Miracle Visitors

by Ian Watson

  Aware that he was on exhibition, Michael somewhat primped and preened.

  • • •

  “Multiple dimensions are just mathematical terms for describing particle behaviour in the space-time which we’re already part of,” said Sandra Neilstrom of Physics, harking back to an analogy Deacon had made. It was the Neilstrom woman—smart tweed-suited brunette in her early forties—of whom Deacon felt most wary (more so than Andrew Rossiter for his political objections!) yet whose knowledge he most needed to tap.

  “I don’t dispute there may be ‘wormholes’ through superspace—through the underfabric of space-time,” she went on, “but multiple occupancy of our own coordinates by independent entities which can pop in and out from ‘somewhere else’ strikes me as unlikely, to put it mildly. No, I don’t see squatters in our own subatomic space!”

  “Didn’t Charles Tart suggest, though,” interrupted Tom Havelock, “that symbols might actually have an objective reality? They might be manifestations of some spiritual reality outside the mind. Isn’t that what John’s really driving at?”

  “Squatters in psychological space?” She laughed. “I don’t feel as though I’m being squatted in. Do you, John?”

  “I’m not sure,” muttered Deacon, reviewing the events of December. “Maybe I do. What is mind, after all? Do we generate it in our brains—or do we simply transmit it? William James posed that puzzle decades ago, and there’s still no answer. If the latter’s the case, and we simply transmit, then we’re all like receivers, or modulators, embedded in some sea of consciousness. The same sea.”

  “I’ll offer you an analogy, if you must insist that we aren’t what we think we are!” Sandra Neilstrom patted her tight bun of brown hair; she was enjoying herself. “The electron. At its core there’s a negative charge—we call it the ‘bare charge’—of huge, possibly infinite magnitude. This charge induces a halo of positive charge in the vacuum surrounding it, which almost, but not quite cancels out the bare charge. The difference between these two huge charges accounts for the small actual negative charge we’re able to measure. So you might have something present that’s far larger than what you actually ever measure or observe. Could you have a similar situation in psychological space?” She sat back smiling, fisherwoman dangling a bright fly.

  Martin Bull took the fly, though, and a different species of fish was hauled out.

  “I’m always puzzled that people visualize thought as a continuous flowing wavefront, when it’s really the product of—pardon me, John, when it’s transmitted through—an electro-chemical biocomputer. Why don’t we think in terms of quanta of thought, Sandra? Of thought-energy existing in discrete units, even though it shows up statistically as a continuous process?”

  “There are certainly discrete states of mind,” said Deacon. “That’s what state-specific psychology is all about That’s why it’s so damn difficult to pin down the moment of transit into an ASC. Our body shows definite ‘quanta’ of movement, too—discrete states of posture. That’s why I mentioned kinesics earlier. A person ‘jerks’ from one preferred state to the next, and he gets damned uncomfortable if he’s halted in between! We have a body vocabulary of several hundred of these states. Naturally body posture reflects and influences the different discrete states of consciousness… There’s a lot of work to be done.”

  Nothing daunted, Sandra Neilstrom cast her fly again.

  “Call this quantum of thought a gnoon. Say that it induces a halo of ‘positive charge’ in matter, in the form of mind. It possesses an enormous bare charge. But all that we can know of its power and magnitude is the tiny little charge left over—the little bit that doesn’t cancel out in the equation. And that’s us: our individual consciousness.”

  “Below which is the whole field of mind!” Yes, thought Deacon; this might be why one could never really know the entirety of consciousness.

  “That’s just a wild analogy, John. Let’s hope you don’t start taking UFOs for these ‘bare charges’—somehow rendered visible to us!”

  Yet if they were that, in a sense? Deacon fretted at the idea, as Martin Bull grumbled:

  “The trouble about this whole Phenomenon of yours is that if it’s aiming any sort of information at us, the signal-to-noise ratio is strongly in favour of sheer noise. Or put it another way. The signal just says, ‘I am a signal,’ but it doesn’t carry any other specific content. How do we distinguish it from noise?”

  “Why should it be aiming a message at us,” retorted Deacon, “if it’s a state? What ‘message’ do hypnosis or an LSD trip convey in themselves? UFOs may seem to present themselves as this thing, or that thing, but that isn’t what they are. What they actually are,” he grasped, “may indeed be akin to these bare charges of Sandra’s—enormous forces seen nakedly, telling us something, if we can examine the UFO-conscious state, about what on earth mind itself is! Likewise these unmeasurable ‘bare charges’ hint at what the root of matter might be. I’m sure the key’s in the mind. There’s a bridge too, between mind and material reality—or we wouldn’t get holes dug in the soil by them, or radar images, or fairy rings where the things land.”

  “Fairy rings?” Sandra Neilstrom had caught the right fish now. But it proved inedible—distasteful and grotesque. The subject had become too ridiculous. And yet… consciousness and physics must come together. This was why she had been moved to join the group in the first place. Any final theory of a self-consistent universe must contain a theory of consciousness too…

  “Fairies?” she sneered, leaning forward intently.

  “Oh, they’re part of the same constellation of UFO events!” Deacon assured her. “What do fairies typically do? They kidnap people. They carry them off to fairyland. UFOs likewise! Do you know what percentage of missing person cases are never explained? Do you realize that in the fifteen nineties a Spanish soldier vanished from the Philippines and turned up twenty-four hours later in Mexico?”

  “Oh I’d trust sixteenth century colonial rumours—like the plague!”

  “Well then, an Argentine doctor called Vidal and his wife, out for a drive in ’68—”

  “That’s 1568?” She licked her upper lip.

  “No, of course not! 1968. They were ‘removed’ from Argentina along with their Peugeot car. They found themselves in Mexico forty-eight hours later—”

  “It seems like a popular destination.”

  “—with no idea how they got there.”

  “Maybe they drove quickly?”

  “During the First World War a whole regiment disappeared in Turkey. The One-Fourth Norfolk Regiment. They were seen marching into a brown cloud down at ground level. They never came out No bodies were ever recovered! The cloud just moved off up into the sky.”

  “Quite right of it! That’s where clouds belong.”

  “These events are all on record. They happened. They’re not fantasies. They’re UFO-events.”

  She hummed a snatch of tune.

  “ ‘Oh fairyland my fairyland—’ On record with whom, I’d like to ask? With which particular glossy journalist? Do beware the slippery slope of parascience, John! Fringe science perches on a brink. There seems to be some law that always sends it tumbling over before long, into pseudoscience. Facilis descensus Averno—it’s easy to get into Hell. Getting out again’s the difficulty! Now I do think it’s time we had some tea and biscuits.” She directed a meaningful glance at one of the research students present, who nodded and ducked out. “After we’ve refreshed ourselves, maybe you could demonstrate some of your induction methods?”

  Deacon saw Michael blush. Perhaps inviting him hadn’t been such a good idea.

  The yellow light from the committee room flooded into the black mid-air, five floors above the paved quadrangle—and Deacon thought of himself as a puny yellow light glowing in a huge dark sea, of infinite charge, yet somehow drawing all his power, unbeknownst, out of this sea… A halo of thought. Other lighted windows across the quadrangle were other, supposedly private transmi
tters.

  If only he could floodlight the whole! What would be seen then? Or… would it blind him?

  • • •

  Michael excused himself after the meeting; he seemed embarrassed by the proceedings.

  Sandra Neilstrom attached herself to Deacon on the way out.

  “You’re working in a vacuum,” she smiled, laying a consoling hand on his arm. “Perhaps literally! Did you know that it’s respectably theorized that the whole universe is only what one might call a vacuum fluctuation? If you balance the positive mass energy of the whole cosmos against the negative gravitational energy, the net energy of everything that exists may in fact be precisely zero. There’s a deep void for you! Particles emerge out of vacuum easily enough on the quantum level. Why not a whole universe? No reason at all why not!”

  “But… a whole universe? All the stars and galaxies?”

  “So long as the net energy is zero—in the mass versus gravity equation. Naturally the universe has to be the huge size that it is, or nobody would be around to observe it, would they? It has to be the sort of universe where life, and mind, evolve. But maybe the whole universe as such just happens—in the vacuum. Maybe your UFOs are other spontaneous emergences inside it?” she teased. “Reflections of this situation?”

  “Why didn’t you say so before?”

  “Ah—” She walked off into the night, mischievously.

  Blackness all around; in windows here and there, tiny charges of illumination.

  Thirteen

  It hadn’t yet struck five, but the Common was dark and deserted. Suzie hesitated, then began walking along the perimeter road instead, brightly lit by high sodium vapour lamps.

  Rush hour traffic blocked the road. The air began to stink as drivers revved their cold cars forward a few inches at a time. Poison gas drifted up around her. She felt she was suffocating, her lungs eroding.

  Impulsively she turned aside and headed over the dark grass instead. It was still tolerably light, once she’d escaped from the roadside.

  The first school she ever went to was at the end of a long high-walled lane, overhung by elm trees; in high winds the boughs fell, littering the lane, and council workmen came to lop and trim. Drone of buzzsaws, plimsolls making sawdust footprints… Older girls joked that there were rats in the outdoor stone toilets—running out into the playground screaming and giggling, terrifying her… She dreamt nightly of a Giant who lurked among the elms, with great grasping hands and a buzzing voice. The sawdust was of ground-up bones…

  She stalked, lost in that dream, towards the lake and clump of elms, a very small girl chased away from the traffic by its broad saucer eyes, foul urinal breath, throaty buzz. These elms too might have to come down soon, by the saw, diseased.

  The buzz wouldn’t die away. She started to run, imagining huge hands gripping her, imagining being consumed alive.

  A green moon was reflected in the lake, as two swans clapped and battered their way across the water, flailing to take off—then swung skywards on swishing wings…

  … as the original of the green reflection drifted down amongst the trees: a bright ball of green light.

  She ran away past the edge of the lake. A glaucous furry fog boiled off the water—and the same fog suppurated out from the mildewed bark of the trees, capturing her, warping the space around the lake and those trees to a malicious involuted curve. She waded through glue; her legs were jelly. Sinking to her knees, lapsed and atheist though she was, she began to pray: “Jesus Christ, dear God, save me.”

  A devil floated through this fog out of the elms, A goblin that bobbed and bounced as though the low fog was all that glued it to the ground, by a sort of misty adhesive. The creature was green, and as tall as a large child. Its head was huge with stiff piglike ears rising to points, tiny nostrils without a nose, an expressionless downward-sloping slash of a mouth—and two red globes of eyes, set in bulging orbits right round the corners of its head. The eyes were plastic models of fried eggs stuck to its head—in the wrong colours.

  Its ears twitched. It turned its head from side to side, as if searching. It couldn’t see her except sideways, and would only use one of those eyes when the huge ears had located her. She held her breath, but couldn’t hold her heart.

  Its shoulders were broad, but slewed askew. One arm hung down as far as its knees, from an up-tilting shoulder; long fingers tapered to sharp talons. The other arm was as fat and stumpy as a fiddler crab’s claw, and dragged the lower shoulder down by its weight. It hadn’t spun out to its proper length, but stayed part-formed and inchoate, yet massively crushing. The chest was large, the waist tiny. Its thin legs buckled, and its feet splayed ducklike into a kind of “fog shoe” foot—a foot, or shoe, for walking over fog. Was the goblin dressed in green fabric, or was this fabric its own skin?

  It hovered nearer, ears atwitch, long arm reaching, passing to and fro, swimmerlike parting air that had condensed.

  Suzie’s crotch felt wet. She was all liquid, slush and jelly, half dissolved herself into the fog.

  “Sweet Jesus, I do believe in you—” All things bright and beautiful; deliver us from evil… She pulled off her shoes, heavy shoes with thick ribbed soles.

  And threw one shoe at it.

  The missile hit it in the chest It rocked backwards, like a wobbly toy. It didn’t cease approaching; simply leaned over backwards, slowly righting itself again, all the while drifting forward.

  “Away in the name of God and Christ!” she cried. Its glossy, chitinous head turned at her cry, and one red egg-yolk eye regarded her. It stretched out its long green arm further, three tapering clawed fingers and a long thin thumb widespread, to touch her hair. Gently; but the beast stank of rotten eggs.

  Flabbily she beat at the thin sharp hand with her other shoe, knocking the arm away. The goblin swung round, brought its other eye to bear. The massive, half-formed crab claw rose. Foreshortened fingers were fused together, opposing a thumb which was almost all thick nail. Flesh had melted and flowed, hardening into stiff gristly ridges.

  The crab claw caught the toe of the shoe and held it. She let go of the shoe, pulling her hand back with an effort as though a magnet held her flesh.

  Her shoe fell in slow motion from the daw towards the vaguely luminous fog—which now she saw, not as fog at all, but as all the separate blades of grass growing from the soil blown up hugely, fused and interpenetrating one another, all faintly illuminated from within.

  When the shoe touched the fog—or the grass—she felt her whole body repelled from the creature, tossed away, rejected. She spun away from it, falling slowly into that inflated, foggy and translucent grass. Away she scrambled then, at last.

  • • •

  She fled. Incoherent. Barefoot. Not knowing where she fled to. Behind, trees creaked and shone as the green fog rolled back among them…

  On she fled.

  Fourteen

  A chanting counterpoint of rhythms. At first slow and soft, then becoming staccato and percussive as they quickened, binding the brothers into one complex breath…

  “Hu! Hu!” the brothers called out.

  He. He. No music, but the Word.

  “Eternal!” they shouted. “Assistance!” Fingers interlaced no longer, brothers spun on the spot, clockwise, anticlockwise, arms aswirl like dancers’ skirts. Sweating, straining, but without strain or exhaustion, only accumulation. In what seemed a din they found their peace. Even those who veered out of line, faces twisted, ricocheting off the wall, were only sweating poisons from their blood, which the whole group soaked up as energy and food, while their Sheikh clapped his hands ever faster, conducting.

  “Hu! Hu! Hayy! Hayy!”

  So they swirled and sweated, flicked their fingers, swung about, submitting to the Will.

  After half-an-hour Muradi recited the opening of the Koran, to bring the dhikr to an end.

  As he walked back through their ranks to the anteroom, hands rose to foreheads, brothers called out, “Madad! Madad!” As
sistance! He exchanged hand kisses with some. Salim stood wishing, hoping. However, Muradi did not look at him; the Sheikh went away through the private door with a few senior brothers. The meeting broke up.

  As Salim was stepping out into the courtyard one of these elders overtook him and touched him on the sleeve.

  “He wishes to speak to you—will you come?”

  • • •

  Sheikh Muradi sat with his inner council in a crescent of plain cane chairs. (Murmured courtesies: “Allah yakrimak!’ ”Allah yakhallik!’ May God be generous to you—May God preserve you—!)

  He offered Salim his hand; flushing, the youth pressed kisses. Muradi announced, “Please smoke if you wish to.” No one cared to, least of all Salim; it was a token, not a licence. They refused, and refused again. “Praise God,” smiled the Sheikh.

  “You look troubled tonight,” Muradi said to Salim.

  “It’s nothing, Sidi. Not now. An argument at home—my Father…”