Watson Ian - Novel 06 Read online

  “Wars and hatreds came from this, but the chance of crossfertilization too. That’s what powers civilization. But our history is growing stationary and locked. Our culture is all together again, and all alone because of this. Can it be that these avatars from God’s World are symptoms of a new upsurge of diversity: of a rebound, of the ‘Other’ welling up again psychologically? Where can that ‘Other’ be found nowadays? Only out there, among the stars! You don’t really need to send an alien anthropologist—not that any such person exists! You need someone who senses these currents—senses how they can be played on and manipulated.”

  “Nice commercial.” A certain General Patrick Sutton pursed his lips. “These forces are extremely destructive. Destabilizing, hmm? All the religious groups claiming the avatars as their own personal revelation; that’s desirable, is it?”

  “You speak as though this is simply a psychological event,” repeated Chen Yi-piao doggedly. “Do you think we have collectively imagined the High Space drive into existence? Why should you be thought fit to travel to a far star, if it is only to study the irrational in mankind?”

  “Because the ‘Other’ is out there. It must be. It reaches out and touches the hollow where the ‘Other’ was, in us. It fills it. It gushes into the empty reservoir. This may be how we were able to perceive these messages at all: because of our need for them! God’s World—whatever it is—has reached into the subconscious context of man. It’s a lost context. And now it restores that context abruptly in a world which has no place for it, no social structures adapted to it. Suddenly it becomes objective: in the form of tangible apparitions. The transcendental has come back into our lives. Mystery, strangeness, the numinous, God. That’s the form this ‘Otherness’ takes when it flows in now. The unused symbols are still latent in us.”

  A certain Andre Navarre scribbled a note and passed it down the line of faces ...

  Rain stung along the Rue de Rivoli. Electric Citroens and Peugeots passed silently, wipers performing interrupted harmonic motions, bearing citizens whose lives had all been interrupted, some of whom were terribly afraid, affronted in their bourgeois myth by avatars of Christ, Mohammed, Buddha. Solid men of civilization, managers, they were being manipulated by something out of their control which couldn’t be tamed in tidy convenient token rituals while the life of the real world went on without revelation; they had been touched by something from outside, manipulating the religious consciousness.

  A van with red slogans painted on its side cut in. ‘Bouleversez le Monde!9 ‘La guerre des anges aura lieu.9 ‘Turn the world topsy-turvy.’ ‘The angel war is on.’ Drivers hooted angrily; they wanted to ram that van.

  Here in Paris one should feel safe! The God’s World broadcasts weren’t visible north of the 44th parallel. Maybe that was one reason why this panel was being held in Paris. One might thus prevent something from eavesdropping. God, in a word: deus absconditus, who had recontacted humanity from an alien star.. .

  THREE

  Captain K calls another meeting, summoning everyone personally by interphone. (In vain merely to post notice of a meeting amid this personal timelessness.)

  K stands for Kamasarin, Grigory Arkadievitch. Half-Russian and half-Mongol, and a General in the USSR Kosmonaut Corps —though styling himself plain Captain here—with years in military and astronautical parapsychology research, he is a ‘sensitive’. Consequently he keeps a foot firmly planted in both camps aboard ship: the rationals and the psychics (wickedly abbreviated to rats and psychs).

  Built like a champion wrestler, a lion of the steppes, is our Captain K: a man of severe merriment and a gracious though tough politeness (of courtesies to opponents on grassland wrestling fields). In his broad ruddy wind-chapped Asiatic face, under a bullet haircut which would render him bald were his stubble not so jet-black, are set mesmeric eyes.

  As usual, the meeting (or encounter group, or metascientific rap session) occurs in the mess room. Most of us soon have our butts stuck fast to the adhesive chairs. One or two simply float, albeit not far off the deck. Lese-majesty it would be to float up above Captain K’s head; though, as mercury slides up the thermometer, this may happen if opinions hot up. Peter brings two tubes of tomato juice from the autochef as the last stragglers drift in. (They make a point of rubbing sleep from their eyes.) We pretend there is vodka in the tomato juice.

  A crew list for starship Pilgrim Crusader :

  Grigory Kamasarin (USSR; Captain)

  rats psychs

  Col. Neil Kendrick (USA; computers Heinz Anders (W. Germany; astro-

  & communications; 2nd in com- physics)

  mand) Salman Baqli (Iranian IPR; planet-

  Col. Gus Trimble (USA; astronaut- ology)

  engineer) Rene Juillard (France; biology)

  Maj. Ritchie Blue (USA; astronaut- Zoe Denby (USA; comp. religion)

  pilot /navigator) Sachiko Matsumura (Japan; lingu-

  Maj. Natalya Vasilenko (USSR; istics)

  astronaut-doctor; life-support Peter Muir (Scotland; parahistory)

  systems) Amy Dove (England; psycho-

  Dr Li Yu-ying (China; biochemistry) sociology)

  Mme Wu Chen-shan (China;

  historiographer / commissar)

  Jacobik (Czechoslovakia; weapons

  systems, deserving no first name)

  So you see, the punch, the hard technology is entirely in the hands of the heavy rationals, American and Soviet, with Chinese support. (Except of course, for Kamasarin’s hybrid role; but he is loyal.) The political trigger fingers are orthodoxly Christian, or their orthodox Marxist antitype: bedfellows in defence of established history. We psychs, who hold the ship in High Space by our presence, are only supportive scientists, really. We may be the batteries that sustain the flight, but the switchgear is in other, harder hands; and if the ship travels the slower for that, so much the worse, so long as it travels.

  We visualize High Space as a huge pyramid, apeing the pyramidal shape of the alien drive itself—the higher step you are on, the closer you are to the other side. So we psychs leaven the flight; we make it rise. We’re the horses in harness, pulling the royal chariot along (albeit horses much deferred to in our whims). No doubt we should arrive much sooner without the drag of the rat contingent, yet this is a political crusade as much as a pilgrimage, and besides, without rational stabilization the flight might enter a fantasy domain—for we are, in a very real sense, imagining our journey’s progress; it is a journey through, by virtue of, imagination.

  Affectionately Peter slips his arm around me, and I fondle him. Dr Li stares frostily at us—pretty creature, as tormentingly sexless as a jade figurine of herself.

  “Maybe it is your pleasure that delays us,” she hints. “Maybe it holds our journey back. You wish it not to end.”

  “Your disapproval delays us, dear lady,” smiles Peter. Li stares up at the clock ticking on mechanically, bearing no relationship to the time that any of us feel. According to that, we are at Day 41, Hour 13. To me it feels no longer than the day before yesterday since we left. It is always the beginning here.

  “Fine way to run a ship,” remarks Li, not looking directly at Captain K but criticising him nonetheless. Captain K appears infected by our joy, however. Rene and Zoe are holding hands too, exchanging enchanted glances.

  “There must be amity aboard,” pronounces our Captain: his order of the day. “In one sense this is a journey of love.”

  “Love?” snorts Jacobik, the hatchet-faced. Slightly built, really, starved in his boyhood; bony-nosed, witch-chinned, with dark eyes which never seem to blink—as though somebody has cut the lids off them. He is thinking of his missile bays and lasers. His fist firms. “Love? After what they have done to our civilization? That clock tells lies. We’ve been flying forever. We’ll never get there! ”

  “Do we send a warship to worship God?” asked Salman gently. (Yes, the meeting has begun. The subject, invariably and as always, is ourselves, our attitude to the voyage and to the appa
ritions broadcast to the Earth.)

  “Did they say anything about worship, though?” enquires Captain K, deftly balancing both sides of the argument. “We are summoned. It is a crusade to the holy places. Yet who occupies them? Who besieges them? Why are they holy? Anyway, we aren’t heavily armed against a whole world that can project solid images across the void. And they set those size constraints, not us.” He smiles distantly at Peter and me. “It is more of a children’s crusade.”

  “We all know what happened to that,” sniffs Wu. Comrade Wu: small, dapper, too tight-skinned for her forty-five years to have left a single mark on her. One thinks of her as Madame Wu—she has such autocratic presence. Alongside sexless biochemist Lady Li, the Chinese have sent as orthodox and historically adept a politician and diplomat as one could imagine: diadem of a mandarin Marxist court.

  From her throne, she denounces us.

  “We are being thrust back into childishness aboard this ship— into infantile gratification and superstition—just as they would thrust our whole culture back, into childishness. I’m surprised at your talk of love, Captain Kamasarin. You grow infected with this”—she gestures at Rene and Zoe, Peter and myself—“this euphoria which loses touch with time, with history, with Earth’s true situation. Making love is only like drinking a glass of water. It is a materialistic need.” (And this is a set speech.) “To raise it to the level of a spiritual power that speeds our ship along is another part of their same trickery. Even if the drive does seem to work that way, still we must not trust it.”

  “Actually, it’s more like a hallucinogenic drug experience,” suggests Natalya the flaxen-headed, of the turned-up nose. “It lasts much longer, but isn’t quite so drastic. Though it does have its troughs and its crests. These tricks of quasigravity, the dissolution of time, the paranoias and ecstasies. We shall all return to normality when we re-enter normal space. We must simply tolerate the constant dissolution of one’s sense of reality till then. Apparently it’s our ticket through interstellar space. So let us tolerate it rationally. As indeed you do.”

  Peter fidgets; Peter disagrees. “It seems more like the original shaman flight to me—a flight to knowledge.” (To each it seems what they themselves are.) “We’re going up into the sky like the shaman of old, back when there was free communication between all men and the Beyond, before we lost touch. Only, we’re flying in a steel ship, rather than on a bird’s back . . .”

  “We still call ’em birds,” grins Ritchie Blue, our farm-boy astronaut, least offended of the rats by the psychic component of our voyage, perhaps since he was once close to nature, if only from the cab of his Dad’s grain harvester.

  Wu looks offended, but Kamasarin nods understanding^, his mind (I imagine) on the last few seeds of the dying Siberian shaman magical tradition, barely a memory in some centenarians’ heads, painstakingly gleaned from among the Tungus, the Reindeer People, the Yakuts, the Mongols, and replanted by the paraphysicists outside Novosibirsk.

  “Costly ticket,” grunts Gus Trimble. “A trap.” He speaks in crossword clues, in anagrams; as though wishing to say something else, only he doesn’t know what. He sweats: a meaty man, with padded hips and butt that fail to emulate Captain K’s sculpture of muscle.

  “Why should it be a trap?” asks Peter angrily. “If they had simply bombarded the world with inexplicable visions and quasibeings and had not come through with the High Space drive so that we can follow them up—well, we might justifiably feel paranoid. As it is—”

  “They’re manipulating human history,” Wu interrupts. “They destroy the very essence of history—which is human practice, human action. That’s why Colonel Trimble rightly speaks of a trap.” (Though actually she spoke of it first. But such is her diplomacy. Or cunning.) “He senses this accurately. Whereas he”—a finger pokes out at Peter, and with her other hand upon her hip she is a teapot with a scalding, scolding spout—“he brags about primitive shamans. Is that to be our astronautics from now on? You see how the God’s World broadcasts rob us of our really noble, authentic human dreams by seeming to make archaic, obsolete religious dreams come true! It’s pitiable that we should fly on a hand-me-down broomstick fuelled by superstition. The fact that it will not work without ‘psychic’ sensitivity is the real trap.”

  “If it does work,” sneers Jacobik. “If we really are going anywhere. If we can return.”

  “Ach, the probability of our arrival goes on rising,” breaks in Heinz Anders. “At least, most of the time it does. As to returning, we will find that out. One would hardly go to so much trouble to maroon fifteen humans light years from home.” (Would one?)

  “Pitiable,” repeats Madame Wu, still pouring tea, “that our history is seen by many now as guided—however evasively—by emanations from another world. Most pitiable of all that the artefact we have found—the main drive of this ship—suggests to these same people that our whole technology is merely the feeble rediscovery of some ancient, star-guided wisdom.” Her lip curls on the last word. “It diminishes man. That is the intention of the trap. That is why we carry our weapons with us—not because they summoned us to some vague contest.”

  “Those missiles are hardly planet-busters,” regrets Jacobik, as though a planet-buster exists. In his dreams, no doubt it does! “Tactical stuff. This ship’s too damn small. Come and fight, my little ones—but don’t bring your catapult, just bring a wooden sword.”

  “Perhaps,” says Wu, “the trap was waiting to be sprung all these centuries in the Gobi desert, instead of being projected there overnight. Perhaps the broadcasts all came from the pyramid machine itself? Perhaps that has been recording and assessing human activities for a very long time? We hardly understand its workings, do we?”

  “That’s a new point of view,” allows Captain K. “Yet it’s hardly supported by the geographical cut-off line of the broadcasts.”

  “With the pyramid found near the very boundary? I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this of late, Comrade Captain. The High Space pyramid may be much more complex than even we suppose. It did ‘grade’ the candidates for the mission. It is,” she speaks bitterly, “responsive to human thought patterns. Some would say to some numinous sensitivity. Why shouldn’t it soak up human thoughts world-wide?”

  “Some ancient traditions do suggest a centre of, well, power somewhere in or around the Gobi,” recalls Zoe, our priestly negress. “There was the legend of the Kingdom of Shambhala, north of Tibet. An invisible redoubt of magical wisdom was supposed to exist somewhere there. Are you suggesting that this tradition was based on the presence of some kind of psychic sponge-cwm-time bomb—which some people, Tibetan lamas, for example, were aware of?”

  “A mind bomb,” echoes Captain K, with one slight change of wording, as if to lead Wu and Zoe on. “A psychic projector? A sort of God machine, switching on periodically?”

  “To keep us all in thrall, in ignorance!”

  “No,” frowns Ritchie Blue. “The thing was custom-built to take us to the stars. Well, to one particular star.”

  “Just how,” Wu asks him, “is it known out by 82 Eridani that we have achieved sufficient know-how to lift it into space and build a ship around it?”

  “Extrapolation from our radio output?”

  “They didn’t contact us by radio, boy,” snaps Trimble. “Their approach was a damned sight more direct! We might have been under surveillance—mental surveillance, deep down. Maybe that pyramid, maybe something else. I guess some of us—and it could be a whole lot of us—have been growing sort of opaque to that surveillance for some time now! Our third eye has shut up shop. We’ve been getting a sight too rational for their liking.” He glares bullishly at us psychs.

  Captain K flexes his arms, stretching strong fingers out. “We must arrive in agreement and amity. I believe it is good to talk out our differences of opinion like this.”

  And quite suddenly I see the truth behind these meetings. It’s as though I’ve read his mind, for the thought leaps fully formed
into my brain, and it does have a ‘flavour’ of Grigory Kamasarin attached to it as surely as there’s a flavour of whichever lovers are responsible, in the surge of quasi-gravity that tugs our bodies but touches something too within our minds. That thought is that the authorities on Earth, who have fully confided alone in Captain K, hope that we fifteen human beings, in constant proximity to the activated High Space drive which ‘registers’ at least half of our number intimately, will somehow achieve a collective insight into the true nature of the alien device. The thought is that we shall measure its essence by collective parallax from all our various viewpoints, some of which are safely opaque to it. That’s why he condones—no, encourages the fusion of love-making, over and above the presumed speeding of the flight. He hopes that we shall somehow fuse into a consensus mind—if only for a moment, if only in someone’s dream! —and perceive the real purpose. We are a flying laboratory of ourselves, as well as being pilgrims, crusaders, scientists, whatever; and of course, who better than Grigory Kamasarin to run it?

  I stare at our Captain, till Peter grows restive at my inattention to himself. Captain K sits invulnerable, a distant smile on his face.

  While Jacobik launches into some revolting gratuitous anecdote about flaying people alive and about executioners sticking heads back on their victims with glue behind the guillotine . . .

  We listen to the sadistic ravings of the Czech as though hypnotised by a snake. What is this doing to our probability of arrival? Yet no one cuts him off. One is free to say anything at these meetings. Let him vent it all out of his system; let him get it off his chest. I’m scared, though. He’s a madman. He must have been under huge restraint before, to fool the panels. This side of him has only betrayed itself now in High Space. It’s as Natalya says: paranoia, hallucination, dissolution of reality threaten us constantly. Oh, let love conquer them!