Miracle Visitors Read online

  Miracle Visitors

  Ian Watson

  Pour Bertrand Méheust,

  qui m’enthousiasma pour le problème…

  … aghast the Children of Men

  Stood on the infinite Earth & saw these visions in the air…

  But many stood silent, & busied in their families.

  And many said, “We see no Visions in the darksom air.

  “Measure the course of that sulphur orb that lights the darksom day;

  “Set stations on this breeding Earth & let us buy and sell.”

  Mighty was the draught of Voidness to draw Existence in.

  William Blake

  Vala or The Four Zoas

  Prologue

  Standing up on the pedals, the schoolboy sprinted his bicycle over the cattle grid.

  Ahead, the dusky rumples of Swale Moor spread out vaguely in the fast-failing light. The single-track road leading over and down into Goosedale was deserted. Rainclouds were clearing away fast to the east, unveiling a few glimmering stars, and Venus was already quietly bright, while the microwave relay tower silhouetted on the outcrop of Garth Rigg thrust two beady red warning lights up into the Yorkshire sky.

  As a sheep blundered out of the furze and back, he squeezed his brakes then picked up speed again, whistling to himself. Ten minutes more and he would be back home at Neapstead in the dale.

  His attention was caught by a bright violet light above the microwave tower—too intense to be a star or planet The strange light swung from side to side like the bob of a sinking pendulum, then dodged sharply around the tower and began heading across the moor in his direction. The boy braked and watched, puzzled.

  The light swelled, grew blue, incandescent. A blimp of burning gas, sinking down to the soil behind a rise a few hundred yards ahead.

  It can’t be; but it might be! he thought.

  He raced his bicycle towards the rise.

  Resting among the gorse sat a wingless metal ellipsoid as large as a milk tanker. It no longer glowed, but seemed to be pulsing as if breathing: a metallic lung, emitting a bee-like hum. As he watched, it steadied, firmed. Light streamed from a porthole.

  An oval hatch opened, framing a beautiful woman with long white hair.

  It was quite late when he reached home, but he had no idea what had delayed him.

  The next day his eyes smarted and his skin itched. A pink flush coloured his whole body. When he passed water, he felt a burning irritation; but out of embarrassment said nothing about it—before long the peculiar symptoms went away.

  For a while—he couldn’t have said why—he caught the bus to school in Swale instead of cycling by the shorter route. Whenever he cycled over that moor afterwards, it always seemed as if something was missing—some dip in the road, or stretch of stone dyke that he thought should be there, but which wasn’t.

  Part One

  One

  “I recommend the green chair.” John Deacon waved his student into the room. A pretty boy, Michael Peacocke, a dark cherub with glossy eyes, thick eyelashes, a dainty nose. Who had scored an outstanding twelve on the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale.

  Michael sat. He crossed his legs then uncrossed them in a fidgety way. When Deacon had invited him to help his research towards the work in progress, The Hypnotized Mind, he’d appeared to be as pleased as if he’d won some prize; but now that the actual moment had come, he seemed nervous and on edge.

  “All I want to do this afternoon,” explained Deacon easily, “is to get you acquainted from the inside with the Extended North Carolina Scale. That’s the scale for measuring the subjective depth level of the trance, remember? After I hypnotize you, PH ask you to call out your ‘state’ at regular intervals. A number will pop into your head. We’ll recap what they all stand for in a moment. Don’t bother about how the number gets there. It’ll be right It always is—even if it takes both you and me by surprise.”

  Deacon ran a hand across his head. Now that his wispy, sandy hair was receding apace, his crown was speckled with freckles, and his head looked a bit like a hen’s egg fringed with flaxen feathers as though from some hard delivery, the fluff advertising its supposedly free-range origin. His eyes were light blue, his lips humorous, if slightly sad.

  His room was golden-crisp with early autumn sunshine: a freshly-baked loaf. The view south, from the University of Granton, was of grazing land encroached on by a new industrial estate; distant smoke from burning stubble smearing the sky. One could hear the hum of a chain saw, taken to sick elms…

  And where was he really? Originally he’d set out with a trust that he could chart all the altered states of mind, and with this chart enter his own soul, discover hidden treasure there. Now charts and arcane records seemed to be all there was—a mental filing cabinet of them to match the cabinets and card indexes in this room. He was an anthologist, lost at a crossroads beneath a hundred signposts.

  Yet, on his desk lay review clippings of the symposium he’d edited the year before—Consciousness: Ancient and Modern—agreeing how insightful and stimulating it all was. And consciousness research was still in its infancy; no one even knew yet what consciousness was… Somehow the failure was elsewhere than in his work. It hovered offstage. The failure… beckoned, like a guide.

  Deacon outlined the North Carolina Scale to Michael.

  Zero represented the normal waking state. From numbers one to twelve a subject felt himself relaxing more and more. At twenty-plus he could expect to feel strong sensations of, say, numbness if suggested. After twenty-five, powerful dreamlike inner feelings. By thirty-plus a subject could regress into the past, experience false tastes and smells, completely blank out actual items such as chairs or even people from his awareness. By forty-plus, a fully convincing false reality could be induced…

  “What’s the limit?” asked Michael. “How far down can you go?”

  “Oh, brief states have been reported as deep as a hundred and thirty. Around fifty to seventy is what I call the ‘sense of joke’ phase. Ego evaporates, there’s a feeling that you needn’t be this one person, but could equally be anyone or anything. A sort of detached Observer—some ‘higher’ aspect of the self—seems to be richly amused at the proceedings… And thereafter is a kind of passive Buddhist void. Pure awareness, of a sort of nothingness. That’s a very intriguing state of mind indeed! To me it’s the most fascinating aspect of the trance mind. The Void. But we shan’t be going so deep yet-a-while. Today’s is just a mapping session, to familiarize you. We’ll need—oh, at least half-a-dozen, maybe a dozen sessions before that.”

  After disengaging the telephone, so that no incoming calls would disturb them, Deacon switched on the tape recorder and sat on the edge of the desk beside Michael to induce the trance.

  He spoke routine words. He placed his hands upon Michael’s eyes for a moment…

  • • •

  “State?”

  “Thirteen,” said Michael promptly, taking Deacon by surprise. Surely rather premature?

  “Go just a little deeper… State?”

  “Forty-five,” came the flat, blank answer.

  (“You’re joking!”) But he didn’t say it. This was a farce. The boy wasn’t hypnotized at all… Yet he was, he could tell by the voice.

  “Are you sure, Michael? Stay where you are. State, again!”

  “Seventy.” So automatic, dissociated.

  “Go no deeper, do you hear?” (“Yes, I hear,” the boy said promptly.) “I forbid you to. Return to forty-five now. To forty-five. Where are you? State, please!”

  “Seventy-five.”

  “Return, dammit!” ordered Deacon.

  “I can’t. I’m on the moor. It’s right there in front of me. It’s stronger than you are.”

 
What was? He’d lost control of the trance. It was as though some outside influence had elbowed him aside—some suggestion planted under deep hypnosis. Yet Michael had assured him he’d never been hypnotized before. Buried, repressed material, then? It couldn’t happen!

  “Where are you, Michael?”

  “On Swale Moor near my home. I see the light in the sky. It comes down and lands. A metal egg with portholes. It can’t be but it is! It’s a flying saucer!”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m sixteen. Eight days past my birthday.” The pedantic precision of the hypnotized…

  “A lovely woman with long blonde hair stands in the hatch. She beckons me. I hear a voice in my head encouraging me. Though she’s not speaking words. She’s… mooding me, can I say that?”

  “Yes yes, you can say it.” Allow it all to unwind. It must be some sex fantasy that had meant an enormous amount in private to the boy for years. Which he’d run through time and again till it became a tape-loop in his mind, lurking there unerased.

  “She has two men with her. They’re dressed in ski-suits, just like her, and they’ve got long blood hair too. One of them shouts that it’s quite safe. Do I want to come aboard? Oh yes—she moods me on. I must jump through the hatch. I’m not to touch the earth and their craft at the same time. So I do. I jump into a semicircular cabin with a glowing ceiling. There’s one padded couch in it, nothing more. I can see through to another room with proper seats and screens and controls—that must be the control room. One of the men shuts that door in a hurry—”

  The speechless woman “mooding” him must be some fantasy figure of pent-up libido—and the two men were the superego twins, Guilt and Anxiety, their voice the voice of conscience. And now they had shut the door on the “controls”…

  “He does most of the talking. His name is Tharmon, he says. I’m scared because—” (Michael started to sweat) “—I can’t even see the outside hatch any more, there’s only smooth hull. The other man hands me a glass of water. He says I’ll feel better when I drink it. At least I think it’s water. It has a queer metallic taste, it jars my teeth…

  “It must have had something in it. I feel a lot happier now. The woman’s name is Loova, Tharmon tells me—”

  “You say they’re blond?” interrupted Deacon. “Do you mean Nordic types, like Scandinavians?”

  “No! Their skin’s yellow. Their eyes are like Chinese eyes with hardly any eyelids. They’re much longer than normal eyes. They go right round the corners of their cheeks, as though their eye sockets are a different shape from ours. What long fingers they’ve got! The fingernails are as smooth and pink as plastic… And Loova just smiles and smiles. Maybe she can’t mood me and talk at the same time.”

  (But Michael Peacocke isn’t scared of women. He has a fine thing going with his girlfriend, buxom little Suzie Meade—or he seems to.)

  “They’ve come from the stars, from the Pleiades. From a planet called Ulro, says Tharmon. The name means ‘Earth’ or ‘World’ in their own speech. He says that the human race is in danger because of our vile nuclear weapons. The people of Ulro want to save us. They can’t reveal themselves, though. That’s against their ethics.

  “Luckily their biology’s slightly different from ours. Their women can fertilize themselves, if their glands release a particular hormone. It makes the woman’s egg capable of doubling the number of chromosomes in the germ-cell, so that the egg fertilizes itself. Tharmon explains it all. The people of Ulro have found a hormone that will do the same thing for the sperm fertilizing the egg. The egg will copy the chromosomes in the sperm and double those, contributing none itself. It will make a baby entirely from the male chromosomes. So you get a child that isn’t really the mother’s at all, even though she bears it. It’s entirely the father’s.

  “They can use this hormone on an Ulran woman when she mates with a human male, and she’ll bear babies of either sex that are fully human. Tharmon calls it the parthenogenesis of the male. A virgin birth—out of the loins of donors… like me! Young donors are best, he says.”

  A masturbation fantasy. Surely that’s what it was. Its self-reference was amply underscored by the name of the “alien” world actually being “Earth”.

  “If we do destroy ourselves, they can still save a small kernel of pure humans this way. They’ll be born on Ulro and carry on our race. They’ve prepared a special community.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “They leave me alone with Lover, I mean with Loova—”

  Quite!

  “And shut themselves up in the control room—”

  The boy grinned, inanely, with excitement. “She runs a pink fingernail down the front of her ski-suit. It just falls apart like a pea-pod. Her flesh is a creamy dusky yellow like an old ivory ornament, but there’s no hair on it anywhere, not even—”

  No, because you hadn’t seen female pubic hair then, had you? You didn’t know what to imagine.

  “She has breasts like little puffballs you find in a field in the autumn. They’re very rounded and… new-looking, as though they’ve just sprouted from the ground. When she touches me it’s as though she’s never seen a naked human male before—”

  Inverted truth, indeed!

  “She pulls me into her, on the couch. And it hurts me! Oh I’m enjoying it, but there’s a cold pain in my balls as if they’ve been dipped in a bucket of ice. I never knew it hurt a man the first time! Now’s the only time she makes any sound: like a softly growling dog, a growling bitch—”

  Hatred of the fantasy figure; resentment.

  “When it’s done, she gets dressed without looking at me, then opens the door. Tharmon comes back in from the control room. She pats her belly. He grins. Then it’s foggy, I feel sick and empty-headed. They open the outside hatch again, and there’s the moor, black dark… And out I jump. As soon as my feet hit the ground I’m scared, I run away. A tingling follows me. My whole skin pricks with pins and needles. I’m too frightened to look back till I reach my bike. By then the craft is a bright red egg-shaped fog. Suddenly it rises up and skitters away across the moor—as though it’s bouncing over waves. I can hear noises, like fast burbling morse on the short wave band, inside my head. I’m trying to think about what happened, what they told me. B-but… I’m just cycling home along the road. How has it got so late?”

  “You can come back now, Michael. Return to forty-five.” He hesitated. “State?”

  “Forty-five.”

  He counted him down in big leaps through the thirties and twenties; Michael followed tamely. From twelve to zero Deacon counted backwards one by one.

  Michael woke. He moaned, like some hot metal surface contracting, and held his forehead.

  “Have we started? I’ve got a filthy headache.”

  Deacon hunted in the desk drawer for paracetamol. “In fact we’ve finished. How much do you remember?” he asked casually. He tapped out two tablets.

  “Well, you said ‘State?’, then I said ‘Thirteen’ because that was what popped into my head, and then… you just counted me back to zero. Was I no good?”

  He remembered nothing.

  “Look at your watch; half an hour’s gone by. You were fine. Sorry about the headache! You must have been sitting too stiffly… It won’t happen again. I’ll fetch some coffee to wash these down—”

  Deacon came back with the coffee just as the recorder was winding up its last few inches of tape; it clicked off.

  “Can I listen to myself?”

  “Well, I’ve got a lecture soon… We’ll have a longer session next Monday. I’ll play you the tape before we start. All right?”

  • • •

  When Michael left, Deacon re-engaged the telephone, then pushed the rewind switch on the recorder. While the tape was spinning back, the telephone rang. He lifted the receiver, and heard a high-pitched scraping noise. The screech of a fingernail on slate. The teeth-jarring noise sounded like the squeak of tape racing through the machine, much magnified.
Fife spoke into the receiver, but no one was calling. Puzzled, he cradled it, then halted the tape and pressed for play.

  His own voice was asking, “State?” “Thirteen,” replied Michael. There was a pause. “Go just a little deeper. State?” This was were it had gone really wrong.

  The tape wound on—in complete silence. There was nothing more on it.

  He flipped open the lid and ran the cassette forward, spot-checking.

  Not a word.

  But he’d seen the recording needle flicking about! Michael couldn’t even have erased the tape during the couple of minutes he was out of the room—that would have taken as long to do as it took to record in the first place. Why should he have done it anyway? Deacon sat staring, exasperated, at the mute recorder. Damn the machine.

  Hurriedly he began making notes.

  He had no evidence now.

  Two

  Deacon parked in the gravel drive of his burly Gothic-trimmed house, down a quiet road lined with horse chestnut trees shedding golden leaves.

  Fourteen-year-old Rob was guiding the hover-mower on the back lawn. An Old English Sheepdog galloped around him, a curtain of hair in its eyes. Waving to Rob, he went in by the kitchen door, perfunctorily kissed Mary, poured a sherry for her, one for himself, and started telling her about the trance that had gone wrong.

  He broke off. “Why is Rob leaving all those fungi?”

  Mary laughed. “He says they’re edible… Parasol mushrooms. I don’t intend cooking them!”

  “They look poisonous to me.” He cracked the window open. “Rob,” he called. Then louder; the mower was too noisy.

  “Don’t fret, John. I said I don’t intend cooking them.”

  (He’d been overworking lately… She imagined cracks suddenly running across his crown like crazy paving. Funny if he was about to hatch at last! What would emerge?)

  “You were telling me about this boy Michael?” she reminded.

  “Oh yes, don’t you see? It’s such a strongly repressed fantasy there should have been a lot more abreaction—more of an emotional outburst, more struggle when I stumbled on it! But it just spilled right out, as though he was programmed to spill it. The whole thing was taken out of my hands. He went all the way to seventy-five.”