Mission (8 page)

‘Don't tell me,' I said. ‘They are the bad guys.'

He shrugged. ‘That depends on your point of view. They've evolved a very persuasive argument which casts us as the villains of the piece and them as the protectors of the universe which, according to this novel thesis, we are out to destroy. A neat twist.' He smiled. ‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, we won the First War of Secession. The rebels were banished to the Netherworld.'

‘The universe of anti-matter …'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘It was a prison. That was the sole purpose behind its creation. We couldn't go in there, and they couldn't get out. Or so we thought. There was a period of relative calm during which we began the work of reconstruction, then the rebels broke out of the Netherworld through the Dark Gates and swept through the universe like a forest fire. The Second War of Secession has been raging for about two hundred million years.'

‘How's it going?' I said.

He grimaced. ‘We're not doing too well at the moment. But don't worry. It will all work out.'

I wondered if he knew that, at that moment, I was not worried in the slightest degree who the eventual winner might be. I was busy telling myself there was no need to pick sides.

His voice broke into my thoughts. ‘One of our problems is that the power grid – the network of channels linking the Empire with the galaxy primes which serve as both sailing and signal lanes – was totally shattered in the first assault. We've been trying to reconnect the system ever since so that the Power of The Presence can once again flow through the cosmos. Until that day, it has to come in discrete packages – through people like me.' He smiled. ‘All this may not seem important to you but to the Celestials in the World Below, The Power of Presence is the life-blood of the universe. It's like the human body. Stop the circulation to any of the limbs and they begin to waste away.'

‘Is that what happened to the twelve Aeons you had working here?' I asked.

‘In a way, yes,' he said. ‘Except of course in our case the condition can never be fatal. Just a lingering agony.'

It had never occurred to me that immortality might have its drawbacks too. ‘Tell me about the Aeons who were stationed here.'

‘I will. But first, I'm going to have to throw a couple more names at you. Don't worry if you can't remember all this. It's a lot to take in first time around.' He paused to give my brain time to catch up. ‘The word Aeon describes their degree of power in The World Above. All Celestials trapped in the World Below by the Second War of Secession are know generically as the Ain-folk. And the ancient name for Earth was Eardh-Ain. The last signal we received from Earth confirmed that the rebels had taken the galaxy and were poised for a final attack on the prime. This planet. The colony had turned down a last chance to surrender and were preparing to make a last stand. And that was it. End of message.'

‘And so, to continue the medical analogy, the colony begins to waste away until, a few zillion years later, you drop out of the clouds like the Flying Doctor,' I said, testing the limits of his good humour.

He shrugged. ‘That's one way of putting it.'

‘And when Michael and Gabriel had been here before, under different pen-names, they were acting as paramedics. Checking the patient's pulse.'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘But if I can use another, more aggressive analogy, they were like OSS agents sent in to organise the Resistance. Earth wasn't totally cut off from our influence. We managed to make the occasional power input; slip a few of our people in under the wire. But it was mainly an undercover presence. We had human beings fronting for us. Noah – who was more than a floating zoo-keeper, Moses, Elijah, Zoroaster, Gautama Buddha. All making an input. Keeping up the pressure.'

‘Now that you've mentioned Moses,' I said. ‘Were the Jews really the chosen people?'

‘You were once,' he replied. ‘You know the place called Atlantis?'

I nodded.

‘Well, the myths about that particular long-lost continent have their genesis in the history of our Earth colony and its destruction by the rebels. Fortunately, a small nucleus of survivors managed to escape the final holocaust. The progenitors of what you now call the human race. And among them were the distant ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel.'

‘So, in fact, what you're saying is that our forefathers, in whatever guise, came over on the Celestial
Mayflower
.'

‘In a sense, yes. But by the time I got there, the situation had changed quite radically.' He smiled. ‘To put it in modern terms – you no longer had an exclusive.'

‘Nevertheless,' I insisted, ‘you still turned up at Bethlehem.'

He shrugged. ‘I had to start somewhere.'

‘Oh, come on,' I said. ‘We were expecting you.'

He smiled and relented. ‘All right. It validated the prophecies and, in terms of world history, it was where the action happened to be. The point where Greek, Roman, Jewish, Egyptian and Persian culture overlapped. It was the right time and the right place for the message to create the maximum impact.'

‘So doesn't that make us the chosen people?' I might have renounced all forms of religious faith but I still nourished the notion that I and my Zionist brothers might have an edge on the rest of humanity.

‘What I meant was that you were no longer the chosen people in the strict Biblical sense. I hadn't come just to save the Jews,' he said.

‘But to redeem Mankind,' I concluded confidently.

‘It depends on how you define Mankind,' he replied. He clasped his hands together and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. ‘The
truth is, Leo, when I first got here you people were the least of my concerns. Jews, Gentiles – in my book, you were all expendable. My mission was to rescue
our
people. The twelve Ain-folk who were inside you.'

‘Inside us?' I said. I don't know why, but the news came as quite a shock. ‘Are you trying to tell me that the human race has been occupied by your people?

‘Yes,' he said. ‘That's where they've been hiding ever since Earth and the rest of this galaxy fell into enemy hands. Remember what I said about Michael and Gabriel resembling agents of the OSS? The situation here is analogous to your own recent past. The Second World War. The universe is like occupied Europe. The Ain-folk are the underground resistance movement that we are helping to stay alive until the day of liberation. And it's the rebels, your new overlords, who are the Nazis, stamping their
Sturm und Drang
philosophy on the cosmos.' He sat back. ‘You don't look too happy.'

I shrugged. ‘I may get used to it but right now, I'm not too sure I like the idea of being taken over.'

He leaned forward again and looked at me intently. ‘Leo, you haven't been taken over. The Ain-folk
are
the human race. Your body is no more than a mobile life-support system. A vehicle in which they could shelter until the Empire was able to rescue them. Without them, you'd be just another race of termites. It is the Ain-folk who provide your guidance system: the controlling intelligence of their earthly hosts. Note the plural. From the very beginning, they used groups of hosts. A few hundred at first, then several hundred, then several thousand. Just as the movements of a shoal of fish appear to be directed by a group mind, so the host-bodies possessed by each of the Ain-folk formed a cohesive unit. They provided him with a refuge from the attacks of the Secessionist forces – the “evil spirits” of antiquity – and in return he used his powers and knowledge of the world to ensure their continuing survival.'

I nodded to show that I had understood, even though I was still not too sure how I felt about my newly-discovered role as a minuscule, misplaced cog from a dismembered Celestial machine that lay awaiting the arrival of that Big Mechanic in the Sky. ‘Am I right in thinking that this is where all those stories about guiding spirits, folk-gods and the soul of a nation come from?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘If you can bear with me, I'll explain how it happened. Conditions weren't too bad when the Ain-folk first went into
hiding but, as the rebels strengthened their hold on the world, the Ain-folk were no longer able to exercise the same degree of control over their host bodies. As time passes — and we're talking here of millions of years – the situation got progressively worse. Galaxy after galaxy fell into the hands of the rebels. Finally, they wrested control of the World Below from the Empire and began to change the nature of the physical universe.'

‘Was this the change of wavelength you mentioned?' I asked.

‘Yes. Man was forced to change too. And in adapting to the new environment, he became totally enmeshed in the physical world. Enslaved by the pain and pleasure of a purely material existence. And, as ‘Brax ground Man into the earth beneath his heel, the beleagured Ain-folk began to give up all hope of rescue.'

‘And it was no good them trying to break out,' I added. ‘Because there was no way they could have got home.'

‘Right …' He paused and poured himself another glass of wine.

‘Just one thing,' I said. ‘Who is ‘Brax?'

He sank half the glass before answering. ‘The self-styled Lord of Chaos.'

‘I understand you're related.'

He nodded wearily.

‘Every family has one,' I said. ‘In ours, it's my cousin Samuel.' I waited for a moment but he refused to be drawn.

‘Let's get back to the war.'

‘Okay,' I said. ‘But how about a time-check?'

‘Hmmm …' He closed his eyes while he worked it out. ‘At this point, we're talking about events that took place ninety million years ago. In geological time it is the last quarter of the Cretaceous Period – '

I cut in. ‘You mean when dinosaurs were roaming around?'

‘Yes, and when the Alps, the Rocky Mountains and the White Cliffs of Dover were in the process of being built. The next two segments of geological time brought more upheavals: separation of the continents through lateral shifts in the Earth's outer mantle; world-wide population movements due to climatic changes. Gradually, the cohesion of the original host-groups was destroyed. They split up, intermingled and gradually forgot their collective identity. Each Ain-folk fragment, hiding deep within its human host, no longer openly remembered it was part of a greater whole. Celestial reality became a distant dream buried deep within the subconscious.'
He paused and took a sip of wine. ‘And that brings us back to your question about folk-gods. It was the hidden memory of this relationship that gave rise to the first primitive forms of religion and sacrifice. From the sub-conscious awareness of the Ain-folk that lived within them came the idea of a powerful god-father figure. They recognised this as a psychic force which their enemies also possessed. By killing their enemies in battle, or by sacrificing captives, they believed they released trapped psychic power that would make their own god stronger. And because that life-power was believed to reside in the heart and the head, these came to be the favoured sacrificial offerings. And since their gods also had to eat, animals and other foods were provided in ceremonies that became increasingly elaborate. And as proof of their allegiance and knowledge that they owed their existence to him, Earth-Man made the ultimate sacrifice – specially selected members of their own tribe.'

‘What happened to the Ain-folk fragment when its host died?' I asked.

‘It was released into a shadow world of nightmarish oppression from which it could only escape by entering another new-born human being.'

‘But wait a minute,' I said. ‘As I understand it, the spirits of dead people who speak through these mediums all say that they're happy and having a good time. There's a lady who claims that Beethoven and a clutch of classical composers are all hard at work writing music and that Bertrand Russell is busy revising his ideas about God.'

The Man shook his head. ‘Don't you believe it. Like the
kami
that the Shintoists revere, there are a lot of disembodied spirit forces present in the World Below but they are not floating around disguised as historic figures from Earth's past.'

I was struck by a sudden insight. ‘You mean because – because of the simultaneity of time, Beethoven, Handel and all of these other guys are still alive. So these mediums who claim to be in contact with them must somehow be locking on to their creative subconscious. Is that it?'

He nodded. ‘You're on the right track.'

‘Okay,' I said. ‘I'll pick it up later. Let's stay with the Ain-folk. They were in the process of forgetting who they were …'

‘Yes.' He downed some wine and took up the story again. ‘Slowly, the bond between each Ain-folk fragment and its host body
deepened; became stronger through their shared experience. It marked the beginning of an individual sense of identity. The birth of Man's ego. The rebels did everything they could to encourage it in an insidious attempt to blot out all memory of the Empire. But despite their efforts, a dim awareness of belonging to a greater whole remained. A lingering memory of immortality; of another existence beyond the confines of Earth. This is why, throughout the ages, generation after generation of Men have turned their eyes to the skies, often without knowing why, and have yearned to be rescued. That's what lies behind Man's death wish. The desire to shuffle off these mortal coils. For despite all the efforts to destroy it, the flame of Truth endures. The inner knowledge of Man's true origins and destiny.' He paused and looked me right in the eye. ‘The realisation that you and I are one, Leo.'

That was when I felt I needed a drink.

I got up and poured myself a stiff shot of bourbon and got some ice from the kitchen. I remember standing holding the open door of the ice-box, watching the cubes swirl around in my glass. To give me time to collect my thoughts. He had been right to warn me about George Lucas and Tolkien. He could have thrown in Doris Lessing as well. The Man had just outlined the best scenario I'd heard since
Star Wars.
It had an engaging plausibility but there was no way I could prove whether any of it was true. I just had to accept whatever he chose to tell me. I was conscious of this tug-of-war going on inside me. An eager, almost child-like credulity fighting a see-saw battle with this hard-faced, dismissive cynicism. Why had his words had such a disturbing effect on me? And what was it? Regret for lost innocence? A nostalgic memory of a simpler time, for ideals long discarded? Whatever it was I did my damnedest to bury it under a mountain of indifference. Once again, I asked myself the sixty-four dollar question: Why me? Why was he here? Why was he telling
me
all this? Had I gone quietly crazy? Was I going to wake up in a flower-filled room to discover that everything I had seen and heard in the last eight days had been taking place inside my head? Or was I dead? Had I, like the central character in that story by Michael Frayn whose title I was unable to recall, been the victim of traffic accident on the way to pick up Miriam at the Manhattan General? Was this God's way of breaking the news to me? Or was it The Man who was crazy? Or maybe not even The Man at all but some metaphysical freak from
another star-system who, for opaquely alien reasons, had decided to take advantage of my guilt-laden Jewish consciousness by presenting himself as the Messiah?