleven at school, still living with my parents in Codford, although I couldn’t wait to get away. I used to go walking a lot, even in winter—although the winters were getting mild by then—on the plain or the Ridgeway, sometimes going as far as Gravely Wood and back. It was on the Ridgeway that I ran into him, one Sunday afternoon. He didn’t seem to belong there; he was wearing a business suit and light shoes, and he was wearing sunglasses—the reflective kind they call mirrorshades—even though the sky was grey and overcast.
There were usually plenty of people around at that time, even in December—it’s a popular weekend walk—and it’s usually quite safe, but I realized when he stepped into my path that there was no one visible behind him. When I looked round, I saw that there was no one behind me either. He was tall, and, although he didn’t seem particularly muscular, I knew that I wouldn’t have the slightest chance of outrunning him or fighting him off, if he turned out to be a rapist.
“I’m terribly sorry to bother you, Miss,” he said, “but I wonder if you could possibly help me. I’ve suffered a malfunction, and I can’t fix it by myself.”
“What kind of malfunction?” I asked. I thought he might be using the word euphemistically, and that he might want me to do something nasty.
“It’s my right eye,” he said. “To be strictly accurate, it’s the socket. I have the necessary tools to put it right, and I even have a mirror, but I can’t see into the socket clearly enough with the mirror to perform the operation. Even if I wedge the mirror securely to free up both hands, I can’t clear the contacts, let alone realign them. While the contacts aren’t working properly I can’t get back into my...car. The lock has an iris-recognition system, you see. It’s a little too secure, in the circumstances.”
Although the Ridge way’s just a footpath, with hedges to either side, people ride motorbikes there, and joyriders sometimes tear up and down it in stolen cars, but he certainly didn’t look like a joyrider. Nor could I see any sign of a car in the vicinity.
I looked round again, but there was still no one in sight. “What car?” I said, eventually.
“It’s not really a car,” he confessed. “But then, it’s certainly more like a car than a ship. I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but...well, if you agree to help me, you’ll find out soon enough what I am. The last thing I want to do is frighten you, because you’ll need a steady hand if you’re to be of any help, but it’s not going to be easy to avoid causing you a certain amount of alarm, so I might as well get it over with. I’m a humanoid robot from the distant future, and my car is a time machine. Usually, the things my makers build are very well-designed, but human simulacra are rather problematic— because, in all fairness, humans aren’t very well-designed. Natural selection does tend to fudge things somewhat, especially in eras as primitive as this one. Mine’s a creationist era, of course—but for purposes of remote prehistorical research my makers have to produce simulacra, which requires a certain amount of awkward improvisation.”
“Show me,” I said, trying hard not to shiver.
He took off his mirrorshades, and then he took out his right eye. It wasn’t on a stalk—it just came right out. He knelt down so that I could see inside. The back wall of the eyeball was covered in electronic circuitry, and so was the inside of the socket, but there were some tiny specks of grit on the back wall, which seemed to have scarred the circuitry.
“Can you see what the problem is?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, and reported what I could see.
“If they’d equipped me with a proper conjunctiva, it wouldn’t have happened,” he said, with a sigh. “It would have made switching eye units more difficult, and it would have run up the budget. They’ll just say that it was my fault, though, for letting the grit get back there.”
The robot produced a toolkit from his pocket, and showed me the things inside. They were considerably more complicated than your average screwdriver.
“I’ve threaded needles in my time,” I told him, “and helped Dad put together the occasional Ikea flatpack, but I think this is out of my league.”
“I’ll tell you exactly what to do,” he assured me. “All you need is good eyesight, a steady hand and plenty of patience.”
“Famous last words,” I said, “but I’ll give it a go.”
It wasn’t nearly as easy as he’d tried to make it sound, of course. In fact, it was fiendishly difficult. It took me the best part of an hour just to figure out how to hold the necessary tools and how to work their controls. While I worked, though, we talked. At the time, I thought he was just naturally garrulous, or pretending to be chatty to put me at my ease. I figured that he probably didn’t get many opportunities for relaxed conversation, and none at all to talk about himself.
“My makers tried to use local materials, you see,” he said, apologetically, as he tried to explain how it came about that he’d gone wrong, “in the interests of accurate simulation, they said. No nanotech at all—for fear of accidental contamination, they said. I’d have been a lot more expensive, of course if they’d coughed up for state-of-the-art instead of cutting so many corners. If I were the client, I wouldn’t even have taken delivery—but they don’t really care, you see. If there were a serious malfunction, my internal alarm would go off; they’d send a self-destruct command back and I’d disintegrate into my component atoms. Technically, I suppose, I should have notified them of the problem, so they could decide whether or not to do that anyway, but it seemed so trivial—and just because I’m a robot, it doesn’t mean that I don’t have any appetite for continued existence. You people have reasonably good hands, considering that they were practically the first ones on the evolutionary market.
“Exactly how distant is this future you’re from?” I asked.
“About five billion years—a few hundred million after the crucial contact.”
“Contact with aliens, you mean?”
“In a manner of speaking. The system has been in contact with what you’d call aliens for a lot longer, but the conversations are very slow, and tend to be utterly uninteresting—mostly empty social ritual, if you ask me, although no one ever does. The crucial contact was contact with the hyperbaryonic intelligences...except, of course, that they can only contact us by making baryonic simulacra— simulacra not so very unlike me, in principle, although they’re crafted to a much higher standard. They never suffer from bad contacts—not in the literal sense, anyway.”
“What’s a hyperbaryonic intelligence?” I asked.
“I’m sorry—I assumed that you’d understand. According to my files, twenty-first century humans have figured out that the kind of matter you and the stars are made out of—baryonic matter—only accounts for a tenth of the mass of the universe, and that galaxies are held together by the gravitational pull of their companionate hyperbaryonic matter. Perhaps I should have said dark matter.”
“I’m still at school,” I explained. “If I stay on, which I probably won’t, I’ll do English, History and French A levels—no science.”
“Right,” he said. “That’s good, in a way. It reduces the possibility of information-contamination, in case the memory-wipe doesn’t work. The apparatus works perfectly with more advanced brains, but I think there’s some sort of glitch in the native software of the human cerebrum that makes it difficult to synergize with the resident censor. I envy you that—my memory is all too easily wiped. Sorry—I was explaining hyperbaryonic intelligences, wasn’t I? Before the crucial contact, my makers’ ancestors had no idea what might be going on in dark matter, in spite of all the probing devices they developed once they got an elementary grip on the principles of matter/time relativity and the technology of time travel. Some people thought that dark matter was essentially inert, like some sort of anchor holding the baryonic universe in place, while some thought that it was essentially reactive, capable of responses to stimuli bu
t not of initiation. At the other extreme, some thought that godlike Hi’s had actually designed the BU in order to create conditions conducive to the evolution of life and intelligence, maybe just as some sort of game, or maybe as a means to some mysterious end. The latter group were quite excited when the contact came, because they thought they’d be able to find out what the BU’s purpose was, and what its eventual fate would be.”
“And did they?”
“In a manner of speaking. It was a bit of a disappointment, for those that believed what they were told. Some didn’t of course. Personally, I can’t imagine why the Hi’s would lie about it, but that may be a robot thing—everyone makes jokes about robots having no imagination, although I can’t imagine why. After all, we never make jokes about the Ultimate Worms and the Worldplants having too much imagination, although it seems to me that one could make out a very reasonable case for it, given the TT agenda.”
The abbreviations were becoming annoying, but I hadn’t time to ask for clarifications. I had more substantial matters to attend to. “I think that’s got rid of all the grit,” I said, “Repairing the damage isn’t going to be so easy, though.”
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 38