Watson, Ian - Novel 06

 
Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc.
 
New York

God's World
is an exciting voyage of discovery in the
realms of both mind and matter and a highly compelling novel in its own right.

 
          
In
the year 1997 "angels" appear at holy places around the world,
summoning humanity to "come to God's World"—a planet twenty light
years from Earth. A powerful and mysterious space-drive is subsequently
discovered in the
Gobi
desert, giving scientists the means to
construct the first spaceship capable of taking humans outside their own
galaxy.

 
          
These
events provide a miraculous opportunity to prove or disprove the existence of
the Heavens and answer age-old theological questions that millions have died
for.

 
          
Representing
the peoples of the earth,
Pilgrim
Crusader
lifts off with a carefully hand-picked team of technicians aboard.
Soon they find themselves traveling through a strange dimension of distortions
and hallucinations until their ship is captured by creatures called the
Group-ones. Amy Dove, a sociologist and five co-pilots manage to escape to the
nearest planet—"God's World"— to find an alien civilization existing
partly in everyday reality partly in "Heaven." But through contacts
appearing out of dream imagery, Amy becomes aware that the Group-ones may not
be the enemy they seem, and that the "Heaven" of God's World masks an
awesome threat.

 
          
 
 
Never content with the ordinary Ian
Watson is one of the most adventurous science fiction writers of our times,
always intent on firing the imagination and extending the barriers of thought
and experience.

Other Works By Ian Watson

 
 
          
Chekhov’s
Journey

    
The Embedding

             
The Miracle Visitors

 
          
Copyright
© 1979 by Ian Watson

 
          
All
rights reserved

 
          
First
Carroll & Graf edition 1990

 
          
Carroll
& Graf Publishers, Inc.

 
          
260 Fifth Avenue
New York
,
NY
10001

 
          
Library
of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 
          
Watson,
Ian, 1943-

 
          
God’s
world / by Ian Watson.—1st Carroll & Graf ed. p. cm.

 
          
ISBN
0-88184-574-4 : $17.95
I.
Title.

 
          
PR6073.A86306    
1990

 
          
823'.914—dc20                                                       
90-31723

 
          
CIP

 
          
Manufactured
in the
United States of America

 
 
         
For
all history is in some measure a fall of the sacred, a limitation and
diminution. But the sacred does not cease to manifest itself, and with each new
manifestation it resumes its original tendency to reveal itself wholly. It is
true, of course, that the countless new manifestations of the sacred in the
religious consciousness of one or another society repeat the countless
manifestations of the sacred that those societies knew in the course of their
past, of their “history”. But it is equally true that this history does not
paralyze the spontaneity of hiero- phanies; at every moment a fuller revelation
of the sacred remains possible.

 
          
Mircea
Eliade,
Shamanism

CONTENTS

 
          
This time, when
Peter and
I
make love, we unmask the porthole.
Dousing the cabin lights, we float in the pale gloaming. We touch, we kiss.

 
          
Outside
is High Space: a grainy, mottled sea of trembling, incoherent half-light.
Brighter kaleidoscopic whorls well up and die back in that twilight sea, as
though they are the distorted, prismatic images of actual stars out there. But
they are not that; the ship’s instruments cannot translate them into patterns
corresponding to stars. At times they appear like ghostly images of our own
ship, probability echoes trying to suck us back down again into normal space.
Perhaps they’re simply the product of atoms sloughing off the hull, particles
scattering away through the boundary of the High Space field, becoming
mountains of virtual mass in our wake before they cascade back among the
ordinary interstellar hydrogen.

 
          
“So
far from Earth, and so close to ourselves,” murmurs Peter, with a royal purr.
Freckles stipple his upper reaches (I chart their chiaroscuro with outspread
finger tips) as though nature couldn’t make up her mind whether his top half
was to be white or amber. In the vague glow of High Space all these freckles
tend to merge, while his legs, bare of freckling, seem magnified, stockier and
plumper than they really are. He’s quite short, and wiry. A curly red-head.

 
          
“Yet
how far, Amy? We can measure our own closeness far more easily. This way—”

 
          
From
our long, free-fall foreplay of tongues and toes and fingertips we are borne
gently down upon the waiting bunk.

 
          
Or
rather, here it is that we bear down by choice. For in High Space a strange,
subjective sort of quasi-gravity comes into play. As we are drawn to each other
by intense desire, so we gather a local force of gravity in ourselves. It pulls
and holds us against each other as though we are about to be fused by natural
law as well as inclination. Only extremes of feeling trigger the effect— and
its opposite, if hate or rage is the feeling: an actual repulsion, a thrusting
away.

 
          
So
the tethers of the bunk rise towards us, Indian rope trick style, as we sink
down. Peter catches hold and tugs impatiently. Will we never reach our goal?
Time is stretching out now, teasing us. At last the tethers wrap round us
softly. We squash the bunk, we squeeze each other.

 
          
So
he slides inside me: slow dance of swelling tissues, hot muscle, nerves aglow,
glissade douce
. We are dense with this.
Our joy winds us together slowly like twin rubber bands of nerve fibre which
seem as if they can never reach a snapping point. Ours is snail-love: the slow
mutual twining of molluscs. In this sliding world we move only by muscle waves,
snails both of us, his love dart lodged beneath my mantle. The love-making of
snails is very beautiful.

 
          
Outside
in High Space the whorls bloom and dissolve back again into the formless
modality of pre-Creation: fingerprints of our ship’s transit, perhaps. My
fingertips press into Peter’s flesh meanwhile, his into mine.

 
          
Our
twin orgasm, later, expends the quasi-gravity in a slow shockwave detectable
throughout the ship, tugging vicariously for a while—we know well! —at the rest
of the crew. There may be smiles of complicity later on, perhaps a grimace from
cold Jacobik who deserves no first name. (Could he ever have been a product of
love?) The others can sense that it was us, rather than Rene and Zoe, say;
there is our signature, our flavour in the gravity pulse . . . Oh, we’re all
very much together on this journey.

 
          
When
we finally drift apart, in free-fall once more—in detumescent space—Peter
remasks the porthole while I illumine the little cabin softly, rheostating the
lights to half-strength.

 
          
Despite
the size-constraints imposed by the ellipsoid of the High Space field, here is
a private place. Private space guards us against the conflicting subjectivities
of High Space, and makes me wonder again (as a good cultural proxemicist): what
is the irreducible distance between people? What unconscious forces still
resist the equalization of all humanity?

 
          
One
wall of my cabin is decorated with a photocollage of those extraordinary events
whose origins we now fly to discover: the God’s World broadcasts—those
temporary appearances of angels and avatars who came into existence and
departed from it again. Here are the photographs: actual snapshots of God’s
messengers. I brood on them. Can one film an illusion? A durable, solid
illusion? How solid and durable must an event be to be classed as real rather
than imaginary? These angels and avatars hovered precariously between the two
categories—though not so the chariot they brought for us; that remains,
amidships.

 
          
Peter
claps his hands. Here am I wool-gathering before my photographs! So easy to
lose track of time, where time is ours to construct. How long have we been
en route
? Forever—and no time at all.
Clocks tick on, yet they are only clockwork toys. True time depends upon our
attention. Yet a shared consensus still exists by and large: the average of all
our attitudes. In this same steel hull we contrive to coexist.

 
          
Peter
bowls a ball of clothes for me to catch, my blue jumpsuit unravelling slowly
in mid-air, arms and legs inflating, offering me part of my stencilled name,
lest I forget:
Amy.
Briefs detach
themselves and hover: a white butterfly.

 
          
Acrobatically
we dress. Pulling on the magnetic boots, we click gently to the floor. Now
Amy Dove
faces
Peter Muir,
not loving snails but two crew members of Earth’s first
starship— which is Earth’s only in superstructure. Myself, psychosociologist.
And him? Call him parahistorian: chronicler not of profane but of sacred time,
of events that occur outside history, in faith, legend, shamanic rites; cartographer
of the ‘Other’. When we first met it was fairly obvious that he was the obverse
of my coin, and I of his. For I charted the extent to which we can still remain
‘other’ to one another in an increasingly homogenized world, and my basic
yearning must always have been for that lost human
terra incognita
which he was pursuing, in fossil form, on the
sacral plane: by way of the idea of some lost Golden Age of direct
communication with the sky, with the beyond, to which we had all lost the key.
Which is now so suddenly and alarmingly restored to us...

 
          
“If
you really love someone,” I suggest, “any baby you make together isn’t
‘yours-and-mine’ or ‘yours-or-mine\ No, it’s a fusion. It’s the impossible
fusion that you can’t actually reach on your own, by yourselves.” A third side
of the coin of ‘otherness’ : the unity of lovers?

 
          
He
grins roguishly. “We don’t do so badly.”

 
          
“We
aren’t
one
, though. Our baby would be
that one. I think that’s why people have babies, really. To be fused forever,
even though they can’t experience it directly. When we get back . .

 
          
“When?”
The word puzzles him; he has to recollect its meaning.

 
          
“That
baby would be the sum of ourselves: the sum of our relationship, wouldn’t it?
Yet he or she would be somebody else, quite separate from us—a mere
relation
! ” He groans at the play on
words, which is—I admit—pretty ludicrous, and even unintentional. Words! So
clear-cut and definitive on the one hand, yet on the other hand so foggy,
dissolving into other words, even into their very opposites. With such words we
try to express all the connexions and disconnexions of the world. Perhaps words
have to be that way or we should see no connexions at all, or alternatively we
should be cast adrift in a sink of consciousness where everything melted
together indistinguishably. As it is, we’re poised in between total connexion
and total disconnexion. I click a few paces across the floor to kiss him.
Connecting.

 
          
“What
will he look like, Amy? Or she! A perfect fusion would have to be a
hermaphrodite, wouldn’t it?” Chuckling, he licks his lips, tasting my love.
“It’s better in High Time, isn’t it? Making love, I mean. We’re that much
nearer the fusion of I and Thou . . . And then the fusion bomb goes off,
tickling them all up and down the ship! And so, we fly apart again.”

 
          
“Please
don’t joke about
those
.” I’m
offended. We may not be carrying fusion bombs but we do have our quiver of
thermonuclear missiles—ten arrows tipped with five kilotons apiece. To me that
is abominable. Yet the avatars spoke of war in Heaven...

 
          
“I
didn’t mean those, love. I wasn’t thinking.”

 
          
“No,
but Jacobik does, at every moment.”

 
          
What
will that baby of ours look like? The genetic roulette wheel should have a fine
spin, matching Peter’s short befreckled redness to my own ampler, more
exuberant limbs (for I overtop my love by almost a head; though my breasts are
quite tiny, really, little cones); to my own tumbling jet-black curls
(monkishly cropped for zero gee, alas), my brown eyes flecked with green, my
copper-tan skin: I have Irish in me, and Bengali too . . . and am always
predictably a little in love with myself, after love ...

 
          
“I’m
hungry. Let’s go and dial a meal. We’ll watch the others smile at us, if
anyone’s about. Race you?”

 
          
A
race in lightly magnetized boots is an exaggerated, ridiculous fast walk of
pumping elbows and quickly planted flat feet; one must be careful not to leave
the floor. We could float, we could fly; but this is funnier—our private game.

 
          
So:
click, click, click, we sprint in stylized sloth along the corridor, past
closed doors. Quasi-gravity tugs at us once, unbalancing us. Rene and Zoe?
Yes! We know, we know. Their signature is in the pulse. Today (what does
‘today’ mean?) our couplings have coupled, almost. Maybe we inspired them. We
wink, we chuckle. Conspirators.