by Ian Watson
At that moment Bonaparte returned. The alien went to the blank screen, unplugged the green glassy block and laid it delicately on the ground before Michael. It was a honeycomb of tiny transparent cells, layer upon layer of them full of green matter, linked by fine, barely visible wires. Copper prongs stuck out from one end. Michael touched it tentatively.
“Yes, it lives,” said the alien. “It senses the vibrations of the world around. Molecularly—vibrationally—it is highly sensitive. It is nourished by sympathetic radionic resonances from the parent Biomatrix up in the hood of the starship, with which it is in tune. We can modulate it with our various instruments to tap the memories of the Biomatrix—as on this screen—or make it an extension of the perceptions of the Biomatrix, as perhaps you saw Gar-boor-oold-ee do…”
“Those were live films of your evolution that I saw?”
“Apart from the star and planet diagrams, yes. They are recalled from the world-memory with which the Biomatrix is primed. We can see into the past history of our world this way. All vibrations are recorded and stored.”
“I told you you’d learn,” smiled Helen happily. “It’s a kind of dowsing—not of where lost things are, but of everything that happened in connection with them earlier in their history. Stones, places, tools, skeletons, fossils… All the vibes they’ve been imprinted with. My grandad used to pick up a brooch or ring he’d never seen before, and he could tell you all sorts of things that checked out afterwards about who’d owned it. What the person looked like. How she felt—even though she was long dead. These guys have got it down to a fine art. Live archaeology.”
Bonaparte retrieved the cartridge and slotted it back into the keyboard. “Now it is time to show you the Biomatrix itself, through this access point. You may not enter our ship yourselves on account of the hostile atmosphere and pressure. We do not have pressure suits for humans, and our own suits are far too large even if we tanked them up with your air—”
Helen giggled.
“Besides having four legs apiece! We’d look like a pantomime horse with only one guy in it, dragging the empty hind legs around!”
Michael chewed his last frankfurter. Such squashy things these Gebraudi must be under their thick rhino hides! Full of guts and giant entrails busily digesting ropes and balls of green fodder, with cud passing to and fro through chains of stomachs. He felt he was seeing right into Bonaparte for a moment, just as he’d once stared at a cow in a field, trying to see right into it and be it. He realized that he hadn’t yet seen any of the aliens eating. Yet herbivores are hungry all day long, aren’t they? Their alien stomachs must really be packed with cud. For a moment he felt that he was living in the alien’s guts himself, being pressed back and forth in peristaltic surges. Obscurely he sensed that he and Helen and the Swede had somehow been swallowed by the beasts, taken in by some oozy digestive process…
The image of a pantomime alien teased him. He imagined Helen, wagging kangaroo-hipped behind him, with her head burrowing blindly up his backside so that they could actually fill a Gebraudi suit: blindly, not seeing her way. There was some principle of compensation, at work here. Two humans equalled one “balanced” alien—yet the alien had only one arm… A curious equation of plus and minus seemed to be in operation. Once more he wondered: were they genuine star travellers at all?
The notion of the American girl burrowing into him made him realize that it wasn’t she who should entwine with him at all, but an English girl with a ziggurat of crinkly red hair—who had been driven away and separated from him by a goblin that frightened the wits out of her… Why had the twisted UFO-being separated the two of them? Was it so at he could be free to be driven here, to learn all this about the true harmony of life? If so, what a seemingly cruel means. Had he first to lose something, in order to gain something else? Had he first to be wounded, to be healed? The principle of compensation again: galaxies race away as we chase them with our telescopes; what we gain on the swings, we lose on the roundabouts…
“The Biomatrix constantly reads the whole vibrational status of the ship and every being in it So we can view the ship by sending a query-impulse through the Matrix—a viewpoint ‘Ego’ to inquire upon this status. What you will see is not the ship directly, but its primary awareness of the ship: the image of reality, which it dreams.”
The image which it dreams. Michael felt dizzy and afloat. Maybe it was the fault of the low Moon gravity. He took another bite, to ballast himself.
“How does it monitor anything between the stars?” he asked hesitantly. “Surely it must sleep in the cold too?”
“ ‘Awake’ and ‘asleep’ are not correct terms for the Biomatrix, Plant cells do not sleep or wake; they always do both. Their awareness is primary; it precedes the split into conscious and unconscious modes. The Matrix simply waits in chilled dormancy between the stars—matching the dormant ship. That is its wintertime. Then comes the star, your Sun, and Spring.”
Something nagged at him. Something Bonaparte had just said. About sending a viewpoint “Ego” through this strange living matrix of awareness. Wasn’t this what John Deacon had been hoping to do? To attach an “ego-tag”—to UFO-consciousness! Was this, then, Deacon’s experiment succeeding?
The screen showed a ship’s interior, seen by a disembodied eye drifting along a corridor which throbbed and pulsed as though, to the dance of atoms in its walls. The eye passed through a solid wall; a grainy, densely-packed kaleidoscope of quivering, intersecting dots—a pointilliste wall. Beyond the wall stood an alien, doing something. The eye passed sheer through its body; and the screen jumbled with throbbing forms of light—fluorescent balloons squeezed into one another—which he took to be internal organs.
“They cure illnesses that way,” Helen boasted. “Their Biomatrix reads the vibrations of sick organs and adjusts them. It’s beyond our medicine—except for a few psychic healers.”
The eye drifted into a lift shaft, a long vibrating tunnel boring up through the stem of the ship.
Bonaparte stroked the cartridge, as the eye drifted upwards. “Basic awareness does not ‘think’,” the alien said. “Rather, it knows. Existence is primary, individual existences are secondary. Our Biomatrix puts each individual being in touch with the Whole.”
The eye glanced out through a porthole across Tsiolkovsky crater, then down at the roof of a leathery, paunch-like dome, perhaps the very same dome that they were in. If it dived down through the dome, thought Michael, he would see himself on the screen, watching himself… throbbing, shimmering.
“Knowing is everywhere. It Is the texture of Whole Planet Life. Conscious thought only need to learn to tap it—”
On the screen, several aliens grazed round tanks packed with fleshy, vibrant plants resembling water hyacinths. They trunked up clumps of greenery, and fed. More tanks repeated, mirrorlike, as well as machinery that hinted more at an engine room. The eye drifted roofwards, and passed through the roof into a hall that glowed with blue-tinted sunlight Honeycombing the domed roof was a translucent cellular mosaic. It was a fly’s many-faceted eye, hugely swollen, seen from within. The viewpoint eye dipped.
“Behold the Biomatrix.”
Michael saw row upon row of U-tubes, hundreds of these racked in series and in parallel. Each tube was as large as an upturned pair of human legs. Each one was brimful of green clotted glue. From a spider grid overhead, silver wires dipped down into the stiff green juice. Pipes and cables ran about like roots and branches. Spaced round the perimeter of the matrix were screens similar to the one he was watching. Aliens sprawled intently before them, observing vibrating lattices and hierarchies of complex patterns unfolding.
“Doesn’t it all shut down during the lunar night?” asked Michael weakly. “That’s two weeks long.”
The Swede bared his pink, withdrawn gums. His mouth looked false, like dentures in plastic on a dentist’s tray, as though it was only a model of a mouth, detachable from the rest of his head.
“Time is sensed in a
different way by Whole Planet Life,” he grinned.
For a moment Michael imagined that Bonaparte was speaking through the Swede’s lips, and Moller was merely an extension of the alien, a pseudo-human with a false mouth. Whereas Bonaparte was too solid, too thick-hided, too full of rumbling guts and cud-packed stomachs to be anything less than wholly real! How strange that a human should Item less authentic than an absurd alien from the stars! A moment later, Bonaparte did indeed take over Moller’s lead.
“Whole Planet Life is an entity, child of your star as ours is of our own star. You are its cells. So are the fishes and the birds, the trees and grass. Your communities form its organs. As do the forests, and the coral reefs. You, however, are its brain cells, its higher consciousness centres. Yet you remain unconscious of the world-field within which you operate!”
The screen became bobbly green: a jelly aquarium stiff With frogspawn. For the eye had drifted down into the Biomatrix itself, completing its journey of observation by reentering into its own vision of itself—whereupon everything became amorphous, formless, indecipherable.
Bonaparte blanked the screen.
“Its time sense is radically different from yours. Its memory comprises all the timeline of cellular life from the very beginning! So the world does not ever forget itself. What, then, is the nature of the ‘present moment’ for it? Very much greater than your own personal present moment, Mikal.” Bonaparte made his name sound like an Old Testament prophet’s. “Time is only a construct of consciousness. How long does the present—the ‘now’ moment—seem to you to last? How long before an event feels ‘past’? Perhaps a single minute by your watch? Not much more.”
Michael glanced at his watch. Perversely it had stopped and was recording no passage of time at all. He rewound it.
“Your personal ‘now’ spans a moment of the past, and an instant of the future. It must—or you could not think continuously.”
“We all share this same ‘specious present’,” said Helen. “That’s the best name for it, because it isn’t absolute. It isn’t written into the universe. Other viewpoints can have a different time sense. Ours last a few minutes at the very most—not long. It’s funny: personal time’s a kind of Moebius strip. All the information we get comes to us from the past—the sound of my voice, the light of a distant star: they’ve already happened. So we’re always living in the future of everything else, inside ourselves. That’s how the knot of time gets tied, that binds us in the here and now. Past and future tie themselves together in our minds to make the specious present. There’s only one surface to this Moebius strip, though. So there’s only one direction. We can only go forward.”
“You express it well, Helen,” honked Bonaparte. “We are proud. We enjoy.” “Enjoy” sounded utterly the wrong word: conveying a gloating, almost. Perhaps it was just an unhappy choice. Just then a suited alien poked its head between the partitions and gobbled at Bonaparte, then began hauling the screens away. As the walls vanished from around them, Michael could see into the parking lot again. Another alien was fitting an entire new petrol tank into the boot of the Thunderbird which he had thought so seamlessly welded.
“Whole Planet Life binds time far more vastly,” went on Bonaparte. “Its present moment extends much further than yours or mine. For this reason the Unidentifieds—which are the go-betweens of the higher-order system—seem able to tamper with time, appearing and disappearing mysteriously as they cut across our narrow viewpoint. Or they may take time away from creatures they meet; or add it on.”
How long was it really since he had left Swale Moor? A minute—or a day? How long could one disappear, into the UFO-state? Forever? He panicked.
“What’s happening to my car?”
“They’re renewing the reaction mass,” Helen said sharply. “I don’t know what it is plain water, maybe. That’s for the gravity-field. Of course it runs the normal engine too. From now on, friend, your only filling station’s on the Moon.”
“The units are sealed,” sighed Moller. “We aren’t ready for such technology yet. We shan’t fly to Jupiter and Pluto in our cars, trailing our unstable UFOs with us. Bearing false Witness, half the time, because of our own poisonous blindness!”
It was all a film, a solid three-dimensional film where the events and actors were real, living and tangible—yet somehow projected from elsewhere. Michael felt full of wind. Covering his mouth, he burped, and tasted pickled onions again. By the “thirty-plus” level in a trance, Deacon had said, you could experience false tastes as perfectly real… How deep down was he now? Michael stared at the Thunderbird—which must still be parked on Swale Moor! It was his re-entry vehicle to normal sane reality. However could he learn to drive it back?
John, where are you?
Twenty
There was no surcease, no let up.
“The briefest moment of time for the Whole Planet Life of Earth,” continued Bonaparte, “must extend at least twenty-four hours, to equal the period of rotation of your world. Otherwise the spin of your world would rule all its other sensations.”
“Put its head in a spin,” laughed Helen.
“Which means that events which seem to possess sequence for you are blurred and averaged out for it They do not necessarily have the same strict order. What is more, this is only the briefest moment in its experience. Many such moments make up its own ‘specious present’—amounting to days or weeks on your time scale.” Bonaparte spoke swiftly now, as though time was running out Beyond the transparent wall, the alien serviceman slammed the boot lid shut and ran a nozzled machine, a hand vacuum cleaner, around the joint, perhaps welding it by acoustics or vibration…
“Wait a moment,” interrupted Michael. “If we humans are its higher thought centres, and if we only feel that the present moment lasts such a short time, how can it last so much longer for Whole Planet Life?”
“How long does it take one of your brain cells to fire, then inhibit itself and be ready to fire again?” demanded Bonaparte. “Microseconds! A time too short for you to register compared with the time a thought takes! You are all separate brain cells, but you are not the Mind. You cannot fully grasp the Whole Planet Life system when you are merely the thought cells in it Yet you can certainly upset its balance, and very sanity, by your collective attitude—just as a poisoned brain makes the mind schizophrenic!” Bonaparte wagged its trunk in distress.
“Take your attitude to death. Life and death are really a dialectic process. Cells must die so that new ones are born. Older species must pass, that higher species may arrive. What does death signify to a Whole Life that stretches back a billion years? Not the constant, nagging anxiety that it conveys to you. What does death mean to a creature properly in harmony with Whole Planet Life? The hunted prey accepts death with a kind of frozen joy once death becomes inevitable! But your abject fear of death—ignorant as you are of the Whole Life system—imprints a virulent death programme upon the nervous system of Planet Life. This death programme wins over the life programme and becomes its master, not its partner. You are murderers! Killers and poisoners of beasts and forests and seas. Killers of yourselves. No wonder so many Unidentifieds are hostile and hurtful!”
Axel and Helen were bobbing their heads in agreement The technician had finished fusing the Thunderbird back together; now it waved to Bonaparte.
“I suppose this is the new mystical ecological frame of reference for UFOs!” Michael said acidly.
“What are you saying?” cried Moller. “Do you think we aren’t real people? Listen to me, boy. Whole Planet Life is ancient and powerful—and it’s becoming bloody autistic because of us, its brain cells, and our death and power crazes. That’s why it wiped out the first Gebraudi expedition with an energy attack or something. We couldn’t tolerate it if the aliens came. We’re too self-centred. We’ve infected the world. We’ve malformed it. It’s a mass of festering wounds. Thankfully, Whole Planet Life isn’t just us. It’s all the creatures that dwell on Earth. We aren’t even
the only higher brains around. Why do you suppose so many UFOs are seen diving into the oceans? That’s not because of bloody Atlantis. It’s because of the whales and dolphins—they’re wiser than us. We just happen to be the dominant race right now, because we’re cuter at manipulating things. And it wasn’t always this way. Primitive Man Was in key—so we still have some credit balance from our Own past, too. The life programme’s strong. It fights back—”
“With its saviours!” Helen burst in. “With its prophets and mints, with its miracles and signs.”
“We can help you,” vowed Gomorrah. “First we will examine and diagnose. There are natural pathways in the world, as in a brain: networks that the Unidentified will follow. These are the Hues that link life centres, where you once built pyramids and shrines and temples. We have some maps of these ‘ley lines’ already. Axel and the others have helped with this. Here is where we must take the pulse of your world, on the primary level. We will feed this information to our Biomatrix to make a model of your world. Thousands of biosensors need to be laid out, to read the rhythms along the ley lines that Ancient Man knew—before you unlearnt all this. But we Gebraudi cannot place these sensors along the leys ourselves. The Unidentifieds would soon try to crush us. We must rely on you.”
