by Ian Watson
Helen Caprowicz, wearing a spangly leotard that emphasized curious lumps and bumps in her body and her large pear-shaped bum, mounted the alien and galloped him round what was now Suzie’s bedroom—much enlarged—in the Hall of Residence. Outside the window lay no Common. In its place he saw leprous blanched craters, jagged black mountains, blinding stars reflecting the spangles of Helen’s acrobat costume. He thought of her as Suzie, though she didn’t remotely resemble her.
He noticed the Earth hanging in the black and starry sky. “Helen,” Suzie cried, “Catch me if you can!” Digging spurs into the hide of her lumbering mount and flicking its rump with a riding crop she galloped it into the window and through in a spray of broken glass. All the air suctioned out of the room, suffocating him, spinning books and records, cups and saucers, and himself through into lunar darkness.
He thought he was dying; in fact he was waking up.
Twenty-Three
Since he had used Suzie as his alibi, he went to see her in reality. He drove over Otway High Moor, by way of Scawby and Bridleby, the forty odd miles to Sandstairs.
The embarrassments of the Thunderbird! Lipstick red, as wide as many country lanes, rear seat and floor piled with glassy biosensors under a groundsheet: why couldn’t they have stolen a less conspicuous car?
Outside Bridleby, a few hundred yards uphill from the road, rose Worm Rigg, a ragged edge of rock with standing stones around it.
He pulled over and unrolled the map given him before he left Tsiolkovsky. The map recorded the ancient ley lines, the lines of power linking sacred and numinous places; holy stones, mounds, dewponds, hilltops where prehistoric man met his “Gods”—those lines which the ancient Chinese had called lung mei, the dragon lines, marked out the probable nervous system of Whole Planet Life, the pathways of the Earthworld considered as a living system, those loci where Unidentified events would most logically occur.
Worm Rigg was one such node on it; a primitive God-spot, a locus where the Unidentified could be experienced.
The ridge of the worm: of the dragon, of the serpent power—of Quetzalcoatl and the Lambton Worm. For a serpent with its tail in its own mouth formed the UFO disc, the mandala, the circle of being of which man was part—and which man could not stand outside, to see entire. He could only see its shadows in the sky or meet its “solid” echoes on the ground.
Michael took the first biosensor from under the ground-sheet and clicked it into the slot of the modified tape player. Beeping tones sounded from the speakers, fore and aft. He fiddled with the fader and balance controls to synchronize the tones while the tuning bar tracked across the radio dial, which was calibrated with the 360 degrees of the compass. He checked this reading against the dashboard compass.
Yes, Worm Rigg up there was a place to plant a biosensor.
He pushed one of the channel selector buttons, and the beeping faded out. No warning whistle howled. At the moment the potential for a UFO event in this prime location, this prime acupuncture point, was quite low. Currently the area was inhibited, not excited. It was safe. Otherwise, it could be like fixing a lightning conductor to your roof just before a thunderstorm. In the presence of a higher thought centre of Whole Planet Life—himself—the sensor might draw down a discharge of the UFO force that would zero in on him, alerting the planetary consciousness to the “tap” planted in its nervous system. Remember Tunguska, the Gebraudi had warned; and Michael remembered Garibaldi dodging the gleaming UFO that appeared just as they took off from Swale Moor. Garibaldi had only been able to locate Michael, a sensitive, by exposing himself where an event involving a human contactee was highly probable. Now, though, Michael knew how to steer clear of such a probability. He was cautious. He pushed another button which sent a vibrational signal (so he’d been told) towards the Moon via a biosatellite in space, to say that this particular biosensor was now on line.
He hiked up Worm Rigg through spiky grass and heather towards the unshaped boulders which his map identified as standing stones.
He hid the biosensor beneath a tangle of gorse inside a rabbit hole.
It needed no sunlight, nourished (they’d explained) by primary vibrations from the main Biomatrix on Luna.
He could just make out the blue line of the sea from the top of the Rigg. A fresh breeze brushed his hair. He listened a while, to hear the haunting of this spot, the tune of energy. However, there was only wind. Just as well.
He went back to the car and drove on towards Sandstairs, stopping once more en route to plant another sensor.
He hid the Thunder bird in among hundreds of day-trip cars and holiday coaches, where it looked quite plausible, almost fitting into place.
He found a phone box. The equipment inside seemed creaky and medieval compared with Biomatrix, Thunder-bird and sensors that could read unidentified world patterns which had shaped human religions and mythologies.
Rather to his surprise, the telephone worked; and she answered it.
“Suzie? It’s Mike, Fin back home.” Yet he hadn’t said he was in the same town as her; indeed his words implied the opposite. He’d concealed the Thunderbird; wasn’t going to show it to her. He couldn’t. It would appal her just as it would appal his mother.
They talked inconsequentially.
After a while he asked casually, “There haven’t been any more odd events, have there?” He received no reply.
“Are you still there, love?”
He heard an exasperated intake of breath. “Haven’t you given that dirty nonsense up yet?”
Yes? No? What could he say?
“You haven’t,” she accused.
“You did see something, Suzie. It reached out and touched you. I know it did!”
“So does madness. Madness reaches out and touches people. Witchcraft too, if you’re fool enough to get involved.”
He thought of Bonaparte, on the far side of the Moon; of the Biomatrix, and of Whole Planet Life…
She was saying, “I don’t even need sleeping pills any more. I’m coming off the Valium too. I’ve got a job in a café, would you believe? I’m clearing tables for the Summer. The debris of people’s holidays—you get to feel quite aesthetic about clearing it up. Reality therapy! I’m ordinary now, Mike, and it’s lovely.” He heard her fingernails tap the mouthpiece. “So you’re still up to your neck in it? That’s what you rang to tell me?”
How could he not be up to his neck in it?
“You are. Oh dear.” It sounded such a mild reproof; but she had put the phone down. The receiver buzzed in his ear, white noise.
Bonaparte…! Moaning, agonizing alien.
• • •
He settled into a routine, cycling to the quarry of concealment, driving to the nearer loci on the alien map, hiding biosensors. He had to fly the car by night to some points on the map. Those far afield. Glastonbury Tor. Dragon Hill, by Uffington. Stonehenge. Silbury Hill. The Gebraudi had promised that radar couldn’t pick him up; somewhere under the welded bonnet was a jamming device. He flew, he landed, he drove, he scaled locked gates and wire fences, hid his sensors. He never saw a single strange light chasing him in the sky; the speakers never whistled out a warning. He led a charmed life, as though he was as invisible to the UFO force as he was to human radar. Nearer home, he succeeded in never being seen by any friends of the family. It was all surprisingly easy. Perhaps, looking up into the sky, late night travellers saw a dark enigmatic flying object, soundless, wingless. To them, of course, the car and human pilot would be a UFO. He lived perfectly though feverishly; he began losing weight. At home, a truce prevailed, while his parents willed his motiveless cruel rebellion and his sudden passion for hiding himself away to burn themselves out. His mother smiled bravely, his father went about the daily business of managing the land.
He got no University reading done; but one day his mother handed him an old newspaper, unread at the first time of grief three weeks before. “Don’t you know him?” she asked.
He read about a psychology profes
sor’s flight to Cairo in a state of “UFO-consciousness”; and rejoiced.
It was time in any case to return to Granton for the new term.
Twenty-Four
“Carl Jung was perfectly well aware of the risk to his reputation in speaking out about UFOs,” said Deacon. “He didn’t do so with a light heart.”
“What a pity you didn’t share his scruples,” sighed Bruce Fraser. “It isn’t just your reputation you’re putting at risk. It’s the Group’s—and the University’s.” Fraser, Dean of Social Sciences, attended this forty-third meeting of the Consciousness Research Group distastefully. For some others present, too, It represented a calling to account of the Group’s director.
“Jung only wrote about UFOs as psychic myth,” objected Martin Bull. “Yet you claim you were spirited off to Egypt by them—when we all know you flew there by scheduled jet! And as for this notion of your dog’s head being taken in some kind of Devil’s exchange, so that you can conjure UFOs up by magic now… it’s sheer sensational crap!” He tossed his head. “It beats me what you think you’re doing.”
“Jung spoke out because he saw that a major psychic transformation was on the cards. By that, I mean a shift in the whole structure of knowledge—in the episteme. Jung saw the UFO ‘sky wheels’, quite rightly, as focal patterns for the breeding of, let’s say, a new kind of transcendent consciousness—a fusion with some higher order of mental information. And I assure you there’s a lot more to UFOs than just sky wheels! Anyway, the papers misinterpreted me.”
“What did you expect?” asked Fraser. “If you feed them a sensation story, it’ll have precious little to do with the nature of sense perceptions in their eyes.”
“You do honestly maintain that you conjured up a ‘devil’?” asked Tom Havelock. He covered the vinyl of his cheek with a cupped hand. It seemed to be blushing furiously in the neon light.
“ ‘The Devil Rides a Flying Saucer’!” snorted Martin Bull. “That’s a good one.”
“It wasn’t a devil, Tom. It was a UFO that looked like a harpy or pterodactyl or something equally devilish. The Phenomenon does adjust itself to our frame of reference, but we’re still trailing phantoms from the religious past. We all have our ingrained images of Gods and Devils. I’m certain that the whole phenomenon is connected with the very nature of knowledge: a knowledge that stays hidden.”
“Occult, in other words.” Havelock rocked his head against his hand, sympathetically but nervously, hiding his stigma.
“Wrong connotation. ‘Occult’ suggests devils and pentacles and dancing witches and things. No, my view is that the Phenomenon has always been with us in one form or another because it really relates to what you might call, information-wise, the ‘knowability’ of the cosmos. It’s a kind of evolutionary learning programme which exists because of the way the universe is. It teaches by means of what is unknown. How else? It uses the medium of what is, at each and every stage, unknowable. Obviously the science for this has to be a very special breed of science.”
“Doubtless,” said Sandra Neilstrom dryly. Deacon’s folly angered her now.
“A science of consciousness.”
“How about this Lemegeton?” asked Havelock uneasily. All those shattered circuit diagrams… As though a machine could be built for tapping God’s thoughts. The new hubris. Something very different from true God-centredness.
“Magic is about the unknowable too. It’s an attempt to tap it through symbols and geometries which even you, Tom, agree are objective. Though if you just stop at that point and imagine you’re actually summoning up demigods—Forneus and his crew—from other dimensions, you’re lost. Superstition swallows you. The programme eats you up instead of you drawing nourishment from it. After all, the whole point about Alchemy was to transform the mind—not to make gold or a miracle longevity drug! I want to appeal for people like my student Michael Peacocke, people who are sensitive to what I’m calling ‘UFO-consciousness effects’, to join in a new sort of research programme.”
“Using black magic?” winced Sally Pringle. She worked with the Psychiatric Hospital, her metier being the shapes of!,? psychosis. A tall thin brunette, she wore charm bracelets and heavy silver bangles on her wrists as though to ward off and earth any encroachments into her own personal life; although in her own mind she regarded her ornaments merely as bringing a touch of sympathetic elegance into the dim tattered lives of the prisoners of madness.
“That’s not what I said. We need to develop a new state-specific science—directed at the unknowable. At the Unidentified. ‘Surely some revelation is at hand.’ That’s what I Jung believed. I trust I know how to uncover it. The way to do it is to attach the ego-tag, somehow, to those ‘non-ego’ psychic areas. Those areas, dear Sandra, being ones which bridge both mind-space and the material world.”
Bruce Fraser cleared his throat.
“This simply isn’t on at a university. I’ll rephrase that; it’s not on at this one. Really, John, your razzle-dazzle approach so far!”
“I had to set the record straight in public. I’d be a coward otherwise. Strange and remarkable things have happened to line. What use is this damned Group if we’re not bold? We still haven’t the foggiest idea what mind and consciousness are. We’re still no nearer learning.”
Fraser stroked his chin, which seemed to wear the permanent blue bruised blush of a fresh shave, as though he ran an electric razor over his face three or four times a day to maintain a perfect fresh polish. A suave, burly figure, with an air of elegant brutality about him—as though quite prepared to strip to the waist and put up bare fists like some gentleman Regency bully—he had supported the Consciousness Research Group strongly in the past.
“If I might introduce a note of business, John? The Group’s application for a research fellow?”
“Held over from last year! That’s long overdue.”
“Ah, you know how priorities compete… Normally I’d support this request to the hilt. But we all had the impression you were working on hypnosis. Now this turns up. In one of those newspaper interviews you as much as said that we’d be advertising a flying saucer fellowship! That kind of thing really puts people’s backs up. Academic Board’s collective back, for instance.”
“Are you threatening that we don’t get a research fellow unless I drop the Phenomenon?”
“Frankly, John, it will have to be a bit more than that This isn’t exactly the place to wash our dirty linen.” He glanced at some of the research student members of the group, who contrived to look demure. “You’ve raised a lot of eyebrows with these wild assertions… This isn’t Esalen, you know. I always strongly supported the concept of the CRG. Consequently you’ve had your teaching load relaxed to almost nothing. So has Tom for that matter, and Andrew. You have these post-graduates doing dream research and whatnot on your say-so. Not to mention a lot of behind-scenes help: secretarial, library, floor space… The CRG’s been your pigeon—and a fine flier it’s turned out to be. But it isn’t all you, John It isn’t your own personal property.”
“Right,” nodded Sally Pringle. “It would rather queer our present excellent relations with the Hospital if we seemed in need of psychiatric treatment ourselves.”
“One of the CRG’s real achievements is its interdisciplinary character. Look round this table: Biochemistry, _ Physics, Computers—”
“That’s not an achievement! That isn’t a discovery!” “When you involve other disciplines you have to consider your working relationships.”
“Physics and flying saucers aren’t the best bedpartners, Bruce,” said Sandra Neilstrom. “It makes it just that much harder for me to propose a meaningful synthesis of Consciousness and Nature.”
“Do you see, John?” Bruce Fraser patted his bruise-blue chin. “I was even talking to the Vice-Chancellor on the phone—”
That evening, after a rather meagre dinner, Deacon bit into a Cox’s Pippin. Apple of Knowledge, he thought wryly! as he savoured the sweetness. Already that s
weetness was biting at the enamel of his teeth, eroding them like old sandstone buildings exposed to car exhausts and acid rain. Ghost toothache haunted him. He cut a wedge of soft Wensleydale, and sucked the cheese around his mouth to clean his teeth again.
How to halt the rot? He was in the right, God damn it! So why should knowledge eat a man away, consume him? There were people in the world who already knew. Who had known for a thousand years and more, maybe far longer. Who had anticipated. Who had goaded the knowledge gently on. There was an invisible college of them, fluent in the paradoxes of the unknowable. One of the latest of these being Sheikh Muradi, to whom Khidr had come, but of the collective psyche of Humanity to communicate an ambiguous, teasing truth to Deacon…
The phone rang; thankfully he quit the table, it was Michael Peacocke who spoke.
He talked excitedly of a rendezvous. In his room, the following evening at five.
“I’ve asked Barry Shriver to be there too. It’s the most important thing, John! I’ll show you something remarkable—”
Part Four
Twenty-Five
“You’re expecting an event?” Shriver chuckled. “It won’t happen. Not if you expect it to, boy. You’ve been hooked!”
“There’s no point in me telling you beforehand,” said Michael, unruffled.
