Plato's Cave

by Russell Proctor

  Obviously form and substance were different here, and no doubt many more dimensions that we normally had to deal with on a daily basis.

  "I get it," I said. "You’re passing through our universe, and what I’m seeing is just one aspect of you, one slice as it were?"

  I am an assembly of possible images transformed into the phenomena you call light and sound and other forms that may have meaning to you.

  "Thanks, it does help."

  I looked around. The whole landscape was It. If there was anything beyond it – if, indeed, it was anywhere for there to be a beyond – I had no way of knowing. This whole universe could be the Thing. It was all relative.

  "But why are you here? Why are you passing through?"

  There is another, and we are meeting.

  "Another one of your kind?"

  I have no kind.

  "Whatever."

  Semantics at time like this!

  "Another – aspect - of you?"

  I have no aspect you could understand.

  "Why did you take over my body? Why have all these things happened to me? Did you do that? Make me go into star-form, all those sausages? Was that you?"

  That was you, but because you are linked to me. When you encountered me, you made me into things you could understand. This had certain effects in your universe. It changed you, and created effects around you.

  "We sort of suspected that. So why am I linked?"

  You were there.

  A thought occurred to me. I pointed at Mike: a useless gesture, because whatever was speaking/thinking in my head could not see me.

  "What about Mike? The plant. He came here first, before me. Is he part of you?"

  That is the other aspect.

  "So it was Mike you were after all the time? And I got involved just by accident?"

  You were linked in another way to it. But I was looking for the Other.

  "May I ask why?"

  There may have been a microscopic pause, a hesitation, or I may have just fancied it.

  We are breeding.

  "What?"

  We require a coming together of two to make others.

  Ok. Good old-fashioned sex. The Thing and Its Other were out for a bit of fun, and I walked in on them. Typical me.

  "I’m sorry. I didn’t know."

  It was necessary to find the Other and form the link, so that we might breed. And you were there.

  "Sorry about that. And now you have – er – done it, you’ll go away?"

  No.

  "Why not?"

  You must see.

  "See what?"

  Then something happened off to my left. In the sparkling, infinite landscape, something was approaching. I looked and knew, all at once. It was the phoney pizza man, who had been pulled into this place like I had. He was running towards me over the grass. I turned, glad to see a human face, even his, but he kept coming for me, not slowing as he approached, and I knew I was in trouble.

  He hit me square on, folded me up like a birthday card. We thumped on the ground together, rolled over a couple of times, and then his elbow – accidentally I hope – connected with the side of my head. Everything spun around. Lights that had nothing to do with the surrounding landscape danced little fairy rings around my skull. Pretty but painful.

  By the time the lights stopped, the man was over the other side of the stream. He had a blank expression on his face, and I wasn’t certain if he was quite the man he used to be. Mike, for his part, had done nothing.

  I sat up. "What did you do that for," I asked, clutching my head.

  It is necessary for you to know.

  "Know what?"

  Everything.

  "Including pain, obviously. Sorry, but I’m already familiar with that."

  I wanted to go home, to get away from this strange place. I didn’t much care if the pizza man came with me or not. In fact, he could go to hell as far as I was concerned. He had hurt me.

  And I must thank you.

  "My pleasure. Thank you for the punch in the head."

  There was a pause. Even in another universe, drama played a part. I was being handed a cue on a plate.

  "All right, I’ll bite. Why do you have to thank me?"

  We could not have bred without you.

  That did not make me feel better. It sounded just a little too kinky for my liking.

  "Just don’t name it after me, ok?"

  This will be returned.

  "What? The pizza guy? Why did you bring him here in the first place?"

  The Other brought him. You had not come, and we were looking for another bonding.

  "I don’t think I want to know about it."

  The pizza guy vanished. I never saw him again, but I’m sure he was returned safely to our universe. I hope.

  Nothing happened for a few minutes/hours/years. I just stood there, in that weird landscape, my head throbbing.

  It was necessary to cause you pain, to release the final barriers in your mind. So you can See.

  And then the Thing showed me what it wanted me to See.

  The World as It really Is.

  The landscape changed, opened up, unzipped. The colour that was a thousand shades of many colours grew even deeper. Forms came and went, some blatantly geometric, others different, more defined, but still enigmatic. I saw the truth in all things, knew that everything here reflected something in our universe, but on a higher, a more sensitive, a more acute level. Here, Fact gave way to Reality; Shape became Form; Truth was a solid object.

  And in all this, I suddenly understood. What we are and what we know are limited to our own experience, and our experience is obedient to physical laws. It was all unutterably simple. Our universe is finite but unbounded, yet infinite and bounded too. Within, beyond, above, across: all distances are a lie, because distance is relative, time is a vague theory not yet proved, and we are shadows, reflections, versions of higher forms that scoff at both the laws of science and the secrets of the philosophers.

  The Maestro could not have been more wrong: I was not in the Shadowplane, but from it. What we call reality is merely the prelude to the way things really are.

  I stood there for a long time, although time had no meaning, while the universe came and went around me, and eventually I was sent back.

  That’s all.

  ***

  I woke up in bed: Joanna’s bed. She was there, looking concerned, staring down at me. She seemed older, lines of worry across her face, concern in her eyes. I wondered how long I had been away. Looking at her, it seemed like years.

  "Hello," I said, as cheerily as possible.

  The room was full of shadows, even though the windows were wide open and the bright sun was flooding in. The light of our world was different for me now. Darker, it seemed, if light could be dark: dimmer, maybe.

  I could feel Joanna’s hand in mine, and gave it a squeeze. Her skin felt coarse, lined, like old leather.

  "Are you ok?" I asked. "You look a little peaky."

  "Emily!" she said, a tear starting on her cheek. "You’re awake!"

  "Yes. Miss me? What happened?"

  Nothing much, she explained. I had entered the circle and vanished. A second later, I reappeared, unconscious, on the floor. The circle, and the glow of its illumination, had gone. They didn’t know it then, but over their heads, the Gap had gone also, winking out in a second as if it had never been. No more objects fell from the skies. I had been bundled up and brought back to Joanna’s house. A day had since passed, while I slept deeply and they all prowled around, worried I was gone for good. David felt particularly bad, since entering the circle had been his idea. But it looked as if I was going to live after all.

  Only, the light...sounds...appearances. They weren’t the same to me. Something was missing, something that had never been there, but I never knew it should have been there until now...an essence, a texture...

  Nothing was complete. Nothing contained any soul.

  Nothing ever had, on
ly now I was able to notice it. Everything was shadows, dim suggestions of more solid things.

  Joanna looked closely at me, smiling.

  "But you," she said. "What happened to you?"

  "Well - " I began, and stopped. There was no way I could explain, not yet, not without a great deal of sorting and sifting and arranging of events in my mind. "I guess you sort of had to be there."

  ***

  To me, at any rate, it was clear now: this – Thing – from another universe had entered ours looking for another of its kind, in order to have sex. Nothing wrong there, except that the Other was a plant growing in our kitchen. Somehow, while I lay drunk on the cushions in the living room, the Thing wandered into my universe, touched my alcohol-expanded consciousness when I happened to have exchanged DNA or something with Mike, and formed a link to It through me. I then started seeing sausages, fake horoscopes and all sorts of other things as a result of being the gooseberry in the middle of these two lovers. Since I couldn’t make sense of what I experienced, I converted it into things I could, like sausages and horoscopes. The Thing had removed the contents of my house presumably hoping to take Mike along with it, only the necessary link between the two – me – was not in contact with him. Everything that had happened, including the Gap itself, were just other aspects of the Thing. Once the Thing had fully entered our universe, or at least enough as was necessary for mating to take place (I cringed a little at the thought of that), the Other, Mike, had responded in its own way, and that was that. They had sex, or whatever.

  Glad I could help bring a little romance to the fourth dimension.

  ***

  Life has pretty much returned to normal, now I’m back in the land of shadows. Heather managed to avoid too great a punishment for her assault on the sergeant: a good behaviour bond for twelve months, first offence and all that. Max was charged with the unlawful use of a motor vehicle to crush a policeman’s toes, and lost his licence as a result, but he’s still Director of the Planetarium. The Maestro was delighted with everything that happened, and had made some notes for his next book. He seemed to be looking forward to recanting everything he had previously stated and starting from scratch.

  I visited him before he returned to Turkey to thank him for the talisman he had given me. It had proved utterly useless, but I’m not one to hold a grudge. At least he’d tried, in his own way.

  "You will always be very powerful in your own right," he said. "Especially now that you have seen the real world. Gerçeği gördün." His handshake was very warm this time, and the blue of his eyes as intense as ever.

  Unfortunately, Joanna and David didn’t take things so well. It was partly my fault: I found it so difficult – still do – to explain what happened to me. But at least I could understand now what had been going on when I first encountered the Thing, while still in our world.

  Joanna mentioned something about subjective interpretation of paranormal phenomena, and David muttered darkly about disobeying the Laws of Thermodynamics, and left it at that. They couldn’t reconcile the fact that they had both been wrong, that in another universe there was a different science, and a different mysticism, and no way that either could be applied to explain what had happened to me.

  I tried to reassure David that I had seen the unification of science and myth that he had been searching for, but that it wasn’t what he had expected. He could never quite understand. Maybe he was just a little upset because he wasn’t there to see for himself.

  On a personal front, there have been no more sausages, no more star-states or symbiotic relationships with trees, no more splits in the bright azure sky. The Gap has gone, and so has Mike. I know why, now.

  I’m not sure if there is such a thing as love in whatever universe it had come from. Certainly there is sex. The Thing never revealed to me the true nature of Its relationship with the Other. Maybe they were in love; maybe they were just both out for a good time. That was fine by me. Somewhere, I guess, they are happy now, and maybe there are some little Things that will grow and one day have offspring of their own.

  As for the other things I saw after I lost the talisman, when the real world had been shown to me, that was probably the most significant thing of all. I saw the universe – our universe – as it really is, not the shadows we occupy on the mundane level. It’s not that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, it’s just that they are different to what we imagine them to be. Our ignorance exists, as I have said before, on four levels. There is much we don’t know and much we do. But don’t believe what anyone tells you. Because on the real level, above and below and on all sides, just out of sight, around the corner, over the horizon, the world is deeper, stranger, wider and more beautiful than you can possibly imagine. You can see it without bonding with multi-dimensional Beings. It’s there. All you have to do is look.

  Trust me.

  Days of Iron

  by

  Russell Proctor

  In the future, genetic engineering has created three species of humans. Homo sapiens – the Sapes – are the masters. The Sirians are savage and insular. And the Helots are slaves, denied even the right to breed.

  Humanity in all its forms has spread out into the galaxy, ruled by the all-powerful Syndicate of Galactic Corporations. But the Syndicate refuses to share technology beyond the ruling Elite.

  For Maddy Hawthorn, a Sape colonist, the peaceful life she had planned at Barnard’s Star is torn apart when she becomes involved in a terrorist plot to destroy the stranglehold of the Elite over the other races. Pursued by the military and the Syndicate’s agents, Maddy and her companions mount a desperate attack on the centre of control in the galaxy, an obscure planet on the fringes of known space.

  Maddy must fight a ruthless regime to survive, but her own past demons might be the most dangerous threat of all.

  Available from Amazon.com in Kindle edition and paperback.