Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (2 page)

 
          
A
tape recorder
stood on a long
mahogany table, spools slowly turning. Behind the vast gilt-framed mirror on
the wall perhaps a video camera was filming me; maybe a team of psychologists
sat there unseen, observing every gesture, every tic. My chair wobbled slightly
and was placed too far out in the enormous room, isolating me; however I sat
composedly, concentrating instead on the minute interactions of collaborating
nations, brought together by the mystery and threat of the God’s World visions.
Through the tall, heavily draped windows, on the other side of the Rue de
Rivoli the trees in the Tuileries gardens were still leafless. A cold scudding
shower blew from the north; a forlorn electric
camionette
with striped red awning unfolded was attempting to sell
hot
crepes
to passers-by. Piebald
pigeons pecked and scuttled near it.

 
          
I
shook my head, just once, to toss my curls aside, indicating the faintest
impatience with the questions, outweighed by friendly tolerance of the
questioners, aware that the ritual was necessary.

 
          
“Proxemics,”
I told my multinational interrogators, “is the study of how close people come
to one another—how close they
can
come, psychologically. Cultural proxemics is more; it’s the study of how
closely human cultures can converge in a highly integrated and homogeneous
world. Or whether there’s an irreducible core of cultural diversity. Society
functions like the stars,” I smiled, offering them a bit of astrophysics that I
had off pat. (After all, we were talking about going to the stars.)

 
          
“The
pressure for diversity—for which you can read radiation pressure—balances the
convergent pull of the huge solar mass. Where these two balance, you have a
viable sun. Where diversity wins out, you get explosions, novae, a tearing
apart. Where convergence wins out, you get that collapse inwards upon itself
of a neutron sun. Every atom is stripped of its difference from every other.
Every irregularity is erased. Worse, you can get the black hole from which
nothing will ever emerge. Humanity might be heading that way culturally.
Though, of course, the inward collapse —the sheer density—may provoke an
explosion in its turn, an outburst on a different energy level: a new fusion
explosion in the core. Maybe the God’s World broadcasts should be seen in this
light—as a sort of resurgence of mythical thought, a resurgence of the
‘Other’.” (I was annoyed by that ‘sort of’.) “I believe it’s a useful
viewpoint...”

 
          
“But
there
is
an objective machine, Dr Dove,”
insisted the Chinese interviewer. “An actual piece of alien equipment was
transmitted here.”

 
          
“In
which we must participate with our . . . souls, to make it carry us anywhere.
Why
now,
at this point in time?
That’s the question I put to you.” Yes, turn the tables on them!

 
          
In
High Space, where time has ended, to be reborn only when we reach our
destination, I remember that world where history had become too much for us.
Every moment had become instant history, a matter of recorded data to be sorted
and ordered as soon as they occurred. The foreseeable future would consist only
of extrapolations from this mass of data—portending the death of our culture?
Culture had ceased to recreate itself at every moment. Now it merely
accumulated itself (just as the mass of humanity accumulated itself!), and no
alternative cultures were in view. I’m remote from that world now, seeing it
through the wrong end of a telescope, receding and diminished. In any case,
that world had passed away already. The ‘Other’ had returned with a vengeance,
erupting from elsewhere. It was an emergence which I greeted with as much joy
as fearful surprise . . .

 
          
“Of
course my background influenced this line of thought!” (A background which was
all on record. But did
I
understand
my own record? This was what I had to sell them—or, in the case of the Chinese
interviewer, provide a self-criticism session about...)

 
          
“One
of my grandads was a Bengali, a Hindu who’d emigrated to
London
. He married an Irish girl who’d lapsed from
her faith.

 
          
My
other two grandparents were Finnish and Brazilian; he was an engineer and she
was a Kardecist spiritualist. They were lovely people. We all lived—three
generations—in this huge house. A family commune. The grandparents used to make
up hybrid stories to amuse us kids:
Krishna
and
the leprechauns, you know! After a time this began to worry me. It seemed as if
they were throwing away something precious—the totems of the tribe—on
anecdotes, so that we could all live together smoothly. It seemed so richly textured
and, well, up to date on the surface, but I got to wondering how much of
themselves they were all giving up for adjustment’s sake. They all gave so much
to the common pool.

 
          
“Well,
you pour water into a bathtub and let it stand for a few days, and it looks
completely settled—but it isn’t settled at all. The original currents are still
there days afterwards, even though you can’t see them.

 
          
“I
began to think, if you pour people together so that they’ve got no choice but
to mix—in a pool of nine billion, do you see? That’s why I started in on this
line of work. And it also seemed to me that humanity must have had a primitive
sense of identification with others and with nature once upon a time—a kind of
collective soul rather than separate individualities. Civilization only began
when you got differentiation: a sense of diversity, of the existence of the
‘Other’.

 
          
“Wars
and hatreds came from this, but the chance of crossfertilization too. That’s
what powers civilization. But our history is growing stationary and locked. Our
culture is all together again, and
all
alone
because of this. Can it be that these avatars from God’s World are
symptoms of a new upsurge of diversity: of a rebound, of the ‘Other’ welling up
again psychologically? Where can that ‘Other’ be found nowadays? Only out
there, among the stars! You don’t really need to send an
alien
anthropologist—not that any such person exists! You need
someone who senses these currents—senses how they can be played on and
manipulated.”

 
          
“Nice
commercial.” A certain General Patrick Sutton pursed his lips. “These forces
are extremely destructive. Destabilizing, hmm? All the religious groups
claiming the avatars as their own personal revelation; that’s desirable, is
it?”

 
          
“You
speak as though this is simply a psychological event,” repeated Chen Yi-piao
doggedly. “Do you think we have collectively imagined the High Space drive
into existence? Why should you be thought fit to travel to a far star, if it is
only to study the irrational in mankind?”

 
          
“Because
the ‘Other’
is
out there. It must be.
It reaches out and touches the hollow where the ‘Other’ was, in us. It fills
it. It gushes into the empty reservoir. This may be how we were able to
perceive these messages at all: because of our need for them! God’s
World—whatever it is—has reached into the subconscious context of man. It’s a
lost context. And now it restores that context abruptly in a world which has no
place for it, no social structures adapted to it. Suddenly it becomes
objective: in the form of tangible apparitions. The transcendental has come
back into our lives. Mystery, strangeness, the numinous, God. That’s the form
this ‘Otherness’ takes when it flows in now. The unused symbols are still
latent in us.”

 
          
A
certain Andre Navarre scribbled a note and passed it down the line of faces ...

 
          
Rain
stung along the Rue de Rivoli. Electric Citroens and Peugeots passed silently,
wipers performing interrupted harmonic motions, bearing citizens whose lives
had all been interrupted, some of whom were terribly afraid, affronted in their
bourgeois myth by avatars of Christ, Mohammed, Buddha. Solid men of
civilization, managers, they were being manipulated by something out of their
control which couldn’t be tamed in tidy convenient token rituals while the life
of the real world went on without revelation; they had been touched by
something from outside, manipulating the religious consciousness.

 
          
A
van with red slogans painted on its side cut in.
‘Bouleversez le Monde!
⁹
‘La guerre des anges aura lieu.
⁹
‘Turn the world
topsy-turvy.’ ‘The angel war is
on
.’
Drivers hooted angrily; they wanted to ram that van.

 
          
Here
in
Paris
one should feel safe! The God’s World
broadcasts weren’t visible north of the 44th parallel. Maybe that was one
reason why this panel was being held in
Paris
. One might thus prevent something from
eavesdropping. God, in a word:
deus
absconditus
, who had recontacted humanity from an alien star.. .

 
          
Captain
K
calls
another meeting, summoning everyone personally by
interphone. (In vain merely to post notice of a meeting amid this personal
timelessness.)

 
          
K
stands for Kamasarin, Grigory Arkadievitch. Half-Russian and half-Mongol, and a
General in the USSR Kosmonaut Corps —though styling himself plain Captain
here—with years in military and astronautical parapsychology research, he is a
‘sensitive’. Consequently he keeps a foot firmly planted in both camps aboard
ship: the rationals and the psychics (wickedly abbreviated to
rats
and
psychs).

 
          
Built
like a champion wrestler, a lion of the steppes, is our Captain K: a man of
severe merriment and a gracious though tough politeness (of courtesies to
opponents on grassland wrestling fields). In his broad ruddy wind-chapped
Asiatic face, under a bullet haircut which would render him bald were his stubble
not so jet-black, are set mesmeric eyes.

 
          
As
usual, the meeting (or encounter group, or metascientific rap session) occurs
in the mess room. Most of us soon have our butts stuck fast to the adhesive
chairs. One or two simply float, albeit not far off the deck. Lese-majesty it
would be to float up above Captain K’s head; though, as mercury slides up the
thermometer, this may happen if opinions hot up. Peter brings two tubes of
tomato juice from the autochef as the last stragglers drift in. (They make a
point of rubbing sleep from their eyes.) We pretend there is vodka in the
tomato juice.

 
          
A
crew list for starship
Pilgrim Crusader
:

 
 
Grigory Kamasarin (
USSR
;
Captain)

           
      
rats
  
                                                
       
   
psychs

Col. Neil Kendrick (
USA
; computers
            
Heinz Anders (
W. Germany
; astro-

& communications; 2nd in com-
                    
physics)

mand)
                                                              
Salman
Baqli (Iranian IPR; planet-

Col. Gus Trimble (
USA
; astronaut-
                
ology)

engineer)
                                                          
Rene
Juillard (
France
; biology)

Maj. Ritchie Blue (
USA
; astronaut-
                
Zoe Denby (
USA
; comp. religion)

pilot /navigator)
                                               
Sachiko
Matsumura (
Japan
; lingu-

Maj. Natalya Vasilenko (
USSR
;
                      
istics)

astronaut-doctor; life-support
                          
Peter Muir (
Scotland
; parahistory)

systems)
                                                          
Amy
Dove (
England
; psycho-

Dr Li Yu-ying (
China
; biochemistry)
             
sociology)

Mme Wu Chen-shan (
China
;

historiographer / commissar)

Jacobik (
Czechoslovakia
; weapons

systems, deserving
no first name)

 
          
So
you see, the punch, the hard technology is entirely in the hands of the heavy
rationals, American and Soviet, with Chinese support. (Except of course, for
Kamasarin’s hybrid role; but he is loyal.) The political trigger fingers are
orthodoxly Christian, or their orthodox Marxist antitype: bedfellows in defence
of established history. We psychs, who hold the ship in High Space by our
presence, are only supportive scientists, really. We may be the batteries that
sustain the flight, but the switchgear is in other, harder hands; and if the
ship travels the slower for that, so much the worse, so long as it travels.

 
          
We
visualize High Space as a huge pyramid, apeing the pyramidal shape of the alien
drive itself—the higher step you are on, the closer you are to the other side.
So we psychs leaven the flight; we make it rise. We’re the horses in harness,
pulling the royal chariot along (albeit horses much deferred to in our whims).
No doubt we should arrive much sooner without the drag of the rat contingent,
yet this is a political crusade as much as a pilgrimage, and besides, without
rational stabilization the flight might enter a fantasy domain—for we are, in a
very real sense, imagining our journey’s progress; it is a journey through,
by virtue of,
imagination.
 

 
          
Affectionately
Peter slips his arm around me, and I fondle him. Dr Li stares frostily at
us—pretty creature, as tormentingly sexless as a jade figurine of herself.

 
          
“Maybe
it is your
pleasure
that delays us,”
she hints. “Maybe it holds our journey back. You wish it not to end.”

 
          
“Your
disapproval delays us, dear lady,” smiles Peter. Li stares up at the clock
ticking on mechanically, bearing no relationship to the time that any of us
feel. According to that, we are at Day 41, Hour 13. To me it feels no longer
than the day before yesterday since we left. It is always the beginning here.

 
          
“Fine
way to run a ship,” remarks Li, not looking directly at Captain K but
criticising him nonetheless. Captain K appears infected by our joy, however.
Rene and Zoe are holding hands too, exchanging enchanted glances.

 
          
“There
must be amity aboard,” pronounces our Captain: his order of the day. “In one
sense this is a journey of love.”

 
          
“Love?”
snorts Jacobik, the hatchet-faced. Slightly built, really, starved in his
boyhood; bony-nosed, witch-chinned, with dark eyes which never seem to blink—as
though somebody has cut the lids off them. He is thinking of his missile bays
and lasers. His fist firms. “Love? After what they have done to our
civilization? That clock tells lies. We’ve been flying forever. We’ll never get
there! ”

 
          
“Do
we send a warship to worship God?” asked Salman gently. (Yes, the meeting has
begun. The subject, invariably and as always, is ourselves, our attitude to the
voyage and to the apparitions broadcast to the Earth.)

 
          
“Did
they say anything about worship, though?” enquires Captain K, deftly balancing
both sides of the argument. “We are summoned. It is a crusade to the holy
places. Yet who occupies them? Who besieges them? Why are they holy? Anyway, we
aren’t heavily armed against a whole world that can project solid images across
the void. And
they
set those size
constraints, not us.” He smiles distantly at Peter and me. “It is more of a
children’s crusade.”

 
          
“We
all know what happened to
that
,”
sniffs Wu.
Comrade
Wu: small, dapper,
too tight-skinned for her forty-five years to have left a single mark on her.
One thinks of her as Madame Wu—she has such autocratic presence. Alongside
sexless biochemist Lady Li, the Chinese have sent as orthodox and historically
adept a politician and diplomat as one could imagine: diadem of a mandarin
Marxist court.

 
          
From
her throne, she denounces us.

 
          
“We
are being thrust back into childishness aboard this ship— into infantile
gratification and superstition—just as
they
would thrust our whole culture back, into childishness. I’m surprised at your
talk of love, Captain Kamasarin. You grow infected with this”—she gestures at
Rene and Zoe, Peter and myself—“this euphoria which loses touch with time, with
history, with Earth’s true situation. Making love is only like drinking a glass
of water. It is a materialistic need.” (And this is a set speech.) “To raise it
to the level of a spiritual power that speeds our ship along is another part of
their same trickery. Even if the drive does seem to work that way,
still
we must not trust it.”

 
          
“Actually,
it’s more like a hallucinogenic drug experience,” suggests Natalya the
flaxen-headed, of the turned-up nose. “It lasts much longer, but isn’t quite so
drastic. Though it does have its troughs and its crests. These tricks of
quasigravity, the dissolution of time, the paranoias and ecstasies. We shall
all return to normality when we re-enter normal space. We must simply tolerate
the constant dissolution of one’s sense of reality till then. Apparently it’s
our ticket through interstellar space. So let us tolerate it rationally. As
indeed you do.”

 
          
Peter
fidgets; Peter disagrees. “It seems more like the original shaman flight to
me—a flight to knowledge.” (To each it seems what they themselves are.) “We’re
going up into the sky like the shaman of old, back when there was free
communication between all men and the Beyond, before we lost touch. Only, we’re
flying in a steel ship, rather than on a bird’s back . . .”

 
          
“We
still call ’em birds,” grins Ritchie Blue, our farm-boy astronaut, least
offended of the rats by the psychic component of our voyage, perhaps since he
was once close to nature, if only from the cab of his Dad’s grain harvester.

 
          
Wu
looks offended, but Kamasarin nods understanding^, his mind (I imagine) on the
last few seeds of the dying Siberian shaman magical tradition, barely a memory
in some centenarians’ heads, painstakingly gleaned from among the Tungus, the
Reindeer People, the Yakuts, the Mongols, and replanted by the paraphysicists
outside Novosibirsk.

 
          
“Costly
ticket,” grunts Gus Trimble. “A trap.” He speaks in crossword clues, in
anagrams; as though wishing to say something else, only he doesn’t know what.
He sweats: a meaty man, with padded hips and butt that fail to emulate Captain
K’s sculpture of muscle.

 
          
“Why
should it be a trap?” asks Peter angrily. “If they had simply bombarded the
world with inexplicable visions and quasibeings and had
not
come through with the High Space drive so that we can follow
them up—well, we might justifiably feel paranoid. As it is—”

 
          
“They’re
manipulating human history,” Wu interrupts. “They destroy the very essence of
history—which is human practice, human action. That’s why Colonel Trimble
rightly speaks of a trap.” (Though actually she spoke of it first. But such is
her diplomacy. Or cunning.) “He senses this accurately. Whereas
he
”—a finger pokes out at Peter, and
with her other hand upon her hip she is a teapot with a scalding, scolding
spout
—“he
brags about primitive
shamans. Is that to be our astronautics from now on? You see how the God’s
World broadcasts rob us of our really noble, authentic human dreams by seeming
to make archaic, obsolete religious dreams come true! It’s pitiable that we
should fly on a hand-me-down broomstick fuelled by superstition. The fact that
it will not work without ‘psychic’ sensitivity is the real trap.”

 
          
“If
it
does
work,” sneers Jacobik. “If we
really are going anywhere. If we can return.”

 
          
“Ach,
the probability of our arrival goes on rising,” breaks in Heinz Anders. “At
least, most of the time it does. As to returning, we will find that out. One
would hardly go to so much trouble to maroon fifteen humans light years from
home.” (Would one?)

 
          
“Pitiable,”
repeats Madame Wu, still pouring tea, “that our history is seen by many now as
guided—however evasively—by emanations from another world. Most pitiable of all
that the artefact we have found—the main drive of this ship—suggests to these
same people that our whole technology is merely the feeble rediscovery of some
ancient, star-guided wisdom.” Her lip curls on the last word. “It diminishes
man.
That
is the intention of the
trap. That is why we carry our weapons with us—not because they summoned us to
some vague contest.”