Miracle Visitors Read online

  “Spoken-like a true believer!”

  Deacon turned to the “G-field diagram” in the grimoire; but Michael had never studied magic nor even heard of the Little Key of Solomon. The diagram obviously puzzled him. However, he soon recovered himself.

  “Well, it is the uniquely logical way to fly, isn’t it?” He wouldn’t elaborate.

  “And this is how the Phenomenon indicates you ought to investigate it?” mused Shriver. “Through magic? Typical! The old trickster! You’ll end up diving under tables to hide from etheric fiends who live in the hollow Earth. You’ll count the cracks in the sidewalk. And you’d not be the first one!”

  Dangling car keys, Michael hurried them downstairs and out of the Hall, after making the curious request that they should all empty their bowels first; they were going a long way. (“I can pee by the roadside,” Shriver said. “I’m not shy.” Michael shook his head. “Not by this roadside you can’t.”)

  As they walked along to the multistorey car park Shriver said, “Look, suppose some UFOs actually landed by prior ft arrangement at a US Air Force base. It’s said they did, only it was all hushed up. Dammit, I even knew that they did, myself, once upon a time! Well, if they did and there was still no way of knowing what they were, whatever their operators said—”

  “No full proof,” Deacon nodded. “There never can be.”

  “—if they just dipped into what you call normal cognition and out again, then I’d say it would be very wise of any government to clam up about it. It’s one thing for us poor guys to go chasing these will-o’-the-wisps and living—or ruining—our lives accordingly. But for a government to succumb, God Almighty, we’d be like a banana republic run by voodoo then I If I was the President’s adviser and a whole fleet of UFOs landed at a base I’d say to him: don’t you believe ‘em, Sir. Honest to God. You can’t run governments by miracle. This isn’t the Middle Ages. If the President suddenly upped and announced that UFOs really have made contact, and come from Star X or Dimension Y, he’d be utterly wrong, and I’d be scared shitless. Goodbye to rationality forever.”

  “I thought that way,” said Michael. “Once.”

  “Satan and his crew would be loose in the world, monkeying with history. That’s why your book of magic’s so damn dangerous, John. That’s what it hints at!”

  The carpark lift, aswirl with aerosol graffiti, smelt of urine.

  “Supposing you interpret these shapes as the ‘circuit diagram’ for a special kind of consciousness, though,” Deacon began.

  Michael led the way through the concrete gloom to a parked Ford Thunderbird.

  “That’s yours?” exclaimed Shriver, “With Wyoming plates? Where on Earth did you borrow it?”

  “Oh, I got it from someone. You’ll meet them soon.” Michael tipped the driver’s seat and Shriver climbed in the rear.

  “Someone’s been messing about with the instrument board,” he said over Deacon’s shoulder, as Deacon settled himself in front.

  “My window’s jammed,” complained Deacon; Michael switched the air conditioning on.

  “So is the clock, John. It’s stuck too. It says nine.”

  Michael navigated the large car with some difficulty round the tight coils of the down ramp. Once, the bumper hit the wall. Braking, he swung the wheel, overcompensating. At the exit barrier he switched the remarkably quiet engine off and opened his door to push the ticket in the toll machine; apparently his window was stuck too. Then they swung out into a queue of evening commuters, heading out of town. Drizzle began to wet the windows, insulating them.

  “Well suck in all their exhaust fumes, you know,” Shriver told Michael.

  “Oh no, we won’t.” The air in the car did smell faintly metallic, but it was clean and refreshing.

  “Getting back to the subject of miracles, John. Take the miracle at Fatima. Portugal, 1916 to 1917. A luminous lady appears to some kids inside a hovering globe of light. She says she comes from Heaven. That’s a religious context, right? She promises to return again. That’s the initial contact—the preconditioning phase. A small crowd gathers at the appointed time. They see these kids go into a trance. Our Lady promises them subsequent light-shows in the sky, and passes on some secret prophecy that never gets revealed—though leaks out of the Vatican suggest it ready horrified the Cardinals. End of the world stuff! She says the First World War will soon end—that’s true enough—and goes on accurately enough about the coming ‘conversion’ of Russia. That has already begun, though these peasant kids aren’t aware of it—and it surely isn’t a religious conversion.

  “No Sir, it’s the Bolshevik Revolution that’s busy ‘converting’ Holy Russia! She uses all sorts of technical theological jargon which these kids couldn’t possibly have known. The crowd don’t see her, they just hear a curious buzzing noise. But she promises the kids a real miracle for everybody—” A motorway patrol car blocked the road, its red lights flashing. A policeman was setting out warning cones, while another waved cars through the bus lane. A motorbike lay tangled with the fender of an estate car. Crystals littered the tarmac. Death and wreckage. The traffic speeded up and spaced out after this.

  “And so, on 13 October 1917, about seventy thousand people turn out. The miracle damn well does happen, A great whirling disc bobs up and down over their heads. It puts the fear of death into them. Mass hallucination? Not likely! The thing could be seen over twenty kilometers away. The disc becomes like the Sun itself, a great blood-red Sun falling down from the sky upon their heads! Its heat even dries their wet clothes bone dry.

  “Plenty of photos of that crowd survive—with people in it pointing cameras at the sky. And not one single picture of the disc itself! Did all those cameras jam? It isn’t unknown, with UFOs around. Maybe photographic emulsion and shutter speeds weren’t up to it back then… Or did the Vatican grab all the exposed film—just as they watered the event down by making a fuss of the kids’ saintliness, keeping the whole thing a holy mystery and suppressing the major prophecies? Very wise of the Vatican, say I! Not just because it wouldn’t do to have our religions seen as engineered and manipulated by the Phenomenon, with God in the back seat—if in any seat at all! But to keep miracles where they belong, in the pages of piety—not loose in the real world. I bet the Vatican could see the danger. They’ve a lot more experience than any other government!”

  At the roundabout marking the city limits Michael swung eastwards along the ringroad between fields and farms. As dusk thickened, he flicked the headlights on. A mile later he turned off down a deserted country lane. Brambles reached, scratching, from the hedgerows. No other car followed. He pulled up.

  “Here?” whispered Shriver, mockingly.

  “Not here.”

  Michael jerked the steering wheel back roughly and dabbed at the dashboard. Tilting the wheel a few degrees, he touched his foot to the accelerator.

  The car jumped forward, and upwards—without motion, Acceleration or tilt. It rose above the hedgerows.

  Squeezing the accelerator and pulling the wheel sharp back, he flew the Thunderbird upwards.

  “Oh Christ.” Shriver clung to his seat, slowly relaxing as he realized where the locus of gravity still was, then tensing again as he fought the knowledge of how this could be so. Deacon stared blankly ahead as they cut into the clouds, sweat like teardrops on his cheeks.

  Michael smiled shyly, “You see, we’re going to the Moon.”

  • • •

  The swelling Moon ahead was crescent.

  Black space.

  The milky spatter of stars.

  The Void.

  “Why didn’t you hand it over to somebody in authority?” protested Shriver. “Any air force, British, American, whoever you please? Somebody who could have copied it and built new ones. Gravity control… anti-gravity! My God, we could reach Mars in a few days in one of these. We could fly down the gravity well of Jupiter and out again!”

  “I just told you. I had to do things for them. For us all! Because ou
r Whole Planet Life—”

  “The metaconsciousness,” shivered Deacon. “That’s what it is.”

  “It’s becoming deathly. More beasts and fish and forests are wiped out every year, and there are always just more people, more cities, more machines. Our… yes, our metaconsciousness is becoming a deathly mechanical thing, a kind of plastic devil because of us. That’s why I spent the last few weeks laying out the biosensors where they told me instead of having the car sawn open. Who’d have done it if I hadn’t?”

  “So these aliens, these Gebraudi, left their own metaconsciousness, their own Gods, behind them when they left their Star system? That’s like leaving your soul behind. What strange pilgrims…”

  “One of the darling features of the Phenomenon,” said Shriver, “is its way of using human equipment. What else could it use?”

  “It’s for camouflage, so that their agents—us—can move about easily.”

  “No, they’re safe. The ‘moment’ of the metaconsciousness is much longer. Its present is much vaster than for its individual components. It’s spread out through time. The Gebraudi are still part of that same moment. They still belong.”

  “Even though, at the same time, they don’t?” Deacon stared out.

  The appalling vacuum, beyond the windows. Even this vacuum was crowded with atoms, compared with the emptiness further from the Sun.

  “I could write volumes,” said Shriver, “on the implausibility of your aliens. Plant eaters have to spend almost all their time grazing.”

  “I know. I saw them eat.”

  “No arms, just one elephant’s trunk? Even if it has got a whole starfish of fingers! They can pull, but never really push hard. That makes technology pretty unlikely for simple mechanical reasons. And yet they’re not like any UFO operators I’ve heard of.”

  “They look outrageous—because they’re genuine. I drought the same as you at first.”

  “Why do they look outrageous?” worried Deacon. “If the timespan of this metaconsciousness is so great—well, just suppose there are ultra-intelligent machines up ahead of us in our own future, conscious computers that we’ll build to design other superconscious ones… and they become part of this metaconsciousness. They would have to, wouldn’t they? They’d be part of it already then! They’d be thought-centres more complex than ourselves! I wonder, could your Gebraudi possibly be how these superconscious machines of the future would view the biological life that originally designed them? As pitifully hamstrung, clumsy, and limited?”

  “No! They’re from Eta Cassiopeia. They want to help us. Their ‘Gods’ would befriend our ‘Gods’.”

  “They may just as well be all the lost souls of whales and dolphins, and elephant and chimpanzee, and the souls of the forests and prairies, and even of humans too—which have aH been superseded. They could still be UFO beings, representing the dying flesh in the only way the programming allows!”

  “They can’t be,” explained Michael, exasperated. “Because this isn’t a UFO we’re in now. This is no tulpa—no materialization. This is a car built in Detroit and rebuilt by alien science so that human beings can fly, line of sight, to the Moon base.”

  “Dowsing, and hiding boxes of telepathic algae? Sure, I recall that a couple of Men in Black driving a car saved you.”

  “Has any human being ever been given a UFO to pilot, Barry? Or do you suppose I’m some tulpa masquerading as I myself?”

  “Don’t you see, you’ve been programmed by them in the past? Now your own personal Fatima miracle has happened!”

  “Your miracle too!”

  The emptiness, outside. Deacon’s head ached with it. The tiny, vastly distant beacons of light…

  “You’ve been given the good news, Mike. By messengers from the backside of the Moon. Angeloi, angels. You ought to have handed the car over. Were you scared it wouldn’t really work? Aren’t we mainly here to prove to you that this isn’t only a dream? What would you have thought if we hadn’t taken off from that lane?”

  “We did take off.”

  “You ought to have handed this car over! Damn it, with this baby we could get right down into Jupiter!”

  “It doesn’t carry enough reaction mass to get that far.”

  “Mars, then! We could colonize Mars with just one of these.”

  “Not even Mars.”

  Shriver laughed brusquely. “Somewhere, somewhere!” One belief was oscillating wildly with another—scepticism with utter conviction.—as he gazed at the huge Moon crescent and the smooth dark circle of the Sea of Crises pocked by craters Pierce and Picard, so close now, less than a single Earth diameter away. Michael swung the steering wheel to the right. Great Luna moved gently over.

  • • •

  The sheer static precision of every rumple and bend of airless ground, the clarity of the brown horizon…

  The inky floor of Tsiolkovsky loomed ahead, with its bright peak casting a jet shadow. As they flew in over the crater wall Michael hunted for the tall mushroom of the alien starship.

  In its place, he saw flattened wreckage.

  Twenty-Six

  Destruction.

  Of starship; of domes.

  Not by explosion, but somehow by compression, by a squashing flat—as though a giant hand had squeezed the Gebraudi expedition into shapelessness. The ship was a small splayed hill of metal less than a tenth of its original height; the volcanic basalt underneath was cracked and riven by the pressure.

  They landed in a brief flurry of dust; Michael switched over quickly from flight mode to ground mode. Not far away, at the end of tyre tracks, the wreckage of Helen Caprowicz’s Pontiac lay squashed into a car-size crater.

  “But,” said Michael. He drove to the crater. A bare human arm poked stiffly out of sandwiched metal; it must be Helen’s.

  Michael swallowed. “But we need more reaction mass. The clock doesn’t measure time, you know, it measures the fuel level. We left at nine by the clock and now it’s ten…”

  “That’s okay.” Shriver was flying over Korea again, one eye on the fuel gauge, calculating the reserves, the other hunting for MIGs—or for a cigar of glowing light… “We took two hours real time to get here. That’s equivalent to sixty minutes of fuel. We’ve still got plenty left. Let’s look around—I’ve never been to the Moon. I want to see if there are any alien bodies.”

  “God, they got Helen. Maybe they got everyone.”

  “They?” sneered Shriver. “Who’s ‘they’? Let’s find something out, boy. One thing I’ll tell you for starters: someone forgot to get the gravity right. It’s the same as back home.”

  “Oh, I left the internal field on. Here—” Michael switched off the “heater”; then they were only an eighth of their proper Earth weight.

  “Wup.” Shriver pressed himself off the seat on the palms of his hands. Michael switched the internal gravity back on.

  “Okay, okay, realistic. My body is convinced.”

  “Is your head?”

  “If only you’d handed this damned car in, Mike! Then we’d know.”

  Michael steered the Thunderbird away from the crater where Helen had died, towards the flattened things that once were domes and the putty mound of metal which had flown from the stars.

  Jammed into a pocket crater no bigger than its pressure suit lay a solitary alien, faceplate missing, trunk-tentacle squashed across the rim as if vainly fending something off. Its dead face was plain, to see.

  Shriver gripped the door handle impulsively, then jerked his hand away; from his lips came a popping, nervous noise. “Christ, I nearly did it there.”

  “No, all the doors are power-locked while any G-field’s on. That’s why I switched it on again. Poor aliens,” mourned Michael. “Poor clumsy brave things—”

  “Dammit, if only we could grapple the body! Confront NASA with an actual body and tell them where.”

  “Ah, you do believe in them!”

  “Seductive, isn’t it? I stand corrected: if only we could show NASA
this… There looks no way into the ship or those things you say were domes. Pulverized… but how?”

  “What the hammer, what dread grasp?” murmured Deacon.

  “Yes, it does kind of become mythological! Out of the window with reason, that’s the risk. Except, luckily, the windows won’t open or we’d all be dead… This surely wasn’t any shock wave from a nuke at altitude. No air. No medium to propagate in…”

  “Maybe we’re looking at all this upside down,” said Michael. “Everything looks squeezed flat. Couldn’t it have been sucked flat instead? They do have gravity control. Did have. Suppose it went wrong? Suppose they accidentally generated a point source of a hundred or two hundred gravities—or a plane source, if that’s possible—and all this happened before the generator destroyed itself! It could be a terrible accident.”

  They drove right up to the starship. A pressure-welded hill, now, driven a little way into the solid rock. A snapped landing jack splayed flatly from the mass along the surface, indented into the basalt… Michael pressed his cheek to the side window, staring up at where the vaned mushroom cap had been: the Biomatrix, too… All the biosensors back on Earth must now be lifeless, rotting.

  He stared up…

  At the bright veil of the Milky Way, the white shroud of stars above…

  There was a hole in the shroud.

  A hole that swallowed one star then another was swelling darkly upon the field of light. The silhouette of a great wingspread bat was free-falling down towards the Moon…

  “Look up there! What’s that?”

  They squirmed against the glass.

  Or the outline of a pterodactyl… Something ancient, extinct.

  Hooked black wings, spread wide, were falling, falling down upon them. There were no features apart from the outline. Dozens more stars disappeared. The shadow of this thing which seemed like shadow itself brushed the white peak in Tsiolkovsky. Eclipse began, winging over the crater floor, casting the alien base and the car into the darkness of burial underground. The darkness was only relieved by their headlights.

  “Focus the external G-point above us fast, Mike! Can you do that without driving us into the ground? Use it to shove against that thing?”