by Ian Watson
Thirty-One
They sighted the other helicopter on a dry stream bed below a rutted conical hill dad in sagebrush. They landed close by it, and Deacon ducked towards them.
Shriver extended a helping hand, however Deacon needed no assistance.
“You look chipper, John! Thank God we found you, A man can die out here. Say, our car has some weird stulf under the hood.”
Deacon settled himself into the spare seat He grinned. “I feel rather like Zarathustra—glowing and strong. Because… I’ve solved it. Or rather it all solved itself—just as soon as I gave up resisting and became really receptive.”
“Pity it’s so badly crushed,” Shriver went on regardless.
“What the hell, we’ve got the remains.”
“Of course it’s crushed,” nodded Deacon. “You won’t be able to reconstruct anything.”
“Won’t we? Just you wait and see.”
Deacon chuckled. “I have seen. I saw what frightened Suzie, and how Shep lost his head. Why Luvah made love to you, Michael. Why our aliens took the shape they did.”
“Are you saying that the Gebraudi could control how we saw them?” Michael asked, incredulously, “Why choose a ludicrous shape?”
“Why use a Ford car as a spaceship?” Deacon countered.
“Well, that was for camouflage.”
“Ah, the whole affair camouflages itself, doesn’t it? Right down to that old canard about Tharmon and Company refusing to reveal themselves as it was ‘against their ethics’… Was it, just! It was against their UFO nature—unknowability is built in throughout I should know; I’ve been back over the whole course on the inside. No, you two, I’m afraid there’s no possible proof. There’s only a showing forth of the UFO reality—a demonstration of it. I’ve had the most remarkable experience of that.”
Michael licked his tips fretfully. “What Tharmon and Company said doesn’t matter. We know they weren’t from the stars. They were earthly UFO presences. Sort of piebald ones: part good, but part misleading. The Gebraudi said so.”
Captain Dorris torqued his tongue around his mouth. A fat finger tapped a fat thigh; his nose looked leprous. “Carry on, fellows, I’m fascinated. Just what are UFOs, by the way?”
“We’ll find out,” Shriver cut in hastily. “First we need that Thunderbird analysed, to give us our tools. When we get that glass and bristle under a microscope—”
“It’ll turn out to be plain glass and bristle,” promised Deacon. “UFO events simply aren’t susceptible to cause and effect science, ipso facto.”
“Dammit, the Thunderbird isn’t a UFO!”
“Not any more it isn’t. But it was for a while. Small wonder you had no bother with ‘hostile’ UFOs when you were off on those night rides of yours, Michael. Away on your Thunderbird broomstick, eh?” Deacon smiled roguishly.
“You were in a UFO state! Didn’t someone say that it’s all part of the same spectrum? That spectrum included the Gebraudi! UFOs really are rather aptly named: they’re objects that fly away out of your grasp and become unidentified as soon as their work is done. They’re unidentifiable events—which is precisely what the Gebraudi have become by now.”
Shriver scowled, exasperated. “Think straight, John. Try to remember where we’ve all been. We’ve got a car rebuilt by alien science—as a UFO hunter!”
“Correction: we’ve got a car. A pile of scrap, actually. What we had before is utterly gone. It’s become unidentifiable, If it’s any consolation, Barry, the UFO programme is really a very positive, life-enhancing one at heart—which is why the Gebraudi went on so about their altruism…”
“It was poor Helen and Axel who went on so,” Michael reminded Deacon quietly.
“Ah yes, they were learning their lesson too—yoked in with you in the UFO symbol-reality. Don’t worry, Helen is safe. She had a serious accident, which is an awful shame. But she’ll mend.”
“Christ, man,” cried Michael angrily, “we saw her lying crushed in that crater!”
“We saw something. An image. I saw it all somewhat differently the second time.” Deacon’s eyes twinkled. “I’ve met the UFO pilot, Barry. I hate to mention Little Green Men—but popular intuition has chosen wisely. The Arabs call the pilot Khidr, the Green Man.”
“Look,” snapped Shriver, “the Gebraudi had genuine equipment to pin down UFOs—gear that worked.”
Deacon held up his hand. “All this UFO ‘hostility’ is very much bound up with sheer ignorance of the forces involved. We needn’t try to overcome UFOs; we need to overcome the limitations in ourselves. They even told you as much, Michael. The real aim is to perfect yourself. That’s why the goad exists. Goads sometimes do hurt, though.”
“Yeah, like they hurt the Gebraudi!” scoffed Shriver.
Deacon shook his head. “That’s all been erased. It’s been deleted from the simulation.”
“What ‘simulation’?” Shriver tossed his own head impatiently, as if shucking off an annoying fly. “And we need to get our hands on some of those biosensors that Mike planted—”
“They’re dissolved, too.”
“I’m afraid he’s right there,” said Michael. “With the Biomatrix on the Moon out of action, and no sympathetic vibrations coming from it, they’ll… well, starve. Rot down.”
“Everything has reverted,” agreed Deacon. “There are no nice causal proofs, only demonstrations—then whoosh, away! You can never validate a system completely within the terms of that system, Barry. Kurt Gödel proved that about the most basic tool of science: simple arithmetic. This same limit applies within each hierarchy of organization of the universe. Systems are only ‘proved’—they’re only fully determined—by higher systems. UFOs can’t yield to our science, because they’re part of a higher psychic pattern.”
Shriver pounced. “So you do buy what the Gebraudi told Mike about there being hierarchies?”
“A grand intuition! It was there to discover—but not to prove. Imagine our universe as a great vortex, Barry. This is what I saw. The universe emerges from a Void where there’s no subject and object, no cause and effect, no ‘law’ in our sense. As soon as it fluctuates into being, the universe is immediately a mass of subjects and objects. Now it has ‘laws’, a ruling causality. It has observer and observed built into it right down at the level of the atomic particle. So it’ll inevitably generate observers—living witnesses of its own existence, systems of knowledge of a higher and higher order of complexity. That’s what these ‘hierarchies’ really are. The force that evolves higher organization out of lower is nothing less than this basic separation of observer from observed, of consciousness from what it’s conscious of. It’s this inaccessibility—the pull of it! That’s the force that pulls material up the spirals of the vortex, from the Void back in to the Void.”
As he spoke, Deacon’s hands made empty, circling shapes in the air, weaving a basket then collapsing it. Tom, the police pilot, sniggered, as though there was something erotically suggestive in this handplay. A female torso.
“I’ve seen into that Void, Barry—when the black thing took me. I glimpsed it for a moment, before I remembered who I was. That Void is pure consciousness. It’s pure awareness, of itself, with no other contents involved—no subject, no object.”
“In other words it’s God.” Shriver sighed. “You saw God.”
Dorris’s finger tap tap tapped. His tongue munched saliva. Flies buzzed on the outside of the plexiglass. A hawk winged overhead, hung briefly then pounced on to the hillside.
“I saw the root consciousness behind reality. I don’t think that the word God helps much. Any more than your scheme for hunting UFOs helps! UFOs haunt the boundaries between levels of the vortex spiral. They pull upwards, by a kind of vacuum suction—by being present, yet inaccessible. They’re shortcuts across reality; they’re bridges. The whole universe is a quantum fluctuation overall, so obviously it has indeterminacies built into it. They’re part of this ‘ignorance’ dynamic. This lets non-causal data a
ppear all the time—whenever the separate brains that transmit consciousness tap the deeper sea. That’s how higher organization can draw lower organization upwards. What we need isn’t batteries of UFO ‘detectors’ but a consciousness-science: not to analyse the phenomenon into causes and effects, but to envision it, from within! That’s the way to learn. You’ll never pin down a UFO with your bits of string and sealing wax.”
The hawk had risen from the hillside, something small clasped in its claws; dead prey. It flew away, to feed.
Shriver grimaced. “You’re suffering from exposure, John. Or shock or something.”
“Do I really look it?” Deacon inquired gently.
The hand which had touched Khidr was beginning to smart now, and stung, as though he’d grasped a bunch of nettles with delayed action.
“I went through the whole sequence of events all over again. But I went through them from a higher viewpoint. I nm the UFO pilot, myself—”
“Now I’ve heard everything,” said Carl Dorris.
However, a moment later, Edwards Air Force Base was on the radio to them…
“I’m not sitting here in the goddam desert!” swore Dorris. “ ‘Project Unsightly’—whatever in hell is that? Unsightly’s the right name for it! How many tens of thousands of tax dollars—? Jesus, no wonder the Soviets are laughing.”
“Russia has its UFO problems too,” said Shriver quickly. “Back in ’59 UFOs were playing ducks and drakes over Sverdlovak—that’s a tactical missile HQ—for twenty-four hours, dodging MIGs. What’s more—”
“Mister, be quiet. You are spoiling my day.”
Whenever Deacon rehearsed events now, he no longer tried to locate at what point their common experience, shared with the world at large, had become “other”—inaccessible to rational analysis. He was beyond that point. His thoughts were ordered differently now. In a sense, he reflected, he was an alien. He had sucked all the alienness into himself when the phantom Eta Cassiopeians were obliterated.
“It’s like a teaching mechanism, Barry,” he said soothingly. “A dynamic caused by the nature of reality. Its essence is that there has to be constantly an area of reality outside our own expanding sphere of knowledge. That’s the only way a universe can be.”
“Pretty weird teaching device—that burns people! Scares and confuses and crushes everybody!”
Deacon glanced at his palm. The irritation had reached a tolerable plateau, though the skin looked raw and blistered.
“Say, John, what’s with your hand?”
“I touched Khidr. I grasped Knowledge.”
“Take a look at that hand, Captain. Burnt! Tissue damage—maybe from radiation.”
“Crap. He did it himself. For the effect.”
“It’ll clear up, don’t bother about it. I was in the force-field of knowledge, that’s all.”
“You touch the Green Man and get gangrene, eh?”
“As soon as you grasp the nettle of this knowledge, Barry—”
“You get stung!”
“Of course. It’s a sort of compensation factor. Whenever you investigate, you alter. When the thing doing the investigating is part of the system being investigated, you damage the perfection—the wholeness of the model. The model’s what we call reality. You inject some extra consciousness, a higher awareness, so something must be deleted—if you’re stuck on the same level. Or else reality would be overfull. You actually take up part of the programme that sustains the ‘authentic world’. It bleeds out… some data, which sustain flesh and blood and the world; bleeds it by as much as it’s enriched.”
“UFO bitches!”
“When we understand better, when we really know how to enter into the simulatory being of our universe, we’ll be able to manipulate it in ways that would once have seemed magical. That’s where magic actually comes into it! That’s the ‘higher science’ of the Saucer People—who are only us, of course, part of our collective psychic life.”
Dorris shoved past them to open a steel box painted with a red cross and take out a can of Coke. He tore the tab off, drank, then passed the can to Tom.
Michael gazed out at the angle the rutted cone hill made with the dry stream bed—a pointer through the Earth to somewhere else. “I think we’re all mad,” he shivered. “We’ve been mad for days. Swept up in madness. Suzie was right.”
“Now you’re talking, boy!” smirked Dorris.
“I… I’m coming out of it. Thank God it’s all gone. Crashed and crushed. We made that thing ourselves. It was our own tulpa—a sort of witchcraft we performed collectively. We never went to the Moon. The aliens were all wrong. I don’t know where we did go, or how, or what power we tapped—”
Deacon patted him on the arm with his Khidr hand. “We went outside normal cognition, that’s where. Now we’ve reentered. You’re right that we didn’t go to the Moon in any ordinary sense—though it was still the Moon.”
“Changing your story now that the Air Force is coming?” inquired Dorris.
“Not at all,” laughed Shriver. “Who do you think reported this to Edwards? I did! Last night, from the Astro. Edwards is a major test centre. This isn’t the sort of thing they’d pass up. Though I never knew there was a Project Unsightly! That’s strange. It must be secret. ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ Don’t take any notice of these two, Captain. They’re burnt out. They’ve blown their fuses.”
• • •
When the Cayuse helicopter from Edwards circled overhead, frail as a dragonfly, they took off to guide it.
Both helicopters landed beside the wreck of the car. A Major Bower emerged, a great balding man in his early forties, wearing blue tinted sunglasses. His eyes were small and piggy behind them; rooting eyes. His pilot, a Lieutenant Molinelli, photographed the wreck then checked it with a geiger counter.
“Normal readings, Sir—”
Major Bower prodded one of the splayed wheels with his toe like a child giving the token touch to a patch of wet paint, to prove it wet.
“Would you please check my friend’s hand?” Shriver tugged Deacon forward.
The Lieutenant complied. “That’s normal too,” he said. He peered at tire hand without touching it. “Seems like an allergy rash of some kind. Poison ivy? Not here, I guess! Could be some plant, though.”
Major Bower lit a cheroot. “Let’s hear your story, gentlemen.”
The Lieutenant produced a recorder.
The sun shone hotly now. Dust devils danced. Major Bower seemed unworried by the heat. Deacon too felt unaffected; cloaked in vigour. He ceased paying attention as Shriver talked. He hunted for that little prickly Opuntia cactus he had fixed his eyes on the night before. It was still there. It continued mutely to exist, to sustain its own reality. As did a stone, as did the furthest star.
Yet that wasn’t quite correct, reflected Deacon.
A stone, and a star, were not really separate entities. They weren’t really discrete loci of being. Particles constantly vanished and came into being out of Void within each of them. Photons from the star impacted on the stone. The cactus soaked up sunlight and breathed out oxygen for animal life, which incorporated cactus fruit and other animal life as food, and excreted mineral manure for the plants in the soil; while body cells were constantly being sloughed and new ones built. Material was constantly recycling…
How did one define an “entity”? Was it a single body cell, or the whole body? Or was it the whole ecology this body was part of? Where did one draw the line? Was a stone a separate object—or the single atoms that made it up? Or the much larger rock it must have fractured from? Or the whole desert environment? When did a stone become too small to be a stone? This was surely the “Gebraudi” message, too, with their talk of Whole Planet Life: a human being drew the line at such and such a point, yet actually it was quite arbitrary. Really, all the “separate” entities and objects in the world were more like amplitude peaks along a continuous line of being. And so the world was dual: it was continuous—yet full of separate
objects, too, from innumerable higher and lower points of view.
Nor was the consciousness that resided in all these separate points of view quite so myriad and separate as it seemed. Rather, it was all one and continuous—yet with innumerable local amplitude peaks, resonances of individual beings each possessing its own unique energy signature, its own signature of personal awareness. Consciousness was individual, for the individual beings—yet it was also continuous; and being continuous, so it partook of the original Void Awareness from which it had whirlpooled forth. So it was rooted in that deeper continuum of awareness of “nothing” whatever, existing before and after the universe peaked out into all its separate objects and existences.
The separating mechanism, he had already seen in his vision of the vortex. It was: point of view, observer and observed, leading inevitably to the consciousness of separate minds. The potential for separate consciousness was built into the basic subject-object, cause-effect, law-obedient nature of reality. And all these separate, “individual” foci of awareness, the existence of all the separate entities there were, prevented the universe from realizing itself and vanishing, for as long as these existed.
Deacon went on staring at the little Opuntia cactus, his eyes transfixed by its spines, as Shriver told his tale of alien visitors who-had come to heal the Earth…
Captain Dorris sweated heavily. Presently he fetched a glossy gun club magazine to fan himself. Michael sat down limply after a while; he huddled, hating the Major and his interrogation methods—unendurable stress by heat.
How medieval to torture the mad…!
“Major Bower,” said Shriver, “I never heard anything about a Project Unsightly, and I should have done because I interest myself in these matters.”
