by Ian Watson
“Didn’t Freud say that flying’s a sex symbol? Hence the flying saucer.”
“Oh, it’s obviously sexual,” he agreed. “I mean, the control room being shut off. That punishment by pinpricks afterwards. The Lover-woman’s breasts sprouting like falsies—he’d never seen a girl’s breasts before and was making them up. The hairlessness. The fact that she couldn’t talk—because he wouldn’t know what to say. I know he’s from the countryside, but he’s an only child, and his mother was Italian, so maybe they’re a bit straitlaced.”
“You have a funny concept of the country! Swains and milk-maids tumbling in the hay… Did you say that the space-woman was called Luvah? And one of the men Tharmon?”
“It sounded like ‘Loova’. But I know what he meant!”
“No you don’t, John. You’re being illiterate. I remember now. Those are both characters in Blake’s Prophetic Poems. Luvah’s a man, not a woman. He’s a demi-God who nurses infant Mankind. Bater on, he gets locked up in Ulro—which is a sort of deep-down Hell. Enitharmon, not plain ‘Tharmon’, is another demi-God, the enemy of Luvah.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I am. I used to love Blake when I was at college. He seemed so… magical. Such an imagination!”
“So Luvah’s really male? Michael was screwing a man in his fantasy, I suppose that explains the tacked-on breasts! The poor kid must be fairly knotted up inside. Repressed homosexuality—which he can’t acknowledge… Damn. What should I do?”
“He probably just had some pederastic frolic when he was a schoolboy. That doesn’t make him queer. He has a steady girl-friend, hasn’t he? If you go digging into this, you’ll just mess him up.” Mary regarded homosexuality not as wicked, but as faintly absurd. It seemed so restrictive. She was a dark, lithe woman, growing stocky of late, who had handed on her strong bushy black hair to both the children, Rob and Celia. With her firm jaw, long nose, and brown-flecked eyes deep-set close together, she recalled (to herself) the black and white collies of her youth in the Welsh sheep-farming hills: well-trained and masterful, godlike bolts of energy to the bleating, scurrying flock; however, at heart, with a strong scent for the fold. They had an instinct for penning in securely, amidst the intoxicating wild. The playful beast gambolling round the garden was only a satire on that sort of sheepdog, more like a sheep and named accordingly.
“It’s fascinating, a psychic structure as powerful as that. If only the damn recorder hadn’t gone on the blink! Well, I’ll just have to repeat the whole performance. I must know how a hypnosis could get so completely out of hand. I suspect, Mary, that I might just have stumbled on a new discrete state of consciousness distinct from the usual trance terrain. An independent subsystem. In a word, a new ASC—” Freudian interpretations, besides being out of fashion, were really far too simplistic.
“ASC?”
“An Altered State of Consciousness. One which can be explored through hypnosis, since it shares some of the same mental structures, but it can’t be controlled by hypnosis. That’s very strange. I can’t pass this up. Besides, there’s my responsibility to the boy… This thing’s like an independent, alien ego within the mind: a parasite one with its own will and initiative which copies the ‘shape’ of a particular ASC—”
The kitchen door flew open. In bounded Shep, to thump his tail against their legs before subsiding, panting. Rob followed, a dark wiry youngster. Looking a little like a Romany boy, in school cap and blazer rather than rags and earrings, he stood waiting for his palm to be crossed with silver.
“You saw I left the mushrooms, Dad?”
(“And did you hear me shouting?”) “They’re fungi,” corrected Deacon.
The sound of the front door banging shut—Celia, at seventeen, asserting herself with a newly acquired doorkey—brought Shep to his feet again.
“We still aren’t going to eat them,” said Mary.
“Not eat what?” asked Celia—a dark girl with her mother’s ebullient hair and the big oval face of her father; coming in, she wrestled Shep as the dog planted its polar bear paws on her shoulders.
“Our parasol mushrooms,” said the boy.
“I don’t trust fungi,” explained Deacon.
“Maybe they’re hallucinogens?” insinuated Celia. “Perhaps you could feed them to the Consciousness Research Group and find out?”
Deacon shrugged. “We’ve got a Ministry of Health contract to study the effects of cannabis—that’s Bernie Jorden’s line. And Rossiter and Sally Pringle do some work with the mental hospital. That’s about all.”
“Aha, the chemistry of madness,” chuckled Celia. “Serotonin and LSD? It’s so false, grooving away in your own heads on official time while kids are being busted on the street for doing research into their heads in their own way.”
“Outside of any framework, Celia.” It was an old argument.
“The framework called life, Dad. It’s one big experiment from birth to death. And if you cross the road at the wrong time and die, even that’s okay because you made the choice.”
“That seems like an excellent reason for having a proper framework for crossing roads: roads in the head as much as roads in town.”
“Really? What does ‘proper’ mean? You wrote in the intro to your own book that what’s irrational nonsense for the everyday mind can be perfectly valid and true in another state, and it can tell us a damn sight more (“Celia!” Mary snapped) about what being alive and conscious are. I quote chapter and verse.”
Celia was only making waves—paddling a little way from shore, the better to return. So he hoped; so Mary hoped.
“I doubt you’d drive a car better if you were high on berserker mushrooms,” he said to her.
“Most people already drive as though they’re stoned Vikings. Most people are crazy, Dad. They’re stuck in a mad repetitive trance. You wrote that.”
“I didn’t say they’re mad exactly. What I said is that there’s a constant loading stabilization of ‘brain chatter’ that keeps us in an ordinary baseline state of consciousness most of the time.”
“In a trance, like most of the teachers at school.”
“You’re not implying,” inquired Mary, “that it would be a nice constructive idea if you took drugs?”
“Oh Mummy.” Celia’s face became spiritual. “I just can’t stand hypocrisy. Dad has all these far-out ideas, but…” She gestured at the neatness of the garden; and Mary smiled faintly, in complicity.
Quite abruptly, Deacon felt grief-stricken.
Three
Loitering by the off-licence hatch of the Bunch of Grapes, Michael watched the glitter of upside-down spirits bottles reflected in cut-glass mirrors behind the brightly-lit bar, and listened to the grumble of talk and the clack of the fruit machine. A bar billiards cue rose high in the air as someone tried to bring it to bear on the ball without butting too many backs. He swayed slightly as he waited for Suzie, pleasantly tipsy. Tonight everything would be fine. He felt no urgency—no prematurity.
She came out of the toilet: bouncy, dressed in fray-bottomed blue jeans and a chunky-knit fisherman’s sweater, her red hair descending in crinkly wedges like some rusty ziggurat. Draping one arm around her, he tucked his hand into the back pocket of her jeans, and they set off across the Common towards the distant lights of the highrise Halls of Residence, rocking slightly about a common centre of gravity located somewhere in her abdomen. Behind them wagged moon shadows, for the Moon was high and dazzling, only a shave off full, the rays from Tycho and Copernicus so bright that you couldn’t make out any details.
A church clock struck ten as they reached the mid-way lake. Apart from the white boat of a swan sailing towards a fellow white hump on the small stone island, the whole Common seemed deserted.
“Mike, look up there! Look at the Moon!”
A bright violet orb—a halfpenny to the Moon’s penny—floated beside the Moon. As they stood staring up, the mysterious object became a dazzling ultramarine, painting their hands and f
aces with ancient savage woad.
“It’s so cold!” Suzie burrowed into him. His body felt frozen, as though the Common had suddenly been translocated beyond the Arctic Circle, and they were standing on a field of blue ice.
“It’s like a great blue eye, watching us! Mike, I’m scared.”
The false moon swelled, competing in cold brilliance with the real Moon. Bands of green and yellow swirled round rapidly, now, bearing a hot red blotch: the pupil of an eye, hunting.
Suddenly the glowing orb darted downwards and sideways in a Knight’s move that clued them in to how close it really was—hovering before them now in a rocking, sloshing motion as if floating on a watery swell. The red spot swam counterclockwise through the swirling colour bands, coming to rest, staring at them, A white searchlight beam flashed out from it, catching them briefly, blindingly. Heat swept their bodies, though their clothes still felt as cold as ever.
When they looked again the thing was gone, was nowhere.
“Christ!” cried Michael “This afternoon! The trance—I remember! John Deacon knows. And he didn’t tell me!” He drew Suzie to him, stroked her hair. “It’s all right, love. I know what that was. They promised they’d find me again. It’s the Space People, Suzie! Isn’t it wonderful? They’ve woken my memory up again.”
Already in the distance they heard the bee-baw wail of a siren approaching; presently a fire engine halted on the far edge of the Common, its blue light whirling in tiny replica of the recent apparition. Helmeted figures spilled out and stared across the Common.
“Someone must have thought it was a fire… I’ll take you back to your room. I must phone him.”
“Shouldn’t we tell them we saw something?” She hadn’t taken in what he said.
“Tell them?” he scoffed. “Do you think they’d believe? When I was sixteen, love, Space People landed and took me on board one of those.”
“What…? You’re saying you went on board a flying saucer?” She brought the phrase out repugnantly. “You’re saying that’s what that was? You’re… you’re crazy.”
“They blocked my memory. But they told me they could always find me again.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Do you realize what we’ve seen, the two of us? A starship from the Pleiades! Look up there, love.” He pointed at the Seven Sisters twinkling milkily. “That’s where. They even took me for a flight in it.”
“To the stars?”
“Of course not. Look, let’s both phone Deacon. You saw it too. His hypnosis brought it out. There’s a lot more that he didn’t hear.” Michael laughed harshly. “He must have thought it was a fantasy. He’ll believe it now all right. When you tell him what we both saw!”
Suzie was a lapsed Methodist; and it was a pragmatic, trimmed religion, without hysteria, almost without miracles. All things bright and beautiful, in a plain brick building. The prodigy of the loaves and fishes translated into a Sunday School tea party. No breath of Hell, no Devil, hardly even a Deity, Heaven was a rather large meadow strolled by a white-robed, bearded figure wearing slightly dusty sandals.
Two firemen were walking up the grass from the road, casting about as they went.
“You’re just making up a nonsense explanation. Why should this happen on the same day as your trance?”
“Maybe… maybe somehow I drew them to me.”
“That’s preposterous.” Suddenly she made a retching noise. “I think I’m going to be sick—”
One of the firemen waved to them and shouted.
“They’d just think we were drunk,” said Michael. “Let’s go.”
“Maybe you are drunk,” she panted. Somehow she managed to avoid vomiting.
They hurried off, as the fireman headed towards the lake, switching on a torch.
• • •
Suzie woke from a dreamless sleep, squeezed into her single bed alongside Michael. Traffic noises proclaimed it to be a new day. A painful rosy light suffused her eyelids. She tried to open them. She couldn’t. Sitting up, she fumbled at her face. Her eyelids felt huge, filled with hot water. They were glued together. Blindly, she shook Michael.
The night before they had neither phoned Deacon nor made love. By the time they had reached her room, they had both felt too limp and drained to do anything more than shed their clothes by moonlight and fall into bed, and sleep.
Michael woke. His eyes also ached. But at least he could open them.
“I can’t see, Mike! My face hurts.”
“You’re… sunburnt. Just like I was, after…”
“Damn it, what’s wrong with my eyes?”
“They’re puffed and swollen. Can you make out any daylight?”
“Yes.”
“It’s just the lids, then. Good job we both shut our eyes last night. I’ll soak a handkerchief in milk for a cold compress. That should help.” His eyes took in the rest of her body. It was pink all over. Sliding sorely from the sheets, he saw in the mirror over the washbasin how sunburnt he was too.
A half-full milk carton stood on her desk. As he picked it up, he glanced out across the Common. People were wandering about in a purposeful yet random way as though searching for lost property. Several appeared to be carrying field glasses and cameras; bird watchers, but the birds had flown…
“Throw a pin to find a pin,” he thought. It was a maxim of John Deacon’s.
Deacon had spoken a good deal in Psychology seminars about “state-specific logics” and the need to develop “state-specific sciences” to pin these logics down. Each altered state of consciousness possessed its own internal logic, different to a greater or lesser extent from the logic of ordinary baseline consciousness. Each altered state had a rationality that was perfectly coherent, yet could be wholly alien to everyday reason. This was why it was so difficult for the traditionally “objective” scientist to study these states. Here was a fundamental barrier to communication: an unreportability. Even the subject who experienced the altered state couldn’t necessarily explain it, even to himself, afterwards. That was because separate memory systems seemed to exist for each altered state. Whenever you entered that state of mind again, they clicked into place with a shock of familiarity, the sense of beingthere again in a familiar landscape lost till that moment. Thus new psychological sciences were needed that would be specific to each altered state: sciences that would devise their laws within these states, exploiting the logics specific to them—with the ultimate aim of reporting back to states nearer ordinary consciousness; for some states could apparently overlap other states, while these in turn shared features in common with more workaday mentality. Figuratively, then, you had to throw a pin away to get into the frame of mind where you threw—and lost-a pin before. You had to get drunk, to discover what you had (so logically) misplaced when you were drunk. And in order to meet a flying saucer…
Deacon. He had to see him. He had news.
Michael poured milk on to a folded handkerchief.
Four
Two floors down the London traffic rumbled. In his small office Barry Shriver sat opening the morning post, which came from France, Sweden, America, Australia, Brazil, Britain. Soon news cuttings and typed reports littered his desk, to be eyed with a sarcasm which might have surprised his faithful, even fervent correspondents.
The Alabama Huntsville News told of “a spinning disk, like an upturned jelly mould” seen by truck drivers not far from Marshall Space Flight Center. The jelly mould had fled up into the sky, receding at huge velocity…
The Hereford Evening News reported a “mystery flying object” hovering over an RAF camp at Credenhill, seen by airmen on guard duty and a passing farmer.
So it went. Fresh sightings every day, buried in local newspapers world wide. Many hundreds every year. Encounters of the First Kind, mostly—things seen in the sky. A fair number of the Second Kind, where some sort of physical evidence was left, some visible trace. A few of the Third Kind too—glimpses of the “operators” of these mystery objects and even
actual contact with them… The third category seemed to be on the increase lately.
Shriver—turned fifty—sported a trim black goatee beard and a rigorous greying crewcut: a mix of colonel (to which rank he had never actually risen) and natty archaeologist or explorer. Fireproof cabinets lined the office walls. An IBM Selectric sat on his desk alongside a pile of A pa Newsletters, monthly journal of the Aerial Phenomena Association—to him, by now, so ineptly named.
In the earlier nineteen fifties, fresh from college into the US Air Force, Barry Shriver piloted an F-86 interceptor in the Korean War. In June 1952, flying wing in a squadron out of Inchon, they were paced through the sky by a glowing cylinder as large as a B-26, shorn of wings. When the squadron climbed towards it, it split up like an ameoba into two pulsing disks dotted with portholes. Arcing around the squadron at high speed, these bracketed the American jets, Shriver’s radio went dead, his compass spun, his engine cut out. He dived. He saw the two disks closing in around the F-86 on his right as though herding it; then they fused around it, and—as one single fat cigar again—shot skywards, receding to a point of light, and vanishing. (Except that he wasn’t positive the cigar had actually shot away into the distance, so much as shrunk to nothing right where it was…)
He and the others pulled clear. Controls and engines functioned again. Returning to Inchon, they logged the loss of an interceptor in collision with a moving ball of light…
Some effort was made to find wreckage, as the ground below was in United Nations hands; none was found. War was pressing. The loss was blamed on massive ball lightning.
Barry Shriver knew this for a lie, a miserable cover-up. Though—of what?
After the war he was posted to Edwards Air Force Base at Muroc, three hundred thousand acres of dry lake and scrubland in the Mojave Desert’s Antelope Valley where, in 1954, the world’s longest runway was being completed.
