by Ian Watson
“Do you know who you are?” he interrupted. “Have you got a real identity?” Michael moved close, straining to hear. He shook his head; it wasn’t Suzie, to him.
“A terrible time is upon us. The world might abort itself of embryo, man. For you poison the womb. Then others will come in your place. But there is still time. You can be guided. Only, you must do what you’re told exactly. You mustn’t question. Mustn’t—”
“What terrible time? What others?”
“—mustn’t—ask—questions—about—flying—saucer—beings. Must—accept—”
Far away, the words grew more disconnected; as though someone was reading aloud in a foreign language which they only knew how to pronounce, not understand.
Shaking his head to empty his ears, like a swimmer emerging from a pool, Deacon cradled the receiver.
“So they can tap into telephone lines,” he murmured, shaken, “They can materialize plasma clouds in the sky, and produce malprogrammed tulpas—as well as perfect copies of cars. They can tap into the human brain, deep down. Or are they there—is it there—already? And I’m supposed to quit, and not ask questions!” They had destroyed his dog, as an object lesson: an act of vicious, petty intimidation. How did that sort with the purity, transcendence, wise interventions of the Sufi Green Man?
In no way.
Yet it had to. Somehow it must. How?
“We’ll try in the new year,” he promised Michael “Till then, take care.”
Part Two
Eleven
That evening, Naguib Fouad quarrelled with his son again, about the Sheikh and his circle.
At the age of fifty, Naguib had risen as high up the hierarchy of the Ministry of Finance as he was likely to; high enough, though. The family flat, on the eastern, less luxurious side of Roda Island, was proud achievement for one whose father herded buffalo all his life in Upper Egypt. Reproduction Louis Quinze provincial fauteuils with cabriole legs, carpentered locally, clustered round the dining table. A pallid oil painting of bathing cabins on some French beach hung over the elephantine sofa, where Mrs Fouad sat whispering interminably into the telephone to her sister about her current stomach disorder. Naguib relaxed in pyjamas, in his favourite armchair frowning at cartoons in the Rosa al-Youssef. Ridiculously skinny men in galabiya robes were prancing up and down, spinning round and falling over each other while sweat poured from their faces and sinews stood out in their necks.
As soon as Salim came in from the University, Naguib pushed the Rosa at his son.
“Are you going out again tonight? Going there?”
“It isn’t really much like that, Father.”
Naguib jumped up and minced round the room, clapping his hands faster and faster. “Hayy! Hayy! Hayy!” he chanted. Despairingly, he sank back into the vastness of the armchair.
“Religion’s all very well,” he lectured acidly. “Ours is a religious country, God be praised. Of course I’m religious! Not a Communist like some of you students, though sometimes frankly I wish you were a Communist instead. Our country might need miracles—but not that sort! I suppose yours is an attack of adolescent piety; it still grieves me. Mockery is all it brings. Can’t you fall in love instead?”
His son shifted from one foot to the other: a tolerably handsome, rather skinny boy, with slightly protruding ears. He wore a freshly-ironed white shirt (which he must have collected from the laundryman on his way home, for tonight), loose trousers, plimsolls and a leather jacket. The hoy smiled apologetically.
“I should fall in love? With whom? Ibn el-Arabi once said that the lover loves a secondary phenomenon—‘whereas I love the Real, the Essential’. It’s much the same with miracles, Father. They’re a secondary phenomenon too. If all a person hunts for along the Sufi way is miracles, he’ll never find the Real that underlies them. They’ll always go on seeming merely like miracles.”
“How you can attend engineering lectures, and spout this kind of mysticism defeats me!”
“The answer’s quite simple. Unlike the yogi on his bed of nails, we work in the world. We do our jobs as well as we can, in society; meanwhile, we’re part of another current helping to guide the world.”
“You’re a prig, boy.”
Salim tapped the cartoon page. “This sort of self-intoxication is as bad as drink. I know that some Orders indulge in it. But we mustn’t try to quit the world. We must behave as though this world is real, even while there’s a deeper reality. God wants us to be here. But of course this produces a certain heedlessness of God—”
“I’m not heedless, boy! Don’t they tell you to respect a father?” (Could this son, Naguib wondered askance, be holy? He rejected the idea.)
“Heedlessness, I mean, because if there wasn’t that, and if everyone perceived, the world would be sure to vanish.”
“Oh would it indeed? Pray God that sort of foolishness isn’t in your head when you’re designing a bridge, may God let me see that day!”
“I promise it will be the best bridge I can make.”
“God forbid,” murmured Mrs Fouad into the receiver. It was her turn, now, to hear her sister’s ailments. Kidneys, liver, urinary tract, wherever. Sickness migrated round the body like a band of nomads, pitching its tent in this organ then in that, sustaining a huge industry of laxatives, pills and tonics. Cupping her hand over the mouthpiece, she asked Salim, “Fetch me a glass of water?” and sank deeper in the sofa, clucking sympathy.
In the kitchen, the Nubian houseboy was sorting a heap of giblets on an iron-top table. Salim found a bottle of mineral water, returned and poured it. By now Mrs Fouad was clutching a little yellow pill.
“Isn’t it true that you seize your Sheikh’s hem to capture magic? Don’t you all wash your hands and faces in the carpet, for baraka?” Naguib flapped his hands in parody.
“For the blessing? Our more countrified cousins sometimes do. It’s frowned on. Generally there’s just the hand kiss. Come along and see, Father.”
“Go there? God forbid. I have a position in life.”
“Sheikh Muradi has taught overseas, you know. He’s much respected. He has been to Europe and America.”
“Pah! America can afford mysticism. It has enough money. What did he lecture about?”
“The hidden currents—”
“Indeed! Well, you can’t deny that your people do boast about his karama, his little miracles. I certainly heard you boasting in this very room about that chap who fell off Tahrir Bridge into the Nile—God knows how anyone can be so stupid, is that a hidden current, eh, the Nile? He was worrying how to find the cash for his rent, right? So, while he’s flailing about in the water, his hand closes on this soggy banknote that must have blown out of somebody else’s hand into the river upstream. He surfaces with this banknote in his hand and hears your Sheikh’s voice telling him to be more careful next time. After all that drenching I’m not surprised he hears voices in his ears.”
“People get overenthusiastic. I’ve made that same mistake, Father. In this room, you say. People get carried away.”
“Off bridges, ha! You don’t really believe in these hidden currents, do you? Some kind of invisible community governing the universe—headed by some mysterious Axis of the Age, isn’t that it?”
“Maybe there are events beyond comprehension by reason—fuq al’aql, above the intelligence. If there are, then we can’t speak of them without producing a nonsense. But they can still be experienced.”
“It strikes me as thoroughly blasphemous that God should bother himself with a banknote.”
“That’s the whole point of that story, Dad! We don’t properly see the connections that produce such an event. Yet events do impinge on our lives from another level. I’m sure of it. Truth is constantly trying to show itself to Men. In the shape of a banknote floating in the Nile—as much as in the Burning Bush. Or it takes upon itself a human form. Remember how Moses had a guide whose actions seemed absurd? They all had a reason, but even Moses got impatient—”
“Thank you for your comparison, but I’m not Moses!”
“ ‘How can you tolerate that which is beyond your knowledge?’ the guide said to him. One day, when we see the connections—”
“The World will fall apart?”
A smell of grilling hearts, tails and livers drifted in from the kitchen; Mrs Fouad cradled the phone at last.
“That boy says he had to queue two and a half hours at the Co-op to get those… entrails. Should we believe him? Do you think he was really at the cinema?”
Naguib shrugged. “Let’s assume he was queueing. We don’t want to lose him, do we?” He glared at his son. “You might as well go to some zaf in a brothel—some seance, as though you were a kitchen maid!”
“Are you two arguing about that again?” Mrs Fouad asked. “God forbid, it makes me ill.”
The Nubian youth carried in a bowl of boiled potatoes and tomatoes and a tiny beef salad to go with the giblets. He smiled vaguely at the TV set that he hoped to be watching later on in company with the Fouads. For a new song was promised, from Wafaa—“fidelity”—Wahbi, rising successor to the vasty voice of Um Kalthum.
• • •
After dinner Salim caught a number eight bus from near University Hospital along Kasr-al-Aini Street to Liberation Square; here he boarded a second bus bound along al-Bustan Street for al-Azhar.
Gamaliya, ancient crowded bustling quarter of the galabiya robe, increasingly was becoming Salim’s own personal Cairo, his Cairo of the mind. Every visit to the headquarters of the Order was a voyage on two planes: the spiritual, of course, but on the way there was the discovery, too, of hidden social sources which his father preferred to forget—the baladi landscape, village Egypt in the midst of the city.
Narrow streets crazed the quarter like deep cracks in long-dried mud, illuminated by strings of naked light bulbs strung from shopfront to shopfront, by livid neon calligraphies, intermittent lamp-posts like giant matchsticks with glass-blob heads, with in-between zones of hissing paraffin light. Streets and alleys were flickering subterranean canals. Pots, pans, second-hand ball bearings, old clothes, beads, incense, charms, bathplugs cut from spent lorry tyres were up for bargain. Male concierges squatted on doorsteps of balconied tenements. Men in the cafés played backgammon and chattered, full of protestations. Somewhere overhead ranged the tin shacks of a second, even poorer world which had colonized the sky farmyards on top of the city, where lambs bleated plaintively in the dark. He crossed a small plaza fronting a bathhouse of Ottoman design: intricately wrought iron grilles. A crowd was gazing at the large public TV upon a tripod there. An improving romance of young love at the Aswan High Dam was on the screen. A sherbet seller meandered about, clacking his metal saucers. A religious orator was attracting an audience of much the same size as he belaboured superstitions and decried the magic charms on sale nearby.
Salim caught some of the diatribe as he walked past.
“Have you ever bought a blue bead for your daughter to save her from the evil eye? Have you ever begged permission of the Jinn before you used the toilet? Didn’t the Prophet—the blessings of God be upon him and his family!—say in the Sum called al-Jinn, ‘Some men sought the help of Jinns, yet they misled them into further error’? The meaning of this is perfectly plain! Even though the majority of Jinns were converted—”
The words faded as Salim walked on, his thoughts not on Jinns that supposedly haunted rivers and streams and even toilet bowls nowadays, but on the mysterious supranormal Guide—the emanation and representation of the unseen linkages in the universe—he who was called Khidr, Green Man, Master of the Saints, Patron of the Orders, and who merely seemed to be outside the world of TV screens and hydroelectric schemes… How, Salim wondered, did Sheikh Muradi himself conceive of Khidr? Already he realized that this was a meaningless question. If Salim knew the answer, he would be as the Sheikh was, not as himself who asked the question! The realization brought a note of joy.
He came to an old stone building hemmed by pale cement shops. Hunks of purple buffalo carcass hung outside one shop, bright carpets outside another.
The windows of this building were blocked by thick metal grilles; however, iron-studded doors stood wide open. Beyond a vestibule, naked bulbs lit a courtyard containing a small, railed pool. Water bubbled from the knob of a fountain, sending ripples crossing and recrossing. Ancient blighted stones led to a modern hall with sliding lattice doors. About fifty men were already gathered there. Some wore light suits, others simply a shirt and trousers. There were kaftans, too, and long white galabiyas topped by cotton skullcap turbans.
Salim stepped inside, nodding to his friends and brothers. When first he came to the Circle he thought of them, effusively, as the friends of his true life. No longer, though. The world of the engineering student must remain every bit as real as this, or else this was not real at all—then the Work wouldn’t be done properly.
The men formed ranks when the Sheikh came in from a side room, interlacing their fingers. And Salim gazed at the Sheikh.
He was a short, black-bearded man with thin eagle nose and hooded eyelids exaggerated by hornrimmed glasses. His eyes weren’t lugubrious or fatigued, though. The dark eyes shone. They discerned. They asked a host of questions wherever he looked. Muradi wore the long, full-sleeved gown and long kaftan; his tight turban was wound with the green band of the Order. Yet he wore these robes only for ritual events. At home—a very modern one, so it was said, in the medieval city not too far from the great mosque of Ibn Talun—he dressed western style; likewise in his secular role as Professor of Arabic and Persian Languages at al-Azhar—thus gently emphasizing the truth that there was nothing feudal, reactionary or retreatist about the Order.
How misplaced were his Father’s jokes! Even if they did apply to some of the popular Orders! Even as he thought this, Salim realized that the Sheikh’s eyes were upon him, reproaching him, so it seemed, for remembering anything other than God at this moment. He composed himself.
Dhikr commenced—the Remembrance of God.
The profession of the Faith. The recitation of the Name. The cycle of the Odes…
Twelve
The Consciousness Research Group was in session: the forty-first meeting of the staff seminar. Deacon had invited Michael to sit in, on this dark February afternoon, when he would broach a tentative theory and method for the state of UFO-consciousness…
“—How can one ‘ego-tag’ that mental island-state, so that the UFO-conscious person is consciously aware of his or her role in it? How does one stamp a visa on the psyche, how does one issue a state-specific entry permit to that very powerful and enigmatic island?” Deacon sat back, pleased with the rhetorical flourish.
“One moment,” said Martin Bull, a stocky, ginger-headed, rugby-playing man; a neural cybernetics modeller. “I thought flying saucers were supposed to exist in the real world? They appear on radar screens. They get their photos taken. How could you take a photo of something that’s purely in the mind?”
“They aren’t ‘purely’ in the mind, Martin! I’m sure their roots are there—but they affect external reality as well Anyway, since you mention photos, there is such a thing as psychophotography.”
“The Amazing Ted Serios?”
“Why not? Ted Serios seemed by all accounts to be authentic. He was well investigated. He could produce photos of distant buildings—ones he’d never even visited—simply by staring into the camera. He had to work himself into a drunken fury to do it. That’s to say, he forced himself into an ASC which actually influenced photographic emulsion in the external world.”
“But could he knock planes out of the sky and burn holes in the ground? Your flying saucers are supposed to do that, aren’t they?”
“This might be a far more powerful form of the same thing. Ted Serios induced an ASC in himself. He didn’t know what it was—heavens, he was only a semi-educated hotel porter in Chicago—but he knew what it felt like. There’s one key: the sensations accompanying the
ASC. Start by inducing those—suggest them hypnotically, once we know exactly what they are. Naturally this will involve a whole lot of interdisciplinary work: ASC research, kinesics, muscle memory, discrete states of posture… not forgetting parapsychology and sensitivity to the ‘supernatural’. It’s important not to proceed by negative, ‘downer’ methods. We mustn’t make the mistake of all those boring statistical card guessing games that have queered ESP research. Positive reinforcement is the secret. We must make every experiment a learning game with rewards—”
“The supernatural?” queried Tom Havelock of Ethics, a frayed, angular figure with a pinched chin and a caved-in, pink vinyl cheek from plastic surgery; he always tried to walk, and talk, with the false cheek presented the other way. “How?”
“Ghosts could be a sort of UFO, Tom. A kind of projective psychic photography a la Ted Serios, only sans camera. We’re talking about actual things—maybe just temporary things, but things none the less—getting projected into physical reality by an ASC. In Tibet, before the Chinese took over—and I suppose it was just as well for the majority of ordinary Tibetans that they did!—”
“Hear hear,” nodded Andrew Rossiter, who liaised with Granton Psychiatric Hospital; Deacon knew that he tended to bridle at any praise, however indirect, of elitist psychologies.
“—there was a fascinating secret lamaist tradition for the production of just this sort of thing, which I know a little about Tulpas, they were called—”
Deacon shivered, gleefully. Titles of working papers ran through his mind. Induction and deinduction procedures for traversing into and out of a state of ‘UFO-Consciousness’; Limits of stability of UFO-awareness; Depth measurement of the UFO experience; a tentative scale and empirical map, leading ultimately to The Triggering of UFO-experience: techniques for initiating an Altered State of Consciousness. This would be only a start. How many million dollars had the US Air Force done spent chasing reports of lights in the sky? This project would surely deserve one-tenth of those funds, once the first research papers began to appear. Of course, the discovery itself was far more important than the funding or the rather horrifying fame that must attend it Human growth was the main criterion. Unfortunately, little further actual progress had been made with Michael since the events of December. The boy seemed to be holding back—if only subconsciously, out of a false guilt about Suzie. If only he could be freed from it! Deacon had invited him to the seminar to inject more motivation. A breakthrough with him, and he could cast his net wider for other subjects. Though he needed that breakthrough first. It had to be Michael: projector of the pterodactyl, vector of so many alarming events.
