Ghost Dancers

by Brian Craig

  “During those same seventy years our imaginative writers have produced countless lurid accounts of the invasion of our world by alien life—but they have almost always assumed that the invaders would be beings like ourselves, who have crossed space in mighty armadas of starships. Suppose, Mr Zero, that the invasion did not come like that—suppose the would-be conquerors and colonists of earth did not send armies bearing guns and bombs, but only tiny packages of DNA, whose task is to work from within—to invade the bodies of all living creatures on earth, not simply as destroyers but as changers, whose task is to transform our biosphere into an alien Eden, ready and waiting for a new Adam and Eve. Would that not be the method of a truly sophisticated race of invaders, Mr Zero? And would not the first evidence of such an invasion be the emergence of a new and multifarious race of mutants?”

  The Kid was stunned. He knew that a tape had been made of the interactive hallucination which he had produced before being woken up after his journey from America, but he also knew from having viewed Pasco’s and Preston’s tapes that such a transcription was very limited. As Yokoi had pointed out, the visuals could be taped, but not the interpretations. His reflections on the substance of his own dream were as private as his reflections on the provocative content of Pasco’s. There was no way that Tanagawa could know about his emotional responses to the images of a reborn earth which he had dreamed up in collaboration with Yokoi’s computers, and no way he could know about the trains of thought which Pasco’s nightmare had triggered off. How come, therefore, this bizarre hypothesis of Tanagawa’s could mesh so easily with his own fantasies?

  I have a remarkably vivid imagination, thought the Kid, remembering what Yokoi had said to him before, considering my limited education. The lousy bastards think I’m one too! They think I’m the freaking mutant, not Lady Venom. They think I’m carrying some alien disease—that’s why I’m worth two hundred thousand a day to them.

  He didn’t say a word of that out loud, though. After all, he might be wrong—and he certainly didn’t want to put the idea into their heads if it wasn’t already there.

  “You believe the earth is being invaded by alien life-forms?” he said, trying as hard as he could to sound sarcastic and incredulous.

  Tanagawa spread his hands wide to disclaim any such belief. “It is a fantasy,” he insisted, very politely. “Mere hypothesis, and nothing more. A nightmare, if you will—a mere horrorshow. But until we know the truth, how can we conquer our nightmares, and overcome our horrors?”

  The Kid remembered something else that Tanagawa had said earlier, about how worrying it was that the directors of Mitsu-Makema didn’t know who their opposite numbers in GenTech actually were. Did Tanagawa, he wondered, also have nightmares about who, or what, might be behind the org which might be on the verge of owning the entire earth? Was that why it mattered, even to sandrats and panzer boys, who might win the war between the corps?

  “You’re crazy,” said the Kid, who was still a long way from mastery of Japanese etiquette.

  “We are living in crazy times, Zero-san,” said Yokoi gently. “Do you not have a saying in America, to the effect that anyone who isn’t a little crazy these days has to be completely insane?”

  “We do,” admitted the Kid, more soberly than he would have liked. “We surely do.”

  And as he said it, he asked himself the question whose answer would hit his own personal jackpot, which was: What if they’re right? What the freaking hell am I going to do if the bastards are right? What if I am a freaking alien?

  He knew that it would probably tax his vivid imagination to the full to figure out an answer.

  5

  You’re moving through a red world, which blazes here and there into incandescent yellows and whites, and fades in its shadowed regions to burgundy and black. It’s difficult to make out shapes, because nothing is in sharp focus, and even the shape of the world itself is wrong; it’s as though you’re looking up through a piece of bottle-glass at a jumbled panorama which sometimes seems impossibly wide and at others impossibly narrow.

  Your field of vision alters as you move, rhythmically canting from side to side. You’re hugging the ground, but you can’t be crawling because there’s no sensation of lurching. You wish that you could feel the pressure of your body against the rock, but you can’t. Nor can you hear the sound which you make when you move—though there ought to be a sound, which you could surely pick up if your hearing weren’t impaired.

  (There are probably other senses which are guiding your host, though, which are unavailable to you.)

  You pause, basking beneath the brilliant sky, spreading yourself out to soak up its energy.

  Time changes, as if it were folding in on itself; the world fades and flickers.

  (You struggle for some kind of description which you can offer yourself in order to help you understand what is happening. It’s as though your consciousness is fading—not into a dream, because you know that you’re dreaming already—but from sharp attentiveness into distant reverie. You wish that you knew what sensations ought to accompany such a drift, if any should. It might be like drug-induced euphoria, but there’s no way to know.)

  Nothing happens until you begin to move again, sliding away from the bright-lit surface into the burgundy shadows—but you still don’t really feel the force of the passing moments; you still can’t recapture the state of full attentiveness. You bury yourself in shadow, reducing the bright world to a crevice which cuts slantwise across your field of vision, blurring to become an undifferentiated river of light.

  Time passes; you can’t tell how much.

  You’re on the move again now, coming out of the shadows again, into a world very different from the one you left. The sky, which was a field of fire, has now become a pit of darkness. The shadows are softened now, though the surfaces over which you move have not yet faded from dark red to black. You move swiftly, with a sureness which suggests purpose and competence.

  Suddenly, there’s something in your field of vision which burns with an oddly frail and fugitive brightness as it moves among the shadows. Its radiance cannot compare with the brighter lights which surrounded you before, but in this darkened world it stands out like a candle-flame.

  (You wonder what attitude your host has to this curious dancing blur. Is it perceived as the epitome of beauty? Is there any luscious anticipation of pleasure in the sight of it, or the following of it? How does the magnet of instinctive necessity feel to the hunting snake which is thus drawn along? What can it possibly be like to live in an inner world of feelings unpolluted by thoughts?)

  The end, when it comes, is unexpectedly swift. You move with astonishing rapidity, and the candle-flame which was a mouse or a frog is suddenly gone—engulfed, you must presume.

  (Your host, no doubt, can feel the shape and taste of it as it passes back from mouth to throat, but you have only borrowed the Lady’s sight; your feelings are your own, and they are alien to this mode of experience. You cannot truly be a man dreaming that he is a snake; you are a much stranger hybrid than that—a man eavesdropping on that insufficient fraction of a snake’s dream which can be captured by a cunning machine.)

  You’re moving again, but once again your attentiveness is slipping. Once the purposes of instinct are served, your senses slide into that more quiescent mode which is not sleep but which nevertheless detaches you from time. You can’t judge the passing of the minutes or the hours, and the world becomes so dark and empty that you can’t follow its subtle changes, despite the fact that you aren’t still.

  Nothing changes until your eye is caught again by a flicker of fire, at which point your consciousness is sparked again and made to rejoin the stream of time.

  This time, the fire is much greater in extent, though no brighter—indeed, its brightness is patchy, greater at the extremities of its enormous being than at the connective core.

  (As you struggle to make sense of the second-hand vision you’re suddenly reminded of the effort
of trying to perceive a human figure in that pattern of stars which early astronomers dubbed Orion; that analogy provides you with the clue which you shouldn’t have needed. Once you’ve realized that it’s a giant at which you’re looking, with face and hands illuminated more brightly than those parts of the body which are obscured by clothing, it becomes easier to make sense of the movements of the blur.

  You realize, with an odd sense of wonderment, that you’re probably looking at yourself as seen through the eyes of your closest companion—that you’re peering into a peculiar distorting mirror. You wish, briefly, that you had seen yourself through Pasco’s eyes, or Carl Preston’s, for the sake of comparison, because the alienness of your appearance now would seem less troublesome and less threatening if you’d already undergone transmutation by the eyes of human beings.

  You try to figure out what you’re doing, but it isn’t easy. The movements of your limbs and body have to be inferred, and the fact that the image remains stubbornly unfocused means that three dimensions of movement are effectively reduced to two. If you were running or leaping it would be easier, but you seem to be doing something much more ordinary—and you’re already beginning to fade into the folds and confusions of collapsed time, because you’re too familiar to warrant the attention of the Lady—too much a part of her strange, private and thought-free world….)

  Time passes, and…

  The Kid tried as best he could to explain what it was like being inside Lady Venom’s being looking out, but it was difficult. Dr Yokoi tried to help him by asking questions—but when they had finished, the Kid couldn’t believe that they had got much out of it. All that Yokoi’s two-way linkages could pick up were visual images, and it was impossible to judge whether such images contained any evidence of alienness or not. There was no hint of any explanation for the special rapport which existed between the snake and the man.

  That explanatory void worried the Kid now, though it never had before. He had asked himself for the first time whether the talent which sealed the special relationship was really the Lady’s, or whether it was his own. If it was his own it seemed to be operating independently of any conscious direction, but that might be only one more facet of his alienness, if he was an alien.

  If.

  He still didn’t believe that he was—but ever since Junichi Tanagawa had obliquely raised the possibility, it had preyed on his mind. When Yokoi finally stopped asking questions about his impressions of the Lady Venom tape, the Kid was quick enough to dive in with a few of his own.

  “Do you believe what Tanagawa said about the possibility of earth having been invaded by alien life?” he asked—though he realized even as he said it that the question was wrongly phrased.

  “It is not a matter for belief,” said Yokoi contentedly. “It is conjecture only.”

  “But you think it’s a strong enough possibility to be worth checking?”

  “All possibilities must be checked. The facts are very disturbing, and we must leave no hypothetical stone unturned in searching for an explanation.”

  “Which particular facts are were talking about?” asked the Kid.

  “The changes in the earth’s climate and the increasing rate of mutation are the fundamental observations which cause us to be anxious. There are other observations too which might be unconnected, or which might be secondary effects. There are evident changes in patterns of human behaviour, which tempt some to refer to a plague of madness—but we know that human behaviour can and does become very peculiar in response to extreme situations.”

  “Ghost dancing,” said the Kid, in a low tone. “It’s all just ghost dancing.”

  “Perhaps,” said Yokoi. “This is not the first time in history when environmental changes have stimulated an explosive growth in Millenarian fervour. The Roman Empire was extended during a phase of global warming, and contracted again when the climate began to get colder. The initial growth and rapid spread of Christianity may itself have been connected with that brief environmental destabilization—but in its early phase Christianity, like all the other great religions, was essentially defensive; faith and hope were effective mainly at a personal level. Collective actions on behalf of the faith were necessarily

  small-scale –the Crusades and the Inquisition resulted in the deaths of thousands of individuals, but could not harm the planet itself. Now…things are different.”

  “I don’t know,” said the Kid dubiously. “I’ve run into a few followers of these weird cults on the road, and I hear the horror stories that get bandied about—the human sacrifices and that sort of thing. It’s all small-scale…except maybe the Josephites in Deseret.”

  “That is not the only exception,” Yokoi told him. “The Catholic Church has undergone considerable changes lately, in the style of its operations. But what causes our directors most anxiety is the secret organization known as the Temple. How numerous its members are we cannot tell, and it certainly does not follow the ancient pattern of the great religions in trying to win converts among the poorest and least powerful members of society. For this reason, its growth is very unobtrusive. But it differs from the old religions in the power which is already at its disposal—technological and economic power out of all proportion to its membership.

  “The Sioux ghost dancers who were slaughtered at Wounded Knee had only imaginary armour, Zero-san, and their guns were inferior. But what would the history of the world be like if their ghost-shirts really had been invulnerable, and their bullets unstoppable? The Temple may have a very considerable arsenal to add to its armour of invisibility.”

  “I never heard of the Temple,” said the Kid warily. “It can’t be that big.”

  “Nor have the two men who were captured along with you. Nor, I suspect, has the famous Dr Zarathustra. Nevertheless, there is a possibility that the Temple are the true owners of GenTech. We have only the vaguest notion of what GenTech’s ultimate aims and ambitions may be, but another of the hypotheses which must be considered if we are to account for the rapid deterioration of the world’s environments is that their pollution is being deliberately engineered.”

  “By GenTech?”

  “Ultimately, yes,” Yokoi asserted.

  “But Mitsu-Makema is, no doubt, utterly innocent. Its directors are all good and humane men who would make the earth into a paradise if only they could. None of its industries produce poisonous wastes, none of its workers are exploited, and none of its PR men would dream of manufacturing black propaganda in the hope of convincing its loyal employees that the rival corps are run by the Devil himself.”

  Dr Yokoi shrugged his shoulders in an oddly delicate fashion.

  “Yeah,” said the Kid disgustedly. “It ain’t a matter for belief, but all possibilities must be considered. It’s bullshit, Dr Yokoi. If a sandrat like me can see it, why can’t you? Are you so sure your own bosses have clean hands? Maybe they’re the inner enclave of the Sons of Okhotsk, or the Blood Banner Society.”

  “Mitsu-Makema is a multinational corporation, not a Japanese company,” Yokoi reminded him. “GenTech is more powerful, even in Japan, than we are. This has nothing to do with nationalism, Zero-san—it has to do with the survival of all life on earth.”

  “And what exactly are M-M doing to fight the good fight,” asked the Kid sarcastically, “apart from improving horrorshow technology?”

  “We have what we call the Ark project,” Yokoi informed him. “We are hollowing out vast underground caverns in several remote parts of the world—there is one beneath us here—where we hope to establish closed ecological systems. We hope to preserve independent biospheres there no matter what happens on the surface. If alien life has indeed invaded the earth, we will have a redoubt to which we can retreat—and if there really are men who have the power and the will to visit an apocalyptic catastrophe upon their fellow men, we may be able to ensure that they are not the sole survivors.”

  “Are you offering me a ticket for one of these underground Arks?” asked the Kid.
r />   “You have a chance to earn one,” countered Yokoi.

  “I bet you’ve already earned yours.”

  “That hardly matters,” Yokoi observed. “I am old and you are young. My interest in the farther reaches of the future is personally disinterested, although I must confess to a strong desire to serve the needs of my children and my grandchildren. You, on the other hand, may have the chance to witness the coming apocalypse—no matter what form it may take.”

  “I’ve been living on borrowed time since I blew up my first GenTech wrapper,” said the Kid sourly. “Ever since that disc came into my hands the debt-collectors have been out in force. I didn’t have much of a future even before I went up against GenTech—even before I first joined the Low Numbers. People like me don’t think about the future, Dr Yokoi. We can’t afford to.”

  “You can now,” said Yokoi insistently. “You can and you must.”

  The Kid had hardly opened his mouth to reply—without knowing exactly what he was going to say—when alarm bells started ringing. Yokoi leapt to his feet and ran to the computer consoles which ran along one side of the wall. The Kid could see that half a dozen red lights were blinking, and he didn’t have to be told that whatever was wrong was nothing trivial.

  Suddenly, the immediate future seemed to be something worth worrying about.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Is the reactor going to blow?”

  “We are under attack,” said Yokoi, in an incongruously soft tone.

  “Attack?” said the Kid, totally fed up with being made to sound like a stupe, always incredulous.

  “Not by aeroplanes and men with guns,” the scientist added. “But the attack is no less deadly for all that—the attack is coming through the datanet, blasting the webs which connect us informationally with the outer world. We have been invaded by hostile software. We have severed all our communications links with the outside world, but it may be too late. Our systems are going crazy, and we cannot shut them down.” While he said all this he was just standing there, looking on—an innocent bystander in a crazy costume.