Miracle Visitors

by Ian Watson

  “Ah—”

  They spoke about Salim’s difficulties. Finally Muradi nodded to one of the elders. “I believe Hagg Ahmad knows someone in your Father’s office—”

  So there was help. Not help beyond ordinary knowledge—though there was certainly perspicacity in noticing that Salim needed it! Simply help that was perfectly adequate to the situation. One didn’t take a hammer to crack a nut… Salim’s thoughts still dwelled on hidden currents and authentic miracles, though.

  “I believe there’s something else?” said Muradi.

  Salim blushed.

  “Yes, Sidi, Lord. Khidr—how can he be? Where does he come from? Where does he go to? Can a man actually meet him in our century?”

  Sheikh Muradi rubbed his beard, then smiled. He steepled his palms.

  “If a man needs to. If his necessity is great enough. If the event needs to occur. Our way, you see, seeks to evolve Man. It establishes communications with an ultimate source of knowledge. But this source can’t be known directly. The Whole is beyond knowledge. ‘Can you imagine a mind observing all of itself? If it were all busy observing, what would it be observing?’ Paradox! Is that correct, O beloveds?”

  (“Praise God!” agreed the elders.)

  “Actually there have to be unknowables, or there’d not be any human knowledge. Khidr is this unknowable—who may nevertheless be experienced.”

  “Sidi, have you yourself—?”

  “Ah, I’m sure that you know the traps—for yourself—in that question! It’s perfectly true that the Masters have learnt to modify their own faculty of knowing so that they can experience space and time, or cause and effect, in another way. Then they can pass from the possible to the impossible, and back again. A true miracle! Yet some onlooker will still see it as deception. Necessarily. The miracle isn’t meant to be explained, however hard men struggle to explain it. It’s a metaphor, an illustration of what is always—by our very nature and by the nature of the world itself—beyond. ‘Allah coins metaphors for men. He has knowledge of all things,’ as it says in the Sura called al-Nur.”

  “Ya Sidi!” exclaimed someone, prompting a chorus of quiet acclamation.

  “I believe you’re studying engineering, Salim?”

  Salim nodded.

  “A practical art. You can’t build a bridge with insufficient supports, any more than you can ride a camel with only three legs—it needs four. Well, the bridge of science is supported by ninety-nine legs, which is enough for almost perfect stability—for practical purposes. There should still be another leg. Or perhaps there are already nine hundred and ninety-nine legs. There should still be another. Khidr is this other leg; the miracle leg, which is outside explanation. He is the leg that actually balances all the others!”

  “God be praised!”

  “Scientists of the very large must leave out the very tiny. Scientists of the very tiny must leave out the force that holds the stars together, isn’t that so? This is necessary to reality. It isn’t a mere temporary shortcoming. If the whole world was known, it would cease to be.

  “Come, you’re full of doubts. But not-to-know is a part of knowing. You have to master not-knowing, for not-knowing is part of reality itself. The master of not-knowing will know who Khidr is. Do you recall the story of how Khidr saved a man from drowning?”

  Salim recalled it, but waited to be told again, since the telling of this story at this particular moment was quite different from simply remembering it.

  “A man once fell into the river Oxus,” Muradi recounted briskly. “An onlooker saw a dervish rush into the water to help. The dervish was soon in difficulty with the current too. Suddenly a third man, dressed in radiant shining green, leapt in. Once in the water, he seemed to be merely a log of wood. Our two unfortunates clung to this log till it bore them safely to shore. The log drifted on downstream. Our onlooker chased it down the river, keeping well hidden. He watched it touch the bank—and saw the Man in Green pull himself ashore, soaking wet. Our onlooker raced up to him to beg his blessing. He knew this must really be Khidr, the Master of the Saints. He noticed that his clothes were already mysteriously bone dry.

  “The Green Man told him, ‘I come from another world. It’s my job to protect people who have a service to perform—without their knowing anything about it. And you’ve seen too much!’ The Green Man was gone—whoosh. There was only a rushing noise in the air.

  “Later, our same onlooker met the rescuer again. The rescuer no longer looked luminous. Perfectly ordinary, in fact. But there was something about him; our friend still recognized him. Again he begged him to bless him and explain. How could he be a log—and a man? How could he vanish—to reappear in another part of the world?

  “The rescuer simply laughed. ‘Go ahead and tell the whole world you’ve met Khidr! It won’t do any good. They’ll lock you up as a lunatic.’ He picked up a perfectly ordinary pebble and held it out. As soon as our bold onlooker looked at it, why, he couldn’t move a single muscle. He turned to stone—while the rescuer walked off. Only when he’d gone, could our friend move once more!”

  The elders, who all knew the story, exclaimed in wonder as if this was the first time they had heard it.

  “Well now, Salim, our beloved Master Rumi—who understood the evolution of Mankind long before the Darwins of Western Science—once said that ‘God most high is not contained within this world of ideas. For if he were contained within the world of ideas, it would follow that the man who formed ideas could comprehend God: who could not then be the creator of ideas.’ So: beyond all worlds is God—”

  “Praise Him!”

  “That is how reality is made, and how it is held in being from moment to moment. Khidr—Guide and Intercessor—must be able to enter and exit again from our faculty of knowing, or the world wouldn’t be what it is. In fact, there’d be no reality whatever. Can he be met with in our century? Ah Salim, in what way is it our century? Do we own time? Do we generate time?”

  “God’s century it is,” agreed an elder.

  “He recreates the world every moment,” another nodded.

  “Is time ‘real’? Then hand me some! Is the world-within-time real? No, reality is elsewhere. It is where Khidr moves. God sustains the illusion of the world for us. Where is your consciousness, Salim? Can you show me some of it?”

  Salim scratched his head.

  Muradi leaned over and hit him sharply on the knee: Salim jerked reflexively.

  “It is not only in your head. But there too—in your knee! And up there!” Muradi pointed at the naked light bulb. Salim glanced up and was momentarily blinded.

  “It is whatever you sense. Thus thought is elsewhere. It has no specific place among all the objects which it imagines, because it is itself the imaginer of them. Which is why mind cannot possibly inspect the whole of itself: it is not an ‘object’. So Khidr comes and goes—with a whoosh in the air. By disappearing, he proves the texture of reality. Real knowledge protects itself in the same way, Salim—and at the same time forces people to develop new organs of perception; from which in turn it hides itself away. Thus evolution is made possible. However, it’s to be experienced—not spoken about! Words aren’t the metaphors that God coined for men. Our own lives are that! The world is that!”

  “Do you mean that the knowledge is mine already—because I’m alive? Because I have a mind?”

  The Sheikh laughed boisterously.

  “How could it be yours if you weren’t alive, or didn’t have a mind?”

  He rose, taking Salim by the arm and leading him out alone while the others stayed to discuss the coming festival. The hall was deserted, lit only by a light bulb near the door. They walked out into the courtyard, also in darkness save for starlight and some illumination coming from the street. Salim shivered, as the sweat which had earlier soaked his shirt chilled in the night air.

  A schoolgirl passed by outside, still wearing her neat blue pinafore, followed by a fat woman draped in a shapeless black meliya out to peddl
e a few spoonfuls of hot rice. Loud film music poured suddenly from a nearby rooftop. Distracted, Salim stared at the roofs. Only for a moment.

  A man was already standing beside the pool, when his eyes returned to it. The water glowed and sparkled as though chemicals had been scattered; it cast a sheen of green light upon the stranger’s costume—a cloak with voluminous sleeves, a zouave jacket, floating pleated skirt and tall felt hat: The stranger was wearing the clothes of a whirling dervish from old Turkey, as if in fancy dress for tourists to film… except that he was in the wrong city, the wrong country. Salim saw a tight-bearded, ironic face, not unlike Muradi’s own; though this stranger was taller than Muradi, and his eyes sharper.

  The Sheikh was staring at the stranger, transfixed.

  If only the radio hadn’t blared out so suddenly, Salim would have seen where he came from.

  Muradi knelt and touched the stranger’s cloak.

  “Master,” he murmured.

  The stranger laughed. “Listen to this reed forlorn,” he sang softly.

  I’m witnessing a miracle, thought Salim, frozen. Yet what am I actually seeing? If I didn’t see how it began…

  The stranger glanced at Salim. “Fihi ma fihi!” he said sharply. “There is in this, what you put into it, child! A demonstration to one man is a bewilderment to another.”

  Producing a small old book in a worn leather binding from under his cloak, he pressed it into Muradi’s hand.

  “This isn’t for you, but for another more retarded seeker—who doesn’t even know yet that he is seeking.”

  Muradi turned the book over.

  “A book of magic? Written in French… Am I to help a magician?”

  “Isn’t it said, ‘Once you’ve mastered one superstition, you’re unlikely to take up another’? But there’s no magician in this instance. Don’t worry. Trust. Do I not come from another world, where more is seen?”

  The stranger echoed Muradi’s own words. The Sheikh touched his hand to his heart.

  “He will come with the first breath of spring, not knowing how he comes, nor why—like Humanity itself. Give this to him, Sheikh. He will find in it what—for him—is in it. It will have a different meaning for him, You see, one moment can serve many purposes. For you the meaning is already here, right now. In this instant ‘Cause is singular, chains of effect are many’.”

  At last Salim found his tongue and dared to speak.

  “Who are you… Master?”

  The stranger looked amused. “You already answered yourself, child, by giving me a title and a name. What does the name mean to you? Fihi ma fihi! A toy is your best answer just now. A toy in words—some poetry!” And he recited:

  “Ever-knowing, as we hide we seek.

  To normal men, we seem other than we are.

  In inward light we roam: making miracles appear.

  —Yet none knows who we are.

  “That is me. That is us.”

  The stranger extended his arms, right palm turned upwards, left palm down; wearing the cloak though he was, whirled.

  Overtaken with dizziness, Salim momentarily closed his eyes.

  When he opened them only seconds later, he was alone with the Sheikh in the darkness. The pool was only faintly illuminated as before by the meeting hail light, the street, the stars above. The same fat woman in the baggy robe passed by the gate, going the other way without glancing in. She’d sold her rice.

  Part Three

  Fifteen

  On Easter Monday Michael woke early. He’d been dreaming of cycling uphill, standing up on the pedals while Suzie perched behind, dinging to his waist She slipped backwards off the seat and rolled down the hill, bouncing like a rubber ball. Immediately the bicycle bounded up and over a crest… He was riding on a battlefield now, bearing dispatches. Acid gas roiled up, dissolving the rubber of his tyres. Lying in a trench, in stale water, he saw Suzie again—her hair bleached white. She smiled feyly at him.

  “Ride to me—to the moor. Now.”

  He had only a vague memory of the dream, yet he saw what a fine morning it was. Birdsong; green gold world. Dressing, he went downstairs, pocketing a couple of apples from the kitchen as he passed.

  • • •

  After Suzie’s breakdown, when she was found wandering shoeless through Granton, she went for a while to stay in the Psychiatric Hospital. Michael she had refused to see. Transferred home for a few months’ rest, she ignored his letters. Her parents put the phone down on him. And the work with Deacon proceeded nowhere very fast…

  • • •

  He’d ridden this road several times since his memory was restored. Wild-coated sheep were grazing the wiry grass. Gorse flared yellow: beads of sun. Little piles of rabbit droppings, like aniseed balls, lay scattered.

  He breasted the rise—and saw a big red car, an American luxury model, parked near the spot where Luvah’s craft had landed (or come into existence).

  Elephant-tyred, long-bonneted, massively bumpered, with cinemascopic rear lights, and dual exhausts—a beast of unctuous steel—it blocked the road. Its colour, lipstick red.

  Was it Barry Shriver, come to investigate the landing site? But Shriver drove an old estate car. In any case, he would have needed Michael to guide him to the spot…

  Michael coasted closer.

  Thunderbird. American number plates: the letters WYO, no doubt standing for Wyoming; a logo of a cowboy riding a bronco…

  A great grey parcel blocked the driver’s seat. Something very large, wrapped up. Then the parcel shuddered and twisted into a mass of grey rubber tyres piled on one another, and there wasn’t actually a driving seat at all, only this great pile next to the passenger seat, taking up the majority of the space between dashboard and rear seat.

  The passenger door swung open and a voice (broadcast, transmitted through some speaker) hooted, “It is safe. It is not one of them. It is something else. Please come! It is safe—”

  Bright morning, blue sky, faint cirrus streaks. Sheep were still grazing, unperturbed.

  “Safe. Safe. Safe. Please believe.” Shuddering, the heap of tyres half turned and something peered at him: through the bulging face-plate of a segmented, grotesque diving suit. Whatever was in that suit could hardly move, jammed into such (for it) limited space. The sheer sense of its confinement made him pity it long enough to look twice, not race away.

  He saw a head shaped like a tortoise’s… then revised what he saw. The entire head was a tortoise. The face with its big beady eyes, drilled nostrils and horny beak protruded right out elastically from the plated cranium, like a tortoise’s whole head from its shell. The corded “neck” he saw at first wasn’t a neck at all, but muscle and sheathing joining the extruded eyes, lips and nose to the rest of the head, where the brain must be. The eyes seemed quite distant from the brain.

  It must react rather slowly, he thought… How vulnerable, despite its armour. Back home on the mantelpiece, brought from India by a neighbour, rested an empty tortoise shell with a tiny hole drilled in it so that ants could scavenge the quick from the poor creature and clean it out…

  “Peace,” it honked. “Love.”

  “All right,” said Michael. “Peace.” Ponderous and absurd, the thing seemed too confined, too ridiculous almost, to pose a threat. Humanoids, dwarfs, silvery giants, winged “mothmen” had all turned up in UFO reports, but the phenomenon had never manifested itself remotely like this! This was too far from the phenomenon. Too alien to it.

  What was it doing at this spot? Squeezed into a Ford Thunderbird! It must be a UFO-thing, after all… The UFO programme had gone wildly askew—generating a great plated tortoise-elephant in a pressure suit with only an ordinary “Man-in-Black”-style car for it to ride in. It must be bewildered and in misery. Again he pitied it It radiated the pathetic.

  “I am not what you think I am,” it said. The voice came from a silver grille below the face-plate, The being groaned and heaved; the suit was a boa constrictor. Michael felt excited, as though
some resolution was in sight: a loose hem of the Phenomenon, which could be caught hold of and unravelled.

  “How do you know what I think?” he challenged the trapped tortoise-head.

  “We have a device. A biological machine. It reads the pulse of the Unidentified. You are bright as a light to it, for the Unidentified made you come here to experience an event. The potential is building up right now around you; though we are both still safe for a little while.”

  “You’re an abortion, tortoise. A UFO tiring yourself! Only, the UFO programme really got screwed up this time, didn’t it? Is this your idea of a flying saucer?”

  “No!” The being reared in protest. As it stood inside the ear, he could see four stout legs. The forelegs were twice as tall as the hindlegs, though set very close to them. The broad back sloped steeply. The being raised a single gloved tentacle from between its front legs, a soft arm ending in a starfish of rubbery fingers, which it waggled at him.

  “I am not part of the Unidentified! We are scared of it too. But we will help you—”

  “Why are you all squashed up in that car?”

  “We stole the car. We apologize for that. We draw less attention this way—it is a thing of this world. But we have redesigned it. Now it is different. It can fly.”

  “Oh really? As pigs can fly?” (Yet Michael found himself drifting closer all the time, as if magnetized…)

  “It harnesses gravity now. This car will be the means for you to get about in your own world, unnoticed—and out to us in space. We dare not stay here too long ourselves, but you are native to this planet.” The being wagged its single arm. “It is very easy to fly. You will soon learn. We are not bilateral, you see. We only have one arm. We must needs be simple in our designs.”

  “What, the car’s for me?” How soon, Michael wondered, would the monster in its Michelin tyre-suit dissolve into thin air, leaving him (perhaps) with a stolen, translocated American car which was quite undrivable since its driving seat had been torn out? The proffered gift began to fall into place as part of the whole absurd pattern of gifts to UFO contactees…