The light was moving in such a strange swirling fashion that I couldn’t make out the shape of the vessel on which it was mounted. The window wasn’t open, but when the whirlpool of light emitted a single ray that fixed itself on me and paralyzed me I was conscious of being moved. I lost track of time completely. When I returned to my senses I wasn’t in my bedroom any more, and my night-dress had vanished.
Most people the aliens take seem to find themselves on operating tables, usually restrained in some way, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have liked that either, especially if I’d had a fit of restless legs, but the situation I found myself in seemed at first to be much worse. Perhaps it makes me seem like an awful prude, but for the first couple of minutes after I woke up I couldn’t think about anything but being stark naked, and having nothing to cover myself up with.
I wasn’t even lying down, let alone tied down, but I was in a kind of glass case, like one of those round display cases people sometimes keep stuffed birds in. There was nothing else in there— not a stick of furniture, not a scrap of cloth. There was a kind of box built into the glass wall just below shoulder height, and the inward face was grooved in a way that suggested that there might be little doors in it that could be opened, but I couldn’t get any of them to budge at first, even though I broke a nail trying.
The other side of the box, outside the glass cage, was joined to an opaque wall. I thought of that as the back of the cage, because there was a bigger open space on the other side, which had some weird equipment in it. The wall beyond the open space had a big window in it, through which I could look into another room— although the view was doubly distorted, because the window of the room seemed to be curved, like the wall of my glass prison. It was difficult to figure out what the real shapes might be of the objects I could see between the two glass walls and beyond the more distant one. The other room put me in mind of a control room, though, because there seemed to be some kind of console underneath the window on the inside, and there seemed to be chairs lined up so that people—or aliens—could sit at the console.
Only one of the chairs was occupied, and I wasn’t at all sure whether the thing sitting in it might qualify as a person, or how much of its strange appearance was due to visual distortion. I was aware of its existence for some time, while I grappled with the unyielding box, before I could bear to turn around and face it. I was terrified, of course, and horribly embarrassed. I admire the way that some other members of the group seem to have sailed through their experiences without undue alarm, but I felt simply awful. I think that was due to not having been desensitized to weirdness by watching a lot of TV. Josh won’t have a TV in our house, although I keep telling him that we ought to get one now that the kids have left home and we don’t have to worry any more about the possibility that it might rot their brains.
I couldn’t actually meet the alien’s eyes, because it had three of them. I thought at first that might be an optical illusion, but I soon became convinced that it wasn’t. The extra eye was mounted in the middle of what I had to think of as the creature’s forehead. Its mouth was pretty much where you might expect a mouth to be, given the position of the two eyes set below the single one, but if it had a nose and ears I couldn’t identify them, and I couldn’t begin to make a guess as to what the various smeary protrusions and excrescences distributed about the rest of its face might be. If I’d been able to look at it directly, without the distorting glass, it would probably have looked something like a slug with virulent acne. What I could discern clearly, though, was the color of its moist and rubbery skin, which was a vivid scarlet.
I screamed for a while, and writhed a bit—because I was trying to cover my breasts with one hand and my nether regions with the other, not because of my restless legs—and when it first spoke to me I screamed some more. Eventually, though, I calmed down when the familiar CFIDS numbness began to take hold. At least the lights were bright, and they never went out, so the one good thing about the early part of the experience was that it kept the SAD at bay. Eventually, I was able to listen. Josh says that I’ve never been a good listener, and I suppose he’s right, but I did my best.
The monster wasn’t really speaking to me. The voice was synthesized; it was as if the words materialized in the air close to my ear. “Please don’t be alarmed, human lady,” it said. “We are neither cataloguers or analysts, and we mean you no harm. If all goes well, we shall return you to your home within a matter of days. We shall do our utmost to minimize the apparent lapse of time between your departure and return, and we shall do our best to obliterate your memories of this disturbing experience. In the meantime, we shall keep you informed of everything we are doing and the reasons for our actions, in order to reduce your temporary distress and perhaps obtain your cooperation. You may address me as Kitten.”
“Kitten?” I echoed, incredulously.
“There is no actual resemblance, I know,” the alien admitted. “The name is meant to be suggestive of something humans find familiar and non-menacing.”
“Arrows by any other name would wound as deep,” I said, feeling quite proud of myself for being able to be witty, even though I’d stolen the quip from Josh’s standard repertoire. He always attributed it to Saint Sebastian, but that was just part of the joke.
“You may call me Rose if you would prefer to do so,” the monster said. It could recognize an English play on words when it heard one.
“No thank you,” I said, politely refraining from making any remark about the impossibility of believing that the foul thing could possibly smell sweet. “Kitten it is. I’m Zoe.”
“Thank you, Zoe,” it said. “I apologize for frightening you. It would have been feasible for me to replace the glass panel in front of me with a TV screen, on which I could project the false image of a human being, but that would be a lie. We do not approve of the manner in which the cataloguers and the analysis lie so frequently in order to confuse the increasingly-large number of humans who prove resistant to their primitive memory-obliteration techniques.”
“Can I get some clothes in here?” I asked. “A dressing gown, maybe?”
“I’m afraid not,” the alien replied. “You are being held in a maximum security biocontainment facility. We need to be extremely careful about any kind of matter-transfer between your environment and ours.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m sure it’s very kind of you to go to such lengths to make sure that I don’t catch any of your diseases, but I really would be willing to take a small risk in the interests of having something to wear. A hospital gown would do, or the kind of paper suit the police give you to wear in a rape suite, when your own clothes are taken away for forensic examination.”
“We are a gnotobiotic species,” the monster said, “but even if we were not, you could not possibly be infected by micro-organisms from our ecosphere, which is very different from yours. The opposite is, alas, not the case.”
It took me a minute or two to figure out that that he was implying that I was the disease-ridden one. I thought of the Martians in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, who had all kinds of superscientific weapons but no resistance to Earthly diseases, having long disposed of all their own. The comparison didn’t make the implication seem any less insulting, although it was slightly less distressing, in its way, than Josh’s insistence that I only suffered from imaginary diseases.
“So,” I said, eventually, “you won’t give me any clothes because you’re afraid that they might start some kind of plague in your world when I don’t need them any more. You could always burn them—or, better still, send them back with me.”
“We cannot permit any of our materials to enter your ecosphere, for fear of disruptive consequences,” the monster told me, apologetically. “Nor is decontamination as simple a process as you imagine. If it were only a matter of bacteria, burning would easily suffice—but what causes us anxiety, as well as making you a vital resource in our hour of need, is your remarkable complement of protovitalistic energi
es.”
“I have no idea what that means,” I confessed. “Or any of the rest of it, really. I don’t know what not-a-biotic means, or cataloguers and analysts. It’s all Greek to me. I’m sorry.”
“The word I used was gnotobiotic,” the monster told me, spelling it out for me. “It means that my flesh is free of all biomolecular materials that do not actually belong to it, including commensal micro-organisms. A cataloguer is a humanoid life-form of relatively short stature with silver or grey colored skin and large almond-shaped eyes. Its species is one of several collecting data on the physiology and culture of the human species on the eve of its extinction. An analyst is a humanoid life-form of considerably taller stature, which usually adopts quasi-human form to communicate with human beings, although that is not its native appearance. Its species is another of those collecting data, but its methods tend to be more invasive....”
While it was talking, I recalled what the monster had said about the cataloguers and analysts being frequent liars, and thought about the way that Josh would have reacted. “How do you figure out which is the liar and which is the truth-teller,” he’d have said, “when they’re both accusing the other of telling lies?” He liked logical puzzles. Maybe that’s why he’d once liked me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but the explanations of the explanations aren’t any clearer than the explanations themselves. On the other hand, this protovitality whatsit sounds like the sort of thing they put into antiwrinkle cream, so I might be able to follow the argument a little bit better in that instance. I’ll try.”
“The phrase I used was protovitalistic energies.” the monster said, in the sort of patronizing tone that make-up consultants often adopt. “Do you know what vitalism means?”
“I think so,” I said. “It’s healthy stuff that clears out all your toxins and perks you up.”
“Not in the sense of the term that I’m using,” the alien replied, its voice taking on a slight tone of exasperation. That seemed odd, when I thought about it—not because I thought aliens oughtn’t be able to get exasperated, but because they oughtn’t to be able to express exasperation in the tone of a synthesized voice. “In your world,” the monster went on, “it’s a seemingly-obsolete theory of biology, which attributes the fundamental phenomenon of life to the activation of inert matter by some kind of vital force or energy.”
“Oh, I see,” I said. “As in Frankenstein, where the patchwork dead body is brought back to life by a big jolt of electricity.” I’d never actually seen the movie, but I’d read the book to the kids when they were young, just as I’d read them The War of the Worlds. You have to make some educational compromises in the interests of encouraging a healthy attitude to reading.
“That would be one of the least plausible speculations corollary to the notion,” the monster conceded, reluctantly, “but you’re thinking along the right lines. If my reading of your timeline is correct, vitalistic theories were still widely held by your ancestors until quite recently, when organic chemistry made sufficiently rapid progress to reveal the actual workings of metabolic pathways—at which point it was realized that vitalism was an unnecessary hypothesis, ripe for excision by Ockham’s razor.”
“Josh uses a Phillips,” I said.
“I’m sorry—just forget the last bit. The point is that your contemporaries have abandoned vitalism as a theory of life, because it no longer seems applicable to organisms of your sort—quite rightly, since your kind of life really can be almost entirely explained in other terms. True vitalism doesn’t emerge for the first time until several hundred million years downstream of your present. As your kind of metazoan life evolves, however, all of its commensals evolve in parallel—not merely your parasitic worms, bacteria and viruses, but multifarious entities whose existence you don’t even suspect yet, including the most primitive imaginable entities of nascent protovitalistic energy. Their existence is irrelevant to most creatures of your organic sort, although they play a peripheral role in maintaining the phenomena of human consciousness, but the existence of their remote descendants is extremely relevant to the kinds of life and consciousness that entities of my kind experience. Do you see what I’m driving at?”
“I’m not an idiot,” I told it. “You’re saying that I’m carrying lots of not-quite-material bugs, which are distantly related to things that you’re carrying.”
“That’s nearly correct,” the monster conceded, now contriving to sound surprised, in the supercilious manner Josh tends to put on whenever I have a good idea. “In my case, however, carrying gives the wrong impression. Humans often think of themselves as immaterial entities of mind or soul which merely employ bodies as vehicles. The image is little more than a plausible illusion, in the human case, although the elements of some such situation are present in your primitive version of consciousness, but evolution is indeed capable of producing organisms of that general sort. We really are compound creatures, in which entities of an energetic nature are intimately allied with fleshy hosts. Our vitalistic components are the very essence of our sensitivity and intelligence, and their versatility allows our minds to be much more flexible, versatile and powerful than yours.”
“My husband says the same thing about his mind,” I told the alien. “Personally, I think it’s him that’s a bit lacking in the soul department.”
The monster sighed, as if to say: Well, I tried. It was sounding more and more like Josh with every minute that passed. My legs were getting restless, and I had to wriggle a bit, although I tried as hard as I could not to seem as if I were doing some kind of subtle erotic dance.
“Well, Zoe,” the monster said, “that’s the reason why we have to be so very careful in handling you—and also why we need to take the risk. You have lots of these primitive energy-entities inside you, whose individual properties extend across the whole of a wide spectrum. The vitalistic component of each of our subspecies is much more specialized, refined by natural selection from a very specific sector of the spectrum.”
“The red part, so to speak,” I said.
“I see the joke,” the creature conceded, disdainfully. “Yes, if it helps you to grasp the issue, you may identify the sector of the spectrum from which my own vitalistic component comes as the red part. To carry the analogy further, my own subspecies is under threat from creatures of another sort, so different that it would be analogically legitimate to describe their innate energies as violet, or even ultraviolet. We have no ready-made weapons with which to fight them, but we are very familiar with the theory that might allow us to manufacture some, if only we can exploit and mobilize the right resources.”
It took me a moment or two to cotton on to what it meant, although it was obvious enough. “And that’s me, right?” I said. “You kidnapped me out of my nice centrally-heated bedroom, leaving my comfortable winter nightie behind, so that you could mine me for the raw materials of what passes for biological warfare in your world.”
“That is correct,” the monster told me, seeming slightly relieved that it didn’t have to try to spell it out any more clearly.
“I suppose,” I said, acidly, “that it wouldn’t do me any good to say that I didn’t want to be used like that? As a matter of principle, I mean—not just on the trivial grounds that if I had to compare you with your enemies, I’d probably find them every bit as ugly.”
“You suppose correctly,” it said, a trifle stiffly. “We have you, and we intend to use you, with all possible speed. If our enemies had you, they would not hesitate to do likewise. Fortunately, we have obtained access to the analysts’ records of the vital point in the stream—not an easy thing to do, given the hectic activity that surrounds your pre-extinction phase.”
“And instead of just taking what you needed while I was sleeping peacefully, utterly oblivious to what was happening,” I said, “you thought you’d wake me up instead, so I could stand here stark naked listening to your stupid explanations before you started sticking needles in me?”
“You
mistake our motives, Zoe,” the monster told me. “Although the protovitalistic energies we seek are largely irrelevant to the fundamental processes of your kind of organic life, they are not entirely irrelevant to human consciousness. In order that you may serve our purpose we need you to be conscious, and fully informed. The process of abstraction does not involve needles, and will be quite painless in a physical sense—but a certain amount of mental effort on your part would be most helpful.”
As you can imagine, I picked up the vital part of that sentence immediately. “What do you mean, painless in a physical sense’?” I asked. I remembered that I’d once read the children a story about emotional vampires that fed on love, which leeched the capacity for affection and anxiety out of their victims, leaving them utterly dispassionate, devoid of hope and fear. If they expected to do that to me, I thought, they were at least ten years too late to catch any sort of tide. I’d had three children, and they’d all grown up.
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 16
