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CHAPTER FOUR
The Catalyst and the Chrysalis
This is something I’ve always remembered but always kept quiet about. I didn’t need psychoanalysis or hypnotherapy to dredge the memory up, but it wasn’t something I wanted to tell anyone at the time, or at any time since. It wasn’t that I was afraid of being laughed at, or being called a liar or a fantasist. It was just something I needed to keep to myself for a while. Now, though, it seems that the time is right. I’ve been coming here for a couple of years now, listening to everyone else’s stories, and I feel that I’m ready to let it go.
Some of the younger members won’t have any memory of 1981, and it’s not a year that has gone down in history for any particular reason. It’s probably enough to say that it was two years into Mrs. Thatcher’s reign of terror, with the economic recession getting ever deeper and unemployment rising fast. I was married then, and my husband, Mike, was one of the people who lost his job.
We had been doing reasonably well until then, and weren’t exactly plunged into instant destitution. I was working at the local hospital as a nurse, but my pay wasn’t enough to pay the mortgage and sustain any kind of decent standard of living. Unfortunately, Mike didn’t react well to unemployment, or to my becoming the breadwinner. The vague plans we’d made to start a family went right out of the window, and although the prospect of having children had never seemed a particularly big deal before, the fact that we were no longer able to consider the possibility suddenly seemed to become one. At any rate, it became another thing for Mike to get bitter about—another thing to fuel his disappointment and his drinking.
We were soon struggling, getting gradually deeper in misery and debt. Being in debt doesn’t seem to mean much nowadays, when everybody under thirty seems to live on credit, but in those days we didn’t think about owing money as something normal and natural. It was bad, and it preyed on our minds—which only served to increase Mike’s disappointment, and drinking, even further. You can imagine how the spiral worked.
I did my best to increase our income, working extra shifts and studying hard for the exams I needed to pass in order to get promotion, but that only made the fact that I was supporting him increasingly conspicuous, burdensome and annoying. The state of the marriage went downhill rapidly once the slide began, and I think we both knew that it was only a matter of time before something broke under the strain.
The abduction itself was like a dozen others I’ve heard described here. I’d worked sixteen hours on the trot, from six o’clock in the morning to ten at night, and I came home exhausted. Mike was already asleep when I came into the bedroom, so dead drunk that an earthquake wouldn’t have woken him up. I should have been equally oblivious once I’d dropped off, but I woke up suddenly in the early hours of the morning. I glanced at the clock on the bedside table, which said that it was twenty past three. I got out of bed and went to the bedroom window.
The window was open—it was August, and we were three days into what passed for a heat wave in those days. There was a huge disk floating over the house, silent and unilluminated. I was paralyzed, and then grabbed by some kind of tractor beam. Its manipulators maneuvered me out of the window easily enough. I was a lot thinner in those days. I lost consciousness when the thing swallowed me up.
When I woke up, I was in the kind of laboratory space that we’ve heard described so often. I was lying on my back on an operating table, with a white sheet draped over me. My limbs were immobilized, although I couldn’t see any solid restraints.
There was a bright light directly above me, bright enough to hurt my eyes. There were various items of equipment massed on the left-hand side of the bed, all seemingly idle. I had lines in each arm, and one in each leg. The one in my left arm seemed to be an intravenous drip, and the one in my left leg also seemed to be carrying a clear fluid—probably bodily wastes. The ones that caught my attention, though, were those in my right arm and leg, which were full of colored fluid. The tube connected to the leg appeared to be carrying red fluid out, while the tube connected to the arm seemed to be carrying a blue fluid back again.
It didn’t take a genius to guess that the leg-tube was carrying oxygenated arterial blood while the arm-tube was returning deoxygenated venous blood. The flow was slow but steady. I didn’t appear to be breathing any more deeply or rapidly than usual, but the air I was sucking in had a slightly strange taste, which suggested that it was richer in oxygen than Earthly air.
It wasn’t easy to see where the blood was going, because it was below the level of the operating table, but I could crane my neck just far enough to see that there was something in a kind of cradle resting on the floor. The cradle must have been about four feet long and two wide, and the thing fitted into it fairly snugly. It was dark brown in color, with a shiny surface. It put me in mind of a big balloon, or a giant rugby ball, or some sort of monstrous egg. My blood was being slowly pumped into the ovoid at one end, and pumped out again at the other, then returned to the vein in my arm.
My first thought was that I had fallen victim to alien vampires, but that didn’t make sense, because the blood—or something very like it—was being returned. Then I wondered whether the ovoid might be some kind of dialysis machine, but that didn’t seem very plausible either.
I must have been lying there for an hour or so before anyone— or anything—came in. I felt quite calm, perhaps because I was being fed tranquilizers through the incoming drip as well as nutrients. I didn’t scream when the door finally opened, or experience any dreadful sensation of shock. I’d already prepared myself mentally to see something that wasn’t human, and was, in the event, slightly relieved to see something that wasn’t quite as horrid as it might have been.
It was a bug of sorts—a six-limbed thing that used its four hind feet for walking while its two front feet were modified into something more like arms. Its wing-cases curved around its upper body like some sort of fancy jacket, colored dark red with black spots like a ladybird. The body would have suited a head like a praying mantis, but that’s not the sort of head it had. Its skull was big and rounded, and its face was like some kind of Halloween mask, with big round eyes positioned in front and a big smiling mouth with nice white teeth. It didn’t have a nose or ears, but the eyes and the mouth were just enough to provide a hint of apparent humanity even before it spoke.
“Hello Mary,” it said, in a strange fluty accent. “I’m Imhotep. I’ll be looking after you while you’re here. I hope you’re quite comfortable.”
“Wasn’t Imhotep the guy who built the Great Pyramid?” I said. “You’re not going to tell me, I hope, that the pyramids really were constructed as landing-pads for alien spaceships?”
“The legend connecting Imhotep to the Great Pyramid was something of an afterthought,” the bug informed me. “You’re absolutely right to identify it as a pseudonym—you wouldn’t be able to pronounce my real name—but it was selected because of a different legend, which makes Imhotep the father of medicine.”
“You mean you’re a doctor?”
“Absolutely.”
“And what, exactly, are you treating me for?”
“You’re not the patient, I’m afraid,” it said, in what might have been a crude attempt to fake an apologetic tone. “You’re the treatment.”
I looked at the thing in the cradle. “That’s your patient?” I said.
“Yes it is. Perhaps I should have said that your blood is the treatment—but I assure you that our using it won’t do you any harm at all. Blood is essentially a carrier, you see. At the risk of stretching the metaphor, you might say that we’re using your hemoglobin and its associated cofactors as a kind of catalyst, which facilitates certain chemical reactions but is then regenerated, so that it can be used over and over again in an endless cycle.”
The bug said all this rather blandly, as if it didn’t expect me to understand, and didn’t really care whether I did or not, but wanted for
some reason to put on a show of honesty. It obviously didn’t know that I was a nurse, or that I’d been desperately revising my anatomy and physiology of late.
“Isn’t there an easier way to pump oxygen into the damn thing?” I asked it. “Taking an interstellar trip, then using a tractor beam to kidnap human beings from their bedrooms, merely in order to use the hemoglobin in their blood as a means of infusing an egg with oxygen, strikes me as the most ludicrously uneconomic project imaginable.”
“It probably would be,” the pseudonymous Imhotep agreed. “As it happens, though, we’ve disguised our apparatus as a spaceship for reasons of convenience. We haven’t had to take an interstellar trip, or even an interplanetary one. And yes, if it were only a matter of oxygenation, we could find simpler ways to do the job. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It’s a much subtler process of catalysis—which, I have to admit, we don’t fully understand ourselves. Also, it’s not an egg; it’s a chrysalis.”
It took me a minute or two to work my way through the complexities of the triple denial, but I got there in the end. I figured that I ought to take things a little more slowly.
“You’re not from another planet, then?” I said.
“No,” it said. “The little silver-skinned guys with the big eyes apparently claim to be extraterrestrial, and they’re probably not alone, but we don’t socialize with them any more than we socialize with others of our own kind. We often disguise our vessels as theirs, though, in order not to attract overmuch attention from other travelers. Everyone’s used to seeing the little guys hanging around this era.”
“So where do you come from?” I wanted to know.
“Earth, about three hundred million years downstream.”
“Downstream?”
“Down the time-stream—about three hundred million years in the future. The Third Arthropod Era. The insects of your world are our remote ancestors. Some of our scientists think that might have something to do with the fact that we still have a vestigial dependence on—or, at least, a vestigial affinity with—human blood. Personally, I don’t believe it. The hypothesis that we’re descended from human parasitic lice is at best unproven and at worst silly. The chain of evidence is broken in half a dozen places—global catastrophes and their consequential extinction events tend to mess up the fossil record somewhat. On the other hand, our adults do seem to need the catalytic infusion of mammalian blood if they’re to pupate successfully, and human blood does seem to work far better than any other kind. Whatever the explanation is for that, it’s bound to be at least a little crazy.”
By the time Imhotep had finished that speech I had several things on my mind, and it wasn’t easy to figure out which to tackle first. “So you got to be the way you are by having human blood pumped into you when you were a chrysalis?” I said, figuring that I really ought to demonstrate that I was capable of keeping up with his arguments.
“That’s a neat inference,” the bug conceded, “but I’m afraid it’s mistaken. I know that I look something like an adult, with the wing-cases and the legs and all, but actually I’m the result of what we call pedogenetic pseudometamorphosis. I never pupated—which might be regarded as a blessing, or as a lost opportunity, according to your point of view.”
I was now way out of my depth. Rather than ask it what the hell pedogenetic meant, though, I thought it might be more productive to change tack.
“You don’t have any humans in your world,” I inferred, “so you have to travel back in time to acquire human blood.”
“That’s right,” it said. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but your species becomes extinct in the not-too-distant future, when global warming causes a catastrophic release of methane from seabed clathrates. Most vertebrate species go with you, although a handful of rodents get through. The insects do better—though not as well as the worms, of course. The worms always pull through. Arthropodan Eras are relatively rare events, although they might be more common downstream of our time. As I said, we don’t socialize with time-travelers from our past or our future. It’s too dangerous. Nobody wants to create an unhealable rift in the fabric of history.”
“But snatching twentieth-century humans from their beds doesn’t count as changing history?”
“No. It happens all the time, thanks to the little silver-grey guys, and it never changes anything, even though their memory-wipes are always liable to go awry. Not that ours are perfect, mind—but our timing’s much better. The silvers are always returning people hours, or even months, later. With us, you can be sure that you won’t lose a single minute. You’ll be back in your bed within a few seconds of getting out of it, no matter how long you’re here. You won’t have aged measurably either—that cocktail we’re pumping into you to keep you healthy and happy is good stuff.”
“That’s good to know,” I told it. “Even so, you’re not exactly observing the principle of informed consent, are you? I know you’re calling yourself Imhotep rather than Hippocrates, but that doesn’t free you from the demands of medical ethics. Or do you think that just because you’re a giant bug, who isn’t even a true adult, while I’m only a long-extinct mammal, you don’t owe me any ethical consideration at all?”
“That’s fair comment,” the bug conceded. “To tell you the truth, we have occasionally tried to observe the principle of informed consent, but we’ve found that it leads to a drastic shortage of volunteers. Time travel isn’t as impractical as space travel, by any means, but it’s not so convenient as to allow us to waste a great deal of energy and effort. It’s an ethical compromise, I know, but we tend to skip the consent part—and I have to confess that even the information component is a bit of a swizz, considering that the memory-wipe will surgically remove all the information I’m currently giving you. The odds are a thousand to one against your actually remembering any of this when we put you back—and even if you do, the fact that you’ll only have been gone for five or six seconds will make it very difficult for you to believe that it was anything but a wacky dream. In that event, your brain will probably do its own memory-wipe, just as it does when you wake up every morning, to protect you from the possibility of mistaking your dreams for real experiences.”
“Actually,” I told it, “I’m quite good at remembering my dreams—and my nightmares too—although I rarely mistake them for real experiences.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Imhotep said, with all apparent sincerity. “I’d offer to treat you for it if I could, but it’s not my specialty. I’m a metamorphologist.”
“Right,” I said. “The overgrown football is your patient. I’m just the unconsenting blood donor. So what’s the problem you guys have with pupation? Why does your average chrysalis need a three hundred million year time trip if it’s to produce a healthy adult?”
I got the impression that it had been asked the question a dozen times before. Its answer was as casual and as practiced as the rest of his spiel. “It’s a question of pedogenesis,” it said. “There are a few pedogenetic insects around in your era, but they don’t get the same kind of publicity that ants and bees get, so the idea isn’t exactly common knowledge. You might be familiar with the general notion, though, in an amphibian context. Do you know what an axolotl is?”
“No,” I said.
“Pity. Well, briefly, an axolotl is a kind of tadpole, which has the genetic apparatus to metamorphose into a kind of salamander— but if there’s plenty of water around, it doesn’t bother. It grows sexual organs while remaining a tadpole, and breeds without ever producing a true adult. We think it’s a fairly common reproductive pattern in certain evolutionary phases—lots of new species seem to emerge during phases of rapid adaptive radiation by taking neotenic short cuts, so that larval forms begin reproducing themselves rather than completing their supposedly-full life-cycles.
“In your world, some insect larvae that feed on material that’s rare in general terms but tends to crop up in massive quantities when it does occur—the rotting wood from falling trees, say�
��have the option of developing sex organs as larvae and breeding as juveniles, often going through twenty or thirty generations like that before finally running short of food, pupating, and producing flies that hurtle off in every direction looking for another juicy fallen tree. Do you see the logic of the situation?”
“Yes,” I claimed, bravely.
“Well then,” Imhotep said, settling down on his oddly-jointed legs as if for a long lecture, “imagine what might happen to an insect species that developed intelligence in its larval form—and developed agriculture along with it. Agriculture provides the means to secure a permanent food supply, while the prospect of a reversion to idiocy provides a strong motive for trying very hard to avoid metamorphosis. My ancestors—like the ancestors of most of the species that developed self-conscious intelligence in our era—had the pedogenetic option, and they took it. Adults became very rare, and then almost mythical. Pupation came to be regarded as a fate worse than death, and for centuries those individuals unlucky enough to pupate were ritually destroyed. After a long period of time, though—during which our fledgling civilization flourished, and eventually gave rise to science—attitudes began to change. Pupation became a mystery to be solved, and an opportunity to be explored. We began to produce adults again—but the adults our nearer ancestors produced seemed to be defective, even by comparison with our modest expectations.
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 8
