“There will be no pain, Zoe,” the monster said, “if you can refrain from inflicting any upon yourself. What we would like you to do, if you will, is remember. We would like you to review your life, as scrupulously as you can. That is the aspect of human mental activity in which the protovitalistic energies are most involved—not as instruments, but as catalysts. You will not lose any of your established memories, I assure you, while we identify and refine what we need—nor, of course, when we subsequently erase your memory of this experience.”
I thought about that for a moment or two. Eventually, I said: “So I can refuse to co-operate?”
“No,” the monster said, brutally. “We have the means to keep you fit and well, and the means to keep you awake. I have told you what I want you to do. How easy, do you think, will it be to avoid doing it, given that you have so few alternatives? You have nothing to lose by co-operating, Zoe, and will go home all the sooner if you do. It’s as simple as that.”
Josh would have approved of the paradoxical aspect of it. If you tell someone not to think about an elephant, he’s fond of pointing out, they can’t do it, because trying not to do it is the same as doing it. However hideous the monster was, at least he was asking me, straightforwardly and not entirely impolitely, to think about the elephant—or, to be strictly accurate, about me: my life, my past, my accomplishments.
I agreed to help out as best I could; it seemed like the sensible thing to do, as well as the only thing I could do.
* * * *
For a long time, while I reviewed my life and loves, my labors and desires, my hopes and my dreams, nothing much happened. As promised, there were no needles, and no pain that wasn’t an effect of RLS or unpleasant memories. I couldn’t detect the means by which they were working on my protovitalistic energies, but as I’d never known that I had any protovitalistic energies, and had no senses that would have allowed me to discern the red, the violet and all the bits of the spectrum in between, that wasn’t entirely surprising. In all probability, the bell-jar was chock full of invisible vitalistic instruments busy vivisecting my poor excuse for a soul, but all I actually felt was restless legs. Whatever means the aliens had of keeping me awake was holding the CFIDS at bay.
The other seats in the control room were sometimes full and sometimes empty, but Kitten’s was always occupied. Whether it was always occupied by the same individual, I couldn’t say. The monsters were presumably able to tell one another apart, but they’d all have looked alike to me even if the curved glass hadn’t distorted their appearance.
They fed me, if you can call it feeding, by means of the box in the back wall of my upturned test tube. The panels did open, but only to expose other panels behind them. When I placed my hands flat on the surfaces that were normally covered up, they felt slightly warm. That was it. They weren’t pumping any fluids into me, let alone giving me anything to eat, but as long as I pressed my hands against the active panels every few hours or so I didn’t feel hungry and I didn’t get dehydrated. I didn’t feel any need to excrete anything, either, which was a tremendous mercy—I didn’t even get sweaty armpits.
When I asked about it, Kitten explained that they were feeding me with something akin to the raw vitalistic energies that provided sustenance to the more sophisticated soul-things that infused their intelligent subspecies. The force couldn’t nourish me directly, but it interacted with the protovitalistic energies native to my own body, which were capable of catalyzing physical processes as well as mental ones. In essence, my own protovitalistic energies were being stimulated in order to cause my body to make counter-provisions for a short period of effective starvation. It wouldn’t have kept me going for very long, but it worked pretty well as long as my confinement lasted.
When I eventually got back home I’d only been gone for twenty minutes or so on the clock, but I thought that I’d been in the glass case for at least a week. That didn’t make sense, because I hadn’t had anything to drink, and you can’t go without water for more than couple of days. On the other hand, I’d lost a couple of stone, which you can’t possibly do in less than a fortnight, even if you fast—so it didn’t make sense either way. At any rate, although the CFIDS came back with a vengeance from then until the end of January, I didn’t put the weight back on when I started eating and drinking again. I guess that was one aspect of the experience that worked to my advantage.
I won’t bore you with the details of my long trip down memory lane. What you’ll be far more interested in, I imagine, is the war.
The scarlet slug-things were working to a tight deadline, because they didn’t know what the enemy—the violets—might be up to while they were putting together their biological A-bomb. I never got to see one of the violets, so I have no idea what color they were, but I don’t suppose for a moment that they were actually violet. I imagined them as three-eyed and lumpy, much like my captors, but for all I know they might have had five heads with six eyes each, and thirty-two legs apiece. I did ask once, but Kitten ducked the question. After that first long conversation, he became less generous with information and explanations.
I say “he” at his point, rather than “it”, not because I ever discovered any evidence that our sexual categories had any equivalents in their alien biology, but because simply I’d begun to think of him as “he”, maybe because of the echoes of Josh I could hear in his synthetic voice. On reflection, those echoes might have been real, in the sense that they’d actually borrowed Josh’s voice for the purposes of synthesis, or they might have been purely subjective—but whatever the truth of the matter was, Kitten became “he” to me. He excused his lack of communicativeness, once the honeymoon period was over, by saying that he didn’t want to distract me too much from my reminiscing. It might have been true, but I’d heard too many excuses from Josh to swallow it without a pinch of salt. He did make occasional attempts at conversation, though, presumably in the interests of trying to keep me sweet. He even gave me a few tidbits of news regarding the progress of hostilities.
“We have intelligence suggesting that the violets are working on some kind of ultimate weapon too,” he said. “It’s not impossible that they’ve got their own human in a facility not too different from this one, but we have to hope that they’re working along other lines, which will prove less effective.”
“What will happen to me, if they strike first?” I asked.
“You’d be sent back. We’ve made provisions.”
“Not for my benefit, of course—just to make sure I don’t fall into enemy hands,” I said, to show him that I was capable of putting two and two together.
“Partly,” he admitted. “There’s also the matter of making sure that, however the war turns out, there’s no possibility of a further disaster being precipitated by the retention of a dangerous source of infection. If our need weren’t so desperate, we wouldn’t be taking the risk of entertaining you at all.”
I thought of telling him that it hadn’t been so very entertaining, even for someone who hadn’t got a TV at home, but I thought I ought to be diplomatic. After all, there was a sense in which I was humankind’s ambassador to the alien nation.
I couldn’t help wondering whether Kitten was telling me the whole truth, or whether he even knew it himself. The reds were obviously desperate to get their crucial blow in first, and were terrified by the prospect of being beaten to it. It seemed to me, though, that even if I were returned home with all possible speed once the red weapon was ready, that Kitten’s anxieties about the possibility of a further disaster following the war’s supposed end might be well-warranted. The weapon they hoped to derive from my protovitalistic energies would be used as a strike weapon, if possible, to win the war—but if things went awry, from the red viewpoint, it might end up providing a counterstrike. I couldn’t help fearing that the produce of my frail flesh might end up as a doomsday weapon in a case of Mutual Assured Destruction.
You might suppose that I shouldn’t really have cared about that, or an
ything else, except for the possibility that I might not get home—but I did care. It was a matter of principle. I remembered, too, that Kitten had said that the human race was on the brink of extinction, and that remark had reawakened all my old fears about the Cold War turning into a nuclear holocaust. That was one of the things I had to remember, to help them sort out the violet components of my protovitalistic spectrum.
Anyhow, I felt that it would be a terrible tragedy if two whole subspecies got wiped out in an orgy of mutual antipathy. No matter how ugly they were, or how alien, they were thinking and feeling beings. I don’t have a clue where they came from, but wherever it was, I figured that the extinction of sentient life-forms there would be just as awful a waste as the extinction of sentient life-forms here. I asked Kitten more than once whether there was any possibility of making peace.
“None whatsoever,” he told me. “Our biology isn’t like yours; our struggles for existence aren’t like yours. Vitalistic life doesn’t have much room for compromise. Conflict is a matter of competing energies, not competing political ideologies. Yours is a very primitive form of life: slow, inefficient, horribly ugly and almost certainly an evolutionary dead-end—although we don’t know a great deal about what goes on downstream—but it has its advantages.”
“Ugliness,” I reminded him, “is in the eye of the beholder.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “I have three and you have two, so yours are outvoted.” His sense of humor was improving. I think he learned more than he’d anticipated by talking to me, just as I learned more than I could have anticipated in talking to him. If his hopes had been fulfilled, and his side had won the war by a clear margin, I probably wouldn’t remember this, but I think the planned memory-wipe was overlooked in all the confusion.
I don’t know for sure whether his side won the war or not, although it’s certainly possible that what the slug-monsters in the control room were doing for the three minutes before the darkness came was their idea of a victory dance. I might have been mere minutes away from being sent home in a spirit of cheerful and slightly tearful camaraderie—but once the darkness did arrive, the automated system had to kick in. If the darkness was the first-strike weapon, I can only hope that the one I’d provided was never used in retaliation, but I suspect that mine was used first and that it was the darkness that became the counterstrike: the doomsday bomb. Kitten was right, though; the ultimate weapon the opposition had been working on was quite different from his.
The darkness didn’t arrive in the manner of a light that had been switched off; it was more measured and methodical. It was as if a crowd of shadows were oozing from invisible cracks in the walls and floor of the control room: shadows that had the ability to devour the seemingly solid flesh of the slug-men, and which set about doing so with a certain amount of relish.
They probably screamed, but I couldn’t hear them. I felt their terror and their pain, though, in a sympathetic fashion. Long winter days make me feel depressed at home, but the darkness of long winter days is nothing compared to that darkness, and it did more and worse than fill me with depression, even though I didn’t have the right kind of biology to be devoured by it. My SAD went into an overdrive I’d never imagined that it could possibly possess.
I couldn’t feel the darkness physically, because it was really some kind of vitalistic shadow-monster, eclipsing the energy that sustained the slug-things and swallowing their souls, but I was certainly conscious of the darkness, in a fashion that was far more intense than any mere awareness of what it was and what it was doing. The slug-things weren’t a pretty sight while they were alive, but that didn’t mean that I could take the slightest delight in seeing them dissolved, turned inside out and consumed, or in feeling the tragedy of their annihilation.
What the darkness looked like to their unhuman eyes, and what it felt like to their other senses, I have no idea—but Kitten had told me enough about the spectrum of vitalistic energies to give me some imaginative inkling of the horror of it.
The reds had been intent on extracting a weapon from my deadly repertoire that was very specific—one that could be very carefully aimed, so as to be deadly to some of the life-forms of that curious world but utterly harmless to others, like an earthly virus that’s deadly to pigs but utterly harmless to sheep. It was, I suppose, a good strike weapon to aim against a foe whose innate energies lay in a very different part of the vitalistic spectrum.
What the violets had done, by contrast, was to develop an all-purpose, all-devouring energy weapon that could annihilate anything within its ecosphere. If it had been used first, it would presumably have been targeted with great care—but if it had, in fact, been used as a counterstrike by the violets...well, as I said, perhaps I shouldn’t have cared, but I did. I still do. The thought that we might still go the same way, if things get out of hand in the Middle East, doesn’t make it any easier.
I’d like to think that my guys were the right side, insofar as there was anything to choose between them. I’d like to have been helping the good guys, or at least the less worse guys. I’d also like to think that the loss of the war hadn’t led to the extinction of all the intelligent subspecies in their ecosystem. I fear, though, that the darkness claimed everything—except me. I was sent back by some kind of reflexive fail-safe mechanism, designed to make sure that I would pose no further danger to anyone in that other world.
I think about the experience a lot. It seems absurd, I know, but I think about it most when I think about leaving Josh and the possibility of getting a divorce. I know how easily divorce can turn into an all-out war whose ultimate result is Mutual Assured Destruction. I sometimes wonder whether the differences between us might just be a matter of different protovitalistic energies catalyzing our consciousness in different ways, and nothing really to do with us at all, even if those energies really are all that any of us has by way of a pathetic excuse for a soul—but that doesn’t help either.
Anyway, I shan’t be doing anything in a hurry, no matter how restless my legs become or how depressed I get.
I know now, although I didn’t before, how very afraid of the dark I am.
<
* * * *
CHAPTER NINE
Letting the Cat Out
Milly and Janine both seemed rather subdued during the journey back to Salisbury. The light banter they’d exchanged on the way out had faltered. Although Milly had manifested such mood changes before, and she was the one tacitly in control of the situation, Steve couldn’t help wondering, anxiously, whether Janine might have picked up some mysterious subliminal signal during the meeting to inform her that all was not well within her relationship with her best friend. When a pause developed in their conversation, Steve could not bear the silence.
“You know that old enigma about whether a tree falling in a forest makes any sound if there’s no one round to hear it,” he said, more-or-less randomly. “Here’s another. Is a woman really naked if there isn’t another human being to look at her? I mean, obviously she’s got no clothes on, but is she really naked,?”
“Have you spent the last two hours imagining Zoe naked?” Janine asked. “That’s disgusting. She’s old enough to be your mother.”
“It’s a valid philosophical question!” Steve protested.
“I didn’t believe what she said about coming back two stone lighter and not putting the weight straight back on when she started eating again,” Milly said. “It’s never that easy—believe me, I know. I bet she’s had liposuction.”
“Maybe she had it without telling her husband,” Steve suggested, “and had to think of a bloody good story to explain the sudden shrinkage.” He knew that the suggestion was a casual breach of the AlAbAn rule that required him to refrain from suggesting that a story-teller might be telling lies. Given that he was in the privacy of his own car, however, with only his two girl-friends for an audience, he figured that no one was likely to object. Milly and Janine, however, obviously thought differently about the
propriety of this particular suggestion.
“Some of us humans,” Milly said, in a tone that was slightly ominous as well as obliquely accusatory, “probably have more protovitalistic energies than others.”
“And some of us,” Janine said, as if supplying an echo, “have probably had run-ins with those emotional vampires that leech all the affection and anxiety out of you, and leave you with stones for souls.”
Steve didn’t dare retaliate, in case things got out of hand. He had imagined Zoe naked, but it hadn’t seemed like a disgusting thing to see or do. Her story had surely encouraged, if not actually required, some such imaginative effort. He’d felt sorry for her, because she was obviously stuck in a loveless marriage from which she dared not make her escape, because she felt too vulnerable to be fully exposed to the world’s vicissitudes. Perhaps he shouldn’t have cared, but he did. It was a matter of principle.
“Shall I drop you at home before Janine and I go on to the Chinese, Milly?” he asked, politely.
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 17
