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  Deacon understood, as the Sheikh sat looking at him, that he was being seen as a meaning behind the metaphor—as the real import of himself, the hidden substance that cast the shadows which Deacon, being the shadow, could not see.

  The real question wasn’t whether a UFO “event” had shipped him here, like the real or legendary Spanish soldier from Manila to Mexico; or whether he’d “actually” stepped on board an aeroplane and flown here in a kind of trance—in some state of mind not accessible to baseline consciousness, As he sat facing the Sheikh, still tasting the charred, fatty savour of the minced grilled lamb, he knew that in a sense both had happened so that one explanation cancelled out the other. No wonder he had no ticket, no passport to record his entry point! He simply wasn’t located at an event-viewpoint from which ticket or missing passport could be viewed. Which was how all UFO events must relate themselves to the sensus communis, the common world! They withdrew their meaning at the moment that they yielded it. Their credibility always vanished on the point of being proven. Yet, while he might be in a state of not-knowing, for Muradi at this moment he represented knowledge—the very knowledge of which he had to be deprived.

  Muradi lifted his glass to sip some iced water. “I think you can see—how you come to be here.”

  “I know you can see it! I’m just a thought in your mind, aren’t I? A thought which you can know in its entirety—objectively—because actually I’m out here in flesh and blood—and very well fed, thank you! I needed that. But did you somehow cause me to come here? Or are you only a sort of target for me, the arrow, to hit?”

  “Calm yourself, John. You’re losing the moment Knowledge is a matter of keeping the moment just as it was before you opened your mouth, seeing the world through those eyes, holding that vision.”

  “Where does it all lead?”

  Muradi shook his head. “It doesn’t ‘lead’—except out of the world, beyond the world. ‘Leading’ is a matter of the causes and effects within the world. The true answer is the event of your being here, not some explanation for that event. The event is already a metaphor. You proceed the wrong way if you make it still more metaphorical, by attaching an ‘explanation’. At that point explanations proliferate endlessly, all equally paltry.”

  “I have to know! Tell me, how much do you know about flying saucers, Sheikh? About unidentified flying objects, as they’re called?”

  Muradi smiled.

  “As much as I know about flying carpets!”

  “I thought Salim said that some local saint—what was his name, Salim? The one who was supposed to fly—”

  “Al-Mutawalli,” said the Sheikh.

  “You do know about ‘flying carpets’ then! Are you saying that you do know, or don’t know?”

  “I answered you, John, in exactly the same style as the ‘answer’ you seek to this event! Don’t you see that the event is the answer?”

  “It may be for you. I believe I’ve been captured by a UFO event. I don’t say captured by a UFO—that isn’t the same thing.” Deacon laughed harshly. “That’s how those who undergo this experience often interpret it. It’s the story they tell themselves—the metaphor their mind tosses up. It’s the tree they make up out of a green blur in the distance. They can even go closer and climb into its branches and pluck apples from it. They go away and tell everyone about this fine tree with luscious apples. So people come and there’s nothing there; they seem mad.”

  “You could become quite a fair Sufi story-teller,” nodded Muradi. “Let us drink some coffee to celebrate. Or perhaps you’d prefer mint tea?”

  “Mint tea sounds different.”

  “Therefore it is better! Salim, would you please—?”

  As soon as Salim left the room, Muradi took an old leather-bound book from his pocket and placed it face down on the table.

  “Let me tell you something, John, He who does away with causal law does away with mind itself—with the human mind we know, the mind which knows the world of things and so permits us to live here. Our human mind can’t cease to think of the things around it. That’s our activity in the world. Only God truly exists—outside causes. The extra-causal, the miraculous, is always present, though—within everything, for the world only exists while God keeps it in being from one moment to the next, with its freight of causes and effects that our minds feast on. The… disparity between our thoughts and His Thought—the inexplicable vacuum that would suck all causes and effects into it, if we weren’t so imperceptive of God—is actually what draws us on, to higher states. So new organs of perception—new states of consciousness in your jargon, John—come into being. Out of necessity! I say therefore increase your necessity! Your own necessity has already been increased wonderfully by all this. But don’t impose false causes.”

  “UFO events are simply meant to breed… the need to understand? Not to understand them as such? Is that what you mean?”

  Muradi slid the book across the table. “A gift for you. From Khidr, the Green Man. Its meaning, likewise, is for you.”

  “Salim said that you met Khidr! I thought he was just being poetic—”

  “Salim saw with his very own eyes, precisely what there was to see.”

  “How did Khidr appear? Out of the sky? Out of a—” Deacon felt embarrassed: a hobbyist, a stamp collector trying to mail first day covers from Hiroshima on the evening of the Bomb.

  “Out of a flying saucer? Why shouldn’t he be his own flying saucer? Why should a flying saucer not be he?”

  Deacon took the book and opened it.

  LE LEMEGETON

  ou La petite Clef du Roi Solomon

  Dictionnaire Infernal des Esprits

  Paris, 1856

  Tirage limité à 20 exemplaires

  No. 8

  The figure 8 was written in faded red ink. Dried blood? No, blood would surely blacken. A mimicry of blood, perhaps.

  He turned the pages, and saw curious diagrams. They reminded him of electrical circuits with looping wires, aerials, resistances, gates and switches. Little symbolic light bulbs sprouted from the circuits. If they were all somehow connected up to each other in the correct way in some three dimensional array, all these shapes that apparently conjured up power. Was it possible to put them all together? To write a computer programme to sort all the millions and billions of possible ways of interlinking them…?

  His heart thumped. On one page was a diagram he knew well.

  Michael had drawn it under hypnosis! It was the schematic for the gravitationally propelled space vehicle! The circuit diagram for a UFO!

  He read:

  FORNEUS a l’apparance d’un monstre de mer, bien qu’il devienne humain si l’opérateur le desire. Il peut enseigner a l’opérateur tous les arts et les sciences. De plus, on peut apprehendre de lui tous les langages.

  So the shape that Michael saw on the control panel of his “flying saucer” was really an occult sign for conjuring up some devil called Forneus which looked like a sea monster—though it could change its shape to suit whoever saw it. A devil which could teach all arts and sciences and every known language…

  The Sheikh seemed to recede physically, becoming part of the wall, an abstract text. His reality waned. Meaning leaked out of all he had said. An ethereal edifice which had been building in Deacon’s mind dissolved into a mirage in a hostile or, worse still, an indifferent desert. The desert didn’t invent the mirage, the desert simply existed—with the mirage a mere by-product of men’s eyes.

  A book of black magic.

  Of trashy superstitious spells.

  Salim came back. “Please smoke if you wish,” invited Muradi. “Please do.” Salim shook his head firmly, face full of protestations; to win a smile.

  A dark wrinkled man of indeterminate age—the servant—followed with a beaten brass tray bearing three cups of aromatic mint tea.

  “The answer is that UFOs operate by magic…” The answer was no answer.

  This might just, still, be a joke. A teaching joke staged
—in all seriousness—by Muradi who saw life permanently from a different angle. Suppose Deacon discounted Salim’s pious avowals that he and Muradi had indeed encountered the Green Man slipping into this reality continuum then out of it again… Could he discount them? Hadn’t Muradi experienced, in his own way, a UFO encounter? He might have done—and still the gift of Le Lemegeton could be a teaching joke, to prove by shock to Deacon that the answer is no answer! Weren’t the Sufis notoriously fond of sending pupils away with apparently idiotic advice—which, years later, would suddenly take on an entirely new meaning, once the pupil’s inner state had changed? Weren’t they notorious for sending fools away with blessings in disguise? Famous for deliberately absurd behaviour? For their shock psychotherapy? The gift of this book could easily be one such absurdity grafted on to whatever had really happened earlier to the Sheikh. Indeed, the Sheikh’s message might be that he had no need to know about UFOs, or about ineffable phenomena—and no capacity either. So he was given a child’s conjuring set, a book of magic spells.

  Except…

  … that the diagram was exactly the same as the one that Michael saw! So it was genuine. Which meant that the truth was: occult nonsense. Forneus can teach… all human knowledge. Forneus indeed!

  “Why should a flying saucer not be he?” Muradi knew; and wouldn’t say!

  Bitterly, Deacon slipped the book into his pocket.

  “I really should telephone my wife. I ought to have thought sooner. I’m afraid it could cost a bit—”

  “A few pounds.”

  “I’ll repay it. When I get back to England I shall wire the money.”

  “You merely say that because now you resent me, John.” Muradi sipped his tea equably. “Salim will take you up to my study and put the call through for you.”

  Deacon followed Salim upstairs. The Sheikh’s study was a large shaded room lined with Arabic books, Persian books, French and English books. On a broad mahogany desk sat an IBM typewriter with an Arabic typeface. Salim proudly showed it off—its automatic script processor, its simplified keyboard, its logic circuits—to prove how up-to-date his Sheikh was. A small three-legged rosewood table held a large Arabic volume, its binding densely illuminated with floral forms: a carpet in miniature. The Koran, no doubt. A black and white photograph (the only picture in the house, it seemed) stood on the desk—of a coffin upon a catafalque covered with an embroidered shroud. A large black turban perched on the coffin with an eel of fabric hanging loose.

  “What phone number in England, Sir?”

  Deacon said. Salim dialled the operator, talked a while.

  “It might be half-an-hour. They’ll call back. When you speak, Sir, you must only use English, French or Arabic.”

  “What do they expect I speak—Venusian?”

  “That is the law, Sir. Russians must speak to Moscow in French or English. Japanese to Japan. It’s to hinder spies.”

  “Oh, I suppose I could be seen as a spy! No passport. No logical explanation for how I got here.”

  “Ah, but we know, Professor Deacon. I know. Sidi Muradi knows.”

  “What’s the photo, Salim?”

  “That is the tomb of Shams of Tabriz! The dervish who intoxicated our Master Rumi. It’s at Konya in Turkey. Shams seemed like a wild man—yet between his mysterious appearance and his disappearance three years afterwards he inspired sublime poetry and thoughts and transformed our Master’s life. It’s said,” Salim hissed, “that actually Shams was Khidr…”

  “Khidr certainly gets around! I think I’ll stay up here till they phone back. I’d rather.”

  • • •

  Mary sounded furious with relief: the tight anger of a mother chastising a child for tumbling downstairs.

  “I’ve no idea how I got here!” he protested sheepishly yet again. “I’ll be back with you all as soon as I can book a flight.”

  Static crackled, relays of clicks. Was this call routed beneath the Mediterranean, or was his voice flying into outer space and bouncing back again? Had he too been transmitted through outer space, and reassembled—by means unknown?

  “I don’t have my passport or any money, you see. The embassy might have to repatriate me—”

  “Like a lost child, with a label round your neck!”

  “I can’t talk too long. This is someone else’s phone… Will you give my love to Rob and Celia?”

  Click-click-dick…

  After he’d put the phone down, he slipped a sheet of paper into the Arabic typewriter and played at tapping out simplified characters for two or three minutes, watching the IBM processor conflate them into Arabic script; though as he didn’t know the language the words must needs be absurd, lacking any true existence.

  Then he went downstairs. The Sheikh was putting him up, after all. One must be polite.

  Nineteen

  A blond man with big bones and a long stubbly witch’s jaw was sitting on the floor by Helen Caprowicz. He wore a ski sweater, jeans and tan boots. They were eating cold frankfurters, vegetable salad and pickled onions off paper picnic plates, using their fingers. Helen pushed a third plate towards Michael.

  “Meet Axel Moller—our food bringer! It’s his fifth solo trip to the Moon already. Imagine that! That’s his Volvo parked out there.”

  Moller nodded, still eating. “I’m from Kiruna, up in the north of Sweden,” he munched. “A mining engineer.” He swallowed and grinned, displaying large loose-looking teeth, noticeably bare of gums. “What do you think of our friends?” he asked Michael.

  Michael smiled wryly. “I think it’s very… harmonious of them, to help us.”

  The Swede nodded. “Of course, there’s the long-term threat to them—and to anyone else in the vicinity—if we get loose outside the solar system in our present state. Just imagine if we sent a starship of our own out to Gebraud—then another and another, I don’t doubt. What a fine colony Gebraud would make! Especially as they’re non-aggressive. We’d treat them as we treat the whales and dolphins back home. Then we’d leapfrog on to another world, and another, over their bodies—and souls.”

  “But it’s such a long way to their star,” protested Michael. “My pilot said it took them forty years to reach us.”

  “I imagine there’s a faster means. Gebraudi technology’s fine, but it’s always been pretty linear—while ours is exponential. I’m talking about the next few centuries, boy. The next millennium. Our aura would be growing blacker all the time, expanding like a metastasising cancer as we carved out an empire—till eventually we met something too big and wise to be crushed and poisoned. Or till it eventually registered us. There are lordly beings that pervade whole star clusters, out there! The entire galaxy is an even higher level of being, slow and vast. These are hierarchies of existence we can hardly comprehend! We’d be surgically erased in the end, believe you me, and it would still only be a tiny tragedy within our galaxy, but the local cost could be incredible whole worlds and races lost because of us. And yet actually self-interest hardly enters into it, for the Gebraudi—that’s the wonderful thing. They come here as much for our sake, as for themselves. No, even more so.” He picked up a frankfurter and bit the end off. “Did they tell you how their own Unidentifieds inspired them to send this second expedition to us? Just as a human being might see a vision and hear a voice telling him to go on a pilgrimage… It’s in the Gebraudi nature to help and be helped. Altruism’s a genetic thing with them.”

  Helen shook her head. “Not exactly, Axel. It’s outside the actual genes. It’s an ‘idea-gene’. It’s a way of thinking that gets handed down. That can be just as formative as any piece of DNA, once a species reaches a certain stage. Given their physical shortcomings, they really need it—so the idea survives too.”

  “Shortcomings?” echoed Michael. “They don’t seem overly functional, do they? To have built machines and cities and starships…”

  Helen turned to him, pursuing her hobby-horse. “We don’t really understand the genetics of ideas properly yet. But
they do get passed down like physical characteristics. Thought patterns get inherited. They mutate and evolve only, in society not in the germ cells. Thank God we’ve got a bit of an idea-gene for harmony, ourselves—or we wouldn’t have survived as long as this! We just don’t have enough of it. The Gebraudi can inject a whole lot more into our system if we only let them!”

  “I said they don’t seem very functional. Or very realistic—”

  Moller glared at him.

  “I mean evolutionarily,” Michael added hastily. “They’ve got the absolute minimum, haven’t they? One arm. It doesn’t even seem to have any bones in it.”

  “Is a giraffe ‘realistic’?” demanded Moller. “Was the pterodactyl ‘realistic’?—they couldn’t even take off from the ground. Nature is prodigal with her shapes.”

  “Giraffes and pterodactyls don’t build starships, though,” said Michael.

  “You saw the film of how they evolved,” insisted Helen. “They belonged perfectly in that environment. Then after the supernova, when all those filthy pests got wiped out, it became a lot more favourable.”

  “Some might say too favourable. Where was the challenge to evolve?”

  “Challenge?” snorted Moller. “Nature isn’t an enemy, to be fought and beaten. That way lies planetary suicide—and it’s been our way far too long. Oh, once it was different! Primitive Man felt at one with Nature, in all her moods—foul as well as fair. Power flowed through him because of this, and he enjoyed a psychic oneness with his fellows, too, that we precious individualists can hardly credit. But Man became alienated from this power and this oneness. He couldn’t come to terms with his awakening intelligence within the bosom of Nature. He rejected the Mother, then repressed the guilt of it It was a self-alienation—but he turned it outside, don’t you see? Man is the ultimate obsessional neurotic—and this split has been widening ever since, so that civilization is one long fight against untold evils ‘out there’: devils, or other nations, or natural ‘disasters’, or the plain ‘stubbornness’ of Nature in making us sweat for her fruits. And all the time the evil is inside—it’s the denial of Nature and the rhythms of the world. The Gebraudi never denied Nature, though. They woke to intelligence within her bosom, and stayed within it, all together. They didn’t need two meaty fists to belabour the world; one soft trunk is enough for their needs. So Nature guided them upwards, softly, gently.”