Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (3 page)

 
          
“Those
missiles are hardly planet-busters,” regrets Jacobik, as though a planet-buster
exists. In his dreams, no doubt it does! “Tactical stuff. This ship’s too damn
small. Come and fight, my little ones—but don’t bring your catapult, just bring
a wooden sword.”

 
          
“Perhaps,”
says Wu, “the trap was waiting to be sprung all these centuries in the
Gobi
desert, instead of being projected there
overnight. Perhaps the broadcasts all came from the pyramid machine itself?
Perhaps that has been recording and assessing human activities for a very long
time? We hardly understand its workings, do we?”

 
          
“That’s
a new point of view,” allows Captain K. “Yet it’s hardly supported by the
geographical cut-off line of the broadcasts.”

 
          
“With
the pyramid found near the very boundary? I’ve been giving a lot of thought to
this of late, Comrade Captain. The High Space pyramid may be much more complex
than even we suppose. It did ‘grade’ the candidates for the mission. It is,”
she speaks bitterly, “responsive to human thought patterns. Some would say to
some numinous sensitivity. Why shouldn’t it soak up human thoughts world-wide?”

 
          
“Some
ancient traditions do suggest a centre of, well, power somewhere in or around
the
Gobi
,” recalls Zoe, our priestly negress. “There
was the legend of the
Kingdom
of
Shambhala
, north of
Tibet
. An invisible redoubt of magical wisdom was
supposed to exist somewhere there. Are you suggesting that this tradition was
based on the presence of some kind of psychic sponge-cwm-time bomb—which some
people, Tibetan lamas, for example, were aware of?”

 
          
“A
mind bomb,” echoes Captain K, with one slight change of wording, as if to lead
Wu and Zoe on. “A psychic projector? A sort of God machine, switching on
periodically?”

 
          
“To
keep us all in thrall, in ignorance!”

 
          
“No,”
frowns Ritchie Blue. “The thing was custom-built to take us to the stars. Well,
to one particular star.”

 
          
“Just
how,” Wu asks him, “is it known out by 82 Eridani that we have achieved
sufficient know-how to lift it into space and build a ship around it?”

 
          
“Extrapolation
from our radio output?”

 
          
“They
didn’t contact us by radio, boy,” snaps Trimble. “Their approach was a damned
sight more direct! We might have been under surveillance
—mental
surveillance, deep down. Maybe that pyramid, maybe
something else. I guess some of us—and it could be a whole lot of us—have been
growing sort of opaque to that surveillance for some time now! Our third eye
has shut up shop. We’ve been getting a sight too rational for their liking.” He
glares bullishly at us psychs.

 
          
Captain
K flexes his arms, stretching strong fingers out. “We must arrive in agreement
and amity. I believe it is good to talk out our differences of opinion like
this.”

 
          
And
quite suddenly I see the truth behind these meetings. It’s as though I’ve read
his mind, for the thought leaps fully formed into my brain, and it does have a
‘flavour’ of Grigory Kamasarin attached to it as surely as there’s a flavour of
whichever lovers are responsible, in the surge of quasi-gravity that tugs our
bodies but touches something too within our minds. That thought is that the
authorities on Earth, who have fully confided alone in Captain K, hope that we
fifteen human beings, in constant proximity to the activated High Space drive
which ‘registers’ at least half of our number intimately, will somehow achieve
a collective insight into the true nature of the alien device. The thought is
that we shall measure its essence by collective parallax from all our various
viewpoints, some of which are safely opaque to it. That’s why he condones—no,
encourages
the fusion of love-making,
over and above the presumed speeding of the flight. He hopes that we shall
somehow fuse into a consensus mind—if only for a moment, if only in someone’s
dream! —and perceive the real purpose. We are a flying laboratory of ourselves,
as well as being pilgrims, crusaders, scientists, whatever; and of course, who
better than Grigory Kamasarin to run it?

 
          
I
stare at our Captain, till Peter grows restive at my inattention to himself.
Captain K sits invulnerable, a distant smile on his face.

 
          
While
Jacobik launches into some revolting gratuitous anecdote about flaying people
alive and about executioners sticking heads back on their victims with glue
behind the guillotine . . .

 
          
We
listen to the sadistic ravings of the Czech as though hypnotised by a snake.
What is this doing to our probability of arrival? Yet no one cuts him off. One
is free to say anything at these meetings. Let him vent it all out of his
system; let him get it off his chest. I’m scared, though. He’s a madman. He
must have been under huge restraint before, to fool the panels. This side of
him has only betrayed itself now in High Space. It’s as Natalya says: paranoia,
hallucination, dissolution of reality threaten us constantly. Oh, let love
conquer them!

 
          
Much
as I would prefer to stuff my fingers in my ears, I realize after a while that
he, astonishingly, is uttering poetry—rendered into English so that we can all
appreciate it. Even if it is a poetry of death and torment, which alone speaks
to his twisted soul.
“King Herod alone,”
he sings,

 
          
“ loved you pure white babes

 
          
above everything else

 
          
and ordered you to be set free from life

 
          
Give thanks therefore to your saviours”

 
 
 
         
The year 1997
: the millennium was
a
little early. On the other hand,
maybe Christ was really born in 3
bc?
And
what did time matter anyway: this was revelation—the end of secular time . . .

 
          
It
was Easter Day in
Jerusalem
. In the dingy cluttered Church of the Holy Sepulchre, to a crowded
brawling congregation of Roman Catholics, Copts, Greek Orthodox and others, in
the chapel that contains the empty marble-lined tomb of Jesus, there appeared a
radiant angel—a tall shimmering creature of golden light. Rapidly it resolved
itself into more tangible bodily form, naked but for a loincloth, with wounds
in the wrists and ankles and a deep gash in its side.

 
          
“Come
to God’s World in the Heavens, for I am the Son of God,” it told the exalted
faithful (variously heard in English, Russian, Greek, and even in Latin by some
clergy). “Come to the holy places in the sky, where there is no death—” So
saying, the being vanished.

 
          
Before
news of the miracle had spread into the nearby streets, let alone around the
world, by the Wailing Wall close by appeared another—or the same—creature of
golden light. For Jewish pilgrims it resolved itself into a tall,
white-bearded, white- robed figure, heard by most witnesses to speak in Hebrew,
in the prophetic perfect tense—the tense for a future event of such certainty
that it can be spoken of as already accomplished. “You have come to God’s
World. You have climbed Jacob’s ladder. You have crossed the years of light—”

 
          
As
this figure vanished in its turn, in the Noble Enclosure of the Moslems beyond
the Wailing Wall, in the bright and beautiful mosque of the Dome of the Rock
from which Mohammed is said to have ascended to Heaven, leaving his footprint
behind in solid rock, a third glowing angel appeared, becoming a black-bearded man
wearing kaftan and turban, with a scimitar by his side. He planted his foot in
Mohammed’s footprint and called out in Arabic, “Come to God’s World, come to
success!”

 
          
As
the world spun on its course that Easter Day a whole series of manifestations
came and went: a mere shaft of light at Lourdes—but a robed Christ figure who
endured for all of five minutes on the terrace of the hilltop church of Bom
Jesus at Congonhas in Brazil. (Here the first photographs of an apparition were
shot. Standing amidst the remarkably lifelike soapstone statues of the twelve
apostles who look out across the valley, it invited an ecstatic crowd in
Portuguese to visit Heaven.) In Salt Lake City appeared Joseph Smith’s angel,
and in Mexico the Virgin Mary . . . and some hours later at the Great Shrine of
Ise in Japan, amidst the cypress trees, materialised the Sun Goddess Amaterasu.
And on, across South-East Asia and India, avatars Buddhist and Hindu appeared
at holy places, completing the circuit of the globe in Mecca as a golden angel
floating above the black-draped granite block of the Kaaba, calling out to
circling pilgrims the same message: “Come to God’s World, come to success! ”

 
          
Even
in
China
an ancient warrior figure coalesced out of light in the
Square
of
Heavenly Peace
and fired arrows of light towards the
horizon.

 
          
Northern Europe
,
Canada
and the
USSR
, excluding its Asian southlands, were alone
unblessed ...

 
          
Over
the next few days, as people flocked—and inevitably trampled over each other—to
these places of witness, the apparitions gained in duration and solidity, as
if they actually borrowed strength from the increasing numbers who saw and
heard them. Already it was apparent that they spoke to the ear of each faith
(even to atrophied faiths) and presented themselves to the archaic not the
modernist eye. It was apparent too that the apparitions tracked around the
world in a systematic scan from numinous node to numinous node, remaining below
latitude 44° north.

 
          
The
composite message of the avatars, given through the lips of quasi-Jesus,
quasi-Buddha, quasi-Mohammed—and interpreted a little out of the language of
revelation—ran as follows:

 
          
/ am the prophet/ angel/ messenger/ message

 
          
from Heaven/the heavens/space

 
          
where God lives! where God's World is.

 
          
There is a star in the River/ constellation
Eridanus.

 
          
That star is unique)an isolated star.

 
          
Your best souls will go to Heaven/will
ascend/fly there.

 
          
If you die, you will live again, undying.

 
          
Now there is war in
Heaven/conflict/struggle. Gird your arms about you!

 
          
Join the Crusade. Bear witness/send
witnesses/an expedition.

 
          
Send champions/ representatives.

 
          
Follow the path of the angels /the waveguide
of these messages.

 
          
The way is open/transport is arranged/a
means.

 
          
Join the caravan/the drive/ /yoke your
caravan (your craft?) to the drive / means/ engine we bring you. Hitch your
wagon to the stars/your craft to the star-drive.

 
          
It is high time you came//it is in High
Time/sacred time you will travel/it is outside space-time/in hyperspace. Ascend
to Heaven through High Space /the space above/hyperspace.

 
          
Look beyond the highest mountains, beyond
the roof of the world.

 
          
There is the instrument of light beyond
light.

 
          
Bring pure minds to the task/ /only suitable
minds (your wish/ intention/consciousness) will make it work. (The journey is
imaginary?)

 
          
I (it) will judge/diagnose your best/most
suitable souls.

 
          
Let some hard (evil? unresponsive?) souls
ballast your ship, so you will travel more steadily (or slowly?). For all are
called, both sheep and goats, and all WILL BE chosen in the end.

 
          
The
‘God’s World broadcasts’ ceased after seven days, having persuaded many that a
contemporary, ecumenical God had sent messengers, or aspects of Himself, to
intervene in human history once more to save mankind, or merely to indicate
that all religions were equally true. They persuaded many more people of the
exact opposite, namely that particular forms of belief had been declared
authentic—a situation fraught with Jihad and bloodshed. Others interpreted the
messages as overt contact by alien intelligences of a superior order who had
been influencing the growth of human religions in the past. A final
interpretation, to which ‘sane’ men clung, was that here indeed was a message
from the stars—from a star in the straggling star river of Eridanus —calling
for aid and comfort, or at the very least begging for contact and support (if
in a somewhat authoritative way); and this message was transmitted in the only
way that such contact could apparently be made with human minds—by triggering
religious imagery, tapping mythical levels of the psyche (a numinous node in
the brain, almost) in geographical locations where the sense of worship was
most powerfully imprinted.

 
          
The
distribution of the broadcasts, with fade-out at the 44° latitude line,
appeared to rule out, among nearby candidate stars in that constellation,
Epsilon Eridani, since any broadcasts from Epsilon should have blanketed the
northern hemisphere (though what wavelength were they transmitted on?). The
second leading candidate, twice as many light years from Earth, though even
more likely in theory to possess a habitable world, was the star 82 Eridani;
and this star was only visible from those latitudes where angels and avatars
appeared.

 
          
What
of the promised ‘instrument of light beyond light’? (To be interpreted as
‘faster than light’?) To be found beyond the
Himalayas
and beyond
Tibet
, yet south of the 44th parallel? Satellites
angled their orbits over that terrain in the far southwestern stretches of the
Gobi
desert on the desolate border between
Mongolia
and
China
; spy planes overflew, peeling away only at
the very border ...

 
          
And
so the interviews continued at a guarded, woodland-girt chateau outside
Paris
with small groups of candidates, as the
Joint Space Liaison Committee shuffled and reshuffled its cards, mixing and
remixing its cocktail.

 
          
The
Chinese woman, Wu, wore an orange badge. So she was not an activator of the
High Space drive. Peter wore a green badge, as did I, so we were, and so was
the tall black American woman Zoe Denby. We had already been flown into
Tyuratam (by night, seeing nothing of the Cosmodrome) and passed the ‘psych
test’. Now we four sat ‘informally’ around a circular table in a
chandelier-hung room, with Generals Patrick Sutton and Grigory Kamasarin (who,
strangely, wore a green badge too) and Chen Yi-piao, drinking coffee.

 
          
“.
. . It
is
a message from the stars,”
Peter argued (and here perhaps my love for him began). “But not in matrixes of
prime numbers or whatever. This is in terms of revelation, vision—in
mythological language, burrowing deep into the human psyche and borrowing from
that. So we don’t have
pi,
but
symbols which all rational people believed had been discarded. Yet here they
re-emerge in all their devastating pristine force, like an upsurge of repressed
material into consciousness. They were never really lost, only overlaid. The ‘psychs’
among us are still sensitive to this symbolism, you see. The ‘rats’ are those
in whom it’s been most deeply repressed and has almost atrophied. But actually
it never can. Atrophy, I mean. Not entirely.”

 
          
“That
is how we ‘read’ the broadcasts,” Wu agreed. “They trigger psychic patterns in
our minds. So, I will accept that. But what are they really
saying
? That superstition is true. That
prayer can bring power. Now that we have the chance of perfection and
greatness in our hands, through human
practice
,
this is loosed upon us. It is rank sabotage. It has a material origin, and is
being used as a weapon of control—as priests have always used religion against
the people. Only, these priests are alien ones.”

 
          
Peter
shook his head. “With respect, you’re confusing two things. One is a psychic
symbolism inherent in man, which gives rise to religions. The other is the use
of this strong symbolic language to make contact with us. I’m mainly interested
in the old belief that direct contact with the ‘sky’ was once both possible and
practical. It was a numinous thing, but it was also quite pragmatic too.
Something in the mentality of early man must have given rise to this tradition.
Alas, it degenerated considerably.”

 
          
“
As we grew wiser.”